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The pictures bombard our everyday lives.
Britney Spears driving her car. Britney Spears shopping in Los Angeles. Britney Spears eating dinner with her father. Britney Spears entering a dance studio. Britney Spears walking on the sidewalk with her mother.
No one can escape the mundane details of this pop star’s everyday life.
In his book, Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold explains this social phenomenon and provides examples of how smart mobs have evolved; the effectiveness of smart mobs; and the benefits and perils of this group of citizens. While examining his examples, I couldn’t help but feel that he’d neglected to include an extremely intrusive, technologically sophisticated smart mob—the paparazzi.
With the advent of technology and the accessibility of online communication, smart mobs are more empowered than ever. “The same convergence of technologies that opens new vistas of communication also makes possible a universal surveillance economy and empowers the bloodthirsty as well as the altruistic” (p. XVIII).
If there’s one profession that almost solely relies on the information embedded in text messages, it’s photographers. Their income depends on the frequency and reliability of this form of communication. Depending on what their “sources” tell them in the body of a message, these individuals will position themselves outside of restaurants, clubs, grocery stores, Starbucks, and airports.
The hordes of photographers are in competition with one other. They’re pushing each other out of the way in order to capture the perfect shot. The celebrity is the prize. With the exception of acting rationally, photographers perfectly depict the Game Theory, which Rheingold discusses. “Game theory is based on several assumptions: that the players are in conflict, that they must take action, that the result of the action will determine which player wins according to definite rules, and that all players are expected to act “rationally” by choosing the strategy that will maximize their gain regardless of the consequences to others” (p. 41).
The prize for these coveted pictures is nothing to scoff at. According to Jossip.com, Us Weekly and People are willing to pay over $100,000 for pictures of Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson holding hands in Miami. According to Thomas Hobbes, “Humans are so competitive that the only way we can cooperate is for a more powerful competitor to impose a truce” (p. 34).
Hence the wheeling and dealing that these photogs attempt to do with celebrity friends and family. Photographers have given their phone numbers to close friends of the couple in hopes that they’ll tip them off to the whereabouts of Hollywood’s hottest commodity. However, the members of this smart mob must be discerning when intercepting text messages from their trusted “sources.” Smart mobs can be pitted against smart mobs—inaccurate text messages can also be disseminated to deter these bloodhounds from following the every step of this new couple.
As John Battelle discussed in his book, The Search, these same photographers that sell their pictures to tabloid magazines also utilize the infamous search to track down other outlets interested in purchasing their goods. MrPaparazzi.com provides up-to-the-minute text messages with the latest celebrity news. According to their Web site, you can join the Mr. Paparazzi celeb tracker and “you’ll get regular text alerts on the whereabouts of the hottest celebrities.”
The most recent example of how paparazzi can negatively impact those subjects who they are covering involves an individual who I referred to earlier on—Britney Spears. The trouble singer’s sad downward spiral was discussed on evening news programs and newspapers alike. The mobs which captured the every detail of this girl’s life were able to do so because of text messages they’d received from Sam Lufti, a Spears friend. According to Maxim magazine, “There’s one paparazzi agency that’s emerged as having the inside track on Britney all the time – they’re the ones who know where she is, where she’s going… It’s called X17. “One of the owners of X17 told me that last year she began getting messages from lots of people with funny names; we know that Sam, in the past, has used a lot of pseudonyms. “After that she said one day out of the blue, Sam Lutfi called and introduced himself by name, then he started calling more and more often. “By the time I was with the paparazzi, they were sitting there getting text messages from him at regular intervals telling them where she was, where she was gonna go.”
If we look at old Hollywood, we rarely see pictures of make-up-less Marilyn Monroe exiting her boyfriend’s home. We aren’t flooded with images of a drunk Frank Sinatra slouched over a blond bombshell at a New York club. Why not? Is it because photographers were only informed of public photo opportunities? How has this access to celebrity lives impacted our perception of reality? How has this “smart” mob repositioned our priorities as a society?
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The other day I was babysitting for a friend of mine, helping her third grade son with his homework, when he asked me how much I knew about the Roman Colosseum. Although I’d studied in Rome for a semester while an undergrad, I was embarrassed to admit that aside from providing him with directions to the closest bar to the Colosseum, there wasn’t much I could tell him to further his research for a report that was due the following week. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, “I’ll just Google it.”
I sat there for a second and had my first, “I’m old” moment, for when I was a third grader back in the day, my mom would send me upstairs to the study to sift through the encyclopedias when I needed information. After I came back downstairs and reported my findings, she would sit down, call in my dad, and the two of them would share any additional information they knew about the subject I was searching for. Often the topic would have some relevance to a relative or friend of the family and it wasn’t unusual when my mom recommended that I call my grandma to ask her about the Civil War or get in touch with my sister to ask her a question about biology (she loved science). It was a search that required hard work and dedication, and was often enriched by a personal story (from my grandma or anyone else I was forced to call at 8 pm on a Wednesday night). Although I could summarize the second half of Battelle’s book in great detail, I’d like to reflect on a point that Martin Shore, a California-based real-estate developer mentioned in Chapter 7: Information has replaced relationships.
This past Sunday, an article appeared in The New York Times, which discussed teens’ reliance on technology and the division this semi-obsession creates among children and parents. The article provided an example of a teenage girl who was riding in a car driven by her dad and sitting with her friends in the backseat. At one point, her dad noticed her frantically texting away and reminded her of how rude that behavior was, especially when she had guests sitting right next to her. This teenage daughter informed her father that he was like so out of it, and that she was totally texting her posse who were sitting in the back seat for her. The article went on to say that technology, including the computer, along with the Internet, “has given even very young children virtual lives distinctly separate from those of their parents and siblings.” How has technology impacted our relationships with members of our own family? How has it inhibited our efforts to make face-to-face contact with each other? What implications will this reliance have on future generations? Unfortunately, these lackadaisical communication habits are not only done on the phone. In addition to being able to send each other messages instantaneously through social networking sites and instant messenger services, the search component of the Internet also makes information retrieval much easier. Instead of executing extensive research on an obscure topic, students are now able to simply type in a couple of key words and have the needed information within a matter of milliseconds. Individuals no longer have to work hard to seek out information. Why is having all of the necessary information at our fingertips perceived as a positive thing? What are individuals missing out on when they locate information online versus through history books and personal interviews? Additionally, this ability to locate information at the click of a mouse often leads to security concerns which Batetelle discussed. According to an article on MSNBC, 61% of child bloggers provide their full contact information on the Internet. Although Scoble and Israel might promote these open lines of communication, such exposure can be dangerous for children. Even more concerning is that over 1/3 of children have blogs, and only 5% of parents know about them. The MSNBC article recommends that parents utilize the search to locate what information is being made public about their children. It’s a bit ironic to think that the search now becomes a powerful navigational tool for parents, but the same search bar that is helping them locate their children’s information is the same one that countless individuals who are up to no good could have clicked on.
Individuals’ ability to easily access information via the search function is not only diminishing the importance of relationships–it’s replacing them. And all those lessons learned from hard work have been thrown out the window with ‘em.
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In his book, The Search, John Battelle talks about the history of the search and Google’s fairytale rise to fame. Battelle begins profiling the who, what, where, why, when, and how (much) of the search. According to Pew research, nearly 84% of people have conducted at least one search. “Pew also found that the younger you are or the higher your educational attainment is, the more you search” (p. 26).
Google ZeitGeist takes a look at some of the most searched questions and words that people are looking for online. “Nearly 50 percent of all searches use two or three words, and 20 percent use just one. Just 5 percent of all searches use more than six words” (p. 27). According to Battelle, the Long Tail of Search Queries proves that no matter what word you search for, there’s most likely a result that contains it. He also provides a statistic I found interesting (perhaps because I’m included in this percentage): 40 percent of us have done a vanity search
85% of searchers use one of the big four portals (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, or AOL) to conduct their searches. Why do they conduct these searches? The answer to that question is a bit more complex. Although it sounds a bit obvious, people search to find information. According to Battelle, not only are we searching for what we know, but we’re also searching for the answers to that which we don’t know.
I know it’s hard to believe, but Google was not the first actual search engine! Before our lives changed with the advent of Google, AltaVista was the engine where people their searches. AltaVista had several problems, the main one being that the founders were not prepared for the amount of activity that the search database would generate. Before AltaVista’s time (there was a time before the time before Google!) search engines Archie and Veronica provided a database of search results, although they included titles of documents but not the full text of article. Not too helpful. But alas, in the summer of 1997, an academic paper was written that introduced Google to the world. Halleluiah!
Being the academics that they were, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed an algorithm after the citation process used for academic papers. “Papers are judged not only one their original thinking and the rigor of their citations, but also by the number of papers they cite, the number of pages that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation” (p. 70). Hence the birth of PageRank, which lead to a ranking system that “rewarded links that came from sources that were important, and penalized those that did not” (p. 75). The algorithm that the duo created managed to take into account the “number of links to a particular site, and the number of links into each of the linking sites” (p. 75).
Although Page and Brin thought their algorithm was revolutionary, they had a hard time selling it to newly formed web search engines. Because they couldn’t convince anyone else, they decided to start their own search engine and implement the algorithm. Think of all those web search engine execs out there who are thinking, ‘If I only would have…”
But back to PageRank. I want to return to this algorithm because I find it a bit faulty. I know these guys have accomplished quite a bit in their lifetimes, but what gives them the right to judge everyone else’s web pages? According to Wikipedia, “Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google.” How do these “eyes of Google” represent the eyes of the hundreds of millions of searchers out there? How does Google assess sites in order to determine their numerical value? Isn’t it impossible for small Web sites that specialize in particular areas to become “credible” in the eyes of Google if no one else is linking to them? Another PageRank problem that Google has also encountered is that it’s considered fairly easy to manipulate the system. Some web hosts sell sites with high PageRank values to people who are willing to pay more for a higher ranking. Although Google admonishes this practice and says that people who participate in it will be reprimanded, how can they possibly police the entire transaction process and get all of the bad guys out there? According to their blog, Google is constantly finding ways to improve their algorithm by looking at data from individual searches and asking themselves important questions about search tendencies. “What results do people click on? How does their behavior change when we change aspects of our algorithm? Using data in the logs, we can compare how well we’re doing now at finding useful information for you to how we did a year ago. If we don’t keep a history, we have no good way to evaluate our progress and make improvements.”
One thing that I find particularly impressive about Google is that they use their own results to fuel future initiatives. In the 2007 yearend Zeitgeist report, 3 of the 10 questions under the “What is” category pertain to health. It’s no coincidence that Google’s newest project is to develop a health database. It’s also no coincidence that this site is being launched during a political season where healthcare is the number one issue for the majority of voters.
After officially announcing the project on their blog, Google said that, “Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.” This sounds like a fascinating project and one that could be beneficial to millions of Americans. Are they hiring?!?!?!?!? The only way that Google will be beat in the world of technology is if more executives like Richard Branson begin to launch search engines that capitalize on their specialty. Branson will be launching a vertical search launcher that “promises to revolutionize high-end corporate travel and last minute luxury travel.” Although Google has the technology, Branson has his reputation and the means. Others should take heed to Branson’s newest business venture.
My 2008 prediction for Google: According to ZeitGeist, a majority of search queries deal with religion, lifestyle (dieting and cooking), and psychology. By the time we ring in 2009, Google will have developed search engines that concentrate on all these areas.
