Escaping the clutches of big tech - initiative from Norway

Photo by Nicolai Berntsen on Unsplash

At last there seems to be some serious resistance to the monopolistic dominance of big tech, the empires of the tech billionaires. The term enshittification, coined by Cory Doctorow a few years ago has now gained mainstream acceptance: read more about this in a post I wrote a couple of years ago, The "enshittification" of the internet - we know it's bad for us but we're hooked. Digital platforms and services that initially offered genuinely useful and attractive services for users have been slowly and deliberately degraded (for the users) by increasingly promoting adverts and paid content at the expense of the useful functions the user originally signed up for. Once users and advertisers are locked in then the companies add subscriptions for previously free functions, increase fees for advertisers and sell user data to the highest bidders. They hold users and advertisers hostage since the platforms are so big and powerful that you simply can't afford not to be there. If competition comes along big tech just buys them creating de facto monopolies. The unprecedented global power wielded by the Big Five (Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Apple) mean that users, companies and governments are all helplessly trapped in their walled gardens. You and all your content can be instantly removed from the platform without explanation or right to appeal. Indeed it's hard to appeal when you don't know what you have done wrong as I found out a few weeks ago. We are no longer customers and the concept of customer service beyond an exasperating chatbot is becoming extremely rare.

But maybe a backlash is coming. The Norwegian Consumer Council, together with other similar bodies in Europe, has released a report on the dangers of enshittification with concrete policy recommendations for the EU and European govenments, BREAKING FREE – Pathways to a fair technological future. They define the issue thus:

Enshittification is the result of a dysfunctional market, where companies have been able to get away with mistreating and exploiting consumers. Consumers are trapped in digital services, potential competitors are shut out, and policymakers and regulators are unable or reluctant to clamp down on anticompetitive, illegal and otherwise abusive behavior. In practice, a handful of tech companies have become so powerful that they do not have reason to fear any consequences. 

To make people realise how far this phenomenon has gone they have produced a satirical video showing how companies make their products increasingly "shitty".

We are becoming trapped in the walled gardens of big tech and it's very hard to escape. In recent years I have tried to at least reduce my dependence by using a European browser (Vivaldi), a non-tracking search engine (Duckduckgo), an alternative music streaming service (Tidal), a European storage, calender and mail service (Proton) and an open source office suite (LibreOffice). But here I am blogging on Google's Blogger platform, I still use Google Maps, YouTube, Instagram, Whatsapp etc. My banishment from Facebook should have been a relief but I really miss my communities and network there. As in the old Eagles song: You can check out any time you want but you can never leave. 

An alternative suite of social media services, the Fediverse, has existed for several years with built-in portability and interoperability. These include Mastodon as an alternative to X, PeerTube for YouTube, Pixelfed for sharing images and many more. They work but the problem is how to move all your own contacts into those services.

AI is of course a key element in this process. Big tech owns the tools and are integrating AI into almost everything, in many cases as a feature that you cannot remove and certainly can't ignore.

Generative AI is to a large degree driven either by the incumbent big tech companies or by companies with strong financial connections to these companies. It is also evident that big tech companies want to lock users into their generative AI services, to capture an emergent market and further entrench their dominance. 

Our search requests are now reliant on AI, often leading to misleading or biased results. Our "smart" devices from TVs and fridges to cars and homes are AI-enabled allowing big tech to harvest vast amounts of personal data on users' lives. All devices require frequent updates and standard functions can suddenly become premium features at an extra expense as shown amusingly in the final part of the video. Whether you like it or not you are forced to become reliant on AI and even more helpless to work things out for yourself. The days of fixing your car in the garage at weekends or mending electrical appliances in the home are well and truly dead. Everyday life without an app-ridden smartphone is virtually impossible.

The report is well researched and provides many examples and references. The final chapter proposes a number of recommendations that offer the hope of an alternative internet with interoperability between platforms and services and freedom for users to change platforms without losing their contacts or content. 

1. Rebalance power between service providers and consumers.
2. End dependence on big tech. To lay the groundwork for innovative products and services and pave the way for alternatives to big tech, competition in digital markets must be restored.
3. Double down on the enforcement of existing laws.

Innovation and competition have been effectively stifled as it is impossible to challenge big tech's dominance. The report recommends that governments invest in new solutions that are based on openness, interoperability and portability. There are indeed regulations and guidelines in place to combat monopolistic practice but they are poorly implemented and the tech giants can easily avoid taking any responsibility - they are too big to care basically. The report urges European authorities to seriously challenge big tech and implement regulations vigorously.

This is very admirable and I hope the report has some effect but in today's toxic political climate I am not confident that much will change. The EU is far from united on any issue and many governments are either governed by neoliberal right-wing parties and their allies or are too afraid to challenge those parties and their followers. Big tech funds and embraces the march of Trump-inspired authoritarianism and will fight to prevent anyone from threatening their dominance. The report urges the public sector to lead the change by moving away from dependence on big tech. Indeed, there are already examples of municipalities that have switched from Microsoft to open source software.  

For example, Denmark, Germany and Austria are trying to swap out their proprietary (Microsoft) software for the open-source alternative LibreOffice. The German state administration of Schleswig-Holstein estimate they will save 15 million euros by not purchasing Microsoft licenses annually, whereas the open-source alternative is a one-time investment of nine million euros.

Vast savings could indeed be made but logic is sadly lacking in modern politics. We seem unable to imagine an alternative to the existing order, even if we see how harmful it is for us. This applies not only to technology but also on a global scale to our lifestyles that are accelerating us towards catastrophic climate change. But all signs of resistance must be applauded and encouraged and I would love to see this report stimulating serious discussions in the media and in politics. I am not confident but try to hope for better times.

 

 

Is digital life without the big five possible?

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Over the last year I have made a few attempts to limit my exposure to some of the tech giants services and make it harder for them to track everything I do. I have stopped using Chrome as a browser, stopped searching with Google, deleted Google maps from my mobile, reviewed all the privacy settings in my mobile and deleted a lot of apps. However this all seems rather futile after reading and watching a fascinating series of reports by Kashmir Hill, Goodbye big five. She decided to try to live without the big five tech giants one week at a time: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. My attempts are simply superficial because between them these five companies control virtually everything on the internet. Services that we use every day and never even associate with the big five use their cloud hosting services, map functions and other tracking and ad-based services.

Hill took on one giant at a time and with the help of an expert colleague blocked all traffic from known IP addresses connected to Amazon, Google etc. Amazon alone controls over 23 million addresses which means that living without them is extremely difficult. So just stopping using the companies main site is not going to get them out of your life. Virtually everything we do online is dependent on five gigantic companies.

It’s not just logging off of Facebook; it’s logging off the countless websites that use Facebook to log in. It’s not just using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search; it’s abandoning my email, switching browsers, giving up a smartphone, and living life without mapping apps. It’s not just refusing to buy toilet paper on Amazon.com; it’s being blocked from reading giant swaths of the internet that are hosted on Amazon servers, giving up websites and apps that I didn’t previously know were connected to the biggest internet giant of them all.

The most interesting week of her experiment was when she blocked all five and tried to live with a non-connected digital camera, a no-frills Nokia mobile and a PC running open source OS Linux (watch the video about this week below). Suddenly she had almost nothing to listen to or watch since services like Spotify and Netflix are dependent on the big five. All streaming services were off limits as were most communication channels. Sending messages and files became extremely difficult because even if there are open alternatives they tend to be harder to use, less attractive in design and the people you need to communicate with are not on them. Hill calls the final stage of her detox as digital veganism and in the film below she interviews a tech expert who lives that way.

Basically we have allowed these companies to expand without any regulation and now when they control most of the internet it seems a bit late to try to fix things. Attempts are being made, most notably in the EU with, among other things, the recent GDPR legislation but there are few signs that the present US administration is considering any moves. The moral of the story from Kashmir Hill's experience is that we need to at least to become more aware of how dependent we are on the big five and try to limit that exposure to some extent. A certain amount of digital detox is recommended for all but at the moment it seems virtually impossible to escape completely.

Some final words from Hill's article series:

I went through the digital equivalent of a juice cleanse. I hope I’m better than most dieters at staying healthy afterward, but I don’t want to be a digital vegan. I want to embrace a lifestyle of “slow Internet,” to be more discriminating about the technology I let into my life and think about the motives of the companies behind it. The tech giants are reshaping the world in good and bad ways; we can take the good and reject the bad.

Goodbye Google+

"End of the road" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by kewing

Google are pulling the plug on their social network Google+ with as little ceremony as possible. It's not even clear exactly when the lights will be switched off but it will probably be in April. It is no big surprise to many users since the service has been largely left to wither over the last few years with few signs of any loving care from its owners. It now follows a line of Google services that have been quietly laid to rest over the years when they failed to gain the impact that their often over-hyped launches promised. Remember Google Wave for example? It was the platform that would revolutionise online communication and was introduced cleverly by invitation only in 2009. Invitations to try Google Wave became status symbols and expectations were sky-high. However the platform didn't meet these expectations and was quietly phased out a mere two years later.

There's a good eulogy to Google+ by Gideon Rosenblatt, Can You Fall in Love with a Social Network?, where he tracks the rise and fall of the platform and explains why he embraced it so enthusiastically, as did many others including myself. Although it is often presented as Google's challenge to Facebook, Google+ offered a different approach built on forming interest groups based on circles of friends and colleagues. I've been using it for several years as a platform for our online course Open Networked Learning, both as a community for the whole course and for small communities for each of the study groups in the course. It has worked very well and has an attractive layout that is easy to work with. A few years ago Google+ was fully integrated with Google Hangouts, the web-conferencing tool, and this made group work extremely easy, allowing all participants to arrange and run events in the form of a Hangout. Sadly Hangouts was suddenly disconnected from Google+ a few years ago and we have had to find other conferencing tools instead. Hangouts still lives on as a service, but it is very much under the radar and I hardly know anyone who uses it any more. Another case of a good service dying through neglect.

The main lesson here is that platforms and tools come and go. That means you will always need a plan B and somewhere safe to store the data you value.

The main lesson of Google+ is that it’s time to stop trusting our creations and our relationships to companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, in the hopes that they will do the right thing with them. They will do the right thing as long as it maps to their primary purpose, which is maximizing returns for their shareholders. When that stops being true, well, then, that assumption of trust disappears. Google+ demonstrates this problem more vividly than any product or service shutdown that I can remember.

I will miss Google+ but not in the form it has taken in recent years, where it became less useful with every so-called update. It lost its spark a few years ago and instead of being a place for innovative new functions and dynamic communities it became a slowly stagnating backwater. Our online course is now using BuddyPress, a WordPress plug-in, to create communities and this looks like a more reliable solution that we have greater control over and can run on our own server.

If you want to see how you can save at least some of your content on Google+, I can recommend a post by Sue Beckingham, Google+ is now closing in April 2019 – How to download what you have curated.

Platform diversity in online learning

"Andrew and Jerome juggle" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by salomon888

How many different platforms should you offer in an online course? Should everything be included under one roof in a learning management system (LMS) or can we offer a number of social media where discussions take place, leaving it up to the participants to decide which spaces in which they wish to be active? Traditional e-learning favours the one-stop shop of the LMS (Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas etc) where one log-in gives you access to everything you need to complete the course. However we find that many participants prefer to discuss the course, for example in their own Facebook groups, rather than using the LMS discussion forum and to cater for this tendency many course providers offer a choice of arenas for interaction and collaboration. Most LMS now offer integration with social media to allow for platform diversity. However when courses offer a diversity of arenas they run the risk of confusing participants who find it hard to move between the LMS, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others and it becomes impossible to get a clear view of the course as a whole. The one-stop-shop solution runs the risk of being too controlled and resstrictive (and often less open) whereas the eco-system alternative risks confusion and lack of overview.

This problem is highlighted in an article in eCampus News, Can social media enhance the MOOC experience?  which describes a study on the Carpe Diem MOOC that was run in 2014 by Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. The MOOC used Blackboard's CourseSites as platform and blended this with discussion and support via Facebook and Twitter. Participants could get support and engage in discussions on social media as an alternative or complement to the central platform. The interaction between participants on this course is analysed in an article by Gilly Salmon, Bella Ross, Ekaterina Pechenkina and Anne-Marie Chase, The space for social media in structured online learning. Research in Learning Technology. The findings are not surprising but raise important issues for all involved in online course design. You would expect that many of those following a MOOC like this one would be comfortable negotiating multiple platforms but the study reveals that over 40% of survey respondents did not use Facebook or Twitter at all and focused solely on the activities in the LMS. As one respondent put it:

I did not use Twitter or Facebook. Those are social sites. For professional work, I prefer it to be on a professional platform.

Many are reluctant to mix private and professional roles in Facebook and many see Twitter simply as a medium for gossip, celebrities and publicity rather than as a professional networking tool. The benefits of using social media for professional development are not widely accepted and many learners are wary of them.

I am involved in running an online course called Open Networked Learning together with colleagues from 4 other universities. The course is offered as professional development for teachers in each of the participating universities but is also open to learners from other institutions. As a result an internal professional development course becomes an open international course with a wonderful multi-cultural mix. To avoid discussions of which university's LMS we should use we choose Google+ as our platform complemented by a WordPress site with all course information and resources. In addition we use Twitter (#ONL161) for chat sessions, Diigo to gather useful bookmarks and each participants reflects on their learning on their own blogs. One of the main ideas behind the course is using multiple platforms and tools and investigating the potential of these to enhance learning but the downside is that many participants find this diversity confusing and this leads to some dropping out. We try to compensate by offering lots of support from a network of facilitators and co-facilitators but it is still a major issue that juggling between platforms makes it hard to see the bigger picture.

I suspect most of us really prefer to have everything under one roof since the course is one of many activities going on in our lives. We have some participants who succeed in juggling with all the platforms but the majority focus on maybe a couple, primarily the study group's own community in Google+ and then less attention to the other spaces. The delicate balance is to promote diversity whilst avoiding overload, offering a choice without dictating and providing timely support to those who feel insecure.

The main conclusion of Salmon et al is to see value in including social media as alternative arenas but make it clear that learners have a choice whether to use them or not.

When designing for MOOCs or online learning, participants’ preferences for social media use should be taken into account ... One solution is to offer a few different platforms, in addition to the LMS, but not require that learners use them if they feel uncomfortable. Alternatively, ask learners to create professional identities on social media for all formal learning and professional development uses.

Reference:

SALMON, Gilly et al. The space for social media in structured online learning. Research in Learning Technology, [S.l.], v. 23, dec. 2015. ISSN 2156-7077. Available at: http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/28507. Date accessed: 06 Mar. 2016. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v23.28507.

Don't fence me in

 by Fovea Centralis

I have quite a number of friends on Facebook but only a few of them ever show up in my news feed. I used to think that maybe they weren't so active but now I suspect that they are simply filtered out. A video (see below) by Derek Muller of Veritasium, an educational science channel on YouTube, featured in an article on the Huffington Post, Nobody 'Likes' Your Status Updates Any More? Blame Facebook, explains how Facebook is increasingly filtering what we see. Muller explains how we only see a fraction of what our friends post and that some friends never show up at all. Basically each one of us is an advertiser on Facebook and we are marketing ourselves. As a result we might be interested in paying for increased exposure. You can already pay to boost the impact of particular posts and although this applies mostly to companies and organisations a likely development, according to Muller, is that we too may have to pay extra to make sure our updates reach most of our friends out there. As Facebook, like all social media, tries to find new ways of monetizing their service it's not surprising that you may have to pay for maximum impact, even if Muller is highly critical of this tactic in the film. So we live in a kind of bubble in Facebook with a select band of faithful friends selected not so much by us but by an algorithm at Facebook. Read a reaction to Muller's film in Business Insider: Blogger Nails A Major Problem With Facebook's Newsfeed.

There has been similar criticism of Google cocooning us in a comfort bubble due to personalised search results. As Google learns your preferences it searches for sites that you have previously used and as time goes on you will get results that are customised to your preferences. That explains why my own blog posts always feature prominently when I search for something via Google (I bet they don't show up in your searches!). This creates a false bubble that could lead me to believe that my opinions are shared by the world and means that I am seldom exposed to ideas that are radically different from mine.

Personalisation sounds great but when it leads to a bubble culture it becomes rather dangerous. We develop tools that help us distill the vast reserves of raw data there will be increasingly sophisticated levels of personalisation. Learning analytics appears in most predictions of the next big thing in education and undoubtedly our devices will be able to lead us to learning resources that match our preferences and interests. The problem with all this is that it lacks serendipity and often real learning occurs when you meet the unexpected and have to deal with answers that question your thinking.

I don't want to be herded into personalised bubbles, no matter how convenient and comfy they may be. I want to have the option to switch off the bubble and see all my Facebook friends' updates now and again (well, minus the Farmville updates!). Let me choose if I want appropriate learning resources chosen for me or whether I want to take pot luck out there in the wild west of the web.

Will my plea be heard? No chance, I fear, but at least I've asked.

Learning to deal with free - don't put all your eggs in the same basket

 by paulmorriss

We often hear that if you don't pay for something then you are the product, especially in connection with social media and cloud computing. Companies offer attractive services for free in return for information about ourselves that can then be used for targeted advertising or to tempt us into buying a more advanced version of the service (so called freemium). However there's nothing new with this concept. We've had many years of commercial radio and TV who offer their services "free" and the cost is being subjected to sometimes rather intense advertising. Many magazines which we pay good money for are over 50% pure advertising and many of the articles are slightly more discrete lifestyle advertising. Most of us have loyalty cards that give us discount at the cost of giving the company information about every purchase we make. Read more on this in an article from 2012, Stop Saying 'If You're Not Paying, You're The Product'.

The concept of free raises a lot of integrity issues, especially when cloud services are used in an educational context. An article in Inside Higher Ed, Teaching Ethically with the Free Web, raises many relevant questions about using services like Google Apps, Facebook, Dropbox, WordPress and iCloud in schools and colleges. Many of these are excellent for collaborative writing, discussion, project work and reflection and are more user-friendly and attractive than more closed environments such as learning management systems. However they all have different policies for privacy and ownership of content and each has to be examined and discussed. Another issue is that some are not compatible with tools that improve accessibility for those with visual impairments.

However the article advises teachers to become more aware of the implications of using open services and discussing them with their students. For example the documents you store on a cloud service are probably your own intellectual property but the information you put in your profile is probably not. Becoming aware of the conditions is the first step to taking control of your digital footprint and this is an essential classroom discussion that needs to be repeated and refined over the years. The article offers the following practical advice to teachers working with cloud services and social media.

• Inform ourselves about the technologies we are using with students and our responsibilities as their teachers—both legally according to FERPA and ethically according to our beliefs and our students’ best interests. To that end, I’ve provided links to the policy and privacy statements of all of the apps and technologies mentioned in this post in the fact box above.
• Engage our students in conversations about whatever apps or technologies we will be using in our courses, including conversations about what will be done with their personal information or content.
• Offer options whenever possible as alternatives to particular web services. This gets tricky when using reminder or organizational applications, but you can always use multiple reminder services (Twitter and Remind101, for example) to keep students up-to-date on changes to the syllabus, or give groups options for online collaboration when they are completing collaborative projects.

The advantages of using free social media and cloud-based services are too many to simply ignore but we need to be aware of the conditions and actively discuss the issues when using them in teaching. And don't put all the eggs in the same basket.

The silent majority - why are MOOC forums counterproductive?

 by James Cridland

The discussion forum is a central feature of all learning management systems and the focus for most online courses. Often it's the only interactive feature in the course but it's notoriously difficult to generate real discussion there. Too few participants and it will probably never take off. Too many and it becomes chaotic. In many cases students only post in the forum because there are credits at stake and very often the real discussion takes place elsewhere; on Facebook or Google Hangouts for example.

So if the forums of regular online courses are difficult to run effectively they will prove almost impossible in a MOOC with potentially tens of thousands of participants. Nonetheless most MOOCs persist with them as a token attempt at interaction or because the forum is somehow a default setting in online learning. Generally MOOC forums become overwhelming and chaotic with hundreds of unrelated threads and the vast majority of participants take one look and never return. An article in Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, reinforces this impression that forums are actually counter-productive:

"Ironically, the biggest obstacle preventing MOOC students from forming relationships is the feature most relied on to encourage them."

A dynamic forum is like gathering people in a room and asking them to discuss. A class of say 30 will divide into smaller groups and it is easy to move over to a new group when you want to. There's a clear structure to the interactions and it's easy to get an overview. However if you add a few thousand strangers into the mix it gets completely chaotic and effective communication is likely to break down. Some forums are dominated by so-called super posters, students who can be responsible for up to 25% of a forums total posts (see report on a recent Stanford University survey in eCampus News Sept 2013 p6). Their enthusiasm might inspire a few but will intimidate less confident participants. The same survey shows that only one in ten students posted more than once in MOOC forums and the vast majority wrote absolutely nothing. A major factor to the inactivity is that most people are simply not used to online discussion and see learning as an information transfer from teacher to student. Media literacy is a clear issue here.

Another problem I have noticed in MOOC forums is the presence of expert participants. Many teachers and researchers are taking MOOCs out of curiosity and as a way to expand their professional networks. Very valid reasons and I am guilty as charged. However the danger of having over-qualified participants is that their contributions to the discussions can set an impossibly high standard that can intimidate the new learners. There are also MOOCs which are also regular for-credit courses mixing full-time campus students with thousands of MOOCers. The regular students will inevitably set the tone of the discussion. Maybe these two groups should somehow be kept apart since they have such widely different motives for participating. They can inspire and motivate each other but I suspect they can also intimidate, irritate and confuse. I'd be very interested in reading any research on this issue.

So if a massive anarchic forum is not the way to encourage meaningful discussion in a MOOC, what is? The Campus Technology article lists a number of examples. One way is to encourage small-scale groups using whatever networking tool is most appropriate for the participants, such as a Facebook group. Basically break up the massive crowd into friendly neighbourhoods. Another way is to create focused interactions such as a question and answer session with a tutor where the structure is clear and within a given time frame.

"So instead of trying to force a free-flowing conversation in the live session, Greene and her colleagues took advantage of students' eagerness to pose questions in the forums. "The second week, we ran a question-and-answer session with topics we had prepared," she explains, "formed by what was coming up on the [forum] thread." The blend helped students feel like participants in the live session without being pressured to interact with the experts on the spot."

Interestingly many MOOCs are using synchronous online meetings as an effective discussion area where a teacher meets with a limited number of students to deal with questions using for example Google Hangouts. These are also situations that most participants will feel comfortable with reflecting traditional classroom practice that all are familiar with.

There is of course no patented answer to this problem but maybe we should think at least twice before launching a MOOC with a common discussion forum in the middle. Maybe that's the one element we should drop.

Telephones and e-mail - is the end at hand?

 Some rights reserved by kristiewells

The two most important means of communication for those of us over 30 are showing signs of serious fatigue. Most of us still rely on phone calls and e-mail for the vast majority of our business and personal communication but two new articles in the New York Times indicate that this domination is under threat.

Let's take e-mail first. According to an article by Nick Bilton called Disruptions: Life’s Too Short for So Much E-Mail, 107 trillion e-mails were sent last year from 3.1 billion active accounts. This boils down to the average business user getting an average of 105 e-mails every day. Most of this deluge is unnecessary and could be avoided if people learned a few simple rules like thinking several times before hitting the "reply all" button and not sending so many copies to people who probably don't need to know at all. However the constant flow is hard to regulate since even if you diligently reply quickly to every mail that action simply prompts just as many answers.

"Last year, I decided to try to reach In-box Zero, the Zen-like state of a consistently empty in-box. I spent countless hours one evening replying to neglected messages. I woke up the next morning to find that most of my replies had received replies, and so, once again, my in-box was brimming. It all felt like one big practical joke."

The fact that the vast majority of e-mail in the world is spam does not make the situation easier. Maybe e-mail is simply nearing the end of the line and is suffocating under its own weight. Many under the age of 25 use e-mail very sparingly, preferring to communicate by social media where you have greater control over who can reach you and where communication is usually short and to the point. Most over 25 belong to the e-mail generation and are trapped in it for the time being but we can see new communication models forming.

Good old telephony does seems to be on the retreat already. Again the younger generation clearly prefer texting to phoning and now companies are increasingly abandoning the phone for online communication with customers. Amy O'Leary writes in another NYT article, Tech Companies Leave Phone Calls Behind, about how many net-based companies are simply not on the phone at all.

"Voice calls have been falling out of fashion with teenagers and people in their 20s for some time (text only, please). But what is a matter of preference for the young is becoming a matter of policy for technology companies; phones cost money, phones do not scale."

Global companies like Google or Facebook would need large armies of call-center operators to even try to answer customer questions by telephone and it's easy to understand why they simply don't even try. It simply takes too long to talk to customers and costs too much. Many companies don't even advertise a single phone number and often make their e-mail address very difficult to find. In a global market there simply is no time to deal with the millions of phone enquiries that would stream in. Instead of trying to keep up with the deluge the big companies are switching off and referring customers to self-help sites and forums.

However as the giants become harder to talk to maybe smaller companies can use the old technology to their advantage by providing the exclusive service of voice communication. 

YouTube copyright school

This short video is Google's attempt to inform in a clear and light-hearted way about copyright issues on YouTube. The message is clear and YouTube have some effective mechanisms in place for alerting copyright infringement. However much more than this film is required to encourage users to follow the rules.

Since YouTube makes it so easy to copy and embed videos it's no surprise that everyone does it. If a film is copyright then the owner should be able to disable the embed button, but as long as it is in place then people will embed! I'd like to see YouTube fully adopting Creative Commons, making it simple to label a video with the relevant CC license and having the attribution built into the embed code. If I embed a film here the full attribution should automatically come with it. As it is now I enmbed and hope for the best.

A search function in YouTube for CC material, as already exists on Flickr, would help those of us who do want to abide by the rules. The problem with copyright and Creative Commons is that it is so complicated to follow the rules and as a result few people do so. CC has to be fully embedded in all content and it should be easy to label works with the right license as well as simple to search for free-to-use content. If not then don't be surprised that no-one bothers.

Thanks to The Clever Sheep for alerting me to this. See his post, Copyright school.

In the bubble

We live in the age of personalization. Products and services can be tailor-made to our individual requirements and we can choose from a bewildering number of alternatives, all to make us feel unique and special. On the net we have Google,  Facebook and all the others checking our on-line behaviour, remembering our preferences and then customising and adapting the information we receive according to our preferences. Several online newspapers, like the New York Times, now feature news items that your Facebook and Twitter friends have recommended so that you get the news you are interested in.

  by  zzub nik 

But there's a darker side to all this. At this week's TED2011 conference Eli Pariser spoke on the theme of his forthcoming book, The filter bubble; that personalisation is actually making us more uninformed. It sounds so positive that filters on the net help us to find the information we really want and that our friends' recommendations influence our search results. However the tendency that Pariser sees is that we end up only seeing information that confirms our present views, what he calls our "filter bubble". Information that conflicts with the preferences of my friends and myself are simply filtered out of the search without our being aware of the process. This unconscious filtering is worrying.

If all my friends share my political views I risk only seeing search results that we all approve of. Conflicting views are quietly discarded and we can be lulled into thinking that our views are correct. We can easily filter our news preferences on the net so we need never be disturbed by uncomfortable information. We risk being trapped in our own information bubbles.

Shouldn't we be able to switch off this well-meaning filter or at least be more aware that it is there? Is the wisdom of the crowd so wise if the crowd all agree with each other?

Read more in a Mashable article Is the personalization of the web making us dumber?

Pictures at an exhibition

Google are just about everywhere these days. First by giving us satellite views of the world via Google Earth, then by expanding that to Google Maps Street View where many of us can see the street we live on and then the latest Google Body Browser that allows us to go all the way into the human body. Now they've sent their cameras to 17 of the top art galleries of the world in the application Art Project. Here you can choose your gallery to visit and go through all the exhibition halls, stopping to admire the paintings that catch your attention. It uses the same technology as Street View and you just use your mouse to guide the camera around the gallery.

Here's the introduction film that can be found on Art Project YouTube Channel.



You can examine particular paintings in high resolution and even assemble your own virtual collection of favourites with the option of adding your own notes toeach one.

Some paintings are blurred and this is due to copyright restrictions on that particular work. Very frustrating if it happens to be the painting you are most interested in. If you hang a painting in a public gallery surely you want the work to be seen by the public? Will it really affect the galery's future income if people can also see the painting on the net? The high resolution images presented on the site are all covered by copyright anyway. I assume negotiations are in progress to eventually enable us to see even the blurred paintings.

In the meantime, enjoy your visit.

Forget me not

Soon after writing my previous post on being able to filter what you write on social networks I read an interesting article in the New York Times, The Web Means the End of Forgetting. This discusses the digital trails we leave and the fact that whatever we write may come back to haunt us. Since everything is searchable whatever you put on to the net may be taken down and used in evidence against you. Online reputation is a fragile comodity and many have discovred the drawbacks of not thinking too hard before posting.

  by  snopek 

Identity boundaries are getting increasingly blurred as we reveal more of our work life to friends and relatives and more of our provate life to colleagues at work. Even if we do manage to filter our posts as I suggested earlier once you tell a few people something interesting you can assume they will pass it on. It's the first law of gossip and is even more true on the net.

There's even a service called Reputation Defender that promises to enhance your digital reputation by making sure that all the positive information gets top scores in a Google search and although the embarrassing stuff cannot be deleted they make sure it ends up at the far end of a search list. A sort of personal spin doctor. It's no longer only celebrities who need help with their media profiles.

One tempting solution mentioned in the article is that of being able to label content with a digital sell-by date after which the content will self-destruct, in true Mission Impossible style. I like that idea on social networks where you must choose how long you want a photo or text to be accessible. It would certainly free up storage space otherwise clogged up with digital junk. The problem is whether we can trust such a system. When we delete something on our computers we naively assume that they are gone forever but if a skilled IT technician gets hold of your hard drive it's amazing what they can dig up.

Dirt diggers will always find something in your past no matter how careful you are. We may have to get used to a web that never forgets and become more forgiving and tolerant of previous misdemeanours.

"Our character, ultimately, can’t be judged by strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever." 
New York Times, The Web Means the End of Forgetting

What's a zettabyte?

There's a certain fascination in extremely large numbers. Children often invent their own vocabulary for numbers higher than a billion; I remember using zillion for example. The world of computing is teaching us to use all sorts of new prefixes to describe the vast amount of information in the world today. I remember when a megabyte of information was considered a lot but now we talk more in terms of gigabytes and terabytes.

So I enjoyed reading an article in the Guardian, Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes, stating that the total amount of digital information in the world today is fast approaching the zettabyte level and is set to reach 1.2 ZB by the end of the year. In case you wondered, a zettabyte is a million million gigabytes or the equivalent of 75 billion iPads. Once you get up to these levels you lose track of how many zeroes there are. If you enjoy mind-numbing number crunching have a look at a couple of entries in Wikipedia: the biggest number of all, the Googolplex and the names of large numbers

The trouble is that this vast amount of information is largely unstructured and impossible to retrieve despite the growth of Google. Our texts, photos, films and music are stored on servers, own computers, CDs, DVDs and memory sticks and most of us hardly even bother to label them. Just imagine a famous tourist attraction like the Eiffel Tower. How many photos of it are taken per day every day, every year? Just watch the camera flashes in the crowd at say the opening ceremony of the Olympic games and imagine that each member of the 80,000 crowd took at least 100 photos per person. Where are we going to store all this in the future and more importantly should we even try to store it all? Who decides what to save? There must be plenty scope for some serious spring cleaning on the web. How many identical photos of the Eiffel Tower does the world need?

Photo: by Anne Helmond on Flickr, CC-BY-NC-ND

Not waving but drowning

I finally got a Google Wave invitation and logged in a couple of weeks ago. That's it - so far. It's still in quarantine until I have time to work out what to do with it. I'm not sure why I'm keeping it at arm's length since it must be one of the most awaited (and hyped) applications of all time and I've read plenty of rave reviews from people I trust. I think I got a bit turned off by the whole business of sending out a limited number of invitations (according to Google anyway) and letting the world fight over them. Talk about creating demand. Very clever marketing of course.

Already I have a few contacts in my Wave box and I clicked on one of the conversations. It was a long column of messages and embedded dokuments resembling a long chat session. I immediately felt stressed. Google claim that this will sweep away e-mail and I welcome that. The trouble is that right now I have so many communication channels that I can't find room for yet another, especially one with only a select band of users. When Wave is ready to incorporate my e-mail as well as contacts in Facebook, Skype, Twitter etc then I'll be really interested but I really don't want yet another communication app open on my screen.

Wave is not the first app I've kept in quarantine a while. I signed up for Twitter months before I even sent my first tweet. I signed up and then watched it sit there for a while as I tried to think of something useful I could do with it. Now it's one of my favourite tools and a great source of information. Maybe I need time to adjust and Wave will be a hit when I finally decide to examine it.

If you're already using Wave you will realize that I still haven't learned the basics yet but I suppose I am experiencing the same feelings many teachers and colleagues get when they hear me waxing lyrically about the wonders of Web 2.0 etc. Interested yet hesitant to open Pandora's box and let all the demons out. Good to get a reality check basically.

Wikipedia as it happens

Ever wondered how often Wikipedia is updated? You're not the first because there's now a site that shows you updates as they happen and where in the world the update has been made.
Wikipediavision is the brainchild of a guy called László Kozma from the Helsinki University of Technology. It is a mashup with a world map (Google maps) and a feed from Wikipedia and you can simply sit and watch the world add to Wikipedia. When a new entry appears you just click on it and you see it on Wikipedia. Something for those long winter evenings maybe.

Is the net changing the way we read?

There has been considerable debate around an article by Nicholas Carr called "Is Google making us stupid?" He admits to finding it increasingly difficult to engage in deep reading and blames it on our restless habits on the net (symbolised by Google); "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

We are becoming increasingly impatient as the information overload increases. Quick news summaries, newsletters, highlights packages and Twitter feeds help us keep up with events without spending too much time on it all. Blog posts of over 5 paragraphs are seldom read. Carr fears we're losing the ability to contemplate and reflect since we never switch off the background noise for long enough to hear the silence again.

Trent Baston's response in Campus Technology sees the trend in a more positive light. Knowledge today is constantly being adapted and enriched in a constant dialogue. Learning is no longer a solitary activity reading the thoughts of one author but is revised almost daily in a rich on-line discussion. In a way, Baston argues, our net habits are more in line with oral tradition; listening to different arguments and replying spontaneously. Rather than making us stupid, the net is helping us discover new ways to collaborate and learn.

Google everywhere

I've just borrowed a new book from the library called Googlepedia. It describes how all the various Google apps work and has lots of useful tips. It has also some good background to why Google has succeeded. The author, Michael Miller, admits that writing a book about anything on the net is like shooting at a moving target and a book about Google would seem to be a very swift target to aim at. To keep things up to date he also runs a blog on the subject.

The book is well worth looking at as long as you realize that it will be at least partly out of date by the time you finish it (weighing in at over 700 pages), thus making it a good library loan but a bad idea to buy someone as a birthday present. An admirable project though I'm sure the legendary figure of Sisyphus would have sympathised with the author.

Books on IT tend to be weighty objects and have a very short shelf life. We all have copies of mega-sized guides to, say, Windows 95 or Java programming for dummies lurking somewhere on the shelves helping to prop up other less bulky publications. Despite all the on-line guides and FAQs we still seem to need the reassuring hard copy. However, it is rather a lot of paper for something so ephemeral.