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?

multiple selves

It has become almost redundant to refer to the web as the technological apparatus for the emergence of multiple selves. Sherry Turkle talks about the way that web allows us to “recast identity in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives” and explore multiple aspects of self in parallel. Laura Robinson notes that “these technologies present self-ing opportunities for an ephemeral self, without commitment to a masterself that becomes an ‘I’ or ‘me’.” 

Clearly, the theoretical paradigm of multiple selves reflects the postmodern critique of the narrative of the essential self with its attendant rejection of the ‘myth of wholeness’. And it is the desire to preserve this revolutionary potential of multiple selves - the choose your own identity riff that Chris Poole lionises - that has led to so much uproar around ideas like google passport.

But how much are we actually walking the walk of all this prismatic identity talk? More and more the read-write-webverse seems to be trending towards an interconnectedness of self that forces us to be one person online. 

In fact, an emerging consequence of the collapsed contexts of the web seems to be that we are perhaps more our selves online than in the real world - I am me in ways I didn't have to be me before, I am the same me to my mum and my boss and my friends, even when once I would have preferred to keep those versions of my self separate and distinct.

Is this leading to a situation - like a certain social network founder would have it - where privacy itself is no longer a relevant ambition? Is the web finally going to catch up to the Australian legal system? Or are we going to find new ways to carve out private spaces in the share-everything landscape of the web? 

Of course, it's still early days in the evolution of the web and it's hard to predict what it will look like five years (or even a year) from now. But I worry that the longer we allow things to continue as they are - where we rely on the privacy settings of corporations with absolutely no interest in protecting our privacy - the more we will disenfranchise ourselves from the conversation and handover control of a big part of our identities to 'the man'.

What do you think? Can we still have private places in open spaces? Or do we need locked wall garden internet communities to keep our secrets for us?

Connected, but alone

In Sherry Turkle's recent TED talk, the Life on the Screen author turns her analytical gaze on the paradox of why she loves to receive texts even as she worries that too many texts may be a problem. In essence, she is interested in exploring the way in which the increasing ubiquity of technology may be changing the way we relate to each other - and the way we relate to ourselves. For Turkle, the central difference between the excitement she felt 15 years ago with regard to technology and the concern she feels now is the fact that 15 years ago we would go online, hang out - and then turn off. 


It is the absence of turning off that gives Turkle the sense that technology may be taking us places we don't want to go. She cites what she refers to as the 'Goldilocks effect' of technology - the ability it gives us to moderate our self-presentation, interactions and relationships in such a way as to keep other people 'not too close, not too far, just right'. In so doing, she argues, we have lost the ability to have a real conversation, and we have lost the ability to be alone, with the result that "we expect more from technology and less from each other". Sadly, a lot of the examples she gave of the increasing alone/togetherness of our social lives rang true for me. 


What do you think? Are we trying so hard to be constantly connected that we can't be by ourselves? Are we editing and retouching ourselves so much that we are no longer able to experience authentic intimacy? Is the way that we communicate online inauthentic, or just a new kind of authenticity?

authenticity

This week Rhode Island repealed a law which criminalised lying online (maximum penalty: a year in prison). Apparently, the law was enacted to fight online fraud, but the breadth of the drafting meant that it could conceivably apply to all sorts of online communications. It's interesting that this law was ever passed, but what I think is particularly interesting is that in the coverage of its repeal the standard line has been "well... everybody lies online". Of course, it's persuasive that criminalising lying in one communicative context while it is simply frowned upon elsewhere is problematic and chilling on free speech and for these (and other) reasons it's great that the law was repealed; but the framing of online dishonesty as something everybody does got me thinking about authenticity online and the way that we think about 'the truth' in networked publics.

Would we be so quick to say that "everybody lies" in the meatverse? Do we conceive of everyone as fundamentally untrustworthy in our day to day lives, or is there something specific to the digital realm that encourages this view?

Of course, evaluations of 'authenticity' online lack the situatedness, the physical and verbal cues of a similar assessment in the real world, and I'm sure that informed the development of a view that online identities were merely masks that could not be trusted as you couldn't 'reach' the person behind them (to verify, or to shame; to regulate); no doubt this is why things like the friendster 'fakester' scandal reverberated so far.

However, part of me wonders whether the vision of the online self as a slippery, untrustworthy, un-pin-downable fiction is becoming outdated these days. We are entering the web 2.0-verse of multi-sited, transferable online identities, with online histories and online reputations - we are fleshing ourselves out online. People are more truly fixed as themselves in more places online than they have ever been. Surely at some point this new version of online citizenship will overtake the shadowy who's who of the irc-verse?

Indeed, even now we seem to be seeing less of a discourse around the need to secure identity and more of a resistance to corporate/legal solutions to identity authenticity (eg debates about online passports or real name policies). To me, the discourse around truth and authenticity vs performativity and play seems to be increasingly pregnant with the desire to hold on to a notion of the web as a 'lawless frontier'; increasingly pregnant just as this view seems, for good or ill, to be  becoming increasingly untenable in the corporatised web we live in now.

So where does that leave us? Worryingly, I feel like Rhode Island is repealing its law at a time when the law is becoming redundant anyway; that the challenge is no longer a matter of finding ways to insist upon authenticity but rather a question of how to find room for any kind of multiplicity...

Yes I am, but who am I really?

Just when you decide to stop talking about Facebook and privacy...

So Facebook went ahead and changed my email address; in fact, they changed everyone's email address - switched us all over to our 'Facebook' emails (mine is kate.willcox.52@facebook.com, apparently - catchy) in an effort to gain users for their mail service and capture more market share.

Of course, they let you change it back, and apparently for new users there is going to be an opt in/opt out option, but yet again we see Facebook monkeying with our personal data for their own gain. 

Now I'm sure that lots of people take the view that we have signed up for this in choosing to use Facebook - after all, it's their network, we just live in it. But there is something particularly troubling about a social networking site changing facts about us, and it is compounded in circumstances where the changes made are to further their commercial objectives (not only does it increase use of Facebook mail & decrease use of competitor mail programs, it also turns us all into advertisements for Facebook mail). What is to stop them changing my photos or facts about my life to make them more Facebook friendly? (Here I am in my Facebook tshirt. Here I am posting how cute Mark Zuckerberg is. Except, wait, it wasn't me posting those things!)

There is something almost Orwellian about these erasures - about which we weren't even informed (or if we were I missed the memo) - and they strike at important identifiers about our online identity.

This seems especially ironic to me given that earlier today I was reading twitter's policy on use of the brand (I'm sure Facebook has something similar), and there was a great deal of "thou shalt not" mess around with the trademark - no putting the bird in a cage. Meanwhile, Facebook is messing around with aspects of our trademarks, not to mention our user experience, and apparently there is little we can do about it.

What do you think? Is it a reasonable step for Facebook to take? Should we accept these little incursions into our autonomy - and identity - as the cost of using the network?

it's not what you're like, it's what you like

According to Business Insider, new company Likester's Adcenter is revealing "surprising and depressing" trends in what people like on Facebook. 

Putting aside the obvious privacy concerns (because who really needs to talk about privacy on facebook AGAIN), what struck me about this latest iteration of behavioural advertising is how close it is coming to creating an entire composite of a person through their preferences - my identity is getting fleshed out on line in direct proportion to the extent to which I choose to support brands.

In a lot of ways, this isn't that different from the meatworld. I have strong memories of my ninth grade back pack (army surplus baby), which was marked up with all of my favourite bands in thick black and blue permanent marker (sonic youth; nirvana; bikini kill) - and true, I did spend money on their albums and tshirts and shows, and this communicated those aspects of my identity to other kids. It also communicated other things about my consumer (and no doubt also moral) choices: in that sense "sonic youth" was a complex signifier for converse sneakers, thrift store shopping, coen brothers movies appreciating etc etc. 

But I guess the main point of difference now is that online you have to write yourself into existence, there is no you outside of that (although for kids coming up today I imagine they can't imagine a time when they didn't exist online - I'd be interested to know how that impacts on the sense of self). So the entirety of the communication of self is what you can write on your hyperlinked backpack (or facebook wall) - so what does it mean if that information is being used by advertisers to set up a marketing profile for you (and, importantly, others 'like' you) and communicated to corporations so they can better sell to you?

It seems fairly sinister to me (especially as Facebook toys with lowering the age of its users) - and I also can't quite get my head around how to think about the fact that we opt in to this system. I like things on my Facebook (bruce campbell, julia kristeva, slate magazine, etc); and likester itself appears to have a social networking function wherein their likester affinities program tells you what ELSE you might like based on your Facebook profile (could be useful in a video store. Oh, wait). So why are we choosing to commodify our identities in this way? Are we so keen for a better shopping experience that we want to make it easier for stores to target us? Or is there something more complicated going on when we merge our articulation of identity with commericialism?