The unholy union of online funerals and location-based social networking

Twas a lovely Friday afternoon, meeting some friends for a cheap lunch of Cuban sandwiches at the famed El Margon restaurant in the equally  infamous Midtown.

As is our habit, my friends and I started talking about interesting events that had transpired between the 12 hours we last saw each other and my contribution was the story of how I met a fellow Filipino at the graduate lounge who introduced herself to me because she had overheard me trying to define the word “kinikilig“. I was describing the young lady, how she was in the second year of her master’s degree and that she was in the NYU ITP program and that:

Me: Oh oh! She’s doing her thesis on online funerals, e-funerals! Have you heard of this?

Friend: What are those?

Me: Oh my god it’s crazy…

And so I went on to describe what I had read in the New York Times just days, previously: “Private Funerals Now Streaming Online“. Essentially, an e-funeral (I don’t know if this is what it’s actually called but I am following 21st century digital convention with this neologism) is a live stream or webcast of someone’s funeral, for those who are far away or unable to attend the funeral of a loved one for various reasons. The article argues that it is a useful development in this age of rapid mobility, a way for friends and family to grieve and digitally “be there” even if they are thousands of miles away. The article also mentions the negative reaction to this, how it devalues what a funeral means, among other things, a position shared by most of my interlocutors. And I paraphrase:

Friend 1: A funeral is one of the most personal events that could ever happen to a person, you should make the effort to be there and if you can’t, then that speaks of your relationship to that person.

Friend 2: I guarantee you most of those people will click on the link then step away from their computers.

Friend 3: That’s just bizarre! It’s making a spectacle of something very private.

… and there were many more.

I largely agreed with these points. I had first heard about e-funerals in the Philippines (a translation would be e-libing or e-burol for live streaming of the wake, which I feel is the next stage of this innovation) and laughed at the absurdity of it. And in keeping with the unavoidable tendency to blow things up into comic proportions…

Me: Yeah! It’s like, people are just ‘checking in’ on the funeral like its FourSquare or something. Oh hey look, I’m “here”! What’s next, “I’ve been here so many times I’m the mayor of your funeral?”

Research idea: Measuring social networking behavior usage to test whether we actualize our network potential

“Just because we can, doesn’t mean we do.”

I find myself saying that a lot when people get overly enthusiastic about the power of technology. Per my previous reflections on Ethan Zuckerman’s TED talk and as a tangential homage to Malcolm Gladwell’s ass-kicking of the technotopians in the New Yorker this week, I came up with a research question that might make a dent on the whole conflation-of-Internet-architecture-with-human-activity.

Sure I have 900 friends on Facebook. But that is because I was too polite to blatantly reject someone’s friend request in the early days of Facebook’s opening up to the non-collegiate user base and now I’m too lazy to do the infamous, if absolutely necessary “purge”. It might also have something to do  with the superficial high I get seeing that I know that many people, even though our ‘friendship’ is predicated on the click of a button. But as I mentioned in a guest post for Gorditamedia, I’ve stopped caring so now I don’t hesitate to click “ignore”. And I realized that I primarily interact with people in my immediate surroundings (i.e. grad school peers) and the folks that really matter to me (my best friends from high school and college). Now doesn’t that sound more like how we ‘manage our friendships’ in the real world?

Looking at my own experience, I very much don’t conform to the ideal of mass hyperconnection that makes phenomena like the (terminologically-contested) ‘Twitter Revolution’ possible. Mostly, I use these miracle technologies to, surprise!, reinforce the relationships I already have. I have to say, organizing an event through Facebook has actually made me into somewhat of a party planner. This coming from someone who balked, nay, went into hiding in the distant peaks of the Himalayan mountain range at the thought of throwing a party. Ah, but therein lies the problem- Facebook is perhaps too personal a tool for most users to complicate with their politics. But seeing the kind of links being posted left and right, it’s safe to say users aren’t too shy about wearing their ideological hearts on their sleeves.

But before I fall into the trap of narcissistic theoretical induction, there are definitely people out there who shamelessly promote themselves or their causes. I’ve “liked” a few of these myself. But I don’t really count that as meaningful political action (and I haven’t gone to any Facebook event rallies either). Gladwell was completely on point when he said “It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.” This study is meant to see how prevalent online networking induced social/political action actually is, versus the current proof cited by the technotopian adulators: because it is built into the architecture.

Methodology has always been my weak suit but I imagine something like getting volunteers to allow their Facebook behavior to be observed for a X amount of time and show track the frequency of Facebook contact with all those populating the user’s friend list and cross-reference it with geography, real world interactions. Who would sign up for such a thing? Broke college students who watch ‘MTV’s Real World’ and ‘Jersey Shore’ (their shot at 15 minutes!). I’m just saying. But obviously this still needs a lot of thought.

This could work for Twitter too, probably to deliver an upper-cut to the kumbayahs about the Iranian “Twitter Revolution”. Jack Shafer details some of this in his Slate article, citing Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov and Ethan Zuckerman via The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle. As for how to measure this, maybe the algorithms developed over at Indiana University’s Truthy Project can help. It’s a project that studies how memes propagate through the Twittersphere.

I’m tired of anecdotes proving one way or another. Gimme some (hard)* social science.

PS. If you’ve heard of or have seen a study like this, please send it my way! I’m neck deep in tying corporate influence on foreign policy with human rights and the political muscle flexing of ICT companies to think of the proper search term for it on JSTOR.

* – I put “hard” in parentheses because while I live and breathe the world of the social sciences, I share the physical science’s bias towards chemistry, physics, geology etc as ‘real’ science. Statistics is so useful yet so… mutable. Yet it’s what makes PageRank and Google Translate possible. I swear  lit a candle for all the cognitive dissonance I tolerate within my own brain, I could, er, waste a lot of wax.

Beware of the “info”nets!

I went on a mad privacy purge, no actually it was more like a privacy armament build-up a couple of days ago, thanks to @gorditamedia‘s re-tweet of Giga-Om’s post, “Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them”. Whew, that was a mouthful. It was a day after I complained about how Facebook was telling me that I should link my profile to these pages they had so kindly connected to me, thanks to my profile information. The Giga-Om post then informed me that this profile-page linking situation was only one of the various ways Facebook was trying to be the one-stop data-collection hub of the Web.

The same day as my rant however, was Jessica Vascellaro’s piece in WSJ entitled “Facebook Wants to Know More Than Just Who Your Friends Are”.

Facebook Inc. announced an ambitious plan to get its tentacles further out into the Internet by better linking people, places and things, as it looks to turn a massive audience into a pool of well-understood consumers.

A centerpiece of the changes involves a simple button, offered to other Web sites, that says “Like.” For free, other Web sites can install a Facebook “Like” button that users can click on to signal their interest in a piece of content, such as a band or an article. The user’s approval then shows up on his or her Facebook page, with a link back to the site.

The idea is that other Web sites will drive traffic back to Facebook.com, and in turn receive traffic from Facebook. Other sites can also offer personalized modules, telling individual users what their Facebook friends have done on the site, such as review a restaurant.

It’s a good read and I am fucking terrified.

It’s not an “interne”twork anymore. It’s an “informationnet”work, an insatiable beast that I shan’t feed any longer. Except for the link-sharing on my wall, dangit it’s so handy!

New media enthusiasts need to take a chill pill

Brian Solis, writing for PaidContent.org wrote this absolutely infuriating piece that basically says… investigative journalism is dead. Reporters should just plug into their iPhones and laptops and wait for news to come to them. It was so absurd and downright small-minded about the importance of journalism that I actually got mad and started cursing out loud (I got even more mad after doing a very reductionist summary of his point).

Halfway through he says that journalists should give up: crowd-sourced information is going to do a better job than they ever will so they should just sit back and become “social seismologist”. I can’t say this any more eloquently– what the *$#%?

As reporters become social seismologists, it is also the responsibility of the reporter … to connect information to audiences who can thus serve as information emissaries to further extend stories to social graphs across the Web.

Journalists reduced to a the trivial neo-profession of “social seismology”‘? This is what really set me off. Excuse me, tweets and blog posts are great and all but I don’t see anything like this wonderful feature on the NYTimes about a Queens payphone coming anytime soon. What about those ‘beats’ that Twitterers or bloggers don’t cover? Take a quick look at the demographics of this so-called Internet ‘global society’ and you’ll find many places don’t even register a single bleep on this ‘human seismograph’ of information. We still need to know about police brutality in that crime-ridden neighborhood even though no one updates their Facebook status about it. Who is going to go out there and investigate but the professional journalist?

The romantic raving continues:

I once referred to Twitter as TNN, the Twitter News Network as it consistently beat traditional media in the race to report relevant news and trends. And as a result, Twitter and other social networks continue to earn an entrenched role as the primary source of information and breaking events for the hundreds of millions of people connected to one another at varying degrees within and across each network.

If someone ever needed to get slapped in the face with the cold fish of reality, it would be this guy. Don’t forget about the ‘digital divide’, my man. Tim McGuire wrote an absolutely lovely article about how journalists should properly use new media sources of information: responsibly. And no Brian, Twitter isn’t the best iteration of social media as news source. First of all, so much bullshit goes on in these sites that I beseech the reader to imagine the hackneyed idiom about a haystack and an easily misplaced sewing tool. Second of all, and actually most importantly, this is a grave confusion of journalism as a consumer product. It’s not about getting the newest and the freshest (though unfortunately thanks to the advertising driven model of news media and now all this social networking, it’s becoming more so). It is about readers getting correct information and processing it so that people can have a better understanding of the world around them and make good decisions about social issues and politics.

This disturbing train of thought is further elucidated by the following line:

Media is now forced to compete in an attention economy where the business of news is now a real-time competition for mindshare, connectedness and earned relevance.

Mindshare in an attention economy?  This is not the latest denim cut from The Gap! It probably shouldn’t surprise me, this guy has a background in public relations (he is, and I quote: the “Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley”) hence cares more about the ‘business’ of news that its social use. He actually even says the ‘business of news’ repeatedly throughout the article which is probably why my face got redder as I went through the whole thing. This article refocuses the ultimate purpose of news (which is to inform the population) to become all about the news-gathering process. Literally, he makes it about the journey and not the destination. You don’t make good decisions about voter initiatives on the ballot by re-tweeting. You make good decisions by learning about relevant facts.

McGuire quoted one of the journalists who succumbed to the instant gratification of Twitter and shamefully had to retract. Its a good thing it was only sports, imagine if this thing was about something much more important, like nuclear armaments, war or the health care debate. This guy Michael Rand from the MinnPost prematurely tweeted about some high school football signing with one team and started a “trending topic”, something Solis gushes almost lovingly about, that he had to take back. I liked what he said: “But if we [journalists] are to be standard-setters instead of standard-followers, we can’t just get caught up in it all. There was far less to gain by being 45 minutes early than there was to lose by being 100 percent wrong, even if we were trying to hedge our bets. And in this case, we could be sure that a final answer was coming at a finite time. Sometimes judgment isn’t just about right or wrong, it’s about what’s at stake in either case.”

THANK YOU. Let’s remember professionalism, credibility and accountability.

Honestly by the time he concluded his article, I was so blinded by rage I don’t even know what he means by this:

As a new hybrid of collaborative journalism takes shape, reporters who remain plugged-in to communities outside of their domain will open new doors to relevance – connecting to stories and people that propel information beyond the reach of any one network at the speed of the now web.

You know what, I think I’m grateful I don’t understand it because if I did, that would mean I chugged the Kool-Aid right along with him and the rest of the Twit-o-blogo-verse. And I realize this might seem a hypocrisy because I myselt tweet, blog and get my news from various sources on the Internet. But I still subscribe to public radio and trust the Times or the BBC or the WSJ or those random briefings of the Council of Foreign Relations for most of my news. I’m as much in the boat as everyone else and I am so excited by the possibilities new media holds for journalism. But this sort of talk is not constructive and if it’s the discourse that wins when this whole tumult ends, I think I’m going to go join that guy who lives off the grid. I hope he can make room for me in that cave.