Oliver Stone's Untold History - Interview With Cenk Uygur

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Is YouTube a driver for social movements like Occupy Wall Street?

from eurekalert.com

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

29-Oct-2013

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Contact: Vicki Cohn
vcohn@liebertpub.com
914-740-2100
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News 

		IMAGE: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research,... Click here for more information.

New Rochelle, NY, October 29, 2013—Social media such as YouTube videos provide a popular and flexible venue for online activism. How two different social protest movements—Occupy Wall Street and the Proposition 8 same sex marriage initiative—utilized YouTube, and their success in engaging activists are explored in an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on theCyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website.

Emily Vraga, PhD and coauthors from George Mason University (Fairfax, VA), Georgetown University (Washington, DC), University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA) emphasize an important advantage of YouTube videos for the purpose of social and political activism: they can be shared easily, quickly, and effectively through a variety of mechanisms, including other forms of social media, email, and print media.

The article "The Rules of Engagement: Comparing Two Social Protest Movements on YouTube" compares how two disparate political movements used YouTube to define and advance their goals. The study shows that social media activism resulted in differing degrees of popularity and engagement, perhaps related to the content of the videos and to the different online environments in which they appear.

"As YouTube matures, and additional social networking tools evolve, it is interesting to note how these tools may be used by individual citizens as well as political activists to advance their goals," says Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCIA, Editor-in-Chief of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, from the Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, CA.

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About the Journal

Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking is a peer-reviewed journal published monthly online with Open Access options and in print that explores the psychological and social issues surrounding the Internet and interactive technologies, plus cybertherapy and rehabilitation. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Games for Health Journal, Telemedicine and e-Health, and Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's more than 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.

Edward Snowden sets privacy time bomb ticking

from usatoday

Byron Acohido, USA TODAY2:59 p.m. EDT October 11, 2013

SEATTLE – Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., asked the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday to formally investigate how online data brokers and marketers track consumers across their computing devices.

This latest development spinning out of the Edward Snowden affair suggests a privacy time bomb may be close to detonating.

Context:How web tracking has become a privacy time bomb

Markey reacted to a story in last Saturday's New York Times examining how the online advertising industry is now able to track consumers across the various platforms and devices they use, often without the user's knowledge or consent.

That Times' scoop followed an Oct. 2 report about how the National Security Agency conducted a secret pilot program in 2010 and 2011 to test the collection of bulk data about the location of Americans' cell phones. That pilot program was never carried out.

Even so, Markey said in a statement issued late Thursday to reporters that he is "concerned about the increasing practice of marketers scooping up digital traces from our phones, tablets and computers that are then stitched together into detailed dossiers without consumers' knowledge or permission."

In a separate -- but very much related development on Thursday -- data management firm Identity Finder disclosed how the caching mechanism in Google's popular Chrome browser stores unencrypted personal data in a way that makes it trivial for hackers to steal.

If privacy is the gunpowder in these developments, consumer trust is the fuse. For most of the past dozen years, U.S.consumers have extended Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, AOL, Verizon and AT&T a high level of trust as the tech giants went about devising infrastructure to collect vast amounts of data on how we use phone and Internet services.

Led by Google and Facebook, the online advertising industry should hit a record $40 billion in revenue this year by intensively data mining information culled from our Internet searches and web surfing. Contacts, interests and preferences we disclose in our web browsers and on our smartphone apps routinely gets co-mingled with personal disclosures made on popular social networks.

Online display, mobile and search ads should top a record $40 billion this year(Photo: Interactive Advertising Bureau)

All of this tracking and profiling is in the service of delivering what the ad industry asserts is more relevant ads. By and large this is done without asking permission. All of this was just fine with the majority of U.S. consumers -- until Edward Snowden came along.

Snowden's disclosures of the NSA's PRISM surveillance program revealed the extent to which the tech giants turn over some of this sensitive consumer data over to government snoops. Snowden's whistleblowing -- and the surge of investigative reporting that has followed -- has given Americans an impetus to question online tracking, more along the lines of what Europeans have been doing for years.

The realization that the federal government has been tapping into the advertising industry's tracking data -- arguably with good reason: to track and deter terrorists -- has prompted consumers in both the U.S. and Europe to consider how to exert more individual control over what ought to stay private.

Make no mistake, the richest players in the online advertising industry desire no changes in the rules of how the game is played.Online ad sales rose 18% in the first six months of this year to $20.1 billion, and should easily top $40 billion by the time we get through Christmas sales, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Over the past two years, Google and Facebook have poured millions into lobbying efforts to derail proposed federal Do Not Track regulations. And last month, the ad industry quietly stifled an earnest effort by the respected World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to establish voluntary Do Not Track standards, something the W3C had optimistically hoped to get done by the summer of 2013.

Sen. Markey has long championed the concerns of privacy advocates. In his letter to FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez, Markey writes: "Such tracking envelopes users in a digital environment where marketers know their preferences and personal information no matter which device they use while consumers are kept largely in the dark. I request that the Commission investigate this emerging tracking trend."

How One Brave Co. Stood Up To The Government (And Got Shut Down Forever)

from youngturks