Farcebook

I'm pretty sure the Facebook hysteria now qualifies as a moral panic. We've named a problem ("loss of privacy"), identified it with a public enemy (Facebook is obviously tailor-made for this role; Google might be an even better fit, but - well, they drew a long straw this time), abused tens of thousands of innocent words on describing and discussing and distancing ourselves from The Problem. Now we're at the stage where lawmakers have got in on the act, and Congress is grandstanding at Mark Zuckerberg.

That's worrying, because moral panics generally end in new laws to crack down on some pastime that had, up to now, been classed as - if not exactly virtuous, then at least not harmful enough to be worth the loss of freedom entailed by passing laws about it. Think legal highs, dangerous dogs, alcopops, motorcycle gangs. And the pastimes at stake here - communicating with friends and family, networking, personal publishing - are, basically, everything that is best about the internet. If politicians come to see "social media" as something that needs to be clamped down on, then it's hard to imagine any result that would leave blogs like this one untouched. (The British government is already going this way: its recent changes to press regulation are clearly designed to stifle independent comment, while keeping the press barons onside. It's not, in itself, fascism - but it's one of its building blocks.)

I imagine, by now, just about every country with any kind of commercially-driven media sector has had its say on the Facebook panic. Here is what someone who passes for a media commentator in New Zealand has to say. And I think it's an instructive study in how moral panics - as well as their direct dangers - are also susceptible to hijacking by special interests.

Look at the headline: "Govt needs to protect Kiwis from Facebook's power". Explicitly calling for government action (i.e. new laws), explicitly aimed at Facebook. The writer criticises Facebook - not for collecting data, nor for slinging "targeted" ads, but for doing all this from abroad. "Fundamentally", he says, "we need to have a voice with these overseas organisations who are increasingly playing such an important role in the daily life of New Zealanders". On the other hand, you can "trust local retailers and organisations who have no agenda apart from being useful and understanding you".

Yeah right.

The author, one Ben Goodale, is a frequent contributor to the New Zealand Herald. More germanely he's described, in an easily missable footnote, as "the managing director of justONE". I didn't know what "justONE" is any more than you do, but its website describes it as "New Zealand's pre-eminent data-driven marketing, CRM and loyalty agency".

So no, the stench of self-interest that rises from this drivel is not just our imagination.

Note to every legislator: Facebook is a publisher. (Zuckerberg denies this, on the grounds that Facebook doesn't create the content, and it's "a technology company". In other words, he doesn't know what a publisher is.)

You know how to regulate publishing. You've been doing it for hundreds of years. Don't let the new technology and associated gobbledegook blind you to that simple fact: Facebook needs to be treated exactly like every other publisher. How would you react to a publisher that surreptitiously gathered data on people, then carelessly shared that data with third parties?

NZ already has a perfectly good privacy law that covers that scenario, but for some reason nobody has ever thought to apply it to Facebook. We don't need new laws, and we don't . We just need to enforce the laws we've got.

More in sorrow

Dear Mozilla,

I've been using Firefox, loyally, since before it existed. I used it when it was called Firebird, and Phoenix, and before that I was using the Mozilla browser. Occasionally - maybe once a month or so - I'll fire up some other browser for a specific task, but Firefox has always been my standard, everyday, all-purpose browser. The interface is clean and simple, the extensions are beautiful, I like the focus on privacy and putting the user in control. It just - works the way a browser should.

Until now.

The Quantum leap was, for me, not a good thing. True, pages rendered faster. But that performance came at a price: pages sometimes crashed, or slowed the whole system to treacle (Trello was particularly badly affected, presumably because of something in their Javascript - but whatever it was, it didn't affect other browsers). Nevertheless, I persisted. I told myself that Quantum had been a huge change, and teething problems were only to be expected. The next major update, I thought, would cure some of these ills.

Sadly, the opposite has happened. The "next major update" has landed, and while it has cured whatever ailed Trello, it has reduced several other sites to "completely unusable". As in, it simply no longer renders the page content at all. It will load a frame, or maybe a background image, but not display the content; or the content will disappear when I scroll. This happens across multiple sites and multiple computers, with and without extensions enabled; so I'm picking Firefox as the culprit.

(The content is loaded, it's still "there". It's sometimes possible to select it, by clicking and dragging with a mouse, and sometimes when this is done it will remain visible after deselecting. But sometimes not. At any rate, this is not an acceptable workaround.)

It is therefore with a heavy heart that I have decided, I can no longer wait for Firefox to get this excrement back together. Right now I have little choice but to adopt Chrome at work; for home use, I will probably prefer Vivaldi. A lot of people speak highly of Palemoon and Waterfox; I may give one or both of them a try within the next month. But Firefox, most sadly, is a broken vessel.

Goodbye. I wish you nothing but the very best of luck in the future; but from today, I'm no longer a user. I just don't have the time to deal with this level of crap.

Poe's paradox

So, I was doing a spot of research on the deployment of smart meters in Texas when I came across this site.

I'm not sure if these people are for real. Maybe the whole site is an elaborate troll or a student prank. But I'm very much afraid these people - who, I have to assume, probably vote - really believe that, and I quote, "electrical induction [is] illegal everywhere in the so-called civilized world".

Now, I have to admit, I was slightly surprised to learn there are smart meters in the world that use wireless communication. I can't see any reason for that. It's not as if the meter had to be mobile, nor detachable from the mains, and there is (by definition) already a wired connection between the electricity supplier and the consumer site. European meters, as far as I can tell, use wired connections.

But even allowing for the silliness of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the sheer level of paranoid hysteria on show here takes my breath away.

Unless that's my wifi network.

There's a rule on the internet, that it's impossible to create a parody so blatant that it won't be mistaken for the real thing. As originally formulated it applies specifically to religious fundamentalism, but quite obviously the same is true in the spheres of politics, economics, technology and health. Now I think that rule needs a corollary: there is no theory so stupid that its supporters can't create and sustain their own community of believers.

Interred with their servers

Usenet meant a lot to me, at one time. Specifically, the time between 1997 and approximately 2001. I spent most of my spare time there; I made a reputation, I made friends, some of whom graduated to real-life friends; I met my wife there. If that doesn't qualify me to feel nostalgic for it, I don't know what would.

So it's with some sorrow that I read about the death of Usenet. While this death has been reported many times before, this time it probably means something.

For my less-technical readers: Usenet is (I'll use the present tense for now) a worldwide network of computers, called servers, that exchange messages. The messages are written by people - ordinary people, like me for instance - who "post" them to their local server (in much the same way as one might write and "post" an e-mail), addressed to one or more "newsgroups". Once posted, a message is promptly copied ("propagated") between hundreds or thousands of other Usenet servers in the world - this process normally takes a few tens of seconds - and subsequently read by other people, anywhere, who "subscribe" to the newsgroup you addressed it to. Anyone who reads it then has the option to reply, in the same medium.

Discussions - sequences of replies stemming from an original post - commonly go on for several days, often running to scores of posts from a dozen or more participants. A long post might spin off half a dozen tangents, and people will commonly pick on just one detail to reply to; so you frequently find yourself conducting many different, distantly-related discussions with different people. And (and I think this is the aspect that appealed most to me) all of them can read what you're saying to all the others; so you have to be either consistent or clever, or at least witty. You could take as long as you liked to compose a reply, and there was always the option of not replying at all; but if and when you did reply, it had better be consistent with what you'd written before.

It's a medium that encourages both thought and honesty. So maybe it's not surprising that it's dying.

It has its problems, of course. Spam is one - although it's not nearly so intractable on Usenet as it is in e-mail, thanks to a mechanism called "cancelling". Anonymity and anarchy can be problems: it's a perfect forum for bullies, and for loons with too much time on their hands. Usenet gave us the concepts of "flame wars" - the exchange of written insults as a form of competitive performance art - and "trolling" - the art of provoking thoughtless responses from people who haven't been around long enough to know better.

Worst of all, it popularised the form of debate that has since become known as "fisking" - line-by-line dissection of an opponent's argument - which, I think, has done a lot to shape the over-cautious, content-free journalism of our time. Journalists soon realised that no well-written article can withstand fisking (it's named after Robert Fisk - possibly the greatest journalist of his generation - because he was the most popular target for the (American) right-wing political bloggers who coined the term). The only effective defence is, simply, to avoid saying anything that it's possible to disagree with.

So why am I sad that all this is gone? Is it just nostalgia?

Well, it's interesting to note that all the bad effects are still with us. Spam, cyber-bullying, trolling and flaming and fisking - all these have outlived the medium that gave birth to them. But the good effects - that open, free discussion - that's gone.

On the web, discussion is relentlessly compartmentalised and, increasingly, professionalised. If you want to make friends on the web, you find a 'social networking' site, give them your personal details, agree to their rules, submit to their censorship, and generally put yourself at their mercy. What should be a free exchange between peers has been replaced by a commercial relationship, between users (who are, at best, a commodity), and site owners (who are gods).

If you wanted to make friends on Usenet, you just joined a group that interested you and started posting; you revealed precisely as much or as little about yourself as you wanted. You could present yourself as serious or frivolous, serenely wise, icily logical, tempestuously romantic or tortuously dadaist - all in the same day, if you could manage it. You could enter a discussion about the ageing of a fictional character between books in a series, armed with nothing more than a nodding acquaintance with literary criticism, and emerge with a wife. All of it without paying a cent.

"The evil that men do lives after them." The same, it seems, is true of technologies.

Star, arts, tsar, tars

Of all the Google searches that bring people to this page, by far the commonest is "anagram rats".

I would've thought that most people would be capable of working those out for themselves - it's only four letters, after all.

Truly, there is no such thing as an upper limit to human laziness.

Digital pollution

So I'm looking in on niq's blog to see if he's had any more replies to his latest whinge, which is about an unabashedly pro-middle-class tax break in the UK, when I happen to notice the "Possibly related posts" that Wordpress has selected for this one. There are two shown: New Jersey Property Taxes Useful Facts, and Tax Advantages of Live/Work Properties.

The second of these titles promises perhaps the dullest article I've ever read, but the first at least has the appeal of being geekily specialist. And besides, useful facts are always useful, nicht wahr? Lacking anything better to do for the next 30 seconds or so, I click on it.

The first sentence is quite promising:

You see, we should be very thankful that we are born in this modern generation because of the existence of the Internet.

Indeed, I thank my parents daily for delaying my conception until a mere quarter-century before the invention of the World Wide Web. How farsighted they were! Tell me more...

With the Internet, every information (whether about new jersey property taxes or any other such as raised, pennsylvania property tax, property tax laws or even business property tax) can be found with ease on the Internet, with great articles like this.

Hmm. Actually, I have to say that my interest in all of those subjects was never very high, and is now evaporating with each letter I read.

What follows is, as far as I can tell from about ten seconds of careful scrutiny, a perfectly serious and deathly dull article that looks as if it's been generated by some kind of automated broken-English script generator.

My curiosity piqued, I click on the latest posting for that blog:

I am sure your quest for bexas county property taxes has come to an end as you read this article.

Too right it has.

It looks for all the world as if some wannabe tax advisor has set up a script to produce post after post of bland, tedious waffle, far too vague to be of any real use to anyone, while giving each one a title that they hope will exactly match someone's Google query. Each post is prefaced with a generic statement of how great the Internet is, presumably in the hope that anyone Googling this sort of thing is predisposed to think that way already. And for some reason, the raw phrases and sentences they're using are written by someone who speaks English only brokenly as a second or third language. And they ran this script for one day last November, generating seven posts for a random selection of states, counties and circumstances across the USA.

I know my posts may not be the best-written or most intelligent materials around, but I like to put a little effort into them. I like to think I am contributing something to... something. But these gits... It's as the elitists and purists said all along: blogs have made it too easy to make noise. You don't even need a human being any more.

Does anyone else feel ever so slightly creeped out at the sight of a machine using the pronoun "I"?

The price of liberty is - everything

Of all the sad things about the Internet, the fourth most depressing, I've decided, is the rise of "libertarianism".

This, for those of you lucky enough to have missed it, is a political idea whose conditions seem to be ripe - though not as ripe as its conclusions, which are higher than a skunk's latrine. During the Cold War it seemed just plain silly; before the Internet it was written off as an adolescent phase one grows out of, much like Leninism; before the economic crisis it seemed to be addressing an abstract, tedious problem that few people cared about. But now it's gaining traction.

It's sad, really. "Libertarianism" started out as an extreme left-wing idea, aimed at freeing people from the shackles of arbitrary authority. Now, it's been adopted gleefully by those whose main concern is to preserve their own privileges. For that, I mostly blame Ayn Rand - the woman who made a career out of her personal bitterness that the Russian Revolution had robbed her of the wealth and privilege that, she was raised to believe, were hers by right. Rand took a deeply held personal belief - that there could be no possible justification for strangers to have taken her toys away - and turned it into what's euphemistically called the "philosophy" of Objectivism.

Now, in a reasoned debate with any real political philosopher, Rand wouldn't have lasted five minutes. In her lifetime she was, rightly, ignored by everyone. Her ideas simply don't take account of - well, pretty much anything outside her own head.

But on the Internet, that's no longer a problem. Online, it's not hard to find a clique of true believers for absolutely anything. St Patricks' Day is a global conspiracy to promote the colour green? Barack Obama is the direct male heir of Genghis Khan? The Rapture actually happened in 2002, and now we're living through the End Times? There is no belief so bizarre that some idiots won't support it.

Better yet, those who don't support you - no matter how numerous - can simply be ignored. And so you can live in a beautiful dream bubble in which yours is the mainstream opinion, and you never have to defend it. It's a curious paradox, that free speech has delivered us to exactly the opposite of the situation that John Stuart Mill, with his sunny Victorian logic, hoped for: where every idea goes unchallenged, and nobody ever needs to change their mind.

And people see these sites, and there will always be a small number of those people who imagine that there must be something to them.

Take this drivel, for example. These morons seem to think that there are people who oppose exploiting the Earth. (Of course there are such people, by the same no-niche-left-unfilled principle I've just been describing. But to characterise this belief - that we need to exploit the Earth - as a courageous, individualistic stand against repressive conformism, makes about as much sense as handing out leaflets proclaiming "The sky is UP! Don't let THEM deny it!")

The Exploit-the-Earth loons remind me of the philosophy of Franz Fanon, who held that violence has a liberating effect. To make oneself free, one must break taboos; and the greatest of these is violence, especially murder. How do you show your defiance for the eco-nazis who would subjugate human life to the interests of trees and squirrels? Set fire to a tree today!

We are free, within the law, to destroy what we own. You can, if you like, buy a field, then salt the earth with chemicals so nasty that nothing will grow there and no builder will ever want to build on it. It's your property - if you want to destroy it utterly, the libertarians would say, that's nobody's business but your own.

But does that make it right?

"Do cats have nose hair?"

There's a truly weird site that you've probably seen, if you've Googled a lot of random trivia, but I for one have seldom dwelt on. It's called "WikiAnswers". The idea is that you can log on and type in any question you like, and take a chance that some random J Bloggs, somewhere on the Internet, will take the time to answer it just for the sheer joy of showing off their knowledge.

Or maybe that they'll make up something entertaining enough to be worth sharing with your friends.

It's amazingly popular. In a random 60 second period this afternoon, 20 new questions got posted:

• What is the name of the group made from former klymaxx members?
• Bobs discount furniture?
• Do apples brown faster in the fridge or on the counter?
• How are the functions of connective tissues reflected in its structure?
• What is the gvwr of a 1981 toyota 2wd pickup?
• What is broken down by cells to produce energy?
• In ancient china what did they use money for?
• Where is the high speed relay located on a 1983 chevy el camino?
• Is Nomex windproof?
• Outline the role of condensation and hydrolysis?
• What was the significance of the fall of fort sumter?
• How many syllables has the word house how many syllables has the wordcurtain?
• Ancient method to predict the future?
• Do cats have nose hair?
• What are the areas that border mexico?
• California's largest county?
• I had sex 3 days in a row alot of times he finished each time my period came the next day its a week early could you still get pregnant?
• Full faith in credit clause example?
• Is there a scary movie 5 comming out soon?
• Why are the dim lights on a is300 blue but the bright lights and running lights are white Can i make them all blue?

Fairly obviously, about half of these are from schoolkids trying to get their homework done for them. (I do hope their teachers look in from time to time. In fact, if I were a teacher, I think I'd post the question here myself before setting it to the kids.) One is a frightening testament to the quality of sex education. Some seem to suggest that the questioner has never heard of Google (which would tell you, without waiting, that California's largest county is San Bernardino, and Scary Movie 5 is scheduled to appear in 2011).

Or maybe they're just craving acknowledgment and validation, the (extremely indirect) human contact of some faceless, random stranger picking out and taking the time to answer their question.

So if you happen to know the answer to any of these, feel free to head over and show off. Make someone's day. But no-one will thank you.

Thank you, Google

The latest visitor to be drawn here by a Google search was a reader in Barnsley, who was searching for "whores bradford".

I hope he (I'm guessing it was a he) found what he was looking for.

Just when I'm getting used to the idea of Google as the new evil empire, they go and illustrate just how much sheer free entertainment they're still willing to provide, and I find myself warming to them again. Just a little bit.

E-mail and the death of trees

I first used e-mail as a student, in the mid 1980s. Sadly I wasn't a particularly visionary type of student, and I didn't take much interest in it.

In 1997, when I got my first dial-up connection at home, things were different. By then nobody could miss what e-mail was, and I took to it like a banker to money. Within six months I had e-mail contacts on five continents, a good proportion of whom I considered "friends".

Combined with Usenet, the medium suited me to perfection. I now had a public profile and an active private correspondence. I loved to take my time writing, rewriting and polishing to put the perfect gloss on whatever I wanted to say. "Spinning", it might be called, and the medium was beautifully tailored to that. (Alas, this is no longer the case. Somehow I don't have that kind of time any more. Nowadays, even blog posts feel hurried.)

In that first rush of enthusiasm, I naïvely thought that e-mail was free; and as freely, I gave my address to everyone as my preferred contact method. Better, I thought, that I should receive junk mail in electronic form, rather than tree-eating paper.

What I hadn't thought through - and in retrospect it seems horrifyingly obvious, but the world looked different back then - was the economics of e-mail technology. It never occurred to me that people would send me e-mail without even caring whether I read it or not.



The story of my personal battle with spam is stirring, but long, and its ending is not happy. I have seldom managed to convey the depth of my hatred for spammers. I'm not talking just about pornographers, fraudsters, Nigerians offering money - that subject is quite exhaustively documented elsewhere - but the daily deluge of unwanted mails about the most tedious of subjects - drugs, holidays, used cars, penis enlargement, jobs in Chicago, Ukrainian brides, Bollywood movies, home-education courses in everything from acupuncture to zoophilia...

All of which is a long-winded way of introducing a story I noticed today: spam is "killing the environment", apparently.

That's a headline I can greet with qualified pleasure. Extremely qualified. We're talking fully bonded, industry-certified, Masters-educated pleasure here. It's nice to see an attack on the (still occasionally touted) fallacy that junk e-mail is environmentally benign, compared with junk paper through the door. But this study is commissioned by McAfee, who can't resist the temptation to imply that the problem could be solved by using their software.

Yeah, right. That's like treating depression by drinking yourself into a stupor.

No, the treatment for spam - if there is one - has to be legal, not technical, and it has to be directed at the people who pay for it, not those who send it. It's the economics of e-mail that creates the problem, and that's what has to be changed. For the recipients to have to buy and maintain spam filters - that's no better than paying protection money.

Self-googlement

It's a long time since I Googled myself. But today, galvanised by the discovery of the waterfowl-abusing Jeremy Stamper's site, PersonRatings.com, I thought I'd see what the Internet reputation of my real name currently looks like.

Turns out there are dozens of me out there. There's entries on Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates and other social networking sites with my name, each describing a completely different person. Hundreds of pages, none of them relating to me.

With one exception. The number one result in Google is a home page I created for myself back in 2000, before most of those sites existed. I haven't updated it since 2001. And it's still the most-linked <My Real Name> page on the 'web.

Now that's what I call a reputation system.

How drunk would you have to be...?

Introducing perhaps the dumbest business idea since sliced ketchup: PersonRatings.com.

It's a website where you can rate anyone. Well, any American, anyway. You get to award marks out of five in each of ten categories: smart, sexy, confident, successful, friendly, funny, kind, classy, energetic, trustworthy. The score you see displayed for a person is based on the average rating they've received.

I don't know where to begin - but it doesn't matter, because none of my readers are demented enough to imagine for a microsecond that this sounds like a neat idea. Even the site's founder doesn't want to put his hand up to it: the only contact address given is for a "jerry.smith". Searching for "jerry smith" on PersonRatings turns up - nothing.

So whose brainchild is it? Turns out to belong to one Jeremy Stamper, of Seattle, WA. Mr Stamper, you may be reassured to learn, clocks a solid two out of five stars in each of the ten categories - meaning that, in the aggregate opinion of random people on the 'net, he's "not very" smart, successful, sexy etc.

Possibly Mr Stamper is hoping to capitalise on the Facebook Effect - that once you've got a profile, it's practically impossible to remove it, so you have no choice but to keep maintaining it for as long as the site owner chooses to hold you to ransom. Or possibly it's all some elaborate April Fool's joke that's broken early.

A Google search reveals that Mr Stamper made his first career, and name, in real estate. And now he's gone into publishing. Which, I guess, should be enough to tell us all exactly what I should think of him...

Just a couple of gems from the FAQ:

Why is Anonymous Free Speech important?

We should all be very protective of our right to express our opinions without being required to register with the government or any other entity. After all, why should governments, employers, or anyone else be tracking our personal opinions and beliefs. The American tradition of anonymous free speech is older than the United States itself. In fact, the anonymous publication of the Federalist Papers was vital to the birth of the United States. [And so on, but you get the gist.]

I swear, I'm not making this up. It gets funnier:

I see a post that isn't true. Will you remove it?

It is impossible for us to determine the legitimacy or veracity of posts. Even courts of law are seldom capable of this. With the amount of content that is posted, it is impractical for any service provider to scrutinize user generated content. We appreciate your help in trying to keep the site content legal and on topic. However, Personratings is not the author of posted content and is not obligated to remove content posted by users except in very rare circumstances. We believe that the best response to offensive free speech is not censorship, but instead more free speech. Readers will use their own criteria to evaluate the credibility of posts.

So feel free to visit Mr Stamper's profile and write - anonymously, of course - whatever takes your fancy. With a bit of determination, in six months' time, his name could be synonymous with "noted duck-rapist".

Addendum: Jeremy Stamper has added himself as a follower of this blog. Nice to see you, Jeremy - hope you enjoy it. But it does mean paragraph 3 of the above entry is probably no longer true. All the same, I'm leaving it now for the sake of Historical Integrity, or something.

Trolls and thugs

Let's hear it for The Register, which for the second time this week is feeding me material on how evil the Internet is. And this time, it's proper Research.

The latest piece, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, shows a significant positive correlation between teenagers who make heavy use of the Internet, and those who show violent and aggressive behaviour in real life.

Now, anyone who's been online for more than half an hour must surely have noticed that there's a high proportion of jerks, and I've seen a great many explanations of this advanced over the years. Maybe it's harder to avoid such people online; maybe the anonymity of the 'net makes people more confident and less considerate; maybe it's because we're not accustomed to mixing with so many teenagers; maybe it's a small proportion of users making a large volume of noise; maybe it's simply the shared culture of a "place" with a population historically weighted towards adolescent males.

But this research suggests - although all of those things may still be true - it's not just a perception. There really is a higher concentration of yobs out here in cyberspace.

Media coverage of the finding is fairly clearly divided into two camps. In the blue corner, we have those such as FOX News, who have no reservations about citing the study as evidence that the Internet is turning our teens into sociopathic thugs. In the red corner, the likes of El Reg argue that causality could work the other way - it's possible that thuggish kids are simply more drawn to spend excessive amounts of time online. (To do it justice, FOX does acknowledge that possibility - but it's buried half-way down the story, while the opposite explanation is in the headline.)

Intuitively, to me, the second explanation looks likelier. Show a bully a medium in which they can inflict fear and offence with minimal risk, and my bet is they'll gravitate to it like the British government to a database. It'll fascinate them, seeing how much they can do, what they can get away with, until some idiot leaves it on a train...

The original paper preserves a studied neutrality on this point. But it does suggest that "preventive programs for aggressive behaviors should pay attention to Internet addiction among adolescents." Which just goes to show, it is possible to convert science into policy recommendations without, necessarily, getting into a shouting match about it.

How the Internet will kill you

Spending too much time online, apparently, causes high blood pressure. Also heart disease, cancer, dementia, sleep deprivation, diabetes, and Dr House's favourite: lupus.

This story comes to us from Biologist, the strictly non-sensationalist journal of the British Institute of Biology, via El Reg. I'm torn, for a response, between "you're making it up as you go along" and "well, duh."

I think this conflict arises from the outrageously wide remit of the paper. It's as if the author were briefed to look at all the studies linking health effects to either online behaviour or social interaction of any sort, to find all the possible biological connections between "getting ill" and "spending too much time typing away at a lonely screen", and then write a paragraph on each one. There's no coherence to it.

In fact it looks very like dozens of articles I published in my time on a similar journal, although of course "social networking" hadn't been invented then. (And in justice to myself: if they were this bad, I'd generally send them back to the author and tell him to try again. I was a better editor than this.)

In short: the part I can both understand and believe says that (a) if you spend a lot of your time and energy "socialising" online, you don't spend as much time and energy meeting people physically; and (b) spending time physically with other people, preferably in groups, is important for health.

This much seems (to me) obvious. What's not so obvious is the detailed process by which loneliness translates into illness. The paper touches on the usual culprits - stress, depression, lack of confidants, and so forth - but also covers a wide range of biological mechanisms. Sadly, it doesn't provide enough information on any of these for me to understand what it's talking about.

Take the discussion of leucocytes and cytokines, for instance. Citing "Recent research at the UCLA School of Medicine", it seems to be saying that social interaction increases the efficiency of our immune systems. In other words, not only do we share germs with other people, but also immunities to germs that they've previously been exposed to. To me that seems far-fetched, but I don't know enough to argue it either way.

"Regular religious group participation", it says intriguingly but uninformatively, "is a significant predictor of elevated IL-6 [interleukin-6] levels and lower subsequent 12-year mortality." So there you go. It's not the power of prayer, it's the power of churchgoing; it doesn't matter what god you worship, so long as you do it with others.

What makes this paper frustrating, for me, is the shopping-list feel. The authors make no attempt to conceal the fact that they started out from what (you might think) should have been their conclusion - that online life increases physical isolation, which is bad - and gathered evidence only in support of that belief. They make no attempt to develop arguments from one point to another, nor to explore alternative explanations of any of their "findings", nor to explore the full implications of what they did find, or otherwise present any kind of balanced picture. So although I'm inclined to believe that they're probably right, for limited values of "right", I'm left frustrated and dissatisfied.

And now, instead of heading down to the pub to bore the earlobes off some poor sap in real life, I'm blogging about it. That'll show 'em.

The Internet is still evil

I lost a friend today. Well, that may be over-dramatic. I hope so. I'm quite optimistic that "lost" may be a temporary condition. And as for "friend"...

There are a few words coined to describe that curious, but still genuine, feeling that grows up between people who only know one another on the 'net. "Cyber-friend" makes her sound like a cutesy, friendly, prototype unstoppable futuristic assassin, and that's way too many adjectives for anyone. As for "e-pal", "netpal" -- surely "-pal" is only a valid relationship for under-13s. "Mate", "buddy", "chum"? Don't go there. "Online friend"? Just lacks punch.

Ho hum.

Whatever you call them, I have a few. Some appear in the list of blogs I follow or who follow this one -- and I really do appreciate all of you, folks. Please don't vanish. Others, for various reasons, don't appear in any of those lists, but I'm always aware of their presence, and pathetically grateful when they take time to comment or e-mail.

JasmineArdent was one of my favourite writers from thisisby.us. Frighteningly intelligent, perceptive and confident. And she liked to argue, as much as I do; she wasn't shy to speak her minds on whatever topic someone happened to be ranting about today. When she agreed with me, which was more often than not, I felt validated. When she argued, I felt stimulated to examine my position in depth. There's not many people who can make me feel like that.

And when I saw that her account had vanished...

It was a little like the feeling you get when you're strolling carelessly across a field on a sunny morning, and you look up to see that one of the cattle that had been dispassionately observing you from a distance has put down its head and is now running towards you. Or, miles from home, you reach the place where you know you left your car, but it's not there. (Yes, I've had both of those experiences.) In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole balance of the world changes.

I quit TIBU the same day, although I left my writing up. And, via e-mail, I talked Jasmine into starting a blog.

She was never too convinced by the idea. Blogging isn't the same as taking part in a hothouse, semi-closed community like TIBU. The daily stimulation, the constant feedback -- just aren't there.

And today I discovered that her blog has gone, too.

I hope she gets in touch. But if she doesn't... Has she been forced to delete it for professional reasons? personal reasons? has she joined a cult, or walked under a bus, or gone to work for the FBI, or in witness protection? -- from my perspective, there's no way of telling. I've lost e-friends before that way ("e-friends"? not as ugly, but kinda -- trivial), and it's always disappointing. But there's nothing I can do about it.

Be well, Jasmine. Write soon.