Social Media: Archiving Human History

I recently read a very interesting blog post written by Mashable‘s former co-editor Ben Parr titled “5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History” and found my mind flying seven skies! But that was short lived as I came across another article that counter argues the Ben’s position written by Tom Scheinfeldt titled “Archiving Social Media“. Pay special attention to the comments section for the second blog, the arguments are worth the read. This is the primary reason I decided to write this blog, to weigh in my opinion.

Preamble

Now I am not a philosopher, sociologist or anthropologist, however I do know that as humans we like to be remembered. Most of us try to achieve something in life that someone someday will look back and think about.

For most part of our human story, we have very little recollection of what happened in the past. Most of the historical sources are scant and tainted with propaganda, folk tales, etc, which tend to obscure our vision of our ancestors. We only have written sources for the larger and more prominent events like Napolean’s campaign in Russia, Alexander’s death in Persia, etc. We don’t quite know how a common man would have lived in that time period. Of the occasional diaries, travel logs, and essays, they usually belong to diplomats or artisans who travel on some emperor’s orders. They are insufficient to piece together an average day in the life of a common man.

This has drastically changed since the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. Higher literacy rates and technological improvements meant that writing was more affordable and possible. Major revolutions, civil wars, and world wars took place in this time frame. Unlike previous wars, accounts survive of not only military records but also personal records of the soldiers and officers that fought in them. Newspapers became more prominent means of information dissemination about daily goings and comings. Photography and motion pictures became cheaper and affordable. We can not only read about how people lived, but also experience their lives through their movies and pictures.

Here is a very interesting talk given by Daniel J. Cohen on the topic of “New Directions in Digital History” that ties well into this topic.

The Internet Revolution

The advent of the Internet has meant that we are able to share information faster and seamlessly across political and cultural boundaries. Multiple websites whose core goal is to build communities, for profit or otherwise, have been very successful in bringing people together. This social aspect of their business has meant that people are able to share their thoughts, ideas, and feelings more freely- now excessively.

Twitter updates, Facebook status changes, LinkedIn job postings, Instagrams, etc, have made it possible for the common man to not only document his entire life but also disseminate this information to almost anyone that wants to access it. The ethical and social implications of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this post, so I will skip it. But what is clear is that for the first time in history, we can construct a person’s life by piecing together their daily interactions from birth to death.

Apart from personal accounts, companies, governments, and other organisations (including the Government) too have started to utilise social media for marketing, promotional, and announcement purposes. All of this information gets stored across thousands of data farms across the globe in the form of 1s and 0s. In other words, snapshots of human history being stored on a second by second basis.

The History of Social Networking

Infographic image:

A brief history.

Data Mining

One of the most important ways how the online data can be harvested is through data mining techniques. For example, the Center for Disease Control recently tried to track down and understand how the flu virus spread using Google Trends.

There are websites entirely built on collecting links, photographs, videos, etc, supplied by visitors pertaining to important events in modern history. They can be either big or small. e.g. 911digitalarchive, hurricanearchive, etc.

Whilst these sites rely on the users to gather and post information, sites like Twitter provide mechanisms (hashtags) for easy information retrieval pertaining to a particular subject. Google also has a product called News which tracks the latest press releases from various media outlets.

Utilising all of these tools one can make important and informed decisions. For example, if you are investing it might be worthwhile to spend time in gathering information about the company’s blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, news articles pertaining to that company, the field in which that company operates, etc. Since the Internet has allowed fast up-to-date information, even though it might not be accurate, it is enough to get a clearer picture as to where the company might be heading in the future.

One of the most recent events where social media played a very big role is the Arab Spring explored more in an article described by AlJazeera titled “Taking power through technology in the Arab Spring“. Despite the fact that the Spring is over, the posts and the images, and the raw day-to-day data still survives. The news from the recent civil war in Syria is another such example, where civilians and the fighters (from both sides) are posting videos and news daily to capture the effect of war in that state. I sometimes wonder if and how the outcome of previous conflicts and wars would have been different under these conditions where every side’s action was recorded and analysed over and over again.

In a similar fashion, we can construct a person’s life using similar methods. What interests me most is that what would happen when someone from around my generation stands for prominent positions in the government and other organisations? Will their digital footprint haunt them? Past friendships, associations, etc., be drawn and quartered to the point where it might be considered harassment?

One of the recent NSA internal document leaks describe how gathering data on internet habits of prominent Muslim radicals were used to intimidate them and silence them.

The Future

Whilst all the arguments that I have presented seem to suggest that archiving social media is inherently good, my only concern is that we still have a lot of work to do in this field. For instance, someone has to process and judge the quality of the data that is being used, and ignore the noise of mundane events. A video clip from the movie “Easy A” clearly demonstrates this (not owned by me and no copyright infringement intended):

To conclude, I see the future of this vast information wasteland (the Interent) as more like a graveyard of unstructured and unformatted data. A museum piece in the museum of human history. Another opportunity to learn about human beings, squandered, due to the plight of privacy statements and organisational red tape. But as with everything else, there will some improvements that I am sure of, but they will be most likely be in the form of more annoying ads on every web page I visit, waiting to be blocked by ad blocker. Being an information-phile (is this even a word?), I fear that we will lose more records about our current events, as technology races to replace paper and traditional media; i.e. digital bits lost due to incorrect storage and computer failures. If I leave this post online untouched, it will most likely not exist in a decade’s time. But then again is this post worth preserving?

Hardcore Addiction: How Modern Pornography is Interfering with Human Evolution

Preamble

Growing up we have all (I can read your mind through the screen) wondered at some point or another- where babies come from? Depending on how open your parents were to talking with you about sex, you may or may not have tried to find out more, on your own or as a joint venture with your best friend. Now, despite the fact that we are animals whose only purpose, unless you believe in reincarnation or heaven, is to procreate and die. Sex has always been a taboo subject.

It is something that “adults” do, and children are supposed to somehow figure everything out before they get married and decide to have children of their own. Of course, we both know that is a lie!

As young lads, we scoured the dictionary, the encyclopaedia, and every other piece of text we could find in the school library, in thirst of knowledge of this elusive act. If you were lucky your friend might get his hands on a fashion magazine or a Playboy. All of this would usually happen before becoming teenagers. All too familiar experiences that have been continued for the most part of human history. It is important to note that information of any kind always took time and effort to obtain.

But what if I told you that things are not even remotely similar for a growing number of pre-teens and teens these days? According to a recent TEDxTalk video that I watched on YouTube, this seems to be the case- have a look:

A brief history of internet porn…

The Internet as we know it today started sometime in the 1960’s and 1970’s with the invention of ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network). ARPANET was world’s first packet switching network, modern internet is based on this technology. It was the brainchild, of all things good, ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency, a US government organ) later known as DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Project Agency). It was still in its infancy and more or less useless as far as you and I go.

Fast forward to the early 90s.

Internet has grown tremendously from a small fragile network to a vast array of interconnected network of networks connecting millions of users, fostering new businesses and enterprises, and innumerable number of new services. For some businesses, this meant that they no longer had to use traditional channels for the distribution of their goods and services, as the Internet could bypass physical, political, and religious restrictions that would have hindered their growth in the past.

One of the industries that capitalised on this new medium, and became very successful doing it was the American Porn Industry. Other countries have caught up to and exceeded the Americans in recent times, but reliable statistics are very difficult to come by.

How widespread is modern porn and what do we know about it?

It has often been joked that the internet is for porn and that internet has single handedly fuelled the explosion of the internet, but how much of that is true? As I mentioned before reliable statistics were hard to come by, a lot of the websites just quoted each other until I landed on a “top ten review” site, which I didn’t have much faith in. However I did manage to find two news articles, one of which quotes a recently published book on the topic and the other is a personal interview with the author. The information presented was different between them. It was part of the Forbes publication found here and here, and this is the gist of it:

• In 1991, fewer than 100 porn magazines were published. Today, over 2.5 Million websites are blocked by CYBERsitter.
• Though there are over 4.5 million porn sites, of the top 1 million most visited sites, only 42,337 websites were sex-related. Which is about 4% of the sites.
• 13% of the web searches between July 2009 to 2010 were for erotic content.
• The most popular adult site on the web is LiveJasmine.com a live webcam site .
• Porn is a $3 Billion businesses in the U.S. However, I recently watched a BBC documentary called Hardcore Profits claimed that most of the pornography based profits were cashed in by the major creditors and the banks who provided the credit cards to purchase the porn. So the above stated figure is based on the arguably accurate figures reported by porn production studios claimed to make, although it is an open secret that these studios cook their books more than often.
• According to the wikipedia article on internet pornography, in 2003 about 20% of all the pornography on the internet was child pornography. Several organisations, including the FBI and Interpol, claim that that number has increased as a lot of the child pornography has moved on to “Dark Nets” such as Tor, i2P and the Freenet Project.
• According to a Huffington post article which claimed that porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined at around 450 Million.

Legal issues surrounding pornography are very murky. Uslegal, a website run by a law firm, has an internet law section which contains an article on pornography. For the most part pornography is considered indecent and serving of no use to the society. A fair number of countries either ban or heavily censor and/or regulate the porn sites being served in their countries.

Why is this important?

What we can draw from all of this is that porn is very accessible, fast, cheap(try free), and always available. With the advent of cheaper, faster, and mobile computers(tablets, notebooks, smartphones) pornography is now mobile too!

Over the past few years, it has become ever more evident that the Digital Age is not showing any signs of stopping. Children brought up with these technologies are just as vulnerable to accessing the same type of material. The average age of first internet porn exposure currently stands at 11, which is just before the child undergoes puberty.

As explained in the above videos, at this tender age, the brain’s nueroplasticity is very malleable. This is just a fancy way of saying that our brains are still making neural connections which we will carry with us for the rest of lives. Learning a habit, a skill, or a language is very easy at this age. As Dr.Gary Wilson from the TED talk explains: being exposed to explicit material causes physiological changes to the primitive parts of the human mind, also referred to as the ‘symbian brain’ or ‘hunter-gatherer brain’, and tricks it to accept such stimuli as normal.

Most importantly, it physically alters the reward centre in our brains. The reward centre usually fires when we accomplish a goal. A chemical called dopamine, is released into brain when we accomplish a task. This is the same happy feeling chemical that is released when we eat or even care for someone we hold dear parents, children, friends, etc. Almost every stimulating drug, e.g. cocaine, opium, etc., all alter the neurotransmitters that pick up these chemicals and give us the “happy good” feeling, whilst simultaneously releasing more than necessary dosage of dopamine into the system.

This causes confusion and the brain expects such stimuli more and more often. This constant craving is called addiction. The symptoms of this addiction are exactly the same as addiction of alcohol and other hard drugs. Furthermore, it has been frequently stated as the cause for and leading to misogyny, paedophilia, breast implants(body image issues), relationship problems, social anxiety, and erectile dysfunction amongst others. The patients have also reported to show signs of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, social isolation, lack of confidence, etc.

Moreover, not only does the patient feel compelled to seek and watch porn, but also find more and more novel types of porn. This interferes with the Coolidge effect, which is the bilogical programming of the mammalian brain to react to sexual stimuli. Much like any other drug, after a while a tolerance is developed resulting in higher craving for stilmulation. This cycle feeds itself as the person slips deeper into addiction.

Apart from the change in the sexual preferences, there is also a change in the attitude towards sex altogether. The person becomes more aggressive and saddomasichist. For those who were already suffering from other mental illnesses, the combination can beome lethal. Plenty of research is being undertaken in this field as Internet Addicition and especially Porn Addiction is on the rise, and is expected to rise as internet continues to connect millions more every year.

Personal and societal costs

The cost can be very high for addicts, as porn addiction is considered more dangerous that crack. The reason being it causes multiple addictions all at once, namely: porn addiction, sex addiction, compulsive masturbation, internet addiction. This is compounded by other illnesses the patient picks up with these types of addiction.

What can be most devastating is the loss of families, friendships, and other relationships the personal used to value very highly before the onset of the addiction. The internet is littered with the cases of a number of divorces and break ups whose root cause is in this form of addiction. One quarter of Americans admitted to watching porn at work, this could also cost them their jobs. The loss of productivity either at work or at home is also tremendous. Having techonology is already causing nuclear humans, I feel that this only compounds its effects until the man’s life reduces to nothing but a hollow shell of an existance. Moreover, for those who haven’t yet had children, it could jeapordise the future of their genome, something that has been being carried for since the evolution of primapes. This addiction is not limited to just men; women are just as likely to get addicted as described in Newsweek.

So if you are an addict, what do you do?

The growing epidemic of this type of addiction has caused the American Psychological Society amongst other psychological and neurological societies to add porn addiction to the list of addictions requiring a treatment. The treatment programs for porn addicts is exactly the same if not more rigorous than those for crack, cocaine, and opium addicts.

Recently a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania launched an in-patient addiction program for internet addicts. It is a 10 day program where the patient lives at the hospital and undergoes therapy. I feel that such sites will become more common as more research continues to done on these topics.

Lastly, a while back a handful of redditors began a “No Fap” challenge, where addicts take pledges of sobriety and collective try to shake off their addictions. They also post their success stories and the challenges that they faced in the hopes that someone else could benefit from it, like they have.

In conclusion I include a few “facts” from Daily Infographic. I could not find concrete evidence for the statistics even though they seem to be all over the internet.

Bitcoins: A Boon or a Bane?

Recent news of the seizure of the Silk Road website has gained a fair bit of global news coverage. But the issues behind this crypto e-currency run deep, this post discusses some of these very issues.

Let’s start at the beginning: What are Bitcoins?

Here is a video that gives a brief overview:

Bitcoins are unique hashes that are generated by a series of mathematical functions. They are universally unique, which is to say that they can never be replicated. What gives them an edge over ordinary currency are the following:

• Bitcoins don’t need a middle-man(Bank) for transactions. This means that it becomes -extremely difficult to track transactions.
• They are directly transferred to the other parties’ e-wallet.
• Ideally the wallet that holds the Bitcoins can be distributed more or less anonymously over the decentralised distributed network that is required for the Bitcoins network to function properly.
• The decentralisation also means that is extremely difficult to tack which node is generating a transaction.
• The Bitcoin wallet is protected by an asymmetrical encryption(RSA-like).
• The process by which BitCoins are manufactured, is called Mining.

All of the above mentioned make the Bitcoins very hard to destroy and track.

When a transaction needs to take place, it is signed with the wallet’s private key, which acts like a signature such that the transaction cannot be modified or altered once issued. All transactions need network confirmation. This relatively anonymous nature of the currency and transaction helps the service/good providing company to be safeguarding from the online fraudulent charges and fraudulent charge-backs, generally associated with E-bay, kijiji, etc. This relative anonymity also helps the consumer as there is no need to give personal information, like with credit cards. This in turn also safeguards the user from identity theft. Furthermore, as the currency is nothing more that hashes, they can be safely encrypted and backed up.

Currently the net worth of all the Bitcoins in the world is around is about $1.5 Billion U.S., as of August 2013. It is an open-source protocol, has many software that that run it successfully. You can view the current price of a Bitcoin here.

Much like ordinary currency, Bitcoins too have some drawbacks. Once created a hash in irreversible and unrecoverable, what this means is that if you were to forget your password to your wallet, then there is no way to get back those hashes and they are permanently lost. Mathematically, there can only be a limited number of Bitcoins mined, so if some of these hashes are lost, then the value of the remaining Bitcoins increase as per Supply and Demand. The market volatility for the currency is quite high. This is because there are a fewer number of vendors and customer accepting the young currency. Moreover, as people get educated in what Bitcoins are, more businesses will start to accept the currency leading to higher per Bitcoin. One of the primary issues that the vendors are having is the question of trust. The protocol is still improving incorporating several technologies so that one day it can be used with Credit Cards, etc.

With wider acceptance and much media coverage, the legality of the virtual currency has been brought under scrutiny and its legality questioned. As of August, 2013, only Germany recognises the legality of the Bitcoin, regarding it as a “unit of account”, applicable for a capital gains tax. Despite several countries prohibiting the institution of a currency parallel to the national currency, Bitcoin still has not been considered illegal in any country. However, several countries are reviewing policies that relate to virtual currencies such as Bitcoin. It seems inevitable that such cross-border, international, and virtual currencies will dominate the cyberspace for decades to come.

If we consider what Bitcoins are typically being used for, we can safely conclude that they being used like any other currency- for legal and illegal activities. However, unlike ordinary currency, Bitcoins are impossible to counterfeit. Despite its anonymous nature, it is possible for the law agencies to associate the transactions back to a user. This is because every transaction ever taken is stored somewhere on the Bitcoin network in a block after it has been given an okay from network as a legitimate transaction. This can be easily seen in the recent FBI bust of the Silk Road case, where they did manage to shut down the website and arrest its founder. On the other hand, anonymous currency helps to ensure privacy amongst its user. This can become vital if a person is living in a very politically hostile environment, where seeking tools to overcome an oppressive regime could mean execution.

Whilst the critics and proponents for an anonymous virtual currency debate whether privacy is more important or security, in the end it is still up to us to decide what do we use the technology for. Our motives are more important, and in the end it is they that will truly dictate the outcome of any ethical grey areas such as the use of Bitcoins.

Bibliography:-

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/07/fbi-bitcoin-silk-road-ross-ulbricht

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/feds-arrest-alleged-top-silk-road-drug-seller/

http://bitcoin.org/en/faq#what-is-bitcoin

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/08/25/the-federal-governments-reaction-to-bitcoin-is-an-acknowledgement-of-the-dollars-vulnerability/2/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Satoshi_Nakamoto