Posts Tagged ‘web culture’

The Night We Live-Tweeted The Suicide of A Desperate Man

February 10th, 2009 by AV Flox in malwebolence

The white Bentley stopped in front of a Toyota dealership near Universal City after a three hour chase on Hollywood Freeway and Interstates 5, 10 and 405. The stand-off began at around 11:00PM PST, with hundreds tuning in to the FOX11, ABC7 and KCAL9 live feeds online.

Before long, Twitter streams were on fire with commentary from people around the world about what was happening. People watching gave in to speculation about the identity driver, debating whether it was hip hop singer Chris Brown, charged earlier with assault—allegedly against his girlfriend, the singer Rihanna or rapper DJ Khaled, as well as the reason for his fleeing.

As time passed with no action, the public became more and more irate. Jokes followed, including the creation of the fake account @WhiteBentley, which ran a stream of comments as though he was the driver inside the car.

The jokes soon turned sinister, with many expressing someone should just shoot the driver down and save the LAPD thousands, and still others suggesting the driver end his life to avoid repercussions of the extended chase. Then, after news reports began coming in that the driver might indeed have shot himself and the ABC7 cameras zoomed out to avoid exposing the public to a gruesome scene, the disappointment was almost unanimous.

“They aren’t going to zoom in and show us the possible brains, bullshit!” a chilling tweet read.

The driver and law enforcement personnel involved were no longer human to those of us watching. Moving around inside our computer screens, they had become characters in a play put on for our entertainment.

DEATH OF EMPATHY ONLINE

In a recent e-mail to his mailing list which he later posted to his blog, Jason Calacanis talked about the death of empathy on the internet. Speaking about his friend Josh Harris—the mastermind behind “We Live In Public,” an art project that involved the constant surveillance of Harris’ loft and exposed his collapsing relationship with his then-girlfriend—Calacanis reflected on the attitude changes people undergo online:

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

… Internet Asperger’s Syndrome (IAS): I’ve come to recognize a new disorder, the underlying cause of Harris’ Law. This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost.

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

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

The dual nature of Asperger’s, from my understanding, is that it makes the individual focused on very specific behaviors–obsessively so in many cases–while decreasing their capacity for basic empathy and communication. It’s almost as if you trade off intensity in one area for common decency and communications in another area–not that the person has a choice.

Well, trading off people’s feelings for page views and Twitter followers sounds familiar to me.

When we began connecting on Twitter via the hashtags for the chase and bouncing off each other’s comments with retweets and replies, we became more and more committed to the race to break developments as quickly as possible and one-up the clever comments and simultaneously began to disconnect from the gravity of the situation for those involved.

“i want at least 10 new followers out of my #chase coverage” someone tweeted as the chase was first unfolding.

As the FOX11 link that we’d tr.immed for the live feed was passed along the Twittersphere, my friend Atherton Bartelby updated me on how many click-throughs it had received.

People were engaged in a deadly stand-off and we were looking at metrics.

BLOODSPORT IN MEATSPACE

“We’re harvesting our lives and putting them online,” Calacanis writes in his piece. “We’re addicted to gaining followers and friends (or email subscribers, as the case may be), and reading comments we get in return. As we look for validation and our daily 15 minutes of fame, we do so at the cost of our humanity.”

People who meet Calacanis in person, he recounts, are quick to apologize for what they’ve written to and about him. This, he says, shows “normal folks will lose their empathy online, only to regain it the instant they face the ‘object’ (aka real person) of their scorn.” But he worries about the patterns we’re establishing.

“Writing about a person turns them into a character,” my friend Becky recently told me. “The character does not have the final dimension which gives life.”

As we blog, tweet and report about one another, we draft ourselves as characters. We cease to be human and become accessories to our story. Having been objectified, we become easy targets.

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

He’s not wrong. On the same day Calacanis’s post went live on his blog, Michael Arrington blogged about being spit on after leaving the Digital, Life, Design Conference in Munich, Germany.

“The event was over and I was on my way back to my hotel,” Arrington recounts. “The last thing I wanted was another product pitch as I hurried to the car that would drive me to Davos for the next event. So when I saw this person approach me out of the corner of my eye, I turned away slightly and avoided eye contact. Sometimes that works. But in this case all it did was make me vulnerable to the last thing I expected.”

What happens when seeing one another in the flesh is no longer enough to humanize us?

“We’re training ourselves to destroy other people, and there’s a generation growing up with this in their DNA,” Calacanis says. “They don’t remember a world when communications were primarily in the real world.”

THE SILENCE

By the end of the night #chase was the top trending topic on Twitter, registering 1,199 tweets in just five hours.

Immediately after the last live news feed went off the air, an eerie silence descended on Twitter. As the reality that the driver of the car had killed himself sank in, along with the knowledge that I had watched it all unfold, I stared at my tweets. A sense of shame fell over me as well as I realized that I, too, had objectified the people involved in that situation.

Is Calacanis right? Does technology dehumanize people? What does this mean as more of our lives shift to the web? Can we reverse the process somehow?

I don’t have answers.

As I take a moment of silence for the yet unidentified man, I pray too that we’ll find a way to bring humanity back.

RELATED

Bentley driver in chase was a former luxury car dealer in Chicago by Andrew Blankstein, Jeremy Gorner and Noreen Ahmed-Ullah on the L.A. Now blog at The LA Times.
Suspect leads police on low-speed pursuit in a Bentley, kills self during standoff by Carol J. Williams and Andrew Blankstein at The LA Times
Twitter *kills* Google in real-time search by Dave Winer
Why Twitter Is Bad by Jason Rosenberg
#chase on Twitter Search
We Live In Public, the 2009 Sundance Festival award-winning documentary about Josh Harris’s project

OTHER VIEWS

Adventures in Hyperreality: Live Suicide and Why It Doesn’t Matter by Jason Quackenbush
Twitter Is Killing Your Soul by Amber Rhea
The White Bentley Chase Did Not Happen by Bonni Rambatan
Suicide Hashtag Livetweeting by Sandra Kiume
Internet Hate – Not So Much With the Relevance of Anonymity by Liz Rizzo

Special thanks to Ryan Kuder, who brought Jason Calacanis’s post to my attention.

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New Brand World: What’s Your Brand?

January 10th, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz, personal brand, social media

I had a friend in high school who dressed a provocatively and was constantly fighting with people about her right to her self-expression. One evening while spending time with her boyfriend, she defended her fashion choices by saying: “just because I dress like a slut doesn’t mean I’m a slut.”

I will never forget his response. There was nothing moral in it, just logic: “if you saw someone walking down the street in a police uniform, would you assume they were a police officer or would you think they were just expressing themselves?”

It reminds me of a saying my mother says to this day: haste fama y échate a la cama, which translated from the Spanish means, “make your fame and lay in bed.”

(It’s a little like the saying “you’ve made your bed, now lie in it,” but it goes further because in this case you don’t have to actually make the bed, you just have to give the impression that you have in order to have to lie in it.)

You can imagine how irritating an adolescent focused on her self-expression and unconcerned with the repercussions of her actions or demeanor found such a saying. If I didn’t learn the lesson well enough then, I am certainly am now: in social media, image is everything. We shape this image by what we say and what we do, but, perhaps more importantly, by how people perceive these things.

Recently, I wrote about Chris Brogan and how the public received his work for Kmart through IZEA. More than what he said or how, the fact that he was working with IZEA for Kmart did a lot to shape the public’s view of who he is.

Image matters. How other people perceive you is as important as what you’re actually doing.

BRAND! BRAND! BRAND!

We’re all brands now, whether we like it or not, and everything we do and say affects the image of this brand. Suddenly, we’re not really making choices based only on the immediate satisfaction of our desires or return on investment, but in terms of how this decision is going to be seen by others.

Recently, at a party with a lot of people in the Los Angeles tech scene, I remember thinking I could use the opportunity to get some fodder for a column I’m writing for BlogHer about how improve one’s sex life in 2009.

Despite being a fun, laid back crowd, a lot of the people I spoke with told me they would be glad to share suggestions on the condition that I did not reveal who they were because discussing sex—anything about it—was not something that they wanted associated with their personal brand.

More recently, my friend and Mashable contributor Atherton Bartelby found that someone had made a fake Twitter account using his first name and photo. It was supposed to be a joke made by a mutual follower, but Bartelby took it very seriously. He didn’t think that the content was conducive to maintaining the sort of image he wants to have online. Fortunately, the person who made that account understood the situation and took it down immediately. But there are people who don’t have such respect for people’s image or reputation.

A case in point are the recent hacks on Twitter. Last weekend, 33 high profile accounts on Twitter were hacked. The Fox News Twitter feed announced that Bill O’Reilly was gay, Barrack Obama’s account had a fake contest with US$500-worth of gasoline as a prize, and Britney Spears’s account updated her 14,075 followers on the size of her vagina.

In regard to the breach, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Wired over e-mail that the company is addressing the security issues that allowed the breach, and doing “a full security review on all access points to Twitter. More immediately, we’re strengthening the security surrounding sign-in. We’re also further restricting access to the support tools for added security.”

As Problogger and Twitip founder Darren Rowse points out, “Twitter is increasingly being targeted by malicious attacks and should serve as a warning to those using Twitter to expect the unexpected… Twitter does seem to be moving towards a more secure system with an beta test of OAuth scheduled for later this month, but until it goes live (and even after it) be a little more alert than normal.”

Security issues on Twitter may be resolved, but the incident raises red flags: in a world where we’re investing so much time and energy building ourselves, what’s worse than the idea that our personal brands can be so easily compromised?

“Branding is experience in time, and the brand becomes a series of interrelated behaviors,” writes Jonathan Baskin in Branding Only Works on Cattle.

YOUR BRAND IS STICKING OUT

Ages ago, sometime after I started becoming more active on Twitter, I partook in a chat with Laura Fitton’s tribe. I don’t recall exactly what we were talking about, but at one point, I remember Fitton saying to me, “you’re fabulous. I can tell that’s your brand.”

I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, but I took it as a compliment—who doesn’t want to be fabulous?

I thought about this comment again during a conversation about personal brands with social media maven Damien Basile. He commented on how dichotomous I was, pointing out that if someone found me through my blog, they’d be likely to assume I was one more social media commentator, whereas if they looked at my Twitter stream, they’d think I was more focused on relationships and lifestyle.

“You’re a conundrum!” he exclaimed. A fabulous conundrum?

Whereas people are multifaceted, brands that are associated with a clear mission have proved time and time again to have more success than those who don’t. So instead of sitting around looking for resolutions to kick off the year, I decided to do something a little different: write my mission and values and address my personal brand from there.

LABEL ME

“The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there,” wrote Jack Welch in Winning.

I must have stared at the screen for two hours. Finally—and perhaps more out of exasperation than real inspiration or vision—I typed out the following: “My mission is to become a top commentator on how the internet is shaping our lives. I plan to do this by regularly providing information that is accessible and thought-provoking to readers, despite their level of involvement in web culture.”

The statement is likely to change as I refine it, but that’s OK. The idea is to create something solid on which you can stand, then building on top of that.

What’s your mission? Does your “brand” reflect it?

Further Reading:
5 Steps for Planning the Direction of Your Blog in 2009 by Darren Rowse.
The Thing About Goals by Seth Godin

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Hiring The Information Generation

December 12th, 2008 by AV Flox in intarwebz, oversharing, travel

Once upon a time, questioning Greeks made their pilgrimage to Mount Parnassus to get the 411 on their situations from the Oracle at Delphi.

Of course nowadays, instead of watching the Pythia sway and prophesy in riddles to figure out what to do, all we need to do is put a couple of well-chosen words in Google and voilà!

Lost? Internet. Single? Internet. Job? Internet. Last minute dinner reservation? Internet. Need a place to crash in a strange city for under $100? Internet. What’s everyone doing? Internet. Where are they? Internet.

But just as we can find out almost anything with the internet, nowadays other people can find almost anything about us, too.

GOT GOOD GOOGLE?

Recently I got an e-mail from someone I’d written about asking whether I would remove her name from the piece I’d posted. The reason? She was applying for a job and my piece about her explosive love affair with a minor internet celebrity was showing up on searches of her name—along with all the gory details.

If Google has all the answers, it was only a matter of time before employers began using it to check up on prospective employees. A background check that requires no disclosure—who in their right mind would refuse?

Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development at New York University told The New York Times that more and more employers are checking out potential hires online.

“The term they’ve used over and over is ‘red flags’,” Steinfeld said. “Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?”

Today, Business Week says, there are two of us: “the analog, warm-blooded version of you that who presses flesh at business conferences and interprets the corporate kabuki in meetings. Then there’s the digital doppelgänger; that’s the one that is growing larger and more impossible to control every day.”

It’s this hard-to-control doppelganger that companies are worried about.

CHANGE: A SALARY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

Even the Obama administration understands the weight of electronic communications. Their application for employment includes a seven-page questionnaire that leaves no stone unturned. Items 13 and 14 deal directly with online communications:

13. Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict or interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

14. Diaries: If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe

Would you mind defining “embarrassment,” Mr. President?

FAQ ON THE DIGITAL BFOQ

To get the inside scoop on what employers think about our online interactions, I chased down Rowland Hobbs, CEO at DMD Group, firm that unites integrated marketing, sustainability consulting, and experience design in New York City, and Brooks Bayne, a successful start-up developer and the brains behind The Graph, an up-and-coming new start-up in Los Angeles.

“I see this as a judgment for an employee, or potential employee,” Hobbs told me via e-mail. “If you think your brand should be about what you did on Saturday night—good, make that work for you, own that, and understand the consequences of how that communication is perceived. Make it a part of yourself that is also a part of how you sell yourself in the marketplace. You are a brand. What you say and do online reflects on you both positively and negatively. It is not a black and white issue, you have to decide how you wish to be perceived, and understand that part of your audience is your future employers and colleagues.”

Bayne was more relaxed about people’s online sharing when I interviewed him on the phone: “as long as you don’t have any hate or anything illegal in your streams, in my book you’re fine. I would hire somebody whose views I disagreed with if they were good at their job, regardless of what they posted online. If they wanna share, more power to them, as long as it’s not illegal.”

Bayne was concerned with companies telling prospective employees that being hired was contingent on deleting or making private some of their social media profiles, as well as other restrictive trends in hiring.

“If companies and the government and everyone else start to look at people online and their activities online under a magnifying glass, I think we run the risk of creating a homogenized society—one that I wouldn’t want to participate in,” he said. “As companies start basing their decisions on your blog or your Twitter stream or some other of your social profiles, I think you run the risk of creating an environment where you have a bunch of people not willing to engage online. I would hate to see people not being themselves online because they’re worried about whether or not they’re gonna get a job.”

Hobbs agreed that employees activities online should be viewed as more than a potential liability.

“Employees that participate in social media may be a great asset for your company’s communications strategies,” he told me. “Businesses should approach it as an opportunity, not a liability. Could they train your team on how to use social media effectively? Are they plugged into potential new talent, customers online that you don’t normally reach? Lots of points of opportunity here to consider. That being said, businesses should have a blogging policy in their employee handbooks to avoid ambiguity. This should be vetted with a labor attorney, but it should be part of a large communications decision. A firm should have its own perspective on how they want to be represented—and remember, choosing not to show up online can be damaging as well.”

YOU ARE WHAT YOU POST

I was 13 the first time I read George Orwell’s 1984. I will never forget the kind of anxiety that the phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” inspired in me. I was online back then, too, but I was totally anonymous—there was no way to link my outrageous jailbait cyber-escapades to my 4.0 GPA-holding, honor roll-regular and student body officer self.

Back then, it was easy to be anonymous and unplug whenever you wanted. You could delete blog posts you didn’t like and poof! they were gone. Now the content is aggregated everywhere. There is no ctrl+z or apple+z. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We have short attention spans, so most of us have already forgotten it, but a quick search on Google for “intern” and “fairy” brings up the story of Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank who played hooky citing a family emergency and was caught when his boss found the Facebook pictures of Colvin from that day, dressed up as Tinker Bell, having a jolly good time. Oops!

As we chronicle more and more of our lives, as more applications are developed to make even the most mundane tasks easier, as more of us turn to social networks to reach out to one another in our mobile world, there is a definite merging of the analog and the digital.

Big Brother is watching you? Big Brother has nothing on FriendFeed.

TAKING CHARGE

When I interviewed them, I asked Hobbs and Bayne whether they could impart some advice to oversharers and millennials joining the workforce.

“Think about some of the ramifications before you post,” Bayne said.

“We encourage online communications in the way you communicate anywhere: with respect, smarts and awareness that people are indeed listening to you,” Hobbs told me. “Saying things that put you in a bad light will probably come back to haunt you. That does not mean don’t communicate online—we now preference those that do communicate online in our hiring process—but, how you communicate tells me about who you are, and your judgment.”

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  • AV Flox writes about web culture; new media’s gradual overthrow of old media; trends in social media; and the complicated entanglements people get themselves into as we venture forth into this new world where, more and more, the analog is colliding with the digital.

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