Privacy Matters

Our web feature “Privacy Matters” stems from the ideas covered in Week 4 – the death of privacy.

“Privacy is not simply about that state of a set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences when negotiating data” (Boyd 2008: 99). Our target audience of 18-25 year olds all have a digital counterpart, half of which admit to having never audited their online profile – giving rise to the “intimate stranger” (Wellman 2002).

Facebook dominates the social media scene, gravitating a huge 98% of social networking users in this age group. As Boyd points out, with social convergence, control of private information is lost (2008:103).

With Facebook expecting personal data sharing to double every decade, it makes it every bit the “ticking privacy time bomb” that Marc Rotenberg (exec director of the Electronic Privacy Info Centre) describes Google as.

A ‘Sticky’ Feature

Rod McGuinness’ lecture struck a chord today when he talked about information that is collected online essentially being ‘up for grabs’.

Tapping into Jenkins’ network culture, our feature relies on that participatory culture of sharing – as the data calculator will be a link spread via Facebook (Jenkins 2009:2).

Grant McCracken calls this spreadable model a “multiplier” as it emphasises the activity of consumers in shaping the circulation of media content (McCracken in Jenkins 2009:2).

The repurposing of the media content adds further value to it, allowing the content to be localized to diverse contexts of use and specialized for each individual user – as they enter their own calculation of personal data worth.

Facebook is our chosen platform as it is “very ‘sticky’” – users tend to visit often and this youth demographic are quite receptive when spoken to in “their online vernacular” (Hearn 2008:211; Malik 2005; Hempel 2005).

On average, about one-third of Facebook users’ friends see each post – this makes me fairly confident that our web feature will effectively spread online via this particular social network.

Mediating media plugs

The commodification of social relations is a rising issue considering the prevalence of online journalism.

Similar to PageRank, the process of paid-for-placement is “virtually invisible to the searcher” and this disallows the reader to apply the appropriate adjustment to the credibility of the content (Finkelstein 2008:114).

But wait, there’s hope!

In April of this year, Google’s head of spam search Matt Cutts confirmed that PageRank algorithms had changed, attempting to close rank (ha) on paid-for blog placement. The take-over of social shares from backlinks is further proof that online public relations may be aligning with Google’s priorities of quality editorial content as opposed to bowing to SEO agencies’ wishes.

Considering 61% of women who are active blog users make purchase decisions based on blog recommendations, it could be interesting to create a feature looking into issues of sponsorship and disclosure.

**This article is not endorsed by Matt Cutts and/or Google. I genuinely think they’re both cool.

Bombs #googlebombs #twitterbombs #hashtag

Finkelstein may as well be Frankenstein considering the monster he unleashed: the inner workings of Google and how people use this knowledge to exploit the system.

Considering users generally want to look at as few results as possible, the commodification of the page rank system shouldn’t come as a surprise (2008: 104).

The practice of “Google bombing” as the “mirror image of search engine optimisation” particularly caught my attention (2008:113). Down this rabbit hole, I discovered a similar concept called “Tweet bombing”. #obama #onedirection #clouds

An example of a particularly successful Twitter bomb analysed in a research paper described how nine fake user accounts produced 929 tweets within 138 minutes – all with a URL link to a political website. The message may have reached 60, 000 before being deleted as spam.

Feature idea: Orchestrating our own google or twitter bomb and observing the wreckage.

The Resurrection of Blogging

 

It’s interesting to note that in 2007, blogs were declared “dead”. Yet in 2011, Tech blog (a blog – duly noted) estimated that there were over 70 million WordPress blogs and over 39 million Tumblr blogs. The blogosphere has come a long way from the mere 23 blogs counted in the World Wide Web back in 1999.

In Jodi Dean’s article ‘The Death of Blogging’, she says, “A sure sign of the triumph of a practice or idea is the declaration of its death.” She hits the nail right on the head.

And so here I am, jumping on the bandwagon, reaffirming that the obituary for blogging was definitely premature.

Dean goes on to talk about the digital footprint that all of these bloggers are leaving behind – even after they have deleted their blogs. “Dead blogs persist as digital zombies.” This idea of a trail leading “virtually anyone” – including potential employers – to my thoughts/incoherent tangents made an impression on me to say the least. You’ll note that my full name is not attached to this blog.

Hopefully I don’t make too insightful comments here, thereby making myself wish I had attached my full name to this blog so as to receive credit for aforementioned insightful comments. That said, I hope they are still somewhat insightful. Enjoy, Jonathon Hutchinson.