Daphia Gaines's List: Digital Citizenship

• Social media have proven extremely volatile in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. Two days after the bombings, Fast Company posted a blog entitled “The Modern Tool In Terror Investigations: Your Phone,” which explained how the mass adoption of smartphones has enabled instant transmission of pictures or short films to ever-greater publics on the myriad of Web 2.0 networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. The article dramatically asserts that once the public realized the power of handheld technology, “culture shifted, just a little.” Maybe. In some ways public response to the bombing marks the new kind of public intervention and collaboration with the government. But many questions remain about the kind of surveillance provided by a technologically fortified and massively, instantaneously connected populace.
• As soon as the Boston bombing suspects were identified, social media quickly began praising themselves for their newly acquired powers of intervention and potential protection. there were many such tweets as “Social media & the massive use of smartphones amounts to a layer of information protection against terror.”
• rior to the bombings, public opinions of social media remained divided and often more speculative: Some extolled social media as a purveyor of grassroots participation that enabled a more informed, better-equipped public to work democratically. In a 2011 article, New York University professor Clay Shirky describes social media as an “environmental” technology with a far greater ability to mobilize vibrant civil societies and promote democratic change than “instrumental” governmental efforts that endeavor to export Internet freedom programmatically.
• Poor social media reporting, Salmon avers, arises out of the difficulty of moderating what he calls a “massively multivariate real-time Bayesian analysis.”
• That is, social media present a monumental challenge for statistical analysis as the flood of new information from multiple sources continually reshapes knowledge of the event. Confronting the complex task of interpreting social media data, Salmon praises the traditional media outlets and established writers like Seth Mnookin for their restraint and bemoans the fury of indiscriminate information on sites like Reddit and 4channel, where users can upload material anonymously. Salmon’s response leaves readers wondering how to manage that massive Bayesian migraine of data.
• the abundance of misinformation roundly demonstrated the one aspect of the “dark side” of social media--a negative potential which many have long feared.
• Dark Side of the Digital Revolution,
• Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen comment on their visit to North Korea and explain why digital media remain far from an unalloyed good, especially in the hands of authoritarian governments, where data collection can serve state surveillance. After the Boston Marathon bombings, social media raises another question: To what extent can social media serve as a massively individualized volunteer surveillance force?

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• Technology services are becoming a digital helping hand to people affected by the Boston explosions.

   

• n response to the explosions at the Boston Marathon on Monday Google Inc.GOOG -1.84%’s philanthropic arm activated “Person Finder,” a digital message board and registry for people affected by natural disasters or other crises.

   

  As of 6 p.m. ET Monday, the Person Finder website said it was tracking about 1,800 records of people looking for someone they can’t track down, or of people looking to pass on information they have about affected people in the Boston area. Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
• As is now commonplace in the wake of major events or crises, Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc.FB -0.63% have become digital timelines of eyewitness accounts, photos and video from the scenes of the Boston explosions. Topsy, a service that analyzes Twitter posts, showed a spike of more than 1.5 million tweets mentioning the term “Boston” just after 4:30 p.m. ET, about an hour and a half after the explosions happened and news of the incidents had gone viral
• On its Twitter page AT&T Inc.T -0.28% also asked people in the Boston area to “keep non-emergency calls to aminimum,” and to send text messages instead of making phone calls

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• Many communities helped authorities apprehend the Boston Marathon bombers and update the broader public about related events. This raw exhibition of the power of social media offers lessons to managers about how to use social tools.
• In my own use, I found that different platforms were suited for very different purposes: Twitter was better for tracking rapidly changing events, while Facebook was better for care and support
• On one hand, we should not hold social media users to a higher standard than traditional organizations, which were far from perfect in the wake of last week’s events. The professional press also got information wrong. Numerous reputable news organizations incorrectly reported that suspects were in custody the day before they went on a shooting rampage that killed one police
• On the other hand, neither let us forget that social media collaboration is often worthless unless used in partnership with these professional experts.

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• After last week's bombings at the Boston Marathon, authorities had to sift through a mountain of footage from government surveillance cameras, private security cameras and imagery shot by bystanders on smartphones. It took the FBI only three days to release blurry shots of the two suspects, taken by a department store's cameras.
• Compare their quick turnaround with the 2005 London bombings, when it took thousands of investigators weeks to parse the city's CCTV (closed-circuit television) footage after the attacks. The cameras, software and algorithms have come a long way in eight years.
• Modeled after London's system, New York's Lower Manhattan Security Initiative monitors 4,000 security cameras and license plate readers south of Canal Street. The project uses feeds from both private and public security cameras, which are are all monitored 24 hours a day by the NYPD.
• Using face and object-detection technology, the police can track cars and people moving through 1.7 square miles in lower Manhattan and even detect unattended packages. The $150 million initiative also includes a number of radiation detectors and automatic roadblocks that can can be used to stop traffic in an emergency.
• All that information is stored in a database. Big clues that would take a traditional investigator untold hours of watching video to uncover can be found with a 15-second search query.

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• While the majority of Americans seek to find a reasonable course of action now and whatever ways they can to help, there are those who respond immediately to great acts of violence like yesterday’s bombing by immediately requesting similar responses, even if they don’t know who should be the target of that revenge. Aptly-named blog Public Shaming, whose goal is to call out those who use social media like Twitter to make asinine and offensive remarks, could barely keep up with the amount of violent statements flooding the internet.