i tweet therefore i am ... a psychopath?

Next week at DEFCON, the good people of the Online Privacy Foundation will be giving a talk on their research regarding what a person's twitter usage reveals about their personality. Specifically, they are examining the (dark triad) psychological traits of narcissism, psychopathy and machiavellianism with a view to answering the question "Can twitter really help expose psychopath killer's traits?"

In particular, they propose to address:

1. Public understanding of psychopathy;

2. General public focus on whether we can spot psychopaths and therefore predict crime; and

3. Public perception that detecting personality from social media is infallible.

Of course, given that this is a talk by the Online Privacy Foundation, I would expect that they will touch on the troubling privacy implications of their research. The participants in the study were volunteers (cheered on by Stephen Fry, which could be said to be under the duress of awesome); participants in any sort of real world application of the research would not be, and we would find ourselves stuck in a bind between privacy and security. While its always difficult to know which way public policy is going to turn on these questions, something (PATRIOT Act) gives me a clue... 

In any event, I imagine that this is a talk that will touch a few raw nerves this week. In fact, I would be worried that current events might overwhelmingly colour reactions to the topic.

Apparently the paper is going to be published a month-ish after DEFCON, so watch this space.

digital dualism vs augmented reality

In his recent piece in The New Inquiry, Nathan Jurgenson discusses the fetishization of 'real life' (as opposed to web life) in contemporary culture.

He argues that the discursive valorisation of 'the real' can be understood as a reaction to the proliferation of mobile technology. Indeed, he argues that the constancy of our interconnection/-nectedness has left us longing for a more pure or authentic pre-digital self, manifesting in the celebration of tropes of the homemade, the offline, the rustic.

However, Jurgenson takes the view that the romanticization of the meat world is based on a false assumption that there is dualism between our online and offline worlds. Rather, he argues that we are living in an age of augmented reality, where the online and offline are interconnected, mutually constituting and reinforcing, and that there is artificiality at play in suggestions that we have 'collectively lost the offline experience'. Instead, he claims that we are now able to appreciate offline life in a way we were never able to before.

It strikes me as cynical to suggest that we appreciate something more because it has been compromised, and i don't think that Jurgenson pays enough attention to the way that the online physically (and psychologically) disrupts and coopts our experience of the offline (doesn't he care that his friends are on their phones during dinner?), but I do think he makes a good point regarding the dissolution of the divide between offline and online life when he says that "the clear distinction between on and offline, between human and technology, is queered beyond tenability."

And maybe, as Jurgenson alleges, this isn't a bad thing. Perhaps, the more comfortable we get with our augmented reality, the better we will be able to manage the new rules of the game - and the less we will be bothered by our friends tweeting through dinner.

But for me - and you can call me old fashioned - there will always be room for a twitter free zone, for conversation that is not mediated by a character limit and for loose talk, muddled up, spontaneous opinions that aren't edited to most flatter the opiner. Does that mean I reject the augmentation of our reality? Do I think we have to switch off to plug into the 'real world'? No. But I do think it's important that we keep discussing the way that the various modes of 'real life' both online and off intersect, bounce off and shape each other, and the way that senses of self are profoundly informed by the way that that self is performed and communicated. 


What do you think? Is it a zero sum game? Or can it be both and neither?

Nike tweetvertising ban

The UK Advertising Standards Authority has banned a Nike twitter celebrity endorsement campaign on the basis that the footballers concerned did not make it clear that the endorsement tweets were advertisements. Nike argued that consumers would not be misled as it was well known that the players were sponsored by the brand. However, the advertising watchdog determined that this was insufficient - in order to be acceptable it was necessary that the sponsored nature of the tweets be "obviously identifiable", "obvious" and "prominent" (such as #ad) to ensure that they would not be missed by a twitter user scrolling through hundreds of messages a day.

As this is the first ban of a celebrity endorsement by the Authority, it is a very revealing elaboration of exactly how strictly the regulations will be applied to endorsement speech - and, at first glance, apparently quite strictly. It is interesting to note that the tweets themselves did not mention Nike. Rather, they were a reference to the player's 'goals for the year' which simply linked to Nike (implying that it was through Nike that they would achieve these goals) and, according to Nike, both players were free to post the tweets "at their own discretion".

Accordingly, it seems to be the case that a sponsored celebrity cannot even link to one of their sponsors without the linking being regarded as an ad. I wonder whether this would be applied in the same way to bloggers - if I accept an advertisement on my blog, am I no longer able to speak about the advertiser in any way without it being regarded as an ad? And without having to characterise the post as an advertisement? Given the number of bloggers blogging about companies with whom they have a financial relationship, I wonder about the chilling implications of the decision for speech in the blogosphere. What do you think? Is this an advertisement? Is it misleading? Is it good for the watchdog to be extra cautious?