Alice Marwick, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, discusses her newly-released book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Marwick reflects on her interviews with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technology journalists, and venture capitalists to show how social media affects social dynamics and digital culture. Marwick answers questions such as: Does “status conscious” take on a new meaning in the age of social media? Is the public using social media the way the platforms’ creators intended? How do you quantify the value of online social interactions? Are social media users becoming more self-censoring or more transparent about what they share? What’s the difference between self-branding and becoming a micro-celebrity? She also shares her advice for how to make Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and other platforms more beneficial for you.
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David Garcia, post doctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and co-author of Social Resilience in Online Communities: The Autopsy of Friendster, discusses the concept of social resilience and how online communities, like Facebook and Friendster, withstand changes in their environment.
Garcia’s paper examines one of the first online social networking sites, Friendster, and analyzes its post-mortem data to learn why users abandoned it.
Garcia goes on to explain how opportunity cost and cost benefit analysis can affect a user’s decision whether or not to remain in an online community.
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Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.”
As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most importantly that websites obtain the “verifiable consent” of a child’s parent before collecting personal information about that child or giving that child access to interactive functionality that might allow the child to share their personal information with others. The law was intended primarily to “enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities” as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children.
Yet advocates of expanding COPPA—or “COPPA 2.0″—see COPPA’s verifiable parental consent framework as a means for imposing broad regulatory mandates in the name of online child safety and concerns about social networking, cyber-harassment,
etc. Two COPPA 2.0 bills are currently pending in New Jersey and Illinois. The accelerated review of COPPA to be conducted by the FTC next year (five years ahead of schedule) is likely to bring to Washington serious talk of expanding COPPA—even though Congress clearly rejected covering adolescents age 13-16 when COPPA was first proposed back in 1998.
We’ll discuss some of the key points of our paper in a series of blog posts, but here are the top nine reasons for rejecting COPPA 2.0, in that such an approach would:
- Burden the free speech rights of adults by imposing age verification mandates on many sites used by adults, thus restricting anonymous speech and essentially converging—in terms of practical consequences—with the unconstitutional Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA;
- Burden the free speech rights of adolescents to speak freely on—or gather information from—legal and socially beneficial websites;
- Hamper routine and socially beneficial communication between adolescents and adults;
- Reduce, rather than enhance, the privacy of adolescents, parents and other adults because of the massive volume of personal information that would have to be collected about users for authentication purposes (likely including credit card data);
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By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
As we noted in our intro to this ongoing series, Google’s tenth anniversary has passed with Googlephobia reaching new heights of hysteria.
But is Google really too big and dangerous, or are people just too lazy to find other alternatives to each of the wonderful services that Google offers? If one is truly paranoid about the firm’s supposed dominance, it doesn’t take much effort to live a Google-free life. To prove it, we set out to find alternatives to each of the services that Google provides. After awhile, we got a little tired of compiling alternatives in each category and just provided links for the additional choices at your disposal. It’s tough to see what the fuss is about with the cornucopia of choices at our disposal. If you don’t like Google, then just don’t use it or any of its services. The choice is yours.
In each case, we’ve listed Google first, even though Google may not be the market leader (
e.g., Google’s relatively unknown social network Orkut).
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.