A presentation for the Critical and Cultural Studies Division, “Voices for Sale: Monetizing Social Media” National Communication Association, New Orleans, LA (November 2011), organized by Christopher M. Boulton, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; with Kathleen M. Kuehn, Christopher Newport University; and James Hamilton, University of Georgia.

Monetizing Social Media: The conditions for sharing by Robert Bodle, College of Mount St. Joseph

I have been researching, writing, and talking about the conditions for sharing on Google, Facebook, and other online spaces and services for some time,

Mostly interrogating the tacit agreement between Internet companies and users, that we get wonderful applications for free, but not really for free, at a cost.

This cost, as many of us already know, is the disclosure of our personal information (and sale of that info to advertisers)

But so what? Why does this matter?

I was worried about this question, especially when I first began to cover this tacit agreement in my new media and society classes.

After covering at length how our information is shared online, many of my students were somewhat concerned but mostly appreciative of the benefits of Google, Facebook, and other online services, regardless of how they function.

Today, I am happy to see that my students are becoming more aware of the conditions of sharing on SNSs, without my help,  when a freshman recently told me that she was repelled by the “creep factor” of FB’s “Real-Time Activity” feature on the upper right hand of her Facebook wall. Hooray!

Recent polls conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicate that people are very concerned about their privacy from all demographic groups, bearing out the truth of my anecdote.

Perhaps this is why there are rumors circulating in the industry press that Facebook will start to make its privacy changes opt-in, instead of opt out (by default).

Yet, while we’re becoming more concerned about how our information may be used, it is still difficult to get the full picture, and of course, this is intentional.

To get a fuller picture of the conditions of our sharing, I ask how are we sharing? what is being shared? what are the market incentives and the consequences?

I cover “the how” at length in another article, Regimes of Sharing.

But quickly, in order to participate in  the main currents of social and political life many of us are participating on social media sites, whether we actually are on these sites or not (e.g., “Liking” an op-ed on NYTimes.com).

And while we are sharing with one another, and moving from site to site, we are also sharing with our social media services, advertisers, and other third party websites (NYTimes.com) within and outside of social media spaces. (Technically thiis done with the help of cookies and Open APIs).

What was once surreptitious gathering of our data under the awareness of users and without our consent (e.g., Beacon),

is now freely given through social plug-ins, such as the “Like” button.

Whenever we “Like” something using FB’s Like button on websites outside of Facebook.com we share this preference

Which is combined with much more personally identifiable data, including a running log that tracks our web browsing session with “date, time and web address of the webpage you’ve clicked to . . . IP address, screen resolution, operating system and browser version” for 90 days.

What is not clearly known is how much of this information is being shared with Facebook’s 300 million third-party websites, including powerful yet little known marketing and data processing firms like Acxiom Corporation (largest data mining company in the world).

Again, the obvious answer as to why this information is shared is the profit motive, our social labor is being converted to financial value for companies, and some have suggested that not only should we get the use of online spaces but that we also get a cut. I would argue that we should at least have the choice, because,

The condition for use on social media sites and cloud services is that we submit to surveillance, monitoring, and targeted advertising for “personalized web experiences.”

My Central Claim is that we need to change the conditions for sharing (granular control, transparency of how info is used, security measures to protect our data).

Yet, we might still ask, “what’s the big deal?”

There are intended and unintended consequences.

Among the intended consequences are that our online history is used to serve relevant and interesting news and information, advertisements, and money saving deals that coincide with our past interests.

Another intended consequence is that while Facebook turns our information into product – where we are the product, it takes away what Tavani calls our informational privacy, or “control over one’s daily activities, personal lifestyle, finances, medical history, and academic achievement stored and transmitted over ICTs.”

This loss of control over one’s own information deprives us of the freedom to make informed decisions on our own behalf.

When we lose the ability to control our information, we lose our autonomy and self-determination.

In political economy terms, this loss of control over our information reconfigures social relations between social media sites and individuals

establishing a power imbalance,

where we become more dependent and vulnerable to the SNS, and to the intended and unintended consequences such as government access to our data, and the implications of a personalized Web . . .

As our information is shared with third parties to serve ads inside and outside of facebook, it helps to construct,

what Eli Pariser calls the Filter Bubble or the personalization of content,

Through a human/algorithmic hybridization our past clicks help rank most of what we see online, including:

our friends feeds, news stories, and search queries.

This personalization makes us four times more likely to click on a link (FastCompany) which is the intended consequence, but

it also helps “to shape the information diets of its users” (Novey, July 1st, 2011).

The problem is that this process is invisible, we’re not aware this is going on (because we don’t see it happening), and ultimately,

it limits our exposure to different points of views, enabling entrenched political polarization, preventing real consensus, critical thinking, and tolerance of diversity and appreciation of our irreducible differences in society.

My question, then, is that by the time we all come around to what is happening, when navigating the Web feels like exploring our own subconscious such as in Being John Malkovich, will the conditions for sharing matter to us?

Thank you.

11th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden, October 20-23

[Slide 1]

Hello, Thank you for coming, my name is Robert Bodle.

My presentation is titled Opening the social media ecosystem: the tenuous nature of interoperability

among dominant social network sites, services, and devices  (article here)

This is a distillation of a longer paper that looks at Google, YouTube, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook’s use of APIs or Application programming interfaces to open up user data to achieve interoperability

[Slide 2]

This presentation specifically looks at the values, characteristics, and conditions of interoperability between Facebook and its third party developer ecosystem,

using Open APIs to provide new ways to share and participate, but also finding that FB uses Open APIs to achieve market dominance, undermining privacy, data security, contextual integrity, member autonomy and freedom.

Ultimately this work points to the need for a more sustainable basis for sharing online.

If anyone has ever played a social game on Facebook (including FB quizzes), cross-posted their Tweets to serve as status updates on Facebook, or merely “Liked” using FB’s Like button on websites outside of Facebook.com, they have utilized OpenAPIs

[Slide 3]

Open APIs can be considered the sex organs of interoperability, or software tools that enable 2 or more online sites and services to get with one another and exchange data . .

[Slide 4]

enabling one to access your FB account on CNN.com, for example.

[Slide 5]

Open APIs utilize what are known as “calls” or requests made to a social network to send and retrieve data routed through a third party server.

In this process graphic, using an example, we might want to “Like” a story on New York Times,

sending this request through NYTimes’ server, to FB, which would record our recommendation on our status updates.

As calls are routed through the third party server, user data is opened up to the third party, in this case newyorktimes.com.

[Slide 6]

[Slide 7]

Open APIs enable social network sites to interoperate with one another, allowing cross-posting or the syndication of messages across multiple platforms simultaneously.

[Slide 8]

They also enable social networks to interoperate with a host of third party developers, giving rise to a developer ecosystem that builds on top of the platform, in a relationship of mutual dependency, adding value and driving traffic to the platform by giving birth . . .

[Slide 9]

to a world of useful and interesting applications including mashups

[Slide 10]

widgets

[Slide 11]

social games

[Slide 12]

desktop and mobile applications such as TweetDeck

[Slide 13]

and social plug-ins or the “like button”

[Slide 14]

Interoperability was a guiding principle of the development of the Internet. One of the founders, Jon Postel, who was religious about interoperability and non discriminatory standardization, spent much time and effort making hacks to achieve interoperability among heterogeneous computer systems.

Interoperability was widely acknowledged to prevent vendor lock-in (or dependency on a single company to provide a product or service), drive innovation, drive competition, and reduce costs.

[Slide 15]

With the adoption of HTML programming language, and introduction of the Mosaic browser as a standard graphical user interface, interoperability became a dominant paradigm in the development of the World Wide Web.

Early Internet companies began tentatively opening their APIs to 3rd parties but limiting the number of calls made, and restricting the amount of data shared – the number of calls will become unlimited and access to data less and less restricted.

Far from a risky business strategy industry leader Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, in 2002, urged online companies to embrace interoperability in order to achieve market lock-in and coolness.

FB will take O’Reilly up on this challenge to use interoperability to achieve market dominance, and going one further, by using Open APIs to exclude rivals – a common anti-competitive business practice. FB has refused interoperating with Google’s APIs for years, and yet rival search engine Bing enjoys full access to FB’s member information.

[Slide 16]

In contrast to rivals MySpace and Friendster, FB gradually pursued interoperability.

Looking back at the last five years a pattern emerges – with the release of each new API, member data become more portable, with more and more information gathered and open to more spaces online.

FB’s Developer API released in 2006 was the first related to a social network, and enabled a select group of third party programmers to create applications that were seamlessly integrated into Facebook, such as MyMusic, or iRead These applications had access to information that it could solicit, such as members taste in music and books, but also friends, profile information, photos and events

[Slide 17]

FB’s Platform API gave rise to an avalanche of social games and their viral adoption by members, who authorized full access to their profiles as a condition to play. However, it was discovered that even friends of players information was accessed contributing to what the Northern California Chapter of the ACLU dubbed the “App privacy gap.”

The Platform API also enable the development of widgets and mashups.

[Slide 18]

FB Connect API enabled members to logon to third-party sites with their FB identifications, opening up their activity streams to external sites.

[Slide 19]

FB Open Stream opened up member data to external desktop and mobile applications, introducing new categories of information that could be accessed so that these applications could achieve full functionality.

[Slide 20]

But with Open Graph, FB is able to advance on FB co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the ‘Social Graph” or the ability to share one’s sum total of connections, preferences, and profile information with third-parties, instantaneously.

Open Graph is really a trifecta of connectivity apps, 1) Graph Protocol, 2) Graph API, and . . .

[Slide 21]

With 3) social plugins, or basically the Like button, FB is able to achieve what its most unpopular advertising service Beacon could not. Like Beacon, the recommendation feature allows the tracking of member preferences and recommendations for targeted advertising, but instead of working invisibly under the awareness of its members, this is now achieved on a voluntary basis.

[Slide 22]

Looking back at was was initially shared through Open APIs with a few developers to the present, from Developer to Open Graph, we see that a lot more member information is open to third parties.

This is entirely in keeping with the companies advertising-based revenue model, where the more FB and its partners know about its members, the better it can offer targeted and predictive advertising, and grow its business.

To get perspective on how FB feels about Apps doing this, Zuckerberg reasons that if over 500 million Facebook users can look up information on each other, “Why shouldn’t an application be able to do that to give you an awesome experience too?”

The obvious answer is that apps aren’t friends, advertisers aren’t friends, FB is not a friend.

[Slide 23]

As FB gradually opens up member data over time, it conceals the shady practice of soliciting and monetizing member participation for secondary purposes.

When members do not have knowledge of what information is being gathered and for what purposes, they lose the ability to anticipate the consequences and make informed decisions.

They lose their autonomy – the freedom from interference to make choices and decisions on their own behalf.

[Slide 24]

As online participation is sucked into FB’s gravitational pull through colonizing the Web with Like buttons, directing info-flows to the network, and commodifying participation changing social value into exchange value – attracting advertisers, through network effects – FB achieves lock-in, where people feel dependent on the social network to participate in the main currents of social life.

Which also prevents seeking alternative and noncommercial spaces and forms of sharing.

[Slide 25]

This is why I believe that we need a new model for sharing based on human-centric values and principles, including transparency, privacy, security, user control over their information, even the granular control of what’s shared through Open APIs, and finally not using interoperability to discriminate, even among rivals.

In this way we can move towards opening the social media ecosystem and help establish a more sustainable basis for sharing online.

Thank you.

[Slide 26]

I. Format

II. Outcomes

III. Challenges

IV. Things I Would Do Differently

V. Role of the Charter in education/advocacy

I. Format:

The course was offered in an accelerated format taught at the undergraduate level (juniors and seniors, traditional and adult learners), at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest.

You can find syllabus, PowerPoints, and student work on the class wiki ( http://humanrightsindigitalage.pbworks.com/ ). Check out the student paper on HADOPI laws and the Digital Economy Act – “FOX Final.docx” under Research Papers link.

I used the terrific collection Human Rights in the Global Information Society (Jørgensen. Ed. 2006), complimented by newer essays, case studies and examples that highlight the worrying trend of the erosion of human rights online (ACTA, Hadopi, net neutrality challenges, state censorship, privacy violations, copyright culture, sexism, digital colonization, cultural imperialism), and the rising collective civil society efforts to confront these trends at every level.

I basically ran the class as a graduate seminar with panel discussions led by student groups of four providing chapter reviews that covered:

1) the significance of research (often stated as a problem or issue that needs to be addressed),

2) central themes or specific suggestions to address the issues raised

3) implication of results (possible limitations in the chapter, and suggestions for future research)

4) and finally, to pose a discussion question with the entire class as respondents.

So each week students read four chapters – analyzing one in depth – and answered each others’ prompts posted to the class wiki as comments.

I opened and closed classes with short lectures (2 x 20-25 min. per 3 hour class; access to my PowerPoints here: http://bit.ly/cMxHsa ).

II. Outcomes:

-students were very mobilized by the Human Rights framework of looking at the Internet and networked technologies. (The college also offers a service learning trip to the UN in NY every summer to study the Millennium Development Goals). Class was at full capacity – rare for Summer classes – with only one person dropping (18 students).

-students familiarized themselves with the relationships between ICTs and UDHRs, as well as the role of international and national law, regulation and policy

-students gained knowledge that ICTs both upheld and undermined certain rights for certain populations

-students gained an appreciation for the role of civil society and user rights in global information society

-students were encouraged to formulate and express their opinions, to take a stand but also to identify ways that they could go further in engaging these issues (e.g. at the level of advocacy, education, information literacy, awareness raising, and fighting back as users)

-some students were able to make local-global connections around ICT use and Human Rights. One student mentioned that at the College janitors/custodians were refused email accounts by their superior (hand-picked printed announcements were posted on a physical bulletin board). Having an email account provides information about the college, community events, school security issues, building maintenance, and service learning opportunities. Students identified withholding email accounts as a right to information issue, solidifying their resolve to pursue the cause.

-issues that students were particularly receptive to included: Freedom of Expression, Copyright and file sharing networks, Right to Information laws, Internet filtering, privacy on social networks, and defamation, libel, and slander issues including cyberbullying and sexting (though sexting also involves privacy and other rights).

III. Challenges:

Some of the challenges I faced in class fall under two categories, 1) US-Centric standpoints or bias 2) level of complexity (scale and scope) of the topic.

1) US Centric issues include:

-tensions between UN multilateralism vs. state autonomy or unilateralism

-issues of security trumping privacy and freedom of expression

-neoliberal capitalism as the only economic sphere of intelligibility (often raised in discussions of international development)

2) Complex issues that were difficult to cover in the time frame at the undergraduate level:

-the field of Internet Governance

-knowledge about the Internet and ICTs from a stratification or layers approach (basically how the Net works)

-lack of knowledge about theories of development

-lack of knowledge about the history of colonialism, imperialism, and the processes of globalization that contributes to many kinds of inequalities characterized by political, economic, and cultural dominance.

-local-global connections

IV. Things I would do differently:

-assign respondents to panel presentations instead of having the class to respond on a volunteer basis,

-more workshopping and less autonomous presentations,

-workshop UDHR’s relationship to ICTs more in the first class (I assumed too much here)

-provide a more basic introduction to what the Web is and how it works,

-go into more depth about how ICTs are governed, role of IGF, ICANN, intermediaries, ISPs

-provide more about the Political Economy of ICTs including issues of competition and cooperation, and market dominance)

V. How the HR Charter will help immeasurably in classes like this:

-it would be extremely helpful to have available a foundational document that already transposes human rights to the Internet, which can help accelerate comprehension about the relationships between ICTs and HRs

-the normative weight of the Charter would challenge students to reflect on their beliefs, which will help them form opinions through their engagement with strong arguments and unequivocally expressed opinions

-the Charter will help mainstream the interpretation of human rights online, which can help teach any class dealing with ICTs and ethics, human rights, international development, globalization, intercultural communication, political science and critical theory.

Ultimately, the Charter will empower me as an educator by providing a strong advocacy statement and powerful teaching tool (like the Jørgensen collection) that can help inform students about the the role ITCs can play in upholding human rights online and off.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions and/or comments, and I am really looking forward to the Charter.

-r

robertbodle.org/bodle/igf/figure1.html

robertbodle.org/bodle/igf/figure2.html

robertbodle.org/bodle/igf/figure3.html

-to help visualize relational ties used in creating social power within multistakeholder organizations.

Full version here: The Public Voice

From The Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC)

Glossary of ICANN Acronyms

Zittrain OP-ED

The chief worry is that our computing and content will exist in an environment controlled by a cabal of “gated cloud communities,” providing platforms that discriminate against developers, “hindering revolutionary software.” Zittrain’s recommendations for a better cloud environment include: 1) requiring companies, under fair practices law, to allow users to access and erase their digital dossiers 2) requiring companies to adopt more secure communication practices and password protections 3) demanding companies to keep their word about how users can use content sold and accessed online (in the cloud) 4) applying a regulatory requirement – governments or independent judiciaries to demand better safeguards for data held in the cloud 5) provide a “subtle set of incentives . . . tax breaks and liability relief”

Zittrain’s most emphatic point, again, is the generativity argument. Cloud computing environments that are controlled by “mighty incumbents” like Google, Apple, Facebook, are gated. That is, they prevent the freedom to develop applications for these sites and services, thereby control their uses, and reign in the radical potential of ICT innovation. When we fight against poor applications, wonder why there aren’t better ones that perhaps enable more interoperability and more syndication features, its due to a closed “cloud-computing infrastructure” that prevents it.

Image courtesy of http://infreemation.net/cloud-computing-linear-utility-or-complex-ecosystem/

1-Communication tool for reformists leaders Twitter and Facebook along with reformist websites such as Ghlamnews help communicate the decisions of reformist leaders and pass on the message.

2-Closing the gap between Iran and the world Iranian tweets reached thousands around the world and by following and re-tweeting people get involved.

3-Twitter does not organize demonstrations: Reformist leaders and their supporters make decisions to organize protests and they communicate it through different means.

4-Tweets can misinform people: either through reflex/impulse retweets or through malicious infiltration and disinformation (see Patronus Analytical for more on this).

5-Tweeting is recycling news and tips Information pool -most people tweet what they read on websites, and have also shared useful tips and information to help Iranians circumvent internet filtering and censorship.

6-Misunderstanding the sender: Sometimes tweet information form online sources without checking the facts, or without mentioning any references.

7-Activism and agendas: Most Iranians who tweet are activists supporting the protest movement and promoting a cause. Their information should be double-checked and not be accepted at face value.

Another important reassessment is Ted Friedman’s Tweeting the Dialectic of Technological Determinsm , which recognizes and responds to the unmistakeable US hype over Twitter’s social media revolution, attributing it to technological determinism or “a familiar American narrative of technological utopianism, in which hopes for social and political transformation become attached to the promise of new technologies.” Friedman gives a balanced view first looking at the benefits of cyber utopianism, which “momentarily transcend immediate pragmatic concerns” helping imagine new possibilities and a “radically different future.” But he also looks at the dangers of technological utopianism, which can “simply replace military utopianism as a self-serving imperial fantasy;” that democratic change cannot simply happen through military or technological means. The dialectic, then, is to “distinguish cybertopian hopes from the messier reality, without giving short shrift to either.” Well stated.

Implications: ZDNet suggests this could bring down RIAA, Ray Beckerman’s blog Recording Industry vs. The People suggests this will make US justices system the laughing stock of the international community, and EFF suggests that claims of unconstitutionality will be presented to the judge in “post-trial” motions, who will hopefully find the case unconstitutional and dismiss it. (Nnot sure about this last point).

At the very least, this will freak many people out (the millions of file sharers out there), destroy the woman who was scapegoated by the recording industry, and perhaps demonstrate to law makers, regulators and the public that new laws, regulations, and user protections are desperately needed to stop future abuse by RIAA and pro-industry  juries coerced by powerful RIAA legal teams.