Adding anyone as “friend” on Facebook is simple. You could have known them your whole life, or just met them. It makes little difference to the social network, and your interaction is exactly the same. The people who see your status messages and read your latest wall posts are part of a single mass of connections. They are privy to your opinions and emotions; they have a level of intimacy with you that in previous times would have been reserved for our nearest and dearest. What kind of impact does this have on us? On our psychology? On our concept of friendship?
A recent Associated Press article states that divorce lawyers are finding social networks increasingly useful.

“People are just blabbing things all over Facebook. People don’t yet quite connect that what they’re saying in their divorce cases is completely different from what they’re saying on Facebook. It doesn’t even occur to them that they’d be found out,” divorce attorney Leslie Matthews says.

It’s natural to trust your friends, but what happens when everyone you’ve ever met becomes a “friend”?
Mashable has an article by Ori Brafman, co-author of a book on instant connections, which raises this question.

Working with his brother, a psychologist, to research what makes people form instant connections, Brafman found that Facebook lacks many of the “accelerators” that trigger or enable the deep bonds we form in real life.

Instead of meeting people who are close to us and who we can see all the time, sharing secrets with them and forming the cliques that give us a sense of belonging and unity, Facebook and social networks like it encourage us to reach out to strangers, to trust everyone and to belong to one giant global community.

More, not deeper
Social psychologists believe communication is an important factor in establishing friendships, but the sending and receiving of verbal and written messages goes alongside other factors like similarity, personal attraction and non-verbal cues.

“In their interactions with each other, humans display complex interpersonal dynamics. Their overt actions hide covert patterns of interaction,” summarises Kate Grieve, author of A Student’s A-Z of Psychology.
In the digital age, we know more people and spend more time with them, but the bonds we share are thinner, as our friendships through these networks lack depth.

Facebook’s original mission was to reconnect you with the people you already knew, letting you form intimate groups online where you could share recent experiences and photographs. Now things have changed… Facebook encourages you to connect with “everyone”, or at the very least, “friends of friends”, much in the way MySpace used to, toting slogans all about “open” and “instant”.

Your special little network on Facebook has become much bigger, encompassing not only those who you’d share your deepest, darkest secrets with, but everyone you’ve ever met. While this is still useful in its own way, it places limits on how close a relationship you can form.

The solution may lie in balancing our online relationships with real interaction with the people in our lives, and being extra careful about what we say to everyone else.

(originally posted at Digital Life)

Called Pioneer One, the double meaning in the title cannot be missed. The series is about a forgotten Soviet space mission that returns to Earth, bringing back more than just the past. According to the site, “It’s part political drama, part procedural drama, with a tinge of sci-fi,” and is based on factual events. The other thing it is, of course, is a pioneer into a new age of television distribution.

“One of the main challenges that independent content producers face today is not piracy, but finding ways to get their work noticed,” says P2P news site TorrentFreak.

“There’s only so much of that TV pie to go around, there’s only so much real estate on the networks,” co-creator Josh Bernard explains. “We would have to storm the gate just to get a meeting with somebody. Why would they pick a show from two nobodies outside their industry?”

So he and partner Bracey Smith created their pilot relying on donations and dedication from a cast and crew that believed in the dream. The dream is not only to produce a TV show, but also to create something that does not rely on the taste of bigwigs in an office around a conference table, but on the passion of the show’s fans, on its popularity.

This is a dream that the distribution channel, VODO, shares. VODO is a platform powered by BitTorrent, which uses peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing to release independent films and music, funded by donations. Founder Jamie King says he hopes to develop “an independent creation culture on P2P infrastructure”.

Pioneer One is distributed for free, but if you donate towards the creation of the next episode, you receive additional bonus features such as deleted scenes and commentary (features vary depending on how much you donate).

Previous pioneers

Pioneer to this level of P2P distribution it might be, but the series is certainly not the first to use the “pay what you think the show deserves” model.

The model was first used for music. The Smashing Pumpkins and Radioheadboth released albums online and encouraged fans to donate what they thought the tracks were worth. Radiohead’s manager, Brian Message, explained: “We realised that, by using the internet for the delivery of the album, we could reach 173 countries and it would cost us less than three cents a copy for distribution.”
It makes logical sense.

More recently, Joss Whedon, the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, came to similar conclusions to Bernard and Smith. During the writer’s strike in 2008, he decided to challenge the industry by creating a three-part movie release specifically for online.

“The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it; to turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet; to show how much could be done with very little, and show the world there is another way,” he said.

The movie, called Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,was a superhero spoof musical, and it became an instant success. The online episodes were available for free for a certain period and then DVDs were released with commentary for those who wished to support the initiative.

While others have created “webisodes” – series broadcast online – Dr Horrible proved that online does not necessarily mean amateur and was a giant step towards improving the reputation of series that are released for free.

End to what we know?

So does the future hold an end to television as we know it?
Yes and no. The big networks aren’t going to die any time soon. As with traditional publishers of books and editors of titles like the New York Times, people rely on the quality control of the television networks. They know what they see is probably going to be good.

There is, however, space for both. The television networks don’t need to compete with people like Bernard and Smith, and they don’t need to treat P2P networks like enemies. The technology exists for them to cut down their distribution costs radically, if they are only more open to the idea of free sharing. There is also the opportunity for them to tap into talent, have their shows reviewed before they accept them by putting pilots online, and to bring in public opinion and crowd-sourcing. Perhaps, one day, we will see this happening. Perhaps soon.

Originally posted at Digital Life

He believes that reading on the internet has changed how we think, causing skimming, browsing and scanning of information and making us incapable of deep thought.

A 2008 report, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, commissioned by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, backs up Carr’s claims finding “a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, ‘flicking’ behaviour in digital libraries.”

The way we read, according to the study, has altered. We no longer evaluate meaning, but rather scan for quick answers and are constantly distracted. And this distraction is addictive.

Carr told Reuters that when he was writing his book, he switched off Facebook and Twitter and restricted e-mail access. He went through a withdrawal process for a couple of weeks, where he felt “befuddled”, but after that, his concentration returned and his productivity drastically increased.

Other studies, including studies by Harvard and Princeton universities, have shown that human beings become addicted to fast thought because thinking fast gives us a feeling of elation. This may be why we find it so hard to just switch off our social networks. On 31 May, a large group of people held a “Quit Facebook Day”, committed to getting a significant number of users to delete their Facebook accounts due to privacy concerns, but the day was a flop, with only 30 000 people actually deciding to kick the habit (Facebook gets 840 000 new users per day ).

“Quitting Facebook isn’t easy,” the Quit Facebook Day group admits. “Facebook is engaging, enjoyable and, quite frankly, addictive. Quitting something like Facebook is like quitting smoking. It’s hard to stay on the wagon long enough to actually change your habits.”

There are a few applications around to help limit your social network usage. One such app is called “Freedom”. Blogger Rebecca Traister discovered the app, developed by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Ph.D. candidate Fred Stutzman, last year. “Even as a comparative Luddite,” she explains, “I find myself bewitched, bewildered and deeply bothered by the number of minutes, hours, days I spend circling the online drain.”

“Freedom”, which cuts off network access for a set amount of time, seemed the perfect solution. What she found, though, was she still experienced what she calls a “phantom limb period” when she desired to click everything and was surprised to find it didn’t work. Her productivity did increase but after weeks of using the app, she still battled to switch it on for more than 15 minutes at a time.

It seems our lives are governed by this new media, perhaps more than we are willing to admit. However, it’s not all bad. According to Carr, our brains have also become more adept at making fast, visual decisions and at finding valuable information segments quickly.

It seems that different does not necessarily mean bad. The internet itself is not necessarily evil, but the research of Carr and others shows we need to be weary of our use of it, and of how much control we are giving to it.

Originally posted here

“Our feeling is that it is time to stop giving away our journalism. That’s because we feel that we are undermining the value of our journalism, undermining the value of The Times and undermining the perception that journalism and news has a value,” said editor James Harding

There is no doubt that print revenue is falling. With the increasing prevalence of internet access, the collapse of advertising revenue in print media and the economic decline, some are going so far as to say it is on its last legs. Newspaper revenue fell 28% in the first three quarters of 2009 and nearly 15 000 newspaper employees were laid off.

In a hurry to transition into the technological age and not lose out to the likes of Google and Yahoo! News, many publications started putting their content online. But advertising does not bring in as much online and, in the words of NBC Universal’s CEO Jeff Zucker, publications are “spending analogue dollars to get digital dimes”. This has to change and “paywalling”  – charging for that content – is one way of doing it.
The theory that people will pay to access the content online comes from the idea that they still value the content the same as they always have, but with cheaper and easier distribution now (i.e. online) would rather not pay for paper. These people would, however, be willing to pay a lower price to access the same content digitally. This theory assumes a value for journalism: in-depth, truthful and balanced stories.
But is this the case?
The Wall Street Journal has made a success of it, with about 407 000 electronic subscribers, enough to keep the print publication going. But The Wall Street Journal has a very specific audience and offers highly specialised content. Charging for general news is another story entirely, and one that even News International isn’t sure will work.

One problem is that people in the digital age have grown used to finding that content for free. Another problem is that paywalling means the sites will not be indexed by search engines and will not be exposed to non-subscribers at all. That means an immediate loss of up to 20% of their traffic. It’s a brave move to make, but not necessarily a wise one.

Also something to take into account is that our reading habits for online are incredibly different from those at the breakfast table or on the beach. Studies have shown that we do not even read entire articles, let alone entire publications: we click around, we become distracted.

A recent study by the Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism showed that not even the content is the same. The things we talk about and share with each other on social networks are markedly different from those we read in the news. We consume a different kind of journalism now – short-form, tweeted, pasted, blogged. Gone are the days of the long-form stories found in The New York Times. At least online.

This is something The New York Times might want to consider seeing as they’ve recently announced that they will also be paywalling from the start of next year.

What The New York Times is doing, however, that is a bit different from The Times is what the Poynter Institute calls “a metered system”. Already tried out by the Financial Times, this system allows users to read a certain number of articles a day for free before being prompted to pay up. It’s a good system for the casual browser, but will it make them any money considering how little people enjoy reading on the computer screen? Time will tell.

The fuss about the iPad
One point worth making is that tablets, like the iPad, may serve as some kind of salvation. By charging for applications and editions, the publications could make back some of their money. The question has to be asked, though: if you could get your news for free on your iPad browser from another source, even if it was just a blogger, would you still pay for an app just because it gave you “professional journalism”? Or is professional journalism itself a dying concept?

You can read our previous feature on blogging vs journalism here.

Originally posted at Digital Life

On 10 February 2008, thousands of 4chanians all over the world showed up outside churches in masks claiming the religion to be a cult. The protests in London, the USA, Canada and Australia were large enough to make the news. Many found the protests entertaining, particularly since several incorporated 4Chan memes. But what humour cannot hide is the fact that the protest was a strategically planned, coordinated attack that spanned the Internet-faring globe.

But could charges be brought against “Anonymous” for the attack? “Would limiting of freedom of speech in that case be justified?” I asked, “Our South African constitution says “Yes”. It excludes hate speech from that freedom.” Secondly I asked, “would it be possible? The outcry of 4Chan still echoing around the Internet says, “No”… Aside from anonymity, the update rate of the site is so fast that posts become unavailable before they can be reported, let alone traced to an IP.”

Today I was surprised to read that one of the members of “Anonymous” has been jailed.

According to the Associated Press: “Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, of Grand Island, Neb., was also ordered Monday to pay $20,000 in restitution and serve a year on supervised release after he gets out of prison.”

Says The Register:

“As part of an earlier plea bargaining agreement, Mettenbrink admitted using custom software from a message board run by Anonymous to throw useless traffic at Church of Scientology websites. Some sites became intermittently unavailable in January 2008 as a result of the efforts of Mettenbrink and many others.”

The judge justified the sentence by calling the attack a “Hate Crime”.

If it is possible to jail a man despite the anonymity provided by 4Chan, perhaps we will begin to see justice served for others who have fallen prey to the message board.

Privacy worries are something for conspiracy theorists and paranoid nerds, aren’t they? What does it mean for me, a normal person with not much to say to the world? Surely no one is all that interested in what’s going on in my life? If this is your thought process… you’re wrong.

Last month, Facebook unleashed something called “Open Graph”, a platform that shares your information with other sites so that these sites can tailor their services and offers to your personal interests. Such sites include Pandora, Yola, Microsoft and, well, 100 000 others (as of last week Tuesday).

There are many positive aspects to the service – it taps into an already-built database of your likes and dislikes and those of your friends. It also goes a long way towards creating what they call a Semantic Web – with everything connected to everything else, able to be categorised and indexed mechanically, as envisioned by the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee.

So what’s the problem?

Open Graph gives web developers access to your personal information. Even if you go through the complicated process of opting out, your information can still be shared through your friends. And that data can be stored on the site for longer than 24 hours. In order to grab your personal info, webdevs need only drop a single line of HTML into a website to search Facebook for information on users. This can be, as intended, really convenient when you go to a site and it automatically tailors its service for you. However, it can also be abused.

A new site called OpenBook was developed to create awareness of these possible abuses. It uses only the API that Facebook makes so easily available to allow you to search every facebook newsfeed for embarrassing information such as “cheat test” and “boss is an asshole”… and the results come up with profile pictures of the posters. Why don’t you try searching for that status you just posted? What happens if your boss or teacher or nemesis tries searching for something similar and stumbles upon yours? Do you really feel as safe saying what’s on your mind now?

Facebook vs Privacy

Facebook seems to have a thing against privacy. Actually, Facebook’s creator and CEO Mark Zuckerburg does. He follows a philosophy that privacy is an outdated concept, that the social norm is now to share everything. But as true as that may be, privacy amounts to more than that. It’s about safety, which is why various organisations, including the Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, have a problem with it.

Facebook’s privacy policy has changed so completely and so often since the site first started in 2007 that most users no longer have a clue where they stand. Opting out is easier said than done.
Of course, this is because Facebook does not really want you to opt out. While you are opted in, you are making them money. As the Canadian Privacy Commission says, your data is a hot commodity. Facebook has faced enquiries over its apps before for this reason – because many of the surveys, quizzes and games on Facebook, developed by third parties, aim to get your personal data, collect it and sell it. And now third parties don’t even have to develop applications to obtain that information; you don’t even have to click the “approve” button anymore.

What does this mean for you? It means more spam, more catalogues, more advertising targeted specifically at you. It also means that, with that data freely available to the world, decisions are made about you without you even being asked. Employers, judges, teachers, all have access to every status update you make, every group you join. Is this really okay with you?

Forget about stalkers and horror stories of Facebook murders, the real worries are much more malignant.

Read more here

The Cheezburger Network has become widely successful in the past few years by cataloguing and cashing in on Internet memes. The most well-known is possibly the LOLCat – captioned pictures of cats that took the Internet by storm. The interview is certainly worth a look.

Andrew Keen, in his book The Cult of the Amateur, compares bloggers to monkeys, who type out whatever they think with no consideration of what is readable, or should be read.

“Blogs have become so dizzingly infinite that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective, professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com,” he claims.

He argues that in our information society, anyone can create anything and there are no checks and balances as to what is true, useful and reliable. Therefore, blogs are not only useless, but a threat to the credible, the academic, the journalistic. They are the product of the amateur – “a hobbyist, knowledgeable or otherwise, someone who does not make a living from his or her field of interest, a layperson, lacking credentials, a dabbler.”

But does one really need credentials in order to produce something useful and informative?

Origins

Blogging started to become popular, as far as the experts can tell, after September 11 2001. The new medium enabled ordinary people to play a role in creating news and reporting on events. It was the beginning of what has been dubbed the Third Great Media Revolution where, in the words of writer Dan Gillmor, “the first draft of history was being written, in part, by the former audience”. This `former audience’ provided information the American media either couldn’t (such as personal accounts) or wouldn’t (the media at the time were rallied around the American cause).

Usefulness

In many countries where the traditional press is under government control or corrupt, it is the blogger who stands up and tells the world what is really happening. And in times of great disaster, with media houses lying in shambles, it is bloggers who reach out of the rubble with critical information.

Take for example the recent Haitian earthquake. The news that reached us long before the media teams landed was from people like Carel Pedre who used micro-blogging site Twitter to post things like, “There are still a lot of students and teachers still alive under the debris of GOC University in Nazon. @RedCross.”

Disaster or political blogs are not the only ones that serve a purpose. There are also blogs that post reviews, commentary and even expert advice. Technorati’s top ten blogs include technology blog TechCrunch, political blog The Corner and entertainment blog The Gawker. All of these have thousands of readers daily, who rely on them for information.

Useful, but is it journalism?

Blogs may provide information but does this mean they are the same as journalism? After all, isn’t the aim of journalism to inform?

The key difference between a blogger and a journalist is that there is no editor, which can be a good thing. True, there is no one to control what a blogger can and cannot say, no one to choose what thoughts get priority. On the other hand, this means there is also no one to check for accuracy and impartiality.

If a popular blogger makes a statement that is incorrect, thousands could be mislead. An example is The Freedom Blog by “Shelly the Republican” who proudly tells her followers: “Ubuntu is only kept ‘free’ by the judicious use of cheap, South African labour, often using intimidation, threats, and even outright violence to keep workers in line, slavishly marching towards the Ubuntu Management team’s brutal deadlines.” Is she joking? Probably. Is there anyone telling her readers that? No.

Blogging also has no other kinds of editors, like subs, who will check facts to make sure a story is accurate before being sent to press. Blogging relies solely on self-moderation and reader comments to ensure the truth leaks through, and since these are controlled by the blogger… well, you can see where this could be a problem.

Both, not either

This is why it is unlikely that blogging is, or should be, a threat to journalism. However, that does not mean there is no place for it. Another difference between journalism and blogging is that journalists rely on the reputation of their media houses and people automatically trust them because of that good name. Bloggers, on the other hand, have to work hard to build a good reputation from scratch. So, chances are, popular blogs are popular for a reason.

In response to Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, writer, lawyer and academic Laurence Lessig says: “What Keen misses is the value to a culture that comes from developing the capacity to create – independent of the quality created. That doesn’t mean we should not criticize works created badly. But it does mean you’re missing the point if you simply compare the average blog to the NY Times.”

Originally posted here.

A white bearded man misunderstands something a younger black man says and they get into an argument. The black man threatens the white man, the white man unceremoniously beats him up and storms off the bus, leaving the black man with a nosebleed and calling for an “amberlamps” (due to his nose being blocked with blood that is how he pronounces “ambulance”). The other people on the bus either egg him on, laugh at him or – like the girl sitting next to him – ignore him completely.

Something about this situation made it a meme. But what part exactly?

Many passed it on, laughing at the fact that a trouble-stirrer got what he asked for. Some marvelled at the irony of the “reversal of roles” where a young black gangster-like figure gets his ass handed to him by a elderly man.

I put “reversal of roles” in inverted commas because the other aspect, the more disturbing one, is that this isn’t really a reversal of roles, is it?

Roles

“More proof of the white man keeping brothers down. Literally in this case.” was a comment left on forum FAZED by user jhumbug.

It stands in stark contrast to the comments on YouTube like that of  dukenukembunz69 who says, “Nigga got split by an old ass white guy with balls and all the black fucks are sayin its the white guys fault. NEVER EVER FUCKIN LEARN and when shit hits the fan white people and asians arn’t gonna take shit no more.”

Many of the comments passed along with this video show exuberance, not at irony or a sense of justice, but at the fact that a white man beat a black man.

Knowing nothing about the two people involved, the white man was characterised as a Vietnam veteran who knew how to defend himself – an image of honour, a hard life and willingness to work hard at what he does. The black man was characterised as a gangster. Some comments went so far as to say that it was “karma” getting back at the man for all the trouble he’d caused.

These assumptions are what makes  a video such as this dangerous and shocking. There is no evidence that the black man was not a hard-working young man who had pulled himself to where he was by toil and strife only to (mistakenly) hear a old white guy ask how much it would cost for him to shine his shoes. There is no evidence that he is not a usually mild-tempered guy who decided to stand up for his rights. But the comments do not allow for this possibility:

“Yeah but we got jobs and don’t mind working for our stuff. Can’t say that for many niggers though. After all, the best way t starve a nigger to death is to hide their food stamps under their work boots.” – URTARDS, Youtube

Other characters

This video features characters besides the protagonist and villain.

There is the woman sitting ignoring the violence. Her lack of interest in the situation has served to make her an object of fascination – where “object” is the word. The Internet has christened her “Amber Lamps”, the “hot chick”.  She shows none of her personality in the video and this seems to make her less-than-human outside it. The meme has many spin-offs directed towards her – the hot woman, the object.

There is also the black woman who films the scene and says to the black man, “we can sue him, I got it on video”. Comments point out that her and her friend are eating Fritos while watching the action and they take the old man’s shopping once he has left the bus. They are used to epitomise the image of lazy, thieving black people – the black people who go ” ‘sho good eatin!” (referenced in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks).

Lastly there is the older black woman, the one who sits out of the action but eggs on the black man. She plays the role of the modern stereotype: the African American liberal who cries for civil liberties but does not take part in claiming them.

Real danger

Aside from this video’s popularity re-enforcing stereotypes, it can also cause real danger. Some viewers have put together what they call a “movement”. They have managed to get hold of the name and address of the woman who filmed the video and say their mission “was/is to get the man with the epic beard his bag back and ruin this woman’s life.”

Once again the Internet has managed to produce something, passed along because of humour, that can cause real damage to real people and enforces stereotypical views. And most are all-too-willing to accept it. Why? Because it’s funny!

]]> http://cyberlens.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/amberlamps/feed/ 2 tallyunlikely ebmbff epicbeard 1266476454184 http://cyberlens.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/privacy_price/ http://cyberlens.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/privacy_price/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:53:41 +0000 tallyunlikely http://cyberlens.wordpress.com/?p=235 ]]> The Register has an amusing account of a TechCrunch interview with Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that he is a prophet.

Surprisingly,  Zuckerberg is not referring to foreseeing the rise of social networking, but rather the lapse of concern over privacy.

Zuckerberg said that he saw the coming of an age where people would want to share everything, and he aimed his business at that market.

“That social norm is something that evolved over time and we followed.”

But is it really a social norm? Or is it something that people are beginning to accept because the companies driving social networking have finally found a way to make money?

Social networking sink-hole

John Norton of The Guardian posted an interesting article last month about how social networking can not make money.

“The truth is that investing in social networking represents the triumph of hope over experience. The optimism comes from a feeling that it’s impossible to gather, say, 350 million people in one place and not somehow make money.” he says.

The number is not random. It is in fact the user count of Facebook as of last week – a population greater than that of America. And yet Facebook is still running at a loss. Twitter, according to Norton, has not made a cent.

These networks can not charge membership – for then people will just not sign-up. Advertising, which has worked so well for Google, does not work so well in other cases – with click-through dropping as low as 8% according to Norton.

Is investing in social media, therefore a waste of time?

Fun and games

Facebook has come under fire recently for its privacy policy updates that, by default, share your information with everyone, including Google.

According to PrivCom.gc.ca, social networking is part of a revolution in marketing. It allows companies to openly harvest personal information about people and target products directly at them.

Dennis Yu, CEO of advertising/marketing firm BlitzLocal, came clean to TechCrunch recently, in an article about just that.

“People on Facebook won’t pay for anything. They don’t have credit cards, they don’t want credit cards, and they are not interested in shopping. But you can trick them”

He explained how applications developed for Facebook can go viral, and users are all too willing to give over their personal information. This data includes who they are, where they’re from, what they like and most importantly email and phone numbers, which can be sold to advertisers.

A number of court cases, including the recent class action suit against Zynga and Facebook, are attempting to defend users against such scams, but how much good will the suits do if people are so willing to give away their personal information?

The information age

As I mentioned in my previous post, we’re in an age now where people want to get to know each other online, and this requires sharing of information. On that much  Zuckerberg and I agree. However, Zuckerberg implies that a willingness to share automatically means people are no longer concerned about privacy.

The dawn of social networking brought about the creation of a new ecosystem, where in order for the environment (the sites) to survive, the sharks (the scammers) have to survive too. The people who frequent these social networks may not be aware of the danger, they my make silly mistakes like offering a limb to a great white (Farmville springs to mind), but this doesn’t mean that they no longer care if they’re eaten.

When it comes to privacy I believe there’s a very fine line. People may be more willing to share what their favourite food is, but that doesn’t mean that they want to be harassed in their own homes by telesales people trying to sell it to them.