In Media Res is going on vacation, but will return with all new ramblings on Monday, August 23rd.  In the meantime...

A couple of weeks ago, our own Heather Wax did a post on an experiment involving altruism in religious vs. non-religious contexts.  What stood out to me, though, was the first sentence of the abstract:

We design a decision-making scenario experiment on Facebook to measure subjects’ altruism and trust toward attendees of a religious service, a fitness class and a local music performance.

I stopped reading at Facebook.  I didn't know that Facebook was considered a valid place to do experiments.  I imagine a roomful of academics looking at the proposal and saying "Face-what, now?" 

In retrospect, though, I don't see why not.  With half a billion users you're certainly dealing with a useful sample size.  I'm just accustomed to people thinking of Facebook as either frivolous or lucrative, not scientific.  The fact that it is being perceived in this way just means it's getting one step closer to becoming an ordinary communication tool — no one would think twice about an experiment involving telephones — and not a wonder of the age of social media.

In light of Clive Thompson's assertions that we are so over the telephone call, I'm reminded of a conversation with an older colleague about asynchronous communication. Basically he was overwhelmed with e-mails and I asked him if he felt the need to answer them right away. When he said that he did I suggested he turn off his alerts, given that that sort of interruption has been proven to make you as effective as if you were smoking pot (seriously). It hadn't even occurred to him that he could turn off his alerts. He suggested that perhaps it's a generational thing. As he grew up, the primary form of electronic communication was the telephone which requires immediate presence. And while voicemail allows for asynchronous phone conversations, there's still the lingering feeling that a ringing phone must be answered, especially if that's how you grew up. That same thinking applies to e-mail alerts, and here we are. 

Except now we grow up in a world where most electronic communication options default to asynchronous. Even chat can be reasonably ignored or delayed because the person on the other end doesn't have the same expectation of instant response as someone on the other end of a live phonecall. And getting used to asynchronous communication actually swings us back to the time when all non-in-person communication was very asyncrhonous. By weeks or months kind of asynchronous. 

But here's the trick. That pendulum could swing back. The next frontier of communication (or maybe a couple of frontiers down the line) is telepathy. No, seriously. Start with the notion that eventually we'll be able to put a chip in our heads that will act like a really tiny iPhone feeding heads-up displays to our optic nerve and music to our acoustic nerve and generally cutting out the middle man of our eyes and ears. Now, it's a phone, right? Well, call someone. That person "picking up the phone" is doing it in her head, right? How is that any different from telepathy? Even our current state of wireless communication has been referred to as high friction telepathy.

When we can "telepath" each other, we're right back to having to pick up the phone again. Will we have to develop resources in our minds to "store" messages we don't want to respond to right away? Or are there still some functions we'd rather perform in meatspace?

There's no doubt that the shrinking budgets of news-gathering organizations leading to the closing of foreign bureaus is a Bad Thing. What irked me a bit about the coverage of this trend when it began was that it assumed that there was no alternative; that the closing of these bureaus or the inability of news organizations to send reporters to far off lands meant that no news would come from those lands. The implicit and, in my opinion, racist (or at least nationalist) assumption in that conclusion was that no one in those far off lands was capable and/or willing to tell the truth about those lands.

Demotix is a wire service that sets out to undermine that assumption and, while it's at it, maybe stem the tide of radicalization.  From Wired:

The idea for Demotix came out of [founder Turi] Munthe’s studies of the Middle East and the patterns he saw for why certain countries seemed to radicalize.

“There was a very clear — less clear now but nevertheless clear — inverse correlation between the openness of a society and its likelihood to radicalize,” he says. “If you put a lid on a pressure cooker, it has a tendency to blow up.”

Part of the solution, in Munthe’s eyes, was to open up avenues of free speech in those countries to combat the trend.

“Demotix sort of emerges out of this silly realization that, built properly, you can create a safe haven for free speech, with all the results that free speech tends to have in repressive societies as in opening them up, changing the debate terms etc.,” says Munthe.

And it's clear that Munthe feels my pain:

“It’s no longer, ‘White man goes off to tell stories in dark corners of the world and relating it back,’” says Munthe. “We’re telling native stories in a native way and just creating a platform for the stories to get seen and potentially bought.”

It's not that I feel that local voices should replace our voices.  It's that I think there's room (and a need) for both.

Jeffrey Rosen has an engaging piece in the Times about privacy and the web that touches on issues of forgiveness and reputation and how the Internet has basically screwed that up for all of us; the upshot being that because your Facebook profile never really goes away, your sins are plastered on the world's largest wall for all to see forever.

Here's the thing. They're probably not. Forever, that is.

Digital archivists would love if Rosen's assumptions about online inertia could be taken at face value — anything that goes on the web, stays on the web unless acted on deliberately by a person or built-in self-destruct. But that's not the only way — or the primary way — things disappear from the web. Anyone who's looked for a link to a really cool article only to find that it just isn't there anymore knows that digital information is all too mortal. Incompetence and neglect are just as likely to kill a piece of web ephemera as a cease and desist order.

But some blogger who refuses to use permalinks or Yahoo news letting their old urls die is only the beginning of what keeps digital archivists up at night. If you want to know what else does, scour your home office and see if you can find a floppy disk. Found one? Okay, tell me what's on it.

See, the web is good at a lot of things, but legacy is not one of them. Technology in the past three or so decades has been a story of improving standards and formats but backwards compatibility? Not so much. 

This is true for more than just physical formats. File formats are what will be the death of history on the web. Take the Flash vs. HTML5 debate. Let's say HTML5 wins. How many sites that render in Flash will convert all of their data to render in HTML5 and not just the most recent two years worth? Or six months?

As a web manager, I've overseen the overhaul of many a content management system, and there's always a compatibility issue which forces editors and technology teams to ask the same question. How much? How much will it cost (in time and money) to convert how much information? Do we really want to bother reformatting 400 news stories that were published in 2000 to a whole new format on the off chance that someone will search for them? The answer is almost always no. And that's just 10 years.

We assume that formats like .jpg (that picture of you doing a kegstand) or .mp3 (that ill-advised phone message you left at 3am) or — I won't even pick a video format since they change every week — will be here forever because they've been around as long as we can remember consumer-friendly digital information. But the odds that your Facebook page will still be here in ten years — or will be readable in ten years — while not terrible, probably aren't as good as you think.

People have been talking about this problem for a long time now. And they still are. The problem we face may not be that the web never forgets, but that it is better at forgetting that any technology we've ever used.