Bianca Bosker's Blog, page 13

What Really Happens On A Teen Girl's iPhone

MILLBURN, N.J. -- Fourteen-year-old Casey Schwartz has ditched more social networking services than most people her parents’ age have joined. Like many of her friends, Casey has a tendency to embrace social media sites, then suddenly drop them.



Skype, Formspring and WhatsApp have all felt the consequences of these flighty users. Casey still uses Snapchat, but less than she did last year. And in three months, she's joined, quit, and rejoined Twitter. She’s collected banished apps into a folder on her phone labeled “Stuff Nobody Likes.” And she’s thought about deleting her Facebook account because she checks it so frequently.



“I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just … because,” Casey says. “It's not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life."



Inseparable from her iPhone, but apt to tire of the sites she uses it to access, Casey at once personifies why much of the technology world has become obsessed with capturing the attention of people her age, and why those efforts risk turning into expensive debacles. That teens' friendships and relationships will play out online is certain. But which site will host that social intrigue is constantly up for grabs.



Earlier this week, Yahoo became the latest tech giant to make a major play for younger users, agreeing to pay $1.1 billion in cash to take ownership of Tumblr, the blogging site that has emerged as a popular and engaging platform with users under the age of 35. Yahoo has in its sights young people with disposable income, still-evolving spending habits and a willingness to devote virtually unlimited amounts of time to staring at a screen.



In short, Yahoo is trying to gain access to people like Casey. As social media experts have already suggested, and as a day with Casey makes clear, winning the attention of teenagers and maintaining it are two very different things. Yet seeking that attention is irresistible.



Casey’s habits underscore a new reality for this networked generation: Social networks -- and the gadgets they run on -- aren’t a distraction from real life, but a crucial extension of it.



Born in 1999, just a few years after the mass adoption of the World Wide Web, Casey belongs to the first true generation of digital natives, who have no memory of life before the Internet. The eighth-grader, who lives in the northern New Jersey town of Millburn, has always been attached to her gadgets. When she was only 18 months old, she received a toy computer that quickly became her favorite plaything. In second grade, she got her first cellphone (“it could hold two numbers, it was stupid,” she says). Now, at 14, she’s the proud owner of a white iPhone 4S, which she takes with her to school, carries as she wanders around her house, uses at the breakfast table, and keeps beside her pillow when she sleeps at night.



“I bring it everywhere. I have to be holding it,” Casey says. “It’s like OCD -- I have to have it with me. And I check it a lot.”



Casey only parts with her phone during the hours she’s at school, when she leaves it in her locker. The rest of the time, she and seven friends keep up a running conversation over text messages.



Not having an iPhone can be social suicide, notes Casey. One of her friends found herself effectively exiled from their circle for six months because her parents dawdled in upgrading her to an iPhone. Without it, she had no access to the iMessage group chat, where it seemed all their shared plans were being made.



"She wasn’t in the group chat, so we stopped being friends with her,” Casey says. “Not because we didn’t like her, but we just weren’t in contact with her.”



On a recent Thursday, Casey and her friends are up texting on iMessage until midnight, then they pick up again around 7 a.m., when they wake for school. By 4 p.m. that day, the group has exchanged more than 56 messages, not including those sent in the private, one-on-one chats Casey also kept going during the day.



“That’s not even a lot. That’s small. And we were in school the whole day also,” Casey says.



Early that morning, they kicked off their conversation polling each other on what they’d wear to school.



“Shorts?” someone wrote, followed by, “Should I?”



“I’m not.”



“What are you wearing?”



“Leggings.”



“Would it be weird if I wore my Hunters [rainboots]?"



“Is the bus there?”



Later, the girls cast votes on which picture each should share for "TBT" (short for Throwback Thursday), a weekly Instagram tradition, where people post childhood photos. The typical teen girl will send and receive 165 text messages in a day, according to a 2012 report by the Pew Research Center. Casey's texting continues even when she and her friends are together.



“We’ll be sitting on a couch next to each other, texting each other,” she notes. “We text in the same room. It’s weird, I don’t know why.”



As we chat in her lime-and-lavender painted room, surrounded by soccer trophies and a framed collage of Justin Bieber photos, Casey alternates between checking her phone, which buzzes incessantly with a steady stream of texts, replying to messages, and refreshing her Instagram and Facebook feeds, where she “likes” people’s posts. Occasionally, she plays a few rounds on Dots, her new favorite iPhone game, or scrolls through fashion accessories on Wanelo, a social shopping site heavy on photos. Later, Casey uses Facebook to get homework help and posts a question in a private group chat set up by her classmates.



Casey’s social networking faces scrutiny from her mother, who has her own Instagram and Facebook accounts from which to monitor what Casey and her friends are doing online. Occasionally, Casey's mother will insist that a picture her daughter has shared needs to come down -- usually because Casey has been "exclusive," posting a photo of that could offend friends who weren't included in that day's activity. Via Apple's Find My iPhone app, the Schwartz family can also keep constant tabs on each other's location.



Thanks to Silicon Valley, there's no off-switch for one’s social life, and popularity has become instantly quantifiable.



Here are just a few of the things Casey regularly tracks: the number of contacts stored on her iPhone (187); the number of people following her on Instagram (around 580); the number of people who’ve asked to follow her on Instagram, but she’s refused to accept (more than 100); the number of people following her Tumblr blog (more than 100); her high score on Dots (almost 400); the number of photos she stores on her phone (363, fewer than before because she's maxed out her phone’s memory); the number of photos her friends store on their phones (around 800); the number of people she’s friends with on Facebook (1,110) and the number of acquaintances who’ve quit Facebook (three or four). She also uses the app InstaFollow to keeps tabs on who's unfollowed her on Instagram (she quickly unfollows those who defect).



Casey is a novice programmer and has customized the code on her Tumblr blog so it displays how many people are viewing it at one time. She and her friends aspire to becoming “Tumblr famous,” or attracting thousands of followers to their sites. She's wary of what will become of Tumblr under Yahoo's watchful, corporate eye.



"I don’t like that they bought it," she explains, echoing sentiments shared by others who use the media network. "I'd rather it was how it was before because I'm afraid they're going to change it and make it worse."



The most important and stress-inducing statistic of all is the number of “likes” she gets when she posts a new Facebook profile picture -- followed closely by how many “likes” her friends’ photos receive. Casey's most recent profile photo received 117 "likes" and 56 comments from her friends, 19 of which they posted within a minute of Casey switching her photo, and all of which Casey “liked” personally.



“If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100,” she explains. “Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”



Still, she notes with a twinge of regret that a friend received more.



“I changed my profile picture and then [my friend] changed it right after and she got so many more 'likes' than I did,” Casey says. “And I didn’t get mad at her, but I was like, 'You got so many 'likes!'’ She just gets so many 'likes' on everything. She has more followers on Instagram. I have more friends than her.”



For all the time Casey spends online, she predicts that soon she won’t be using her smartphone or social networks as much as she has been. It’s distracting, she says, as her iPhone chimes for perhaps the 12th time that hour. Her phone, be it Facebook, Instagram or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework, or her sleep, or her conversations with her family.



“If I’m not watching TV, I’m on my phone. If I’m not on my phone, I’m on my computer. If I’m not doing any of those things, what am I supposed to do?” Casey says. “I think that in a few years, technology is going to go back and people won’t use it anymore because it’s getting to be a lot. I mean, I don’t put down my phone. And it makes me wish that I did. It's addicting.”



But at least for now, her iPhone remains the center of her existence. The friend who was the last to buy an iPhone has recently purchased one, regaining her place among the circle.



“Now we start hanging out with her every week because she knows the plans,” says Casey. “She has a smartphone now, so that’s what gets her in. We always loved her and she was always our good friend, but she was excluded -- and she knew it, too -- because she didn’t have an iPhone.”

Google Glass 'Winners' Can Buy Glass Now

Google announced Wednesday that it will begin shipping Google Glass to the 8,000 individuals chosen to purchase an early version of the tech giant's wearable computing device.



In February, Google launched a contest inviting U.S. residents to submit applications detailing how they'd use Glass for a chance to join Google's Explorer Program. Glass Explorers would be able to buy an early version of Glass for $1,500, months before the product's forthcoming release to the public at large. General sales for Glass are expected to start in late 2013 or early 2014.



Google selected the "winners" at the end of March, and will now begin taking orders. Glass, which suspends a small glass cube over the wearer's right eye, allows people to search the web, translate phrases, send messages, take photos and film video, among other capabilities. Developers from Twitter, Elle, The New York Times, Facebook and other companies have already announced plans to create applications for Glass.



"In February, we opened up the Explorer Program by asking people across Google+ and Twitter what they would do if they had Glass. We were looking for bold, creative individuals to become our next wave of Explorers -- and wow, did we get them," Google's Project Glass team wrote in a post shared on Google+. "Over the next few weeks, we’ll be slowly rolling out invitations to successful #ifihadglass applicants. If you were one of the successful applicants, please make sure you have +Project Glass in your Circles so we can send you a message."



Google also tweeted that people selected for the program should follow @ProjectGlass in order to receive a direct message with instructions for ordering Glass. According to Marketing Land's Matt McGee, Google's emailed instructions for purchasing Glass specified that he should phone a 1-800 number, and then order Glass by sharing his "unique code" (and, presumably, his credit card information).



While some 8,000 people will be eligible to purchase Glass, it's unlikely that that many will shell out $1,500 for a still-buggy piece of technology -- albeit one as futuristic as Glass. Crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and FundMe have been teeming with requests from people hoping to raise money to buy Glass.



"My daughter has two hobbies: jumping horses & making videos. Using Google Glass will let her share the experience from her perspective," wrote one Kickstarter user, whose campaign failed to raise the $1,500 he was seeking within its deadline.



On Indiegogo, fundraisers seeking the cash to buy Glass are pitching it as a way for them to reinvent live performance, document life as an "avid social media user...in South Korea," experiment with new teaching approaches inside a school classroom and capture New Orleans "through the eyes of a native." There's even someone hoping to use Glass to document the Battle of Gettysburg as seen by a historical reenactor.



There are also privacy concerns surrounding the use of Glass -- members of Congress wrote to Larry Page last week asking him to clarify Glass' privacy safeguards -- and questions about whether its unusual appearance could prevent mass adoption. Glass has been described as "freakish" and "nerdy."



Google announced last week that it had finished distributing Glass to its first group of trial users, the 2,000 developers who signed up to receive the device at the 2012 Google I/O developer conference.

How Teens Are Really Using Facebook: It's a 'Social Burden,' Pew Study Finds

The Facebook generation is fed up with Facebook.



That's according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 802 teens between the ages of 12 and 17 last September to produce a 107-page report on their online habits.



Pew's findings suggest teens' enthusiasm for Facebook is waning, lending credence to concerns, raised by the company's investors and others that the social network may be losing a crucial demographic that has long fueled its success.



Facebook has become a "social burden" for teens, write the authors of the Pew report. "While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own."



Teen's aren't abandoning Facebook -- deactivating their accounts would mean missing out on the crucial social intrigues that transpire online -- and 94 percent of teenage social media users still have profiles on the site, Pew's report notes. But they're simultaneously migrating to Twitter and Instagram, which teens say offer a parent-free place where they can better express themselves. Eleven percent of teens surveyed had Instagram accounts, while the number of teen Twitter users climbed from 16 percent in 2011 to 24 percent in 2012. Five percent of teens have accounts on Tumblr, which was just purchased by Yahoo for $1.1 billion, while 7 percent have accounts on Myspace.







Facebook, teens say, has been overrun by parents, fuels unnecessary social "drama" and gives a mouthpiece to annoying oversharers who drone on about inane events in their lives.



“Honestly, Facebook at this point, I'm on it constantly but I hate it so much,” one 15 year-old girl told Pew during a focus group.



"I got mine [Facebook account] around sixth grade. And I was really obsessed with it for a while," another 14 year-old said. "Then towards eighth grade, I kind of just -- once you get into Twitter, if you make a Twitter and an Instagram, then you'll just kind of forget about Facebook, is what I did.”



On the whole, teens' usage of social media seems to have plateaued, and the fraction of those who check social sites "several times a day" has stayed steady at around 40 percent since 2011.







Asked about teens' Facebook habits during a recent earnings call with investors, Facebook's chief financial officer answered that the company “remain[s] really pleased with the high level of engagement on Facebook by people of all ages around the world" and called younger users "among the most active and engaged users that we have on Facebook."



Here's what that "high level of engagement" really looks like, according to Pew:



They’re deleting, lying and blocking: As the chart below shows, some three-quarters of Facebook users have purged friends on Facebook, 58 percent have edited or deleted content they’ve shared and 26 percent have tried to protect their privacy by sharing false information. Among all teens online (not just Facebook users), 39 percent have lied about their age. The report also notes, "Girls are more likely than boys to delete friends from their network (82 percent vs. 66 percent) and block people (67 percent vs. 48 percent)."







Superusers on Facebook are superusers on other social sites: Teens with large friend networks on Facebook are more likely than their peers to have profiles on other social media sites: 46 percent of teens with over 600 Facebook friends have a Twitter profile, and 12 percent of such users have an Instagram account. By comparison, just 21 percent and 11 percent of teens who have 150 to 300 friends have Twitter and Instagram accounts, respectively.



Teens have hundreds of friends, but they haven’t met them all: The typical Facebook-using teen has 300 friends, though girls are more likely to have more friends (the median is 350) than boys (300). Seventy percent of teens are friends with their parents, 30 percent are friends with teachers or coaches, and 33 percent are friends with people they’ve never met in person.



It turns out parents actually do see what their kids are posting: Just 5 percent of teens tweak their privacy to limit what their parents see.



They’re watching out for their privacy: Sixty percent of teens on Facebook say they’ve checked their privacy settings in the past month -- a third of them within the past seven days. The majority (60 percent) of teens have their profiles set to private, while 14 percent have profiles that are completely public.



But yes, they are sharing personal details: Teens with more Facebook friends are more likely to share a greater variety of personal details about themselves online. Among all teens on Facebook, 21 percent share their cell phone number, 63 percent share their relationship status and 54 perent share their email address.



Seventeen percent of teens on Facebook will automatically share their location in their posts, and 18 percent say they’ve shared something they later regret posting.



They’re enjoying themselves, but they’ve been contacted by creeps: Among all teens surveyed by Pew, 17 percent have been contacted by strangers in a way that made them “scared or uncomfortable.” However, 57 percent of social media-using teens said they’ve had an experience online that “made them feel good about themselves,” and 37 percent say social media has made them feel more connected to someone else.

Yahoo's Got Tumblr's Teens -- But For How Long?

In paying $1.1 billion for Tumblr, Yahoo has just gotten the attention of the 300 million, predominantly young people who have made the site one of the most engaged communities on the web.



But hanging on to that community may be difficult, say analysts, while focusing on an emerging truth of the web: Though young people beckon as the most prized of users, they can also be markedly fickle. Yahoo just paid a bundle to reach people who have proven easily distracted and inclined to move on.



It's a dilemma with which many social media sites are grappling, as they face off against a seemingly endless proliferation of new social networks all vying to be the favorite among millennials.



“Teens certainly look to en vogue websites, and in some cases they may be here today or gone tomorrow,” said Clark Fredrickson, a spokesman for eMarketer, a digital media market research firm. “Older generations have less free time, so it takes more time for their habits to change. The younger generation can spend hours a day on one site, get bored of it and switch to something else the next day.”



In a call with investors on Monday morning, Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer explained that Yahoo and Tumblr’s differing demographics would give the company’s advertisers access to a valuable new audience. More than 65 percent of Tumblr’s users are under 35, Tumblr chief executive David Karp told The Huffington Post at a Yahoo press conference Monday evening. Yahoo’s users, by contrast, “tend to be slightly older,” said Mayer.



Yet it remains to be seen how loyal those teens and 20-somethings are to the suite of sites they have embraced online -- from Tumblr and Twitter to Facebook and YouTube.



Like other social networking sites, Yahoo and Tumblr will be challenged to stay relevant to millennials, a population with an unquenchable appetite for the next new thing, an instinctive aversion to anything deemed uncool or corporate and the technical know-how to switch services easily. After all, teens and 20-somethings regularly outgrow their offline hangouts, gradually moving from their parents’ basements to bars and other spots. Who’s to say the same won’t happen online?



Karp maintained that Tumblr can hold onto its younger users because of its focus on content, rather than relationships. Mayer, for her part, referred to Tumblr not as a “social network” but as a “media network” during her call with investors Monday.



“I don’t think this has anything to do with, ‘We’re the social network of the moment.’ I think Tumblr is decidedly not social. It’s not about the people in your life, it’s not about relationships -- though it can grow into that -- but really, it’s about the stuff that you love,” Karp told The Huffington Post. “People come to Tumblr to find the stuff that they love, and that’s built on this incredibly creative community that we do everything to support.”



Tumblr helps people to create and distribute content, said Karp, who argued these activities are particularly popular among younger audiences.



“The thing about supporting creativity is that young people have much more boundless creativity,” Karp continued. “People start to give up when they get older. Creativity is a very human thing, but I think it’s something we all experience when we’re young.”



Yet some experts speculate that younger demographics may be more fickle than their parents or older peers. Not only do they have an ever-expanding selection of sites and services from which to choose, but these younger users are “more ambitious in what they explore,” noted Brian Solis, an analyst with Altimeter Group.



Just a few years ago, another mass media company paid top dollar for an up-and-coming social network that, like Tumblr, offered what reporters at the time deemed “a unique 'in' with the preteen, teen, and young-adult population” and that enjoyed “surging popularity with young audiences” -- Myspace.



Yet in the eight years since News Corporation’s 2005 acquisition of Myspace, the percentage of teens on the social media site has dropped dramatically. In 2006, 85 percent of teens who had social media accounts said their Myspace profile was the one they used most often, according to the Pew Research Center. By 2011, only a quarter of teens with social media accounts even had a Myspace profile.



Of course, Myspace’s dwindling popularity isn’t the only evidence that young users are inherently capricious in their online habits. Myspace's own strategic missteps -- and Facebook’s concurrent successes -- also help to account for the mass exodus. Yet Myspace’s foibles highlight how little tolerance millennials have for sites that go astray and the speed with which a flourishing site can find itself abandoned.



Though data are scant on millennials’ evolving usage of specific social media sites, a 2013 survey by investment bank Piper Jaffray suggests younger users have lately been turning away from sites like Facebook and YouTube that were once their preferred destinations. The proportion of teens that named Facebook the “most important social media site” fell 10 percent in the past year to just over 20 percent, according to Piper Jaffray. Tumblr’s importance also dropped slightly: Nearly 10 percent of teens identified Tumblr as the most important social media site in the spring of 2012, while just 5 percent said the same this year.



With so many alternatives from which young users can choose, social networking sites needn’t do anything besides mature to see their popularity plummet.



“If a site gets stale, millennials start to talk about banishing the network,” said Solis. “If a site starts to feel uncool, it is uncool. It has as much to do with the technology as the culture.”



Tumblr faces the real risk of becoming uncool by virtue of its association with Yahoo, noted Solis, and already some teens are threatening to leave the site.



“Karp has to make a strategic effort every day to protect Tumblr’s culture and evolve its culture so millennials feel like it evolves with them,” said Solis.



Karp already seems to be burnishing his anti-establishment street cred. The 26-year-old entrepreneur skipped Yahoo’s investor call on Monday morning to meet with Tumblr’s team, and signed off a blog post announcing Tumblr’s acquisition with a flippant, four-letter salutation: “f*** yeah.”

Tumblr's Porn Can Stay, Suggests Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

Tumblr pornographers, take heart: Yahoo comes in peace.



During an investor call Monday morning announcing Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition of media network Tumblr, Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer emphasized that Yahoo wants to "let Tumblr be Tumblr," which she suggested would include allowing its numerous X-rated accounts to continue pumping out pornography undisturbed.



Asked by an investor how Yahoo would balance user and advertiser interests with regard to Tumblr content that is "not as brand safe as the rest of Yahoo" -- content that presumably includes posts by sexually explicit Tumblrs such as "Red Hot Porn," "Porn and Weed" and "Secretary Sex" -- Mayer noted that the diversity of Tumblr's content was "exciting" because it allowed Tumblr, and by extension Yahoo, to reach a far wider audience. She explained that carefully targeting ad placement should allay the concerns of marketers who might be skittish about placing their brand alongside explicit content.



"I think the richness and breadth of content available on Tumblr -- even though it may not be as brand safe as what's on our site -- is what's really exciting and allows us to reach even more users," said Mayer, who did not mention pornography as such, but referred obliquely to content that was not "brand safe." "One of the ways to start measuring our growth story here is around traffic and users, and this obviously produces a lot of that. In terms of how to address advertisers' concerns around brand safety, we need to have good tools for targeting."



Conscious of the threat of a mass exodus by Tumblr devotees wary of a corporate overlord, Mayer has repeatedly stressed that Yahoo will allow Tumblr to operate independently, and promised in a blog post about the acquisition that the tech giant would "not screw it up."



Tumblr chief executive David Karp, who was not present on the investor call Monday, wrote in his own blog, "We're not turning purple." Yahoo will keep Tumblr's team intact, noted Mayer, to whom Karp will report directly.



"In terms of the integration between the two sites, we plan to operate and brand and grow Tumblr separately from Yahoo," Mayer said during her call with investors. "We will not have Yahoo branding on the Tumblr site. We want to let Tumblr be Tumblr, and let Yahoo be Yahoo."



Tumblr's guidelines are upfront about the site's tolerance for explicit material, and merely ask users who share "sexual or adult-oriented content" to tag it "NSFW" ("Not Suitable for Work") so people can filter it out of their feed if they so desire. Tumblr also asks content creators not to upload sexually explicit videos using its video-sharing tool ("We're not in the business of profiting from adult-oriented videos and hosting this stuff is f***ing expensive."), but helpfully suggests they could use a service like xHamster.



Peter Shankman, a marketing expert and author of "Nice Companies Finish First," argues that Tumblr's extensive collection of pornography will do little to dissuade advertisers from buying real estate on the site, so long as the media network can offer access to the users and demographics brands seek to reach.



"Advertisers go where the audiences that matter to them are. They always have and they always will," said Shankman. "Yahoo will have the ability to create tools that help prevent some of that [explicit material] from being seen by people who shouldn't see it, and that will benefit advertisers. In the long run, I don't see advertisers running away from this any more than Twitter, or Vine, or Instagram. There's porn. It exists. It's 2013 and it's available anywhere."



But whether Tumblrers like it or not, more advertising will be coming to the blogging service, and Mayer said that Yahoo might feature Tumblr content on its main site. She also discussed the possibility of working with Tumblr bloggers to post ads on their sites, with their permission.



Mayer declined to go into detail about Tumblr's plans for advertising targeted to users' interests -- be it fashion, art or perhaps even pornography -- but noted that the "psychographic profiles on Tumblr are different from what we have on Yahoo, which enriches the user base and makes it that much more interesting to advertisers."



She ended the call by quoting a line from David Fincher's film "The Social Network," which she said summarized Tumblr's advertising evolution and readiness to feature more ads.



"It's like the line from 'The Social Network' movie: 'Why would you monetize it? You don't even know what 'it' is yet,'" said Mayer. "Tumblr is now at the point ... [where] they know what 'it' is, and it makes sense to monetize it in a way that is tasteful and seamless."

Google Glass Privacy Concerns Spurred Lawmakers To Ask Larry Page These 8 Questions

Eight members of congress belonging to a bipartisan "privacy caucus" have penned a letter to Google chief executive Larry Page to request additional information about the privacy implications of Google Glass, Google's yet-to-be released wearable computing device.



Noting that they are "curious whether this new technology could infringe on the privacy of the average American," the representatives laid out eight key questions for Google, including requests for additional information about Glass' ability to track non-users of the device, the use of facial recognition technology and whether Google will revise its privacy policy to take Glass' new capabilities into account.



Glass, which includes a camera that could allow wearers to surreptitiously film and photograph non-users, has sparked privacy fears among some who worry the technology could allow people to secretly record conversations. The product might also eventually make use of facial recognition technology, another privacy concern for some.



Glass also allows wearers to send text messages, check their email, search the web and get directions via the head-mounted gadget, and new apps from CNN, Twitter, Elle and Facebook, among others, are rapidly expanding the capabilities of the device. One developer boasted he'd created an app that allowed Glass wearers to snap pictures just by blinking their eye -- potentially making it easier than ever to record someone without his or her knowledge.



The lawmaker's questions, which Google has until June 14 to answer, include:

[W]e would like to know how Google plans to prevent Google Glass from unintentionally collecting data about the user/non-user without consent?



Would Google place limits on the technology and what type of information it can reveal about another person?



What proactive steps is Google taking to protect the privacy of non-users when Google Glass is in use?



When using Google Glass, is it true that this product would be able to use Facial Recognition Technology to unveil personal information about whomever and even some inanimate objects that the user is viewing?



Given Google Glass's sensory and processing capabilities, has Google considered making any additions or refinements ot its privacy policy?

Google's track record thus far -- which includes multiple settlements with the FTC over privacy violations -- has undermined lawmakers' trust in the tech giant. They noted in their letter that Google's Street View vehicles had mistakenly collected personal information, including telephone numbers, email addresses and passwords, and asked how the company plans to ensure that Glass users don't commit similar errors.



In the case of Google Glass, bar policy also seems to be influencing public policy: Lawmakers, in outlining the reasons for their concern, cited a Seattle bar owner's decision to ban Glass because of privacy concerns.



The congressional committee's letter was delivered on the second day of Google's annual developer conference, Google I/O. Google's director of product management for Glass, Steve Lee, addressed some of the privacy questions in a panel discussion on Thursday afternoon during the developer conference.



Lee stressed that Google had designed Glass with privacy safeguards in mind, noting that the glass display lights up from both sides when in use so non-users can see when it's active. Users must also speak or tap Glass to record -- so "taking a picture has clear social cues," he said. But while privacy may be Google's intent, at least one developer has already found ways to circumvent those safeguards via the app that he says lets users wink to take a photo.



On Thursday, Lee did not rule out the possibility of including facial recognition capabilities in the device.



“We’ve consistently said that we won’t add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place,” he said, according to The New York Times.



Google chairman Eric Schmidt previously expressed concern over the implications of facial recognition systems, noting in a 2011 interview, "I'm very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition."



"We built that technology and we withheld it," Schmidt said of facial recognition at the All Things Digital D9 conference in 2011. "As far as I know, it's the only technology Google has built and, after looking at it, we decided to stop."



Google has repeatedly emphasized that social cues and peoples' "social contract" will help keep Glass wearers in line, a point Glass engineer Charles Mendis brought up again on Thursday.



"If I'm recording you, I have to stare at you -- as a human being. And when someone is staring at you, you have to notice," said Mendis, according to The Verge. "If you walk into a restroom and someone's just looking at you -- I don't know about you but I'm getting the hell out of there."



Read the letter in its entirety below:

Congress Inquires About Google Glass by WSJTech

The Truth Behind Google's Bizarre Mission to Make Tech 'Go Away'

As a cadre of Google executives took turns touting Google's newest products at a conference in California on Wednesday, they also described how they were working toward a future in which technology would disappear.



That might sound like a bizarre mission for a tech company. Yet they promised that by fading into the background of our lives, technology would become easier to use, more intuitive, more efficient and more anticipatory, even allowing people to speak to Google like it were a person, rather than a piece of software. Google would usher in this new world with tools that would bring web services into every crevice of our lives, from maps that know where we'll go next, to Google Glass, eyewear that puts the Internet mere millimeters away from our eyeballs.



But Google's professed goal of making technology "get out of the way" masks what's truly taking place. By making technology invisible, Google is also making it omnipresent. As software and gadgets become less in-your-face, they also become more pervasive and more influential, as we in turn become more dependent on them, more accepting of their presence in our lives and less critical of them. After all, how can someone scrutinize what they can't see?



When Google says it's working on technology that will go away, it really means the opposite: It's after technology that gets into our heads and takes over.



"The idea of getting technology out of the way is a loose and fast way of saying we want to control more of your life, we just don't want you thinking that we have that level of control and mediation while we exert it," said Evan Selinger, an associate professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. "It's like the perfect black box -- I don't need to think about it, I just hope for the best."



In Wednesday's three-and-a-half hour keynote kicking off Google's three-day developer conference, Google I/O, engineers from multiple parts of the company discussed more than a dozen new offerings. Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering, unveiled a new messaging app that would "finally allow technology to get out of the way." By stitching together texts, photos and video into a single service accessible on any device, Gundotra promised, "technology can just go away and people can focus on what makes them the happiest."



Next, Google software engineer Ahmit Singhal demonstrated how people could speak their queries to Google Now, a Siri-like virtual assistant that anticipates people's questions even before they've been asked. It would allow people to "ask Google like you'd ask a friend," Singhal said, and bring the world closer to omniscient Star Trek-like devices that converse easily.



Google chief executive Larry Page concluded by discussing his dream of "really being able to get computers out of the way and really focused on what people really need."



Or, put more explicitly: Page and company aren't imagining computers that "get out of the way" because they're gone. Instead, they disappear because they've been fused with us.



Consider Google Glass, Google's wearable computing device slated for public release sometime next year. Glass' tagline boasts it's "getting technology out of the way" -- yet it's also a device people are expected to wear at virtually all times, mounted on their foreheads with a screen suspended over their right eye.



That may be modest by comparison with what Google has in store. Google co-founder Sergey Brin offered a vision of just how far the company might go when he mused, in 2005, "Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain."



Allowing technology -- whether Google Now or Google Glass, Facebook or the iPhone -- to recede into the background of our lives may make us both more reliant on it and less critical of it, ultimately ensuring we're even more susceptible to its suggestions. At the same time, Google gains dedicated customers forking over ever more data -- and dollars -- that it can use to attract the advertisers who still account for the lion's share of its revenues.



A service like Google Now that's automatic, omniscient and omnipresent, whispering to us from our Glass headsets or speaking to us from our smartphones, could ultimately allow Google to access us so easily and intimately, its suggestions could feel like they're coming from our own subconscious. Over time, we might be less inclined to question them, or to unplug Google from our lives.



"The hope is that we begin to live much more mediated by algorithms, but we don't pay attention to them. They become invisible, almost like thoughts in our head," Selinger noted. "It allows a company like this to exert a profound influence, while making it harder to detect the impact of that influence."



When technology "goes away," so too does our ability our ability to analyze it objectively, argues Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.



"If we think that the technology is invisible and seamless, then Google can do anything they want and we lose our ability to be skeptical of what these devices do," said Jackson. "We need to retain the visibility of these gadgets to be skeptical of these gadgets."



In demonstrating the latest version of Google Now, Singhal noted it offered "a new interface -- or as I call it, 'no interface.'" That "no interface" opens up a direct pathway between our minds and Google Now's suggestions, from where to eat to when to leave for work.



But perhaps, with Google as our interface with the world, we'll be able to work with the tech giant to exert control over the version of the world Google delivers up. We could see only what we want to see, and excise the rest. Seemingly a part of our subconscious, Google could offer a kind of algorithmic anti-depressant, where not only avoid bad restaurants and traffic, but we can block unhappy articles, excise annoying people and hear only the songs that make us happy.



Get ready to see the world through rose-colored Google Glasses.

Why Facebook's Phone Is Flopping: It's a Social Network With No Social Skills

This week offered a status update on Facebook's efforts to get people to embrace its phone: Its much-hyped Home software, engineered to put Facebook front and center on smartphones in every way possible, has so far been a bust.



Home has been downloaded fewer than one million times -- small change for a company with more than one billion users -- and the first smartphone to come pre-loaded with Home has had its price slashed from $99 to 99 cents. On top of that, more than 15,000 reviewers on Google Play, Google's app marketplace, have decided that Home merits no more than two stars.



But in taking stock of Home's flop, most have ignored the fact that we already have Facebook phones: They're our iPhones. (Or really any other smartphone with a Facebook app)



Facebook has become so pushy about its on-the-go alerts that the primary screen of my phone has already been taken over by Facebook notifications -- less visually appealing than Home's news feed, but just as brash. My Apple smartphone more and more feels like a Facebook smartphone: the social network is aggressively using our conversations with friends as an entrée into starting a conversation with us. And in so doing, it risks alienating the very people it needs to keep hooked through the very medium it most needs to master.



In its urgent bid to show its network is gaining mobile users more quickly than it's losing desktop ones, Facebook has become the annoying, tone-deaf relative who calls daily to ask why you haven't responded to his email, interrupts with unfunny jokes and forwards every spammy chain letter, no matter how often you ignore him. Like your irritating but occasionally endearing second cousin, Facebook is tolerable in small doses and is connected to too many people you care about to be excised completely.



Facebook, invited onto our phones, has taken advantage of having access to us at anytime. Home's lackluster success may stem from our unpleasant interactions with Facebook on our other phones: We can't trust Facebook to know how to behave. It's a social network with no social skills. And it seems we don't need a Home-powered phone because whatever smartphone we're carrying is already dominated by Facebook.



Facebook took over my iPhone's screen on a recent Monday.




For several years now, I've toted Facebook's app around with me on my iPhone, where it's offered a convenient portal into my online social life and occasional updates that pushed to the front of my screen. But over the past few months, Facebook has morphed from a source of once-in-awhile reminders to a chatty, jabbering nuisance that seems dead-set on carrying on a constant conversation with me throughout the day.



I'm not alone, according to Chris Silva, an analyst with the research firm Altimeter Group. As the frequency with which people check Facebook on their computers has dropped, the social network, eager to offset the decline with a bump on mobile use, has been making a non-stop pitch to get people hooked on Facebooking with their phones. Facebook hopes to show advertisers that their dollars will be well spent on mobile devices, even if their ads are smaller, Silva notes.



"There's absolutely been an increase in frequency and perhaps even the number and type of notifications users are getting," Silva said. "They're trying to use these things as the Trojan Horse ... to bring me into the app more frequently and for longer periods of time, which then sets the stage for having higher engagement numbers when advertisers are pushed more heavily toward mobile."



"It's very clear that in the last couple of months, Facebook has ratcheted up their engagement game," Silva added.



Facebook has turned my phone's screen into a real-time stream of updates from people I don't much care about doing things I'm not too interested in. On Monday alone, Facebook sent me about a dozen push notifications -- those eye-catching alerts that pop up on the phone's front screen, make it vibrate and send its speakers dinging. It's the same mechanism local governments use to send emergency alerts, and the same format Apple uses to alert you to text messages.



Here are just a few of the crucial updates Facebook deemed important enough to push to my iPhone's screen: an invitation to an event still weeks away; an invitation from someone I barely know to play an online game; four friend requests from people with whom I have zero friends in common; a photo shared by a person I knew in elementary school; and a comment left by someone I don't know on a Facebook post I don't remember making.



Of course some of these notifications are unique to me -- I'd guess I receive a higher-than-average number of friend requests by virtue of my job -- and they can all be silenced or tweaked in Facebook's privacy settings.



Yet the social network, left to its own devices, has still taken the liberty of using our phones as its broadcast channel.



Most intrusive of all have been the alerts, received by myself and others, suggesting we chat with someone who's just logged onto the social network, post a status update, or buy a friend a birthday gift using Facebook's gift-giving service.








In these cases, it feels like Facebook has committed the ultimate sin of assuming people want to hear from it, whereas the whole point of signing up for the social network was to hear from friends. When Facebook pushes people to fork over their credit card numbers to buy something through its service, it underscores that it has also decided it's entitled to bug us with what it wants to tell us -- and do so in the most in-your-face way possible.



"Because mobile devices are our most personal screen, consumers have a far lower tolerance for interruptive, brand-centric communications," Corey Gault, director of communications at the mobile marketing firm Urban Airship, said in an email.



Gault said he had received the impression that Facebook was seeking to better monitor users' reaction to its alerts -- that they would stop sending push messages to people who'd been inactive for more than 28 days and only continue messaging people who clicked on a certain number of notifications. But that hasn't happened, he argues.



"Facebook is not really practicing Good Push itself, sending many messages that serve its own interests, not its users," Gault noted.



Twitter is littered with complaints from other users who've felt needlessly interrupted by Facebook push notifications urging them to ask a question, update their status or chat with a friend who's just come online.



"Jesus christ Facebook just sent a push notification to say an old flame is online, and that I should chat her," tweeted Derek Mead, managing editor of VICE's Motherboard, in February. "Horrifying. Is this new?"



Another user, @SetsuPorcelain, tweeted earlier this week, "Facebook, what u doin'? I asked NO PUSH NOTIFICATION STOP ruining everything."



A website and app designer, @juice49, got especially angry, tweeting this week, "Facebook, this should not be a notification. Don't push this sh*t to me."







Facebook, a glutton for data, is presumably closely monitoring our interactions with its notifications for signs that we're either irritated or intrigued.



But bear in mind that Facebook has never been dissuaded from a course of action simply because it's proved annoying to its users. And unlike an irritating relative, Facebook doesn't just seek to control its own behavior, but to mold yours.

Ugh. Since when does Facebook send you a push notification when friends come online? Do Not Want and I can't find the setting to turn off.

-- David Akermanis (@davidakermanis) February 21, 2013

Click 'Pray' to Pray: How Evangelical Megapastor Joel Osteen Is Saving Souls With Facebook

MIAMI -- Halfway through megapastor Joel Osteen’s sermon at Marlins Park stadium, seven frazzled people sitting in a press box overlooking the field realize they have a problem: The prayers aren’t going through.



“I can forward ‘prayer’ to ‘prayer request,’” volunteers a member of Osteen’s technical staff as a possible fix. He fiddles with the trackball of his BlackBerry as he tries his best to reassure Osteen’s marketing director, Jason Madding, that they can redirect people's emailed prayers to the proper place and prevent them from disappearing into the digital ether.



Hunched over a MacBook, Madding flips back and forth between a Skype chat and a page tracking traffic to Osteen’s sites. He coordinates with a remote team of developers as he monitors the popularity of Osteen's page to gauge whether the surge of visitors will overwhelm the servers and bring down the site.



On the field below, a musician blows two long blasts from a ram’s horn while drums thump in the background. “Every day has your name on it,” Osteen shouts to the crowd.



Osteen, a 50-year-old Texas native with an impeccable complexion, thick head of dark hair and a gleaming white smile, is the pastor of the largest church in America. On this April night in Miami, nearly 36,000 cheering people have gathered in the stands of the stadium to hear him speak. But for Madding, the crucial action is playing out on an iPad propped on a desk in front of him: He is watching the live stream of the pastor’s sermon as it appears to audiences who are tuning in from home -- a group numbering more than 138,000. They are absorbing Osteen’s “Night of Hope,” a gathering of evangelical Christians aimed at strengthening people's commitment to Christ, swaying non-believers and spreading Osteen's message of self-improvement through Christianity.



Madding’s iPad displays a ceaseless stream of comments from those taking part from their homes around the world -- people grappling with illness, joblessness, loneliness, despair and suicidal thoughts; people seeking comfort, prayer and fellowship here. These participants are not inside the stadium, but in an expanded gathering that connects the experience of those here in the flesh with those online.



Over the course of this night, Osteen’s team of social media consultants confronts the formidable task of making that synergy happen. They struggle to keep up with the relentless flood of digital interaction. In life, prayers may or may not be realized. But in the social media realm of the Night of Hope, all prayers must be answered.



Osteen's staff has instructed online congregants to post prayers to his Web site or phone prayers to a 1-800 number. They've also provided an email address -- prayer@joelosteen.com -- assuring digital participants that the church has dedicated prayer partners on hand who will field their missives and pray for them.



But at this moment, those emailed entreaties have no prayer of reaching anyone. The email address Osteen's helpers have supplied is the wrong one. It's an address that doesn't exist -- the staff was meant to offer up "prayerrequest@joelosteen.com." Thanks to the error, an automatically generated email reply is informing the faithful that delivery of their prayers has "failed permanently."



“It bounced back,” types one of the people in the chat room, who has tried to email from her home in Canada. “I need your prayers.”



She tersely summarizes her feelings about the situation: “=(.”





A man prays at the Night Of Hope in Miami.



THE ORIGINAL SOCIAL MEDIA



Social networking sites, long celebrated as avenues for up-to-the-minute information from friends, pundits, celebrities and corporations, are now being deployed in the spirit of higher powers. They have emerged as vehicles for spiritual salvation.



Increasingly, the road to Damascus is a hyperlink and the Epistle is a tweet.



In some sense, this seems inevitable. The Internet is effectively doing for present-day pastors what television once did for Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and the rest of the so-called televangelists: helping them spread Christianity on a mass scale while liberating their congregations from the confines of the physical church.



Beyond the tens of millions of viewers who can be reached via television broadcasts, the Web has amplified the potential audience to the hundreds of millions, while transcending geographic boundaries. Pastors need not concern themselves with buying TV time in the appropriate markets. They can instead use tweets, streaming video, podcasts and Facebook status updates -- free, accessible anytime and widely shared -- to turn hearts and shepherd their flock. And while TV is a one-way form of communication, the Internet enables interaction, letting ministries converse with the people tuning in.



“Thirty years ago, televangelists used technology that did not exist before then to spread their message, and that is essentially what technology is allowing pastors and churches to do now,” said Todd Rhoades, the director of new media and technologies at the Leadership Network, which seeks to help churches master technical innovation. “But it’s on a much larger scale and in many ways it’s on a more individual scale -- it seems a lot more personal.”





Osteen during a 2012 interview with Matt Lauer on NBC News' Today show. (Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)



Social media brand managers would pay dearly for fans as active as the followers that religious groups have attracted online. On social networking sites, megapastors’ fan bases are considerably smaller than those of pop stars or big brands, but church followers tend to be far more engaged and apt to spread the word of their preachers.



Religious groups regularly rank among the top five most-discussed fan pages on Facebook, according to PageData, a social media analytics firm. Rihanna, the most popular public figure on Facebook with over 70 million “likes,” averaged 41,000 interactions per Facebook post during the month of March, reported Quintly, an analytics firm that registers shares, comments and “likes” as individual interactions. Joel Osteen Ministries, with a relatively paltry 3.6 million “likes,” averaged 160,000 interactions per post, Quintly found -- nearly four times Rihanna’s average, three times Justin Bieber’s and almost sixteen times the White House’s.



Evangelical Christians and social media creators ultimately share something fundamental in common: Both are consumed with the nature of how information spreads, and both are intent on fashioning a sense of community out of individuals separated by time, space, language and culture. Both also passionately apply themselves to filling what they view as a void in the human experience.



“Religion is the original social media,” says Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On . “Even that phrase, ‘spreading the gospel.’ Religion is one of the original things that people shared to a good degree.”



'THE DIGIVANGELIST'



Osteen has long harbored aspirations of reaching enormous numbers of people. Early in his career, when he published his first book, Osteen's public relations team pitched him as “Billy Graham meets Tony Robbins.” His message of positive thinking and attaining personal prosperity through Christianity has attracted both devout followers and strident critics, who argue he preaches a watered down version of the Bible that overemphasizes material wealth. But his breed of self-empowerment evangelicalism -- “Be a victor, not a victim,” “[God] wants us to enjoy every single day of our lives” -- has proved so popular, Osteen delivers his song-filled sermons to traveling Night of Hope events held monthly in different cities around the world. He’s also authored several bestsellers and reaches 10 million homes a month via his weekly TV broadcast. He has a passion for television and doesn’t seem to have ever met a camera he didn't like. “TV is Joel’s heart,” notes Madding.



But seeing new opportunities to expand his following and spread his brand of inspiration, Osteen has lately sought to master a new field: digi-vangelism.



In his telling, social media enables him to “impact more people in a positive way” -- an impact he no doubt hopes will ultimately tether believers and non-believers closer to his congregation (and maybe even sell some of his books or DVDs along the way).



Other churches, like Oklahoma’s evangelical LifeChurch, have been more ambitious and creative with their approaches to technology, though none can yet rival Osteen’s reach.



And Osteen, born in an era where the dominant screen was a television, not a computer, is facing some of the same challenges other churches are confronting as he attempts to update his message for the Facebook era. Larger churches have traditionally been technology’s early adopters, and smaller congregations are likely to crib from Osteen’s social media strategy.



Here’s where devotees can currently find Osteen online: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, on podcasts, delivered to their email inboxes, as a blog on JoelOsteen.com, livestreamed via his website, in an iPad magazine and, coming soon, on two standalone iPhone apps. To handle the deluge of prayer requests posted to Osteen’s Facebook wall and phoned into his church, Joel Osteen Ministries has even launched a dedicated site, Pray Together, where people can post prayer requests for the ministry’s entire congregation to respond to. Just click “pray” to pray.











“It’s kind of like -- are you familiar with Reddit or Digg?” asks Brian Boyd, the chief executive of Media Connect Partners (or MCP), a social media consultancy that assists Joel Osteen Ministries with their with day-to-day online outreach efforts, as well as their Night of Hope events. “You can vote a prayer request up or down, and actually pray.”



Some evangelical Christians view these developments with alarm, decrying what they portray as an insincere reach for souls with social media and a trend that could undermine the draw of in-person gatherings of people in one place. Evangelical Christian pastor John MacArthur railed against “flat screen preachers” in a 2011 interview with Christianity.com, declaring their form of ministry an “aberration” that moved “away from the core of sound doctrine.”



But Osteen’s social media consultants maintain they have witnessed the faithful finding real fellowship and solace in a virtual setting.



“You don’t have to sign up for an email, you don’t have to go to church, and you don’t have to go out and find it: you can literally log onto your computer or your phone, and you can get the encouragement or inspiration that you need,” says Kelly Vo, a twenty-something social media analyst manager with MCP who helps Osteen, along with other Christian figures, on his web strategy. “People share things on social media, with Joel, that I don’t think people would even share with their pastor in person.”



'I SPEAK JOEL'



It's just after noon on Saturday, more than six hours before the Night of Hope is set to begin, and already a gaggle of web gurus have arranged themselves at a long desk in the empty press box at Marlins Park. They are seated elbow-to-elbow, MacBook-to-MacBook, as they prepare for the intense activity ahead. The room is silent, save for the growl of planes flying overhead and the occasional twang from an electric guitarist rehearsing on the black stage below.



For the Night of Hope, Boyd's MCP has rallied a team of 10 to run social media, with most of the moderators here in Miami and others working from their homes scattered from Las Vegas to Charlotte. Joel Osteen Ministries has tapped another 11 people, including Madding's marketing staff and a group of developers, to be sure Osteen's site doesn't collapse under the weight of its online congregation. In Texas, Osteen has seven prayer partners, made up of Lakewood Church staff and volunteers, on hand to pray via email and on the phone.



The mission for this sizable social media operation is to transpose and transmit the real-life experience of Osteen’s Night of Hope sermon -- a rock concert-like production where thousands pray, sing, shout, stand, stomp, hug, clap, cry and convert -- to people sitting alone, in darkened rooms, before the glow of computer screen.



“I want it to be real, interactive,” says Boyd. “I want them to feel like they’re sitting in the stadium.”



MCP will update Joel Osteen Ministries’ social accounts throughout the night in an effort to drive people to the main attraction: the live, online video stream of the Night of Hope and the public chat room that sits alongside it on the screen. Osteen's chat room will be open to all comers as a place where they can message with other followers or with the team of MCP moderators on hand to offer encouragement, share information on local churches and answer questions posed by the virtual attendees. A separate section of the screen will allow participants to post prayer requests for all to see and answer.





Osteen's wife, Victoria Osteen, as seen during the Night of Hope live stream on Osteen's site the night of the event.



Vo, a slim brunette dressed in purple pants, a lavender collared shirt, and black pumps, works on putting together a list of pastors to follow on Twitter. Peering into her laptop, she shifts between Twitter, Facebook, a custom-made scheduler listing outgoing posts and the Instagram app on her iPhone.



Though this is Vo’s first Night of Hope, she has worked smaller Osteen events, and she has a sense of what’s in store. She has warned her colleague to steel himself for a virtual stampede.



“There are thousands of comments a second,” she tells another team member. “It’s just a massive undertaking. It’s exciting because his fans are excited, and so nice, and they’re so happy to be a part of it and they’re so enthusiastic.”



That deluge of comments is the most stressful part of the night for Boyd, who notes it's simply impossible to interact personally with every virtual attendee -- though that's the aim.



"We really do want to try to reach everyone," he explains. "If someone asks a question, we want to get an answer to them. If someone has a concern or wants to give a praise report, we want to be able to talk to them, and you just can’t do it. Even with 10 people, with that kind of volume, you're unable to get to every single person."



A former literary editor who studied creative writing at Arizona State University, Vo knows Osteen’s fans better than most. She’s helped manage Osteen’s social profiles for six months, and spends an hour or two every day responding to his followers’ comments or drafting status updates to send from the pastor’s accounts. The posts, based on lines from Osteen’s sermons and books, are each screened by Joel Osteen Ministries’ media relations chief, Andrea Davis, before they're published. Osteen is against personal updates and insists on short, motivational phrases: "It's hope, it's inspiration, it's stuff that they can use," the pastor explains. "That has helped us be effective." Though Osteen doesn’t tweet himself, he has a separate, private Twitter account from which he monitors his official feed. If Osteen sees a tweet go out that doesn’t sound true to him, Davis can expect a call.



“I eat, breathe and sleep Joel at times,” says Vo. “I speak Joel now … You pick up the voice and it’s like, ‘Oh, God bless you’ and ‘Would love to pray for you.’”



And yet, much like the majority of the congregants who will gather here tonight via social media, Vo knows Osteen primarily as a digital experience: She has met him in person only once -- the day before.





The MCP Web moderators in the Marlins Park press box, dubbed "Social Central JOM" (short for "Joel Osteen Ministries").



Osteen's Facebook and Twitter posts are relatively standard fare, but their reception is anything but typical. A tweet sent earlier that morning advised his 1.6 million followers, “Today, find something to be grateful for. Every day is a gift from God.” That message has been retweeted over 6,000 times, about average for Osteen, who takes a personal interest in his retweets. By contrast, Whole Foods, which boasts twice as many followers as Osteen and in 2012 was named the most influential brand on Twitter, is lucky to see one of its tweets retweeted a dozen times.



Retweeting and "liking" on Facebook amount to an effective way to convey the Word, as believers disseminate Osteen’s message through their genuine social networks.



“It opens up the doors for a lot of unbelievers,” says Alisha Brooks, one of the in-person attendees at the Night of Hope who follows Osteen closely online. “Through social media, I might have a whole bunch of people who follow me that may not be into the Word or anything like that. So if I see something [Osteen] tweets and I retweet it, now it has access to an extra 100, 200 or 300 people that didn’t have access to that or didn’t see it. And it might help.”



Vo breaks from her Twitter work to scan through the 400-odd comments on Osteen’s most recent Facebook post, systematically “liking” some and answering questions about the Night of Hope. That personal attention, says Vo, helps endear Joel to people by assuring them he’s hearing their prayers and praise -- even if it’s from the “JOM Team,” not Osteen himself.



“Joel is there. He’s touchable, he’s interactive. You don’t feel like he’s just a TV,” she says. “The followers know he’s there, he’s listening, he’s a pastor and he’s watching, so they get the interaction.”



'I NEED A PRAYER'



About twenty minutes before the Night of Hope is scheduled to begin, Vo resettles herself in front of her computer. In addition to updating Facebook and Twitter, she’s been assigned the role of “greeter,” meaning she will be welcoming people to the Night of Hope chat room. So-called "URL pushers" will answer queries with pre-written blocks of text that direct people to everything from Osteen’s Twitter account to local churches. Two others from the group will screen each incoming comment before publishing it to the public forum, and someone else will run giveaways (the prizes: free copies of Osteen’s books)



In the Night of Hope chat room, people waiting for Osteen to take the stage banter about where they’re from and where they’re watching the stream: Israel, Canada, Hawaii, North Carolina. Shortly after 7 p.m., Osteen’s big, pearly grin flashes onto the screen.



Prayer requests begin to flow into the chat room. Elsewhere on the Internet, people tend to present themselves in the best light. Here, people bare all, sharing stories about depression and abuse, seizures and strokes, infertility and lost children.



“Hey everyone I need prayer,” writes a woman, who identifies herself in the chat as “Lisa Elliott.” “I am dealing with Brain Cancer and dealing with abuse in my life and asking for some prayers in this I feel like I cant keep going with the way my life is going.”



Vo writes back to Elliott assuring her Osteen ministries "would love to stand with you in prayer." She advises her to share her prayer request online, or by phoning into a 1-800 line, where volunteer prayer partners will join callers in prayer and offer them scripture.



Then, 30 minutes later:

8:05 p.m. Comment From Lisa Elliott: siting here in tears



8:14 p.m. Comment From Lisa Elliott: I hatmy life my abusive boy friend is drunk sleeping if he wakes up I get beat

“Lisa, We are standing with you during this time,” types one of the moderators, called “Matt-ADMIN.” He directs Elliott to a prayer site and to the erroneous email address, prayer@joelosteen.com. “Our prayer team would love to pray with you.”



Another woman in the chat room, someone not part of the Osteen team, tells Elliott: “my prayers are with you, I was in your situation nine yrs ago, there is a way to get help, call your local womans help center as I did.”



“Can I have the number so I can call them now,” Elliott asks. Then, “crying over this I have never had something like this.”



“Enjoy the experience, Lisa!” a moderator answers cheerily.



Another half hour passes.

9:00 p.m. Comment From Lisa Elliott: please pray for me toight that nothig happens



9:00 p.m. Comment From Kelly-ADMIN: Lisa, we are standing with you in prayer and faith.



9:03 p.m. Comment From Lisa Elliott: I know he will beat me tonight

Another moderator is congratulating Elliott. Apparently, she has just won a free copy of Osteen’s newest book.



The MCP team is having trouble keeping up. The room grows quiet, save for the frantic tap of fingers clicking on keys. An unpublished queue of comments speaks to the agitation of people waiting for answers: “CAN YOU SEE ME???” one person has typed. A moderator sends a private message to a particularly frustrated user, assuring him they’re doing their best.



As tens of thousands of people absorb the live stream, the video is stalling, spurring even more gripes in the chat room and on Osteen’s Facebook wall.



“You’ve got thirty complaints on your Facebook page that the servers are down,” the wife of one of Osteen’s photographers informs Vo.



Vo clenches her jaw. The audience is diminishing, with the number of concurrent online viewers down to 34,000 from over 41,000 earlier in the night. People have spent an average of 48 minutes watching the Night of Hope, but the video's hiccups seem to be costing Osteen his viewers. Boyd tells Vo to post a link to the live stream on Facebook. Now.



“It’s frozen, my thing is frozen,” Vo answers through gritted teeth. “It’s literally frozen.”





A view of the Marlins Park stadium on the Night of Hope.



In Rapid City, South Dakota, Janice Heigh, 53, logs on to the chat room to seek help. She and her husband have been overwhelmed by the work of caring for their three grandchildren. She feels distance and isolation seeping into her marriage.



She also feels removed from a community of people grappling with similar troubles. Though she attends weekly services and teaches Sunday school at a local Rapid City church, Heigh has struggled to find a Bible studies group for people in her predicament. There are meetings for parents with young children -- populated by people decades her junior -- and meetings for people in her age group, who generally have other worries. She has had trouble arranging her schedule around that of her local church.



But on the Web, church services are always happening, and support groups are to be found at every hour of the day. Heigh has tapped into them via Facebook, Prayer.com, and at sites like the one for Osteen’s Night of Hope. In this way, she has found other grandparents tending to their own grandchildren. She has taken comfort in seeing that other people’s lives are imperfect, too.



Unlike in person, these online exchanges spare Heigh from feeling like she's a burden: The people she chats with online are there because they want to be. She takes refuge in the anonymity of this interaction.



“At midnight, I can go to the computer, pull it up and there’s someone on there somewhere who can give you insights, a kind word,” she says. “They’re thinking about you, praying about it and it’s like, ‘I’m OK. I’m all right. It broadened my horizons spiritually because I was able to feel connected, even though I knew there was no way I could make it to this or that.”



On this night, in the chat room at the Night of Hope, she begins typing.



“Iwill be maried 34years tomorrow," she writes. "My husband and I have had many years of trials and triumphs. We are now raising our daughters 2 girls. I feel that my husband and I have grown far apart since we took on the resposibility of these GOD given children."



“Please pray that we can come together after all these years.” Heigh continues. “We have had the girls for 7 years so it is not a new situation but seems I am a single parent.”



Vo answers a minute later.



“Janice, thank you for sharing your story and your heart with us,” she types back. “We are standing with you in prayer and faith. May God's goodness and mercy shine upon you.”



From Miami to South Dakota, this message makes its way, arriving with the affirmation intended.



“It makes you feel validated,” Heigh explains later. “The Internet, to me, it has brought a whole situation to God.”

Google「検閲システム」の特許を取得

今や誰もが、入力した文字のスペルミスを修正するのにスペルチェッカーを頼りにしている。そしてGoogleはこのたび、「悪事（evil）チェッカー」とでも呼べるツールの特許を申請した。電子メールや電子文書上に、社内ポリシーや法律に抵触するような書き込みが行われるのを事前に防止できるというものだ。



Googleが考案したこの「Policy Violation Checker」（ポリシー違反チェッカー）では、ソフトウェアを使って、ユーザーが入力している文章を監視することができる。そして、「問題のある表現」、すなわち「ポリシー違反や法に触れる恐れがある表現など、企業、ビジネス、または個人にとって問題になりかねない」内容が文章に含まれている場合に、会社の雇用主などに警告を発することができる、と特許申請書には書かれている。



特許申請書によれば、このアルゴリズムは、過去に「問題あり」と判断された表現のデータベースとユーザーの書き込みを比較して、問題になりかねない文章を自動的に検出する。さらにこのツールは、規定に違反する内容が書き込まれたことを当のユーザーに知らせるだけでなく、なぜルール違反になるのかを説明し、リスクの低い別の表現を提示し、そして重要なことだが、第三者にその違反を警告することができるという。



「ユーザーが問題ある文章を含むテキスト文書、プレゼンテーション等を作成したとき、ポリシー違反チェッカーはその事実を法務部門に連絡することができる」と特許申請書は述べている。



この技術は、電子メールだけでなく、「テキストのドキュメント、スプレッドシート、プレゼンテーションなど」あらゆる電子文書に利用することができる。また、デスクトップコンピューターやワークステーションだけでなく、分散型ネットワークシステム、組み込み型システム、モバイル機器、セットトップボックス、TVなどさまざまなシステム上で利用することができる。



この技術は、訴訟や情報漏洩、それに罪に問われるような他の情報が表に出るのを避けたいと考える企業にとって役立つ可能性があるとGoogleは示唆している。例えば、「『わが社のABCプロジェクトは、XYZ社を完全に抹殺するものだ』といった表現が文書に含まれていると、不当な競争を仕掛けているとして訴えられる危険性がある」と同社は説明している。



この技術は企業向けとされているが、全体主義的体制の国で「ネット検閲」システムとして採用されることも考えられないわけではない。そうなったら、スマートフォンからTVまで、あらゆる機器で利用できることから、市民が何かを書いたとき（電子メールやWord文書、ブログ投稿の草稿、デジタル日記等）、抑圧的な政府がそれをリアルタイムで検知して、「送信」ボタンが押される前にそれを抑制できるようになる。



この技術は、小児愛者の存在を警察に警告できるのだろうか。政治家の不倫を未然に防いだり、パートナーの浮気をその配偶者に警告したりできるのだろうか。あるいは、白人至上主義者や宗教的過激派が仲間内でメールをやり取りするのを阻止できるのだろうか。そして、これらのことが可能だとして、これらをそもそも行うべきなのだろうか。



特許申請を最初に報じた「Slashdot」は、この技術が、かえって悪事を働く人が法の目をくぐる手段を提供する場合があると推測している。「悪事をやめられない人でも、少なくとも証拠文書を残さない悪人になれる」と、同記事は述べている。



さらに大きな懸念は、Googleが「道徳的判断を下す者」になる可能性があることだ。かつてGoogleの創設スタッフたちは、同社が目指すべき標語として、Don't be Evil（邪悪になるな）を掲げた。しかしだからと言って、われわれが悪事を働かないように監視する権利を、本当にGoogleに与えるべきなのだろうか。



更新：Googleの広報マット・カルマンは電子メールで、たとえ同社の特許が許可された場合でも、製品化されるとは限らないと説明した。



（2013/05/06 掲載原文／訳：佐藤卓／ガリレオ）