Tag Archives: internet

Blog

The true cost of internet addiction: US$14,500

1 Comment

internet cafe signFinally, the spurious demon of  internet addiction gets its own Betty Ford clinic – complete with a scarily large price-tag. Ars Technica reports on the reSTART program that has just been launched by the Heavensfield Retreat Center in Washington State; enrolment for qualifying internet addicts has just begun, so block-book your 45-day break immediately! I guess you’ll not want to mark it in Google Calendar, though… [image by James Cridland]

Heavensfield certainly makes it sound like a professional and fully featured program, though:

reSTART offers counseling with professionally-trained staff, group therapy, vocational coaching, 12-step meetings, recreational activities, “high adventure” outings, health and fitness programs, and volunteer service. This is in addition to psychiatric assessments, medical treatment, scholastic tutoring, and career guidance. As pointed out by Mashable, you must qualify for reSTART by displaying symptoms of IAD, which include a strong impulse to use the Internet, withdrawal symptoms without it, a reduction in other interests or social activities as a result of the Internet, and an impairment of everyday life.

Hmm; that all sounds rather like someone I know… but then doesn’t pretty much anyone who isn’t a teetotaller come out looking like an alcoholic on the Alcoholics Anonymous tests?

That said, much as I’m skeptical about a high-dollar treatment program designed to cure it, I’m pretty sure there is an addictive component to the internet – my recent weeks without it were pure hell, though that was as much to do with being unable to work for my clients (and hence pay my rent) as anything else. Whether the addiction is a basic physiological response or a reflection of how swiftly and completely our social culture has migrated onto the intertubes remains a topic for debate, I think.

Blog

Keep watching the skies – tag clouds as predictors of emergent fads

1 Comment

relational tag cloudEvery day, I spend a couple of hours digging through my RSS subscriptions for interesting stories, some of which I use here at Futurismic and most of which I store away at del.icio.us as research material (you know, for those fiction pieces that I keep meaning to find time to write… ahem). [image by ottonassar]

I’m a big fan of tagging my links because it enables me to trawl through the stored pieces (mine, and other people’s as well) by context and related topics, but it turns out there’s a greater benefit – user folksonomies on social bookmarking sites can be used to track and predict emerging trends and fads using mass data analysis:

The researchers tracked different users and noted the submissions they made, as well as the tags used on those posts. Taking this data, they could see what tags were frequently used in correlation with one another. This created a “coocurrence network,” which assigns weight to tags based on how often the tag was used and how many different users applied it.

With this information, it was possible to conduct a random walk (stepping randomly from one tag to another) and note how tags that occur together can form an otherwise undetectable semantic chain. These tags, based on their association with one another, allowed the researchers to follow along as one popular trend gradually replaced its predecessor.

When comparing individual random walks with one another, researchers noted that tags that appear close together in a non-obvious semantic network were likely to be visited by the same user, and tags that were far apart were visited together less often. Although no individual user might be aware of following these obscure connections, they became obvious when the data was examined in bulk.

[…]

The applicability of Heaps’ law to Internet tags was noted in particular. Heaps’ law states that the number of distinct words used in a body of text grows sublinearly relative to the size of the text—the bigger texts have more diverse vocabulary, but there are diminishing returns as things scale up. Likewise, the number of unique tags on del.ici.ous and BibsSonomy grow nearly linearly relative to the total number of tags—that is to say, our interests and the vocabulary used to describe them grow directly along with the Internet. It isn’t all just lolcats and musical parodies, even though it might seem so sometimes.

This fascinates me, because it confirms as a real phenomenon something that I always dismissed as a fallacy born of close involvement; scanning close to a thousand RSS feeds a day from a variety of sources and covering a variety of subjects gives me a sense of being able to observe trends bubbling up out the web’s chaotic maelstrom. I get a real kick out of watching a story or meme moving from low-level niche sites into the wider world of the web, and seeing new obsessions gather popularity.

And talk about hindsight – if I’d thought about it, I’d have seen the economic collapse coming about six months or more before it bit in and shifted all my investments somewhere safer. If I’d had any investments, that is…

Of course, this sort of trend analysis could probably be used for profit or surveillance purposes as well as the more abstract goals of research and cultural analysis, but if you haven’t realised that the internet is the ultimate double-edged sword by now… well, you’ve not been following along with my links, have you? 😉

Blog

The Iranian elections: is democracy viral?

2 Comments

Iranian election protestorsThe past weekend’s hot news story is still smouldering strongly today: the Iranian elections (and the resulting landslide victory for incumbent president Ahmadinejad) have resulted in accusations of vote fraud (which isn’t entirely surprising) and street riots and protests from supporters of the principle opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi. Throw in some state censorship in the form of social networking websites and text messaging services being blocked, and you’ve got a story that’s not entirely unfamiliar in recent years. [image by Shahram Sharif]

Of course, I have no idea whether or not the election was rigged or not, though I have my suspicions. What interests me most about this story is how it paints a very different picture of Iran to the one we’ve been fed in the last decade or so. Far from being a monolithic Islamic state in thrall to Ahmadinejad, there’s evidently enough support for reform to threaten the incumbents; after all, a mere handful of angry reformists does not a riot (or an electoral recount) make.

How long this has been the case is beyond my knowledge, and I wish I had the time and opportunity to research it further. But the ubiquitous presence of peer-to-peer communications (and their inevitable censorship by the state) is telling, and I find myself wondering if perhaps the talk about democracy being a viral concept has some weight to it after all. Have services like Twitter and Facebook simply given a voice to those already opposed to the incumbent Iranian government? Or have they acted as a catalyst, enabling a population whose access to information and discussion was previously more closely controlled to see that there are alternatives within their grasp?

These aren’t questions with simple answers, of course, and there are many other factors at play in a world where everything is changing faster than ever before. But I think it’s fair to suggest that the internet is one of the strongest disruptive forces on the gameboard, especially in countries where state control of media has been far more crude and heavy-handed than here in the privileged West.

I fully expect we’ll be seeing a lot more stories like this from developing nations in years to come, as affordable communications technology pulls aside the heavy curtains of the state… it’s good news for oppressed citizens, certainly (at least in the short run), but for global stability? Maybe not so much.

Blog

Crowdsourced justice, or just Vigilantism2.0?

Anonymous vigilantism against Kenny GlennThere’s been a steadily increasing number of stories about “crowdsourced justice” of late, a phenomenon that arguably started in China but which is spreading across the world to anywhere that has a population with ready access to the internet.

For example, you may have heard about the 4chan crusade against one Kenny Glenn, a teenager foolish enough to post videos of himself abusing a kitten; Anonymous doesn’t respect many things, but it sure loves cats, and swiftly unearthed enough information about Kenny to land him in very hot water (and to get the cats rescued, natch).

An article at H+ Magazine takes an in-depth look at the phenomenon, which the Chinese refer to as the “human flesh search engine”:

Fortunately, human flesh search engines don’t end the lives of their victims, like the witch-hunts or lynching of the past.

(Erm… they don’t yet.)

We will not know for some time how these cyber-hunts will shape the future of our privacy, freedom of speech and sense of justice and security. But there is no doubt that these cases are just the beginning a vast social change taking place right now. What we can see from these incidents is that the flow of information will no longer be controlled and that the power of public outrage will not easily be quelled.

Kitten Killer of Hangzhou and her cameraman will walk away from their brutal act.. An apology is hardly appropriate recompense for the death of the tiny tortured feline. But these small stories will remain a part of our collective human memory and help guide the decisions of future societies, because the Internet does not forget, does not forgive and cannot be stopped. Ever.

While containing more than a mote of hyperbole, that final sentence is very telling – not because it is de facto true, but because many people believe it to be true. It’s that motivation combined with the ease of acting upon it en masse that gives human flesh search engines their power. [image sourced from Anonymous’ Kenny Glenn site]

And via SlashDot we find that it’s not just animal abusers who can become the focus of public ire, even in censorship-ridden China: the China Digital Times has a report regarding the dissemination of personal information about one Chen Hua, a deputy director of the Beijing Internet Propaganda Office who was foolish enough to boast of his own corrupt practices to a girl he was seeing “in a personal capacity”. Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant; word got out, the human flesh search engines dug up a lot of Chen’s personal details, and Beijing is now trying to contain the viral spread of said information… which makes me wonder yet again about how effective the blackout on the Tiananmen massacre really is.

Much as with any other technology, the uses to which the internet can be put are decided by the people with access to it; most of these cases could be argued to be ethically justified to a greater or lesser degree (though the lines are as fuzzy as ever), but that may not always be the case. The lord of the flies tends to follow us wherever we go, and I can’t see the transition to the digital world slowing him down too much.

Blog

Pseuicide – faking your death on the internet

2 Comments

fake death?Via Chairman Bruce comes a great article at Wired UK about the phenomenon of Munchausen By Internet – members of online communities who fake serious illness or death for a variety of reasons, be it to dig themselves out of their other untruths or because they enjoy being the focus of mass sympathy:

In his 2004 book Playing Sick, Dr Marc Feldman, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Alabama, offers the first published investigation into a disorder he refers to as “Munchausen by internet”, or MBI, which introduces an online element to the symptoms of Munchausen syndrome, the condition whose sufferers fake sickness and may demand medical treatment for a illness they do not really possess.

“The easy and ready access to the internet propagates MBI,” said Feldman in a recent email. “In fact, I believe that MBI is more common than MS in ‘real life’. The reason is that it is so easy to use the net to research medical conditions, post fallacious materials, and engage others without the need to literally enact an ilness. Many of these people seem to be very lonely, and the internet offers a readily and continually-available source of unconditional support.”

In one startling case, a woman from New Zealand named “Sara” approached Feldman with an 8,000-word confession of her own Munchausen by internet, a story of vast complexity and novelistic detail in which she created more than eight online aliases, constructed intricate relationships between them, and killed at least five.

It’s grimly fascinating to see how the internet is amplifying some of the weirder parts of human psychology. I can’t help but wonder whether or not this might become some sort of performance artform, though; one of the earliest examples of a faked death online was a guy on USENET:

In 1999, when online interaction was still in its relative infancy, a prominent poster on the popular usenet group alt.religion.kibology perpetrated one of the earliest fake deaths, partly as a way “to be a fly on the wall at my own funeral” but also purportedly as part of an investigation into the nature of online relationships. A long-time and regular poster named M Otis Beard suddenly became unusually argumentative with fellow contributors over a brief period, before one of Beard’s friends, who had met him in real life, posted a muted and thoroughly credible notice that Beard had killed himself.

[…]

Some days later, Beard himself resurfaced with a message that, while overbearingly smug in tone, is underpinned by what he claimed was an intellectual motive. After a gleeful pronouncement that “rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, Beard announced that his “little escapade” had been a method of testing the sense of community in the group and had been designed to offer a perverse sense of catharsis when the deception was revealed.

“You thought you had irretrievably lost something; that something is now returned to you,” he wrote. “If I hadn’t made you sad by pretending to be dead, I wouldn’t have been able to make you happy (well, OK, angry and THEN happy) by jumping out of my coffin, whole and hale. Forgive me for putting you through the emotional roller coaster ride, which I hope was a healthily cathartic experience for all of you.”

That sounds exactly like the sort of stunt that the 4chan/Anonymous massive might come up with, keen as they are to shatter expectations, wind up the over-emotional and disrupt internet communities using the very tools used to construct them. I can easily imagine some sort of annual awards for the most convincing, most audacious or most ridiculous faked deaths… and increased awareness of the phenomenon will only make it seem more of a challenge. [image by aliscarpulla]