DATA SMOG
DOUBLE W MAGAZINE
A QUICK LOOK INTO THE EFFECTS OF THE INTERNET
DATA SMOG
COVER PAGE
WWW
2013
I
USAGE
REHAB
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FIRST PACKET-SWITCHING PAPERS
MERIT NETWORK FOUNDED
NIC CREATED
1961
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The World of Data Taking a step back from the world of monitoring, virtualization and cloud can be rather humbling at times. When you think about it in very elementary terms, everything that we do on a daily basis is reduced into bits, stored somewhere, sent other places, and more importantly, it is constantly growing.
IANA ESTABLISHED
1972
TELENET PACKET CREATED
I 1974
WWW
TELENET PACKET CREATED
1974
X.25 PROTOCOL APPROVED
MINITEL INTRODUCED
IAB ESTABLISHED
1976
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USENET
1980
UUCP
II 1980
USAGE
ETHERNET CREATEAD
1980
CSNET
TCP/IP FORMALIZED
DSN
1981
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We Use Too Much People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with different people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. —Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg If you have something you don’t want anyone to know about, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. —Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Our uneasy relationship with the internet begins with the fact we don’t really know who can see our data and how they might exploit it. “Not even the experts have a full understanding of how personal data is used in an increasingly complicated market,” points out Carnegie Mellon University public policy professor Alessandro Acquisti, who researches the psychology behind online privacy perceptions. Behavioral economists often refer to this problem as information asymmetry: One party in a transaction (Facebook, Twitter, advertisers, the NSA) has better information than the other party (the rest of us).
UUNET FOUNDED
ANS ESTABLISHED
ARCHIE SEARCH ENGINE
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We Fall For Misdirection Many social networks give users granular control over how their data is shared among users, but very little control over how it’s used by the services themselves. This is a classic case of misdirection—the magician’s trick of calling attention to one hand while the other stuffs a rabbit inside a hat. A Carnegie Mellon study published in July found that misdirection caused people to disclose slightly more information about themselves than they might otherwise.
IMDB
AMAZON
EBAY
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We Are Addicts Some of the same psychological quirks that cause people to smoke cigarettes also explain why they don’t stop sharing personal details online. In short, we value immediate gratification, discount future costs, believe our own risks are less significant than the risks of others, and have trouble calculating the cumulative effects of thousands of small decisions. People “who genuinely want to protect their privacy might not do so because of psychological distortions well documented in the behavioral economics literature,” Acquisti writes. And “these distortions may affect not only naive individuals but also sophisticated ones.”
CRAIGSLIST
HOTMAIL
GOOGLE SEARCH
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Ignorance is Bliss Ignoring privacy threats and sticking your head in the sand might actually be a good idea. Consider the recent revelation that the NSA targets people who use Tor anonymity software... just because. So why bother to become a privacy expert? Caring too much about privacy, as Google’s Eric Schmidt has implied, might be taken as a sign that you have something to hide. This “ah, fuck it” approach is known to behavioral economists as rational ignorance. “Even those that are privacy sensitive among us may rationally decide not to protect their privacy,” Acquisti explains. “Not because they don’t care, but because it’s just too hard. You could be trying to do everything right, and your data could still be compromised.”
IANA ESTABLISHED
NAPSTER
BIT TORRENT
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WIKIPEDIA
MYSPACE
SKYPE
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Facebook is Bad for You
THOSE who have resisted the urge to join Facebook will surely feel vindicated when they read the latest research. A study just published by the Public Library of Science, conducted by Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan and Philippe Verduyn of Leuven University in Belgium, has shown that the more someone uses Facebook, the less satisfied he is with life. Past investigations have found that using Facebook is associated with jealousy, social tension, isolation and depression. But these studies have all been “cross-sectional”— in other words, snapshots in time. As such, they risk confusing correlation with causation: perhaps those who spend more time on social media are more prone to negative emotions in the first place. The study conducted by Dr Kross and Dr Verduyn is the first to follow Facebook users for an extended period, to track how their emotions change. The researchers recruited 82 Facebookers for their study. These volunteers, in their late teens or early 20s, agreed to have their Facebook activity observed for two weeks and to report, five times a day, on their state of mind and their direct social contacts (phone calls and meetings in person with other people). These reports were prompted by text messages, sent
ITUNES STORE
PIRATEBAY
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REHAB
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PODCASTS
FLICKR
YOUTUBE
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Facebook is Bad for You (cont.)
between 10am and midnight, asking them to complete a short questionnaire. When the researchers analysed the results, they found that the more a volunteer used Facebook in the period between two questionnaires, the worse he reported feeling the next time he filled in a questionnaire. Volunteers were also asked to rate their satisfaction with life at the start and the end of the study. Those who used Facebook a lot were more likely to report a decline in satisfaction than those who visited the site infrequently. In contrast, there was a positive association between the amount of direct social contact a volunteer had and how positive he felt. In other words, the more volunteers socialised in the real world, the more positive they reported feeling the next time they filled in the questionnaire. A volunteer’s sex had no influence on these findings; nor did the size of his (or her) social network, his stated motivation for using Facebook, his level of loneliness or depression or his self-esteem. Dr Kross and Dr Verduyn therefore conclude that, rather than enhancing well-being, Facebook undermines it. Their study does not tease out why socialising on Facebook has a different effect from socialising in person. But an earlier
GOOGLE EARTH
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Facebook is Bad for You (cont.)
investigation, conducted by social scientists at Humboldt University and Darmstadt’s Technical University, both in Germany, may have found the root cause. These researchers, who presented their findings at a conference in Leipzig in February, surveyed 584 users of Facebook aged mostly in their 20s. They found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bons mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed. Real-life encounters, by contrast, are more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). What neither study proves is whether all this is true only for younger users of Facebook. Older ones may be more mellow, and thus less begrudging of their friends’ successes, counterfeit or real. Maybe.
WIKI LEAKS CREATED
GOOGLE STREET VIEW
KINDLE RELEASED
2007
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Why I deleted my Facebook account I went to Facebook when everyone else did, and stayed for a number of years; but I recently (finally) decided to “cut the cord” and leave the network—for good. Like many others did in recent years, I dithered about whether or not to continue using Facebook. Over the years, I’ve migrated from system to system like so many other digital nomads: in terms of “social” I go all the way back to Sixdegrees, then Friendster, MySpace... and finally to Facebook.  With an itinerant history like that, I always felt that at some point it’d be time to move on to whatever was the next thing; I just didn’t expect the next best alternative was going back to independent blogging! Ultimately deciding to delete my Facebook account was a simple matter of weighing the pros and the cons of using and maintaining it. I ’m sure that the first thing most of you think I’d talk about as a reason to go is the privacy violation issue. While it’s a real problem, and Facebook has no respect for anyone’s privacy, it’s also a moot point.
DROPBOX
SPOTIFY
BING SEARC ENGINE
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There is no privacy left in the world—the NSA monitors everything you say or do, remember? Giant multinationals have mountains of data about every one of us. Privacy died decades ago, so it’s not really related to all this. No, the things that bother me most about Facebook are the bugs, the inconsistency of the experience, and the constant involuntary upgrades. All the things that I want to access, Facebook goes to great pains to hide. Sadly, on top of these things, Facebook has also eliminated just about all the reasons to stay that I listed above. The fact that they now actively hide posts and even comments from people, groups, and fan pages that I’m interested in, make the point that “everyone” is on Facebook moot, because now I don’t interact  with everyone any more. Remember the “Facebook is going to start charging you” hoax / meme? It’s basically true at this point, because you and everyone you know have to either go through a ridiculous set of preference and option changes, or you all have to pay to get your posts promoted so that everyone can see them;
GOOGLE DOCS
KICKSTARTER FOUNDED
GOOGLE +
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end up having to pay to get their announcements out to their members. As far as events go, they’re never at the forefront, so I often forget when things are happening. No calendar on the front page? Ridiculous. And now in addition to the events I’ve been invited to (many of which could easily be classified as “event spam” from promoters trying to get me to come to their marketing parties) I also get suggested events that I almost never care about and would feel weird about inviting myself to anyways. And the game requests... good grief, the game requests! Overall, I judged Facebook a terrible user experience that I cannot control at all and was no longer worth my time. When I found that WordPress was a viable choice, I made one more Facebook backup and promptly deleted my account. I’ve not looked back since.
“Now What Am I Supposed To Do?” You’re probably asking yourself: “Should I quit Facebook?” I don’t have an answer, you’ve just got to figure it out for yourself—it’s your prerogative. What are you getting out of it? Are you spending a lot of time using it but find yourself endlessly frustrated? Is all that time and energy you put in worth what you’re getting out of it? Are you concerned about government surveillance, inappropriate trust relationships with major multinational corporations, and endless privacy violations? Does it suck that you have no control over who gets to see your posts, and that you don’t have any say in whose posts you get to see? To me, Facebook has become like Las Vegas—a glitzy wonderland of games and entertainment, all style and no substance, and almost nothing like a “social network” at all. And just like in Glitter Gulch, a seedy underbelly is throbbing beneath the flashing lights, a churning well of lost souls fueling its engine of personal financial and spiritual ruin. Facebook addiction is as real as gambling addiction. Visitors to both are constantly bombarded by advertisements and empty promises. Everyone using their facilities is constantly surveilled and totally monitored. Casinos in particular do everything they can to keep you trapped inside their walls and to foil your sense of the passage of time...try logging out of Facebook some time and clearing out all your cookies; you’ll see just how tall and thick their garden walls really are. I will say that I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything important post-Facebook. I certainly don’t miss all the noise, ads, game requests, spam, and garbage constantly filling my screen.
CALVIN LEE MINI MAGAZINE STUDY FALL 2013 / 203