Boyd, Shirky, and Privacy

     Is privacy dead? There are many who believe that privacy isn’t dead, but has just become more involved to maintain. But isn’t it all about how “privacy” is defined?

     According to Danah Boyd, “Privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences. When people feel exposed or invaded, there's a privacy issue.”

     It is in this sense that Clay Shirky feels that privacy is dead. In an interview with the Switched Show, Shirky says that when someone such as a potential employer is able to find and use information that they have found on someone’s Facebook page, it is very problematic. He goes on to speak of the oddity in searching for information on someone’s postings. He says that if there was a group of teenagers in a food court and you listened in on their conversations, you were being weird and socially unacceptable. He goes on to say that it is the same if you were to record people’s conversations in a public setting: you are being socially unacceptable and weird. However, this for some reason does not apply online which is also a public setting. Bottom line: peoples’ privacy is being invaded in ways on the internet that would be unacceptable and weird in any other public setting.

     I for one concur with the idea that privacy is dead from an experience one of my sisters had with Facebook. As the story goes, she posted something along the lines of “I hate my job” on her Facebook page. Her employers got wind of this posting and fired her because of it. Now, in any other setting if a person were to say that they hated their job there would be no consequence; but in the online world, my sister was chastised. Obviously she felt exposed and vulnerable for what her employer had done which is the basis of what Danah Boyd and Clay Shirky were speaking about in terms of privacy.  

Brin: Privacy and Surveillance

     Privacy and Surveillance is a touchy subject for most. On one hand, people want to feel safe while they go about their daily lives. On the other hand, people want their privacy. There has always been a thin, constantly shifting line between the two, but there may be a time very soon when there will no longer be a debate.

     According to David Brin, “In the information age to come, cameras and databases will sprout like poppies-or weeds-whether we like it or not.” This is exactly what has happened in Chicago. In this segment by The Associated Press they speak about how the city of Chicago now hosts an estimated 10,000 cameras whose feed is monitored at all times. Though the segment reports that the system has caught a wide variety of criminals, from drug dealers to pick-pockets, the main issue is that the citizens of Chicago were not even able to vote on these cameras before they were implemented. Also according to the report, law enforcement is going to be adding more cameras even though they do not even have consent from the citizens of Chicago.

     What this says to me is that big brother does not really care what John Q. Public thinks about surveillance in regard to their privacy. It seems as though that they have seen a decrease in crime with the surveillance system and that is all that matters as long as they claim that they don’t spy on people, which is what they said in the report segment. I for one don’t have a clear opinion about surveillance because honestly, in an age with pinhead sized cameras and cameras in the hands of most everyone through their phones, I don’t think there is such a thing as privacy anymore anyway.   

Boyd:social networks.

In chapter five on Danah Boyd’s Taken Out of Context, she says “For many of the teens whom I met, participating on social network sites is a necessary part of participation in peer culture. Social network sites are one of the many forms of social media that fill in social gaps by allowing teens to connect when getting together is not possible.”

     The people at Socialnomics parallel this idea in their segment Social Media Revolution. In the segment, they make claims that “By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber baby boomers,” and that “96% of them have joined a social network.” This resonates with the student Boyd interviewed who said “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.”

     If this doesn’t sound like a lot, read on. Socialnomics goes on to say that although it took newspapers, radio, and television a varying number of years to reach a 50 million users, Facebook had double that number in a period of less than nine months.

     What this says to me is that social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become a main staple in the average teenage life. It is clear that peer to peer interactions have shifted into cyberspace to fill in the interactions that are being missed by a lack of social gatherings that were commonplace years earlier. At any rate, it seems that social networking has become the new peer world.

ARGs

This week’s blog concerns ARGs or alternate reality games. ARGs are games that take place in a setting that dissolves the boundaries of traditional games.

     According to Jane McGonigal, one of the problems associated with traditional games is that “players are prone to falling for the games’ dissimulative rhetoric. The gamers, in other words, are too easily persuaded by the games’ realistic aesthetics and aspirations. They wind up believing in their play too much for their own good. (pg. 3)” In short, people play their games to the ending and realize that they have nothing to show for it and may even find their actual lives in disarray due to their constant game play. This is not true of ARGs.

     In an interview with Steve Paikin on The Agenda, McGonigal further explains the benefits of ARGs. She says that, unlike more traditional games, ARGs allow players to play as themselves solving real world problems such as the case with A World without Oil. In this game, players simulate what a world would be like during an oil shortage. With players playing as themselves working on real life problems, players can take away from the game a sense of accomplishment they could not get in more traditional games.

     Another benefit that McGonigal mentions is that with ARGs, once the original goal is accomplished, the community does not go away. She says that often times players come up with new problems to solve and continue their play. This in turn leads to a higher level of satisfaction from playing because the game becomes more about the process than an end goal.

     It looks as though ARGs are the next step in gaming. With its realistic problem solving scenarios and actual identity gaming, it is certain that ARGs will keep gamers engaged and may also lead to real solutions to real world problems. My question is this: where will games go from here?

Fans, vandals, or both?

This week, we are discussing Wikipedia which is a user generated online encyclopedia that can be used as a very reliable research tool. The reason Wikipedia can be used to research reliably despite many criticisms is because users are willing to post accurate information and defend articles from vandals. As Clay Shirky (pgs.136-137) said “Evidence that enough people care about an article, and that they have both the will and the tools to defend it, has proven enough to demoralize most vandals.” But what if those who care for an article are also the vandals? This is just the case for Daniel Tosh.

As seen in this link to the Tosh.0 blog (Warning: video clip and hyperlinks to wiki page edits contain vulgar language, view at your own risk), Daniel Tosh told his audience to go online and edit his Wikipedia page much like Stephen Colbert instructed his audience to edit various Wikipedia pages. Unfortunately for Tosh, his followers are not quite as devout as Colbert’s followers. Instead of positively contributing to his Wikipedia article, his fans thought it would be more fun to vandalize his article by inserting a wide array of jabs, bashes, flames, and their own brand of humor. The end result? Wikipedia was forced to lock the article down and fix what had been done.

Although this might be an isolated case, what if this became a reoccurring trend on Wikipedia? Although Tosh’s article was vandalized, it was done by his fans which shows that those who care about a subject will not necessarily have its best interests at heart when editing its Wikipedia article. In short, what this all means is that although Wikipedia is generally a reliable source of information, viewers must be very careful of the information they see and still further research their subjects.