I was happy to read this restrained rant against photo filters by one of CNET’s tech writers, Stephan Shankland. Led by Instagram with 7m users, photo filter apps have become increasingly popular as iPhone photographers recast ofen banal subject matter into bright, poppy, retro images. That is, 7m users reliving a design aesthetic that they probably weren’t alive for. Previously these kind of effects were painstakingly achieved through box cameras and the like, but as Facebook has decided to piggyback on Instagram’s success and add filters to its photo editing tools, what was previously an indie hobby is becoming increasingly mainstream. Incidentally, Facebook thinks it has about 60bn photos on its database. SIXTY BILLION lomo-fied photos, all over your news feed.
I genuinely dislike these photo filter apps – the most popular being Instagram and Hipstamatic (even the names are intolerable) – and find it surprising that a generation of super-connected people choose to filter their lives through an artificial aesthetic which belongs to the 1970s. Pop culture’s nostalgia for history, to recast the present against the golden haziness of the past is hardly anything new, as testified by the ongoing popularity of retro dramas like Mad Men, or (in the UK) The Hour. But the tendency seeps across the media more widely, to interesting, if not always commendable, effect. Take Foreign Policy, which chose to host a photo essay on the war in Afghanistan dubbed “The War in Hipstamatic“. The essay consists of a series of highly coloured photographs of the war in Afghanistan which recall, to borrow Hipstamatic’s own chirpy tagline, ”the look and feel of plastic toy cameras from the past”.
A filtered photo (complete with faux Polaroid edging) of a soldier in Afghanistan, from the Basetrack media project and presented in Foreign Policy's "The War in Hipstamatic"
The NYT’s Damon Winter has won plaudits earlier this year for a similar project – so clearly not everyone feels quite as offended as I do by this. Indeed, Winter writes an articulate defence of his choice, saying that using Hipstamatic has no effect on the actual content of his war photography. It is worth reading in full.
What has gotten people so worked up, I believe, falls under the heading of aesthetics. Some consider the use of the phone camera as a gimmick or as a way to aestheticize news photos. Those are fair arguments, but they have nothing to do with the content of the photos.
I disagree. Recasting Afghanistan in grainy colours feels, at gut level, like an insult both to journalism and the soldiers who face a much greyer reality on a daily basis, and the aesthetics actually distract from the content.
Of course, you could ask how far this snobbery should trickle down, and to what extent using any filters in photography is trickery. The simple answer is that I don’t know; I’m not inherently against people experimenting with Diana cameras or or Polaroids. But with more and more people taking retro photos as the norm, rather than the novelty, this insistence on recasting the present is going to get tiresome at best.
Filed under: Publishing, Technology | Tags: e-books, hachette, penguin, qriocity
I went to a Westminster Media Forum seminar for the first time recently, to listen to various members of the UK publishing industry debate intellectual property, e-books and piracy.
Two things struck me. One was a surprising unwillingness to acknowledge how high the risk of iterating the mistakes of the music industry was. Another was Sony’s presence in the room, something I imagine hadn’t happened before.
Some background – e-book sales are growing quickly in the UK, though they are far from overtaking print sales, generating £3.1bn in revenues last year (Publishers Association). I can’t actually find an up-to-date comparison with print sales, but Hachette’s digital head says e-books might account for about 10% of its revenues this year, while Penguin and Faber & Faber place it at 7%. Meanwhile, print sales have fallen 3% by volume.
I should admit that I am very, very new to covering the publishing industry and e-books. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the attitude of Penguin’s (incredibly articulate, and apparently sensible) CFO on e-book pricing and piracy. BML conducted research into consumer attitudes towards e-books and found that they expect e-books to be up to 70% cheaper than the print versions. Most publishers drop prices at most by 50%…and that’s only 50% off the recommended retail price, which actually tends to be more expensive than what you’d pay on the high street. So in all probability, you’d pay on average much the same for an e-book as you would buying its print counterpart on the high street.
Penguin (and others’) justification was this – that while e-books cost nothing to print, the cost of editorial and marketing remain the same. There’s also a hefty slice of VAT to pay, unlike print. In summary:
“The idea that there is going to be a substantial reduction in e-book prices compared to physical, I don’t think can happen.” – Coram Williams, Penguin.
I found it interesting that it fell to a digital entrepreneur, Lovingreading’s Peter Crawshaw to sound the alarm:
“People don’t value electronic things as much as physical things. I think the format issue is interesting, because we have now got two such huge global players who are outside the publishing industry. [Digital] formats are here to stay - you can see now on our website the prices of iBooks and Kindles are now pretty much in synchrony, so somebody is monitoring that very carefully. The real test will be for the e-publishing format which really has to step up to the mark and look to defend itself because of these two huge players that have come into the market.”
This, I thought, was the single most sensible thing anyone said, particularly with Sony sitting in the room. There was brief mention of Sony’s Qriocity platform – a sort of iTunes equivalent which will eventually offer e-books. Indeed, in Sony’s own words, “We are, in fact, a publisher.” Given what iTunes did to music pricing, I wonder if those words shouldn’t start ringing alarm bells.
Filed under: Privacy, Social media, Technology | Tags: facebook, picture memories, see friendship
There has been a whole string of developments over the last week which indicate Facebook is taking even more of an interest in relationships than usual.
Facebook’s impact on relationships has been somewhat lost in the noise about privacy infringements. Interest is picking up however, as people begin to notice they are less in control of their online relationships than they might think. See Tom Weber’s excellent analysis of how Facebook decides what to put in your news feed. Did you know there was a pecking order of status updates – in that links are more ‘top news’ than status updates, and photos are the most ‘top news’-worthy of all? Which is why that get who keeps posting links to Being a Dickhead’s Cool two weeks after everyone already e-mailed it round gets prioritised over closer friends’ status updates (and Facebook is easily clever enough to work out who your closer friends are, as you’ll see if you read on).
Jealous lovers
Not everyone has actually noticed the ‘Photo Memories’ feature which pops up on the right-hand corner of their screens. lt is an unobtrusive feature which pulls in an apparently random choice of photo from a friend’s album from a year or more ago. Facebook’s recent reasoning is that it might give you a nasty jolt if photos of a former lover popped up out of nowhere – even if you’ve been careful enough to ‘hide’ their updates in your news feed (being too cowardly polite to go the whole hog and delete them). So it has carefully rejigged some code so that anyone who once shared your relationship status remains hidden from view. To help (I’m not making this up) ‘heal the heartache’.
What a far cry from the days of “Ben and Jessica are no longer in a relationship” next to an 8-bit image of a broken heart.
Jealouser lovers, bordering on stalkerish
Let’s be entirely honest here though. The problem with Facebook and exes isn’t really that you get a nasty jolt from seeing an ex-partner unexpectedly because you haven’t seen a photo of them for ages.
Non, non. Most dumpees of my generation embark at some point on a massive Facebook stalking session of their former beloved. It might be just after the break-up. It might be sparked by jealousy or genuine curiosity. It might just be a one-off, after which they say ‘No more’. But it happens – and hiding old photos probably isn’t going to cure that.
Especially with another new feature which has been introduced – ‘See Friendship’. The ‘Wall-to-wall’ functionality which allowed you to see every wall post between two friends with has now been replaced. See Friendship is a scary/clever first look at how accurately Facebook can picture not only you, but your relationships with others. Essentially, I see See Friendship as a mini Facebook page, dedicated to your relationship with a given Facebook friend. Isn’t that a little strange? A page enshrining the history of your relationship online?
Go and look at it, if you can. The way to do it is either to look on any post from a friend, where on the bottom right-hand corner you’ll see ‘See Friendship’. Alternatively, go on any friend’s profile, look under their picture and click ‘View you and [friend]. The scary/clever bit is that Facebook does absolutely no work, and relies purely on the data you volunteer. See Friendship can tell you:
- What events you’ve both been to.
- All the photos you’ve both been in
- Your shared relationships with other people, and the nature of these relationships
- Where you’ve both commented on something anywhere in the history of Facebook EVER.
All this, as I say, relies on tiny everyday actions like photo-tagging or clicking ‘attending’ on an event. I doubt many users are aware of the consequences of all these tiny online actions, particularly on a platform as complex and controlled as Facebook. So much for making life easier for exes – it’s now become considerably easier to reflect nostalgically on the history of your relationship, because it’s all now gathered and documented conveniently in one place. (Or if you’re really masochistic – a convenient place to track how well your ex-partner is getting on with someone new. But that’s a very dark thought. Don’t go there.)
You’re about to become a jealous lover.
Finally, I leave you with this unhappy little chart – when Facebook statuses predict you’re about to get dumped. Everyone wants to be single before the summer, it seems.
Mathias Mikkelsen, using data from David McCandless.
Filed under: Internet, Technology | Tags: City University, data, Journalism, MA, privacy, surveillance
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!
The Guardian loves it. FOI campaigners chase it. Even the Saturday Times Magazine devotes a page to it.
Data has long been the staple of mash-ups, news articles, bar charts and…just about anything really. It’s just another word for information, preferably neatly arranged in nice rows so we can make a colourful map of MPs’ expenses. Or a word cloud of Obama’s inauguration speech. Hurray! These pretty toys have given journalists a reason to live again!
Occasionally though, the toys achieve something useful, and since Wordle the New York Times’ revolutionary Faces of the Dead in 2006, data + journalism has gone mainstream. It’s largely taken off in the US where the launch of data.gov earlier this year prompted calls in the UK for the British Government to do the same. The idea being, simply, more transparency in government. You can look at air quality in California. Or average wage information in Utah.
The Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses coverage has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that transparency is a) needed and b) achievable through data. And so, yanked by the American dog-lead, the British government will indeed follow suit. Maybe. Hopefully.
Speaking at Open Tech 2009, Whitehall munchkins John Sheridan and Richard Stirling laid down the first draft for a UK version of data.gov. The only data available to them was traffic logs, but they hope to sell the idea to civil servants nonetheless. Currently the pair are looking for ways to spin this to Whitehall. “It works with most of the big departments if we say we can make public services better, and that we can do this by making information about a service available,” said Richard Stirling wryly.
Except – and even data enthusiasts immersed in numbers cannot fail to have noticed this – the UK is in the worst recession since 1991 and Brown can barely find the funds to let young people actually have the jobs they want. Let alone funding a database for some XKCD-shirted nerds to plot 10 years’ worth of traffic data on Many Eyes.
So it’s unlikely we’ll be using a British open databank any time this year, but they’re trying.
Why should you care?
Because although all of this is happening centrally in Whitehall at the moment, eventually local authorities will have to publish their stats. Don’t hold your breath though, even the US has only managed to get two states on board so far. Do you know how much of a pain in the arse these things are to get hold of usually? I wanted to find out the mobile phone expenditure of one local council, and had to wait three weeks for a reply. And that’s not even a difficult Freedom of Information request. It’s the same sort of thing as PlanningAlerts – because information is freely available, it’s a lot easier for the public to kick up a fuss about a planning application. Or traffic logs. If that’s your thing.
What next?
It’ll happen, eventually. The downside is obviously it will cost the taxpayer money just when the government is looking to cut back everywhere but yes, it may lead to a general improvement in services. Largely by you spotting something dubious on your local council’s databank and then shouting at them about it.
Filed under: Internet, Politics, Technology | Tags: counter-terrorism, data privacy, database, government, home office, interception modernisation, ISP, jacqui smith, serious cat, terrorism, voip
Decent, upstanding British citizens will no doubt be spending today reading Jacqui Smith’s latest opus on data privacy. Yes, all 49 pages of it, so that you can answer some questions (which are, incidentally, in ‘Annex A’ so get reading) . This is, after all, for your sole benefit and the government ‘would welcome your views’.
Oh alright. I’ll summarise it here.
Since May last year, the government has been bleating about a central database in which to store information about how we communicate. Primarily it’s a counter-terrorism measure but it’s um, also quite a big privacy infringement. So under the Interception Modernisation Programme (which really, when you think about it, literally means ‘better ways of snooping’) the government is proposing ways to effectively ‘save lives’ while not spying.
The database isn’t going to happen any more, it says. Which is peculiar, because it then goes on to outline exactly how it would go about creating a data store, if it was allowed to. Which it isn’t.
Nothing’s law yet. Hence this consultation report where you – because that will be your data eventually – get to raise objections.
It’s an educational document. By the second page I am graced with such insights as: Communications data is information about a communication. And Jacqui Smith’s inappropriately beaming face on the introduction which, for your own safety, I have replaced with serious cat.
This is the bit where she says the database isn’t happening. But, in case you were interested, she tells you how it would work anyway on p25.
The next bit’s quite important though. And for all the paranoia, it’s not as though anyone will actually read your racist jokes/cybersex/ascii art.
Communications data does not include the content of a call or the content of any other communications event, such as an email. This consultation does not propose changing the law to collect or store the content of any communication.
No, but it will try and get everything but. Mostly by coercing service providers into doing it for them.
As it stands, VoIP services like Skype currently don’t hold that much information about you. Or at least, not enough to be of any use. Indeed, Skype isn’t actually a UK service provider, so it’d be down to ISP’s like BT, Virgin etc to actually collect the times and destinations of your Skype calls. They’d also have to arrange it nicely so that the authorities aren’t flailing around uselessly with numbers. This, aside from the database or doing nothing, is the ‘middle way’. And here, quietly tucked away, is the £2bn cost estimate to compensate the private sector.
What next?
UK service providers will take a look over these suggestions and respond. This isn’t good news for them; they’ll be bearing the brunt of the costs for a lot of extra work, and potentially compromising the privacy of their customers. Equally, the intelligence agencies are disappointed by this seemingly flimsy resolution. Not having a central database makes piecing together data about one individual more difficult. In short, no one has won.
Filed under: Internet, Technology | Tags: closures, geocities, web hosting, yahoo
Reports are filtering through the web that the latest Yahoo amputee will be 90′s DIY webkit GeoCities. Similar tools Angelfire and Tripod are reputed to be in trouble according to a comic eulogy from PC World. The Guardian feels a certain ‘pixel nostalgia’ for the swathes of dreadful content relegated to the digital abyss.
Most people have forgotten about GeoCities, because it failed to innovate. Its interface didn’t get any cleaner or easier to use. No one has an ‘about me’ page just for the hell of it any more – you know, the kind of thing with a picture of your dog and an awful Word 97 fun ‘border’. Users have become a lot savvier about building their own websites, especially since friendly CMS’s like WordPress popped up.
Being a 2.0 nerd I naturally created my own GeoCities monstrosity back in the day. Isn’t it beautiful? Mismatching colour schemes, in-built ad bar and what one visitor described as a ‘flaming turd’ across the masthead. I hasten to add that I was about 16. At least it wasn’t chatrooms, alright?
All of that was created with the wonderful PageBuilder which is so backward I couldn’t even get it to open in Firefox. From memory though, it was a web building tool which took an age to load across several Explorer windows and then crashed. A lot.
The ‘main page’ buttons on my site used to flash – an effect created by making two separate picture files interchange very quickly when your mouse hovered over them. Sadly that sophisticated little feature seems not to work on most modern browsers…and soon, neither will GeoCities.
Apologies to anyone who read an accidental first draft of this. Got a bit keen pushing the new post on Twitter. So keen, I hadn’t even completed it.
Filed under: Internet, Technology | Tags: censorship, china, dalai lama, great firewall, hacking, snooping dragon, tibet
A friend of mine has just begun to blog about teaching sixth-formers English in an eastern province of China. Commenting on setting up his WordPress, he says:
I found my initial attempts at communication barricaded by the Great Firewall of China (no, not an example of my parched dry wit; Party officials really do refer to it as such) and so I’ve had to look into other options. If you’re currently scanning this page, it’s finally worked…
The sheer manpower needed for Chinese paranoia to run at all levels continues to astonish, since it includes not merely the harmless gap year blog but its highest political enemies.
So says the ‘snooping dragon’ report, a joint effort from Cambridge University and the University of Illinois. Look beyond the academic propensity for headline puns and it makes a terrifying read. Authors Ross Anderson and Shishir Nagaraja describe how the Dalai Lama’s offices first became aware of information leaks with potentially dire consequences for Tibetans. His administration set up one meeting with a foreign diplomat via e-mail. Before they had even made the follow-up courtesy phone call, Chinese government officials contacted the diplomat to instruct him that the meeting could not go ahead. How was this possible without a security breach?
Further investigation showed that Chinese IP addresses – not associated with the Dalai Lama’s offices - had logged into their servers.
Obviously the monks hadn’t been watching Swordfish, although frankly even they managed to be more up-to-date than Jack Straw. Hacking into their email accounts was, it seems, relatively easy since they were defended by low-security passwords and plain-text mail. Unfortunately, even encryption wasn’t going to work as the monks had fallen for the virus-as-a-link gag, otherwise known as phishing.
Easy enough to avoid, but more nastily, the hackers managed to interrupt legit mail in transit and replace harmless attachments with malicious ones. So while Gyaltsen Norbu might have been showing off his new robes to Tenzin Gyatso in a picture attachment, it probably arrived as something unmentionable.
Luckily for the Tibetans, no deeply secret documents were exploited and their safety has not been compromised. But the authors finish on an ominous note – that these personalised phishing and hacking techniques are easily replicable:
In the medium term we predict that social malware will be used for fraud, and the typical company has really no defence against it. We expect that many crooks will get rich before
e ffective countermeasures are widely deployed.
Jack Schofield writes that Western companies should learn to safeguard against this, and fast. What is perhaps more sad is those who continue to believe in the ideals of the internet – the sharing and movement of information – may find themselves increasingly cynical of how this freedom will be exploited. Once you’ve scaled the Great Firewall, a dragon lies in wait.
Just playing about on Google maps, and have constructed my long-winded cycling route from Harringay to Islington with landmarks – well, landmark – en route.
View Larger Map
