twopointouch

We love our infograms, don’t we, the digerati, the twittering classes? These information graphics, or data visualisations. I don’t think there’s another field of the social sciences quite so keen on complicated graphs that half-explain themselves and suggest transparency and half are a subtle appeal to the imagination.

Because these images are machine-generated, there’s a temptation to believe that they are transparent. That they are mirrors of hard-and-fast facts. They are not. No image is unmediated nor undesigned. Someone decided to style the information in this way, with this scope and format, these colours and these dimensions. And there’s an agenda in that, whether overt or unrealised: this is how we visualise this stuff and how we want you to visualise it, too. They fulfil an ideological function.

For this post about data-visualisations, I’m going to focus on the visualisation part of the term ("You can picture it like this"), rather than the data part.

Why are these the images that are selected and why do they look the way they do?

The Connected Web

These types of images are especially popular. I think that when you sign the application for the International League of Social Media Consultants, you must pledge to include them in every slide deck.

This is what the web looks like, we’re told. The visualisation holds a nod to the Powers of Ten and the Mandelbrot Set, a web of terrifying complexity that will reveal infinitely more layers of complexity the closer you zoom in. This web is far bigger than you know, or can possibly know. They may remind you, too, of the molecular diagrams of complex carbohydrates that you never quite understood properly at school.

It looks like this because today’s web is about interconnectedness, not just in the sense of wires under the streets, but the connections of tribes of influence and ultimately of every individual on the web – each of which is subtly different (unless, of course, they are not). The colours are interesting, too. Note the preponderance of blue (unvisited links) and red (alert!) in these pictures.

Why do Web 2.0 presentations nearly always start with this image? Because they need to disabuse you of the notion that the web looks like this:

You don’t need a £1000-a-day consultant for a web with one input box and two buttons, one of which is almost never used. No; understanding the web requires science beyond your ken and difficult Maths.

The Tag Cloud

I’m actually a big fan of tag-clouds – as I’ve mentioned before. I think they encourage exploration, individual journeys and also give an instantly understood visual fingerprint to a site.

So two thumbs-up for ones like this:

The ones that I’m less keen on sometimes look a bit like this:

Or, even worse, like this:

The video shows CNN creating – and then seriously discussing – a ‘word cloud’ in its terminology, made from President Obama’s press conference on March 24. Not a brilliant starting point. Tag clouds do not provide a lot of analysis for documents. They flag up the main topics. They do nothing to establish sentiment or tone. If Obama’s speech had consisted entirely of questions, rather than statements, the tag cloud would look exactly the same.

By the way, UK’s Daily Telegraph immediately copied the idea, to our shame, in order to ‘analyse’ the Chancellor’s budget speech last month:

The Friend Wheel

The Friend Wheel became one of the enduring visual images to try to explain Facebook and the Social Graph – the network’s term for the interconnectedness of your friends in a social network – and why advertising on it will work (click for big).

What the hell does this show? Well, that my friends on Facebook sit in three broad groups: the green ones are the social media whores – they all know each other as well as me. I’ll probably see them at a London networking event once a month. The blue ones seem to know each other, but not the greens. They are perhaps specialists or old work colleagues. The pinks are less likely to know the greens and blues – maybe family and friends who came a little later to the network?

What you realise after a while, is that everybody’s friend wheel looks exactly the same. That’s what Facebook is like. People who don’t do the whole social media thing probably won’t have as much of a green crowd, but for them, school friends or people within a large corporation might take their place.

Again, it seems like over-complication and scientification of some common sense about what Facebook is like. This, more familiar, view of your friends doesn’t look like you need a specialist firm advising you:

But, oh!, the colours and so many lines!

Last Words

I am not remotely as cynical as this might imply. I remain an enormous fan of data visualisations, despite all of this, and advise a visit to Visual Complexity on a weekly basis to get your fix. But do be alert: don’t forget that this is an art as much as a science.

I spent the day today at the Wealth of Networks II conference, the agenda of which was set out as the next-generation of the Internet.

It was a good event and the organisers managed to bring together some top-rate speakers in a great venue with rock-solid internet, for once. And it was free – yay for the ESPRC which created the funding.

The slight oddness was that all three of the three panel events at the conference, and one keynote, despite their ostensible themes, turned out to be about trust and identity online. I rather suspect that might have been in reaction to the top-down research model described in the first keynote which admitted that E70mn of EU research funding into the next ‘net was being spent without investigating users’ concerns or agendas.

We’re becoming increasingly aware that there’s an issue with the identity and trust thing. What are the headlines? Backlash against StreetView; Facebook’s T’s & C’s; stalking, bullying, frauds and impositions.

There are two poles in this debate that need to recognised and reconciled in whatever the Next Web brings.

Authentication is a good thing. Being able to prove that it’s you buying that DVD and accessing the details of your bank account; you (if you’re a 12-year-old-girl) joining that social network designed for 12-year-old girls; you registering your general election vote, should that come to pass. Tracking down cyberbullies, slanderers and child-porn disseminators also sounds good.

On the other hand, anonymity is also extremely valuable. If you’re in a repressive regime and blogging about that, then it ought to be possible. It should be possible here in the UK, if you stay lawful (I’m already inviting some big questions, to which we have no answer).

You might want to have separate professional and personal online personae – if you join a dating site, for example, you probably don’t want your colleagues finding that profile. Avoiding stalkers without retiring from online would be a good thing. Teens frequently maintain multiple personae to explore different social scenarios and make mistakes without (real) consequences, I understand, and that certainly sounds like a very good thing compared to the horror of my own teenage years.

So we need a way for people to prove their identity if they need to; to protect their identity if they need to. And about a million shades of privacy and open-ness in between.

The internet safety / government services agenda would sway towards everyone having a registered identity with some third-party, let’s say the BBC, who would act as a trust broker.

But how much are you going to trust anyone to be that broker? A panel late in the day highlighted several elements of grey in the word ‘trust’. For example, sometimes, a better word would be ‘confidence’:

• I trust that my bank won’t run off with my salary next month.
• I do not trust my bank to offer me the best financial advice for my individual situation.

So do I trust my bank or not? You see? The first example is better described as confidence. You know that NatWest would probably not be better-off running away to southern Spain with your month’s wages. It’s an informed gamble. But you don’t think they could be trusted with your finances full stop – you don’t think they’re all beautiful people who only care about your interests.

Trust (real trust) depends enormously on context and implies a belief in the moral character of a person/organisation/business. Most likely, a lot of the services we might be described as trusting (Banks, Amazon, eBay) would be better described as things we have confidence in.

Added to that, sometimes we have no choice but to sort-of trust. Helen Keegan pointed out that oftentimes we click through acceptance of a service’s terms and conditions, because there’s no real alternative. We either want to do banking online or we don’t – we can’t disagree with point 5 in the t’s & c’s and have them changed. It’s like it or lump it.

I don’t really trust anyone to be the trust-broker of my online identities – or yours, dear reader. Let’s look at the possibilities, currently:

• The Government. Obvious non-starter. I might be a dissident of some sort. (and *what!* 25% of government databases are already illegal)
• Government Organisation: e.g. BBC. Similarly flawed.
• Private Corporate: e.g. Google. Already massively failed in China.
• Private small company: might turn evil; vulnerable to hackers, potentially, eh monster.com. And who the hell are you, anyway?
• The UN: this is a possibility, but once the UN is hacked, then how do I recover my ID?

So this probably leaves the least neat, least integrated, least semantic possibility:

Lots of stuff. Regular password for stuff you don’t care about; unique passwords for stuff you do; OpenID and Facebook Connect and MyBlogLog and Google for social apps; NI number and PIN for government apps; Account Number and PIN for commercial stuff.

Messy. And I think it may be the case that ‘messy’ is the best solution to online identity, trust and anonymity for a long time to come. I can’t really imagine that computer scientists are going to be the people that manage to overcome that.

That is probably not what the ESPRC, or Southampton & Imperial Universities wanted me to walk away thinking today. But thanks again for the thinking.

via Richard Sambrook and David Brain, here’s a great presentation from the Lift conference, given by Genevieve Bell, who works as an anthropologist at Intel:

It’s about how we all lie online in terms of the way we present ourselves, or rather, that we’ve been lying about ourselves for an awful long time – how we feel, how we feel about our partners and jobs, our height, weight and age, for example – and this hasn’t changed just because technology has speeded up. According to psychologists, we tell between six and 200 lies a day in order to socialise (’I'm fine’), for play and fun, to hide misbehaviour, feel safer, feel private, feel better about the world for ourselves and to try to be more popular. There are lots of good (and bad) reasons to dissemble.

Lying is a bad thing for society, of course, as every major religion agrees. Though, on second thoughts, our culture does allow for things like white lies, keeping secrets and preserving our privacy, all of which are seen as good things by-and-large but which normally involve deception. Our actual practice means that deception is implicit to our social existence.

New information technologies that attempt to insist on personal transparency don’t really fit with our lying culture or our biological needs. There are conflicts between our cultural practises and our cultural ideals, and while we can work round those in meatspace, dealing with machines tends to expose those conflicts. (”Date of Birth?” on the registration screens of a service is a good example.)

Twitter, according to Bell, is about making an art out of confabulation. The construction of a lifestyle we present is both a biological necessity and a work of art in its entirety. On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world ‘what are you doing right now?’. But I did a little search on Twitter for ‘having a wank’ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bell’s contention.

I haven’t seen this subject addressed before and found the presentation fascinating. I am troubled by the idea that transparency is coming to be seen as a moral necessity. It’s like the web 2.0 equivalent of Daily Mail readers saying, “you wouldn’t object to CCTV if you had nothing to hide.” As individuals, hiding, privacy, confabulation, imagination and play are pretty important to mental health, I think. This is one reason why people are very concerned about who they let into their Facebook circle of friends. Facebook insists on people using their real names and thus makes it impossible to hide different circles and different personae from each other, the way you can offline. Facebook makes it impossible to lie, and that is arguably mentally damaging.

Whisking through my unread posts today, two items struck me as demanding a little follow-up. First of all, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship. The nature of the paper is pretty obvious from its title, though that is not to imply that it is not well-written, intelligent and provoking. The authors don’t spell out their definition as a short list of unambiguous phrases, so I’ll take the liberty of doing that bit for them. Social network sites:

• enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks
• these networks often reflect offline networks in that they make explicit friend-of-friend links and other ‘latent ties’
• Friends on these systems are not necessarily friends in the offline sense, but are very likely to belong to the same offline social network somehow
• implement a (variably) visible profile system, which also displays a list of Friends within that system
• Friends can normally leave visible messages for each other – some actually evolved from messaging systems e.g. QQ and Cyworld
• Many social networks attract groups of quite similar people, at least initially.

So far, so good – not much that most people would find enormously controversial – and a useful list of defining characteristics to keep to hand the next time someone asks you, ‘So what are these social network sites, then?’

Then I read JP Rangaswami’s posts Some Friday Night Ruminations about Facebook et al. and  More Musings about what makes Facebook Different. The short answer to what makes it different, from the first of those posts is that:

I don’t quite know, but it is. Stuff like MySpace and Bebo are overtly narcissistic, it’s all about how you express yourself. Facebook, on the other hand, is about relationships and conversations.

So that kind of wrecks the neat list and the generalisations, because while I agree with them all, I can’t help but observe that he’s right.

In his later post, JP remarks Facebook seemed like ‘a site where communities coalesced and sometimes even collided’ – given its overwhelming take up among the UK and US population over the last twelve months, you find and re-find friendships with family, school-friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, lovers and rivals – its omnipresence and insistence on real names makes your Facebook identity a lot like your real-life identity. JP reckons this ought to be of value to enterprises because it allows work contact to deepen through the discovery of shared likes, random insights into a fellow’s personality which make you feel more intimate. This is a topic I wrote about in the Double Intimacy Score post at the end of September.

It seems to me that Facebook’s focus is on interaction, not representation. The home page, crucially, I think, is not your profile, but the lifestream of your network. The topmost item of everyone’s profile page is the stream of their latest actions and interactions on the network. That’s the big attraction, not creating the pimpingest profile page ever. That’s why you might go back several times a day – to see what’s going on in your neighbourhood. Once you’ve set your profile up, maybe automated streams from your blogs, flickr and twitters, etc., you’re not actually that likely to return to it very often at all. Once you’ve established contact with a Friend, you’re not even likely to visit their profile page very often, except the sub-sub-sections for new notes, imported items and photos, etc. The action’s in the actions. You add applications because they provide additional ways to interact with people. The action’s in returning that Poke, playing your turn at Scrabble, biting that chump. It’s the wall-to-wall page you look at, not the wall.

YASNS = Yet Another Social Network System

In my newsletter to NMK readers today, I referred to the Internet as a ’she’. Reading that back once it arrived in my inbox, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that. I think I’m happy about referring to websites as ’she’ – they are akin to vessels like ships and cars, and also domiciles – those things are very often referred to as feminine. But the Internet as a whole?

I’m wondering about this from a web 2.0 perspective. Web 2.0, with its insistence on ’social everything’ – seems to fit well with what people normally classify as feminine characteristics – connecting, embracing, collectivism, joining together.

The proposed next generation of web applications, on the other hand, the sort that will join up microformats and form the semantic web, seem to be delivering the Internet back into the hands of the engineers, and into the traditionally masculine traits of straight facts, logic and formulae. The thing that interests me is whether this is being driven by gender agendas in some way, at least in the way it is narrativised, if not in terms of the science.

Are any readers aware of any gender politics research being done in this domain? Or have I finally found my PhD thesis? [sidenote: also interested in anyone attempting to 'queer' the 'net and what that entails.]

PS: there is a broken link in the second paragraph of the newsletter. You could patch it together yourself, but to make things easier, the link is to this – a great analysis of the new rules of reputation in the era of Google, and why the Internet is really rather frightening.

I’m going to the Battle of Ideas conference later this month. I do recommend that (London-and-environs-based) readers take a look. Despite it being at the weekend, which might understandably dampen the ardour of any self-respecting new media flâneur, it’s looking like a veritable cavalcade of fresh ideas, innovation and debate across the disciplines. Not just technology and media, but art, education, health, science, everything… I am going on Saturday (gulp!) and Sunday (argghhh!) and that says a lot about how valuable I think it could be. It’s also really cheap when you look at the range and calibre of the speakers. Yay for the Institute of Ideas for putting it on.

One particular aspect that’s interesting to me [there is a work aspect to that in terms of how NMK may be participating, but that participation comes out of my own perception of what's interesting in New Media right now] is the debate on Saturday afternoon on privacy in this new world of Web 2.0 and the strange psychology that has developed around that.

On the one hand, we’re telling perfect strangers what we had for lunch and where we are on Twitter, give our name and address and phone numbers to Facebook, divulge our deepest personal secrets on blogs (but not this blog, dear reader, rest-assured), publish photos and videos of our social life. Transparency is held as an ideal. Self-surveillance, continual publishing and, above all, authenticity, are held as golden standards.

On the other hand, people are often appalled at the thought of Tesco’s (the biggest UK supermarket chain) analysing our shopping habits, Facebook personalising advertising for us, Google recording our searches and our ISPs and credit card companies selling our browsing and buying patterns to third parties. Within larger organisations, corporate IT departments are appalled by the risks we’re taking, but we hold our hands to our ears and say ‘lalala – open that firewall, you nazis’.

So are we being two-faced? Do we want our cake and to eat it too? It’s OK to hold up transparency as an ideal for businesses and corporations and to operate according to that ideal ourselves, but when those organisations take some very obvious steps in data-mining the information that’s available, then it’s suddenly a different story?

The plan, at the moment, is to unveil some new research on attitudes to privacy and to unpick the nature of these inconsistencies at the conference.

Without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever, though, here’s a couple of hopefully inflammatory thoughts:

• Transparency online is held as a gold standard of behaviour because it’s viewed as a return to past, lost, possibly illusory norms where people dealt with each other face-to-face and where a firm handshake was all you needed to create genuine trust and a reliable relationship. Our virtual existence craves some solidity where it is lacking.
• That the transparency lobby is thus a mechanism of nostalgia. They’re Golden Ageists. That’s fine, but it’s a narrative about commercial practices that potentially shifts the visibility of what is happening to the data you’re sharing. I’m putting on my post-modernist hat, and suggesting that narratives are the way we understand the world. But one of the counter-narratives might be equally valid, one about big business set to exploit consumers at every opportunity.
• Holding those two (and more) possible narratives in our heads at the same time is far from impossible. We live in a world of warring narratives, each of which interpolate us at some times.
• That the Cluetrain has already been railroaded by those bastards in big business who can see how to manipulate this state of affairs.

I personally like the idea and practice of being transparent online about my behaviour, the things I like and don’t like, and how I’m feeling. It’s liberating to not operate under a corporate persona, or maintain a series of separate online identities. If that allows advertisers to target me better (I like really expensive, funky, creative adverts for cheap stuff, btw) then that probably won’t do me much harm. Does it harm ‘people in general’ to be transparent? That’s a harder question and automatically makes me sound either incredibly patronising or self-deluded if I say ‘yes’.

But ‘yes’, I think it does. The companies that have the most money and thus the most advanced data-mining techniques might ultimately be the most successful. They’ll target us better, harder, faster, more creatively and more often. Because we’ve opened up. That’s bad news. Commercial success would be a meritocracy in an ideal world, I think: the best companies would be most successful. Transparency is often cited as a way of making that happen – the best companies will expose their internal workings and personality, and thus win support – but it is also a way of making it fail – the consumer population becomes infinitely ‘bucketable’, targetable, individually identifiable by the corporations with the best, most-expensive technology and resources.

I came across a great paper today called Vernacular Web 2, which is about two things in particular:

1. The golden age of the ‘Welcome to my web page’ sites: the ones with the starry backgrounds, midi music on autoplay and animated gifs. These expressions of folk art were reviled by designers and internet intelligentsia alike throughout the course of the late 90s. To the extent that they seem to only exist today in the form of clever pastiches.
    
2. That these pages find their contemporary analogue in [ugly] MySpace pages.

The author – Olia Liliana – charts the emergence of glitter graphics on MySpace pages. Glitter gifs are the epitome of the vernacular web. They link both to the Barbie world of a particular subset of teenage girls and to the bling culture of hip-hop music. Maybe bratz providing the link between the two. This joint heritage gives them an unusually large influence over a swathe of teenagers of different ages and sexes. The author notes that to a teenage girl today – those ‘digital natives’ – a glitter gif on their MySpace profile has no emotional distinction from the glitter stickers that they might put onto their school exercise books. It’s a great point and a really pertinent way to illustrate the way teenagers now differ from people like me who created their first web sites by hand back in the 90s (I still quite like my own internet skeleton closet, I’m pleased to say).

This is also about class and control. As danah boyd noted in July, there are class distinctions attached to which social network one chooses: the tidy, Ivy League, muted-blue of Facebook or the Bash Street Comprehensive multicolour of MySpace. That gap is also a difference – a really important difference – between expression in words alone and expression through sound, layout, pictures and jewellery, I think. Why do you think MySpace is so popular with creative artists? MySpace is visceral and multisensory; Facebook is guarded and controlled. (I know and I agree – this probably overstates the case – the nature of a social network probably has less to do with the software and more to do with the nature of your network and the way you play with each other). Nonetheless, you get the point when it comes to the design of each of these applications. Liliana suggests that users who adopt the provided templates on Web 2.0 sites like iGoogle are being put in their place, interpolated, if you like – that they are accepting their allotted role as amateurs; as users.

I wonder, though, if this latter distinction is valid. Facebookers as conformist yes-men; MySpacers as the rebel yell. While self-expression through the wilful disregard of ‘good taste’ is rebellious on one level, on another it is equally consumerised. Those webkinz and habbos and glitter stickers cost real money, are subject to real peer forces of control and subjugation and to corporate interventions. The number of genuinely original layouts for MySpace profiles is pretty limited, I think, and a lot of those have been created by professional designers. A lot of profiles have been bought from or advertise design shops. [Though maybe the geeks have an escape route - get some sort of kudos through their 133t skillz with CSS]. For the teens, I imagine there’s nothing new. The wrong colour of glitter on your MySpace, I guess, is equivalent to wearing the wrong trainers to school – the ones your mum got from the market. At the same time, Facebook apps are allowing users to disrupt the clean and calm veneer of the application – to much distress in some quarters. However, I think I can believe in the jist of the argument. Facebook is more conformist than MySpace. Bringing this to the mass adoption of Facebook and not MySpace by the tech-blogger world: I guess the implications are obvious – we’re people who prefer to express ourselves with words because we wore the wrong trainers to school so often that visceral self-expression seems painfully risky.

You may want to install this on your Facebook. Fight the power. Fight the power.

[Edited for idiocy and sense - it's ended up painfully note-y as a result. Enjoy the music, if not the pictures.]