Tag: Kate Eichhorn

Bookmarked How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker)

Kyle Chayka discusses two new books about the Internet—“Content,” by Kate Eichhorn, and “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is,” by Justin E. H. Smith—which examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom.

In reviewing Kate Eichhorn’s Content and Justin E. H. Smith’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Kyle Chayka explores the way in which the internet has turned up into content machines. These books continue a long tradition of books critiquing the internet and its influence on us, including Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Eichhorn discusses the way in which “content begets content”. This is captured in the term ‘content capital’, referring to a user’s ability to create additional content.

Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work. Where “cultural capital” describes how particular tastes and reference points confer status, “content capital” connotes an aptitude for creating the kind of ancillary content that the Internet feeds upon.

On the flip side, Smith’s portrays the internet as a ‘living system’ that is the product of centuries of work. We cannot just undo all of this, instead what we need to do is better understand ourselves.

To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.

In some ways, this reminds me of Ethan Zuckerman’s discussion of the ‘good web‘. I wonder if the solution is in the actual discussion and reflection.

Listened Does data science need a Hippocratic oath? from ABC Radio National

The use and misuse of our data can have enormous personal and societal consequences, so what ethical constraints are there on data scientists?

Continuing the conversation about forgetting and ethics, Antony Funnell speaks with Kate Eichhorn and Kate Mannell about digital forgetting.

Eichhorn, the author of The End of Forgetting, discusses the long and complicated history that children have and challenges associated with identity. She explains that our ability to control what is forgotten has been diminished in the age of social media. Although new solutions may allow us to connect, this also creates its own problems and consequences, such as the calcification of polarised politics. Eichhorn would like to say things are going to change, but she argues that there is little incentive for big tech. Although young people are becoming more cynical, there maybe resistance, but little hope for a return to an equitable utopian web.

Kate Mannell explores the idea of forcing a sense of ethics through the form of a hypocratic oath. Some of the problems with this is that there are many versions of the oath, it does not resolve the systemic problems and it is hard to have an oath of no harm when it is not even clear what harms are actually at play. In the end, it risks being a soft form of self regulation.

I found Eichhorn’s comments about resistance interesting when thinking about my engagement with the IndieWeb and Domain of One’s Own. I guess sometimes all we have is hope. While Mannell’s point about no harm when it is not even clear what harm is at play reminds me about Zeynep Tufekci’s discussion of shadow profiles,  complications of inherited datasets and the challenges of the next machine age. In regards to education, the issue is in regards to artificial intelligence and facial recognition.

Bookmarked Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people (MIT Technology Review)

As past identities become stickier for those entering adulthood, it’s not just individuals who will suffer. Society will too.

Kate Eichhorn discusses the way in which the young people today are tracked and transformed through the use of algorithms. This strips them of any possibility of psychosocial moratorium. Young people are subseqeuntly becoming risk-adverse wgere they are becoming prisoners to perfection at a younger age.

LinkedIn originally had an age minimum of 18. By 2013, the professional networking site had lowered its age floor to 13 in some regions and 14 in the United States, before standardizing it at 16 in 2018. The company wouldn’t say how many middle and high schoolers are on the platform. But they aren’t hard to find.

As one 15-year-old LinkedIn user (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing her account) explained to me, “I got my first LinkedIn page at 13. It was easy—I just lied. I knew I needed LinkedIn because it ranks high on Google. This way, people see my professional side first.” When I asked why she needed to manage her “professional side” at 13, she explained that there’s competition to get into high schools in her region. Since starting her LinkedIn profile in eighth grade, she has added new positions and accomplishments—for example, chief of staff for her student union and chief operating officer for a nonprofit she founded with a 16-year-old peer (who, not surprisingly, is on LinkedIn too).

The fear is that:

In a world where the past haunts the present, young people may calcify their identities, perspectives, and political positions at an increasingly young age … The risk is that young people who hold extreme views as teenagers may feel there’s no use changing their minds if a negative perception of them sticks regardless. Simply put, in the future, geeky kids remain geeky, dumb jocks remain dumb, and bigots remain bigots. Identities and political perspectives will be hardened in place, not because people are resistant to change but because they won’t be allowed to shed their past. In a world where partisan politics and extremism continue to gain ground, this may be the most dangerous consequence of coming of age in an era when one has nothing left to hide.

Listened ‘The End of Forgetting’: Chips with Everything podcast from the Guardian

This week, Jordan Erica Webber talks to Kate Eichhorn about her new book The End of Forgetting: Growing up with Social Media, which explores the dangers facing young people who may find it difficult to distance themselves from their pasts, long into the future.

Kate Eichorn talks about the impact of social media on refugees and growing up. We no longer allow children what Erik Ericson’s calls a psychosocial moratorium. Sometimes the memory is generated by somebody else, such as parents and ‘sharenting‘. What is overlooked in all this is how participation online is contributing in digital labour. Associated with this are the profits and data mining associated with platform capitalism. I am reminded of Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt’s call for empathy when responding to digital missteps. Clive Thompson also discusses the impact of technology on memory in Chapter Two of Smarter Than You Think.
Liked Social Media Could Make It Impossible to Grow Up (WIRED)

In sharp contrast to Postman’s prediction, childhood never did disappear. Instead, it has become ubiquitous in a new and un­expected way. Today, childhood and adolescence are more visible and pervasive than ever before. For the first time in history, children and adolescents have widespread access to the technologies needed to represent their lives, circulate these representations, and forge networks with each other, often with little or no adult supervision. The potential danger is no longer childhood’s disappearance, but rather the possibility of a perpetual childhood. The real crisis of the digital age is not the disappearance of childhood, but the specter of a childhood that can never be forgotten.

Excerpt adapted from The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media by Kate Eichhorn, published by Harvard University Press.