Shona Ghosh » Internet

A film about now: Shame

shonaghosh — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:07:02 +0000

I don’t normally discuss films here, but it’s pleasing to see the debate around online pornography move away from scientific theories and speculative headlines to thoughtful considerations of its real-life impact.

Shame follows Michael Fassbender (sometimes we follow a little too much of him) playing a lonely sex addict in Manhatten, unable to form romantic connections and getting off on his impersonal encounters with prostitutes and porn. In an interview with Salon, Shame’s director Steve McQueen says the film is firmly rooted in the dilemmas of 2011:

We’re making a film about now. It’s not a costume drama, it’s not something that happened 40 or 50 years ago. It’s about now, and for me — I don’t care what anyone says — I think cinema has a responsibility. You’ve got HBO and AMC doing whatever they’re doing, but cinema has another way of doing things, which can actually be closer to how we live today than any nine-part series on television. Absolutely. We can do that, and people are interested in seeing that and having a conversation about it.

What happens when you make a film about now is that it does have an aspect of social commentary because it’s urgent, there’s an immediacy about it. Particularly about the Internet, about pornography on the Internet, and about how that affects us, how we navigate this maze of sexual content that’s all about us.

When I came out of the cinema, my immediate thought was to wonder what several young male friends of mine would think if they watched Shame, given their attachment to online porn. Simply put (and this is simplifying hugely), Fassbender’s sex addiction and the ready availability of porn and prostitutes essentially destroy his ability to relate to women in the context of a relationship. Sex is shown without tenderness, and when offered the opportunity of a meaningful connection, Fassbender’s character can’t get it up. Instead, he gets off on a series of rough, brief encounters, some of which directly recreate scenes from pornography.

I wouldn’t like to give you the impression that online porn is the main focus of the film – it actually plays a relatively small role. McQueen weaves it into the fabric of daily existence, perhaps as the average porn viewer does, and it is this which is so clever. Much of the initial porn debate focussed on how graphic content – readily available online and less easily regulated than paid-for porn – might encourage rape. Many studies concluded that porn was “harmless” in this respect, which is probably true, but few stats focus on the impact on everyday relationships – something McQueen attempts to address. This prescient piece in the Guardian from 2003 is a good companion piece to Shame on the relationship of sex addiction and porn. ”Pornography does damage,” says one psychologist, “because it encourages people to make their home in shallow relationships.” It’s a subject where it’s all too easy to get all Daily Mail and prudish. Light viewing it is not, but Shame is a thought-provoking, subtle and overdue look at the cause and effect of sex addiction in the online age.

Why use Twitter?

shonaghosh — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 14:36:22 +0000

I’ve written this post as a starting point – but not a how-to guide – for a few non-nerds who have been asking in real life (gasp!) about why they might use Twitter. Comments and so on welcome.

Newspapers must be pretty confusing if you’re a non-Twitter user. The Speaker’s wife, Sally Bercow, would be missed by her “followers” before she enters the Celebrity Big Brother house, said the Standard. Republican candidates spar over their scientific beliefs (or disbeliefs) via status updates, according to the Guardian. The media’s always had its sources of information – but few have been so prolifically or prominently publicised as Twitter, much to the puzzlement of its readership, which asks itself why it should care and, increasingly, whether it should join in.

Why would I use Twitter?

The reasons for using Twitter are manifold, and rather than try and think them all up, I asked people why they use the site.

“

Writing a post about joining Twitter for non-journalism, non-geeky friends who are curious. What do you personally use Twitter for, please?

shonaghosh
August 23, 2011

“

@shonaghosh well, predominantly to feel part of a crowd of successful writers that I am clearly not part of in real life. Tragically.

nellstevens
August 23, 2011

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@shonaghosh good for mid-football match updates #nffc

simonlp
August 23, 2011

“

@shonaghosh News, updates, random links…

eleanorturney
August 23, 2011

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@shonaghosh news and making fun of Jesse

elliottchilds
August 23, 2011

“

@shonaghosh replying late in non-Twitter fashion but as an expat I use it to feel less removed from London life…

SongsIlike
August 23, 2011

Following your niche interests

Already, this is quite different from Facebook. On its homepage, Facebook tells you to “Connect with your friends” – by contrast, Twitter’s tagline is “Follow your interests” – and you can really follow specific topics to quite a niche level. One of my niche and slightly pretentious interests is finding ace things to do in London, usually based around design, modern art or literature – so I follow @Proteinfeed which, if you click the link, shows a bunch of quite cryptic but always-intriguing links. Unlike Google, where you have to know what you’re looking for to begin with, there’s often a kind of serendipity about discovering things through Twitter. Another feed for discovering beautiful art is @Brainpicker, who is arguably far more effective on Twitter than she is on her site.

I don’t think I can emphasise this discovery element enough. Yes, newspapers, magazines and blogs can all provide you with quite specific information – and I’m certainly not disputing their value. But firstly, unlike some of the above, Twitter is free. Secondly, if you have carefully followed a very set group of niche tweeters – that no mainstream newspaper or magazine will ever discover – which is entirely tailored to your interests, then that, surely, has to be better than something designed to appeal to the masses. I admit that that following people can be time consuming – but I would argue it only requires an initial burst of work, of finding people to follow, before your feed becomes invaluable.

Twitter as a news source – floods of information

I was asked this by my friend Claire Hance via e-mail. She says she doesn’t use Twitter, but has frequently seen it referenced in the media and is tempted to try it:

…to me Twitter feels like another layer of complication in the myriad outlets from which we can garner our information. We can read newspapers/ magazine website, and when looking for more specified info, can use blogs/ special interest websites/ guides. So why is a space for mass short bursts of minute information in a (what seems) fairly muddled arena so useful[?]

I would agree that as a source of general news, Twitter can add unnecessary complication. And if you aren’t too fussed about knowing about news first, and knowing every aspect of the story as it emerges, then I would advise against following any news journalists. Much of Twitter’s reputation as a source of news comes from the fact that many of its most active users are journalists, or would-be journalists. Being one myself, I suspect that it will have an increasing role in relation to news, and particularly emergencies, as time goes on. Imagine if a bomb went off in London. You still have phone signal, but the news crews haven’t reached the disaster area yet, and the rescue services have yet to piece together what’s happened. Often, then, an effective way to find out what’s going on is from a social network – and Twitter, being mostly uncluttered by photo features and so on, is a much cleaner service to use for this kind of thing than Facebook, which isn’t really geared to handle ongoing streams of information.

Of course, bombs don’t go off every day in London, and a continuous stream of live, rolling updates from places which are struck by tragedy or warfare can be exhausting, and sullied by unverified information and rumours. And that is damaging to journalism, and unhelpful for readers. I would say that you don’t always have to follow news sources all the time. It is possible to stop following people without offending them.

There are many more points I could address about Twitter as a valid source of news, but, another time.

Ego and networks

Relative Twitter newcomer, @Agshorsley emailed me her own reasons for using the service, which I found remarkably refreshing.

I think primarily the reason I signed up was because I found it a good place to talk about myself (aware of how horrible this sounds) without having to constantly update my facebook status. I hate those people who update their status every 15 minutes and yet sometimes I would – horror of horrors – find myself updating my status 2-3 times a day. Basically, simple VANITY drove me to sign up.

Ego, as with all social media, is a huge part of Twitter - I use it to post links to my journalism, in a naked attempt to become more widely read. But, I would also say that networking (grurgh) is a huge part of this. Even if it is ego-driven, like @NellStevens, I use Twitter to talk to tech journalists who I would otherwise never have the opportunity to meet, let alone discuss the future of Nokia with as a peer. And this networking aspecting doesn’t just need to apply to writers and journalists – there are many influential marketers, PR types, politicians, designers and even lawyers who use Twitter, and if you’re ambitious and know what you’re doing, it is entirely possible to break into these circles – which offline might once have remained closed – through social media.

A common misconception

A final email from a naysayer, who shall remain anonymous:

When I hear [Twitter] being talked about on the news, or on tv, it generally is quoting celebrities (pop stars, footballers, comedians) saying, in my opinion, not very much. I see it is a big, constantly updating collection of facebook statuses for people to tell others absolutely nothing of genuine interest about anything. It just seems to be yet another form of faceless communication, combined with a further outlet for the cult of celebrity.

Of course, Twitter can be outlet for banal celebrity crap, and if that’s all you follow, then that’s all you’ll get. In much the same way, you could watch Panorama, or you could watch Jeremy Kyle. But on the other end of the scale, you can also hear what it’s like for rebels on the ground in Libya. If your Twitter feed is banal, it is because you are following banal people – more serious is the site’s impact on accurate reporting, and the spread of rumours. Always best to take things with a pinch of salt…

And um, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I’m here.

Google+ Circles = too many boxes

shonaghosh — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 21:14:13 +0000

That Google+ is still in the stages where its users’ first posts are ‘OMG I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING’ is, perhaps, indicative that it is as yet too early to judge how the service will develop.

I like boxes to put people in…

But however premature the evaluation, it doesn’t seem clear who or what Google+ wants – and this to me is a problem, whatever stage the service is at. I was at university when Facebook came to the UK, and exactly the kind of user the social network was targeting. Much of its appeal was the fact that it was only open to certain networks – a master stroke. It wasn’t the elitism that was clever, but the fostering of niche communities. By the time Facebook opened out to any user with an e-mail address, the service had become too valuable for its existing users to utter anything more than a low rumble of discontent before continuing much as they had done before.

So being archetypal of the original Facebook generation, it feels quite important to be able to have a strong theme tying my social connections together. My experience on Twitter was similar; after two years on the service, it has become a valuable journalistic network. I don’t agree with GigaOm’s Marshall Kirkpatrick in all aspects of his review, but he says much the same thing:

….groups are the secret weapon of the social web. Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it. List creation on competing services has been a mixed bag. It’s undervalued at Twitter and suffocated on Facebook.

Just not that many boxes.

Google+ understands this need for filtration, to some degree. If Facebook’s flaw is that it doesn’t let you filter enough, Google+ wants you to filter too much, too soon. The maniacal insistence on THE CIRCLES is simply confusing when I have no one to put in them, when I am simply getting my head around what kind of user will be on here to begin with. Presumably, my e-mail contacts. But my e-mail contacts are a motley crew of friends, colleagues, people I want to network with, and people I’ve never met. That’s similar to Twitter – but the difference is that I follow whoever I like on Twitter and then put them into lists as I navigate the service and the stream of information. I don’t try and pre-define the flow of that information, the way that Circles essentially wants me to.

Google+ needs to work out what it’s for

If Google is genuinely throwing down the gauntlet to Facebook here, then it needs to understand who would want to use it. Let’s not pretend it wants to be Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is ace – but the site’s still relatively niche, and its most valuable activity comes from a small core of loyal users.

Google, for all the innovation and creativity it encourages from its employee, has an unfortunate history of lacking vision in social media Speaking at a conference earlier this year, Google’s creative director in the UK was on the defensive about Google+ predecessor, Wave. His first point was that Wave was “ahead of its time”. The second, that sometimes “at Google, sometimes we don’t know if we create things for [the public], or for ourselves”. Telling, no?

That’s certainly not to say Google+ will fail. It’s better designed than its social predecessors Buzz (unfortunately, Buzz still lives in Google+), and has much, much more focus than Wave. The service might also simply better suit those who have not been indoctrinated with the ‘Facebook way’.

There are also a number of nifty sub-features which I can see taking off. Huddle is a mobile app which is essentially Google’s answer to WhatsApp, an extremely popular little mobile messaging service. Hangouts showcases Google’s video chat capabilities, which might threaten the new Facebook-Skype partnership (not least because the new Facebook Chat layout looks, frankly, pants).

It’s early days – but at the moment, Google+ feels like hard work. In its launch post, Google says:

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

You’re not there just yet, Google.

Criminality, social media and #Twitterjoketrial

shonaghosh — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 23:35:03 +0000

As several commentators wryly observed, today is the day David Cameron told China off (sort of) for impinging on free speech, while in the UK the justice system found Paul Chambers guilty of (wait for it) ‘menace’ for the following tweet:

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!

A colleague of mine remarked that Chambers losing his appeal was ultimately a good thing, demonstrating that the UK was taking terror threats seriously. But the British law should not, cannot be manipulated to hold an easy scapegoat up as an example – it’s an insult to the public intelligence, particularly when there are genuine terrorist threats to combat.

Honestly, what kind of message does this send out? That people aren’t permitted to occasionally vent their frustration in public, however ill-advised? Or that the police are still technologically illiterate and might look to analyse the context and impetus for an online message before embarking on a massive, tax-wasting joke of an investigation? Illiterate might be a strong term – but the Paul Chambers investigation began in January. The police didn’t announce any kind of ‘social media training’ to help carry out investigations online until May this year.

A sad day for flippancy and freedom of speech.

Cognitive Surplus: eh what?

shonaghosh — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:17:56 +0000

This is a post taken from my work blog, the social marketing agency RMM. There’s a great follow-up blog by my colleague Dr. Dan O’Connor that’s also worth a read.

Clay Shirky, talking head on social technology, the internet and technology’s effect on human behaviour, has a new book out. You’ve probably heard the book’s title “Cognitive Surplus” bandied about already. I was a little hazy over what this actually meant, so I headed along to the RSA to hear his explanation. I think I’ve just about wrapped my head around it:

The cumulative free time and talents of people within the developed world have to spend on stuff they like doing. (Mostly watching terrible TV, he says)
The shift from the media producing stuff for us to consume passively, to us producing stuff on our own. For free. i.e. How the Internet Now Lets You Make aLOLcat Bible and Inflict It On the Rest of the World Without a Publishing House Getting in the Way.

So free time + consumers creating stuff out of love, for free = cognitive surplus. What Shirky primarily focused on was the result of this surplus, and how it may lead to profound cultural change. He broke down the value of these online creations into three categories:

Communal value – creating stuff like LOLCats
Public value – providing information or some other service, like Wikipedia
Civic value – a (social) project which aims to fundamentally change social attitudes. e.g. How PatientsLikeMe connects individual users with certain medical conditions on the basis of the data they upload. BUT, above and beyond this, the project founders believe, contrary to social norms, you should be encouraged to just…give away your medical data. Your diseases, your dosages, everything, for the purposes of research. Read below for their Openness policy.

It’s these projects with civic value which seem to excite Shirky the most – the idea that without any contractual obligations, people willingly devote their free time to uploading their dosages to PatientsLikeMe, with the wider cultural aim to change how medical data is used for research. I found this example problematic – take a UK example of a civic-value project, the Democracy Club. The Democracy Club encourages anyone to scan election leaflets given out by their local candidates – one point being to hold them to account when they might renege on their original election promises. The wider cultural aim here being not transparency in medical data, but transparency in democracy. Shirky would equate these Democracy Club volunteers with those uploading medical data to PatientsLikeMe. But I would argue these civic-value projects are different.

Surely those uploading data to projects like PatientsLikeMe are doing so for ultimately selfish purposes; to track their own medical data and to find out more about their own conditions. Read the language of the website; it’s all about how PatientsLikeMe can benefityou. I don’t think the majority of those users are uploading data with the purpose of improving medical transparency. By contrast, I do think Democracy Club volunteers are very aware of the wider cultural ramifications of holding local candidates up to account – with flyers (usually binnable once the election’s over) actually scanned and publicly available, it’s much easier to pin down MP’s who quietly change their policies once they’re in power. And that’s a win for transparent democracy. But one project positions itself as beneficial to the user, whereas the other makes it clear this is to achieve that wider cultural benefit.

That’s a quibble around specific examples, but…I guess the implicit question is this: do you have to dupe people to harness their cognitive surplus? In order to truly effect a cultural sea-change via online projects of civic value, do you have to fool the wider, average consumer who watches too much Eastenders into taking part in these projects? To encourage users to spend time on a task, for free (the proverbial stick), do you have to lure them in with some promise of immediate gratification (the carrot)? And if so – is that a good, ethical thing to do to effect wider cultural change?

With love from Rupert xx

shonaghosh — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:31:06 +0000

I just had this e-mail from the Times, because I’m signed up to preview their new website which launches at the beginning of June.

It does look quite pretty but….what you’re basically offering me is:

Automatic refresh
Liveblogging
Data visualisation
Video
Some quite fancy Flash

All of which the Guardian does for free. Except auto refresh but I can click that myself without too much difficulty.

A side project on privacy

shonaghosh — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:35:02 +0000

As you may have noticed, this blog has been quiet for a while. This is due to my MA project, which you can look at here. Surveillance News is a news and aggregation website about privacy, databases and surveillance in the UK, please check it out. If you’ve been interested in anything I blog about here, chances are you’ll be interested in this project too. Please leave comments, all feedback is much appreciated!

Facebook solar flare

shonaghosh — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:20:51 +0000

A fun little addition to your Facebook experience, only really works in IE:

Click on a white space on Facebook, then with your keyboard press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A and then hit enter. (It disappears once you log out).

Thanks to Will Foster for the five-minute wow factor

Charles among the commoners

shonaghosh — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:50:22 +0000

Prince Charles has put away the Smythson and instead chosen to push his latest environmental message on YouTube, which seems to have become the new political equivalent of writing an open letter to the Times. Robin Williams, William n’ Harry, Daniel Craig and the Dalai Lama star among others in this plea to save the rainforests but, as the Times reports, the show is undoubtedly stolen by a certain amphibian extra.

Webby 2009: Winners

shonaghosh — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:34:00 +0000

The Webby Awards winners are in, with relatively few surprises I think. You can view the full list here, though this year’s 5 word speeches will have to wait til the awards ceremony which isn’t actually held until June. You’ll be able to watch it on YouTube though. Big ‘of the year’ wins were NIN frontman Trent Reznor for artist (woo!), comedian Jimmy Fallon for person, Twitter for breakout and Sarah Silverman for best actress. Would’ve picked Tina Fey myself, but whatever.

Worth checking out is the beautiful net-art category winner, Dreamgrove. Users are invited to ‘plant’ their dreams in a virtual field, while visitors can viewers these dreams categorised by mood, colour, name, word or date. People’s choice winner was the slightly sillier JacksonPollock.org, which can only be described as SPLAT.

Another art project, Jason Nelson’s Digital Oddities, topped the ‘weird’ category. I haven’t finished exploring it yet and I’ve yet to decide whether it’s beautiful or just odd. New media artist Jason Nelson assembles a patchwork collection of…well, new media art. Think of those Guardian Datablog visualisations but to the power of 100. There’s something for gamers, surrealists and amateur YouTubers. If that’s too taxing on the brain, there’s always the delightfully snarky FAIL blog.

In politics, the HuffPost took the main prize, while US political journalism site FactCheck was popular among the people. Wordle nabbed best use of typography after ridiculous overusage by the global press (including me). Just to remind you, here were my predictions:

Best newspaper

I predicted….New York Times to pip Guardian.

Winner Guardian

People’s choice New York Times (so half a point, surely)

Best news

I predicted…The Huffington Post

Winner BBC Worldwide

People’s choice BBC Worldwide

Podcast

I predicted…Guardian

Winner Guardian

People’s choice NPR Podcasts. No, no idea who they are either.

Jason Nelson’s award winner for weird.