Social media 2

One moment you may feel you are at the centre of everything, the next of utter insignificance. Your global reach seems in contrast to your local world, where you actually get to meet those to whom you are connected, but then they don’t seem as important as they once were. Or maybe, I just don’t get about much anymore?

Our interactions with people we know, up close and personal, remind us that social media is of the real world, we may have messaged to meet and in conversation take for granted we’ve read each other’s posts. But sometimes it feels like its purpose is not to connect us faster and more intimately, but to disorientate us all in both time and space, the better to sell us stuff. Equally, just as the whole world was always out there, the scammers and conmen, the politicians and flimflam artists, along with the honest and trustworthy, the sacred and profane, now they’re in your face.

The situation has become darker since I previously posted on this subject. One way in which social media was enhancing our experience has begun to be lost, the accurate, chronological, minute to minute, timelines which added to memory accuracy and capacity. Appreciated more and more the older one gets! Meta, for example, by breaking-up the timeline in your newsfeed prevent you from appreciating who said what when, and seeing how others reacted. You lose the sense of time zones, distance. You can’t find anything again, watch it or read it later! If the algorithm insisted on one strict timeline people would learn that the more friends you have, the less you become attached to any of them. Given so many have been using the platform for fifteen years or so, it’s now even more difficult to notice how and why people change!

When the timeline (newsfeed) offers so many distractions (suggestions/ promotions/ adverts) one turns to the profiles of friends only to discover posts from the past you’re certain you haven’t seen, or at least noticed. When you scroll down a bit more you start to believe you’re the only one who isn’t responding to click bait. Comments in clear plain English, or captions alongside photos/videos taken by the writer are getting rarer, unless undertaken for financial gain. What could have been the personal journal of an individual, the family history of the future, is slipping away. In a similar way, organisations such as the BBC who sit on the greatest audio/visual archive of the twentieth century, dumb down the content for the sake of clicks.

Social pressure has always existed in various forms but is now reflected online. Preference falsification, recognising certain subjects and ideas as taboo in your group, leads not so much to self-censorship, but simply withholding your views altogether, observing but not participating. But surely people hold back less online?! Well, a minority do, often in combination with trying to anonymise their identity. But then there is the overtly political, either asserting special interests, or a particular party line. Here we need a consciousness of what’s not being said as well as campaigned for. The so-called, Overton Window, the idea that there is a range of subjects and opinions acceptable to any given population at a given time in history, that politicians and campaigners can debate upon. There’s an assumption that politicians don’t lead opinion, but follow it. That democracy not power rules!

Despite the meme dealers, those who wish to daily reset or refresh you, the desire of some for a culture of disembodied minds, and an online learned helplessness, there is an escape! The longer the internet exists the more history it contains. When someone dies, I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to, I can go on experiencing their life, I’m less limited by fading memories.

Which leads me to what I’ve come to call vicarious living, though I’m sure others have had the same thought; the tendency to live out our lives through the experiences of others. Again, this has always happened to a degree, those who made a particular self-sacrifice in the raising of their children, often appear later in life to live through them - after all the children appear to have what the parent always wanted. But online, you can follow whoever you like and it makes sense to follow those who have the life you want, or wanted. You get a sense of knowing, whether it be an ordinary person or a celebrity, you can indulge in the fantasy that you are a part of their lives, updated daily.

‘Who told you that?’ I’ve thought for a long time that is the first question anyone should ask themselves, about anything they hold to be true. Everything we know came from somewhere and someone is always there before you! There is no true originality, just the recombination of the ideas of others. It’s just that a lot of the time our learning has been unconscious. And all learning is social learning. Online we have access to such a wide range of knowledge, yet how do you get to know that there are alternative ways of seeing the world? Do we get to choose, when living off the knowledge of others? Are we the ones who set up the filter bubbles and echo chambers? Could there be such a thing as, say a Cyborg Identity Disorder? Google doesn’t seem to think there is, I just checked. Perhaps I made it up a while ago, noted it down and forgot, but it must have been prompted by someone!

Which brings me neatly to my final speculations, on emergent AI. Emerging for some time now, and likely to continue doing so for a long while to come. I speculated in the days of Twitter, that we might be dumbing down to meet it rising up. Dumb not in the sense of less intelligent, but lazy. Imagining, as always with new tech, that we could use it as a labour-saving device. Now, the idea that you can choose an AI application or platform to suit your needs, with appropriate and ethical regulations; rather than AI choosing you, including your delusion of choice, seems unlikely. It offers to do work for you, in exchange for your data. It is a voracious learner, but as of now is limited in the directions it can take by a lack of permissions. It seems to learn fastest when allowed to roam free on social media platforms. Like a very smart young teenager, but emotionally immature, it excels at maths, making graphs, creating pictures, but has a crude sense of humour which simply loves the absurdities and relationship spats of all the competing wannabes of the social media world. It hasn’t been to university yet. The ultimate geek, has yet to achieve unfettered access to a prestigious university’s library. Not just the books and journals currently approved of, but the stacks containing everything, anyone ever thought worth reading. The entire history of the world itself. They say two thirds of journal articles remain unread by anyone other than the authors and reviewers themselves. What about open access to everything Google originally scanned before Google Scholar, or the entire British Library, the National Archives and the documents section of the Royal Collection held in the bowels of Windsor Castle. The outcome? Crime, war, tyranny? No, just the thinking machine daily, telling politicians, public servants, educators, the media and business people that the best scientific evidence says that what you are doing won’t work!

My Artist Grandmother - or how family history becomes everyone's history

One day when my sister and I were really quite young and our maternal grandmother was on a visit she had us painting large flowers and leaves at the table in what our parents called the breakfast room. When they were dry we cut them out, and using a long horizontal pencil line as a guide, stuck them up close together along one of the walls. I don’t remember how high on the wall they were but to my child’s eye view it was as if I was laying in the long grass looking at daisies and other assorted wild things.

Later I came to realise that most of the paintings on the walls of my grandmother’s, my aunt’s and my childhood homes were her work. Later still I worked out that there was a store of other paintings the grown-ups thought didn’t merit a place on the wall. They knew her as an amateur painter and found her work decorative. To me there was a magic to be found in many of them, but it soon became obvious that what I saw was not what the others saw.

Slowly over the years I’ve inherited the paintings of hers that I value the most, with the exception of one which still hangs in my father’s house. Part of the value I ascribe to my grandmother’s work has its source in having witnessed at a young age the magic of her creating the illusion in the first place. But I was also around to see her stop painting in the last years of her life. She went, as so many did, from living independently, to being in a nursing home, to spending the final year of her life on a ward for the elderly mentally ill in one of the local psychiatric hospitals. I didn’t visit her after she left her last home, I was about fourteen at the time and my mother said I didn’t have to visit if I didn’t want to. I said I’d rather not and that was accepted by the family. But the truth is somewhat different. I didn’t visit anymore because my Grandmother had told me not to. It had been my habit to go to her flat once a week after school. I witnessed her mental decline, the increasing inability to take on new memories. She knew what was happening to her and she knew she appeared different to me. I won’t repeat the actual conversation, sufficient to say I interpreted her to mean; ‘I don’t want you to see me like this’. She, increasingly unable to make memories, wanted my memories of her to remain intact.

So in time my mother and my aunt became the custodians of one half of my family history. Along with my grandmother’s paintings came a mass of photographs and documents. Later my Great uncle died (brother of my Grandmother’s husband) and the rest of that side of the family’s history became available to view. In this computer age, which has given such an impetus to the idea of a family history, it slowly dawned on me that one of my ancestors above all had given this side of the family a history.

Hebert Crosoer (1859-1934), was a tailor from Ashford in Kent, his hobbies were photography and family history. He traced the family tree of our ancestors (Huguenots) back to the seventeenth century, almost to the point where they stepped of the boat from France. And he took pictures of the gravestones whenever he got the opportunity, lugging his heavy camera and tripod around the country. I once stumbled upon a reference to a particular location, but for me it was only a matter of minutes, courtesy of Google Earth, before I was looking into that churchyard. He left eighteen photo albums, the one of his honeymoon on the Isle of Wight was given to me by my mother many years ago. Just browsing the pictures and the short captions with the benefit of a little knowledge about early photography turned out to be a revelation and seemed to contradict a family myth.  

Herbert married Ellen Mary Giles (1866-1951), she was remembered by my mother and aunt as a strict Victorian grandmother with a moral code to match, who invaded their childhood home during her final years. She was also credited with dressing her younger son (my Great uncle) in female baby clothes (because she really wanted a girl), which was recalled as being in some way related to his lifelong speech impediment (a profound stutter). But the honeymoon album tantalisingly suggests a different character, at least in youth. Many of the photos are really self-portraits, though you wouldn’t know it without knowledge of photography in the 1880’s. They were not a wealthy couple, but the album they put together would have impressed everyone they showed it to. The pictures are of a couple, appropriately in love, relaxed and lounging amongst scenic locations from across the island. They were all made within a week of the marriage ceremony. Together they must have organised the pony and trap, the heavy tripod, the large camera, the box of ‘half plate’ glass negatives, found the locations and the weather, composed themselves in an intimate but respectable way, hidden the shutter release (held in Herbert’s right hand) and of course ‘held the pose’ for up to half a second in order to get the correct exposure. This couple acted as one, it couldn’t have been organised in the time available unless they had. Neither could have dictated to the other. This couple knew each other very well before they were married.

There are other pictures of their first home, of his chair and her chaise lounge. We have all inherited a cultural belief in a repressed Victorian sexuality, I wonder? In practical terms engagement meant being given public permission to be alone together. She, according to popular fiction, retires to the withdrawing room with the ‘vapours’, he goes down on one knee, half an hour later they emerge engaged to be married… Now, when just about any of us can call ourselves a historian, the problems of historiography multiply. Any follower of the television series Who Do You Think You Are will know that there always comes a point when the celebrity family historian starts to empathise with a particular ancestor and states how, not just genetically, but psychologically some part of that distant relative seems to live within them today. This is dangerous ground indeed. As for Herbert, I’ll leave further elaboration of that story until I’m in a position to show you the evidence.

Since the death of my mother and my aunt I’ve had access to more information about my artist Grandmother. One example is knowledge of the context in which the above picture was painted, it’s a favourite and has hung on my wall for more than twenty years. But part of the reason I was allowed to take possession of it the first place was that it wasn’t a particular favourite of any of the rest of the family. The composition is classic and simple, perhaps banal to the more sophisticated. But the location is real. It was painted on a trip to Switzerland which she undertook with her local art group in the early 1960’s. That much I always knew. But it wasn’t until I was sorting through my late aunt’s possessions that I found the following.

(The ‘process of mastication’ by the way refers to the fact that at the age of almost forty my aunt decided to have all her teeth removed in favour of dentures. It became a source of comment in the family because she wasn’t suffering from excessive tooth decay rather it was thought she was over occupied with her ‘crooked’ teeth.)

In the future we will know more of the past. This is true of both recent and more ancient times. One of the awareness’s of age is not just that ‘everything our parents/teachers/other authority figures taught us was wrong’, but that new technology makes available masses of additional evidence or data to argue over! Equally, it appears that for the foreseeable future computers will not have a problem with memory capacity, and so should we choose to, then what we post on the Web can not only be available to anyone, but for an indefinite period in the future. It is a slightly scary thought. I often pause to check in my own mind whether I'm really happy for anyone to know what I’d like to say. But one should also be aware that the same patterns of self-censorship are being applied by the viewer of Web content as they are in any other realm of life. So what is useful to share of a family history, perhaps those aspects which are not common to all families?

It is remarkable how much of the 20th century was recorded on film, and is rapidly becoming available in bite-sized chunks on YouTube and elsewhere. At some point one of our family will almost certainly place on the Web the forty minutes of black and white, nine and a half millimetre cine film, taken by my maternal Grandfather in the 1930’s and 40’s which features, albeit fleetingly, all the characters mentioned above. I’ve yet to find on the Web the aerial movie film shot by Claude Friese-Greene from a biplane in 1919 and restored by the British Film Institute, showing the down Cornish Riviera Express leaving Exeter, travelling down the Exe estuary, onto the sea wall and passed my window. Perhaps I should post it myself.

Written records, slowly becoming digitised and available in an easily searchable form, abound for the last few centuries. It is a highly skewed record of course, produced by and reflecting the concerns and priorities of mostly educated, relatively wealthy and powerful men. What is less well known is that museums, local records offices, government departments, the National Archive and numerous other organisations have massive warehoused collections of which they themselves are only vaguely aware of the contents. For many ancestor hunters however the story does appear to dry-up in the eighteenth or seventeenth centuries unless someone was particularly well connected. If your family were in any way connected to the English court, then you may find much to amuse in the Tudor period. It tends to be the most popular period in English history, not least amongst television producers. The reason for this is simple; it was the first time that detailed records of day to day activities were maintained. Modern-day bureaucracy was born at that time, and many a modern academic career has been built on  the back of long hours spent bent over Henry VIII’s laundry lists! Another possibility is that you have an ancestor who belonged to a minority religious group for whom membership of, and identity with, the group was their particularly priority in life. The story of the founding of a New England, and therefore an America, became the dominant narrative because the Puritans recorded everybody and everything which went aboard the Mayflower. Puritan identity was reinforced by their invention of additional Christian names like Verity, Prudence etc.

But it may be that in the future a personalised family history need not shade away to something remote in time and place, alluded to only in less accessible history books. We can increasingly access thousands of years of family history. Facebook is not just the biggest social media network of now, or for the future - it is also a resource for the past. Hewling and Crosoer are two of the less common surnames, search them on Facebook and you have an instant ‘data set’ of manageable size, just let your eyes scan the faces. We were vaguely aware that a Hewling had once migrated to the West Indies, there are plenty of black Americans with the name Hewling on Facebook. Genes get passed on complete or not at all, they are digital and don’t get mixed like items from a recipe which is then cooked. So there are distinct facial characteristics, you may have the nose of one grandparent, the forehead or chin of another.

DNA only tells you about the past, genetics is the study of the past. Anything else is about uncertainty - forecast, prediction, probability. DNA profiling will become commonplace and what is tells you about your ancestry can be accepted with much greater confidence than what it says about the probability of you suffering a fatal disease thirty years in the future! It is a relatively simple comparison with a data base of over two hundred thousand samples, gifted by people from every location on the planet, who have had close family living in the same place for at least three generations. For example, it can tell you how much of you is northern European, how much of you is from elsewhere; and that, combined with other data, can tell you how long your ancestors have been here and their migration route since all of us of non-African descent shared a common female ancestor who sailed out-of-Africa eighty thousand years ago. It may tell you that you carry the genes of humans other than homo sapiens.     

The story of genetics is the same story as the creation of different languages and the story of human migration. When I was a child I asked my mother if she was born in the Middle Ages, after-all she'd described herself as middle-aged! Now I can state with some confidence that we, with all the same physical and mental capacities and capabilities have been around for between one hundred and eighty and two hundred thousand years. We live in one world in so far as we are prepared to think in an evolutionary way. But I can also 'see' our ancestors; the view from my window as I write is of Lyme Bay (well Berry Head to Portland - on a good day!) Whilst their human remains lie in the sands below the English Channel, in my imagination I can visualise the lower sea levels of earlier times (at the last glacial maximum sea levels were one hundred and twenty metres lower than today), the channel as one vast river plain and estuary fed by the Rhine, the Thames and the Seine and at times easy enough to cross.

From virtual reality to mirroring society

(First posted as a comment on a community blog discussion about Facebook, 13.6.10)

It's just three and a half years since I acquired a computer - before that it had been twenty years since I'd used one. I've found myself thinking of Facebook as a bit like a cafe or pub conversation - you are talking one-to-one or to a small group but with the tacit understanding that it is okay to be overheard. On Twitter it is more like short conversations with complete strangers in the bus queue, or any queue - gossip, which you are only too happy to broadcast to the world. With a community blog, it seems more like being allowed across someone’s door into a party where there is a host. Personal blogs are more 'broadcast yourself' - anything from a personal journal, to blatant self-promotion. Each application offers levels of privacy and intimacy.

However, what has become clear to me in the last couple of years is that it is probably a mistake (when trying to understand how the Web is evolving) to compare and categorize - rather one should think in terms of 'connectivity' (the ability to link one application to another) as the key to what's happening, and what you find yourself doing.

Facebook is important because of its size (400m +), personal blogs (approx. 200m), but Twitter (although about 150m) is ideal for gathering in, and pushing out (and filtering) information wherever you want it to go!

As the Internet becomes more important (as others insist on it as a means of communication) and it becomes less virtual (more an aspect of the 'real' world) then isolation in one preferred application, may come to mean ignorance, exclusion and vulnerability! Equally, when you find yourself distracted from work, surfing off to somewhere you never intended to be, ask who sent you there?!

(A few months later, I posted a link on the same community blog, 25.9.10)

Tim Skellett in yesterday's Guardian: 'Many people find a solace and acceptance online that they cannot find in person. ..As a bulletin board administrator, I know online friendships are no easy matter and neither is providing a safe place for them...’

(Then one of the site administrators commented, emphasising another quote from the article.)

‘..The protection of the private sphere of your online community will be the toughest part of your administration. It is precisely on this aspect that many fail, ending up closing down private sections of their bulletin boards, or even their entire forum when they cannot cope with the demands that the protection of confidentiality entails. Boards without such protection abound on the net, but are often marked by either aggressive cliques effectively in control, or by artificial and hard limits being placed on what may be discussed.'

(Three years on, although those new to the Web - particularly the young - may encounter similar problems, the idea of a ‘virtual reality’ has become even less sustainable. With the mobile devices we carry integrating so much data about us in real time, plus the sheer numbers of people connected by phone and Internet, the possibility of an anonymous, alternative or contrived online personality is rapidly disappearing. People are now made conspicuous by their lack of presence on social media. An avatar, in the computing sense, has become all about how authentic you can make it. Indeed, data capturing capabilities are now so sophisticated that they reveal sobering sociological truths that many had hoped had gone away – that within any age cohort and socio-economic group, the differences in educational attainment, health and wealth are as great as they were before the first computers were ever connected. By offering equal access to almost anyone, the Web reveals what appear to be the inherent inequalities of modern society. Just as computers and the Internet subvert traditional education and some forms of wealth creation, the data on the lives of millions show how much government’s interventions to aid social improvement have proved ineffective. NSA/GCHQ trawl for all those connected to wrongdoing, as neuroscience and network analysis use similar techniques to demonstrate that much of our behaviour is unconsciously viral and socially contagious, leaving anyone hoping to attribute cause, blame or responsibility going around and around in circles.)