Celebrity tweets

Recently, a student emailed me about a piece she was writing for DN magazine about Twitter and how celebrities are using the service to broadcast info about their private lives, whilst also complaining about their privacy being violated. Saying as this material fits nicely with the session I will be delivering on MAC301 in a few weeks I thought I'd post my response to the email here.

Mac Social Media And The New Publicness

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I've been reading (ie blind referring for a scholarly journal) a little academic material recently about the ways in which celebrities use services like Twitter to manage their public personas in order to present what seems like an authentic version of themselves for their fans to consume. The internet, generally, has had a significant impact on celebrity culture in that it has fostered a large range of outlets through which ideas and discussion about celebrities can circulate. Forums, fan sites, blogs and social media (like Twitter) all play a part in offering us unprecedented access to celebrity content - some of it official, some of it unofficial.

What makes Twitter interesting and unique is that it seems to offer an uncensored and intimate point of access. Celebrities (or even people posing as celebrities) can grant their fans or followers what seems like highly personal contact. Many even respond to comments or question in a public replay (eg @username). Some, like Mariah Carey, opt to send messages to their fans using the private 'direct message' reply.

There is a danger that we read a little too much into the supposed legitimacy of the celebrity on Twitter. Not all celebrities are who they claim to be - many of the Twitter accounts of the most famous celebrities, like Britney Spears, are frequently attributed to Britney herself, but also her manager and her website. It's also not uncommon for 'ghost writers' to be employed by high profile celebrities who write posts in the 'voice' or style of the author they represent. It's not always easy to distinguish these writers from the 'real' celebrity - but then again, its questionable if the general public ever really get access to the real, authentic celebrity in other media forms

The celebrity image or persona is 'performed' and 'managed' by stylists and PR teams who frequently brief their employers on what to say, where to be seen and who to be seen with. Twitter could be seen as an extension of that kind of practice. However, their are many celebrities who do use the service as a way of performing what seems like intimacy with their followers. I can imagine that this is part of the appeal for celebrities and fans alike. Appearing at ease with your fame can be advantageous and useful for promoting the brand that is the celebrity identity (ie Katie Price). How honest this kind of communication or authentic is is debatable on the whole. The fact that a celebrity might be accessing their Twitter account from the mobile phone in their pockets or handbags does at least suggest a sense of potential intimacy and this is where Twitter has been successful for the celebrity-stalking fan

Some followers even go out of their way to anger and incite their chosen celebrity victims in order to solicit a response from them, while others may be more flattering.

The web and the tools we find on it (ie Twitter) are great at offering us what seems like more direct access to folk, but their seems to be an unwritten contract between those people who publish things in public and those that consume said material that if you opt to put it out there, then you cannot complain about the invasion of privacy that might come along with that. I'm not sure that having a public presence gives followers a carte-blanche rationale for invasive behaviour, but being able to control your own public facing platform certainly seems to be appealing to those people who bemoan the interference of gossip columnists and the paparazzi.

I'm not sure how influential Twitter is - it may be too early to tell, or it may be that the general creep of social media into our everyday lives is forcing a blurring of the boundaries between what was once considered private and what is now thought to be public. It seems like some commentators are suggesting that Twitter's popularity has peaked, but again, it may be too early to tell. Once thing is for sure, it's never been easier to use social media tools to get what seems like direct access to celebrities. Whether or not that access is genuine or authentic depends on the celebrity

The Digital Economy Bill, Clause 17

About a week or so ago the Digital Economy Bill made it's second pass through the House of Lords. Lord Lucas has been one of the most vocal critics of the Bill, especially the controversial Clause 17 which gives the First Secretary of State (currently Lord Mandleson) the power to enforce sweeping copyright reforms without public consultation in the face of future technological developments. Briefly, this section of the Bill would grant the government the power to make changes it sees appropriate to help enforce the copyright held by the content industries (eg the music industry). These powers are so broad they can be applied to adapt any future changes in technology without consultation (emphasis needed!). The Bill also proposes to disconnect illegal filesharers from the Internet after three warnings - commonly referred to as the "3 strikes" ruling. If you want a quick overview of how serious this is, check out the video below:



Back in December '09 PC Pro reported on how Lord Lucas expressed some doubts as to whether the Government's plans to disconnect users, claiming that the entertainment industry hadn't done enough to encourage people to pursue legal methods:

"We need to bear in mind that the problems now facing the industry are, to quite a large extent, of their own creation ... The industry has been extremely slow to listen to the demands of its customers, and has had something of an abusive relationship with them, seeking to punish them before thinking of how to serve them better."

"It has taken a decade for the industry to produce sensible alternatives to illegal file-sharing, and the fact that a generation of people have become used to an illegality comes down to the industry’s sluggishness. It is still slow."

He also raised some concerns that the methods being proposed to pinpoint who was actually responsible for downloading illegal content was inaccurate - the harvesting of an IP address doesn't always guarantee that the person responsible for paying the bill is the person engaging in filesharing activity, especially in households where several people have shared access. The same could be said of the hospitality sector in which hoteliers, bars, cafes and conference venues offer free wireless access to patrons.

Educators have complained that the bill also endangers their businesses and internet provision to the general public (via city-wide cloud-based services) is also under threat because of the insistence that organisations providing net access should be liable for the actions of their customers. The British Library with its public Wi-Fi access would be in jeopardy.

In January 2010 Lord Lucas suggested a number of amendments to the Bill including adding a remedy to help prevent false claims from being made against the innocent by giving them legal recourse to pursue counter actions against the accuser. He also tried to add an amendment that would require copyright holders to detail actual damages done by file sharing in their reports to ISPs notifying them of infringement. There were a total of 299 amendments suggested by the House of Lords. Lords Razzall and Clement Jones proposed one amendment (no. 34) to Clause 4 that stands out, mainly due to its evocation of the Human Rights Act:

Compliance with fundamental rights

In drafting or amending any code, laying any statutory instrument, or taking any other action under sections 124A to 124L of the Communications Act 2003 or under section 302A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the Secretary of State must demonstrate before such action is implemented that he has considered whether such action—

• a) is necessary and proportionate to the goal of protecting and enforcing copyright, and
• b) appropriately balances the interest of rights holders and the interests of the public in due process, privacy, freedom of expression and other fundamental human rights guaranteed by inter alia the European Convention of Human Rights and the EC Charter of Rights."

The safety and privacy of the general public must not be disregarded in lieu of the demands of the content industry.

Earlier this month the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights also claimed that sections of the Digital Economy Bill needed clarification. The technical measures and the powers that are to be given to government were not "sufficiently specified". The fear here is that they might result in sweeping powers which restrict the freedom of expression and the privacy of individual users. Andrew Dismore MP and chair of the Commitee stated:

"The concern we have with this Bill is that it lacks detail ... It has been difficult, even in the narrow area we have focussed on, to get a clear picture of the scope and impact of the provisions."

One of the real concerns is with the lack of "due judicial process" to people accused of illicit filesharing. There is a real fear that the burden of proof will lie at the feet of Internet users who may be unable to prove they are innocent as they may not have the knowledge or skills to do so, nor the space to react to accusations accordingly.

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Public or private?

In anticipation of a session that I will be giving on MAC301 in a couple of weeks, I thought I'd post a few links here which touch on the issue of data privacy. These might make interesting case studies for anyone looking to explore what seems like a hot topic at the moment (think Twitter, Facebook, Big Brother, reality television, mobile phones, etc). Indeed, The Guardian has a handy collection of resources here. City University London even offers a MA in Surveillance Studies.

Google's Street View

Earlier this week Jamie Doward wrote for The Observer about how the Information Commissioner ruled that Google's Street View, the service which depicts 360-degree views of buildings and highways, is not a threat to personal privacy. This in itself is not new news, but it is just one article among many that have highlighted anxieties about the new service. Privacy advocates like Privacy International have already complained about the service, claiming it has led to moments of embarrassment or distress, when the Street View car has captured members of the public at importune moments (eg such as people being caught on camera leaving sex shops).

Google has already gone some way to offset this type of criticism by obscuring the faces of people caught on camera, as well as car numberplates. However, this hasn't allayed all anxious that the service may be abused, such as the inhabitants of Broughton, North London, who were so fearful that their affluent neighbourhood's appearance on Street View would attract criminals that they remonstrated with the driver of the Google vehicle (see CNN story here for more details). This isn't the first or last time that Google's tools have been used inappropriately, but that doesn't mean there are no advantages to its services.

There are obvious advantages to a location-aware service like Street View, especially for people trying to find their way to places they have never visited previously. A three-dimensional representation will help bridge the gap that satellite images cannot.

Phorm

I've mentioned Phorm (aka Webwise) on this blog before. They are a company who harness intrusive DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) technologies to monitor our private personal data so that they can sell this data to interested parties in order to 'improve' targeted advertising. Briefly, this means that the sites we visit and the kind of links we follow will build up a profile of our behaviour so that more suitable adverting content can compete for our attention rather than being bombarded with blanket advertising that we have little or no interest in. BT and Virgin Media have been linked with this technology in the past.

Several high profile groups have criticised Phorm, especially the Open Rights Group (ORG) and the inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee. ORG have managed to get a number of key sites to opt out of Phorm's Webwise project, including Amazon.co.uk.

There is very little average web users can do to prevent targeted behavioural-based advertising from happening (beyond complaining to their ISPs and supporting groups like ORG) as the technology works at the ISP server side. I recently wrote about Google's decision to employ similar techniques and how to prevent privacy being invaded here.

Phorm have claimed that they are not being invasive. The data gathered is anonymous in that individual Internet use is collated into similar user types - Phorm will not create a unique target-based system for everyone just yet. An individual's behaviour will fall into a specific set of established categories with relevant advertising directed at those groups of users.

The UK government has approved Phorm but the European commission has launched legal proceedings against them for allegedly breaching EU data protection laws (see The Guardian article here for details). It seems that the intercept technology employed does not neatly fit within present guidelines of the intentionality of the interception and the amount of consent given to Internet users.

Government intercept powers

Recently the UK government shored up the final bit of data interception law that was missing from it's portfolio when it added email and VoIP to the list of things that communication service providers had to keep records of. Mobile and fixed-line phone connection records have already been part of the package for a few years now. As of March 15th 2009, ISPs have to retain data about when and where emails were sent (not about the content) - historically this was voluntary - in case one of over 600 public bodies makes a request to access the information. This was part of a wider EU Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL), agreed back in 2006.

The rationale behind this move is to protect our freedom - to keep an eye on potential and actual terrorists using these services in order to prevent an attack. It is debatable whether or not buidling up these network profiles actually prevent terrorism (as in the 9/11 incident when the network was known to officials but ineffective as a means of prevention). Charles Arthur wrote a piece for The Guardian this week in which he astutely highlighted the dangers of this legislation for investigative journalism - something which is already under threat in a period when news producers are facing tough economic conditions.

The implications are clear - a journalist's data and sources for investigative stories, if gathered electronically, will be accessible for those bodies with a 'valid request'. This is potentially harmful for democracy when a whistleblower's anonymity is far from guaranteed.

What will be covered next? Messages sent across social networks sites like Twitter and Facebook or across gaming networks like the Playstation Network and Microsoft Live? So, just how private is private when so many disparate bodies are interested in the minuate of everyday communications? Is it best to think of everything we do which we may have thought of as being private as being public?

Google's behaviour based advertising and how to avoid it

In the past week Google announced that it was going to make 'ads more interesting' by launching a behavioural advertising programme that will monitor browsing patterns and deliver personalised and tailored adverts to surfers. It sees this as a much better way of making advertising more relevant to consumers, and it will certainly be more advantageous to advertisers in that their messages will hopefully compete for the right eyeballs.

However, not everyone is happy with this. The CDD (Centre for Digital Democracy) raised flags at the partnership between Google and DoubleClick which preceded this current action back in January. The real sticking point is that Google has decided to make this an 'opt-out' rather than an opt-in policy. Some have seen this service as a little intrusive and feel like it encroaches on their anonymity (a somewhat problematic concept given how browsers actually function but never mind), and have been keen to opt out. Follow this link to opt out.

You might want to think of this change of direction as having a little in common with the Phorm debacle that raised it's ugly head about a year ago. Phorm were proposing much the same thing as Google, but they were planning on working at the server side for companies like BT and Virgin Media until public feeling turned a little hostile. This was also initially an opt-out service.

If you would rather not have personalised adverts targeted at you Google has provided a solution - one which is far from ideal. In order to block the service you can download a cookie from Google. Of course, this is less than ideal if you regularly run anti-spyware/malware software which regularly cleans cookies from your browser. You'd have to reinstall the cookie each time you run the software or create a software dependent exception.

If you want to download the cookie then follow this link. It works on all RC versions of Firefox from 1.5+. I'm not sure if it works on the Mozilla Flock browser which is essentially a reskinned Firefox, but I can't see why it wouldn't. Mac user running Mozilla's Camino might want to try the same link. Google have created a version of the browser cookie for Safari users, but they do advise that Safari comes prefigured to block most cookies by default anyway - far from ideal.

Of course, many long term users of browsers like Firefox (this also works for Flock), Camino and Opera can bypass the problems associated with Google's privacy creep by installing Ad Block Plus or using the inbuilt 'content blocker' found in the settings. The use of Adblock has the added advantage of enabling web-pages to render a little quicker and saves battery life on laptops if you regularly visit sites with Flash animation embedded.

This is just another example of Google gathering more and more personal data on its users...

EDIT

I noticed an improved Firefox extension was being discussed in The Register this week. They claim that 'privacy crusader Christopher Soghoian is offering a single Firefox plug-in that maintains your opt-out on 27 separate behavioral ad networks' and that you can get that from here. There are implications to using this plug-in so be sure to read the author's blog.

Welcome back to uni!

I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all our students who have been brave enough to face the inclement weather in Sunderland this week. Public transport links and public carriage ways haven't faired so well under the recent snow storms meaning that many students have been trapped in their beds, sorry, I mean homes! Attendance wasn't great yesterday - notably amongst the staff - so it seems we were all caught a little short. At least Sunderland was warmer than London for once. The capital seemed to grind to a halt due to the odd bit of the white stuff - softies ;-)

I'm running two modules this semester which are focussed around critical readings into new media and the web, plus I've also focussed half of another module around related issues:

• MAC281: Cyberculture
• MAC309: New Media, the Web and Society
• MAC301: Media Studies 2 ('Media & Modernity' strand)
  

I've already posted content on the VLE WebCT Vista for these modules but I just though I'd share a few useful web-based sources that might be useful for students wanting to do a little bit of background reading on their computers whilst they are 'snowed in'. You might find some interesting articles...

• New Media & Society (ATHENS access available to all University of Sunderland students)
• Convergence - the Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (dead tree copies available only!)
• First Monday
• Culture Machine
• Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (pre-Jan 2008)
• Fibreculture
• M/C Journal
• Game Studies

You might also be interested in the recent government green paper by Stephen Gowers: Digital Britain.

Hope you like them... See you next week

MAC301: GW2 and Al-Jazeera

This is a real quick post mainly to say that I've uploaded tomorrow's lecture slides to Slideshare and the VLE. They were pretty hefty at 7 mb due to the hi-res photos I used so some of the slides haven't processed properly, which is a shame. You should be able to see most of them below.

Mac301 Gw2 And Al Jazeera 2008 9 Sem1

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: gw2 al-jazeera)

You might have to forgive the stupid type-o!

The advantage of Slideshare is that it forms a handy little repository of previous lectures I've written, some of which may be related to the current topic. I've also assembled a video playlist of related material over on YouTube which I will embed here too:

There's always a few quality control issues with public playlists, but, putting that aside, there should be an underlying logic in the selection. Most of it focusses on the ways in which Western media outlets were strategic pawns in a military managed game, with Arabic media outlets (and the blogosphere) offering useful alternates.

Download The Pirate's Dilemma

Now, I know I've mentioned Matt Mason quite a bit on this blog over the last few months but I don't want to stop doing that just yet because he's announced that his publishers have agreed to release his book, The Pirate's Dilemma, for free.

It’s been in the works for sometime now, but today is the day we have finally been able to make the book available for free online. Both my English language publishers (Simon & Schuster in the U.S. and Penguin in the U.K.) agreed we should release the book free online after the UK launch was out of the way, and that time is now.

Click here to be taken to his site.

I say 'free', but you are given the option to reimburse the author and the publisher for his work. The checkout defaults to $5.00 which is a fair price for an easy and enjoyable read. You will have to provide your name and an email address before you can access the downloadable file.

I think Mason has got the courage to stand up for the position he advances in his book. It would have been hypocritical for him to advocate that intellectual material is information not property and then not be supportive of the electronically distributed version. He makes this clear:

By treating the electronic version of a book as information rather than property, and circulating it as widely as possible, many authors such as Paulo Coelho and Cory Doctorow actually end up selling more copies of the physical version. Pirate copies of The Pirate’s Dilemma are out there online anyway, and they don’t seem to have harmed sales. My guess is they are helping. To be honest, I was flattered that the book got pirated in the first place.

If his sales are doing well then he must feel vindicated. He took a chance and it seems to be working out for him.

I have to admit I already have an electronic version of the book as I found it on The Pirate Bay. Strange, I can't seem to find the ebook on there now ;-) No need for that now anyway, but it did make me wonder if that original pirated version on TPB was an advance leak as part of a promotional drive.

Just to be clear, I also own the dead tree version too. The electronic copy is for convenience. II will be drawing from some of this work when I teach on MAC301 next year, so any students out there would be doing themselves a favour by getting a hold of this now.