Multi-directional camera atop a Google street view car, captured in Dallas Texas. Source: Pablo Quinones
George Orwell’s all knowing Big Brother, imagined in his classic novel 1984, seems to have come true in our time. Edward Snowden’s leaks, really a river by now, have shown us the broad capability of the state to watch us. The extent to which the NSA can assimilate that massive harvest of data into something useful is questionable but will surely grow.
Orwell warned us of this Big Brother, but he didn’t foresee the rise of a more hip, friendlier Middle Brother: Facebook. While our Big Brother is a bully who beats us up if we don’t do what he wants, our Middle Brother is more subtle. He let’s us play with him sometimes and we feel good sharing our secrets with him-which he later uses to manipulate us.
In the June 17th issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an article about “emotional contagion” was published to controversy about privacy and informed consent. It was revealed that for one week in January of 2012, Facebook manipulated the newsfeed of 689,003 of its users (about 0.04% of users at the time) to display more emotionally positive, negative or neutral posts. We’ve heard about the potentially depressing effects of seeing everyone else’s best moments and comparing them to our worst, but the study shows that positive emotions expressed in a user’s newsfeed tend to produce positive posts. The same was true with negative posts. Emotionally neutral newsfeeds tend to discourage posts altogether. While we expect companies like Google and Facebook to use our data for targeted ads, this crosses another threshold of creepy for many.
In response to the uproar, the author of the study, a social psychologist in the employ of Facebook, Adam D. I. Kramer, states on his profile: “The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.”
Adam Kramer, the study’s author. Source: Facebook.com
It seems Facebook was trying to find just the right emotional balance to keep us coming back. It seems like a reasonable goal for a company whose revenue comes from eyeballs on ads. Part of this is just translating conventional manipulation into the digital world. Grocery stores already place staples in the back of the store to force us to pass by other offerings that we might just buy because we saw them and rows of candy bars tempt children (and adults) in line at the checkout, easy listening music is always playing as we shop. It’s business as usual.
However, in the era of Big Data, the potential for manipulation has increased exponentially. Can the techniques of emotional contagion be refined to condition us to more specific behaviors? Will the NSA learn to use their massive harvest of data not just for passive observation but active manipulation of individuals or groups considered dangerous?
The struggle of this generation is not to stop the advances of technology or squelch the potential of Big Data, but come to a fair balance between privacy and progress. Big Brother is watching us, but Middle Brother is listening. We need to be prudent about what we tell him.
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