Strikes by country

Just to put one of my week-end’s debates to rest, and start the increasingly complicated process of rebuilding France’s brand as a decent country, the French are by far NOT the number one strikers in the world ;)

The stats above are from the OECD and show the “five-year average in days not worked per 1000 employees (1996-2000)”. I really feel for you if you live in Denmark, Iceland or Canada ;)

Link

Multitasking, iPads and learning

Schools get in the media for tuning to iPads, the device will allow multitasking this fall, and brain scientists worry of the effects of multitasking on learning. Adopting a new technology early means playing with fire?

The iPad has been an instant hit for millions of consumers following its recent launch. It has also been a great success in the IMD classroom. “After having piloted the iPad in a partnership program with Allianz Global Investors at the beginning of May, I am convinced that this device will revolutionize executive education,” stated IMD Professor Bettina Büchel. “The feedback from IMD Faculty, staff and the participants was overwhelmingly positive.”

Link
Apple: Multitasking coming to the iPhone this summer, iPad in the fall
One of the biggest criticisms leveled at the iPhone and the iPad — that it can’t run third-party apps in the background — will be fixed at last [when] the major OS revision will arrive this summer for the iPhone, while iPad users will have to wait until the fall.

Link

Russell A. Poldrack, the director of the Imaging Research Center and professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote: “Our research has shown that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, changing the brain systems that are involved so that even if one can learn while multitasking, the nature of that learning is altered to be less flexible. This effect is of particular concern given the increasing use of devices by children during studying.”

Link

How is the internet shaping us?

More and more voices are wondering. And the words “addiction” and “detox” are coming quite often in discussions these days. Only a couple of hours ago at the Lift@home workshop on teens and technology, half of the panel of four were confessing to be “seriously addicted to Facebook”. Are we faced with a real (and seriously widespread) issue, or is this another one of these moments where, faced with a radically new balance, we temporarily lose footing while defining the new rules needed to survive life on the social web?

Check this recount of a Facebook and Twitter addict taking three month away from status updates:

This year, in my late-twenties, I set a resolution: for four months, until April 1st, I would turn away from Facebook and Twitter.  I had grown bored, obsessed, bothered, even – I admit it – enamored with my reflection there. [...]

“Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information under represents reality.”   I’m not my Facebook profile, nor am I a series of Twitter updates.  And the time I spend on these sites means I have less time to write fiction and converse with people in person, two things that make me feel most alive in the world. [...]

The problem of the internet– its power, and the way it’s changing how we live our lives–is a big topic these days.  There’s The Tyranny of Email: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your In-Box by John Freeman, and, forthcoming, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr.  The internet age is so young that we’re worried, and intrigued, by how it will shape us – we simply have no idea.

Link

Recreating serendipity in social networks

Social networks started on the past (classmates), moved to the present (Facebook), then the future (dopplr). Social networks used to be on people you knew (classmates), people you know more or less (Facebook), people you do not know (dating websites), they will soon also be about people you do not necessarily want to know.

At Lift Asia 09 we welcomed Jin-Ho Hur, CEO of Neowiz, a social network/gaming platform whose fundamental concept is that everybody can hide behind an avatar. Why? Because not knowing who the other users are is a feature! If you spend hours playing online games from the office, do you really want to share that with your network? And what about meeting people randomly like what happens at bars? This is not really covered by existing networks, hence the success of something like chatroulette that “generates one-on-one Webcam connections between you and another randomly chosen user” (NYT link).

I believe this is a trend, not only because it corresponds to a need, but because it is the only place where social networks can innovate under the current framework, where each positions itself along the past/present/future and friends/acquaintances/strangers dimensions.

The red bubble is where we have the less players at the moment. I expect to see many new services in the coming months, reproducing a phenomena that is omnipresent in our lives but mostly absent of online life: serendipity.

The fact these services are used & created by teenagers is also not very surprising. After all this generation seems to have lost many of the opportunities we had to connect randomly: the arcades have been replaced by Playstations, the rave parties have been forbidden, dating happens online rather than in bars, etc etc.

User generated [unpredictable, lurching] future

This gut feeling I have had for a while, that we haven’t fully understood the impact of the new technologies and will soon start to notice less productive side effects, is reinforced by Bruce Sterling’s latest State of the World address.

you’ve treated your future as an “unpredictable lurching thing…” and now you’re all morose about that… You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of “disruptive innovation,” “disintermediation,” “offshoring,” “small pieces loosely joined,” “de-monetization,” “plug and play” “the network as a platform”? Of course you’ve heard of all that crap, because you’ve been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don’t have any stability now! Much less guys like you, who move their fingers up and down on keyboards for a living.

Link

Technologies might have disrupted (rich countries’) social organizations a bit beyond what would have been productive course. We now face some of the problems we created (and naively wished for?). Time to put technology back in its place, something I have been preaching for a while, unfortunately without yet having found a solution to apply it to myself.

Following up on “Publicy”

Following Eric Schmidt’s latest take on privacy, I am getting some link “love” from the big guys, with Techcrunch and Cnet both pointing to an early 2009 article I wrote on my take on privacy, something I believe you are not getting at birth anymore, but need to build around the concept of a “plausible me”. Publicy is a space you can control and where you can regain your privacy by publishing fake information – like 50% of social networks users aged 13-21 who claim they falsified information (see page 28).

Almost one year has passed since that post, and this important topic deserves a few more thoughts:

• More logging planned
  One year later, laws like Hadopi are popping up all around the world, which means every single act you do online is being monitored and logged. In France again, several databases are in the works, some storing information like philosophical, religious and sexual orientation, and other strangely irrelevant information when it comes to something the government should know on you. All this to say that the situation got worse, and definitely, privacy is not a choice anymore. Nobody can shut down all the video cameras capturing our movements in the streets.
• Privacy in the old sense of the word is dead
  Saying this does not make me agree with that development. But whether we like it or not (and I mostly don’t), there are many files on each of us, and we need to find a way to limit their impact. Privacy in the 19th century sense of the word does not exist anymore. Reversing the trend will demand a lot of catastrophes and abuses for public opinion to realize the pitfalls of such systems, and start making the legal, social, and technological changes. It is like the financial system, one government, person or company can not change this alone. It is a global issue.
• Privacy is not something we are granted at birth anymore
  It is not the default setting of our lives. In developed countries babies get their first database entry a couple of minutes after birth. The first data given up is weight, height, gender, name. Trivial and revealing at the same time. What is at stakes here is to find balance between the usefulness of data – tracking babies allows for better public health, and hopefully helps avoid confusions – and their nuisance potential. In the case of babies, it is pretty clear that the positive outgains the negative. But what happens for criminal databases? When they allow the capture of a recidivist, pretty good. When they prevent someone who has changed to get a new job and work himself back into society, they are a negative force. Where the balance point is depends on your political view, on whether you had such a case in your family, on the history of your country, etc.
• Not to mention lost data…
  And I am not even talking about the worrying number of hacked/leaked data making it to the open. There is storing data, then there is securing it. And every time I call my insurance company and witness their global incompetency in handling even the most basic process, I am terrified to think that the same people are managing servers with a lot of my personal data on it.
• The loss of the right to be forgotten is a terrible thing
  Because it prevents one from getting recognized as having gotten over any past mistake. Shrinks (they are put to contribution in the pre-cited CNET article) will tell you that a people can change radically through the long process of therapy. But as the recent Roman Polanski saga shows, there is no need for Facebook or Twitter to have things catch up with you 30 years later. Again, not a new problem, and probably more of a social than technological problem. 21st century is very bad at giving second chances it seems, despite the many stories of former convicts turning into positive forces. It is like, implicitly, society has accepted the total futility of the jail/punishment system. It does not work, criminals will strike again so we need a record on them. It is a shame there is no debate on how to regain trust in the correction system. If it was working 95% of the time we might not need databases.
• The search for fame is not the only driver of online existence
  There are many reasons for us to go online, and therefore try to control our identity. The distance with friends (I’m in touch with my childhood friends now living in Reims, Paris, L.A, Lisbon, etc. It can only happen online), participation in a community (and something like Lift is only possible through online communities), launching a business (which means having a website with your name on it), etc. There is much more than pursuing an elusive fifteen minutes of fame. For a lateral view on this, take five minutes and read Howard S. Becker on studying new media. He mentions the many reasons why people are active online.
• We are not the only source of negative information on us
  Where I disagree with Eric Schmidt is when he seems to imply that one is the source of all negative information about him/herself. Yes, “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place“, but many exceptions should be taken into account there. I am not sure 14 years old Joseph Ratzinger (a man for whom I don’t have any special sympathy whatsoever) voluntarily engaged in the Hitler Youth, yet this was held back against him when he became Benedict XVI. A disease can also be a source of information you want to rightfully hide from the public, and this should be possible. People do not chose to have cancer, yet a few cases of people fired after searching for data on this condition have surfaced. Some information can hurt us, and we might have nothing to do about them.
• Privacy needs a serious framework
  Trying to find a definitive rule to guarantee an even privacy to all citizens is probably a lost cause, because we all need to solve a different equation. Some of us need total privacy, others need to be semi or fully public figures because of their business, personal or political activities. Being totally transparent can even protect you from government abuse! What we need is more of a framework where anybody can position the cursor as he wants, and more importantly, change its position over time. As the founder of Lift, I have to communicate online as I am the first node of a global community. Whatever my next job is, I might want to reverse the trend and become more secret. This is not really possible right now, and if you have a solution in mind you will be very rich and you should contact me, I will invest whatever I have in your company :)
• Self regulation is already underway
  This kind of larger than life issues tends to self regulate. And I think that in the end, Google and the advertisers – often cited as the ones asking for less privacy – are the ones who have an interest in it. Why? I already mentionned earlier a study showing that 50% of users among the 13-21 age range falsify information. You want to spy on me? I will feed you with fake data to push the envelope to where I want it to be. And I will make your profiling efforts much more complicated in the process. In the contrary, if you give users a system they can trust, one where they can control what is controllable, then they will share the data advertisers need. I am sure Google [Disclaimer: a partner of Lift] understands this, as their recent Data Liberation Front initiative shows. Facebook does not seem to be that far in terms of thinking, but it will inevitably come. This reminds me of the click fraud controversy: you can hardly identify them so the solution is to acknowledge them directly in your bidding for AdWords. For more on the lying habits of online users, be sure to check Genevieve Bell’s talk at Lift08:
  [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/xa2c31&related=0" width="425" height="335" wmode="transparent" /]

Social media, democracy and dictatorship

Many questions raised by this Evgeny Morozov’s article who goes beyond the usual “the web is making democracy inevitable” tune. Social networks can be used by protesters around the world, but once governments pass the door they become a source of information on dissidents, with potentially dramatic consequences:

But that isn’t what happened in Belarus. After the first flash mob, the authorities began monitoring By_mob, the LiveJournal community where the activities were announced. The police started to show up at the events, often before the flashmobbers did. Not only did they detain participants, but they too took photos. These—along with the protesters’ own online images—were used to identify troublemakers, many of whom were then interrogated by the KGB, threatened with suspension from university, or worse. […] Social media created a digital panopticon that thwarted the revolution: its networks, transmitting public fear, were infiltrated and hopelessly outgunned by the power of the state.

Controlling your privacy on social networks is quite complicated – mostly because it goes against the fundamental needs of advertising, and is therefore not encouraged. Bad privacy management can have consequences:

Social networking, then, has inadvertently made it easier to gather intelligence about activist networks. Even a tiny security flaw in the settings of one Facebook profile can compromise the security of many others. A study by two MIT students, reported in September, showed it is possible to predict a person’s sexual orientation by analysing their Facebook friends; bad news for those in regions where homosexuality carries the threat of beatings and prison.

But everthing’s not lost:

[...] the internet can if used properly give dissidents secure and cheap tools of communication. Russian activists can use hard-to-tap Skype in place of insecure phone lines, for example. Dissidents can encrypt emails, distribute anti-government materials without leaving a paper trail, and use clever tools to bypass internet filters. [...] Second, new technology makes bloody crackdowns riskier, as police are surrounded by digital cameras and pictures can quickly be sent to western news agencies. Some governments, like Burma and North Korea, don’t care about looking brutal, but many others do. Third, technology reduces the marginal cost of protest, helping to turn “fence-sitters” into protesters at critical moments. An apolitical Iranian student, for instance, might find that all her Facebook friends are protesting and decide to take part.

Conclusion: social medias are, like all innovations, a double edged sword:

Yet while the internet may take the power away from an authoritarian (or any other) state or institution, that power is not necessarily transferred to pro-democracy groups. Instead it often flows to groups who, if anything, are nastier than the regime. Social media’s greatest assets—anonymity, “virality,” interconnectedness—are also its main weaknesses.

Link (via Bruce again)

Courts and connected jurors

Bruce Sterling points to the issues created by Google, Facebook and the other online tools allowing jurors to get external – and disallowed – information on the case they must examine:

Last week, a Maryland appeals court upended a first-degree murder conviction because a juror consulted Wikipedia for trial information. Earlier this year, the appeals judges erased a conviction for three counts of assault because a juror did cyberspace research and shared the findings with the rest of the jury. In a third recent trial, a juror’s admission to using his laptop for off-limits information jeopardized an attempted-murder trial.

On Friday, lawyers for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon asked for a new trial in part because five of the jurors who convicted her of embezzlement Dec. 1 were communicating among themselves on Facebook during the deliberations period – and at least one of them received an outsider’s online opinion of what the verdict should be. The “Facebook Friends,” as Dixon’s lawyers call them in court documents, became a clique that the lawyers argue altered jury dynamics.

Link