Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

  • Copywriting
    • Content Marketing
    • SEO
  • About
  • Contact

Archives for June 2015

Online Privacy vs Mass Disinterest

June 16, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

Franklin Delano Roosevelt - nostri-imago (Cliff) on Flickr | Online Privacy vs Mass Disinterest

You might have heard the myth that, during FDR’s presidency, the media had a sort of gentleman’s agreement with the office of the president not to detail Roosevelt’s condition – particularly with regard to his wheelchair, and the effects of Polio he suffered. It turns out that’s mostly a myth – that even in 1932, the New York Times Magazine described then-Governor Roosevelt’s “wheel[ing] around in his chair.”

Did this get suppressed, or did we simply forget about it in favor of the more convenient narrative? Convenience in this case being the uplifting idea that the media of the day were somehow more respectful, because they didn’t pry into America’s leader’s personal life – that they knew his public image was important enough to obviate focusing on his person itself.

Fast-forward to 1975, when an attempt was made on then-President Ford’s life, and a former marine foiled the attempt. The marine, Oliver Sipple, made an agreement with the media not to focus on his sexuality… But Harvey Milk, of all people, decided it was better that the world know that gay people could be heroes too. Milk didn’t consider the outcome of his outing Sipple – that the marine would lose his entire life, effectively. Milk focused, like many people in that kind of situation, on the idea of the greater good that would be served through the story. Here, the media isn’t the bad guy, a gay rights activist is… Or is he?

Fast-forward again, to 2012, when Gawker journalist Adrian Chen publicly outed a Reddit troll and cost the man his job, and the health insurance that kept his disabled wife cared for. All because Chen felt like it was a good story. The troll, Brutsch, is not the good guy. But neither is Chen, who destroyed someone’s life for a story on a news website by violating their online privacy and tracking them down. Chen’s reasoning? From the Wired article describing both of the above stories as parallels;

In identifying Butsch and shining a spotlight on his insidious practices, Chen’s article condemns Butsch’s choice of using the mask of pseudonymity to hide behind actions that have societal consequences. Public shaming is one way in which social norms are regulated. Another is censorship, as evidenced by the Reddit community’s response to Gawker.

Privacy is a troubling concept; the idea that anything about you, things you wish to keep personal and secure, could be revealed to the wrong audience at any time keeps a lot of us up at night. And for good reason! No one wants to be strung up by the court of public opinion, for any reason, ever. Even people who choose lives of public visibility (actors, media personalities, etc) who don’t need to be outed in detail to give context for their bad acting shrink from the idea that something they’ve done, or an offhand comment they’ve made, could run afoul of The Public’s ideals.

The “Out By Proxy” Issue is Not New.

Much of the discussion around online privacy frames this outing of people – the publication and focusing on their private information – as if it were a result of new tools, recently available to the web. That’s simply not the case – as Milk/Sipple proved 40 years ago. Out-by-proxy was an issue even when I first started in online communities 20 years ago.

In the mid- to late-90s, I spent a lot of time in chat rooms. Text systems built on Perl scripts, designed to log and display serialized entries from those signed on, at a near-realtime pace. We used it for roleplay – collaborative fiction writing – and I was part of a community that had about five years’ history on this chat alone, by the time everyone grew out of it. In the 90s, 5 years was an eternity in web time.

No one played under their own real name. Handles were par for the course. Even if you got to know someone fairly well and met them “in real life” – which I did, one of them was my first real relationship, and people looked at me like I was asking to be murdered by internet weirdos… There was still the chance that everyone else you were writing with wasn’t what they said they were.

During my time on these chats, I can easily recall at least two instances of people being “found out” by a number of means, and having their real details publicized within our small circle. Names, addresses, photos, schools they attended, whether they had been married or had kids – the names of their pets.

Keep in mind, this was the late 90s – nearly twenty years ago – before Google was properly a thing, much less reverse image search. In both instances, the person who’d been found out disappeared – one without a trace, and the other simply stopped playing, but kept in touch with those people who didn’t care about the revelation through non-chat means.

This process of discovering, revealing, and using the data around an otherwise anonymous person on the web is known as doxxing – and it’s becoming rather common. In an Economist article on doxxing, comments section in particular reveal attitudes on the effects of doxxing. How this intentional destruction of online privacy works, and the complete lack of accountability related to it are the subject of deep discussion in a lot of places.

Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that The Online Privacy Lie is Unravelling – and made a case for why that’s important… But they’re a bit late to the party, clearly. When Milk doxxed Sipple forty years ago the idea of privacy as we think of it was already under fire – and on the web, it never existed at all. Any belief otherwise is delusion. At that time, being outed as gay was damning on its face. Now, however, being outed can include much more than your sexuality – any behaviour you exhibit, anything you allow to be recorded and documented – especially if it goes into the web – becomes a condition you can be outed for.

Spent too much time drinking in your teens? It’s probably documented. Kicked a dog by accident? Might be a viral video without context before you know it. Participating in a chat, or on twitter, behind a mask of anonymity? Be ready to be doxxed, apparently, because that’s the big red button hanging over us all.

We do have some control over our own data, if we look for it.

If you’ve put that information into an electronic form, it might be less of a breach of privacy and more of an intentional disclosure. It has its upsides, however – one of the reasons I’ve written for the last six years on a domain carrying my name was a concern over identity fraud. I don’t get enough visibility to qualify a public figure, which is fine, but there’s definitely value in owning your namespace and controlling the context around it.

We rely on mass disinterest for protection, but that’s not privacy.

The reason TechCrunch’s article rings false, at least for me, is that it’s not Google or Microsoft who’s doxxing people. Most of the privacy debate is now focused on marketers, businesses, advertisers and so on. Almost none of it comes back to what more often than not puts people in danger; the laser focus of targeted and specific public attention.

When you see a video of someone committing animal cruelty, and hear about how the person was found in record time by a crack team of investigators… It’s other stakeholders, independent actors and occasionally smaller groups who create this publicity for that bad actor. It’s this process that brings context and focus onto an individual, in a way no advertising targeting or aggregate data point ever could.

TC’s right, though, in that “Start-ups should absolutely see the debunking of the myth that consumers are happy to trade privacy for free services as a fresh opportunity for disruption.” But the answer is not necessarily that transparency related to data and algorithms is a must. Education about what online privacy is, and what it isn’t, will become very important in the near future. Their last note, “Services that stand upon a future proofed foundation where operational transparency inculcates user trust — setting these businesses up for bona fide data exchanges, rather than shadowy tradeoffs” is particularly apt. However, that should have been a general commentary about the need for education, not an admonishment of businesses doing business things.

Our reliance is on being part of the crowd. There’s definitely safety for your person as part of an aggregate – without identifying data and backing context, the most you can do with a data point is throw off the averages a bit. And even then, there are very likely to be bigger outliers in some other region that make your data look uninteresting. This means that until there’s a very particular reason for people to care about who you are, that will offer them some gain, there’s no value in the effort it takes to back you out from the crowd and doxx you.

The safety of the herd. It’s effective for most, but not very attractive because we know precisely what it takes for this system to fail us individually.

We don’t have a good answer for online privacy yet, no matter what anyone says.

Even the best software – and hardware barriers can’t prevent breaches in data security. We see this all the time with stories about government actors attempting to breach national firewalls, proving that security on its own is not enough. We also saw this with last year’s iCloud hack that released hundreds of celebrities’ nude selfies and caused a massive kerfuffle. Apple’s since gone on a total “This Is Your Data” bent, and pooh-pooh’d Google, America’s NSA, and other bodies for trying to destroy privacy with their data collection techniques.

Backing all of your data out of the aggregate would destroy the value of that aggregate – as well as limiting your potential to benefit from its value. Many services are tied to data aggregates, whether we believe they’re related to online privacy or not. Social networks improve their features by way of aggregate data analysis, as do online games. However, where most people are now concerned with the amount of personally identifying information bodies such as Facebook have attached to their accounts, very few people ever worry about how a multi-player online video game could negatively affect them (in which case, see above regarding doxxing).

Think of the census – your country probably conducts one. It’s not just used for making sure everyone’s in the right place; it’s also used for economic projections, spending plans, as background information for poles, and many other statistics that help keep the country running. This real world, physical aggregate is no more or less valuable than its online counterpart – though it’s never referenced in the same bad light.

The other side of this, is that the argument “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” is utter and demonstrable bullshit. Everyone has issues about their person that they’d simply rather not have brought forcibly to light. It doesn’t matter if it’s a a particular kink, a lifestyle choice, what sort of small-clothes they wear, or a self-esteem issue because the right side of their nose is slightly more rounded than the left side… No one likes their very-personal weirdness exposed without consent or control.

Jeff Jarvis suggested, years ago, that no one really cares about privacy – they just hate being surprised. That, I think, is a major key to solving for privacy in the future; creating situations where, by our intentional delivery or withholding of information, we’ll understand the potential outcomes of that action.

That’s not privacy as an outside regulatory force, though; it’s self-censorship. And that’s a lot harder to sell.

Back to FDR’s wheelchair. My point here, on the whole, is that privacy is a result of context and framing. We believe that things are private not because no one has access to them, but because they’re framed in a private context – these bits and bytes of information about us are obscured, or undisclosed, and as such exist within a framework of privacy. When that’s breached, we’re right to be upset. However, just like that “unreported” wheelchair, even information within a broader public knowledge can be respected, and treated with dignity such that eventually we believe it was never public at all (even though we all know it).

The conversation about online privacy has to stay a cultural one – not the subject of a business or regulatory study.

Filed Under: Communication Tagged With: community, internet, privacy, sociology

The Meta Game

June 13, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

There’s a lot marketing professionals can learn from gaming as it is right now. Gamification, as an ideal, seems to apply to business planning the most – and I’ve heard it discussed around the longer, broader process of enterprise growth… But a few of the less-obvious ideals, especially from fast-paced games, apply to marketing strategy as if tailor made for it. In particular, the idea of a “meta game” surrounding an existing game’s play and development strategy.

What is “The Meta Game?”

In gaming, particularly in eSports, “the meta game” describes prevalent strategies, expectations, and often becomes the minimum viable method of play for a given game. In most modern online games – and even in a number of offline or solo play titles – these strategies grow and change effectively on the pace of the publisher’s content release cycle. As game development and play go on, the understanding of what each tool within the game can be used for, what’s most efficient, and what works under what circumstances. Changes are made, in response to this understanding, as well as to accommodate for new content such as additional features, characters, items, encounters, and so on.

In some cases, “the state of the game” is much more volatile than others.

It’s easy to pick out a few central genres that benefit from growing metas; MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV (which I play regularly) release content at scheduled intervals, which increase the potential of the player character, add new instances or raids to complete, and provide new tools either in the form of items or new abilities. However, MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games, such as DOTA 2, League of Legends, Smite and – recently – Heroes of the Storm, tend to have a much more visible meta game surrounding their play due to a number of factors.

  • Games involved in eSports circuits tend to have much more visibility on them, and benefit from being less static,
  • This visibility promotes faster development cycles from the publisher,
  • Faster dev cycles mean even high end players must regularly relearn the game – either in part or in whole – because of tiny or sweeping changes,
  • Huge game populations outside the professional circles also provide an enormous amount of data from which to draw balancing information.

Basically, the meta moves faster where there’s more visibility, in part because broadcasting benefits from never showing the same game happen twice. Constant balance-and-rebalance efforts from the publisher ensure no one plays the same game in a tournament twice.

To understand the meta game, understand “balance” as applies to games.

“Balance” is an ideal that developers strive for in any situation where multiple options exist for play. Whether that’s a broad range of characters a player can choose to use, larger libraries of items they can acquire to make those characters stronger as games go on, different abilities and other meta data that can be applied to a character before the game begins – or during… There’s a lot of flux possible, and even when players understand what works “best” for their purposes, the ability of the best participants to react to their opponents’ virtual curve balls is still an issue.

The meta itself must change, that’s the nature of it. As understanding is created about what’s strong, what’s weak, and what works in general – at every angle – the developers make changes to adjust for those strengths and weaknesses. Portions of the game seen as weak are often augmented, or buffed, to make them viable. Others – seen as over-powered – are nerfed, or reduced in value such that they’re in line with the remaining content as much as possible.

Because of this, “balance” is not in any way a destination; it’s absolutely a path. The steps along this path are the individual content releases for the game itself.

The meta game is a three-way tug of war.

Many gamers hate this “buff-and-nerf” cycle particularly because it creates gaps in their knowledge. There’s a need to constantly iterate through the available data and get to the content on the end of the rope. At some point when a new change happens, someone gets to be the first to try it out, to either do the metrics and statistics against other options to see if those are important, or to actually play test it and come up with inventive ways to react to the changed state of play. These pioneers are important, because they find novel uses for mundane things, and further the understanding of their use for the public.

The public – the second group in our tripod – by and large are not innovators, but they do create value for the gaming community. Their involvement – either by way of providing revenue, or promotion of the game itself – is integral to the game publishers’ overall strategy. It’s this larger group who spend the lion’s share of time just acting in the game, either conscious of the meta or unconscious of it. Publishers can collect huge volumes of aggregate data from these behaviours, codify that data, and understand what their work’s been affecting within the broader game.

Very often, though, this later creates problems for the developers – who made adjustments aimed at balancing the game. If something unexpected happens, either in a major tournament or off in the far reaches of casual gaming, they need to account for it somehow in a future update. And so the cycle continues.

In short, the public pulls from the pros, who pull from developers, who pull from both the pros and the public. With all three legs of the tripod generating and sharing data in one form or another, growth happens fast and effectively.

Your industry is in one of these three positions. Period.

No matter what your position is. it’s worth trying to understand who’s pulling from you – and who you’re pulling from. Whether it’s tools you use, build, or pioneer the use of – or inspiration and information that you, as a knowledge worker, add value to in order to generate revenue.

Understanding where your position is within this tripod is intensely valuable. Should you be the one creating tools? Should you be leading the way – gaining visibility for your industry and your work? Should you be following the lead of industry giants and providing a different value to your clients than they’re capable of? All three of those positions are important for keeping the array propped up.

Understanding the meta game isn’t just useful for you, it’s useful for everyone in your organization.

I highly suggest you read ESPN’s profile on Faker, a prominent League of Legends player from Korea’s SKT team. The pull-out, right in the middle of the profile, features an insanely insightful comment from Faker – one that’s easy to lose in the hype, biographical text, and imagery surrounding it.

“My strength is in understanding the flow of the game, when to fight and when not to fight.” – Faker

And further down, another from a teammate;

When I mention Faker, kkOma furrows his brow. “It’s a team game,” he says. “When the team doesn’t do well, Faker doesn’t do well. He looks as good as he does because there’s a baseline set by the rest of the team.”

Bingo. That’s the other side. The onus is on every player – in LoL, that means five players usually – to understand the metagame, how it applies under the current conditions of play, and act accordingly. Their understanding must be such that they – individually and as a unit can operate as needed to ensure success.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: gamification, gaming, meta game, sociology

The “Heat Death” of Design and Technology

June 10, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

Flickr - chrisyarzab - Mountain of Fire

The universe passes around an awful lot of information – an awful lot of energy – all the time.

Go for a run? Bleed calories as heat into the air. Sun’s warm today! It’s shedding its worth into the ambient area at quite literally the speed of light. Atomic bombs? Self-explanatory.

The mechanics are all the same – physics is wonderfully complex but it’s not complicated. Which brings us to tech and design, weirdly.

It feels like every site on the web (including mine, for which I make little apology) features the same elements – because they’re popular and effective – all at the same time. Hero sliders, big images, stunning typography, literally the entire Material Design playbook in action – on every website it can be – 24/7 this year. Homogeneity at its best.

Why? It’s effective. We know what to expect. We know what a clickable link looks like on a desktop, and we can make simple guesses on mobile as to which regions are touch ready. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it will cause exhaustion, and go out of fashion.

Now tech is doing it too! This should not be a surprise.

This morning, Wired had a piece about everyone having the same plans for tech that’s damned accurate – and damning by way of its accuracy. From the article;

You can prefer one design or another, but that will be the only thing separating iOS from Android and Android from Windows. They’re just skins at this point. You’ll have access to all the same apps, all the same services.

Sounds great, right? And we can admit there’s less animosity between Mac users and PC users lately, just as there’s less ague in consumers over which phone to pick. As Wired says, “There are a few differentiators left, sure […] but they don’t matter to most users. A phone is a phone is a phone.”

Heat Death is at hand.

This is where we get back to physics. The idea of heat death centers on the passing of energies – that, and I’m paraphrasing a really large number of ideas here for the sake of demonstration – eventually, given enough passing, all of that energy will become homogenized. It’ll become the same. Momentum will be lost, among the many processes involved, and we’ll suffer the final doom of the universe; a lack of differentiation across all matter and energy, because there’s nowhere to go that hasn’t been gone before.

I feel like design, and tech, might spiral into a premature heat death situation by way of the hegemony of homogeneity.

Or I could be over thinking it. Maybe, as Wired says, this is what we need. Adoption is hard, and getting people on board with new systems is a challenge. Perhaps – going back to Clay Shirky – all of this stuff will become socially interesting as it becomes technologically boring.

Still, who wants to be bored by design items? Not me. How about you?

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: android, apple, commentary, design, internet, technology, windows

Thoughts from Average is Over

June 6, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

On Google Play, where I bought this book, I wrote the following terse book review;

This is not a book that you understand in the first twenty pages.

The concept is pretty simple – boredom and a want of simplicity are keeping us from working with all of the tools we have to build a better world, a better economy, and a better life. However, the volume of detail Cowen goes into on just how that world might look is compelling, dangerous, and a little scary – but in a good way.

I’ve already recommended this to at least 3 people – and will continue to do so in the future.

Average is Over - Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation - Tyler Cowen | Google Play Books
Oddly, I found this book via Imgur – not via a business blog.

The ability to work with and interpret for computers is a big deal – and it’ll continue to be bigger and bigger as computers get better. All those soft skills your councillors tried to foist on you will pay off, if they already haven’t. However they won’t necessarily just pay off with people – they’ll pay off with your ability to be the back-channel between those who understand computer work, and those who do not.

This is a core part of what Cowen is getting at, but the reasoning behind it is very important to understanding the why for why this interpretation is so crucial to developing personal and cultural economic success.

Bizarrely, while this is an economist’s book about computing, and it comes very clearly from a statistical thoroughness I can’t possibly recognize in a book review properly, Average is Over feels very much like a galvanizing agent for knowledge workers. It’s not going to teach you to handle margins, do statistics in any real way, or anything like that. What this book offers is an understanding – from a non-business point of view – of just why the rush in knowledge work is so meaningful, against the backdrop of “normal people living normal lives.” It’s also a fairly damning account of just why the middle class is evaporating – though, thankfully, the book has some things to say about why that’s not necessarily a bad thing either.

What I appreciate most, personally, is that Tyler Cowen is and behaves like a knowledge worker himself.

If you follow him on Twitter, or read the blog at Marginal Revolution, you’ll get a broader sense of what fuels Cowen’s work, and where his passion is; making life better through adding value to information, which should be the knowledge worker’s mantra.

Without becoming too exhaustive, I’ll leave some key thoughts I had from the reading of Average is Over – and hopefully they’ll either spark some discussion or urge you to read the book itself;

  • The “average” being discussed is the middle class, without a doubt. Strangely, how I read this is that – and I’m nowhere near equipped to back it against data – there’s going to be far more room to get into the “have” category none the less, for those willing to do so. We’re not all going to like that, on both sides. Barriers to entry to the have-class are going to relate much more to personal effort in the future than legacy advantages.
  • Elitism is OK, as long as it puts on a polite face. We see this in gaming culture all the time. Even the most staunch “git gud son” players of online games can be the best of people – if they understand, and have the soft skills available, how to manage their environments and the people in those environments. As a force for internal personal development, or even external encouragement, “good enough isn’t good enough” is actually really powerful.
  • Median inflation adjusted income is dropping, have we compared this to an increase or a decrease in consumption? What gets me is that, if needs-and-expenses are also dropping, then inflation might be more related to wants. Again, we’re seeing that “effort” as above, may relate to force of will and personal austerity in some areas. Maybe people who don’t get the Apple Watch are the winners, in other words.
  • Your data is your most valuable and irreplaceable currency – and I’ll probably talk about this a little more soon. Tim Cook (Apple) very recently threw a pooh-pooh at Google and Microsoft for making business out of people’s’ data. What’s interesting about this, as relates to the book, is the idea that aggregates most often trump individuals as far as big-enough-data is concerned, and oddly that makes us safer and not less secure.

There’s so much more here as fuel for discussion. What I’m electing to take away from the book en mass though is the idea that setting your expectations, and then learning how to back those expectations out toward reality, is a killer app in terms of thought technology.

Get Average is Over by Tyler Cowan on Google Play Books – or, you know, that other place that used to be nothing but books and now sends you toilet paper overnight.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: book review, books, business, economics, success, tyler cowen

Categories

  • Announcements
    • Event Notices
  • Blog
  • Communication
  • Content Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Personal
  • Reviews
  • Social Media
  • Technology

Archive

  • January 2016
  • June 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • July 2008
  • February 2004
  • Copywriting
  • Blog
  • Reading Lists
  • Colophon

© Copyright 2023 Ian M Rountree · All Rights Reserved