Reclaiming Conversation (51 page)

we learn to interrupt ourselves as well:
Laura Dabbish, Gloria Mark, and Victor Gonzalez, “Why Do I Keep Interrupting Myself? Environment, Habit and Self-Interruption,” CHI 2011,
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(New York: ACM Press): 3127–30, https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Research_files/CHI%202011%20Self-interruption.pdf.

predictable time off:
Leslie Perlow, “Predictable Time Off: The Team Solution to Overcoming Constant Work Connection,”
Fast Company
, May 2012, http://www.fastcompany.com/1837867/predictable-time-team-solution-overcoming-constant-work-connection. See also Perlow,
Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).

the place where new thinking begins:
On solitude and its importance, including in business settings, see Cain,
Quiet.

THE PUBLIC SQUARE

the ideas we think our followers want to hear:
Keith Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, et al., “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence,'” Pew Research Center for Internet, Technology, and Society, August 26, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence.

those in political power ultimately surrender:
Anthony Wing Kosner, in a blog post on Forbes.com, writes about this model as a game changer: “12 Lessons from KONY 2012 from Social Media Power Users,”
Forbes
(blog), March 9, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/03/09/12-lessons-from-kony-2012-from-social-media-power-users.

“Go out and rock it”:
“KONY 2012,” YouTube video, posted by Invisible Children, March 5, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc.

a direct source of political change:
Malcolm Gladwell refers to Clay Shirky's
Here Comes Everybody
(New York: Penguin Press, 2008) as the “bible of the social media movement,” though Shirky is not alone in extolling the utopian possibilities of
social media for political action. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,”
New Yorker
, October 4, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-3. The Kony video also got its share of negative press, most of it critical of its “slacktivism,” the way it turned activism into the feeling of activism. See, for example, Michael Deibert, “The Problem with ‘Invisible Children: Kony 2012,'”
Huffington Post,
March 7, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-deibert/joseph-kony-2012-children_b_1327417.html. Some of the critical literature is summarized in Eleanor Goldberg, “Invisible Children, Group Behind ‘Kony 2012,' Closing Because of Funding Issues,”
Huffington Post,
December 16, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/16/invisible-children-closing_n_6329990.html.

nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize:
Mark Pfeifle, cited in Gladwell, “Small Change.”

the State Department asked Twitter:
Ibid.

The power of weak ties is awesome:
Gladwell does not minimize what you can accomplish with weak ties. Among other things, he notes that studies show that “our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information.” Gladwell, “Small Change
.”
Here, Gladwell cites Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter's work on weak ties. See, for example, Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,”
American Journal of Sociology
78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2776392. But the civil rights movement became effective as it turned bloody and dangerous. Gladwell asks, “What makes people capable of this kind of activism?” To answer this question, one place Gladwell looks is to a study that compared those who stuck with the Freedom Summer movement and those who dropped out. Those who stayed in were likely to have close personal friends who were going to Mississippi. In “Small Change” Gladwell concludes that high-risk activism is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

“was flanked by his roommate”:
Gladwell, “Small Change.”

Is there free thought without privacy?:
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution makes citizens immune from unreasonable search and seizure of their possessions. The amendment applies to their books and papers. Now that our books and papers are digital, should they be fair game?

“Where do you want to go today?”
Evgeny Morozov, “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,”
New York Times,
February 4, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

searches of ordinary Americans are monitored:
A write-up of a cache of intercepted conversations given to the
Washington Post
by Edward Snowden revealed that “nine of ten account holders . . . were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Barton Gellman, Julie Tate, and Ashkan Soltani, “In NSA-Intercepted Data, Those Not Targeted Far Outnumber the Foreigners Who Are,”
Washington Post,
July 5, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost
.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html.

is out of sync:
You are in a new kind of space; the term “hyper-public” has been used in an effort to capture the kind of space it is. Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society hosted “Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space in the Connected World,” in June 2011. The symposium website has background information and video footage from the conference, http://www.hyperpublic.org.

In May 2015, a federal appeals court found that some of the NSA searches, in particular the bulk collection of data on individuals, is illegal. This area of law is fast-moving, in line, I believe, with my hypothesis that it is time to rethink where we are on these matters. Charlie Savage and Jonathan Weisman, “NSA Collection of Bulk Call Data Is Ruled Illegal,”
New York Times
, May 7, 2015.

Bentham's image of panopticon surveillance:
Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish
, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977 [1975]).

the feeling that we are cared for:
Rob Horning, “No Life Stories,”
New Inquiry
, July 10, 2014, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/no-life-stories, a review of Marc Andrejevic's
Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know
(London: Routledge, 2013).

can provide “natural data” to the system:
Zeynep Tufecki, “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance, and Computational Politics,”
First Monday
19, no. 7 (2014), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097.

It places us in a particular world:
Eli Pariser,
The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think
(New York: Penguin Press, 2013). Also on this topic, see Rob Horning, “No Life Stories.” The degree to which the net polarizes is an important and researchable topic. As this book goes to press, a new study has been published, done by Facebook investigators and published in
Science,
that suggests that the polarization effects of the Facebook News Feed are less significant than expected. Almost 29 percent of the news stories displayed by Facebook's News Feed presents views that conflict with the user's own ideology. Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic, “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook,”
Science
, May 2, 2015. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa1160. The discussion of this study centers on the fragility of this hopeful finding: The algorithm for what shows up in the News Feed is after all determined by Facebook and can be changed by Facebook. (Most recently, Facebook has given users greater control over what appears in their timeline—again, an intriguing corporate decision in the direction of transparency but one that can be reversed.) The new study about the diversity of what we see in a Facebook News Feed is in dialogue with other studies, such as the 2014 Pew study that suggested that online we read what we agree with and post what we think our followers will want to hear, the idea of a
“spiral of silence.” Keith Hampton, Lee Rainie, Weixu Lu, et al., “Social Media and the Spiral of Silence,” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, August 26, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence.

just not to you:
Jonathan Zittrain, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,”
New Republic
, June 1, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-fiduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering.

“The most successful tyranny”:
Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008 [1987]), 249.

actively constructs its version of you:
Sara M. Watson, “Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization,”
The Atlantic
, June 16, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/data-doppelgangers-and-the-uncanny-valley-of-personalization/372780.

We have become what the social philosopher Gilles Deleuze called “dividuals,” to denote entities comprised of multiple parcels of data that can be bought, sold, and traded in the new marketplace. The dividual is an aggregate of recorded preferences, histories, and tastes. If we are disoriented and unsure in our new situation, Deleuze would say this is natural. We have never been dividuals before. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,”
October
59 (1992): 3–7, http://jstor.org/stable778828.

“evolves out of its wooden brain”:
Karl Marx,
Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1992 [1867]).

“a line has been crossed”:
Watson, “Data Doppelgängers.”

reached its conclusion about her:
Watson comes to understand that the study is targeting all women in her age group. Ibid.

And how can she challenge:
In this, Watson is like respondents in a 2014 Pew study of privacy and the Internet. They didn't think they had enough privacy, but they didn't know what to do about it. Eighty percent of those who use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are concerned about advertisers and businesses accessing the information they share on the sites. Two-thirds of them think the government should do more to regulate those advertisers. Mary Madden, “Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era,” Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, November 12, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/12/public-privacy-perceptions/.

“knows us better than we know ourselves”:
Watson, “Data Doppelgängers.”

“rather go to a movie”:
Zuckerberg said this during an interview with Charlie Rose, noted by Morozov, “The Death of the Cyberflâneur.” He is cited in Neil M. Richards, “The Perils of Social Reading,”
Georgetown Law Journal
101, no. 689 (2013): 691, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2031307.

“
and even thinking
”:
ibid.

blogging as a regular part of her academic program:
Molly Sauter, “Curiosity, Being Yourself, and Being Bad at Things,”
Odd Letters: The Online Home of Molly Sauter
(blog), December 5, 2013, http://oddletters
.com/2013/12/05/curiosity-being-yourself-and-being-bad-at-things.

friends might disagree with them:
Hampton, Rainie, Lu, et al., “Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence.'”

“Crowdsourcing” your reading preferences:
Richards, “The Perils of Social Reading.”

easy not to think about something:
On a cognitive level, problems that are not clearly defined are nearly impossible for people to care about as moral problems. Researchers have studied how this is true of climate change—a problem that is “complex, large-scale and unintentionally caused.” Ezra M. Markowitz and Azim F. Shariff, “Climate Change and Moral Judgment,”
Nature Climate Change
2 (2012): 243–47, doi:10.1038/nclimate1378. See also Matthew C. Nisbet, “Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement,”
Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development
51, no. 2 (2009): 12–23, doi:10.3200/ENVT.51.2.12-23.

a blizzard of acronyms:
On teenagers' strategies for preserving their privacy from parents and others in their communities, see danah boyd,
It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

experts tell us that this is not true:
In one classic example from 1997, Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Latanya Sweeney reidentified the medical record of William Weld—then-governor of Massachusetts—using only data on gender, date of birth, and home zip code. “No Silver Bullet: De-Identification Still Doesn't Work” (unpublished), http://randomwalker.info/publications/no-silver-bullet-de-identification.pdf. Other, more recent studies have shown that many personal characteristics—including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious views, and political views—can be predicted by nothing more than Facebook “likes”: Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
110, no. 15 (2013): 5802–5, doi:10.1073/pnas.1218772110, cited in Zeynep Tufecki, “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance, and Computational Politics,”
First Monday
19, no. 7 (2014), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097.