For my group's website, please visit the link below:
http://www.wix.com/twccarsandtech/aircraft
For my group's facebook page, please visit the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-future-of-aviation-Aeroplanes/268188619883091?sk=wall
For my class' blog page, please visit the link below:
HTTP://TWCSHAHI2011.BLOGSPOT.COM/MASTERBLOG
Thank you all for your support!
Friday, November 11, 2011
WEEK 13. Last lesson. Boohoo :(
It was the last lesson for TWC and my group was supposed to present for our group project, out of 3 groups. We presented on the topic ‘The future of aviation’ with an emphasis on aeroplanes. After 13 gruelling weeks of projects, thesis papers and blog posts, it has finally come to a finale. I would like to thank Prof and the class for a wonderful classroom ambience and an effective discussion on technological issues. This class has expanded my horizons and made me realize how far technology has come in the last decade. A very prominent example will be the iPhone, which changed the consumers’ expectations of a phone and made smartphones the must-have item for every young consumer.
The second group presented on the topic of telecommunications, and they made a very creative and funny video on how telecommunications have evolved since the 18th century. It was an eye-opener for me because I always thought that the telephone came before the telegraph, but the actual reality was that the telegraph came into existence nearly 60 years before the telephone experiment by Alexander Graham Bell. Following that, the fax machine came into use, followed by a giant leap in technology from the Internet. Despite all these improvements, the future remains exciting. In five years’ time, holographic images projected from mobile devices for us to view images, type notes and basically perform all functions available on smartphones may be available.
My group presented on the future of aviation, focusing on 4 aspects, namely fuel efficiency, gravity-powered airplanes, scramjet engines and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Gravity-powered airplanes are still in the theory stage, which means it has not been tested in an actual experiment. It works in the same principle as the Zeppelin which was common during the pre-war years. However, instead of using hydrogen or helium, vacuum is used so as to further reduce the weight of the plane and displace more air for the same volume. As for scramjet engines, it is a futuristic form of engine that provides so much thrust to the plane that it is able to reach speeds of nearly Mach 10, or nearly ten times the speed of sound. This means that the time spent on air travel can be minimized to as little as two hours for a round the world flight. It can also allow for greater fuel efficiencies since it uses hydrogen as fuel. However, one limitation is that it needs a conventional jet engine to boost it to Mach 5 speeds. Further, until now, no prototype of the scramjet engine has survived its test, mainly because at such high speeds, the engine experiences too much friction and its flight pattern becomes very unpredictable. UAVs are a form of planes heavily utilized in the military world, with the Americans and Israelis relying on them heavily for missions in the Middle East. They remove the need for a plane to have a pilot, instead relying on a ground pilot to control the UAV remotely from a safe distance. This reduces the casualty rate, allows smaller planes to be built which can then escape detection by radar more easily and saves fuel since a lighter plane can now be built. In the future, we debated whether these planes can be used in the commercial arena. Even though autopilot is now a standard procedure on commercial flights when the plane is cruising at 12000m above sea level, a switch to totally unmanned flights will possibly face large resistance from passengers due to security risks, safety risks as well as a stigma against totally relying on computers.
All in all, these group presentations had been very informative and had piqued my interest in TWC. Despite this course coming to an end, I believe I will continue to be inspired and amazed by new technologies, and will take an active role in getting exposed to these technologies and learning about the possible limitations and social problems that it may cause. I would like to thank Prof Gurinder Shahi for his very engaging and innovative approach to teaching.
The second group presented on the topic of telecommunications, and they made a very creative and funny video on how telecommunications have evolved since the 18th century. It was an eye-opener for me because I always thought that the telephone came before the telegraph, but the actual reality was that the telegraph came into existence nearly 60 years before the telephone experiment by Alexander Graham Bell. Following that, the fax machine came into use, followed by a giant leap in technology from the Internet. Despite all these improvements, the future remains exciting. In five years’ time, holographic images projected from mobile devices for us to view images, type notes and basically perform all functions available on smartphones may be available.
My group presented on the future of aviation, focusing on 4 aspects, namely fuel efficiency, gravity-powered airplanes, scramjet engines and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Gravity-powered airplanes are still in the theory stage, which means it has not been tested in an actual experiment. It works in the same principle as the Zeppelin which was common during the pre-war years. However, instead of using hydrogen or helium, vacuum is used so as to further reduce the weight of the plane and displace more air for the same volume. As for scramjet engines, it is a futuristic form of engine that provides so much thrust to the plane that it is able to reach speeds of nearly Mach 10, or nearly ten times the speed of sound. This means that the time spent on air travel can be minimized to as little as two hours for a round the world flight. It can also allow for greater fuel efficiencies since it uses hydrogen as fuel. However, one limitation is that it needs a conventional jet engine to boost it to Mach 5 speeds. Further, until now, no prototype of the scramjet engine has survived its test, mainly because at such high speeds, the engine experiences too much friction and its flight pattern becomes very unpredictable. UAVs are a form of planes heavily utilized in the military world, with the Americans and Israelis relying on them heavily for missions in the Middle East. They remove the need for a plane to have a pilot, instead relying on a ground pilot to control the UAV remotely from a safe distance. This reduces the casualty rate, allows smaller planes to be built which can then escape detection by radar more easily and saves fuel since a lighter plane can now be built. In the future, we debated whether these planes can be used in the commercial arena. Even though autopilot is now a standard procedure on commercial flights when the plane is cruising at 12000m above sea level, a switch to totally unmanned flights will possibly face large resistance from passengers due to security risks, safety risks as well as a stigma against totally relying on computers.
All in all, these group presentations had been very informative and had piqued my interest in TWC. Despite this course coming to an end, I believe I will continue to be inspired and amazed by new technologies, and will take an active role in getting exposed to these technologies and learning about the possible limitations and social problems that it may cause. I would like to thank Prof Gurinder Shahi for his very engaging and innovative approach to teaching.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Week 12 (Presentation Week)
Today, for the lesson, there were 3 groups presenting their websites. One group presented on social networks and their impact on society, one presented on technology for disabled people, and another group presented on technology and the arts.
For the first group presenting on technology and the arts, it was a eye opener for me because throughout the course, we had been focusing on technology and its practical uses. There was little attention given to technology in the arts. This group presented that technology will be infused into the way we hear music in the future. For example, when we listen to music, no longer is it merely sound waves travelling into our ears and us simply listening to the beats from our music players. The next generation of technology will allow us to ‘visualize’ music, such that when music is played, we are actually able to ‘make out’ the shape of the music waves dancing around in our heads. I think that this is actually a very interesting idea to work on, but whether it will be accepted by the public is another issue. For example, some may simply want to listen to their music for relaxation after a long day at work, and do not wish for any ‘advancements’ in their music to distract them and make it too complex for them. To these listeners, music is to be enjoyed at its purest and simplest form, not a technologically-modified song that has ‘depth’ and ‘movement’. I belong to this group of listeners, so I can describe vividly how we feel, and this technology will not be very popular with us.
The second group talked about using technology for disabled people. We watched a video of Nicky Vujicic, a man who was born with no limbs at all. It was an inspiring sight to see him make full use of his life and to treasure it as well, despite having such a terrible disability and not being able to do things that normal people will be able to do. If there were more resources used to help these people, it will be even more wonderful. Luckily, there are already advances in this field. Using telebraille, among other innovations, to help the disabled communicate with other people and to help them learn as well. This field of innovation is very meaningful, since society has for a very long time sidelined this group of people and has not devoted enough energy, money and attention to helping them. However, one constraint of this technology is the high price that machines that employ these technologies command. This limits the number of people who can afford these machines, which means they will not be effective in helping many of the disabled, which is what this field is all about. Secondly, there are barriers to overcome before these new technologies are accepted by mainstream society so that they can be provided to the disabled at low cost and to be widely available. Again, technology has to be fused with monetary concerns and practical issues before it can be called a success.
The third group presented on the social networks and its impact on society. They focused on the social and political issues. This topic is very similar to my individual topical review paper, so I was very aware of the current situation as well as the future considerations that social networks provoke. The group talked about the Arab Spring, and how social networks such as Facebook were used for communications and to mobilise large crowds to gather and protest against the regimes. However, the group failed to find proper examples on societal changes that social networks have catalyzed, and they had confused political change for social change. As Prof has said, social change is more on how social networks change the way people interact with one another, not whether social networks have been used for democratic change, since that will be classified under political change. Overall, all three groups presented quite well, but I thought that more can be done to make their websites more interactive and more interesting for the casual visitor to browse through. Also, more can be done to substantiate the content on the website. A paragraph or two on each point is simply too short and too frivolous for a reader to take the website seriously, since he or she can simply use Google to find a website that contains more information.
For the first group presenting on technology and the arts, it was a eye opener for me because throughout the course, we had been focusing on technology and its practical uses. There was little attention given to technology in the arts. This group presented that technology will be infused into the way we hear music in the future. For example, when we listen to music, no longer is it merely sound waves travelling into our ears and us simply listening to the beats from our music players. The next generation of technology will allow us to ‘visualize’ music, such that when music is played, we are actually able to ‘make out’ the shape of the music waves dancing around in our heads. I think that this is actually a very interesting idea to work on, but whether it will be accepted by the public is another issue. For example, some may simply want to listen to their music for relaxation after a long day at work, and do not wish for any ‘advancements’ in their music to distract them and make it too complex for them. To these listeners, music is to be enjoyed at its purest and simplest form, not a technologically-modified song that has ‘depth’ and ‘movement’. I belong to this group of listeners, so I can describe vividly how we feel, and this technology will not be very popular with us.
The second group talked about using technology for disabled people. We watched a video of Nicky Vujicic, a man who was born with no limbs at all. It was an inspiring sight to see him make full use of his life and to treasure it as well, despite having such a terrible disability and not being able to do things that normal people will be able to do. If there were more resources used to help these people, it will be even more wonderful. Luckily, there are already advances in this field. Using telebraille, among other innovations, to help the disabled communicate with other people and to help them learn as well. This field of innovation is very meaningful, since society has for a very long time sidelined this group of people and has not devoted enough energy, money and attention to helping them. However, one constraint of this technology is the high price that machines that employ these technologies command. This limits the number of people who can afford these machines, which means they will not be effective in helping many of the disabled, which is what this field is all about. Secondly, there are barriers to overcome before these new technologies are accepted by mainstream society so that they can be provided to the disabled at low cost and to be widely available. Again, technology has to be fused with monetary concerns and practical issues before it can be called a success.
The third group presented on the social networks and its impact on society. They focused on the social and political issues. This topic is very similar to my individual topical review paper, so I was very aware of the current situation as well as the future considerations that social networks provoke. The group talked about the Arab Spring, and how social networks such as Facebook were used for communications and to mobilise large crowds to gather and protest against the regimes. However, the group failed to find proper examples on societal changes that social networks have catalyzed, and they had confused political change for social change. As Prof has said, social change is more on how social networks change the way people interact with one another, not whether social networks have been used for democratic change, since that will be classified under political change. Overall, all three groups presented quite well, but I thought that more can be done to make their websites more interactive and more interesting for the casual visitor to browse through. Also, more can be done to substantiate the content on the website. A paragraph or two on each point is simply too short and too frivolous for a reader to take the website seriously, since he or she can simply use Google to find a website that contains more information.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
twc week 11 lesson blog
Twc minutes 10
We watched a really funny video on the technology that ‘Microsoft’ will create in the next 498 years. Although the video had a sarcastic tone to it, the technologies presented are very appealing and futuristic. The technologies seen in the video were similar to those in a video by Microsoft that was shown in class a few weeks ago. I especially liked the technology where everything, including mugs and tables, had interactive touch screens that can function as a virtual folder or even tell the level of liquid in the mug, and had aesthetically pleasing designs coupled with these amazing technologies. But the question is, how long will we have to wait before we have access to these technologies? The future is indeed bright for mankind, and it is up to the scientists to engineer ways to lower the costs of the technologies, the advertising specialists to market the products, and for a big firm to reap the economies of scale. The firm that can do this will be the next Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon combined.
There was another interesting video which we watched. It was about the three hottest technologies in the future. One that caught my attention was the Nokia morph, which uses nano technology in the phone. This phone will be able to morph into different shapes, whichever pleases the user, and have vivid touch screens that are paper-thin. Not only are these phones smaller and easier to carry around, they are so intuitive and fun to use that the company that is able to sell this phone will definitely be the world leader in the industry within a year. This phone packs even more functions in a single device than the iPhone, because it acts as a phone, a watch, a computer, and you can even peel off layers of the phone, just like that!
Another technology that the video introduced was the use of salt water as a fuel in the future. A cancer researcher found out that when salt water is bombarded by EM waves, it burns at an extremely high temperature with a bright red flame. This is an exciting prospect for the energy industry and for the world, because in today’s age, not only do we have to meet an exponential rise in demand for energy, we have to do it in a way that does not damage the environment further. Salt water is hence a very environmentally-friendly method, if it works, because 75% of the world’s surface is water, and these water bodies are full of salt water. It is impossible to use up this supply of salt water, and using this supply of salt water will not hurt the environment in any way.
Going to the lesson proper, we talked about the common uses for foresight output. For example, they are used for policy recommendations, analysis of trends and drivers, technology recommendations etc. One interesting trend that I discovered was that Europe tends to dominate these forward-looking projects in all areas of research. This could be because the governments of Europe put more emphasis on forecasting the future and hope that these forecasts will influence policies across the globe. Having so many of the blueprints from Europe, the Europeans may be subtly trying to dominate the way the world thinks and envisions the future, and hopefully shift the future world into a mould that will be advantageous and suit Europe. If Europe does not have malevolent intentions, and that all these forecasting projects are used for the greater good, then it can be a good thing for mankind. If this is another form of neo-colonialism, where ideas are dominated by Europeans and forced upon others, then it is debatable whether these projects should be allowed to continue, or whether other regions of the world, namely Africa and Asia, should step up on these projects and present their views to the world.
Personally, I do not think that these forecasting projects are of much use. As Prof quoted, ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it’. Entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were responsible for creating products that no one could imagine the need for prior to its introduction. They created the demand for their own products, and made people dependent on them. These giants among men are responsible for changing the way we live, and the way we interact with other people, not dreamers and thinkers who do not take action. Most of the forecasting outputs may be trying to provide a framework and a structure for the uncertain future, but most of the time, they are off the mark. Before the emergence of Facebook and the iPad, no one could correctly predict the impact that these 2 products have on consumers and people.
We watched a really funny video on the technology that ‘Microsoft’ will create in the next 498 years. Although the video had a sarcastic tone to it, the technologies presented are very appealing and futuristic. The technologies seen in the video were similar to those in a video by Microsoft that was shown in class a few weeks ago. I especially liked the technology where everything, including mugs and tables, had interactive touch screens that can function as a virtual folder or even tell the level of liquid in the mug, and had aesthetically pleasing designs coupled with these amazing technologies. But the question is, how long will we have to wait before we have access to these technologies? The future is indeed bright for mankind, and it is up to the scientists to engineer ways to lower the costs of the technologies, the advertising specialists to market the products, and for a big firm to reap the economies of scale. The firm that can do this will be the next Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon combined.
There was another interesting video which we watched. It was about the three hottest technologies in the future. One that caught my attention was the Nokia morph, which uses nano technology in the phone. This phone will be able to morph into different shapes, whichever pleases the user, and have vivid touch screens that are paper-thin. Not only are these phones smaller and easier to carry around, they are so intuitive and fun to use that the company that is able to sell this phone will definitely be the world leader in the industry within a year. This phone packs even more functions in a single device than the iPhone, because it acts as a phone, a watch, a computer, and you can even peel off layers of the phone, just like that!
Another technology that the video introduced was the use of salt water as a fuel in the future. A cancer researcher found out that when salt water is bombarded by EM waves, it burns at an extremely high temperature with a bright red flame. This is an exciting prospect for the energy industry and for the world, because in today’s age, not only do we have to meet an exponential rise in demand for energy, we have to do it in a way that does not damage the environment further. Salt water is hence a very environmentally-friendly method, if it works, because 75% of the world’s surface is water, and these water bodies are full of salt water. It is impossible to use up this supply of salt water, and using this supply of salt water will not hurt the environment in any way.
Going to the lesson proper, we talked about the common uses for foresight output. For example, they are used for policy recommendations, analysis of trends and drivers, technology recommendations etc. One interesting trend that I discovered was that Europe tends to dominate these forward-looking projects in all areas of research. This could be because the governments of Europe put more emphasis on forecasting the future and hope that these forecasts will influence policies across the globe. Having so many of the blueprints from Europe, the Europeans may be subtly trying to dominate the way the world thinks and envisions the future, and hopefully shift the future world into a mould that will be advantageous and suit Europe. If Europe does not have malevolent intentions, and that all these forecasting projects are used for the greater good, then it can be a good thing for mankind. If this is another form of neo-colonialism, where ideas are dominated by Europeans and forced upon others, then it is debatable whether these projects should be allowed to continue, or whether other regions of the world, namely Africa and Asia, should step up on these projects and present their views to the world.
Personally, I do not think that these forecasting projects are of much use. As Prof quoted, ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it’. Entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were responsible for creating products that no one could imagine the need for prior to its introduction. They created the demand for their own products, and made people dependent on them. These giants among men are responsible for changing the way we live, and the way we interact with other people, not dreamers and thinkers who do not take action. Most of the forecasting outputs may be trying to provide a framework and a structure for the uncertain future, but most of the time, they are off the mark. Before the emergence of Facebook and the iPad, no one could correctly predict the impact that these 2 products have on consumers and people.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Session 10 discussions
We started off the class by discussing about the future of plastics, or more specifically, plastic chips. Currently, silicon chips are the standard in manufacturing computer chipa and circuitry mainboards. However, these silicon chips can be bulky, heavy and opaque. With plastic chips, computer chips can be further shrunk in size, allowing for smaller electronic gadgets. By making chips lighter, they allow for lighter gadgets to be manufactured, and this is in tune with the shift from PCs to mobile devices. With transparent plastic chips, aesthetically pleasing transparent gadgets, for example a transparent phone, can be manufactured. Moreover, plastic can also substitute glass as a material for use. Instead of hard, easy-to-crack screens made of glass, there will be flexible screens made from plastic. This will eliminate the frustration that many of us face when our iPhone screen cracks!
The class then talked about how innovation is driven by unmet market opportunities and needs (market driven research and development) → summit opportunities. This is true because unmet market opportunities have already defined the problem that society faces and
Supply can sometimes create demand – when people don’t realize they need it until they experience it e.g. iPhone.
Prof mentioned Albert Einstein’s quote, which said that people with imagination are more important than people with knowledge. Whereas people with knowledge are limited to what they have learnt and already know, people with imagination are not limited by any artificial boundaries. This can be drawn to the ‘Rising star and falling star’ model of dominance, where the people with imagination will be categorized under the rising star model. This is because those with imagination will be able to think out of the box and envision the future, whereas those who are bounded by their existing knowledge and do not put in the extra effort to seek new knowledge may find themselves lagging behind on the technology curve and remain stagnant.
The class viewed a video on the perfect woman, a product of two nerdy scientists from Japan and France. The video showed a robot shaped and modeled just like a real woman, though the motions are still very robotic and stiff. However, the scientists mentioned during the interview that their robot was able to interact with humans normally and were even able to answer questions that were not cued. This led me to the question: just exactly what is the boundary between humans and robots? With the existence of robots and computers that are already smarter than humans, such as the Deep Blue computer that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match and overwhelmingly defeated its opponents in a Jeopardy game, humans are no longer the sole sentinel beings on earth. With computers that can run algorithms faster than humans and better than humans, there arises a need to supervise these smart robots and make sure that they do not threaten the existence of humans. Their capabilities can be harnessed for the good of mankind, for example to help us do 3D modeling of buildings. However, when similar robots are engineered to kill humans, for example drones used by the military to carry out strikes against enemy forces, ethical questions arise and there has to be debates and careful thought put into the question as to whether they should be allowed.
How about the consequences of substituting labour with robots? In this age of pessimism and financial chaos, where unemployment is high, there really is no mood for talk on substituting more labour with machines, where the need for jobs is high. Despite talks on raising productivity by switching to automated supply chains and using more machines in service industries, the accompanying problem is always more people displaced by these machines and subsequently becoming unemployed. I believe that the need for productivity is crucial because it is the underlying reason for economic growth. However, productivity has to be carefully balanced with an expansion of jobs, whether by creating new industries or focusing more on non-substitutable jobs, such as the tourism industry or the teaching industry.
With China and India fast rising out of poverty and into the middle class, there will be an exponential growth in demand for power. That rise in demand for power will cause a similar rise in demand for copper, because copper is used for wiring. Therefore, wireless transmission of power will be a very attractive prospect if it can be made commercially viable. Not only will a huge amount of copper be saved and be used for other purposes, unsightly transmission towers will be a thing of the past, and there will be a greater ease in using and recharging electronic devices. Imagine a world where we can charge our phones simply by placing them on the table without any wires and connections, and by simply selecting a few options in the phone, the phone starts charging up by itself. This view of the future has already left me salivating and lusting for more.
The class then talked about how innovation is driven by unmet market opportunities and needs (market driven research and development) → summit opportunities. This is true because unmet market opportunities have already defined the problem that society faces and
Supply can sometimes create demand – when people don’t realize they need it until they experience it e.g. iPhone.
Prof mentioned Albert Einstein’s quote, which said that people with imagination are more important than people with knowledge. Whereas people with knowledge are limited to what they have learnt and already know, people with imagination are not limited by any artificial boundaries. This can be drawn to the ‘Rising star and falling star’ model of dominance, where the people with imagination will be categorized under the rising star model. This is because those with imagination will be able to think out of the box and envision the future, whereas those who are bounded by their existing knowledge and do not put in the extra effort to seek new knowledge may find themselves lagging behind on the technology curve and remain stagnant.
The class viewed a video on the perfect woman, a product of two nerdy scientists from Japan and France. The video showed a robot shaped and modeled just like a real woman, though the motions are still very robotic and stiff. However, the scientists mentioned during the interview that their robot was able to interact with humans normally and were even able to answer questions that were not cued. This led me to the question: just exactly what is the boundary between humans and robots? With the existence of robots and computers that are already smarter than humans, such as the Deep Blue computer that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a chess match and overwhelmingly defeated its opponents in a Jeopardy game, humans are no longer the sole sentinel beings on earth. With computers that can run algorithms faster than humans and better than humans, there arises a need to supervise these smart robots and make sure that they do not threaten the existence of humans. Their capabilities can be harnessed for the good of mankind, for example to help us do 3D modeling of buildings. However, when similar robots are engineered to kill humans, for example drones used by the military to carry out strikes against enemy forces, ethical questions arise and there has to be debates and careful thought put into the question as to whether they should be allowed.
How about the consequences of substituting labour with robots? In this age of pessimism and financial chaos, where unemployment is high, there really is no mood for talk on substituting more labour with machines, where the need for jobs is high. Despite talks on raising productivity by switching to automated supply chains and using more machines in service industries, the accompanying problem is always more people displaced by these machines and subsequently becoming unemployed. I believe that the need for productivity is crucial because it is the underlying reason for economic growth. However, productivity has to be carefully balanced with an expansion of jobs, whether by creating new industries or focusing more on non-substitutable jobs, such as the tourism industry or the teaching industry.
With China and India fast rising out of poverty and into the middle class, there will be an exponential growth in demand for power. That rise in demand for power will cause a similar rise in demand for copper, because copper is used for wiring. Therefore, wireless transmission of power will be a very attractive prospect if it can be made commercially viable. Not only will a huge amount of copper be saved and be used for other purposes, unsightly transmission towers will be a thing of the past, and there will be a greater ease in using and recharging electronic devices. Imagine a world where we can charge our phones simply by placing them on the table without any wires and connections, and by simply selecting a few options in the phone, the phone starts charging up by itself. This view of the future has already left me salivating and lusting for more.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
session 9 blog post
Session 9 minutes
For lesson 9, the first major issue that stood out was how Germany was utilizing solar power usage. Despite being a country not blessed with ample sunshine, it has invested heavily into solar power, with large open fields and stretches of grassland alongside the autobahn covered with solar panels. However, this scheme was successful since its inception due to the large subsidies that the federal government provided. For example, households or companies that sold one kilowatt-hour (kwh) of power to the grid received 50 cents when it took only 20 cents to produce one kwh. This encouraged the Germans to participate in the scheme, since there were profits to be made by investing in solar panels. The high fixed costs of the panels could then pay itself off over the course of 3-5 years. We then discussed about the possibility of implementing this in sunnier Singapore. Despite Singapore being a more favourable location for solar power exploitation, space constraints mean that we cannot exploit this to the fullest. However, with advances in solar energy technology, thin-film and malleable solar panels are available in the market, and these can be placed on windows of corporate buildings or even HDB buildings. The future for solar panels is indeed exciting, and all there is left is for governments around the world to gather the political will to implement renewable energy policies. If countries around the world heavily invest in solar technology, the economies of scales that can be exploited will be immense, and the subsequent cost savings can then be passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices.
We then talked about the sustainability of using fossil fuels in the future. Fossil fuels are finite, and it is unsustainable to deplete these resources without preparation for life without them. Also, there are consequences for burning fossil fuels, such as the emission of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, so there is an immediate need to divest away from oil and coal and invest in new power generation technologies. We watched a video on the usage of renewable resources in the USA. The use of renewable energy was 100% until the 1850s when the use of coal was introduced. Since then, the percentage has steadily decreased until now. One reason was because of the abundance of fossil fuels till now, second reason was because the effects of burning fossil fuels were not well known until recently, and thirdly because of the high energy density of fossil fuels as well as the ease of transporting it.
The class discussed about the possibility of the entire world returning to 100% renewable energy usage by 2050, and we concurred that it is almost impossible, for economic, political and social reasons. Some members of the class thought that 75% was a reasonable margin, but I think that a 30% would have been a great achievement already. I have a few reasons for thinking this way:
1. The rate of investment in green technology is too low to reach such a high target as of yet. Even though China has invested much in green tech, the percentage of investment with GDP is miniscule.
2. The rate of energy usage is expected to increase exponentially as more people live in cities and as India and China, two huge countries representing almost 3 billion people, develop and grow rich. Not only will green tech have to replace existing grids and meet current demand, they will have to meet future demand in 2050 which is almost triple of what we are using now.
3. Unless future technologies reduce energy consumption for gadgets, energy demand will continue to rise exponentially and strain the grid.
4. Mindsets have to be changed. People have to accept the fact that fossil fuels consumption is unsustainable and push the government to implement national policies to ensure a gradual shift to green tech. however, this is easier said than done. For example, recently, the Australian parliament passed a law imposing a carbon tax, with the aim of reducing consumption of fossil fuels, but this has met huge resistance from the population who are unhappy with the resultant higher prices that will be paid for their energy consumption.
5. Air travel will be more and more common, but there is no technology right now allowing for mass air travel on airplanes that are NOT run on jet fuel. Hence, fossil fuels will still be consumed in 2050 by aeroplanes at least, and possibly used by the military since it is hard to conceal and camouflage vehicles run on solar power.
For lesson 9, the first major issue that stood out was how Germany was utilizing solar power usage. Despite being a country not blessed with ample sunshine, it has invested heavily into solar power, with large open fields and stretches of grassland alongside the autobahn covered with solar panels. However, this scheme was successful since its inception due to the large subsidies that the federal government provided. For example, households or companies that sold one kilowatt-hour (kwh) of power to the grid received 50 cents when it took only 20 cents to produce one kwh. This encouraged the Germans to participate in the scheme, since there were profits to be made by investing in solar panels. The high fixed costs of the panels could then pay itself off over the course of 3-5 years. We then discussed about the possibility of implementing this in sunnier Singapore. Despite Singapore being a more favourable location for solar power exploitation, space constraints mean that we cannot exploit this to the fullest. However, with advances in solar energy technology, thin-film and malleable solar panels are available in the market, and these can be placed on windows of corporate buildings or even HDB buildings. The future for solar panels is indeed exciting, and all there is left is for governments around the world to gather the political will to implement renewable energy policies. If countries around the world heavily invest in solar technology, the economies of scales that can be exploited will be immense, and the subsequent cost savings can then be passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices.
We then talked about the sustainability of using fossil fuels in the future. Fossil fuels are finite, and it is unsustainable to deplete these resources without preparation for life without them. Also, there are consequences for burning fossil fuels, such as the emission of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, so there is an immediate need to divest away from oil and coal and invest in new power generation technologies. We watched a video on the usage of renewable resources in the USA. The use of renewable energy was 100% until the 1850s when the use of coal was introduced. Since then, the percentage has steadily decreased until now. One reason was because of the abundance of fossil fuels till now, second reason was because the effects of burning fossil fuels were not well known until recently, and thirdly because of the high energy density of fossil fuels as well as the ease of transporting it.
The class discussed about the possibility of the entire world returning to 100% renewable energy usage by 2050, and we concurred that it is almost impossible, for economic, political and social reasons. Some members of the class thought that 75% was a reasonable margin, but I think that a 30% would have been a great achievement already. I have a few reasons for thinking this way:
1. The rate of investment in green technology is too low to reach such a high target as of yet. Even though China has invested much in green tech, the percentage of investment with GDP is miniscule.
2. The rate of energy usage is expected to increase exponentially as more people live in cities and as India and China, two huge countries representing almost 3 billion people, develop and grow rich. Not only will green tech have to replace existing grids and meet current demand, they will have to meet future demand in 2050 which is almost triple of what we are using now.
3. Unless future technologies reduce energy consumption for gadgets, energy demand will continue to rise exponentially and strain the grid.
4. Mindsets have to be changed. People have to accept the fact that fossil fuels consumption is unsustainable and push the government to implement national policies to ensure a gradual shift to green tech. however, this is easier said than done. For example, recently, the Australian parliament passed a law imposing a carbon tax, with the aim of reducing consumption of fossil fuels, but this has met huge resistance from the population who are unhappy with the resultant higher prices that will be paid for their energy consumption.
5. Air travel will be more and more common, but there is no technology right now allowing for mass air travel on airplanes that are NOT run on jet fuel. Hence, fossil fuels will still be consumed in 2050 by aeroplanes at least, and possibly used by the military since it is hard to conceal and camouflage vehicles run on solar power.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
TWC Paper (Draft)
Lin Liye G14
Individual Topical Review Paper
Social Networking and its evolution: A case study on Facebook
Executive Summary
This paper aims to discuss on the issue of social networking and its evolution with a focus on the world’s largest social network, Facebook, as well as the multilateral ways in which this innovation has changed the world culturally, socially and politically. Facebook, a social network originally intended for students in Harvard to get together, has expanded its reach worldwide, reaching 750 million users as of July 2011, and has already cannibalized other online social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster to become the single most dominant player in the market. Because of the long life of information on the Internet, the concept of privacy has gradually evolved as well. Privacy on Facebook means limiting who has access to one’s private information, not the exclusion of everyone to the information. Over sharing of information on Facebook can lead to employees being sacked and adolescents being cyber-bullied, among other reasons.
Facebook has also affected the world politically, as exemplified in the Arab Spring revolution in 2011. Across the Middle East and North Africa, citizens had used Facebook and other social networking sites to transmit information, garner support and mobilize crowds to protest against the government. Besides that, Facebook is emerging as an essential campaigning tool for politicians. A prominent example of a politician who had successfully exploited it is President Barack Obama, who was able to win over the young voters during the presidential elections in 2008. Other examples include the 2011 General Election, when both the ruling and the opposition parties fought to win over voters by setting up Facebook fan pages and campaigning online.
Looking into the future, this paper expects more time and attention to be devoted to social networking sites as campaigning tools, due to several reasons. There are obvious cost savings in doing so, and candidates can reach out to a wider audience than before. Also, Facebook can act as an old-fashioned petition, forcing governments to take notice of any cause that has managed to achieve a substantial number of ‘likes’ on its Facebook page. It can also exist as a check and balance on the government, since users are able to mobilize a large number of supporters to protest against corrupt acts, as seen in examples from India. Facebook allows every user to update their statuses and broadcast it, and this makes every user a potential journalist. This paper, hence, foresees a change that news will increasingly come from these avenues instead of conventional print sources and news channels. Examples from the Wenzhou train crash in China as well as the March 2011 tsunami in Japan show that users were first to alert the nation to such a disaster and shed light on the suffering of the survivors. Further, there will be a reduction in Internet anonymity as more and more people use their Facebook accounts to access other websites and forums and post comments. This runs counter to the initial trend of the Internet, which covered users with a cloak of anonymity. Using real identities will reduce the number of offensive and irrelevant comments so prevalent on forums as users become more discreet with what they post, but one disadvantage is that there is a further loss of privacy on the forums as users can no longer post anonymously.
Facebook can also act as a one-stop portal for different services online, such as shopping and checking medical records, though security issues remain the key obstacle to furthering these plans. With more and more social interactions happening online, it is also imperative to equip future generations with online social etiquette. Because information posted onto the Internet will stay indefinitely and has consequences for the user in the long-term as well, schools have to recognize the importance of Facebook as a communication tool and ensure students cultivate the right habits online. Finally, this paper proposes a Facebook effect, not unlike the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention espoused by Thomas Friedman, which states that two states with a 50% citizen participation on Facebook will not engage in armed conflict. This is because Facebook represents globalization, and a high participation rate on Facebook will reflect the degree of connectedness to the rest of the world of the country. A more globalized citizenry will be less willing to give up popular culture and material comfort for war and suffering.
Introduction
Men are social creatures. We constantly seek to be among others and to communicate our ideas to others. With the emergence of the Internet, we are now able to communicate and share with one another online, especially in social networking websites like Facebook. The numerous mobile gadgets that can access the Internet on the go mean that users can access Facebook everywhere with the appropriate network, which they can then use to broadcast anything of their choice to the whole world. Facebook has also affected and changed the world culturally, politically, commercially and socially. One example of its influence in politics will be the recent upheavals experienced in the Arab world. Online social networks, most notably Facebook, had been utilized by the population to organize protests and as a portal for the population to show their support for the supporters and voice their unhappiness about the incumbent regimes.
Through these events, Facebook has demonstrated its potential as a tool to assemble a large crowd in short notice, and this has many repercussions. One possible political repercussion is that autocratic governments will find it harder to crack down on dissent, and this brings the question as to whether Facebook will actually be an agent of democracy. It can also be as a campaigning tool, as exemplified by Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential elections. News channels and newspapers will not monopolize the broadcasting of news in the future, as citizenry journalism rises in importance. This is because Facebook allows users to upload information and share with the users’ networks of friends, allowing a quicker and more efficient transmission of information. Etiquette in online social networks has become very important because everything that is uploaded to the network remains there for posterity, yet it is still a relatively unexplored field. Children and teenagers who sign up for accounts on these online social networks at such a young age may not understand the consequences of posting an inflammatory comment, which may have repercussions in their future work life. Hence, this paper will talk about implementing mandatory online etiquette lessons for students as a future consideration. Due to space constraints, this paper will only discuss social and political perspective in the world today, and will be focusing on the political, social and cultural perspectives in the near future.
Historical Perspective
From the 1980s, people could communicate through electronic bulletin board systems¬¬¬¬¬¬1. These websites were mostly frequented by computer geeks and allowed users to post information and engage discussion (Lusted, 2011: p.8). However, these usually involved only people living in the same region or city. However, it was only in 1995, the start of the Internet age, when Internet providers and search engines such as Yahoo created forum websites where members could post comments and interact with one another. The first recognizable social networking site, sixdegrees.com, emerged in 1997, and it lasted from 1997 to 2001 when it ran out of business. It was probably the source of inspiration for future social networking websites such as Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004.
Indeed, the reach of these social networks have broadened exponentially, from the initial community of computer hobbyists to the global online community found on Facebook. The waiting time for which the other party can access the information sent out by other users has shrunk from days to seconds. The effective audience of online social networking has also increased exponentially since the start of social networking, from a single individual to as many as over a million ‘friends’ for the most popular pages on Facebook. Even within the short lifespan of Facebook, it has already undergone many changes, including a recent facelift in September 2011 that changed the way users view profiles now as well as the way news appear in the homepage through Facebook Timeline. One possible reason for this change is because with a wider community of users, as well as the escalating number of friends that each user now has compared to the past, Facebook recognizes that most of the updates are just ‘noise’ that contains irrelevant and uninteresting information to the user. Instead, live feeds now stream continuously at the right side of the screen in a format not unlike that of news channels. This leaves the homepage relatively uncluttered and prevents overloading of information from bogging down the casual user, which may leave them disenchanted with the whole Facebook experience, reduce their activities on Facebook and even quit Facebook altogether, since it takes too much effort to differentiate between useful and even vital information and spam.
Current Situation
Social Perspectives
Privacy has evolved in meaning in the age of Facebook, and it has become socially acceptable to share personal things such as photos with friends and strangers. Due to the nature of the Internet, almost everything that is uploaded to the web stays in the web forever. Once a photo or instant message hits online, users lose control and cannot take it back (Mooney, 2009)[p.69]. Pictures are laid bare on Facebook for everyone to see, whether from one’s own album or photos that have been ‘tagged’ by friends. Pictures in compromising positions or posts that knowingly or unknowingly insult people close to you can no longer be erased away without a trace. The new Facebook Timeline, a profile replacement whereby user information is presented as a long, scrolling timeline going back to their date of birth (October 4, 2011, The Australian), shows that Facebook has retained all the information that users have uploaded throughout the years in their databases. This demonstrates the long life of Internet content, and what the user posts today may possibly come back to haunt him twenty years later when he applying for a job. According to Danah Boyd, a social networking expert at the University of California, Berkeley, young people growing up in an online world no longer see privacy as keeping information confined to oneself…it has become a matter of controlling who has access (Mooney, 2009)[70]. There is a change in the mindset of people in the Internet age, where it has now become acceptable for strangers to have access to our photos and to know about us through the information published on our ‘wall’. Besides the issue of privacy between the users themselves, they now have to contend with Facebook itself. Facebook already has information on the sites that each user frequently visits, as well as the links and videos one had posted, which Facebook will then match each user with the ‘relevant’ advertisements it deems suitable for the user. So much information is extracted from every individual that there are now worries on how Facebook will take action in protecting these information, as well as the ethical issues of whether a company should have so much knowledge of the individual’s online habits.
Facebook has also introduced a new function which is termed as ‘frictionless sharing’, and what it means is that sharing a comment, picture or video is no longer limited to just the first degree Facebook friends, but to everyone, namely the second degree friends, third, and so forth. What this means is that it is now easier for wall posts to become viral on Facebook, and this can further contribute to overloading of information on Facebook. It can however be used in ways to demean other users, and this may result in cyber bullying becoming more and more prevalent in the future. Due to the uncontrolled spread of information, users have no way of censoring or restricting access to comments that shame or hurt them in any manner. Imagine the impact on the self-esteem of an adolescent who is the victim of cyber bullying. Already, across the globe, there are reports of teenagers committing suicide because they were unable to bear the shame of being taunted in full view of their friends and family. Such materials can also impede career advancement. For example, when the Philadelphia Eagles allowed their star Brian Dawkins to leave for the Denver Broncos earlier this month, Dan Leone, a gate chief at the Eagles’ stadium, expressed his disappointment by referring to the situation with an obscenity on his Facebook status update. Mr. Leone’s boss, who was his Facebook friend, forwarded the update to an Eagles guest services manager, who fired him (March 28, 2009, New York Times).
Facebook has successfully tapped on the efforts of netizens to build its website. Working with the same principle as Wikipedia, Facebook allows users to contribute to the site. For example, when Facebook wanted to translate its website to Spanish, it allowed users to give opinions and be part of the team that helped to translate the entire website. Within four weeks, 1500 Spanish speakers around the world had created a full version (Kirkpatrick, 2010). Subsequent translations were built upon this initial success and users continued to be enthusiastic and contributed to the site. For example, the French version of the website was completed in less than two days (Kirkpatrick, 2010). By utilizing the users’ contributions instead of hiring more staff to cover the increased workload, adding new languages cost Facebook almost nothing. By outsourcing its work to the Internet and nobody in particular, Facebook is relying on the individual’s discretion to contribute anything that is relevant to the website.
Facebook allows people from different classes and social statuses to come together and interact with each other equally. In an interview with Kirkpatrick, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, recalled the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Facebook friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister and invited Mr. Rasmussen to speak to his class of special-needs children, which the prime minister obliged (zdnet.com). Zuckerberg said that “this represents a generational shift in technology” and that “what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.” Before Facebook, it was inconceivable for the common people to have such close interactions with a Prime Minister on a day-to-day basis, yet Facebook has managed to bridge the gap between voters and leaders. By allowing an average Joe to easily access a person with status and power like the prime minister, Facebook demonstrated its ability to cut through these invisible social barriers.
Political Perspective
Facebook has also effected political change in the world. A prominent example of Facebook activism in politics is the recent Arab Spring revolution in North Africa and the Middle East that was sparked off in Tunisia on 18 December 2010. Citizens who were fed up with the injustice that was so prevalent in society overthrew leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, but one key difference that separated these revolutions with the previous revolutions in history was the use of Facebook and other social networking sites to disseminate information and mobilize crowds to protest. These social networks allow huge numbers of people to be mobilized in a very short time, when a single message can be seen by tens of thousands of people as a post on their ‘live feeds’. This allows discussions to take place for all to view and take part in, though potentially allowing demagogues to take over the discussions. Facebook has become one of the first places dissatisfied people worldwide take their gripes, activism and protests, and these campaigns work well on Facebook because it allows large numbers to become aware of an issue and mobilize quickly (Kirkpatrick, 2010). It has become so relevant to policy and decision making that in 2008, President Bush and his National Security Council staff discussed about it in the White House Situation Room during crises (Kirkpatrick, 2010).
Facebook can also be used as a campaigning tool. President Obama was the first presidential candidate to successfully exploit Facebook to garner support for his campaign and to win over the young voters, who were the majority of his supporters, during the presidential elections in 2008. Facebook has an inherent advantage over other mediums of broadcasting such as print and television because it allows the candidate to broadcast updates and information at a much lower cost than it will take if the candidate tries to campaign through print sources and television advertisements. The cost of an Internet campaign consists of only the salaries of the Facebook page’s developers, which are fixed. To add on, the marginal cost of advertising to an additional person on Facebook is zero. This means that sharing the information online with one more person is free, and this pushes costs down even further. Whereas the circulation of a newspaper is limited to the vicinity of a city, and candidates have to buy advertising space on multiple newspapers in order to reach a wide audience across the nation, Facebook allows candidates to reach a large geographical area instantly at zero cost, since almost every household in the developed world has access to the Internet. For example, once subscribed to Barack Obama’s election page, users are able to receive regular updates and be kept up to date on election issues. Moreover, the same page that Obama used to campaign for the 2008 elections was used as a portal to communicate with the voters and answer queries. Also, the same page can be used for future elections, as Obama has demonstrated on his page as he prepares for the upcoming 2012 mid-term elections.
During the recent 2011 General Elections in Singapore, Facebook was a crucial medium for the transmission of information that was used by both the incumbent party as well as the opposition. Online groups such as Temasek Review and The Online Citizen surfaced, urging users to support a particular party or personality. Instead of merely receiving news from conventional sources such as newspapers and the news channels, which represented views that were deemed by the general public to be more favourable to the incumbent than the opposition, users could now access all sorts of videos, including those of interviews and rallies, and participate in discussions using their real identities. One could even argue that Facebook was a major contributing factor to the unpopularity of Tin Pei Ling, a candidate for the People’s Action Party. Facebook allowed users to share videos extensively, and candidates who were not careful with their choice of words now faced intense scrutiny by the online community and risked videos of their faux pas moments replayed over and over online. Videos of Tin Pei Ling behaving inappropriately surfaced and became so viral that the numbers of viewers of her videos were among the top few for the elections. Public disillusion with her was so great that many Facebook groups and pages were set up to rally voters against her. Facebook had become so central to the elections as a medium for voters that within minutes of Ms. Tin being voted into parliament, groups were set up to express their unhappiness at her successful entry into politics.
Facebook is also a readily available medium for discussion to take place in. What differentiates it from other forums is that it has a ‘share’ button that allows other users to broadcast the videos on their own profile pages. This makes it very easy for information to be disseminated through a wide audience at a very short time, and no other forum comes close to both the number of users that Facebook has and the convenience of sharing information. Facebook also has a ‘like’ button that can be utilized by users to show their support, albeit passively, for any political cause. Although there has not been research done on this field, the number of likes that the posts from candidates get may act as a straw poll and an early indicator of how successful their campaigns are going. Currently, Facebook only has the ‘like’ button for users to indicate their interest. If the ‘dislike’ button, not unlike the one on YouTube, is included on Facebook, perhaps it can give a clearer idea of the percentage of voter support, which is more relevant to the politicians as compared to an absolute number of ‘likes’.
Future Considerations
Political Perspective
This paper foresees Facebook to be an important portal for political discussion, as well as an important tool for politicians to campaign and garner support. In an interview with U.S. News, David Kirkpatrick said that ‘Facebook had a significant role in the election of Barack Obama… any politician who really wants to come out of nowhere and have an impact, Facebook is the tool that he or she would be crazy to ignore.’ With the print media suffering from a steady decline in readership, and television advertisements surpassed by Internet ads, the trend is clear that our daily lives are more and more dependent on the Internet. With an increasing number of people having access to the Internet than before, it is pertinent for politicians to be connected with the electorate through online portals like Facebook. In fact, not only is it easier to reach out to a wide audience through the web, it is also more cost-efficient than other conventional sources. It is possible that in the future, political parties will shift their focus from news agencies to online social networks as their frontline contact with the masses. Manifestos of the parties, as well as the introduction of new members into the parties, will be uploaded onto the website to be scrutinized by the users before they are sent to the news agencies. Even through the period between elections, parties will be able to stay relevant and connected with the electorate by regularly posting updates, instead of only emerging to interact with the people during elections.
Facebook can be used as a tool to force democratic changes in countries, as exemplified by the Arab Spring revolutions, and it can be a deterrent against autocratic leaders to abuse their powers. Kirkpatrick also mentioned in the interview that ‘if you're upset about anything, and you want to get people riled up and join you in protesting it, no matter where you are in the world, Facebook is likely to be the first place you're going to turn if you're just an ordinary citizen…(because of) the ability to convey messages between people very efficiently and for messages to spread virally.’ The Arab Spring revolution across the Middle East and North Africa was a prime example of how social networks were utilized to rouse emotions, spread information and mobilize large crowds to protest against the regimes. Leaders around the world have witnessed the use of Facebook against regimes, and they are aware that similar unrest can happen in their countries as well. The ruling elites can prevent this by blocking Facebook entirely, as China had already done, or to be more democratic in ruling the country. Even in China, similar networking sites have appeared, for example Renren, and the central government is actively monitoring the site for any signs of dissent as well as suppressing the flow of information. In other Arab countries, the leaders have recognized the threat of Facebook as a weapon to focus opposition to its rule, and sweeteners have been dished out to the citizens in response to the Arab Spring, namely cash givebacks and adopting a more participative parliament, at least in name. The United Arab Emirates has expanded the strength of the Electoral College from less than 7,000 in the 2006 elections to almost 130,000 for the September 2011 ballot exercise (http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/07/18/158083.html). With Facebook, autocratic leaders around the world will find it harder to control the flow of information and the minds of the people.
Facebook can act as an old-fashioned petition and serve as a check and balance on the government. One way is for voters to set up a Facebook page devoted to a cause and use the number of people who have ‘liked’ their pages as a form of online petition and send it directly to the authority in charge. Time and money will be saved, and petitions will more likely to actually reach those whom the addressee of the petition is for. In countries such as India, which has seen high levels of corruption and bureaucracy, using Facebook as a form of whistle blowing on corrupt officials can be an effective way to force the government to clean up its act. With the released information readily available to all, every citizen will be able to view the deeds of the alleged, and groups can be created in short notice to gather support among users for a common cause. For example, it can be used to indict a corrupt official. Facebook can be exploited to force a government to be open about its policies and hence act as a form of check and balance on the government. Citizens will be more involved in the decision-making process, because any government that fails to meet the expectations of the electorate will face a potential outburst rallying against it on Facebook.
In the future, this paper feels that there may arise an organization that will supervise Facebook and its daily operations. With 700 million people users in Facebook and growing, each sharing and contributing, there is a growing concern that a privately owned company of 300 employees may not be appropriate in governing the burgeoning online social networking site. Because any changes to the terms and conditions of the site will directly and indirectly affect the lives of millions across the world, and because Facebook has already demonstrated its ability to effect political changes, the need to address this concern is grave. There are already calls for an external body to oversee the corporate governance of Facebook. This paper does not think that a supranational governmental body will oversee the corporate operations of Facebook, since Facebook is headquartered in California and hence falls under U.S. jurisdiction. However, it is possible to have an international advisory and supervisory board, not unlike the World Wide Web Consortium headed by web founder Tim Berners-Lee, which will take a largely passive role in ensuring that Facebook functions properly everyday. This ensures that while Facebook retains its independence to change the way it operates and implement changes on the website, there is also a check on it to make sure these changes are responsible and acceptable for users.
Social Perspective
This paper argues that news will increasingly emerge from social networking sites rather than conventional sources such as newspapers and TV news channels. On July 23, 2011, 8:38 p.m., the now infamous Wenzhou train crash occurred in China near the city of Wenzhou, but the first report of the accident was from a passenger in the train on a microblog at 8:47 p.m., instead of the state media in China. The post went viral on the Internet and was responsible for raising awareness to this incident before any reports by the TV stations. Even though these microblogs were the domain of only Chinese users, they demonstrated the potential of Facebook to replicate their successes. These microblogs have transformed each user into potential journalists, making it harder for official censorship to take effect and silence critics. They offer an alternative route to information that was previously monopolized by media and publishing companies, and to the state-sanctioned viewpoint. They are able to escape official censorship on news, meaning users get a fuller picture of what is actually happening. Also, because users can update a status instantly, the time gap between the incident and the reporting has shrunk so much as to be negligible. Another prominent example was the Japanese tsunami disaster that happened on March 14, 2011. The nation was first informed of the scale and the human suffering caused by the tsunami by a post on a Japanese social networking site, not one of the national broadcasting channels. As such, there may be a ‘flip’, a synonym for revolution, where news channels will increasingly source for the latest news from these networking sites like Facebook. Already, there are isolated cases of incidents from Facebook making their ways to the daily news.
This paper foresees that increasingly, people will be using their real identities online. Using Facebook identities to publish news or post comments can have positives. Already, media companies like the Huffington Post have integrated Facebook with their websites, which allows Facebook users to directly comment on and share the news using their Facebook identity (Kirkpatrick, 2010). By removing the veil of anonymity when they use their real identity to comment on an issue, they force readers to be more selective with their choice of words. Moreover, when the provenances of the comments are made known, the comments can have more credibility, depending on who posted them. One glance at the comments available on website like YouTube would reveal that many comments posted under anonymity were irrelevant and even offensive. The Internet had been operating on a system of anonymity since its birth, where users were shielded from revealing their real identity when posting on online forums. There may be opposition to the trend of using our real identities online, as it leaves the user more exposed. Furthermore, it is still unclear on which way the future will proceed. If there is indeed a shift in popular perception to use their real identities online, there can be consequences as well. For example, in countries where free speech is stifled and the population suffers from oppressive rule, using real identities will make it easier for the regime to identify dissidents and arrest them. Also, by revealing identities, people may be less willing to make disparaging remarks, even if they are due, and are more inclined to niceties and pleasantries.
Facebook can be a one-stop portal, linking different services for the users in a single website. If one goes to an online forum, chances are that the forum will prompt the user to log in via his or her Facebook account. By collaborating with other websites not related to it and allowing users to use their Facebook accounts to access other websites, users will be able to enjoy a seamless experience for different websites by simply logging in using their Facebook accounts. This not only makes it more convenient for the user to surf the net, forum users no longer have to trouble themselves memorizing different usernames and password combinations for sites which they do not visit frequently enough faced by. Logging in using their Facebook accounts also give added advantages to the user because they can share materials from other websites more conveniently back on Facebook. Currently, though, users are only limited to relatively unimportant services such as online forums. One can only imagine the possibilities that will be unlocked if Facebook is able to integrate with crucial services that requires higher security levels such as healthcare, shopping, banking and local governmental services. Patients will be able to see updates on Facebook from their doctors giving advice on their medical conditions, and patients can also consult doctors for symptoms that they are unsure of by sending a private message or even posting on the doctors’ profiles.
However, there are certainly limitations to this further integration of all services. One of these will be the heavier reliance on Facebook in our everyday lives, which will lead to us surrendering too much of our privacy as well as giving FB too much control and information about our lives. If a rogue employee threatens to release all these information in the same as what Julian Assange did via Wikileaks, or sell these information to the highest bidder, private medical information will be made public and it can be very embarrassing for people with diseases that carry a social stigma along with them, for example gonorrhea or even HIV. Hence, before more progress can be made integrating these services, reliable web security has to put in place first.
With online social networking taking on an increasingly central role in our lives, there may arise in the future compulsory primary school classes for social etiquette on online networking sites. Currently, we already have social etiquette lessons, but these lessons are not extended to online etiquette. An increasing amount of our time is spent online, but there is no formal lesson structure or courses conducted by professionals to teach on such etiquette issues. Moreover, even though Facebook requires users to be above 13 years old in order to be eligible to set up an account, these rules are frequently flouted. A quick survey among primary school students in Singapore found that almost every student had a Facebook account by posing as someone who is above 13 years old. These young children are exposed to the Internet at a young age, and naturally, they will not understand the consequences of their actions on Facebook. What a ten year old student thinks is appropriate may not necessarily be so, and the student may look back and regret that particular post in the future, twenty years later. Hence, it is imperative for schools to implement these ‘life skills’ in primary schools immediately. Some schools in Singapore, such as Hwa Chong Institution, make it compulsory for their students to attend social etiquette lessons to make sure they are able to behave adequately in social functions, and they are taught basic things like recognizing the different dress codes for different functions, formal table manners and even something as basic as tying a tie. This is done with the view that having social etiquette will be a necessity in the future when the students graduate and are out in the workforce interacting with their colleagues, superiors and clients. This paper argues that an online social etiquette course is more relevant and necessary because of the fact that information on Facebook will leave a digital footprint behind, meaning that incriminating posts on Facebook may have a bigger impact on one’s career than a mismatched tie can bring. Recognizing this fact, Nicole Seah, an opposition candidate in the General Elections 2011, was rumoured to have spent over a year cleaning up and censoring her Facebook accounts by removing unglamorous photos and refraining from posting explicit remarks. In comparison, Tin Pei Ling was unprepared for the scrutiny by the press of her Facebook accounts and failed to limit access to inappropriate photos and videos, and the resultant leakage of photos and videos that placed her in a bad light further shifted public opinions against her. Facebook has only been in popular use for less than 7 years, and yet there were already so much material of Ms. Tin inappropriate for a public figure that had accumulated on the site. It is therefore reasonable to extrapolate this phenomenon and assume that teenagers today, with a longer exposure to Facebook before they reach working age, will have even greater amounts of information that they have to manage and censor. Hence, attending and passing an online social etiquette course should be a graduating requirement for primary school students in addition to the usual academic requirements. This will bring about greater awareness of the possible pitfalls of these online social networks, manage expectations of using these websites as well as equipping students with the essential knowledge such as customizing privacy settings as well as maintaining a good public image by not posting offensive or crude remarks.
Cultural Perspective
This paper proposes that the rise in number of users in Facebook will be inversely proportional to the risk of war between countries. As more people get more connected on Facebook, there is an increase in exposure to people from different countries and regions. The question is whether there will be a similar rise in cultural assimilation or understanding, and if there will be a Facebook effect not unlike that of the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention (GATCP) espoused by Thomas Friedman. The GATCP states that two countries with the McDonald’s franchise operating within them has never been to war with each other. This effect is only relevant to conflict between two states and does not include civil war. As Friedman mentioned in his book, he expected the McDonald’s effect to be proven wrong in the future as the world becomes more globalized and every country has a McDonald’s, since throughout recorded history, there did not exist a single period of absolute peace across civilizations. This is a very interesting avenue to explore. After Thomas Friedman proposed his theory in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, it was proven wrong almost immediately by the invasion of Panama by USA, the invasion of Serbia by NATO and the invasion by Israel of Lebanon. Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system ‘symbolized by McDonald's’ (Friedman, 2000: 252–253).
Globalization brings greater integration of all nations together into a giant network through trade, commerce, and has brought the world closer together, with greater interactions between countries than any other period in history. Online social networks like Facebook have emerged as portals to bring people together and have allowed people from all around the world to interact with each other instantly at anytime and anywhere. Globalization has also presided over an extended period of wealth creation in the world, and many countries around the world have been lifted out of poverty when they opened up to trade with other countries. Like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, Facebook has become a symbol of modern society and a crucial part of it as well. These are products that are consumed by people worldwide, and they represent the shared values across countries: that of consumerism and an aspiration to join the middle class. With prosperity at stake, few if no countries will be irrational enough to give up market opportunities, rising comfort and prosperity in exchange for armed conflict and suffering. Fewer people will want to risk isolation and the loss of these modern amenities associated with globalization as well. Hence, Facebook can be used as a gauge of the connectedness of the population of any country i.e. the higher the percentage of population registered as a user on Facebook, the more globalized the citizens of the country. Moreover, because Facebook greatly increases interactions with citizens of almost every country, there can be more candid discussions between users from countries with strained relations privately, which will help countries to have a deeper understanding of the opposing party’s interests and constraints and push them towards negotiations rather than armed conflicts. With a greater stake in global prosperity, a more connected citizenry as well as a deeper understanding between countries, the risk of war must inevitably shrink. Therefore, this paper proposes the Facebook effect: that the risk of war between two states is inversely proportional to the percentage of registered Facebook users in the countries, and that two countries with a user participation of more than 50% on Facebook will not be in armed conflict.
Conclusions
The future is bright and uncertain for Facebook. Despite slowing growth rates, Facebook seems destined to achieve 1 billion in user membership in the near future, possibly before 2014. It is less than ten years old, and there is still a long way to go before it can prove that it is not just a fad that will die off like Friendster. But it does not appear to be moving in the same direction as that of Friendster and MySpace, but rather, it is following the paths of Google and Amazon, which has successfully integrated its services into the lives of users and consumers. This is because Facebook has tried to continue to be relevant by periodically reviewing the website and making the interface more user-friendly and interesting with increasing loads of information uploaded daily on the website. Facebook has already changed the way we communicate and keep in touch with our friends and family, where high school classmates can find each other on the website and relive their high school experiences, where parents can post reminders and messages on their children’s ‘walls’ now, keeping in touch with the family both online and offline. Not only has it changed the way we socialize, it has also proved to be a catalyst in the recent political revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. It is also undeniable that Facebook will be a major fighting stage for political parties in the future.
However, challenges await Facebook. Even great start-ups stagnate after some time, and Google is a prime example of this, given that it has struggled to further increase market capitalization and introduce new ideas and products. Facebook has struggled to make profits that match the estimate of its market price, even though it is not listed yet. Besides that, there may even surface a new social networking site that provides a more refreshing approach to online networking, which may render Facebook to be obsolete and redundant. Similar networking sites already exist that are mostly catered to the domestic market, and Facebook will have to find a way to penetrate the closed market and increase market share.
References
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/07/15/how-facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-are-changing-politics
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/facebook-reaches-200m-users-is-it-too-powerful/1417
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html?hpw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Arches
Friedman, Thomas L. (2007). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century (2nd Ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Watkins, S. Craig (2009). The young and the digital: What the migration to social-network sites, games, and anytime, anywhere media means for our future. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
Mooney, Carla (2009). Online social networking. Farmington Hills, MI: Lucent Books.
Are social networking sites harmful? (2011). Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press.
Kirkpatrick, David (2010). The facebook effect: The inside story of the company that is connecting the world. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Mesch, G.S., & Talmud, I. (2010). Wired youth: The social world of adolescence in the information age (p.5). New York: Routledge.
Friedman, Thomas. (2000) The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books.
Lusted, M. A. (2011). Social networking: MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Edina, Minnesota: ABDO Publishing Company (1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/opinion/frictionless-sharing-a-cause-for-concern/story-e6frgb0o-1226157574498
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/7453443.html
http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/07/18/158083.html
Individual Topical Review Paper
Social Networking and its evolution: A case study on Facebook
Executive Summary
This paper aims to discuss on the issue of social networking and its evolution with a focus on the world’s largest social network, Facebook, as well as the multilateral ways in which this innovation has changed the world culturally, socially and politically. Facebook, a social network originally intended for students in Harvard to get together, has expanded its reach worldwide, reaching 750 million users as of July 2011, and has already cannibalized other online social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster to become the single most dominant player in the market. Because of the long life of information on the Internet, the concept of privacy has gradually evolved as well. Privacy on Facebook means limiting who has access to one’s private information, not the exclusion of everyone to the information. Over sharing of information on Facebook can lead to employees being sacked and adolescents being cyber-bullied, among other reasons.
Facebook has also affected the world politically, as exemplified in the Arab Spring revolution in 2011. Across the Middle East and North Africa, citizens had used Facebook and other social networking sites to transmit information, garner support and mobilize crowds to protest against the government. Besides that, Facebook is emerging as an essential campaigning tool for politicians. A prominent example of a politician who had successfully exploited it is President Barack Obama, who was able to win over the young voters during the presidential elections in 2008. Other examples include the 2011 General Election, when both the ruling and the opposition parties fought to win over voters by setting up Facebook fan pages and campaigning online.
Looking into the future, this paper expects more time and attention to be devoted to social networking sites as campaigning tools, due to several reasons. There are obvious cost savings in doing so, and candidates can reach out to a wider audience than before. Also, Facebook can act as an old-fashioned petition, forcing governments to take notice of any cause that has managed to achieve a substantial number of ‘likes’ on its Facebook page. It can also exist as a check and balance on the government, since users are able to mobilize a large number of supporters to protest against corrupt acts, as seen in examples from India. Facebook allows every user to update their statuses and broadcast it, and this makes every user a potential journalist. This paper, hence, foresees a change that news will increasingly come from these avenues instead of conventional print sources and news channels. Examples from the Wenzhou train crash in China as well as the March 2011 tsunami in Japan show that users were first to alert the nation to such a disaster and shed light on the suffering of the survivors. Further, there will be a reduction in Internet anonymity as more and more people use their Facebook accounts to access other websites and forums and post comments. This runs counter to the initial trend of the Internet, which covered users with a cloak of anonymity. Using real identities will reduce the number of offensive and irrelevant comments so prevalent on forums as users become more discreet with what they post, but one disadvantage is that there is a further loss of privacy on the forums as users can no longer post anonymously.
Facebook can also act as a one-stop portal for different services online, such as shopping and checking medical records, though security issues remain the key obstacle to furthering these plans. With more and more social interactions happening online, it is also imperative to equip future generations with online social etiquette. Because information posted onto the Internet will stay indefinitely and has consequences for the user in the long-term as well, schools have to recognize the importance of Facebook as a communication tool and ensure students cultivate the right habits online. Finally, this paper proposes a Facebook effect, not unlike the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention espoused by Thomas Friedman, which states that two states with a 50% citizen participation on Facebook will not engage in armed conflict. This is because Facebook represents globalization, and a high participation rate on Facebook will reflect the degree of connectedness to the rest of the world of the country. A more globalized citizenry will be less willing to give up popular culture and material comfort for war and suffering.
Introduction
Men are social creatures. We constantly seek to be among others and to communicate our ideas to others. With the emergence of the Internet, we are now able to communicate and share with one another online, especially in social networking websites like Facebook. The numerous mobile gadgets that can access the Internet on the go mean that users can access Facebook everywhere with the appropriate network, which they can then use to broadcast anything of their choice to the whole world. Facebook has also affected and changed the world culturally, politically, commercially and socially. One example of its influence in politics will be the recent upheavals experienced in the Arab world. Online social networks, most notably Facebook, had been utilized by the population to organize protests and as a portal for the population to show their support for the supporters and voice their unhappiness about the incumbent regimes.
Through these events, Facebook has demonstrated its potential as a tool to assemble a large crowd in short notice, and this has many repercussions. One possible political repercussion is that autocratic governments will find it harder to crack down on dissent, and this brings the question as to whether Facebook will actually be an agent of democracy. It can also be as a campaigning tool, as exemplified by Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential elections. News channels and newspapers will not monopolize the broadcasting of news in the future, as citizenry journalism rises in importance. This is because Facebook allows users to upload information and share with the users’ networks of friends, allowing a quicker and more efficient transmission of information. Etiquette in online social networks has become very important because everything that is uploaded to the network remains there for posterity, yet it is still a relatively unexplored field. Children and teenagers who sign up for accounts on these online social networks at such a young age may not understand the consequences of posting an inflammatory comment, which may have repercussions in their future work life. Hence, this paper will talk about implementing mandatory online etiquette lessons for students as a future consideration. Due to space constraints, this paper will only discuss social and political perspective in the world today, and will be focusing on the political, social and cultural perspectives in the near future.
Historical Perspective
From the 1980s, people could communicate through electronic bulletin board systems¬¬¬¬¬¬1. These websites were mostly frequented by computer geeks and allowed users to post information and engage discussion (Lusted, 2011: p.8). However, these usually involved only people living in the same region or city. However, it was only in 1995, the start of the Internet age, when Internet providers and search engines such as Yahoo created forum websites where members could post comments and interact with one another. The first recognizable social networking site, sixdegrees.com, emerged in 1997, and it lasted from 1997 to 2001 when it ran out of business. It was probably the source of inspiration for future social networking websites such as Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004.
Indeed, the reach of these social networks have broadened exponentially, from the initial community of computer hobbyists to the global online community found on Facebook. The waiting time for which the other party can access the information sent out by other users has shrunk from days to seconds. The effective audience of online social networking has also increased exponentially since the start of social networking, from a single individual to as many as over a million ‘friends’ for the most popular pages on Facebook. Even within the short lifespan of Facebook, it has already undergone many changes, including a recent facelift in September 2011 that changed the way users view profiles now as well as the way news appear in the homepage through Facebook Timeline. One possible reason for this change is because with a wider community of users, as well as the escalating number of friends that each user now has compared to the past, Facebook recognizes that most of the updates are just ‘noise’ that contains irrelevant and uninteresting information to the user. Instead, live feeds now stream continuously at the right side of the screen in a format not unlike that of news channels. This leaves the homepage relatively uncluttered and prevents overloading of information from bogging down the casual user, which may leave them disenchanted with the whole Facebook experience, reduce their activities on Facebook and even quit Facebook altogether, since it takes too much effort to differentiate between useful and even vital information and spam.
Current Situation
Social Perspectives
Privacy has evolved in meaning in the age of Facebook, and it has become socially acceptable to share personal things such as photos with friends and strangers. Due to the nature of the Internet, almost everything that is uploaded to the web stays in the web forever. Once a photo or instant message hits online, users lose control and cannot take it back (Mooney, 2009)[p.69]. Pictures are laid bare on Facebook for everyone to see, whether from one’s own album or photos that have been ‘tagged’ by friends. Pictures in compromising positions or posts that knowingly or unknowingly insult people close to you can no longer be erased away without a trace. The new Facebook Timeline, a profile replacement whereby user information is presented as a long, scrolling timeline going back to their date of birth (October 4, 2011, The Australian), shows that Facebook has retained all the information that users have uploaded throughout the years in their databases. This demonstrates the long life of Internet content, and what the user posts today may possibly come back to haunt him twenty years later when he applying for a job. According to Danah Boyd, a social networking expert at the University of California, Berkeley, young people growing up in an online world no longer see privacy as keeping information confined to oneself…it has become a matter of controlling who has access (Mooney, 2009)[70]. There is a change in the mindset of people in the Internet age, where it has now become acceptable for strangers to have access to our photos and to know about us through the information published on our ‘wall’. Besides the issue of privacy between the users themselves, they now have to contend with Facebook itself. Facebook already has information on the sites that each user frequently visits, as well as the links and videos one had posted, which Facebook will then match each user with the ‘relevant’ advertisements it deems suitable for the user. So much information is extracted from every individual that there are now worries on how Facebook will take action in protecting these information, as well as the ethical issues of whether a company should have so much knowledge of the individual’s online habits.
Facebook has also introduced a new function which is termed as ‘frictionless sharing’, and what it means is that sharing a comment, picture or video is no longer limited to just the first degree Facebook friends, but to everyone, namely the second degree friends, third, and so forth. What this means is that it is now easier for wall posts to become viral on Facebook, and this can further contribute to overloading of information on Facebook. It can however be used in ways to demean other users, and this may result in cyber bullying becoming more and more prevalent in the future. Due to the uncontrolled spread of information, users have no way of censoring or restricting access to comments that shame or hurt them in any manner. Imagine the impact on the self-esteem of an adolescent who is the victim of cyber bullying. Already, across the globe, there are reports of teenagers committing suicide because they were unable to bear the shame of being taunted in full view of their friends and family. Such materials can also impede career advancement. For example, when the Philadelphia Eagles allowed their star Brian Dawkins to leave for the Denver Broncos earlier this month, Dan Leone, a gate chief at the Eagles’ stadium, expressed his disappointment by referring to the situation with an obscenity on his Facebook status update. Mr. Leone’s boss, who was his Facebook friend, forwarded the update to an Eagles guest services manager, who fired him (March 28, 2009, New York Times).
Facebook has successfully tapped on the efforts of netizens to build its website. Working with the same principle as Wikipedia, Facebook allows users to contribute to the site. For example, when Facebook wanted to translate its website to Spanish, it allowed users to give opinions and be part of the team that helped to translate the entire website. Within four weeks, 1500 Spanish speakers around the world had created a full version (Kirkpatrick, 2010). Subsequent translations were built upon this initial success and users continued to be enthusiastic and contributed to the site. For example, the French version of the website was completed in less than two days (Kirkpatrick, 2010). By utilizing the users’ contributions instead of hiring more staff to cover the increased workload, adding new languages cost Facebook almost nothing. By outsourcing its work to the Internet and nobody in particular, Facebook is relying on the individual’s discretion to contribute anything that is relevant to the website.
Facebook allows people from different classes and social statuses to come together and interact with each other equally. In an interview with Kirkpatrick, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, recalled the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Facebook friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister and invited Mr. Rasmussen to speak to his class of special-needs children, which the prime minister obliged (zdnet.com). Zuckerberg said that “this represents a generational shift in technology” and that “what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.” Before Facebook, it was inconceivable for the common people to have such close interactions with a Prime Minister on a day-to-day basis, yet Facebook has managed to bridge the gap between voters and leaders. By allowing an average Joe to easily access a person with status and power like the prime minister, Facebook demonstrated its ability to cut through these invisible social barriers.
Political Perspective
Facebook has also effected political change in the world. A prominent example of Facebook activism in politics is the recent Arab Spring revolution in North Africa and the Middle East that was sparked off in Tunisia on 18 December 2010. Citizens who were fed up with the injustice that was so prevalent in society overthrew leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, but one key difference that separated these revolutions with the previous revolutions in history was the use of Facebook and other social networking sites to disseminate information and mobilize crowds to protest. These social networks allow huge numbers of people to be mobilized in a very short time, when a single message can be seen by tens of thousands of people as a post on their ‘live feeds’. This allows discussions to take place for all to view and take part in, though potentially allowing demagogues to take over the discussions. Facebook has become one of the first places dissatisfied people worldwide take their gripes, activism and protests, and these campaigns work well on Facebook because it allows large numbers to become aware of an issue and mobilize quickly (Kirkpatrick, 2010). It has become so relevant to policy and decision making that in 2008, President Bush and his National Security Council staff discussed about it in the White House Situation Room during crises (Kirkpatrick, 2010).
Facebook can also be used as a campaigning tool. President Obama was the first presidential candidate to successfully exploit Facebook to garner support for his campaign and to win over the young voters, who were the majority of his supporters, during the presidential elections in 2008. Facebook has an inherent advantage over other mediums of broadcasting such as print and television because it allows the candidate to broadcast updates and information at a much lower cost than it will take if the candidate tries to campaign through print sources and television advertisements. The cost of an Internet campaign consists of only the salaries of the Facebook page’s developers, which are fixed. To add on, the marginal cost of advertising to an additional person on Facebook is zero. This means that sharing the information online with one more person is free, and this pushes costs down even further. Whereas the circulation of a newspaper is limited to the vicinity of a city, and candidates have to buy advertising space on multiple newspapers in order to reach a wide audience across the nation, Facebook allows candidates to reach a large geographical area instantly at zero cost, since almost every household in the developed world has access to the Internet. For example, once subscribed to Barack Obama’s election page, users are able to receive regular updates and be kept up to date on election issues. Moreover, the same page that Obama used to campaign for the 2008 elections was used as a portal to communicate with the voters and answer queries. Also, the same page can be used for future elections, as Obama has demonstrated on his page as he prepares for the upcoming 2012 mid-term elections.
During the recent 2011 General Elections in Singapore, Facebook was a crucial medium for the transmission of information that was used by both the incumbent party as well as the opposition. Online groups such as Temasek Review and The Online Citizen surfaced, urging users to support a particular party or personality. Instead of merely receiving news from conventional sources such as newspapers and the news channels, which represented views that were deemed by the general public to be more favourable to the incumbent than the opposition, users could now access all sorts of videos, including those of interviews and rallies, and participate in discussions using their real identities. One could even argue that Facebook was a major contributing factor to the unpopularity of Tin Pei Ling, a candidate for the People’s Action Party. Facebook allowed users to share videos extensively, and candidates who were not careful with their choice of words now faced intense scrutiny by the online community and risked videos of their faux pas moments replayed over and over online. Videos of Tin Pei Ling behaving inappropriately surfaced and became so viral that the numbers of viewers of her videos were among the top few for the elections. Public disillusion with her was so great that many Facebook groups and pages were set up to rally voters against her. Facebook had become so central to the elections as a medium for voters that within minutes of Ms. Tin being voted into parliament, groups were set up to express their unhappiness at her successful entry into politics.
Facebook is also a readily available medium for discussion to take place in. What differentiates it from other forums is that it has a ‘share’ button that allows other users to broadcast the videos on their own profile pages. This makes it very easy for information to be disseminated through a wide audience at a very short time, and no other forum comes close to both the number of users that Facebook has and the convenience of sharing information. Facebook also has a ‘like’ button that can be utilized by users to show their support, albeit passively, for any political cause. Although there has not been research done on this field, the number of likes that the posts from candidates get may act as a straw poll and an early indicator of how successful their campaigns are going. Currently, Facebook only has the ‘like’ button for users to indicate their interest. If the ‘dislike’ button, not unlike the one on YouTube, is included on Facebook, perhaps it can give a clearer idea of the percentage of voter support, which is more relevant to the politicians as compared to an absolute number of ‘likes’.
Future Considerations
Political Perspective
This paper foresees Facebook to be an important portal for political discussion, as well as an important tool for politicians to campaign and garner support. In an interview with U.S. News, David Kirkpatrick said that ‘Facebook had a significant role in the election of Barack Obama… any politician who really wants to come out of nowhere and have an impact, Facebook is the tool that he or she would be crazy to ignore.’ With the print media suffering from a steady decline in readership, and television advertisements surpassed by Internet ads, the trend is clear that our daily lives are more and more dependent on the Internet. With an increasing number of people having access to the Internet than before, it is pertinent for politicians to be connected with the electorate through online portals like Facebook. In fact, not only is it easier to reach out to a wide audience through the web, it is also more cost-efficient than other conventional sources. It is possible that in the future, political parties will shift their focus from news agencies to online social networks as their frontline contact with the masses. Manifestos of the parties, as well as the introduction of new members into the parties, will be uploaded onto the website to be scrutinized by the users before they are sent to the news agencies. Even through the period between elections, parties will be able to stay relevant and connected with the electorate by regularly posting updates, instead of only emerging to interact with the people during elections.
Facebook can be used as a tool to force democratic changes in countries, as exemplified by the Arab Spring revolutions, and it can be a deterrent against autocratic leaders to abuse their powers. Kirkpatrick also mentioned in the interview that ‘if you're upset about anything, and you want to get people riled up and join you in protesting it, no matter where you are in the world, Facebook is likely to be the first place you're going to turn if you're just an ordinary citizen…(because of) the ability to convey messages between people very efficiently and for messages to spread virally.’ The Arab Spring revolution across the Middle East and North Africa was a prime example of how social networks were utilized to rouse emotions, spread information and mobilize large crowds to protest against the regimes. Leaders around the world have witnessed the use of Facebook against regimes, and they are aware that similar unrest can happen in their countries as well. The ruling elites can prevent this by blocking Facebook entirely, as China had already done, or to be more democratic in ruling the country. Even in China, similar networking sites have appeared, for example Renren, and the central government is actively monitoring the site for any signs of dissent as well as suppressing the flow of information. In other Arab countries, the leaders have recognized the threat of Facebook as a weapon to focus opposition to its rule, and sweeteners have been dished out to the citizens in response to the Arab Spring, namely cash givebacks and adopting a more participative parliament, at least in name. The United Arab Emirates has expanded the strength of the Electoral College from less than 7,000 in the 2006 elections to almost 130,000 for the September 2011 ballot exercise (http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/07/18/158083.html). With Facebook, autocratic leaders around the world will find it harder to control the flow of information and the minds of the people.
Facebook can act as an old-fashioned petition and serve as a check and balance on the government. One way is for voters to set up a Facebook page devoted to a cause and use the number of people who have ‘liked’ their pages as a form of online petition and send it directly to the authority in charge. Time and money will be saved, and petitions will more likely to actually reach those whom the addressee of the petition is for. In countries such as India, which has seen high levels of corruption and bureaucracy, using Facebook as a form of whistle blowing on corrupt officials can be an effective way to force the government to clean up its act. With the released information readily available to all, every citizen will be able to view the deeds of the alleged, and groups can be created in short notice to gather support among users for a common cause. For example, it can be used to indict a corrupt official. Facebook can be exploited to force a government to be open about its policies and hence act as a form of check and balance on the government. Citizens will be more involved in the decision-making process, because any government that fails to meet the expectations of the electorate will face a potential outburst rallying against it on Facebook.
In the future, this paper feels that there may arise an organization that will supervise Facebook and its daily operations. With 700 million people users in Facebook and growing, each sharing and contributing, there is a growing concern that a privately owned company of 300 employees may not be appropriate in governing the burgeoning online social networking site. Because any changes to the terms and conditions of the site will directly and indirectly affect the lives of millions across the world, and because Facebook has already demonstrated its ability to effect political changes, the need to address this concern is grave. There are already calls for an external body to oversee the corporate governance of Facebook. This paper does not think that a supranational governmental body will oversee the corporate operations of Facebook, since Facebook is headquartered in California and hence falls under U.S. jurisdiction. However, it is possible to have an international advisory and supervisory board, not unlike the World Wide Web Consortium headed by web founder Tim Berners-Lee, which will take a largely passive role in ensuring that Facebook functions properly everyday. This ensures that while Facebook retains its independence to change the way it operates and implement changes on the website, there is also a check on it to make sure these changes are responsible and acceptable for users.
Social Perspective
This paper argues that news will increasingly emerge from social networking sites rather than conventional sources such as newspapers and TV news channels. On July 23, 2011, 8:38 p.m., the now infamous Wenzhou train crash occurred in China near the city of Wenzhou, but the first report of the accident was from a passenger in the train on a microblog at 8:47 p.m., instead of the state media in China. The post went viral on the Internet and was responsible for raising awareness to this incident before any reports by the TV stations. Even though these microblogs were the domain of only Chinese users, they demonstrated the potential of Facebook to replicate their successes. These microblogs have transformed each user into potential journalists, making it harder for official censorship to take effect and silence critics. They offer an alternative route to information that was previously monopolized by media and publishing companies, and to the state-sanctioned viewpoint. They are able to escape official censorship on news, meaning users get a fuller picture of what is actually happening. Also, because users can update a status instantly, the time gap between the incident and the reporting has shrunk so much as to be negligible. Another prominent example was the Japanese tsunami disaster that happened on March 14, 2011. The nation was first informed of the scale and the human suffering caused by the tsunami by a post on a Japanese social networking site, not one of the national broadcasting channels. As such, there may be a ‘flip’, a synonym for revolution, where news channels will increasingly source for the latest news from these networking sites like Facebook. Already, there are isolated cases of incidents from Facebook making their ways to the daily news.
This paper foresees that increasingly, people will be using their real identities online. Using Facebook identities to publish news or post comments can have positives. Already, media companies like the Huffington Post have integrated Facebook with their websites, which allows Facebook users to directly comment on and share the news using their Facebook identity (Kirkpatrick, 2010). By removing the veil of anonymity when they use their real identity to comment on an issue, they force readers to be more selective with their choice of words. Moreover, when the provenances of the comments are made known, the comments can have more credibility, depending on who posted them. One glance at the comments available on website like YouTube would reveal that many comments posted under anonymity were irrelevant and even offensive. The Internet had been operating on a system of anonymity since its birth, where users were shielded from revealing their real identity when posting on online forums. There may be opposition to the trend of using our real identities online, as it leaves the user more exposed. Furthermore, it is still unclear on which way the future will proceed. If there is indeed a shift in popular perception to use their real identities online, there can be consequences as well. For example, in countries where free speech is stifled and the population suffers from oppressive rule, using real identities will make it easier for the regime to identify dissidents and arrest them. Also, by revealing identities, people may be less willing to make disparaging remarks, even if they are due, and are more inclined to niceties and pleasantries.
Facebook can be a one-stop portal, linking different services for the users in a single website. If one goes to an online forum, chances are that the forum will prompt the user to log in via his or her Facebook account. By collaborating with other websites not related to it and allowing users to use their Facebook accounts to access other websites, users will be able to enjoy a seamless experience for different websites by simply logging in using their Facebook accounts. This not only makes it more convenient for the user to surf the net, forum users no longer have to trouble themselves memorizing different usernames and password combinations for sites which they do not visit frequently enough faced by. Logging in using their Facebook accounts also give added advantages to the user because they can share materials from other websites more conveniently back on Facebook. Currently, though, users are only limited to relatively unimportant services such as online forums. One can only imagine the possibilities that will be unlocked if Facebook is able to integrate with crucial services that requires higher security levels such as healthcare, shopping, banking and local governmental services. Patients will be able to see updates on Facebook from their doctors giving advice on their medical conditions, and patients can also consult doctors for symptoms that they are unsure of by sending a private message or even posting on the doctors’ profiles.
However, there are certainly limitations to this further integration of all services. One of these will be the heavier reliance on Facebook in our everyday lives, which will lead to us surrendering too much of our privacy as well as giving FB too much control and information about our lives. If a rogue employee threatens to release all these information in the same as what Julian Assange did via Wikileaks, or sell these information to the highest bidder, private medical information will be made public and it can be very embarrassing for people with diseases that carry a social stigma along with them, for example gonorrhea or even HIV. Hence, before more progress can be made integrating these services, reliable web security has to put in place first.
With online social networking taking on an increasingly central role in our lives, there may arise in the future compulsory primary school classes for social etiquette on online networking sites. Currently, we already have social etiquette lessons, but these lessons are not extended to online etiquette. An increasing amount of our time is spent online, but there is no formal lesson structure or courses conducted by professionals to teach on such etiquette issues. Moreover, even though Facebook requires users to be above 13 years old in order to be eligible to set up an account, these rules are frequently flouted. A quick survey among primary school students in Singapore found that almost every student had a Facebook account by posing as someone who is above 13 years old. These young children are exposed to the Internet at a young age, and naturally, they will not understand the consequences of their actions on Facebook. What a ten year old student thinks is appropriate may not necessarily be so, and the student may look back and regret that particular post in the future, twenty years later. Hence, it is imperative for schools to implement these ‘life skills’ in primary schools immediately. Some schools in Singapore, such as Hwa Chong Institution, make it compulsory for their students to attend social etiquette lessons to make sure they are able to behave adequately in social functions, and they are taught basic things like recognizing the different dress codes for different functions, formal table manners and even something as basic as tying a tie. This is done with the view that having social etiquette will be a necessity in the future when the students graduate and are out in the workforce interacting with their colleagues, superiors and clients. This paper argues that an online social etiquette course is more relevant and necessary because of the fact that information on Facebook will leave a digital footprint behind, meaning that incriminating posts on Facebook may have a bigger impact on one’s career than a mismatched tie can bring. Recognizing this fact, Nicole Seah, an opposition candidate in the General Elections 2011, was rumoured to have spent over a year cleaning up and censoring her Facebook accounts by removing unglamorous photos and refraining from posting explicit remarks. In comparison, Tin Pei Ling was unprepared for the scrutiny by the press of her Facebook accounts and failed to limit access to inappropriate photos and videos, and the resultant leakage of photos and videos that placed her in a bad light further shifted public opinions against her. Facebook has only been in popular use for less than 7 years, and yet there were already so much material of Ms. Tin inappropriate for a public figure that had accumulated on the site. It is therefore reasonable to extrapolate this phenomenon and assume that teenagers today, with a longer exposure to Facebook before they reach working age, will have even greater amounts of information that they have to manage and censor. Hence, attending and passing an online social etiquette course should be a graduating requirement for primary school students in addition to the usual academic requirements. This will bring about greater awareness of the possible pitfalls of these online social networks, manage expectations of using these websites as well as equipping students with the essential knowledge such as customizing privacy settings as well as maintaining a good public image by not posting offensive or crude remarks.
Cultural Perspective
This paper proposes that the rise in number of users in Facebook will be inversely proportional to the risk of war between countries. As more people get more connected on Facebook, there is an increase in exposure to people from different countries and regions. The question is whether there will be a similar rise in cultural assimilation or understanding, and if there will be a Facebook effect not unlike that of the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention (GATCP) espoused by Thomas Friedman. The GATCP states that two countries with the McDonald’s franchise operating within them has never been to war with each other. This effect is only relevant to conflict between two states and does not include civil war. As Friedman mentioned in his book, he expected the McDonald’s effect to be proven wrong in the future as the world becomes more globalized and every country has a McDonald’s, since throughout recorded history, there did not exist a single period of absolute peace across civilizations. This is a very interesting avenue to explore. After Thomas Friedman proposed his theory in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, it was proven wrong almost immediately by the invasion of Panama by USA, the invasion of Serbia by NATO and the invasion by Israel of Lebanon. Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system ‘symbolized by McDonald's’ (Friedman, 2000: 252–253).
Globalization brings greater integration of all nations together into a giant network through trade, commerce, and has brought the world closer together, with greater interactions between countries than any other period in history. Online social networks like Facebook have emerged as portals to bring people together and have allowed people from all around the world to interact with each other instantly at anytime and anywhere. Globalization has also presided over an extended period of wealth creation in the world, and many countries around the world have been lifted out of poverty when they opened up to trade with other countries. Like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, Facebook has become a symbol of modern society and a crucial part of it as well. These are products that are consumed by people worldwide, and they represent the shared values across countries: that of consumerism and an aspiration to join the middle class. With prosperity at stake, few if no countries will be irrational enough to give up market opportunities, rising comfort and prosperity in exchange for armed conflict and suffering. Fewer people will want to risk isolation and the loss of these modern amenities associated with globalization as well. Hence, Facebook can be used as a gauge of the connectedness of the population of any country i.e. the higher the percentage of population registered as a user on Facebook, the more globalized the citizens of the country. Moreover, because Facebook greatly increases interactions with citizens of almost every country, there can be more candid discussions between users from countries with strained relations privately, which will help countries to have a deeper understanding of the opposing party’s interests and constraints and push them towards negotiations rather than armed conflicts. With a greater stake in global prosperity, a more connected citizenry as well as a deeper understanding between countries, the risk of war must inevitably shrink. Therefore, this paper proposes the Facebook effect: that the risk of war between two states is inversely proportional to the percentage of registered Facebook users in the countries, and that two countries with a user participation of more than 50% on Facebook will not be in armed conflict.
Conclusions
The future is bright and uncertain for Facebook. Despite slowing growth rates, Facebook seems destined to achieve 1 billion in user membership in the near future, possibly before 2014. It is less than ten years old, and there is still a long way to go before it can prove that it is not just a fad that will die off like Friendster. But it does not appear to be moving in the same direction as that of Friendster and MySpace, but rather, it is following the paths of Google and Amazon, which has successfully integrated its services into the lives of users and consumers. This is because Facebook has tried to continue to be relevant by periodically reviewing the website and making the interface more user-friendly and interesting with increasing loads of information uploaded daily on the website. Facebook has already changed the way we communicate and keep in touch with our friends and family, where high school classmates can find each other on the website and relive their high school experiences, where parents can post reminders and messages on their children’s ‘walls’ now, keeping in touch with the family both online and offline. Not only has it changed the way we socialize, it has also proved to be a catalyst in the recent political revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa. It is also undeniable that Facebook will be a major fighting stage for political parties in the future.
However, challenges await Facebook. Even great start-ups stagnate after some time, and Google is a prime example of this, given that it has struggled to further increase market capitalization and introduce new ideas and products. Facebook has struggled to make profits that match the estimate of its market price, even though it is not listed yet. Besides that, there may even surface a new social networking site that provides a more refreshing approach to online networking, which may render Facebook to be obsolete and redundant. Similar networking sites already exist that are mostly catered to the domestic market, and Facebook will have to find a way to penetrate the closed market and increase market share.
References
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/07/15/how-facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-are-changing-politics
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/facebook-reaches-200m-users-is-it-too-powerful/1417
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html?hpw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Arches
Friedman, Thomas L. (2007). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century (2nd Ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Watkins, S. Craig (2009). The young and the digital: What the migration to social-network sites, games, and anytime, anywhere media means for our future. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
Mooney, Carla (2009). Online social networking. Farmington Hills, MI: Lucent Books.
Are social networking sites harmful? (2011). Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press.
Kirkpatrick, David (2010). The facebook effect: The inside story of the company that is connecting the world. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Mesch, G.S., & Talmud, I. (2010). Wired youth: The social world of adolescence in the information age (p.5). New York: Routledge.
Friedman, Thomas. (2000) The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books.
Lusted, M. A. (2011). Social networking: MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Edina, Minnesota: ABDO Publishing Company (1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/opinion/frictionless-sharing-a-cause-for-concern/story-e6frgb0o-1226157574498
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/7453443.html
http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/07/18/158083.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)