The media has discovered Second Life in a big way. So, I’m chatting with people about it. Here is an article in the New Haven Register (but I do have land!), and below is a piece for the local NBC affiliate. Camera adds 100 pounds, as they say. Oh, wait, they don’t say that?
Playing with Sketchup and Google Earth this semester. Here’s an attempt to put together a model of a fairly complicated building on campus. It’s probably not the best way to do it, since I’m new to the program, but it works. Also, somehow in one of the transcodings all my blues went to greens, which is a little strange, but doesn’t interfere much with the walk through. It’s longish (about 40 minutes) and only the first of three (maybe 2) parts.
Who knew this story had legs? Essjay, an active editor on Wikipedia, who has claimed to be a tenured professor, is in fact a community college dropout. It turns out he used the claimed position to win arguments over content on Wikipedia. Heck, if I knew a Ph.D. ever helped you win arguments, I’d put it after my name all the time. “Hi, I’m Alex, Ph.D., and I’m right.” (I do say the “and I’m right” part, but I guess the Ph.D. part gives it more weight.)
Some of this comes back to a New Yorker article entitled “Know it all: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise” by Pulitzer-winning Stacy Schiff that appeared last summer. I have already praised that article in this blog as being a nicely balanced and readable piece. As much as a black eye as this gives Essjay, and possibly Wikipedia, what I am most struck by is the fact that a well-regarded journalist and magazine failed miserably in checking credentials. Although Wales’s response could have been much better, the truth is that Wikipedia shouldn’t care whether someone has a Ph.D. or not—there are likely people claiming silly things about their own expertise every day on the talk pages of Wikipedia, but given that the resource is designed to draw its credibility from the sources, not the authors, this shouldn’t be a big deal. On the other hand, when I pick up the New Yorker and read that someone is a professor, I expect that they have made at least a rudimentary effort to check this. This is particularly true when the core of her argument is that there is a standoff between traditional sources of academic authority and new forms. Wouldn’t you think knowing which part of that spectrum one of your informants stands on is important? Kudos for appending a correction, but really: too little, too late.
The black eye suffered by Wikipedia is not so much to process as it is to general respectability, and it provides another outstanding piece of ammunition for those who are already critical. As Brock Read writes over at the Chronicle, “the incident is clearly damaging to Wikipedia’s credibility—especially with professors who will now note that one of the site’s most visible academics has turned out to be a fraud.” The Telegraph: “Deep down, though, we all knew it wasn’t that reliable.” Larry Sanger, long a critic of uncredentialed encycloping finds the initial shrug from Wales and Essjay’s “non-apology” to suggest that the moral keel of Wikipedia administrators is a more than a little uneven.
Wales’s initial acceptance of Essjay’s fake credentials, while they may have been spot-on in terms of the content of the site, were particularly tone deaf to the wider community of knowledge. While credentials do not matter to Wikipedia, they do matter to much of the non-Wikipedia world, and faking them suggests to critics and non-users that the core of Wikipedia is rotten. A more measured response would have used this as an opportunity to note that even the worst transgressions of any single editor are put in check by the community. Sure, that may be a simplification of the niceties involved, but as a simplification it does much better than “so what?”
What I find peculiar is that the New Yorker is largely getting a pass. Wikipedia doesn’t check credentials as part of its administrative structures—or, rather, hasn’t—but the New Yorker and “professional journalists” are expected to maintain certain standards, and they really fell down here.
The worst possible response: Wikipedia trying to check credentials of those who claim a degree. Someone at Wikimania last year suggested that those with a Ph.D. should be verified, and a little star placed next to their name. I noted then, and still think, that vetting academic credentials is a job left to journalists and fact-checkers, and not a worthwhile project for Wikipedia to engage in. I really hope they back off this position, and instead suggest that decisions not be made by credentialed fiat: “I have a Ph.D., so I must be right.”
A psychological report that indicates that self-esteem programs have given us a generation of narcissists is getting a lot of attention in the media. The authors argue that decades of being told that “gosh darnit, people like them” has gone to the heads of today’s college students.
Moreover, it seems social technologies encourage narcissism. Jean Twenge, an author of the report, is quoted as saying: “Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism. By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube.” (Wait: How can both MySpace and YouTube be narcissistic names, but whatever.) In other words, you may be a narcissist if you blog.
Uh-oh. Maybe this is all about me.
Naturally, there is something narcissistic about blogging. You have to believe that what you have to say is important enough for other people to hear. Twenge’s claim that the ability to express yourself actually “fuels” narcissism, rather than attracting narcissistic people (as does acting, journalism, and other careers—ahem, teaching—that require personal performance) seems to me to be more than a little premature. But what about this: are we all becoming narcissists?
By 2006, the article suggests, two-thirds of the students surveyed had scores above average on the Narcissistic Personality Index. Now, unless they were surveying near Lake Wobegon or the distribution was really skewed, it seems unlikely that two-thirds are above average—what is meant is that two-thirds are above the average of 1982 students. The difference is more than merely semantic, as a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder generally relies on someone being significantly above the average in terms of self-regard. If everyone’s self-regard is rising, it gets a bit harder to be considered a narcissist.
I am one.
I mean, I’ve always known I was a bit of a narcissist (I’m really good about knowing things like that), but never realized that I was a clinical narcissist. As I run down some of the short-form NPI items, I am clearly leaning toward that top (bottom?) end. For example:
(These are from the 40-item NPI created by Raskin & Terry in 1988, and reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.)
Now, it’s true, I didn’t answer all forty items as a raging narcissist, but I did tend very heavily to that end. As an aside, I wonder whether seeking out the NPI to take it can itself be considered a narcissistic act. In any case, I’m OK with being a bit of a narcissist, and I am interested in knowing other people who tend toward those characteristics. Normal is boring.
I guess the real question is the degree to which some of the less socially beneficial elements go hand-in-hand with these tendencies. Clearly, we don’t want to eliminate narcissists—in doing so, we would probably take out most of the interesting people who have ever lived or been imagined, from Gandhi to Godzilla. It seems that the worry is that if we are all becoming more narcissistic, we might all want to lead, all create our own fashions, all rule the world. But I wonder if, when it comes to being a creative owner of our selves and what we contribute, I wonder under these circumstances if greed is good.
Perhaps the real issue is that some people think that students should recognize their place, as passive recipients of collected wisdom. I don’t think that is the case. I am confident that I would do an OK job at ruling the world, but part of that is because I grew up knowing that I was special, and that I therefore had special responsibilities. The attitude that I find disturbing among students is not inflated self-regard, but deflated other-regard—a lack of respect for their fellow men, and a lack of knowledge about their circumstances. I am a humble narcissist; I know I believe I am more able than most, and therefore have to work harder to make everyone’s lives better. Too many college students believe that they are just average members of their caste, and have no desire to work their way to the top. They have no will to power, no will to commit the extraordinary, but instead believe that they should profit by being as close to average as possible.
If that’s narcissism, then I’m not your average narcissist. I’m special.
The Call for Papers for this year’s Wikimania is up. It will be held August 3-5 in Taipei this year. Probably too long a trip for me, but for any of the readers who may be in Asia that time of year, it’s certainly worth dropping in on. They are looking for presentations of various sorts on the following themes:
Kevin is playing with using his new helmet-cam to record his everyday experience. I did this a few years ago, trying to record an entire day, using a webcam and my laptop. Mine was, by necessity, shoulder-mounted, rather than head-mounted, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.
The idea runs back to Mann’s sousveillance or Brin’s reciprocal transparency, though I have to say that the term only gets at a slice of what I think this starts to get at. Really, it remains surveillance, and but with you as the “surveillor” and gateway to other people looking in. That is, the camera is naturally a panoptic device, a one-way mirror, and as such you have to wonder who is or will be observing you. When I did this, I wore a label next to the camera saying “You are being recorded,” and this resulted in a lot of discussions like the one Kevin has in this clip.
The emergence, however, of YouTube and similar services changes the nature of the video camera. In the past, there was always the possibility that something captured on a camcorder could be shown to others, and—if interesting enough—sold to the evening news. Now, however, at least in certain circles, there is the assumption that some form of the video is likely to find its way out onto the web. This makes the camera a different kind of device, and our cultural assumptions and public policy will change as this shift becomes complete.
On the one hand, someone taking pictures of a birthday party at a restaurant has become a common thing to see. But when those photos are likely to be published publicly, and facial recognition (either computer-driven or human-driven, as on FaceBook) becomes the norm, that camera takes on a new intrusiveness. One could even see restaurants outlawing cameras; which, of course, also means outlawing camera phones. Already, this is an issue for those going to courts where camera phones are not allowed. Imagine what happens when camera phones are not allowed in a quarter of the restaurants you visit.
I’m glad Kevin has done this. I’ve been planning on retrying my shoulder-mounted cam (in much lower resolution than Kevin’s new camera!) and do a “day in the life” or “week in the life.” While these kinds of experiments have been going on for a long time now within relatively limited groups (mostly wearables researchers), it will be interesting to see the degree to which amateur panveillance becomes more common in the coming months and years.