Big Tech

The interesting semi-pejorative name I've been seeing thrown around in the political circles recently is Big Tech. I think there are some rogue marketers out there somewhere who are just having a heyday coming up with all the various ways to tear down others by labeling them negatively instead of using creative words to positively build up one's own brand. But this latest is a very interesting turn.

Social media in all its various shapes and forms is the tool many people use to communicate these days, especially if you're looking at groups of people who are united by a common interest but who may not have a normal face to face relationship. Early social media was a way for people who knew each other to keep in contact with each other. As social media grew and expanded, it became more and more a tool for people who didn't already know each other through family, friends, school, work, or otherwise to make connections. This was a powerful shift but also one that has been able to foment conspiracy theories and provoke actions that polite society might normally disapprove of.

As conspiracies and provocations have abounded, so-called Big Tech has been called upon or chosen of their own accord to start trying to filter illegal or inappropriate behavior. They have always tried to put themselves in a place of being a neutral communication channel who is not responsible for what other people use their networks for. As they have started to crack down on those committing illegal acts using their services, the call has started to appear for the need to take a few of the large, powerful technology companies to be split up a la Ma Bell. Such a breakup may be called for, but the breakup of AT&T's phone monopoly in the 80s is different than what we're seeing now.

Fox News reports on how Big Tech companies are helping to preserve data from rioters and other extremists who posted their activities online and are now trying to delete the evidence. The funny thing is that the article makes it sound like the social media companies are doing something special by preserving that data, but I've always taken it as common knowledge that social media companies never actually delete anything. If you say you want to delete something, it may make it invisible to you and others, but it's always going to be archived somewhere that it could be pulled up again if needed or for the company who owns your data to be able to mine and build your profile. If anything, that is more information about you, knowing that you posted something and then deleted it.

The main issue that people seem to have is that they are claiming that their rights are violated by having their hate speech or violence or otherwise illegal behaviors shut down. They think by breaking up these large tech companies who can currently limit social media behaviors or websites and app stores that host various content, the ability of any given company to lock out a law breaker or rioter will be diminished. The only other option they have is to move to dark web communication tools. How ironic that those who claim they are trying to do what is moral and right will end up having to hide underground as their misdeeds are published to the world.

Social Media Fatigue

Awhile back I had posted about the problems with Facebook. It's not just Facebook, though. I won't list all the different social media sites, but I think very few don't suffer from the same issues of being designed to lead to addiction and brainwashing.

Mark Zuckerberg has just been quoted as being for free speech or freedom of expression. I get that. One of the most powerful tools for the oppressed under totalitarian regimes is the ability to use social media to get their message out to the world.

Cory Doctorow's After the Siege paints a different picture of broadcasting an oppressed society gone wrong. He also talks about how awesome it would be to put the power of technology and smart sensors into the hand of the people and not the other way around.

Why isn’t it creepy for you to know when the next bus is due, but it is creepy for the bus company to know that you’re waiting for a bus?

Why is it creepy that when I go to The Guardian's website to read Doctorow's column about corporations and the government surveilling us I get a warning about the cookies being placed on my computer to track me as I visit the site?

As important as it is to work through the issues of all the data constantly tracking everything we do, backing it up a minute to the original, less complicated thought, there's just a fatigue that sets in trying to keep up with everything.

Going back 20 years, when email was pretty much the only thing close to what you could call a social media tool, I was always on top of my email, answering any message quickly and reading everything that came to my inbox. As spam clogged things up and a variety of other options popped up, whether that was Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or just about anything else, I have found that I will generally have a primary or favorite platform at any one time. If I'm staying on top of Instagram, Twitter suffers, and vice versa. Email suffered to where I don't read most of what comes in my email and what I do read is usually days later, because I was staying on top of something else.

So 5 months ago, while on vacation, I just stopped dealing with social media. It wasn't really on purpose. I wanted to enjoy the vacation. I meant to post some pictures from it but never did, and all of a sudden it's been 5 months. When I mention it to people (sparingly, not in a vegan or crossfit way of mentioning it to people), I've not heard kickback from it. It's generally been positive, as I got the feeling they wished they could give it up, too.

I was aware of the social media fatigue before and my behavior of switching platforms and not being able to keep up with all of them at the same time, but I hadn't realized how freeing it would be to just give it all up together.

What is real?

As we have been planning for the coming year, we have asked our scouts what life goals they have or what they want to do when they grow up. Now, I know that no one really knows what they want to do at 12, and many of us will be doing things that don't even exist when we are in high school. We want to support them in our activities. So what do a couple of them have in common? They want to be YouTubers.

I guess that makes sense, as that is the media that people connect with. I don't see their personalities fitting that model, but it's all acting and production quality.

The ironic thing is that I was at the Wal-Marts a couple weeks after this conversation, and we happened to see some local actors and YouTubers. On their channel or on Instagram they are polished, smiling, and traveling the world. From what they have shared, I know they have had some crazy trials to work through, but it is always still poised. Not at the Wal-Marts, though. This was real - unshaven, no makeup, no show.

I guess we all put on a show in whatever we do. Here's to being more real in 2020!

Local News

Over a decade ago, my old hometown paper was downsizing, but my new hometown paper seemed to be doing okay. Over the past several years, my small town has apparently caught up with the big town trends.

The local paper has been struggling for years, going from 7 day delivery to 6 day delivery for subscribers and a minimal ad-filled paper on the seventh day for non-subscribers (TMC or Total Market Coverage was the product).

My kids delivered papers, up to three routes at once at times, but the TMC products which they had been getting paid for eventually just sort of stopped showing up at our house. At one point, one route wasn't getting it at all and the other was getting twice as much as we needed.

Then they moved to ditching Sunday for a big Saturday paper, so down to 5 delivery days per week.

Near the end of that, they did a big push for the Saturday-only subscription - a one day paper that was fairly inexpensive. A couple months later, they got rid of the one day subscription, so bumped everyone who had subscribed to it up to a regular subscription. Bait and switch.

Now they are delivering three days per week, through the mail. They claim there have been issues with finding enough carriers due to low unemployment. I think they lost good carriers due to a reduction in a quality newspaper and issues with getting them out on time to the carriers (which I suppose could be back to a low unemployment thing).

It's not a good day to be in the newspaper business. I don't have the solution for it. I'm a fan of the local interest story. I like community traditions and letters to the editor from local crazies. It used to be you paid for something that was scarce, because someone had to produce and deliver it to you. Now there is no physical production, and distribution is free electronically, so how do you still make enough money to create something no one is willing to pay for?

More and more of what is delivered to us electronically is in the hands of just a few massive media conglomerates, meaning the independent voice is being stifled. I have a feeling those free stories are being sold by someone who has something more than a nice story to tell.

Facebook = AOL

I remember in the late 90s being at the house of a friend who was (and is) very tech savvy. The thing that blew me away was that he was dialing up to AOL and looking something up through their portal. Why would anyone use AOL for anything? Well, anything other than creating wall-sized art projects with all the AOL CDs they had gotten in the mail.

The problem is that it was a closed community. It simplified and filtered out the raw parts of the full Internet. It tried to create a one-size-fits-all view of the Web, and by doing so limited the interesting bits, and the potential for growth was stymied.

In the years that followed, AOL declined in favor of interesting startups that promised the world. Some lasted. Some didn't. I still miss the blogging days of about 2006-2010 when the Web seemed limitless, and everyone was so excited to be sharing information with each other. Around that time, however, Facebook opened to everyone and provided an easy to use platform that was filled with hip college students who had been using it out of sight of prying eyes.

Facebook grew, adding in messaging, unlimited picture sharing, a mobile app, and so on. It structured things more rigidly than MySpace. It became the place where everyone who wanted to communicate was on it. Only the Luddites avoided it.

Fast forward to the growth of advertising, meddling Russians, commercial adoption, and the dagger to the heart - the news feed algorithm. I think having companies on FB is not bad, as they can provide an easy way to message and provide deals to their customers. But ripping out the reverse chronological feed of simply everything posted by everyone you knew and were friends with, in favor of FB deciding what it thought you would want to see, that is to me the beginning of the end.

A former student of mine who got a job as a project manager at FB after taking my project management class (before even completing the rest of the degree program and graduating), told me that it is all numbers driven. FB knows that people who use the algorithmic news feed spend significantly longer on the site than those who use the most recent chronological feed. I think that's because they are confused and can't find what they want. Or because most of the content is hidden from the chronological view and only shown on the news feed. The news feed is the default, and I'll often see a glance of something interesting before I switch to the most recent feed, and as I scroll down through the most recent posts, the interesting item from someone who I am friends with never comes up, even when it should.

Then it hit me. We've just rebuilt AOL. We have a one-size-fits-all platform, tightly controlled by their corporate decision makers. We have control of content handed to advertisers. We have an experience that is locked down to be as simple as possible. Look only at the death of blogs for an example of this. It used to be that people would write daily or maybe a couple times a week but at least monthly. And they would write a lot. They would customize the look of the blog, although generally without getting too much into MySpace-esque horrid background designs. The most important, though, is that they would write a lot. Long articles they would work for a long time on, with curated pictures embedded right in the text where it was discussed. Bloggers would link to other blogs or posts on their own blog. The comment section would run wild. What do people write now? A couple sentences? Maybe a full paragraph? Pictures are out there sort of with no context other than a short description. If a post is longer than a couple sentences you can click on a link to show more, but if it's longer than a couple paragraphs it loads into a totally new page that people don't even wait for it to completely load to shut it down. TL;DR (too long; didn't read) becomes the name of the game. That to me is the saddest part of it. We lost thoughtful discussion and editing of deep content in favor of clicking a like button and a couple sentences of writing. The biggest innovation was the reaction buttons where you could not only like something but mark it as something you dislike or are angry or surprised about. We don't even need to write a response showing our surprise. Just click the surprised button.

My favorite part that keeps me coming back to FB every day is the memories, where it will show what you posted on that day some number of years ago. It's a fun way to relive things that have been posted over the past 10 years or so. It's a little private section of memories just for me (that I don't reshare, although some people do). But what is the majority of content on my wall? I've posted about this a couple times recently, here and here, and it hasn't changed much, so I won't do an update. But it's just curated content from big media companies for the most part.

Think about when you do see something interesting on FB, and you go to tell someone else about it (IRL), chances are they have already seen it. Everyone else has already seen the same viral video, the same breaking news story, or the same joke or meme. Think about how decades ago before the rise of cable, everyone watched the same TV shows at the same time, with some time shifting as VCRs became popular. Then cable hit, and everyone was watching different shows. Eventually we had DVRs and later ubiquitous streaming options. But we've cycled back around to everyone watching the same shows or other content. If you're behind on a series, you have to avoid FB so as to avoid spoilers, but then you miss other things, too, so you have to catch up with everyone else.

We have moved away from a creation- and sharing-oriented platform to one of consumption. It's easier to consume what others have created than to create and share our own. And who is creating that content that we are consuming? Big media that invests heavily in FB to keep our attention, because we are afraid of missing out if we disconnect.

Tragedy of the Common Carrier

The Tragedy of the Commons is a well-known example in economics of how a common or public resource can be destroyed through over-use.

Adam Smith's famous Invisible Hand worked differently as he applied it to privately owned resources. Take the richest person you can find, and their wealth and resources are distributed to the poor due to the fact that the rich person will hire others to help take care of the estate. They can't possibly consume everything they own or create, and they can't take care of it either. Hiring someone poorer than them helps to maintain or grow the estate, while benefiting others at the same time. This is in some way the basis for Trickle-down Economics.

A commons, however, is a public space, with no majordomo to place limitations on its use. The tragedy comes in when this public resource is overused to the point that it becomes useless. Normally individuals acting in their own self-interest will provide a net benefit to society through their actions. The problem is that public lands can be overgrazed, roads can be shut down by gridlock, and a once-beautiful park can be spoiled by trash.

The stock market has the potential to be destroyed by those large players who manipulate it in a variety of ways.

I think our phone system has all but passed this point. Between mobile phones, the Internet, and scam calls, something major needs to happen to fix the problems that our common carrier phone system is faced with. There used to be natural limitations on abuses of the phone system, long distance calling rates being one of the biggest. There is no security system in place with our phones, as they were built as a commons, to allow anyone to call anyone if you had their number (and these were published). With the advent of free calling via VoIP, the minimal cost gatekeeper is gone, and untraceable nuisance phone calls flourish. Scammers are riding a dying wave, as fewer and fewer people have a landline anymore, and fewer people answer phone calls that they aren't expecting. There are still a few people left to scam, so they continue trying, and as they do, they hammer their own coffin even tighter.

With many messaging and voice apps available, we still have options to communicate within private systems. This requires that everyone maintains multiple accounts, in order to have the ability to talk with different groups. Those under Apple's spell are locked into their communication tools, yet there are many other providers. Facebook had gotten too big and has taken a stumble because it got away from its original mission and sold out to scammers and advertisers, so alternatives arise. It is a pain to deal with so many protocols and username/password combos, but the pain and cost is what puts up just enough of a wall to keep tragedy at bay.

Genisys

This type of thing happens all too often. You're talking about something random, let's say your favorite pieces from a bag of Chex Mix. You don't type anything into a search engine about it. You're not using your desktop computer or mobile phone at the time. You haven't purchased any from the store or Amazon or looked up any Chex Mix recipes recently. You just briefly talk about it for a minute and then the conversation changes.

The next day, you open up Facebook, and the following ad appears:

That is an actual screenshot I took when this happened to me. The strangest thing about this is that I don't have the Facebook app on my phone. I access it through my web browser, which means Facebook can't be constantly listening in to me. My wife and daughter do have the Facebook app. So if it was listening on one of their phones, it made the connection to show the ad to me.

Genisys in the title above is a reference to Terminator Genisys, which I just watched so is fresh on my mind. It is interesting how the time travelers are blown away by everyone's obsession with their mobile devices. And [spoiler alert] the artificial intelligence network which was a missile defense system in the initial movies ended up being a social media cloud system in this movie reboot. It was honestly more of a MacGuffin than an important plot point, other maybe when the security guard was looking at his phone instead of the surveillance cameras. Of course 2 or 3 decades ago people were concerned with Soviet missiles, while now social media is the big thing.

Is it a big leap from your phone showing you ads for Chex Mix to robots controlled by social media and destroying mankind? Maybe. But next time you're out in public, look around at who's being controlled by their phones.

Facebook Update

A year ago, I posted about the problem with Facebook. I took a quick sample of the last 50 posts to my wall and coded them to see how many of each kind there were. I realize some social media gurus will figure out the optimal times to post based on time zones and when people are awake, at work, on break, and so on, but I didn't take any of that into account at the time. I've done an update and didn't try to match time of day or anything.

News is still up near the top. Advertisements and status updates from people I don't know jumped way up to the top. The number of unmotivational images dropped. Status update from someone I know dropped a little.

Of course, this isn't a scientific study, but I will say that things seem to be moving in the wrong direction. It was already problematic a year ago, but to have advertisements and status updates from people I don't know overtake the top spots, just above news, and to have status updates from someone I know drop, that heightens the irrelevance of Facebook as a social media platform. It's becoming even more about advertising and big media, while throwing in some random extra stuff from friends of friends to try to make it seem like it's still personal and social. But if people I know aren't using it to post things about themselves, what's the point?

The Problem with Facebook

I did a quick count of the most recent 50 items on my wall. It's an interesting look at why Facebook is going to fail, even if they don't know it yet. Now, I'm not a member of as many groups as some people that I know have some significant interactions through that platform. Also, I consistently load my wall with the Most Recent view, not the Top Stories view, to try to do my part to skew the numbers in that direction, since their analysis shows that people who use the Top Stories view spend significantly more time using FB than those who use the Most Recent view. I think it's because it takes so long to find what you're looking for.

Here is what I found:

There's 6 out of 50 that are text-based posts from someone I know, and 3 out of 50 that are images that weren't also posted to Instagram. 4 of the 50 were photos I've already seen on Instagram. Three-fourths of what is on my wall consists of news stories, viral videos, things posted by people I don't know (but by someone who knows someone that I know), celebrity posts, supposedly motivational messages that end up being just sappy, and advertisements.

A colleague of mine described the difference between Twitter and Facebook like this. Twitter is for connecting to random people to talk about specific things. Facebook is for connecting to specific people to talk about random things. The problem, then, is that FB has lost this differentiation in that the majority of what is there is not actually posted by the specific people I know, or even when it is, it's just a re-post of something created by a big news or content company.