Let’s play a game—thought experiment. Imagine it’s the near future. You’re walking along a city street crowded with storefronts. As you walk past boutiques, cafes, and the Apple Store, your visage follows you. Thanks to advances in facial recognition and other technologies, behavioral marketers have developed the capacity to take your Facebook profile, transform it into a 3-D image, and insert it into ads. That sweater you’re eyeing? In the display, the mannequin wearing it takes on your face and shape. The screen showing a car commercial depicts you behind the wheel. At a travel agency (let’s pretend they still exist—after all, this is a thought experiment!), you see yourself sunning on a beach, while the real you is bundled up against the cold. The ads might show you with an attractive stranger or a lost love (after all, Facebook knows whom you used to date). Or they could contain scenes of you and your happy family. No longer do you have to picture yourself in the ad—technology has that covered.
Alluding Misnomer
WhoWhatWhenWhereHow + Subtext = Story
We can’t jump from skyscrapers like River Song or point guns at CIA agents like Irene Adler, however much we admire them for it. But we can be thoughtful and we can be kind. We can choose a career we love and we can be a friend to someone who needs us. I can’t hope to be Irene or River, but I can be Molly. I would rather be Molly.
Molly Hooper is important because she’s not just my hero, but my sister’s as well, and the hero of a hundred other girls who look at her and think, that’s the woman I’d like to see in the mirror. Perhaps she’s even more important to the girls – quiet, kind, stumbling over their words and wishing they could be as cool as River Song – who already see her there.
The Real Woman: Why Molly Hooper is the One Who Counts, Miss Transmission (via nijimei)
Well this needs to be reblogged roughly ten thousand times.
(via roseredhoofbeats)
Those who follow the hobo code: An ethical code was created by Tourist Union #63 during its 1889 National Hobo Convention in St. Louis Missouri. This code was voted upon as a concrete set of laws to govern the Nation-wide Hobo Body, it reads this way;
- Decide your own life, don’t let another person run or rule you.
- When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
- Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
- Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
- When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
- Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals treatment of other hobos.
- When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as bad, if not worse than you.
- Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
- If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
- Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
- When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
- Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
- Do not allow other hobos to molest children, expose to authorities all molesters, they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
- Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
- Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
Jeanie, Will and Adina at the supermarket, 2011 — Isadora Kosofsky
Meet Jeanie, 82, Will, 84, and Adina, 90— the three are bound together in a relationship, you could call it a love triangle of sorts. 18 year old photographer Isadora Kosofsky documents their relationship — read more about it here.
In the future, all the cool kids will have at least three biological parents
Having two biological parents is just the way that humans and all mammals have operated since the beginning of time. But in the future, people may have at least three biological parents, with genes mixed from several people to try and minimize life-threatening genetic diseases. And all the poor kids with only two bio parents will be picked on by the rich kids with four bio parents.
So, when someone would speak normally, and one of the forbidden language forms or pronouns was used, someone else — as a joke — would chime in with “that’s not P.C.”
It was a way for the Left to make fun of itself in a way that it needed to and deserved. Most importantly, it recognizes overtly that the trivia that dogmatists might criticize are unimportant. It was a joke that made a moderate, sensible point of critique within the Left.
The Right took hold of the term, using it to ridicule earnest attempts to make discourse more civil or policy more responsible, painting them with the same brush as the myopic, dogmatic revolution-speak it was originally intended to make light jest of.
It is now assumed by the general public that this notion of “politically correct” speech was a serious one, and that the left tried to impose it on others, and that it is an example of the Left overreaching in social areas. This is patent bullshit, and I am disgusted that nobody who wasn’t around at the time recognizes it. Using the term reinforces the success of this right-wing propaganda move, and I hate it.
I hate orchestrated right-wing propaganda moves.
Infogasm (n.) — The fleeting sense of the erotic that occurs only when a graphic perfectly clarifies complex phenomena through the careful arrangement of its visual data sets.
How’d My Avatar Get Into That Sneaker Ad?
The ethical questions surrounding building consumers into commercial advertising.
By Evan Selinger and Shaun Foster
Slate, Jan. 4, 2012, at 7:10 AM ET
Although the technology in our thought experiment doesn’t yet exist, many of the necessary components already do. There is Autodesk 123D Catch, a program that uses computer vision technology to transform simple photographs into 3-D objects. Facebook has its own recognition tools to help users identify and tag photos. Video games generate avatars using sophisticated motion capture techniques.
It seems that commercial actors and advertising models are well on their way to losing their jobs as the consumer becomes the star. Online ads already allow for browsed items, like a pair of shoes, to follow one across the Internet like a “persistent salesman” in a practice called personalized retargeting. H&M uses “completely virtual models” to market its clothes. These practices can sometimes seem creepy at first, but customers generally adapt to them—and such advances are making users more open to the types of ads and content they see and even expect. While the highly developed personalized advertising featured in Minority Reportremains science fiction, less sophisticated, but still promising versions have been rolled out.
If the technology described in the thought experiment gets developed, how might it be used?
It is especially hard to predict the future of behavioral advertising, given the headline-grabbing controversies Facebook and other outlets inching toward avatar advertisement have faced. There are serious questions about consent, privacy, and data security. Debate rages between industry advocates who want the field of behavioral advertising to remain self-regulating and those endorsing government regulation. Even the seemingly simple solution of opting out is contentious. Some are satisfied with the National Advertising Initiative’s tool, which allows users to opt-out of behavioral advertising from “member companies” that placed cookies on one’s computer, while others defend the stronger Internet equivalent of the “Do Not Call” registry, i.e., the “Do Not Track” option.
This conflict has serious economic consequences. Forbes notes that in order to prevent government regulation, “Ad technology companies will have to spend as much on privacy issues this year and next as they will on developing their new technologies and figuring out when to sell out to Google, Yahoo, or Facebook.” Lobbying efforts will intensify accordingly.
Given all this industry uncertainty, it would be foolish to attempt to predict what will happen. Nevertheless, we can consider several potential scenarios, each with its own ethical trouble spots.
For instance, consumers themselves could become split on the technology. Perhaps the most desirable consumer—affluent, young, early adopters—will see the new advertising technology as cool and fun. Accordingly, a company—if permitted by law—may launch its avatar campaign by opting users into the advertising. But unless a massive cultural shift takes place, smart money says the privacy bell will ring. Companies tend to announce data ownership and management policy in fine print, buried deep in long user agreements that hardly anyone reads. Consequently, sometimes people develop their own expectations about how their data will be used. “I didn’t imagine my image would appear here!” some users might exclaim when first encountering a targeted avatar ad at their favorite grocery store; perhaps they might expect it to appear only in the clothing store, say, where they first opted in to the technology. This shock could prompt vocal concern about images being transferred to undesirable locations.
Advertisers may also have to make hard decisions about how to present these avatars. Right now, despite all the advances in computational power, it remains impossible to digitally duplicate reality. What’s a company to do when it can’t quite make images walk like us, talk like us, or gesture like us? They certainly won’t alienate customers by making them uglier … unless they want to entice users to feel bad about themselves and invest in beauty, fitness, and sartorial products to change things. Or, perhaps companies will use avatars plucked from the “uncanny valley” to entice consumers to purchase upgrades to adorn their virtual selves. If such ads become ubiquitous, this may feel like extortion.
When Jean-Paul Sartre famously said “hell is other people,” he meant life can suck when others don’t affirm our idealized self-conceptions. Advertisers know this. Translating vanity to the visual, they could go with idealized avatars—slimmer, smoother-skinned versions of their real customers. While flattery isn’t inherently a problem, too much distortion can be dangerous. If idealization sucks the viewer in too deeply, the problem of deceptive practice, already at issue in the controversy over “magic mirrors,” could become a hot issue. Shirts simply look much better on the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie avatar versions of us—perhaps too good.
Even if the idealization strategy is used, customers may see through the airbrushing. Undue comparison, with all its associated psychosocial baggage, could rear its ugly head: Young women who berate themselves for being fatter than Size 0 models could fixate on having skinnier avatars. Or the esteem of skinny boys could drop in the presence of their buff doppelgängers. And, since advertising history displayed insensitivity to race, sex, and class, it would be naive to believe that avatars with lighter skin and fancier bling couldn’t possibly get rolled out.
It’s possible that a dominant company could, taking a page from the Nintendo Wii, let users quickly design custom avatars that can be inserted into a range of fun and informative networking functions, but only so long as they also allow the images to be used for commercial purposes. For example, in order to send avatar-texts or avatar-e-mail, or to create avatar-status-updates, you might need to give the companies broadcasting Grandma’s favorite shows the right to bombard her with avatar ads, ones imploring her to buy little Johnny and Susie the latest overpriced toys. She could get powerful visual displays suggesting that her grandkids, who don’t make much time for her anyway, will like her even less if she doesn’t step up and make the purchases. When the practice matures, people might very well feel like social outcasts if they don’t participate.
The problem thus arises of whether it becomes too expensive to opt out of dominant norms. We already know that “the Facebook-free life has its disadvantages in an era when people announce all kinds of major life milestones on the Web.” The same may come to be said for those living off the avatar grid. To signal conformity, parents could end up bragging that little Johnny or Susie made it to the “avatar stage of development”—a point at which they can identify an avatar as a representation of themselves—before classmates.
To get a sense of how resonant these concerns are, we presented a modified version of the thought experiment to college students enrolled in a course on the philosophy of technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This scenario featured personalized avatars inserted into Internet ads—a possibility that future historians might call Targeted Online Advertising 2.0. To heighten the thought experiment, we visited RIT’s Motion Capture Room and demoed technology that quickly converts 2-D into 3-D images, explaining how advertisers could capitalize on similar tools. Braced for vocal concern and hot debate, we instead encountered perplexity. Most students weren’t too bothered. Frankly, they were surprised we expected trepidation.
Let’s imagine that we ran a similar thought experiment several years ago. Would students have been more agitated then? Probably. When social networking was in its infancy, thought experiments about new and transformative practices could seem startling; infringing on privacy and liberty could seem like a big deal. But now, things are different, at least for the younger, tech-savvy crowd. Generation Z can’t conceive of opting out of software that fuels mainstream social networking and online communication. Instead of worrying about major losses in privacy and liberty, they focus on peer behavior. If every else who matters accepts digital trade-offs, why make life hard by being an outlier? After all, the benefits appear to outweigh the costs, and adaptation seems inevitable. Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, believes that “young people do care about privacy,” but “they seem to be more concerned about parents, teachers or employers peeking at their online activity than privacy intrusions by marketers.”
The students might be right. But, then again, people regularly underestimate how easily their behavior can be modified. To the delight of ad executives, adults mistakenly believe that their preferences can be shaped only by powerful but regulated techniques, like subliminal advertising. Contrary to this folk psychology, current behavioral marketing trends are promising precisely because viewers powerfully respond to “relevancy” in targeted and contextual ads. Three questions thus arise. How much more persuasive power would come from adding the thought experiment features? If lots, how much is too much? And should the ability to think for ourselves be compromised, how long would it take regulators to acknowledge this truth and make appropriate adjustments? Polonetsky notes, “In its proposed new children’s privacy regulation, the FTC has already moved to restrict behavioral ads targeted to kids, without their parents express consent.” Protecting kids is always a step in the right direction. Crafting policy that protects adults without being too paternalistic is a more complicated endeavor.
Products are not nouns but verbs. A product designed as a noun will sit passively in a home, an office, or pocket. It will likely have a focus on aesthetics, and a list of functions clearly bulleted in the manual… but that’s it.
Products can be verbs instead, things which are happening, that we live alongside. We cross paths with our products when we first spy them across a crowded shop floor, or unbox them, or show a friend how to do something with them. We inhabit our world of activities and social groups together… a product designed with this in mind can look very different.
Enthusiasms: Cyberderivé
No one surfs the web anymore. Increasingly, we get everything we want from an endless stream provided by a small selection of websites: Reddit, Google, Tumblr, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon would be my list. Those six sites probably constitute a frightening percentage of my web browsing, and most of the content that originates on other sites can be consumed through them—or will be consumable through them in the future.
Evgeny Morozov points this out in The death of the cyberflâneur. He might have a book out about “The Dark Side of Internet Freedom”, but he’s right. Morozov compares the early web with 19th century Paris, where flâneurswould stroll the streets aimlessly for the simple pleasure of seeing where one ended up and taking in the sights and sounds that presented themselves. This was how we experienced the early web, but, just like modernism made Paris less friendly to the flâneur, so Facebook and Google and the “app paradigm” and frictionless sharing make the internet less conducive to “cyberflânerie”
— Read More of dailymeh
