Games Blamed For Moral Decline And Addiction Throughout History

from the moral-panics-through-the-ages dept

Video games are often blamed for unemployment, violence in society and addiction – including by partisan politicians raising moral concerns.

Blaming video games for social or moral decline might feel like something new. But fears about the effects of recreational games on society as a whole are centuries old. History shows a cycle of apprehension and acceptance about games that is very like events of modern times.

From ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, historians know that the oldest examples of board games trace back to the game of senet around 3100 B.C.

One of the earliest known written descriptions of games dates from the fifth century B.C. The Dialogues of the Buddha, purport to record the actual words of the Buddha himself. In them, he is reported to say that “some recluses… while living on food provided by the faithful, continue addicted to games and recreations; that is to say…games on boards with eight or with 10, rows of squares.”

That reference is widely recognized as describing a predecessor to chess – a much-studied game with an abundant literature in cognitive science and psychology. In fact, chess has been called an art form and even used as a peaceful U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War.

Despite the Buddha’s concern, chess has not historically raised concerns about addiction. Scholars’ attention to chess is focused on mastery and the wonders of the mind, not the potential of being addicted to playing.

Somewhere between the early Buddhist times and today, worries about game addiction have given way to scientific understanding of the cognitive, social and emotional benefits of play – rather than its detriments – and even viewing chess and other games as teaching tools, for improving players’ thinking, social-emotional development and math skills.

Games and politics

Dice, an ancient invention developed in many early cultures, found their way to ancient Greek and Roman culture. It helped that both societies had believers in numerology, an almost religious link between the divine and numbers.

So common were games of dice in Roman culture that Roman emperors wrote about their exploits in dice games such as Alea. These gambling games were ultimately outlawed during the rise of Christianity in Roman civilization, because they allegedly promoted immoral tendencies.

More often than not, the concerns about games were used as a political tool to manipulate public sentiment. As one legal historian puts it, statutes on dice games in ancient Rome were only “sporadically and selectively enforced … what we would call ‘sports betting’ was exempted.” The rolling of dice was prohibited because it was gambling, but wagering on the outcomes of sport were not. Until of course, sports themselves came under fire.

The history of the “Book of Sports”, a 17th-century compendium of declarations of King James I of England, demonstrates the next phase of fears about games. The royal directives outlined what sports and leisure activities were appropriate to engage in after Sunday religious services.

In the early 1600s, the book became the subject of a religious tug of war between Catholic and Puritan ideals. Puritans complained that the Church of England needed to be purged of more influences from Roman Catholicism – and liked neither the idea of play on Sundays nor how much people liked doing it.

In the end, English Puritans had the book burned. As a Time magazine article put it, “Sport grew up through Puritanism like flowers in a macadam prison yard.” Sports, like board games of the past, were stifled and the subject of much ire in the past and present.

Pinball in the 20th century

In the middle part of the 20th century, one particular type of game emerged as a frequent target of politician concern – and playing it was even outlawed in cities across the country.

That game was pinball. But the parallels with today’s concerns about video games are clear.

In her history of moral panics about elements of popular culture, historian Karen Sternheimer observed that the invention of the coin-operated pinball game coincided with “a time when young people – and unemployed adults – had a growing amount of leisure time on their hands.”

As a result, she wrote, “it didn’t take long for pinball to show up on moral crusaders’ radar; just five years spanned between the invention of the first coin-operated machines in 1931 to their ban in Washington, D.C., in 1936.”

New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia argued that pinball machines were “from the devil” and brought moral corruption to young people. He famously used a sledgehammer to destroy pinball machines confiscated during the city’s ban, which lasted from 1942 to 1976.

His complaints sound very similar to modern-day concerns that video games contribute to unemployment at a time when millennials are one of the most underemployed generations.

Even the cost of penny arcade pinball machines raised political alarms about wasting children’s money, in much the way that politicians declare they have problems with small purchases and electronic treasure boxes in video games.

As far back as the Buddha’s own teachings, moral leaders were warning about addicting games and recreations including “throwing dice,” “Games with balls” and even “turning somersaults,” recommending the pious hold themselves “aloof from such games and recreations.”

Then, as now, play was caught in society-wide discussions that really had nothing to do with gaming – and everything to do with keeping or creating an established moral order.

Lindsay Grace, Knight Chair of Interactive Media; Associate Professor of Communication, University of Miami. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Filed Under: games, history, moral panics

Australian Government Passes Law Forcing Tech Companies To Break Encryption

from the nice-one,-idiots dept

The Australian Parliament has passed a law ordaining compelled access to encrypted devices and communications. The legislation was floated months ago and opened up for comment, but it appears the Australian government has ignored the numerous complaints that such a law would violate civil liberties and otherwise be an all-around bad idea. But that's OK. It's completely justified, according to the Prime Minister.

Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, told local radio on Thursday that encryption laws were necessary to target Islamist terrorism, paedophile networks and organised crime. “These laws are used to catch the scum that try to bring our country down and we can’t give them a leave pass,” he said.

Sure, and if innocent people find their communications compromised by government-mandated holes, so be it. The law was rushed through Parliament in a late evening session since every moment wasted was just one more leave pass for scum. Legislators promise to review the law in 18 months to ensure it hasn't been abused or created more problems than it's solved, but let's be honest here: how often does legislation like this get clawed back after a periodic review? It's never happened in the history of the laws governing our surveillance programs, even after leaked docs exposed unconstitutional practices and widespread abuse of surveillance authorities.

Here's a short summary of the new powers the legislation hands over to law enforcement and national security agencies:

The law enables Australia’s attorney-general to order the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Whatsapp to build capability, such as software code, which enables police to access a particular device or service.

Companies may also have to provide the design specifications of their technology to police, facilitate access to a device or service, help authorities develop their own capabilities and conceal the fact that an agency has undertaken a covert operation.

This law will go into effect before the end of the year. How it will go into effect is anyone's guess. The law provides for compelled access -- including the creation of new code -- but no one seems to have any idea what this will look like in practice. The new backdoors-in-everything-but-name will be put in place by developers/manufacturers at the drop of a court order, with the onus on the smart people in the tech business to iron out all of the problems.

The law only prevents the government from demanding that "systemic weaknesses" be built into devices or programs. Everything else is left to the imagination, including the actual process of introducing code changes in multi-user platforms or targeted devices.

An actual software developer, Alfie John, has put together a splendid Twitter thread pointing out the flaws in the government's assumptions about software development. Since the compelled participants are forbidden from discussing surveillance court orders with anyone (which would include coworkers, supervisors, the general public, etc.), these requested alterations would have to be implemented in secret. The problem is coding changes go through a number of hands before they go live. Either everyone involved would need to be sworn to secrecy (which also means being threatened with jail time) or the process falls apart. Changes ordered by a court could be rejected by those higher up on the chain. Worse, the planned encryption hole could see the compelled coder being viewed as a data thief or foreign operative or whatever.

Law enforcement is going to have to make everyone involved in the product/device complicit and covered under the same prison threat for this to work. The more people its exposed to, the higher the chance of leakage. And if the code will break other code -- or the request simply can't be met due to any number of concerns -- the government make ask the court to hold the company and its personnel in contempt for their failure to achieve the impossible.

To make matters worse, the company targeted with a compelled access request may be monitored for leaks before and after the request is submitted, putting employees under surveillance simply because of their profession.

In some cases, the only weakness that can be introduced will be systemic, which will run contrary to the law. How will the government handle this inevitable eventuality? Will it respect the law or will it simply redefine the term to codify its unlawful actions?

Even if all of this somehow works flawlessly, users of devices and communications platforms will be put at risk. Sure, the compelled access might be targeted, but it will teach users to distrust software/firmware updates that may actually keep them safer. The government may even encourage the forging of credentials or security certificates to ensure its compelled exploits reach their targets. And just because these backdoors theoretically only allow one government agent in at a time, that doesn't mean they aren't backdoors. They may be slightly more difficult for malicious actors to exploit, but once the trust is shattered by compelled access, other attack vectors will present themselves.

It's a terrible law justified by the spoken equivalent of a bumper sticker. And it's going to end up doing serious damage -- not just in Australia, but all over the world. Bad legislation spreads like a communicable disease. If one democracy says this is acceptable, other free-world leaders will use its passage as a permission slip for encryption-targeting mandates of their own.

Filed Under: australia, backdoors, compelled access, encryption, moral panics, secrecy, software development, terrorism

Internet Memes Are Making UK Children Fat, Say Researchers Who Don't Understand Memes

from the my-Imgur-account-gave-me-the-diabetes dept

Literally anything can be the basis of a moral panic. The internet's mere existence has prompted all sorts of panickers (professional and lay) to blame any number of things/concepts for destroying the youth of the world. If it's not teens getting high by huffing MP3s with their eyeballs and ears, it's Minecraft creating unrealistic home-building expectations or IoT devices creating a generation of automaton abusers.

For those that buy into this thinking, it seems plausible because it's happening in the present. With technology being indiscernible from magic, the academics behind these questionable assertions are no more than shamans guiding the faithful towards conclusions that cohere with their prejudices. If they didn't have X growing up, chances are X is what's ruining their kids. A little history would go a long way. I mean, at one point in time, chess -- the game of kings and gifted elementary school students -- was considered to be the Grand Theft Auto of its day, capable of turning players into cold-blooded killers.

Some UK "researchers," who have earned every bit of derision contained in those scare quotes, are claiming internet memes are ruining children. While they may have somewhat of a point about bullying and shaming, they lose it completely by claiming memes play a role in the UK's childhood obesity stats. (via PetaPixel)

Here's the part of the "written evidence" [PDF] that makes a little bit of sense:

Our provisional inquiries show that a substantial number of individuals on Twitter share health related Internet memes, with both positive and negative messages, through their public accounts. Such is the pervasiveness of Internet memes that the vast majority of sharers display little, if any, emotion when sharing these memes: many of which contain inappropriate material or ridicule others by race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, body shape, religion, diet etc. When viewed in this way, Internet memes have the potential to normalise undesirable behaviours such as trolling, body shaming and bullying, and a lack of emotion may be indicative of a larger apathy with regards to such practice.

Yes, the internet can be an awful place filled with awful people. So can real life. Internet decorum isn't on par with IRL decorum, but that doesn't mean the "emotionless" sharing of memes is indicative of widespread sociopathy. Lots of things, good and bad, are "normalized" through frequent exposure. But on the whole, the internet is net gain for humanity, and that includes today's youth.

Moving on from there, the "researchers" decide the same memes -- the ones normalizing body shaming and bullying -- are also (somehow!) normalizing something that tends to attract body shaming and bullying.

Whilst the sample for this preliminary research equates to about 5% of Sykora et al.’s (2014) sample, it does uncover a potential ‘hardening’ of social media users’ emotions towards memes. [...] Furthermore, in ridiculing body shape, diet and fitness there is a worry that we are also normalising obesity, poor diet and sedentary behaviour.

If you want to have it both ways, I guess you can. Ridicule = normalization. Why not? I mean, this is "research" that starts with a ridiculous theory and trolls the web for internet detritus to back it up. The "study" culled a bunch of tweets containing hashtags related to body image (#fitnessaddict, #flexibledieting, and… um… #meme[?]) and used the hashtag #tea for a "control." Unsurprisingly, these intrepid researchers found memes being shared without much use of "emotional" words -- at least according to the AI it fed the tweets to.

These results would have ended the "study" right then and there if the researchers were intellectually honest and/or had any idea how meme sharing works. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the meme is the message. They're generally served straight up, with no additional text from those sharing them. If there's any emotion present, it's a like or dislike of the meme itself. Unsurprisingly, there was almost no "emotionality" contained in the tweeted meme dataset.

This isn't so much a research project as it is a pitch for a tweet-hoovering project the researchers would like to see continue. This "research" is basically a roundabout way of asking the UK government for money. It goes under the name "MEMEotive," which should cause involuntary vomiting in any number of readers. (I apologize for not warning you in advance.) This project seeks to hitch its wagon to government-funded social media surveillance pioneered by the war-fighting arm of the UK government.

The project, MEMEotive - Analysing the Effects of Internet Memes on Young Teenagers’ Health and Health Behaviours – builds on the success of EMOTIVE, funded by the Defence Science Technology Laboratory (DSTL) following the London Riots, to detect and measure emotions on social media (Twitter).

MEMEotive aims to understand which memes become popular and how they influence and motivate the health and health behaviours of young people and teenagers.

Speaking of wagon metaphors, MEMEotive needs to gets its horse in front of its cart if it's ever going to understand anything. It may want to familiarize itself with the how and why of memes before it starts attributing a 30% childhood obesity rate to image macros.

Filed Under: memes, moral panics, obesity, uk

Listen To Stephen Fry Perfectly Analogize The Moral Panics Around Facebook To The Ones Over The Printing Press

from the do-it dept

So I'm a bit late to this, as Stephen Fry released a podcast "documentary" entitle Great Leap Years a few months back. I've just started listening to it recently, and it hits on so many of the points and ideas that I've tried to address here on Techdirt over the course of the past 20 years, but does so much more brilliantly than anything I've done in those ~70,000 posts. That is, in short, if you like what we write about here concerning the nature of innovation and technology, I highly recommend the podcast, after having just listened to the first two episodes.

And just to give you a sense of this, I'm going to quote a bit from near the end of the 2nd podcast. This isn't revealing any spoilers, and the storytelling is so wonderful that you really ought to listen to the whole thing. But this so perfectly encapsulates many of my thoughts about why people freaking out about "bad stuff" happening on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more are in the midst of a a moral panic not unlike those we've seen before. None of this is to say that we should ignore the "bad stuff" that is happening, or try to minimize it. But it does suggest that we take a broader perspective and recognize that, maybe, this is the way humans are, and it's not "this new technology" that's to blame.

The episode itself is about the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg (which also wonderfully works in some details about Gutenberg's real name that I had not known). And after going through the details of Gutenberg and his invention, discusses how the Catholic Church was initially overjoyed at the invention, noting that it could print and sell indulgences faster (which is an important call back to the 1st episode...). There's a brief discussion of how the Church suddenly realizes its "mistake" and tries to fight back, and then this:

All kinds of bad people saw the opportunity to harness the power of the printed word for their own ends. Ends that could result in burnings, massacres, and wars. The speed of the transmission of information accelerated everything.

You might say that the medieval world had been like one of those sluggish hormonally slowed down catatonic patients in Olver Sachs' book, Awakenings, later made into a film with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams. Encephalitis lethargica was their affliction. Statue-like, motionless, with low body temperature, slow heart rate, zombie-like lethargy and stillness, they lived almost dormant lives. Sachs saw one such patient with just this disease, who was otherwise perfectly healthy, save for a small tumor in his tummy. Sachs injected his magical L-DOPA serum, and the man swiftly woke from his torpor, totally restored. Smiling, walking, remembering. Fully awake and alive. Everything back to speed... including his tumor. He was dead within two months. Killed by the stomach cancer which had awoken from its dormancy with the rest of him.

You might regard Europe as having been in just such a torpid state. The arrival of printing was like an injection of life-giving serum into Europe. It awoke and energized the world. But aggravated all kinds of cancers of tribalism, sectarianism, and rivalry too. In a manner all too familiar to us in our day, a cultural, intellectual, ideological and doctrinal chasm opened up in Europe. Culture wars that foreshadowed our own broke out. The Muslim world banned printing of Arabic or of Islamic texts. For centuries, Jews were banned from the printing trade and Christian countries forbade the printing of Hebrew texts. Propaganda took off. Edicts and attacks on Protestantism flew from Catholic presses, and vice versa.

As the historian Nile Ferguson argues in his book The Square and the Tower: The invention of movable type printing and the unleashing of what is known as the Gutenberg Revolution, created social networks in which two sides countered each other with misinformation (fake news, as we would have it now), the vicious abuse, and (as in our time) all without supervision or a locus of recognizable authority. A free-for-all raging outside of what had previously been structured hierarchies. Because anyone could use the invention, all kinds of bad actors and malevolent hustlers did use it.

Technologies like printing, or any other information technologies that have followed in its wake, are essentially neutral, have no moral valency, no inner directive in and of themselves to act either for good or ill. Indulgences could be printed, and broadsides attacking the corruption of indulgences could be printed just as easily. Das Kapital or Mein Kampf. It's all the same to the type, the paper, and the platten. The Declaration of Independence or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The sonnets of Shakespeare or the thoughts of Chairman Mao? Collections of recipes for cake making or collections of recipes for bomb making.

All this is familiar to us, we who mourn the swift death of the Utopian ideals promised by the internet and social media. The letter types in their boxes could seem like the evil spirits that flew from Pandora's box and released strife, starvation, war, and wickedness into the world.

I've, perhaps, now gone too far the other way. After all, impulses and new ways of thinking and exchanging ideas that were benevolent flourished too. To depict the Gutenberg Revolution as causing a human disaster is as sentimental and over-simplified as seeing it as having ushered in a golden age of open thought and perfect freedoms. Or, as regarding early humans, moving from hunter gatherers to agriculturalists as catastrophic. Or, looking on social networks and media as wholly calamitous.

Part of what this series of podcasts is aiming to do is to come to terms with the inevitability of... let's call it "change." Progress may be regarded as too freighted a word. Change, transformation, mutation, cultural evolution. These are our weather systems. Our historical and future landscapes were and our shaped by these processes, just as our geographical landscapes are shaped by the action of water and weather. To believe that we should or could halt them, or to waste time mourning their existential alterations to our ways of living is, to put it crudely, to piss into the wind. The movable type revolution was necessary and never a genie that any sane person would want to be forced back into its bottle.

Yes, cancers may have woken up in Europe at the same time as a new life surged through its bloodstream. But surely better a quick hot life, however cut short, than a permanent frozen nothingness, a catatonic zombie nullity.

The key is not to bemoan or to overpraise change, but to attempt as best we may to know all we can about the transformative nature of our leaps of innovation and to understand them. For today, changes are coming that will dwarf the revolutions in information technology with which we are familiar. It has never been more important, in my view, to be armed with knowledge and understanding of our past in order to confront our future with anything like confidence.

There's more and you should listen to the whole thing -- but this is a succinct and brilliantly described viewpoint that I've long shared about technology and innovation. Going back all the way to the copyright debates that we had on this site from the earliest days, the key point that I kept raising over and over again is that fighting over the claims that infringement is somehow "bad" totally miss the point. It is happening. And if it is happening, bemoaning that it was undermining traditional business models (that had their own problems for culture, free speech and, importantly, for artists themselves) was a silly waste of time. Wouldn't we have been better served looking to understand what new things were being enabled, and how those might be used to encourage more creativity and innovation.

And, of course, now we're having similar fights and discussions (as Fry clearly notes) about social media and the internet. And I'm sure there will be others -- perhaps about artificial intelligence or 3d printing or blockchain or satellites and space travel. Many of those debates have already started. And, as new technologies and innovations come about there will be more to debate and to understand.

But if the default is to start from the position that anything bad created by these new technologies condemns the technologies themselves, we will lose out. Not necessarily on the technologies themselves -- as those seem to have a way of advancing -- but on the ability to harness those technologies in the most useful and most fruitful ways. If we fear the transformations or focus solely on what will most prevent the "bad" or bring back the world that used to be, we will undoubtedly lose out on many of the many good things that come along as well.

This is the key point that Fry so nicely puts forth in the two episodes I've listened to so far. Change is happening and it has both good and bad consequences. No one should deny that. Focusing solely on one side, rather than the other, doesn't change any of that, but can create a lot of wasted time and effort. Instead, understanding the nature of that change, looking for ways to encourage more of the good, while discouraging the bad, is a reasonable path forward, but that has to come through understanding what's happening and recognizing that it is an impossible and pointless task to seek to remove or prevent all of the bad.

So many of the technological fights we talk about today over copyright, patents, encryption, the future of work, surveillance, and more often seem to stem from legacy operations which had a handle on things in the past that they no longer have a handle on today. But rather than looking for reasonable paths forward that preserve the good new things, they focus on eradicating the bad -- which is not just an impossible and fruitless plan, but one that will create significantly more negative consequences (intended or not).

Fry's podcast is great in providing some more historical perspective on this, but has also helped me better frame the work that we've tried to do here on Techdirt over the past two decades, and which we'll hopefully continue for many more.

Filed Under: change, innovation, moral panics, stephen fry

Best Buy Bans Huawei Phones Despite Zero Public Evidence Company Spies On Americans

from the hypocritical-protectionism dept

A few years back, you might recall that there was a period of immense government and media hyperventilation over allegations that Chinese hardware vendor Huawei spied on an American consumers. Story after story engaged in hysterical hand-wringing over this threat, most of them ignoring that Chinese gear and components are everywhere, including in American products. So the government conducted an 18 month investigation into those allegations and found that there was no evidence whatsoever to support allegations that Huawei spies on Americans via its products. One anonymous insider put it this way at the time:

"We knew certain parts of government really wanted” evidence of active spying, said one of the people, who requested anonymity. “We would have found it if it were there."

What inquiries into this subject do tend to find is that U.S. networking companies like Cisco, terrified by the added competition from Chinese network vendors, are really effective at scaremongering gullible and non-tech savvy lawmakers into supporting a protectionist stance against Huawei. The hypocrisy of "protectionism is only bad when somebody else does it" is compounded by the fact that Snowden docs revealed that the NSA hacked into Huawei starting back in 2007 to steal source code and...plant backdoors in Huawei gear to spy on people around the world.

In an ideal world, numerous lessons would have been learned from this whole experience.

But this is America! Fast forward to the last few months, and the narrative of Huawei as a villainous, unchecked Chinese spying apparatus is once again all the rage, with nobody apparently heeding the lessons from just a few years ago. As we've been noting, both AT&T and Verizon (who not only help the NSA spy on everyone but have been caught giving advice on how to best tapdance around privacy and surveillance laws) were recently pressured to kill looming business deals with Huawei based on unsubstantiated, unpublished and vague allegations of spying.

While Huawei has some presence here (they helped Google build the Nexus 6P), they'd been making some solid inroads at AT&T and Verizon on deals that would have let them strike major smartphone partnerships. AT&T was just hours away from announcing one such deal at CES earlier this year, when it suddenly announced it would be scrapping the deal. AT&T didn't say why, but later reports indicated it was because of pressure from a handful of lawmakers on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees (again, AT&T has oodles of NSA contracts it would obviously like to protect).

Again though, nobody was able to offer concrete evidence of said spying, nor did anybody seem to remember we just went through this a few years back and found no evidence of Huawei wrongdoing. Fast forward to this week, when Best Buy announced it too would be banning Huawei products from its store shelves (warning: obnoxious autoplay video):

"Best Buy, the nation's largest electronics retailer, has ceased ordering new smartphones from Huawei and will stop selling its products over the next few weeks, according to a person familiar with the situation. Best Buy made the decision to end the relationship, the person said. "We don't comment on specific contracts with vendors, and we make decisions to change what we sell for a variety of reasons," said a Best Buy spokeswoman."

Few news outlets seem to spend too much time worrying about the fact that these decisions are being made completely non-transparently, with no hard evidence being offered to justify them. Again it's not impossible that Huawei helps the government spy, but given the volume and duration of these accusations, you'd think that somebody would be able to drum up a shred of public evidence supporting them. Regardless, protectionism is playing a pretty major role here one way or another, and you'd be hard pressed to find any American tech press coverage that so much as breaches that already documented reality.

While it's obvious that China spies on America, it certainly has an ocean of ways to do so outside of Huawai. Chinese hardware is utterly everywhere in America, including inside of most U.S.-made networking gear and smartphone hardware. And Americans also have a voracious appetite for internet of broken things devices, most of which lack even the most rudimentary privacy and security safeguards. Spying on us at scale doesn't really even require Huawei's help. We volunteer ourselves routinely for the duty courtesy of our collective obsession with "smart" televisions and other easily-hacked devices.

It's routinely amazing how the same individuals and organizations who preach endlessly about the need for healthy, open competition and malign China endlessly for protectionism, are suddenly OK when we're the ones dressing up protectionism under the thin veneer of national security. Similarly there's an endless roster of individuals engaged in all manner of face-fanning when foreign governments spy on us, but don't so much as blink when it's revealed we illegally hack into companies to plant backdoors or intercept U.S. networking gear deliveries for the same purpose.

And again, this hypocrisy is routinely made worse by a U.S. (and Canadian) tech press that's utterly oblivious to how nationalism skews their reporting and allows them to be easily manipulated by companies simply eager to avoid competition. If you're a tech reporter it is, shockingly enough, still your job to provide hard data--even when reporting on murky allegations against "enemies of the state" you may not personally be a fan of.

Filed Under: china, competition, moral panics, surveillance
Companies: best buy, cisco, huawei

Everything That's Wrong With Social Media And Big Internet Companies: Part 2

from the the-list-is-growing dept

Late last year I published Part I of a project to map out all the complaints we hear about social media in particular and about internet companies generally. Now, here's Part 2.

This Part should have come earlier; Part 1 was published in November. I'd hubristically imagined that this is a project that might take a week or a month. But I didn't take into account the speed with which the landscape of the criticism is changing. For example, just as you're trying to do more research into whether Google really is making us dumber, another pundit (Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times) comes along and argues that Apple -- a tech giant no less driven by commercial motives than Google and its parent company, Alphabet -- ought to redesign its products to make us smarter (by making them less addictive). That is, it's Apple's job to save us from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other attention-demanding internet media — which we connect to through Apple's products, as well as many others.

In these same few weeks, Facebook has announced it's retooling the user experience for Facebook users in ways aimed at making the experience more personal and interactive and less passive. Is this an implicit admission that Facebook, up until now, has been bad for us? If so, is it responding to the charges that many observers have leveled at social-media companies — that they're bad for us and that they're bad for democracy.

And only this last week, social-media companies have responded to concerns about political extremists (foreign and domestic) in Senate testimony. Although the senators had broad concerns (ISIS recruitment, bomb-making information on YouTube), there was, of course, some allocation of time on the ever-present question of Russian "misinformation campaigns," which may not have altered the outcome of 2016's elections but still may aim to affect 2018 mid-terms and beyond.

These are recent developments, but coloring them all is a more generalized social anxiety about social media and big internet companies that is nowhere better summarized than in Senator Al Franken's last major public policy address. Whatever you think of Senator Franken's tenure, I think his speech was a useful accumulation of the growing sentiment among commentators that there's something out of control with social media and internet companies that needs to be brought back into control.

Now, let's be clear: even if I'm skeptical here about some claims that social media and internet giants are bad for us, that doesn't mean these criticisms necessarily lack any merit at all. But it's always worth remembering that, historically, every new mass medium (and mass-medium platform) has been declared first to be wonderful for us, and then to be terrible for us. So it's always important to ask whether any particular claim about the harms of social media or internet companies is reactive, reflexive... or whether it's grounded in hard facts.

Here are reasons 4, 5, and 6 to believe social media are bad for us. (Remember, reasons 1, 2, and 3 are here.)

(4) Social media (and maybe some other internet services) are bad for us because they're super-addictive, especially on our sweet, slick handheld devices.

"It's Time for Apple to Build a Less Addictive iPhone," according to New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo, who published a column to that effect recently. To be sure, although "Addictive" is in the headline, Manjoo is careful to say upfront that, although iPhone use may leave you feeling "enslaved," it's not "not Apple's fault" and it "isn't the same as [the addictiveness] of drugs or alcohol." Manjoo's column was inspired by an open letter from an ad-hoc advocacy group that included an investment-management firm and the California State Teachers Retirement System (both of which are Apple shareholders). The letter, available here at ThinkDifferentlyAboutKids.com (behind an irritating agree-to-these-terms dialog) calls for Apple to add more parental-control choices for its iPhones (and other internet-connected devices, one infers). After consulting with experts, the letter's signatories argue, "we note that Apple's current limited set of parental controls in fact dictate a more binary, all or nothing approach, with parental options limited largely to shutting down or allowing full access to various tools and functions." Per the letter's authors: "we have reviewed the evidence and we believe there is a clear need for Apple to offer parents more choices and tools to help them ensure that young consumers are using your products in an optimal manner."

Why Apple in particular? Obviously, the fact that two of the signatories own a couple of billion dollars' worth of Apple stock explains this choice to some extent. But one hard fact is that Apple's share of the smartphone market mostly stays in the 12-to-20-percent range. (Market leader Samsung has held 20-30 percent of the market since 2012.) Still, the implicit argument is that Apple's software and hardware designs for the iPhone will mostly lead the way for other phone-makers going forward, as they mostly have for the first decade of the iPhone era.

Still, why should Apple want to do this? The idea here is that Apple's primarily a hardware-and-devices company — which distinguishes Apple from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter, all of which primarily deliver an internet-based service. Of course, Apple's an internet company too (iTunes, Apple TV, iCloud, and so on), but the company's not hooked on the advertising revenue streams that are the primary fuel for Google, Facebook, and Twitter, or on the sales of other, non-digital merchandise (like Amazon). The ad revenue for the internet-service companies creates what Manjoo argues are "misaligned incentives" — when ad-driven businesses' economic interests lie in getting more users clicking on advertisements, he reasons, he's "skeptical" that (for example) Facebook is the going to offer any real solution to the "addiction" problem. Ultimately, Manjoo agrees with the ThinkDifferentlyAboutKids letter -- Apple's in the best position to fix iPhone "addiction" because of their design leadership and independence from ad revenue.

Even so, Apple has other incentives to make iPhones addictive — notably, pleasing its other investors. Still, investors may ultimately be persuaded that Apple-led fixes will spearhead improvements, rooted in our devices, of our social-media experience. (See, for example, this column: Why Investors May Be the Next to Join the Backlash Against Big Tech's Power.)

It's worth remembering that the idea technology is addictive is itself an addictive idea — not that long ago, it was widely (although not universally) believed that television was addictive. This New York Times story from 1990 advances that argument, although the reporter does quote a psychiatrist who cautions that "the broad definition" of addiction "is still under debate." (Manjoo's "less addictive iPhone" column inoculates itself, you'll recall, by saying iPhone addiction is "not the same.")

"Addiction" of course is an attractive metaphor, and certainly those of us who like using our electronics to stay connected can see the appeal of the metaphor. And Apple, which historically has been super-aware of the degree to which its products are attractive to minors, may conclude—or already have concluded, as the ThinkDifferentlyAboutKids folks admit — that more parental controls are a fine idea.

But is it possible that smartphones maybe already incorporate a solution for addictiveness? Just the week before Manjoo's column, another Times writer, Nellie Bowles asked whether we can make our phones less addictive just by playing with the settings. (The headline? "Is the Answer to Phone Addiction a Worse Phone?") Bowles argues, based on interviews with researchers, that simply setting your phone to use grayscale instead of color inclines users to respond less emotionally and impulsively—in other words, more mindfully—when deciding whether to respond to their phones. Bowles says she's trying the experiment herself: "I've gone gray, and it's great."

At first it seems odd to focus on the device's user interface (parental settings, or color palette) if the real problem of addictiveness is internet content (social media, YouTube and other video, news updates, messages). One can imagine a Times columnist in 1962—in the opening years of widespread color TV— responding to Newt Minow's famous "vast wasteland" speech by arguing that TV-set manufacturers should redesign sets so that they're somewhat more inconvenient—no remote controls, say—and less colorful to watch. (So much for NBC's iconic Peacock opening logo)

In the interests of science, I'm experimenting with some of these solutions myself. For years already I've configured my iDevices not to bug me with every Facebook and Twitter update or new-email notice. Plus, I was worried about this grayscale thing on my iPhone X—one of the major features of which is a fantastic camera. But it turns out that you can toggle between grayscale and color easily once you've set gray as the default. I kind of like the novelty of all-gray—no addiction-withdrawal syndrome yet, but we'll see how that goes.

(5) Social media are bad for us because they make us feel bad, alienating us from one another and causing is to be upset much of the time.

Manjoo says he's skeptical whether Facebook is going to fix the addictiveness of its content and interactions with users, thanks to those "misaligned incentives." It should be said of course that Facebook's incentives—to use its free services to create an audience for paying advertisers—at least have the benefit of being straightforward. (Apple's not dependent on ads, but they still want new products to be attractive enough for users to want to upgrade.) Still, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company is redesigning Facebook's user experience, (focusing first on its news feed) to emphasize quality time ("time well spent") over more "passive" consumption of the Facebook ads and video that may generate more hits for some advertisers. Zuckerberg maintains that Facebook, even as it has operated over the last decade-plus of general public access, had been good for many and maybe for most users:

"The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health."

Even so, Zuckerberg writes (translating what Facebook has been hearing from some social-science researchers), "passively reading articles or watching videos -- even if they're entertaining or informative -- may not be as good." This is a gentler way of characterizing what some researchers have recently been arguing, which is that, for some people at least, using Facebook causes depression. This article for example, relies on sociologist Erving Goffman's conceptions of how we distinguish between our public and private selves as we navigate social interactions. Facebook, it's argued, "collapses" our public and private presentations—the result is what social-media researcher danah boyd calls "context collapse." A central idea here is that, because what we publish on Facebook for our circle is also to some high degree public, we are stressed by the need (or inability) to switch between versions of how we present ourselves. In addition context collapse, the highly curated pages we see from other people on Facebook may suggest that their lives are happy in ways that ours are not.

I think both Goffman's and boyd's contributions to our understanding of the sociology of identity (both focus on how we present ourselves in context) are extremely useful, but it's important to think clearly about any links between Facebook (and other social media) and depression. To cut to the chase: there may in fact be strong correlations between social-media use and depression, at least for some people. But it's unclear whether social media actually cause depression; it seems just as likely that causation may go in the other direction. Consider that depression has also been associated with internet use generally (prior to the rise of social-media platforms), with television watching, and even, if you go back far enough, with what is perceived to be excessive consumption of novels and other fiction. Books, of course, are now regarded as redemptive diversions that may actually cure your depression.

So here's a reasonable alternative hypothesis: when you're depressed you seek diversion from depression—which may be Facebook, Twitter, or something else, like novels or binge-watching quality TV. It may be things that are genuinely good for you (books! Or The Wire!) or things that are unequivocally bad for you. (Don't try curing your depression with drinking!) Or it may be social media, which at least some users will testify they find energizing and inspiring rather than enervating and dispiriting.

As a longtime skeptic regarding studies of internet usage (a couple of decades ago I helped expose a fraudulent article about "cyberporn" usage), I don't think the research on social media and its potential harmful side-effects is any more conclusive than Facebook's institutional belief that its social-media platforms are beneficial. But I do think Facebook as a dominant, highly profitable social-media platform is under the gun. And, as I've written here and elsewhere, its sheer novelty may be generating a moral panic. So it's no wonder—especially now that the U.S. Congress (as well as European regulators) are paying more attention to social media—that we're seeing so many Facebook announcements recently that are aimed at showing the company's responsiveness to public criticism.

Whether you think anxiety about social-media is merited or otherwise, you may reasonably be cynical about whether a market-dominant for-profit company will refine itself to act more consistently in the public interest—even in the face of public criticism or governmental impulses to regulate. But such a move is not unprecedented. The key question is whether Facebook's course corrections -- steering us towards personal interactions over "passive" consumption of things like news reports -- really do help us. (For example, if you believe in the filter-bubble hypothesis, it seems possible that Facebook's privileging of personal interactions over news may make filter bubbles worse.) This brings us to Problem Number 6, below.

(6) Social media are bad for us because they're bad for democracy.

There are multiple arguments that Facebook and other social media (Twitter's another frequent target) are bad for democracy. The Verge provides a good beginning list here. The article notes that Facebook's own personnel—including its awesomely titled "global politics and government outreach director" — are acknowledging the criticisms by publishing a series of blog postings. The first one is from the leader of Facebook's "civic engagement team," and the others are from outside observers, including Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein (who's been a critic of "filter bubbles" since long before that term was invented—his preferred term is "information cocoons.").

I briefly mentioned Sunstein's work in Part 1. Here in Part 2 I'll note mainly that Sunstein's essay for Facebook begins by listing ways in which social-media platforms are actually good for democracy. In fact, he writes, "they are not merely good; they are terrific." In spite of their goodness, Sunstein writes, they also exacerbate what he's discussed earlier (notably in a 1999 paper) as "group polarization." In short, he argues, the filter bubble makes like-minded people hold their shared opinions more extremely. The result? More extremism generally, unless deliberative forums are properly designed with appropriate "safeguards."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Facebook is hosting his essay, Sunstein credits Facebook with taking steps to provide those such safeguards, which in his view includes Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg's declaration that the company is working to fight misinformation in its news feed. But I like Sunstein's implicit recognition that political polarization, while bad, may be no worse as a result of social media in particular, or even this century's modern media environment as a whole:

"By emphasizing the problems posed by knowing falsehoods, polarization, and information cocoons, I do not mean to suggest that things are worse now than they were in 1960, 1860, 1560, 1260, or the year before or after the birth of Jesus Christ. Information cocoons are as old as human history."

(I made that argument, in similar form, in a debate with Farhad Manjoo—not then a Times columnist—almost a decade ago.)

Just as important, I think, is Sunstein's admission that that we don't really have unequivocal data showing that social media are a particular problem even in relation to other modern media:

"Nor do I mean to suggest that with respect to polarization, social media are worse than newspapers, television stations, social clubs, sports teams, or neighborhoods. Empirical work continues to try to compare various sources of polarization, and it would be reckless to suggest that social media do the most damage. Countless people try to find diverse topics, and multiple points of view, and they use their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds for exactly that purpose. But still, countless people don't."

Complementing Sunstein's essay is a piece by Facebook's Samidh Chakrabarti, who underscores the company's new initiative to make News Feed contributions more transparent (so you can see who's funding a political ad or seemingly authentic "news story). Chakrabarti also expresses the company's hope that its "Trust Project for News On Facebook" will help users "sharpen their social media literacy." And Facebook's just announced its plan to use user rankings to rate media sources' credibility.

I'm all for more media literacy, and I love crowd-sourcing, and I support efforts to encourage both. But I share CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis's concern that other components of Facebook's comprehensive response to public criticism may unintentionally undercut support, financial and otherwise, for trustworthy media sources.

Now, I'm aware that some critics are arguing that the data really are solidly showing that social media are undermining democracy. But I'm skeptical whether "fake news" on Facebook or elsewhere in social media changed the outcome of the 2016 election, not least because the Pew Research Center's study a year ago suggests that digital news sources weren't nearly as important as traditional media sources. (Notably, Fox News was hugely influential among Trump voters; there was no counterpart news source for Clinton voters.)

That said, there's no reason to dismiss concerns about social media, which may play an increasing role—as Facebook surely has—as an intermediary of the news. Facebook's Chakrabarti may want to promote "social media literacy," and the company has been forced to acknowledge that "Russian entities" tried to use Facebook as an "information weapon." But Facebook doesn't want in the least to play the rule a social-media-literate citizenry should be playing for itself. Writes Chakrabart:

"In the public debate over false news, many believe Facebook should use its own judgment to filter out misinformation. We've chosen not to do that because we don't want to be the arbiters of truth, nor do we imagine this is a role the world would want for us."

Of course some critics may disagree. As I've said above, the data are equivocal, but that hasn't made its interpreters equivocal. Take for example a couple of recent articles—one academic and another aimed at popular audience—that cast doubt on whether the radical democratization of internet access is a good thing—or at least, whether it's as good a thing as we hoped for a couple of decades ago. One is UC Irvine professor Richard Hasen's law-review article published last year (set for formal publication in the First Amendment Law Review this year), which he helpfully distilled to an LA Times op-ed here. The other is Wired's February 2018 cover story: "It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech." (The Wired article is also authored by an academic, UNC Chapel Hill sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci.)

Both Hasen's and Tufekci's articles underscore that internet access has inverted an assumption that long informed free-speech law—that the ability to reach mass audiences is necessarily going to be expensive and scarce. In the internet era, what we have instead is what UCLA professor Eugene Volokh memorably labelled, in a Yale Law Journal law-review article more than 20 years ago, as "cheap speech." Volokh correctly anticipated back then that internet-driven changes in the media landscape would lead some social critics to conclude that the First Amendment's broad protections for speech would need to be revised:

"As the new media arrive, they may likewise cause some popular sentiment for changes in the doctrine. Today, for instance, the First Amendment rules that give broad protection to extremist speakers-Klansmen, Communists, and the like-are relatively low-cost, because these groups are politically rather insignificant. Even without government regulation, they are in large measure silenced by lack of funds and by the disapproval of the media establishment. What will happen when the KKK becomes able to conveniently send its views to hundreds of thousands of supporters throughout the country, or create its own TV show that can be ordered from any infobahn-connected household?"

There, in a nutshell, is a prediction of the world we're living in now (except that we, fortunately, failed to adopt the term "infobahn"). Hasen believes "non-governmental actors"—that is, Facebook and Twitter and Google and the like — may be "best suited to counter the problems created by cheap speech." I think that's a bad idea, not least because corporate decision-making may be less accountable than public law and regulation and, as Manjoo puts it, they are "misaligned incentives." Tufekci, I think, has the better approach. "[I]n fairness to Facebook and Google and Twitter," she writes in Wired, "while there's a lot they could do better, the public outcry demanding that they fix all these problems is mistaken." Because there are "few solutions to the problems of digital discourse that don't involve huge trade-offs," Tufekci insists that deciding what those solutions may be is necessarily a "deeply political decision"—involving difficult discussions what we ask the government to do... or not to do.

She's got that right. She's also right that we haven't had those discussions yet. And as we begin them, we need to remember radically democratic empowerment (all that cheap speech) may be part of the problem, but it's also got to be part of the solution.

Update: Part 3 is now available.

Mike Godwin is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at R Street Institute.

Filed Under: content, moderation, moral panics, social media
Companies: facebook, google, twitter, youtube

How Moral Panics Can Turn Into Therapeutic Tools: The Dungeons And Dragons Edition

from the medicine-check dept

It seems there must be something in our human DNA, something that hasn't been filtered out over the generations, that causes the masses to engage in moral panics. When you peruse our previous posts about moral panics new and old, it highlights how laughably absurd they tend to be. Specifically, if past is prologue, you get a fair understanding of how our current moral panics will be viewed in the future, as we laugh now at the consternation caused by such demons as telephones, comic books, chess, and pencils. And that laughter causes no pause about the current moral panics surrounding social media, certain forms of music, and video games.

Sandwiched in between antiquity and modernity is Dungeons & Dragons, the popular tabletop role playing game that experienced its own moral panic decades ago, but which has since risen dramatically in popularity. This game, once thought by parents to create potential Satan worshipers out of their little darling children, has already been pushed as a fantastic starting point for would-be creative writers. More recently, however, therapists have begun using the game as a therapeutic tool in sessions with patients. Adam Davis runs one of these groups using D&D in therapy, called the Wheelhouse Workshop, and details one story in which he uses the game as a therapy tool.

Davis, who runs Wheelhouse Workshop out of an office in a large, brick arts building in Seattle, is used to seeing sides of kids that don't usually come out in school. He, along with co-founder Adam Johns, designs D&D games that are less like hack-and-slash dungeon-crawls and more like therapy with dragons. In D&D's Forgotten Realms world, the kids' psyches run amok. Earlier this month, over the phone, Davis told me about Frank (not his real name), a tall, lanky teenager who barely spoke above a whisper. In school, he tended to sit with his feet in front of his face, so no one could really see him. He hated to take up space. After his parents and teachers noticed that his body language seemed a little stand-offish to peers, they enrolled him in Wheelhouse Workshop.

"The character he chose was a dwarf barbarian," Davis recalled. "He was really loud and bumbling and unapologetic. It was a really obvious opportunity for this kid to play with qualities other than his." Adam had Frank sit like his character, spreading his legs apart and slamming his elbows onto the table. In dwarf-barbarian mode, Frank could experiment with new modes of relating to others.

In the link, there are other examples of other groups using D&D in therapy sessions, and it becomes instantly obvious why it's such a valuable tool. Letting kids play the game to work out real life issues, or work on modes of interaction and socialization, is what every tabletop RPG session is to some extent. But for those whose interactions aren't merely escape from reality, but a way to work on their real life interactions, the lessons learned in the game can be profound. Therapists have always used role-playing in therapy sessions, of course, but allowing for an in-game narrative filled with social interaction and potential consequences adds a new layer. When the therapists explaining why they use the game as a tool in this way talk about the benefits, it will likely sound familiar to what the proponents of more recent moral panic targets have to say on the subject.

Because D&D is inherently cooperative and escapist, it urges players to re-imagine the ways they interact with peers. And because each player has their own specialty, like communicating with dragons, they'll have their moment to feel valuable in a group setting.

At worst, kids who are socially isolated can enjoy hacking up some goblins after a crappy school day. "For someone who never leaves their house except for school, to have a peer say, 'I need your help picking a lock' makes a huge difference," Johns told me.

That sure sounds like someone describing interactive multiplayer video games to me, among other things. The point to understand here is that thirty or forty years ago this game was absolutely vilified. Unfairly so, by a public too willing to buy into fears about something they didn't understand and a media environment happy to whip that fear into a fervor. No part of that equation has changed saved for the target of the moral panic du jour. Hell, we've already heard of things like video games and other technology being used in therapy sessions, yet what percentage of parents polled today would have negative things to say about those games?

If moral panics are in our DNA, or perhaps merely in our social fabric, we need more people to have a greater understanding of how often these panics melt away and the benefits of the thing feared are then realized. Maybe then we can at least muffle these types of moral panics.

Filed Under: dungeons and dragons, moral panics, therapy

Techdirt Reading List: Moral Panics And The Copyright Wars

from the pay-attention dept

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

Congress appears to be gearing up to really look at copyright reform again, and so it probably shouldn't be a huge surprise that we're starting to see a ramp up of crazy hyperbole about how horrible infringing is, how it's destroying millions of jobs and billions in revenue. These claims seem to get even more ridiculous whenever legislation is on the line. I may do a post about some of the more recent whining about all of this, but for this week's reading list post, I thought it might be good to point people to Bill Patry's excellent Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. Patry has been involved in the copyright world for decades, working on copyright issues in Congress and with the Copyright Office -- and also in private practice as a lawyer. He's written a massive treatise on copyright law called Patry on Copyright as well as a treatise focusing just on fair use -- both of which are frequently cited in legal decisions. He now works for Google -- which causes some people to try to dismiss what he says as biased. But with his background, knowledge and experience, you'd be foolish to do so.

Patry used to run an excellent blog, discussing various copyright topics, but unfortunately gave it up a few years ago, after he felt some of the copyright debates got too heated. Either way Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars is a worthwhile read (or reread, if you haven't read it in a few years), and I highly recommend it for people observing just how the propaganda campaign for stricter copyright laws is shaping up. Patry goes back and explores just how the legacy players have long twisted language to make arguments around copyright that have little basis in reality, but which sound good to policymakers (and to the press). Since that is undoubtedly happening again, it's important to understand its history to be aware of attempts to manipulate the debate yet again.

Filed Under: copyright, moral panics, techdirt reading list, william patry

No, Virtual Reality Won't Make Us Fat, Stupid Slaves Of Mark Zuckerberg

from the fear-is-the-mind-killer dept

With the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift prepping for launch over the next few months, the public has only just begun to be inundated with a sound wall of virtual reality media coverage. And while that's great if, like me, you've been waiting for functional, non-vomit-inducing VR since childhood, those unnerved by the idea of strapping a $600 plastic and metal headset to their face for hours will react poorly. The folks that believe games make us violent, Google makes us stupid, and cell phones make us antisocial are going to have an absolute field day demonizing VR. Usually, never having tried it.

Right on cue, the backlash began in earnest this week. Countless news outlets and Twitter users circulated this photo of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg demonstrating Samsung Gear VR Headsets at the Mobile World Congress this week in Spain. It is, admittedly, very white, very male, and not particularly flattering: But the Washington Post was one of numerous outlets to somehow read entire universes of meaning into the photo, breathlessly insisting it was mystically precognitive in nature, offering a glimpse into our "creepy" and "dystopian tech future":

Zuckerberg has said that, in his vision for the future, these virtual experiences will be fundamentally social. But the photo suggests something quite different: Hundreds of people share a physical space, but no perception, no experience, no phenomenological anchor. The communality of a conference (literally from conferre, 'to bring together') is thrown over for a series of hyper-individualized bubbles. And you’re reminded, from Zuckerberg’s awkward semi-smile, that the man who owns the bubbles also owns what’s in them. That controlling virtual reality, in other words, is only a step from controlling reality itself.

Ooh, scary! I'm not necessarily a fan of Zuckerberg or his tone-deafness during the recent global net neutrality fracas, but the Post's "digital culture critic" seems more than a little confused by what VR is, and what was happening at the event. As folks like Ben Kuchera were quick to point out the event was mostly harmless, with audience members being greeted with a surprise cameo by Zuckerberg after they took off their headsets. Audience members actually reacted with "gasps of excitement" at glimpsing a t-shirt clad billionaire. Nerdy white dudes being nerdy white dudes, sure. But 1984 this wasn't.

When people unfamiliar with VR see someone in a headset, many immediately picture the fat hovering people in Pixar's Wall-E, happily guzzling sugar water while anesthetized to all greater meaning. But while many spent the week deriding VR as a Zuckerberg-controlled big brother enslavement tool, most of the people that have actually tried VR realize it has amazing potential as a tool for creation, expression and connectivity for artists, story tellers, journalists, and musicians. Again, once people actually try VR, it doesn't take long to see the potential.

Yet all week the photo had a bizarre, hypnotizing effect on the media that overshadowed this fact. Fusion, for example, became oddly transfixed by the heaviest man in the photo, magically equating his daily caloric surplus with the idea that VR will somehow make us all miserable:

If you were to choose an attendee in the crowd who most represents You, it would be probably be this man. Here you are, six years from today: Unsatisfied, dour, a VR headset crammed onto your face. Your belongings are at your feet, your computer balances on your lap, your identifying lanyard hangs from your neck. You are watching…something? It doesn’t matter. You hate it.

That's some rich analysis, yo. The existential fear of VR from the Luddite wing of the American electorate is palpably bizarre. The Atlantic, for example, published a piece of moody dystopian fiction based entirely on the heavyset man in the photo. The piece is set years in the future -- after we've all apparently become fatter, sadder and notably less productive thanks to Zuckerberg's villainy.

It apparently needs noting: putting on a VR headset doesn't magically prevent you from eating kale, doing yoga or going for a run. If you're chubby outside of VR, you're still chubby with a headset strapped to your head. That's not somehow VR's fault. At the same time, if you've actually watched some of the developer demos for games like Budget Cuts, you'd realize VR gaming can be a very physical and social experience. Still nerdy as hell, granted. But VR is not, contrary to this week's press narrative, somehow synonymous with servitude and muscle atrophy.

We've been over this before at Techdirt countless times. Each and every time a new technology emerges this same narrative bubbles forth: "this new technology is going to make us less social than ever and usher forth a terrifying future where nobody interacts!" XKCD highlighted quite well a few years ago how this idea is neither accurate nor new, and it's getting downright boring: Does VR have some major PR obstacles to broader adoption? Absolutely. The initial cost of entry is significant, given to do VR "right" you need a quality headset (the Oculus Rift is $600 at launch and the HTC Vive will be $800) and a higher end PC with a beefy graphics card (around $1000-$1500) capable of powering it. But what will begin as a high-end playpen for art, porn and video gaming will quickly evolve into adoption at schools, universities and homes everywhere -- especially as the technology matures, its uses expand, and prices drop.

Sure, until VR tech can be shrunk down and integrated into contacts or glasses we'll all look downright stupid wearing VR headsets. It's just a fact. But if you're dismissing an entire technological revolution for appearance's sake, the problem would be yours, not virtual reality's.

Filed Under: innovation, mark zuckerberg, moral panics, virtual reality, vr

Australian Government Warns That Alternative Rock, Teenage Rebellion Could Lead To Radicalization

from the but-what-of-dubstep? dept

The Australian government is fighting back against the unrelenting terrorist threat that threatens to consume every Western nation. It, too, has noticed that youngsters and their SnapChats are particularly prone to radicalization from outside forces. As Richard Chirgwin of the Register points out, it has chosen to address this threat to Australian society in the way only a government agency can: with a blend of the bizarre and the tone deaf.

Launched this week by justice minister Michael Keenan (who also glories in the title Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Terrorism), the Radicalisation Awareness Kit is supposed to help school teachers identify which of their students is going to enter the adult world with a penchant for bomb-throwing.

Cue the cheery faces of unradicalized youth:


The 32-page booklet starts with a long definition of radlicalization, hedged by warnings that not every diversion from the mainstream will result in violence. Then it heads into a series of "case studies" that indicate every deviation from societal norms is a warning sign of impending unlawfulness.

The case studies are the best kind of hilarious: inadvertent.

"Erin" joined a "hate group" and committed crimes against Muslims. After a stay in jail and laying off the booze, "Erin" turned her life around. Not completely, but it's a start.

It is now a number of years since she left the group and Erin has sought treatment for her depression, reconciled with her family, is studying and has made some new friends. However, it was a difficult and slow process. She has moderated her beliefs significantly and makes a point of educating herself on issues rather than just accepting what others tell her. She does not entirely trust the government or police yet – it takes a long time to change some habits of thinking.

If nothing else, this fabricated tale shows the government to be overly-concerned about its place in the world. "Erin" is still partly broken because she doesn't "entirely" trust the government or police. What a shame. But it is hoped "Erin" will be made whole in the near future -- full of trust in the government and prone to only tempered beliefs.

But that's not the worst of it. Much like the Homeland Security Advisor's ridiculous claim that teens acting like teens pose a threat to national security, the Australian government's concerns about future radicalization are also tied to the hallmarks of adolescence.

As Richard Chirgwin points out, the radicalization anecdotes reach their nadir with the story of "Karen," starting with setting these ground rules for Normal Existence.

Karen grew up in a loving family who never participated in activism of any sort.

This is called foreshadowing. Karen soon deviates from her family's path of loving do-nothingness.

When she moved out of home to attend university Karen became involved in the alternative music scene, student politics and left-wing activism.

And there you have it: alternative music is the gateway drug to terrorism. As is politics, oddly enough, considering this narrative has been written by a political agency. And let's not forget the activism -- the kind of thing her normcore family never felt compelled to participate in.

Strangely, the government chalks this up to "normal teenage rebellion" before going on to warn parents about normal teenage rebellion.

One afternoon Karen attended an environmental protest with some of her friends. It was exhilarating, fun and she felt like she was doing the ‘right thing’ for society. She enjoyed spending time with this crowd. Over the next six months Karen progressively dropped out of university in order to live full-time in a forest camp, where she remained for a year. Her family were confused and disappointed and stopped supporting her financially.

:(

You can guess what happened next. Logging operations were screwed with, Karen was arrested multiple times and, finally, she became disillusioned with her radical brethren and sistren. She chucked it all for a staid job at a "mainstream environmentalist organization." Happy endings all around, especially for Karen, who now realized the only way to fight the system was to become part of the system.

She now thinks illegal or aggressive direct-action campaigns only produce short-term solutions, and she is much more interested in working towards developing a sustainable solution using the legal system.

The warning signs the government says to look for are basically A Day in the Life of a Teen.

Issues that can help push someone onto a path of radicalisation may include:

• changes in living or employment
• anxiety, depression, paranoia, suicidal thoughts or other mental health issues
• personal issues such as health problems, addiction, anger or social problems
• dropping out of school or university
• negative changes in friendships and/ or personal relationships
• confrontations with family members
• discrimination and social unfairness
• exposure to hateful attitudes and actions, either as victim or perpetrator, and
• overseas events that may harm their community.

Now, the report does go on to caution that these are normal and don't necessarily signify Early Onset Radicalization. However, the report does make it clear -- especially through its anecdotal evidence -- that these can lead to radicalization when combined with activism, alternative music and an apparently unearned distrust for the government.

Perhaps sensing the sort of response this document might generate, the hefty propaganda leaflet also makes an effort to assure Australians that ASIO (the MI5/FBI of Down Under) is not allowed to crack down on radicalization warning signs -- at least not without going through the pre-lubed proper channels.

There are concerns that ASIO has extraordinary and unaccountable power. A review by the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor has found that ASIO’s powers have been used appropriately and effectively, with no evidence of abuses. As at November 2014, ASIO has not used its powers to detain anyone at all, and has used its questioning powers only 16 times since 9/11.

BUT OF WHAT YEAR?

These questionable anecdotes notwithstanding, the document takes a fairly restrained look at radicalization and its causes. But the nuances of its more cautious wording are undercut by stories that equate trusting your government and steering away from activism with normality, not-so-subtly suggesting any deviations from the norm should be viewed with suspicion.

Filed Under: australia, children, moral panics, radicalism, teenage rebellion