How to disapper

Speaking of the web privacy, I thought of a recent website (http://www.frankahearn.com/home.html) I notices. It is started by Frank M Ahern, who was a private investigator. He provide the service of helping people erase the footprints online.

High-Net-Worth Privacy: From experience, most privacy issues that make  clients or their family vulnerable come  accidentally from either an employee or a family member. Have you recently reviewed what your child or employees are doing digitally?

He’s not cheap; this New York-based skip-tracer turned skip-maker charges $42,000 minimum, half upfront, for his personal brand of magic. He takes neither credit nor debit cards. In fact, his first move will be to confiscate and destroy yours.

Although I think it is meaningless to escape the Internet (it is coming to you and covering the world, even beyond the earth, no matter what), I do like one of his quote on information privacy importance.

Your information is gold, you wouldn’t give gold away, so don’t give information away.

He also wrote several books about his work.

Dilemma: Privacy and personalization

The privacy issue in Web 2.0 world brought a lot of people’s attention. Frankly, as long as we use the Internet, we will leave footprints. It is just like walking in the street, you will also leave footprints and be seen by others. It is common in the real world and it is also common in the Web 2.0 world.

The reason why I say this is not I don’t value the privacy, but I think the personal information is actually a very useful thing in the Internet world. According to the footprints, the recommendation algorithm can help you find the close friend (Facebook), favorite book, possible buying items (Amazon), and offer you help when you are in need (Google Now). With more personal information shared, the artificial intelligent Web 2.0 can identify our characteristics and provide better personalized assistance, which is definitely the trend in the future. If I reject to share any information, these service is impossible.

However, it is true that the more privacy you shared in the Internet, the more likely the privacy will be stolen/ sold by others. This is a dilemma and currently I cannot think of many concrete solutions. Probably the ethical guidelines suggested by Dr. Dennen and Burner (2013) can be a possible solution, but once it is about the ethics, there are a lot of grey areas and cross-culture problems. Personally, I think a better and robust network security (for both company and personal use) and related education or popular science is more necessary to the public.

Reference

Dennen, V., & Burner, K. (2013, October). Friending and Footprints: Privacy and Ethical Issues of Facebook Use in Higher Education. In World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education(Vol. 2013, No. 1, pp. 642-648).

Spending to much time on social network and self-esteem

Spending time on social network is sometimes both anxious and attractive to people. Recently I am reading some psychology journals which might address the problem.

When we are staying in the social network, we create a lot of produsages, and much of the social networking activities are based on these produsages. When the fist time I was keeping the blogs, I really wish to reply all the people who leave me a comment, and I will feel anxious if no one pays a visit to my produsage work.

However, if I only repost a advertisement or a promotion for some companies. I won’t care if it gets any comments. From this point of view, interacting with others produsage actually means the assessment of them.

Therefore, those who pay much attention to the comments, likes and reposts, might be the ones with low self-esteem according to the William James’ definition of it, which is the “Self-esteem = Success / Pretensions”.  Another work of self-esteem is from Dr. Chris Mruk. He constructed a Two-factor Self-esteem meaning matrix (Mruk, 2006).

 

When the competence and the worthiness is both high. One don’t really need to prove it from the social network. However, when the expectation of competence is high, but the perceived value is not, people tend to spend more time on the social network to get more interactions, which are evaluations to their produsage.

 

Reference

James, W. (2004). The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2). Digireads. com Publishing.

Mruk, C. J. (2006). Self-esteem research, theory, and practice: Toward a positive psychology of self-esteem. Springer Publishing Company.

Ingress: Augmented reality mmorpg

The world around you is not what it seems.  —— Ingress

I noticed this game for some time, but didn’t actually play with it. I tried it for a few days, and find that it is really cool!

Below are the quote from Wikipedia

Ingress is an augmented realitymassively multiplayer online role playinglocation-based game^[4] created by Niantic Labs, a startup within Google. The game was originally exclusively for Androiddevices,^[5] and was made available for Apple‘s iOS on July 14, 2014.^[3] The game has a complex science fictionback story with a continuous open narrative.^[6][7]

The game makers’ framing device for the game is as follows: Alongside the discovery of the Higgs Boson by the physicists at CERN in 2012, it has also been discovered that the Earth has been seeded with “Exotic Matter,” or XM. This substance has been associated with the Shapers, a mysterious phenomenon or alien race which is neither described nor seen (and which thus functions as a MacGuffin). The in-universe motivation for the Enlightened faction is their belief that the Shapers are working toward a powerful enlightenment which will uplift all mankind. The Resistance believes that it is protecting humanity from Shaper ingression.^[13] The factions have, however, been occasionally observed to ignore the back-story and to co-operate for the sake of real-life gameplay and game balance, for example by establishing neutral zones and rules of engagement.^[14]

There are two factions to choose from. The Enlightened fight believing their actions will uplift humanity, and bring about the next chapter in human evolution, whereas the Resistance believes in preserving what freedom humanity has left. The Resistance is represented by blue and the Enlightened are represented by green. In some areas, the Resistance are jokingly referred to as “Smurfs“. Similarly, the Enlightened are referred to as “Frogs” or “Toads“, while the lower-level players are referred to as “Tadpoles“. Portals are either grey (neutral), blue (Resistance), or green (Enlightened).^[16]

I didn’t realize how amazing is that when the reality world network is integrated with the online network (by saying that, I meant I spend a whole afternoon to walk around the FSU and play with the game lol). I belong to the Resistance, which is now the main force at FSU and Stone Building.

From this game, it is clear that Web 2.0 is no longer the world in virtual, but it starts to blend into the existed real world. I think the trend is the overlapping of Web 2.0 and real world is increasing, therefore the augmented reality is popular recently.

Web 2.0 and Deep Learning

Can Web 2.0 facilitate deep learning?

Some people may argue that Web 2.0 is too distracting (e.g., Facebook and Twitter). It is very true that there are a lot of irrelated information and we often lost in the ocean of information. The research also points out that students who use social network service like Facebook often, usually perform worse than those don’t. However, I can’t agree with this statement, since Web 2.0 is only a tool, and it is who use this tool matters instead of the tool matters per se.

There is more information and less limitation online so that allows Web 2.0 users to contribute to deep learning any time, any where and with more resources. The power of people is unlimted and users-generated content can trigger the deep learning in any time since its information volume is much larger than the traditional ways.

Furthermore, the Web 2.0 ways to learn is usually asynchronous which allows the learner to reflect more often and deliberate at their comment. Unlike the instant way (i.e., traditional f2f), learners can not only pace themselves, but also spend more time as much as they like in the details and carefully think about the content.

In addition, once the learner is in the Web 2.0 learning environment, he is almost completely on his own. The connections are loose so that the learner should take responsibility for himself. Therefore, he/ she has to regulate his/ her own learning which is definitely good for deep learning.

Yet, there are many unsolved problems of learning through Web 2.0 including distractions and low social presence. There is no way to reject the potential of expanding our learning possibilities by Web 2.0.

American Airline in-flight Web 2.0

I flew with American Airline yesterday across the Pacific Ocean from China to US. I took two stops including Hong Kong and Dallas to Tallahassee. The overall flight is almost 30 hours and I am exhausted. However, I found that the American Airline provide a quite interesting application in their inflight touch screen – chatroom and personal status.

I registered in the application and log into it. It allows passenger to update their mood, status, ideas like a twitter and also chat with others instantly. Although not many people used that (most of them were attracted by the movies and HBO or falling asleep), people in that app communicate with a great joy. User started to build their identity through introducing their departure place, destination, hometown (home country), workplace etc. I witnessed the online community merged with the offline community since a few people found they were all going to University of Indiana. They met near the lavatory, where was the only roomy place on Boeing 777.

Zhihu Daily and Zhihu Daily 3.0

I am not sure if all the social network application in China like to set foot in the news provider industry. Zhihu started the Zhihu Daily from 2013 and provide some selected answers to the question (high-quality answers to ordinary question), answers to the news-related questions (like “How you think NASA announcing finding Kepler 425b?”), and Zhihu columns (like Zhihu user’s blog). Usually it will provide about 20 articles per day through 7:00 am to 10:00 pm. Although people can interact with each other and leave comment under the article, it is still only a news application which provide selected content from Zhihu.

Recently it is testing its latest version Zhihu Daily 3.0 publicly. It allows the user to select content from Zhihu and anywhere to establish their own Zhihu Daily. I think it is a great opportunity to lead users to make content curation, and hopefully it will be released officially in a couple months.

 

Zhihu: A Chinese question-and-answer website

Zhihu (知乎) is a Chinese question-and-answer website which has a similar product model as Quora.founded in January 26, 2011. The name of Zhihu is very interesting (and hard to pronounce). It is an ancient and very formal way to say “Do you know”? In the website, people can ask questions, share experience and start discussion. Both the questions and the answers are the produsages and people are gathered like community according to interested topic. I particularly like the way that users can exchange ideas freely on the website according to the questions. Just like in Web 2.0 class, we do that every week. The instructor post a topic and students will post their opinions. One function of both Quora and Zhihu is upvote/ downvote. It enables the users select the most valuable answer instead of merely listing them by time sequence. I noticed that BlackBoard also allow users to rate others comment, however, it seems that no one actually use them.

As a Chinese speaker, Zhihu feels more localized and linguistically familiar than Quora to me. Like another Quora-and-Zhihu user, Zhicheng Zhu put that “the more deeper reason that why this kind of Chinese preferring Zhihu is Zhihu has some “special” people and localized topics or  questions which come from Chinese culture background. For example, questions like “what kind of interesting stuff can I buy from taobao(a websites belongs to Alibaba) ?” or “Does Guo Xiang really loves Yang Guo ? (Yang Guo and Guo Xiang are protagonist of the wuxia novel The Return of the Condor Heroes)?” Those kind of Chinese-related questions or topics are very common in Zhihu, because Zhihu are focusing on China.”

SEO and Recommend system

I talked with a search engine optimization (SEO) engineer few days ago and he explained his work and some general ideas of the SEO algorithms to me. I found this is a very interesting work which can potentially benefit the company and content promotion a lot! However, the idea is on the other side of coin of the recommend system.
The aim of recommend system is to recommend the most relevant information/ content to the user based on the content’s and users’ matching characteristics. However, SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results (Wikipedia).
The first process is a machine-directed selection while the second process is the manipulation and the fraud of human to the machine. It will definitely affect the objective recommendation of the machine system.
It is a game between human and machine and does raise two of my concerns. We are fed what is optimized. Since the content is not objective, the process can be manipulated. Therefore, the so-called customization and personalization is just the nonsense. Web 2.0 is not all about free and networked. It is just like the traditional human society: full of beautiful scenery but also full of illusion.

Reading Notes: The Crowd

The second book I read this time is French social psychologists Gustave Le Bon’s famous sociology classics The Crowd. This is the second time I read this book and this time I think more from the Web 2.0 perspective. The situation is quite similar to the previous book Out of Control, I read the Chinese version and hereby only talk about my reflections.

First thought is will the Gustave have the same pathetic assertion of the human being if he can see the Web 2.0 nowadays? I think the answer is absolutely yes. Since the network society emerges and people connected with each other tighter than ever before, the collective unconsciousness is amplified but not reduced by the collective wisdom. People obey the great power of group’s voices instead of self and independent deliberations.

I read a question on Quora