Social Implications

Mobile Apps for Behavior Change

July 27, 2012
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Mobile Apps for Behavior Change

Graphs attribution: Molly Norris, Conference Photo Behavior change is one of the most difficult things to achieve whether you’re trying to alter consumer purchases or harmful lifestyles. I was able to share my thinking on how mobile apps contribute to the war being waged in becoming our better selves at Editorial Intelligence’s Mobile World Conference in association with Vodafone, The Huffington Post and Channel 4. I see two main models that inform how app developers hope to change behaviour: the rational and social learner. Apps that involve logging new data about oneself expose the previously unseen. Apps to track fitness and diet, spending or transport could be employed by anyone with health or efficiency goals. You log calories, see how much you eat, and using this new knowledge, adjust...

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YouTube Still Appreciates User-Generated Content (For Now)

June 14, 2012
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YouTube Still Appreciates User-Generated Content (For Now)

  “YouTube is popular.” There it is, folks. The safest sentence I have written on this blog. With 60 hours of content uploaded every minute and 4 billion page views every day, the pre-eminent video sharing site has found monumental success. But since 2007, what can be less confidently asserted is that YouTube is a champion of user-generated content, a bastion of hope for the layman with a camera or video file. Of course, a statement like this was tautological when YouTube was created. The only content on YouTube was of the user-generated variety, and so the site fostered the impression that user-generated content was king. But when corporations began to take notice of the video-uploading sensation, they thought two things. First, that YouTube was a threat to their...

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Exploring the Geography of WorldBank.org

June 11, 2012
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Exploring the Geography of WorldBank.org

 “Once we become critical of the assumption that the Web is a neutral repository of information, the structure of the Web becomes much more interesting.” – M.H Jackson, 1997 Absences speak volumes, and yet, interpreting information gaps online has produced only muffled truths. Studies on the geographical origin of Internet content have shown old divides between rich and poor countries repeat themselves online. For example, the vast majority of the shares of Google’s user generated content, academic journal citations and authorship of Wikipedia entries tilt to the wealthier global north. Admittedly, exploring digital landscapes is far less adventurous than the globetrotting variety. However, these journeys allow us to peer not at the contours of physical unknowns, but at the shapes molded by the collective human brain — its associations, biases and desires codified in the traces left behind...

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Your Voice–Your Vote?

June 7, 2012
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Your Voice–Your Vote?

Facebook is updating its privacy policy and its users can vote which policy version they actually want to have. Considering the torrent of criticism about Facebook’s general approach to privacy, that sounds like a good idea. Except it is not. It presents itself as a democratic procedure but is far away from the standards of an actual referendum. A chance to enhance the self-regulation process has been wasted. Who should get to decide how long Facebook should keep personal data or how they should deploy targeted advertising? The future of privacy will be decided by little tweaks in the phrasing of regulation terminology and users are mostly unaware of these changes. The recently proposed alterations in the privacy rules will facilitate data processing procedures and are deemed problematic by the Irish Data Protection Commission. When dispersed challenges to...

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How Privacy Advocates Respond to Piracy Hawks: a rudimentary analysis on public salience

May 9, 2012
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It makes sense that the salience of these two issues would be related. Anti-piracy laws and countermeasures tend to violate traditional privacy norms – indeed they are perhaps the biggest threat to our online privacy these days. The Google insight chart below shows the relative volume of ‘privacy’ and ‘piracy’ in news headlines since 2008. What we see here is that often after an upward blip in the public salience of piracy, there is a corresponding upward blip in the public salience of privacy (there are, however, spikes in privacy that are seemingly unrelated to piracy salience). This fits with a conception that the public salience of privacy (as measured by media attention) is driven by privacy advocates responding to specific campaigns (like anti-piracy measures) which are threats to...

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Losing a Grip on Your Facebook Account? You’re Not the Only One

April 30, 2012
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Losing a Grip on Your Facebook Account? You’re Not the Only One

Having a Facebook page is becoming more and more of a liability. Surely we’ve heard it all before, though. Journalists, authors, bloggers, and even occasionally incredulous Masters’ students love talking about the potential negative Facebook effects, from loss of self-esteem to increased anxiety or jealousy. But there’s a much more tangible one: you can be expelled or not hired based on what is posted on your Facebook wall. This is hardly a newsflash depending on how jaded you are about invasions of privacy, but the situation has gotten worse. In 2009, the University of Oxford’s student population discovered that their administration was using Facebook to spy on their pictures and subsequently fine them for any wrongful behavior. As recently as four days ago, a report surfaced that three 14-year-old girls...

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What Privacy Advocated DO Get About Data Tracking on the Web

March 21, 2012
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This post is a clarification of some recent work I have done, which I think has been taken in slightly a different manner than I intended it. The clarification is substantive. I wrote a piece recently for The Atlantic entitled, “It’s Not All About You: What Privacy Advocates Don’t Get About Data Tracking on the Web.” The thesis of this piece was, essentially, the power that massive user and behavioral data gives private corporation (and the asymmetry between them and everyone else) is more important ramification of this new ecology than any individual level breech of personal information. Creepily targeted ads aren’t really the downside, insane levels of influence and control are. I think you get the gist of the article from the opening paragraphs (I am learning about...

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Weekend Quick Hits

February 18, 2012
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Weekend Quick Hits

This is going to become a weekly thing. Just some quick notes about interesting things that have been floating around over the week and are worth a quick comment. On paying an unlimited fine, or the UK shills for the media industry: Ars was among a group of outlets commenting this week on the notice that the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) put up on a domain it had seized, RnBXclusive.com. Below is a screencap of the warning that SOCA put up for 32 hours. The egregious thing here isn’t actually the domain seizure (although that game of whack-a-mole is a waste of resources and often lacking due process). The ridiculous part is that the wording of the warning: “SOCA has the capability to monitor and investigate you”...

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Playing with New Toys

February 13, 2012
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Playing with New Toys

Last week, I found myself in Nuffield College, watching a bright-eyed lecturer, Ilmo van der Lowe, in fascination. Believe me when I say that I knew less about the topic, ‘co-rumination,’ than you did. But knowing Ilmo’s background in social psychology (a field in which I had received my bachelor’s degree), I had trekked over to glean what I could. Luckily for me, the lecture topic seemed almost extraneous. Ilmo laid the foundation for how the field of social psychology was waiting for its next theoretical breakthrough, and then broke out his real reason for speaking: to show that network theory could be co-opted by social psychology to make experiments easier and data more mathematical. The overlap between network theory and social psychology became clear within a few minutes...

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Slow Down, Apple: How to Look at Technology in Education

February 2, 2012
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Slow Down, Apple: How to Look at Technology in Education

  On January 20th, Wired published an article reporting the results of a pilot study jointly conducted by Apple and Houghton Mifflin on the impact of iPads in a middle school classroom. The title (“iPad a Solid Education Tool, Study Reports”) reflected the optimistic and surely-not-conclusive need for digital supplements to enhance educational outcomes. To keep it brief, the study basically put iPads in the hands of middle schoolers and told them to read their algebra textbook using its interface. 78% of the students who were given iPads tested at proficient levels or higher in algebra, compared with 59% of those who used the traditional textbooks to learn. A 19% spike? Surely this justified a call-to-arms for Apple, which has gone from 1996, when Steve Jobs said that education...

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