Author: Juan Monroy

Inside the Filter Bubble

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Personalization

  • Google and Facebook
  • Apple and Microsoft

prediction engines

  • a theory of who we are
  • alters the way we encounter ideas and information

three dynamics of the Filter Bubble

  1. you are alone in it
  2. invisible
  3. you have no choice, except to enter the bubble

Adderall Society

  • we need Adderall because there’s so much going on
  • distorting effect
  • acts like a magnifying glass
  • is the idea of the filter bubble helpful or harmful?
  • is this isolating us?
  • personalized filters promote narrow focus
  • hyper focus promotes synthesis

The User is the Content

  • crisis of print
  • advertising revenue
  • in the age of the mass media: editors do the filtering
  • in the age of digital media: personalization does the filtering
  • filter bubble: personalization, people become isolated
  • Click-bait: sensationalism, for the aim of clickiness of an article

Are we paying closer attention to the dead squirrel in front of our home than a genocide?

Don’t Want to Be Tracked

Groovy

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Groove

Do you know what this is? What does it look like to you? Does it look like a canyon?

What about this one?

Vinylrecord1

On second thought, that looks too smooth for a canyon.

Back in 2005, an optics class at the University Rochester magnified a series of small objects with an electron microscope.

One of them was of a vinyl record, which is what you’re seeing in those images above.

A different set of images have been circulating online. You can see the needle riding the grooves of a record, bumps and all.

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And here is a similar view of a stereophonic record with a greater magnification. The halftone suggests it was scanned from a book.

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Sound is vibrational energy.

The earliest sound recordings, such as those developed by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1860s and later by Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner in the 1880s, were something like fossils of those vibrations. Those sounds and their vibrations are preserved inside of these tiny grooves.

The Networked Individual

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We had a pretty great discussion on the first and fifth chapters of Rainie and Wellman’s recent book, Networked: The New Social Operating System.

Here are some questions that I drafted to review what we covered.

  • What is “networked individualism”?
  • What are the “triple revolutions”?
  • Why do critics use the Internet as a scapegoat?
  • What is an ICT?
  • What are “strong ties”? What are “weak ties”?
  • How are online exchanges extensions of offline relationships? How are they distinct?
  • How has “networked individualism” altered the specific location for our relationships with others in our network? Do we always communicate with specific people in only one place?

Feel free to add any other questions…

One of the things that stuck with me is how Rainie and Wellman are challening the assumption that the Internet is ruining our relationships. When we discussed the deterioration of proper spelling and grammar in personal communications, we considered whether everything would eventually be written in a style resembling a casual, instant message.

I thought we convincingly challenged that theory by considering how our online messaging style is determined by our offline relationships. If you’re messaging a close friend, you’re going to have a casual tone with him/her, but you’re not going to write a potential employer in that same style. However, if you do land that job and you work closely with that person, the style of your communiques might change. Just like your relationship has changed.

Another issue that we considered is whether online messages are absent of all nonverbal cues, like tone, gesture, and spatial context (such as your specific location). I wonder how your offline relationship is one of those nonverbal cues.

Finally, I mentioned to a few of you about a recent book that resonates with this topic. Check out danah boyd’s It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. You can get a PDF from her blog.

Movie Trailers and Marketing in the Movie Industry

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Since we ran out of time last week, I wanted to see what movie trailer you selected for last week’s exercise. Also tell me a little bit about it.

Let me start:

Watch the trailer for Errol Morris’s new documentary, The Unknown Known.

This film is a series of interviews with Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense under GW Bush, who sold the American public on invading Iraq in 2003. It could be understood as a sequel to Morris’s 2003 film, The Fog of War, about another former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who was in charge during the Vietnam War.

It would be foolish to think that any documentary, including this one, doesn’t have an argument. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that a documentary without a point to make is a waste of time. This trailer makes a compelling argument that engages your interest, regardless of how you may regard the eleven year–long conflict. As is usual with a film like this, with limited commercial appeal, it will be released in New York and Los Angeles this week and expand to other markets, depending on how strong the box office figures are.

If Morris’s past films are any indication, this film should do well in the awards circuit, including an Academy Award nomination.

Googlized, Are We?

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Earlier today in class, I mentioned that I small collection of links related to Google. My entire collection, which I thought was bigger, is available on Pinboard, a bookmarking service. Here are some of those that might help with today’s excellent discussion.

The Jenny McCarthy and erroneous UAL stock story reveal that using Google, or really any single source, for information can be dangerous. The episode I mentioned about pump-and-dump is partly due to an erroneous story gaining prominence.

Eugene sent me a list (an illustration, really) of the products Google has killed. The one that hurt me the most was Reader, but I found another service that I pay a monthly fee to use. In the meantime, Google has been pushing people towards its social network Google+, even if it really only serves Google.

Another creepy thing about Google+ is that if you use the services, it allows users to send you messages to your Gmail. As with everything in the data-gathering world of “free” Internet services, this is the default behavior. However, you can opt out.

One explanation for why Google “sunsets” these services is because Google is trying to keep us in its walled garden, dependent on their services. According to Marco Arment, Google did so to “compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.”

One of the most popular services that Google offers is Gmail. It’s no secret that Google sniffs your email to build an advertising profile. That seems like a fair exchange, no? You get a free email service in exchange for your delicious data. But what about when your university switches to Google Apps for Education, which is free to qualified institutions? It’s not like you have a choice. You have to use whatever email service your university offers, no? Is your university email and other data safe from Google’s terms of service that allow them to use it for advertising/marketing purposes? A lawsuit, moving through the federal courts, argues that Google has been using the data of Apps for Education users, including K–12 students, for building marketing profiles.

Michael Arrington, founder of the popular website TechCrunch, is certain that Google has gone so far as to read his Gmail messages. Eek!

Finally, I’m surprised…shocked even that we didn’t mention Google Glass. (Is it really that irrelevant?) As Google’s motto has been “don’t be evil,” it now implores those testing Google Glass to not be a “glasshole.”

N.B.: Yes, I am aware of the irony of the Google+ link in this and every other blog post. Follow me, and let’s be done with it.

Louis LePrince and Thomas Edison

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A couple of follow up notes to what we discussed last night.

  1. Although Edison was first to market the kinetograph in the United States, there is compelling evidence that Louis LePrince was the first to invent a single-lens camera. He vanished in 1890, a year before Edison and WKL Dickson made the first successful camera test with the kinetograph.
  2. LePrince’s film, Roundhay Garden Scene, from 1888, is available on YouTube.
  3. A few years ago, Ars Technica profiled the the Motion Pictures Patents Company, the Thomas Edison–led cartel.
  4. Speaking of patent pools, Apple, Microsoft, RIM, and Sony Ericsson all own patents related to mobile telephony that were once owned by the now-defunct Nortel Networks. They outbid Google and Samsung for the patent portfolio in 2011.

I’ll try to get around to watching the 220-minute version of Heaven’s Gate (1980). You should, too.

Did You Start Reading The Master Switch?

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I just wanted to make sure everyone had the book by now. Remember, it’s a long book so even if you do speed read it, it will still take you about six solid hours to read it. And you’ll probably need a break so it’s not like you can set aside 10am – 4pm on Sunday to do that.

If you haven’t gotten it yet, you can get it from:

I’ll check in tomorrow to see how much you’ve read.

De-Program or Be Programmed

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Review Questions

These are the review questions that I posed based on the introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 10. Liz had different questions for Chapter 6, which she listed on her slides.

  1. What is a bias, according to Rushkoff?
  2. Computers are great at handling a steady stream of inputs—my typing on a keyboard, an incoming email message, a push alert, etc. How many inputs can a human being handle?
  3. Our class meetings are synchronous, but our home work is asynchronous. How does understanding this difference help us manage the various inputs we encounter?
  4. A good deal of this reading reminds me of Walter Ong’s famous argument about orality. Ong argued that writing was a technology that transformed oral cultures into ones capable of advanced thinking. Rushkoff seems to argue the opposite: that our use of digital technology in real time has ruined our thinking. How are we are using these technologies differently?
  5. What does he mean by “hacking” an arbitrary system?
    • Missile guidance systems used for assisted driving technologies: cruise control and GPS navigation
    • Missed call feature -> Text messaging
    • Powerful personal computer best used as an Internet terminal
  6. Is learning to program the only answer?

Radio Programs from the “Golden Age”

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If you’re interested in listening to radio programs from the “Golden Age of Radio,” there’s an overwhelming collection available at the Internet Archive. You’ll find a lot of dramas, news, comedy and variety programs available.

For other classes where I get to indulge radio more, I usually audition these programs to get a sense of the different formats available.

  • Amos and Andy, “Andy Reads a Law Book,” July 3, 1929. A comedy that traffics in some pretty racist stereotypes of the not-so-distant past. However, note that the comedy follows the straight-man and the stooge template of comedy duos and is entirely premised on literacy.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Fireside Chat, March 12, 1933. This excerpt of FDR’s first radio address to the nation explains why he chose to close the banks: it’s so that people don’t all take their money out at the same time. Note his use of two opposite tropes: fear vs. faith.
  • Rudy Vallee on the Royal Gelatin Hour, August 25, 1938. This singer, and bandleader of the Connecticut Yankees, entertains his audience in classic variety show style. As a recreational softball player, I appreciate the interview with the softball player.
  • CBS News, “London After Dark,” August 25, 1940. This dispatch gives radio listeners in the US a sense of what it was like in London during the “Blackout,” when the entire city was kept in the dark so that German bombers couldn’t find their targets. This proves the adage that radio is the most visual of all the media.
  • Burns and Allen, “George Goes to College,” November 29, 1945. George and Gracie are married and living in Hollywood. A lot of the humor is predicated on George being old (he was 49 years old but only half way through his life at the time), Gracie being dumb, and Jack Benny being cheap. Only that last bit was probably true. Also, I don’t know about you but my college didn’t have such an obsession with popularity, but then again, I went to a state school.

Also, if you’re interested in the difference between AM and FM radio, and how static (interference) affects the reception, here’s a US Army film from the 1960s.

I love this stuff so it makes sense to me, but if you need to have something explained, let me know.