Saving Time?

 

If you were to ask me, right now, what is the least recognized important invention that has affected us the most in the last century, I would have to say, the rechargeable battery. Looking around my house, I could not help but notice all these dangling cords, some black, some white, whose sole purpose was to recharge our smartphones and other digital devices. And that led me to think about how dependent we have become on these devices. And that led me to the Internet and all of the information, disinformation and entertainment it provides and, while the rechargeable battery has played some part in this enchantment, there are, of course, many other reasons why the Internet pervades our lives.

For example, there are several sites on the Internet that provide book reviews targeted to students as a way of speeding up the process of learning. Of course, book abstracts have long preceded the arrival of the Internet, but one would have to admit that the Internet has enhanced and facilitated that process. Without diving deeply into a philosophical discussion of the value of entertainment, one could ask, “What’s wrong with learning useful stuff faster? ---  I’m a busy person with no time to waste.”

But, upon reflection, what is gained by the ability to skip over the “unimportant parts” of any book when you have to trust not only the opinions of the author but the judgement of the reviewer who provides the abstract?  Why the rush?  Would you speed up the transmission of a Mozart symphony in order to get to the end as quickly as possible?  Or chug a bottle of fine wine?  Of course not.  Books, especially fiction, must be read at a pace that allows us to enjoy the story, the writing style, to muse upon the plot and the characters and to  be able to pause and reflect on what’s just been read. These are, after all, the great rewards of reading. Speed and efficiency have replaced introspection and retrospection and while the Internet is not the sole cause, it certainly helps it along. 

“The world is too much with us”, is  a sonnet by William Wordsworth lamenting the withering connection between humankind and nature, blaming industrial society for replacing that connection with material pursuits.  Wordsworth wrote the poem during the First Industrial Revolution, a period of technological innovation spanning the mid 18th to early 19th centuries that thoroughly transformed British life.

Here are the first four lines:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

The next ten lines can be found at:

www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-wordsworth/the-world-is-too-much-with-us

The message of the poem holds true today:

Nature, the natural world, is being overwhelmed by our human weaknesses --- power, greed and desire. We used to stop and smell the roses, now we run farms that sell roses to florists. These farms displace stands of trees which provide not only better soil but oxygen while capturing carbon dioxide which has helped to restrain climate change. But even this situation is not a new phenomenon --- it happens every time we have an industrial revolution as was the case when the English Poet William Wordsworth in circa 1802 wrote the above  sonnet,” as a cautionary tale, warning us to not stray too far from Nature.

There is a Zen lesson about saving time: A Zen Buddhist Monk is invited to speak to a Sangha (https://www.lionsroar.com/the-practice-of-sangha) in the heart of New York City  He is met at the closest Subway station and the person greeting him says,” We can take a shortcut through the park to save some time --- Let’s go.” As they approach the end of the park, the Monk sits down on a bench and starts feeding the squirrels . “What are you doing?’ the greeter says to the Monk. The Monk replies, “I’m spending some of the time we saved.”

Is the Internet too much with us?

 Free Speech and the Internet ReVisited

Many feel that any restriction to free speech is generally a dangerous and slippery slope, reasoning that once the government decides to ban or limit speech in even the most innocuous cases, it becomes a small crack in the right to free speech which can only grow. Because the  very first Amendment to our Constitution contains protection of speech, it is just not worth the gamble to mess with it.

On the other hand, there are a growing number who would limit Internet speech to stop hate speech and “fake news”  which most people feel contributes to current distrust of any information from the Left if you are a member of the Right and vice-versa.  It divides, not informs the nation. What to do?

It seems time to re-examine the laws concerning information flow as well as how we govern ourselves. Perhaps a multi-party political system like those in Europe instead of a two-party political system would produce better results because it affords voters with more nuanced choices --- a voter doesn’t have to swallow the entire platform of either party.

The down side to multi-party systems is that the winner of an election usually gets a ruling party that has garnered less than 50% of the vote.  The rebuttal to that is simple: due to the structure of our current Electoral system the outcome of winning by less than 50% of the national vote has been happening with greater frequency --- for example the 2016 presidential election where Clinton received 2.87 million more votes than Trump but lost in the Electoral college (Wikipedia).  Also, because European elections seldom elect a government with a clear majority, the winner has to form a coalition with one or more of the other parties in order to pass legislation. On the other hand, one can argue that forming coalitions is similar to what we currently do --- but by individual members of the other party crossing over, voting their conscience or, more likely, creating an obligation- dependency for the receiver of the vote to help out the giver in future votes. Politics is complicated.

In order to gain a better understanding of the issue of Freedom of Speech on the Internet, we must first understand some of the history of  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act or CDA. Here goes:

“Congress enacted the Communications Decency Act (CDA) as Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in an attempt to prevent minors from gaining access to sexually explicit materials on the Internet. (Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997)), (However) the Supreme Court ruled the CDA to be unconstitutionally overbroad because it suppressed a significant amount of protected adult speech in the effort to protect minors from potentially harmful speech.”

(https://www.wiley.law/newsletter-59)

You can see that  the CDA had a very short lifetime of about one year because it was very quickly opposed by the Internet community as well as the ACLU and the American Library Association on the grounds that it was violating the right to free speech. Librarians in particular were distressed. They had tried to set up filters on their computers to adhere to the CDA and block porn sites for example but soon realized they were throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A list of sites that were unfairly  blocked included sites ranging from  ‘Good Vibration Guide to Sex’ to ‘Contraception and Sexually Transmitted Diseases’  to sites devoted to the topic of breast cancer(www.womens-health.org/sex.htm) and even one that remains a mystery to me:  “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens !

“https://www.ntia.gov/legacy/ntiahome/ntiageneral/cipacomments/pre/fepp/appendixA.html”

Because established law will always lag behind the advance of  technology,  it is becoming increasingly clear that we have to re-examine much of our law due to changes wrought by the Internet.  As if the Internet giants (Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon) did not have enough trouble with Congress probing privacy concerns as well as beginning to investigate if they are monopolies.

 Who  knew, in 1991, that the World Wide Web (WWW) --- aka the  Internet --- would raise such interesting and perplexing problems?

Free Speech and the Internet

 

In the beginning (circa late seventies), the hope was that the Internet (aka WorldWideWeb or WWW) would help to bring us all together. The network was designed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defence DOD) to withstand a nuclear strike; the problem was how to defend a computer installation from an enemy attack. The solution was to decentralize Pentagon computers locating them safely, physically distant from one another but still somehow connected so that if one went down the others in the N(liketwork would continue functioning. This ArpaNet soon became available to civilians under the name “The Internet” thanks mainly to the efforts of then Senator Al Gore. At first only large universities and DOD facilities had access to the Internet via their local large computers but as time went on, smaller universities got connected and finally individual users like you and me acquired access to the Internet using our own Personal Computers (PC) and, as they say, the rest is history.

This jump in technology was as momentous as the invention of the telegraph in terms of creating a social network. On the other hand, Thoreau, when informed that this fabulous new technology would enable a man in Maine to talk to a man in Texas, his response was something like,  “But what would a man in Maine have to say to a man in Texas?”  Indeed, if we substitute the word Democrat and Repulican for Maine and Texas that comment seems prescient. To explore this insight more thoroughly, search on “What Would Thoreau Think of Our 24-Hour News Cycle?”

But the problem raised by Thoreau seems to be pretty much solved. One of the defining features of the Internet is, not only that it helps us keep in touch with friends and family, it allows us to make new friends and keep up-to-date on whatever news is happening anywhere.  Anyone and everyone can find something to mull over and that certainly includes me: I am interested in what a person in Hong Kong, let alone Texas,  is thinking and feeling right now.

Unfortunately, there is a flip side to this remarkable technology. Rather than bringing the country and our elected representatives closer, it seems to be driving them apart. We don’t listen --- we talk past one another and that only exacerbates our differences and continues this vicious cycle of dividing this country and indeed, the world.  We find ourselves in this paradoxical situation where connections are being  made and broken with equal ease. 

So,  this so-called stupendous technology is simultaneously connecting the human race and driving it apart. If the venom facilitated by the Internet continues, especially via social websites such as Facebook (which has over 2 Billion monthly active users) and Twitter as well as the Comments sections of most all news sites --- if this continues, then I believe the United States will continue to unravel becoming  the “Untied” States of America. (Sorry about that).

As an antidote to this problem, social sites are beginning to fact-check and to remove or flag hateful speech as well as misleading political ads using Artificial Intelligence programs (AI) as well as hordes of people (Facebook claims that it has over 35,000 fact checkers.) In the near past, both Facebook and Twitter had laissez-faire attitudes regarding political ads including those that could be interpreted as rabble-rousing. , Mark Zukerberg, CEO of Facebook, has said, “What I believe is that in a democracy, it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying, so they can make their own judgments and that when it's not absolutely clear what to do, we should err on the side of greater expression”. But pressure from advertisers (More Than 1,000 Companies Boycotted Facebook. Did It Work?” NYT August 2020) and groups trying to protect minority rights has forced him to back away from completely free expression and to adhere to a policy that bans political ads that contain hate speech or are factually false.

https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/facebook-founder-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-news-business-political-advertising-37948/ “

Similarly, Twitter has tightened up its vetting of political ads that contain hate speech. Here is a snapshot of  a page in its community standards: 

“...we expanded our rules against hateful conduct  to include language that dehumanizes others on the basis of religion. Today, we are further expanding this rule to include language that dehumanizes on the basis of age, disability or disease.

We will require Tweets like these to be removed from Twitter when they’re reported to us:”

I’m sure the editors of this newspaper will agree that It is becoming an increasingly tough call determining what is publishable and what is not.

August 2020: The Privacy Problem Revisited

         

The Privacy Problem Revisited


Many of us would be annoyed by the divulging of our private information such as where you live and many others would rationalize, “Well, if I have to get these ads to support the services provided by this site, then I’d rather they be targeted to my interests instead of a random choice --- either way I’m going to get the ads so that I won’t have to pay for the services the website provides. So the choice becomes: do I want to pay for the use of the website (like any other commodity) or do I pay by sharing some of my personal information? To paraphrase an old saying that sums this up, “When a website claims to be “free” you are the customer and you pay with your private information”.


In my experience, the younger generation is less concerned with protecting their privacy than is the older generation and the older you are the more the concern. During the early days of the Internet a story circulated about a fellow on the subway handing out forms that, when filled out, would capture much of the rider’s personal data. What was the gift to the riders for providing this information? A cheap plastic ballpoint pen. So, if you’re willing to give up your privacy for a cheap pen, it would seem to follow that you would do the same in return for the services of a Google search engine or a social platform such as Facebook.



An article by Cameron Summerson summarizes the argument for using Google and Facebook and paying with personal data.

https://www.howtogeek.com/353483/why-its-not-a-big-deal-that-google-and-facebook-knows-a-lot-about-you/ (If you don’t want to type that long URL, it might be simpler to search on “why it’s not a big deal that google and facebook knows about you”).


In a nutshell, he argues that you are not selling your personal data to the two tech giants. At best, you are leasing it to them in return for using the services the giants provide. Besides , he argues, Google and Facebook provide very strong security for your data (which makes sense because it is valuable to them.). Likewise, the advertiser who pays Google and Facebook to display his advertisement in your searches or feeds has a self interest in providing strong security for your data keeping it safe and private for the same reason --- it is valuable. Once the user clicks on their ad and is taken to the advertiser’s website then any information that you give about yourself is your own personal choice. And finally both Google and Facebook as well as most Big Tech companies claim that the data is anonymized before being distributed. “ Data Anonymization” is defined as a "process by which personal data is irreversibly altered in such a way that a data subject can no longer be identified directly or indirectly, either by the data controller alone or in collaboration with any other party." (Wikipedia). So the question becomes do we take Google and Facebook at their word? Can they really keep our data private? But even if we choose to trust them, to make matters more complicated, it is possible for a hacker to de- anonymize the anonymized data to the point where your identity is discovered! “De-anonymization is the practice of matching anonymous data (also known as de-identified data) with publicly available information, or auxiliary data, in order to discover the individual to which the data belong to. “ (Wikipedia)


However, to make matters even more complex, de-anonymization is not foolproof and the name of the person can be found using simple computer techniques. For example,

” Mr. X lives in ZIP code 02138 and was born July 31, 1945. ... narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population. ... show that people can potentially be re-identified by these kinds of data, not that everyone will be.” (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/what-information-personally-identifiable)



By now you might be asking: how is all this head-spinning information useful to me? We protect our privacy by reading what the experts have to say; if you search on the phrase “how to protect my privacy” you will be rewarded with a plethora of sites to visit that provide advice. In fact I made this search and was impressed by an article in Time Magazine entitled “11 Simple Ways to Protect Your Privacy” by Christina DesMarais. She makes suggestions that range from “Don’t fill out your social media profile” to “Lie when setting up password security questions”. Although these sound counter-intuitive, if you search on the title to the article, DesMarais explains why these are reasonable precautions.


How to protect our privacy is not a new problem spawned by the Internet. The issue has been around for at least 100 years. “Lewis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren published “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, where it became the first major article to advocate for a legal right to privacy.” (Wikipedia)


Brandeis succinctly summed up his beliefs in the much-quoted phrase, “ Privacy is the right to be let alone” He was right over 100 years ago and he is right today.

The Evolving Internet

I ran into  an engaging piece in the New yorker, “”Second Career Dept”  by Antonia Hichens that was entitled, “What do you do after you’ve been fired by the Trump Administration?”  I was hooked. She goes on to explain about how a new Internet Service at cameo.com where, for a fee, you can send a video message from a menagerie of semi-famous people like George Papadopoulpos (whose very name stretches your spelling ability) who, if you can still recall, was one of Trump’s early advisors. As an example, for a Father’s Day gift you can send Dad a video featuring Papadopoulpos (or even a Trump impersonator) wishing him well.

Intrigued, I visited cameo.com to see for myself their list of semi-famous celebs and how much they charge for the honor of receiving a video containing their best wishes. Obviously, no one Really famous (like Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen) needs to stoop to this level to make a living but there are a surprising number of second-rate celebs who enjoy or need to do this. 

Upon entering the site one is met with a header page that is essentially a table of contents indicating various categories such as “Popular” “Sports” “Comedy” etc where you can pick a pseudo celebrity and the type of message you want them to send to your chosen loved one.. Before you commit to purchase, you may view sample videos that the celeb has already delivered so you can have a better idea of what you’re buying into.

I sampled Isiaih Thomas, Basketball Hall of Famer (Cost $245) and got a short but inspiring pep talk; (Brett Favre was $300) On the other hand, I found Gilbert Godfried’s schtick costing $150 disappointing but was quite amused by John Di Domenico’s impersonation of Trump for $180. 

Not to mention, there are over 250 Drag Queens from which to choose. Just browsing the site was an eye-opening and nice mindless distraction from our “New Normal”.

Cameo’s COO, Arthur Leopold is quoted in the article, “We’ve democratized access to talent and celebrity. You don’t have to go to a fund-raiser at the Beverly Hills hotel anymore”.  At first blush this may sound like pretty high-falutin sentiments for a purveyor of bubble gum for the mind, but think about this: isn’t one of the great things about the Internet  that it is a leveler of opportunity --- resulting in greater social justice? Isn’t that a sweet addition to a democratic republic? Or not.

Anyone with a cell phone can access the Internet for entertainment, to shop, and even to access information to help make decisions to a degree greater than all the kings and queens of past centuries. Granted, it sure does feel like drinking from a fire hose and it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff but after a while one learns which sources to trust and which to go to for their needs. My favorite medical site for health issues is The Mayo Clinic and I trust the New York Times, The Economist, and the Christian Science Monitor for general news reporting. My favorite comic strips are --- wait, let’s not go there. But you get the general idea.

I worked on the IILIAC IV project at the University of Illinois back in the late sixties. It was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects agency) of the DOD( Department of Defense) but we perhaps over-optimistically believed the purpose of the project was to make the world a better place to live in. Using the ILLIAC IV, a massively parallel computer (it had 256 CPUs working in parallel),  we could, for example, write useful algorithms that could predict the weather faster and more accurately. Of course, this was also of great interest to the Department of Defense. DOD had another important goal: they wanted a computer system that could withstand a nuclear attack.  The obvious solution was to decentralize the location of our computing power by physically separating individual computers but linking them together via a Network so that they could cooperate and share information and in a safe, secure manner. In this way if one computer on the network went down for any reason, information could be routed around to another active computer on the multiply-connected network. Later, when free internet speech became an issue, this feature led to the aphorism coined by John Gilmore, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”  Gilmore (born 1955) is an American computer science innovator, Libertarian, Internet activist, and one of the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Wikipedia)

As the ARPAnet morphed into the Internet and civilian control, it was used first primarily by scientists worldwide to share papers. Personally, I found it very useful to be sitting in Champaign-Urbana Illinois running my programs on the computers at Stanford Research Institute (S.R.I.) in Menlo Park, Calif., U.C. because it was two hours earlier there and turn-around times for jobs submitted was way better.

Once the Internet was completely opened to individuals and businesses, the advantages of information sharing blossomed and today we reap those benefits as well as the problems. Many sites offer abundant services but at the price of giving up our personal privacy.  There is also a real danger of addiction especially to webtsites that offer pornograpy, games, auction sites, social networking and just plain old surfing the net. There  is a fair and balanced discussion of the Internet Addiction Disorder on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder

In the meanwhile, stay safe and, just like you adhere to the social contract by not running Stop signs, wear your mask.

Too  much Disinformation

Most everyone remembers a situation when they asked a friend, “How ya’ doin?”  and they hear, in grisly detail, too much information (abbreviated as TMI). You make a mental note to not ever ask this person how their operation went.

As H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) is said to have said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”  It’s acerbic but it’s wrong; it is not inclusive enough --- it should include, to some extent, everyone.. We all have been taken in one time or another because we are ruled by our emotions first, reason second. To be fair, there are other theories that claim emotion is not necessarily the enemy of reason but complements it.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/09/18/emotion-is-not-the-enemy-of-reason/ 

However, for the purposes of this column, I will be  assuming that emotions and reason are mostly antagonists.

Many of the Iowa Caucus voters admitted that even on the day of voting their final decision was not yet formed but would probably be based on a last minute gut feeling about the candidate. If he or she doesn’t feel right about a candidate then that’s a deal breaker; emotions trump reason.  Reason, however, gets its chance after the gut has voted and is very, very good at rationalizing our choices.

So the question becomes whom do you trust? Trust of information is usually based on a gut feeling you experience towards the source of that information. The longer you feel that the source has worked for you over a long enough period of time, the greater the trust grows ( the New York Times was founded 170 years ago and I trust its reporting second only to the Christian Science Monitor), On the other hand if you believe the source to be biased, your trust is, at best, a maybe. We have evolved to  trust members of our clan more than outsiders. This is not necessarily a bad thing because this trait is more likely to get our genes into the next generation and it will contribute to our clan’s long-term survival.

Before newspapers were widespread, before radio and television began to saturate the airwaves and before  the Internet connected everyone to everyone, folks turned to friends, colleagues, neighbors and relatives to help them make up their minds about who to vote for and who to vote against. Why?  Simply because they trusted them. Our new technologies, especially the Internet, have added a vast amount of data and information to help us make useful decisions. (the short answer to your question is: Data is unorganized facts that are not useful in and of themselves --- but after the data is organized by some rule or classification system, it can become useful  Information). But the fact is that we are drowning in data that are not even facttual so that even if they become organized we cannot call it information, it is actually disinformation and we cannot really trust it.

So the problem becomes TMD (too much disinformation) because we have no precise way to disentangle disinformation from information, Even if we could disentangle the actual information from the disinformation  we will still have the problem raised by Groucho Marx, “ “Who you gonna’ believe --- Me,, or your own eyes?’” which is a comical way of saying that reason will always be trumped by emotion at least in the short run. Sometimes we are saved by Reason finally returning after a bad decision based on a gut feeling and changing course accordingly.  

This process is particularly evident during election campaigns. Since shortly after the dawn of time, lawyers and politicians have been distrusted.Most all politicians have studied law Shakespeare put it best when he wrote in his play, King Henry V1

“Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man?”

In modern English he is saying what Dickens said a couple cenuries later,“the law is an ass” so watch out for lawyers. He  goes on to have one of his characters utter the well-known phrase, “First we kill all the Lawyers”. Most readerss analyze this as ridding soiety of leaches who prey on ouur misfortunes There are however those who have a radically differnt interpretion: In order for the character to overtrurnand take ovet  command of the ccountry th he would have to abolish the current laws and the lawyers with them.

In  our current situation where disinformation seems to rule the line would have to be updateed  to : “First we kill all the compter folks” and that would eventually bring down the internet and ,as a result much disinformatioin will not be spreae.==d. Unfortuantely, much useful info would all be lost --- like throwing the baby out with the bathwat3r

So, what to do, what to do? Well, a drastic remedy would be to follow a modified version of what Shakespeare wrote a couple of centuries ago:

“Whatever you do, don’t shoot me --- I’m just the messenger.”

The Internet and the Pandemic 

First an update to my previous column, “Monopoly just a Game?”. I used the early http://www.weather.com/weather/hourbyhour/graph/12901railroad industry  as an example of a monopoly but neglected to mention a more current example: 

Microsoft was  prosecuted as a monopoly in the late nineties. The accusation was that they deliberately exercised control of the computer market which was unfair to their competitors as well as causing consumers to pay more for their product. They had combined their operating system with their browser, “Internet Explorer” in such a way that it was nearly impossible for users to deploy other existing browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Firefox.  Microsoft countered that all they were doing was throwing in a free browser with their operating system. 

“The ruling on April 3, 2000, called for Microsoft to divide the company in half, creating two companies that were to be called "baby bills." The operating system would make up one half of the company and the software arm would make up the other.

Before this could be achieved, however, the fangs were removed from the ruling during the appeals process. However, rather than being broken by the antitrust ruling, Microsoft saw its once invincible market share erode due to the old-fashioned competition. As a result, many now wonder if bringing antitrust cases against non-coercive monopolies is merely a costly redundancy of work the free market can do at no charge.” 

The reader should keep in mind that this is an opinion from a website devoted to investors. (https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/microsoft-antitrust.asp)

During those times,  Bill Gates was viewed, (primarily by academics) as a bad guy because their social agenda was slanted more towards sharing (e.g. Information should be Free) than profiteering.

Nowadays, as most everyone knows, Gates is viewed as an enlightened philanthropist guiding the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation which is fighting hunger and poverty in less-developed countries. Is this an example of maturation or guilt? 

Now, back to the issue raised by the title of this piece. It’s pretty clear to me that, yes, the Internet like other modes of communication such as Newspaper, TV and Radio, by overwhelming us with information may have done more harm than good. (I’m undecided on that one)          

 One cannot help but notice the similarities between the Internet and the virus spreading like a meme or a tweet where they proliferate very, very quickly. Without knowing whom to trust, they can cause a very large commotion before it dies down.

So, is it possible to quarantine a website that is clearly infected with false information? Right now that is an issue that social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google are currently struggling with. Given the estimated number of 

Internet users (there are about 4 billion active social media users (statista.com) it is close to impossible to address this problem in the same way a newspaper  can vet letters to the editor. A proposed solution to this problem is to harness AI to do the job for us. Clearly there will be those who object to an “artificially” intelligent agent making what are essentially human decisions for.us. It is hard not to develop a , “How dare you!?!?” attitude.

However, the other side of the argument is similar to that used by advocates of self-driving cars: Look, it’s not going to be perfect but neither will human decisions be perfect plus the AI doesn’t sleep, go for coffee breaks or have a bad day. And perhaps most importantly, the AI learns from experience --- something in short supply these days. Finding and removing trolls ( people who want to provoke and upset others online for their own amusement (howtogeek.com)). is more complicated as it is easy to create a fake username making it difficult to trace. One approach is to let the AI do the quarantining subject allowing  the offender to defend/challenge their submission similar to the your antivirus program quarantines potentially dangerous websites or downloads.Then you, the user, can decide later whether or not to lift the quarantine.

With regard to people, a quarantine is effective in that it contains the virus to a circumscribed area and even though the people inside that area are unlucky ,it stops the spread of the virus to the general population. Being only human, people become contentious when in quarantine while the programs your antivirus captives are quite docile.  

                                                                                         

Although I use this World Wide Web for most of the research I do for this column,

 I am beginning to think that the Internet, and social media in particular, may be, or certainly have the capacity to create more problems than it solves. If nothing else, the current pandemic has reminded us that we are indeed, all connected.

                       

Pros and Cons of Social Media Part 2

What do we really mean when we use the phrase, “social media”?  Of course, we know what “social” means and we know what “media” does. So we can deduce that “social media” is media like books, TV and internet websites that connect people to other people to pass information back and forth without having to be physically present as we do in conversation. After smoke signals,  perhaps the first social medium was realized through the telephone which made it possible to have conversations over long distances instead of face-to-face. A pessimist would conclude that we have accepted physical separation at the price of lost intimacy.

Next, consider the following two quotes:

 “A recent study by the online security firm AVG found that 92 percent of children under                                                                                                                                                                                             2 in the United States have some kind of online presence, whether a tagged photo, sonogram image or Facebook page. Life, it seems, begins not at birth but with online conception. And a child’s name is the link to that permanent record.” --- Allen Salkin, New York Times, Nov 27, 2011

"One particular advantage of social media is that they help a reporter see the intellectual and social network of a source. For example, in Twitter I can see whom you are following and who is following you. I can see what you have re-tweeted and what links you have selected. Therefore, I can understand more fully your social context." -- Jerry Zurek, professor of English and communication department chair at Cabrini College

The first quote appears to be a negative assessment of social media while the second a positive one. However, like many of  life’s problems, the pros and cons can be somewhat ambiguous but here is an example that is clearly positive:

“Twitter was so important to the Iranian protests after the Iranian presidential election in June 2009 that the US State Department asked Twitter to delay a scheduled network upgrade that would have taken the website offline at a busy time of day in Iran. Twitter complied and rescheduled the downtime to 1:30 am Tehran time.

Proponents of social networking sites argue that these online communities promote increased communication with friends and family, familiarize people with valuable computer skills, and allow contact with people from around the world.” --- to which I would add the important role that social media played in the 2011 Egyption Revolution.

And here is an assessment that accentuates the negative:
Opponents argue that social networking sites expose children to predators, increase vulnerability to computer viruses, lower worker productivity, and promote narcissism and short attention spans.” (source: http://socialnetworking.procon.org/)

If you were to ask, I would say the strongest and most general arguments pro and con are:

Pro: Social Media contributes to the happiness of both the individual and society.

Con: Social Media contributes to the unhappiness of both the individual and society.

But then  what do we mean by “happiness”. I know that I am happy when I am afforded the pleasure of being able to turn over and get a couple more hours of sleep --- but that’s just me. Someone else may be happy in knocking over little kids blocks or tormenting their cat. And even if we could all agree on a common definition of “happiness” --- how would we go about measuring it? Alas there is no Richter scale for Happiness. Also, the problem might be that there are too many possible ways to measure it.

In either case, the popularity of social websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram continue to grow and appear to be living long and prospering.  And this raises yet another question.

We know that AT&T was broken up by the government into Baby Bells and has never  regained the market share or power it once held. AT&T was a monopoly in telephone production and distribution from its inception in 1882 until 1982. Because, according to Balaji Viswanathan, they grew and grew until they were essentially a monopoly and the government stepped in and shut them down. He goes on to  point out that the larger a company grows the more the government tends to regulate it until the overregulation leads to bankruptcy. He identifies Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft as the social media companies that are most likely to go bankrupt due to increased government regulation. Although I would not categorize Apple, Microsoft and Google as true Social media companies, they all provide a social medium via their email services (iCloud, Outlook and Gmail). He predicts the order from lowest to highest probability of bankruptcy as: Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. His reasoning can be found at: https://www.quora.com/Which-company-will-fall-first-Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon-or-Microsoft

So, what do you think are the pros and cons of social media?