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Trolling

18 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

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1-9-90 rule, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Internet TV, Marshall McLuhan, original content, trolls, Walter Cronkite, you've got mail

Internet-Troll-Pictures

What’s a troll?  Most people understand trolls come from Norse mythology and you probably picture one exacting a toll from anyone trying to cross its bridge.  So then, what is trolling?  The bridge toll metaphor extends to some asshat commenting ugly remarks on your social network.

trolls

Why do trolls do this?  I don’t know but there is extensive information on the psychology of this habit online if you google the topic.  Trump’s tweets border on trolling.  My goal here is to put you at ease with social networking, despite the trolls and seemingly dangerous personal privacy concerns.

internet-trolls-online-provocateurs-troll-ipredator-image

I see this message as important because the vitriolic rhetoric has been increasing lately on the social networks I participate in, and I don’t see the noise abating anytime soon.  Not with us entering the final throws of an election season.  And I don’t want my friends and family psyched out and tuning out.  I know you probably only want to see pictures of your grandkids.  It irritates you to get friend requests from friends of your kids whom you don’t know.  Do what I do.  Accept their requests out of politeness and then immediately unfollow them.  That way you will never see their posts.  They will still see yours’ but only if you actually post stuff and many of you don’t.  This is also important because social networking is not going away.

YOUVE-GOT-MAIL

My comfort level participating on the Internet might be partly my personality but I suspect it mostly stems from my job.  My I/T career put me online.  Before the Internet, I was on CompuServe.  Online communication is the company culture at IBM.  That was curious to me when I joined IBM in the early ’90s because I came from the phone company where we never answered email.  We were all about voice mail.  Now everyone is on email.  Remember “You’ve Got Mail” from 1998?  We’re way past that now and today we are all on Facebook.  1.55 billion of us at last count.  The Internet only has 3 billion users so that’s like saying half the world.  It’s nearly a quarter of the real world.

walter cronkite

Let me digress even further, although I promise this is relevant to my point.  Walter Cronkite is often associated with America losing the war in Vietnam.  The phrase, “the Vietnam War was lost on television” came from Marshall McLuhan.  It’s probably also fair to say that Carter lost the Hostage Crisis on television, to Ted Koppel.  And the first Gulf War was won on television with General Schwarzkopf and CNN.  And then came the Internet.  McLuhan’s other popular phrase is, “the medium is the message.”  I suspect you are way ahead of me by now and I probably don’t need to even say this, but the war on terror will be fought on Facebook.

We’ve all seen this war playing out on Facebook over the last couple of weeks.  The online social medium changes our experience from the television in our living room to our mobile device or desktop computer.  Facebook is just another channel like CBS News, but with one important difference.  It’s more immediately participatory.  What do I mean by that?  TV, then and mostly still, is a one-to-many broadcast.  Within a few years, by merging picture-in-picture (PIP) technology with the Internet, it will more closely resemble Facebook, which is a many-to-many broadcast.  A party line.  Know that the speed of the Internet adds velocity to the spread of ideas.  Including bad ones.

google-tv

So the Internet and social networking has extended your living room to a much wider audience.  To the entire world ostensibly although really just to your online contacts factored by some multiplier of your friends’ friends.  Unless of course your big game hunting photos go viral.  And this makes many of you uncomfortable.

Doesn’t matter how uncomfortable you are.  You have a role to play.  Let me explain the 1-9-90 rule.  It’s sometimes compared to the 80/20 pareto principle, although I would argue it’s much different because everyone participates in 1-9-90.  I first read about it as part of teacher education studies.  Let me start with that example.  In a classroom, there is one teacher producing all the content.  A handful, 9%, comment by raising their hand and asking questions.  The point of the teaching studies is that the remaining 90%, sitting contently and following the conversations, are still participating.  They learn by listening to the question and answer.  Maybe they listen in math class, but ask questions in social studies where they have more confidence on the content.

pinterest-content

Do you ever post content?  Are you the 1%?  The teacher?  Do you ever comment?  Are you the 9%, at least on some of your friend’s content if not to every post?  A like is the same as commenting.  I post content.  Much of it is via my blog and I leverage various social networks as distribution channels.  I think I prefer blogging for its ability to format text and pictures.  People quick at observational humor are good on Twitter.  I’d probably pay to subscribe to my sister-in-law’s tweets, she’s that clever.

Doesn’t matter if you aren’t the 1%.  Don’t feel obligated.  My focus is on the 90%.  The 9% are still contributing, perhaps even with original content.  This is where trolls tend to play, although trolls can be found in the 1% too.  I suspect most of them are too dull though to produce original thought.  They are nothing though if not confident and steadfast in their beliefs.  I try to avoid trolls but will find myself in heated debates with marginally more cordial but equally unyielding commenters.

I never actually care about winning a debate with the commenter though.  I don’t expect to change someone’s fundamental beliefs.  Not without hitting them over the head with a hammer.  My audience is always the 90%.  The much larger audience reading the comments.  Some are still forming their opinions.  That’s why they’re reading the comments.  They find it interesting.  And that’s why it’s important to remain respectful and if possible, write well-reasoned arguments.  But for the 90%, not the 9%.  Screw the 9%, they’re a bunch of asshats anyway.  I would know.

DontFeedTheTrolls

Sorry this post is so long.  I have the day off from work.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  You might not be an original content producer.  You might not even comment.  But you are being influenced by online commentary.  I can say that because you’re reading this.  I can even suggest you might be more influenced online than by your television because this year Cyber Monday might just exceed Black Friday purchases.  Don’t be a troll, but don’t get turned off by all the rhetoric either.  Understand that you’re a participant whether you comment or not.  The world is a stage and you’re on it.

 

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Broadband

21 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Geek Horror

≈ 3 Comments

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Marshall McLuhan, net neutrality

RG6 CableI recently blogged in favor of net neutrality.  To be clear, I don’t think regulation is the answer.  In fact, I believe regulation is as much the problem as greedy broadband providers; but I’m against the notion that cable operators charge additionally for content that doesn’t originate on their network.  Pick your poison.

Just when you think you might understand this net neutrality issue, and be honest, you don’t, not really; a story comes out the other day about content providers actually lobbying the broadband providers for guaranteed bandwidth.  The exact same thing, only the content providers are requesting this rather than the broadband providers forcing it on them.  Hmm. Net neutrality was designed to protect content providers from having to pay extra, but apparently some want to.  And make no mistake, these are content providers with deep pockets.  Sony.  HBO.  Showtime.  Note, they are also traditional TV content providers and not a Facebook or YouTube.

Clearly, some trend is underway to explain this.  It’s easy enough to assume these content producers are positioning themselves for the eventual transition of content delivery to the Internet.  That seems to be what’s behind all these related stories.  Marshall McLuhan professed that all new media are destined to subsume and extend all old media, and to use the old media as their content.  I’m fairly certain that if I understand what Marshall meant by this, then it would explain this transition of broadcast television to the Internet.  Not that I feel any dumber than the media companies.  They’ve been positioning themselves for decades with cable companies acquiring content companies and content companies merging with cable companies.  And then they split up.  I don’t think they have a clue how this will play out either.

But that’s their problem.  I thought I would provide some details here to help explain just how certain content could be expedited by your provider.  The original plan by the cable companies was to regulate the flow of Internet traffic.  They can do this by tagging the data packets as they flow through their network switching equipment and assigning more or less bandwidth to the data session.  I don’t know if they do this by leveraging the Quality of Service field of bits in the IP header, but there is an actual QoS field in IP headers, as well as in other transmission protocols, that can be modified for this purpose.  This is how VLANs and MPLS work, if you’re familiar with those transmission protocols.  They know the source and destination of each packet and they tag them to control their flow.  But the recent net neutrality regulations nixed that plan.

The story I linked above is about a proposal to provide media outlets whom are willing to pay, essentially a TV channel.  It would be a data service, Internet traffic rather than television signals, but carved out of a separate slice of bandwidth on the cable.  They term this capability a “managed service”.  It’s not clear yet if the regulators will allow it.  Nor is it clear the cable providers care to offer it.  But just how is this different?

A friend recently asked me to define broadband.  It’s worth understanding.  The term has a very specific meaning to network engineers; but about the time dial up was giving way to DSL and cable, network marketers co-opted the term to simply mean fast.  It didn’t help that the FCC further diluted the term by defining it as a specific data rate.  2 or 4 Mbps initially.  Just recently the FCC redefined it to mean 25 Mbps or faster.  They do this to regulate the providers to be more innovative; prompting their national deployment of faster speeds because regulated companies aren’t thought to be innovative.  That sentence made sense in my head, not sure it actually does now that I wrote it.  Regardless, I can assure you that speed does not define broadband.  Broadband is the transmission of multiple signals on a single medium.

Think of how your radio works.  Or broadcast TV.  Without detailing the entire electromagnetic spectrum, understand that FM radio and broadcast television operate in a frequency range from 30 to 300 MHz.  You might listen to radio station 93.7.  That’s a signal transmitted at 93.7 Mhz.  The allotted frequency would be somewhat bigger, perhaps from 93.6 to 93.8 – I don’t actually know, but a frequency range is provided to carry the signal.  In the open air, this is not considered broadband.  Multiplexing multiple channels onto a single wire would be broadband, and this is what cable providers do.  You de-multiplex the signals with a tuner or remote.  It might help to think of the opposite of broadband.  There is a term called narrowband, but in this context the opposite technology is called baseband.  That is what ethernet is.  A single medium with a single channel.  Sort of.  10Base T on cat 5 cable is 10 Mbps of bandwidth operating over 2 twisted pairs of wire in a 4 pair configuration in full duplex mode.  1000BaseT (1 Gbps) uses all four wire pairs.  This gets complicated but those 8 wires are considered a single medium and transport a single channel.  Take from this that if you have 5 computers in your house on ethernet, they each take turns to communicate.  Very fast turns, but they are sharing a single channel, and the more computers running on that ethernet, the slower your potential speed.

Broadband transmits multiple signals, or channels, on a single medium.  It generally consists of a different type of wire, coax rather than twisted pair (telephone wire).  While technology continues to increase the capacity of cable types, specific medium will always be superior in terms of potential bandwidth.  Ethernet over telephone wire doubled its use of wires from 4 (2 pair) to 8 (4 pair) as it increased its data rate from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps.  There is even a 10 Gbps version now.  Coax has also advanced, but switching to fiber to the home is what will be the medium of choice for gigabit data speeds.

Sony, HBO and Showtime are proposing their television channels be transmitted as data.  TV signals are mostly already transmitted as digital.  The difference is packaging them within the IP protocol, as all Internet traffic is transmitted.  Then you won’t need a TV tuner, simply your computer.  The point is that televisions are going away.  As analog gave way to digital, TVs will be vanquished by computer monitors or TV tuners replaced by computers, because their transmission methods are coalescing.

I took liberties with some of my technical explanations here so I wouldn’t copy paste this into any school essays, but hope this helps as a primer for understanding the very near future.  And by the way, Marshall McLuhan has some great quotes.  “The medium is the message.”  “Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”  And, unrelated to media but a good one, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth.  We are all crew.”  Good guy to read up on.

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