"Is this the Facebook we all signed up for?" asks the hipster VJ interviewer from his desk inside the office command center on HuffPo live, a digital interview show with Skyped-in guests.
The topic is Graph Search, the new Facebook tool that mines subscriber uploads for data useful in research, dating, stalking, etc.
The guests include an activist, a philosopher, a BuzzFeeder, and a token ex-Facebook user, art world tech whiz Barry Hoggard, who makes the best contributions despite being patronized by the show's host because, eh, everyone pretty well has to be on Facebook at this point.
The NYC-based Hoggard, who runs the ArtCat artists' web hosting service, among other projects (recap here), points out that as a host (predating Facebook) he made certain pledges to customers not to exploit their data: "it would never occur to me to change my privacy policy every few months in order to increasingly use the data that people had given to me, when I was promising that I would do very little with that data. I just don't feel it's an ethical way for a company to behave."
Ethics, gulp. You can almost hear the gears grinding in the heads of the other panelists. "We have to talk about ethics, now? In connection with this service we all use and promote? What are ethics, even?"
February 2013
reaction GIF culture
Greg (who sent his full name and I'll revise this if he wants) emails:
I recently google searched "reaction GIF culture" just to see what would come up, and I found this post -- in which someone posts a GIF of a scene from Glee as a reaction to some inane comment about gender bias in Pokemon. Anyway, the curious thing about the GIF is that it doesn't really need to be a GIF -- in it, the girl has an expression of exasperation, but her face doesn't move, and the only things that do move are some figures in the background and immediate foreground. Someone called this a spandrel of reaction GIF culture, an analogy I'm not sure fits 100%, but is a pretty interesting concept - that of a totally useless reaction gif, seemingly only used to acknowledge that reaction GIFs are typically used in such situations.
Reply:
I like the idea of a placeholder for a reaction GIF - am also not sure if spandrel is the right word -- but this example is a classic (if banal) reaction GIF with the straightforward meaning of "long skeptical stare" or "slow burn." For that to be effective you have to know it's happening over time. The GIF gives you a sense of the room (school lunchroom [?] where people are moving around); it's fairly economical as these things go. As for its uselessness (animation vs still), the cheerleader is making herself into an "anger icon" by freezing that way, so including all the background movement makes it a fairly sophisticated joke (as opposed to overkill). As for the Pokemon issue, reaction GIFs are usually "off topic."
feed me i'm starving
Twice in the last few days someone laughed when I mentioned "checking my stats." Ha ha, that's so 2004.
OK, but when your host expects you to keep your site clean of malware and spoofers ("we are not your parents, or Facebook") one ought to give at least a cursory glance at those numbers to see weird incoming URLs and sudden unexplained traffic spikes. Right? Oh well.
Anyway, I keep seeing this "twitterfeed" BS, and apparently it's just your host's way of telling you that "x number of visits came from links on twitter":
And has nothing to do with this:
As for that bit.ly-owned service ^, why would I want to "feed my blog to twitter"? Is this for folks who can't paste a blog URL into a tweet? Does anyone look for a blog on twitter?
Some people say they use twitter as a substitute RSS reader (e.g, the ancient Google Reader). I've never gotten that. Twitter is chaotic, and you follow people for their amusing daily blather, not for links to their blog posts. I get if you have a blog why you would put up links to your new posts on twitter (though it seems pretty redundant) but why would I "follow" those if I could just follow the blog (in bookmarks or on a reader)? Questions, questions. Obviously if you rely on the Zuckerberg continuum for news none of this means much. This post is for the maverick weirdos interested in carving out a space of partial Zizekian withdrawal from the most egregious aspects of the socialmediasphere (all one of us).
emerging markets: history of a buzz word
...Participants in public policy debates are often insensitive to how much ground they cede when they embrace the nomenclature used by their opponents. My personal bete noire is "free markets" which is actually an oxymoron. Another is "entitlements" which is code for "welfare." Why don’t people who favor programs like Social Security call them “social insurance’? Or “economic stabilizers”?
Or "catch a break programs"? The above quote precedes a guest post on Smith's blog by Robin Broad delving into the history of the term "emerging markets":
Perhaps the first use of the term “emerging” was in fact a positive one (as far as I’m concerned) – coming from the 1955 Bandung Conference, best known for leading to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement. At that point, the new “emerging” powers or nations or countries referred to former colonies gaining independence. Indonesian President Sukarno’s vision was that these “new emerging forces” would rival the colonial forces at places like the United Nations.
But what a difference almost three decades makes. Jump ahead to 1981 and the onset of the reign of free-market fundamentalism – when a man named Antoine van Agtmael coined the term “emerging market economy” as an alternative to “developing country.” And van Agtmael’s perch?: Deputy director of the capital markets department of the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group in Washington, D.C.
A side note: “Emerging markets” also was used by some after the collapse of the Soviet Union to refer to the “2nd world,” the former Soviet republics and satellites that were said to be “emerging” from socialism or communism to private-sector capitalism. (These are now more commonly referred to as “transition” economies.)
Back to the main plot: In the mid-1990s, van Agtmael’s “emerging markets” became even more defined and popularized – thanks to Bill Clinton’s activist Commerce Department under the leadership of Ron Brown. The term is typically associated with Jeffrey Garten, Brown’s Undersecretary of Commerce, and author of a speech (and later a book) entitled “The Big Emerging Markets.” The U.S. government’s concern wasn’t the poor and marginalized or poverty reduction in these poorer nations, but rather the roughly 10 countries “with the greatest potential for future export growth” (as Secretary Brown phrased it).
Meaning the growth of sales by US companies to various countries' former colonies. As the US gradually declines to GOP-led banana republic status, multinational capital is discovering new emerging markets in our own impoverished heartland: buyers' markets, that is, for labor, public infrastructure, coal, shale gas, student loans, foreclosed home rentals, etc. A rumored Obama pick for Commerce would certainly abet this trend.