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Canada is in the midst of a federal election and you can read posts covering it by myself on r h i z o m i c o n and Impolitical on our respective blogs. Lorne Gunter in the National Post is mad as hell and he’s not taking it anymore. His beef? All of this social media in politics hoopla::

“Oh, please, spare me. Social media – services such as Twitter and Facebook – are not going to swing the current federal election away from the Tories and in favour of the Liberals, NDP or Green party, no matter how much anti-Harper activists and reporters wish they could.”

While he acknowledges that social media is a useful tool, he’s also making sweeping generalizations about their effects::

“But they don’t win or lose elections on their own (or pull off Middle Eastern revolutions), no matter how much social media devotees in newsrooms and elsewhere claim they do.”

He seems particularly perturbed by the shitharperdid website and this supposedly gushing Vancouver Sun article.

“The Vancouver Sun story claims 2 million web surfers quickly hit on the www.shitharperdid.ca site. Great, so they went to a site run by like-minded lefties and had their prejudices confirmed. Whoopee.”

He drifts into a Malcolm Gladwell argument that social media promotes just “one click activism” and doesn’t really engender any real persuasion. Here on ThickCulture, we have discussed Malcolm Gladwell’s downplaying and concerns about social media in the social activism arena, here, here, and here.

Lorne argues that social media campaigns are largely ineffectual, citing anti-prorogation and strategic voting efforts. Then, he loses it and goes off on Harper Derangement Syndrome as the latest manifestation of a leftist affliction along the lines of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Well, the left has no monopoly on demonizing the other side.

The problem with Lorne’s analysis is his narrow definition of success and assumption that social media merely preaches to the converted. There are three things wrong with what he’s saying:

1. It assumes a narrow definition of efficacy
2. It ignores the “mere exposure” effect
3. It ignores the marketing concept of “segmentation”

Efficacy

Gunter suggests that social media doesn’t win elections on their own, but nobody is really advocating that they are. Naheed Nenshi, the Calgary mayor whose campaign last fall was attributed to the use of social media notes that his campaign was based on ideas. Social media helped to personalize his campaign to make it salient to voters. I don’t think Gunter would quibble with this, but I think he underestimates the effects of content that “preaches to the converted” and the persuasive effects of content that goes viral.

When the March 2007 anti-Hillary Clinton Vote Different video went viral {posted by a designer who worked for the firm that designed Obama’s website}, Obama’s polling numbers didn’t budge. Guess what? That month, his contributions did, quite considerably. My point being is that the effects of social media may not be straightforward and political strategy needs to take account of this. The preaching to the base aspect of social media that Gunter views as a waste of time can help a campaign motivate its loyals and turn them into activists. Social media can also increase the exposure and salience of a party, which segues into the next issue.

The “Mere Exposure” Effect

Decades ago, social psychologist Robert Zajonc found that people can be persuaded to have positive inferences about an object {or brand, party, or candidate} through increased exposure. So, controlling for aesthetics and other source material and content characteristics, Zajonc found that increasing exposure leads to higher favourable attitudes. In effect, a “familiarity breeds contentment” route to persuasion that doesn’t require any real substance to the content. This explains how the ubiquity of Starbucks builds the brand with relatively little advertising. Social media can have the same effect. Anti-Harper sites can persuade by just going viral and entering into voter consciousness. The challenge is cutting through the clutter to get that exposure, i.e., coming up with something that resonates and goes viral.

Segmentation: It’s the Young Voters, Stupid

A big topic this election is the youth vote. The 2008 turnout for those 18-24 was 37%, compared to 58% overall, a historic low. Interestingly, some view this as likely to worsen, as prevailing attitudes deem voting as a choice rather than a duty [Also, see StatCan 2005 pdf youth voting/civic engagement report]. The youth vote is a prime target of sites like shitharperdid.ca and the youth…have more of a tendency to not vote Conservative. Getting the youth mobilized, along the lines of the Rock the Vote campaign in 1992, is tricky business that cannot be easily replicated. Nevertheless, sites targeting the youth aren’t necessarily “one-click activism” that has no effect.

It’s About Engagement

At the end of the day, engagement matters. I think it’s the height of arrogance for Gunter to state that social media cannot swing the federal election. I’m curious what Gunther’s thoughts are on the Conservative Party’s efforts to use the web and social media to scare voters about how there “might” be an iPod tax with false claims that IP expert Michael Geist has debunked.

The A Channel news in Victoria gets it, as does NDP Leader Jack Layton who used the Twitter term “#fail” {hashtag fail} in the English debates last week::

The idea that social media can increase youth engagement of “square” politics through sites young people use and help to make politics less intimidating are part of the democratizing potential of the web.

Edit: My original post on this topic was too glib, hurried and as a result poorly presented.  I appreciate commenter thatsnotcanon for taking me to task on the tone and content of my original post and helping me vet my thinking on this.  I am duly chastened and I apologize to anyone I offended with the content of my original posting.  I have revised the post in the hopes that it makes my points more clearly and thoughtfully.

according to the Catholic Church . According to Pope Benedict, the Internet has a numbing effect on users and creates an “educational emergency – a challenge that we can and must respond to with creative intelligence.”

While responsible internet use is an important goal, it is not altogether settled in the research literature that the Internet “numbs” people or that it creates solitude.  I think Pope Benedict’s position is in keeping with a belief he has previously espoused that modernity in itself is isolating and numbing and that the church has a necessary role as a stalwart against the more egoistic and isolating aspects of a reason based culture.

While the Internet may not isolate or numb us, it does  promote is instantaneousness.   I imagine the Pope is concerned that having everything we want online when we want it might further lock us into a sense of the “good life” based on Benthamite notions of pain, pleasure and utility.  The “numbing” might serve to steer Catholics away from tradition, community and hierarchy…things to which the liberal enlightenment project has an uneasy relationship.  However, we’re not sure this is happening.  Research on Facebook users find that they are more likely to engage in off-line contact with friends when compared with non-Facebook users.

I think the Pope’s issue is with modernity, not with the Internet.  The Internet speeds up communication, but whether that communication is inherently numbing or anti-social is up to the content of the communication and the orientation and skill-set of the communicator. Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion comes to mind as a form of communication that seeks to push back against the “hardening of the heart.”  Indeed a commenter to my original post notes that the Catholic Church has its own active web presence.

I would hope the Pope turns from this initial critique of the Internet towards guiding Catholics and others towards ways in which the Internet can be used in ways that build community….ostensibly this is what he means by “creative intelligence.”  But we need more scholarship to gauge whether this is indeed a problem unique to the Internet.

I have been bad about posting…I will now be good. Thanks to Ken for holding down the fort!

I’ve been observing the ideological war in the media in the wake of the Tucson tragedy and I’ve been wondering how Sarah Palin would respond to the fingerpointing regarding charges that her heated rhetoric may have played a role. Today, she responded with a video::

It will go down as the “blood libel” speech, as she used that loaded term to accuse the media of an unwarranted pointing of fingers at her.

Was this another gaffe -or- was this part of a very controlled and disciplined Sarah Palin who is taking upon the role as a leader? This WaPo article isn’t missing the fact that the video was a stark departure from her prior history of Tweets and Facebook updates, where she reacts with off the cuff “reflexive spasms”. The article ends with this::

“Republican operatives report that Palin has been calling around in recent weeks to seek advice not only on whether but how she should run for president in 2012. This statement might suggest she is not only seeking that counsel, but taking it as well.”

Hearing the video in its entirety, it uses very specific language invoking God and country to get her message across and frame it in a way that will resonate with her base and show she can “talk the talk” of sounding like a presidential candidate.

So, I don’t think the use of “blood libel” will be a gaffe, unless she plays into criticism of its use. I do wonder if a little contrition would have been a better tactic, in that her base is already sold on her, but contrition may have made inroads into support of the coveted moderates. I get a sense that a little of Palin’s feistiness goes a long way and showing a bit of humility could broaden her range without necessarily diluting her brand.

I saw this article by Thomas Roche linked to on Twitter, where he finds the genesis of the cartoon character-end child abuse meme. He doesn’t like how the meme, which started as celebrating an artform, took on a life of its own by morphing into the support of a specific cause. It sounds like he’s pretty peeved::

“Such epic asshattery is a the confluence of good-natured light-hearted celebration and rampant, infectious shallowness. It cheapens the cause of child abuse prevention and, just as importantly, it draws a connection between comic books/cartoons and childhood, where none should exist.”

He goes on to criticize how this One Click Activism doesn’t really do anything, which echoes Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change” critique of social media social activism [see criticisms of Gladwell’s article on this blog here]. Both Gladwell and Roche take a dim view of these “consciousness raising” efforts because they do precious little “real” work as diversions. Gladwell sees identity-driven social activism as being at cross purposes with the more hierarchically organized variant::

“It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”

While Roche wants to shame everyone participating in what he sees as a shallow, identity-feeding enterprise::

“But Facebook Activism isn’t just stupid; it’s dangerous. It convinces people that doing next to nothing is actually better than doing nothing at all. And you know what? It’s not. If it’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness, is it the same, but less of a hassle, to just call up a photo of a candle on your iPhone? Seriously. Ask yourself. Is that the kind of person you want to be? Someone who can’t even be bothered to strike a match?”

I disagree.

First, I think a lot of naysaying regarding social movements has everything to do with discontent, simmering in the zeitgeist of these times in North America. The federal parties in Canada are lucky to get support of 30% of voters and many in the US are disillusioned with Obama’s promise of change and the Tea Partiers are advocating their own variant that isn’t necessarily in synch with the Republicans. I feel the Gladwell and Roche articles resonate with those skeptics who are critical of what they see as feel-good do-goodery.

Could there be something to these criticisms? After all, what is the point of just getting people to slap an image on their profiles.

The problem with this discontent is that it’s based on a zero-sum mentality and a conjecture that none of it matters, as opposed to the possibility that some of it might matter—a lot. The zero-sum angle assumes that these efforts are taking the wind out of the sails of more concrete efforts. I think these are apples and oranges. The attention received by being a meme that goes viral may seem like a bunch of wasted effort, but a more useful way to see this is that it raises consciousness and may motivate key people to do more organizing or mobilize resources in this direction. Is this likely? Maybe not in most cases and causes, but it’s a possibility and and a possibility borne out of the power of the Internet. In fact, I would argue that with Web 3.0 that the gaps between memes, activism, and results will be narrowed. So, pissing on the idea categorically is premature.

On my r h i z o m i c o n blog,  this post on Nestlé’s handling of social media criticism and attacks on Facebook for their use of palm oil in Kit-Kat bars shows how activism interfaces with corporations. In this facepalm tale of corporate woe, social media and the old guard media {OGM} converged to raise awareness of the issue that palm oil destroys wildlife habitat. Nestlé allegedly altered its practices due to activist pressures, so while the corporation was touting a greener approach to palm oil, Greenpeace wasn’t buying it due to practices of an Indonesian supplier, Sinar Mas, and an anti-Nestlé, anti-Kit-Kat video was circulated and hammered with—wait for it—copyright infringement. Did it matter that people were changing their Facebook profile images and posting critical comments on Nestlé’s Facebook wall? Nestlé thought so and requested users to stop doing it.

I’m not buying the arguments that social media activism merely feeds the ego or is dangerous because it takes efforts away from more real endeavours. I’m of the mind that if it increases awareness through resonance and meaning and increases motivation by just a fraction of those touched by a meme, it’s far from useless or dangerous.

Roche is seeking a stronger connection between the meme and outcomes. I can appreciate that, but when he expresses his frustration with the government and the public regarding the social ill of child abuse, his argument turns into what I see as an elitist political treatise::

“Do you want to know why kids are being abused in the United States? Because no system exists to prevent them from being abused. Do you want to know why no system exists to prevent kids from being abused? Because some very vocal Americans seem to spend much of their time being terrified that some kid somewhere who’s not their kid will get something for free, up to and including a life without abuse.

Violence against children has been endemic throughout all societies. We in the Western world had a chance, last century, to make great strides toward eliminating it. We chose to fight wars, cut school lunches, privatize national parks and pay lower taxes instead. As a result, we march into a new decade in which the kids of the world are as helpless as ever.

And legions of people out there are exactly upset enough about that to upload an image of Danger Mouse.”

I think this makes huge assumptions about anyone supporting the meme. Maybe it’s cynical of me to take issue with him on the grounds that my take is that he doesn’t get or doesn’t like how the mobilizing of the masses works. It works by making a cause “cool”, e.g., Obama 2008, and if you’re fighting something that’s cool, you need to make it uncool, e.g., adding social stigma to smoking. I say cynical, as it pretty much means that we as a society are often driven by what’s cool—or at least by things that resonate with us through meaning, no matter now tangential it is to anything “real”.

Twitterversion:: Is the attack on the cartoon-child abuse Facebook meme warranted or does Thomas Roche just not get the big picture here? @ThickCulture @Prof_K

This Chronicle of Higher Education article, “The Shadow Scholar”, was posted to a friend’s Facebook wall yesterday and I’ve been enjoying the fracas in the comments {I personally love the grammar pedants}, which are more interesting than the article itself. The article does know its audience and how to extract the most emotion and righteous indignation from those in the ivory tower and the blowback from those who realize that the institution of higher learning is what it is—increasingly, a business.

The article is written in half-sneer {hint:: all part of the formula} that chronicles an academic mercenary’s career path and his work of crafting prose and poetry for those with ambitions beyond their abilities. Perhaps this is part of a trajectory of a more egalitarian system that is open not just to those with pedigrees, but to those who, let’s face it…can navigate the system. The article describes the clients who are desperate and willing to pay to get through their academic hurdles, from admissions essays to doctoral dissertations. He points the finger squarely at acadème itself, which is bound to raise hackles. He takes direct aim on the field of education::

“I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)”

Then, there’s this wry observation::

“The 75-page paper on business ethics ultimately expanded into a 160-page graduate thesis, every word of which was written by me. I can’t remember the name of my client, but it’s her name on my work. We collaborated for months. As with so many other topics I tackle, the connection between unethical business practices and trade liberalization became a subtext to my everyday life.”

I think many in acadème have stories of know of less than honourable behaviour by colleagues and acquaintances. I know of a Masters of Healthcare Administration student, at a large public university in California, who graduated after submitting a thesis with statistical analyses he outsourced but was clueless with respect to what the printouts meant. More disconcerting was the fact that he didn’t have a clue on what consisted of an interesting research question, let alone how one would go about crafting a research design. His advisor gave him comments, but the student quickly deleted them off of his Blackberry—a combination of “who cares, I passed” and a gnawing sense of inadequacy, as this student wasn’t accustomed to receiving anything but high praise for his work and knew he just “got by”. The advisor could have held up his degree, but that would just mean more work and I’m sure he his plate was full.

Regarding academic scholarship, I know of questionable tactics regarding authorship played by those navigating the tenure game. Grad students get shafted, coauthors get dumped. I think it would be naïve to believe that there aren’t mercenaries out there helping the ambitious get tenure and promotion, ghostwriting books, chapters, and solo-authored articles.

Is higher education broken and, if so, why?

Well, higher education is a business, but it also is one of the last, enduring feudal systems. I feel this combination is a recipe for disaster in these late-modern times. Being a business, colleges and universities need to profit maximize, but are also tied to a more feudal tradition, with concepts like honour and mentorship are regarded highly. I recall being in a business faculty meeting and we were discussing ethics and cheating in the classroom. Talk was circulated on how Chinese students often see “cheating” as part of business and defended their actions as learning how to game the system. Well, if you think about it, gaming the system in varying degrees is what we’re all being taught—it’s what’s rewarded in our everyday lives.

Entrepreneurs are often celebrated in our culture, as risk taking mavericks that innovate and create new paradigms, Schumpeterian growth, and wealth. Take a look at this TED talk with entrepreneur Cameron Herold::

About 5 minutes in, he freely admits to cheating and having others do his accounting assignments at Carleton. His take is that entrepreneurs don’t do accounting, they hire accountants. It’s all about figuring out the system and gaming it. Sounds like those accounts of what the Chinese students were allegedly saying. Getting back to the original article, one commenter {3. skaking} makes a good point about whether the author’s services are in less demand where there’s an emphasis on education, not evaluation. Getting back to business side, the question is whether or not there’s a market for truly “educated” students versus “evaluated” ones. I’m not so sure there is, but I hope one can be developed. It should be a charge of higher education to make this happen.

Twitterversion:: [blog] Commentary on “The Shadow Scholar” article in The Chronicle of Higher Educ. Plagiarism, feudalism, & capitalism http://url.ie/86an @ThickCulture @Prof_K

I was forwarded this Michael Geist article {h/t:: LQ} in the TO Star on lawful access legislation being tabled by the Conservatives here in Canada::

“The push for new Internet surveillance capabilities goes back to 1999, when government officials began crafting proposals to institute new surveillance technologies within Canadian networks along with additional legal powers to access surveillance and subscriber information.

The so-called lawful access initiatives stalled in recent years, but earlier this month the government tabled its latest proposal with three bills that received only limited attention despite their potential to fundamentally reshape the Internet in Canada.

The bills contain a three-pronged approach focused on information disclosure, mandated surveillance technologies, and new police powers.”

The “trifecta” of bills are listed here and here are links to the first reading versions {C-50, C-51, C-52}. Last year, Geist blogged about Parliamentary reactions to the last round of lawful access bills, with the Liberals taking a stand of “what took you so long?”, while the NDP and the Bloc supported moving the bill {c-46} to committee, but expressed concerns about balancing privacy and security. Earlier in 2009, Impolitical warned of the implications of lawful access granting increased police powers::

“The dangers of such powers being placed with law enforcement and the potential for abuses have been made abundantly clear by the experience Americans have had with the Bush administration and the revelations from whistleblowers in the last year.”

I’m still reading up on the issue, but my immediate concerns, as one in the trenches with Web 3.0 projects, is the implications of warrantless surveillance and data mining, which may not be immediately evident by Parliamentarians or the general public. Algorithms already can mine data to determine the identities of people in social networks despite privacy settings on sites like Facebook.

The telcos are expressing concerns about the costs of compliance with the proposed surveillance, as compensation schemes aren’t well-defined.

While surveillance can sound good in the abstract or the theoretical, the devil is in the details and its implementation. While Google’s Eric Schmidt has a rather unenlightened view of privacy as it concerns “wrongdoing” online, a “don’t be evil” stance, the reality is that breaches of privacy of non-illegal activity can have real and dire consequences and it assumes a benign stance of law enforcement and police powers—without judicial oversight.

Twitterversion:: [blog] “Lawful access” bills in #Canada proposing increased Internet surveillance in emerging era of Web 3.0. @ThickCulture @Prof_K

To his credit, Malcolm Gladwell has opened a critical space of discussion in the media and blogosphere in his latest New Yorker article, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.”.

I won’t detail all his arguments leading to the conclusion that, compared to the merits of face to face communication, activism on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter is very poor activism indeed. There are already many terrific critiques of the article, such as Ken Kambara’s.

I would simply add to this discussion that in constructing his views, Gladwell has forgotten about the findings of his first book, The Tipping Point, which taught us much about the nature of viral epidemics and influence in society. In a section of the book, for instance, Gladwell demonstrates how one type of person critical to such epidemics, “Connectors,” have an amazing ability to make social connections and act as a source of social power/glue by having so many mere acquaintances and “weak ties” in their networks. Before even questioning Gladwell’s notion of weak ties (I again refer you to Kambara, who discusses “multiplex” ties, etc.), surely social media have at least a) amplified the ability of Connectors to continue doing what they do best, and b) created forums for these kinds of Tipping Point ties–the likes of which the world has never seen before. There’s lots of other relevant points from Gladwell’s book, like his discussions of academic diffusion models, which could have been applied and updated to the context of social media.

All in all, though it’s only been nine years, we shouldn’t forget “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.”

This blog post is part of a series on Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on how social activism during the Civil Rights era is categorically different from activism using social media. Malcolm Gladwell’s controversial piece in this week’s New Yorker is shaking things up, as he’s advocating that social media doesn’t lend itself well to social activism. He cites examples of how social media only fosters surface-level, low-commitment actions based on weak ties and that social movements, like those pushing for civil rights, require hierarchies. I disagree. Others have, as well, as John Hudson has compiled over on The Atlantic. I’ll focus on Gladwell’s take on weak ties in this post, which I find problematic due to his sweeping generalizations of ties and their potential in guiding everyday life. The Nature of Ties Gladwell claims that social media fosters weak ties::

“There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.”

Others have critiqued this by stating that social media tools {like Twitter and Facebook} can foster more than weak ties. Network structures are combinations of both weak and strong ties. The organizational research of Brian Uzzi at Northwestern {see image above} found that there are dangers of being overembedded {too many strong ties leading to insularity} and being underembedded {too many weak  or arms-length ties leading to a lacking of social structure}. Gladwell’s critique on this front hinges upon characterizing all networks as underembedded networks. There’s another issue here, which is the content of the tie. Ties can be characterized as strong or weak, but they can also be multiplex, i.e., representing a complex relationship that has more than one channel. For example, a tie can be characterized by flows of different types of capital, e.g., social, economic, political, etc., with varying degrees of strength. Social media campaigns can and do tap into networks and use people’s multiplex ties to increase engagement. Hearing about an issue through someone in your network is often more persuasive than from media and advertising, so there’s great potential here, but going from a social media campaign to action, let alone social change, is far from automatic.

My next post will address the issue of motivation and social media. Gladwell doesn’t think social media motivates people, but drives participation. I question this puzzling sweeping generalization.

Yesterday afternoon, I saw Fincher’s The Social Network with fingers-crossed that Sorkin’s bantery dialogue wouldn’t cause me to cringe like a bad number on Glee. I’ll blog about the film on rhizomicon this weekend, but the film reminded me of several aspects of the sociology of online spaces I’ve been mulling over. The film depicted Harvard in 2003 where a hierarchical social order existed in the face-to-face realm. Mark Zuckerberg ran with the idea of taking the collegiate de Certeauean everyday, in all of its mundane glory…online

Facebook is perhaps the perfect Web 2.0 app. User-driven content, interactive information sharing within social networks, etc. etc. Facebook allows users to create multidimensional fielded networks, using Bourdieu’s concept of field/champs. Here’s a summary from an Economist article from last year on the sociology of Facebook, based on how people use the site.

Not surprisingly, we tend to interact with a finite number of other people in our social networks. I’m thinking that as we move into Web 3.0, there will be pressure towards…a diversity of ties. We will be able to interact with others not on the basis of extant contacts and networks, but on other dimensions that may even be latent, e.g., a penchant for music in 3/4 time or a love of books with socialist themes.

Last.fm allows users to find others that have similar musical tastes, find similar bands to those with profiles, and friend others. Here’s an analysis {in French} of a Last.fm network [Google translation] with great interactive visualizations. Each artist on Last.fm has users who like and listen to them. The data is being ported to other sites, such as Songkick, that uses feeds to populate a database of live shows. I think it’s a powerful concept to be able to find like-minded others who might be right next door or around the globe.

Web 3.0 or the semantic web won’t destroy Web 2.0, but will shift focus from user-driven content to the utilization of users’ data. This will push social networking away from user-defined networks and I feel it will foster more tie diversity, not necessarily in terms of demographics, although this is a possibility, but in terms of geography and psychographics. Will Facebook be able to adapt to a scenario of users’ forging multiplex ties based on data or will it get bogged down with user expectations of what the site means to them and those clinginging to the notion of privacy?

David Dylan Thomas questions the popular assertion that Internet content will be stored forever:

We assume that formats like .jpg (that picture of you doing a kegstand) or .mp3 (that ill-advised phone message you left at 3am) or — I won’t even pick a video format since they change every week — will be here forever because they’ve been around as long as we can remember consumer-friendly digital information. But the odds that your Facebook page will still be here in ten years — or will be readable in ten years — while not terrible, probably aren’t as good as you think.

His larger point is that digital information has to be stored somewhere. Old information often has to be converted at a cost. While reasonably current information has a value to market researchers, of what value is a 10-year old Facebook update? Perhaps for the sake of nostalgia, we’ll store our own information, but there’s some reason to question the notion that someone benevolent force out there will keep track of our digital lives for us for free.