The Future of the Internet: Applications

FarmVille and MafiaWars! Just the names of the two Facebook applications that dominated my Live Feed (until I recently removed them) drive me crazy. The open platform that allows them to exist on Facebook also opened the gateway to other types of spam. In a recent NPR interview, former Facebook spammer, Dennis Yu, described several different ways people let spammers into their Facebook lives, simply by participating in applications. Yu explains:

"When a user clicks Accept, that they want to join, most of their profile information is now available. That can be used to create a very intense, addictive game, but it can also be used to [sic] advertising, and when you can use that data inside an ad to inject a user's name, their profile picture, the information of their friends, it creates highly relevant, highly targeted advertising, very smart ads. We can call them appvertising..."

These "appvertisements" can now be opted out of by in-the-know users, but many of the less savvy users might be taken in by these targeted ads. The real trouble comes when spammers use the collected information to hack profiles. This has happened to several friends of mine, who suddenly send uncharacteristic comments, messages, or status updates wanting friends to go to certain websites. Luckily, these incidents can be mostly alleviated by changing passwords.

Appvertising and spammers are just a few of the downsides to open platforms found on Facebook and MySpace before that. Identity theft, Phishing, and viruses have also become problems on these once mostly safe sites. Before Facebook opened its platform in 2007, there were only a select few Facebook created Applications for sharing photos, groups and events. Now, it seems like there is an application for everything, including those crazy addictive FarmVille type games. Some people would vote for a more sterile Facebook of the past, but others clearly enjoy the new offerings an open platform can bring, even if the bad comes along with the good.

This is the dilemma faced in Jonathan Zittrain's book, "The Future of the Internet -- and How to Stop It." Zittrain argues that the open platforms or Generative-ness of PCs and the Internet, while beneficial for their initial development and popularity, are now becoming more of a negative than a positive. In 2008, when his book was published, Zittrain noted that 90 percent of email was spam (p.99) and that 80 percent of it came from zombie computers sending it without their owners' knowledge (p.46) and nearly half of those computers were in North America. These are staggering statistics, and they are beginning to make people sit up at take notice. Last week I wrote about the prevalence viruses on Windows-based PCs, but according to Zittrain, the truth is that all personal computers are likely to be infected with some kind of virus, especially if they are hooked up to a constantly open Internet source like broadband or a T1 line.

The solution in the past has been to just throw more bandwidth at the spam problem, so that the email lines don't get so clogged that the relevant email can't get through (p.99). However, at some point that solution will not work any more, and then people will have to face the real problem: there are people exploiting the Generative nature of PCs and the Internet, and they're ruining it for everybody. People like Alan Ralsky, the self-proclaimed "King of Spam" and many even more malicious people have used the easily re-programmable nature of PCs and the Internet to not just make a profit, but to take advantage of and hurt people in the process. Although Ralansky was caught and punished, there are thousands more to take his place, and as more patches are made to the system, even more work around programs will be written.

For some, the solution to these problems is to just close the whole thing off and create tethered technologies. Tethered (or appliance) technologies like iTunes, TiVo, and XBoxes are not generative, meaning that they can not be changed or reprogrammed by the consumer, but must be used in the way the manufacturer intended (p.3). These technologies can be reprogrammed and often are, but only by the remote manufacturer. Tethered technologies still serve many useful functions, but they allow for less innovation and their content and functionality are not fully controlled by the user, even if the user has technically bought the product outright. This can of course lead to undesirable outcomes, like a service getting changed or canceled, and the user losing content or functionality that he or she already paid for.

Zittrain includes iPhones to the tethered technology list, but I disagree with him, since there are thousands of applications (written by third and fourth parties) that can be downloaded and added to iPhones, changing what they can do. Perhaps technologies like the iPhone could be the happy medium between too much freedom and too little. Apple does allow applications created by virtually anyone to be uploaded to their App Store. I say virtually, because although anyone can create and upload applications, they first have to pay to become a developer, and then go through online training to learn how to develop, and finally their applications have to pass standards before they can be added to the App Store. Except for the having to pay for the privilege part, this program seems to me to be a great solution to the programming woes of traditional generative technologies. In the Apple Application setting, programming is allowed and even encouraged, but standards have to be met, before new programs can be released to the general public. And, unlike Facebook, iPhone/iPod Touch users do not have to send applications all of their personal information in order to be able to download them. Apple's program may not be perfect, but I think it's on the right track.

Visibly Invisible

When I was 13 years old, I got on my Dad's computer and found my way into a chat room online.  I met people online who would immediately message me "a/s/l" for "Age/Sex/Location," and I realized that online, I could be anything I wanted to be. Of course, as a 13 year old girl, what I wanted to be was a 16 year old girl, which nearly got me in trouble with some gross online stalkers who wanted to meet me in real life. 

I've heard more than one story from friends meeting someone from a dating site, only to find out that they were not exactly "as advertised."

The point is, that online, people can be anything that they want to be. And they often are. They can be a different age, sex, race, religion, nationality, etc. all with a little bit of imagination and typing. Lisa Nakamura found that "when [online] users are free to choose their own race, all were assumed to be white. And many of those who adapted non-white personae turned out to be white male users (p. 391)."

According Lisa Nakamura in cybertyping and The Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction, the phenomenon of stereotyping has made its way online into what she calls "cybertyping." Specifically, the word cybertype describes "the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism (p.318)." In theory, the Internet could and should  be a place above and beyond race and gender. However, in reality, this has ended up not being the case. Even when race and gender are not specified online, white male is almost always assumed. "One of the symptoms of cybertyping is this convenient 'disappearance of awareness' of American racial minorities, a symptom that 'multiculturalist' Internet advertising and the discourse of technology work hard to produce (p. 327)."   If a certain race is not shoved in our faces, most Americans will not see or think about it, especially online, where that person is not easily seen.

The irony of this is that in today's society we are seen by more cameras and observers than ever before. If you go out in public you can bet that you will be seen by at least one camera. If you run a red light or a tollbooth, you may be sent a picture of yourself in the mail. We are living in a version of Bentham's Panopticon or even Orwell's Big Brother society. Whether or not we are actually being observed at any particular time, there is a chance that we are.  Under the Patriot Act, the government can even check our emails and phone calls if they think we may be doing something illegal.  At the end of his essay, Discipline and Punish, Foucoult asks, "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (p.486)"  The regimented, disciplined, observed way of life, which started in government and prisons has now come to dominate other institutions which effect our daily lives. 

Has this quest for discipline and observation reached into our homes though the internet?  I have already suggested that the government can monitor communications if it thinks that you are a terrorist, but what about more daily regiments online for the "regular" user?  

On the way home from work the other day, I heard a familiar story. A couple of teenage girls took some provocative pictures over Summer break and put them on their MySpace pages.  Someone at the school started passing the pictures around, and now the girls are suspended from participation in sports and have to make a public apology. These girls did something (questionable or not) on their own time in their own homes, but the act of putting pictures of the event online made them a part of the public system and subject to its rules. The sports team at those girls' school has rules about behavior both inside and outside of the classroom.  Their actions became known and punishable because of the publicness of people's lives now on the internet. The system can now reach into our lives like never before and change them for better or worse.

With all of the positive things that the internet can bring: organization, communication, digitization, and more, it is far from a perfect place. It is not accessible to everyone. The poor and many minorities have not seen the saturation that white middle class America has.  But even if and when that saturation does catch up as did television, the internet may still not be as diverse or equal as people might think. "Mainstream film and television depicts African Americans in consistently negative ways despite extremely high usage rates of television by African Americans. Hence, the dubious goal of 100% 'penetration' of African American communities by Internet technologies cannot by and of itself, result in more parity or even accuracy in representations of African Americans (Nakamura, p. 330)." 

Although the internet has vastly changed society in many ways, we still have a long way to go as a culture to catch up in racial equality and in finding a balance of power and privacy.