http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc hourly 1 1901-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://gmane.org/img/gmane-25t.png http://gmane.org http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2392 <pre>Fuchs, Christian. 2012. New Marxian Times! Reflections on the 4th ICTs and Society Conference “Critique, Democracy and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society. Towards Critical Theories of Social Media”. tripleC – Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10 (1): 114-121. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/411 _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC&lt; at &gt;mailman.thing.net https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</pre> Christian Fuchs 2012-05-06T20:17:20 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2391 <pre>Congratulations to Trebor and the entire Situated Technologies team! This is an impressive effort of public education, using socialized resources and undoubtedly, much passionate volunteer labor, to generate new knowledge and distribute it freely to all those who want to understand and change the contemporary world. I hope these pdf books will be widely used. The generosity of the project is evident from the first download. Thanks for all your efforts, Brian On 04/29/2012 09:06 AM, Trebor Scholz wrote: </pre> Brian Holmes 2012-05-02T17:01:07 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2390 <pre>Hello iDC'ers...are you still out there? I am writing to share an archival document that may hold some historical interest for those who study and critique media. In 1974, Ontario's public broadcaster (OECA) launched a unique experiment in live broadcasting and media criticism. Media Circus was 90-minutes of live commercial-free analysis of 'what is on TV right now', with the 'set' being the TV control room where the show itself was being produced. Until recently it was believed that no recordings of this groundbreaking TV series existed, but recently a copy of the first episode came into my hands. I was particularly happy to see it because my father, Ken Sobol, was one of the creators and hosts of Media Circus. And I have now uploaded the first 30 minutes of that episode to YouTube, with more to come. Here's the link to Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9t-CfbkyjU&amp; Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy25x5raQxM&amp; Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1isWbBJoTo&amp; This episode of Media Circus aired on a Wednesday evening, but other episodes aired on Saturday afternoon, Sunday morning, Friday night and on other days and times, so that every aspect of the TV schedule could be surveyed and critiqued. The show included skits and guests, among whom were Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye at various times, watching and talking about 'what is on TV right now'. This episode features a discussion with the actor Tony Musante (who had recently starred in an excellent network detective show called Toma on ABC) and another with a HAM-TV operator (a kind of primitive fax machine) among other elements. This is a remarkable glimpse into another televisual era, not only an era with just 12 channels, but also an era in which public broadcasters took bold risks and invested in genuinely radical media experiments, of which Media Circus stands out as a particularly notable example. Because it was 'live TV' and no recordings have been in circulation since the series aired in 1974, Media Circus has been all but forgotten. I hope this video will help it to regain a measure of the attention and respect it deserves as one of the most fearless and critically sophisticated series ever aired on mainstream TV. As Harris Kirshenbaum wrote in an early Canadian Film Development Corporation newsletter... "...Among the best have been Media Circus, a totally experimental programme last season that ran three hours in its final form, and dealt with the ideas of television, its sociological effects, its capabilities and future, and its legalities. Where else on major market television could you see the host of one live programme having a telephone conversation with the host of a concurrent live show, and see them both on split screen?" Regards, John Sobol -- www.youareyourmedia.com </pre> John Sobol 2012-05-01T16:11:51 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2389 <pre>Dear all, Yesterday we concluded the Situated Technologies Series with the symposium “Situated Technologies: Beneath and Beyond Big Data” at Cooper Union. http://urbanomnibus.net/2012/04/april-28-situated-technologies-beneath-and-beyond-big-data/ You can download all nine books below. ~Trebor == The Situated Technologies Series, edited by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/ Urban Computing and its Discontents Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard Fall 2007 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST1-Urban_Computing.pdf Urban Versioning System 1.0 Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque Spring 2008 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/UrbanVersioningSystem.pdf Situated Advocacy Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey Summer 2008 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST3-SituatedAdvocacy.pdf Responsive Architecture / Performing Instruments Philip Beesley and Omar Khan Spring 2009 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST4-ResponsiveArchitecture.pdf A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova Fall 2009 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST5-A_synchronicity.pdf MicroPublicPlaces Marc Böhlen and Hans Frei Spring 2010 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST6-MicroPublicPlaces.pdf From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City Trebor Scholz and Laura Y. Liu Fall 2010 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST7-MobilePlaygrounds_SweatshopCity.pdf The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg Spring 2011 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST8_InternetOfPeople_web.pdf Modulated Cities: Networked Spaces, Reconstituted Subjects Helen Nissenbaum and Kazys Varnelis Spring 2012 http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/files/ST9_ModulatedCities_web.pdf </pre> Trebor Scholz 2012-04-29T14:06:33 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2388 <pre>(Hyperlinked version: http://tinyurl.com/dx5dwsb Images discussed: http://tinyurl.com/7g2h77e) New Literacies for a New Aesthetic? by Trebor Scholz As a ten year-old, passing by the Forbidden City of the East German Head of State and his functionaries sparked my imagination. The walled complex, tucked away in a forested area near Berlin, was guarded by an armed division of the Stasi, named after the founder of the Soviet secret service Felix Dzerzhinsky. Back then, you couldn't Google for images of this residential compound; Pinterest, Google Earth, and civilian drones were not around. And even if they were available, there was no grassroots way of mass-reproducing images or texts. After the implosion of the German Socialist Republic in 1989, however, reports about this forest settlement surfaced. My top pick of all stories is that about one apparatchiks’ secret closet filled with Salvador Dali paintings, financed by public funds. Months later, early in 1990, those who celebrated their newly found freedom of movement by grabbing a map of the German-German border region to hike westward found themselves led astray in mysterious ways as the border area was purposefully misrepresented on East German maps to deceive those who wanted to escape. Images invade our consciousness. They can bear witness when words are used up. They can mobilize, gratify and inform. They can be put to work as evidence, argument, accusation, and proof. Images can help us to make sense of our surroundings. We surrender to the onslaught of images; sometimes the anti-punctum: senseless, lackadaisically composed, and extraneous. But images also fail us: the overabundance of visual material desensitizes. In 2006, Ethan Zuckerman investigated a 45 page PDF that circulated among Bahrainis. It uses images from Google Earth to ask uncomfortable questions about land allocation in Bahrain, you know, the small island state east of Saudi Arabia. One image in particular shows the extravagant palaces of the King, built on confiscated public land, next to the packed living quarters of citizens. Protests ensued and the Bahraini government temporarily blocked Google Earth. Over the last five years something has changed when we consider digitally-produced images. Many claims to pictorial novelty have been made. And they concern more than a bunch of cool-looking stuff on Pinterest, an online pinboard. I remember going through shoe boxes of photos in my grandmother's house, noticing that the black and white photos of my grandfather had a tiny cut-out circle on his jacket, dubiously just in the place where he may have worn his party pin. Visuality in the early decades of the 21st century is not merely about image manipulation software though, it is about entirely new attitudes toward visuality. In the early years of the 21st century, the collection of essays Imagery in the 21st Century, edited by Oliver Grau with Thomas Veigl sets out to understand what will constitute an image, and what are novel ways to generate, project, and distribute pictures. Imagery in the 21st Century resulted from a conference that Oliver Grau convened. It traverses the disciplinary divides between art history, anthropology, and cell biology, focusing on: the ecological and ethical dimensions of screen technologies (Sean Cubitt), a course on image practices in the university (James Elkins), machinima aesthetics (Thomas Veigl), medical illustration (Dolores and David Steinman), the obsession with source code (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun), novel cultural interfaces (Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau), the museum as Noah's Arc (Peter Weibel),  and the Warburg Image Atlas for a digital age (Martin Warnke). At first, I asked myself, what holds the twenty chapters in this book together. What do all the puzzle pieces add up to? An analysis of contemporary imagery felt like an uncomfortably all-embracing ambition. John Berger, for example, focused on the way oil paintings primarily reflected on the status of those who commissioned the artwork. What are we talking about when we are thinking about contemporary visuality? The advent of infographics, games, CCTV, animated gifs, art generated by algorithms, histograms, 4D visualizations, or Instagram? Constructively, the authors reflect on imagery not merely through the lens of a specific device, genre, social practice, or social function, and it becomes clear that image literacy can no longer be the exclusive domain of art historians.  But are we really, as the book suggests, amidst an image revolution? "The curse of the ‘perpetually new’ is perpetual," Bruce Sterling writes. What, then, is so subversive or new? A Tumblr  image collection might help to answer. Curated by James Bridle, the tumblr received quite a bit of attention recently with articles in the Atlantic, Wired and a panel at SXSW titled The New Aesthetic. Beyond the claims to newness, it is self-evident that many of the eye-catching images in the collection could not have been created in, say, 1993. In Bridle’s collection, Ian Bogost discovered a screenshot of a “list of tweets announcing the surprising discovery that the Titanic was a real ocean-liner and not just a film.” But there are also maps: Planned Parenthood gave out sixty thousand condoms with QR codes that lead you to a website which asks you to check-in with information about how and where the condom was used. Many of the technologies that generated the images on Bridle’s tumblr are still emergent. Unsurprisingly, they show that digital aesthetic is seeping into architecture and fashion. Over the weekend, my colleague McKenzie Wark fired off a series of tweets about the “new new aesthetic of the tumblresque.” He tweets: The #tumblresque is not John Berger's Ways of Seeing but sprays of seeing. The #tumblresque wants to see you naked. The #tumblresque is a bedroom wall big enough for every teenager on the internet. The #tumblresque is one, two, a thousand Cindy Shermans. Wark shows what is at play in this “#pinteresque” image collection. Thinking about contemporary visuality, there is something lost in comparison to the quirky online aesthetic of the 1990s. With the emergence of centralized platforms like LiveJournal and Blogger, net aesthetics became a big mush of networked sameness, facilitated by template mania. No more experimental, handmade, and surprising websites like AdaWeb that made you chase after javascript-powered buttons to even enter the site. Today, creativity and experimentation on the Internet are not dead  but they have moved onto platforms like 4Chan. Today, visual culture invades societies that are largely unprepared. We surrender. Appropriately, one important axis of discussion in Imagery in the 21st Century concerns the question of much-needed image literacies. The editors aspire to extract a crosscutting literacy that can catch the elusive phenomena of contemporary visuality. Grau calls for an image competency for our culture that is still largely dominated by writing. Do we speak the language of the image? Illiteracy, Grau suitably suggests, has largely been overcome in most countries but the inability to interpret images adequately, has not been sufficiently considered. For me, a cohesive program for image literacy would comprise seven key competencies. It’d entail an understanding of 1) the material foundation of digital images (and its ecological implications), 2) an understanding of the technical processes involved in their making, 3) their historical references, and 4) the fundamental data literacy (the ability to interpret scientific imagery). It’s time to look under the shiny hood of images. And that includes the capability for a political decoding of long tail images, which is my fifth point. Image literacy needs to be more than fuzzy judgment. Can you give nuanced interpretations of QR codes, 3D renderings, complex graphs, visualizations, technical pictures like x-rays, face detection, MRIs, mammograms or mathematical images? With the gaming industry economically outperforming the film sector, it becomes harder to ignore image practices like machinima (i.e., technology to produce films in computer games). Images become findable if properly tagged but which images can we access, copy, or use? Image literacy is also about intellectual property and fair use; that is my 6th bullet point. Images and code, both have a tight grip on us. 7) Image literacy should also be about a basic understanding of the principles of programming. Douglas Rushoff makes an eloquent case for that in Program or be Programmed. “If you don’t understand the software, you are the software,” Rushkoff poses. Students don't have to become industry-strength programmers but they should all be able to converse with programmers. On a foundational level, they should comprehend the workings of information architectures. With the proliferation of digitization, we are inundated with heaps of information. In this Age of Big Data, the ever growing pile of data becomes unknowable as David Weinberger and others have pointed out. There are ever more data but fewer theories to make sense of them. The world has become harder to know. Visualization, aggregation, curation and the filtering of data become core competencies not only for designers but also for journalists, scholars, artists, and scientists. There is no such thing as information overload, there's only filter failure, as Clay Shirky declared. This is also true when it comes to “abuses of the visual,” as James Elkins put it referring to compulsively created, senseless images. Oliver Grau and Thomas Veigl demand new forms of visualization to face this explosion of knowledge. The artist Robert Smithson in the narration of his series of photographs titled “Hotel Palenque,” most insightfully and poetically demonstrates image literacy, for me. In his quick-witted and perceptive talk to architecture students at the University of Utah's School of Art in 1972, Smithson discusses a peculiar hotel in Palenque, Mexico that decayed on one side while still being renovated on the other. In his talk he put forward the notion of “ruins in reverse.” For me, the visual should not merely connect us to the sciences, as Elkins suggests, but also to the political power of images. Think of the work of the British cultural critic Judith Williamson (e.g., Decoding Advertising), the artworks by Alfredo Jaar, Emily Jacir, Trevor Paglen or Alan Sekula. Or, take the recently published book Right To Look, in which Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that "visuality has been central to the legitimization of Western hegemony." Such discussion of global image power as political force is indispensable. In his chapter in Imagery in the 21st Century, “Visual Practices the University: A Report,” James Elkins suggests that today, learning mainly happens through images. Already in 1924, the German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg used arrangements of images from distant times and places. In his Mnemosyne-Atlas he combines images to create meaning. In fact, Warburg's writing is hard to understand without comprehending his Atlas. James Elkins quotes Henry Hutchens, one of the principal founders of the University of Chicago who in The University of Utopia (1964) argued that nothing should be taught in the university except philosophy. I concur with Elkins here, the study of the visual is erroneously sidelined, shelved in art history departments. 
Do images really push themselves in front of words, as  Elkins claims? Have words hopelessly deteriorated? The editors argue along those lines: “It would appear that images have won the contest with words." (p6) Indeed, long-form platforms like WordPress grow slower than short-form writing and image sharing through micro-blogging services. The image sharing board Pinterest grows at an explosive rate. An Instagram photos make sharing even faster than tweets. But thinking of the media representation of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 or the Kosovo War in 1999- images failed to make these atrocities vivid enough; they did not do very much. Susan Sontag concludes that narrative and contextual framing establish more meaning than images. But luckily learning in colleges and universities is still largely based on texts. Part of my responsibility as a professor is to bring students into the intimate, delicious sphere of reading. The visuality of Khan Academy’s hand-written lectures on videos is an interesting hybrid. But still, we largely discover the universe through words. The long sentence is worth defending against the click-click moments of the networked cacophony. There are many accounts that professors assign shorter readings than they used to five years ago. This does not indicate, however, that today's students are simply sub-standard but it does signify that there is more going on in students’ lives. Reading habits change when students have to work longer hours to keep their student loans at bay. Sean Cubitt's in his chapter “Current Screens” instructs us to consider specifically the ethical-ecological layer of discussions about screen technologies.  Her emphasizes that our culture is highly material, especially when you consider the ecological footprint of the raw materials. LCD screens, for example, are poorly biodegradable and potentially significant water contaminants. Sean Cubitt demands that next steps cannot be achieved without respect for the poor and for the ecosphere. Sean Cubitt suggests that in the haste to populate our lives, the screens we have opted for are good enough instead of the best possible. Which trajectories of technological development become abandoned and what kind of social and political capacities and performances would they have suggested? Cubitt's essay also reminded me of the fact that an avatar in the virtual world Second Life consumes as much electricity as a real life person in Brazil. The "immaterial" can't escape the burden, the solace, and social costs of the material world. In this discussion of visual culture, media art has a role to play. How can we rescue digital artworks from oblivion? Oliver Grau's warns of the total loss of our cultural memory of digital art of the past ten years. Most definitely, hardware and operating systems change and without explicit, thoughtful, and well-funded efforts, most works will indeed be lost. There is no one-fits-all preservation solution. Oliver Grau, who is also the author of Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, provides impressive examples of indispensable media artworks like Jeffrey Shaw's T-Visionarium. Already in 1999, questions about preservation of media art were at the center of Jon Ippolito's important exhibition Variable Media at the Guggenheim Museum. 
Peter Weibel, in his chapter, states that a degree of democratization and personalization of technology has helped to empower users. We are all consumers and producers of visual culture. Art, too, is included in this democratization. Painters no longer have a monopoly on creating images ever since photography made it possible for everyone to take pictures. Artists have lost their monopoly on creativity. Museums, Weibel suggests, are floating crates. They are meant to store works in their bellies, just like Noah’s Ark. They are meant to assure that artworks do not perish. If we inquire how many works have been preserved during the last century, the estimates vary between 1% and 7% of the whole production of art. Museums have done a poor job, Weibel states. They have passed judgments with the guillotine of history–separated out the majority of art and rejected it. Today, we have the opposite of Noah's Ark. The Social Web is an endlessly deep archive. The net has become the ark of the creativity of everybody, the support and storage system of the creativity of the masses, Weibel writes. This is an incredible attack on the principle of selection, the Noah's Ark principle. The museum, with the aid of the Social Web, will become a platform where people speak with one another and discuss artworks and topics, he hopes. Today, when I return to the former East Germany, my GPS powered cellphone will not only lead my way, but it will also reveal all that was hidden back when I drove by Erich Honecker Secret City. Smartphones embed geographic location in the photos that I capture. My daily photographic practice allows me to visually cross-question my environment. I take notes and share them. This image practice is a daily solace for me. I surrender to the world of images that surrounds me. While pressing my fingers into the hardcover of  Imagery in the 21st Century, I can’t stop myself from asking why a publication that is so much about the liquidity of the frameless image, the shrinking shelf life of the jpg, a book that so heavily relies on hyperlinked references, is not published online. High quality images, animated gifs and videos could be included this way. Eventually, a PDF of the book will probably surface on aaaaarg.org or scribd.com. An interactive, web-based publication, however, could have better served as an open educational resource, made the content available to far more people, very much supporting the kind of thinking that the publication encourages. This is not a shortcoming of the editors but it behoves all of us to find adequate and creative responses to the old business models of mechanical reproduction. I was thrilled to read Grau’s and Veigl’s Imagery in the 21 Century and I will use it in my teaching. The book can be brought into productive conversation with Nicholas Mirzoeff's Right to See, David Weinberger's Too Big To Know, Cathy Davidson's Now You See It, and also Design Studies: A Reader, edited by my New School colleagues Hazel Clark and David Brody. Imagery in the 21 Century is a fabulous resource for the reflection on contemporary visuality. _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC&lt; at &gt;mailman.thing.net https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</pre> Trebor Scholz 2012-04-29T13:58:20 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2387 <pre>On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:24 PM, Mark Andrejevic &lt;markbandrejevic-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt;wrote: "What kind of information will be prioritized and made available via the "social graph" if this is clearly governed by and subordinate to commercial imperatives? How might a Facebook social graph differ from one that was not crafted according to commercial imperatives? These are the same questions we once asked about how commercial imperatives structures the news and information made available via commercial media outlets. It surely retains its relevance and urgency in the online context, yet we don't seem to ask it as much)." Mark, these are all excellent questions. A few vaguely coherent thoughts in response... - re general critiques of advertising and marketing to children, of the kind that were common a few decades ago but are now almost extinct...yes how much we have changed! My father was a pioneer in educational television but also wrote TV series based on GI Joe and Strawberry Shortcake, both essentially glorified marketing gimmicks, (which he hated but which paid the bills), and for a while I did both as well, so that tension and discourse is something I feel I've known my whole life. And although I used to loathe advertising, and I still cherish any situation without it, I have also spent a lot of time as an entrepreneur and business consultant and I have seen just how useful and in some cases necessary it is. It is one of the most powerful business models we have, for better or worse, often worse, but still, it has its place. And as that place has grown exponentially in the past decades we should at least be clear that protecting kids from marketers is at this point basically non-existent. In large measure due to the fact that marketers were quickest to understand that the web is a social medium defined by relationships, and so they have colonized it very effectively. Much faster than have, for example, educational institutions or governments. (I would argue that this is because neither are defined by relationships but rather by monological literate values that are not compatible with the dialogical web, but that is my bone and I will not pick it here.) I would consider advocating reducing the impact of marketing on kids not by ineffectively regulating it but by building up the relational capabilities of our public sphere online so as to put the commercial sphere into a more reasonable and productive social perspective. Right now facebook is dominant in part because there is such a dearth of leadership and vision in other areas. - You ask: "What kind of information will be prioritized and made available via the "social graph" if this is clearly governed by and subordinate to commercial imperatives?" As regular readers of my comments here know, I believe we can find some answers to questions like this by examining the social dynamics of oral cultures, because they share common dialogical characteristics with digital cultures. So, for example, in oral cultures, interpersonal encounters are essential to commerce, as are personal relationships. Talk and transaction are mutually dependent. It is not the case that one exploits the other but rather that social and commercial interactions coexist, and coexist fruitfully. In our western - read: literate - commercial context, most commercial transactions are anonymous, involving minimal talk and no meaningful interpersonal relationships. The cashier does not really exist as a person but as an instrument of an economic system ruled by paper (cash, inventories, price lists, schedules, etc.) not people. When you buy something at a store you do not genuinely 'meet' the cashier. But when you buy something in any oral culture - at a market in rural Thailand or Morocco or Peru or India - it is exceedingly poor manners to not engage with the seller as an individual. In many cases, it is required. Things don't have prices listed on them. You have to ask. You have to bargain or you are both rude and foolish. You have to chat, taste, joke, look into each other's eyes. You have to get to know one another. And that's if you are a stranger! If you are a local, you are buying something from someone you have purchased from for years, and each transaction is a further installment of a long-standing relationship. Anyway, as I guess you can tell, my point is that we lived for countless generations with this integration of talk and transaction, and we liked it. Now, we live with anonymous transactions, and we like those. But neither is essentially better than the other. If the future involves new kinds of socialized commerce, ones that balance talk and transaction in new ways, we may get to like those too, and we should not assume that just because commerce is no longer anonymous that it will be inherently bad. Of course neither is it inherently good. But it is different from what we know. Cheers John -- www.youareyourmedia.com </pre> John Sobol 2011-11-10T17:03:22 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2386 <pre>John's post raises some core questions for discussions about the brave new world of ubiquitous commercial monitoring. To answer the question of the potential harms of tracking and target marketing to kids -- and others (setting aside questions about potential "abuse" or data breaches and focusing on the use proper, as it were), would mean considering the impact of marketing, commercialization, and advertising more generally on children (and society) as well as the ways in which these shape the content to which they are exposed and their access to information (if, as Mark Zuckerberg thinks, his social algorithms will eventually take primacy in organizing our information worlds for us, what does it mean that these are developed in accordance with commercial imperatives? What kind of information will be prioritized and made available via the "social graph" if this is clearly governed by and subordinate to commercial imperatives? How might a Facebook social graph differ from one that was not crafted according to commercial imperatives? These are the same questions we once asked about how commercial imperatives structures the news and information made available via commercial media outlets. It surely retains its relevance and urgency in the online context, yet we don't seem to ask it as much). In other words, it's not a new question -- if we are concerned about the impact of commodification and hyper-commercialization in offline realms, the recent developments in the online world would likely exacerbate those concerns. Even if we weren't we might start to get concerned about new marketing strategies and techniques. What is striking to me is the way in which the online world tends to get a free pass. If someone were to build a "free" private for-profit school that was funded by using students as guinea pigs for market research by spying on them, experimenting on them, keeping data about everything they did, and then using that to see how most effectively to influence their behavior and shape their knowledge in accordance with commercial imperatives, the creator of this school would likely be critiqued and the proposal roundly rejected. We might engage in some serious questions about what we had, as a society, become (or am I behind the times?). At the very least there would be some significant level of public debate. But when important new forms of sociality and self-expression online are funded this way, we all-too-readily accept that this is the "only" way it can be done and go on to ask, heck, what's so bad about marketing anyway: wouldn't we rather have ads that are relevant to us than ones that are not? John's post also highlights the problems with a privacy-based critique of information collection. There are many pathologies associated with the deployment of the notion of privacy, including the reinforcement of the imagined primacy of the classical liberal subject that underwrites the disturbing social pathologies of, say, the Tea Party with its antipathy to notions of collective goods, shared social responsibility, legal regulation, and so on. In more concrete terms, of course, a certain interpretation of the sanctity of privacy underwrites Facebook's business model, which is based not on "the end of privacy" but on the wholesale enclosure and privatization of huge amounts of data. Even as we become more visible to one another in some ways, what's going on "beneath" the platform or "behind" the screen becomes increasingly opaque (if only because it's getting more involved and sophisticated). We don't have a clear idea of the experiments being conducted on us, the range of data collected about us, or how this data is used because these practices are not open and available to us. It would be interesting if Facebook were as open as some Facebook users, posting an update whenever they conducted a new experiment on us, and writing on our walls exactly what data they had captured about us (including when and for how long we looked at our walls). There is an asymmetry to the so called "end of privacy": users are subjected to it, whereas those who control the commercial platforms are exempted in significant ways. There are huge emerging asymmetries in the terabyte world of "super crunching": those with access to the databases and the tools for managing them can use data in quite different ways than those without access. Data has different significance and affordances for them. Moreover, the data itself is collected in asymmetric ways. Imagine an application that monitored what Facebook does with our information as closely as Facebook monitored its users (not that that would redress the asymmetry entirely -- I think more is at stake). It's probably more helpful to approach these issues through the lenses of power, accountability, democracy and social justice than through the lens of "privacy" concerns. When people express their concerns about privacy (even as their behavior seems to belie their words), it may well be that they are attempting to get at some of these broader concerns but don't have enough a well enough established public vocabulary to get at them. It's worth understanding that target marketing in the world of the expanding database is not simply about collaborative filtering (showing us things that other people who like the things we like also like) or linking ads to past preferences. The folks engaged in cutting edge forms of data-mining and targeted advertising are interested in how knowledge about everything from our moods to our particular anxieties to our DNA can provide leverage over us in ways that we are not aware of (the fear is that if we know what's going on, the strategies might become less effective). They are also interested not simply in tracking but in creating variations in the conditions within which we are tracked in order to conduct ongoing controlled experiments. If that sounds paranoid, just read the marketing literature on this -- it's creepy in a fascinating futuristic kind off way. I don't know if these techniques will actually work, but it's worth understanding that we are incorporating the assumption that they will into emerging economic models for supporting our communicative and informational infrastructure. I'm not trying to over-dramatize the issue - but I think it's worth anticipating the direction in which the industry seems to be headed. On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 1:20 AM, John Sobol &lt;soboltalk-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: </pre> Mark Andrejevic 2011-11-10T03:24:06 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2385 <pre>I think that it's irresponsible to collect data about people without their understanding of what's going on and their ability to intervene in a reasonable way. For one version of why, I recommend reading "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" and consider what her family went through. I also think that a lot of databases are being used to manipulate and segregate people and I think that we need to think through the cultural implications of this. Not at an individual harm level, but at a societal level. What happens when people of color get different experiences than white folks? Think: Filter Bubble issues. Finally, there's the worst case scenario. I think about how the Dutch government's database on its citizens was abused in the 1940s. All of these techs come with good and bad. I don't want to throw away the good to ward off the bad. But I think that we need to have an informed citizenry and I think that people need to understand the implications of a data society. I don't think that we can just accept policies that keep people in the dark, even if it's meant to be for their own good. I think that's unethical and immoral. Thus, what matters most to me is not about protecting people, but about empowering them. Making sure that they can understand what's going on and make informed decisions. danah On Nov 8, 2011, at 10:20 AM, John Sobol wrote: come personalized - as it once was in oral economies - and our resistance to this stems from our allegiance to literate economic principles and values that are based on impersonal standardization as opposed to targeted personalization and interaction (automated or in-person)? care about marketing, I do care about security. So from my personal perspective, perhaps the focus of researcher's concern should be less on the not-so-nefarious practice of targeted marketing and instead on the seemingly more alarming danger of personal data being exported for non-commercial purposes? ghting that new digital norm is a less useful activity than building constructively on it, no matter how uneasy this may make those of us who were raised to cherish and expect anonymity in commerce and elsewhere. . That would be an excellent example of benevolent targeted marketing and personalized commerce, and I'd have no problem with my 12 year old sharing her personal info in that context... ------ "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ &lt; at &gt;zephoria </pre> danah boyd 2011-11-10T02:29:43 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2384 <pre>Thanks to danah for the thoughtful response, I think in the end, your study does a good job of demonstrating that the attempt by COPPA to address issues of maturity/safety online is problematic in a variety of ways -- including those associated with the examples you cite in your most recent post. What seems less convincing, based on your own findings, is the broader attempt to contest the notion of age-related restrictions of any kind on information collection. If, as you reasonably argue, legal regulation (or as you put it, "Protectionism from the State"), is ineffective when it doesn't accord with social norms, your own study indicates that the majority of parents (57 percent) say they support restrictions on data collection (tracking?) even if it means shutting down their children's access to social networking sites. That seems like a pretty significant finding. The "rock-solid" education plan you propose would most likely raise this percentage, based on what we've seen in the research on attitudes to tracking so far (again, Chris Hoofnagle and Joe Turow's work is extremely helpful on this). Empowering people to speak out against what is not right often leads to legal reforms -- and I wouldn't want to relegate those to the vilified category of "Protectionism from the State". A while back the FTC was talking about requiring Web sites to include a "no track" option; That would certainly give parents (and the rest of us) a choice, but it would likely be disparaged by industry as over-reaching by the heavy hand of the state (and, of course, a threat to the online business model -- which tells us something about what types of choices the market makes available and what kinds it shuts down). General claims like "Parents don't want government playing in-loco parentis even when it's well-intended" probably aren't as useful as more specific findings regarding particular practices and preferences. I don't doubt the statement is true in a broad-brush kind of way, and most parents would agree with it, but I don't think it means parents would want all age-specific laws revoked so they could decide on their own whether their child is "ready" (to drive, vote, join the military, etc.). Interpreting data like yours means figuring out the most sensible way of reconciling broad claims about who should take responsibility for children with specific findings about the type of regulation people actually support. (as a related aside, it seems worth pointing out that the question "*Who should have the final say about whether or not your child should be able to use Web sites and online services?" *has a vaguely polemic feel to it, and not just because COPPA does not have the final say about access (as you scrupulously point out in your article). I'm not sure I'd call it a leading question, but when you ask this question, you pretty much know what kind of answer you're going to get. Framed differently you would likely get a very different response "Would you support a law that restricts marketers from gathering detailed information about everything your child does online?" for example.) I'm not trying to argue for COPPA as is. The attempt to reform COPPA is clearly an important one -- but I think it pushes the argument farther than the findings warrant to call for the elimination of all age-related forms of regulation, *even those that the majority of parents would support*. I'd be open to further arguments about the ways in which age-specific restrictions might, say, hinder more general forms of protection (or bolster an commercial model that we would be better off without), but the tone of your article pushes in a somewhat different direction: if you frame laws that limit tracking as "state protectionism" that limits free choice in the marketplace, you put yourself in a tricky position if you are really trying to argue (in the long run) for more comprehensive restrictions on tracking. You raise an important issue about the difficulties of regulating collection: that, as long as people post information to a Web site, that site is involved in data collection. I suppose this poses a problem for the kind of do-not-track legislation proposed by the FTC -- would it mean sites like Facebook couldn't save users' photos and comments? In this case, regulations on use certainly make sense -- although I'm not sure why age-related restrictions on *both* collection and use wouldn't also make sense ("do not track kids' behavior online by capturing information about their activity - in addition to what they themselves post" alongside "do not use the information they post to market to them"). One of the most important findings of your study, at least to my mind, is the one that you mention in passing in your response: "we couldn't even run measures on what parents knew because their basic literacy was so low. They simply don't understand how targeted marketing works let alone how data is shared, sold, or used." As you point out, this is borne out by the research, and suggests that an important part of the online business model relies on practices about which the public is woefully ill informed and that it may not support once it learns more about them. On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 7:48 AM, danah boyd &lt;zephoria-tiaxG+wSQctg9hUCZPvPmw&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: </pre> Mark Andrejevic 2011-11-10T00:15:40 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2383 <pre>John from the session last week with a bunch of London based screenagers (14, 16, 17, 19 and 21 years old) - it is evident that they are far more aware than their parents of harm and benefits, indeed they are the educators of the teachers, younger siblings and parents (and me) They (screenagers) have found various ways round services that they don't want to be tracked on and indeed one question came up about "show me how easy it is to track" which showed that, at scale, it is much harder than you think...... 1. location is off. 2. parents pay for mobiles. 3. mobile is pay as you go. 4. several subscription for mobiles 5. use of persona and pseudonyms 5. closed user groups 6. privacy setting managed 7. use different IM to respond to question 8. migrate across platforms and services over an evening..... 9. private back channels 10. shared machines at home So we have "Consumer Kids" Mayo and Nairn at one end is about the possible but as show in the demo's of tracking - not probable..... At the other end someone knows everything and you cannot hide - again possible but not probable. best Tony 07808 142121 _____ From: idc-bounces-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org [mailto:idc-bounces-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org] On Behalf Of John Sobol Sent: 08 November 2011 15:21 To: idc-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org Subject: Re: [iDC] Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook's 13+ Rule On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:56 PM, Seeta Gangadharan &lt;seeta.gangadharan-LrD5EImo2rg&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: Hi Lynn/all, Though survey research might be useful in ascertaining snapshots of low-income communities' sentiments towards surveillance and privacy, I'm not certain that a survey will capture breadth of harmful experiences that result from tracking or that are perceived to result from tracking. I'd love to hear someone who's working toward that end to suggest otherwise. Hi all, I would be interested to hear from people about this question too, specifically, what are the actual harmful experiences that have resulted from corporate tracking/targeting of teens/kids, as opposed to the perceived or potential harmful experiences? I can think of the RIAA lawsuits but would be keen to hear about others. Personally, as a parent of 'tweens I sympathize with the perspective that assumes that any and all tracking and targeting of our kids - corporate or otherwise - is inherently dangerous and undesirable. But another part of me wonders whether this is not an unfounded assumption. For example, I am of the belief that the passion for privacy that is inherent to literate culture and that arises out of the anonymity of literate technology has been a key factor in destroying our perception of the interrelatedness of all things, and thus in enabling our disastrous delusion that it is OK to exploit the earth to death (ours). Perhaps our desire to migrate anonymity into networked culture is a fundamental mistake? Perhaps we need to maximize our interconnectedness and our collective being, not as unknown atomic individuals but as individuals unafraid of being known by our words and deeds (or profile), i.e. not anonymous? Perhaps the price we pay for our targeted social networking is targeted commercial networking? Perhaps it is inevitable and OK that our economy should become personalized - as it once was in oral economies - and our resistance to this stems from our allegiance to literate economic principles and values that are based on impersonal standardization as opposed to targeted personalization and interaction (automated or in-person)? Targeted marketing already serves us well (or does it? I would say it does) on ebay and amazon and etsy etc. Besides, was listening to the radio not a form of targeting, and of suggestive marketing, or watching TV or reading the newspaper? We let our kids do those things, so the difference appears to be in the personalized tracking/targeting capabilities not in the pushing out of suggestions per se. Partly what I'm saying is, do I care if personalized ads as opposed to generic ads are targeted at my daughter? No I don't. Do I care that a vast store of data about her personal and commercial (and when she gets older, professional) life is in the hands of a company that could be hacked or that could sell it to a 3rd party for non-commercial uses? Yes, definitely. So although I don't really care about marketing, I do care about security. So from my personal perspective, perhaps the focus of researcher's concern should be less on the not-so-nefarious practice of targeted marketing and instead on the seemingly more alarming danger of personal data being exported for non-commercial purposes? Obviously the 'potential' harm is 1984ish and nightmarish. But perhaps the 'potential' benefits, on the other hand, are utopian. Or more likely both are somewhat exaggerated. But I disagree with you Danah when you say that the key determining factor is social norms. I think the determining factor is the architecture of the technology, or the code as you/LL put it. Because social norms change as a result of technological architectures and not the other way around, despite the fact that it is heresy to say so. (Unfortunately, the Myth of the Myth of Technological Determinism is even more entrenched than the Myth of the Myth of the Digital Native!) So partly what I am wondering is whether - given that the architecture of networked culture promotes personalization and destroys anonymity, fighting that new digital norm is a less useful activity than building constructively on it, no matter how uneasy this may make those of us who were raised to cherish and expect anonymity in commerce and elsewhere. For example, I do not believe that the appropriate response to the RIAA's litigious attacks on digital sharing is deeper hiding and sneakier sharing tools, precisely because downloaders will always be trackable. I think the appropriate response is collective self-empowerment in which millions of people should come together and publicly acknowledge their actions as part of a popular movement to challenge IP law and at the very least stop the harmful music industry attacks on students and their families. Alternately, bands should shed their labels and develop digitally-enabled fanclubs in which every single fan is known by name and can be tracked and targeted, so music and media can flow downstream to fans and money can flow upstream to bands and the RIAA can be left out of it all entirely. That would be an excellent example of benevolent targeted marketing and personalized commerce, and I'd have no problem with my 12 year old sharing her personal info in that context... These are open-ended questions. Just thinking out loud and exploring different perspectives...all comments welcome... John Sobol -- www.youareyourmedia.com </pre> Tony Fish 2011-11-09T15:43:56 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2382 <pre>In terms of surveillance and class politics, I recommend Margaret Nelson's "Parenting Out of Control." Her work is ethnographic but she knows a lot about this space and the class politics involved. There is no doubt that this survey is about parents who are online and whose kids are online. And one thing that we've been learning about those who opt out is that they are primarily religious (not actually simply lower SES). They opt out because they don't want their children exposed to public content at all. As for my personal take on addressing COPPA. The following are 100% my personal opinions and don't reflect the attitudes of my co-authors or any institution with which I am affiliated. But what I would personally like to see in response to the failures of COPPA is the following: 1) Don't extend COPPA. Don't try to make it stronger. Just leave it as-is for now. 2) Don't build on COPPA. Do not allow bills like the "Do Not Track Kids Act" to presume that COPPA is working. Strip all COPPA-related elements from pending bills. 3) Develop a strong media literacy curriculum around data. Work with the Department of Education to make certain that teachers are trained and teaching kids to think critically about all of the data that is being collected and the implications that this has. Develop a similar media literacy program for adults. Leverage Khan Academy. Find ways to reach people writ large about data privacy. Get people informed. Make that a priority. 4) Develop a private-public partnership to think through what a data ratings system could look like. Most ratings systems that have been proposed focus on content. This is great, but that's not what we need to solve the problem here. We need some way where parents can easily see what kinds of data are being collected by their kid on the site, what's being done with that data, etc. Some way to create radical transparency for data usage practices. Use this to drive home media literacy. 5) Develop non-age-specific regulatory interventions that focus on the sale and abuse of data. Not the collection, but the usage side of things. These should be helpful to all people, regardless of age. 6) Then repeal COPPA. That's my personal prescription for how to deal with this. But the short version is that I'd like to see a lot more money going into educating the public and making sure that folks can make informed choices and less going into trying to maintain a broken law. I'm not in favor of tracking and stalking our kids. But I'm also not in favor of the government playing in loco parentis. I want the government to create an ecosystem where the public can become informed and make informed decisions. I'm a big believer in Lessig's four points of regulation: market, law, social norms, and technology/architecture. I feel like too much of the focus tends to center on how law and technology can counter market and technology. Too little focuses on how to engage social norms as a regulatory force. That starts with education. danah On Nov 7, 2011, at 8:31 AM, Lynn Clark wrote: ir own social circles. Getting rid of the COPPA age-based restrictions, then, could effectively remove an important moment at which parents want the media literacy you want to provide. And whereas I totally agree that we need to educate parents about media, it's also the case that parents will probably always be two steps behind youth culture, as that's the nature of youth culture. E.g., I remember Jackie Marsh commenting in her work on Club Penguin that most parents first found out about the site when their kids asked to be on it. So I think there's a place for legislation and policy that precedes rather than follows parental knowledge and addresses concerns about the childhood commercial environment that are not quite articulated in terms of the specifics of online tracking and surv eillance, but are clearly out in the discourse (witness the popularity of Juliet Schor's Born to Buy etc.). ironment. ------ "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ &lt; at &gt;zephoria </pre> danah boyd 2011-11-09T01:24:49 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2381 <pre>On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 10:56 PM, Seeta Gangadharan &lt; seeta.gangadharan-LrD5EImo2rg&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org&gt; wrote: Hi all, I would be interested to hear from people about this question too, specifically, what are the actual harmful experiences that have resulted from corporate tracking/targeting of teens/kids, as opposed to the perceived or potential harmful experiences? I can think of the RIAA lawsuits but would be keen to hear about others. Personally, as a parent of 'tweens I sympathize with the perspective that assumes that any and all tracking and targeting of our kids - corporate or otherwise - is inherently dangerous and undesirable. But another part of me wonders whether this is not an unfounded assumption. For example, I am of the belief that the passion for privacy that is inherent to literate culture and that arises out of the anonymity of literate technology has been a key factor in destroying our perception of the interrelatedness of all things, and thus in enabling our disastrous delusion that it is OK to exploit the earth to death (ours). Perhaps our desire to migrate anonymity into networked culture is a fundamental mistake? Perhaps we need to maximize our interconnectedness and our collective being, not as unknown atomic individuals but as individuals unafraid of being known by our words and deeds (or profile), i.e. not anonymous? Perhaps the price we pay for our targeted social networking is targeted commercial networking? Perhaps it is inevitable and OK that our economy should become personalized - as it once was in oral economies - and our resistance to this stems from our allegiance to literate economic principles and values that are based on impersonal standardization as opposed to targeted personalization and interaction (automated or in-person)? Targeted marketing already serves us well (or does it? I would say it does) on ebay and amazon and etsy etc. Besides, was listening to the radio not a form of targeting, and of suggestive marketing, or watching TV or reading the newspaper? We let our kids do those things, so the difference appears to be in the personalized tracking/targeting capabilities not in the pushing out of suggestions per se. Partly what I'm saying is, do I care if personalized ads as opposed to generic ads are targeted at my daughter? No I don't. Do I care that a vast store of data about her personal and commercial (and when she gets older, professional) life is in the hands of a company that could be hacked or that could sell it to a 3rd party for non-commercial uses? Yes, definitely. So although I don't really care about marketing, I do care about security. So from my personal perspective, perhaps the focus of researcher's concern should be less on the not-so-nefarious practice of targeted marketing and instead on the seemingly more alarming danger of personal data being exported for non-commercial purposes? Obviously the 'potential' harm is 1984ish and nightmarish. But perhaps the 'potential' benefits, on the other hand, are utopian. Or more likely both are somewhat exaggerated. But I disagree with you Danah when you say that the key determining factor is social norms. I think the determining factor is the architecture of the technology, or the code as you/LL put it. Because social norms change as a result of technological architectures and not the other way around, despite the fact that it is heresy to say so. (Unfortunately, the Myth of the Myth of Technological Determinism is even more entrenched than the Myth of the Myth of the Digital Native!) So partly what I am wondering is whether - given that the architecture of networked culture promotes personalization and destroys anonymity, fighting that new digital norm is a less useful activity than building constructively on it, no matter how uneasy this may make those of us who were raised to cherish and expect anonymity in commerce and elsewhere. For example, I do not believe that the appropriate response to the RIAA's litigious attacks on digital sharing is deeper hiding and sneakier sharing tools, precisely because downloaders will always be trackable. I think the appropriate response is collective self-empowerment in which millions of people should come together and publicly acknowledge their actions as part of a popular movement to challenge IP law and at the very least stop the harmful music industry attacks on students and their families. Alternately, bands should shed their labels and develop digitally-enabled fanclubs in which every single fan is known by name and can be tracked and targeted, so music and media can flow downstream to fans and money can flow upstream to bands and the RIAA can be left out of it all entirely. That would be an excellent example of benevolent targeted marketing and personalized commerce, and I'd have no problem with my 12 year old sharing her personal info in that context... These are open-ended questions. Just thinking out loud and exploring different perspectives...all comments welcome... John Sobol -- www.youareyourmedia.com </pre> John Sobol 2011-11-08T15:20:52 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2380 <pre>Hi Lynn/all, Thanks for this message. Per your point I am just at the very beginning stages of a qualitative study that examines the issue of online surveillance within the context of digital inclusion policies. (My starting point is the concept of digital inclusion, not the nature of online privacy or surveillance.) The study will take me to four different sites (in the U.S.) where members of chronically underserved communities are going online for the first time or relying on community anchors for access to and knowledge about broadband (fixed or mobile). This is not a family setting but a "gateway" setting, where I'm anticipating many concerns about surveillance will surface (note: we've seen hints even in survey-based and qualitative research coming out of the Federal Communications Commission with Horrigan et al. and Dailey et al.'s works). From initial preparatory interviews that I've done to set up the study, it seems that concerns corporate surveillance are as potent as government ones... not surprising in the wake of the subprime lending crisis. Pertinent to this thread, I should add I'm only looking at adults, including a community organization that serves seniors. That was a choice motivated by issues of (IRB) practicality. Nevertheless, it'll be interesting to discover whether generational notions of privacy supercede those of affinity-based ones. It'll also be interesting how surveillance concerns stand in relation to other considerations weighing before historically marginalized communities. Though, again, I'm just in the very beginning stages of this study, my starting hunch is that low-income communities of color (the main targets of digital inclusion policies) know they're being tracked even if they haven't been harmed per se; they are at a loss as to how to confront it; teachers or trainers are also facing challenges in keeping abreast of privacy protection tools; and hence the chronically underserved require much more than literacy programs to help them wade through the shifting sands of privacy online. Though survey research might be useful in ascertaining snapshots of low-income communities' sentiments towards surveillance and privacy, I'm not certain that a survey will capture breadth of harmful experiences that result from tracking or that are perceived to result from tracking. I'd love to hear someone who's working toward that end to suggest otherwise. Warm regards, Seeta On 11/7/11 8:31 AM, Lynn Clark wrote: </pre> Seeta Gangadharan 2011-11-08T03:56:04 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2379 <pre>Lynn - thanks I enjoyed your insights and contributions As a mobile phone stat - over half of kids in western EU and US under 13 now have a personal mobile and they use it as a place where we don't have control. There are now 5.8bn mobile phone subscriptions (equil to 80% of population) and only 4.7bn people with toothbrushes. Mobile is the first and in many cases the only experience of the web. Agree that nothing replaces the need for parents to parent, but we appear to have lost the balance of rights and responsibilies..... Best, Tony www.mydigitalfootprint.com -----Original Message----- From: idc-bounces-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org [mailto:idc-bounces-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org] On Behalf Of Lynn Clark Sent: 07 November 2011 13:31 To: idc-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org Subject: Re: [iDC] Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook's 13+ Rule This has been a very interesting discussion. I've been doing ethnographic work with high schoolers in lower income families and have data that support both the boyd et al. survey and Mark Andrejevic's points. I agree with danah that parents aren't very concerned about tracking (although many of us in the scholarly community believe they should be). Still, I'm not in favor of the lowering or removal of COPPA's age restrictions, or even of having Facebook et al. remove their "no one under 13" policy. Yes, parents feel that their views are more valid than those of the government's, but the "no one under 13" policy does create a moment for intervention, e.g., it becomes a point of discussion between child and parent that's valuable, even if both decide that the child is "mature" enough for violating the policy. Getting on Facebook and "at what age should my child get a cell phone?" seem to be two key questions of the tween years, not just among children and parents but among parents within their own social circles. Getting rid of the COPPA age-based restrictions, then, could effectively remove an important moment at which parents want the media literacy you want to provide. And whereas I totally agree that we need to educate parents about media, it's also the case that parents will probably always be two steps behind youth culture, as that's the nature of youth culture. E.g., I remember Jackie Marsh commenting in her work on Club Penguin that most parents first found out about the site when their kids asked to be on it. So I think there's a place for legislation and policy that precedes rather than follows parental knowledge and addresses concerns about the childhood commercial environment that are not quite articulated in terms of the specifics of online tracking and surveillance, but are clearly out in the discourse (witness the popularity of Juliet Schor's Born to Buy etc.). The last sentence of the article raises two points: abandon age-based mechanisms, and devise new solutions "that help limit when, where, and how data are used." I agree that it would be nice if we could limit tracking for all ages, but I think it's worth recognizing that people feel that children deserve greater protection than adults, as Mark Andrejevic argues. If scholars advocated 'no tracking for kids under 13,' that might then trigger a different discussion: at what age do we as adults want to say, 'sure, Facebook can own my data?' Or, "Facebook can own my kid's data after 13 but not before." I'd like to see more of that kind of discussion in our media literacy efforts. Our challenge is to change the parental concern from that of stalkers to the commercially supported media environment. One final point: as this survey was an online opt-in, it's important to recognize that it represents those online, not "all" parents. I had to keep reminding myself of that when reading it, as even with the weighting we can see that lower income and lower education groups are underrepresented. I'm finding a lot more concern about surveillance among lower income families (not surprisingly, the concerns are framed as government not corporate surveillance). Can someone point me to who might be doing survey research among this population? Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Dir Graduate Studies, &amp; Director, Estlow International Center for Journalism &amp; New Media Dept of Media, Film, &amp; Journalism Studies University of Denver 2490 S. Gaylord St. Denver, CO 80208 phone: (303) 871-3984 email: Lynn.Clark-lbsTmnSA2kE&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org websites: http://Estlow.org http://lynnschofieldclark.com http://digitalparenting.wordpress.com </pre> Tony Fish - AMF Ventures 2011-11-07T14:28:38 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2378 <pre> This has been a very interesting discussion. I've been doing ethnographic work with high schoolers in lower income families and have data that support both the boyd et al. survey and Mark Andrejevic's points. I agree with danah that parents aren't very concerned about tracking (although many of us in the scholarly community believe they should be). Still, I'm not in favor of the lowering or removal of COPPA's age restrictions, or even of having Facebook et al. remove their "no one under 13" policy. Yes, parents feel that their views are more valid than those of the government's, but the "no one under 13" policy does create a moment for intervention, e.g., it becomes a point of discussion between child and parent that's valuable, even if both decide that the child is "mature" enough for violating the policy. Getting on Facebook and "at what age should my child get a cell phone?" seem to be two key questions of the tween years, not just among children and parents but among parents within their own social circles. Getting rid of the COPPA age-based restrictions, then, could effectively remove an important moment at which parents want the media literacy you want to provide. And whereas I totally agree that we need to educate parents about media, it's also the case that parents will probably always be two steps behind youth culture, as that's the nature of youth culture. E.g., I remember Jackie Marsh commenting in her work on Club Penguin that most parents first found out about the site when their kids asked to be on it. So I think there's a place for legislation and policy that precedes rather than follows parental knowledge and addresses concerns about the childhood commercial environment that are not quite articulated in terms of the specifics of online tracking and survei llance, but are clearly out in the discourse (witness the popularity of Juliet Schor's Born to Buy etc.). The last sentence of the article raises two points: abandon age-based mechanisms, and devise new solutions "that help limit when, where, and how data are used." I agree that it would be nice if we could limit tracking for all ages, but I think it's worth recognizing that people feel that children deserve greater protection than adults, as Mark Andrejevic argues. If scholars advocated 'no tracking for kids under 13,' that might then trigger a different discussion: at what age do we as adults want to say, 'sure, Facebook can own my data?' Or, "Facebook can own my kid's data after 13 but not before." I'd like to see more of that kind of discussion in our media literacy efforts. Our challenge is to change the parental concern from that of stalkers to the commercially supported media envir onment. One final point: as this survey was an online opt-in, it's important to recognize that it represents those online, not "all" parents. I had to keep reminding myself of that when reading it, as even with the weighting we can see that lower income and lower education groups are underrepresented. I'm finding a lot more concern about surveillance among lower income families (not surprisingly, the concerns are framed as government not corporate surveillance). Can someone point me to who might be doing survey research among this population? Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Dir Graduate Studies, &amp; Director, Estlow International Center for Journalism &amp; New Media Dept of Media, Film, &amp; Journalism Studies University of Denver 2490 S. Gaylord St. Denver, CO 80208 phone: (303) 871-3984 email: Lynn.Clark-lbsTmnSA2kE&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org websites: http://Estlow.org http://lynnschofieldclark.com http://digitalparenting.wordpress.com On Nov 7, 2011, at 1:17 AM, Tony Fish - AMF Ventures wrote: </pre> Lynn Clark 2011-11-07T13:31:25 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2377 <pre>Thank you all for the insights and the converstation....I have added some personal comments from EU/ London in CAPS below to make them easy to read. I am also running a survey on this topic - please do complete it if you have some time it takes about 10 minutes. The final summary will be free and I will share the raw data with those who request it. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NFHR3BF Tony Fish (Author - My Digital Footprint) -----Original Message----- I totally agree with you that tracking is indeed a core issue here. But it's also clear that it's not something that parents, children, or adults in general understand [ I RAN A WORKSHOP WITH "SCREENAGERS" LAST WEEK ON THIS TOPIC IN LONDON LAST WEEK - THE KIDS ARE SO MUCH MORE AWARE]. COPPA doesn't educate people about tracking. It basically says, if you're 13 or older, you can be tracked no question. If you're under 13, you need your parents' permission to get tracked/to get access. [100% AGREE] I do not believe that age restrictions do anything to address tracking. [100% AGREE] Adults are clueless about tracking. [90% AGREE - I SAW SOME WHO GET IT LAST WEEK] Chris Hoofnagle's work showed this. And we couldn't even run measures on what parents knew because their basic literacy was so low. They simply don't understand how targeted marketing works let alone how data is shared, sold, or used. education programs to address the media literacy problem here; 2) focus on devising solutions to minimize how data is is abused that do not focus specifically on children. All populations are vulnerable with this regard and it doesn't help kids if clueless parents are making poor decisions on their behalf without understanding what's at stake. [I WOULD LIKE TO SAY THAT THIS WILL HAPPEN ANYWAY, AS WE SEE THE KIDS WHO GET IT EDUCATING YOUNGER SIBLINGS AND THEIR PARENTS AND GRANDPARETNS - PERSONALY NOT THAT WORRIED. I AM HOWEVER VERY WORRIED ABOUT THOSE WHO WILL BE EXCLUDED AS THE TRACKING ANALYSIS SHOWS THEY HAVE LITTLE OR NO ECONOMIC VALUE AND THEREFORE BECOME EXCLUDED OR HAVE TO PAY FOR "FREE" SERVICES] Protectionism from the State doesn't tend to do a lot of good. It motivates industry and parents and children to circumvent the restrictions by any means possible. [ WHY DO KIDS LOVE TECHNOLOGY - "AS IT IS A PLACE THEY CAN GO OUTSIDE OF PARENTIAL CONTROL" - PRIMARY RESEACH] Parents don't want government playing in-loco parentis even when it's well-intended. If we want to help parents and children, we need to focus on empowering them directly. They need to understand enough so that they can speak out against what's not right. [100% AGREE] I'm a firm believer in Lessig's point that four systems regulate: the market, the law, social norms, and architecture (or code). I also believe that the most powerful force is social norms. If you're upset with the market and how technology is being employed to help the market, the law isn't the appropriate solution if it doesn't align with social norms. You need social norms and the law to be working together. This requires focusing on people, their beliefs, their practices, their attitudes. [ I LIKE THIS MODEL BUT.... WE HAVE A SPECIAL AND SPECALIST ISSUE WITH THE CODE - THE PERSON WHO WRITES THE CODE IMPLEMENTATING THE ALGORITHM (WHICH ALLOWS FOR DIFFERENTIALTION) BRINGS THEIR OWN BIAS AND THE MARKET MAYNOT BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE BIAS. THE MARKET MAY BE SLOW TO REACT TO CHANGE. As for your suggestion about children opting out from tracking... have you read the COPPA requirements? The mere act of collecting a username, let alone a name or any other PII requires parental permission. The law isn't actually just about how the data is used. It's about how the data is collected. Even if companies don't use it for targeted marketing, if they collect the data, they have to get parent permission. [ DATA COLLECTION IS A COMMODITY GAME IN THE LONG RUN, STORAGE SHOULD BE SCRAPPED (OTHER THEN GOVERNMENT IS OBSESSED THAT THERE IS A SMOKING GUN) AS THE VALUE LIES IN ANALYSIS - WHICH REQUIRES A MARKET AND KEY REGULATION. One of the most heartbreaking conversations that I had in this whole process was with a psychiatrist working at a private hospital. (Note: non-profits are exempt from COPPA but for-profits, including hospitals, are not.) She wanted to create an online hotline-esque program for tweens who were engaged in self-destructive behaviors, including anorexia, self-injury, suicidal practices, and child abuse. She was specifically concerned about COPPA. But she was told from her lawyers that she couldn't put together an online forum because she would have to get parent permission. How do you ask a parent who is abusing their child to let them join a site focused on abuse? How do you tell an LGBT kid that they need parent permission for a site meant to help them figure out how to come out to their parents? She was heartbroken and frustrated. [ SPOT ON TO BRING TO REAL LIFE AND FRUSTRATING THAT IT IS ILLEGAL TO TELL SOMEONE TO BREAK THE LAW AND JUST DO IT] MacArthur is running into the same problem. The moment that they do anything that's a public-private partnership, they have to abide by COPPA. That means that they have to focus on data collection, regardless of how the data is used. COPPA isn't just about targeted marketing. If it were, the focus would be on the usage not the collection. danah On Nov 3, 2011, at 4:00 AM, Mark Andrejevic wrote: I find disturbing about it is the fact that the question of tracking is downplayed in your survey, even though the issue of tracking is a core concern of the policy measures the study purportedly addresses. restrictions have to do with issues of maturity and safety which they can address themselves (without the heavy hand of the state, thanks very much) through awareness/monitoring of their children's activity (and state guidelines). Only two parents in the sample mention privacy -- none, I gather, mention tracking and targeting. specifically addressed the questions of behavioral tracking, data-mining, and targeted advertising by, say, asking parents whether age restrictions should be set on the ability of companies to collect, save, and mine detailed data about children's behavior in order to market to them more effectively -- which is, of course, the question at the heart of the tracking measures you discuss. It is telling that only 9 percent of respondents reported that their children's data were used for marketing and advertising -- when, of course, this is the case for 100 percent of those parents whose kids are on Facebook. Thank you for noting, in this regard, that. "Given how few parents believe their children's data have been used for marketing and advertising, it is likely that: parents are either unaware of how these techniques work or they imagine a different aspect of marketing when they report their concerns regarding personalized marketing and targeted advertising." policy-related finding that parents, "are not looking for mandatory age restrictions as the solution to their concerns about safety and privacy." The preferred option for protecting children identified by your respondents: "getting parents involved in children's online activities," has to be understood against the background of the lack of awareness and understanding of tracking practices. Parents who do not understand how tracking works and don't know that it's taking place aren't going to be able to address the issues it raises through involving themselves in their children's activities. of mandatory age restrictions with your finding that, with respect to data collection, "57 percent would prefer restrictions, even if it means that children in general will be banned from social network sites." (It's suggestive that you frame this finding by noting that, "Even when the focus is on data collection, parents are not uniformly in favor of restrictions on what information social network sites can collect about children." Another way to frame it would be to note that "A significant majority of parents favor some type of age-based restriction on what information social network sites can collect about their children"). I couldn't find a table for that, so I'd be curious to know how that question was framed. It seems to me to be a significant finding -- given the fact that a majority of parents claim to be willing to sacrifice access in order to protect their children from certain types of tracking. What if the option were that children could have access to such sites without being tracked? My guess is that you'd see an even larger majority of parents saying they would prefer access with restrictions on tracking, even if that meant government regulation. qualify your conclusion that, "Our data show that the majority of parents think it is acceptable for their children to violate access restrictions if they feel as though doing so furthers their children's educational objectives, enables family communication, or enhances their children's social interactions" with the observation that most of the parents who feel this way seem to have a lack of awareness or understanding of the data collection regimes that the legislation (which leads to access restrictions) is meant to address. To my mind this qualification (combined with the finding that a majority of parents do support some type of age-based restriction on data collection) significantly weakens the case against the regulations you target. are in order...I would also express concern about the framing and the practical import of your article. You make a case against the consequences of a law that is not doing what it is supposed to do (thanks largely to the way the industry has responded), but to my mind a much less effective case against the actual goal (of protecting children from the sophisticated forms of manipulation being developed by data driven marketers). Nor do you make it clear that parents are opposed to this kind of protection, at least in the case of tracking, monitoring, and targeting. Then you use the industry response to indict the law. We might equally critique Facebook which chooses to respond by restricting access ineffectively (and thereby getting to have its "underage" data too), rather than providing parents with information and options. Couldn't Facebook easily bypass the onerous process of parental notification and consent by providing an opt-out provision: children who indicate that they are under a certain age would be allowed access, but exempted from tracking. It seems that many of the issues you raise including parental preference for restrictions on data collection could be addressed by making the law stronger (preventing Facebook from tracking anyone under 13) rather than scrapping it. requirements: there must be verifiable parental consent for those under 13 to acquiesce to tracking, but sites are not required to get verifiable proof that those who say they are over 13 really are. In other words, the workaround adopted by Web sites like Facebook is clearly structured to encourage lying -- and thereby to encourage tracking of "underage" users. Is it really complying with COPPA to allow claims to be over 13 to be made without verification? that Facebook is phenomenally popular among young people and an important part of their social lives. However, it is also a commercial site whose economic model relies on detailed monitoring, data mining, and target marketing. We have, as a society, placed ourselves in a position in which an important infrastructure for young people's self-expression and sociality relies on submitting them to the most sophisticated techniques for surveillance and marketing yet developed (remember when we used to worry about advertising in the schools?). In order to placate ourselves we have developed a law that, while purporting to protect children from -- or at least inform their parents about -- these techniques, actually allows the tracking and targeting to take place "unofficially." don't know how tracking works don't support government mandated age requirements -- except for the significant majority of parents who support age-based restrictions on data collection even at the expense of loss of access by their children to important resources for sociality, family communication and education (am I misreading this finding? -- it seems like it runs counter to much of your argument). If the goal is universal privacy protection, I'm not sure why it wouldn't make more sense to provide workable protection for groups that have historically been easier to shield from the most aggressive forms of marketing and work from there, rather than to say the law should be scrapped because industry didn't respond to it appropriately and parents don't seem to want age-based restrictions (except for the majority who think they are appropriate when it comes to data collection). Indeed, the tone of the article, with its framing of regulation as an impingement upon personal freedom and parental authority undermines the concluding gesture toward universal -- and thus stronger -- privacy protections -- unless these end up being a matter of industry self-regulation. That would certainly fit well with the industry agenda, but I'm not sure it accurately reflects public preference (I know, I know, get funding for my own study...actually, there's one underway). interested in addressing the arguments you make here in public comments to the FTC. ------ "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ &lt; at &gt;zephoria _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC-xGejAJT2w6zHsyC+C8RGZV6hYfS7NtTn&lt; at &gt;public.gmane.org https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref </pre> Tony Fish - AMF Ventures 2011-11-07T08:17:48 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2376 <pre>[My apologies for my tardiness in responding; this week has been challenging.] I totally agree with you that tracking is indeed a core issue here. But it's also clear that it's not something that parents, children, or adults in general understand. COPPA doesn't educate people about tracking. It basically says, if you're 13 or older, you can be tracked no question. If you're under 13, you need your parents' permission to get tracked/to get access. I do not believe that age restrictions do anything to address tracking. Adults are clueless about tracking. Chris Hoofnagle's work showed this. And we couldn't even run measures on what parents knew because their basic literacy was so low. They simply don't understand how targeted marketing works let alone how data is shared, sold, or used. From my personal position, I believe that we need to 1) create rock-solid education programs to address the media literacy problem here; 2) focus on devising solutions to minimize how data is is abused that do not focus specifically on children. All populations are vulnerable with this regard and it doesn't help kids if clueless parents are making poor decisions on their behalf without understanding what's at stake. Protectionism from the State doesn't tend to do a lot of good. It motivates industry and parents and children to circumvent the restrictions by any means possible. Parents don't want government playing in-loco parentis even when it's well-intended. If we want to help parents and children, we need to focus on empowering them directly. They need to understand enough so that they can speak out against what's not right. I'm a firm believer in Lessig's point that four systems regulate: the market, the law, social norms, and architecture (or code). I also believe that the most powerful force is social norms. If you're upset with the market and how technology is being employed to help the market, the law isn't the appropriate solution if it doesn't align with social norms. You need social norms and the law to be working together. This requires focusing on people, their beliefs, their practices, their attitudes. As for your suggestion about children opting out from tracking... have you read the COPPA requirements? The mere act of collecting a username, let alone a name or any other PII requires parental permission. The law isn't actually just about how the data is used. It's about how the data is collected. Even if companies don't use it for targeted marketing, if they collect the data, they have to get parent permission. One of the most heartbreaking conversations that I had in this whole process was with a psychiatrist working at a private hospital. (Note: non-profits are exempt from COPPA but for-profits, including hospitals, are not.) She wanted to create an online hotline-esque program for tweens who were engaged in self-destructive behaviors, including anorexia, self-injury, suicidal practices, and child abuse. She was specifically concerned about COPPA. But she was told from her lawyers that she couldn't put together an online forum because she would have to get parent permission. How do you ask a parent who is abusing their child to let them join a site focused on abuse? How do you tell an LGBT kid that they need parent permission for a site meant to help them figure out how to come out to their parents? She was heartbroken and frustrated. MacArthur is running into the same problem. The moment that they do anything that's a public-private partnership, they have to abide by COPPA. That means that they have to focus on data collection, regardless of how the data is used. COPPA isn't just about targeted marketing. If it were, the focus would be on the usage not the collection. danah On Nov 3, 2011, at 4:00 AM, Mark Andrejevic wrote: ------ "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ &lt; at &gt;zephoria </pre> danah boyd 2011-11-06T21:48:02 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2375 <pre>I also read this article and can only agree with Mark and support his criticism. The crucial question (Table 13) only talks about government involvement in setting age limits, there is no talk about targeted advertising, company practices, political economy, capitalism, etc - the question formulation is manipulative and is framed by liberal ideology that stirs sentiments against government intervention and ignores (as in the whole study) political economy, advertising culture, and capitalism. No surprise the only conclusion is "but the key to helping children and their parents enjoy the benefits of those solutions is to abandon age–based mechanisms that inadvertently result in limiting children’s options for online access". No questioning of the corporate character of social media, etc etc. There was once a guy called Lazarsfeld making a distinction between administrative and critical communication research... This is just another study about social media in the whole vast universe of administrative social media research output... Such studies are not only adminstrative, they are so extremly lacking any theory skills and are only boring. Best, CF Am 11/3/11 9:00 AM, schrieb Mark Andrejevic: </pre> Christian Fuchs 2011-11-04T21:32:24 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2374 <pre>Thanks for this heads up about an interesting and provocative study. What I find disturbing about it is the fact that the question of tracking is downplayed in your survey, even though the issue of tracking is a *core*concern of the policy measures the study purportedly addresses. What emerges from your findings is that most parents think that age restrictions have to do with issues of maturity and safety which they can address themselves (without the heavy hand of the state, thanks very much) through awareness/monitoring of their children's activity (and state guidelines). Only two parents in the sample mention privacy -- none, I gather, mention tracking and targeting. I'm willing to bet you would have gotten very different results if you had specifically addressed the questions of behavioral tracking, data-mining, and targeted advertising by, say, asking parents whether age restrictions should be set on the ability of companies to collect, save, and mine detailed data about children's behavior in order to market to them more effectively -- which is, of course, the question at the heart of the tracking measures you discuss. It is telling that only 9 percent of respondents reported that their children's data were used for marketing and advertising -- when, of course, this is the case for 100 percent of those parents whose kids are on Facebook. Thank you for noting, in this regard, that. "Given how few parents believe their children’s data have been used for marketing and advertising, it is likely that: parents are either unaware of how these techniques work or they imagine a different aspect of marketing when they report their concerns regarding personalized marketing and targeted advertising." That lack of awareness is an important qualification to the following policy-related finding that parents, "are not looking for mandatory age restrictions as the solution to their concerns about safety and privacy." The preferred option for protecting children identified by your respondents: "getting parents involved in children's online activities," has to be understood against the background of the lack of awareness and understanding of tracking practices. Parents who do not understand how tracking works and don't know that it's taking place aren't going to be able to address the issues it raises through involving themselves in their children's activities. I'm also not sure how to square your claim that parents are not in favor of mandatory age restrictions with your finding that, with respect to data collection, "57 percent would prefer restrictions, even if it means that children in general will be banned from social network sites." (It's suggestive that you frame this finding by noting that, "Even when the focus is on data collection, parents are not uniformly in favor of restrictions on what information social network sites can collect about children." Another way to frame it would be to note that "A significant majority of parents favor some type of age-based restriction on what information social network sites can collect about their children"). I couldn't find a table for that, so I'd be curious to know how that question was framed. It seems to me to be a significant finding -- given the fact that a majority of parents claim to be willing to sacrifice access in order to protect their children from certain types of tracking. What if the option were that children could have access to such sites without being tracked? My guess is that you'd see an even larger majority of parents saying they would prefer access with restrictions on tracking, even if that meant government regulation. When it comes to data-collection regulations, I think it is important to qualify your conclusion that, "Our data show that the majority of parents think it is acceptable for their children to violate access restrictions if they feel as though doing so furthers their children’s educational objectives, enables family communication, or enhances their children’s social interactions" with the observation that most of the parents who feel this way seem to have a lack of awareness or understanding of the data collection regimes that the legislation (which leads to access restrictions) is meant to address. To my mind this qualification (combined with the finding that a majority of parents do support some type of age-based restriction on data collection) significantly weakens the case against the regulations you target. While I'd agree with your conclusion that "universal privacy protections" are in order...I would also express concern about the framing and the practical import of your article. You make a case against the consequences of a law that is not doing what it is supposed to do (thanks largely to the way the industry has responded), but to my mind a much less effective case against the actual goal (of protecting children from the sophisticated forms of manipulation being developed by data driven marketers). Nor do you make it clear that parents are opposed to this kind of protection, at least in the case of tracking, monitoring, and targeting. Then you use the industry response to indict the law. We might equally critique Facebook which chooses to respond by restricting access ineffectively (and thereby getting to have its "underage" data too), rather than providing parents with information and options. Couldn't Facebook easily bypass the onerous process of parental notification and consent by providing an opt-out provision: children who indicate that they are under a certain age would be allowed access, but exempted from tracking. It seems that many of the issues you raise including parental preference for restrictions on data collection could be addressed by making the law stronger (preventing Facebook from tracking anyone under 13) rather than scrapping it. There is something cynical about the asymmetry in verification requirements: there must be verifiable parental consent for those under 13 to acquiesce to tracking, but sites are not required to get verifiable proof that those who say they are *over* 13 really are. In other words, the workaround adopted by Web sites like Facebook is clearly structured to encourage lying -- and thereby to encourage tracking of "underage" users. Is it *really* complying with COPPA to allow claims to be over 13 to be made without verification? Could we agree that what is going on, if we step back and sum it up is that Facebook is phenomenally popular among young people and an important part of their social lives. However, it is also a commercial site whose economic model relies on detailed monitoring, data mining, and target marketing. We have, as a society, placed ourselves in a position in which an important infrastructure for young people's self-expression and sociality relies on submitting them to the most sophisticated techniques for surveillance and marketing yet developed (remember when we used to worry about advertising in the schools?). In order to placate ourselves we have developed a law that, while purporting to protect children from -- or at least inform their parents about -- these techniques, actually allows the tracking and targeting to take place "unofficially." You point out that the law is ineffective and that parents who admittedly don't know how tracking works don't support government mandated age requirements -- except for the significant majority of parents who support age-based restrictions on data collection *even at the expense of loss of access* by their children to important resources for sociality, family communication and education (am I misreading this finding? -- it seems like it runs counter to much of your argument). If the goal is universal privacy protection, I'm not sure why it wouldn't make more sense to provide workable protection for groups that have historically been easier to shield from the most aggressive forms of marketing and work from there, rather than to say the law should be scrapped because industry didn't respond to it appropriately and parents don't seem to want age-based restrictions (except for the majority who think they are appropriate when it comes to data collection). Indeed, the tone of the article, with its framing of regulation as an impingement upon personal freedom and parental authority undermines the concluding gesture toward universal -- and thus stronger -- privacy protections -- unless these end up being a matter of industry self-regulation. That would certainly fit well with the industry agenda, but I'm not sure it accurately reflects public preference (I know, I know, get funding for my own study...actually, there's one underway). If you're submitting this paper to the FTC in this form, I'd certainly be interested in addressing the arguments you make here in public comments to the FTC. </pre> Mark Andrejevic 2011-11-03T08:00:05 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2373 <pre>I know that many of you believe that COPPA is intended to curb the practices of companies, but it has serious unintended consequences that affect parenting, education, free speech, and children's rights. For that reason, I want to share a new study that I've been working on has serious policy implications that affect every aspect of internet studies. For those who don't know anything about COPPA, it's the U.S. legislation that prompts most major U.S. companies to make their websites 13+. The regulation is currently being reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission (and they're seeking public comments by Nov 28 so if any of you are interested, please let me know!). Anyhow, I'm really excited about this study and I hope you will be too! Title: "Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook About Age: Unintended Consequences of the 'Children's Online Privacy Protection Act'" Authors: danah boyd (Microsoft Research/NYU), Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern), Jason Schultz (UC-Berkeley), and John Palfrey (Harvard) Full article: http://bit.ly/ParentSurveyCOPPA danah's blog post: http://bit.ly/tgKZrE Huffington Post op-ed: http://huff.to/rVocz5 CNet Coverage: http://cnet.co/tnNPw1 Topline: A major new nationwide study released today shows that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site's restrictions. Parents are often complicit in helping their children join the site. These new data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is currently under review, inadvertently undermines parents' ability to make choices and protect their children's data. This study has significant implications for policy makers, particularly in light of the discussion in Congress and at the Federal Trade Commission about COPPA and other age-based privacy laws. Based on a national sample of 1,007 U.S. parents who have children living with them between the ages of 10-14, this survey conducted July 5-14, 2011 found: • Although Facebook's minimum age is 13, parents of 13- and 14-year-olds report that, on average, their child joined Facebook at age 12. • Half (55%) of parents of 12-year-olds report their child has a Facebook account, and most (82%) of these parents knew when their child signed up. Most (76%) also assisted their 12-year old in creating the account. • A third (36%) of all parents surveyed reported that their child joined Facebook before the age of 13, and two-thirds of them (68%) helped their child create the account. • Half (53%) of parents surveyed think Facebook has a minimum age and a third (35%) of these parents think that this is a recommendation and not a requirement. • Most (78%) parents think it is acceptable for their child to violate minimum age restrictions on online services. The authors argue that these data call into question the efficacy of COPPA. Their findings have important implications for COPPA reform and other age-based legislation, such as the "Do Not Track Kids Act" currently being discussed in Congress: • COPPA is well intended but has major unintended consequences in terms of encouraging general-purpose websites like Facebook, Skype, and Gmail to limit kids under 13 from accessing educational and social opportunities. • Age-based restrictions imposed in response to COPPA undermine parental authority and limit parents' freedoms to make choices about what their children do and what information is collected about them. • As a result of COPPA, lying about one's age has become normal and parents often help children lie. This creates safety and privacy issues. • Online safety and privacy are of great concern to parents, but most parents do not want solutions that result in age-based restrictions for their children. • Parents are open to recommended age ratings and other approaches that offer guidance without limiting their children's access. The implications of this study go beyond issues of governance. The age restrictions engendered by COPPA have serious implications for parenting, education, and issues surrounding children's rights. To learn more, view the complete article at http://bit.ly/ParentSurveyCOPPA ------ "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ &lt; at &gt;zephoria </pre> danah boyd 2011-11-01T14:31:39 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc/2372 <pre>Dear All, I had written earlier around the question of Digital Natives as a preparation to the Mobility Shifts summit earlier this month. It was a pleasure to present at the Summit and present some of the research that we have been doing the last couple of years. Continuing with the argumentation, I am sharing this new blog that I have written for the Digital Media and Learning blog at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/search-other-decoding-digital-natives I am replicating the text for people who don't want to click on the link. Given how many people are working around these issues on this list, I hope that this leads to an interesting discussion. I look forward to the conversations. Warmly Nishant * In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives* This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of ‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is changing the world. In this first post, I chart the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society &lt;http://www.cis-india.org/&gt; (Bangalore, India) and Hivos &lt;http://www.alliance2015.org/index.php?id=46&gt; (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built. The Digital Native has many different imaginations. From the short hand understanding of ‘anybody who is born after the 1980s’ (Prensky, 2001) to more nuanced definitions of populations who are ‘born digital’ (Palfrey &amp; Gasser, 2008), the digital native has firmly been ensconced in our visions of technology futures. From DIY decentralized learning environments to viral and networked forms of engagements that span from the Arab Spring to Occupy Together, the Digital Native – somebody who has grown up with digital technologies (and the skills to negotiate with them) as the default mode of being – has become central to how we see usage and proliferation of new digital tools and technologies. Three years ago, when the identity Digital Native was already in currency but before the overwhelming examples that are now so easily available in the post MENA (Middle East-North Africa) world, we asked ourselves the question: “What does a Digital Native look like?” When we started sifting through the literature (published and grey), practice-based discourse and policy, we started spotting certain patterns: Digital Natives were almost always young, white, (largely male) middle class, affluent, English speaking populations who could afford education and were located in developed Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contexts of ubiquitous connectivity. These users of technology were treated as the proto-type around which digital natives in the ‘rest of the world’ were imagined. The ‘rest of the world’ was not necessarily an exotic geography elsewhere, but often was a person whose relationships with the digital were impeded by class, education, gender, sexuality, literacy etc. Moreover, we found that the accounts of Digital Natives that were being discussed across the board were accounts of super stars. They either heralded the digital native as the young messiah who is drastically changing the world, overthrowing governments and building collaborative and participatory structures of openness. Or they feared the digital native as an unthinking, self contained, dysfunctional person who pirates and plagiarizes and needs to be rehabilitated into becoming a civic individual. Very little was said about Everyday Digital Natives – users who, through the presence of digital technologies, were changing their lives on an everyday basis. *Other Digital Natives* Based on this, we began the quest for the Other Digital Natives – people who did not necessarily fit the existing models of being digital but who often had to strive to ‘Become Digital’ and in the process produce possibilities and potentials for social change and political participation in their immediate environments. This was the first step to discover what being a digital native would be in emerging ICT contexts, where connectivity, access, usage, affordability, geo-political regulation, and questions of the biological and of living would give us new understandings of what a digital native is. This quest for the Other inspired us to work across Asia, Africa and Latin America, to talk to some of the most strident voices in the region who claimed to be digital natives, expressed discomfort with being called digital natives, refused to be called digital natives, and sought to provide critique of the existing expectations of digital nativity. The proceedings from these conversations in the Global South have been consolidated in the book *Digital AlterNatives With a Cause?&lt;http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook&gt; * available for free download. For this post, I want to look at some of the presumptions in existing understanding of Digital Natives and how we can contest them to build Digital AlterNative identities. *Presumption 1: Digital Natives are always young.* Even if we go by Mark Prensky’s problematic definition that everybody born after the 1980s is a digital native, we must realize that there is a large chunk of digital native users who are now in their thirties. They are in universities, work forces, governments and offices. They have not only grown older with technologies but they have also radically changed the technologies and tech platforms that they inhabit. It is time to let go of the Peter-Pan imagination of a Digital Native as always perpetually young. Moreover, we must realize that digital natives existed even before the name ‘Digital Native’ came into existence. There were people who built internets, who might not have been young but were still native to the digital environments that they were a part of. Instead of looking at a youth-centric, age-based exclusive definition of a digital native, it is more fruitful to say that people who natively interact with digital technologies – people who are able to inhabit the remix, reuse, share cultures that digitality produces, might be marked as digital AlterNatives. *Presumption 2: Digital Natives are born digital.* It does sound nice – the idea that there were people who were born as preconfigured cyborgs, interacting with interfaces from the minute they were born. And yet, we know that people are taught to interact with technologies. True, technologies often define our own conceptions of who we are and how we perceive the world around us, but there is still a learning curve that is endemic to human technology relationships. Because of the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of certain kinds of technology mediated interaction, it is sometimes difficult to look at our habits of technology as learned interactions. Recognizing that there is a thrust, an effort and an incentive produced for people to Become Digital, is also to recognize that there are different actors, players, promoters and teachers who help young people enter into relationships with technologies, which can often be greater than the first interactions. *Presumption 3: Digital Natives live digital lives.* This is a concern voiced by many people who talk about digital natives. They are posited as slacktivists – removed from their material realities and apathetic to the physical world around them. They are painted as dysfunctional screenagers who are unable to sustain the fabric of social interaction and community formation outside of social networking systems. They are discussed as a teenage mutant nightmare that unfolds almost entirely in the domains of the digital. But these kinds of imaginations forget that a digital native is not primarily a digital native, or at least, not exclusively digital. Being a digital native is one of many identities these users appropriate. The digital often serves as a lens that informs all their other socio-cultural and political interactions, but it is not an all-containing system. The bodies that click on ‘Like’ buttons on Facebook are also often the bodies that fill up the streets to fight for their rights. The division between Physical Reality and Virtual Reality needs to be dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital native practices. *Presumption 4: Connectivity is digitality.* This is often an easy conflation. It is presumed that once one has constant connectivity, one will automatically become a digital native. Especially in policy and development based approaches, connectivity and access have become the buzzwords by which the digital divide can be breached. However, we have now learned that this one-size, fits-all solution actually fits nobody. Being connected – by building infrastructure and affording gadgets – does not make somebody a digital native. The digital native identity needs to be more than mere access to the digital. It involves agency, choice, critical literacy and fluency with the digital media that we live with. So instead of thinking of anybody who is connected as a digital native, we are looking at people who are strategically able to harness the powers of the digital to produce a change in their immediate environments. These changes can range from making personal collections of media to mobilising large numbers of people for political protests. To be digital is to be intimately connected with the technologies so that they can augment and amplify the ways in which we respond to the world around us. I offer these as the building blocks of looking at the ‘Other’ of the Digital Natives as we have discursively produced them. From hereon, in my subsequent posts, I hope to drill deeper to locate nuances and differences, concepts and frameworks that we need to map in order to build a digital native model that is inclusive, differential and context based. </pre> Nishant Shah 2011-10-28T12:43:08 Search the mailing list at Gmane query http://search.gmane.org/?group=$group=gmane.culture.media.idc