Blog Archives

A Baby’s Online Life

Posted on March 6, 2011
by

“A recent study published by AVG, an Internet security company, found that 92 percent of American children have an online presence by the time they are 2. One third of mothers in the  United States said that they had posted pictures of their newborns online, and 34 percent of American mothers had posted sonograms of their babies in the womb. According  to the AVG study, American mothers are more likely to post pictures of their children online than mothers in any other country.”

This is from a recent story on NYT called “The Digital Lives of Babies“. On a fairly periodic basis, I see a commentary on our new fangled online life. I’ve commented a couple of times (here and here) on the commentary, on what my rationale is and what I suspect our collective rationale might be for the surfeit of information about us that we’re willing to put online. This article in NYT is the first that I’ve seen about the online lives of babies.

But, there are already over 500 million Facebook accounts. Practically everyone online is on it, at least among the Internetati. There are tens, if not a hundred, mobile apps that we can use to share our presence with an online community. We can inform the world where we’re sipping java or vino la casa, where we’re enjoying dosa or tapas or what bookstore, museum or park we’re in. We’re sharing everything from the momentous (sonograms, wedding plans, breakups and fights with depression) to the momentary (sipping a latte at this new cafe, it sucks!!!). So what’s so special about posting pictures of babies ?

When it comes to kids, I’ve found parents, at least the ones I know, quite conservative in posting pictures of their babies online, especially accessible to anyone. Most put them behind closed walls, pseudo-protected by passwords, giving access only to close family and friends. I know of one friend who refuses to post any pictures of his child online. I read that in some Mayan cultures, people forbade photographing children for fear that the child’s soul was too fragile and therefore susceptible to capture by things like photographs.

Fear is the overriding factor when it comes to posting kids photos online, at least to many parents, according to this article titled “Parents, safety advocates debate risk of  publishing photos of children“. According to the article: “According to U.S. Department of Justice data, there are about 115 “stereotypical  kidnappings” a year, in which a child is taken by a stranger, detained overnight, transported at least 50 miles, held for ransom or abducted with intent to keep the child permanently, or killed. About 46 of those are killed. In a country with 70 million children, that’s a rate of about .00005 percent.” Even organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children caution on their website that when posting photographs of children online: “… [to] limit access to those you know personally and trust. To limit anyone else’s potential misuse of a photograph of your infant, carefully consider anyone’s request to take a picture of your infant and only share photographs of your infant with those you know personally and trust.”

Once, when I was playing in the park with Maya, I saw a woman was taking pictures of what appeared to be her child. She was shooting pictures of the child wearing different hats. Maya approached the child and started playing with her. After a while, the woman approached me and asked me if she could shoot pictures of Maya and use it on an online store that was planning to open. She promised to send me all the pictures that she took of Maya and also send me the link of her store when she opened it. I agreed and she took a few pictures of Maya wearing some of the hats. She emailed me all the pictures that she said she had taken and a few weeks later sent me a link to her website too which had a picture of Maya wearing her hat.

I didn’t think twice about saying yes to her request to take Maya’s picture. I didn’t agonize over whether the woman was going to sell Maya’s pictures online some place bad. Should I have ?

But the focus of the article in NYT isn’t about this fear. It is more concerned with the effect these online photos will have in how the children perceive themselves as they grow up. The author writes:
“The spontaneity and casualness of snapping family pictures has given way to the calculated, self-conscious display of family members, usually children. … The proliferation of adorable babies and children on the Web makes you wonder, above all, how these children are being perceived by the parents who snap their images, not to mention how they are learning to see themselves.”

On what basis do I select a picture of Maya to post online ? Consider the one posted above. I didn’t post that one until it made sense, as part of this entry. There were two pictures that she sent me and Maya’s face was better visible in this one. The one of Maya’s birthday, I picked to show as many people who had come as possible and I had only 3 pictures, one of which was shaken and the other which contained me and not Maya’s nanny. If we’re making calculated choices about the pictures we pick, I suspect we always have been. With the advent of digital photography, it is just easier to snap away and cull and Photoshop later, unlike the previous era where developing pictures cost a lot of money. But even the previous era, I remember culling pictures to decide which ones went in a photo album and which ones in a shoebox someplace. One criteria that everyone chooses, I suppose, is to cull those in which we look less like the mental image of ourselves. When we post online, do we cull differently ? Are parents looking for an opportunity to post their kids pictures online and hope they go viral ? I like to think that I don’t and I doubt if any of the parents we know think that way. As social animals, we like to share, we like to hang out at corners and indulge in some idle chat. As parents, talking about our kids seems a natural subject, after all we live it and breathe it as intensely as anything else we might experience in our lives. That is not to say that some parents indulge in some kind of one-upmanship or only talk of how wonderful their kids are. But to brand an entire generation that way seems like a little egregious. Maybe there is an entire brand of parental life out there that is alien to me.

Leave a Reply ?

Google’s Transparency Report

Posted on September 23, 2010
by

Google, this week, released what it calls “Transparency Report”, a set of web pages that provide some insight into the requests that it receives from various governments. The requests are categorized into two types: requests for information about users called data requests and requests for removal of content from Google’s sites or its search called removal requests.

Internet Censorship Report (image courtesy of Antonio Lupetti)

Why should we care ? Google says:
“Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.”

Many people consider this data as providing a new insight into government censorship of the Internet.

Countries that massively censor the Internet such as Iran, China or Egypt are not listed in this report. Their level of censorship is well known via reports published by Reporters with Borders and OpenNet Initiative. OpenNet for example provides maps which show the level of censorship based on the subject: political (government dissidence), social (sexual, gambling, socially offensive etc.), conflict (wars, border disputes etc.) and internet tools (websites that provide services such as email, youtube, VoIP etc.). The US and India fare differently in different subjects. For example, India shows up as indulging in selective censorship of Internet tools and conflict, the US shows up as selectively censoring social content  (child pornography, intellectual property etc.). Opennet’s main page also includes maps of censorship (a country is highlighted if it ever censored the media and is not reflective of the current state) of various social media sites such as Flickr and Facebook. For example, the report shows that Flickr is blocked by one ISP in Mexico.

It would not be a overstatement to say that Google is our window to the Internet (though Facebook is mounting a challenging attack on this status). If we can’t find a page, we can’t get to it without trying really hard. So, in countries such as the US, which do not indulge in widescale censorship of the Internet, what kind of surveillance or interference does the government indulge in and to what extent ? No information was available to answer such questions.

Consider the following two charts via Google’s new report which show the data and removal requests received from the governments of the US and India.

Google Transparency Report for the US, Jan-Jun 2010

Google Transparency Report for India, Jan-Jun 2010

It not only lists the removal requests, it also lists the sites from which the removal was requested, whether the request was court-ordered or not and the percentage of such requests Google complied with.

The list shows that the US leads the list of requesters with 4287 followed by Brazil with 2435. They drill down further into the nature of requests. For example, in the last half of 2009, half of Brazil’s requests for removal of content from Orkut involved defamation and impersonation. Germany also figures high on the list, primarily due to requests to take down pro-Nazi content, extreme pornography or violence.

Google says:
“At a time when increasing numbers of governments are trying to regulate the free flow of information on the Internet, we hope this tool will shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests to censor information or obtain user data around the globe – and we welcome external debates about these issues that we grapple with  internally on a daily basis.”

The statistics are not fully accurate, Google says. For example, they do not include information about the sites Google itself censors, mostly related to child pornography. They don’t cover government-mandated service or content blockage, such as those mandated by China. The statistics also only cover what Google considers requests due to criminal investigations. What about requests for removal due to terrorist or national security considerations ? In an increasingly strife-ridden world, those are among the primary reasons used by the government to restrict the free flow of information.

I thought it interesting that Google chose not to put out a similar map for requests by non-governmental agencies. In the US, for example, the report does not show the amount of content requested to be removed due to copyright violations. Free flow of information is not restricted only by governments as is clear from the kinds of self-censorship that exist in the traditional media in the US (for example, post Vietnam war, no videos or images of attacks on US soldiers or civilians are shown, the news channels do not show coffins of US soldiers disembarking from a plane).

All in all, a useful step forward.

Leave a Reply ?

We’ve Met The Paparazzi! They’re Us

Posted on August 26, 2010
by

“However well you write about your family or friends, you diminish them.”

I read this A.S. Byatt quote in an entry in one of The Guardian’s culture blogs.

I write with some reserve when I write about my personal life. I’m especially sensitive when I’m writing about others. I usually don’t name anybody but Shanthala and Maya, I occasionally refer directly to my parents, once or twice, I’ve said “neighbor”, and I think that’s it. For example, in my previous entry about the death of a colleague, I didn’t name her (yes, I did reveal her gender) or my friends through whom I learnt about the death.

Even when I write about Shanthala or Maya, I think if what I write will embarrass them, if not today, some day in the future. When I put up pictures of other people, I usually check with them first, though I’ve been less diligent about that. However, I don’t think that I have put up any possibly embarassing pictures of anybody except maybe myself (in which case, aren’t they all embarrassing, you may ask).

A friend seemed to echo Byatt’s sensibilities when he said that he wouldn’t have written personal entries such as the one I wrote about the evolution of my relationship with Shanthala from our first encounter to our wedding. Another expressed a similar sentiment over my writings about my grief over Kitty’s death.

I have benefited from reading about the experiences of other people. Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” or C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed” provide invaluable insights into the land of grief. They wrote both intensely and intimately about their grief and their relationship. In books such as “Elegy For Iris”, spouses write about what it is like to live with someone afflicted with horrifying diseases such as Alzheimer’s and plot the frightening descent of brilliant minds into unmind. Rafael Yglesias, in “A Happy Marriage”, documents intimate details of his marriage, both good and bad, in ways that illuminate the realities of a marriage. Kay Redfield Jamison writes about her struggles as a manic-depressive in “An Unquiet Mind”. She writes that writing that memoir put her in a difficult situation many times, but many thanked her for bringing out of the shadows the life of a manic-depressive. Gandhi’s “My Experiments With Truth” have helped me understand the perspective of this utterly unique individual.

What We Accept in Public Discourse

In the excellent, “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain De Botton, I was introduced to the ideas of the French essayist and philosopher, Michel de Montaigne. de Montaigne was a proponent of the fact that we’re far from perfect and that this aspect of our lives should not be shut away in closets and only our seemingly rational, methodical and picture perfect self presented to the world as proper. One of his more famous quotes is “Kings and philosophers shit; and so do ladies”. By stating front and center what people hitherto shied away from, he was bringing aspects of ourselves into discussion, and thereby out of the darkness. He wrote:
“The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation ? We are not afraid to utter the words kill, thieve or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth.”

Alain de Botton himself eloquently adds: “If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves. What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.“

When Maya throws a temper tantrum when we open the crayon box that she wanted to open herself, a tantrum that abates in an instant and she’s smiling and happy, Shanthala and I worried about her. Are we raising her right ? Are we being too indulgent ? Is something the matter with her ? Then, when we talk to friends with kids of similar age and they tell us how their kids throw a similar tantrum over the shape of the pasta for dinner or not being allowed to pick the color of their milk bottle for the day, we heave a sigh of relief.

I could go on and on. The history of the autobiography is ancient even if the history of the memoir is somehow very 20th century (and early 21st). The world has changed in ways in which more and more people, even ordinary people, not just the rich and famous, have had the ability to get their narratives published. This has unleashed a glut of memoirs, many of which are tell-alls, meant to air dirty laundry in public rather than present a story or perspective of lasting value. As someone said, “We don’t apologize any more, we just write memoirs”.

But is there more to this sentiment than just personal views ? Is there some larger, more pragmatic consequence to writing about ourselves or framing ourselves publicly ?

The Age of Not Forgetting

Information on the web is around forever. With effective search engines such as google, it is not that hard to dig up information about a person if it was posted online. Many specialize in pulling together disparate pieces to construct a fairly detailed portrait of us. Those embarrassing pictures or midnight twitters stay around forever. NYT Magazine carried an article (when most of my news is read online and not on paper, is “carry” an uesful metaphor anymore?) about a month back titled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”.

The article begins with the story of a teacher in training, a Stacy Snyder, who posted on MySpace a picture of her toting a drink wearing a cap that said “Drunken Pirate”. A supervisor at the high school she was training at found the picture, told her that she was promoting drinking and denied her a training degree. A federal circuit judge ruled against her case. The article cites other cases like Stacy’s including an employee who was fired because she wrote that she was bored on her Facebook page and a Canadian psychotherapist who was denied entry into the US because an online search by the immigration official revealed that he had published a paper 30 years ago on his experiences with LSD. What is next ? Non-immigrants denied entry for blogging critically about the US or US policy ?

Here is a scarier quote from the article:
“According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants, including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.”

The article goes on to state the dawn of companies like ReputationDefender that will clean up your online profile for a fee and ideas like “filing for reputation bankruptcy”. Jonathan Zittrain who reaches cyberlaw at Harvard speculates that in the future there will be companies like the financial credit rating firms, experian and equifax, that maintain the reputation rating of individuals. Here is his take as expressed in the article:
“Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute social measurements – like how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers – like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example, which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.”

But despite warnings by privacy advocates and reports such as this one, people in ever increasing numbers continue to share ever increasing information about themselves. Why do we do this ? While there are reasons posited for uninhibited behavior online, I wonder if in cases of normal behavior, there are other factors at play.

  • Nature: We are social animals and so the need to share is probably primal.
  • Distance and Time: We’re moving farther and farther away from family members with each generation. Even friends are no longer a constant, past a certain age. And with the speed with which we live our lives, we have less time to engage socially with many of them. So, there is a need to share information with them by keeping them informed about our lives, something better than a once-a-year, Christmas postcard.
  • Ease Of Online Sharing: Internet provides a way to bridge that distance in a cheap and easy way. Before, I had to develop the picture that I just took of Maya, put it in an album and remember to show it to you when you visit the next time. Now, I just upload right off the iPhone or my digital camera, you’re notified of the new picture and you can see it whenever you want. The ease also means that I don’t have to think as much to post a picture online, promoting a “post first, think later” mindset.
  • Newness of the Medium: But, the newness of the medium prevents us from fully perceiving other possible effects of our desire to share. For example, if I was Stacy Snyder, I may put up a picture of myself on my Facebook page because someone thought that it was a cute picture of me and I wanted my dad to see it. I might not think that a supervisor at my school would find the picture and to top that, think that posting the picture meant I was encouraging underage drinking.
  • Ease of Discovering: When social sites such as Facebook make it hard to control what we want others to see and easy for others to spot us, we may inadvertently reveal more about ourselves than we care to. Also, before the onset of social media and Google, to know more about you, I had to know someone who knew you or knew someone who knew you. Now, it is easy to piece together a picture of someone using some quite basic tools.

So, unwittingly, we’ve become our own paparazzi. Or to rephrase Pogo: “We’ve met the paparazzi and they’re us”.

The NYT article quotes, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a cyberscholar and the author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age“, about the dangers of this new world:
“By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

So, while I believe in writing candidly and on subjects that maybe painful or intensely personal, I exercise some restraint, cognizant that the web never forgets. But I don’t try to write to blame or titillate. I try and write non-polemically, but can’t say I succeed very well in that. But, I’m aligned with Michel de Montaigne’s sentiments rather than Byatt’s. I don’t think my writing diminishes my friends or family, only rounds them, presents them and me and our relationship in a real, three dimensional way, underscoring our humanity.

Image credit: Wikpedia’s entry on Pogo.

Leave a Reply ?