people’s online social networks may be only an “imaginary” community

Class after class of students come through the small college where I work. They pour out their hearts into the digital blackness and spend their time with socially networked acquaintances; their conversation comes in fast spurts over AIM. Their relationships are increasingly weak and standoffish at the same time that what they reveal of themselves to the public is incredibly intimate. Secrets that they would hate for their parents to see are only a Google search away. Do they realize that those hasty admissions—ideals that will change, relationships that will sour, drunken indiscretions—will all be preserved like fossils in the digital strata for their entire lives and beyond? In a virtual world designed around speed, convenience, and ego, they will loose a sense of what constitutes a strong relationship and their ability to empathize will suffer. At a time when it is easier than ever to find a reason to hate someone, they will be more likely than ever to be willing to hate. How can we—as mentors, as parents, as developers, as netizens—put a stop to this progression?

The Internet is a Cruel Historian

My wife used to write online about our son, who was a baby at the time. Her journal was ‘onymous,’ meaning she made it a point of pride to use her real name. The stories she wrote were the sorts of thing that any parent would share about a baby—harmless amusing anecdotes, pictures, and such. As time went on, we had to think of something that parents before us had never considered. What will our son do when these funny baby stories are still available within seconds of a search when he is in high school? Or when he applies for his first job out of college? Or when he’s middle-aged and looking to distinguish himself in a profession? How will these stories effect his ability to find love or to raise his own children?  Fortunately, she put a lot of thought into where to draw the line on what was shared and what was held back, but many—probably most—parents won’t have that discretion.

Time as a Context and the Usefulness of Forgetting

Our reputation is an essential component to our freedom, for without the good opinion of our community, our freedom can become empty.

Many of us may have had parents who jokingly pulled out the family photo album to show our significant others embarrassing baby photos. It’s a poignant moment, when someone you love can laugh at pictures of you as a tender, vulnerable youth. It never occurs to us that mom may have showed these pictures around her office to near strangers when the pictures were newly made—they weren’t taken for the sole purpose of gathering dust in a photo album, after all. Sharing fun moments is part of the reward of being a parent, but the way we share is changing faster than our consideration for how, why, and with whom we choose to share our personal lives. The internet is ageless and its memory does not dim like a human memory does. The ability for endless lossless copies creates a further complexity.

Yesterday a friend of mine IM’ed me a link to a lifehacker.com article on Adobe’s Zoetrope, which is shaping up to be like the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. In other words, it’s a second and more robust attempt at archiving the internet and tracking changes across time in a way that will allow a user to browse a website through time with ease. Part of me recoiled in horror at this, and I was relieved that Adobe has not been archiving the internet, nor does it plan to move beyond a few high-profile websites. Still, with computer memory capacity, processing capability, and bandwidth getting cheaper and cheaper, it is only a matter of time before a company like Google—who already caches copies of nearly every webpage it crawls—to maintain a detailed, searchable, and browsable archive.

Part of growing up is the ability to move on—to change social contexts at different life stages. This is an ancient truth: “Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son?” Starting fresh in a new place allows a person to re-invent themselves without the burden of memory, and this is especially important for young people. Solove said:

We may find it increasingly difficult to have a fresh start, second chance, or a clean slate. We might find it harder to engage in self-exploration if every false step and foolish act is chronicled forever in a permanent record. [...] As people chronicle the minutia of their daily lives from childhood onward in blog entries, online conversations, photographs, and videos, they are forever altering their futures—and those of their friends, relatives, and others.

I have had several discussions in my office about the need for colleges and high schools to begin counseling students on how they craft online identities and how to use pseudonyms for identity exploration that may come back to haunt them in the future. After all, what is appropriate to share online is still a decision that many adults cannot make intelligently—expecting experimenting teenagers to be responsible for creating immortal reputations online is impossible. Solove says, “For most of us, the foolish things we do as teenagers disappear into oblivion and are revived only when we reminisce with old friends. But in today’s world, foolish deeds are preserved for eternity on the Internet.”

In my case, I was lucky enough to have spent my formative period online before Google and the Internet Archive—the internet did slowly forget my teenage years (thankfully). However, with new tools like Zoetrope and whatever ultimate librarian succeeds it, there is little hope that the information revealed about us online will ever fade. Worse, my colleagues here at Warren Wilson seem totally disinterested, and I imagine the situation at public schools is much more bleak. It seems the ‘Google generation’ will have to fend for itself because too few people today are aware of these issues at all.

The Fallacy of ‘Nothing to Hide’

Daniel Solove asks a sticky question: “Is there a justification for allowing people to conceal information
about themselves that will lower their reputations?” He goes on to discuss what reputation means and how using Google to build an opinion about someone in a matter of minutes is not reputation—at least not in the sense that society has relied on reputation for centuries. One key to reputation is that it is built largely on strong relationships between people who have known each other for a long time—that is the only guarantee that reputation is accurate. The problem with using Google to form an image of a person in moments is that there are only random fragments to draw from. It is foolish to think that we can know something of a person’s reputation from a Google search when a sense of ‘integrity’ would be impossible to convey believably from such a hodge-podge of scanned data. Solove discusses how we are living today in a ‘global village’ in the sense that we have access to all sorts of personal information about each other that used to only be commonly available to members of a small community. He says:

The global village not only revives features of the small village but also amplifies and alters them in profound ways. The global village is worldwide and it encompasses millions of people. The people of the global village have weak rather than strong ties; they are often known not for their whole selves but for various information fragments others hastily consume.

The Social Industry

I have lost the immortal part of my self and what remains is bestial.

My wife and I frequently reminisce about how we met in a CGI chatroom. At the time, the internet was still in its youth, and we formed a relationship from chatting for hours both alone and in a group. That sort of relationship-building happens more and more rarely online. Chatting has changed into Instant Messaging and the way it is commonly used is nothing like the long, soul-searching chats I remember. Social networks are designed to foster a large quantity of shallow relationships between acquaintances. Social networking activities are generally very surface-oriented, topical, and fast. As a result, it is increasingly unlikely that real, deep, and lasting relationships will be formed online. Solove points out, “when little is invested in a personal relationship, even information that is incomplete and of dubious veracity might be enough to precipitate ridicule, shunning, and reproach.”

Relationships mean less on the internet, and damaging someone else’s reputation becomes less serious at the same time that it becomes much easier. At a time when families are shrinking and the support systems that our ancestors enjoyed from community are missing, the internet is doing more harm than good in our social lives by turning socialization into shallow, monetized entertainment. It’s high time we had a social network designed to build real-life, deep connections between people. If we can learn about what it means to live and love meaningfully in a virtual world, perhaps we can better appreciate reputation (and each other) in a virtual context.

cyberspace norm police can be extremely dangerous—with an unprecedented new power and an underdeveloped system of norms to constrain their own behavior

This article is part of a virtual reading group for Daniel Solove’s book The Future of Reputation (schedule here).

‘Hard words break no bones’ is a phrase that has been in use since the Renaissance, but things may be changing. The internet is a realm composed mostly of language, and the process of identity creation that youth go through is thrown into sharp relief when it’s stripped down to words. When teens invest themselves online, they are putting a great deal of value into terms: names, labels, and the power of specialized language to build a sense of community. In a world of interaction and reputation built entirely on words, the old adage is being revised. Online, ‘sticks and stones will never hurt you, but words may break your heart,’ and on the internet, reputation and the damage done to carefully constructed online identities can have devastating ‘in real life’ (IRL) consequences for youth who are already unstable and in need of help.

International Dog Crap

Sometime in 2005, a tiny dog—one of the toy breeds very popular in Asia—crapped on a subway train in Korea. It’s owner, a young college student, refused to clean up the mess. A fellow passenger took a picture with a digital camera and ridiculed her online, unleashing a tidal wave of online activity that made her the center of a moral witch-hunt and an international discussion about privacy. The consequences for the Korean woman far outweighed her poopy faux pas. The stress ended in her dropping out of college and becoming suicidal. The introduction of Daniel Solove’s book, titled “When Poop Goes Primetime,” uses the case of ‘the dog shit girl’ to introduce us to the issues surrounding privacy and freedom of information on the internet. Even if you’re not going to read any of the rest of the book, this first chapter is worth your time.

More below the jump…

More recently, the tragic case of Megan Meier has revealed online emotional abuse as an issue of vital importance. Solove discusses how enforcing societal norms—a common and arguably necessary social force IRL—takes on new and disturbing dimensions online. While not precisely the same as the varied problems of the Meier case, both deal with the issue of ‘public shaming.’ Most of us probably remember occasions in our youth where we were singled out for ridicule because of some difference or infraction. The snickering, finger pointing, and name-calling is usually bearable IRL, and there are safety nets in place for those kids who can’t cope on their own (although the Columbine massacre shows that even our IRL safety nets miss the opportunity to prevent the very real damage possible from social ostracism). However, the power of the internet to draw massive crowds and unite communities has changed the dynamic of public shaming. Where once the class nerd may have had to deal with a handful of tormentors, now thousands or even tens of thousands can potentially participate in the shaming process.

The Internet Hate Machine

How do we allow people to control their personal information
without curtailing free speech or stifling freedom on the Internet?

There is a sizable online youth culture that makes a hobby of ridicule. Sometimes organized for arguably noble purposes—sometimes scorn is necessary, after all—this very loose association of people is mostly just in it for the lulz (for the uninitiated, that’s a nuanced plural of LOL with strong overtones of Schadenfreude). The tamer venues for those who find age-old humor in the misfortune of others include sites like break.com and collegehumor.com, but these sites are generally not much more problematic than the content you might find on youtube.com or the evening news. (Not that youtube.com hasn’t caused its share of problems.) Where the practice of public shaming comes into play in an arguably problematic way is deeper down the rabbit hole, on 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica[NSFW], and other sites frequented by what Fox News outrageously termed ‘hackers’ and ‘an internet hate machine.’ It is on these sites, in part, that self-identified members of culture-moniker ‘Anonymous‘ carried out various campaigns that fall under ‘Project Chanology.’ Some of these, such as the actions against Scientology, are carried out with a strong moral sense in mind (for better or worse), and Anonymous as a whole cannot be called ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ really. It is simply / complexly an internet culture. However, some of the venues and individual actions of public shaming read like virtual scenes from A Clockwork Orange.

4chan… I’m not going to try and describe 4chan’s /b/[NSFW]. It’s an imageboard, better known than but similar to 420chan.org[NSFW], 711chan.org[NSFW], and other (English) parts of the Japanese Futaba Channel. Here’s how Digg user Frywater described /b/:

Are you brave? If so, come hang with the most intelligent, most vile, most underground kidz on the net hands down. Chat with hotgirls, professors, artists, pedos, geeks, all at the same time. Have images burned into your head for the rest of your life. Stay long enough, and meet satan himself. youve been warned.

Right. So, contrary to the seeming chaos, things actually do get started on 4chan and its sister sites (see Project Chanology). On a smaller level, these sites have been used by individuals to propegate public-shaming memes such as the Korean ‘dog shit girl.’ The virtual mob leaders who start public shaming campaigns often adhere to an anti-philosophy that is most evident on the humor site Encyclopedia Dramatica[NSFW].

Encyclopedia Dramatica is a Wiki whose mission is simple: “spread the lulz” (read: time for a little of the ultra-violent, my droogies). As part of the fun, authors single out individuals online for strong ribbing (have a look at the Drama Queens or Furries[NSFW], for example). Many of its contributors are intelligent and college-educated, and it’s multi-author approach to dark humor leaves the articles drenched in a pervasive nihilism. For example, frequently the site challenges societal norms with the ironic use of hate language—used in such a way that it ridicules both the haters and the hated—and the articles are often deeply self-depreciating. The overall sense I came away with is that, were the site to have a singular author, that author would have no philosophy, moral, or belief whatever. Even the stated devotion to humor rings hollow, as the site’s long chronicle of lulz seems laced with bitterness and anger. In the end, none of it is real at all—not the humor, not the hate, and certainly not the ever-changing and conflicting sense of normalcy—and that irony may be the site’s only core ideal.

The online youth culture who frequent these venues think that the ‘internet hate machine’ phrase is ridiculous. The hate and ridicule isn’t quite fake, but it’s hardly real either. It’s just trolling. It’s just for the lulz. The problem is, the effect of their complex, nihlistic, mock-hate for the sake of chuckles is the same as real hate.  It’s little different from the high school bully who defends his brutality by saying “I was just pickin’ with him.” Bullying has become more sophisticated as youth have learned to communicate with so much more than their mouths and fists, but public shaming doled out for lulz is no less damaging for its sophistication and use of in-jokes, specialized language, and philosophy.

The blogosphere can be a much more powerful norm-enforcing tool, allowing bloggers to act as a cyberposse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital marks of shame.

The Virtual Street Worker

So what can be done to prevent virtual bone breaking and the very real emotional damage that public shaming can cause IRL? What is appropriate for humorous mockery and parody? One thing seems clear to me: creating laws around the technology of the internet (such as what’s happening in the wake of the Megan Meier case) is not the answer, nor is a top-down authoritarian approach possible or useful. Danah Boyd had a very interesting suggestion:

The most important thing that we need are digital street workers. When I was in college, college students volunteered as street workers to help teens who were on the street find resources and help. They directed them to psychologists, doctors, and social workers. We need a program like this for the digital streets. We need college-aged young adults to troll the digital world looking out for teens who are in trouble and helping them seek help. We need online counselors who can work with minors to address their behavioral issues without forcing the minor to contend with parents or bureaucracy. We need online social workers that can connect with kids and help them understand their options.

What is certain is that adults–parents especially–need to understand these issues and work with children to help combat the issue of online bullying. This can start with something as simple as parents actually paying attention to what their kids are up to online. Teens need their privacy, but that doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t know whether their children have invested large emotional sums in online relationships and an online persona.

Perhaps Daniel Solove will also have some insights in Chapter 4: ‘Shaming and the Digital Scarlet Letter.’ I’ll return to this topic then.

In then meantime, what are your thoughts?

By DAVID CRARY AP National Writer

NEW YORK Feb 27, 2007 (AP)— Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

“We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special’ and having children repeat that back,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. “Kids are self-centered enough already.”

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,” “I think I am a special person” and “I can live my life any way I want to.”

Read the full article.

I’m not sure how this advances our understanding of the Millennials in a meaningful way. I think most of us have known that they think of themselves as special and demand more personalized, individual attention than their predecessors. What Professor Twinge blames almost entirely on parenting is also, I think, a result of a ‘long tail‘ product and media atmosphere in general. Not only are teens encouraged to build unique identities, but they are (perhaps for the first time) given the niche tools to actually create that unique persona whereas in the past they were limited to broadcast media, chain stores, etc. that were essentially the same everywhere.

Perhaps this is less a case of an increase in narcissism and more a case of a breakdown of group identity (be it national, regional, or clique). In the past, a common media and product atmosphere forced a sort of conformity and community mentality. With growing globalization and the ability for an individual to specialize and create their own media and product universe, we have less and less in common with our neighbors. I can only imagine a stronger individualism would arise from that situation–and a stronger sense of international community.

Maybe it’s just the AP reporter’s spin, but Professor Twinge’s quoted comments and one-liners seemed a little acid and got old fast. They certainly weren’t academic or helpful. While she touched on MySpace and YouTube as a part of the ‘problem,’ she didn’t go beyond the names of those services in attempting to describe their role in the change in the way teens think of themselves.

Oh. I get it. MySpace and YouTube. Ha. Ha. Ha. :(

That creepy “differential permissioning” sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just… magically off limits. It’s a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative… Jesus, I love those words… Where was I?

Right. We teenagers have to live in “controlled spaces”. Radio-frequency ID tags, real-time locative systems, global positioning systems, smart doorways, security videocams. They “protect” us kids, from imaginary satanic drug dealer terrorist mafia predators. We’re “secured”. We’re juvenile delinquents with always-on cellphone nannies in our pockets. There’s no way to turn them off. The internet was designed without an off-switch.

Some of us electro-marketing types try very hard to ride the leading edge of electronic media’s next big thing. Pieces like this take us beyond the breakers altogether and go far out to where our feet can’t touch bottom and we’re carried up and down by swells that are felt as much as seen. What will it take to market to the next generation? What mindscape will they inhabit? What media solar system? By the time I start seriously thinking about my son’s college choices, what will have come to pass?

The result is, as the Princeton Review says, “that which a college admissions viewbook by its very nature can never really achieve—an uncensored view of life at a particular college.” And they’re right. I’m a senior in high school, and I’ll be applying to colleges this fall. The Princeton Review has been an important aid to my college search.

It lacks the clarity and wit of Sam Jackson’s reporting on his experiences, but it has something important that Sam lacks: it comes from someone not in-the-know about how college marketing works. Makes me wonder how many prospects really use the rankings and think that they truly offer an “uncensored view of life at a particular college.” Chilling.

And of course WWC makes a cameo as “Warren Wilson University” for our infamous listing.

Imagine a rising high school senior who not only researches colleges but also examines how college marketing works, takes a peak into our blogs and resources, and journals about it to share with others?

That is precisely what Sam Jackson of Phillips Exeter Academy is doing. I think it’s brilliant.

Why am I reading something most intended for college administrators and web marketers? Because simply put, I’m one of those people being marketed to (prospective students), and it pays to be savvy.

Damn. How do you like them apples all you wanna-be evil masterminds of marketing? Reminds me that the guy who founded TheU did it in college because he wanted to help all the kids who came in and experienced a kind of crash when the school didn’t live up to the hype.

Authenticity means honesty folks. This is a generation that sees through marketing spin as if it were so much gauzy silk drapery.

[As a totally unrelated aside, I just learned today that I missed Generation X bv a hair. I'm a member of Generation Y / Generation Next. At least I missed Howe and Stauss's classification of "Millennials" by three years, so I don't have to stop using 'they' and 'them' in favor of 'we' and 'us' when wielding my favorite demographic term. ]

Okay, so I’ve got this really terrible great musical medley of internet memes. It’s precisely the sort of thing you’d find linked from about 2.5 million MySpace accounts. Queue it up and start listening right now.

Okay, now open the bash.org random page and start reading some chat excerpts (okay, so this is from IRC, which is not really anywhere near as mainstream as AIM et al, but it all comes to about the same…). Now I want you to cross from the bash.org window to this entry while listening to the song. It would also be good if you could do something else too like talking to someone in your office. Well, if they haven’t all gone running yet. Now you’re channeling that inner teen!

Today’s subject is Internet Memes. Internet Memes are those fantastic and random bits of media that, for complex and probably unpredictable reasons, become suddenly and briefly very popular across the ‘net.

In general, memes are humorous pieces, most often video or animation based (although fark.com has generated many image-based and text-based memes). Once you’re done listening to the song, check out these Wikipedia articles on each of the memes that were mixed into the medley:

The Hampster Dance
All Your Base
Badger Badger Badger
Numa Dance
Bananaphone

Several are quite dated, but memes are always best identified in hindsight—especially for us old, twenty-something fogies.

Many of you are probably familiar with the current marketing term for this, which is “viral.” Really, virals have been around for as long as the internet has. It’s an overly-complex and buzzword-ized way of discussing how word-of-mouth works online. Do you have a family member that forwards you not-funny jokes and scare-messages via email? Those are virals, albeit within a very different and much easier to influence market.

Harnessing the power of marketing via meme or viral is very difficult, though the material is most often created relatively easily in the wild. For instance, colleges have spent thousands on Flash cartoons by consultants that specialize in higher ed marketing. For an example at an attempt at a viral, look at Franklin & Marshall’s flash cartoons, which I was introduced to by Andrew Beedle (who worked with F&M to create it) in his presentation at the 2005 Carnegie Communications conference. In my opinion, this cartoon seems too much like what it is—an attempt by adult marketers to appeal to a young audience with an extremely discriminating sense of authenticity born out of the examination of themselves and their social circles during the process of identity-building that is part of coming of age.

For some examples of Flash cartoon media that is popular among Millennials, check out the New Ground’s Flash Portal or just ask your nearest prospect.

The type of content that becomes a meme is deceptively easy to create, but whether or not it clicks with the market is hard to predict. I imagine something like 75% or better of every meme and viral on the web was created in a college dorm room. Memes are frequently accidents—Appalachian State University achieved the kind of free exposure that many colleges and universities would kill for with their unintentionally campy “Hot, Hot, Hot!” video, intended to be shown at Alumni receptions, and they did it completely by accident. Unfortunately, allot of people were laughing at them and not with them. With the right spin and releasing a tweaked version of the original video, they might’ve turned it wholly in their favor. Of course that didn’t happen. The whole ASU affair is an excellent example of how most schools are still either clueless when it comes to managing their web marketing and PR for the younger generation, or else they have hamstrung their talented staffers by bureaucracy and censure.

The moral of the story here is, if you want to learn about memes and virals, save your budget and ignore the Johnny-come-lately higher-ed marketing firms that think they can harness the phenomenon. (The only advertisers I’m aware of that have really succeeded have been high-profile, high-dollar video studios. See Sony’s Bravia commercial for example.) Understand that most internet memes—indeed most humor among the millenials—is going to be self-depreciating, which means that your boss probably won’t like it. Get rid of empty buzzwords—called a meme, a phenomenon, or a viral: it’s just word of mouth at work online.

Remember relevance and look no farther than your market.