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I really liked this article from Gizmodo entitled: “When to Give Your Girlfriend Your Password” (Image above from Gizmodo).   The specific article talks about the proper time to give your Internet application passwords to your significant other.  In general, from a sociological point of view, it speaks to a growing societal understanding of what is the proper behavior associated with Internet applications.

In short, the article says that it is okay within a relatively short amount of time to give your Netflix password to your girlfriend or boyfriend…but it is never okay to give passwords for your Facebook, Email, or AIM accounts.  I agree.

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But Gizmodo does not go far enough in discussing this issue.  The article talks about girlfriends. and boyfriends..but what about spouses?

If you withhold your Facebook or email password from your spouse, will it be interpreted as you withholding something?  My guess is that how a couple views this issue will be closely aligned with the culture that they come from.  In collectivist cultures like Korea, Japan, and India, the sharing of passwords is probably a given.  In individualistic cultures like the United States and England, couples may decide to keep their passwords private. It goes even further.  I can bet that in male dominated cultures, women share their passwords more than men.  So in male dominated societies like Mexico, Thailand, or many African Countries, it is more likely that the woman will share her passwords (or be forced to share them) than the man

Just some food for thought.

I think one way in which new media promotes piece is by (1) decreasing the social distance and (2) decreasing the the information differential between people. Throughout history, wars have been started at the behest of a few on the top. The reasons to fight are usually particular to the upper classes or maybe even a handful of people – delusions of grandeur, oil, simple status, etc, and quite insufficient. But due to social distance people in power have appeared otherwordly (see Triumph of the Will and watch Germans fawning over Adolf Hitler) and due to differences in what they know and what we know they can push the masses in the direction they so choose (see George Bush and the WMD’s he knew they had but we didn’t).

New media, with its decentralized nature, makes it easier for people to gather and disseminate information. This allows more information to be known about our leaders, and it makes them appear less Godly, more human, and more like us. We are less likely to take their word as gospel. This gathering and disseminating of information also means that it is harder for governments to lie, conceal the truth, or otherwise produce a narrative that best serves their ends. In a society where new media is prevelant, the people get a say in what the nation’s narrative is.

There are at least two possible answers to this question*:

1. People help those they hardly know because there are incentives embedded in the online community (e.g. reputation, points, etc.). This approach sees people as individual, rational, resource maximizers.
2. People help because it is in our evolved nature to do so. We are natural cooperators, and for many forms of group activity we do not need any incentive. This approach sees people as fundamentally social animals, with an innate desire to work collectively.

Most scholars of human behavior have spent the last twentieth century working under the first assumption that we need incentive in order to do things that have no direct benefit to us (e.g. in order to get students to fill out a survey, we need to offer them money, otherwise they would not do it). Further, in cases where incentives could not be offered, then punishments needed to be given in order to encourage collective behavior (e.g. if there was no fine for littering, more people would simply drop their trash because it is not in their best interest to walk to a trash can). This assumption is strongest in economics, but it permeates even my discipline, sociology. We also see this approach in businesses, law,
and public policy. Everyone was trying to find out how to get the incentives right.

But in the past thirty years or so, research in economics, social psychology, and evolutionary biology has led to the conclusion that we are natural cooperators. In short, in any population, there are usually more cooperators (people who need no incentive) than non-cooperators. So, given a population of users in an online community, you will always get a good number of people who are willing to simply answer questions without needing any incentive – no points, no votes, nothing**.

There is a catch however. Many natural cooperators lend a helping hand, and expect help in return. If they do not get help, they will not be so generous in the future (for those who read economics or social psychology or evolutionary psychology books, this is the “tit-for-tat” strategy).

In most online forums you have very little participation because those who are willing to write posts and comments soon find that most people simply read the posts, get the information, and do not participate. Those natural cooperators then leave.

So, in an online community, there needs to be a critical mass of cooperators to keep exchanges going.

Ironically, this leads us back to the first answer, that people are selfish and need incentives to cooperate. In order to have a stable, and vibrant online community you need to make sure to provide incentives for selfish people who only respond to “votes” or “likes” or some other form of reward. If there was some way to know the composition of the people browsing a website, one could calibrate the code to fit that composition. However, we never know, so it is always a safe decision to go ahead and give rewards. That way the cooperators will be reciprocated, and the selfish ones will get their reward.

So, like most things in life, the answer is not a simple one. The answer is that people help those they hardly know because some are selfish and selfless!

*This question was posted on Quora, and I attempted to answer it there.  So, this is a repost….

**Yochai Benkler‘s The Penguin and the Leviathan gives a very good review of this literature.

Groups of young people in urban environments, generally black and male, are coordinating their illegal activities via social media been in the news quite often over the last few years, and increasingly so over the last several months.

Young minorities are able to harness the power of Twitter to microcoordinate their activities and overwhelm spaces and places, allowing them to shoplift, rob, or commit other deviant acts. Image from: http://celebpromoter.com/instead-of-a-flash-mob-these-people-did-a-%E2%80%9Cflash-rob%E2%80%9D-at-convenience-store-video/

On one summer day in late July of 2011 in Chicago, five people were attacked and robbed in what were called “flash mob robberies”.  The teens, working in small groups, surrounded their victims, physically assaulted them, and stole their valuables.  IPads, bikes and wallets were stolen.  There was some redemption for the victims, as they were able to identify some of the attackers when police placed suspects in a line-up.  The attacks on that day were only one of several.  The month before four people were attacked within minutes in Chicago’s tony Streetervile area.

Further, these coordinated deviant activities are not unique to Chicago.  Several urban areas such as Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.  These flash robberies had become such a public concern that officials in Montgomery County, a country in Maryland north of Washington D.C. proposed a bill that would impose tougher penalties on those involved in flash mob robberies. But arguably the most attention has come from the flash mob robberies in Philadelphia.  There, the size of flash mobs have been steadily becoming larger, and more brazen.  In 2009, police rushed to stop what they called “a rampage by more than 100 who blocked traffic, pounded on cars, stole merchandise, and assaulted several people” in an upscale area of Philadelphia.  By March of the following year, officials were considering an early youth curfew as thousands of youth swarmed the streets.  By early August 2011, Philadelphia had enacted an early curfew, and anyone under 18 in select areas of the city in which flash mob violence was rampant.

Public discussions about flash mobs revolve around why they are occurring and how to stop them.  The why question has been quite touchy, with most discussions revolving around whether or not the mobs should be described in racial terms and how much is race a factor.  Public officials have been more aggressive in tackling the question of how to stop the flash mobs.  Police officers have stepped up their presence in areas prone to flash mob attacks, and curfews have been imposed to get teenagers off the street.

But I believe that there is a tremendous upside to the awareness that these young minorities are coordinating their activities.  And I think it all starts with acknowledging that poor black males in urban environments are usually doing the flash mobbing.    Let me explain.

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Information technology, especially the Internet, has become so integral to the workings of modern day life, that I think it’s necessary that we fully integrate digital literacy into our educational institutions.  As it stands, a computer class falls into three categories:

• An elective – students in high school or college choose to take these courses as a part of a liberal arts curriculum.  Said students, especially in college, pay as much attention to the course as they would an art or music appreciation class, which is very little relative to their other required courses.
• A “pseudo” computer literacy course – this course doesn’t really discuss the science, history, logic, or rational behind information technology.  Instead, the class becomes a vocational class about computers.  Students practice opening and closing documents, writing equations in excel, and yes, typing.  These are important skills, but this course does not nearly get at the heart of how information technology structures modern life.
• A required course for select majors – students majoring in a computer related field, or a field that relies heavily on computing will take an intro course that covers the basics of information technology.  These courses lay the groundwork for understanding how information technology effects our world.  Unfortunately only those select majors – a small percentage – get this valuable information.

During the course of an educational career, students should take one or more courses that encompass these three components of digital literacy (at the least). I wish I could take credit for this concise image, but the credit goes to an educator, Phil Macoumb, who blogs at http://macoun.edublogs.org

Some may say that with these three options, we have enough.  American students are falling behind as it is in math and science, time shouldn’t be wasted on computer literacy.  I could buy that argument if I presumed that digital literacy was a skill like woodworking, something that could be used by a select group of practitioners or learned “on the job”.   But it is no more a skill than learning about how our constitution has molded American life, or how Greek tragedies have informed modern storytelling.  But just like math and English (admittedly not the same degree) the population as a whole needs to have a strong grasp of digital literacy in order for society to function properly.

Let me explain…

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Like most children of the 80′s, I was told that computers were the future.   So,when I entered college in the early 90′s, I majored in computer science.  However, instead of playing video games, planning war games, or at the very least monitoring a bunch of whirring machines, I found myself learning code and enrolled in math classes.

What?  Where was all the stuff?  I wanted to be the nerdy black guy who helped the hero save the world by feverishly clicking buttons and somehow deriving an answer based upon some highly technical knowledge “my” computers spit out (or alternatively…a bad buy…like the geeky black guy from the first Die Hard movie).   Needless to say, after fiddling with Fortran for a semester, I changed from computer science to biology.

In retrospect, I was learning computer science.  But I operated under the false belief, at that time,  that owning was knowing.  I didn’t care about the concepts that underlie the concept of computing, or even why computers were important.  I just assumed that I would be sitting in a classroom loaded with computer terminals and then magically it would all come together.  I could chalk this false belief up to a combination of youth and coming from a working class background where I was the first in my immediate family to go to college.

But this false belief also operates at an institutional level.  Let me explain…

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There are a few hundred websites that dominate Internet traffic.  I bet the average Internet user may regularly use less than 10 websites…

1. A portal (probably Yahoo)
2. Some social networking site (probably FaceBook)
3. Some e-mail service (probably Google)
4. Some video streaming website (probably YouTube)
5. A school or work site where they are required to log in.
6. One or two special interest sites – political, local news, hobby, etc.

That seems like a lot, but unlike a television, people tend to lock in to their favorite websites, and never leave.  And, as Facebook and Google compete to become one stop shops for news, commerce, and e-mail, this list may shrink to less than five. And, even when a person is forced out of their daily habits, they tend to go to the same site.  For shopping, they go to Amazon, for music they go to Itunes, and for any kind of research they go to Wikipedia.  Once the mission is accomplished, they return to their regular routine.

No one surfs the web anymore. Most Internet users probably have in memory all the web addresses they will ever need.

All the other websites fit into that long, long, tail that we have heard so much about.  So, a site like mine gets twenty hits a day…probably better written and more interesting sites get between upwards of 1000, but that is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands or millions of hits that the big players get.

This means that “surfing the web” has become an antiquated term left back in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, because no one surfs anymore, it gets harder and harder to find that quirky, fresh, and original content.  The only way a web site gets noticed is if it is trying to make some money in some way, gets some investment, and spends thousands of dollars marketing itself.

But there are plenty of good websites out there that never get noticed.

I decided to look for these cybernuggets.

Let me explain…

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I have begun to hang out a coffee shop near my home called Small Point Cafe.  Its a great coffeehouse.  Small Point is in a good location in downtown Providence with a lot of foot traffic.  I can sit at the window and people watch (one of my favorite pastimes).  The bathroom is clean, the service is nice, the ambiance is relaxing (in a granola-artsy type of way…see pics from another blogger here).  And, in what is now a requirement for coffee shops, they have free wi-fi.

Small Point Cafe finally broke my allegiance to Starbucks.  When my home or office surroundings get stale I go to Small Point for a fresh environment to stimulate my mind.  On this particular day I decided to do some more research on my white nationalism project.  I tried to log into the American Renaissance website, an avowedly white nationalist website.  Well…as it turns out, I cannot access many of those websites because…as the webfilter at Small Point says, they are websites of “hate and aggression”.

As a good liberal, I initially applauded this idea.  Let’s stop hate speech, I thought.  But then, I remembered recent arguments I had made about free speech and political correctness (here).  And then, I thought about even more recent arguments (my last post, actually) about how governments try and block websites they don’t like (here).

Is there much of a difference, in principal, between this sign and a "whites only" sign?

And suddenly I didn’t like the idea of Small Point blocking American Renaissance, or any website for that matter.  This raises so many questions.

• If I can draw a generalization from the ambiance of Small Point (organic, green, artsy) I can make an assumption that the owners and even more so the patrons of the cafe are left or center left in their political orientations.  Wouldn’t that imply some level of tolerance…even tolerance for groups that are intolerant?
• At the same time, this is a private enterprise.  Shouldn’t they have the right to ban whatever websites they see fit?
• But then, we don’t let private enterprises segregate their customers by race anymore (thank God…I couldn’t people watch if I had to sit in the back near the bathroom).  So should we let private enterprises segregate websites by political orientation – in effect putting websites showing that are deemed “hate websites” a “whites only” sign?

This amounts to the digital segregation of opinion.  Just food for thought.

We think of the Internet as a medium for free speech.  And, in a familiar progression, free speech equals dissent which can equal democracy.  And we all like democracy.  Its a good thing.  Late 2010 and early 2011 has witnessed this progression in North Africa and the Middle East.  We have all witnessed the “Arab Spring“, as it is now being called.  Information spread via the Internet was one of the catalysts for political change in that region.

But governments are getting adept at finding out who’s who on the web (see Mozorov’s The Net Delusion):

First, every device connected to the Internet is given a unique number known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address.  This is not unlike a mailbox.  While governments cannot exactly say that you personally sent information from that address, chances are highly likely that you or someone you know used that computer (this is not unlike a mailbox, where outgoing mail sent from that box is most likely sent by the owner…although technically someone could place mail in someone else’s box to be sent).  They can simply block information from traveling to and from your ISP, or they can trace information sent online back to its IP address.   By the way, if you would like to know your IP address, go here.

Second, passwords used for social networking and e-mail accounts can be stolen using malware like Firesheep.  From our IP addresses, we send out information packets.  Firesheep and other types of malware are “packet sniffers”.  Once the passwords are stolen of course, all hell breaks loose, and people’s personal information is compromised.  Repressive governments, especially those with more resources such as China and Iran, hire hackers to build this malware and hack into the emails and social network accounts of suspected dissidents.

I would like to believe that one of the great things about the Internet is that it can foster free speech.  But, when anonymity is lost, speech is no longer free in some countries.  Speaking out can cost you your livelihood, some jail time, and maybe your life.

Peyman Bagheri is a blogger who has fled Iran for fear of being imprisoned (picture from CNN.com). Other potential bloggers fear the same repercussions, and thus remain silent.

Just as hard as governments are working to erase anonymity and increase the costs of speech, there are others working just as hard to keep the Internet anonymous and keep speech free.

Let me explain…

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When sociologists talk about institutions, they talk about collections of practices that order the lives of generations of people.  When we say “order the lives”, we mean that the institution possesses symbols, values, and norms that we believe, understand, and adhere to.  In this way, the catholic church would be an institution.  Marriage is also an institution.

We can even talk about people or businesses as being institutions as well – if they are so visible that they order our lives, and they possess a permanence that makes them relevant to generations of people.  Thus, Dick Clark would be an institution, or Monday Night Football (even the recently retired John Madden).

Facebook has arguably become a social institution. President Obama may have started what will become a rite of passage for politicans...doing Facebook Town Halls.

There are several companies of the digital age that are good candidates for being called institutions: Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.  Certainly their market dominance suggests that they are some of the most important economic forces of the digital age (along with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft).  But these companies, more than others, appear to have become inseparable parts of the social fabric of the nation.

Let me explain…

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