Edward Snowden tries to convince me to worry more about privacy. "They're trying to shape your behavior!" he warns.
I rudely say: "Americans by and large don't care, and I mostly don't care. I figure that teenage boy across the street could be picking up the stuff I send. The cork's out of the bottle. What difference does it make?"
Snowden has good answers.
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Google's former CEO once said, creepily: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Snowden points out that we will feel pressured to "constrain our intellectual curiosity, and even frankly, our weirdnesses ... because we could potentially someday be judged on the basis for it."
Another scary thing about today’s internet is that big tech companies have the power to manipulate. Facebook even did a study that confirmed they could make users angrier by controlling which posts they saw.
"This is controlling human behavior by a private company!" Snowden points out.
"For what end? Just to see if they could... the next variants... are not going to be just to see if they could. It is going to be for their advantage. It is going to be to shape laws, it is going to be to shape elections.”
More of Snowden's points, and my pushback on whether tech companies are really "monopolies", in the video above.
Virtual Identity | Stream: Interdisciplinary Journal of Communication
This paper will explore the realm of virtual identity within the context of the online virtual world, Second Life. The creation of virtual identities involves the complex process of constructing an online self-presentation. With the prevalence of online forums and virtual reality, ordinary people are crafting identities online and digressing from their actual identities in real life. In order to explain this phenomenon, I draw on narrative theory's conceptualization of character in order to understand how people craft online identities.
Virtual Reality and Political Outgroup Contact: Can Avatar Customization and Common Ingroup Identity Reduce Social Distance? - Jorge Peña, Grace Wolff, Magdalena Wojcieszak, 2021
This study (N = 217) explores the potential for virtual reality to decrease social distance toward outgroup members among women. Raising the salience of individ...
All the buzz around the need to find alternative ways to target and track ads without third-party cookies has shined a light on shared “identity” solutions.
[PDF] Proteus vs. social identity effects on virtual brainstorming | Semantic Scholar
ABSTRACT Avatars are known to influence behaviour through their individual identity cues (Proteus effect) and through their shared identity cues (Social identity effect). The aim of this study was to investigate these two processes in a crossed design, in order to examine their interaction in the context of a brainstorming task. To activate the Proteus effect, we used creative avatars resembling inventors, and to make social identity salient, we made the avatars wear the traditional clothing of the participants’ school. The resulting factorial design included four conditions: creative avatars with or without social identity cues, and non-creative avatars with or without social identity cues. The results show that creative performance was higher with creative than non-creative avatars, but only in the absence of social identity cues. Furthermore, the presence of social identity cues increased social identification to the group, but this unexpectedly decreased creative performance. This result is discussed together with an analysis of the meaning of the social identity cues we used, which appeared to be unrelated to creativity. This discussion highlights that the effects of social identity cues on performance are complex and may be moderated by their meaning and the particular facet of social identity they make salient.
A shared identity promotes herding in an information cascade game
Our research addresses the effect of shared vs. mixed group identities in an information cascade game. We vary whether subjects always choose after a decision maker who shares the same identity or af
Transactive memory system development in virtual teams | Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel research: The global information technology workforce