social media

I came across this candied hedgehog a few days ago on Facebook, where it was uploaded to someone's pictures. I found it of interest because it's a powerful metaphor for the Hedgehog Project. Blunting quills with marshmallows, while not cool to do to a hedgehog, certainly is something that humans could afford to do a bit more of.

So I decided to do the right thing. I decided to track down the image and find the source so that I could ask permission to use it in a blog post - not this one, but another one. I thought I'd found the source at FunnyCutestuff.com, particularly with the big copyright notice at the bottom of the page, but when I contacted them they said they found it on Reddit.

So I did some more searching.

I can't find the source of this image anywhere. This means that no one bothered pointing at the source of the image and attributing the image to its author. 

I did my due diligence, and I've got no trouble talking to the actual owner of the image - whoever that may be. At this point I have to assume that it's in the public domain.

Still, it bugs me. I've found people using my images from Flickr without proper attribution of the Creative Commons licensing that I use- and I've had to challenge commercial publishers over licensing for commercial use. I don't mind people using images in their blogs, through social media, etc - but linking to the source of the image or at least proper attribution should be done. Therefore, when I use an image, I think along the same thing.

It doesn't stand just for images, either. It stands for writing, for code, and for any number of things that people copy and paste. Attribution is a powerful tool, not just for the author, but for people consuming content who may want to see the original context of the quotation or code fragment.

In the end, I decided to use the hedgehog image for something I'm writing that's for the less technically inclined regarding the Hedgehog project idea. To do that in good conscience, I decided to write this up and put it up so that the original creator of the image can contact me if they choose to - but in doing so, how do they now prove that they are the original creator of the image?

I don't know about you, gentle reader, but I'd like to live in a world where we give credit where credit is due.

Don't forget to support Creative Commons!

If you missed Matrix of Intimacy, Part 1 you may want to read it.

So. We're all matrices of likes and dislikes, and with social media this is more apparent since we have interactions with more people than we would have without the Internet - geography is now less of a factor. Since I couldn't afford the services of Mondolithic Studios, I'm stuck with my riveting stick figures on the left. A computer might interpret how we look to each other as matrices of likes and dislikes - but we humans don't. Maybe we should.

We know what we like. We know what we don't like. Sometimes what we don't like becomes something we do like. Sometimes things we do like become things we don't. Some people are more consistent with their likes and dislikes than others. When you boil it all down to the primordial stew of the collective intelligence of a single creature, we're a pretty dysfunctional group of cells. Picture a body of cells where nerves connect cells in other parts of the body. We'd call that a nervous system. But lets draw that down again back to 2 people.

The things that interest us change. The things that interest us change in priority. It could be argued that introverts might change the people around them as their own interests change and that extroverts might change their interests as those of people around them change.

Change, though, is constant. What we perceive as noise isn't always constant. It changes, too.

Going down into finer detail, in social media, we get to the tags that people use as well as the tags that interest them. Hidden within the tags people use, we get into the things that people use certain tags for.

The Internet is flooded with the autobiographies of primates with blow by blow commentary in the hope that someone, somewhere will think that the brushing of their teeth is noteworthy. So we get noise. That noise is also tagged with all manner of tags. Some, like #YOLO on Twitter, is pretty self-contained and can be easily ignored. Some creeps into all manner of things, from politics to social media to rocket science to lipstick colors.

But some noise isn't noise. Sometimes it's an echo of something we've already seen. If you haven't seen a meme fly by a week after you posted it, you haven't been on the Internet very long.

One person's noise is another person's music. Ask any parent and teenager.

Thus, we get different kinds of noise:

• Matrix mismatches: When people you might otherwise like post a bunch of stuff you're not really interested in. We've all seen it on Facebook, Twitter or wherever else.
• Repetitive: When someone finds that meme from last year for the first time and feels an ovewhelming urge to put on their Indiana Jones hat and share their archaeological discovery to the world.
• Lack of relevancy: Simply put, inappropriate tagging.
• Self-Absorbed: You know. The 'it-is-all-about-me-and-my-cat-and-what-my-grandkids-did-last-summer' folks. To some extent everyone is self-absorbed, but some people make it more of an artform than others.
• Promoted Posts: Where someone pays to own a keyword or tag, as in Google Ads or promoted posts, when you care less than the poo-flinging monkeys at the zoo.

What social networks haven't figured out how to do is attenuate the noise - and if someone actually sat down and thought about it, it's really not tough.

Here's a hint. And it can be done.

To be done well, though.... that's the challenge.