Category Archives: Observer

How (and why) Facebook is sharing people’s secrets with the world

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This morning’s Observer column.

If you think that privacy is an abstract concern of EU bureaucrats and libertarians with too much time on their hands, then might I suggest that you consult youropenbook.org. This is an ingenious site which allows you to type in a search phrase. It then ransacks the publicly available Facebook “status updates” and displays what it finds.

A search for “I cheated”, for example, brings up all kinds of intriguing stuff. A nice young woman from Baltimore posted “dam right i cheated i coulnt get it from u wen i needed it”. There’s also the odd potentially embarrassing reference to cheating in exams. A search for “I lied” brings up updates like “I’m sorry, I lied before when I said I used to make lots of bets. My therapist tells me I should try lying a lot to help get through my… gambling problem”. Another writes “im not gonna bother anymore…theres no point hiding the truth…..iv lost too much and all because i lied to the one i love…im such a fukin dick head, i fucked up the best girl i’ve ever had”.

I could go on but you will get the point. All of these people are instantly identifiable. Millions of Facebook users are posting embarrassing or damaging messages which can be read by the entire internet…

Gravitational pull

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This morning’s Observer column.

So, here we were in this small room. On the table, lying open on a cushion, was Isaac Newton's copy of the first edition of his Principia Mathematica or, to give it its full title, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the book in which he sets out his laws of motion (the basis of classical mechanics), as well as the law of universal gravitation, his derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion and much else besides. It was the keystone of the scientific revolution and was written at Trinity College, just down the road.

On closer inspection, it became clear that the book had been in the wars. It had at some stage, for example, been rescued from a fire. Some of the pages were singed round the edges, but the miracle of its survival paled into insignificance as one turned the pages, because Newton had clearly been dissatisfied with the first edition of his magnum opus. On page after page he had written corrections and added entire paragraphs in his immaculate, tiny handwriting.

What we were looking at was not the creation of this amazing work but, in a way, its recreation…

Why Twitter is different

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This morning’s Observer column.

One of the most intriguing and useful features in Twitter is the "retweet" facility. If you see something in your tweetstream that you think might interest others, then you can click a button to make it visible to the people who are following you. Retweeting has become so commonplace that its conventions have already been the subject of a serious study by the anthropologist Danah Boyd and her colleagues at Microsoft Research. But it turns out that retweeting is not just interesting in terms of discourse analysis; it's also the key to understanding why Twitter is a radically different form of social networking.

We know this because of a remarkable study conducted by some researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and published last week at a major academic conference…

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid

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This morning’s Observer column.

Sadly, there is no cure for megalomania. But venture capitalists ought to start funding the search for a cure, because it’s costing many of them a lot of money, and is likely to cost even more in the future.

Here’s how it works. A smart entrepreneur – a Harvard dropout, say, or some guy who made a lot of money by selling off his last venture to some clueless multinational – starts up a web business which grows like crazy by attracting millions of subscribers who use its services for free. Pretty soon, it's got 400 million of them and everyone is saying: “Wow! 400 million users! That must be good for something.”

Then several things happen. Firstly, the proprietor of the sensation du jour starts drinking the Kool-Aid and contracts the aforementioned megalomania. He begins to fantasise that he could own the whole internet. Secondly, thousands of other entrepreneurs think “Wow! He could own the whole internet. We need to make sure our stuff has hooks into his stuff. Otherwise, we’re toast.” And then the mainstream media, whose insights into this could be written in 96-point Helvetica bold on the back of a postage stamp, are going around saying, “Jeez, this stuff is the real deal. How do we get onside?”

The war against Flash

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last weeks announcement by Apple that the UK launch of the iPad will be delayed by a month was the headline news for consumers, but for geeks a more significant development came on Thursday with some changes in the 21,000-word ‘agreement’ that you have to sign if you are going to develop applications for Apple’s iDevices…

Mandy’s Dangerous Downloaders Act

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This morning’s Observer column.

The trouble is that in Westminster (or on Capitol Hill) nobody speaks for the future or for the wider needs of society. So we wind up with biased legislation framed in a rearview mirror. The fact that the internet makes it easy to copy and remix does indeed pose a challenge for IP regimes framed in the era of print. But that should be a spur for rethinking the regime, not for switching off the net – because that’s what we will have to do in order to stop what’s now going on.

The dangerous downloaders act won’t stop file-sharing, but it will certainly inhibit online creativity. This government has legislated in haste; it will be for the next one to repent at leisure.

The Flickr effect

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This morning’s Observer column.

Because Flickr is so prominent, it’ll get most of the blame for the destruction of yet another venerable profession. But in fact the rot had set in long before the site launched in February 2004. The main culprit was the idiot-proof digital camera, which enabled almost anyone to take a decent photograph, or at any rate one that was accurately exposed, in focus and sharp — and to delete it and try again if it hadn’t turned out right.

Digital cameras had a powerful ‘levelling-up’ impact on amateur photography. Once upon a time, only professionals could consistently deliver images that were technically excellent. And even then, analogue technology often let them down. I’ve just been looking through a book of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s collected portraits, for example. Out of 94 images, only 66 approach contemporary standards of sharpness and focus. That doesn’t mean that most of them aren’t memorable pictures; but it does illustrate how digital technology has levelled the playing field…

Google learns to dog-whistle

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This morning’s Observer column.

Another sign of Google’s growing political sophistication is the way it has started to translate its Chinese difficulties into terms that the US government takes seriously, namely trade. “Since services and information are our most successful exports,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the Guardian, “if regulations in China… prevent us from being competitive, then they are a trade barrier.”

This is pure dog-whistle politics. Western governments, especially in the US, engage in endless posturing about human rights, but rarely do anything to endanger their economic interests. But governments do care about restraints on trade and are minded to take action to deal with them. As General de Gaulle, paraphrasing Lord Palmerston, once observed: “Great nations do not have friends; they only have interests.” By aligning their company’s commercial interests with the wider economic interest of the US, the Google boys have begun to recruit powerful allies…

Only connect…

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This morning’s Observer column:

My mother used to say that television had killed the art of conversation. One wonders what she would have made of Chatroulette, the current sensation du jour. It’s the implementation of a stunningly simple idea: live online chats with randomly chosen, complete strangers.

After logging in two frames appear on the left-hand side of the screen. The lower one shows you (or what your webcam is pointing at). The other is labelled “Partner”. Click “New Game” and you’re off. An image of someone or something appears in the upper frame.

“Connected,” says the status bar, “Feel free to talk now.” If you don’t like what you see, click the “Next” button and you’re instantly connected to someone else. And so it goes.

To anyone unused to raw, unmediated Net culture, Chatroulette will come as a shock…