Jake Gilbert's 50N Blog

Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner conducted an experiment where a number of test subjects were asked trivia questions, then tested to determine whether their instinct was to search their mind or to search the web for the answers. As it turned out, participants were often inclined to think of computers in response to hard questions; our “knowledge” as we know it is collective, the information we answer questions with is often subconsciously just collected from the internet instinctively (SOURCE). This idea of the internet being used as a source of information is nothing new; but the implications of it are fascinating.

As internet users, we are interconnected, creating one huge network of knowledge acting as a transactive memory system, as Orion Jones put it in his article “The Internet as Hive Mind.” This comes with dangers, though; firstly, we are creating a society of people who rely very heavily on their mobile devices. Losing access to our world’s collective knowledge base could be literally considered losing a part of our minds: do you believe that as we have become more reliant on technology, we’ve begun to store less and less information in our own brains, knowing we can default to the internet for answers?

In my opinion, the biggest danger of essentially integrating the internet with our brains is the assumption that the first viable piece of information we see on the internet is not only true, but is the only truth. This brings me to the “echo chamber” of the web; we discussed in class the idea that targeted advertising and curated news feeds bring about extremism in points of view. For example, Facebook will show a left-leaning user news articles portraying liberalism, the DNC, and so on in a positive light; Facebook will show a right-leaning user articles that portray those things negatively (and the opposite goes for right-leaning users). When the internet is treated as a functional arm of our minds, and the information on it is not only taken in as fact but as our facts—things we know rather than are learning—this can create a dangerous paradigm.

In my last blog post, I discussed the idea of “fake news” and briefly touched on echo chambers. But let’s set aside the misinformation on the web; extremism can come simply because views are never challenged. We discussed in class the downsides of the “upvote/downvote” system, best exemplified by Reddit (but prevalent all over the web). The biggest downside comes from the idea of the “tyranny of the majority” – if 51% of Reddit likes a political candidate, the articles written in that candidate’s favor will end up having a positive score, giving them a better chance of being on the “front page” of Reddit. Negative articles, or articles supporting other candidates, will be hidden due to negative scores. Comments on Reddit posts rarely show fierce discourse; often comment replies will deviate very slightly from parent comments, if at all. This is because the upvote/downvote system is based in the idea that things that are popular should be seen more, making them more popular.

How do we, as people, remain intellectually independent? What strides can we make to truly know things, rather than share knowledge collectively? Is it a bad thing to rely on our phones to answer hard questions? I mean, if the phones will always be here, what’s the difference between them and our brains? Is it healthy to intentionally seek information that angers us, or that we disagree with? If so, how do we do that when only things we agree with are shoved in our faces? Thanks for reading.

“Fake news!”

You’ve heard that before, right?

I was inspired by the second point on the article we read this past week (https://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/) to examine the causes, effects, and power of “fake news”.

The spread of misinformation on the internet has created a ridiculously frustrating paradigm in American political discourse: we don’t know what’s true. To be fair, the American people were never truly able verify the claims made by TV news anchors on their own (in the days before the web), but the news networks were recognized and credulous sources to begin with. Often, TV news had to show raw video or play audio to rile people up with evidence. The proliferation and popularity of the internet has shifted everything about news, perhaps including the very meaning of the word. The first offender is social media – websites like Facebook create an echo chamber, where people can choose to hear no opinions but those they agree with. Targeted advertising allows only videos, news sources, and products that align with your political views to show up on your news feed. Suddenly, you find yourself in a world where your opinion is the only opinion, and it doesn’t seem too extreme to lean a little more towards the extreme on your side of the political spectrum.

The second offender is one we know and love: search engines. Websites like Google can curate search results, showing you things you want to see, rather than things you need to see.

But the biggest offender of all is the “news.” There’s money in misinformation; if I start a completely fabricated “news” website, tell people what they want to hear, and monetize it…I’ll make a lot of money. People will share my articles, and the others in their echo chamber will like them. Simple as that. For example, check out this website (scroll down once you’re on it): http://thelastlineofdefense.org/

The Last Line of Defense is literally fake news. They write that they’re “satirical” in the fine print, but that doesn’t matter – their individual articles get shared around, monetized, and misinformation spreads. For example, one of their articles, tastefully titled “WHOA! Hillary Caught On Hot Mic Trashing Beyonce’ With RACIAL SLURS!” has over 200,000 shares to social media. I would bargain a vast majority of those did not share it for the “satire”. All of the 200+ comments seem to be taking the article very seriously. And there you have it – a slightly more misinformed public, one article at a time. This demonstrates a big part of the issue of fake news: the internet allows anything to go viral. One person can write a fake article, and the next day a million people have read it. How many do you think will fact-check it?

The problem becomes even more complicated when accusations of “fake news” are directed at credible news sources. Then, the people start thinking: who can I trust? What’s real? How do I know?

And it simply becomes easier to listen to the opinions we want to hear, rather than going out into the field to see the truth with our own eyes.

My questions for you all are: how do we ensure the news we’re reading is real? How do we stop the proliferation of existing fake news? How to we break free from our echo chambers? How can we, as individuals, help the fight against the creation of new fake news? Could big companies like Facebook and Google be doing more? How? Would it infringe on free speech for the government to attempt to curtail fake news? I look forward to hearing from you all, and thank you so much for reading!

Something that really struck me in the reading & our class discussion was the seemingly ever-present problem of privacy on the internet; even in the web’s literal origins, people had qualms about their privacy. As we discussed in class, it began with the “finger protocol.” Here’s an excerpt from Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hefner and Matthew Lyon that explains it well:

The FINGER controversy, a debate over privacy on the Net, occurred in early 1979 and involved some of the worst flaming in the MsgGroup’s experience. The fight was over the introduction, at Carnegie-Mellon, of an electronic widget that allowed users to peek into the on-line habits of other users on the Net. The FINGER command had been created in the early 1970s by a computer scientist named Les Earnest at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. “People generally worked long hours there, often with unpredictable schedules,” Earnest said. “When you wanted to meet with some group, it was important to know who was there and when the others would likely reappear. It also was important to be able to locate potential volleyball players when you wanted to play, Chinese-food freaks when you wanted to eat, and antisocial computer users when it appeared that something strange was happening on the system.” FINGER didn’t allow you to read someone else’s messages, but you could tell the date and time of the person’s last log-on and when last he or she had read mail. Some people had a problem with that.

We discussed in class that possible reasons people would have a problem with this could include wanting to be able to ignore messages when busy without people knowing, not wanting people do know if they missed work on certain days, and more. This issue can be followed all the way to the modern internet; in May of 2012, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, had a very sensitive instant messenger leak. His messages over AIM from 2004 were released, and, in one, he calls users of Facebook “dumb f–ks.” He calls them (us, I guess) this because they gave him their “emails, pictures, addresses” and more. Nowadays, we openly give our location to “Snap Maps” 24 hours a day, we give Facebook far more than those three parameters, we don’t blink when Google Maps gives us directions home before we even look at our phones when we get in the car, and more. An important but perhaps obvious question is: have we begun to care less about our privacy on the internet? And the truly pressing question is: why? 

I believe, of course, modern users of the internet are far more cavalier about privacy. However, the reasoning for that can be speculated about a lot; perhaps modern internet users simply know less of the dangers of sacrificing privacy than the internet pioneers did. Or, one could argue that the internet has simply become so integrated into our lives that it seems silly to try and be “separate” from it.

Greg Satell of Forbes Magazine released an article in 2014 entitled “Let’s Face It, We Don’t Really Care About Privacy.” In it, he argues that the “cost” of privacy has gone up. In order to have privacy, one would have to sacrifice their use of, say, their Facebook and LinkedIn. This would be sacrificing potential social and financial opportunities. This aligns well with the idea that the internet is just too important to hide from nowadays. What do you all think? Can we still preserve privacy in this day and age? Should we even try? Why aren’t we trying? Why did we seem ultimately unfazed by the idea that Google stores all voice commands online when discussed in class? Let me know your thoughts.

Welcome to my blog! Here’s the Jake Gilbert elevator pitch: I’m an 18-year-old Harvard student from Long Island, New York, and I’m interested in studying computer science, government, English, and a few more things (I’m particularly interested lately in comedy). Let’s dive in…

While reading “Where Wizards Stay Up Late” by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, a few things stood out to me. I found the initial requirements for the first IMP as it was contracted to be very fascinating. A particularly relevant request was that the network be “transparent.”  The book put it this way, on page 64 in Chapter 3:

“To achieve that transparency, the network was going to have to be fast, free of congestion, and extremely reliable. These were relatively straightforward requirements that Roberts had written into the request for proposals, but no one expected that actually accomplishing them would be easy”

This got me thinking; how has our definition of “transparency” on the internet changed throughout time? Do internet providers still hold an obligation to provide that transparency? When, if ever, did we lose transparency on the internet, and what did we gain through that sacrifice? Is the current fight for “net neutrality” analogous to the requirement for transparency in the young web?

Back during the origins of the internet, speed, lack of congestion, and reliability were enough to determine transparency. This is probably because that was all a transmitting host needed to be able to “look into the network through its adjacent IMP and see itself connected to the receiving host,” as the book put it. Those three factors gave a user enough knowledge to know exactly what was going on on their network; the average internet user today has very little personal knowledge regarding the inner-workings of their internet usage. Our in-class discussion about Artificial Intelligence raises some points regarding this; do Amazon, Google, Apple, etc have any obligation to their users to report exactly how and where the data collected from their voice input is used? Where do Alexa’s answers come from? Who’s hearing my voice as it’s used to build a better AI?

Transparency on the net is becoming a lost obligation as we know it. The fight for net neutrality is the greatest example of this. ISPs are currently lobbying the US government for the right to throttle internet connections for certain sites, charge more for certain services, and cap data usage at specific amounts (often on certain websites). This could create a dangerous dynamic where some have greater access to the knowledge on the internet, and some don’t. This could create a system by which ISPs can essentially hold users hostage by disallowing access to Netflix unless they pay an extra monthly fee. Does this comply with the internet’s original goal of “fast, free of congestion, and extremely reliable”? It seems the further we stray from this idea, the blurrier our idea of “transparency” for ISPs becomes.