Internet

It’s a series of tubes that Al Gore invented, right?

Drama-Free Facebook

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Leave it to the kids to figure out how to make Facebook as safe, secure, and drama-free as possible.

From danah boyd | apophenia » Risk Reduction Strategies on Facebook:

Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account – that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reactivate the account and have all of her friend connections back. But when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. But when she’s logged in, they can do all of that. And she can delete anything that she doesn’t like. Michael Ducker calls this practice “super-logoff” when he noticed a group of gay male adults doing the exact same thing.

[…]

Shamika doesn’t deactivate her Facebook profile but she does delete every wall message, status update, and Like shortly after it’s posted. She’ll post a status update and leave it there until she’s ready to post the next one or until she’s done with it. Then she’ll delete it from her profile. When she’s done reading a friend’s comment on her page, she’ll delete it. She’ll leave a Like up for a few days for her friends to see and then delete it. When I asked her why she was deleting this content, she looked at me incredulously and told me “too much drama.” Pushing further, she talked about how people were nosy and it was too easy to get into trouble for the things you wrote a while back that you couldn’t even remember posting let alone remember what it was all about. It was better to keep everything clean and in the moment. If it’s relevant now, it belongs on Facebook, but the old stuff is no longer relevant so it doesn’t belong on Facebook.

(via Waxy)

Interesting approaches, and I don’t think I would have thought of either. Well, I might have thought of the second, but I babble enough that it would be far too much trouble to bother with (and besides, the majority of what goes on Facebook also goes to Twitter and my blog, so there wouldn’t be much point).

RockMelt

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From First Look at RockMelt, a Browser Built For Facebook Freaks | Webmonkey | Wired.com:

We’ve seen browsers custom-built for the social web before, most notably Flock, which launched as a MySpaced-up version of Firefox. Mozilla experimented with Ubiquity, an in-browser tool for posting to different social sites and interacting with web services. There are a number of add-ons that can embed social networking dashboards into the browser for you. These tools have grown in popularity as we’ve struggled to manage the ever-increasing flow of links, media and bits shared by our online friends.

So, the idea isn’t original. And RockMelt doesn’t sport a complete re-invention of the browser interface, either. But it is very streamlined, and there are some key elements that people who live and breathe the social web will find intriguing.

(via Wired)

Interesting. I’ve signed up to get a look at it, since I’m pretty constantly on both Facebook and Twitter. I’m not entirely sure how often I’ll use it (do I really need a specialized social media browser?), but I’m at least interested in the idea.

Regarding Facebook

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A nice analysis of how Facebook works best:

Yeah, [Facebook] sucks ass if you use it wrong. Don’t do that. Keep connected only to people who are active, intelligent participants on the site; jettison everybody else. Facebook friends are not real life friends. You can unfriend somebody and keep their number in your phone. That’s allowed. Then, pursue lofty ambitions….

Facebook should not be a timesink where you slowly drown in all the half-remembered named of your youth. It’s a community like any other. What makes it great is that you control every member of your own community. Don’t like a contributor? Kick them out! And you’re left with a customized circle of the most wonderful people ever. (This works unless you don’t know any wonderful people.)

— Rory Marinich

Lazyweb: Automated Crowdsourcing of Website Uptime/Downtime Tracking

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Last night, Prairie and I were watching Bones on Netflix’s streaming service when Netflix suddenly stopped responding. In order to find out if there were service-wide problems, my first step was to turn to Twitter to see if there were any other people reporting problems — and as it turns out, there were. Reassured that it was a Netflix issue, and not something going wrong with my setup, we popped in a DVD until people on Twitter started reporting that things were working again.

It seems that using Twitter is becoming a more and more common way to get a quick handle on whether a particular website is having issues. This started me thinking about a website that could act as a simple, centralized tracker of uptime/downtime reports, gathered from real-time scanning of the Tweetstream. I don’t have the coding chops to do this, so I’m tossing the idea out to the Lazyweb in case anyone else wants to run with it.

The basic idea seems simple enough: scan the tweetstream for variations on the types of posts people make when a service is showing signs of problems. Basic search strings would be something along the lines of “* is [down|broken]” and “is * [down|broken]“. Anytime a hit is made on the search string, an entry is made in the database with the reported problem site and whatever might be considered relevant data from the source tweet (the tweet text, time/datestamp, perhaps even geolocation data for those tweets that are carrying it). Tracking reports of websites coming back online could be integrated as well, by watching strings such as “* is [back|up|back up|working]“.

The website would display a regularly updating display of downtime/uptime reports, one line per target website, with a series of stats indicating things like how recently the last problem or resolution tweet was recorded, the number of problem or resolution tweets found within the last 10, 30, or 60 minutes, perhaps a map showing geolocation markers that could indicate if downtime is widespread (indicating downtime at the website itself) or geographically targeted (indicating problems with a particular network, carrier, or ISP between the website and the Twitter users reporting problems), and whatever other data might be useful. It might be possible to use CSS to color-code lines depending upon variable such as the rate of problem tweets being found, too.

Anyway, that’s about as formed as the idea is in my head. If this sounds interesting to anyone else, feel free to grab the idea and run. If someone does build this based on this post, though, some mention or credit would be nice. ;)

No Olympics For Us

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While it’s not quite to the point of being what I’d call a “boycott,” it’s looking like the chances are extremely slim that we’re going to be watching much of this year’s Olympic coverage. We’d like to, but NBC has done a marvelous job of ensuring that we either can’t watch, or when we can, we don’t want to.

We just tried to watch some of this afternoon’s coverage. In the roughly fifteen minutes before we couldn’t take it any longer, we saw three commercial breaks, four talking heads (with audio lagging about a second behind the video feed), a bit of an interview with the first medalist from this year’s games, and eight-year-old footage from that same athlete’s first win in 2002. We listened to Bob Costas tell us that he was in Vancouver and that there were sports going on. We heard — again — about the accidental death on the luge track. We heard an interviewer ask an athlete “how he did it” after winning (um, he practiced his ass off, you idiot — why are sports interviewers always at the very bottom of the “stupid interview question” scale?).

What we didn’t see was any actual sports footage.

Oh, how I miss watching the last Summer Olympics on CBC, the Canadian network that Comcast carries locally. Their coverage was leagues better than anything NBC had: fewer inane talking heads (which can be interpreted as fewer talking heads overall or less inanity from the talking heads they had, either of which is an acceptable and correct reading); less “we’re the only country that matters” mentality; comprehensive coverage of all sorts of sports, even those that are less massively popular; and coverage that wasn’t constantly cut into with edits, updates, promises of what’s to come, and commercials (we spent one afternoon watching an entire marathon nearly commercial free, in part because we could, and in part because it was far more interesting than we’d ever realized, simply by virtue of actually being able to watch it). The realization that CBC wouldn’t be broadcasting the Olympics this year — and, further, that the Canadian network that got the contract isn’t viewable locally — was a sad one indeed.

Lately, we’ve been enjoying my new computer’s ability to watch streaming video sites like Hulu and Netflix, so I went to the NBC Olympics site to see what was available there. They’re posting a number of videos of stuff that has already happened, but prominently displayed on the main page is a live video stream (only active at particular times and for particular events, however). I click that, and am asked to tell NBC who my cable or Internet provider is. Apparently, NBC will only serve the live video to customers of certain other companies that they have contracts with. Annoying, but hey, Comcast is right near the top of the list, and we have Comcast cable, so we should be good.

After choosing Comcast, I get directed to a Comcast login page. I log in to Comcast, and they direct me back to the video stream…which tells me I’m not eligible. What? I go through the process again, and this time, work my way through until I discover that even though NBC has a contract with Comcast, and even though I’m a Comcast cable subscriber, I’m not the right kind of Comcast cable subscriber.

See, Prairie and I don’t watch a ton of TV, don’t see the need to pay ridiculous amounts of money for hundreds of channels we’ll never watch, and don’t even have a digital TV — both of our TVs are old, square, analog sets. So, there’s no reason for us to subscribe to digital cable, and we’re quite happy with our $15/month bare bones, completely basic, plug-the-cable-into-the-back-of-the-TV-set package (and honestly, we wouldn’t even bother with that if we got decent over-the-air reception with a digital receiver box, but OTA digital TV is essentially nonexistent in the Kent Valley). However, it appears that Comcast has decided that people like us don’t count, and is only sending the video streams to customers who subscribe to a digital cable package.

Crappy.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at Comcast’s website — and after poking around there, I think that digital cable prices might be one of the biggest arguments against upgrading our TVs until we absolutely have to (when they die, that is). Right now, we’re paying $15/month for a bare-bones package that serves us more than adequately — in fact, we only pay attention to about 7 of the 30-some channels that are part of the package, so there’s an argument to be made that even now, we’re over paying. If we were to upgrade to a digital cable package, the least expensive package available is $60 a month! Of course, what the website says is $30/month, but that’s only for the first six months. I can’t think of any reason why I’d want to quadruple what I’m currently paying so that I can have more crap that I’m not interested in piped into my home, no matter how pretty it is or how much of it has surround sound.

Further down the page, they mention a “Digital Economy Package,” apparently aimed at people like us, that actually is $30/month — but, of course, you can only get that if you also get your phone and/or internet through Comcast, which we don’t. So, once again, that’s not an option.

(Heading off counter-arguments: satellite TV isn’t an option, our apartment faces the wrong direction; and outlying the money for a HTPC/Media Center of some sort isn’t a realistic option for both budgetary reasons and that nagging little fact that we’re still using “old school” TV sets. I’ve got a very nice Sony TV set that’s only eight years old, and my parents have a Sony TV set that’s in its 30s and still working, so we may well not be upgrading our hardware for a long time to come.)

The end result of all of this? NBC can bite me, Comcast can bite me, and the Olympics — well, it’s not really their fault, but come on.

Managing Inbox Overload with Google Buzz

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My Google account just got set up with Google Buzz, the new social networking addition to Google’s stable. One of the first things I noticed was that this could be a recipe for inbox overload, as every new reply to something I’ve posted or replied to ends up as a new message in my inbox.

Inbox Overload

Simple solution: set up a filter. Here’s the settings I used…

  1. Click the “Create a filter” option just to the right of the search box and related buttons towards the top of the screen.

    Create a Filter

  2. Enter “Buzz” in the “Subject” field of the filter options box, then run a test search. Unfortunately, this will catch any message that uses the word “buzz” in the subject line, and from my testing, neither adding a colon (“Buzz:”) or surrounding the word with quotation marks makes a difference. I can’t currently find a way to force the filter to grab only messages that begin with the word “Buzz” so caveat emptor. If your test search looks acceptable, click “Next Step”.

    As has been pointed out to me by a few people, and posted here: Enter “label:buzz” in the “Has the words:” field of the options box. Google will pop up a warning, but go ahead and ignore it.

    Filter Options Screen One

  3. In the next screen, activate “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” and “Apply the label:”, then create a new label titled “Buzzes” (or whatever you want, but you can’t use “Buzz”). If you want, click the checkbox to apply the filter retroactively to the messages caught by the filter’s test run. Then click “Create Filter”.

    Filter Options Screen Two

  4. You’re done!

From now on, rather than getting flooded with inbox messages every time a new Buzz response pops up, you’ll have a little ‘Buzzes’ filter sitting to the left of your screen. If it’s bold, you’ve got a response waiting for you. And that’s it!

Facebook ‘Dislike’ Button Suspicion

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I just got an invite to a Facebook group titled “DISLIKE BUTTON is here – ADD it now!”. After looking this group over, I have very strong suspicious about it, and my first impulse is to recommend that everyone ignore it.

First: Facebook still isn’t adding a ‘dislike’ button. This is a third-party software hack, and has nothing to do with Facebook. Admittedly, the group does admit this on their info tab — but placed so far down the page that most people will never see it. This is shady.

Second: The instructions on how to add the dislike button have very little to do with adding a dislike button, and everything to do with getting as many people as possible to look at the group. Out of five ‘installation’ steps, only one — the last one — has anything to do with installing the button. The other four are just about spamming the group out to everyone on your friends list. This is shady.

Third: The dislike button itself is a Firefox browser add-on, and will not work for anyone using Internet Explorer, Safari, or any other browser. This is not mentioned anywhere on the dislike button group page. This is shady. Also, because they stress that you have to invite all your friends to the group before adding the button, many people will not realize that the button will not work for them until after they’ve already spammed all their friends. This is doubly shady.

Now, I don’t know what the dislike button Firefox add-on actually does or does not do once it’s installed on someone’s computer. However, given that they’re being sneaky about the entire process, and seem more concerned with getting their software on as many computers as possible, this doesn’t look good to me.

If you get an invite to the dislike button group, I strongly suggest ignoring it. if you use Firefox and have already installed the Firefox addon, I strongly suggest removing it. I don’t know that it’s bad, but from what I can see, I strongly doubt that it’s good.

Windows 7 + Digital River = Headaches

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Yet another item in the “why I’m a Mac user” file, and the “we’re never buying another Windows-based PC” file.*

Back on September 18th, I bookmarked an article detailing a special program Microsoft had set up for college students, offering the Windows 7 upgrade for $29 dollars. While I’m definitely a Mac user, we do have Hermie, our PC laptop, and this seemed like a reasonable deal. I went to the website, put in my college e-mail address, and got the process started, placing an order for the digital download and paying the extra $13 for a physical installation DVD to be set via snailmail.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before things started to go all pear-shaped. The following is the text of a support request I sent to Digital River, the company handling the digital sales and distribution for the program, through their website:

Selected Reasons: Order question – I received an error message.

Shopper Email: [me]@cwu.edu

Shopper Comments: Store error?

I just had what appears to be a catastrophic error when attempting to place my order for the $29 Windows 7 special student price. On my first attempt, I made it through to the final ‘checkout’ button, when the store stalled for a minute or two, then came back with an error message (unfortunately, I didn’t save the message, so I can’t relate exactly what it was).

When I reloaded the store and again attempted to place my order, I am now being told that I am not eligible for this upgrade, even though the initial check of my e-mail address indicated that I was, and allowed me to place the order (until the error message appeared).

At this point, I’m not sure if my order has been placed or not. I’ve not yet received any sort of e-mail confirmation, which seems to indicate that my order does not exist, but the ‘ineligible’ error message might mean that the system thinks I have placed an order, and is preventing me from placing a second order.

Additionally, I’ve been receiving the following error from the webserver while attempting to submit this error report:

Access Denied

You don’t have permission to access "http://drh.img.digitalriver.com/DRHM/servlet/ControllerServlet" on this server.

Reference #18.64d32d0.1253551495.12f2e3d

This forced me to find this customer service page on the main Digital River website, rather than being able to use the customer service page on the Windows 7 US Online Store.

Any assistance, including confirmation of whether or not my order has

actually been placed, would be greatly appreciated.

Three days later, on September 22nd, I got the following response:

Thank you for contacting the Windows 7 Offer online store.

We show that the payment for order number XXXXX has been received and is awaiting clearance through the bank. This process may take up to 14 days from the date payment was received. Once the payment has cleared, you will be notified via email. If you purchased a digital product, it will become available for download after the funds have cleared.

Order Number : XXXXX

Sincerely,

Mark V.

Windows 7 Offer online store

Customer Service

webhelp.v4@digitalriver.com

Email ID: 11915177

Time passes…

I never did get any e-mail confirmation of my order, and the payment took a lot longer than 14 days. Yesterday I checked my bank accounts online, and saw that the charge from Digital River had finally gone through on October 27th, more than a month after I had placed the order. Still, at least that was confirmation that they had received and processed my order. I went to the Digital River site, plugged in my order number, and was finally able to download the Windows 7 installation.

So, yesterday morning, I get the upgrade process started. The initial download was a small, 346k installation manager. I open that, and it begins the two-hour process of downloading the full Windows 7 installation package.

Two hours later, it’s ready to go. I run the installer, it chews on things for a while, checks for online updates, chews on things a little longer, and then tells me that I need to complete two steps before proceeding: I must uninstall iTunes, and restart Hermie because of some system updates the installer had changed. Okay, fine. iTunes goes away, and I restart Hermie.

Once Hermie restarts…um, well, now what? The installation process didn’t automatically restart. There’s no standalone installer that I can see, either on my desktop or in my Downloads folder. Odd. Maybe it’s all handled through that initial little download manager? I open that up, and a few minutes later, I’m watching the download counter slowly crawl through another two hour download process, as apparently whatever it downloaded the first time disappeared during the restart process. At this point, I have to head off to school, so I just let a few choice words fly and wander off, letting the machine do its thing.

That night, I come home from school. The download is finished, so I start the installation process again. This time the installer seems happy, and proceeds chug away, after warning me that the process will take “a few hours.” A few hours indeed — two hours later, it’s still installing, and I go to bed.

Which brings us up to this morning. When I check Hermie, it looks like the install has gone swimmingly, and Windows is happily sitting and waiting, asking me to type my Windows product key. “You can find your Windows product key on a label included with the package that came with your copy of Windows. The label might also be on your computer case.”

Hm. Well, since this was a digital download, I don’t have a package. Maybe, as this was a digital download, they just need the old Vista product key? I dig out Hermie’s box, find the Vista product key, type it in…no go. Okay, so apparently, I’m actually supposed to have a Windows 7 product key somewhere. Not really surprising, but I’m more than a little curious as to where it might be.

Back to Digital River’s site. I poke around the customer service pages and find out that the product key was supposed to be e-mailed to me. Hey, I’ll bet that that was part of the e-mail that I never got because the website crashed! Oh, goodie.

So, the following two e-mail messages go off to Digital River, this time directly to “Mark” at the e-mail address that replied to my first message:

Hi Mark —

On or about September 20th or 21st, I submitted a support request through Digital River’s main site regarding my issues ordering the special $29 student price edition of the Windows 7 upgrade. You replied to me on the 22nd, letting me know that despite my problems with the website, my order had been received and was merely awaiting clearance through my bank. I’ve included the discussion thread with my original request and your response below.

The good news is that the order did finally go through — I saw the entry on my bank statement yesterday, and was able to log in and download the Windows 7 installer. I let the installer run overnight, and everything seemed to be going well. Unfortunately, the bad news is that (I assume) because of the issues with the website when I originally placed my order, I never received an e-mail confirmation or receipt for my order. And, of course, it is this e-mail confirmation that contains the Windows 7 Product Key necessary to complete the install and activate Windows. At the moment, I have a computer that has a legally purchased and installed copy of Windows 7, but is of no more use than a doorstop because of the lack of a product key.

I’ve tried every avenue I can think of to find the key on the Digital River website. While I can log in and view my Order Details page, which verifies my order number, date, status, and billing and shipping addresses, that page does not display my product key. It does offer a helpful-looking button titled “View Invoice”, however, clicking on that, rather than showing me my invoice, instead sends me to the main Registration page on the site that asks for my educational institution e-mail address to verify that I’m eligible for the program.

I’ve paid for the software, the money has been deducted from my account, I’ve installed the software, and my computer is now useless due to some bug in the Digital River system. Please have someone find my invoice or receipt and send me my product key so I can use the software I’ve purchased…and my computer.

An addendum to the attached message that I sent approximately 40 minutes ago:

I have just checked my physical e-mail box, and though the charge from Digital River was deducted from my bank account on Oct. 27th (incidentally, more than a month after I initially placed the order), I have not yet received the physical DVD that I ordered (which I’m hoping would also have the product activation key as part of the package, though at this point, I’m less than optimistic). Do you have any idea when my installation DVD shipped, the expected shipping time, or (best case scenario) a tracking number?

In addition to sending the e-mail off, I also decided to see if I could call Digital River and actually speak to a customer support representative. Of course, Digital River doesn’t have a customer support phone number anywhere on their site that I can easily find, so I turn to Google…and boy, was that an education. Searching for ‘digital river customer service phone number‘ brings up a whole lot of reasons not to trust ordering anything from Digital River — including this battle from 2001, indicating that in eight years, they still haven’t managed to figure out their process — something that I wish I’d known before starting this whole process.

I do find a phone number for Digital River customer service listed on this customer service contact page from an entirely different company. Calling that number just gets me a recorded message from Digital River telling me that the number is no longer in service…but at least they are kind enough to give me another number to call.

For the record: as of November 6th, 2009, Digital River’s customer service phone number is (952) 253-1234.

So, at 7:57 a.m., I call. I speak to a polite young Indian lady who tells me her name is “Jay,” who checks and verifies my order, and tells me that I should get an email at my CWU email address in “about fifteen to twenty minutes” with my product key. The whole phone call takes all of about five minutes, so some small kudos to Digital River on that score: once you can find someone, they’re relatively polite and efficient. I thank her, and start writing this blog post. It’s now 8:52 a.m., long past the “fifteen to twenty minute” window that I was given, and no email has arrived yet. Yeah, any points Digital River got from their phone etiquette have been quite handily counteracted.

And that’s where the matter stands right now. I’m lucky in that Hermie is a backup machine, not a primary for either myself or Prairie, so it’s not catastrophic that it’s currently out of commission. I’ll keep fighting with Digital River, but if this goes on for more than another day or so with no product key, no physical installation DVD (with product key), and an inoperative computer, then I’ll be using the backup install DVD that came with Hermie to go back to Vista and start arguing for a refund instead.

What a completely crappy experience. Thanks, Digital River, and thanks, Microsoft, for choosing such a stellar business partner.

Update: After waiting for a full hour after the stated 20-minute window, I called back and spoke to another representative. This time, I had him send the email to my Gmail account, and kept him on the phone until it appeared. When it did appear, the email was very helpful in explaining how to download and install the Windows 7 upgrade…but said absolutely nothing about the product key. I explained this to the representative, even narrating exactly what happened when I followed the link in the email he had just sent me, until it finally sank in that yes, I had downloaded Windows 7, and yes, I had installed it, and yes, I still needed the product key!

Finally, he admitted that there seemed to be something going wrong, and read me my product key, character by character. Once again making sure to keep him on the phone, I read the product key back to him as I entered it in…and, finally, success! The box blinked away, and Windows 7 finally finished installing.

So, an eventual acceptable ending. But wow. What an incredible amount of frustration to get there. Any bets on whether that physical installation DVD ever shows up?

* A quick aside to the zealots: yes, I’m perfectly aware that this post details an issue primarily with Digital River, and only slightly with Microsoft. However, as I’ve never had a customer service experience quite this frustrating with Apple or an Apple-related company, and as I wouldn’t be having this experience were it not for attempting to upgrade a Windows-based PC, the Microsoft/non-Apple-PC side of things ends up being the target of my ire. Perhaps it’s not entirely fair, but that’s just how it is.

The End of Empathy

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This may be a little rambling and disjointed, but hey, that’s one of the benefits of a personal blog with a relatively light readership, right? A few loosely connected threads have been running through my brain, and while I’m not likely to be able to weave them into anything resembling a gorgeous tapestry, I might be able to produce something akin to a kindergarten “my first cross stitch” project.

How’s that for a tortured metaphor?

Item 1: Neighbors

As much as Prairie and I like where we live — we’ve got a nice apartment, in a nice complex, in a fairly pretty area of Washington, in the Kent Valley right next to the Green River and lots of farmland, with easy access to the Green River Trail and frequently gorgeous views of Mt. Rainier — we have neighbors who drive us up the wall with noise. We’ve made a number of attempts to find a solution (first personally, then through the rental office, and occasionally with the assistance of the local police), but the issues continue.

As we’ve discussed it, we keep coming back to the conclusion that on a very real level, the people around us simply don’t care about anything outside of themselves. Where we recognize that we live in an apartment complex and, out of common courtesy, take steps to live quietly and not impact on our neighbors any more than can be reasonably expected when living in an apartment complex, they act as if they have no idea that there’s anyone around them. Rock Band parties, loud music, shouting and yelling, little to no consideration for what time of night it is, etc.

It’s not that they don’t know that what they do might be (and often is) annoying to the people around them, it’s just that they don’t think about it at all. There’s no point when they realize that they might be getting a little loud and perhaps they should tone it down. There’s no concept of how they might be impacting their neighbors. Back when we used to think that being good neighbors and politely talking to them might make a difference, I’d get (privately) frustrated how they’d all wide-eyed and innocently tell us that they were not trying to bother us…but it never clicked that it would be good if they tried not to bother other people.

In short: no empathy, no acknowledgement of other people around them.

(And this little rant doesn’t even go into the number of “boom cars” that cruise through the parking lot at all hours of the day and night….)

Item 2: Jason Fortuny and Troll Culture

I’m not sure if the following is so much a lack of empathy as it is a near psychopathic anti-empathy, but the rise of modern ‘trolling‘ found a poster child in 2006 in Jason Fortuny, a local prankster and troll who conceived and executed the notorious Craigslist Sex Prank, in which he posted a fake sex ad on Craigslist, collected the hundreds of responses he got, and proceeded to post them publicly and in their entirety, complete with any identifying information (e-mail addresses, names, numbers, pictures, etc.) that had been included. I just found out a couple hours ago that one of the pranks victims sued Fortuny, and last week was awarded a nearly $75,000 judgement. This (the judgement) is a good thing.

Item 3: We Live in Public (and the End of Empathy)

Yesterday, Cygnoir linked to this article by Jason Calacanis from January, where he dives headlong into this lack of empathy and links it to our ever-increasing dependence on the digital world, and how a generation that has grown up with most of their contact with other people being through the digital medium are failing to develop that empathic sense of the actual person on the other end of the bitstream. It’s a long post, and well worth reading, but I’m going to pull out a couple of excerpts here.

From “Godwin’s Law Meets Harris’ Law”:

Digital communications is a wonderful thing–at least at the start. Everyone participating in digital communities is eventually introduced to Godwin’s Law: At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis. But that’s only part of the breakdown. Eventually, you see the effect of what I’ll call Harris’ Law: At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

Harris’ Law took effect last year when Abraham Biggs killed himself in front of a live webcam audience on life-streaming service JustinTV. The audience’s role? They encouraged him to do it.

Harris’ law took effect in October of 2006, when Lori Drew, a grown woman, created a fake alias on MySpace (”Josh Evans”) in order to psychologically torture 14-year-old Megan Meier. Drew started a online love affair with Megan as “Evans” before pulling the rug out and viciously turning on her victim. This “cyber-bullying,” as the press likes to call it, resulted in Megan killing herself.

Harris’ Law took effect in October of last year when Choi Jin-sil killed herself, reportedly over the fallout from Internet rumors. The bullying in Korea has become so intense that you’re now required to use your Social Security Number to sign up for a social network. This lack of anonymity is one of the most enlightened things I’ve heard of from one of the most advanced–if not the most advanced–Internet communities in the world.

Ownership of one’s behavior? Who knew?!?!?

I’m sure some of the wacky Internet contingents will flame me for saying that anonymity is a bad thing, but the fact is that anonymous environments create the environments in which Godwin’s and Harris’ Laws apply. What’s the point of starting these communities if they eventually end in pain and suffering? Anonymity is overrated in my book.

From “Internet Asperger’s Syndrome (IAS)”:

I’ve come to recognize a new disorder, the underlying cause of Harris’ Law. This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost (More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FxwHfoWdS8 ).

In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors–checking email, blogging, twittering and retiring andys–combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people.

[…] In IAS, screen names and avatars shift from representing people to representing characters in a video game. Our 2600’s and 64’s have trained us to pound these characters into submission in order to level up. We look at bloggers, people on Twitter andpodcasters not as individuals, but as challenges–in some cases, “bosses”–that we must crush to make it to the next phase.

From “What’s at Stake?”:

Today, we’re destroying each other with words, but teaching ourselves to objectify individuals and to identify with aggressors will result in more than psychological violence. This behavior will find its way into the real world, like it did when Wayne Forrester murdered his wife Emma over a change in herFacebook status, from married to single.

It’s only a matter of time, sadly, until this loss of empathy will hit the real world. We’re training ourselves to destroy other people, and there’s a generation growing up with this in their DNA. They don’t remember a world when communications were primarily in the real world.

So what?

So what’s the point of all this? Well, aside from the obvious conclusion of Jason’s piece — “In summary, how we treat each other does matter. It matters because, without empathy, our lives are shallow, self-centered and meaningless.” — I’m really not sure.

I do believe, though, that this is a real problem. I see too much evidence of this lack of empathy and consideration for others, too many instances of “it’s all about me,” both online and off. From internet trolls like Jason to people on a bike path who will continue to ride side by side, forcing other people off the trail, because it’s more important to continue their conversation than to share the space. From neighbors who feel Rock Band isn’t any good unless it’s played at the volume of a rock concert to people who hide behind anonymous handles to post hateful messages attacking others.

People sometimes wonder why I don’t try to be more anonymous online, why I blog under my real name, especially as it’s something that has caused me problems in the past. Some of the reasoning goes back to my “Own Yourself” post (itself triggered by Anil Dash’s “Privacy Through Identity Control” post), but some of it is this very issue.

I don’t want to hide, or be perceived as hiding, what I think, say, and believe, through an online pseudonym. This is what and who I am, this is what I believe. Sometimes I’ve believed some stupid things that I’ve later changed my mind on, sometimes I’ve done some stupid things that I’ve had to take my lumps for, but it’s all me. Perhaps, in some small (and quite possibly futile) way, I’m hoping that being open and honest about myself will, in some cases and for some people, humanize me more than would be the case if I stuck to ‘djwudi’.

I think, perhaps, that anonymity hurts those who practice it as much as it protects them. Hiding behind a pseudonym with no real view of who the real person is dehumanizes yourself, encouraging others to see you as something less than a real person, and leading you open to attack. Perhaps for some that’s an acceptable risk — I can see a whole long debate about whether the dehumanization of anonymity is more or less dangerous than the openness of a real identity, and I’m certainly something of a poster child for the risks of blogging under a real name (though I’d still argue that my case is more one of blogging foolishly under my real name) — but for me, it’s not. To quote one of the great philosophers of our time, “I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam,” and I’m standing by that.

The End (Such As It Is)

And now that I’ve gone completely off the rails (hey, what ever happened to that thread/sewing metaphor?)…yeah, empathy. Have some. Please? Think about the people around you, both in the real world and in this online bitbucket. I don’t care how cheezy it sounds, or what you might think of the source document, but the Golden Rule of “do unto others as you’d have done unto you” really isn’t such a bad thing, now is it?

Now if we can just convince our neighbors of this….

Resume Crowdsourcing

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Fueled somewhat equally by the frustration of trying to ‘sell myself’ with my resume and curiosity about all this ultra-modern networking and interconnectedness that the intarwebz give us all, I decided to try a little bit of an experiment yesterday.

The only kind of resume I’d ever had was the old “throw everything on there in a big old list” style. Functional, accurate, but I knew it very likely wasn’t the best approach, especially for someone like me who has a bunch of skills, but hasn’t had jobs that obviously stressed those skills. Figuring that somewhere amidst all my various contacts who occasionally check up on me via this blog, its LiveJournal mirror, or my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, or a multitude of other sites, would be someone (or a few someones) with a few good pointers, I sent out a plaintive little cry for help. Once the resume was ready (though with my address and phone number redacted), I created three versions (one each for Apple’s Pages, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Acrobat), zipped them up into an archive, and tossed them on my webserver. Then, one little tweet:

Any kind souls want to view/critique/analyse/make suggestions for my resume? http://xrl.us/mdhresume (174KB .zip w/.pages, .doc and .pdf)

Within just a few minutes, I started to get responses. Over the course of the next few hours, I got some very welcome advice, samples, and edits from ccheney, Michelle, firemaplegirl, and ladybriggan, plus some entertaining stories from Ogre_Kev.

So, now, after far too many hours of banging my head against my keyboard (really, for all the number of years I’ve been told how well I write, resumes are a glaring exception — perhaps because it’s not so much writing as trying to distill all the eclectic bits of experience and tech knowledge into a series of bullet points: me as a PowerPoint presentation), a new tweet went out:

UPDATED: Any kind souls want to critique/make suggestions for my resume (again)? http://xrl.us/mdhresume (158KB .zip w/.pages, .doc and .pdf)

I’m pretty comfortable with the resume as it stands now, so as long as I don’t get a “DEAR GOD, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING‽” response, I think I’m ready to start sending it out to employers (and yes, I’ll be customizing it a bit for particular jobs where necessary).

Once again, thanks to everyone for the advice and words of encouragement!