Hours per day of face-to-face social interaction declines as use of electronic media increases. These trends are predicted to increase (data abstracted from a series of time-use and demographic studies).

First published on thewingsofthecarp

Two scientists express their concern about the use of the social Web.  According to Sigman’s article, entitled “Well Connected? The Biological Implications of ‘Social Networking.”, it could  increase the risk of problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia. Lady Greenfield expressed earlier this month her concerns  in a debate in the House of Lords, in which she said that social networking, as well as computer games, might be particularly harmful to children, and could be behind the observed rise in cases of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder.

Research suggested that the number of hours people spent speaking to others face-to-face had fallen dramatically since 1987 as the use of electronic media increased.  Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims. Emailing people rather than meeting up with them may have wide-ranging biological effects, said psychologist Dr Aric Sigman.

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook allow people to keep in touch with friends over the web. They can swap pictures, play games and leave messages which explain how their day is going. But the lack of face to face contacts can cause health problems as to Sigman.

We are lacking face to face contacts

Britons spend about 50 minutes a day interacting socially with other people. The Internet and other electronic media “can be fantastic tools but they shouldn’t displace real relationships,” Sigman said said. “The balance is all wrong.” But even though they are designed to bring people together, Dr Sigman said they were actually playing a significant role in people becoming more isolated.

The Office for National Statistics of the UK has just reported that “over the last two decades the proportion of people living alone doubled”, a trend now highly pronounced in the 25-44 age group. For the first time in our history a third of the adults in this country live alone, a trend that looks set to continue.

The rapid proliferation of electronic media is now making private space available in almost every sphere of the individual’s life. Yet this is now the most significant contributing factor to society’s growing physical estrangement. Whether in or out of the home, more people of all ages in the UK are physically and socially disengaged  from the people around them because they are wearing earphones, talking or texting on a mobile telephone, or using a laptop or Blackberry. An increasing number of deaths caused by the wearers of MP3 players inadvertently stepping into oncoming traffic has led to Senatorial proposals for a New York State ‘distracted walking bill’ to outlaw the use of mobile phones, handheld emailing devices such as Blackberries and video games while crossing a road. Senator Carl Kruger described how people walking around ‘tuned in’ were, in the process of being tuned in, being ‘tuned out’ to the world around them. The malady is referred to as “iPod oblivion”.

Children now spend more time in the family home alone in front of TV/computer screens than doing anything else (Sigman, 2007). A study by the Children’s Society recently found that television alone is displacing the parental role, eclipsing “by a factor of five or ten the time parents spend actively engaging with children”. Another ongoing study reports that 25% of British five-year olds own a computer or laptop of their own. In particular, the study noted an enormous increase in ‘social networking’ among younger children which “has overtaken fun (online games) as the main reason to use the Internet”. UK social-networking usage is now the highest in Europe. The trend is set to increase: the BBC has recently unveiled the social networking site MyCBBC directed at children as young as six.

Electronic media was also undermining the ability of children and young people to learn vital social skills and read body language, said Dr Sigman. ‘Parents spend less time with their children than they did only a decade ago. Britain has the lowest proportion of children in all of Europe who eat with their parents at the table. The proportion of people who work at home alone continues to rise.

Couples spend less time with each other and more time at work, commuting, or in separate rooms of the same house using electronic media devices, and Britain has the lowest proportion of children in Europe who eat with their parents at the table.

‘One of the most pronounced changes in the daily habits of British citizens is a reduction in the number of minutes per day that they interact with another human being,’ he said. ‘In less than two decades, the number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled.

Is Social Networking Killing us?

Well, no, probably not. Or at least, not literally.  But also  Susan Greenfield suggested that spending all day, and — admit it — much of the night networking on a computer might in fact be bad for your body and your brain.

Susan Greenfeld is an authority on the brain’s workings , she’s a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. She told a British newspaper  that social networking sites remind her of the way that “small babies need constant reassurance that they exist” and make her worry about the effects that this sort of stimulation is having on the brains of users. Lady Greenfield (she’s a neuroscientist and a baroness) told the Daily Mail:

My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.

These remarks echo concerns that Lady Greenfield expressed earlier this month in a debate in the House of Lords, in which she said that social networking, as well as computer games, might be particularly harmful to children, and could be behind the observed rise in cases of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder:

If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales.

As if to perfectly prove her point, here is 36 seconds of Lady Greenfield attempting to explain her thoughts to a reporter for Britain’s Channel Five, in a video clip posted on YouTube today by the broadcaster, without any introduction or context:

A day later, in a very interesting interview on The Guardian’s Newsdesk podcast, Lady Greenfield was given several minutes more to expand on her thoughts. It is worth listening to the whole interview, but of particular interest is her suggestion that conducting personal relationships through a screen could be having an effect on the brains of users and might even be related to the rise in cases of both A.D.H.D. and autism.

In the House of Lords debate, Lady Greenfield also stressed that social interactions conducted through computer screens are fundamentally different from spoken conversations — which, she said, are “far more perilous” than electronic interactions because they “occur in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses.”

Lady Greenfield told the Lords:

Real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.

Biological mechanisms

Time that was previously spent interacting socially is increasingly been displaced by the virtual variety. A recent editorial of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine made the timely point that leukocytes, the small white blood cells of the human immune system, has reported the first evidence that social isolation is actually linked to global alterations in human gene transcription in leukocytes. Transcriptioninvolves the transfer of genetic information from the DNA molecule to the messenger RNA. DNA analysis identified 209 genes that were differentially expressed in circulating leukocytes taken from subjects who reported high levels of social isolation versus those reporting low levels. The differences between the groups included the increased expression of genes involved in immune activation, transcription control, and cell proliferation, and the decreased expression of genes supporting the function of the leukocytes (mature B lymphocytes) and Type I interferon response. The researchers found impaired transcription in genes, which is central to our bodies mounting an anti-inflammatory reaction to illness or stress, referred to as a glucocorticoid response. They also observed increased activity in the gene transcription control pathways that promote inflammation in disease and stress, and they now believe that this is a functional genomic explanation for the greater risk of inflammatory disease and adverse health outcomes in individuals who experience high levels of subjective social isolation (Cole et al, 2007).

Based on quantitative angiogram findings, subjects with smaller social networks had narrower arteries (mean angiogram stenosis value, 40.8 vs 27.2 for small vs. large social networks, respectively; (p<0.001) (adapted from Rutledge et al., 2004).

Lack of social connection or loneliness is also associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The neuropeptide oxytocin is increasingly considered the ‘hormone of affiliation’, released in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid in response to everyday aspects of human interaction such as somatosensory stimulation, hugging, touch, warm temperature – and it is also involved in feelings of trust and generosity. Oxytocin has recently been found to prevent detrimental cardiac responses including elevated resting heart rate, reduced heart rate variability, and reduced parasympathetic regulation of the heart in adult female animals exposed to social isolation. This may be one of the central mechanisms that underlie the relationship between social contact, cardiovascular disease or better cardiac function in humans.

The lack of “real” interaction combined with a dependence on technology is increasingly tied to physiological changes known to influence morbidity, or the extent of disease, and mortality, according to the article, which collates data from western industrialized societies. Those changes include upsetting hormone levels, immune responses and blood pressure, the function of arteries and mental performance. Social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace may increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes and dementia by altering the way genes work, according to Sigman’s  report in the Biologist journal.

“We probably have an evolutionary protective mechanism and when we were still in the cave, we would survive so much easier when we worked together,” Sigman said in a telephone interview. “Evolution has a system that benefits us when we connect with other people in the flesh.”
National debate

Interacting ‘in person’ had effects on the body not seen when writing emails, Dr Sigman claimed. Levels of hormones such as the ‘cuddle chemical’ oxytocin, which promotes bonding, altered according to whether people were in close contact or not. ‘There does seem to be a difference between “real presence” and the virtual variety,’ Dr Sigman added.

Some genes, including ones involved with the immune system and responses to stress, acted differently according to how much social interaction a person had with others. Increased isolation could alter the way genes work and upset immune responses, hormone levels and the function of arteries. It could also impair mental performance.

This could increase the risk of problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia, Dr Sigman says in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.

Dr Sigman added: ‘Social networking sites should allow us to embellish our social lives, but what we find is very different.

Looking around him, Dr. Sigman has observed that, lately, more people “are physically and socially disengaged from the people around them because they are wearing earphones, talking or texting on a mobile telephone, or using a laptop or Blackberry.” Then he notes:

Time that was previously spent interacting socially has increasingly been displaced by the virtual variety. A recent editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine made the timely point that social networking “encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities. … The time we spend socializing electronically separates us from our physical networks.”

From there, Dr. Sigman makes something of a leap, suggesting on the basis of no experimental evidence that virtual social networking, by way of Web sites like Facebook or Twitter, probably does not confer the same health benefits as actual, unmediated social interaction.

One problem with this analysis, as Charles Arthur pointed out on The Guardian’s technology blog, is that Dr. Sigman does not seem to distinguish between interactive activities people engage in online, particularly on social networking sites, and the more passive consumption of media, like watching television or listening to music. He refers to time spent “in front of TV/computer screens” and presents a chart of hours spent in “Social Interaction vs. Electronic Media Use,” which of course assumes that there is no overlap between those two activities.

Most telling, as Mr. Arthur noted, is that Dr. Sigman seemed not to take account of how the Web is increasingly used in what Lawrence Lessig calls read-write ways that are very different from passive media consumption. As Mr. Arthur wrote:

Sigman points to a 1998 study that suggested that greater use of the Internet “was associated with declines in communication between family members in the house, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their levels of depression and loneliness.”

O.K., that was 1998, though. In fact, Sigman doesn’t really have anything to say about social networking systems such as Facebook and Twitter.

So, until some future studies are done comparing the health of compulsive users of Facebook or Twitter to that of their peers, the jury is still out on whether we will all be killed or driven mad by social networking.

One conclusion that some networkers have already come to, though, is that social networking may be killing us in a different way — by adding to our workloads. As Kamran Abbasi wrote in the editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that was cited by Dr. Sigman:

My enthusiasm for reviving old friendships and retaining newer ones via social networking waned when managing information about other people’s socializing became harder work than my day job.

Two summers ago, the editors of the journal N+1 made a similar point about how even e-mail had started to seem more like work than play. And last month in The London Review of Books, in an essay on video games, John Lanchester wrote that in some ways, even games played on a computer are a kind of work:

A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough. A persuasive recent essay by the games theorist Steven Poole made the strong argument that the majority of games offer a model of play which is oppressively close to work. The Grand Theft Auto games, for example, are notorious (especially among people who’ve never played them) for their apparent celebration of random violence. The most recent iteration of the game, however, Grand Theft Auto IV, involves the main character having to spend a large amount of time building up his relationships, so that he can have people to help him do his criminal thing; and building up these relationships involves driving to see these people, taking them out to nightclubs, and sitting there with them. It’s not significantly less boring in the game than it would be in real life.

The very interesting post Mr. Lanchester points to, “Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames,” on Steven Poole’s blog, makes you wonder if there is any way in which computers can be used now that is not some form of work. After noting that many games “hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment,” Mr. Poole makes a persuasive case that all of us really should get away from our screens for a good long while:

Today, the most common paradigm for progress in games, for example, is the idea of “earning.” Follow the rules, achieve results, and you are rewarded with bits of symbolic currency — credits, stars, skill points, powerful glowing orbs — which you can then exchange later in the game for new gadgets, ways of moving, or access to previously denied areas. The only major difference between this paradigm and that of a real-world job is that, whereas the money earned from a job enables you to buy beer and go on holiday — that is, to do things that are extraneous to the mechanized work process — the closed video-game system rewards you with things that only makes it supposedly more fun or involving to continue doing your job, rather than letting you get outside it.

Sources:

Well connected? (paper of Dr. Sigman)

MMR and the value of word of mouth in social networks
Technology Blog
Daily Mail online
New York Times

The main Google paradox

One way to define contextual information search would be intelligent search. In this article we explore one of the origins of human intelligence: mirror neurons. As to prominent linguists like Arbib  and Lakoff mirror neurons explain the adaptive evolution of the human language faculty and the development of conceptual knowledge (Arbib, 2005; Gallese, Lakoff, 2007). The problem is our easy and accepting relationship with Google. We are geesing at Google and engage with it more and more every day, uncritically unthinkingly.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is concerned about the fact that:

“….we do not properly understand the nature of the nature of the transaction between us and Google. …into our relationship with Google we do not grasp that we are not really Google’s costumers. Google calls us users, but in fact we are Google’s products. Our attention is what Google sells to its customers, which are the advertisers.” (BBC interview)

The thesis I want to develop here and in the articles to come is that by using Google we stop developing our conceptual knowledge. Googling is not an intelligent information search strategy. But we are always communicating something. In using Google we express our intentions and the cleverness of Google is to incorporate our intentions in its advertising system and giving us the feel we are finding what we are looking for, but  for all this is what Google wants us to look at. One of the things that intrigues me why Google does not disclose to its users their personal user profile, though it shares it with third parties:

• We may use personal information to provide the services you’ve requested, including services that display customized content and advertising.
• We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.
• We may share aggregated non-personal information with third parties outside of Google.
• When we use third parties to assist us in processing your personal information, we require that they comply with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
• We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.
• Google processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries. In some cases, we process personal information on a server outside your own country.” ((http://www.google.be/intl/en/privacy_highlights.html)

The stunning paradox is that Google says that it wants to use our personal data for “research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services”, but is far to slow in improving search technologies. What about improvement? Google only recently (24 March 2009) implemented “a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search” as to ‘The Official Google Blog’. It was about time Google implemented this because this feature was implemented earlier in the search results of Google’s main competitors. Ask displays ‘Related Searches’ next to the page results and formulates additional relates Questions and Answers about the topic. Cuil lets you explore answers by category and subcategory. Ask and Cuil didn’t only offer associations and concepts earlier they offer more than Google does. Yahoo‘s  versions of concepts is comparable with the one of Google, only it was implemented much earlier. and Wikia Search doesn’t only offer conceptual associations it is also letting the user add suggestions interactively. So it looks rather like Google felt the heat from its competitors than it implemented a novel improvement. (see Search Engine History);

Is Google stupid or does it thing we are stupid? I’m afraid the latter is the case. Google has collected the best research brains and is funding top research at universities worldwide but the use of this knowledge conflicts with its business model. If a Google search would deliver only relevant results, it would reduce the opportunities to show pay-per-click advertisements. These ads are the main income of Google

About the importance of Mirror neurons, also in CMC intention counts

Mirror Neurons were discovered in 1994 in the macaque brain by Gallese and Rizzolatti. What do Mirror Neurons do? They mirror observed actions:

“The observation of an object-related hand action leads to the activation of the same neural network active during its actual execution. Action observation causes in the observer the automatic activation of the same neural mechanism triggered by action execution.” (Gallese, 2005).

In the years that follow, Gallese and others (also called the Parma Group because they all work at the university of Parma in Italy) explore the Mirror Neuron system. The Mirror Neuron system is also demonstrated in the human brain.What is special about this is that the neural system for action execution is triggered but the execution of the action is inhibited. It’s not mere a system that is mirroring action it also performs simulations. When a given action is planned, its expected motor consequences are forecast. This means that when we are going to execute a given action we can also predict its consequences. The action model enables this prediction. Since the Mirror Neurons uses the same neuronal circuits this mechanism allows us also to predict actions of others.

“The same functional logic that presides over self-modelling is employed also to model the behaviour of others: to perceive an action is equivalent to internally simulating it. This enables the observer to use her/his own resources to experientially penetrate the world of the other by means of a direct, automatic, and unconscious process of simulation.” (Gallese, 2005)

This ‘process of simulation’ of the action of others takes place regardless of the fact we are in direct communication with them. In a way our brain is communicating with the persons we observe before we even exchanged a word.

Iacobini compared the action of Mirror Neurons when observing intentional and not intentional behaviour. He concluded that the reaction pattern of the Mirror Neurons is different when the actions observed were intentional. Mirror Neurons are only activated when the action is meaningful to the observer, the system cannot be deceived:

“-areas active during the execution and the observation of an action-previously thought to be involved only in action recognition are actually also involved in understanding the intentions of others. To ascribe an intention is to infer a forthcoming new goal, and this is an operation that the motor system does automatically.” (Iocobioni, 2005)

The system of Mirror Neurons also works with emotions as to Gallese:

“We recently published an fMRI study showing that experiencing disgust and witnessing the same emotion expressed by the facial mimicry of someone else, both activate the same neural structure – the anterior insula – at the same overlapping location (Wicker et al. 2003). This suggests, at least for the emotion of disgust, that the first- and third-person experiences of a given emotion are underpinned by the activity of a shared neural substrate.” (Gallese, 2004)

These results provide a neurological basis for pragmatic linguistics, saying that we understand each other in grasping the intentions of our collocutor. This is not to say that Mirror Neurons are the only mechanism through which we understand the intentions of others, analysis of the perceived action and connecting it to the context and some theory we have in mind play a role as well (Rizzolatti and Craigheiro, 2005, p. 108-109).

Rizzolatti and Craigheiro also wondered if mirror neurons are also the basis for altruism.

“Can we deduce from this that the mirror mechanism is the mechanism from which altruistic behavior evolved? This is obviously a very hard question to answer. Yet, it is very plausible that the mirror mechanism played a fundamental role in the evolution of altruism. The mirror mechanism transforms what others do and feel in the observer’s own experience. The disappearance of unhappiness in others means the disappearance of unhappiness in us and, conversely, the observation of happiness in others provides a similar feeling in ourselves. Thus, acting to render others happy – an altruistic behavior – is transformed into an egoistic behavior – we are happy.” (Rizzolatti and Craigheiro, 2005, p. 116-120)

Our brains appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism, called ‘embodied simulation’ by Gallese, which gives us an experiential insight of other minds. The hypothesis of the ‘embodied mind‘ has gained more and more proof in recent neurological research.

This let’s us also tune up with others, this is what we call empathy. The theory (well let’s not forget it is based on a mass of empirical research) of Mirror Neurons states that we are continually in a process of mirroring the behaviour of the people we live with and deduct from these neuronal mirror actions the intentions of the others. The system of Mirror Neurons thus has a double functionality: It let’s us grasp the intentions of our collocutor and it creates empathy for him.

Research uncovered the role of mirror neurons in action understanding and imitation, intention understanding, emotions and empathy, and language evolution. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Maddalena Fabbri Destro explain the role of mirror neurons in language evolution:

“The discovery of mirror neurons provided strong support for the gestural theory of speech origin. Mirror neurons create a direct link between the sender of a message and its receiver (Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998). Thanks to the mirror mechanism, actions done by one individual become messages that are understood by an observer without any cognitive mediation. The observation of an individual grasping an apple is immediately understood because it evokes the same motor representation in the parieto-frontal mirror system of the observer.On the basis of this fundamental property of mirror neurons and the fact that the observation of actions like hand grasping activates the caudal part of IFG (Broca’s area), Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) proposed that the mirror mechanism is the basic mechanism from which language evolved. In fact, the mirror mechanism solved, at a initial stage of language evolution, two fundamental communication problems: parity and direct comprehension. Thanks to the mirror neurons, what counted for the sender of the message also counted for the receiver. No arbitrary symbols were required. The comprehension was inherent in the neural organization of the two individuals.” .

“It is obvious that the mirror mechanism does not explain by itself the enormous complexity of speech. Yet, it solves one of the fundamental difficulties for understanding language evolution, that is, how what is valid for the sender of a message become valid also for the receiver. Hypotheses and speculations on the various steps that have led from monkey mirror system to language have been recently advanced (Arbib, 2005) “(Giacomo Rizzolatti and Maddalena Fabbri Destro (2008), Scholarpedia, 3(1):2055)

See also for a review of the role of mirror neurons the article of Giacomo Rizzolatti and Maddalena Fabbri Destro in the Scholarpedia.

More neurological research points in the direction of the intentional and social grounding of our communication skills. The work of Tania Singer and Ernst Fehr in Zurich linking neurological research on empathy to micro-economics (altruistic punishment) was one of the first to give a push to several interdisciplinary studies where neurology is used to shed light on human communication and exchange. Neuro-economics and Neuro-sociology are research fields that are developing fast today. Mirror neurons are one of the basic systems for the human communication. They are also involved in Computer Mediated Communication, you cannot switch them off. Or as communication theorist Watzlawick did put it: “You cannot not communicate.”

Google’s one-way mirror

Google is a one-way mirror, meaning you cannot look back. Besides Google is still a lousy search engine. Vint Cerf, Googles evangelist even admits that Google is rather a big shovel:

“Look search today is messy. Think about one of those big construction shovels, you know, like a tractor with a big shovel on the front. And you have to operate it by pulling and pushing a series of levers. It’s big and imprecise. Using a search engine today feels like trying to move one of these Earth-moving shovels.” (Interview with Vint Cerf of Google, 13 August 2008, Siva Vaidhyanathan)

But it is for all a money shovel:

“The real brilliance of Google is the ability to monetize search through AdSense. This company uncovered the relationship between advertising and information. The old way of advertising had no direct interaction with the audience. But now the audience can click.” (same interview)

The primary view of Google is behaviourist and system centred. The following oracle of Vincent Cerf’s is clear:

“There are things that computers can do that six billion humans can’t do. Computers have the scale capacity to discover and analyze things,” (same interview)

This a quite humiliating claim for human kind in my opinion. Recently bionics made important progress by realising a bionic eye. But we must also consider the relativity of this realisation. Our retina contains 126 million sensitive cells, the bionic interface consisted out of only 60 electrodes. One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11) neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses. Each neuron can be considered as a small biological computer on its own. Google’s cloud computers is compared with the human brain merely a fart.

Google is expanding because that’s the only way to stay on top since it misses evolutionary constraints. It will only reproduce its own model. Google’s chief evangelist Vincent Cerf is looking for answers in the InterPlaNetary Internet. I’m afraid he isn’t going to find them. Google will expand until it bursts.

Google’s search system is a black box, all we know about it are the published patents, but the search algorithms used aren’t part of them.

Wiki Search acknowledges the demand for openness as you can read on the about Page:

“For hundreds of years, the most respected institutions have treated transparency as a requirement. Those who, of their own accord, promise openness find that with this pledge comes credibility, as, in the words of the late Justice Louis Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Indeed, those who avoid the light of scrutiny and instead opt for obfuscation are often assumed to be hiding something, and for good reason.”

David Koepsell pleads for a new paradigm in scientific research based on the Wiki model:

“In idealized science, the search for the laws of nature and explanations of phenomena is collaborative and ongoing, and does not become fixed in a final text, but is always subject to revision and refinement in the face of new evidence. The wiki model is the natural extension of the initial model of science employed in the early salons and meetings of the first scientific societies, before publishing overtook the processes employed by natural philosophers as the be-all and end-all of science itself.” (David Koepsell, Back to Basics: How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science)

Also Tim Bernbers-Lee (unplugged) stressed the need for open WEB standards and its use in data queries as you can see in this video of 2007 and his view in “Up to Design Issues”.

A business model for Privacy Invasion

I have no clue what techniques Google is using for its contextual ads, I guess one is latent semantic analysis. My experience before was that Google adapts its answers based on my previous search behaviour. Google stores that information and is quite hypocrite about it. After several protests Google promised to delete this logged information after 9 months, but it only anonymizes IP addresses on its server logs. Google recently confirmed my suspicion when launching a detailed behavorial add program.

“The most privacy protective solution would be to have behavioral targeting systems be based on the user’s opt-in. To no one’s surprise, Google has not gone down that road (“‘Offering advertising on an opt-in basis goes against the economic model of the Internet,’ Google spokesperson Christine Chen told the IDG News Service“), and we are not aware of any major player in online advertising that has an opt-in targeting system. Google has, however, done some things that make opt-out quite a bit better.” (EFF)

Google defines and re-shapes the economic model of Internet. What’s more, Google’s contextual voyeurism entails a privacy invading culture snooping and spying the Net while we tend to consider the Net as an information source. Google contextual ads business model has many followers. See for some recent examples: Deep Packet Inspection, Advance Interactive Media using questionnaire as a manipulating marketing technique and video screens with built in tracking systems.

‘Contextual advertising’ is typical Orwellian newspeak. Why not call it what it is: “unsolicited advertising” like “unsolicited mail”: SPAM. At the same time it is a huge privacy invading system. Everybody that is questioning this should read Greg Conti’s “Googling Security: book that opens your eyes to how much you disclose to Google“

As pod casters, broadcasters, bloggers, site builders, in one word: content providers we leave our traces on the Net. While the Net is a huge space to seek an audience, big players, telecom providers and service providers, want to use the Net primarily to make money, annihilating human presence, turning and degrading communication into bits and bytes, into usable code for profit making. Google’s net neutrality is circumstantial as we showed in a previous article. A free meal is never entirely free. Most people are not aware of that evidence. This is the shadow side of Web 2.0. See also In Your Face: Recession and The Rise of the Anti-Social Web, about the risk that service providers like Google and Facebook will try to make profit with usercontent when they run into financial problems, something that is rather likely to happen today.

We should become aware of the reshaping of our communication practices using the Net. Why not make part of its infrastructure public or social owned. After all, Internet (DARPA TCP/IP) and the Web (HTML of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN) was developed in the public domain. If not, there would be no Internet, no Web, I’m afraid. Google is using our data, why do we have nothing to say about the way it does? Because Christine Chen said so? Because Google wants it this way? One of the reasons is simple: a lot of content-providers do not understand Google’s trap. They participate in the page-ranking competition and join the page-ranking manipulation business. This allows Google to say that keywords aren’t relevant any longer when describing documents.

“Next we have two name values: keywords, which these days is mostly useless, ironically, and description, which is still somewhat useful.” (Google Code Home, Metadata, http://code.google.com/intl/nl/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html)

But after all, what could you expect when Google started a business based on a random surfing, pageranking mechanism and contextual advertising? Google itself is at the core of pagerenking manipulation business. It does not only organise an auction of webcontent (see Tony Curzon Price) it also organises an auction on keywords. Google has come under fire for allowing AdWords advertisers to bid on trademarked keywords. In 2004, Google started allowing advertisers to bid on a wide variety of search terms in the US and Canada, including the trademarks of their competitors. See Stefanie Olsen, Google plans trademark gambit, .CNET. http://news.com.com/2100-1038-5190324.html.

Danny Sullivan, widely considered a leading “search engine guru”, proposed that Google should open it’s search index for researchers and for its compettitors to research, because since Google has he largest search index it has an advantage his competitors cannot coop with. But Google won’t do that. On Google’s closeness he remarks in “Google: As Open As It Wants To Be (i.e. When It’s Convenient)“;”

“There’s probably no deeper example of Google being closed than when it comes to book search. Google’s efforts to scan books are well known at this point. But Google keeps coming under fire for agreements said to restrict those scans for being used by its competitors.

(…)

To be fair, Microsoft has also added similar restrictions. But if Google’s on an “open” kick, why not join the Open Content Alliance?”

(…)

AdSense isn’t an “open” marketplace where publishers set prices and see how much advertisers are willing to pay, with Google taking a known and set percentage. Google will take whatever it wants, and publishers are left guessing. So much for open.

Google has been criticised for selling keywords of its competitors but another issue is also coming up: Google’s quasi monopoly in online advertising. The mainstream press, such as The New York Times, has noticed that even Google itself is starting to worry about the possibility that the Department of Justice of the US may seek regulation, possibly even the break-up of Google. Eric Clemens is Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He sketches what an anti-trust case against Google might look like:

• “·Even with the appearance of competition from other search engines such as Yahoo and Microsoft in the market for sponsored search, Google enjoys monopoly power over corporations that participate in its keyword auctions. This monopoly power is especially great when Google deals with corporations whose operations are largely fixed cost, such as hotels and airlines.
• Google is abusing its monopoly position by overcharging corporations for access to consumers. These charges are passed along to consumers and ultimately result in consumer harm.
• Google is likewise abusing its monopoly position, deterring market entry in areas that would benefit consumers and damaging potential entrants.Any one of these would justify regulatory intervention. The second and possibly the third would also justify some form of financial compensation to those who could demonstrate that they had been damaged by Google.”

And of course Google’s privacy policy has been under attack many times. Recently the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a 15-page complaint asking the FTC to force Google to stop offering online services that collect data until the presence of adequate privacy safeguards is verified. The FTC is de Federal Trade Commission in the US. The EPIC complaint [PDF] also listed other security flaws in Gmail and Google Desktop, a desktop indexing program, and urged Google to donate $5 million to a public fund that will support research into technologies such as encryption, data anonymization and mobile location privacy. (see EPIC Urges FTC To Investigate Google Services)

References:

Arbib M.A. 2005a From monkey-like action recognition to human language: an evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics. The Behavioral and brain sciences. 2:105-24

Arbib, Michael, 2005b, “The Mirror System Hypothesis. Linking Language to Theory of Mind”, published on Interdisciplines, http://www.interdisciplines.org/coevolution/papers/11

Gallese, Vittorio, 2004, Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron system and its role in interpersonal relations, paper published at ‘Interdisciplines’, consulted online on 15/03/2008 at http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1

Gallese, Vittorio, Lakoff, George “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role Of The Sensory-Motor System In Conceptual Knowledge”, 2005, University of California, Berkeley, USA, Università di Parma, Italy, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2005, 21 (0), XXX-XXX

Gallese, Vittorio, 2007, “Mirror neurons and the social nature of language: The neural exploitation hypothesis”,University of Parma, Parma, Italy, consulted online on 15/03/2007 at http://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/pubs/pdffiles/Social_neuroscience_2008.pdf

Rizzolatti G, Arbib MA. 1998. Language within our grasp. Trends Neurosci. 21:188-94

Rizzolatti,Giacomo, Craighero, Laila, 2005, Mirror neuron: a neurological approach to empathy, Neurobiology of Human Values, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005, online http://www.robotcub.org/misc/review2/06_Rizzolatti_Craighero.pdf

After pressure of the Electrtonic Frontier Foundation, Google has delivered an opt-out option for the behavioural ad system.

Additional Electronic Resources

Neuroscience

Broken Mirrors, A Theory Of Autism

Neuroeconomics of Mind Reading and Empathy

Psychologists shed light on origins of morality

Nikolas Rose, Neurosociology, and Neurochemical Selves

What Is The Value of Neuroscience?

Privacy

New privacy policy, cooperation with law enforcement & your data: An interview with Google

A Race to the Bottom – Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies

Proximic Signs Deals With Yahoo and eBay To Turn Product Listings Into Contextual Ads; Taking on AdSense

When you watch these ads, the ads check you out

Orwell’s 1984 revisited: Uberveillance

Google Big Brother? Eyetracking en Latitude

Jacht op je privéleven geopend by Karin Spaink

Debunking Google’s log anonymization propaganda

Hi-Tech Spousal Abuse – Technology Perverted

Privacy group calls Google Latitude a ‘danger’ to security

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Data Breaches list

’1 miljoen geen baan door fouten in Franse politiedatabank’

Les “Déchets Infoactifs” : Avec Le Développement Des Réseaux Sociaux (FR)

La Vie Privée S’expose À La Surveillance (FR)

Facebook, Le Meilleur Ami Du Détective Privé (FR)

Vos Traces Internet Valent De L’or (FR)

Peut-On Tout Confier À Google ? (FR)

Das Google-Imperium (DE)

More articles about Google Watch

More articles about Privacy

More articles about the Social Web

More articles about Uberveillance

More articles about Web 2.0

Links to Wikipedia: Open Society, Closed Society, Advertising, Surveillance, Uberveillance, World Wide Web

Links to Scholarpedia: Intentionality, Mirror Neuron

Googling has become a verb in our language. This shows the deep impact of Google on our culture and our lives. But Google is not primarily about searching. Google is an information shovel selling adds. In a previous article I intuitively described contextual search as finding information on the web not using Google. I was a little bit surprised about the interest for the story, because the idea of contextual search was still an embryonic idea. In this article I will develop this idea of contextual search further correlating to and in opposition to googling trying to find out what it is and what it is not. When looking for better information search strategies I want to compare our search behaviour using  CMC based systems like Google with natural communication. This is the starting point. This may sound odd and completely off the record, but in fact I’m only re-joining a tradition that has started in the sixties and seventies at the Biological Computer Lab in Urbana Campaing by Gordon Pask

Breaking the walls

The point is that computer science has far to long restricted its research in typical domains as logics, statistics and economics. This is understandable since the background disciplines of most computer scientists is of course beta science, but it has lead to a dangerous tendency of inbreeding. Though many of  scientists that were at the origin of computer science and cybernetics like Weizenbaum, and Wiener, were far more critical to their own domain and open minded towards  other scientific disciplines. They were aware of the social implications and warned for misuse and abuse.

In 1950, Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings, which was widely read by general audiences. This book expressed Wiener’s deep concern over the ethical consequences of the new technologies which science and cybernetics were making possible. It examines the nature of language and education as the means for a society to transmit cultural knowledge. It also examines the use of law, mass communication, secrecy and espionage by political regimes to enforce, regulate and protect their systems of power and control. He expresses a deep concern that the technologies of atomic weapons could not be kept from spreading to other countries because just knowing that they are possible is a sufficient incentive to motivate scientists to find the means of building it. And so he urges intellectuals and scientists to think carefully about the consequences of their work, and whether it will really improve the state of the world in the long-run.

An even more reflective book, God & Golem Inc. (1964) addresses the implications of cybernetics for the ethical society. Wiener takes the image of the golem  from Jewish mythology, which is a being made of clay and brought to life by a sorcerer, as a metaphor for the scientist who brings machines to life with cybernetics. He uses the metaphor to develop the idea that every age has its dogmatic beliefs, and there will be those who stand up to oppose them.

In 1966 Weizenbaum fooled those who believed in the almightiness of computers with his automatic therapy program ELIZA. He claimed that the shrink could simply be replaced by a computer program. Many believed the program could cure mental desease until Weizenbaum told to his surprised audience that ELIZA was fake. The second generation of cybernetic scientists, second order cybernetics or new cybernetics only added to this criticism. (see for a tribute to Weizenbaum Geert Lovink: The society of the query and the Googlization of our lives)

New cybernetics was quite aware of the shortcomings of Computer Mediated Communication and it left the narrowness of logics, mathematics and economics .Phisiology, biology, psychology, neurology, epistemology, belonged to their domain of discovery. In Urbana-Campaign at the University of Illinois the Biological Computer Lab of Heinz Van Foerster was inquiring the man-machine interaction. A range of brilliant scientists developed new cybernetics there from 1958 until 1974. The most important were: Heinz von Foerster (fysics, biofysics, epistemology), von Glaserfeld (epistemology, radical constructivism), Maturana and Varela (biologists, radical constrivism), Gordon Pask (psychologist, neurologist), Ashby (Cybernetics). Close to it, at  Palo Alto worked Watzlack and Bateson developping communication theory and double bind theory. Both teams were connected (Müller, 2000)

Today science is even tighter locked op in disciplines. This is a problem for a system engineer who wants to anticipate the social implications of his design. Jim Hendler notes in “Reinventing Academic Publishing – Part III“:

“In science, I would argue that a similar effect is what causes a lot of the jargon issues to arise.  When we use a particular term from a particular field, we are usually in a context, be it a talk at a conference or a paper in a journal, which defines how that term is used.  In fact, one problem that scientists often face is that when we try to explain what we do to the general public, they don’t have these contexts and the words we use revert to their more generic meanings – leading to misunderstandings and confusion.  Similar misunderstandings and confusions happen when scientists communicate across boundaries, and that is where much of the problem arises in interdisciplinary scientific discourse.”

David Koepsel complaints in “Back to Basics: How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science“:

“The relation of article publishing to career promotion in academic science has also promoted “salami science,” in which a single scientific study may generate more papers than would practically be necessary to disseminate the results of a single study.”

I propose that science and science application meet again. Therefore I want to join Gert Lovinks proposal of  ”dismantling the academic exclusion machine”, and leave the strict borders of computer science scout outside this domain in neurology, linguistics, sociology and political economics. Pask’s creative ideas are still at the core of research  today.

On the road with Gordon Pask

The idea of Pask’s conversation theory is that learning occurs through conversations which make the knowledge explicit. This is the main point I want to follow. I want to consider information searching as a human learning activity. Pask’s conversation Theory regards social systems as symbolic, language-oriented systems where responses depend on one person’s interpretation of another person’s behaviour, and where meanings are agreed through conversations. This vision is continued in the sociological work of Niklas Luhman and the evolutionary cybernetics of Francis Heylighen. Heylighen developed the idea of learnig Webs in his article ‘Bootstrapping Knowledge representations: from entailments meshes via semantic nets to learning webs’ (Heylighen Francis, 1997). This idea introduces the possibility of connecting the  namespaces of the semantic Web with  link-spaces. Heylighen continues doing research in this field. See his homepage or his publicaion list at Scientific Commons. Interdiscaplinarity was a main approach of Pask’s Interactions of Actors Theory.

The progress made in the recent years in neuroscience confirms that the approach of the computer-men relation at the BCL was enlightening only computer science today doesn’t seem to be aware of it. Behaviourist Stimulus-Response theories are still predominant in the majority of publications though they have proven to be false. In the 1973 Robert Rescorla refuted  the stimulus-response schema (S-R) , one of the dogma’s of behaviourism[1]..Even the mice brain is not an input-output machine reacting on impulses, it’s behaviour is anticipative. Some computer scientists that promote a system centred approach are still working with old fashioned ideas or are they just erring taking men for computers?  Anyway this is what happens when putting walls between scientific disciplines. Let’s have a look what we can learn from actual neuroscience.

Since the discovery of mirror neurons in 1994 by Gallese, neuroscience is uncovering bit by bit the interaction of our brain in communication with other brains. Neurosociology and neuroeconomics are fast developing fields. They stress the importance of empathy and social interaction  in communication .

Conversation Theory and Pragmatics share important basic concepts on communication. Today pragmatics as well as conversation theory remain greatly ignored in Net applications. As to Pragmatics, and this is stressed in the Relevance Theory (Dan Sperber, Gloria Orriggi, 2004), the primary condition for success of the human communication system is overtness (about intentional communication and mirroneurons, see Google’s one-way mirror: a business model for privacy invasion).

The code model of communication has the advantage of simplicity but if it has to cover human communication it suffers from some important inconsistency: How does a child learn to speak, learn the code, having no basic code available to start with? In engineering we call such a problem, the bootstrapping problem.  The inference model doesn’t need a code to start with. As to Dan Sperber and Gloria Origgi intention is the key to understanding:

“After Grice, a second, wholly different mechanism was identified that also made communication possible: a communicator could communicate a content by giving evidence of her intention to do so, and the audience could infer this intention on the basis of this evidence. Of course, the two mechanisms, the coding-decoding, and the evidence-inference one, can combine in various ways. Today, most students of linguistic communication take for granted that normal comprehension involves a combination of decoding and of Gricean inference processes.” (Sperber, Dan, Origgi, Gloria, 2000)

They point to a key aspect of Paul Grice’s pragmatics is analysing language as speech. Pragmatics today refutes the unique role of codification and confirms that intentions play the leading role. Pragmatics shares this vision with Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky may be called the father of the anti-behaviourist paradigm in language analysis, criticising Skinner in 1959.

Tardes political economy of knowledge fits in Heylighens conceptual schema. See e.g. Trust in Communication between Individuals: A Connectionist Approach (2008). In recent analysis of Web 2.0 we found also indications that Adam Smith’s and Marx’s analysis of the market and commodities cannot be applied on information. One of the misleading concepts in Web 2.0 is the long tail, a marketing based concept (consumer demographics). It points to the context of Smiths free market as a driving force in the development of the World Wide Web. This is a cliché that easily can be undermined. Denis Hancock did put the long tail of Youtube in perspective:

“To me, that looks like a blockbuster model – and based on the viewing habits of people I know that go to YouTube, this makes sense (many simply check out whatever is most popular, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle). But what do you think – am I missing something here, or is the long tail really not that important no YouTube?”

In their paper: Metcalfe’s Law, Web 2.0, and the Semantic Web James Hendlerand Jennifer Golbeck explain the success of Youtube:

“Interestingly, email and blogging has proven to be one of the crucial aspects of the YouTube phenomenon.(…) Search in YouTube is rimarily enhanced by the social context, not by the “semantic content” of what is in the videos (Marcus, Perez, 2007). While automated technologies to create indexes of these videos are being sought, the primary indexing comes through the social overlay of the site.” (Hendler, James and GolBeck, Jennifer, 2007, p. 3)

“…we argue that given the prevalence of the social constructs within these sites, that value of the network effect is coming from the links between people arising from the interactions using these sites.” (Hendler, James and GolBeck, Jennifer, 2007, p. 4)

Therefore we prefer the political economy of knowledge of Tardes to be our guide where once again overtness plays a crucial role and where the market reductionism is disaproved. The complete commodification of knowledge and thereby of communication isn’t possible because it is not a commodity in the traditional sense of Adam Smith’s political economic theory. Making ‘le savoir’ a commodity is a reduction inflicted by those who want to earn money with knowledge and the desire to know, curiosity, a basic human drive. Google mixes these two concepts of knowledge: knowledge as a basic human quality acquired in experience, communication and learning and information as a commodity.

Gabriel Tarde noticed this market reduction more then 100 years ago in ‘Psychologie économique’. Knowledge is a value in itself not needing a market to spread but an educating parent, a classroom teacher, a university professor, a librarian, a trainer, a friend. Tardes theory got lost in time but in the information age it’s an eye opener. Instead of taking material production the famous needle factory of Adam Smith, as a starting point for his political economical analysis, he started with the analysis of ‘la production de connaissances’, ‘des valeurs vérités’ (truth values). Think about it as the production of a book, the production of a text, starting with the author having an idea to write about until the publication and acceptance (Lazzarato, Maurizio, 1999). The social context with strong collaboarative aspects is the domain for political economy of knowledge in Tardes view.

Well on the Web, the text you are reading isn’t a commodity either, since it is published under the Creative Commons Licence. Anyway Google is going to use it to sell its clicks, to earn money with my work. Mixing the economic value of a book, text, with it’s truth value, creates ambiguity resulting in giving up the truth value. This might not have been the original purpose of Google, but it’s clear a result. So Tardes view is quite relevant for our information society and the way it treats knowledge.

References:

Arbib M.A. 2005 From monkey-like action recognition to human language: an evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics. The Behavioral and brain sciences. 2:105-24

Bolchini, Cristiana and Carlo A. Curino and Elisa Quintarelli and Fabio A. Schreiber and Letizia Tanca, 2007,   ”A data-oriented survey of context models”, consulted online on 17/03/09 at http://hiderefer.com/?http://carlo.curino.us/documents/curino-context2007-survey.pdf

Gallese, Vittorio, 2004, Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron system and its role in interpersonal relations, paper published at ‘Interdisciplines’ http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1

Gallese, Vittorio, “Mirror neurons and the social nature of language: The neural exploitation hypothesis”,2007, University of Parma, Parma, Italy, consultedd online on 15/03/2007 at http://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/pubs/pdffiles/Social_neuroscience_2008.pdf

Jøsang, Audun, “Trust and Reputation Systems”, 2007, QUT, Brisbane, Australia, consluted on 18/03/2009 at http://www.unik.no/people/josang/papers/Jos2007-FOSAD.pdf

Hendler, James and GolBeck, Jennifer, 2007, “Metcalfe’s Law, Web 2.0, and the Semantic Web”, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute,  University of Maryland, College Park, consulted online on 17/03/2009 at  http://www.cs.umd.edu/%7Egolbeck/downloads/Web20-SW-JWS-webVersion.pdf

Heylighen, Francis, “Bootstrapping knowledge representations: from entailment meshes via semantic nets to learning webs”, 2007, Center “Leo Apostel”, Free University of Brussels, consulted online on 17/03/2009 at http://cogprints.org/458/1/BootstrappingPask.html

Müller, Albert, 2000, Eine kurze Geschichte des BCL. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 11 (1): 9-30, consulted online 11/03/09 at http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/papers/mueller/mueller00-bcl.html

Lazzarato, Maurizio, Tradition culturelle européenne et nouvelles formes de production et circulation du savoir, publié dans la revue “Thesis”, Weimar, N. 3, hiver 1999, consulted on the Web on 5-03-2009 at http://www.freescape.eu.org/biblio/article.php3?id_article=53

Ochsner, Kevin, 2004, “Current directions in social cognitive neuroscience”, Science Direct, Elsevier, consulted online on 18/03/2009 at http://dept.psych.columbia.edu/~kochsner/pdf/Ochsner_Crrnt_Drxns_SCN.pdf

Rizzolatti,Giacomo, Craighero, Laila, 2005, Mirror neuron: a neurological approach to empathy, Neurobiology of Human Values, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005, http://www.robotcub.org/misc/review2/06_Rizzolatti_Craighero.pdf

Shen, Xuehua, Tan, Bin and Zhai, ChengXiangn 2005, Context-sensitive information retrieval using implicit feedback. In Proc. 28th Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and development in information retrieval, pages 43-50, 2005, Consulted online 15 March 2009 at http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/czhai/pub/sigir05-if.pdf

Shen, Xuehua  and Zhai, ChengXiang, 2005, “Active Feedback in Ad Hoc Information Retrieval“, Proceedings of the 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval ( SIGIR’05), 59-66, 2005, consulted online on 15 Marcch 2009 at http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/czhai/pub/sigir05-af.pdf

Sperber, Dan and Origgi, Gloria “Evolution, communication, and the proper function of language (A discussion of Millikan in the light of pragmatics and of the psychology of mindreading”, 2000, in Peter Carruthers and Andrew Chamberlain eds., Evolution and the Human Mind: Language, Modularity and Social Cognition. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 140-169), consulted online on  17/03/2009 at http://www.dan.sperber.com/evo-lang.htm

Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 2004, Relevance Theory. In Horn, L.R. & Ward, G. (eds.) (2004) The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 607-632. Consulted on 13/03/2009 at  http://www.dan.sperber.com/relevance_theory.htm

Widdowson, H.G.,2004, Text, Context, Pretext. Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Oxford:Blackwell Publishing

The Socal Web is fantastic if it is built on top of social relations in the real world. Somebody discribed it ironically: “Twitter is for the friends you want to have while Facebook is for the friends you have had.” I have no experience with Twitter, but research demonstrated that  Twitter is not a social network. About Facebook, Myspace… and alike, I can be positive, they are an extra channel for multimedia exchange. For some social Webs are the photo-book we had before… for the activists it’s the place where they launche petitions.

A few years ago there was much ado about the long tail, a statistic concept from consumer demographics to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. A frequency distribution with a long tail has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of “non-hit” items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

The Long Tail might be valid for sites like Amazon and Ebay, it doesn’t work in social networking. After all social relations are not built on consumer demographics. Maybe the popularity of politicians might work this way, but in politics today, nobody has real friends. So?  A study of Youtube showed that the long tail doesn’t work on the social web. The popularity of videos on Yuotube follows rather the  blockbuster model. Based on the viewing habits of people I know that go to YouTube, this makes sense.  Many simply check out whatever is most popular, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.  Desaster tourism works the same way, people slowing down on the highway if there has been an accident. So, beware! It is passing. Once the mess is cleaned, nobody will be looking any longer.

In the real world ‘trust building’ gives stable results when one invests time, while a reputation is shallow and passing. Trust building’ is a process that takes time. One has to give evidence of this truthfulness and trustworthiness, it’s about quality. But on Internet things seem to be different. PR based reputation building seems to work all the time. It suffices to get in the picture without getting in jail and that’s about it.  But keep in mind, it’s about quantity and a self-perpetuating cycle, not about quality.

The tools I list here cost nothing. Look at them, but if you use them, keep in mind that long standing relations are built on trust not on reputation and that relations in the real world are not interchangeable.

Social Metasearch : They let you look different sources like social networks, blogs micro-blogs etc.

Whostalkin to follow those who talk about you on the Web

Samepoint Social Media search, Samepoint is a conversation search engine that lets you see what people are talking about. You can discover, learn and share new web sites and ideas. Seaches in blogs, comments, forums, micro-blogs, news, pictures and videos.

Socialmention close to Samepoint but gives a neater result since it orders the results by source. It also searches in  bookmarks.

Serph anohter meta-engine but less performing

Icerocket BigBuzz Meta-engine of Web 2.0. Searches blogs, twitter, news and micro-blogs ‘en plus’ adds an RSS feed of the results.

Blog search Engines : These I have tested a little bit, being a blogger myself. I used the string ‘Galese and Rizzolatti’, because that string is in 2 of my postings from the day before, and it is rather rare. I was curious if they would  find my postings.

• Google Blog Search This is the typical Google interface for blogs.  All options available for website search are also available for blog search. It found one of my postings and also another one with ‘Galese and Rizzolati in it’: Posts about Web Standards as of March 18, 2009 To my surprise it was pointing to my posting. Google does’nt offer tag-search, only text search. That’s what Google is all about. Google offers Atom and RSS feeds of it’s results. That’s OK.
• Technorati is the professional search engine for blogs. It lets you searchs to blogposts on text and tags.  I use is often. It’s all there: Booleans, url-search, tag-search, RSS.  But the interface isn’t userfriendly. To my surprise it did only find one of the two postings but it also found 2 mentions of it in Delicious, both pointing to the other posting. I suppose it eliminates doubles. Nothing to worry about I hope.
• Icerocket The advanced section allows booleans, lets you look for strings, select on date. RSS also. It let’s you search in title, authors list, and tags. In fact Icerocket has more options then Technorati. And it’s indexes are complete also. It did find both postings. That was nice.
• Blogpulse: Sophisticated. The advanced section allows booleans, lets you look for strings,  select on date. You can track conversations and view the blog profiles. Lets you also search to blogs that link to your blog.  RSS channel also available. But it didn’t find my posting.  That was bad. I presume its indexes are rather limited.

News Search

• Google News
• Yahoo Actualités
• Wikio
• Topix

Tools to follow comments.

• Backtype indexes mainly blogspot blogs. You can receive RSS feeds and mail alerts.
• coComment looks for comments at a predefined source address.
• Yacktrack has Friendfeed, Digg et WordPress in its index.

Tools to follow forums

• boardtracker.com
• Omgili
• BoardReader

Tools to follow micro-blogs

• Twitter Search
• Twilert
• TweetBeep
• Twitturly

Integrated sources

• FriendFeed
• Mybloglog
• Keotag

Links to Wikipedia: Web 2.0, Social Web, Internet, Communication, Social Network, Search Engines

Author: Daniël Verhoeven, 22 feb 2009

Avant-propos: finding information on the web NOT using Google or any other search engine

A fortnight ago I planned to write an article about Google and contextual information search, the opposite of full text search (Google, Altavista, Yahoo search…). I started to collect information NOT using Google. I found out that one of my best friends in Belgium, Wim VDB – saw him on the birthday party of Francis – had made a small critical posting about Google privacy: ‘Zoekmachines en uw Privacy‘. When browsing his blog I stumbled on an article of Geert Lovink, I knew Geert a long time ago as a writer in Hactic… I wanted to reconnect. Using the tag http://wordpress.com/tag/geert-lovink, I found an article of him on Weizenbaum and Google search. Weizenbaum is a shared reference, one of the first well grounded critics of the information age. Since Weizenbauw was himself one of the architects of computer technology, he knows what he is talking about. Geert’s  article was a tribute to Weizenbaum and also a kind of Google bashing. This article linked to another article in Eurozine this one from Daniel Leisegan, Das Google-Imperium and to Siva Vaidhyanathan’s huge project:

The Googlization of Everything: http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/. 379 postings until now.

Using the tag Google on the German WordPress domain, http://de.wordpress.com/tag/google/,  I found more articles and again a complete blog dedicated to Google watching: ‘Google is watching you! “Don’t be evil” ? – Pah..‘. Because I want to assist to HAR2009 I landed on Karin Spaink’s Blog, who had also written a few articles about Google and privacy.  I like Tony Curson Price writings, I follow his articles on OpenDemocracy (I get them in my mail). He has written ‘Google’s Attention Deficit Disorder‘ and in his series the Liberty of the networked’, Google is analysed and discredited in a broader context. I also discovered there is a site of Google Watchers: http://www.google-watch.org/. Somebody linked, I think it was Wim, to an article on Cnet: Debunking Google’s log anonymization propaganda… And of course it didn’t stop there, I didn’t mention yet Pit Schultz, Nicolas Carr, several articles I found on Libertés Internets,  Slash Dot  nor tag search using Technorati.

I found all this critical articles  about Google NOT using Google at all, but using a contextual search for information about my subject, defining contextual search as looking in places, reading and  consulting people that I had figgered out to be critical about Google.

Of course I also dived in the resources used, weaving a coherent network of related and associated retrieval. For the writers I mentioned , referencing is self-evident, thus finding resources was a peace of cake. The path to all these resources is transparent and meaningful. It’s not about bits and bytes, but about well formed statements  and anlysis, mostly based on a lot of research.   I  landed where I wanted to land, without having to throw away the typical search engine garbage that’s returned. It’s like asking a librarian: “I’m looking for… but do not find the exact division… to look for in the catalogue. The librarian in the dull library revives, is happy somebody is requiring his expertise, he loves books, he likes to help and to chatter a little, he shows me: ‘You had to look here..’ and there it is.”. Of course I also know something about my subject and I have a circle of friends and acquaintances that have the same interests and know more… this helps.

There is also another important surplus for these findings, since I know most of the people who have written these articles, I know their background and a lot of their past, I also know I can rely on the information they offer and I know how I must interpret things. I know Geert is exaggerating sometimes… wanting to shock people, but his bottom-line is OK, and so on. I can contextualise almost completely the information I found. This is reliable info, there is no hidden agenda and nobody owes Google something. This is no bullshit.

I also consulted the opposition. In an email discussion with another friend Gert, who is/was a Google fan, but switched 180 degrees when I reported  him that the MOS of his Mobile, Google’s Android has a security flaw, I could collect a lot of information too.  After he realised that he was defending a system he didn’t want to defend – he is very scrupulous  about digital security, doesn’t want to work on MS Windows for instance, because it’s not safe and it’s clumsy and ugly – he started to collect prove and information against Google for me… Expert information. All information I can use to write my article.

But now I have another problem. I have so much information, enough to write a book about the flaws and hegemony of Google, but I have no time to write a book though I would like to, but Google is not my main subject, contextual search is, Google is only related to it. But meanwhile also most of my friends know I’m preparing an article about Google, I have to write something and I have to keep my standards high.  They will not accept chewed old stuff neither a messy sketch. So, I’ve changed my plan, I’m going to make it a series, now and then a short episode, with some original material but of course relying on all the good stuff they delivered. This way my time management isn’t put upside down. It’s always a hack. So I discharged myself of a structured approach but not from being coherent. But what can I do better than take over the approach of Siva Vaidhyanathan in preparing his book:

“The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?”

I will try to find answers on these questions in my series, of course more diffracted, and also with a small angle shift.  Since my relation to Google critics is research on ‘contextual search’, and the first peer group of my research is aged between 15 and 25 yrs old, and I am a computer pedagogue having kids myself, the pedagogic view will have more stress. My stand is clear. Google is a disease, an addiction, a money machine that could implement contextual search, combine it with full text search, but refuses to do so because this would throw sand in its own money machinery. In real life, people search always contextual. If you want to buy a bread, you do not go to the pharmacy, but to the bakery. When looking for a text using full text search, you  go nowhere and everywhere at the same time.  That’s how full text search works when you can not define the domain you are searching in.

All blog postings are XHTML.  XHTML, is now the standard for web pages. These webpages contain meta-information about the content domain, topic etc. A lot of older pages also contain keywords discribing the domain, topic of a page. This meta information could be extracted and added to the text-database allowing users of a search engine do define beforehand in which contextual domain they are looking, thus reducing the irrelevant results significantly.

Blogplatforms propagate  this meta-information. That way you can do a  contextual search  using tags within the blogplatform, but also outside the platform using Technorati. I do not say it’s simple, but it is feasible, and of course a lot of  texts containing no, or false meta-information should become second rang, superflouos garbage. This would aslo be a radical but efficient way to counter the pagerank manipulating idiots, something Google claims it is doing all the time. But I doubt about their perseverence. If they are doing  it, the result is never stable and it is almost invisible.

For a blogger Google has become completely superfluous. When looking to the referrer statistics of 2bloggen only 10,86% of the hits arrive on the blog through Google Search, all the rest is contextual. Google is almost completely useless. So Google bashing will be the generic tendency of all episodes.  The first article  is undermining the so called ‘net neutrality’ of Google, a public demand Google once supported, but isn’t practicing any longer itself.

Google the lapdog of authoritarian regimes?

Source Watch discribes ‘net neutrality‘ this way:

“…the guiding principle that preserves the free and open Internet. Net neutrality ensures that all users can access the content or run the applications and devices of their choice. With net neutrality, the network’s only job is to move data – not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.”

Net neutrality is an important issue in the US. In 2008 a coalition of organisations and individuals started a campaign to saveguard the free and open Internet. Put simply, Net Neutrality means no discrimination. Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination. Some very important organisations support the campaing, like:

Consumers Union
American Library Association
National Coalition of Women’s Organizations
Parents Television Council
Consumer Federation of America
Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, Inc.
Public Knowledge
Common Cause
Christian Coalition of America
Democracy for America
Electronic Retailing Association
American Civil Liberties Union
and many others.

Also Obama and a lot of politicians worry about ‘net neutrality’. Let us quote from the ‘Net Neutrality Blog‘:

“President Barack Obama signed an economic stimulus bill with $7.2 billion to get fast, affordable, neutral Internet to the nearly half of American homes that don’t have it.

Net Neutrality was written into the DNA of the broadband stimulus. The plan requires that those who build Internet networks (using the nearly $4.7 billion in NTIA grants provided by the bill) adhere to the nondiscrimination and openness principles at the core of Net Neutrality.

Obama himself pledged to “take a back seat to no one” in his commitment to Net Neutrality. And the administration’s technology policies now posted on the White House Web site list Net Neutrality as the top priority.

Obama’s all-but-certain pick to head the FCC, Julius Genachowski, was one of the principal architects of the president’s pro-Net Neutrality platform.”

See for more detailed information also a text of FreePress.

Who wants to get rid of ‘Net Neutrality’? As to the faq of the campaign site:

“The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all.”

This is also an European threat as you can read in: Who wants Net Discrimination in Europe?

But it’s not Google’s matter apparently, or it isn’t any longer. Google supported ‘Net Neutrality’ thus far. They had too. A search engine that wants to favour certain content, looses his impartiality. Who would still want to use a biased search engine? But America wouldn’t be America  and Google is meanwhile one of the biggest American corporations, if they were not hypocritical about this[1]. We all know that Google blocks a lot of sites in China since 2006, especially sites about Tibet, the Dalai Lama and the Falun Gong. See Sites Google Agreed to Censor in China. In 2001 Human Rights Watch still congatulated Google for not wanting to give free sensitive Informationn to the Chinese Government, while Yahoo and MSN didn’t have a moral problem helping to put Chinese dissidents in jail. Source watch gives more examples of Google’s censorship and the following case is also very clear.

Everybody knows Google Earth where you can see Sharp pictures of any spot on the Globe. The two pictures beneath have both been taken by the Google satellite. The first picture has disappeared meanwhile for reasons we will explain.

Photo of secret CIA base in Baluchistan, Pakistan 2006

Photo of secret CIA base in in Baluchistan, Pakistan 2009

On the First picture you can see ‘Drones’, used by the CIA to bomb the frontier area of Pakistan with Afghanistan. The Information Clearing House knows exactly what kind of planes you see:

“The MQ1 Predator carries two laser-guided Hellfire missiles, and can fly for up to 454 miles, at speed of up to 135mph, and at altitudes of up to 25,000ft, according to the US Air Force website www.af.mil“

The Information Clearing House also mentions that several governments have asked to remove such pictures. They have accused Google also of giving free military secrets. The argument often used is that Iraqui insurgents possessed detailed pictures of UK military bases when arrested.

We do not know and will probably never know why Google has removed the picture but we know the reason is not military security, but pure political considerations.

As to the  Washingon Post some 30 attacks from the air were deployed on Pakistani territory using unmanned aeroplanes ascending from a secret CIA base in Pakistan, Baluchistan. The Taliban does not have aeroplanes to revenge these attacks, so knowing where these planes lift-off is not useful information for them. But there is another problem. The Pakistani do not like the US military. Pervez Musharraf is a servile ally of the US, because in exchange his government receives a billion dollar support.

But now and then there are elections in Pakistan, it is some kind of democracy. Pervez Musharraf is one of the candidates of the elections to be held this year in Pakistan. The Washington Post expected Musharraf to stop his support for the raids on Pakistani territory using a Pakistani airbase. If  the Pakistani newspapers would print pictures of these secret airbase, it would excite many Pakistani and Musharraf would be considered as a traitor of his own people and  therefore not being reelected. So. I think this is a clear cut case of political influence resulting in Google censorship. Google’s Net Neutrality is circumstantial. You can not rely on it.

More on  Net Neutrlity

How the net-neutrality debate crossed the pond (UK)

More articles about Net Neutrlity

More articles about Google Watch

More articles about Context Awareness

Links to Wikipedia: Context Awareness, Net Neutrality, Content Filtering, Google Watch