Tag Archives: internet

What the internet is doing to us

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I am sure you are just dying to know what I read this summer.  Well, there was a lot of brain candy (mystery novels).  But I also read a bunch of books about how the internet is changing us (and not necessarily for the better):

Aboujaoude, Elias. Virtually you: the dangerous powers of the e-personality. New York: Norton, 2011. (Publisher’s description)

  • This one gets awarded The Cataloger’s Stamp of Approval.  This book is that good.  Aboujaoude talks about the ways that our online personality seeps into our offline life, and that is a recipe for disaster.  He identifies five main psychological forces in our e-personalities: “grandiosity, or the feeling that the sky is the limit when it comes to what we can accomplish online; narcissism, or how we tend to think of ourselves as the center of gravity of the World Wide Web; darkness, or how the Internet nurtures our morbid side; regression, or the remarkable immaturity we seem capable of once we log on; and impulsivity, or the urge-driven lifestyle many fall into online” (43). Aboujaoude call this the “Net effect”. Aboujaoude is a psychiatrist, and he talks about how the Net effect can ruin our ‘real’ (as opposed to ‘virtual’) lives. This should be required reading for anyone with internet access.  It certainly gave me pause, and led to more than a few days this summer where I took an internet hiatus.

Carr, Nicholas. The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: Norton, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

Lanier, Jaron. You are not a gadget: a manifesto. New York: Knopf, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

  • One of Lanier’s major arguments is that our culture now promotes only re-mixing and re-hashing old art.  We don’t make anything new.  (When was the last time you heard about a new movie that was not just a remake of an old movie?)  We remix music,  We cut-and-paste the stuff of the internet into new stuff.  What we fail to do is create anything, and this is a problem for the future.

Pariser, Eli. The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. New York: Penguin, 2011. (Publisher’s description)

  • This book should be required reading for everyone who uses Google and/or Facebook.  This also could have been edited to be a bit shorter, but at least it is an easy read.  I learned a lot about filtering from Pariser.  Here’s one that you probably didn’t know: when you look at your Facebook New Feed, it displays the Top news by default.  But you can click on “Most recent” to see even more posts.  The trick is that most people think that clicking on “Most recent” shows you all of your friends’ posts.  However, that is not the case.  It only shows you posts that are similar to the sorts of posts you’ve clicked on before.  Every click is changing what is displayed to you, both in Facebook and on the internet in general.  Pariser also maintains a blog on this topic: The Filter Bubble.

Rushkoff, Douglas. Program or be programmed: ten commands for a digital age. New York: OR Books, 2010. (Publisher’s description)

  • This book is also really good.  It’s a short work that talks about the re-mix culture of the internet.  It also mentions how we are being ‘programmed’ by the internet and by software.  So few people know how to do programming, and that means that we are stuck receiving what is given to us; we can’t make changes ourselves.  This is really unfortunate, because it puts the power of creation into the hands of very few people, and they generally are driven by market forces to create not the best software, but the software that will sell the most.  (This reminds of me of tv.  They don’t make shows that are good; they make shows that attract the largest market audience.  Those are usually two different things.)  Rushkoff doesn’t just talk about software programming, though.  The book is much larger than that.  I highly recommend it.  I’m going to give this one The Cataloger’s Stamp of Approval too.

[Tech tips] SpiderOak

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I am a big fan of DropBox, which is an application that helps you sync files from your hard drive into the cloud.  It’s wonderful for people who have to use different computers, but forget to email things to themselves or carry their USB drives so that they can access their files wherever they are.  It’s also really helpful to know that there is a place where you can store your files and never, ever dump coffee on them.  Most importantly, you can set it up to sync your files automatically, so that you don’t have to remember to do it.  You can even set up parts of your synced files to share with other users, so sharing is easy, too.

The one drawback to DropBox, though, is that it is not particularly secure.  It’s secure enough for mundane things, but the really important things that you want to back up are not necessarily safe there.  There were recent security breaches at DropBox that made me search for a better solution.

I just discovered SpiderOak.  SpiderOak is similar to DropBox, in that it syncs your files to the cloud.  But before it does that, it encrypts them.  If someone were to steal data from SpiderOak, they would need your encryption key to read your files.  SpiderOak doesn’t store your password, which is how your encryption key is made.   (If you want to read more about the encryption technology they’re using, visit this page.)

SpiderOak is slightly more complicated to setup than DropBox, and it takes a while to do your first major backup of files.  (That’s because they need to be encrypted first.)  But once the file syncing is set up, it’s really easy and fast.  They also have really helpful videos and instructions on their site to walk you through the process.

Having said that, I want to remind my academic audience that it is not appropriate to store certain kinds of information in this way.  For more details about privacy and security for student data, please read this statement.

If you decide to switch, you might want to take a few minutes and think about the ways you use DropBox.  If you’re sharing folders, for instance, you’ll have to let people know that the folders are moving elsewhere, and give people access to the new folders.  Switching might be a little more complicated than just pushing a button.  Still, I think it’s worth it.

(For more information on DropBox security, check out this post. Also, their news terms of service are poorly written, which calls into question whether you own your files.  Here is information on a complaint to the FTC about DropBox.)

[Tech tips] Why filtered RSS feeds are awesome – and how you can make your own

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Let’s imagine that you follow some RSS feeds for professional (or personal) reasons.  You have them nicely set up in an RSS reader so that they are not clogging up your inbox. But they’re getting overwhelming.  Maybe you have an RSS feed that is itself an aggregator, which means it picks up content from other RSS feeds.  That can be really convenient for you, since it means that you don’t have to follow feeds from multiple sites.

But it can also be annoying.

One of the RSS feeds I follow has multiple authors, and I find one of the authors to be particularly obnoxious.  I don’t like his posts.  He is, unfortunately, a pompous windbag who writes too much of too little substance.  Sure, I can skip his posts, but I’d much rather not see them at all.

The solution here is simple: I can filter my RSS feeds.  Most RSS readers can’t handle this task, but I found a very simple, free web application that makes it easy.  It’s called Feed Rinse.  You create an account on their site – you’re using LastPass to manage all your logins, right? – and then you add the RSS feed you want to follow to your account.  Then you can tell it to filter results.  In my case, I told it to cut out all the blog posts that started with a particular title, since the feed I filtered always prefaces articles by that one author with a particular title.

Once you save your filter, you’re nearly done.  Now you can copy the URL of your filtered RSS feed and add that to your RSS reader.

You can also combine RSS feeds into a ‘channel’ with filters, which might be helpful in the classroom.  You could pull together a bunch of feeds, add them to a channel, and then tell the filter to only publish posts that include certain terms, such as a geographic location or a person.  (For example, you could pull together news feeds from several world newspapers, and then filter them to only show results including the word “Lebanon”.  This would help you quickly create a source for up-to-date news for discussion in the classroom, without you having to individually hunt for articles to recommend to students!)

The more I think about this, the more I am amazed – and it’s so easy, compared to some other filtering systems you can construct.  So, go experiment.  Have a good time.

[Tech tips] Facebook privacy

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I feel like that title is a bit of an oxymoron.

If you have a Facebook account, you probably just accepted the default security settings during the process of opening the account.

That’s not good enough.

You really need to learn how to take control of your account and understand what information is exposed.  I am sure that reading the privacy information on Facebook does not sound like your idea of a good time, but until you are familiar with it, you shouldn’t post anything in your account.  (To get to their privacy information, go to “Account” in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page. Choose “Help Center” from the drop-down menu.  In the left column, choose “Browse Help Topics”.  Take a look at the pages dealing with Privacy.)

For a helpful overview on keeping your Facebook information private – including how to display different levels of information to different friends – please head on over to Lifehacker to read this post: http://lifehacker.com/5808175/how-to-keep-people-from-seeing-your-facebook-info.