internet | Ian M Rountree

How Will Our Children Learn to Internet?

January 6, 2016 by Ian Leave a Comment

When you boot up a video game for the first time – whether it’s a first person shooter, a single player RPG, or an MMORPG involving multiple players across the internet – there’s almost always a newb island. For the first little while, the game’s distressingly easy, you’re handed all kinds of information in easy to digest chunks, and the broad rules of the game are laid out in the form of demonstrations.

Move here. Get the thing. Press the button. Talk to her. Fight him. Complete the quest.

These places – it’s usually either a literal island, or a small encounter camp off to the side of the rest of the world – teach the newest of the new players, with no previous exposure to the genre or the game, the fundamentals of the world they’re about to inhabit. Experienced players, who have an inherited understanding of many elements of general game design and delivery, will pass through this experience very quickly. The less your exposure to the game, games in general, and the system being used, the longer it’ll take to get through it. But everyone can get through newb island with relative ease. It’s a literal boot camp for the experience; the place where your expectations get reset, you’re informed about the new world, and given your place in it.

Unlike designed experiences such as video games, there’s no “newb island” on the internet. Without it, how will we teach future users what good behavior is?

The User’s Side: Child-proofing the world vs World-proofing the child

We like to think of the early web was very different from what we see now. Small, insular groups controlled their bulletin boards and chat systems with a friendly face and clear no-nonsense rules.

There are a few examples of this. One of the earliest chats I joined in the 90s, Alamak, had a large (at the time) community – numbering a few hundred users concurrently connecting, almost any hour of the day. The admins, and particularly the owner, were very active. They had to be; sales of “Ops” permissions (the ability to make rooms, a stake in the policing of the site, and other perks) for a few dollars a month were how they made their living. They had a clear interest in growing a community, and making sure that community supported them.

Some of these Ops took it on themselves to do a New User Speech, when they identified someone very clearly logging in for the first time. Doing that identification was hard, but the speech was integral to how a number of people saw the chat; over the course of about fifteen minutes, in a locked room, the Op would go over the usual expectations, dump some really simple “Don’t be a jerk” style guidelines on the new user, and answer some questions.

Lots of people have a clear nostalgia for that kind of activity – the small groups, the new user speeches, and so on – but it’s difficult to remember that the environment didn’t stay that way for long. By the time you were a “new user” on two or three different chats, you get tired of learning new rules, and you start assuming that every community is basically the same. It’s hard to learn that “Don’t be a jerk” actually means very different things in different environments.

So things changed. New users stopped accepting help as offered. Problems got more common, and toxicity (a big deal today) began to make its way toward being the norm. System admins had to adjust; instead of educating the users, they had to secure their systems. Unfortunately, in the way of many things, the business side of system security is always more effective than the community side, and we can see where that goes today.

The bigger the net got, and the more people logged in daily, the more obvious it became that there was just no value – no way to scale tasks – in the realm of user education. So we abandoned it. There were simply too many new things, and too many people.

The Internet’s Side: Eternal September

There are way too many newbs. Like – mind-boggling numbers of people, entering the web for the first time, every day. It’s so hard to foster new people partly because there are so many – and partly because they come in with this sort of magical-thinking “I Am Om(net)scient” attitude that’s impossible to break down.

The term “Eternal September” isn’t used very often any more (because it’s over 20 years now that we’ve been within this never-ending month). But it’s an important idea to recognize.

The truth is that your experience with the web begins long before you actually put hands to keyboard, especially for younger people. Anyone under 18 now has never lived in a world without pervasive cellular phone use. Anyone under 10 won’t remember a time when tablets were a novelty, and not a de rigueur part of living in a connected economy. There are no effective barriers to entry, by design, to the world of connected commerce, communications, and digital business.

The outcome here is that, while there’s a lot of ambient knowledge about the internet and how to work it, it’s become largely instinct – unstudied, mysterious, and sourceless. Anyone who’s never gone out of their way to read an EULA, T&C document, or the ToS for their favorite app is an amateur. They’re appreciating something, even to a high level of potential use, without conscious education about the thing they’re appreciating.

They’re newbs. All of us are, still, after close to 25 years. This is especially true of social media, which has only been a big deal less than a decade, despite being the literal core of the internet’s popular foundation.

It’s clear we don’t yet know how to use social media in a positive light.

Resentment is a serious consequence of social networks, and one that they’re all bad at dealing with. On any social network there are far fewer people who are successful (usually in quasi-tiers) and then there’s everybody else looking in through the window at the party. For many this means they get to contact their heroes, but for some it’s a cause for jealousy. She’s so lucky. He’s such a shill. She knows the right people. He’s in their pocket. She sleeps around. He’s corrupt.

The above is from an article decompressing about GamerGate. This isn’t an article about GamerGate, but it’s impossible not to look at big internet phenomena without considering where it’s come from, what could have prevented it, and spending some time thinking about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.

Of course there will always be instances where good comes from the internet’s basic transparency and free communication. Child predators being found out, joyful revolutions, shared moments of accomplishment. But those aren’t what I want to talk about. What worries me is how, in the future, will people know how to act in social circumstances, both online and offline? How will the differences between the tools at hand for those circumstances begin to cue us in and create opportunities to use reason and accurately develop opinions and emotions?

There’s no “decline of internet education” – it’s never existed properly in the first place.

I wish I had answers to offer, I really do – so if you came here for them, my apologies for disappointing you. Instead of trying to fix this problem (which I hope you’ll at least agree it is), I’d like to ask some questions that I really hope you’ll think about, whether you respond here in the comments or not.

Education or Training: How can we begin to build an education framework for the web, for the users to come after us? Should that framework have a face in the school system, or should parents keep that role?
Respecting the “Internet Permanent Record”: What kinds of social structures do we need to change, so that we stop punishing people decades later for their initial lack of informed action, such as just generally being young and stupid, or – more recently – a Canadian Liberal candidate being pushed out of her election race because of a poor taste tweet being dug up?
Mandates of Limitations: Should parents allow or encourage their kids to set up masks, or disposable avatar accounts, that they’ll use until their age of majority and then permanently abandon, for the sake of both of the above aims?
Should Business Step In: Fewer people every year actually learn non-social skills, such as keyboarding, despite average typing speed likely rising simply by way of self-training. Is there a business case for creating apps or systems intended to obsolete themselves by way of educating a user out of the need for them?

You can see where this is going, I hope. We must a lot more considerate not only of the structures we’re building (socially and personally) using the internet itself – and conscious, intentional education is a good way to start. But how does that work?

If you’ve got any questions about this – and I hope you do – I really hope you ask them, and keep asking them, until someone begins to work on answers in a meaningful and visible way.

Online Privacy vs Mass Disinterest

June 16, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

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.

The “Heat Death” of Design and Technology

June 10, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

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?

Embracing Practice and Theory in Social Marketing

January 10, 2011 by Ian 5 Comments

In a typical paroxysm of brilliant insight, Amber Naslund posted what she called “one of those pensive posts [that needs a lot of thought]” on Sunday evening. The crux of the post was how theory can play a role in such highly action-sequence oriented fields like marketing – especially social media and content marketing.

As Amber says in the post, current social media advice is largely prescriptive; How To and 3 Steps To, and so on. This is beneficial to a point, but is it all we can do to move the work forward?

From her post – Elements of Knowledge and Embracing Social Media:

And in many ways, when you’re starting something new, that’s exactly what you want. The what and the how. Some understanding of what the established and familiar rules are, some guideposts to meter your own activities and behavior, and some reassurance that you’re headed in the “right” direction, or at least one that makes sense to you.

But when it comes to comprehension, there’s more than just the instructive side of the equation. There’s also understanding.

This is an important point, and one that I think needs some more elaboration and consideration.

The Case for Theory Before Practice

If school has taught us anything, it’s that there’s a use for having domain knowledge before practice begins. Just like we teach our kids (or try to), if something’s too hot to touch, there’s an effect from touching it regardless of cautions. Learning anything early that we can apply before negative happenstance can be helpful.

There’s also the possibility for analysis-in-the-moment, for anything we have knowledge of before practice. When something beneficial comes from what we might otherwise perceive as a negative action (for example, breaking up a flame war by making an explosive remark yourself), a theoretical understanding of human motivation and debate habits can be really helpful; with a theoretical knowledge to guide us, we might understand why that explosive comment worked to diffuse the situation, and another one might have made things worse.

The ability to understand the effects our actions might have can be hugely beneficial. The question is not whether theory has a place, but whether or not it should come first.

The Case for Practice Before Theory

In the Karate Kid, when Ralph Macchio is being taught to wax cars and paint fences, he spends a lot of time being annoyed that he’s not really learning karate. His sensei, Mr Miagi, smiles and fails to explain until much later. After weeks of labour and practice, finally the lesson becomes clear; the Kid was building muscle memory for the activities relevant to his required expertise.

Of course once the purpose of the practice is explained, there’s a blossoming of understanding. Having the muscle memory for the work that needs to be done makes the actual doing of the work so much easier. All that needs to be done in each instance is decide which skill to apply in which circumstance. This makes activity of any kind highly strategic – counter follows block follows jab and so forth. Natural progression and rhythm of action becomes easily apparent, for reasons entirely different to the in-the-moment analysis that those who learn theory before practice take advantage of.

But Which Should Come First?

And should it always be that way? Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) almost immediately responded with a question about why linear thought about theory and practice were such a big deal. It’s a good question; not everyone needs the muscle memory that comes from preemptive practice, and not everyone else can apply theory to their initial exploration of a task or domain.

I think there’s a case to be made for both directions, but it’s a case that has to be made on a per-instance basis. Some of us are polymaths, able to learn a huge variety of things easily. Some of us are intuitive learners, others kinesthetic. There is a huge variety of learning style out there – and it’s on the teachers, the instructors… The sensei among us to look for the signs that a student (hello, fellow grasshopper) can benefit better from one style of teaching than they can from another.

Before we can decide which style of teaching to employ, however, we need to define our theory. That, I think, goes far beyond just deciding who learns what better in what form.

Me? I’m going to do some more study. I’ve spent the last year playing karate kid – and I know, from how the year turned out, that I need more of that. My muscle memory isn’t as strong as it should be in some areas. However, I know I can’t survive on practice alone. Part of my work this year, I think, will be building some core theories out of observations of my own habits, and tending to the things that have succeeded.

What do you think? Where are you on the scale of theory vs practice?

Image by Woodley Wonderworks.

The Triangular Social Graph Problem

May 29, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

The more time I spend networking – on and offline – the more I’m noticing a problem with the basic assumptions some people – including myself – make when looking to build connections. Beyond just who we connect with, there’s a part of the specifuc how that creates issues.

We’re getting worse at introductions, especially self-introduction.

The sheer density of instances where we run into new people online has overtaken realtime introduction so thoroughly that the skills we use are changing in all arenas. When you meet someone new, the practice has been to either be introduced, or to introduce yourself with a 30-second personal sales pitch. Anything to explain who you are, why it’s important you make a connection, and what benefit it might be to the person you’re connecting with.

Now, however, we comment on others’ blogs, reply to them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook out of the blue, and call any reciprocation of these actions a success as an introduction. But we’re wrong in some cases, and unless we learn the cues, we’re going to make idiots of ourselves.

You’re my friend. He’s my friend. He’s not your friend.

It’s easy to forget that many of the most vocal people in a space know each other already. If we miss the key references that tell us that two bloggers – in or out of the same industry – are from the same town, or grew up together, we’re missing out when we see them respond to each other in certain ways on Twitter or in comments. Because of this, even if you know one of these two people, missing the link between your friend and their friends can cause a lot of awkwardness if you approach this third-lever connection from the same angle you approach your own friends.

This, along with a failed introduction practice, can make us come off like idiots.

But now often do we notice, and what affect does our reaction have on our audience when we’re in any of these three positions?

How can we tell when we’re being idiots? Better yet, how can we tell our friends they’re being idiots?

Want an example? Let’s break this down.

We’ll call position one Bill. He’s the popular guy. We’ll call him a marketer. He’s used to audiences.

Position two is Doug. He’s Bill’s friend, perhaps he’s an author. He’s known, for different reasons than Bill is, and is still growing his audience. Hasn’t hit critical mass yet.

Then there’s Steve. He’s the late comer. He’s a marketer like Bill, and has made a connection – maybe a strong one – with Bill. Steve’s a fan of Doug’s work.

Steve makes a joke at Doug’s expense, on the assumption it will go over well, because Bill’s made a similar joke before.

Doug gets pissed. He rants. In public. On Twitter.

Steve’s no longer going to buy Doug’s book. Bill is confused with Doug. Doug is pissed with Bill for not defending him.

Who’s in the right? Is there a right? How can we fix this?

Important questions. I’m glad I’ve never been on any of these three sides – at least not that anyone’s alerted me to. But that can be part of the problem, can’t it? If no one tells anyone they’ve missed a step in the thorough social connection process, those connections can’t be treated like real friendships can.

They remain part of a graph. Inanimate, data-driven, and short lived.