Born Wired

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n early 2008 PBS aired “Growing Up Online”— a Frontline investigation into the often invisible and potentially perilous Internet lives of the so-called “Digital Natives.” The program examined several pressing issues surrounding the first generation to grow up plugged-in. I want to focus on the dangers related to teens socializing online and the generational struggle that it fuels.

For young people born wired, the Internet offers a seductive sense of freedom and provides a much needed space for creativity and personal connection—in other words, the web is a “living” link to friends (and others) and it is an outlet for self-expression. For many parents, however, social networking challenges the received sanctity of privacy and discretion. These parents fear the various ramifications of leading private lives publicly online. For example, concerned caretakers point to the risks related to revealing oneself to a far-reaching and largely unknown virtual audience. This entry looks at the stories of Jess, a shy girl better known by her provocative online avatar “Autumn Edows,” and Davina, a high-school student whose war of words with a classmate—waged over MySpace—culminated in a very real lunchroom brawl that, when broadcasted on YouTube, regrettably earned her Internet infamy.

Jessica Hunter was an insecure girl who had trouble fitting in at school. As a result, she suffered years of humiliation and ridicule. “I didn’t want to be Jess,” she told Frontline producers, “because all it did was remind me of the girl who had no friends…I wanted to be the complete opposite.” For Jess, the Internet provided the opportunity to transform. At just 14-years-old, she created her online alter ego “Autumn Edows.” Autumn—a Goth artist and model known, among other things, for posting sexually suggestive material considered beyond Jess’s years—quickly cultivated an extensive Internet following. And Jess basked in her newfound fame. But Jess’s double-life crashed when her parents “discovered” Autumn and forced her to delete the simulated stand-in. “It was a lesson she had to learn,” said Jess’s father, “The lesson being…you have to be very careful about where this information goes and how people perceive [it].” This kind of online identity play begs several questions that draw out the generational fissures attached to coming of age online: Are virtual selves creative or destructive? Was the real Jess reborn or erased? For her parents, Jess “disappeared” when she first became Autumn. But for Jess, socializing online made her visible. On the one hand, parents’ fears of social networking are well founded. In the words of one anxious mid-lifer, “If it’s on the net, it’s open to anyone…there are no safeguards.” On the other hand, for kids like Jess, new media offers indispensible social ties. To his credit, Jess’s father eventually recognized the value of his daughter’s Internet identity. “She found a world she could live in,” he told Frontline.

Another risk associated with teenagers’ now ubiquitous use of social networking sites was spotlighted by Davina’s story. Thanks to a video posted on YouTube, Davina’s involvement in a lunchroom fight was immortalized online. As a result, Davina told Frontline she worried that college admissions officers might see the video and subsequently reject her application. Corrina di Gennaro and Miriam Simun discuss this legitimate fear in an entry on the Digital Natives blog: “While kids socialize in online spaces they often feel are out of the realm of adults, college admission officers and prospective employers are trolling sites like MySpace and Facebook, searching for evidence of illegal or unsavory hijinks to deny offers of admission or employment.”

Internet buzzwords like “the Cloud” attach a certain transient quality to online activity that belies the web’s unbending permanence. Davina’s story brings attention to this reality. For impulsive teens, an everlasting record of ill-conceived behavior, comments, etc. is a major peril of publishing private lives online.

While social networking has fast become a youth-dominated domain, the digital world is not all casual chats and emails exchanged among teens. As I discuss in my next entry, the 2008 Obama campaign’s deployment of new media to raise funds and rally supporters represented a radical new use of social networking tools: fueling a political movement.

Barack Obama's Political (data) Base

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n an article written for technologyreview.com, David Talbot traces how the Obama campaign used new media to help secure the 2008 Democratic nomination. In particular, Talbot highlights the efficiency and effectiveness of Obama’s social networking site www.my.barackobama.com, or MyBO. Developed by Blue State Digital, MyBO powered the Obama political machine, helping Obama rake in donations and allowing supporters to organize locally and get out the vote. As Talbot writes: “The MyBO databases could slice and dice lists of volunteers by geographic microregion and pair people with appropriate tasks, including prepping nearby voters on caucus procedures.” Further, using MyBO, the Obama campaign managed phone banks, dividing massive call lists into scores of small “chunks” that local enthusiasts could access online. Probably most importantly, MyBO’s user-friendly and interactive fund-raising tools bankrolled the campaign, setting records along the way. As Talbot details: “By July 2008, the campaign had raised more than $200 million from more than a million online donors.” Finally, the Obama campaign leveraged established social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and viral Internet sites like YouTube to distribute media, including Obama’s speeches and the candidate’s overarching message.

To be clear, the Obama campaign did not “invent” online political networking. Indeed, the brains behind MyBO first developed a similar site for Howard Dean’s failed but nonetheless groundbreaking (in terms of its use of the web to raise money) 2004 presidential campaign. Moreover, Obama’s competition—first Hillary Clinton and then Republican John McCain—all developed web strategies. What Obama did do was recognize social networks’ true power and then make well-managed networks of supporters the core of his campaign (by contrast, Clinton, who sat atop the party establishment, relied more heavily on traditional campaigning methods like big-ticket fund-raising).

Obama’s 2008 online march to the presidency (and later his 2012 campaign for re-election) not only transformed campaigning but also presented profound implications for his presidency. In an article written for nytimes.com, David Carr points out that Obama’s “open-source campaign” created so much online popular support (and transformed that support into offline initiatives) that special-interest groups, lobbyists and even, at least to some extent, the Democratic Party now face an administration that “owes them nothing…and can take its case directly to its base [via the Internet].” Talbot, writing before Obama entered the Oval Office, also hints at the effects of using social networking sites to build a political (data) base. He writes: “If Obama wins but doesn’t govern according to the principles of openness and change, as promised, supporters may not be so interested in serving as MyBO foot soldiers [in the future].” Or as David Carr puts it: “There is sense of ownership, a kind of possessive entitlement, on the part of the people who worked to elect him. The shorthand for his organizing Web site, ‘MyBO,’ says it all.”

The effects of social networking on Obama’s campaign and presidency—and on American politics in general—brings me to a related topic that I discuss in my next entry: the danger to democracy associated with the so-called “Online Filter Bubble.” 

Filtered Facts

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li Pariser—now a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute—first earned Internet acclaim when, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, he created a web site aimed at fighting terrorism worldwide (in just a few weeks, over 500,000 people across the globe logged on). The groundbreaking online organizer then joined and eventually directed MoveOn.org, a progressive political action site (under his leadership, MoveOn emphasized online-to-offline organizing and helped power Barack Obama’s web-centered 2008 campaign). More recently, Pariser has focused on how Internet search engines invisibly edit the information individuals receive, and how this “personalized” search process might reinforce our opinions and thereby restrict our worldview. This entry looks first at Pariser’s TED talk “Beware online filter bubbles” (the talk covers issues raised in Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You) and then at Clive Thompson’s alternative interpretation of this Internet “echo-chamber effect.” 

Pariser describes the algorithms behind the results of an Internet search as virtual “curators” or “editors” that individualize the information you get based on who “they” (i.e. the algorithms) “think” you are. Google’s algorithm, for example, first looks at fifty-seven variables—including what kind of computer and web browser you use—to construct your personal profile (e.g. your likes, dislikes, consumer habits, political bent and more). The algorithm then translates that personal profile into search results tailored for you. As Pariser puts it: “There is no standard Google anymore.” For Pariser, the danger of this customized search process is clear: Instead of exposing us to a variety of facts, figures, and ideas related to a given query, say climate change, modern search tools primarily provide information likely to bolster our existing opinions and ideology. “The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see,” says Pariser, “but not necessarily what we need to see.” For Pariser, this kind of invisible indoctrination threatens Democracy, which, at least to some degree, requires people to consider conflicting viewpoints. As Pariser concludes: “We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one.”

Clive Thompson presents a very different take on the Internet “echo-chamber effect.” In particular, he sets out to disclaim traditional ideas about homophily (or  “love of the same”). As we have seen, for Pariser, homophily—i.e. peoples’ tendency to seek out compatible peers—narrows our “information diet” and consequently threatens societal well being. According to Thompson, this view fails to consider the frequency of interpersonal interactions. Conventional wisdom holds that fresh information flows most readily from so-called “weak ties,” or “casual acquaintances,” as opposed to from “strong ties,” or those people within our inner circles. Thompson’s counterargument, based on new research published by a pair of information economists, proceeds as follows: “Sure, weak ties are better positioned to bring us new info. But they don’t do it frequently, because we don’t interact with them very often. Such a person might be, say, five times more likely than a close friend to tell you something surprising in conversation. But if you interact with your friend 10 times more often, the odds suddenly tip toward their being a more valuable source of news.” This claim is nice and simple and apparently convincing but neglects at least one crucial problem: What if your inner circle is comprised of only small-minded individuals? As I see it, no matter how often you talk to a group of biased buddies, you likely won’t encounter alternative or challenging opinions. Thompson seems to admit to this shortcoming, noting: “To be a truly well-informed citizen, perhaps the best approach is to cultivate close friends from eclectic backgrounds.”

After considering the debate over the dangers of Internet homophily, I initially sided strongly with Pariser. While I still favor his view, it might be a little meddlesome. In most cases, relevance should be the principal search filter—do I really need a query of Justin Bieber to give me links to Beethoven as well? Nonetheless, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise that we should all be exposed to diverse material—indeed, you don’t really know about something if you don’t approach it from various angles.