Market Place of Ideas
With some time and effort you can build your own web, independent of Google, Facebook and Twitter, find and store your own sources of information, create the type of Internet that suits your purposes not the money grubbers and create a genuine Market Place of Ideas.
"There were some clever bastards..."
From his essay "As We May Think" (1945), Vannevar Bush, told us about his idea for the memex "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility"
As We May Think predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication. However, he seems to have underestimated the value of the Memex for science and the storage of knowledge for the layman.He accurately predicted the use of stored knowledge in laboratory research, business accounting, and law. Yet he neglected to see that it could affect the greatest number of people through entertainment and recreation, as in television, gaming, product information, and event/travel planning, banking and so forth. Bush never considered the power that might be unleashed by 100 million memexes all joined together.
Bush's project was about storage and retrieval, what later became known as information management. In his essay, Bush has much to say about users following data trails but his thinking was bounded by the technology of the time. The problem of following the trail was later solved by the use of hypertext.
UP
Early Internet Use
Before the first browsers came on the scene there were no web pages as we know them today but there were virtual communities, forums of people using dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS). One of first was The Well (1985) inspired by the spirit of counter culture, free access and free expression, collaboration and sharing. In a sense The Well established the 'open source' philosophy that still prevails on the Web today, despite Bill Gates's efforts to profit from the click of every mouse button.
The Refereers
The academic community, who largely had everything to themselves before the early 90s, did not want their networks opened up to commercial use. This was not surprising when you consider that the academic community saw itself as the referee, the arbiter of all knowledge - the growing potential of the Web would challenge this world view.
The Internet begat the Web
All the thinking and cleverness that went into the planning of that project resulted in something remarkable, way beyond the innovators' intentions. Initially, the net belonged to the military and science community, then business was brought in to finance the expansion of the project; for a very long time Joe Public was kept away. Home computers connected to the net just didn't exist, neither did the World Wide Web - that is, the ability to view web pages using a browser.
UP
Tim Berners-Lee
Ultimately, home computers and dial up connectivity arrived. Physicist Tim Berners-Lee, invented HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocal (1989). Berners-Lee was also responsible for one of the first web browsers. In addition, Berners-Lee, among many others, was finding practical applications for hypertext, as a means of organising and navigating to and through large amounts of information. Berners-Lee's personal project was and is about sharing useful information.
Hypertext
Hypertext enables users of the Web to move seemlessly between web pages. Its use makes it possible to create a system of links between related and geographically distant information sources. Wikipedia demonstrates an excellent example of how to employ Hypertext to provide a study trail through a vast amount of information.
However, it also demonstrates the limitations of hypertext as the possibilities to get lost in a maze of links and lose the thread grow with every click. e.g. Wikipedia. This is the problem of the Web, Hypertext aids navigation but it doesn't solve the effective organisation of information.
Generally, on-line newspapers are good at using hypertext because their material has a narrow focus, a short shelf life and is easily indexed. Larger volumns of information and longer time spans present problems.
Wikipedia would be a case in point, many of the articles sporn too many hyperlinks, too many trails, taking the reader further and further away from the original article. This is a major problem for web designers. UP
The Xanadu Project
There are those who would argue that hypertext is a cull de sac for net progress, the limits of hypertext in its current form have been reached and all the expert groups have no answers.
Those involved in the Xanadu Project are in no doubt:
"The design of our electronic documents has shaped today's world. And so far it has been simple minded, shallow and darkly limiting."
This quote comes from the Transliterature homepage, these people have a legacy going back to the 1960s. Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext back in 1963 is the brains behind Xanadu.
One thing seems clear, at various points in the development of the Web and the browsers used to render web pages, decisions were made that hindered the progress of infomation management. And, worth noting, the biggest block to the full implementation of Xanadu is existing copyright legislation.
However, Xanadu has another problem, Ted Nelson, is as mad as a box of spanners and unable to articulate his vision for an alternative to hypertext. You can read what Nelson says all day long and still struggle to grasp how we get to Xanadu. UP
Notes from an earlier version of Blast-It...
Social online Networking...
is it a mediocre digital nightmare? Or is it something more special, is it about community and collaboration, is it about taking power from the few and distributing it a bit more widely, people informing and helping one another and "changing the way the world changes" (Grossman, Time, 2006).
Nice idea but that moments gone..
Social Networking, has become, in recent years a key feature of Web use. Social networking is what happens when people that don't have any friends create a technology that allows citizens to go 'virtual' into a place where people who don't have friends make some and so-called celebrities stay in touch with the fragility of their own sad existence and people die without consequence and yet, occasionally, the technology appears to become a positive force... e.g., the elections in Iran or the scandal of Trafigura and the collusion of our justice system. Those bright people who created the The Web imagined social networking but not how business would take control of the it.
UP
Enter the nutters...
Unfortunately, whatever the Web was supposed to be, it's not. The bit the marketing men and big business have not taken control of is now in the hands of the nutters; every fruitcake with a computer is out there blogging, making virtual friends, telling the world what they had for breakfast, living a 'second life', playing war games and generally losing themselves...
it's all just the modern day equivalent of going to Butlins for a holiday, with the added attaction of hackers, spyware, adware, and domain hijackers.
The Internet does not belong to Google, eBay, and Amazon although you could be forgiven for thinking it was. All the wires, cables, and routers that enable the movement of information around the globe instantly are owned by governments and large Telcos. This global infrastructure grew from US efforts to build a post nuclear attack means of communication in the early 1960s.
The demands of the military drove network developments, like 'packet switching', that made fast and reliable communication between phyically remote computers possible. The research behind the cold war mania produced ARPANET, the initial core of today's Internet. From the late 60s onward, developments in global networking was the product of a collaborative international research effort.
And it's worth noting that for all those global connections copper wire was used and still is, currently only a limited amount of connectivity uses fibre optic, and satellites are rarely used - too expensive.
The Net will not be the saviour of our world
However, don't get too carried away.... In 2009 when young Iranians took to the streets to voice their dissent, they also Tweeted the rest of the world. Media commentators got carried away, talking about a new age of revolution sweeping Iran. The technology was truly remarkable, giving the down trodden masses a voice, from this change would surely come.
Change did not come from the Twitter revolution in Iran. Since the government of Mr Imadinnerjacket were also able to use the technology, in fact, they employed a army of tweeters to post positive messages about the regime. They used the technology to track down and silence dissenting voices. They discovered that most of those dissenting voices were not marching through the streets in Iran, they were lounging in their university rooms across Europe
Gates did his best to take control of the Web in the 1990s and attempted to use anti-competitive scams to force genuine innovators out of the browser market. Gates was late to the Internet party and he couldn't live with his own lack of foresight. Specifically, he couldn't comprehend the concept of collaboration, people giving freely of their time, giving software code away; there was no place for it in a mind that applauded only grasping. Ultimately, the US Courts freed the browser market from the grasping of Microsoft and even Gates had to give his browser away for nothing.
One of Gate's early Internet ideas was to set up a web site that people would pay to use, he described it as a 'walled garden', full of marvelous content. It was a short lived venture, it offered nothing that wasn't abundantly free elsewhere. This was Gate's last effort to control WWW. Gate's major contribution was in the realm of operating systems, not the WWW, he was and is bit part player.
Microsoft: still behind the curve
For more than a decade Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has been making life difficult for web page designers, due to its sloth in adapting its browser to design innovations occurring within CSS3, i.e. cascading style sheets, and HTML5. In the western world, Internet Explorer is found on the majority of computers, so designers need to incorporate work-arounds or not adopt new features into their designs until Microsoft are ready.
The World Wide Web provides the free and unfettered exhange and access to information across the globe, it thrives on the counter cultural philosophy of anything goes and yet it is highly regulated and controlled at the level of its orgainisation. The WWW is open to everyone for a minimum outlay but governments can pull the plug if they fear the freedom it promotes (e.g. China). And the way its structured lends itself to an invasion of individual freedom, e.g. the UK Government's multi-billion pound scheme to eaves-drop on citizens' communications. We are also seeing threats to bar individual users from Web use to protect the profits of big business, who refuse to adopt and adapt their historic business models. This last example is worth pondering for a moment.
The efforts of big players in the music and film industries to prevent peer to peer file sharing are being constantly thwarted by the amateur Web pirates. Having no technical answer to the pirates, business uses its muscle to enlist political support to restrict the sharing activities of net users. What we have here are two diametrically opposed world views, the one insists on the openness of the web, the other seeks to control the web.
The newspaper industry is now considering charging for on-line versions of its publications, The Financial Times and Times have led the way. It doesn't like the concept of free, prevented by an innate arrogance about the ownership of public knowledge. Some are dreaming up electronic tagging systems to track web authors who steal 'their ideas'. And book publishers are in despair over the appearance of digitized versions of their blockbusters on the web before they appear in the shops but J K Rowling seems to be surviving.
The openness of the Web doesn't just threaten the insecurities of companies, it also makes governments fearful. And as China and Iran have demonstrated, the State wants to be the final arbiter of how open a society will be.
Business tries to use the Law to curtail Web freedom.
An Australian court ruled (Feb. 2010) that the country's third-largest broadband operator (iiNet)cannot be held responsible for the actions of illegal file-sharers
Britain is set to introduce legalisation that will require ISP’s to not only police their customers - but to disconnect those suspected of ‘illegal’ filesharing.
up
The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media
Hollywood v. the Internet (April 2012)
January 2012, Sopa, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was dead and a sister act, Pipa, a neat acronym for the Protect IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) was sunk too. Across Europe, Acta, the US-backed international copyright treaty stalled.
Free culture advocates has been campaigning for a relaxation of copyright law for years, the Sopa battle will be seen as a landmark in a much wider debate about the open nature of the internet compared with the closed, copyright-protected world from before the digital age.
The old guard don't understand the Internet, they perceive it as an organisation that they can take to task in the courts, that is, they don't see the millions of users, they want someone they can identify as an infringer – like Google's You Tube, who Viacom are suing for $1 billion.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are also looking for someone to blame for advocating a free and open help yourself Internet. Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) says the RIAA is missing the point. "They are irrelevant at this point. I don't care what they have to say. Someone is so far out of touch with what is going on in Washington, with the public and with their own industry."
For decades, the media industry has tightened its hold on copyright material. There are valid arguments for protecting the rights of content creators, but it is now clear that applying these rules to the digital age isn't going to work – not least because those now affected by copyright rules are not just other companies but ordinary people.
Megaupload, "Why should you pay these assholes money when you could pay the people who actually made it some money?" said Wales. If the media industry addressed the needs of its audience, there would be less piracy, he believes. He has a point: piracy in Sweden fell significantly after the introduction of Spotify, a streaming music service, which shows people want to reward artists for their work.
The big media bosses in music and film are still bemoaning the demise of their traditional point of sale revenue. Since the peer-to-peer filesharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the US have dropped 53%, from $14.6bn to $6.9bn in 2010. Perhaps it's time they stopped crying and embraced the Spotify model.
The film industry made $30bn at the box office worldwide, that figure represents only 10% of earnings for a hit film. The rest comes from cable and satellite channels, pay-per-view TV, video rentals, DVD sales and digital downloads. All that extra cash comes from sources that Hollywood once railed against, and lobbied for Sopa to crack down on.
Not everyone is waiting for the big industry players to adjust to the demands of the Internet users. Some people are beginning to challenge the received wisdom. Money is being raised via crowd sourcing to make independent films, people can now speak directly to their audiences and music can be made without the music industry. "Going straight to the web, or video on demand, or doing a deal with independent cinemas – these are all viable options now, the success of the Joseph Kony video tells its own story, without a tie-in deal with McDonalds.
P.S. Internet watchers say that Sopa will return after the US presidential elections in November?
Reasons to be cheerful
The controlling ambitions of some states may be damned by the distributive structure of the Web, the escape and sharing of information is not in one place, it's everywhere. The dissent broadcast mechanism is not conveniently packaged into easily identifiable groups but rather millions of individual voices and opinions. This broadcast of dissent cannot be phyically unplugged without unplugging all the activity that the State sanctions. Paradox!
The December 2010 attacks on Wikileaks demonstrate clearly that even the mighty USA can't stifle dissent.... but China and Syria are doing a pretty good job.
The Personalisation of Information
King of the search engines, Google, has been heavily criticized for its antics, in particular, in relation to the hijacking of personal data whilst filming for its peep show, Street View. However, few users of Google will be aware of Google's new corporate strategy of personalising everyone's searches.
Google has re-written its code, so that when a user carries out a search, Google also attempts to second guess what else that user might be interested in. In addition, it will tailor the search list according to your supposed preferences.
The problem with this attempt at personalisation is that two individuals using the same search criteria will end up with different outcomes. In effect, Google's code makers are deciding what you get. They do this by assessing you against over 50 different criteria, building up a profile of you over time. This process of profile building informs the 'code' about what information you are interested in - whether you are interested or not.
July 2011......UP
British advertising firm WPP (Wire and Plastic Products) have just issued a press statement claiming "to have built the world's largest database of individuals' internet behaviour". This database, the firm claims, will be able to track "almost 100 per cent of the UK population". Obviously, WPP has no connection to the sale of wire and plastic, in fact it runs a network of 300 marketing and media companies across the globe - that's why it keeps the database.
Reducing the user's world view
Some argue that this corporate strategy puts users in an information bubble. Effectively, the user's world of information is being reduced and managed.
The creators of the internet envisaged something bigger and more important than a global system for sharing pictures of pets. The manifesto that helped launch the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the early 1990s championed a "civilisation of the Mind in cyberspace" – a kind of worldwide metabrain. Seven years after Perry Barlow penned his 'internet manifesto' an editorial in The Economist (2003) described his ideas as absurd and unlikely to usher in a civilisation of the mind. But then, the writer of the piece likened the Internet to 'just another appliance like radio and television' and so was hardly likely to be receptive to the ideas put forward by Barlow.
However, personalised filters may work to sever the synapses in that mind. Without knowing it, we may be giving ourselves a kind of global lobotomy instead.
If "code is law", as Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig declared, it's important to understand what the new lawmakers are trying to do.
Jaron Lanier, one of the brains behind virtual reality technology back in the 1980s, and now working for Microsoft has been saying that people should be paying for the information they find on the Internet. Put simply, he's saying that if you don't reward the people who generate the ideas, then they will stop generating ideas and you'll have nothing to steal, he calls this the remix culture.
Three big ideas from Lanier
First, the internet encouraged us to treat information frivolously and this is economically unsustainable for the middle classes, like himself.
Second, the idea is that the decisions we make in designing technology systems eventually come back to bite us. One of Lanier's heroes is Ted Nelson, the visionary who invented hypertext and foresaw a world in which everything ever written would be dynamically linked in such a way that humanity could be endlessly creative by combining ideas. But Nelson thought that the linking should be a two-way process and that it would also incorporate micro-payments, so that everyone would get paid whenever anyone used their stuff. In the end, we got a hypertext world in the form of the web, but with one-way linking only.
Finally, the web has gone from being a client-server model to one dominated by what Lanier calls "siren servers" such as Facebook, which hold billions of internet users in thrall without sharing the wealth that they generate with the people who create that wealth in the first place.
Support for this type of thinking is growing apace across the Atlantic.... read on, UP
Identity Ecosystem Steering Group - 4409
The Phoenix Convention Center hosted the Steering Group trying to create a blueprint to control access the internet. This is a government scheme designed to make it mandatory that for you to use the internet, we must submit to using a biometric online identification tool.
People are used to paying on their mobile phone but they aren’t used to paying for content on the desktop. The desktop browser paradigm is; stuff is free, the mobile paradigm is, you pay a ton for your usage, period.
Is this the shape of things to come?
The Internet is an amazing tool but no where near as amazing as it could be. The likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter are beginning to morph into bigger, uglier beasts, concerned with maximizing revenue and maintaining market share. The smart guys who developed these systems are not interested in a "civilisation of the Mind in cyberspace", only selling advertising space.
However, all markets have their carpet baggers, the real problem with the Internet is the management of information, indexing that information, making all those documents easily accessable. The problems that Vannevar Bush highlighted in 'As we may think' are still with us.
The way we access and link documents on the Web is fine up to a point but much more is possible. Reviewing the ideas of Ted Nelson and others from the 1960s makes you wonder what's going on. One problem area seems to have been arriving at agreed standards, developments in HTML5 and CSS have improved things considerably over the past couple of years but change is painfully slow.
Most importantly the idea that the Web is some kind of revolutionary liberating device is flawed. Users of Twitter do not control the the Internet, states do and they can pull the plug on dissent as they choose, they can use it to track dissenters, and use it to spread their own propaganda. And in the land of the free, the liberal democracies, they can use it to eavesdrop on citizens, just in case they might become dissenters.
However, the Internet does provide a means to convey samizdat, to give a voice to the dissenters, to reach out in a way that radio and TV do not allow the average citizen to do. Any fool from GCHQ can eavesdrop on Facebook and Twitter but will struggle to do much more no matter how much money they throw at their snooping projects.
The Metaverse
There is a growing popularity for people to take shortcuts, as if they are attempting life hacks. They are looking for transformation, life improvement with minimal effort, gained from a pill or a piece of technology. Help for these people is on the way. Facebook, Microsoft and Google are spending fortunes to solve life’s disappointments, no hacking required. They are set to introduce new technologies for the Net that will allow a complete escape to an alternative universe, to be known as the Metaverse.
The “metaverse” idea first came from the 1992 book Snow Crash as a place that people flee to escape a dangerous corporation-dominated world. That’s what you call deep irony, imagine that, 63 Modern Neurosis people now trying to escape into the clutches of a dangerous corporation like Facebook. Although, it is not just Facebook selling overpriced immersive goggles, Google and Microsoft are also spending fortunes to get in on the action. Be in no doubt, the Metaverse is the future of the Internet.
Second Life, launched in 2003, is a virtual world where people use avatars to escape from their day to-day reality. Users could go window shopping for free but to buy goods they would need some local currency. Actual businesses set themselves up in Second Life, selling to visitors in this virtual world. Some countries even set up virtual embassies to boost tourism. The firm behind Second Life, Linden Labs, created its own currency, the Linden. It seems like Second Life might be one blueprint for the Metaverse. Although, the 2018 sci-fi film Ready Player One offered a glimpse of what many technology companies prophesy is the Internet’s next big thing. The film was based on the 2011 Ernest Cline novel, where the central character immerses himself in a virtual world called OASIS, using a headset to transition into his avatar, spending days on end escaping his dystopian existence.
Facebook and other tech firms are talking about creating the Metaverse, a communal cyberspace for 64 Modern Neurosis playing games, adventures, shopping, and business meetings using avatars to move from one activity to the next seamlessly. Sounds just like Ready Player to me? Typically, Mark Zuckerberg, imagines it’s his idea, due to his Roman emperor complex, “…hundreds of millions of people” in his Metaverse “compounds the size of the digital economy inside it.” He plans to hook Facebook users in with cheap headsets. The company is investing billions of dollars into the effort. Grasping the Metaverse is easy enough to understand, the Web is something that you look at. The Metaverse will be something you live in — that is the looming problem. We are already living with the damage that the big tech firms have caused for young people. We know that governments talk nonsense about clamping down on them but seem unable to do so. Imagine the damage that a virtual escape hatch may cause for civil society across the world — what happens to community when half attempt to escape the incivility they are living with, vainly attempting to discover something better, supplied by Zuckerberg.
The Modify App
The possession of objects
Many seek solace through the possession of objects. The appetite for new technology seems insatiable. This is unfortunate because that technology may be changing people, and that change may not be apparent until after the changes are made. Others seek companionship with influencer celebrities, remotely, through magazines and the Internet. Influencers have millions of followers on Instagram and Twitter, they tout knock-off products and sales soar. Largely talentless, they make fortunes by being facsimile humans, they encourage real humans to believe that just being themselves is not enough, followers must be special. This quest for specialness requires modification and can lead to disaster for young people, many of whom do not attain the higher ground they are seeking. They use the Web, seeking out the secret ingredients for modification. All they find is themselves being judged by their peers, driven to self-harm and worse. The promise that the Web offered, as a tool of conviviality, has long since passed. Today the Web is just a tool for the Silicon Valley money grubbers, data scrappers, advertising persuaders, fantasists of all descriptions, conspiracy theorists, crooks and scammers.
For the net money grubbers, ruin is a business model, for everyone else it is a social dilemma.
Modification
“I’m in favour of anything that replaces actual human contact”.
(Sheldon, from the Big Bang Theory, commenting on the use of Facebook.)
Somewhere near Reading, England, there's a young girl walking around with the idea in her head that something called 'a modify' exits. She believes ‘a modify’ is a software app that can be used to stop virus attacks on computers. This misunderstanding derives from hearing her teacher telling the class that viruses can modify a computer's operating system. At some point, whilst the teacher was attempting to enlighten his class, we can only suppose the girl's attention wandered off somewhere — never to return, perhaps, even now, she's busy scanning the App Store in search of the elusive Modify.
And why not? They say that penetrative insights may arise from misunderstanding. Perhaps our young friend is on to something but maybe she's looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the Modify App is actually the Internet itself, for there are serious concerns that the Internet, via the web pages it carries, is having a transformative effect on human cognition. Cognition covers a host of mental processes that handle information processing. The effectiveness with which we process data from the environment determines the people we are, as we interact with that constantly changing environment. Put more simply, as things change, we change, whether we know it or not. In a sense we become modified by our environment.
In 2008, technology writer Nicholas G. Carr wrote an essay which was highly critical of the Web’s effect on cognition. Specifically, he focused on his own loss of concentration and reflection whilst reading. He claimed that his increasing use of the Internet to skim and scan text had altered his reading behaviour. Carr was unable to point to any neurological and psychological studies to back up his suspicion, that his own neural circuitry was being altered by, what he calls, shallow reading on the Internet. Carr asked the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and the answer he arrived at is it might be since there are suggestions the plasticity of the brain lends itself to the influence of intellectual technologies, i.e., those that are supposed to extend our intellectual capacity like computers. Carr has our sympathies but there is something far more menacing occurring in Internet use. UP
Anti-social media
Is social media, i.e., Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram, a mediocre time-wasting experience? Or is it something more special, is it about community and collaboration, is it about taking power from the few and distributing it a bit more widely, people informing and helping one another and "changing the way the world changes" (Grossman, Time, 2006). That is a nice idea but that moment has gone, that is, the idea of technology creating a convivial global village, as posited by Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan.
Social media, the medium, has become, over three decades, a key feature of Web use. The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee working at Cern, for the use of the science community. Around 1993 Cern decided to put the Web in the public domain, so that a global community could make use of it.
Unfortunately, whatever the Web was supposed to be, it is not. The bit the marketing men and big business have not taken control of is now in the hands of some odd people; every right-wing fruitcake with a computer, out there blogging stupidly about 5G phone masts spreading Covid 19, making thousands of virtual friends and unable to make a real physical relationship, telling the world what they had for breakfast, living a 'second life’, playing war games and generally losing themselves. For some, perhaps, it is all just the modern-day equivalent of going to Butlins for a holiday, with the added attraction of hackers, scammers, spyware, adware, and domain hijackers.
Giving the Richard Dimbleby Lecture in 2019, Berners-Lee called for a “mid-course correction” by those who control the web before social media activity destroys any existing value the web has. Clearly, the web is far from the tool of conviviality that it might have become. Instagram alone claim to have taken down 10,000 pieces on self-harm and suicide every day over a six-month period in 2019. Somehow, Berners-Lee has managed to stay positive:
“The web does not have to stay the way it is now. It can be changed, it should be changed, it needs to be changed.”
Sadly, the Web belongs to Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, et al, and they do not intend to change their mass surveillance and data gathering, most necessary for their dreams of building AI machines.
Marshall McLuhan set out his ideas on how technology changed society in his 1964 work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. It was here that McLuhan invoked his famous saying,
“The medium is the message”.
McLuhan said:
"As society's values, norms and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realise the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of."
McLuhan asserted:
“The medium is more important than the message because it may change us more than any message it conveys.”
In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat distracting the watchdog of the mind. People tend to focus on the obvious, the content, it provides us with valuable information but in the process, we largely miss the changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, over time. He is saying that it is only when the changes introduced by different technologies become profound, embedded, that we become aware of their implications, i.e., after our behaviour has been modified by them. UP
Digital nightmares
The pitfalls and dangers of Web use have become commonplace. With obsessive compulsive behaviour appearing to be a key feature. Drive down any high street and count the number of people staring into their iPhones as they go along, frightened of missing out. Or indeed, being missed out, overlooked, by net friends, and Twitter tweeters. Compulsion here involves taking selfies for Pinterest and Instagram, in some cases taking a hundred snaps a day. Some indulge in celebrity obsession and adopt unrealistic expectations about what is possible and, in the process, develop negative body images.
Social networking is what happens when people like Mark Zuckerberg create a technology that allows citizens to go 'virtual' into a place where people, who don't have friends, make some and people die without consequence and yet, occasionally, the technology appears to become a positive force. We may recall the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ across several Arab countries in 2009. Social media allowed people across the world to engage with those protesting against the Iranian regime. However, let us not get too carried away. Media commentators did get carried away, talking about a new age of revolution sweeping Iran. The technology was truly remarkable, giving the down trodden masses a voice. From this, change would surely come. Change did not come from the Twitter revolution in Iran. Since the government of Iran were also able to use the technology, in fact, they employed an army of tweeters to post positive messages about the regime. They used the technology to track down and silence dissenting voices. They discovered that many of those dissenting voices were not marching through the streets of Iran, they were lounging in their university rooms across Europe.
Incel network
Social media has turned into a digital nightmare. Recent murders (August 2021) in Plymouth made us all aware just how big the nightmare was. Jake Davison identified himself as an Incel, an ‘involuntary celibate’. He used social media to tell the world he was ugly, fat and unwanted, using Tinder. The thing to know about Incels, they do not blame themselves for their celibacy — it is all the fault of women, known as ‘Stacys’, and ‘Chads’, sexually successful men. Their sorry state is rationalised as the product of unkind genetics.
Their solution is to construct a fantasy gleaned from The Matrix, should they choose the blue mill or the red mill? In the film the blue mill led to denial and, depression. This choice meant living with the reality of your hopeless condition. Choose the red pill (Incels preferred to call it black) and deal with your torment by murdering your tormenters, this was encouraged by other Incels. That is what Jake Davison did in Plymouth. He killed five people, then he shot himself. In the case of the oddball Incels, social media has allowed them to flourish, without it they would just spend their days staring at the bedroom wallpaper.
Wakeup call
When it comes to young people cyberbullying has now reached such a pitch that headteachers, addressing potential new year seven intakes from primary schools, are warning children and parents to be on their guard against bullying that follows 19 The Modify App you home beyond the school gates. A TV advert in late 2019, from Barnardo’s, portrays a pack of jackals terrorising a young girl at school and at home, via her phone. This advert displays the awfulness of technology use and more, it shows how that awfulness has become normalised. According to Ofcom one in 10 young people aged 12-15 have been bullied online. The Good Childhood Report, produced by UK charity The Children's Society, surveyed 65,000 children and young people on the subject of self-harm. The researchers suggest that social media and the internet have more of a negative effect on girls than boys. Studies and research abound, with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the forefront of the data gathering on the way young people think and feel about their lives, generally they are not happy. UP
Molly Russell, 14, took her own life in 2017. When her family looked into her Instagram account, they found distressing material about depression and suicide. Her father said the images on view presented a bleak world, a black hole that sucks in the vulnerable. Hideously, users are being groomed to self-harm and take their own lives. The death of Molly was, in a small way, a turning point.
In another case, Libby, 16, shared her story after hearing of Molly's death. She became hooked at the age of 12 with self-harm images on Instagram — including pictures of cutting, burning and overdosing. She was sharing her pictures of fresh cuts with 8,000 followers.
The government said it would bring in new laws to protect the vulnerable from damaging online material. Facebook and Co. would be told to remove sick material. Jackie Doyle-Price was appointed as Minister for Suicide Prevention and Mental Health in late 2018. She said, that Molly’s death had “focused people's minds". She met Facebook, owners of Instagram, saying their behaviour was inconsistent, sometimes they were helpful but “more often not”. Talking to the National Suicide Prevention Alliance Conference, she said,
"If companies cannot behave responsibly and protect their users, we will legislate.” More insightfully she added:
"They shouldn't wait for government to tell them what to do. It says a lot about the values of companies if they do not take action voluntarily.”
Unfortunately, Doyle-Price was removed when Boris Johnson moved into No.10.
Digital Minister, Margot James, addressing Safer Internet Day, promised to get tough with social media companies that had "fallen short" in their response to online bullying, abuse and misinformation. Children's Commissioner for Wales, Sally Holland, called on schools to create safe spaces for young people to talk and get support. The children themselves were saying adults do not understand our online world. Advice service ‘Get Safe Online’ said, "the bully is in the back pocket" and cyber bullying happens “24/7".
The issue of online safety is not just about bullying, a much bigger issue is vulnerable individuals seeking support for their problems. Support is not in short supply on Instagram. Evidence provided by Norwegian researchers shows that Instagram users may have thousands of followers, sharing their own pictures and tales of distress. Effectively, Instagram was hosting suicide networks, where individuals intent on ending it all themselves assisted others with ways to go about things, with encouragement.
One thing to know is that this is occurring inside private accounts, that is, where only the people that the account owner wants to view the content can take part. And yet this does not imply a small group of friends, it can mean likeminded strangers across the globe. Investigator, Annemarte Moland, who works for the state-owned broadcaster NRK, managed to gain access to one of these suicide networks and she tells us: "I felt like they had been pushing each other closer and closer to the edge.” However, some users advised caution. UP
Online Harms
The death of Molly Russell lit the fuse for intervention, to change the way social media firms were performing. Ministers were meeting with the bosses of social media platforms, seeking undertakings that positive change was on the way. Select committees were asking questions, government produced a White Paper: Online Harms in 2019.
The White Paper made good use of all those meetings and select committee evidence: the overall aim is stated clearly,
“We believe that the digital economy urgently needs a new regulatory framework to improve our citizens’ safety online.”
However, the ‘problem’ as outlined in the white paper turned out to be multiple problems, it identified just about every misuse and illicit use of the World Wide Web. There was nothing new in the discourse provided. The paper comments on Internet use by terrorists to radicalise and distribute bomb making instructions. In the same paragraph it moves onto Internet use by child sex offenders, including the live streaming of sexual abuse of children. Government also shares its worries over the spread of disinformation, “to undermine our democratic values and principles” by what it calls ‘hostile actors’. It also covers the use of social media by criminal gangs to incite violence. Comprehensive coverage is provided but, in the process, focus is sacrificed. The point of the exercise was surely to highlight the problems facing vulnerable young users of social media platforms and to eliminate the nightmare of Online Harms they are living daily.
The White Paper proposed a new regulatory framework for online safety. An independent regulator would be introduced, armed with codes of practice. A statutory duty of care would be placed on companies to behave responsibly towards their users and tackle the harm caused by content on their platforms. The regulator would be able to issue substantial fines and to impose liability on individual members of senior management. The plan:
“Developing a culture of transparency, trust and accountability will be a critical element of the new regulatory framework.”
The Royal College of Psychiatrists produced a report, January 2020: Technology use and the mental health of children and young people. It suggests that the proposed social media regulator should have the power to request data from companies on how children and young people are using the likes of Instagram. This report is not telling us anything that we did not already know. Vulnerable people are being damaged by social media use. This situation is a million miles away from Tim Berners Lee’s intention, or that of any other sane person but it is a disaster that has crept up on us — just as McLuhan predicted it might do.
This situation is clearly absurd, as is the expectation that further research from the College of Psychiatrists will lead to anything worthwhile. The hope that intervention from a regulator will change much is also absurd. The sum of action at the moment can be filed away in the ’seen to be doing something’ folder, it does not amount to more than a list of good intentions. Given the odious impact of Web use we might hope that sooner, rather than later, those who have put themselves forward as experts and decision makers might grasp how desperate the situation is. The situation thus far looks like this; a draft Online Safety Bill was published, it was scrutinised by a committee and read by both Houses. They are promising a new law on online harms for Christmas 2021. That die not happen. However, the proposed Bill has scrutinised over several months by the joint parliamentary committee. They published their report in late December, the main recommendation was that the Bill’s objectives should be set clearly, at the moment it’s too confusing.
They might like to start by banning Viva Street, where they sell women for sex. The Bill will be passed back to Parliament in March 2022.
"Enough is enough. Our children are seeing too much, too young. If we want to make Britain a more family-friendly place to live – which is my passionate ambition – we have to take a stand. That’s exactly what the Conservatives would do in government."
That was David Cameron in 2010, he did not take a stand, he did precisely the sum of nothing on this issue, apart from grinding his teeth. Perhaps some of those women being sold on Viva Street were once children that Dave failed to save.
Sadly, Berners-Lee’s hopes of turning the Web around will be dashed. Consider this example from the UK, during April 2020, in the grip of the Covid-19 virus. Theories began to appear on fruitcake platforms like, Next door, Pinterest, Facebook etc., suggesting a link between 5G phone masts and Covid-19. This link led to up to 20 phone masts being set on fire. And the fire starters did not just attack 5G masts, any mast was good enough. It transpired that Fruitcake-in-chief, David Icke, set up a two-hour 5G interview on YouTube. Icke used this to claim a direct link between the masts and the virus, apparently, the 5G masts were weakening our immune system. In effect, we were being softened up for the virus. Icke supported the fire starters, saying:
"If 5G continues and reaches where ‘they’ want to take it, human life as we know it is over... so people have to make a decision.”
Say what you like but Icke has a fantastic imagination, he actually believed that when a coronavirus vaccine was developed it would include "nanotechnology microchips" designed to control citizens. He also suggested that Bill Gates should be arrested for funding Covid-19 vaccine research. YouTube deleted Icke’s nonsense video (after the event) and banned all conspiracy theory videos falsely linking coronavirus symptoms to 5G networks. Celebrities like Lewis Hamilton and Madonna and influencers that normal people have never heard of were spreading the anti-vax message via anti-social media channels. These chumps, despite the so-called ban, were selling the message that a Covid vaccine will contain a device to control the mind. Logic here is a trifle hazy since 28 The Modify App chumps do not have much to worry about when it comes to mind control. It is all a trifle post hoc,
I mean, if you possess an empty head, what is there to control.
Cyber crime
Cyber crime is billed in the media as a major battle ground for the forces of law and order. Those forces attempt to track down and defeat their foe across the Dark Web, in a virtual game of cat and mouse. However, for citizens affected by cyber attacks, the situation is real. In 2017, the NHS was hit by the WannaCry ransomware, effectively health system computers were taken hostage until a ransom was paid. According to the Department for Health, the attack cost £92 million. The attack caused more than 19,000 appointments to be cancelled, costing the NHS £20m between 12 May and 19 May and £72m in the subsequent clean-up and upgrades to its IT systems. WannaCry exploited a vulnerable App in Windows legacy systems like XP, the 17-year-old operating system. Microsoft claim that they issued a patch two months before the attack but systems across the globe still remained vulnerable. The attackers appear to have been aided and abetted by the CIA and NSA in the States. These agencies have been storing software vulnerabilities with a view to employing them in some kind of cyber war, perhaps against Russia, North Korea or Iran. The problem has been that the protectors of US State are not very good at taking care of their secrets. Somehow the Windows XP vulnerability they had in store was hacked by the boys from North Korea, the Lazarus Group. Typically, Microsoft had something clever to say. The company’s president and Chief Legal Officer, Brad Smith said:
“The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call. They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world.”
Brad did not go on to criticise the NHS for not upgrading years earlier. However, the attack did make the NHS re-think its spending plans for IT systems. Worryingly, it was spending on upgrading 30 The Modify App to Windows 10.
WannaCry spread across the globe, affecting 250,000 computers, it affected Chinese petrol stations, German railways, Fed Ex’s logistics and the Russian Ministry of the Interior. WannaCry started out as an attachment to an innocuous email and ended up as the most destructive cyber-attack ever seen. A 22-year-old security researcher put a stop to the WannaCry ransom, with a $10 purchase. The unnamed tech guy looked at a sample of the malware and noticed it was connected to a domain that was unregistered, so he bought it. This activated a ‘kill switch’ that ended the spread of WannaCry.
He told the BBC:
“We have stopped this one, but there will be another one coming and it will not be stoppable by us. There’s a lot of money in this. There’s no reason for them to stop. It’s not really much effort for them to change the code and then start over.”
The WannaCry incident was the culmination of multiple failures that include the slackness of the 31 The Modify App CIA’s security, Microsoft’s inability to produce a finished product that does not require a dozen updates a year, and the NHS ancient computer systems, unable to handle increasingly complex data management problems.
These attacks are a daily occurrence, the companies and agencies involved ever shy of admitting their incompetence. The LulzSec hacker group mightily embarrassed Sony Playstation, compromising 77 million accounts, costing Sony $170 million. Telecoms outfit Talk Talk suffered a sustained cyber-attack, this attack cost the company £60m and lost them 95,000 customers. The company was fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner for poor website security. It transpired that the boss of Talk Talk, Dido Harding, did not have a clue about cyber security. Adobe are also in the frame for not protecting customers data and an inability to be honest about their slack approach to data handling. In 2013 they admitted to the theft of 2.9 million accounts, then they admitted to 38 million accounts. Sadly, the stolen data file was found on the Internet containing 153 million user accounts.
Internet of Things IoTs
Some people buy things, objects, in the hope that the functionality of the object will enhance their lives. Smart speakers are a classic example of this hope. Owners of smart speakers are being spied on by the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google. These companies are using the data gathered by the speakers, i.e., the requests and conversation of owners to further their attempts to improve their AI aims. These speakers are only supposed to record when a wake word is spoken like “Alexa” but they can and do go rogue.
Amazon’s Alexa suggested a young girl take part in a challenge that it had "found on the web". This was known as the penny challenge, found circulating on social media websites. The challenge required the girl to place a penny on the half inserted prongs of an electric plug. Fortunately, the girl was too smart to take part. The girl’s mother complained to Amazon, they responded:
"Customer trust is at the centre of everything we do and Alexa is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and helpful information to customers. As soon as we became aware of this error, we took swift action to fix it."
Other items that may be tracking you, Google’s Nest thermostat checks on the climate in your home and on movements, via a sensor. You may have lights fitted that keep track of your bed time, if you use Alexa or Assistant to operate them. You may have a device that opens your garage door, this data is sent to a remote server and kept forever. No matter, we have an Information Commissioner, armed with the General Data Protection Regulation to tackle any transgressions. Although, in recent times the Commissioner has not been so keen to pursue the government over its mishandling of track and trace data. The California State Assembly seem to be ahead of the curve on snooping technology, they are suggesting the introduction of an Anti-Eavesdropping Act. Perhaps our Information Commissioner should read McLuhan.
“As society's values, norms and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realise the social implications of the medium.”
We are being encouraged to rely on technologies that few understand, even large companies whose job it is to deal with these technologies. Government and business have been promoting the move to online living for several years and in the process they have introduced vulnerability into our lives.
Telnet, Who knew?
One little understood fact about the Internet of Things in your home is that everything from toasters, DVRs and microwaves to network hubs, are easy to target by hackers. Dyn are a Domain Name Service provider, they make it possible for you to find web pages when you type a site name into your browser. In 2016, hackers targeted Dyn and brought a large part of the Internet to a grinding halt. The hackers issued a ‘distributed denial service attack’ on Dyn and disabled its servers. Denial of Service Attacks (DoS) use thousands of computers to make simultaneous requests of sites. These are routine in the business domain, however, the Dyn hackers enlisted the assistance of thousands of things in people’s homes to aid their attack, the home owners in question were none the wiser. The hackers used Telnet, a virtual open door to your devices. Telnet is supposedly there to aid companies wishing to carry out servicing over the Web. However, the hackers gambled on the fact that many people do not change the default passwords of their things. Telnet was developed in 1969 and the fact that it was still with us in 2016 is criminal.
The vision behind the IoTs, coming from the business community, is the Smart Home, managed by a connected network of devices; appliances, thermostats, security systems all controlled from your office computer or smart phone remotely. Imagine the possibilities to make our lives easier, more convenient, and more comfortable. The home filled with connected devices is big business. One projection suggested the global market value of IoTs will reach $7.1 trillion by 2021. Now what business needs to do is ensure that consumers understand potential vulnerabilities and ensure strong protection for their products. However, consumers should be wary before they suspend their intelligence and adopt the business man’s vision of the future.