The Gallery of the Pop Culture Megamix
For the past few months, I’ve been hungrily scouring the web in an effort to find and collect that most breathtaking of obsessive compulsive video montage masterpieces: the pop culture megamix.
Lovingly dedicated to curating and documenting every tiny, weird repetitive tic of celebrities or Hollywood plot device, the megamix genre is a thing of beauty. Like watching glitches in some bizarre pop culture Matrix, it’s unsettling — but really in only the best possible way.
In any case, if you’ve spent any amount of time online, you’ve no doubt seen some of these and heard about others. In my opinion, it’s totally worth going back and experiencing them all (and catching up on the ones you haven’t). I’ve collected all the best I could find and included them all below.
So, enjoy. If I’m missing any that you think should be included, absolutely drop a comment!
(Obscenely) more videos, after the jump…
After the wave of anger following instant personalization, Facebook has since issued an odd, self-justifying blog post and withdrawn to a kinda-sorta seeming compromise on its privacy policy. But generally the lingering question seems to be not if, but when the next attempt by a fallen social media darling to violate privacy goes down.
But even beyond this question, I think there’s an interesting deeper issue lurking here behind all the media hubblaboo of the Facepalm saga. A question that has more to do with the entire ecosystem of social media generally, rather than the specifics of who or what is going to pose a threat to personal information. Namely:
Is Facebook just an isolated case of a company gone wrong? Or are increasing violations of privacy just the typical behavior of a mature for-profit social network?
And, more generally, are privacy violations on the part of traditional social networks just a unique case of social media gone wrong? Or are they just the first in a broad and growing trend among all social media services (thinking here of microblogging, etc etc)?
The key here, might be to examine the rawest motivation of these companies, which, like all companies, is simply the need to stay solvent. And, if advertising revenue is the cornerstone of the business model for social networks, then one of the fundamental engines determining their activity is a simple formula — the formula for advertising revenue:
(Total Impressions of an Ad) X (Clickthrough Rate of the Ad) X (Cost Per Click) = Total Advertising Revenue
From this formula, I’ve been thinking that there’s a way to derive a pretty neat little economic model. A model which interestingly seems to suggest that as businesses based primarily on the revenue from online advertising continue to expand, they inevitably will try more and more intrusive strategies to acquire data about users. In short, that invasions of privacy are just part and parcel of the mature behavior of a certain type of business that makes online advertising a cornerstone. What’s worrisome, of course, is just how many “businesses that make online advertising a cornerstone” implies in the web startup world.
This argument why is a bit involved, so it’s worth going through it step by step (geekery follows).
Read more…
A Post About “Avatar”
While I agree that the captioning for James Cameron’s new flick “Avatar” could have settled for something more awesome than Papyrus as its font (especially considering they shelled out the money for a linguist to create a totally new language and a new camera just to film the damn thing), Keith Hopper rightly points out that there are way, way worse things it could have been.
He is right.
Mapping Out The Space: “Zittrainism” and More
Image from an emerging conversation with Graham Webster about how to start to map out the intellectual space about the internet beyond the Berkman School by using the old school polysci trick of putting everything into a 2×2 grid. Here, we’re varying the first two pillars/assumptions of the Berkman School, holding all else constant. For the first assumption, we vary whether or not the group of assumptions has relatively greater faith and emphasis on users or institutions in shaping the web. For the second, we vary whether or not the group of assumptions places importance on “The Internet” as a particular set of features and characteristics, or is more agnostic between various forms for different purposes.
Doing so seems to make a neato variety of positions fall out.
On The Berkman School of Thought
I’ve been enthralled lately reading the amazing bit of scholarship that is Randall Collins’ The Sociology of Philosophies. The big idea of the massive 900-page something or another tome, which is pretty intuitive but amazing to see played out across a huge swath of historical research, is that intellectual thought is primarily the product of social processes. To that end, he argues, you can track the course of a school or frame of thinking by closely examining who scholars and intellectuals hang out with and associated themselves with through history. There’s some neat things in there that he argues about the behavior of growing or failing schools of thought, and it’s all pretty great. Collins’ focus is on traditions in philosophical thinking, but I’ve been thinking alot about how this might apply to other fields as well, particularly to scholarship and popular discussion about the internet that’s emerged in the past two decades.
Obviously, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and its sprawling list of digerati that have passed through there over the past ten years and change, is a nice place to start such a discussion. Much of the conversation and scholarship happening there has influenced a great deal of the popular rhetoric around the web in the past decade, and looks to continue to for the foreseeable future.
So, the question: if there is one at all, what constitutes the Berkman School of Thought? What are the underlying assumptions unfolding and undergirding the community of thinkers that have surrounded the Center?
Social Wargaming: Now Looking For Teams
One of the big ironies about social media and marketing gurus is that the prescriptions of their (presumably massive) knowledge and experience are almost always vague and Sphinx-like in their implications. “Listen and engage with your customers,” they offer, unhelpfully. “Why don’t you set up a Twitter account?” suggests another.
Academic research and discussion about social networks suffers from an almost bigger irony: in the midst of an ecosystem of huge amounts data, talent, and quantitative analysis, some of our best prescriptions still don’t give us any good best practices about how to actually take part and consciously shape the social processes they identify.
And, despite huge amounts of work and energy in both worlds, it’s a little bit sad that we still can’t answer some fundamental (albeit by now cliche and boring) questions in a really concrete way. What factors make content become massively popular within certain social groups? What factors lead to social networks/connections between users to take the shapes they do? Are there ways of influencing these social processes? And so on.
The problem with both cases, of course, is a tangible lack of practice and implementable tactics. There’s no good space where people can playtest, experiment, and rapidly iterate on a variety of strategies, particularly where influencing the social space online is concerned. There’s no good place to measure success, or even compare various approaches against one another to assess their usefulness. There’s no way to prove that your methods and data mining can actually produce repeated success. The general question here is: if you’re so sure about the social web and how it works — can you actually put your money where your mouth is?
This is a big problem if we’re ever going to get down to the business of actually figuring out what makes culture and community online tick, and be applied about our knowledge. All these issues came up during a recent WEC, and I’ve been collaborating since with web ecologist Alexy Khrabrov on using games as a way of creating these focused scenarios that people can experiment with. Beyond being fun, it’s also a way of gathering data around what works and what doesn’t in terms of shaping and influencing social structures online.
Think of it like computer security Capture The Flag, but for social engineering and social hacking.
The general idea is this: judges will specify a “battleground” of unknowing, target users (who aren’t aware a game is going on) that form a common pool competed over by all the participants. Groups of teams will then descend on them, trying to get these people to behave in a particular way or influence the overall shape of the social structure. We keep score. And then teams are ranked accordingly. The hope is that teams will mine data about the targets and try to develop a strategy based around available data about the social terrain of the situation.
I’ve included the rules for a first game that we’ve sketched out below, called “Triangles,” essentially a game built around racing to influence certain users on Twitter to connect in particular, tightly interconnected ways. Check it out, after the jump.
We’re doing this for reals. So if you’re interested in putting together a team or otherwise participating, drop an e-mail to tim AT timhwang DOT org. If you want to get in on the first round, e-mail me by November 18th.
The Compleat Joss Whedon
This weekend was, at once, the weekend of the Web Ecology Project’s quarterly research conference, a Window 7 Launch Party, my 23rd birthday, and a screening of von Trier’s incredibly intense (and incredibly great) new film, “Antichrist.” Needless to say, it was crazy, awesome, exhausting, and full of metric shit-tons of enthusing things.
Saturday night, in the haze of all the excitement, a pun came to me when I was about to go to sleep.
It went like this –
“Sad to hear you got laid off man, what are you doing nowadays?”
“Not much, been sitting at home, mostly JOSS READIN”
Hilarious. And perfect for a serious bout of image macro shooping (see above).
It turns out that the pun is surprisingly extensible. I spent the rest of the weekend lovingly crafting more that I’ve aggregated in this post. I’m leaving them here to serve as a testament to the human condition, as a repository, and to solicit you, my way-cleverer readers, to comment and fill in any others that I’ve missed.
So, without further ado, the Compleat Joss Whedon, organized alphabetically, after the jump.
You’re In Good Hands, With Geek Insurance
Had the honor last week of speaking on a panel at the VRooM “Getting Personal With Data” panel, hosted by the typically brilliant and insightful Keith Hopper and Doc Searls. My fellow panelist was local entrepreneur Ben Rubin. His company, Zeo, is in the business of personal informatics — sleep, in particular. They produce slick alarm clock units that sync with a headset that the user wears at night. The machine tracks a variety of really neat stuff for the obsessive lifehacker in all of us: when you sleep, how much REM you’re getting, whether or not your sleep is being disturbed, and so on.
One point of discussion emerged from Ben, a position that you’ve heard a great deal if you’re anywhere near conference-inclined for the tech-open data-free/open source software world. This was the looming threat of the Data Dilemma, a common paranoia of businesses involved in handling large quantities of information. The general idea is this:
Businesses are majorly screwed with regards to choosing to make their data about users widely available or strictly controlled. Whatever they do, they will lose.
The Story of Atari Missile Command
Sometimes, you find the best stuff in the weirdest places. Absentmindedly picked up this novelization of Atari Missle Command for chuckles in a roadside antique shop right outside Mount Rushmore for $1. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a vinyl audiobook tucked into the back. The cover promises, “SEE the pictures. HEAR the story. READ the book.”
And the audio is, well, incredible. Complete with the ridiculous bleeps-and-bloops background music loop and William-Shatner-knockoff narrator. Been talking about it for a long while, but thanks to the help of Fred Owsley, it’s finally now available online in its pure .wav glory:
* Atari Missile Command Read-Along (Side 1)
* Atari Missle Command Read-Along (Side 2)
If you’d like to read along, I’ve also captured the book and all the illustrations here (which are kind of great in their own right). The best part is that the inner flap of the cover suggests that there’s similar vinyl-novelizations of Pac-Man and Marmaduke. Marmaduke?
Update (11/15/09): Thanks to the ineffable Mac Cowell, we now have a compiled and cleaned up version! He rocks.
Uncertain Futures: An Analysis of the FCC’s Newest Commissioners
I’m glad to announce today the release of “Uncertain Futures,” our political analysis of the FCC and its future. While public attention has largely missed the activity surrounding the nominations (particularly in the face of the Sotomayor hearings), the recent FCC commissioner confirmations have huge implications for the communications infrastructure in the US. Plus, no well-researched overview seems available online for researchers in the space.
To that end, we’ve gone through and done our homework. We prepared a basic briefing which reviews the background of the five newly minted commissioners of the FCC. Then, using what we know of the breakdown of their positions across various issues, we’ve made some educated guesses about the direction of the Commission in the coming years, and which policies will dominate going forwards.
The big news: while there is accordance on a great deal of issues, the controversial, divisive (and most important) points of policy will be determined by the critical vote cast by Mignon Clyburn, whose positions on issues are still largely unknown.
You can read the full report here (pdf).
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Other Key Findings and Predictions:
* Drawing from what we know of Mignon Clyburn and her father’s political connections, it appears that the principle of net neutrality may be at risk in the coming years.
* The most contentious issues among the commissioners will be net neutrality and media consolidation, issues that have created intense debate and were the focus of the Senate Committee hearings.
* The FCC will put an end to any further discussion of the Fairness Doctrine, which is opposed by all five of the commissioners and President Obama.
