ChangeEverything.ca, the online community we conceived and built for Vancity, has been nominated for a Webby Award.
social networking
ChangeEverything.ca gets a Webby nomination... and some big-league peers
by Alexandra Samuel and Rob Cottingham – April 15, 2008 - 3:09pmIs Facebook trying to kill you?
by Alexandra Samuel – February 6, 2008 - 1:01am
My new TV addiction is "The Sarah Connor Chronicles", which brings the Terminator franchise to the small screen. There's nothing like watching robots kick ass to make me think about the big issues in life, and this week's man-versus-machine showdown got me thinking about our widely-noted anxiety about the possibility of robot or cyborg takeover. 
From Blade Runner to the Matrix, from Star Trek's Borg to Battlestar Galactica's Cylons, we've spent a lot of time imagining the day when our super-strong, super-smart robots get tired of vacuuming and decide they want to rule the world. You can even buy a witty and informative manual on How To Survive a Robot Uprising
.
As a sci-fi fan and insomniac I've spent more than my share of hours staring at the ceiling and wondering whether our house is about to be stormed by robots who've made their escape from the Honda assembly line. That's given me an opportunity to consider a more immediate threat: Facebook. Not just Facebook, actually, but all the social networks and online communities to which we give our eyeballs, braincells, hearts and dollars. Could these online communities constitute the machine threat that sci-fi has taught us to anticipate?
Here's what we know about the prospect of machine takeover:
The machines share a common intelligence. Thanks to networking, the machines are all connected together. Networked, machine intelligence is way more powerful than solo, human intelligence, which is why the machines crush us like bugs (at least at first). Similarly, an online community links users (and their computers) in a giant network that agglomerates the knowledge, passions, and creative assets of its members. A single social network is a collective entity that is far smarter, better informed, and more interesting to talk to at a dinner party than any one of its members.
The machines evolve. In any scary robot movie, the shit hits the fan once your nice, domesticated robot develops the ability to build a nuclear missile or graft human tissue onto its exoskeleton. You want to keep a very careful eye on any machine that develops intelligence or skills that weren't specifically and deliberately engineered by its human creator. So please worry about social networks like Flickr (originally a set of tools for a multiplayer online game, turned into a photo-sharing community) or communities like Second Life (started as a demo, turned into a world). We may initiate our networks, but we're kidding ourselves if we think they remain under our control.
The machines figure out how to build new machines. Machines cease to be dependent on -- or beholden to -- human beings once they learn how to build more of themselves. That's why you've got to worry about networks like Ning, which are deliberately set up to spawn new networks. Talk about letting the genie out of the bottle. Before you engineer your network for a path of relentless, viral growth, get to know its social dynamics and trajectory, so you have some sense of the trajectory you're initiating.
The machines need a body. Aha! you're thinking. The robots need some sort of physical presence before they take over -- ideally something that goes beyond a computer-controlled jet or tank. Opposable thumbs are as helpful to robots as to humans. Well, Facebook has 128 million opposable thumbs: every Facebook user is a real-world avatar for the network. Don't believe me? Almost 100,000 Facebook users signed up for a worldwide water fight last July 14th -- that's right, the network already has us armed and turning on one another.
The robots always kill their creator first. That's bad news for Mark Zuckerberg, and for all the rest of us who spend our days and nights in the laboratory, coaxing our communities to life. Sure, a community may stagger around the room, thrusting out its arms and legs in a vaguely dynamic way, but you know it's ALIVE when it turns around and plunges a dagger through your heart. Anyone who's launched an online community, only to have the members completely reinvent the community's mission, user agreement and/or code, knows what I'm talking about.
Robots reflect and amplify the worst traits and behaviors of their human creators. Robots can do all the stuff we do: perpetrate mass slaughter (Matrix, Terminator, the Day the Earth Stood Still), take away our ability to make independent decisions (2001), exploit human energy/labor (Matrix), destroy the natural environment (Matrix, Terminator), and appropriate other species' cultural, biological and physical assets (the Borg). Likewise, the virtual being constituted by a social network can amplify the worst traits within the network: social networks have perpetrated mass frauds (hello, lonelygirl15!), turned peaceful coexisters into rotten neighbors, reduced people to whether they are hot or not, and -- in an especially horrific case -- even bullied at least one teen to her death.
Your Facebook profile page may not look a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it bears more than a metaphorical resemblance to the intelligent machines of our nightmares. Each half-machine (servers and software), half-human (coders and users) network you belong to is a collective intelligence. It may not be embodied (or rather, its embodiment may be distributed -- across all its users -- rather than unitary) but it is a new kind of being, a new kind of intelligence, that could have a crucial impact on the future of humanity.
You can understand that impact simply in terms of each network's social, psychological, and perhaps also economic and/or political footprint. A network can fan the flames of material aspiration by encouraging people to think about what's next on their shopping list. It can reduce human connection to the next hookup. It can reduce professional collegiality to notches on a virtual bedpost. Or a network can focus members and observers on how to change everything.
But network participation doesn't just affect us: it constitutes us. When we become part of the network's collective intelligence, the network becomes us -- and we become the network. The network consciousness is (to a greater or lesser extent, in proportion to our participation) our own consciousness.
If our network aims at professional schmoozing, we're schmoozers: as genuine as our last message was forthright, as opportunistic as our last inquiry was grasping. If our network interactions play at zombies and vampires, we're zombies and vampires: undead, sapping energy from our more vital and dynamic selves. If our network focuses on change, it is change; and the consciousness of each member becomes change (and a force for change) too.
That's why it's time for you -- for all of us -- to join the resistance. Our social networks can be the malevolent, murderous creatures of dystopic science fiction. They can form collective consciousnesses that reflect, amplify and encourage materialism, exploitation and cruelty. We can give birth to these half-human, half-machine beings, and be remembered as the generation of foolish scientists who let the experiment escape from the lab.
Or we can constitute another creature entirely. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and the Terminator franchise all feature cybernetic creations who turn against their wicked siblings and instead join with humans for their salvation. Our social networks may have millions of users, but even in machine time, they are still in their infancy. Their first steps may be shaky, but there's still plenty of time for us to steer them on a path towards constructive engagement; towards claiming the best of their human legacy, and amplifying it with the power of machine intelligence.
The collective consciousness of your social network constitutes some part of your own consciousness...but you help constitute its consciousness, too. Your contribution -- your words, your photos, your choice of connections, even your choice of which networks to engage in -- determine the character of each of your network babies. Resistance is far from futile: resistance to materialism, exploitation and cruelty are the very qualities that we can model, embody and endow. A networked Terminator that reflects these qualities of resistance: now that's a cyborg I'd like to help build.
From Blade Runner to the Matrix, from Star Trek's Borg to Battlestar Galactica's Cylons, we've spent a lot of time imagining the day when our super-strong, super-smart robots get tired of vacuuming and decide they want to rule the world. You can even buy a witty and informative manual on How To Survive a Robot Uprising
.As a sci-fi fan and insomniac I've spent more than my share of hours staring at the ceiling and wondering whether our house is about to be stormed by robots who've made their escape from the Honda assembly line. That's given me an opportunity to consider a more immediate threat: Facebook. Not just Facebook, actually, but all the social networks and online communities to which we give our eyeballs, braincells, hearts and dollars. Could these online communities constitute the machine threat that sci-fi has taught us to anticipate?
Here's what we know about the prospect of machine takeover:
The machines share a common intelligence. Thanks to networking, the machines are all connected together. Networked, machine intelligence is way more powerful than solo, human intelligence, which is why the machines crush us like bugs (at least at first). Similarly, an online community links users (and their computers) in a giant network that agglomerates the knowledge, passions, and creative assets of its members. A single social network is a collective entity that is far smarter, better informed, and more interesting to talk to at a dinner party than any one of its members.
The machines evolve. In any scary robot movie, the shit hits the fan once your nice, domesticated robot develops the ability to build a nuclear missile or graft human tissue onto its exoskeleton. You want to keep a very careful eye on any machine that develops intelligence or skills that weren't specifically and deliberately engineered by its human creator. So please worry about social networks like Flickr (originally a set of tools for a multiplayer online game, turned into a photo-sharing community) or communities like Second Life (started as a demo, turned into a world). We may initiate our networks, but we're kidding ourselves if we think they remain under our control.
The machines figure out how to build new machines. Machines cease to be dependent on -- or beholden to -- human beings once they learn how to build more of themselves. That's why you've got to worry about networks like Ning, which are deliberately set up to spawn new networks. Talk about letting the genie out of the bottle. Before you engineer your network for a path of relentless, viral growth, get to know its social dynamics and trajectory, so you have some sense of the trajectory you're initiating.
The machines need a body. Aha! you're thinking. The robots need some sort of physical presence before they take over -- ideally something that goes beyond a computer-controlled jet or tank. Opposable thumbs are as helpful to robots as to humans. Well, Facebook has 128 million opposable thumbs: every Facebook user is a real-world avatar for the network. Don't believe me? Almost 100,000 Facebook users signed up for a worldwide water fight last July 14th -- that's right, the network already has us armed and turning on one another.
The robots always kill their creator first. That's bad news for Mark Zuckerberg, and for all the rest of us who spend our days and nights in the laboratory, coaxing our communities to life. Sure, a community may stagger around the room, thrusting out its arms and legs in a vaguely dynamic way, but you know it's ALIVE when it turns around and plunges a dagger through your heart. Anyone who's launched an online community, only to have the members completely reinvent the community's mission, user agreement and/or code, knows what I'm talking about.
Robots reflect and amplify the worst traits and behaviors of their human creators. Robots can do all the stuff we do: perpetrate mass slaughter (Matrix, Terminator, the Day the Earth Stood Still), take away our ability to make independent decisions (2001), exploit human energy/labor (Matrix), destroy the natural environment (Matrix, Terminator), and appropriate other species' cultural, biological and physical assets (the Borg). Likewise, the virtual being constituted by a social network can amplify the worst traits within the network: social networks have perpetrated mass frauds (hello, lonelygirl15!), turned peaceful coexisters into rotten neighbors, reduced people to whether they are hot or not, and -- in an especially horrific case -- even bullied at least one teen to her death.
Your Facebook profile page may not look a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it bears more than a metaphorical resemblance to the intelligent machines of our nightmares. Each half-machine (servers and software), half-human (coders and users) network you belong to is a collective intelligence. It may not be embodied (or rather, its embodiment may be distributed -- across all its users -- rather than unitary) but it is a new kind of being, a new kind of intelligence, that could have a crucial impact on the future of humanity.
You can understand that impact simply in terms of each network's social, psychological, and perhaps also economic and/or political footprint. A network can fan the flames of material aspiration by encouraging people to think about what's next on their shopping list. It can reduce human connection to the next hookup. It can reduce professional collegiality to notches on a virtual bedpost. Or a network can focus members and observers on how to change everything.
But network participation doesn't just affect us: it constitutes us. When we become part of the network's collective intelligence, the network becomes us -- and we become the network. The network consciousness is (to a greater or lesser extent, in proportion to our participation) our own consciousness.
If our network aims at professional schmoozing, we're schmoozers: as genuine as our last message was forthright, as opportunistic as our last inquiry was grasping. If our network interactions play at zombies and vampires, we're zombies and vampires: undead, sapping energy from our more vital and dynamic selves. If our network focuses on change, it is change; and the consciousness of each member becomes change (and a force for change) too.
That's why it's time for you -- for all of us -- to join the resistance. Our social networks can be the malevolent, murderous creatures of dystopic science fiction. They can form collective consciousnesses that reflect, amplify and encourage materialism, exploitation and cruelty. We can give birth to these half-human, half-machine beings, and be remembered as the generation of foolish scientists who let the experiment escape from the lab.
Or we can constitute another creature entirely. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and the Terminator franchise all feature cybernetic creations who turn against their wicked siblings and instead join with humans for their salvation. Our social networks may have millions of users, but even in machine time, they are still in their infancy. Their first steps may be shaky, but there's still plenty of time for us to steer them on a path towards constructive engagement; towards claiming the best of their human legacy, and amplifying it with the power of machine intelligence.
The collective consciousness of your social network constitutes some part of your own consciousness...but you help constitute its consciousness, too. Your contribution -- your words, your photos, your choice of connections, even your choice of which networks to engage in -- determine the character of each of your network babies. Resistance is far from futile: resistance to materialism, exploitation and cruelty are the very qualities that we can model, embody and endow. A networked Terminator that reflects these qualities of resistance: now that's a cyborg I'd like to help build.
Mom! He's poking me!
September 27, 2007 - 8:46pm
(parent reprimanding child, who is in front of a computer) No 'but's, young man! You log in and friend your sister right now!
Friend friend
September 6, 2007 - 9:49pm
(woman to another woman, looking at a man) He's the kind of guy you want as a Facebook friend, but not as a friend friend.
Where do the cool kids hang out?
by Rob Cottingham – July 10, 2007 - 12:03am
If you follow this stuff, then chances are you've at least heard about danah boyd's blog essay looking at youth participation in online social networks through the prism of class. It's an excellent read with some valuable insights, but I don't think it's the best piece on her site.
Dig a little deeper, and you'll find a remarkable perspective on online participation by young people, one that cuts past the paranoia and panic that too often color public discussion on that topic. She starts from the radical premise that kids are people worthy of respect and dignity; her posts regularly take on political and commercial hucksterism with a rare combination of passion and rigour.
Her interests and insights range beyond youth as well. If you'd like to check out her blog, have a look at some of her greatest hits – and then let me know what you think.
Falling for Facebook
by Alexandra Samuel – April 28, 2007 - 4:14pmI'm besotted with Facebook. I can see it becoming the primary way that I -- and many other people -- interact online. So if you aren't on Facebook already, join now. Now.
Still here? Don't tell me, you need actual reasons to join. Fine, here goes:
- It's huge, and it's growing. While Facebook started as a network for college students, it opened up to anyone who wanted to join in September 2006, and grew more than 75% -- to almost 25 million users -- by February. I haven't found numbers more recent than that, but I can say that between 1-3 people in my own personal address book (1500 email addresses) are joining every day.
- Your friends are already there. If you import/connect to your address book when you sign up , you'll discover all the folks you know who are already on Facebook. This is a great way to keep in touch with them. You can even find out who in your universe is already on Facebook, before you sign up yourself.
- It mixes business with pleasure. Unlike LinkedIn, which feels like some sort of massive résumé swap, Facebook brings a personal side to its user interactions. More than half of my Facebook friends are colleagues or professional acquaintances, and now I'm finding out about their personal passions as well as their professional pursuits.
- It's one-stop shopping. Facebook offers blogging, photo sharing, messaging, web-to-mobile communications, social networking, and groups.
- It's a window on your world. Once you've added your contacts to your list of Facebook friends, your Facebook home page will be the best place on the web for you to find out what's going on with the folks you know. My favourite part of Facebook -- the thing that makes it truly addictive -- is checking in to see what's going on with all my friends and groups. I can see my friends' latest status reports, their latest new friends and groups, their notes, their photos....all in one place. The best way to get how cool this is is to take a look, but I don't think I can really share a screenshot because that would mean sharing details on my friends' activities. And that underlines what is so great about the Facebook feed: it feels far more personal than what you'd normally see on the wide open web.
- It's pretty. God knows, I've fallen in love with my share of social media tools, but most of them have required me to look past a barebones or even downright ugly interface in order to appreciate the inner beauty of content sharing, social networking, or whatever. In contrast, Facebook has a very polished interface.
- It can help you connect with your community. Facebook has now got an API -- application programming interface -- that lets people extend Facebook with all sorts of little applications and enhancements. (Check out some of the options so far.) And that API is going to see Facebook integrated into more and more 3rd party sites. If you find it easier to connect with your members, supporters, customers or friends on Facebook than to lure them into registering on your own site (and for most organizations, it will be MUCH easier to connect via Facebook) you need to start thinking now about how you can integrate Facebook's community and functionality into your own site.
I'll have more to say about Facebook -- and especially about the options for integrating Facebook with external web communities -- in the coming weeks. But if you want to understand why this matters, you need to join Facebook now. And once you do, be sure to add me as a friend!
Twittering to myself
by Alexandra Samuel – March 12, 2007 - 9:43amTwitter seems to be the new addictive social networking app on the block. (For those new to the phenom, it's a site that lets you tell your friends what you are doing RIGHT NOW, and to see what they're doing, too.) But I haven't been able to get into the addiction cycle, because I don't have any friends. :(
Why? Because unlike other social networks -- Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster spring to mind -- Twitter doesn't provide a way to mine your address book for fellow Twitter-ers. As far as I can tell, if I upload my address book to Twitter, EVERYONE gets an invitation to be my Twitter buddy, whether they're Twittering or not. I can see how this helps to spread Twitter, but since I don't want to annoy my entire contact list with invitations to all the social networks I check out, it makes it very hard to get up and running on Twitter.
So consider this a triple request:
- If you're using Twitter, ping me or add me to your friends list.
- If there IS a way to make Twitter scan my contact list for fellow Twitterers, please let me know.
- Twitter, if there ISN'T a way to scan my contact list for fellow Twitterers, could you add it? Or could you at least allow me to scan my buddies on other social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook -- not just LiveJournal, which is the only one you currently connect to?
