sociology | Ian M Rountree

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 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.

Education and Social Media

May 19, 2011 by Ian 3 Comments

There’s a lot of discussion in professional social media circles – from publishers, to consultants, to agencies – about education. Clients need it, businesses need it, the public needs it – but so do the professionals working in these very complex, highly unorganized fields.

There’s now very little stringent education directly related to social networking as a business communication tool; while there are plenty of dyed in the wool professionals, the building of a knowledge base accessible through higher education seems slow in catching up. This isn’t even a theory versus practice problem – I think it’s an educational system problem.

How can we create education for new kinds of professionals, when education itself is failing?

This article from MENG Blend on May 17th tells a strong story about the state of education in general:

[…] even though the real ROI of college over time is well-documented, college completion rates are falling rapidly. On average, four year public schools graduate only 37% of their students within four years. The story at community colleges, which account for 46% of all undergraduates, is even worse: just 25% of those at 2-year colleges graduate within three years of the time they start.

Damning, isn’t it? [Read more…]

Your Klout Score Means Nothing

February 19, 2011 by Ian 8 Comments

It’s not that it doesn’t mean anything – it’s that it actively means “nothing”.

For something to have meaning, you’ve got to be able to use it. Meaning, strictly speaking, applies to what’s done with a thing, or a piece of knowledge. Anything with ‘meaning’ must directly apply to something else. So; a score, made by an algorithm, has no strict meaning until applied. This is as true of Klout as it is of your Twitter follow count, the number of Friends you have on Facebook, or the number of recommendations you get on LinkedIn. Meaning requires application.

Sure, according to my Klout profile, I’m a 58. That’s nothing to sneeze at… Or is it? Could it be that, even in this semi-limited, pseudo-meaningless platform, there are some indicators of how a person behaves, how they prefer to communicate, and how you can learn how they do their work so you can better yours?

Now, this week’s #usblogs topic is supposed to be about online and offline klout, but I want to focus on a few meaningful uses for the Klout score and it’s associated meta-data first, before we talk at all about offline klout (which is far less well documented, and thus harder to quantify). Offline clout may come later, or may not. Partly because real-space communities have far different parameters to online ones.

When I look at a Klout score, I see an aggregate that equates to the curtain behind which hid the Wizard of Oz.

When I look at a Klout profile, like my own for example, I see:

Klout displays a graph of activity to go along with the Score metrics it displays.

This is the base range of information that comes beside a Klout score. Most people pay attention to the three numbers beside the Score itself – I almost never do. Under these, the badges, are much more informative regarding a person’s real activity. Number of list memberships, unique retweet count, total retweets, total comments – these show not only the wattage of a person’s activity online, they show the depth and consistency of that activity over time.

Yes, these numbers contribute to the aggregate of the Klout score, but the mix of badges you see matches strongly the kind of person you’re looking at. For example, this graph shows an even level of “Total Retweets” and “Unique Retweeters” – this tells me that the individual messages I’m sending are getting some traction among a broad range of people, but that traction has little depth.

Based on this graph, and the information relationships within it, I can adjust my actions in the future, if I want to (for example) learn how to create messages that gain depth as well as width of interaction. In this way, my score means nothing, but my profile is a learning tool.

In addition to the activity graph, Klout displays an Influence chart.

Take a look at the people on this chart. Do they match who you’d expect to be influencing me? Better still, do they match who you’d expect me to have influenced? I mean – yes, Mark, Chris, Amber and Matt have an effect on me. They legitimately influence me. But David McGraw? Really? An outlier, clearly.

Klout believes I’ve influenced my web host, MediaTemple. That interests me. In part because it’s an outlier, like David is. In part, because it’s amusing.

It also tells me where on the social chart I fit against my peers. The little orange dot on the graph is me. I’m a socializer. If I got a little more broad in my topics, I’d be a thought leader. I take issue to the idea that thought leadership is measurable on a chart, but these are the terms they’ve chosen to represent people – and by and large, they’re accurate.

The Influence chart can be used to give you a sense of what kinds of relationships the person whose profile you’re reading has. Do they interact with highly professional people, or highly social ones? Is there a broad mix of specialties represented, or a wide mix of opinion? Is there a tendency to focus solely on their own area of expertise, and disregard anything else coming into the mix?

At the end of the day, what you do with any of this data is what gives it meaning. A 60 Klout twitterati is not automatically more influencial than a 45 Klout socializer – unless pure wattage is all you care about. And, honestly, if all you care about is a bigger megaphone, you’ve lost the social media game already.

Keeping focus on what’s important is a good idea when conducting research and analysis, whether you’re doing so before, in the midst of, or after any marketing or business activity. Focusing on the wrong data, like a Klout score alone, can lead to terminal myopia.

No matter the numbers you’re looking at, making sure the numbers match the need is important. Do yourself a favour and look beyond that big orange number at the top of the screen.

How to Master the Power of Voice and Become a Blogging Muad’Dib

January 23, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

The Voice Must Flow!

The power to be in many places at once. Perfect memory. The ability to see the future. None of these count for anything without the power to inspire action with just a few phrases, delivered with perfect pitch, modulation, frequency and poignancy.

Anyone who knows anything about science fiction will know about Dune. In Dune, Paul Atreides – the heir to a ducal title – is cast out of his place by the betrayal of a lesser Baron (the piggish Harkonen) and goes on a journey of self-discovery, eventually learning that he is the Ultimate Power Embodied – the Kwisatz Haderach!

Voice isn’t only about displaying personality, it’s about directive communication.

Bloggers talk about creating a voice all the time, and in many cases, we’re referring to the same things;

Humour, or lack thereof
Opinions, or sets of beliefs
Passion, or clarity of desire
Engagement, or how easy it is to turn a statement into a conversation.

HOPE hard enough and you’ll get a certain kind of success – but to be a real master, you need more than hope.

All of these things matter, but they’re not the core of The Voice.

In Dune, the Voice is an arcana very few are trained in – and the fact that Paul Atreides is trained in even its rudiments is almost heretical. Masters of the Voice have the skills to control anyone they have face-to-face contact with, after just a few minutes of exposure. They must gain this power over each individual person they wish to control, and do so by keen observation of body language, cataloging of reactions to some initial prods, and above all else, listening to the words their subjects use.

By this process of pre-communicative observation, practitioners of the Voice can easily understand the motivations, weaknesses – and potential of a subject. So, when she finally does speak, she can use the entirety of subtle inflection, posture, micro-expression, tone, pitch, metre… Every verbal and non-verbal tool physically possible to such a high effectiveness, that the subject is helpless to argue or disobey.

As a blogger, you have more tools at your disposal than text formatting, multi-media, your usual level of eloquence, or your standard subject matter.

You’ve got more than just your words. You have the spaces between then-the long dashes creating suspense, the ellipsis… Hanging out and doing it’s thing. You’ve got direct address writing (which most of this post is written in), choice of gendered or genderless pronouns… All of these things, once you know how to go beyond vocabulary and work pacing, verbal innuendo, and inflection by way of grammar into your writing… There’s power, just waiting there.

Consider the following passage about a remote bystander observing the initial attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001:

When James burst into the room, yelling this and that about being under attack, I didn’t even know what to think. Who was attacking who? Had he been playing paintball again? I mean, seriously. It wasn’t even seven in the morning. I got a real shock when I followed him to the living room. He wasn’t kidding – one of the towers was falling on picture-in-picture, and not ten seconds after my eyes hit the screen, the second plane hit the other tower.

What sense do you get from the above paragraph? There’s information there. There’s a hook (the attack) there’s characterization (the remark about paintball), there’s narative (first-person). It’s concise, informative, and to the point.

How about this?

“Guys! We’re under attack!”

The door shook – great. James’d put a crack into it with the heel of his boot. A muddy crack. Double great.

“Seriously, guys, get up! One tower’s just come down, and they keep saying there are more planes! More damned planes!”

What was he on about, anyway? I levered myself up and threw on a shirt. If he’d found some new video game to spend his rent money on…

No such luck. One look at the TV left my mouth gaping. Under attack indeed. I forgot about the muddy boot crack in my door.

What’s different? The details are identical in form to the first paragraph – the attack, the two towers… You know exactly what both are getting at. But the two passages may as well have been written about different people. There’s the focus on dialog, the broken-up structure of the second passage, completely different use of timing…

And we’re just comparing two very short pieces, essentially stating the same facts; the narrator’s roommate bursts into his room, waking him/her with what seems like nonsense – but is very quickly proven to be terrifying truth.

While the examples I’ve used are semi-fictional, the same thing applies to blogging, or writing of any kind where format restrictions are loose. Journalists with word count limits need to be ultra-direct. Bloggers, authors and other writers benefit from other tools, like using the tonal changes that pacing and directive writing can create.

It’s up to you, young pup!

Using the power of Voice in writing is more than just what you choose to write about, and the words and phrases you use to express your opinion. Leaving it at phraseology and opinion may be enough for some – but if you really want to master your power of Voice, going beyond and asserting control over your very tone and inflection in writing is the next step along the Golden Path.

Being serious about the development and use of your Power of Voice is a good idea. Knowing how to produce tone, inflection… Even a little – necessary hesitation just with words and grammar can make your writing stand out as much more human.

Still. It never helps to lose the humour all together. Am I Right, Dunecats?

Top image: Modified screenshot from Sci-Fi Channel’s “Frank Herbet’s Dune” (well worth watching)
Bottom image: Dunecat. Source; the interwebs.