New Words for New Communications

Today, the term blogtificate came to me: the process of unloading one's unqualified opinions, unsupported by fact, into a blog because no one else wants to hear them.

That got me thinking that there must be plenty of others:

• imaway - (adj.) When you set your Internet messaging software to away status so people will stop bothering you as you try to get something done.


• blackberryed - (adj.) The state of having a Blackberry filed with so many emails that you will never be able to respond to all of them.


• iphoney - (n.) A technology poseur who purchases some trendy device but hasn't yet learned how to turn it on.

So what others can you think of? There are comments on this blog for a reason.

Joss Whedon's Three-Part-Internet-Only-Take-That-You-Villains Musical and a Review: Soon I Will Be Invincible

As a society, we must be in reaction to superheroes in comics and movies, because there is a mini-wave of takes from the super villain's viewpoint. Let's start with Joss Whedon.

No one could reasonably claim that Joss Whedon was wed to formula. I thought the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was brilliant (and the writing and execution of the rest of the series weren't too shabby, either). During the Writers Guild of America strike, Whedon started writing a three-part musical about a low-rent super-villain called Doctor Horrible - and they're all streaming for free this week only.

But what first got me thinking about super villains was the amusing Soon I Will Be Invincible, a debut novel by Austin Grossman. The novel rests on two points of view: that of super villain Doctor Impossible, who has an IQ of 300 and rookie superhero female cyborg Fatale. And there is the battle between good and evil, with people trying to take over the world in one way or another, but it's not always clear exactly who is doing what. Addressing childhood, shame, love, lust, and the weird twists of fate that make us who we are, the book shows how sometimes the difference between one path in life and another might be a chance word, a bit of kindness, and someone understanding. My daughter wasn't too fond of the writing, though for the most part I enjoyed it, with trite comic book dialog craftily placed to create a kind of character chiaroscuro, only the contrast not being between literal light and dark, but the metaphoric public and private parts of someone's psyche that help define the whole person. There were times that I thought the story got badly out of hand - for example, one character realizes the real identity of another and states it, when a hint would have done the trick and left one area of tension and suspense for resolution at the end for greater effect. But overall, worth the read and a book I can recommend. Check the link for an excerpt and pointer to where you can get a copy.

Missouri Lawmakers Want to Outlaw Cyberbullying

This seems to me one of the biggest opportunities for unintended consequences and no good deed going unpunished: Missouri lawmakers want to criminalize cyberbullying:

"It used to be that adults would pooh-pooh bullying as a phase, but we're seeing increasing violent actions resulting from it," Sanchez said in an interview.

"The problem with cyberbullying is that kids aren't even safe in their own home, because they're being harassed through the computer or cell phones 24/7 potentially," she said.

How about turning off the damned computer and taking an interest in what your kids do online? How can you possibly define "cyberbullying" in such a way as to prevent abuse without completely tossing out protected freedom of speech?

China Unblocks BBC Website

According to the BBC, people in China are finally able to get full English-language stories on the broadcaster's web site, though not any Chinese-language services or links:

Beijing has never admitted to blocking access to BBC news stories - and there has been no official confirmation that the website has been unblocked.

But Chinese users trying to access pages on the site have almost always been redirected to an error message telling them: "The connection was reset."

It now appears that this is no longer the case, and access to the site is much easier.

The Chinese government censor information and only make it available when it figured that such actions would be obvious during the Olympics? Pshaw. It was probably all a matter of inferior western technology.

Fifteen Seconds of Fame and Fleeting Audiences

I caught myself doing something that makes me nuts when it's done to me - the fifteen second reading indulgence. I had followed a link to a column that former litigator Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon.com. The topic, mentioned in an email news list, that caught my attention was a critique of a reporter's coverage of John McCain, but I accidentally stumbled onto an earlier post about the unintended consequential results of hate speech laws. The topic caught my attention - I think that there are probably enough laws to cover pretty much anything that one person might do to another, and that legislating intent and thought is both dangerous and more than a little useless.

I finished reading, nodded to myself, and then was ready to head off elsewhere and suddenly knew that even though I just read two pieces back-to-back from the same author that seemed solid, I had no intention of checking back in the future for further posts. There is something more than a little peculiar about how many of us approach the world as readers, these days. We see something of value, but it is as though these items appear out of nowhere, have no connection to any one person, and certainly could not be evidence that more of the same might be found there. It's as though much of humanity had become thoughtless intellectual cattle, roaming about, grazing here and there, but never drawing any conclusions as to the best places to munch based on experience.

I'm sure people do bookmark spots, I do at times, but perhaps there is just too much out there and trying to keep up with it all has become more burden than freedom. Or maybe there is just so much out there that some of us are sitting tightly in a pool of serendipity, figuring that the interesting things will show up eventually. But I'm wondering how much of value I miss because I don't follow up - even for the few sites where I have a paid subscription.

ISPs More Than Traffic Conduit

According to a story from the CBC, at least one Canadian IPS has been intercepting web traffic to customers and modifying it to display information for its own purposes. For those who don't understand how web traffic works, this is easy. Web pages are nothing more than pages of ordinary text with special control codes embedded. As your browser encounters the control codes, it adjusts the display of the text accordingly, including changing fonts and colors, altering spacing, and inserting graphics downloaded from the web. So modifying traffic requires nothing more than programs that watch what is coming in and inserting the additional text and control codes to change the display. The example in the article is of the ISP adding something at the top third of the search page that comes down from Google.

There are a number of concerns that immediately rise:

• Because an ISP is handling and redirecting all traffic to and from its customers - which is must do if Internet traffic is to actually go where it's supposed to - it can monitor everything a person looks at or wants to see. That extends to email, as well. An ISP that decides to operate without ethics leaves someone completely open to spying, even if the person is using an anonymizing service, because the traffic still comes back to his or her account.


• Because so much content on the web is copyrighted - other than that that has passed into the public domain or that was placed their by its owners - I think there's an argument to be made that such sort of activity is commercial use of that content, and an infringement on the copyright.


• If you remember the Orwell novel 1984, the powers that be constantly changed history to eliminate the ability of people to independently verify what they were hearing. This opens the possibility of changing what people see on the fly at whim. If a country's government doesn't like a given story, it could force ISPs to insert changed copy to alter the implications and sense of the report. This would be censorship on a scale that few if any of us have ever imagined - other than Orwell.
Those who have mindlessly chirped about how the Internet has freed the world and put all the power in the hands of "the people" should sit for a moment and consider just what people might have the power, and whether Internet communications could just as easily make things worse as better.

Candidates and the Internet

Garrett Graff was the first blogger admitted to a White House briefing and was Howard Dean's campaign manager, so if anyone starts to get the connection between politics and the Internet, he does. So it's interesting when he writes in the Washington Post that virtually all the candidates are clueless about the fundamental form of communications. Some of the mix-ups these people made - including Mitt Romney, who apparently confused YouTube and MySpace - are equivalent to a major politician in Henry Ford's day never having heard about the assembly line or someone in the 1970s being unaware of the fax machine.

But the closest analogy that comes to mind is something I once heard about the Patty Duke Show from the 1960s. Because Ms. Duke spent so much time working in the insular world of television, producers had to bring in "real" teenagers to show her the latest dances, so that she'd seem credible on the screen. I think what we're seeing is that politicians spend so much time in their own land, they never join us in this one, which is why they need translation: they literally don't speak the same language as the common people do. I've seen the same thing happen among top business leaders, who no longer mingle with the hoi polloi, otherwise known as the customers. No wonder they are so out of touch. Instead of hearing what their fellow citizens say, they have to make do with representations known as polls. No wonder they like dealing with lobbyists; they don't have to take a crash Berlitz course to converse.

Russia Looks to Control Internet

Last week, I mentioned how Italy seemed to be looking for control over bloggers. It seems that Russia is as well, according to the Washington Post:

Allies of President Vladimir Putin are creating pro-government news and pop culture Web sites while purchasing some established online outlets known for independent journalism. They are nurturing a network of friendly bloggers ready to disseminate propaganda on command. And there is talk of creating a new Russian computer network -- one that would be separate from the Internet at large and, potentially, much easier for the authorities to control.

I remember early on, people claiming that the Internet could not be controlled. But now we've seen multiple models of control: cutting off what a governement doesn't want citizens to see (China, Myanmar), registration (Italy), and using search engine optimization to bury opposition (Russia). Of all the approaches, though, Russia's is the most chilling, because it uses the very features of the Internet to turn it into a propoganda dissemination machine.

There is a growing number of companies in the US that use such techniques to promote their clients or themselves and to crowd out any opposing voices. I wonder how long it will be - assuming this isn't already established - before political parties and those in power use the same techniques to promote their views and interests and to crowd out the inconvenient gadflies.

Actually, a simple search on Google shows that it's already happening. Here's one company that offers a number of Internet consulting services to political campaigns, including online reputation management:

We can effectively displace or bury pretty much any article that's showing up in search engine results pages. We can also preemptively develop and optimize multiple pages allowing us to control the search results for a keyword, and keep any negative listings from popping right to the top.

Someone pass the vodka.

Anti-Spam Tool Used in Deciphering Digitized Texts

The BBC has a story about how researchers are using an anti-spam tool to help digitize old books that machines can't read. You've probably seen a captcha - one of those distorted images of text that you have to deciper and type into a box. Having users unscramble things is helping Carnegie Mellow University with its digitizing program. OCR (optical character recognition) is supposed to take scans of text and translate them into somethig you could edit in a word processor. But the age of these books can cause one mistake out of every ten words - a real pain for the scanning personnel to fix manually. But if you take each of those images, put them up in captchas, and have people from around the Internet take a few minutes and fix them, it goes a lot faster:

Thanks to the adoption of reCAPTCHAs by popular websites like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon, the system is helping to decipher about one million words every day for CMU's book archiving project, according to [Luis von Ahn, a Professor at CMU].

Now, if only we had an equivalent system for deciphering the handwriting of doctors.

New Company to Eavesdrop on Internet Calls

According to the Associated Press, a company called Pudding Media wants to make money with software that would let people make unlimited and free calls from their computers to any phone in North America. The catch? The system listens to the content of the conversation and then displays ads on the caller's screen, based on the subject of the conversation. Talk about a creepy idea. They want to eventually license their system to other companies providing voice conversations over the Internet. The system is similar, in that sense, to Google's Gmail service. I think I'm ready to move back to telegraph and smoke signals.

Thinking About Gresham's Law and Internet Discourse

A few months ago, someone emailed me with a passing reference to Gresham's Law. I had never heard of this before, but apparently it is an economic formulation essentially saying that bad money drives out good. Gresham was an English businessman during the 16th century. In that time, money was metallic coins made out of some rare material - gold or silver. All the money was treated as legitimate currency and citizens were forced to accept it, but many people would shave some metal off the coins they held, keeping the scraps because they had their own value, and then use the coins at face value. Or sometimes governments would mix the rare materials with base ones to stretch them and keep more of the valuable metals themselves.

Eventually people got wise to this scheme and would keep the coins with more metal and spend the devalued currency. Thus, the "bad" money dominates the "good" because it tends to be the one in circulation, as people first spend the ones they know to be of lesser intrinsic value.

On it's own this is an interesting phenomenon. But it applies in other areas. According to the Wikipedia article, for example, lemons can push good vehicles out of the used auto market, because people want to dump the cars with problems, so the lemons recycle more quickly into the used market and, depending on their total number, can come to dominate it. So why not apply it to Internet discourse? I've seen firsthand more than once how unpleasant discourse in specialty online forums, driven by a few people, can cause more thoughtful and knowledgeable folk away. The result is that as new people come in, they see the "victors" as the long-time denizens and associate them with a greater understanding of the topic in question.

In other words, people online are collectively promoting misunderstanding and poor knowledge and effectively rewarding those who actively drive out others because of their own psychological peculiarities. It's another example of collective intellectual and emotional degeneration. What do we expect of younger generations, who spend so much time online, when these are the examples of "success?"

Revengeful Repartee

The next time you are tempted to offer that devastating remark on a mailing list or news group, think twice. You, too, might be insulting someone willing to drive 1,800 miles to set fire to your trailer, as happened in this story.

Using Words to Move Stock Numbers

Those who would game the system to advance their own economic market interests have been hard at work on the Internet. Ever get spam touting stocks? Ever wonder if anyone would believe the hyperbolic emails? Apparently they do. According to the Washington Post, the SEC is accusing two Texas men of cheating investors in at least a baker's dozen small cap stocks of $4.6 million by infecting PCs with viruses and using them as sources of spam emails. People who took the bait drove up prices long enough to let the men sell their holdings.

And in Russia, News.com.au notes that hackers issues a false statement announcing the arrest of the CEO of one of the country's main oil producers. The CEO must have been happy on one hand about the inaccuracy, but unhappy that the stock price fell, albeit by less than 1 percent.

This isn't a new type of activity on the Internet. Stock chat rooms used to be one of the main stomping grounds of they who would induce changes in stock prices. It's fascinating how the mere act of telling people what they would like to hear causes them to take specific actions, like spending their money, even though the source of the advice is highly suspect. That shows the stories that have the most power are actually not the ones others tell us, but the ones we tell ourselves. It's not the words on the screen, but the words in the head that tell us what we'd like to believe - that up is down and that we can have something for nothing just by asking.

Tag, You're It and Internet Privacy

What a few little words can do. According to an article in the Harvard Law Review, when facial recognition software and image "tags" (the words used to describe the contents of a photo) meet the Internet, the growing possibility is that people will be losing their privacy.

The article has some interesting examples: Republican Bob Corker who had to face a bit of a scandal when a picture of his daughter kissing another girl showed up on someone's Facebook account, or television local news anchor Catherine Bosley lost her job after a picture surfaced of her taking part in a wet-t-shirt contest (in the presence of her husband and with some considerable psychology pressure after facing several life-threatening illnesses). But what happens when people can search the web to snoop on their friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbors? Search for someone's name stuck to a picture and see what comes up.

Now expand the concept a bit. Millions of people keep blogs. What if they're adding subject tags to the blogs? What does that say about how they associate information? What will people - or employers or rivals or anyone else with an agenda - think about them and how will they react? What might you learn about someone, or what might someone learn about you, given the combinations of tags that are now associated with your name? The more you are on the Web in any way, shape, or form, the greater a chance you have of losing your privacy.