What the Internet is Doing Part 3 of 3: Our Communities
Iâm haunted by the mis-information thatâs out there about what the internet is âdoingâ to us. Iâve made it my career as a social psychologist to look closely at the claims made in public and behind the walls of the ivory tower, examining research about what drives and influences us and how todayâs drivers and influencers might be different from those pre-web.
Iâve been doing this for 15 years. Last year, I published a book about it, and next week, the fifth series of The Digital Human, the BBC Radio 4 programme about who we are as human beings at the beginning of the 21st century.It starts next Monday 7 April.
But there are still so many questions! So Iâm publishing a primer on the good and the bad of what the internet is doing to us.
This is the third in a series of blogposts answering those questions. Read the first two, about our selves and our sex lives.
Todayâs topic - what the internet is âdoingâ to us.
In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman published a seminal book that ushered in a new definition of community.The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life described a new, post-modern concept of togetherness, one that wasnât limited to groups of people who spent time in the same physical space. He explained that community can exist only in the minds of its members, and that the important thing was that it was a headspace where people felt they belonged.
Fast forward half a decade and the conceptual community is writ large online, and itâs more real than Goffman could have anticipated. In fact, we can actually see it in the connections and digital traces we leave behind. For the first time ever, we can see community behaviour in its natural state on a massive scale. People from around the globe may not be in the same room, but they still manage to create very real - to them - consensual hallucinations (to borrow a phrase from science fiction author William Gibson), and these play out in virtual proximity, where the address doesnât have a post code, but a dot com. It was this kind of community that the optimistic forefathers of the world wide web believed would eventually eradicate conflict and usher in a global group hug; the reality is something a little different.
The Bad
We have a natural tendency to gather into groups, and when we belong to something, we feel we can be ourselves. Itâs a nice, comfortable place to hang out with folks who think like we do, and to find out what people like us are doing that we might also like to do. Naturally, thatâs led to clusters of people with particular political persuasions, religious outlooks, personal philosophies and other things that shouldnât be discussed with an outsider over dinner, just in case he doesnât think like we do and we end up with indigestion.
This is why some people read The Guardian and some people read the Daily Mail, and why theyâre often theyâre not the same person, nor even in the same social group. Offline, weâre geographically bumped up against people of different views (unless you live in Brighton or Deep South, USA), which makes for some potential compassion, because itâs easy to see that a person who reads The Guardian might have features a Daily Mail reader might not find offensive, and vice versa.
One of the most unique things about the web is that people are able make connections between the bits of information that make sense to them, and then theyâre able to share these hyperlinked stories with anyone, including people who think in the same way. That means ordinary folks like you and me - not The Powerful or other gatekeepers - generate knowledge. It also means that the stories might have a particular agenda, and that we should read between the links to figure out why the connections were made, and by whom.
Online, says author Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble, we are naturally able to filter out people who donât think like we do, and the vast amount of information that is contrary to our beliefs is simply invisible. There are even computer processes behind the scenes in our favourite online search engines and social networks that automatically promotes information that we want to see, and demotes information that we donât, which means our information landscape is increasingly skewed. Harvard Lawâs Cass Sunstein called this an echo chamber. And the more our beliefs are confirmed, the more we think weâre right, and anyone who doesnât hold our beliefs is wrong.
Weâve imported our natural inclination to gather into communities into the online world, but rather than encouraging a global group hug, we might be cyber-balkanising, drawing virtual lines in the sand.
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There are clever technologists trying to create digital solutions for each of these areas of our social and psychological selves. Unfortunately, weâre encouraging them. The virtual equivalent of popping a pill when something goes wrong in our bodies is clicking a button when something goes wrong in our lives. We have become techno-fundamentalists, to use a phrase coined by Siva Vaidhyanathan. We have too much faith in the magic machine.
The good news is that this is a natural phase of our evolution with a new technology. It has, like other inventions before it, been seized upon as a panacea and dismissed as a destroyer. It is neither. It is a sin eater. Ultimately, it is a mirror of us all.
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If you like this, youâll like the third section of Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You, Untangling Us.
The bookâs on sale at the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
"Aleks Krotoski is a rare combination of academic (she has a PhD in psychology), geek, reporter and fluent essayist." - The Guardian
"Her combination of cautious academic rigour and geek-like enthusiasm makes a very valuable contribution to the debate" - Financial Times
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What the Internet is Doing to Us Part 1 of 3: Our Selves
I'm haunted by the mis-information that's out there about what the internet is "doing" to us. I've made it my career as a social psychologist to look closely at the claims made in public and behind the walls of the ivory tower, examining research about what drives and influences us and how today's drivers and influencers might be different from those pre-web.
I've been doing this for 15 years. Last year, I published a book about it, and next week, the fifth series of The Digital Human, the BBC Radio 4 programme about who we are as human beings at the beginning of the 21st century. It starts next Monday 7 April.
But there are still so many questions! So over the next three days, I'm publishing a primer on the good and the bad of what the internet is doing to us.
Today's topic - what the internet is "doing" to our selves.
The good
Who do you think you are online? Itâs likely you only know the half of it. You are a collection of your name and everything you do under it - from status updates on social networking sites to blogposts to online shopping lists to comments at the bottom of newspaper articles to the photos you post and the videos you upload. Youâre also the things not associated with your public profile, like what you write on sites where you donât have to log in, or the paths you trace across the web as the invisible cookies for each site feed back where you were and where you went next. Most of that is jumbled into a single digital identity that can be traced back to you, offline. And thatâs usually where the privacy debates begin. But weâre not going there yet. Thatâs the bad bit. Weâre still talking about the good stuff.
Your psychological identity is the person you feel you are or could be. Itâs the lessons youâve learned, the mistakes youâve made, the things youâre proud of and the stuff that defines you. Itâs what you ate for breakfast and the pop song you played thirty times in a row. Itâs your first status updates from five years ago and the one you posted this morning. And putting these little pieces of you - warts and all - is going to change the world.
The printing press was responsible for the Enlightenment because it gave a platform for people outside the traditional power structures (the Church most notably) to record their lives and to reflect on how they changed as time passed. But the process was expensive and literacy and other basic skills were essential, not to mention access to a printing press. Now, everyone has access to a printing press, plus a place to play audio and show off videos, so itâs very likely that the web will give rise to new kinds of personal and social enlightenment. The narcissistic tendencies that people say weâre developing are actually important for the peopleâs evolving psychological self-awareness, and for our understanding of where we as a society are today.
Think about a teenager you know or the teenager you were. Teenagers decorate their walls with blatant signals of who they are. And the poster of the celebrity that was there yesterday may not be there today; weâre constantly changing creatures who try on and take off selves throughout our lives.
In the mid-1990s, when the web was mostly populated by freaks and geeks and academics, it was described by MIT professor Sherry Turkle as an identity laboratory: a place where âmeâs were formed, tried on like a pair of jeans, and then discarded if they didnât fit. Now, things are a little different.
The bad
We can all thank Facebook for the modern web. Seriously, if it wasnât for the worldâs most popular social network, neither your mother nor your uncle, nor your grandmother or your cat would have joined the online revolution. Facebook gave people who didnât trust their computers the confidence to log in, even if it was just to spy on their kids. And why? Because Facebook provides enough information the the person on the other side of the screen is actually who they say they are.
But this comes at a price, and not a particularly hidden one: everything you do on Facebook - and increasingly across the Web - is consolidated into the companyâs servers on a single digital identity.
This is nothing new; most web services do this, usually to personalise what you see online. Most people have ignored or put up with this, although there has been the occasional privacy furore when information uploaded in one context ends up in a recruiterâs in-tray, a journalistâs inbox or in a hotel room in Hong Kong. The amount of potential and actual surveillance is unprecedented; but the danger isnât only in the collection of the material, but what happens to it after. If, for example, an enthusiastic business analyst, social scientist, security officer or government employee assumes that the data thatâs online actually represents the whole person, theyâre missing out a rather large piece of pie: the stuff thatâs not recorded by a database. Human beings are made up of more than binary ones and zeros (read more on this in a new report I published last week fro The Nominet Trust, The Personal (Computer) Is Political.)
And if an HR person looks at the photos of that ridiculous party you were at in college that you uploaded to Facebook and thinks youâre the same person now that you were then, weâve got a serious social problem.
Life is a series of graduations, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and onwards. In each, we do things that are part of those life beats. If you were held accountable by someone offline for something you as a 30 year old did as a toddler, youâd be affronted. Yet as we continue to weave ourselves into the web and the digital versions of ourselves are delivered in a single lump by a search engine, then the distinctions between who we are now and the mistakes weâve survived will evaporate. If this continues to be the norm, as it is now, weâll be too afraid to try new things in case it comes back to bite us in a future version of ourselves.Â
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If you like this, youâll like the first section of Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You, Untangling Me.
The bookâs on sale at the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
"Aleks Krotoski is a rare combination of academic (she has a PhD in psychology), geek, reporter and fluent essayist." - The Guardian
"Her combination of cautious academic rigour and geek-like enthusiasm makes a very valuable contribution to the debate" - Financial Times
[An algorithm is] an editorial opinion encoded into an equation that powers things like the Facebook news feed or the Twitter discovery window... trying to figure out whatâs good: what people want to consume. These little pieces of code are more powerful now than a lot of the most powerful editors in media.
Upworthy CEO Eli Parisoer - author of The Filter Bubble - offers his definition of the new world order. From Upworthyâs Founder Talked At SXSW⌠And Youâll Never Guess What He Said | tech | theguardian.com
The Quantified Self movement searches for universal points and scores and payoffs, but doesnât acknowledge the systems behind how those are valued, who chooses them, what they mean, and who they leave out -- often the already overlooked and marginalized, like caregivers and other low-wage workers.
I've experimented with several QS systems for some time, but have recently found myself in different circumstances than those I was in when I began my relationship with those technologies.
I've become increasingly frustrated by QS devices and systems that assume that, for example, losing weight or exercising more is the holy grail to happiness. What if your situation is different? For example, you're underweight, injured or have another condition that means these parameters are not only incorrect but could be harmful? These services are inflexible and arguably perpetuate social assumptions.
So I was very pleased to discover this quote from this wonderful long-term analysis of what quantifying the self has meant in the context of gender politics and modern society.
From Amelia Abreu's 24 Feb 2014 article, Quantify Everything: A Dream of a Feminist Data Future.
Researcher Toby first got in touch when he was starting out his MA in Applied Theology, and he's settled into a very interesting question in his study: "[what is] the nature of social media, using Twitter as a case study, and how it might be inherently inclined to change us as people and cultures in different ways, along with an exploration of the theological implications of that." Have a look at these questions and answer if you can.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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The people behind the screens are the revolutionaries, the changemakers, I argue in this week's Untangling the Web audio advent calendar treat. But not in the way you might think.
People generally don't think of the paper on which the daily news is printed, or the printing press that puts it there as anything but neutral. They identify the publishers as the ideologues and the medium as the conduit. You'd think the same, broadly speaking, would apply where the web is concerned: Julian Assange didn't invent the wiki platform where the confidential wires were leaked, he was the editor and Wikileaks was the  medium. But in Consent of the networked, former CNN China Bureau Chief Rebecca MacKinnon offers a reality check: "We have a problem," she writes. "We understand how power works in the physical world, but we do not yet have a clear understanding of how it works in the digital realm." in fact, we probably don't even think about power when we update our statuses on Twitter, connect with old school friends via Facebook, but a book based on recommendations from Amazon, or use Mail, Docs, Plus, Maps or Search on Google.
The truth is that software, from computer games to web services from Amazon to Match.com, is suffused with the principles decreed by the context in which it is produced.
If you leave this wanting more, check out the chapters on Friendship and Identity.
"Aleks Krotoski is a rare combination of academic (she has a PhD in psychology), geek, reporter and fluent essayist." - The Guardian
"Her combination of cautious academic rigour and geek-like enthusiasm makes a very valuable contribution to the debate" - Financial Times
Until Wednesday 18 December (last order date for Christmas), people using code UNTANGLING at theguardian.com/bookshop can get copies of Untangling the Web for £6.50, saving 50% off RRP.
The bookâs also on sale at the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
Last week, I posted the audio version of the Untangling the Web chapter about identity. This week, I look at a far more social side of our personalities: Friendship.
In 1998, Robert Kraut from Carnegie Mellon University and his colleagues published their research about a group of people they had introduced to the web. From 1994 to 1996, they'd asked this group to rate their levels of well-being, their feelings of social isolation and the number of friends they had. And in this period, while going online the new web users reported that they had fewer social bonds and felt more depressed, and struggled to establish trust in other people in virtuality. How could they be friends with someone? They couldnât even be sure who the other person was.Â
Newspapers splashed with the articleâs subheading, âA social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?â Fanning the flames of fear with this new, untested technology, this research paper is still one of the most frequently cited papers when journalists write about the quality of life online. But according to what we know now, after fifteen years of research that has consistently and almost universally contradicted the findings of the Internet Paradox, the web is one the best places to make new friends and have a rich and rewarding social life in the modern world.
Have a hear and tell me what you think!
"Aleks Krotoski is a rare combination of academic (she has a PhD in psychology), geek, reporter and fluent essayist." - The Guardian
"Her combination of cautious academic rigour and geek-like enthusiasm makes a very valuable contribution to the debate" - Financial Times
Until Wednesday 18 December (last order date for Christmas), people using code UNTANGLING at theguardian.com/bookshop can get copies of Untangling the Web for £6.50, saving 50% off RRP.
The bookâs also on sale at the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
Neil Denny from London's Resonance FM got me into a studio last week to record a gloriously extended conversation for the Little Atoms podcast about several of the topics covered in Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You. But, you know, with a whole lot more. Including updates on sex, anonymity and what Edward Snowdon has done for you.
Have a listen, and please subscribe to their excellent pod. I am positively honoured to be included in their amazing lineup of interviewees.
"Aleks Krotoski is a rare combination of academic (she has a PhD in psychology), geek, reporter and fluent essayist." - The Guardian
"Her combination of cautious academic rigour and geek-like enthusiasm makes a very valuable contribution to the debate" - Financial Times
Until Wednesday 18 December (last order date for Christmas), people using code UNTANGLING at theguardian.com/bookshop can get copies of Untangling the Web for £6.50, saving 50% off RRP.
The bookâs also on sale at the Faber & Faber website, on UK Amazon or on US Amazon. Other territories are available too!
