Presentation

TedX Bay Area Talk: The Myth of Selective Sharing – Digital Health Futures: Empowerment or coercion?

By Marc Smith

I spoke about my concerns with the continued belief in selective sharing.  I argue at this TedX Bay Area talk that it is unwise to expect that digital information systems are capable of privacy or selective sharing.  In other words, it is a dangerous myth to believe in a feature that in practice fails regularly and by design.  In fact, it seems that it is practically impossible to create any digital information system that is secure.

In such a world we may want to reconsider our sharing practices, particularly if they were built on the idea of selective sharing.  If any of your digital information is something you would rather not share publicly, you may want to rethink the idea that you can keep your information private.

If you are building an information system, you may want to rethink the idea that you can offer selective sharing in a reliable form.

Thanks to the folks at TedX Bay Area, particularly Tatyana Kanzaveli for the opportunity to work out these thoughts and share them.

Here are the slides that were used in the talk:

March 1 Talk at O’Reilly Strata Conf, Santa Clara, Mapping social media networks (with no coding) using NodeXL

By Marc Smith


On March 1st I will speak at the 2012 Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California about:

Mapping social media networks (with no coding) using NodeXL

Time: 16:50 on 01 Mar 2012.

Session type: 40 minute presentation

Topics: Visualization & Interface

Description: Maps of the complex connections that form when people link, like, reply, rate, review, favorite, friend, follow, edit, and mention one another can reveal important trends. It is possible to create network maps with free and open tools that identify key people and sub-groups in any social media population with just a few key clicks. Can you make a pie chart? You can now make a network chart.

Abstract: Networks are a data structure common found across all social media services that allow populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation’s (http://www.smrfoundation.org) free and open NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, Networks become as easy to create as pie charts. Applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, and email networks will be presented.

We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world. Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much of texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. With better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the social media swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities. As more social interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations of human relationships and organizations become possible. But new forms of data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.