My recent decision to leave Facebook was one I didn’t take lightly. As I explained at the time, there wasn’t any unique revelation or watershed moment behind the decision. It’s more that I had wanted to step away for some time and felt it was the right thing to do, but the very nature of Facebook (no doubt combined with a lack of self-control on my part) delayed my exit.

As if on cue, The Social Dilemma (trailer) released on Netflix this past Wednesday. Just a happy coincidence of course that this documentary came out so soon after leaving a platform that consumed countless hours of my life over the past decade, but it served up a nice dose of catharsis, I must say. I recommend it both for those who may be considering their own departure from certain apps and websites and for those who’d like a refresher on the sweeping impacts these spaces continue to have on connected society.

There’s nothing particularly revelatory on offer in its hour and a half runtime. In the current attention economy, major players like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest view humans, us, as an extractable resource. We — explicitly our preferences, desires, beliefs, impulses, and the built-in potential for these elements to be dialed up or down — are the product being sold, while advertisers are the customers. Again, nothing too earth-shattering; the basic blueprint remains essentially unchanged from the launch of Facebook 16 years ago.

What elevates this production over previous attempts at consciousness-raising, I think, are the messengers you hear from. Former Design Ethicist for Google, Tristan Harris, takes center stage as one of the leading voices in this space, having put out a number of TED talks and testified before Congress about the misaligned incentives baked into social media and how its tendency to bring out the worst in society is a feature and not a bug. You hear from senior executives at Facebook. You hear from the former president of Pinterest. You hear from literally the guy who invented the Facebook “Like” button. These aren’t bit players in Silicon Valley or industry outsiders. These are the experts who built and helped grow these platforms — and who now harbor grave doubts their creations are a force for good.

While the information they impart here shouldn’t be too surprising to those with some insight into how these platforms work, it’s nonetheless a compelling synthesis of the variegated problems that have emerged over time: increased ideological polarization, the exacerbation of fake news, election hacking, and other manipulation by bad actors. While these problems existed in some form or another prior to the inception of large-scale social networks, never before have there been tools so uniquely well-positioned to exploit vulnerabilities in our psychology. As one of the featured experts notes, “It’s not that highly motivated propagandists didn’t exist before, it’s that the platforms of today spread manipulative narratives with phenomenal ease — and without very much money.”

A rebuttal we often hear from people who argue the concerns around these spaces are overblown is that we will eventually adapt to social media, in much the same way we’ve always learned to live with and accommodate the next big thing. After all, we had to adapt to newspapers, radio, film and television, and the pre-social media internet, and this is merely the next evolution of that trend.

Tristan Harris and others address this argument head-on by emphasizing an important distinction that sets social media apart from earlier innovations. He uses the analogy of a bicycle. When the bicycle was invented, it didn’t feed addictive tendencies, it didn’t polarize society, it didn’t elevate the fake news crisis, and there weren’t concerns it would erode the fabric of democracy. That’s because a bicycle is simply a tool, a dormant device that wants nothing from us. Social media and other networked applications, in contrast, have their own goals and their own mechanisms by which to pursue those goals. Rather than a passive, tool-based technology, these are persuasion-based technologies that actively manipulate you by using your own psychology against you. The current state of our social media represents a true paradigm shift in how humanity interacts with the world and with each other.

As I conveyed in my Facebook farewell two weeks ago, because the algorithms driving these platforms prioritize overall engagement over social harmony — according to the company’s own admission and internal research — there’s an inbuilt tendency to divide users. Harris cites a well known study which found that fake stories on Twitter spread 6x faster than a true story. The takeaway is clear: fake news and sensational lies boost engagement; the truth, meanwhile, is boring. And thanks to machine learning and recommendation engines (the heart and soul of these mediums), Twitter & Co.’s facility for spreading falsehood improves by the day. Alas, this certainly helps explain absurd offline phenomena like “Pizzagate” and the notion that eating Chinese food can give you coronavirus.

As an aside, I also couldn’t help but notice an unmentioned subtext here that this whole corrosive situation in which we find ourselves came about by and large through the collective efforts of white men (and women) who unleashed these technological behemoths on society, while the divisions and other society-engulfing downstream consequences of their actions have been felt largely by Black and other minority groups across America. This isn’t an angle explored in the documentary, but I do think it’s an important one, especially as we contemplate how to best improve these platforms going forward.

Anyway, it’s worth checking out if you have the time.

Feature image credit: GETTY

 
 
Note: The following post originally appeared on my Facebook page. It is reproduced here with light modification.

Some days you wake up and just make a decision. Today I’ve decided to permanently step away from Facebook. This may come as a shock to some of you considering how diligently I’ve used the site over the last decade. But it’s something I’ve contemplated and wrestled with on and off for the last few years. There’s no single catalyst behind this decision really, apart from a few friends I respect recently doing the same. Rather, it’s the culmination of two different crosscurrents pushing me in a new direction.

The first is that I earnestly view Facebook as a net harm to society rather than a social good. There is a paradox inherent to social networks specifically and the internet more generally in that as information technology on this grand scale has enabled us to be more open and inclusive and allowed us to spread the ideas and values we cherish, it has also led to more closed and siloed communities — to hermetic, algorithmically generated echo chambers that amplify groupthink. As much as we depend on it today, the internet is to a great extent a manifestation of how people use confirmation bias to validate their worldview. And I see Facebook as the living apotheosis of this phenomenon.

In retrospect, it seems self-evident that Facebook and Twitter haven’t been good for human unity, and we’re recognizing some of their more pernicious effects on connected society. We unleashed these great technological behemoths without putting the proper safeguards in place to prevent exploitation by bad actors, and without having the self-awareness and foresight to ensure that these spaces be used to uplift our society rather than tear it down. Though I’ve felt (and argued) this for some time, I nevertheless rationalized remaining on here despite my many misgivings.

I’ve come to expect the divisiveness and aggressive polarization embedded in American society, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need around-the-clock reminders of these dispiriting signs of decay to which Facebook gleefully pays homage. By Facebook’s own admission and internal research, their algorithms prioritize overall engagement over social harmony — something that should be obvious to anyone who’s spent more than five minutes on here. For those of us who assumed this problem would improve over time, we were as naïve as we were mistaken.

The second reason for leaving is that I’d like to extend my activism and passions into new horizons. While I’ve gained tremendously from the many conversations I’ve had here over the years, it’s time to move on. I’m honestly not sure what else there is to gain from my 157th thread on climate change or biblical inerrancy or why authoritarianism is bad. I think there are other ways to utilize my talents, and other mediums geared toward furthering the causes I care about. I don’t know what these look like yet, but I look forward to figuring it out in the months ahead. I also plan to spend more time on so called “deep work” — with books and published research as opposed to news and social media.

At the same time, I’ve managed to build up a respectable following and have contributed a decent amount of viral content. I’d not like to see that content vanish out of thin air (nor, presumably, would the people who have shared, engaged, and otherwise benefited from that content). So rather than deactivate or delete my account, I’ll leave it up, along with all of my posts, shares, and comments. I just won’t be posting anything new from here on out. If you’d like to reach out and say hi, I’ll still be on Messenger for the time being, so if you have questions or just want to chat about stuff, reach out to me there. You can also email me if you’d like.

I do want to say thank you to all the wonderfully passionate and brilliant people I’ve met on here — far too many to name. Some of you I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in person, while others I’ve only engaged virtually. I cherish the many deep and thoughtful conversations we’ve had together; I wouldn’t be who I am today without your knowledge, insight, and wit. I hope you all continue to be a light to those in your life as I aim for the same. I hope that all of us will continue to use our passions to change the world into a better place than it is today. As the late anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Veni, vidi, vici

Update 1.24.2021: FiveThirtyEight published an article this week that goes into how the widespread problem of misinformation on Facebook can be traced to its core design. Its algorithms prey on our obsession with drama and controversy to drive engagement and clicks. In short, divisiveness keeps the lights on at Facebook, and its higher ups have known this for years.

The company thus finds itself in the precarious position of balancing its desire for constant revenue growth — that according to their internal data is fueled by polarizing, sensational content, of which misinformation and science denial form a large part — against any ethical obligations it may have to society. The context of Kaleigh Rogers’ article is anti-vaxx sentiment and false claims around Covid-19 vaccines, but the issue of misaligned incentives is industry-wide and applies equally to the spread of other types of misinformation. Excerpt:
 

“Our research shows how seamlessly old narratives can be repurposed to fit new contexts,” said Rory Smith, a research manager at First Draft and a co-author of the report. “When demand for information about a topic is high but the supply of credible information is low, you get a data deficit, and that deficit will quickly be filled up with misinformation.”

[…]

“The anti-vaxx movement has done so well on Facebook in part because it is controversial, and controversy helps make Facebook a lot of money. In 2019, 98 percent of Facebook’s revenue was from advertising — $20 billion in all. Facebook’s advertising is so valuable because it can be microtargeted, based on the data Facebook collects on its users. To collect more and better data (and to expose users to more ads), Facebook needs its users to be active and engaged: liking posts, sharing links, joining groups and commenting. One surefire way to keep people engaged is to expose them to content that provokes an emotional response, like a post claiming the vaccine you’re planning to give your toddler will cause him or her to develop autism.”

[…]

“A Wall Street Journal investigation last year uncovered how teams within Facebook tasked with addressing the site’s disinformation crisis cited the platform’s design as the root of the problem. An internal company presentation from 2018 included slides that said Facebook’s algorithms “exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and, if not altered, would surface “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.”

[…]

“Social media preys on the most primal parts of your brain. The algorithm maximizes your attention by hitting you repeatedly with content that triggers your strongest emotions — it aims to provoke, shock and enrage,” Kendall said in his opening statement. “This is not by accident. It’s an algorithmically optimized playbook to maximize user attention — and profits.”

[…]

“Industry researchers believe there are other efforts Facebook could make to reduce the impact of the anti-vaxx movement on the site. Last year, nonprofit research group Ranking Digital Rights released a report on how algorithmically driven advertising structures have exacerbated the disinformation epidemic by increasing its spread, and recommended social media sites look at changing these systems — rather than moderating content — to curb the spread. People will always post nonsense on the internet. The platforms we use don’t need to be designed to lead people to it.”

Further reading:

• Facebook reportedly ignored its own research showing algorithms divided users
• Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive
• Why Fights Over The COVID-19 Vaccine Are Everywhere On Facebook

Feature images credit: AFP/Alastair Pike; Richard Drew/AP Photo

 
 
At the heart of social media lies a conspicuous paradox. While sites like Facebook have created more opportunities for human connection, their algorithms have a tendency to silo us in homogeneous spaces. The potential for engagement has never been greater, but the personalized nature of the newsfeed largely ends up reinforcing our own biases and ideological orientation. The more we tell Facebook and Google what we want to see through our clicks and shares, the more it skews our feed to serve up more of the same — be it cat videos or conspiracy theories. In the context of our political environment, this has mostly served to activate our tribalist impulses and sort us into angry, poorly informed partisans.

The obligation shared by Facebook and other social media proprietors to blunt the insularization of their platforms — otherwise known as the viewpoint diversity problem — remains a pressing topic for our time. Efforts to curate more cross-cutting news and crack down on fake news stories are democratically necessary, as is the increased pressure on these companies to monitor how their algorithms are being used and the degree to which they can be exploited by bad actors. But missing from the constant chatter of echo chambers and filter bubbles is something that won’t be solved by smarter algorithms. The problem is not just that people aren’t exposed to information that challenges their worldview, it’s that many would refuse to read and engage even if they were.

I’ve observed this for years in the debate over climate change. Presenting someone who doubts the science with accurate information rarely leads to a discussion of the merits of what was presented. It often devolves, rather, into a dispute over the merits of the source, followed by a repetition of the same shopworn misinformation that kicked off the exchange. A point by point debunking is only as useful as a recipient’s willingness to hear it. And if the link you offer raises partisan alarms, it’s liable to be dismissed out of hand. The Washington Post, The Guardian, Skeptical Science, hell, even NASA, doesn’t matter — once a particular source has been branded as suspect, that source is now off the table for consideration.

I stopped engaging with a certain family member on the issue once I realized he wouldn’t read the articles I was sending under threat of Guantanamo. For those for whom authenticity has become a measure of ideological compatibility, attempts to enlighten are futile. The mulish resistance to outside ideas and the mainstream press has grown more acute in the Trump Years — with open disdain for punditry coming from the top — but it was a virtual inevitability given the tribal nature of human behavior and the cognitive value we attach to closely held beliefs.

Algorithmic approaches can only do so much to compensate for shortcomings written in psychology, or to dislodge the rigid belief structures of low information consumers. Facebook and others could quite easily tune their news algorithm to ensure climate deniers are shown more factual stories in their feed. But this does nothing to ensure those same individuals won’t scroll right past them after seeing the headline and associated source. After all, safely ignoring information that threatens cognitive dissonance is precisely what generates echo chambers in the first place.

Liberals and conservatives alike are susceptible to such effects, and there’s more we all can do to cultivate a less partisan online experience. But for the people most in need of a richer, learned atmosphere — those given to grand conspiracizing and science denial, for instance — revamping the newsfeed is beside the point. That a particular headline or story agrees with the narrative they’re prepared to imbibe is all that matters.

How might we effect change in the short term? For people who take their cues from vested authorities, nothing will change unless those authorities begin to change their messaging. In the arena of climate change, this shift in signaling must come from conservative elites: from the Sean Hannities and Rush Limbaughs of the denial-o-sphere, from the opinion pages of the Murdoch press and Breitbart and WUWT, and any place else that doesn’t teach peer review or value expertise and intellectual honesty.

A sea change could also come about following a dramatic overhaul of who conservatives consider credible and what ideas they embrace. As David Roberts has argued, once rejecting climate science, socialized medicine, LGBTness, and the like are no longer part of the conservative playbook, we’ll see their relevance wane quickly. Unfortunately, this almost surely won’t happen so long as the incentive structures are so perversely misaligned, not just on the part of individuals — who might risk interpersonal blowback from deviating from their ideological cohort — but on the part of partisan elites and the media behemoths they represent.

Looking ahead, perhaps nothing short of a new intellectual renaissance will do, a revitalization of our innate curiosity and our unquenchable desire to understand the world around us. Only a society-engulfing recommitment to fact-conscious living, to free inquiry, to educational improvement, to acquiring knowledge for its own sake, and to objectivity and fairness can serve as a critical advance upon the blind partisanism and enculturated ignorance that so define our times.

This is why our Great Problem is not something Facebook, Google, and Big Data can solve alone. It’s not just about getting information in front of those who need to see it. It’s about fundamentally resculpting the epistemic resolve of ordinary Americans — a generational task if ever there was one.

Further reading:

• Why Facebook’s Changes Are Good News For Fake News And The Echo Chamber
• Blame the Echo Chamber on Facebook. But Blame Yourself, Too.
• This one weird trick will not convince conservatives to fight climate change
• How social media creates angry, poorly informed partisans
• America is facing an epistemic crisis
• The Problem Isn’t Disinformation, It’s Dismediation
• Review: The Demon-Haunted World

This post was featured on HuffPost’s Contributor platform.

Image credit: Stephen Lam/Getty Images

 
 
It doesn’t feel great to learn what we’ve suspected all along: that Russia’s meddling in our 2016 election was extensive and widespread. Whether our favored candidate won or lost, it’s certainly not something we wanted to be true. The notion that Kremlin-sponsored actors used and abused social media to divide America and influence a national election is too scandalous for comfort — something that seems best reserved for late-night cerebration at the pub or unvetted blogs. That information warfare on such a vast scale has been successfully conducted by Russian operatives across eastern Europe and beyond for decades has done little to blunt our collective naiveté.

In fairness, I doubt anyone outside the national security community could have foreseen what Russian purveyors managed to accomplish. Thousands of accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other popular platforms were created by professional trolls — not to spread pro-Russia propaganda as one might assume — but for the express and more sinister purpose of disrupting our political discourse and pushing us further apart as a society. And if the batch of documents released this week by the House Intelligence Committee is any indication, our attackers know us all too well.
 

 
Whether you happened to be a firearm enthusiast, a social justice activist, a right-leaning evangelical, or a Bernie supporter, Russian impostors had you in their sights. The above ad, run in October 2016, was created by the Russian-controlled Facebook page Army of Jesus, and targeted evangelicals aged 18 to 65.

A different Russian-owned page with 225,000 followers called Heart of Texas sponsored an event scheduled for the Saturday before the election entitled “Get Ready to Secede!”. The ad targeted Texan residents only, called attention to “the crimes committed by Killary Rotten Clinton,” and asked voters: “What will happen if Hitlery becomes President?”

How about the popular Facebook page Donald Trump America? Anyone else distinctly recall seeing their content shared by friends and family? Yet another phony page, who in the run-up to the election urged voters to sign a petition to have Clinton removed from the presidential ballot.

On Instagram, the account _american.made, also revealed this week to be based out of Russia, fingered the nexus of Tea Party, Trump, and NRA supporters. One of their ads, first appearing in April 2016, featured a parent and their child, side by side aiming handguns, with the caption: “This is the way our children have to be raised…Follow us if this video makes you proud!”

Left-identifying voters were targeted as well by several fake pages, ads, and sponsored events throughout the campaign season. The pages Black Matters, Born Liberal, United Muslims of America, and LGBT United adopted the familiar language of socially conscious liberals, despite being managed by Russian hucksters.

One of the most egregious examples of Russian misdirection came in May of 2016 when two of the aforementioned Facebook groups managed to organize dueling protests for the same location at the same time. Heart of Texas staged a rally called “Stop Islamization of Texas” outside the Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston. Meanwhile, United Muslims of America advertised a counter-demonstration called “Save Islamic Knowledge” for across the street. Both sides showed up, and the protests soon escalated into confrontation and verbal attacks.

According to Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), “Ironically, one person who attended stated, ‘The Heart of Texas promoted this event, but we didn’t see one of them.’ We now know why. It’s hard to attend an event in Houston, Texas, when you’re trolling from a site in St. Petersburg, Russia.”

What’s striking is not so much that Russia paid to pit liberals and conservatives against one another, but that they likewise sought to flare up festering disagreement within the Democratic party. Indeed, they seem to have funded just as many pro-Bernie ads as anti-Clinton ads (and at least one for Jill Stein). One such ad by the page Born Liberal and run shortly after Clinton secured the Democratic nomination, cites Sanders railing against the Clinton Foundation for accepting donations from certain foreign governments. The writer of the ad expands on Sander’s verbiage, calling the Foundation “‘organized crime’ at it’s finest [sic].”

Evidence coming out of the congressional committees suggests that Russia’s cyber-messaging was even tailored to individual states. Facebook ads peppered with anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment appeared repeatedly before voters in Michigan and Wisconsin — two of the most narrowly won states in the last election. Each of these influences, it must be acknowledged, were calculated to give Trump an electoral edge.

Taken together, the level of sophistication in the form of geographic and ideological targeting employed during the 2016 presidential campaign was nothing short of staggering, and demonstrated an uncanny awareness of American culture wars and the power of social media to give shape to those narratives.
 

At the behest of public investigators, the leading social networks have made considerable strides toward firming up the details and specifying the breadth of Russia’s disinformation campaign. Many of the fake accounts and ad buys trace back to a troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian company based in St. Petersburg. Long suspected of operating on behalf of the Russian government, the IRA is believed to be a kind of headquarters for Russian propaganda. In sum:

• Twitter identified 36,746 Russian bot accounts that posted more than 1.4 million election-related tweets achieving a total of 288 million views. 2,752 accounts, including 310,000 tweets, were traced specifically to the IRA. Twitter found 9 additional Russian accounts not specifically tied to the IRA that bought ads using Qiwi, a Russian-based payment service.

• Facebook announced in a blog post from September that more than 3,000 advertisements posted between June 2015 and May 2017, associated with 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages, can be linked to Russia.

• In the House hearing this week, Facebook grew that number to 80,000 posts reaching 126 million users, and confirmed another 120 IRA-linked Pages. Taking Instagram into account, the number jumps to 150 million reached.

• Google identified 1,108 YouTube videos traced to Russian YouTube channels that garnered at least 309,000 views.

All of these accounts were taken down by their respective platforms as their ties to Russia became clear, while Facebook has taken the extra step of prohibiting Pages that consistently share fake news from advertising on the platform. It’s important to note that while only a fraction of these posts achieved viral energy individually, their aggregate effect allowed for the massive reach in targeted areas. And through systematic encouragement of “likes” and shares, Russian bots increased the chance their intended audience would be treated to similar content in the future, both of the organic and Russia-sponsored variety.

Whether we will ever be able to quantify their impact at the voting booth is beside the point: Russia committed cyberwarfare against US citizens, and they’re really good at it.

What Does Russia Want?

Disinformation, or dezinformatsiya as it’s known in Russia, is hardly new. As Rachel Maddow points out, cyberwarfare has been a central component of Russia’s geopolitical strategy for decades. Using information as a weapon is every bit as integral as military warfare or the ground invasion of neighboring territories, and perhaps more so. The measures uncovered by social media giants mirror the methods and motivations of past Russian-directed cyberattacks around the world. Similar patterns of exploitation coinciding with key elections and policy decisions have been observed in the Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland.
 

 
A report issued this year by the Defense Intelligence Agency (pdf) agrees, stating that “Russia views the information sphere as a key domain for modern military conflict. Moscow views the information domain as strategically decisive and critically important to control its domestic populace and influence adversary states. Information warfare is a key means of achieving its ambitions of becoming a dominant player on the world stage.”

Such ambitions begin by influencing beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors. The information we consume may be barren of truth but useful psychologically, manipulating us to act (or vote) in a certain way, or not at all. According to the same report, by engaging in “information confrontation,” Russian propaganda “strives to influence, confuse, and demoralize its intended audience, often containing a mixture of true and false information to seem plausible and fit into the preexisting worldview of the intended audience.”

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it harks back to what Maria Bustillos has called dismediation (a phenomenon I discussed late last year). Russia doesn’t traffic in dezinformatsiya so you believe something untrue. They push dezinformatsiya so that you give up on the pursuit of truth altogether and believe that nothing is true. The idea is to sever the bonds that make democracy functional, to place a noose around civic discourse by undermining trust in civic institutions, principally the media and governments. As is Russia’s aim, this ultimately facilitates deepening tribal fractures and political alienation.

“The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya,” The New York Times wrote last year, “is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of policy paralysis. What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”

Why they do all of this has a simple enough answer: to kindle existing cultural fires; weaken institutional trust; sow discord and encourage disengagement of the populace; steer the West on a trajectory that benefits them. Answering why they so heavily targeted America and seemed to favor Trump in this particular election is a bit more difficult, though the list of possible motives is seemingly endless.

As a major oil power whose economic interests would be harmed by international policies to slow climate change, it makes sense that Putin would want a card-carrying climate denier at the helm of a dominant superpower. But one could just as easily chalk it up to rankling resentment over Clinton’s term as Secretary of State, anti-Muslim prejudice, and the sanctions we imposed for their invasion of Ukraine. Even if none of these figured prominently, the cost of leveraging social media to influence populations is so low as to be inconsequential, rendering any potential benefits worthwhile.

What Does It All Mean?

As news of the extent of Russia’s interference has come to light, people have wondered what this means for the recent election, the validity of Trump’s presidency, and basic American competence. As reprehensible as Russia’s meddling was, systematic ad targeting isn’t quite enough to overturn an election result. Indeed, that their methods were so effective necessitates a closer look in the mirror.

In an important sense, we have only ourselves to blame for falling for easily debunked propaganda. We have ourselves to blame for so blithely succumbing to confirmation bias and blind partisanism. We have ourselves to blame for not imparting basic critical thinking skills to our students and our children from an early age. That’s on us, not on Russia. Russia exploited this ineptitude for their own gain, and to great effect as recent reports indicate. Our indifference to the facts, to standards of accuracy, journalistic integrity, objectivity and fairness, cost us dearly. In short, Russia’s tampering was so successful because we as a nation are so susceptible.

And rest assured, if Russia didn’t engage in these practices, there are plenty of in-house partisan agitators to fill the void. The far-right contingent, spurred by Alex Jones, Limbaugh, and Hannity, and yes, many on the left as well, do a bang-up job circulating false stories and debunked narratives, without any help from Russia. Though the aid of Russian-backed IRA allowed such narratives to hit harder and spread further, we cannot ignore our own cankerous intellectual failures.

Thus, while lawmakers hem and haw about Russian intrusions into American democracy, we need to acknowledge the obvious point that their techniques would not have worked without existing organic support for the ideas they spread. After all, they modeled them after us. There are deeper problems at home that existed well before Russia decided to get involved, problems that will persist after every detail of their influence campaign is known.

As Vox’s David Roberts argues, the epistemic crisis facing America is a much larger and more serious problem plaguing our politics and society than either Russia’s meddling or whatever Mueller’s probe ultimately reveals. Sure, the probe could lead to grounds for impeachment if federal crimes are uncovered, but this doesn’t magically make impeachment a surefire outcome, nor does it wash away the longstanding intellectual woes of the American electorate. Our enduring indifference to what is real and what is true, aided and abetted by partisan media, has destroyed our ability to find common ground and deranged nearly every aspect of the political environment.

The bottom line: America needs to get smarter if we wish to prevent more Trumps and misdirection. Facts need to matter again — to those reporting them and to those consuming them. For so long as we house and foster a sizable stooge population that treats core institutions and norms like a choose-your-own-adventure story, the faultlines exposed by the recent election will continue to haunt us for the foreseeable future.

Further reading:

• The Agency
• Meet The Activist Who Uncovered The Russian Troll Factory Named In The Mueller Probe
• Russian ads, now publicly released, show sophistication of influence campaign
• The Facebook ads Russians targeted at different groups
• The social media ads Russia wanted Americans to see
• Michael Flynn Followed Russian Troll Accounts, Pushed Their Messages in Days Before Election
• Russia organized 2 sides of a Texas protest and encouraged ‘both sides to battle in the streets’
• Exclusive: Russians Impersonated Real American Muslims to Stir Chaos on Facebook and Instagram
• 2016 Presidential Campaign Hacking Fast Facts
• Expansionist Russia promotes division everywhere else
• A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories
• Americans — especially but not exclusively Trump voters — believe crazy, wrong things
• America is facing an epistemic crisis
• Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology

This post was featured on HuffPost’s Contributor platform.

Feature image credit: mikolajn, adamkaz/iStock

 
 
In his 1981 satire The Crystal Bucket, Clive James remarked, “It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.” We live in a world so reliant on digital technology and internet infrastructure that it’s difficult to imagine one without them. It’s not until the electronic adjuncts we so depend on fail, break or are otherwise removed from our daily routines that we come to grips with how rigid a stranglehold they have on our time and attention. That’s because while technology has repeatedly transformed our lives, every major advancement inevitably translates to increased dependence on the benefits it confers.

Our days are deeply programmed to accommodate a variety of digital activities that have become just as much a part of our daily regimen as brushing our teeth. Our circadian clocks subconsciously spur us to feed our Facebook fix throughout the workday. We pull our smartphones from our pockets when our friend is saying something deserving of our full attention. For many of us, our phone is the first thing we look at in the morning when we wake up and the last thing we interface with before we go to sleep. The abundance of online interaction has revealed just how vulnerable we are to the forces of distraction.

Technology’s transformative impact on our lives is certainly welcomed in its ability to save us great time and energy. Given too much attention, however, it can cause us to lose focus on more important things, like our jobs, our relationships and even our life goals. Without establishing some ground rules for the services and devices we use every day, they can become less a useful tool than a perpetual distraction. Whether you’re looking to make some long-term changes to your internet and smartphone usage or more temporary adjustments to focus on specific goals, try out these tools and tips to better balance your online and offline life. Because now more than ever, we sometimes need a digital detox.
 

1. Disable push notifications

How many notifications do you receive every hour? For me it’s around 7-10. And it’s not because I’m popular or unusually deserving of these provocations to engage. It’s because the services, apps and platforms we interact with are adding more and more ways to capture our attention. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Words With Friends. Each has its medley of notices to divert your focus away from other things and, if left unchecked, will result in a notification windstorm before you’ve even sat down to breakfast.

The best way to regulate this is to disable push notifications within each individual service or app. Since most require your email address to sign up, your account will be linked to your email or even your mobile number if you provide it. For many of these, email notifications are enabled by default. Don’t allow this. Navigate to the account settings of each service and disable all email and mobile notifications. This way, you can choose when to interact rather than the other way around.

Advancing this one step further, on iOS and Android you can globally disable email notifications so your phone won’t ever harass you about your overloaded inbox. You can also set your smartphone on silent to ensure your attention is laser-focused on the task at hand. Of all the suggestions here, reducing your notification rate is the most effective way of suppressing your digital interactions.
 

2. Check email twice a day

We are obsessed with email. It is the default method of communication in today’s culture, and it isn’t going away any time soon. For me, even an organized and properly sorted email account consumes too much of my time. Indeed, between work and personal inboxes, reading and responding to email is likely what we spend the bulk of our time doing on any given day. How many times have we been working hard on a project or engaged in a train of thought when email completely derails our focus? This all-too-common scenario can instantly kill our productivity if we allow it. Our best defense is to remove the distraction.

If you’ve disabled all email push notices as above, you’ll probably find yourself instinctively checking your inbox every 15 minutes or so to make sure something wasn’t missed. This is a waste of time. Instead, resolve to check your personal email just twice a day at specified times. We often forget that constant monitoring and quick email turnaround is a relatively recent development. Rather, opening my inbox after lunch and a couple of hours before bed has worked well. I’m able to meet deadlines and my personal goals much more efficiently this way. It can be challenging at first, but does become easier over time.

The twice daily method can be applied not only to your personal email but to your work email as well. Most of us in the business world use Outlook, so we’re all well familiar with the popups that invade our screen each time a new message is received and interrupt whatever we were working on. By default, these desktop alerts are turned on. To disable this in Outlook click File –> Options –> Mail, and under Message Arrival uncheck the Display a desktop alert box. After that’s done, try only checking your inbox once in the morning and again in the afternoon. As long as you’re not expecting a particularly important or urgent email, you’ll likely find your workday more productive as you are exercising greater control over your schedule.

Adhering to a more periodic email philosophy enables us to use email on our own terms and break from our subconscious habits.

Image via Shutterstock
 

3. Take a social media vacation

Similar advice follows for social media usage, perhaps the greatest time sink of our increasingly digital age. While you can try to limit your Facebook sessions to twice a day, that is just not enough for many people. An innocent session after work can spill into two hours as we aimlessly drift from Facebook to Reddit to Pinterest, ignorant all the while of priorities far more deserving of our time. That new recipe your friend just pinned to her board is probably tasty, but you might let it escape your attention when there are more pressing matters to attend to.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. To combat my propensity for social media saturation I designate at least one day a week as “social media-free.” I’ll often put a pause on Facebook and other of my favorite spaces on the weekends. You can then devote those days to pursuing your goals, meeting your deadlines or completing work you’ve been procrastinating.
 

4. Censor your internet sessions

The more we use the internet the more we are vulnerable to its vacuum-like properties on our time. If you find that every new tab and search window results in a failed attempt at getting things done, it might be time to take more drastic measures. Ironically, there are programs on the internet to help us with our internet addiction. I’ve tried out the following programs and can personally attest to their effectiveness.

SelfControl (Mac OS) / ColdTurkey (Windows). This pair of web apps serves as your personal digital goalie to preclude you from accessing time-draining websites. You simply specify the sites to blacklist as well as the duration, and the program does the rest. Forget about bypassing the block if you change your mind and want to watch one more episode of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. Uninstalling the program, ending the process or task in task manager and even restarting your computer will not revert its effects. You must wait for the timer to run out. Both programs above do the same exact thing for their respective platform. The blocks work across all major browsers. Note that the block sometimes takes a minute or two to go into effect if you already have your browser open, but it will kick in immediately if you restart your browser.

Freedom (Windows, Mac OS). This program ratchets up the intensity by literally locking down the internet in full for the duration that you specify. If you want to access the internet before the timer is finished, you’re forced to reboot your computer, making you seriously reconsider whether it’s truly worth it to refresh that news feed one more time.

Image via YFS Magazine
 

5. Hide the Google+ notifications box

Now that Google has its own social network, Google+ is now part of the omnipresent Google pane and is accompanied by a notifications box. This square box, with its real-time updates and oh-so-inviting scarlet design, notifies you about everything Google deems relevant, including when a spam account adds you to their circles. As long as you’re signed into your Google account, no matter which piece of the Google ecosystem you happen to be using notifications will be front and center. Even if you disable all push notifications, they will still appear across all Google sites in the notifications box.

You can delete your Google+ content in full if you want, but if you’d rather just hide that pesky square box, then I recommend the following browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

Chrome: Hide Google+ Notification. This extension intelligently blocks the notifications box across all Google sites except Google+ (where you’ll likely desire it the most).

Firefox: It’s a bit less straightforward for FF users. First you’ll need to install Greasemonkey here. Then install the user script here. Unfortunately, I found this method inconsistent across different FF versions and Google sites, but it’s the only such script I’ve found that works in Firefox. Let me know in the comments if you’ve come across a better alternative.

Image via Mickmel.com

How do you keep your digital appetite in check? Have you found other methods or tools that are effective at suppressing distractions? Let me know. If you leave a good tip in the comments, I’ll update the article!

Feature image by Jules2445

 
 
Google went live yesterday with its latest search enhancement, Search plus Your World, a feature which introduces a more personal element to your search results. Now when you conduct a search, Google blends publicly shared Google+ content with the ordinary search results.  This more stratified approach to search represents not only one of the biggest modifications Google has ever made to its engine but also the most comprehensive example yet of how its nascent social network – Google+ – stands to benefit from its integration with the Google ecosystem.

For starters, this feature only applies to those who have a Google+ account and are signed in, and for those disgruntled users who prefer the non-personal search results, you can disable Search plus Your World globally (read: completely) by heading over to your Search settings and selecting Do not use personal results. You can also toggle your personal results on/off on a per-search basis by clicking the Hide personal results button which now appears above the search results.

The primary value of this new feature is that Google now surfaces any content relevant to your search that is publicly shared by your Google+ connections, allowing you to see all the information your contacts have produced on a certain topic. For example, if you search the keyword motorcycle, you will see posts those in your Google+ circles have made about motorcycles, motorcycle photos they have posted on Google+ or Picasa, and even external, non-Google affiliated blog posts they have made about motorcycles. This last element is the crux that separates Search plus Your World from the search you can already make from the main Google+ search bar (which only returns content posted on Google+).

To enlarge this circle of discovery, Google will also include personal results from several websites that are not part of the Google ecosystem, as long as the related accounts are connected to your public Google+ profile. For example, if you have a Flickr, FriendFeed, Quora, or LiveJournal account, or a blog by WordPress or Blogger, those photos, posts, etc. will appear in your friends’ related search results, even if they were not posted on Google+. This can mean greater exposure for those who seek it and it also allows your Google+ connections to see content you contributed prior to joining Google+.

To see which web accounts you have made public, navigate to the About page on your Google+ profile and look under Other Profiles. The list that appears here should match the profiles listed here. Note that Facebook and Twitter are not as comprehensively integrated as those mentioned above (more on that later).

Generic queries like music or science will now commonly return “Featured” profiles and pages of those you are not directly connected with on Google+.  These results will be positioned to the right of the primary results, where ads are typically located. A search for music, for example, currently returns Britney Spears and Snoop Dogg’s profiles, two of the most circled people on Google+.

Personal search has also made its way into Google Instant, Google’s designation for the autocomplete feature of its search. With personal results enabled, when you begin typing a contact’s name, their Google+ profile will appear if you are connected with them through the network.

Privacy Concerns

As with any social media change released into the wild, users inevitably want to know how it impacts their privacy. Your personalized results are just that: no two users will see the same information, as the results are tailored to your connections and activity. With Search plus Your World, Google’s results only display publicly shared information, which represents information that’s already available to everyone on the web. This means your private photos and posts will not show up in a stranger’s search results, nor will they be exposed to anyone who couldn’t already see them.

Anything you make public may show up in the search results of those in your circles, and its position is determined by how popular the post was (quantity of +1s, comments, shares) relative to other people in your circles who shared similarly relevant content. If the content exists outside of Google+, such as a blog, it will be ranked according to the usual Google PageRank system.

Lastly, any posts you have shared with specific people, and vice versa, will show up in your respective results but no one else’s.

Is Google Prioritizing Its Own Social Network?

Many tech bloggers have rhapsodized about this game-changing feature, asserting that it unduly favors Google’s own service. Some have even invoked antitrust allegations reminiscent of the Internet Explorer v. Netscape lawsuit brought against Microsoft in the late 1990s. Upon a cursory examination, it might appear these claims hold some currency, as Search plus Your World results do not reflect Facebook and Twitter posts, only those made by your Google+ connections. More explicitly, searching a cooking recipe with this feature enabled, for example, will retrieve posts from those you have connected with on Google+ but not from direct competitors Facebook or Twitter.

Yet Facebook’s and Twitter’s agreements with search engines specify exactly which content is indexed and which content is not. Twitter previously made an agreement with both Google and Microsoft that allowed them to index their public updates in real-time through a special feed. But that agreement expired back in July, and Twitter chose not to renew with Google, only with Microsoft. Bing’s real-time search is still active, while Google has since shutdown their RealTime service, though some of its functionality appears to have been integrated with Search plus Your World.

Facebook, on the other hand, has never allowed Google to fully index its site, and such language is present in their terms of service. Facebook signed a temporary real-time agreement with Google a couple years ago, which stipulated the indexing of public profile and fan pages only. This deal ended the same time as Twitter’s when Google shut down RealTime search. As a result, public status updates, photos, etc. are still not indexed and thus won’t surface in personal search.

Facebook has repeatedly chosen to ally more closely with Microsoft. Their deal gives Bing expanded access to its sitelinks and allows much deeper indexing, resulting in a much more cohesive synthesis between Facebook and Microsoft’s search engine than with Facebook and Google’s.

The lack of transparency and openness between Google and Facebook is nothing new. Perhaps the catalyst for this mutual recalcitrance can be traced to the impending battle for the social web and competitive concerns over Google eventually forming its own social network. In that case, Facebook turned out to be right, but Google has done it without unrestricted access to Facebook’s depository.

At this point, due to Facebook’s recent settlement with the FTC over its privacy practices, it’s highly doubtful Zuckerburg and Co. will allow more information to be indexed, preferring to adopt a “less is more” stance toward search engine crawlers.

Few websites require these collaborative arrangements. Simply embedding the short HTML snippet rel=nofollow in your site’s source code tells Google to exclude your site’s hyperlinks from its PageRank algorithms. For websites with more complicated APIs and data streams, such as Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, special agreements are often needed for Google to index them properly. Simply put, many social media spaces have made formal agreements with Google to index their full universe of public data; Facebook and Twitter do not currently have one.

Hence, bloggers like Eric Eldon of TechCrunch assume too much when he writes, “Google could easily choose to feature the publicly available content from its social rivals in the same way it is showing its own product within its market-dominating search engine.” The site structure of Google’s rivals in the social space is not identical in all respects to Google+’s and are not as easily indexed without special permissions and access.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has tacitly affirmed this and has expressed interest in forming deals with Facebook and Twitter to provide the same level of integration for those sites as Google+ is afforded.

It should be emphasized that not all of Facebook and Twitter content is exempt from search, as Google has indexed and continues to index certain pages just as it does any other site. For example, conducting a personal search of “Twitter” or “Facebook” will return the associated profiles of those in your Google+ circles who have linked these accounts to their Google profile, along with the aforementioned fan pages.

Perhaps the largest divot in the playing field, and the one detractors will likely emphasize, involves the “Featured” area of search results. At this time only Google+ profiles and pages are featured, while Facebook and Twitter links of the same individual or entity are mysteriously absent. As these profiles and pages are public and can be found by way of a personalized or non-personalized Google search, it seems Google could be doing more to establish at least a semblance of parity among the platforms in Featured results.

The reality is that Google+ was built from the ground up to be integrated with search. It’s clear the engineers at Google had this in mind and ensured the two independent services would one day blend seamlessly when the time was right. In my view the only way Search plus Your World would be unfair or antitrust-like was if Google had the arrangements in place with its competitors to index their sites to the same degree it indexes its own and then ranked the results in a nepotistic manner. This is not the case; Google does not have full, unexpurgated access to certain social media sites, so why shouldn’t it add greater personalization to users on Google+?

The Bottom Line

Search plus Your World denotes the largest step forward in demonstrating how social networks and search engines can interact effectively. More important, it’s but a glimpse of what search could look like once integrated with the full arsenal at Google’s disposal, along with other social media sites. As Facebook, Twitter and others are at this time not fully indexed, one can only imagine how much more useful this synthesis could be. Searching good restaurants in Portsmouth NH could surface recommendations from contacts you’ve acquired not only on Google+ but on Yelp, Facebook, StumbleUpon and Reddit, who likely share similar tastes and preferences as your own.

Admittedly, most people have more contacts with Facebook and Twitter, so this new feature will be of little use to this group. And for those who prefer the raw search, it’s entirely an opt-out feature. But for those who are deeply ingrained in the Google ecosystem and would like to reap the benefits social search provides, Search plus Your World is a unique way to better customize your search queries to find relevant information. With its latest revision, Google has further individualized the search experience.

Feature image credit: NY Times, Virginia Mayo/Associated Press

 
 
A new year signals new developments in the burgeoning technology sector. In an industry where innovation occurs at a blistering pace and new products, apps and services are announced almost weekly, accurate forecasting seems nearly impossible. 2011 was largely characterized by the rise of the tablet computer, an emphasis on cloud-centric services, the “daily deals” craze from Groupon, Living Social and others, the discontinued development of Flash for mobile platforms, and the introduction of LTE, dual-core mobile processors and Apple’s automated voice assistant, Siri. What exciting new trends and market shifts will shape 2012 technology? Here are my best predictions of what we’ll see in the coming year.

1. LTE Everywhere

Verizon, AT&T and Sprint each launched LTE networks in 2011, effectively granting mobile devices the power of broadband speeds. Unfortunately, the total number of smartphones utilizing this spectrum is small relative to 3G offerings. While Sprint’s next-gen network just launched last week, Verizon’s is far and away the most mature, with coverage now in 190 cities compared with AT&T’s 15. T-Mobile remains the only major U.S. carrier without official LTE plans, but as its contentious merger deal with AT&T is finally coming to an end, I imagine an announcement is not far away. Competition for 4G market share is just getting warmed up. Expect network coverage and the number of compatible phones on each carrier to proliferate rapidly in 2012.

More intriguing, however, is the possibility of true 4G infrastructures. While many consumers mistakenly believe they are living in a 4G world right now, today’s LTE deviates considerably from the official IMT-Advanced (4G) standard. LTE Advanced, the much-improved successor to LTE, has emerged as the candidate best suited to meet the requirements of 4G, promising speeds of around 100 Mbit/s (in motion) and 1 Gbit/s (fixed position). While Verizon, Sprint and AT&T have all committed to this standard, work won’t likely begin until 2013 at the earliest.

2. App Exhaustion

Collectively we reached the one million apps threshold for iOS and Android in 2011, with over 600,000 iOS applications and 400,000 Android applications. App growth for the two market-leading platforms shows no signs of abatement, as apps continue to replicate features previously performed by separate hardware. Calculators, digital cameras, MP3 players and televisions can now all be consolidated to a single mobile device. It turns out, the more software can do for us, the more the idea of specialized hardware becomes an anachronism. The seemingly illimitable selection of apps can for many people be overwhelming and has given rise to an entirely new app category: app discovery. Projects such as Quixey, Xyologic, Appolocious, AppsFire and Kinetik are all geared toward solving this very first-world problem.

Expect the Windows Phone app store to become much more comprehensive in 2012 in order to compete effectively with the Big Two, as well as the growth of browser app stores such as those of Chrome, Firefox and Opera. The release of Windows 8 will see the introduction of the official Windows App Store as well. It’s an exciting time to be a smartphone and tablet owner, and heated competition can only raise the quality of apps we have to choose from.

3. Social Network Saturation

2011 was a momentous year for social media. Now servicing 62 million users, Google+ has quickly secured its place in the triumvirate of social networks with its improved sharing system and the ability to segment connections. While Facebook and Twitter still dwarf its user base, more and more people are discovering the unique benefits Google+ provides. Much more than a stand-alone product, Google+ is central to a much larger and successful ecosystem, one which is already embedded in our online and offline lives. Facebook’s introduction of Timeline, like every new change that comes along, has proved divisive and some users may be more open to an alternative.

2011 also saw the impressive growth of Diaspora, which launched in 2010, and the launch of newcomer Unthink. These more concentrated social networking sites champion their service as the “anti-Facebook”, catering to users who demand greater control over their privacy.

In the coming year, I don’t expect Google+’s growth to slow down as Google marshals its SEO prowess and other content we like into a cohesive whole. Google+ will further differentiate itself from Facebook and Twitter with deeper integration with the rest of the Google ecosystem. It’s difficult to speculate on where we’ll be a year from now, or on Diaspora’s and Unthink’s continued popularity, but Facebook has proved time and again that people will trade privacy and data ownership for the social value it provides. In an age where Facebook is beyond ubiquitous, it might border on impossible for lesser-known entities to gain a foothold, regardless of the unique value on offer.

4. Desktop and Mobile OS Converge

This year might be most remembered for the sizeable progress made toward OS homogeneity. Both Microsoft and Apple are in the early stages of transitioning to a single operating system, one that will unify the look, feel and underlying framework of their respective desktop and mobile products. The similarities between Lion and iOS 5 are obvious, and Apple plans to begin merging iOS and OS X this year. By leveraging its cloud-based service iCloud with the migration from Intel to ARM-based processors, you can expect the resemblances to escalate over the next few years.

Coming off the huge success of Windows 7, Microsoft is heading in an entirely new direction with its latest 0S iteration, codenamed Windows 8. Believed by many to be the most ambitious and risky venture to date, Windows 8 represents the most radical Windows redesign since Windows 95. Its Metro-based UI is specifically optimized for tablets and other touch-screen devices while offering legacy support for traditional mouse and keyboard use, aspiring to bridge the interface gap between Windows and Windows Phone OS. The beta is rumored to drop as early as Q1 2012, followed by Windows 8 tablets by the end of the year.

Expect the gulf between mobile and PC performance to shrink even further in 2012. The arrival of quad-core mobile processors, like those of the Tegra and Snapdragon variety, offer PC-like strength and will greatly aid convergence. Snapdragon’s most recently debuted chip is expected to hit Windows 8 tablets this year, and there’s a good chance the A6 quad-core chip will make its way into the next iPad and iPhone releases.

What’s most intriguing are the implications of these efforts. Sure, the impetus behind OS conformity is to create services and applications that scale seamlessly, irrespective of screen size, resolution and processing power, engendering a more consistent and familiar experience across all like-branded products. This, both companies claim, will result in synergistic and economies of scale advantages, but will these efforts ultimately cannibalize internal sales? If you can get 90% of the features and functionality of a MacBook Air on an iPad and for much cheaper, won’t most choose the tablet? As Apple and Microsoft move toward a single OS architecture, it remains to be seen whether the anticipated cost savings will be outpaced by a loss in sales from their other product lines. Self-competition is a highly capricious technological trend that will be interesting to watch unfold.

5. Ultrabooks Will Transform the PC Market

Low-cost netbooks arrived on the tech scene in 2008 and, after an initial sales boom, failed to capture a significant portion of the PC market. Primarily optimized for web browsing and email exchange, their poor microprocessing power compared with traditional PCs caused them to quickly lose popularity. Making matters worse, the iPad and other tablets debuted two years later and turned out to be just as capable and more attractive alternatives. Today, the growing preference of mainstream computer users is clearly toward smaller and more capable devices like tablets and the MacBook Air. Sensing this shift in preference, many PC manufacturers are looking to capitalize with Ultrabooks. These mini-laptops combine the portability and slim profile appeal of tablets with the functionality and performance of a notebook PC. They will be priced competitively with the notebook segment, at least initially, and will be distinguished by their quick boot times, low weight and strong battery life.

Just as netbooks initially lifted market share away from notebooks, will a similar trend develop here? As in the case of desktop and mobile OS convergence discussed above, will Ultrabooks cannibalize sales of PC manufacturers’ more profitable product lines? Will they transform the laptop category altogether? I submit they will.

6. TV as Apps

The Internet has already changed the way we watch TV, but what consumers want most is one intuitive interface that consolidates all their favorite content (perhaps with the ability to change camera angles on-the-fly). This approach best recreates the traditional TV experience of cable and satellite, minus the many downsides. The lack of progress on this front is due mostly to resistance from content producers, but we are starting to see tensions ease. Microsoft has inked deals with over 40 content owners and pay-TV distributors worldwide to bring HBO, BBC, Bravo, SyFy, ESPN and much more to the Xbox 360 console. What’s not ideal about this arrangement is that access to much of this content still requires a cable subscription. A better solution is a dedicated app for each television network that is ad-supported or paid for via your Xbox Live Gold subscription.

Independence from cable and satellite operators has always been the aim of Google TV, and Google looks primed to make greater inroads with the product in 2012. Google continues to gather hardware partners in Samsung, Vizio and LG, all of which are expected to debut dedicated Google TV devices or interface support in their HDTV lines. But again, it’s content owner support that has proved most difficult to acquire, and this is where Apple may have the greatest fortuity. Indeed, rumors abound over Apple’s re-imagining of the television experience. It’s not clear whether this product will take the form of an Apple-branded display, a major revision to the Apple TV set-top box or an interactive, Siri-controlled overlay packaged with “smart TVs”, but whatever it is, it seems the late Steve Jobs was passionate about it. All signs point to a 2012 debut.

7. 3D Here to Stay – For Now

3D is perhaps the most polarizing of all tech topics, with sentiments for the format typically isolated toward the extremes. Love it or loathe it, statistics indicate 3D isn’t going away in 2012. For starters, 7 of the 10 highest grossing films in 2011 were offered in 3D. While there’s no public data that distinguishes 2D and 3D in terms of number of tickets sold, 3D showings continue to constitute a substantial percentage of total revenue (though that percentage has declined from 2010). What’s more, there are currently 38 3D films scheduled for release in 2012, including the first Star Wars Episode I 3D re-release and James Cameron’s Titanic 3D re-issue. The 3D format is also starting to garner first-time attention from the Hollywood elite with Martin Scorsese’s 3D debut, Hugo, and Peter Jackson’s upcoming film, The Hobbit. The 3D trend is expected to proliferate overseas especially, where the 3D format is still very much a novelty.

On the home theater front, consumer opinion of 3D is of little consequence as 3D is now a default feature on the majority of HDTVs as well as Blu-ray players and can be toggled on or off. 3D glasses are usually optional purchases, allowing 3D sets to occupy the same price point as its 2D predecessors. Most premium-priced products, those with higher quality features and specs, also support 3D by default, meaning most consumers will end up buying 3D-capable equipment anyway.

The video game market tends to garner the highest appeal for the 3D format, thanks in part to Sony’s continued commitment to stereoscopic gaming. At present there are 18 confirmed 3D PS3 games slated for 2012 release. Both Microsoft and Nintendo seem content just waiting to see how this trend plays out before investing in 3D functionality for their home consoles. The view from here doesn’t indicate 3D will be flatlining any time soon.

8. Consumer-Grade OLED Televisions: Probably Not

HDTV enthusiasts have craved large-screen OLED panels for years now, primarily for their highly desirable contrast and motion performance as well as power efficiency. They effectively combine the best attributes of LCD and plasma display technology, except cost that is. While high manufacturing costs have inhibited OLEDs from materializing in the consumer market, that hasn’t stopped LG and Samsung, who will both debut OLED panels at CES this month. Unfortunately, while the picture quality produced by these sets continues to improve, production costs do not, and even the most optimistic of estimates place product releases toward the close of 2012 or 2013 and later.

9. Green Vehicle Sales Will Further Stagnate

Despite the recessionary economic environment in the U.S. and abroad, sales of hybrid and electric cars and SUVs have not taken off like one would expect. Year-on-year sales volume of hybrids in the U.S. has monotonically declined since 2007 and, as of August 2011, the hybrid market was down nearly 12% compared to a year ago, while the overall auto market was up 7.5% from last August.

For this to change, the manufacturing costs and efficiency of current battery technologies, which directly influence the retail price of EVs, must improve considerably, or better technologies must be introduced. The disparity between the number of hybrids and electric-only vehicles on the market reflects the present state of battery tech: NiMH and Lithium-ion technologies have not been able to yield satisfactory cost-to-range ratios and have not improved at the rate manufacturers had hoped. A number of fresh technologies are on the horizon, such as solid-state, magnesium-ion and lithium-sulfur, but it could be more than a decade before we see them on the road, if at all.

The various purchase incentives that accompany today’s EVs, including tax breaks, toll and parking fee reductions, greater fuel efficiency, along with increasing concern related to climate change and dependence on foreign oil, may not be enough to sway most car buyers. On the other hand, stricter emissions standards and greater attention to fuel efficiency for gasoline-powered cars have resulted in slow but steady growth in the non-green sector the past few years. With gas prices still declining and recessionary pressures still looming, I don’t expect the green car market to change in any major way this year.

What trends do you think will be most significant in 2012? Which one has you most excited? Let me know in the comments.

 
 
Social media can be a great distraction, but over time it can become a chore to wade through all the uninteresting minutia and duplicate posts inundating your feeds. This problem only intensifies as your contact numbers increase. Sure, you can manually mute these posts each time you see them, but this is tedious and a time sink. You also might not want to completely unsubscribe from or remove these users as they often contribute content you care about. These browser add-ons enable you to streamline your Facebook, Google+ and Twitter feeds by filtering specific content from view.

Concealing posts according to specific words or topics is the best way to optimize your feed, and none of the three major social networks natively allow this level of specificity. Sports, politics, religion, weddings, babies or the recent passing of a public individual, just to name a few, are all legitimate examples of topics you might wish to exclude from your feed. Note that while I chose the following add-ons for their keyword-specific filtering, they offer several other useful features which I note below.

Facebook: Feed Filter

Feed Filter, available for Firefox only, is the most effective and easy-to-use add-on of its kind and, to me, is a must-have for any Facebook user. Once installed, you can simply jump directly to the ‘Words to Hide’ tab in the options menu and start entering keywords. Feed Filter will immediately hide all posts in your Facebook feed containing those terms. Reading one too many football posts on a Sunday afternoon was enough to motivate me to use this. Some of the many other great features here include the option to hide the news ticker on the right-hand side and hide all posts of a certain type of activity. You can even “whitelist” specific games or apps you wish to be displayed, while excluding all others.

This add-on is only available for Firefox and I have been unable to find a Chrome or Internet Explorer extension with equally precise functionality.

Google+: Stream Filter

One of the very first extensions to be released for Google+, Stream Filter BETA is essentially the G+ equivalent of Feed Filter above. You can control what you see in your stream by muting all posts according to keywords. Perhaps the most useful feature is the ability to eliminate all gif images from your stream. You know – ones like this.

The extension is only available for Google Chrome. While there are many other add-ons and scripts which can mute gifs for the other browsers, I’m not aware of any with keyword-specific filtering for Google+.

Twitter

For Twitter, you have a couple options. Chrome users can make good use of Open Tweet Filter, which offers a single function: tweet filtering based on keywords.

Alternatively, Tweetfilter supports all major browsers, including Chrome, and also adds the ability to hide all retweets, shortened link expansion, customization of the Twitter UI and much more. Personally I found the add-on to work well on some browsers and not as good on others. Your success may vary, but support seems consistent and the team is reportedly working on a new release for each browser.

Have you found others that offer similar or superior functionality? Were you able to get these working on your browser? Let me know, and if this article helped you in any way, show the love and share it.

 
Feature image via techpp.com

 
 
Facebook users received an early holiday gift today from Zuckerburg and Co. in the form of Facebook Timeline. Now officially released to the public, this new feature serves as a chronological record of your social activity on Facebook in its entirety. Think of it as a digital scrapbook. To some, this may seem less like a present than a burden. Exfoliate for Facebook allows you to cleanse your Facebook profile of any activity you choose prior to a specified date.

Timeline is not an optional upgrade. Love it or hate it, you will not be able to maintain the legacy look. While it’s opt-in at the moment, eventually everyone will be moved over to the new design. If you upgrade right now, you have 7 days to modify or tidy up your Timeline before publishing it to your profile page for all to see.

Image via InspirationFeed

Photos, comments and status posts dating back to when you signed up with the site are now organized in a visual, ordered timeline. Ridiculous comments you made back in high school are still stored and now viewable. Photos you’ve untagged in the past are back. You can even see who has de-friended you and, inversely, who you’ve de-friended. Ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends make a reappearance, for better or worse. The list could go on; I’m sure you won’t have to think too far back to identify something you don’t want resurfaced. While Timeline does allow you to adjust privacy settings and the visibility of activity, it’s more of a manual process. Expect a rather tedious game of preening your profile one slice of activity at a time. If this sounds like a considerable waste of time, Exfoliate offers a more efficient solution by allowing you to delete your digital trail en masse.

This app is currently available for Android users only, but has been rumored to come to iOS and PC soon. Simply login to your Facebook account within the app on your phone, specify a cut-off date, and Exfoliate can remove all wall posts, comments and likes prior to that date. It can even remove posts you made on your friends’ walls as well.

The process is quite time-consuming and, according to the developer, can take many hours or days to complete, primarily because of Facebook’s API and throttling restrictions. If you’re a particularly prolific Facebook user and have been for some time, it could take even longer. On certain devices, apps and games achieve better performance on a Wi-Fi connection. Exfoliate is no exception and is recommended to be run over Wi-Fi. If the process is interrupted at any time, the app will resume normally once a data connection is re-established.

Backup Your Facebook Activity

Before using this app, you may wish to backup your activity for one reason or another, as once this data is gone, it’s gone permanently. By navigating to your Settings page, Facebook allows you to download an archive of all your messages, photos, videos and chat conversations by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.

Like it or not, Timeline is here to stay. For those who might consider permanently deactivating their Facebook account a better investment of their time than cleaning up their Timeline, Exfoliate offers a practical alternative.

Get the app here: Android Market Link

Feature image remixed from boxinggymsinlosangeles.com

 
 
Two of the most dominant names in technology are now in fierce contention for the social web space. Mark Zuckerburg’s Facebook is home to 800 million+ users and has a 7-year lead on Google’s recently launched Google+ network, which has now exceeded 40 million users. This is Google’s second entrant in social media after the now defunct Google Buzz failed to generate lasting interest. For Google and Facebook, the stakes are insurmountably high, as the leader in this battle potentially has claim to everyone’s online identity. As technology wars go, this is on par with QWERTY vs. Dvorak, AM vs. FM, Windows vs. Mac OS. Perhaps even greater.

But as a user, the decision less dramatically boils down to which network do we devote our online time. One might understandably ask why we need another social media powerhouse to occupy part of our daily routine. With 800 million unique Facebook accounts, it would seem victory in the social networking space has been attained. But as Twitter has demonstrated, multiple social networks can peacefully coexist, as each service can represent different things to different people. So the right question to be asking is:

Does Google+ fill a unique niche in the social media space, or is it a mutually exclusive alternative to Facebook? I’ll provide my answer to this question, which may differ from the one that others or even Google might give. The intent of this post is not to convince you to migrate to Google+ or deactivate Facebook if you haven’t already, but to articulate what about Google+ appeals to me in an effort to motivate those who have yet to give it a chance. I have also appended a few beginner’s links for new Google+ users to the bottom of this post.

As a Google+ user since week one, let me be honest up front: Google+ is not a revolutionized Facebook. There’s nothing particularly avant-garde or innovative about the product. One could make a very cogent case that G+’s interface was intimately influenced by Diaspora, another social network which launched eight months earlier. Detailed profile pages, photo albums, photo tagging and games are all there. +1 is the G+ equivalent of ‘Like,’ Stream the alternative to News Feed, and the ever-active notification system is positioned along the fixed Google sites pane. There is a lot of overlap between the two networks, and the reality is that they can be used in much the same way.

With Google+, CEO Larry Page and company sought to capitalize on what people like about Facebook and eliminate much of what they hate. Where Facebook has repeatedly stumbled in the past is privacy control, contact organization, the sharing system and ease of use. For me, G+’s user interface is effortlessly intuitive. Facebook seems intuitive because we’ve used it for so long. If we were to create an account for the first time today, we might not find it so intuitive. Facebook is also annoyingly silent when releasing new features on the site and fails to educate its users on upcoming changes, an area where Google has traditionally excelled.

It seems that every month we hear about another of Facebook’s recurring privacy missteps. While Google is certainly no stranger to privacy protests, evidenced by the headaches the company endured with Buzz, Google has been very transparent with G+. (See Google+’s privacy policy here.) In your profile settings, it’s absolutely clear the effect of each privacy setting. This is refreshing to say the least, especially when juxtaposed with the cavalier attitude evinced by Zuckerburg and Co.

Friend organization and the precise sharing of content is something that’s never really been Facebook’s strong suit. Google+’s answer is Circles. Instead of friend requests, you can choose to follow people by adding them to a Circle. Your Circles are simply groups, which you can name based on the attributes of those inside it. There is no limit to the number of users in a Circle, and you can add people to multiple circles.

Once you’ve added someone to a Circle, their posts will show in your Stream, and they can in turn choose to add you back, with your posts then appearing in their Stream. It’s very similar to Twitter in this respect. When you post content, you can determine its visibility by selecting which Circle(s) to share with. Each of your Circles can even have its own Stream, if you’d like. It’s simple, and it works.

Another substantive edge Google+ has is video chat, which Google calls Hangouts. Hangouts allow you to instantly initiate video chat with anyone with a webcam and Google+ profile. It’s super responsive, easy to use and an especially attractive (and free) alternative to Skype. I follow a few science professors who hold “office hours” via Hangouts. Google+ also has group chat built right into the mobile app, enabling you to send a quick group text to specific circles. My geeky example is a Gears of War circle for playing online.

On a more subjective level, I find myself gravitating to Google+ for the high quality conversations. For me, social media’s appeal lies not just in connecting with friends, but to participate in the exchange of intriguing content and ideas. Sure, such discussion can be found on forums and the comments section of various blogs and websites, but the quality in those spaces is usually compromised by the anonymity with which you can post. Using your real name and profile which is visible to everyone typically engenders higher quality exchanges.

This aspect ultimately hinges on who you follow, but Google+ seems, right now at least, to be the better source of quality discussion because of how easy it is to follow and interact with people who interest you. I’ve discovered tons of fascinating people and been exposed to and participated in conversations I’d never have anywhere else. See the Recommended Users lists at the bottom of this post.) It’s clear Google’s vision here is the exchange of quality content, and it tailors its service in a way that amplifies this vision.

Apart from its status as a social network, the real value of Google+ lies in its integration with the rest of the Google ecosystem and the numerous possibilities this entails. The Google+ tab is already omnipresent along the Google apps pane when using other Google sites. With the deluge of rumors regarding G+’s unique integration with Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Music, Reader, Docs, Maps, Calendar, etc., along with Google’s ever-advancing push into new markets, it might one day seem unnatural or laborious to click away from a Google site to visit another (Facebook, Twitter).

With the recent launch of Google+ Pages, the service could also potentially become a very powerful career networking tool, possibly even a LinkedIn competitor, but the feature is too fresh at this point to say anything definitive. Its effectiveness for job seekers will depend on how Google grows this aspect of the service and may ultimately depend on how active a company chooses to be on the site.

At the end of the day, both Google+ and Facebook are great (and free!) services that achieve their elemental purpose — to connect with other people within an online context. Personally I prefer Google+, but not enough to deactivate Facebook. There is still good discussion to be found on Facebook, and most of my friends are still active there. I can envision a situation where you would have only personal friends on Facebook, while you follow people and entities who interest you on Google+, similar to how many use Twitter. Alternatively, if one day all the people you care about use Google+ exclusively, then you can simply take advantage of Circles and properly organize them.

The core distinction between the two services, in my view, is that Google+ is not a stand-alone product, à la Facebook, but a piece of a much larger and successful ecosystem. This is a crucial aspect that many commentators have overlooked, and I look forward to the Google team’s unveiling of more exciting ideas for the platform.

New to Google+? Here are some great resources to get you up and running:

• Google+: The Complete Guide
• Common Functions and Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet
• Google+ Overview by Google Team
• Who to circle? Browse this community-created recommended users list.
• Google+’s official recommended users page
• Google+ Flowchart
• Google+ Collaborative Guide via Google Docs

This should be enough to help new users get started. What are your impressions of Google+? For the multi-social network users out there, how do you divide your time between Google+ and Facebook? Or if you have yet to sign up for Google+, what’s holding you back?