Fisch Can't Swim

Today we discussed the Internet in developing countries as well as the Internet’s role in the 2016 election.

A particularly interesting thought that came out of today’s final session is how we think about news and news sources. It seems that each week, more and more “media” sources are becoming “news” sources, regardless if the news they proclaim is distorted or grounded in reality.

This comment took me back to my sociology class in the first week of the semester. During that first week, we discussed Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message.” It appears that solely the medium of the internet is increasingly becoming associated with a notion of “objectivity.” We seem to be moving in a direction where people believe that because the internet provides information then that information must be truthful.

We then may consider whether to curtail certain organizations because they are putting out “fake news.” (What, though, is the line between fake news or satire pieces? And who’s to decide what’s “fake”?) And by creating an exclusive group of news providers, are we then curtailing freedom of the press, even if the “news” may not be wholly truthful? The future of the internet’s relationship to our news and to media in general certainly seems murky.

On a final note, thank you to everyone for making this seminar so excellent – it was a real highlight of each week. I look forward to seeing you all soon!

Our seminar this week was particularly interesting – I especially liked the discussion related to online identity.

I’d like to explore Sherry Turkle’s TED talk a bit more, as it didn’t explicitly get talked about in class (also bringing in a bit of extra reading and info from my sociology class.) While I hadn’t seen this exact TED talk video before, I had read some of Turkle’s articles and portions of her book Alone Together. We could consider Turkle a cyber-dystopian, one who is skeptical or cautious about technology’s role in our lives. (Interestingly, she says in the beginning of her talk that she was previously a cyber-utopian, praising the possibilities for transforming one’s identity using the medium of the internet.)

She’s definitely onto something in her wariness of technology ­– in both the video and in some of her more recent articles she describes our inability to no longer have meaningful face-to-face conversations because we choose to be engrossed on our screens (phones/iPads/etc.) instead of in the person standing before us.

While I can think of a few instances where conversations have been interrupted by a friend’s quick peek at a phone, this issue doesn’t seem to be nearly as widespread as Turkle thinks. She seems to suggest that this is an epidemic taking over the country, based purely on interviews and some observations she has made (for instance, mothers walking down the street pushing their children in strollers are now looking at their phones instead of talking with their kids – Turkle argues that these mothers must have been talking with their children before phones and portable technology came along, but this conclusion doesn’t seem particularly well-grounded in data.)

In fact, other researchers (and former colleagues of Turkle) have concluded that technology use actually brings us together and further connects us, far more than it drives us apart. Keith Hampton, a professor from Rutgers, studied homes in the late 90’s that received high-speed Internet. His finding suggested that this new technology seemed to further connect the houses’ inhabitants rather than isolate them. In a more recent study, he also video-taped four major public spaces in the Northeast (the steps of the Met Museum and Bryant Park in New York, Downtown Crossing in Boston, and Chestnut Street in Philadelphia) to observe whether members of groups in public used their phones, instead of talking and interacting with others. When reviewing his footage, he noted that the percentage of people using their phones was quite low (only three to ten percent, far less prevalent than Turkle suggests in her research) and that the people using phones were usually alone. People in groups tended not to be using their phones while spending time with each other, and he concludes that mobile phone usage does not negatively contribute to our social interactions to the extent many suspect.

I think it’s interesting to explore the back-and-forth of opinions on whether phones and other communicative technologies help to bring us together or act to drive us apart. We should be mindful of technology’s role in our daily interactions but perhaps not as skeptical as Turkle suggests.

I thought our guest yesterday, Jonathan Zittrain, led an excellent discussion about cyber security and the intersections of the internet and law.

The opening paragraph of “The Meaning of the Cyber Revolution” offers a quote from “the chief of U.S. Cyber Command, Gen. Keith Alexander” who notes that “there is no consensus ‘on how to characterize the strategic instability’ of cyber interactions ‘or on what to do about it.’”

I wanted to bring up two points about this quote – first, I am curious about the structure of our “U.S. Cyber Command.” It seems that military officials run this operation, but is such an operation best suited to be run under the umbrella of the Department of Defense/Military? (The ARPANET itself started out under the DoD and essentially became privatized later on, so it would be interesting if this trajectory also happens when thinking about cyber defense.)

Second, and following from that initial question: are we allowed to treat cyber-warfare as analogous to actual combat warfare? The Tallinn Manual does set out some solid guidelines for us to think about. However, if not all countries and leaders are bound to abide by the Manual’s rules, how can a country be incentivized to work within these boundaries when thinking about how they will combat cyber warfare? Cyber war seems to be a relatively emerging field of warfare (compared with our more conventional notions of combat), so I’d be curious if creating a Manual of this type could be seen as perhaps premature, as the cyber warfare field seems to be constantly updating (perhaps at a far faster rate than we are creating new non-cyber weapons for soldiers/our armies.)

An interesting point in our discussion this week was about the right to be forgotten ruling in some EU countries. The legislation lets you go to Google and ask that certain information no longer be connected to your name in search results, as it no longer pertains to the “you” of today. The ruling doesn’t require Google to take down the original source, however.

Reading a bit more about this on Wikipedia, it appears that a user submits a request to have a certain list of URL’s removed, and then Google employees (or other search engine employees) assesses the request. I’m curious how Google decides which of these cases to approve or which to deny, and if there are specific criteria or if it’s just done on a case-by-case basis by an individual reader/decider.

In addition, the right to be forgotten concept seems to connect, in some ways, to our desire to craft our images online (on social media, LinkedIn, or other sites.) The higher the degree of accessibility, the more we feel the need to curate and control what others see (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, from a privacy perspective.) At the same time, there’s a balance between overly curating and restricting accurate/relevant data from circulating.

I thought our guest speaker today, David Eaves from the Kennedy School, was excellent.

A particularly thought provoking idea from the end of our session was whether Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have had the same success in his civil rights pursuits with the advanced surveillance capabilities of today’s FBI. Thinking about this in a more modern context, while it is indeed true that advanced surveillance capabilities (both online and otherwise) have allowed the government/FBI to track dissenters, the same advances in technology have also further facilitated dissent. During the Arab Spring, Twitter quickly mobilized large numbers of protestors, leading to far more efficient organization than phones or word of mouth conversations would have allowed in Dr. King’s time. We have also seen online hacking itself and release of hacked data as a form of dissent against various governments – a type of protestation not possible without the internet.

I also want to touch on Eaves’ idea that empathy is integral to success in the civic tech world, as empathy allows an implementer to better understand the needs of a user to ensure that the user experience is as excellent as possible. Empathy seems to be an important skill not just in this field but in many, so I’d be curious to hear more of Eaves’ thoughts on how we better teach empathy (and if it can even be taught in a classroom setting) as we train future policy makers.

One additional thought from the readings – one of the problems with Healthcare.gov was the management structure of the group that ran the project, which brings us back to the integral issue of management structures in technology teams. In my post in Week 1, I touched on this issue with how management style may have positively affected the products created by the original ARPANET team, so it’s especially interesting to see this idea re-emerge later in the semester.