"Search Engine of the Future" - Jeff Koterba, Omaha World Herald, Omaha, Nebraska, US
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Facebook isn't a charity. The poor will pay by surrendering their data
A great opinion piece.
People are fawning over the modern technology & connectivity (internet, smartphones, apps etc.) & they have truly disrupted the business & labour markets alike. But what we gloss over (seeing the trees but forgetting the forest) that these same technologies, if brought some good things in this world (e.g. Wikipedia & WikiLeaks), they also brought a lot of pain in the shape of, for instance, millions of job losses, cyber-bullying, lack of privacy, much closer integration of financial systems (which, in turn, helped spread the financial crises of one country, globally).
Internet now is turning into a device for exploiting the poor, & with the help of dire economic & financial situations, at least, in the near future, billions of poor will keep getting exploited by rich (who became rich with the help of internet in the first place).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Luxury is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed. Such, at any rate, is the provocative argument put forward by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. Recently dubbed “the Varian rule”, it states that to predict the future, we just have to look at what rich people already have & assume that the middle classes will have it in 5 years & poor people will have it in 10. Radio, TV, dishwashers, mobile phones, flatscreen TVs: Varian sees this principle at work in the history of many technologies.
So what is it that the rich have today that the poor will get in a decade? Varian bets on personal assistants. Instead of maids & chauffeurs we would have self-driving cars, housecleaning robots & clever, omniscient apps that can monitor, inform & nudge us in real time.
As Varian puts it: “These digital assistants will be so useful that everyone will want one & the scare stories you read today about privacy concerns will just seem quaint & old-fashioned.” Google Now, one such assistant, can monitor our emails, searches & locations & constantly remind us about forthcoming meetings or trips, all while patiently checking real-time weather & traffic in the background.
Varian’s juxtaposition of dishwashers with apps might seem reasonable but it’s actually misleading. When you hire somebody as your personal assistant, the transaction is relatively straightforward: you pay the person for the services tendered – often, in cash – & that’s the end of it. It’s tempting to say that the same logic is at work with virtual assistants: you surrender your data – the way you would surrender your cash – for Google to provide this otherwise free service.
But something doesn’t add up here: few of us expect our personal assistants to walk away with a copy of all our letters & files in order to make a buck off them. For our virtual assistants, on the other hand, this is the only reason they exist.
In fact, we are getting shortchanged twice: first, when we surrender our data – eventually, it ends up on Google’s balance sheet – in exchange for relatively trivial services, &, second, when that data is then later used to customise & structure our world in a way that is neither transparent nor desirable.
This second life-shaping feature of data as a unit of exchange is not yet well understood. However, it’s precisely this ability to shape our future even after we surrender it that turns data into an instrument of domination. While cash, with its usual anonymity, has no history & little connection to social life, data is nothing but a representation of social life – albeit crystallised into kilobytes. Google Now can work only if the company behind it manages to bring vast chunks of our existence – from communication to travel to reading – under its corporate umbrella. Once there, these activities can suddenly acquire a new economic dimension: they can finally be monetised.
Nothing of the kind happens to today’s rich when they hire a personal assistant. Here, the balance of power is clear: the master is dominating the servant – & not the other way around, as is the case with Google Now & the poor. In a way, it’s the poor who are the true “virtual assistants” to Google – in helping it to amass the data that the company later monetises.
Varian never asks the obvious question: why it is that the rich need personal assistants? Could it be – as seems likely – that it’s not because they like personal assistance but because they like free time? However, to frame the argument this way would be to reveal that the poor, perhaps, are not going to be enjoying as much free time as the rich, even if they get all the latest gadgets from Google.
The dialectic of empowerment works in mysterious ways: yes, the smart devices could save us time – so that we can spend it working to pay our higher, personalised insurance costs, or send that extra work-related email, or fill in an extra form that is required by some newly computerised bureaucratic system.
Facebook, Google’s closest competitor, pulls the same trick with connectivity. Its Internet.org initiative, which now operates in Latin America, south-east Asia & Africa, was ostensibly launched to promote digital inclusion & get the poor in the developing world online. Online they do get but it’s a very particular kind of “online”: Facebook & a few other sites & apps are free but users have to pay for everything else, often based on how much data their individual apps consume. As a result, few of these people – remember, we are talking about very poor populations – are likely to afford the world outside Facebook’s content empire.
Here is the Varian rule at work again: on the face of it, the poor do get what the rich have already – internet connectivity. But the key difference is not hard to spot. Unlike the rich, who pay for their connectivity with their cash, the poor pay for it with their data – the data that Facebook would one day monetise in order to justify the entire Internet.org operation. We are not dealing with a charity here, after all. Facebook is interested in “digital inclusion” in much the same manner as loan sharks are interested in “financial inclusion”: it is in it for the money.
Any service provider – be it in education, health, or journalism – would soon realise that to reach the millions using Internet.org, it had better launch & operate its apps inside Facebook rather than outside. In other words, the poor might eventually end up getting all those nice services that the rich already have, but only with their data – their congealed social life – covering the costs of it.
The free connectivity that Facebook offers to the developing countries is essentially a giant financial derivative that finances the development of its infrastructure: Facebook gives these countries connectivity in exchange for the right to monetise the lives of their citizens once they have earned enough money.
The Varian rule, it seems, needs a major correction: to predict the future, simply look at what the oil companies & banks have been doing for the past two centuries & extrapolate to Silicon Valley, our new default provider of infrastructure for all basic services. In that future, alas, virtual assistants would not be enough – we would be in dire need of virtual psychoanalysts.
People are fawning over the modern technology & connectivity (internet, smartphones, apps etc.) & they have truly disrupted the business & labour markets alike. But what we gloss over (seeing the trees but forgetting the forest) that these same technologies, if brought some good things in this world (e.g. Wikipedia & WikiLeaks), they also brought a lot of pain in the shape of, for instance, millions of job losses, cyber-bullying, lack of privacy, much closer integration of financial systems (which, in turn, helped spread the financial crises of one country, globally).
Internet now is turning into a device for exploiting the poor, & with the help of dire economic & financial situations, at least, in the near future, billions of poor will keep getting exploited by rich (who became rich with the help of internet in the first place).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Luxury is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed. Such, at any rate, is the provocative argument put forward by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. Recently dubbed “the Varian rule”, it states that to predict the future, we just have to look at what rich people already have & assume that the middle classes will have it in 5 years & poor people will have it in 10. Radio, TV, dishwashers, mobile phones, flatscreen TVs: Varian sees this principle at work in the history of many technologies.
So what is it that the rich have today that the poor will get in a decade? Varian bets on personal assistants. Instead of maids & chauffeurs we would have self-driving cars, housecleaning robots & clever, omniscient apps that can monitor, inform & nudge us in real time.
As Varian puts it: “These digital assistants will be so useful that everyone will want one & the scare stories you read today about privacy concerns will just seem quaint & old-fashioned.” Google Now, one such assistant, can monitor our emails, searches & locations & constantly remind us about forthcoming meetings or trips, all while patiently checking real-time weather & traffic in the background.
Varian’s juxtaposition of dishwashers with apps might seem reasonable but it’s actually misleading. When you hire somebody as your personal assistant, the transaction is relatively straightforward: you pay the person for the services tendered – often, in cash – & that’s the end of it. It’s tempting to say that the same logic is at work with virtual assistants: you surrender your data – the way you would surrender your cash – for Google to provide this otherwise free service.
But something doesn’t add up here: few of us expect our personal assistants to walk away with a copy of all our letters & files in order to make a buck off them. For our virtual assistants, on the other hand, this is the only reason they exist.
In fact, we are getting shortchanged twice: first, when we surrender our data – eventually, it ends up on Google’s balance sheet – in exchange for relatively trivial services, &, second, when that data is then later used to customise & structure our world in a way that is neither transparent nor desirable.
This second life-shaping feature of data as a unit of exchange is not yet well understood. However, it’s precisely this ability to shape our future even after we surrender it that turns data into an instrument of domination. While cash, with its usual anonymity, has no history & little connection to social life, data is nothing but a representation of social life – albeit crystallised into kilobytes. Google Now can work only if the company behind it manages to bring vast chunks of our existence – from communication to travel to reading – under its corporate umbrella. Once there, these activities can suddenly acquire a new economic dimension: they can finally be monetised.
Nothing of the kind happens to today’s rich when they hire a personal assistant. Here, the balance of power is clear: the master is dominating the servant – & not the other way around, as is the case with Google Now & the poor. In a way, it’s the poor who are the true “virtual assistants” to Google – in helping it to amass the data that the company later monetises.
Varian never asks the obvious question: why it is that the rich need personal assistants? Could it be – as seems likely – that it’s not because they like personal assistance but because they like free time? However, to frame the argument this way would be to reveal that the poor, perhaps, are not going to be enjoying as much free time as the rich, even if they get all the latest gadgets from Google.
The dialectic of empowerment works in mysterious ways: yes, the smart devices could save us time – so that we can spend it working to pay our higher, personalised insurance costs, or send that extra work-related email, or fill in an extra form that is required by some newly computerised bureaucratic system.
Facebook, Google’s closest competitor, pulls the same trick with connectivity. Its Internet.org initiative, which now operates in Latin America, south-east Asia & Africa, was ostensibly launched to promote digital inclusion & get the poor in the developing world online. Online they do get but it’s a very particular kind of “online”: Facebook & a few other sites & apps are free but users have to pay for everything else, often based on how much data their individual apps consume. As a result, few of these people – remember, we are talking about very poor populations – are likely to afford the world outside Facebook’s content empire.
Here is the Varian rule at work again: on the face of it, the poor do get what the rich have already – internet connectivity. But the key difference is not hard to spot. Unlike the rich, who pay for their connectivity with their cash, the poor pay for it with their data – the data that Facebook would one day monetise in order to justify the entire Internet.org operation. We are not dealing with a charity here, after all. Facebook is interested in “digital inclusion” in much the same manner as loan sharks are interested in “financial inclusion”: it is in it for the money.
Any service provider – be it in education, health, or journalism – would soon realise that to reach the millions using Internet.org, it had better launch & operate its apps inside Facebook rather than outside. In other words, the poor might eventually end up getting all those nice services that the rich already have, but only with their data – their congealed social life – covering the costs of it.
The free connectivity that Facebook offers to the developing countries is essentially a giant financial derivative that finances the development of its infrastructure: Facebook gives these countries connectivity in exchange for the right to monetise the lives of their citizens once they have earned enough money.
The Varian rule, it seems, needs a major correction: to predict the future, simply look at what the oil companies & banks have been doing for the past two centuries & extrapolate to Silicon Valley, our new default provider of infrastructure for all basic services. In that future, alas, virtual assistants would not be enough – we would be in dire need of virtual psychoanalysts.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Saturday, April 18, 2015
How the internet is destroying us
Super loved this article ... left me speechless. Flawless. I tried picking a few lines to put it here, but it seemed every line was more important than the previous one, so I ended up putting here almost the whole article. Ironically, regardless of how much I loved this article, I still gotta use social media.
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The internet, its many evangelists tell us, is the answer to all our problems. It gives power to the people.
It’s a platform for equality that allows everyone an equal share in life’s riches. For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say or buy anything.
But today, as the internet heads towards putting more than half the world’s population online, all this promise has evaporated.
The dream has become a nightmare, in which I fear we billions of network users are victims, not beneficiaries.
In our super-connected 21st-century world, rather than promoting economic fairness, the net is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich & poor, & the hollowing out of the middle classes.
Rather than generating more jobs, it is - as I will explain - a cause of unemployment. Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists such as Google & Amazon in a winner-takes-all economy.
Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency & openness, it secretly gathers information & keeps a watch on each & every one of us.
You need only have read the stories ... about how smart TVs can spy on us in our living rooms to realise that Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a Big Brother society, is becoming a reality.
And thanks to the explosion in social media, rather than creating more democracy, the internet is empowering mob rule.
The internet has also unleashed a seemingly unstoppable flow of increasingly hardcore sexual materials. Only this week it emerged that half a million pornographic images are posted on Twitter every day.
Britain’s most senior judge warned recently that online pornography is a serious danger, fuelling rape & murder. Where will it stop?
And when people are not looking online at other people with no clothes on, they are looking at themselves.
Rather than fostering an intellectual renaissance, the internet has created a selfie-centred culture of voyeurism & narcissism.
Far from making us happy, it is provoking & channelling an outpouring of anger at the world around us.
Of course, the internet is not all bad. It has done tremendous good in connecting families, friends & work colleagues around the world.
The personal lives of 3 billion internet users have been transformed by the incredible convenience of email, social media, e-commerce & mobile apps.
Yes, we all rely on & even love our ever-shrinking & increasingly powerful mobile devices. Yes, the internet can, if used critically, be a source of great enlightenment in terms of the global sharing of ideas & information.
The app economy is already beginning to generate innovative solutions to some of the most pervasive problems on the planet, such as mapping clean water stations in Africa & providing access to credit for entrepreneurs in India.
But the hidden negatives outweigh the positives. Under our noses, one of the biggest ever shifts in power between people & big institutions is taking place, disguised in the language of inclusion & transparency.
Rather than providing a public service, the architects of our digital future are building a society that is a disservice to almost everyone except a few powerful, wealthy owners.
It’s easy to forget the crusading intentions with which the internet revolution began. But then the mantle passed from the techno wizards & visionaries to businessmen.
The internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul. Money replaced all these things.
Amazon reflects much of what has gone wrong. Now by far the dominant internet retailer, it has achieved this position by crushing or acquiring its competitors & selling everything it can lay its hands on.
It has felt the need to expand so ruthlessly because in its type of e-commerce, margins are extremely tight & economies of scale vital. In 2013, Amazon made sales of $75 billion (£49 billion) but returned a profit of just $274 million (£178 million).
To succeed, it has to make itself a virtual monopoly, stifling rivals along the way. Inside the company this is known as the Gazelle Project, after founder Jeff Bezos instructed one of his staff that ‘Amazon should approach small book publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle’.
The book trade - which is where Amazon began - was initially quite enthusiastic about the new arrival but now sees it as a predator as shops close down, unable to compete.
As Amazon expands into more retail sectors - from clothing, electronics & toys to garden furniture & jewellery - it is having the same effect there.
The impact on jobs is huge. While bricks-&-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every £65 million in sales, Amazon employs just 14, making it a job-killer rather than a job-creator.
‘Robotisation’ in its warehouses may reduce job numbers even further, until eventually Amazon eliminates the human factor from shopping completely. The ‘Everything Store’ is becoming the ‘Nobody store’.
Then there is Google, which discovered the holy grail of the information economy with its search engine sifting & indexing the mass of digital material on the worldwide web.
Last year Google processed 40,000 search queries a second, equal to 1.2 trillion searches a year. It controls around two-thirds of searches globally, with 90% dominance in markets such as Italy & Spain.
The service is free to use. Advertising pays the bills & makes the profits.
The irony is that Google was invented by a couple of idealistic computer science graduate students who so mistrusted advertisements that they banned them on their homepage. Now it is by far the largest & most powerful advertising company in history, valued at over £260 billion.
Unlike Amazon, its profits are mind-bogglingly high. In 2013, it returned nearly £10billion for its investors, from revenues of nearly £39billion.
Even more valuable, from Google’s point of view, is what it learns about us. And Google, for better or worse, never forgets. All our digital trails are crunched to provide Google & its corporate clients with our so-called ‘data exhaust’.
From this concept other internet services have developed, including Facebook, Wikipedia, the business networking site LinkedIn, & self-publishing platforms such as Twitter & YouTube.
Most pursue a Google-style strategy of giving away their tools & services free, relying on advertising sales for revenue. In the process, they have created significant wealth for their founders & investors.
On the surface, this seems like a win for everyone. We all get free internet tools & the entrepreneurs become super-rich.
But there is a catch. All of us are, in fact, working for Facebook & Google for nothing, manufacturing the very personal data that makes these companies so valuable.
The result is another massive loss of jobs. Google needs to employ only 46,000 people, compared with an industrial giant like General Motors, which is worth just a seventh of Google’s £260 billion but employs just over 200,000 people in its factories.
For all the claims that the internet has created more equal opportunity & distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a doughnut — with a gaping hole in the middle where millions of workers were once paid to manufacture products.
Take the photo app Instagram, which allows anyone to share their own snaps online for others to see. When it was sold to Facebook for £651 million in 2012, it had just 13 full-time employees. Meanwhile, Kodak was closing 13 factories & 130 photo labs & laying off 47,000 workers.
Or WhatsApp, the instant messaging platform for which Facebook paid £12.4 billion. In one month it handled 54 billion messages from its 450 million users, yet it employs only 55 people to manage its service.
That’s because we are the ones doing most of the work. In this e-world, the quality of the technology is secondary.
What’s important — & what is actually being traded when these companies change hands — is you & me: our labour, our productivity, our network, our supposed creativity.
Yet for our input in adding intelligence to Google, or content to Facebook, we are paid nothing, merely being granted the right to use the software free. And that’s what is driving the new ‘data factory’ economy.
We think we are using Instagram to look at the world, but actually we are the ones being watched. And the more we reveal about ourselves, the more valuable we become to advertisers.
From social media networks such as Twitter & Facebook to Google, ... the exploitation of our personal information is what counts. These companies want to know us so intimately so they can package us up &, without our consent, sell us back to advertisers.
Another great irony in all this is that the internet was created by public-minded technologists such as the English academic Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who were all indifferent to money, sometimes even hostile to it.
Yet the internet they produced with such high humanitarian hopes has triggered one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in human history.
Jeff Bezos has made £19.5 billion from his Amazon Everything Store that offers cheaper prices than its rivals. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated his £19.5 billion by making money out of friendship.
In 25 years, the internet has gone from the initial idealistic banning of all forms of commerce to transforming absolutely everything into profitable activity. Especially our privacy.
Tim Berners-Lee never imagined that his ‘social’ creation to help people to work together more easily could be used so cynically, both by private companies & by governments. Yet that’s what is happening.
As the internet transforms every electronic object into a connected device, we are drifting into a world where everything — our fitness, what we eat, our driving habits, how hard we work — can be profitably quantified by companies such as Google.
Faceless data-gatherers wearing all-seeing electronic glasses watch our every move. Our networked society is like a claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community in which there are no longer any secrets or any anonymity.
We are observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state, from big data companies & the Government to insurance companies, healthcare providers & the police.
Google & Facebook boast that they know us more intimately than we know ourselves. They know what we did yesterday, today &, with the help of predictive technology, what we will do tomorrow.
And it is, frankly, our fault for choosing to live in a crystal republic where cars, mobile phones & televisions — hooked up to the internet — watch us.
Far from being the answer to our problems, the internet, whose pioneers believed it would save humanity, is diminishing our lives.
Instead of creating more transparency, we have devices that make the invisible visible. The sharing economy is really the selfish economy. Social media is, in fact, anti-social. And the success of the internet is a huge failure.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The internet, its many evangelists tell us, is the answer to all our problems. It gives power to the people.
It’s a platform for equality that allows everyone an equal share in life’s riches. For the first time in history, anyone can produce, say or buy anything.
But today, as the internet heads towards putting more than half the world’s population online, all this promise has evaporated.
The dream has become a nightmare, in which I fear we billions of network users are victims, not beneficiaries.
In our super-connected 21st-century world, rather than promoting economic fairness, the net is a central reason for the growing gulf between rich & poor, & the hollowing out of the middle classes.
Rather than generating more jobs, it is - as I will explain - a cause of unemployment. Rather than creating more competition, it has created immensely powerful new monopolists such as Google & Amazon in a winner-takes-all economy.
Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency & openness, it secretly gathers information & keeps a watch on each & every one of us.
You need only have read the stories ... about how smart TVs can spy on us in our living rooms to realise that Orwell’s vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of a Big Brother society, is becoming a reality.
And thanks to the explosion in social media, rather than creating more democracy, the internet is empowering mob rule.
The internet has also unleashed a seemingly unstoppable flow of increasingly hardcore sexual materials. Only this week it emerged that half a million pornographic images are posted on Twitter every day.
Britain’s most senior judge warned recently that online pornography is a serious danger, fuelling rape & murder. Where will it stop?
And when people are not looking online at other people with no clothes on, they are looking at themselves.
Rather than fostering an intellectual renaissance, the internet has created a selfie-centred culture of voyeurism & narcissism.
Far from making us happy, it is provoking & channelling an outpouring of anger at the world around us.
Of course, the internet is not all bad. It has done tremendous good in connecting families, friends & work colleagues around the world.
The personal lives of 3 billion internet users have been transformed by the incredible convenience of email, social media, e-commerce & mobile apps.
Yes, we all rely on & even love our ever-shrinking & increasingly powerful mobile devices. Yes, the internet can, if used critically, be a source of great enlightenment in terms of the global sharing of ideas & information.
The app economy is already beginning to generate innovative solutions to some of the most pervasive problems on the planet, such as mapping clean water stations in Africa & providing access to credit for entrepreneurs in India.
But the hidden negatives outweigh the positives. Under our noses, one of the biggest ever shifts in power between people & big institutions is taking place, disguised in the language of inclusion & transparency.
Rather than providing a public service, the architects of our digital future are building a society that is a disservice to almost everyone except a few powerful, wealthy owners.
It’s easy to forget the crusading intentions with which the internet revolution began. But then the mantle passed from the techno wizards & visionaries to businessmen.
The internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul. Money replaced all these things.
Amazon reflects much of what has gone wrong. Now by far the dominant internet retailer, it has achieved this position by crushing or acquiring its competitors & selling everything it can lay its hands on.
It has felt the need to expand so ruthlessly because in its type of e-commerce, margins are extremely tight & economies of scale vital. In 2013, Amazon made sales of $75 billion (£49 billion) but returned a profit of just $274 million (£178 million).
To succeed, it has to make itself a virtual monopoly, stifling rivals along the way. Inside the company this is known as the Gazelle Project, after founder Jeff Bezos instructed one of his staff that ‘Amazon should approach small book publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle’.
The book trade - which is where Amazon began - was initially quite enthusiastic about the new arrival but now sees it as a predator as shops close down, unable to compete.
As Amazon expands into more retail sectors - from clothing, electronics & toys to garden furniture & jewellery - it is having the same effect there.
The impact on jobs is huge. While bricks-&-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every £65 million in sales, Amazon employs just 14, making it a job-killer rather than a job-creator.
‘Robotisation’ in its warehouses may reduce job numbers even further, until eventually Amazon eliminates the human factor from shopping completely. The ‘Everything Store’ is becoming the ‘Nobody store’.
Then there is Google, which discovered the holy grail of the information economy with its search engine sifting & indexing the mass of digital material on the worldwide web.
Last year Google processed 40,000 search queries a second, equal to 1.2 trillion searches a year. It controls around two-thirds of searches globally, with 90% dominance in markets such as Italy & Spain.
The service is free to use. Advertising pays the bills & makes the profits.
The irony is that Google was invented by a couple of idealistic computer science graduate students who so mistrusted advertisements that they banned them on their homepage. Now it is by far the largest & most powerful advertising company in history, valued at over £260 billion.
Unlike Amazon, its profits are mind-bogglingly high. In 2013, it returned nearly £10billion for its investors, from revenues of nearly £39billion.
Even more valuable, from Google’s point of view, is what it learns about us. And Google, for better or worse, never forgets. All our digital trails are crunched to provide Google & its corporate clients with our so-called ‘data exhaust’.
From this concept other internet services have developed, including Facebook, Wikipedia, the business networking site LinkedIn, & self-publishing platforms such as Twitter & YouTube.
Most pursue a Google-style strategy of giving away their tools & services free, relying on advertising sales for revenue. In the process, they have created significant wealth for their founders & investors.
On the surface, this seems like a win for everyone. We all get free internet tools & the entrepreneurs become super-rich.
But there is a catch. All of us are, in fact, working for Facebook & Google for nothing, manufacturing the very personal data that makes these companies so valuable.
The result is another massive loss of jobs. Google needs to employ only 46,000 people, compared with an industrial giant like General Motors, which is worth just a seventh of Google’s £260 billion but employs just over 200,000 people in its factories.
For all the claims that the internet has created more equal opportunity & distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a doughnut — with a gaping hole in the middle where millions of workers were once paid to manufacture products.
Take the photo app Instagram, which allows anyone to share their own snaps online for others to see. When it was sold to Facebook for £651 million in 2012, it had just 13 full-time employees. Meanwhile, Kodak was closing 13 factories & 130 photo labs & laying off 47,000 workers.
Or WhatsApp, the instant messaging platform for which Facebook paid £12.4 billion. In one month it handled 54 billion messages from its 450 million users, yet it employs only 55 people to manage its service.
That’s because we are the ones doing most of the work. In this e-world, the quality of the technology is secondary.
What’s important — & what is actually being traded when these companies change hands — is you & me: our labour, our productivity, our network, our supposed creativity.
Yet for our input in adding intelligence to Google, or content to Facebook, we are paid nothing, merely being granted the right to use the software free. And that’s what is driving the new ‘data factory’ economy.
We think we are using Instagram to look at the world, but actually we are the ones being watched. And the more we reveal about ourselves, the more valuable we become to advertisers.
From social media networks such as Twitter & Facebook to Google, ... the exploitation of our personal information is what counts. These companies want to know us so intimately so they can package us up &, without our consent, sell us back to advertisers.
Another great irony in all this is that the internet was created by public-minded technologists such as the English academic Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who were all indifferent to money, sometimes even hostile to it.
Yet the internet they produced with such high humanitarian hopes has triggered one of the greatest accumulations of wealth in human history.
Jeff Bezos has made £19.5 billion from his Amazon Everything Store that offers cheaper prices than its rivals. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated his £19.5 billion by making money out of friendship.
In 25 years, the internet has gone from the initial idealistic banning of all forms of commerce to transforming absolutely everything into profitable activity. Especially our privacy.
Tim Berners-Lee never imagined that his ‘social’ creation to help people to work together more easily could be used so cynically, both by private companies & by governments. Yet that’s what is happening.
As the internet transforms every electronic object into a connected device, we are drifting into a world where everything — our fitness, what we eat, our driving habits, how hard we work — can be profitably quantified by companies such as Google.
Faceless data-gatherers wearing all-seeing electronic glasses watch our every move. Our networked society is like a claustrophobic village pub, a frighteningly transparent community in which there are no longer any secrets or any anonymity.
We are observed by every unloving institution of the new digital surveillance state, from big data companies & the Government to insurance companies, healthcare providers & the police.
Google & Facebook boast that they know us more intimately than we know ourselves. They know what we did yesterday, today &, with the help of predictive technology, what we will do tomorrow.
And it is, frankly, our fault for choosing to live in a crystal republic where cars, mobile phones & televisions — hooked up to the internet — watch us.
Far from being the answer to our problems, the internet, whose pioneers believed it would save humanity, is diminishing our lives.
Instead of creating more transparency, we have devices that make the invisible visible. The sharing economy is really the selfish economy. Social media is, in fact, anti-social. And the success of the internet is a huge failure.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Using Facebook to spy on your 'friends' can cause depression
This news or study is not telling something new. It's old news that social media is causing depression in people, all over the world.
But what is astounding here is that most people still take what other people post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media site as the proof that those friends of theirs have a much better life than their own; a great house, travelling to exotic locations, having great food; essentially, living the luxurious life.
Then, if they are single, they go into depression & stress. If they are in a relationship, then they not only go into depression themselves, but also start to create a rift in their relationship by constantly fighting with their partner that why aren't they are living the luxurious life.
What those people forget that what their friends are posting on social media is without context & only half-truth. They are not posting anything negative about their life. Nobody does. Frankly, if everyone is living such a luxurious & beautiful life, then world should be a lot more enjoyable place; we wouldn't be constantly hearing about divorces, runaway kids, people being laid off from jobs, people not protesting against austerity, minimum wages, & debts, etc.
We may think that people should use common sense when they see things (pictures, status, comments) on social media by their friends & realize that it's only tiny side of the whole picture. But then, like a colleague of mine once said to me in 2008, "common sense is not as common as you might think."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Using Facebook to spy on friends in order to compare their achievements with yours can lead to depression & may have a detrimental effect on mental health, a new study from the University of Missouri has found.
But when Facebook is used to see how well an acquaintance is doing in terms of their finances or to see how happy one of your friends is in their relationship, then this behavior can cause envy among users.
“Facebook can be a very positive resource for many people, but if it used as a way to size up one’s own accomplishments against others, it can have a negative effect,” said Duffy.
Facebook users should be aware that it’s important to have social media literacy, said Edson Tandoc, assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who coauthored the study.
“Users should be self-aware that positive self-presentation is an important motivation in using social media, so it is to be expected that many users would only post positive things about themselves. This self-awareness, hopefully, can lessen feelings of envy,” said Tandoc.
But what is astounding here is that most people still take what other people post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media site as the proof that those friends of theirs have a much better life than their own; a great house, travelling to exotic locations, having great food; essentially, living the luxurious life.
Then, if they are single, they go into depression & stress. If they are in a relationship, then they not only go into depression themselves, but also start to create a rift in their relationship by constantly fighting with their partner that why aren't they are living the luxurious life.
What those people forget that what their friends are posting on social media is without context & only half-truth. They are not posting anything negative about their life. Nobody does. Frankly, if everyone is living such a luxurious & beautiful life, then world should be a lot more enjoyable place; we wouldn't be constantly hearing about divorces, runaway kids, people being laid off from jobs, people not protesting against austerity, minimum wages, & debts, etc.
We may think that people should use common sense when they see things (pictures, status, comments) on social media by their friends & realize that it's only tiny side of the whole picture. But then, like a colleague of mine once said to me in 2008, "common sense is not as common as you might think."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Using Facebook to spy on friends in order to compare their achievements with yours can lead to depression & may have a detrimental effect on mental health, a new study from the University of Missouri has found.
But when Facebook is used to see how well an acquaintance is doing in terms of their finances or to see how happy one of your friends is in their relationship, then this behavior can cause envy among users.
“Facebook can be a very positive resource for many people, but if it used as a way to size up one’s own accomplishments against others, it can have a negative effect,” said Duffy.
Facebook users should be aware that it’s important to have social media literacy, said Edson Tandoc, assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who coauthored the study.
“Users should be self-aware that positive self-presentation is an important motivation in using social media, so it is to be expected that many users would only post positive things about themselves. This self-awareness, hopefully, can lessen feelings of envy,” said Tandoc.
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