Conference Tools for Twitter

Recent experience of following (and contributing to) Twitter stream at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association inspired a number of ideas (not all original, I'm sure, and some probably already implemented) in connection with Twitter and conferences:

1. Conference organizers should devise and disseminate a simple hashtag schemes for sessions/presentations.
2. Set up scheduled tweets that announce sessions, say, 15 minutes ahead of time.  Tweet can contain a link to web page with detailed information about session.
3. Presenters can submit brief, say 5 to 10,  tweet summary of the points they are making and these can be automatically scheduled to be tweeted during the talk.
4. If talks are being live streamed, start of each talk can be marked by a tweet with URL to the stream.  Major point tweets could be synced to location in recorded video/audio.
5. Develop an app that aggregates and archives live tweets of presentations for live and followup discussion.

What would you add?

Sociology of Information Nuggets

Elections and a three course semester have crowded out blogging over last few months.  And so, the blogger's cop out of pointers to some recent interesting reads:

Maya Alexandri has a fun post, "What Thomas Cromwell had in common with the Dewey decimal system" calling attention the theme of information revolutions as noted in the Joan Acocella review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall in The New Yorker.  Alexandri and Acocella note interesting similarity of Cromwell's time and our own as eras in which "information is being radically reorganized."  It's precisely the desire to clarify such recapitulations that drives my own work on the sociology of information.


Semil Shah offers a  panegyric post about Timehop, an app that automatically sends you a photo of what you were doing a year ago today.  It purports, among other things, to be a "solution" to the problem of having boxes of memories that you either never find the time to look at or into which you unintentionally dump hour or hour of time you don't have.  Shah's optimistic take is

The carousel of old slides, the cigar box of warped pictures, and the Instagrams you’ve taken, now in your pocket, delivered to you in just the right way.

There are some great research questions swirling around issues like personal memory, artifacts, the externalization and automation of recall, search as every-ready reconstruction of the past.  Stay tuned.

Scoops in Journalism and Everyday Life

Jay Rosen has a post today titled "Four Types of Scoops" that will surely make it into my sociology of information book.  The four types are the "enterprise scoop" where the reporter who gets the scoop gets it by doing the "finding out."  The information may be deliberately hidden or obscured by routine practice, but it would not have become known to the public without the work of the reporter.  Then there is its opposite, the the "ego scoop": the news would have come out anyway, but the scooper gets (or provokes) a tip or equivalent.  The third type Rosen calls the "trader's" scoop where early info has instrumental value -- as in a stock tip.  Finally there is the "thought scoop."  This is when the writer puts two and two together or otherwise "connects the dots" to, as he says, "apprehend--name and frame--something that's happening out there before anyone else recognizes it."

The information order of everyday life is conditioned by information exchanges that might be similarly categorized.  But even before that we'd notice a distinction between exchanges that are NOT experiences as scoops -- I think there are two extremes: information passed on bucket-brigade style with no claim at all to having generated it or deserving any credit for its content or transmission.  "Hey, they've run out of eggs, pass it on, eh?"  and statements of a truly personal nature: "I'm not feeling well today" that do not reflect one's position or location or worth in the world.

Between these there are all manner of instances in which people play the scoop game in everyday interaction.  The difference between an ordinary person and a reporter in this regard is that the reporter's scoop is vis a vis "the rest of the media" while the scoopness of the person's scoop is centered in the information ecology of the recipient.  We have all met the inveterate ego scooper who moves from other to other to other trying to stay one step ahead of the diffusing information so that s/he can deliver the "scoop" over and over.  And the enterprising gossip who pries information loose from friends and acquaintances and is always ready with the latest tidbit.   In everyday interaction the wielder of the traders' scoop often generates the necessary arbitrage because others are willing to "pay" for information they can use as ego scoops.  Alas, as in the media, the thought scoop is probably the rarest form in everyday life too.  It's probably less self-conscious in everyday interaction and too more ephemeral which is too bad.  Those conversational insights are probably more often lost than their counterparts in "print."

Tomorrow's Social Science Today? By Techies?

If you generate the data, the analysts will come.  And more and more of the technologies of everyday life generate data, lots of it. "Big data" takes big tools and big tools cost big bucks.  The science of big data is mostly social science but, for the most part, it's not being done by social scientists.  What's left out when social scientists leave themselves out of the conversation? And what happens to the funding for non-big-data social science when resource-hungry projects like this emerge?  And what will be the effect on the epistemological status of non-big-data social science?

from the New York Times...

THE BAY CITIZEN

Berkeley Group Digs In to Challenge of Making Sense of All That Data

By JEANNE CARSTENSEN

Published: April 7, 2012

"It comes in “torrents” and “floods” and threatens to “engulf” everything that stands in its path.

No, it is not a tsunami, it is Big Data, the incomprehensibly large amount of raw, often real-time data that keeps piling up faster and faster from scientific research, social media, smartphones — virtually any activity that leaves a digital trace.

The sheer size of the pile (measured in petabytes, one million gigabytes, or even exabytes, one billion gigabytes) combined with its complexity has threatened to overwhelm just about everybody, including the scientists who specialize in wrangling it. “It’s easier to collect data,” said Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, “and harder to make sense of it.”

Read full article...

Is There a Right to Data Collection?

What's more socially harmful: politicians not knowing what sound bite will play well or voters being mislead by scurrilous misinformation?

New Hampshire is one state where legislators listened when voters complained about "push-polling" -- the practice of making campaign calls that masquerade as surveys or polls.  Perhaps the most infamous example is George Bush's campaign calling South Carolinians to ask what they think if John McCain were to have fathered an illegitimate black baby.

The gist of M. D. Shear's article, Law Has Polling Firms Leery of Work in New Hampshire" (NYT 1 March 2012) is that pollsters and political consultants are whining that "legitimate" operations are getting gun-shy about polling in New Hampshire for fear of being fined.  Actual surveys won't get done, they suggest, because poorly worded legislation creates too much illegitimate legal liability.

They do not take issue with what the law requires and some even call it well-intentioned. Paragraph 16a of section 664 of Title  53 of New Hampshire statutes requires those who administer push-polls to identify themselves as doing so on behalf of a candidate or issue. In other words, if that's what you are up to, you need to say so.

The problem, they say, is that the law is poorly written -- good intentions gone bad, they suggest.  So, what does the statute actually say?  Not so ambiguous, really.  It says if you call pretending to be taking a survey but really you are spreading information about opposition candidates then you are push-polling:

XVII. "Push-polling" means:

1. Calling voters on behalf of, in support of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office by telephone; and
2. Asking questions related to opposing candidates for public office which state, imply, or convey information about the candidates' character, status, or political stance or record; and
3. Conducting such calling in a manner which is likely to be construed by the voter to be a survey or poll to gather statistical data for entities or organizations which are acting independent of any particular political party, candidate, or interest group.

And so, the question arises: why aren't pollsters themselves taking steps to stamp out the practice?  One supposes the answer is that they still want to use it, even if the "good guys" would not stoop to the level of sleaziness that Bush and Lee Atwater practiced.

Interestingly, one of the objections that the pollsters raised was that "complying with the law by announcing the candidate sponsoring the poll would corrupt the data being gathered."  It's interesting because they don't think that constantly adjusting question wording and techniques that are technically push-polling even if they could stay inside the New Hampshire law would corrupt the data.

But this brings me to my real point.  As a practicing social scientist I am consistently disheartened and often angered at the abuse of survey research engaged in by political parties and organizations.   I receive "surveys" from the DNC, DCCC, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, etc. etc. that triply insult me:

• They are, in fact, often push-polls (if gentle ones) whose real purpose is to inform and incite not collect data.
• They are couched disingenuously in terms of providing me an opportunity for input, to have my voice heard.
• As research instruments they are almost always C- or worse, violating the most basic tenets of survey construction.

Perhaps I should just humor them and wink since we do both know what's really going on.  Sometimes the political actor in me is content to do so.  But at other times the information order pollution that they represent really gets to me.  These things corrupt the data of other legitimate research efforts. If the results are used, they amplify the error in the information order.  These things undermine social information trust.  They cheapen the very idea of opinion research.  Imagine a certain amount of what passes as clinical trials is really just PR for pharmaceutical companies.  Or imagine that the "high stakes testing" used to study the education system was really just a ploy to indoctrinate children.  Or that marine biologists were just sending a message to the mollusks they study.

As a consultant helping organizations do research I used to ask "are you trying to find out something or are you trying to show something?" To this we could add "or are you just putting on a show?"

There's something disturbing when an industry like political polling can't do better than suggest that the one state that has taken steps to address a real democracy-threatening practice within that industry is somehow "the problem."  A republican pollster whined that the law has “a harmful effect on legitimate survey research and message testing that really impairs our ability to do credible polling,” as if we should care.  It doesn't take a Ph.D. to see that a little ignorance on the part of politicians about attitudes in New Hampshire as the price for stopping a practice that corrupts public deliberation is a tradeoff well worth making.

Should Your Company Tell You Your Secrets

Nice sociology of info two-fer in Forbes article about Target being able to detect pregnancy based on purchases (see also "How Companies Learn Your Secrets"in NYT). The first connection is obvious: data mining lets company detect information "given off" by ordinary behavior. Second is the notification question. In the article the "story" is that Target outs young woman to her dad by sending targeted circular for maternity supplies.

So now we are in the situation where data mining companies have to interrogate their notification obligations just like doctors, lawyers, and spouses. I will work up an analysis in subsequent post. I anticipate insights about how corporate-ness of knower figures into the notification norm calculation.

Is Your Information Your Business?

The Business section is fast becoming the sociology of information section.

In "Twitter Is All in Good Fun, Until It Isn’t," David Carr writes about Roland Martin being sanctioned by CNN because of controversial Twitter posts.  On the Bits page, Nick Bolton's article "So Many Apologies, So Much Data Mining," tells of David Morin, head of the company that produces the social network app, Path ("The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love."), that got into hot water last week when a programmer in Singapore noticed it hijacked users' address books without asking. On page B3 we find a 14 inch article by T. Vega about new research from Pew about how news media websites fail to make optimal use of online advertising.

More on those in future posts.  Right next to the Pew article, J. Brustein's "Start-Ups Seek to Help Users Put a Price on Their Personal Data" profiles the startup "Personal" -- one of several that are trying to figure out how to let internet users capitalize on their personal data by locking it up in a virtual vault and selling access bit by bit.

This last one is of particular interest to me. Back in the early 90s I floated an idea that alarmed my social science colleagues: why not let study participants own their data? The idea was inspired by complaints that well-meaning researchers at Yale, where I was a graduate student at the time, routinely made their careers on the personal information they, or someone else, had collected from poor people in New Haven. The original source of that complaint was a community activist who had a more colorful way of describing the relationship between researcher and research subject.

The idea would be to tag data garnered in surveys and other forms of observation with an ID that could be matched with an escrow database (didn't really exist then, but now a part of "Software as a Service (Saas)"). When a researcher wanted to make use of data, she or he would include in the grant proposal some sort of data fee that would be delivered to the intermediary and then distributed as data royalties to the individuals the data concerned. The original researcher would still offer whatever enticements to participation (a bit like an advance for a book). The unique identifier held by the intermediary would allow data linking producing a valuable tool for research and an opportunity for research subjects to continue to collect royalties as their data was "covered" by new research projects just as a song writer does.

The most immediate objections were technical -- real but solvable, but then came the reasoned objections. This would make research more expensive! Perhaps, but another way to see this is that it would be a matter of more fully accounting for social costs and value, and for recognizing that researchers were taking advantage of latent value in their act of aggregation (similar to issues raised about Facebook recently). Another objection was that the purpose of the research was already to help these people. True enough. But why should they bear all the risk of that maybe working out, maybe not?

And so the conversation continued. I'm not sure I like the idea of converting personal information into monetary value; I think it sidesteps some important human/social/cultural considerations about privacy, intimacy, and the ways that information behavior is integral to our sense of self and and sense of relationships. But I do think it is critically important that we think carefully about the information order and how the value of information is created by surveillance and aggregation and how we want to think about what happens to the information we give, give up, and give off.

Related

• Business Insider. 2011. "Here's How Much A Unique Visitor Is Worth"
• Morey, Tim. 2011. "What's Your Personal Data Worth?" DesignMind blog. January 18, 2011
• Moody, Glyn. 2010. "'What "Nothing to Hide' is Hiding," on Open... blog 11 Jan 2010.
• Muffett, Alec. 2010. "Understanding Your Personal Information’s Value = The End of 'Nothing To Hide'" dropsafe blog 13 Jan 2010.
• Personal.com Blog
• Reger, Joe. 2005. "The Time Value of Personal Information," JoeReger.com blog 27 Dec 2005.

Prying Information Loose and Dealing with Loose Information

A sociology of information triptych this morning. Disclosure laws that fail to fulfill their manifest/intended function, the secret work of parsing public information, and the pending capacity to record everything all bear on the question of the relationship between states and information.

In a 21 Jan 2012 NYT article, "I Disclose ... Nothing," Elisabeth Rosenthal (@nytrosenthal) suggests that despite increasing disclosure mandates we may not, in fact, be more informed. Among the obviating forces are information overload, dearth of interpretive expertise, tendency of organizations to hide behind "you were told...", formal rules provide organizations with blueprint for how to play around with technicalities (as, she notes, Republican PACs have done, using name changes and re-registration to "reset" their disclosure obligation clocks), routinization (as in the melodic litanies of side-effects in drug adverts), and the simple fact that people are not in a position to act on information even it is abundantly available and unambiguous. On the other side, the article notes that there is a whole "industry" out there -- journalists, regulators, reporters who can data mine the disclosure information even if individuals cannot take advantage.

Rachel Martin's (@rachelnpr) piece on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, CIA Tracks Public Information For The Private Eye describes almost the mirror image of this: how intelligence agencies are building their infrastructure for trying to find patterns in and making sense of the gadzillions of bits of public information that just sits their for all to see. It's another case that hints at an impossibility theorem about "connecting the dots" a priori.

And finally, in another NPR story, "Technological Innovations Help Dictators See All" Rachel Martin interviews John Villasenor about his paper, "Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments" on the idea that data storage has become so inexpensive that there is no reason for governments (they focus on authoritarian ones, but no reason to limit it) not to collect everything (even if, as the first two stories remind us, they may currently lack the capacity to do anything with it). I if surveillance uptake and data rot will prove to be competing tendencies.


The first piece suggests research questions: what are the variables that determine whether disclosure is "useful"? what features of disclosure rules generate cynical work-arounds? if "more is not always better," what is? can we better theorize the relationship between "knowing," open-ness, transparency, disclosure and democracy than we have so far?

The second piece really cries out for an essay capturing the irony of how the information pajamas get turned inside out with the spy agency trying to see what's in front of everyone (we are reminded in a perverse sort of way of Poe's "The Purloined Letter"). Perhaps we'll no longer associate going "under cover" with the CIA.

And the alarm suggested in the third piece is yet another entry under what I (and maybe others) have called the informational inversion -- when the generation, acquisition, and storage of information dominates by orders of magnitude our capacity to do anything with it.

Journalism and Research Again

Lots of Twitter and blog activity in response to NYT article about Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff research paper on effects of teachers on students' lives.

No small amount of the commentary is about how when journalists pick "interesting" bits out of research reports to construct a "story" they often create big distortions in the social knowledge-base.

So what can reporters do when trying to explain the significance of new research, without getting trapped by a poorly-supported sound bite?

Sherman Dorn has an excellent post on the case, "When reporters use (s)extrapolation as sound bites," that ends with some advice:

1. "If a claim could be removed from the paper without affecting the other parts, it is more likely to be a poorly-justified (s)implification/(s)extrapolation than something that connects tightly with the rest of the paper."
2. "If a claim is several orders of magnitude larger than the data used for the paper (e.g., taking data on a few schools or a district to make claims about state policy or lifetime income), don’t just reprint it. Give readers a way to understand the likelihood of that claim being unjustified (s)extrapolation."
3. "More generally, if a claim sounds like something from Freakonomics, hunt for a researcher who has a critical view before putting it in a story."

See also Matthew Di Carlo on ShankerBlog, Bruce Baker on SchoolFinance 101, and Cedar Reiner on Cedar's Digest

New Book on Data Journalism

Simon Rogers has a new book called Facts are Sacred: The power of data coming out as a part of the Guardian Shorts series with a Kindle Edition available now from Amazon.UK and in January from Amazon in the US.

I was turned on to this project when I stumbled across this excellent collaborative project visualizing the spread of rumor via Twitter during last summer's London riots.

For the last hour or so I've been having that "I should have written this book" feeling -- not a pleasant feeling, but a recommendation to be sure. A nice feature of the book is that it blends boosterism and manifesto with how to and reportage on best practices. That brings it in as a book that won't be perfect for anyone, but has something for each of it's several potential audiences.

Google Knol into the Dustbin of E-history

After 15 weeks of non-stop work, a moment for thinking about something other than classes and budgets came available today. Recently, while googling about, I became re-acquainted with the idea of a "knol" -- a unit of knowledge -- and the associated web service that Google has run these last number of years. And the fact that it is going away. Or rather it is evolving: into something called Annotum which describes itself this way:

Develop a simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles
Deliver an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles

The google knol thing has been around since 2007. The initial beta announcement described the thithis way

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects.

I remember, now, encountering it back in the day -- I may even have written some knols -- but it didn't stay on the radar screen for long. It was portrayed at the time as an alternative to Wikipedia -- with it's distinguishing characteristic being "authorship" :

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It's their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good (googleblog, 2008).

The divergence between Wikipedia's modus operandi and that of Knol (now Annotum) provides a nice case study jumping off point for thinking aboutf how we are figuring out the relationship between crowd sourcing and authorship, peer production, open source, intellectual authority, and how platform as institution feeds into how we think about content legitimacy.

Wikipedia harvests (harnesses, makes possible the emergence or realization) of a potentiality that, in a sense, has always been there, but represents a completely new mode of knowledge aggregation and access.  A project like Knol or Annotatum, on the other hand, is about removing the friction from existing processes in a way that makes more of what's already done happen more easily.

Both approaches thumb their nose at property-based organizational middle-men as the arbiter of intellectual legitimacy, but exploring the contrast between them is instructive.

I am, of course, not the first to think about this.  One knol author suggested that the real point of contrast is "Wikipedia does not allow the visionary or individualistic type of knowledge to be developed, because Wikipedia does not allow original content." And if you google "knol vs. wikipedia" you'll find lots of others -- my initial, quick and dirty assessment is that most are boosters for one or the other approach but I'm guessing there will be some grist for the mill for the chapter in The Sociology of Information where I'll talk about the social organization of information aggregation.

Bottom line: I'm back on the job.

Gossip, CMC, and Tight Knit Communities

U.S.

In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious

By A. G. SULZBERGER

Published: September 19, 2011

As more people share gossip over the Internet rather than over coffee and eggs, anonymous, and startlingly negative, posts have provoked fights, divorce and worse.

Good eye/mind catches logical fallacy in WSJ Analysis

Jean Whit notes that the authors of this piece about Wall Street Journal number crunching about sovereign debt default and bond ratings, WSJ Analysis: Rating Firms Not Effective at Predicting Government Defaults, got their analysis backwards. A classic case of sampling on the dependent variable or percentaging in the wrong direction: how many of the defaults had a given rating rather than how many with a given rating end up defaulting. See Jean's comment at bottom of post.

GPS, Orwell, and the 4th Amendment

The 9/11 anniversary reminds us, among all the other things, of the questions of government surveillance that have arisen in the last decade, some related to terrorism, some reflecting challenges raised by new technologies, and many at the intersection of these.

This fall, the US Supreme Court will consider whether law enforcement should be able to attach a GPS tracking device on a vehicle without a warrant. Adam Liptak reports on the issue in "Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS" in today's New York Times. Lower courts have ruled in different directions on the question.

One way to think about it is in terms of aggregating information and whether there's an emergent property that changes how we would classify obtaining, possessing, or using information. Consider, for example, one's daily round. Leave the house at 7:30, stop for coffee, pick up the dry-cleaning, get stuck in traffic, arrive at work, park in the lot over behind the pine trees, etc. All of these are done in public with no expectation of privacy. And then it all happens again tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow. Except the dry cleaning stop is only made on Mondays and every other Friday there's a stop at a bar on the edge of downtown. If there is a GPS attached to your car, the separate public facts of any given daily round -- the sequence and full set of which perhaps only you know -- are assembled as a unit of information. And, if the GPS is there for a month, both the overall, boring, day-in-day-out pattern and the regular exceptions and the truly unique exceptions are all a part of the information bundle available "out there."

 Even if all of the component information is about mundane, innocent, non-embarrassing activities, indeed has all the properties that would exclude it from your understanding of "private" information, does your willingness to do these things in public view aggregate to willingness for information about them to be aggregated into a tracking record?

See also
UNITED STATES v. GARCIA No. 06-2741.
New York Times. Articles on Surveillance of Citizens by Government
New York Times. Articles on Global Positioning System

From Musical Consonance to Styles of Thought

An article published in Physical Review Letters, reported on in Science News, describes a mathematical model of how neurons can distinguish consonant sounds (say, a C-major chord) from dissonant ones (say, D-E-F). A simple network of neurons, behaving like neurons behave, produces qualitatively different outputs depending on the quantitative differences in the sound frequencies it receives as inputs.

Very interesting as an example of an information processing system with emergent information processing capacities.

I suspect something, at least metaphorically, similar might go on in the processing/experience of consonant ideas. At first I'm tempted to say "least that part of consonant or resonant ideas that we want to ascribe to consonance in the external world" but I think you could take it further and imagine the development of structures along similar lines for the detection of "constructed" consonance. Eventually, one could arrive at mechanisms for implementing "styles of thought" that would not be limited to algorithmic systems that "crank through a set of data" in the same way every time. Rather, we could talk about styles of thought in terms of the kinds of thoughts, tropes, logics, metaphors that would appeal as consonant with "everything else I believe." Or, the flip side of this would be to move toward mechanisms for cognitive dissonance.

 Just a highly speculative bit of musing, but clearly news of this research did strike a chord with some stuff I've been thinking about for a long time.

Sociology of Information in the New York Times

BUSINESS DAY

The Beauty Contest That’s Shaking Wall St.

By ROBERT J. SHILLER

Published: September 3, 2011

Why all the sharp swings in the stock market? To Robert J. Shiller, it’s a case of investors trying to guess what other investors are thinking....

Seeking not what is the case, but what others probably think is, or even what others think that others think is...

U.S.

Perry’s Blunt Views in Books Get New Scrutiny as He Joins Race

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Published: September 2, 2011

When Rick Perry, the governor of Texas and a presidential hopeful, debates his rivals, his assertions on climate change, Social Security and health care could put him to the test....

Once it's out there, it's out there...

U.S.

WikiLeaks Leaves Names of Diplomatic Sources in Cables

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: August 29, 2011

The antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks published nearly 134,000 diplomatic cables, including many that name confidential sources....

Developing story -- a leak, a revelation, or just a mistake?  (See also previous posts on Wikileaks.)

Bloomberg Contra Notification Norms

Consider a recent NYT article by Mosi Secret and Michael Barbaro about the controversy over New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's failure to inform the public about the actual reason -- an arrest in Washington, D.C. for domestic violence* -- deputy mayor Stephen Goldsmith resigned this summer.

 According to the article, Bloomberg "rejected the notion that he had an obligation to tell the public of the arrest." He is quote saying, “I always assumed it would come out, but it’s not my responsibility.”

 It's a first rate example of notification in the public sphere and of how overlapping relational circles can suggest contradictory notification rules.

 It turns out that it's not just a notification issue, though. Initially the mayor said the resignation was to pursue other opportunities -- in other words, he was pretty explicitly misleading not just failing to reveal.

 But back to notification. Bloomberg, apparently, takes the line is that his first obligation was instrumental, making sure "he no longer works for the city." And then his next obligation is to treat Goldsmith and his family with respect. His critics suggest that his first obligation is to the public, although the one quoted in the article, Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, sticks with the instrumental saying Bloomberg has responsibility to "protect the public, not to protect a staff member” according to the article. But nobody really seems to be saying that there was any instrumental damage done by the non-notification and it's a bit disingenuous to say that getting Goldsmith off the city payroll was facilitated by non-notification.

 The issue, then, is how the various relational imperatives governing who ought to tell whom what when and how interact. New York City law, as it happens, has something to say: "the city’s Department of Investigation must be notified" if an official is arrested in the city (not clear by whom), but this did not come into play here since arrest was in DC. The article reports a debate within the mayor's team about the matter with the mayor saying that Goldsmith should get to decide how much to reveal. And after the fact Goldsmith, who took some heat for not indicating in his resignation announcement what the reason was, has "admitted" that HE had a responsibility to be more forthcoming at the time, though he added that he thought that immediacy of his resignation "mooted the need for further explanation."

So, does the mayor's official role and its informational obligations trump the social obligation to allow another "ownership" of his own announcement?   Does the consequential outcome -- resignation -- obviate the obligation to notify (for the record, Goldsmith says he was wrong on that count). If there is public outrage based only/mainly on the relational expectation of "we should have been told," does it support sanctions? Does Bloomberg's citation of a norm that certain personal situations are one's own to disclose get him off the hook? Does affirmatively suggesting other reasons rather than simply failing to disclose the actual ones cross another line entirely?

 Bottom line: in many locations within the social, institutional, moral orders, the import of information behaviors goes far beyond the instrumental, consequential, substantive realm.

 * The case is not being pursued as Mr. Goldsmith's wife dropped the complaint.

Information Control and Politics: Not Just "Over There"

Cell Reception Cut In San Francisco To Hinder Protest

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

August 13, 2011

Transit officials blocked cellphone reception in San Francisco train stations for three hours to disrupt planned demonstrations over a police shooting.

Officials with the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, better known as BART, said Friday that they turned off electricity to cellular towers in four stations from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday. The move was made after BART learned that protesters planned to use mobile devices to coordinate a demonstration on train platforms. ... <MORE>

This is your Background Check on Steroids

An article, "Social Media History Becomes a New Job Hurdle," by Jennifer Preston in yesterday's NYT is obvious fodder for the sociology of information.  It's primarily about Social Intelligence, a web start up that puts together dossiers about potential employees for its clients by "scraping" the internet.

Issues that show up here:

• the federal government (FTC) was looking into whether the company's practices might violate the fair credit reporting act (FCRA), but determined it was in compliance
• "privacy advocates" said to be concerned that it might encourage employers to consider information not relevant to job performance (why not fair employment advocates? -- later in the article we do find mention of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission)
• what do we make of the statement: "Things that you can’t ask in an interview are the same things you can’t research"?
• since this is really just an extension of the idea of the "background check" -- can we think a little more systematically about that as a general idea prior to getting mired in details of internet presence searches?

Perhaps more alarming than the mere question of information surfacing was the suggestion by the company's founder, Max Drucker, about how a given bit of scraped information might be interpreted.  To wit, he mentioned fact that a person had joined a particular Facebook group might "mean you don’t like people who don’t speak English."  According the reporter he posed this question rhetorically: "Does that mean...?"  This little bit of indirect marketing via fear mongering adds another layer to what we need to look at: what sort of information processing (including interpretation and assessment) are necessary in a world where larger and larger amounts of information are available (cf. CIA problem of turning acquired information into intelligence via analysis).

Drucker characterized the company's goal as "to conduct pre-employment screenings that would help companies meet their obligation to conduct fair and consistent hiring practices while protecting the privacy of job candidates."  This raises another interesting question: if an agent has a mandated responsibility for some level of due diligence and information is, technically, available, will a company necessarily sprout up to collect and provide this information?  Where would feasibility, cost, and the uncertainty of interpretation enter the equation?  Can the employer, for example, err on the side of caution and exclude the individual who joined the Facebook group because that fact MIGHT mean something that the employer could be liable for not having discovered?  Will another company emerge that helps to assess the likelihood of false positives or false negatives?  What about if it is only a matter of what the company wants in terms of its corporate culture?  Can we calculate the cost (perhaps in terms of loss of human capital, recruitment costs, etc.) of such technically assisted vigilance?

Anonymity and the Demise of the Ephemeral

The New York Times email update had the right headline "Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone" but made a common mistake in the blurb: "Pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts have made privacy all but a thing of the past."

It's going to be important in our policy conversations in coming months and years to get a handle on the difference between privacy and anonymity (and others such as confidentiality) and how we think about rights to, and expectations of, each.

There's a long continuum of social information generation/acquisition/transmission along which these various phenomena can be located:

• artifactual "evidence" can suggest that someone did something (an outburst on a bus, a car  broken into, a work of art created)
• meta-evidence provides identity trace information about the person who did something (a fingerprint, a CCTV picture, DNA, an IP address, brush strokes)
• trace evidence can be tied to an identity (fingerprints on file, for example)
• data links can suggest other information about a person so identified

Technology is making each of these easier, faster, cheaper and more plentiful.  From the point of view of the question, whodunnit?, we seem to be getting collectively more intelligent: we can zero in on the authorship of action more than ever before.  But that really hasn't much to do with "privacy," per se.

As Dave Morgan suggests in OnlineSpin (his hook was Facebook's facial recognition technology that allows faces in new photos to be automatically tagged based on previously tagged photos a user has posted) the capacity to connect the dots is a bit like recognizing a famous person on the street, and this, he notes, has nothing to do with privacy.

What it does point to is that an informational characteristic of public space is shifting.  One piece of this is the loss of ephemerality, a sharp increase in the half-life of tangible traces.  Another is, for want of a better term on this very hot morning in Palo Alto, "linkability"; once one piece of information is linked to another, it can easily be linked again.  And this compounds the loss of ephemerality that arises from physical recording alone.

From the point of view of the question asked above, the change can mean "no place to hide," but from the point of view of the answer, it might mean that the path to publicity is well-paved and short.

Some celebrate on both counts as a sort of modernist "the truth will out" or post-modernist Warholesque triumph.  But as pleased as we might be at the capacity of the net to ferret out the real story (the recent unmasking of "Gay Girl in Damascus" yet another example), the same structure can have the opposite effect.  The web also has immense capacity for the proliferation and petrification of falsehood (see, for example, Fine and Ellis 2010 or Sunstein 2009).

Thus, it may well be that the jury is still out on the net effect on the information order.

See also :"No Such Thing as Evanescent Data"