Metadata and Tagging - The Twin Pillars

Metadata is the form of describing other data. For example, if an image is uploaded, the metadata is the description, the size of the the image, the colour depth and the image resolution. The general consensus of metadata is the term 'data about data'.

Metadata certainly has its' useful facets. Whether it be libraries sorting their books into specific order through ISBN. The Dewey Decimal System is a clear showing of metadata. In the case of a 'blog', and this website, the end of each blog can have important content, or keywords added into the labels section, making it easier for readers to find articles relating to certain subjects.

Australian medical researchers have endeavoured to apply metadata to their medical records, although despite the relevant research being completed, the medical community has yet to approve the need to follow metadata standards.

Tagging is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information, making it easier to be found again through browsing and seraching.

Blogging has the ability of tagging, or in this websites case, labels. If I labelled this post with the relevant, descriptive keywords, it would categorise the post, and differentiate from other posts, appearing when triggered by one of said keywords.

Now we're firmly embedded into the social media world, Twitter has taken the form of 'tagging' to another level. With the hashtag ability, which seperates all tweets, to your specific hashtag at the click of a button, makes it easier find similar tweets and people talking about the same subject.

Facebook also has a tagging system, allowing you to 'tag' people into viewing a conversation or status update by pressing @ key and following it with their name. A new feature that has the ability to integrate a person into conversation, viewing what's going on.

A negative of tagging is the ability that open to the public tagging systems, for example YouTube vidoes, are also open to spamming. This is where a user will apply several tags, often unrelated in a bid to garner viewers for a video they have produced.

The silent torture - Cyberstalking

Last Friday (24/2/12) our Digital Cultures lecture was hosted by Dr. Emma Short, a world leading researcher in Cyberstalking. The behaviour, facts and figures behind the people who stalk and who are being stalked was staggering, with little left to the imagination.

The research that had been collected concluded that 32% of people who are cyberstalked develop a mental illness called "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder", a illness which your brain regurgitates and relives the fear and emotions felt during the worst part of your ordeal. As a sense of psychological trauma, it's an illness synonymous with ex-army veterans, bomb disposal workers and rape victms. However, cyberstalking fit in amongst the aforementioned when it came to the % of sufferers affected.

Cyberstalking has a subtle difference to cyber bullying, stalking being the means of "mental assault, in which the perpetrator repeatedly, unwantedly, and disruptively breaks into the life-world of the victim, with whom he has no relationship". Cyber Bullying on the other hand is often seen between younger ages, seen in social media. Cyberstalking has the aspect of sheer anonymity and is often regarded as adult-on-adult, with the tendency of their interest being that of a more sexual one.


Dr. Short's research also showed that 40% of victims were males, a surprise as the stereotypical idea of abuse online is that it's usually directed at women. Another quashed stereotype was that former partners would be the stalkers, yet when asked, respondents answered that only 4% of people's attackers was an ex-partner.


Most victims were aged between 20-39, with ages ranging from 14-74. Teenagers said that social websites were the primary sites that could provide and provoke cyberstalking, pondering the idea of whether social media needs to be censored. 


Using examples from the study, their was the story of one woman who was subject to a torrent  of vivid images, glorifying and showing violent rape. Another story was of a teacher who was accused of meeting someone through a child pornography site. This saga went on for years, and the attacker or the reasoning was never discovered. 


Guardian article on Dr.Short's research

A severe case of cyberstalking was displayed in 2003. Two friends, addicted to internet chatrooms were seduced into the world of secrecy. One was so enticed he began obeying and carrying out commands by the woman he was talking to online. He carries out the plan set by this 'secret agent' to kill his friend.

After being arrested, the courtroom would later learn that the the various people he was talking too were all one person attempting to manipulate his every move. Yet the real twist is that that one person turned out to be his friend, whom he's attempted to kill.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/kill-me-if-you-can/

Cyberstalking is a global issue, in which their are serious reprecussions not only for the attacker, but the victim aswell.

The British Crime Survey estimated 5 million people were victims of cyber abuse.

Big Brother isn't watching us. Calm down!

When talk of surveillance arises, in everyday life, my experiences have taught me the responses will carry a theme similar to "everything we do is being watched", "my details are all tracked", "someones watching me". Despite the range of outlandish paranoia infested drivel, their is a degree of truth, however, we're not "live on channel 4". "This isn't Davina", and yes, yes we can swear. 


Surveillance begins at a young age. As a baby and infant there's always people watching you. Be it parents making sure you're safe, whether it be at your playgroup or nursery when people are employed to ensure your safety. Even other infants watch you, like, for example you're in the midst of assembling a dynamic, implausible lego tower.


Even as you get older, go through primary years at school, the consensus is you aren't ready to be responsible for yourself, teachers will look out and watch you throughout school. At home parents will have a wandering eye fixated on their childs' every movement. Even if you're playing out, mobile phones and curfews have now made it almost impossible for a child to escape the clutches of their parents. Unless they wanted to.


As we hit adolescence, become more independent, communicate less with our parents and transcend our personality from a likable, soft spoken child, to unruly, loud, unnecessarily angry teenagers, the watchful eye is still their. Throughout your life it's there. 


Now, at 19, nearly 20 and out my teenage years, there's so many devices where my details can be tracked. Whether it be my mobile phone, Facebook and Twitter pages, cards from various retail stores or credit cards. 


Gary T.Marx summarised these thoughts in his "Encyclopedia of Social Theory" when he said:

"With the trend toward ubiquitous computing, surveillance and sensors in one sense disappear into ordinary activities and objects –- cars, cell phones, toilets, buildings, clothes and even bodies. The relatively labor-intensive bar code on consumer goods which requires manually scanning may soon be replaced with inexpensive embedded RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) computer chips which can be automatically read from short distances."

 The idea that so much in our everyday life can track us is a truly frightening prospect. Yet when you regain your breath, sit down, make a cup of tea and begin to think through said prospect, is it?

For example, i hold reward cards at Game, Gamestation, Blockbuster and HMV, (i like video games). These companies know this. I've purchased items from all of them enough, that they know down to a fine detail what genre of games, music, DVD's i like. Why do they need to know this? Well, if their having a sale, they want me to know it's on. They want to know if the items on sale appeal to me. How would they find this out? Well. Ummm, huh? They could just check my history of what i purchased there.

Gamestation don't want to hack my phone. They're not the News of the World. They want to sell me games. They want me to spend money in their store. How can they enhance the chances of me returning. They appeal to things they know i like/enjoy.

The thought that contemporary society has floated into some overblown, Orwellian world where we can't move without being watched. Is this a problem? On every High street there's CCTV. They aren't interested in whether you're going to Blockbuster, or whether you've quickly detoured into Tesco Express. They're their to be a legal watchdog. If you were mugged, CCTV gives the police a greater chance of catching the mugger.

If you abide by the law, then cameras watching you in public aren't interested in you.

Does a robot's risk outweigh its' reward?

The concept of a robot immediately provokes two avenues of thought. The first being the tall, sliding, silver computer, that talks like 'Microsoft Sam', similar to the one Screech had on 'Saved By The Bell'. The other is a more 'real' description. An organism which can proceed to have lifelike emotion, yet is manufactured and programmed by computer intelligence.

Not to be confused with Peter Crouch's embarassing dance to celebrate goals, the term robot is "a machine capable of carrying a series of complex actions automatically". However as the old cliche goes, "with great power, comes great responsibility".

The U.S army has decided to invest heavily on the idea of robots, whether it be something like this. The questions will arise whether something like that spider looking thing is safe in the middle of combat. What if a programme fails? What if soliders develop a moral, real friendship with the computer? \

Alongside this robot, the U.S military has been testing throwable robots in Afghanistan. The Robots, despite looking like cheap remote-control cars are to be used to be the eyes of the solider, before they go into hazardous situations, or entering buildings. The idea is that, they are durable, so can be thrown and provide the scouting, therefore endangering itself rather than a human.

The idea of robots, not long ago seemed like a distant, almost impossible daydream. The closest we would get to a living robot was seeing Megatron or Optimus Prime alter from cars to giant, mechanical beasts. However, with the work of the U.S military, the extension of knowledge and the lengths the Japanese have gone too, all we're missing now is Craig Charles commentary and a fighting arena.

Furthering the point on the Japanese, they have gone to the lenghts of devising robots that can play violins, strut on the catwalk and sing in a way which makes you more likely to buy a CD off a robot than N-Dubz.

The idea of robots, and the immediate thought of the "saved by the bell" type figure is distant. Nowadays a robot has the potential to be a smart, sophisticated, wildly intelligent individual. The prosperity available when we combine the intelligence of the smartest computer programmers and eliminate the naive, reserved outlook of the human. A world with robots sounds somewhat appealing.

SOPA!

The 'Stop Online Piracy Act' (SOPA) is a bill in the United States which is hoping to "to expand the abiliy of U.S law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods".

The passing of the bill would of offered major corporations the opportunity to request court orders to forbid advertising networks and payment facilities (e.g, Google and PayPal) from conducting business with infringing website, if they feel their intellectual property was being infringed.

Movie studios, record labels and publishers sought after this bill, concerned about the loss of revenue that online piracy has inflicted. The aim is to prohibit U.S search engines to stop referring services which are promoting copyright, and piracy.

The counter-argument to SOPA came from internet phenomenons, like Wikipedia, and Mark Zuckerberg, with the former shutting down for 24 hours, and just displaying an anti-SOPA homepage. 7,000 different websites across the globe joined the protest, and a petition opposing the bill reached 4.5 million.

The argument against SOPA, is that it will result in a policing of the internet, and the major corporation and government will monopolise what we see, hear, think online. The takeover of the internet would end  
the right to free-speech in an online sense.

In response to the overwhelming results of Wikipedia's protest, senators, who supported the bill have backed off, and distanced themselves from the bill. In total 18 representatives said they no longer "approved" of the anti-piracy law.

This news was not well received in Hollywood, where major Hollywood movie moguls have pledged to stop donating to Barack Obama's re-election campaign. His "lack of support" in the bills, has resulted in this fiery, irked response.

The ease of which new movies, television programmes, and other media, can be streamed, downloaded, saved, distributed, for free. Record labels, movie studios will complain about the loss of revenue.

I personally believe that SOPA will prohibit and monopolise the intermet, starting a world where the corporate 'bigwigs' control what we see, read, listen to online.

SOPA being rejected is, in my opinion good for the majority of online users. However I firmly believe that the fight against piracy has a lot of chapters to be read.

Are we too distracted by social media?

Social media is the web-based technology that turns communication, into online dialogue. Through social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube etc, the users of the internet have been given an opportunity to create content accessible to the globe.

Youtube videos such as this or this would not be available for public consumption until the inception of Web 2.0 which focused on information sharing, user-centred design and collaboration of the world wide web.

The inventor of the world-wide web Tim Berners-Lee, called web 2.0 a "piece of jargon", saying his creation was for people could "all meet and read and write".

Berners-Lee said "if Web 2.0 was for blogs and wikis then that is people to people, but that's what web 1.0 was supposed to be all along".

However, now social media is an everyday fixture in our lives. Take Facebook for example, with it's new Guardian app, amongst other papers, the website has now almost become friends-reunited, the newspaper, and telecommunication wrapped up into one delicate world wide web bubble, one that doesn't look like bursting.

With its easy access to people all over the globe, how you can embed and show a friend a video off the internet and post it to a friends' profile. How you can converse with people almost like your text messaging, but in a free, quick way, a way that's available for others to view.

Facebook allows a digital interface, the ability to talk to any of your “friends”, or if you “like” groups, pages, bands, you can talk amongst fans and debate.

Facebook addiction has become a common occurrence, especially in teenagers. The website offers such an astronomical number of options, that it almost become too easy to recluse and live life between four walls, and not miss out on any social happenings.

American website CNN, had a column titled “five clues you are addicted to facebook”. The article, posted in April ’09, saying how Cynthia Newton failed to help her 12 year old daughter with her homework, saying she was “lost in facebook”.

Newton, (not her real name, used in anonymity) said she spent 20 hours a week on the website, saying she “can’t go a weekend without it”. Therapists have said they have seen social dysfunction become more common, and people alienating themselves from society, just spending time on Facebook.

The 5 steps for CNN said were signs of addictions were:

-          You lose sleep over Facebook

-          You spend over an hour a day on Facebook

-          You become obsessed with old loves

-          You ignore work in favour of Facebook

-          You get in a cold sweat when thinking about getting off Facebook

If this is true. I’m not an addict… yet

To what extent does the web form social identity.

In the era of intense social media, where people distribute their thoughts in 140 characters, and emoticons. A service like twitter, has not only allowed regular, average Joe's, like myself to interact with celebrities, or sports figures, it also detracts from said celebrities privacy.

With celebrities differing from lower league footballer, to "leader of the free-world", twitter has transcended the way we discuss and converse the goings-on in our own life, sharing public conversations on the net, for all people to read, and even join in.

Even websites like youtube, and a variety of blogs have a comments section, a section which is often fuelled with hatred, especially i've noted when it comes to sport, where rival supporters systematically insult and demean the other, the majority in anonymity.

This is an example of sticking to a social group, or alligning yourself with people similar. For example, as an avid supporter of Oxford United, if given the option to socialise with another set of people who share this support, or a group that follow a rival team, I would allign with people of my own ilk.

This view is supported in "This classic social experiment", where young boys were instructed to select one of two paintings they prefer. Experiment leader Henry Tajfel thought "it seemed impossible that people stood together for only 30 seconds can be said to form a group in any measurable way".

The experiment saw two groups split, one which preferred each individual painting,

When labels are branded so easily, and carelessly, when you can be dubbed a chav, an emo, a goth or a prep without having many common traits to either clique. It seems in a contemporary society every person needs to be grouped to maintain a social order.

According to Mooney, Knox and Schacht 2000, a social group is "two or more people who have a common identity, interact and form a social relationship. Would this mean Adolf Hitler and Benoit Mussolini would be a social group. They both shared a belief in fascism?

Social idnetity is a situation which is locked full of stereotypes and cliched thinking, the web has only helped to excacerbate these, with new volumes to air out uneducated, unnecessary words or phrases to group, and reduce people to a certain number of people they could be associated with.