The Strip by Brian McFadden

After the Consumer Electronics Show binge in Las Vegas last week, the guilt and remorse settle in — kind of like the day after Thanksgiving.  Was it too big?  Too flashy?  Why did we collectively gorge on stuff that we don’t really need?  Shouldn’t we reflect more upon the slave labor that makes these toys for us, rather than on the superficial novelty they provide?  (The cartoon above, and Flip The Media’s excellent Your Phone Was Probably Made in a Sweatshop expose this harsh reality).

Then there was the oft-shared Fevered Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter:

There is a hole in my heart dug deep by advertising and envy and a desire to see a thing that is new and different and beautiful. A place within me that is empty, and that I want to fill up. The hole makes me think electronics can help. And of course, they can.

They make the world easier and more enjoyable. They boost productivity and provide entertainment and information and sometimes even status. At least for a while. At least until they are obsolete. At least until they are garbage.

And I couldn’t avert my eyes from the Wall Street Journal’s above-the-fold front-page headline trumpeting the much-anticipated Chinese uprising, but then throwing in the twist: not due to politics, but because of the newly-released iPhone 4s.

Fine.  It’s all true.  And all many of the tech blog post-mortems have concluded that this year’s show as more evolutionary than revolutionary.  However, as I consider what I saw — from fridges, to cars, to TV’s — it’s pretty clear what’s driving this consumer electronics gold rush (this year’s CES after all, had the most attendees and the most exhibits): mobile and social.

Of course, this is so intuitively obvious, and may have been for a couple of years with the notable explosion in adoption of devices such as Apple’s iPhone (mobile) and platforms such as Facebook (social).  It’s that synergy, convergence, whatever, that I refer to in the latest chapter to Storyteller Uprising, Inconspicuous, Ubiquitous and Sociable.  For those of us who have smartphones and are connected to online social platforms, we know how useful and convenient these digital technologies can be.  They’re also fun.  But recognize the bigger picture here: we have those powerful, relatively inexpensive, connective devices with us nearly all the time.  And they’re usually on.

Therein lies the opportunity that so many companies and entrepreneurs have grasped: consumers are connected, want access to data and content at their convenience, and value the enhanced utility that these new technologies bring.  As I observed in my recent Mashable article, we are moving away from enteprise-driven digital technology, to a consumer-driven world (something that Apple grasped a decade ago):

It’s all about the consumerization of tech. We’re moving “beyond the PC” as The Economist recently put it, and this will have a far-reaching impact. The enterprise (Blackberry, Windows) once drove tech usage and innovation. Now, how we use our mobile devices begins outside the office.

The “Digital Hollywood” and “Three Screens and Beyond” panels I attended at CES helped drive this realization home.  IBM’s Scott Burnett (Director, Global Consumer Electronics Industry) pointed out that this device and platform convergence and convenience is not just about entertainment and the connected screen.  Rather, there’s application in safety and security, energy management, health and wellbeing.  I saw this first hand when I checked out the in-vehicle technology exhibits.  The key?  We can integrate the functionality, connectivity, CPU power and portability of our smartphone outside of our living rooms and office into our vehicles, kitchens and fitness routines.  It’s a new reality that has yet to truly manifest itself, but as it does, 2017 may be as foreign to 2012 as 1976 was to 1776.  We are just only beginning to experience this massive, ridiculously fast-moving transformation.  I’m convinced it will change pretty much everything, including the relatively molasses-like world of higher education.  Former FCC Chairman (and Colin’s son) Michael Powell said as much during his inspiring Higher EdTech keynote at CES.

So we can question CES’ relevance as we pronounce that the devices at CES individually may not be particularly revolutionary.  But frankly, the big picture trend that I glimpsed in Las Vegas is absolutely a show-stopper.  I’m now trying to find a way to get to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month to continue my headline event intelligence-gathering in this pivotal year.

[Listen to my GeekWire Radio appearance, where I touch on the meaning of CES and more]

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I’ve got a lot of beef with the most recent social media vengeance story currently making the Internet rounds. On Friday night, according to Cha Cha/Bimbo’s waitress Victoria Liss, a customer ordered $28.98 worth of food and beverages, didn’t tip, and scrawled “you could stand to lose a few pounds,” on the bottom of the credit card receipt.

Really?

First and foremost, my sympathy lies with Liss, a woman working to earn her keep at a busy and crowded Capitol Hill establishment who undoubtedly deals with a slew of moderately-to-severely annoying customers daily. Over the past two years, at my own bar, I’ve been stiffed, mocked, smirked at, and ignored—but her insult was extremely personal, and regardless the quality of her service to this couple, it was cruel and unwarranted.  Furthermore, it was a sexist slight, perpetrated by a man who lives in a society in which women are scrutinized in every aspect of their lives by how they look.

Which leads me to this point—and my fellow bartender AJ put it best—her social media tirade should not be seen as a lesson in how to tip properly, but a genuine call to reality that in the age of social media, you can and will be held accountable for your actions. Liss shared that image on her Facebook on Saturday and by Monday the national Gawker blog Jezebel was calling out Seattle’s own culture commenter Dan Savage to “enter the fray.” He did, along with at least a dozen other local and national blogs.

When Sarah Palin’s daughter Willow made homophobic remarks on Facebook, the world took notice. In August of this year, an accused rapist saw his bail increased by $200,000 when incriminating Facebook comments were discovered by the victim’s father and brought in as evidence. Even before the damning repercussions of offensive Facebook comments, Clay Shirkey wrote about a woman who retrieved her stolen T-Mobile Sidekick by utilizing early social media to track down the thieves. In short, if you have a social media presence at all, anywhere on the Internet, and you decide to be a jerk (or worse), your odds of being caught are increased. This is generally a good thing.

The Bimbo’s case brings up some ethical issues involving social media, however. Some of the comments on Dan Savage’s Slog post (SLOG is the blog of the Seattle weekly The Stranger) question whether this was a case of the bullied becoming the bully. Is using his credit card to search for his public profile a breach of privacy? And, frankly, with a name like Andrew Meyer, how many perfectly well-behaved Andrew Meyers out there are suffering from the severe ire of an enormous Internet and neighborhood community out for blood? Where do we draw the line between “community action” and mob mentality?

Regardless, we can all learn a lesson from this instance—treat your bartenders, servers, and fellow human beings with courtesy, kindness, and respect, both in person and online, and you will probably escape the wrath of the Internet. Except if your name is Andrew Meyer, in which case, on behalf of many happy bartenders, I apologize, unless you are the person who left that note, in which I say, for your own sake, keep off the Hill.

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If you’re longing for a digital networking space that lets you easily videoconference with 10 people while everyone watches (and chats about) the same YouTube clip, then put Google Plus (hangouts) at the top of your “to explore” list.

If you’re longing for a digital networking space that integrates functional email, real cloud-based documents, an attractive photo gallery … and lets you eavesdrop on conversations like Twitter does (no reciprocity required in setting up circles) … then put Google Plus at the top of your “to explore” list.

And if you long for a digital networking space that will allow you to easily and simultaneously communicate with people inside and outside of the space … then you must put Google Plus at the top of your “to explore” list.

In October 2009, Google launched Wave. The current launch, Google’s third foray into “social”, is nothing like Wave, except for the clamor to “let me in!”

With Google+, things work. The interface is clean, light, inviting. Engineers have anticipated how we might use existing shorthand (from Twitter and Facebook), such as replying in a comment thread by putting @ in front of someone’s name. They turn that @ into a + automagically and the name becomes a link to the person’s Google profile page.

Sharing Google Plus Posts : Limited Posts Are Limited

And the iteration — response to feedback — is stellar.

After the Financial Times noted Thursday that restricted posts (posts to a circle, not made “public”) could be shared outside your circle, thus negating the privacy implied in circles, Google engineers tweaked the interface. If an author doesn’t manually restrict the sharing of a post, Google Plus will gently remind anyone sharing that the post wasn’t made public. And next week, no limited post (one shared only with a circle) will have “public share” as an option.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a typo in a Facebook status update or comment. No edit option except the hammer that is the delete key. But with Google Plus not only can you fix that typo but you can also style the type (bold, italic)! I call that a #killerfeature.

Have you tried putting Facebook friends in lists? If you haven’t, let me simply say that it’s laborious. Painful. With Google Plus, it’s a simple drag-and-drop. Hiring that original Apple Macintosh designer was a stroke of brilliance!
By making it easy to segment our network into circles that mirror the non-computing (analog) world, Google has made it easier for us to customize our messages. But will we be any better at that than network TV? It’s easier to craft a message than anyone can see than it is to craft multiple messages or tell only a few members of our network. Will enough of us embrace the tool to keep the project from turning into Wave? I hope so.

Circles also make it easier for us to filter incoming messages. More people read than create content, so this functionality is a very good thing. And Google+ is so much easier to use than Facebook! (The timeline/stream reminds me of FriendFeed.) When you read something you like, you click the +1 button (Google’s answer to “like”).

It is a generally accepted theorem that the real-time web is here to stay; it is a natural evolution from the early days of the telegraph, a tool that dramatically increased the speed of global communication. More people — probably using phones — will be added to the roster of Internet consumers and creators; this means more content, more noise. So the recommendations of our friends and trusted networks will become more important as we navigate an overflowing information space; what is scarce today is time and attention, not information. As Kirkpatrick writes:

Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it.

Sharing is a human thing. It does not have a straightforward put-a-set-of-rules in a virtual box technological solution. Google’s algorithms (rules) have successfully help plumb the depths of computer hard drives. But we want to know what our friends think! Is this third attempt (Buzz was number two) a charm? I think the answer is yes. +1!

Looking Back To Look Forward

On Monday, I shared the classic EPIC2015 with my undergraduate new media class. We discussed which companies had been less or more influential than this 2004 vision and how the vision missed mobile and YouTube.

2006. Google combines all of its services into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of disk space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for people to make their lives part of the media landscape.

2007. Microsoft responds to Google’s mounting challenge with Newsbotster, a social news network and participatory journalism platform. Newsbotster ranks and sorts news based on what each user’s friends and colleagues are reading, and viewing and it allows everyone to comment on what they see.

In 2004, Mark Zuckerburg launched Facebook, which more closely matches the description of the fictional Google Grid’s ease of use than anything the search giant has launched. Facebook has also enticed its customer base to make private decisions public — showing us content (but not yet ranking it, no Digg-like feature yet)  that our friends are reading (Facebook integration) — and Facebook makes it very easy for “everyone to comment on what they see.”

Strike outs here for both Google and Microsoft.

One of the core ideas of the Google+ project — our desire to share information selectively — was also at the heart of the imaginary Google Grid. And it answers one of the criticisms of Facebook. Steven Levy (@stevenjayl) has a great background on the project, code-named Emerald Sea, at Wired:

Emerald Sea is not a Facebook killer, Gundotra told me. In fact, he added, somewhat puckishly, “people are barely tolerant of the Facebook they have,” citing a consumer satisfaction study that rated it barely higher than the IRS. Instead, he says, the transformation will offer people a better Google.

Nonetheless, it was impossible to deny that “+1” (as it was then called) offered some of features closely associated with Facebook. The overall difference is that Google would try to leverage its assets to do certain things more effectively than Facebook, and attempt other things that Facebook can’t pull off yet.

“The internet is nothing but software fabric that connects the interactions of human beings,” Gundotra said. “Every piece of software is going to transformed by this primacy of people and this shift.” Gundotra said that to date identifying people has been “the most epic failure of Google…. Because we were focusing on organizing the world’s information, the search company failed to do the most important search of all.”

Me, I’m looking forward to Sparks, which is designed to track my interests and recommend content that it thinks I will like. This bot/AI/whatever-you-want-to-call-it — if it can learn as fast as SPAM algorithms (give me more of this and less of that, you know, like Zite) — could be the deal-maker for information junkies (which includes journalists, politicos, marketing folks …. and a host of others):

Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share—with just the right circle of friends:

What do you think? Has the train left the station or can Google catch up? Which behemoth do you trust with your data: Google or Facebook?

Watch EPIC2015 and Google+ :

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

:: WiredPen Permalink : Follow Me On Twitter!

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What’s the big deal about letting young children onto Facebook? Isn’t it just natural for these digital natives to connect with their friends and share information and updates with each other online?

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg thinks it’s a great idea to let kids into the online community. In an interview following the Consumer Report, Zuckerberg said to Fortune Magazine that it would be a great “educational experience” for kids to be on Facebook.

“My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age,” Zuckerberg said in the interview with Fortune Magazine, adding that he’d like to see if he can change the federal rules over time. Child advocacy groups are less excited about minors on Facebook.

Personally, I suspect letting kids get on Facebook would be great mostly for Zuckerberg’s bottom line. With my background as a sports journalist, the issue reminds me of athletes doping. In cycling, for example, it’s the team owners that benefit the most from doping, not the athletes. After all, the athletes eventually risk ruining their health and their future earning potential.

Similarly, with Facebook, it’s the owners that benefit the most. The kids run the risk of damaging their self-esteem through cyber bullying, not having “enough” friends, or not being “friended” by the cool kids. Child advocates also worry about young internet users not recognizing the long-term impacts that online behavior might have on their reputations. The internet never forgets: pictures showing underage drinking and illegal drug use, or lies, rumors and innuendo aren’t easily wiped clean from an individual’s reputation.

There are good reasons for making doping illegal in sports and not all of them have to do with fairness. There are good reasons for banning young kids on Facebook and not all of that has to do with wasted time.

Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us (CC)

The State of the Union

According to the Los Angeles Times, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and admitted that Facebook doesn’t spend a lot of time tracking the age of its users. In fact, they have only 100 employees tracking the activity of 600 million users. Facebook shuts down accounts if they find that users are younger than 13 but they often rely on other users to report underage account holders.

According to the Huffington Post, Facebook is currently being sued for failing to get parental permission before using minors’ personal information in its social ads.

Furthermore, Facebook is frequently under scrutiny for not having a good handle on protecting personal information. There have been frequent leaks of private information to third-party applications, where personal information on millions of users has been released and is not covered by Facebook’s terms of service.

And then there are the issues of predation, adult content, identity theft, economic scams and computer viruses.

Facebook is Forever

Maile Martinez, a program manager at Reel Grrls, a non-profit in Seattle that teaches media literacy and digital film making to girls age 9 to 19, is more concerned about what kids do online, and the kinds of personal data that they share online, than the potential for adult content and adults preying on kids though Facebook.

“We’re more concerned about cyber bullying. When we were kids, we would make prank phone calls. That was rude. Now, kids can post something that’s untrue about someone on their wall, and that’s much worse. The one being bullied can’t be sure how long the post has been up there and how many have seen it before it’s taken down,” Martinez says, pointing out that even deleted posts are traceable.

“Children and young teens don’t have a sense of the memory of Facebook. They don’t realize that their profiles can be searchable and content is traceable pretty much forever. Maybe in 10 years, they feel differently about what they would put out there,” she says.

Stressfully connected

Martinez worries that Facebook and the perceived need to be constantly connected, constantly in the loop of what everyone is doing, adds more stress to kids who are already under a lot of pressure from friends, school and other obligations.

“It’s a constant noise. Kids are stressed out in general, and this adds another layer of stress that is so constant. Kids tell us that feel like they always have to have their phones with them and be connected to know if there is any drama going on that involves them. Maybe someone posted a picture of them that was ugly. Maybe someone updated their status to ‘in a relationship’ when it was someone they were sort of interested in. It’s just stressful,” Martinez says.

Blurring lines between marketing and content

Martinez also worried about the amount of marketing and advertising that kids are exposed to on Facebook and online in general.

“Younger teens and elementary school kids really don’t understand when they are being marketed to,” she says, pointing out that the internet increasingly weaves ads into the rest of what you are seeing, which makes it harder to sort from other content.

“Say you follow Justin Bieber on Twitter and he writes a lot about a product he is using, then you think that since you like Justin Bieber, you’ll want to have that product. Kids have a harder time interpreting when people are pushing a product,” she says.

Kids Don’t Need to be on Facebook

Ingrid Butler, an MCDM student and mother of two young girls in Seattle, also sees perils for tweens on facebook. She points out that what gets uploaded on the Internet can remain there indefinitely, and travel far beyond the circles for which it was intended.

“There are so many reasons that kids DO NOT need to be on Facebook that I don’t know where to begin. I think it’s great that today’s kids are comfortable with computers and surfing the internet but it’s not as ‘cool’ as one may think. There are a lot of dangers our there such as predators, adult content and worst of all…bullies,” Butler says.

“My 12-year-old daughter is not on Facebook or anything else because I understand the dangers and have expressed them to her. She has experienced a good helping of the bullying this year and we are both so grateful that she did not have an account. A couple of weeks ago she said, ‘I’m so glad I’m not on Facebook.’ That statement means a lot to me, because that means she heard what I was saying to her and she understands the consequences of playing with fire,” Butler explains.

Butler produced a video about the impacts of bullying on her daughter for her Multimedia Storytelling class this quarter

Click here to view the embedded video.

She says she sees several issues with parents allowing their kids to lie about their age in order to set up Facebook accounts.

“When parents decide to help their kids trick the system, what does that say to the child? That lets them know it’s ok to tell a lie and I don’t agree with that parenting practice at all,” she concludes.

Taking a Stand

Martinez is happy to see that many parents are taking a personal interest in what their kids do online, and moderating what they can be engaged in.

“I recently heard some news about the Obama family where a reporter asked if the Obama girls were on Facebook, and Michelle Obama said that ‘no, they do not need to be on Facebook.’ I love it when our First Family makes such a positive statement,” Martinez concludes.

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Increasingly, If we are looking for something, we will shop around, consult user reviews and ask friends for advice. More and more these conversations are happening online and marketers are angling to be a part of these discussions. This is the second article in a series exploring social network trends in online commerce and how some Northwest companies are navigating and even changing the new landscape.

The ancient method of people making recommendations to each other for products and services using word of mouth is suddenly the hottest advertising strategy on the Internet. Facebook and other social media networks are giant marketing tools. But so far, most consumers have lacked a way to buy products or services without leaving the site. For the founders of aptly named DIY Media in Seattle, this conundrum seemed like a great business opportunity.

The problem with peer recommendations is that, in order for consumers to act on recommendations, they have to search for the recommended product.   This almost always means that a potential customer has to leave the site where they heard the recommendation.  In what marketers call the “conversion funnel” that is one barrier for a potential costumer to complete a purchase.  In the rare case that a customer does find something they want to buy on a social network site, then they are invariably redirected to a new site to complete the transaction, which is another opportunity for the customer to jump out of the funnel.

“Facebook is like a giant shopping mall with no stores,” says Jim Lively, one of the DIY Media founders.

According to Lively, the DIY Media business strategy is to make any digital content online for any digital medium available. DYI Media targets those who are downloading digital content for their Kindles, Sony e-readers and Nooks.  They are also targeting people online as well through games and music sharing.

In January 2011, the Seattle startup launched a portable storefront – a virtual ice cream truck for digital content.

Click here to view the embedded video.

DYI Media started with music, out of the founders’ frustration with iTunes and the iTunes music store. For starters, iTunes has about 70 percent of the market, Lively says, pointing out that Apple no longer control that large of a market share in terms of devices. Furthermore, once consumers arrive at iTunes, they are bombarded with so much content that a lot of users never purchased what they came for.

“You want to buy it where you find it. With our portable storefront, your friend can put a link to the item there right in front of you,” Lively says, “You click on it to pull up the content, click on the songs you like and there is a tally on the side that reflects the changes you make – you add a song the total price goes up, you take away a song and the price goes down,”

Finally, the links can be shared. This is the social element that is a key part of DIY Media’s business model.

“If you share it with your 500 friends, it shows up in your update stream. If you post it on your friend’s wall, it is also visible to their 500 friends. By the time it’s been shared three times, 64 million people have seen it. That’s the power of Facebook,” Lively points out–and the power of word-of-mouth.  The most reliable and tested marketing strategy we know of, and it is literally under each of our noses.

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Left with no outlet for writing and/or pontificating, I, like everyone else in the United States at the time, started my own blog.  I also started working with the Seattle PostGlobe, an online news startup that was founded by former P-I journalists.

It didn’t take me long to realize that Facebook could help drive traffic to my blog and to the news site, and that the more friends I had, the more traffic I could drive.

So it began – the quest for Facebook popularity. By the time my quest was completed I had thousands of “friends” and every time I posted from my blog or from the PostGlobe, it increased traffic to those pages.

You may have had a similar quest, or you may be on it now.  Maybe you’ve started noticing that all your friends – real ones and those new ones you’re slowly starting to get on Facebook – have way more friends than you do. I know. I know. It can be embarrassing.

So how are you going to get those “friend” numbers climbing? Well, don’t start surfing the web for the answer. There seem to be a lot of people out there who have exhausted the potential of asking random internet strangers help them distribute their deceased spouse or fallen dictator’s money. Now they have turned to helping people find Facebook friends.

Here’s a great example (errors in copy are from the original):

Everyone want that it should have thousands of Facebook friends. Why you want a huge number of friends in your account? There are many reasons:

• You want to show others that you have that number of Facebook friends.
• You want to make a fan page and want huge number of friends to give it maximum exposure.
• You are selling something and want customers to your product from Facebook.
• You are a webmaster and want regular traffic to your website from it.

Ok, any reason there may be but here is how you can add 5000 Facebook friends in 7 days only. Use the following formula and you will surely get 5000 friends in 7 days only and in a guaranteed way.

1. Make a new Facebook Account with a girl’s profile and pictures.

2. Download any email list generator like “Acute Email IDs Production Engine“, do not use email extractor, as it will be of no use to you. (The above was a hot link in the original that took you to a site where you had to buy the production engine.)

The author goes on and on with eight more steps, but I think you get the idea.

The truth is, if you want to get thousands of Facebook friends, the best approach is to do it the old fashioned way: one invite at a time.

Facebook encourages you to add friends by suggesting friends every time you open your home page. So, if you see someone who looks interesting, invite that person to be your friend.

Of course, that is a slow process, and if you don’t really know the person, chances are pretty good that she/he won’t accept you.

So, here’s what I did. (and here is where it gets tricky, and a little sticky, and where your friends, if they find out, might accuse you of being a poacher) To get friends who will accept your invitation, you need to go to your friends’ Facebook page, call up their friends’ list and starting firing off friend invitations. You and these people will have at least one friend in common, right? Run through the list, and don’t be too choosy. The goal is to increase your numbers, not to recruit new members for to your book club or add to your list of drinking buddies. These are Facebook friends, not real friends.

Repeat this process with all of your friends. But be careful! Don’t invite more than 15 to 20 per day or Facebook will freeze your ability to send invitations for a day or even a week if you’ve really been bad (I mean good). And Facebook is getting stricter all the time. They want you to invite friends, but they don’t want to be seen as encouraging spam. So they will warn you and then freeze you. If you get a warning, back off for a day or two. Then go at it again.

As your numbers start growing into the hundreds, you’ll notice a fun thing. People start inviting you to be friends. People you’ve never heard of and have no connection to. And, as you continue to invite your way through your real friends’ lists and then through your new-found friends on Facebook lists, you’ll be getting several invitations per day.

Within a couple of months – not seven days like the guy above promised – you will have a couple thousand friends.

I used this pretty simple method to run up around 3,000 “friends” last year before I decided to slow down and actually start being selective. Facebook limits personal accounts to around 5,000 friends maximum and after that you have to create a “fan” page and basically start all over trying to get people to “fan” you. Doesn’t sound like fun.

I now have nearly 3,500 friends and it’s slowly growing.

This year I got a real job and suddenly my blog seems a little superfluous. Driving traffic via Facebook seem less important these days. But even so, thanks to all of those friends, I have a unique and always changing source of news and information – coming in 24/7 from all around the world.

One last tip:If you get as ‘popular’ as I did you may want to keep track of real friends – the ones you might have a face-to-face with someday or maybe a drink with at the neighborhood bar, you know, people you actually know – by creating a separate Facebook list and move them into that list. Then you can click on that list in your newsfeed to see what’s up with your friends when you get tired and confused by the posts of all those thousands of other friends.

Or you could just call one of your real friends and go out somewhere. Naaaahhh!

Larry Johnson was National/Foreign Editor at the Seattle P-I from 1998 to 2009. He is now a Senior Writer at Nyhus Communications.

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Evgeny Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” spoke to a large crowd in Kane Hall at the University of Washington Tuesday night with his twist on a topic that generally accepted by digital missionaries: Does Internet access and social media spread democracy? Morozov says not necessarily.

“Some people have an almost religious approach to the Internet. They hold the internet as the Great Liberator,” Morozov said.

Morozov brings up a number of examples to illustrate his main point: Internet access and social media do not automatically lead to more democracy and less oppression.

For starters, he points out that social media, which some say help rebels and activists organize revolutions and overturn the oppressive regimes, are frequently used by the oppressors themselves to incriminate the users. During the 2009 uprising in Tehran, the Iranian government was able to use uploaded photos on Flickr to identify individuals they would prosecute. The government was also able to use these photos to crowd source – asking people to submit information about specific individuals in the photos. Morozov said that according to Al Jazeera, of the 60 tweeters that originated inside Iran during the revolts in 2009, the Iranian government was able to identify and prosecute 54 of them, leaving only six unidentified.

Profit over Security

Social media such as Facebook is set up to make it easy for advertisers to reach eyeballs. Accordingly, some of the practices that would make social media a safer avenue for dissidents and activists are not allowed in Facebook, such as accounts set up using pseudonyms.

“Facebook wants to make sure the accounts belong to real people that they can place ads in front of,” Morozov said.

Evgeny Morozov and discussion moderator Anita Verna Crofts, MCDM Associate Director, during the lecture in Kane Hall, University of Washington, on April 5, 2011. (Photo: Inge Scheve, Flip The Media)

He explained that while user information is supposed to be anonymous, there are ways to cross-reference Facebook with plug-ins that access the users’ email address books and contact lists. For instance, regimes can pose as third-party app developers to Facebook and gain access to the users that way. Morozov also added that security glitches with Facebook and social media themselves sometimes give the regimes golden opportunities to access information. In Tunisia, there was a window of time when passwords and information were available for 12 to 13 hours before Facebook fixed it.

“People knew it would happen, but Facebook (either) didn’t take it seriously or decided it cost too much to prevent,” Morozov said.

“We need to be far more concerned about standard practices. With Facebook, Twitter and any social media, there is an unhealthy amount of personalization,” Morozov said.

Going to school with us

Furthermore, in many cases oppressive regimes are learning their tricks and tactics from western business, marketing and PR firms. Sometimes they even buy the technologies from American and other western manufacturers and developers. Research in Motion (RIM), Cisco and UCLA are a few of the institutions Morozov mentioned that have provided technologies to regimes to enable them to track and even censor their own people.

Also, the regimes have found ways to effectively shut down sites they do not approve of, even without having to block or censor them in a traditional way. Cyber attacks are quite frequent, and the result is that the site simply stops working. Many times the site owners don’t even know why it stopped working, Morozov explained.

Access doesn’t mean action

Then there is the notion that access doesn’t mean that people necessarily will seek out the organizations that can help them organize revolt against their leaders and promote human rights. Morozov pointed out that in Eastern Germany many of the citizens were able to access western broadcasts with all the news and all the information about how corrupt and oppressive their government was. But studies show that more of these people were watching American soap operas, television movies and entertainment programs than were watching the news and commentary. Similarly, when Chinese and Russian internet subscribers are able to get around the censored web access, they download porn and accessed gambling sites.

And finally, some of the bloggers that the western media evangelists want to pump up and promote can be even more conservative than the regimes the West want to overthrow.

Reactions

“I appreciate that (Morozov) takes on a lot of the established points of view and challenges the gospel within the tech circles. I don’t always agree, but I appreciate that he makes the statements,” concluded attendee Joseph Pavey.

Bennett Haselton also found the lecture both informative and eye-opening. As a computer engineer specializing in designing software focused on circumventing internet blocking in censored countries for more than a decade, Haselton has more professional insight to Morozov’s topic than most.

“The Internet is less effective in spreading the ideas of democracy than we like to believe it is. Being able to access anything on the internet is only half the battle,” Haselton said, and echoed what Morozov pointed out: “People tend to gravitate toward the lowest common denominator in terms of content.”

About the Lecturer: Evgeny Morozov, originally from Belarus, is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and Boston Review, and a Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation. Morozov is also a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He was previously a Yahoo! Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, a 2009 TED Fellow, and a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Morozov’s writing has appeared in The Economist, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, Slate, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitug, The San Francisco Chronicle, Prospect, Dissident, and more.

Tuesday’s lecture was presented by the Seattle chapter of the World Affairs Council, and sponsored by the MCDM and Microsoft. The World Affairs Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that provides a forum for speakers of diverse points of view. For more information about the WAC, visit http://www.world.affairs.org. For upcoming events sponsored or presented by the MCDM, visit http://mcdm.uw.edu.

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What made that Philippine revolution unique was that citizens spontaneously organized the mass protest through mass text messaging—the Philippines was an early adopter country.  It was spectacular by all accounts. Within hours 100,000 people had gathered at a popular shrine in a non-violent protest against the president. Within 24 hours, that number had tripled. By the third day, the crowd was reported to have swelled to two million.

A decade after People Power 2 – almost to the day – Tunisians ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, following weeks of demonstrations, fueled by high unemployment and then shared around the country and the world through photos, videos, and updates sent by mobile texts and posts to Facebook and Twitter. The BBC reported that organizing the protest network online worked in Tunisia, because more than a third of the country’s 10 million people are online. Nearly two million Tunisians use Facebook.

Right on the heels of the Tunisian protests came the demonstrations in Egypt and Libya. Frustrated populations with limited ability to form any type of effective opposition to the ruling party also gravitated to their most popular communications tools to organize the expression of their discontent, which again happened to be Twitter and Facebook in Egypt and YouTube in Libya.

While traveling, I was reading Charlene Li’s Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, for my Leadership in the Digital Age: Establishing Authenticity through Story class as part of the MCDM program. In the context of the Middle East upheaval, her book struck a chord. Li argues that you can “control how authentic you want to appear, depending on the situation you find yourself in.” I agree that for authentic leaders this is for the most part true.

But for disingenuous leaders, appearing authentic is getting harder and harder to pull off.

When  country leaders pretend to be something they are not , there are now too many forums to expose their duplicity. Try as they might to muzzle the press, forcibly mute the opposition, and control their image in many recent cases, these strategies have only backfired.

Just before I closed my laptop to head off to my conference, a Google alert popped up that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had fled Cairo and he has since resigned. Now we see Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, resisting the protests and unleashing a ferocious battle on protesters, with UN estimates of more than 1,000 people dead in nearly three weeks of unrest and an estimated 200,000 people – mostly foreign workers – having fled the country.

It would be naïve to say that digital media has sparked these protests. But it has played two important roles. First as is a platform where inauthenticity of leaders has been revealed, unveiling corruption and contradiction. Second, digital media channels, which enjoy pre-existing networks among populations, have been used as a tool for action.

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