Goodbye, Research Paper. Hello Critical Analysis

My research paper is done, I have no regrets.

The class has moved on to critical analysis now. We started out looking at poetry, and how you should read it. Now, we have the option of doing a paper on either a short story or a poem.

As poetry is for the most part not my thing (my sense of rhythm is 404), I'm looking at short stories. Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House" is my current front runner, but I'm tearing through my library and the web. I've also considered doing it on the Zen story "Trading Dialogue for Lodging" which is a favorite of mine. I think the guy who wrote that should be resurrected and given a staff position on Saturday Night Live.

Burning the Midnight Oil

It's very late, and I'm outrageously tired. I just finished up the final draft of my annotated bibliography for Composition II and have been busy propagating it for the past couple of hours. I've made a number of changes, the most import of which is a change in my term for forwarded emails/statuses/tweets, and a somewhat more focused title.

I also changed how I created the document. In my last attempt, I wrote my annotated bibliography in Google Docs and downloaded it to my local word processor, NeoOffice. This time I created it natively in Open Office format, saved a PDF copy and uploaded to Google Docs. This preserved the formatting which was my goal to begin with, but there are no options for editing or publishing here directly. I don't view either of those as a serious issue, though losing the ability to share editing is a bit disappointing.

Trying to upload in .ODT still mangled my citations, so I deleted that one, I'll play around with it a bit more after I've had a bit of shuteye. In the meantime, you can find my final draft here. If you have a moment, I'd appreciate any critiques or comments you could provide.

As always, you can find information on my sources, and the link I provided above through my delicious.com account here.

Thanks for staying up with me, I'll see you next post!

Research Survey

I have to be careful how I discuss this, because I don't want to influence the results of the survey I take, but I need to set my thoughts in order regarding my survey. I'm going to be doing a survey to examine viral messaging habits on various platforms and to produce a picture of the average user who sends these messages. Obviously, I can't discuss the actual structure of the survey here.

Which is frustrating, because that is one of the areas I am having a lot of difficulty with. I'm also not sure how I want to distribute my survey. I have considered using Survey Monkey, but I'm not sure I will be able to convince my subjects to go use it. Which is a pity, I've heard it's great software for just this sort of thing. I've also considered using Facebook to distribute, but frankly it doesn't seem that people spend much time communicating on Facebook. It seems like it is mostly dedicated to broadcasting messages of your own, or more commonly playing poorly designed, scammy games. I don't have enough reach on Twitter or Buzz, so that's out as well. I suspect I'll be distributing via sneakernet.

I'm really slammed at the moment with the two express classes that are wrapping up next week, but I'd really like to have a good draft of my survey done by the end of the weekend. I then hope to beg, wheedle and plead for help from a few classmates in my American National Government class who are taking statistics. This sort of thing really falls far outside my purview, though I don't regret stating that I would do this when I sold my topic. Working outside of your comfort zone is something I think you really ought to be doing as a college student.

Public/Private Permissions: Is Privacy Dead?

Welcome to another day, ladies and gentlemen.

I really want to follow up on my experiment with Google Docs, this blog and a few of the other experiments I'm working on with technology and education. Also, I have some new theories on my research topic to run by you. But, I was puttering around last night and ended up watching Penn Says on Youtube. I'm a pretty big fan of his as a magician, I used to play around with stage magic back in the day, but I wasn't very good at it. I also think he's an interesting person. We agree on a lot of fundamental issues, we disagree strongly on a lot of others.

Penn Jillette is a pretty famous person. A celebrity, in fact. He does stage shows in Las Vegas, has a series on Showtime. I recall that he's had a few network TV specials as well. With his partner Teller, they've put out two or three books as well. The Penn Says series is basically his video diary. He puts it out on Sony's video platform, and it eventually trickles down to YouTube. He talks about whatever happens to be on his mind that day, and often addresses comments from the audience. Pretty cool.

In a previous show, he talked about sending his kids to a fancy private school in Las Vegas versus his lower middle class background. The episode is called "Have I Revealed Too Much," and there's a lot of harsh language in it - so if you're at work, or offended by that kind of language, I'd recommend not clicking the embedded video below.



For those who didn't watch: Mr. Jillette, after making that video I described above went to the parent's orientation night at that private school, and it turned out the principal was a fan. He watched Penn on his Showtime series, and on Penn Says. He said he hoped that they could make Penn feel good about sending his children to this private school. Penn felt uneasy about the principal watching him in a program he puts out for the public.

Now I want to contrast this with Penelope Trunk. I don't know that I would call myself a fan of her work, but I think it is interesting. She seems to write about her life, especially her personal life in a very open fashion out here. She's been called on it by commenters on her blog, people on twitter, and people in her personal life.

One interesting difference between them - Mr. Jillette is only a bit younger than my parents. He would have been entering high school the year after they graduated. Ms. Trunk is a bit older than me, there are about seven years between us. According to this article, and several like it people younger than me are very willing to share personal information online. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was recently raked over the coals for saying "Privacy is Dead" or "Privacy is no longer a social norm" depending upon which site you're reading. The only issue here, is that he didn't say that. He essentially said that social norms regarding privacy are changing, and that people are willing to share more of their lives online. This is not immoderate statement and I would challenge even my most critical reader to deny it.

If the social norms are changing, and I believe they are, what does that mean for us? I can see a few advantages to a more radical version of this change through the lens of my upcoming paper as being a relative "good thing." I can also see why it would scare people, and even I find it a bit unsettling at times.

Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen, cake will be provided shortly.

Annotated Bib Draft

Chris Demmons
February 9, 2010
ENC-1102-431
Professor Wilson

Misinformation in Complex Systems
Annotated Bibliography

    My research paper will cover the societal effects of misinformation in complex systems. Imagine for a moment that a few simple lines of text in an electronic mail could cost two first world governments millions of dollars, force a national charity to move their headquarters, and cause you to be fired from your job or ostracized by your friends? Those lines of text are not a new super virus developed by the Chinese government, they are emails and social media posts written by your friends, family and co-workers. The Craig Shergold chain email forced the British postal service to process millions of letters over the course of more than twenty years. A mutation of the same email caused the Make-A-Wish foundation to move its headquarters and provide a special toll free number to disseminate information about the hoax. The U.S. Postal Service is still receiving mail for Make-A-Wish at its Atlanta processing center which must be stored at considerable cost. The "don't add" chain status on Facebook, which runs: "Don't add Person Name, he is a(n) undesirable thing," typical examples of undesirable things have included accusations of pedophilia, hacking, and other criminal misdeeds. It is not difficult to see how messages like these spread to thousands of people could result in serious real world consequences.
    A viral message is one passed on through a chain of receivers, who then in turn become senders to a new generation of receivers. This is best visualized by the game of Telephone that many people played as children. A group of ten or more kids form a line, far enough away from each other that a whisper cannot be easily heard more than one position away. The child at the far end of the line whispers a simple, easily remembered message or phrase to the second child, who in turn whispers it to the next and so on until the message reaches the end of the line. By the time the message reaches its final destination and is compared with the original message, it has usually undergone a dramatic transformation and is no longer recognizable as the original. On the internet, each sender may have millions of receivers within a single generation or hop of the message. For instance, popular fantasy author Neil Gaiman has approximately one and half million followers on the social networking site Twitter. On Facebook, he has more than one hundred thousand fans and his fan page has only been available for a few days. His blog has a very large circulation, I do not have specific traffic data but from my experience on the web, I would conservatively estimate it at somewhere between three to five hundred thousand unique visits per day. While a given person may receive messages from Mr. Gaiman on more than one channel, when Mr. Gaiman speaks an American city approximately the size of Philadelphia is listening. Each one of those listeners may not have as large a group of followers, but they can retransmit the message to others over a variety of channels and so on. Clearly Mr. Gaiman is not posting messages about sending post cards to Craig Shergold or recommending you avoid friending someone on Facebook. I merely use him to provide a specific example of how the internet is similar, but at the same time a great deal more complex than the traditional game of Telephone.
    So what is being done? Not much at the moment. This issue is not seen as a social problem by the public, and most people hold erroneous belief that what happens on the internet stays there. Many agencies including the United States Marine Corps, most major corporations and our own college have policies that forbid, either expressly or implicitly, these kinds of messages. Despite these admonitions, as many emails and social networking posts are made from work or school as are made from home computers. The National Science Foundation has provided a grant to study email chain petitions. It is a good start, but as I will show, this study is too limited in scope. The National Security Agency is currently studying social networks as well according to several journalistic sources. The details of this study are unavailable, and are unlikely to focus on this aspect of social networking given the N.S.A.'s mission of communication security and surveillance. There is no body of previous research to draw on, remember that the internet as an instrument of mass communication is only a little over twenty years old.
    Not all messages are dangerous, many are chain letters, sappy stories, political polemics and cautionary tales. I feel these messages are just as important to study as messages that present a threat to our society. In communications theory, these messages are considered "noise," and are regarded solely as a negative. According to economics, which assumes human beings are rational actors - always striving to maximize our advantage in a given scenario, these messages should not exist. I believe these messages can not only provide valuable data on how we interact as human beings, they can also provide valuable insights into the hopes, fears and dreams of each sender. I hope to answer the truly important questions regarding this phenomena. How old are these kinds of communication? What traits does the average transmitter possess? Why are these messages sent? Can anything be done to stop them, and if so, should we? Are new forms of social media causing any changes in the way these messages are transmitted, received or their mutation rate? I will pursue the answers to these questions by examining the relevant academic information on communications of this kind which does exist, and through my own original research. My research will include observations of past messages, those currently found in the wild, and through information gleaned from surveys and interviews with people who transmit these sorts of messages on the internet.

---

Annotated Bibliography

Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.

        Ariley's work is concerned with human decision making in the field of behavioral 

    economics, and can provide insight into why people forward viral messages though 

    it does not address this topic directly.
Boese, Alex. The Museum of Hoaxes. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

        Details several viral messages in a variety of media from nineteen-ninety to two 

    thousand and eight.

Biehl, Chuck. "ADMIN: Unathrized (sic) Chain Letter Hurts Make-A-Wish (fwd)."
    dimacs.rutgers.edu listserv. dimacs.rutgers.edu listserv. 11 Nov. 1996. Web. 12 Feb.
    2010.

        An entry from the rutgers.edu listserv from 1996. This shows the extreme longevity
    of the Craig Shergold hoax, as well as describing the effects on the Make-A-Wish
    foundation.

Brunvard, Jan Harold. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1998.
    NetLibrary. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.

        Brunvard describes how technical folklore has trickled down to the less adept 

    computer users, and describes how chain letters are often considered a serious 

    threat to system resources and security.

Bryant, Ron. "Majority in Unscientific Fox News Poll Pegs Tea Party Movement 'Racist'."
    The Raw Story. Rawstory.com. 11 Feb. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2010.

        This article describes an evolution in viral media. Fox news created an unscientific
    poll asking users' opinion of the tea party movement. A member of the Democratic
    Underground posted a link to the poll on the social bookmark aggregator Reddit.
    When the poll produced results contrary to what most conservatives expected, they
    accused Reddit users of skewing the data.

Cluely, Graham. "The Automation Labs Facebook Security Scare." Sophos. Sophos. 3
    Feb. 2010. Web. 5 Feb 2010.

        This is a debunking of a widely propagated viral status on Facebook came from a
    leading British internet security company. The hoax accuses a bot developer for the 

    Farmville game on Facebook of accessing private user data. This source will provide 

    background and technical detail of an emergent multimedia hoax.

Donovan, Pamela. No Way of Knowing: Crime, Urban Legends and the Internet. New
    York: Taylor, 2004. Wilson. Web. 6 Feb. 2010.

        This source focuses specifically upon viral messages related to crime, why these
    messages have become more common in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and
    why debunking at the mass media and personal levels are often ineffective. This source
    will be reviewed as we look at why senders transmit viral messages regardless of content,
     why these stories are widely believed and why traditional debunking is often ineffective.
    This source will also be used for comparison when looking at organization strategies for 
    dealing with viral messages.

Facebook Security. "Facebook Security Links: The Automation Labs Facebook Security
    Scare. | Graham Cluely's Blog" Facebook. Facebook Security. 3 Feb. 2010. Web. 5
    Feb. 2010.

        Facebook security's link to Sopho's blog entry on the Automation Labs Hoax. This cite, 

    and the user comments associated with it show how Facebook inadvertently gave the 

    hoax additional credibility. 
Ford, Hannah. "another chain letter..." Facebook. Facebook Chain letters group. 20 Jan.
    2010. Web. 6 Feb. 2010.

        A chain letter spotted in the wild by a Facebook user in a user group dedicated to 

    chain letters sent via the internet.

Gaiman, Neil. "Fascinating Paperchase plagarism over at http://bit.ly/cdrzKZ. Bad
    Paperchase." 11 Feb. 2010. Web. 11 Feb 2010.

        This shows another evolution in viral messages. Mr. Gaiman read an account of an 

    Etsy.com artist accusing a large British consumer goods manufacturer of plagiarizing 

    her work. This is a cite of the message he sent out a message on the Twitter social 

    network concerning it. This also represents a measure of his followers on Twitter.

Gaiman, Neil. "Neil Gaiman's Facebook Fan Page." Facebook. 12 Feb. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 
    2010.

        Neil Gaiman's Facbook page, this demonstrates how many fans he had on Facebook in

     a period of less than a week. It demonstrates Mr. Gaiman's reach in this medium. 

Gaiman, Neil. "With Great Power comes, well, something..." Neil Gaiman's Journal. 11 Feb.
    2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2010. 

        This entry from author Neil Gaiman's blog discusses the results of what happened after he 

    posted a message on Twitter regarding a dispute between a small crafter on Etsy and a large 

    British consumer goods firm. This shows how a public message can unexpectedly become viral.
Hameed, Bilal. "ALERT: AUTOMATION LABS DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR
    FACEBOOK PROFILE." All Facebook. All Facebook. 3 Feb 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2010.

        This is one of the earliest mentions of the Automation Labs hoax that appeared on 

    the web outside Facebook. This particular hoax is of interest because it is multi-medium, showing 

    up in slightly different forms on both Facebook and in forwarded electronic mail.
KMBC. "Facebook Rumor Hits Gas Station Owner." KMBC.com. KMBC.com. 27 Jan.
    2010. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.

        Local news coverage of an Indian gas station owner in Excelsior Springs, Missouri who has 

    become the victim of a Facebook smear campaign. While viral messages usually target celebrities

     or political figures, this demonstrates how they can be used against average citizens and the effects 

    it can have on the victims daily life.
Lannen, Andrew. "Facebook 'Automation Labs' Warning" Facebook. Hoax-Slayer group.
    3 Feb. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2010.

        This entry is a post on an Australian Facebook discussion board regarding the effects of the Automation 

    Labs Hoax on those whose names came up in Facebook's suggestive search. Those parties received 

    threatening and harassing messages through Facebook, leading to the decision to by Facebook to block the 

    viral message server side.
Lee, Alfred McClung, Elizabeth Briant Lee. The Fine Art of Propaganda. San Franciso:
    International Society for General Semantics, 1939. Print.

        This book discusses propaganda, and specifically the highly emotionally charged language used in it. This 

    language is also typical in viral messages and this source will be used to compare the radio messages of Nazi 

    sympathizer Father Coughlin which are analyzed in this work to several popular viral messages which have travelled 

    over Facebook and through electronic mail forwards.

Lieben-Nowell, David, Jon Kleinberg. "Tracing Information Flow on a Global Scale 
    Using Internet Chain-Letter Data." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 
    of the United States of America. 105.12 (2008): 4633 - 4638. Wilson. Web. 10 Feb. 
    2010.

        The only extant study of this phenomena. Lieben-Nowell and Kleinberg look at two internet petitions and 

    model the number of people who received, signed and forwarded these petitions.

Make-A-Wish Foundation. "Chain Letters." Make-A-Wish Foundation. n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2010. 

        The Make-A-Wish foundation's educational page regarding chain letters. It identifies a number of hoaxes which involve 

    the organization, discuss some of the negative effects these messages have caused and suggest how to deal with 

    receiving such a message. This source will be used in examining the responses of groups that have been targeted by

    viral messages, and how effective their response was.

Meredith, Leslie. "Facebook Hoax May Be Clever Marketing Ploy." MSNBC. MSNBC. 4
    Feb. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2010.

        Coverage of the Automation Hoax by CNBC. This source will be used in examining the claim that the hoax was a 

    form of viral marketing.

Mikkelson, Barabara, David P. Mikkelson. Snopes. Snopes.com. n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2010.

        A website devoted to collecting, examining and debunking rumors, and urban legends on the internet. This source 

    provides the largest library of viral messages sent by email anywhere and analyses of those messages. It also tracks the 

    popularity of these messages.
Otterman, Sharon. "E-Mail Hoax Raises Hopes Of a Day Off." New York Times 5 Jan.
    2010: A18(L). Academic OneFile. Web. 11 Feb. 2010.

        A New York Times account of a school disrupted by a viral message that was then spread further by students. An anonymous 

    hoaxer emailed students in the guise of an administration official, calling off school for the next day. Students further circulated 

    the message on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and electronic mail.

Roeper, Richard. Urban Legends: The Truth Behind All Those Deliciously Entertaining
    Myths That Are Absolutely, Positively, 100% Not True. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career,
    1999. NetLibrary. Web. 7 Feb. 2010.

        This source details a cautionary viral message, and which will be used as an example of the type.

Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.

        This source details two of the earliest historical viral messages, a chain letter and a message mangled in transmission. This source 

    will be used to provide historical context and demonstrate the increasingly complicated web of senders and receivers.

United States. Agency Group 09. "EMAIL HOAX FLOUTS POLICY." Washington:
    FDCH, 1999. EBSCO. 7 Feb. 2010.

        This press release which was written on behalf of the United States Marine Corps, details their policy on electronic media and discusses 

    some of the problems that organization has had with viral message traffic. This will be used as an example of how large organizations deal 

    with this problem, and will be used to asess the effectiveness of various strategies.

Watzlawick, Paul. How Real is Real? New York: Vintage, 1976. Print.

        This source discusses communication in the context of philosophy, and in how human beings perceive the world around them. This source 

    will be used to provide detail on mistranslation, which is what happens when a message is garbled or otherwise modified beyond what the original 

    communication intended. It discusses several incidents of mass hysteria which are comparable to present day viral messages and the public reactions 

    to those messages. It also provides insight into why many senders who are otherwise not credulous in their daily lives may be fooled by electronic mail 

    or social media posting.