Digital publics, Conversations and Twitter

Last week, I left the Web 2.0 conference to listen to Mimi Ito, danah boyd and their colleagues talk about their research on Digital Publics.

Now if you haven't been paying attention, that plural of 'public' there may throw you. Surely things are either 'public' or 'private'? As danah explains:

Just as context is destabilized through networked publics, so is the meaning of public and private. What I learned from talked to teens is that they are living in a world where things are "public by default, private when necessary." Teens see public acts amongst peers as being key to status. Writing a public message to someone on their wall is a way of validating them amongst their peers. Likewise, teens make choices to go private to avoid humiliating one of their friends.

Yet, their idea of public is not about all people across all space and all time. They want publics of peers, not publics where creeps and parents lurk.

Bly Lauritano-Werner (17, Maine):

My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being 'public' when she defends herself. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can communicate with my friends. Not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my life.

Properties of technology have complicated what it means to be in public. We are all used to being in publics that don't include all people across all space and all time. Many of us grew up gossiping with friends out in public and stopping the moment that an adult walks over. This isn't possible when things are persistent. And it's really hard to be public to all peers and just keep certain people out. So teens are learning how to negotiate a world where the very meaning of public and private have changed. Again, this is a good thing. They're going to need these skills in the future.

The day before, at Web2Open, I had heard something similar in the Troll Whispering session. Christy Canida explained that when someone posts something trollish or otherwise dubious on her site, they get put in a state where only they can see their posts, but no-one else can (except Christy and the other conversation monitors). This damps down the flame responses until Christy and co have time to review, and maybe release them, but in their view the post is on the site, but no-one is responding.

This varying view of the web, depending on who you are, seems odd at first, but it is in fact a recognition in code of what actually exists in human attention. We don't all read the same web, we see our own reflections in what we seek through searches or filtered by our homophily-led reading.

Which is where Twitter comes in. Like Jeff, I've been twittering more than blogging recently, and while immediacy is part of it, a far stronger thing is that I have a sense of public there - a public of people I choose to follow and who chose to follow me. Everyone who uses Twitter sees a different, semi-overlapping public, which maps closer to our individual idea of the digital public we are speaking to, and listening to; one that maps more closely what the socialogist and theorists have been describing for a while.

Comcast's Bialystock and Bloom Business Model?

Tomorrow, the FCC is holding a public hearing at Stanford on Broadband network management practices. With striking timing, Comcast today managed to announce a 'Internet Bill of Rights' without inviting any users, and simultaneously cut off Dave Winer's net connection for exceeding their secret usage limits. I can't link to Comcast's policy because their website mungs the text in via javascript - here's what they say:

Excessive use means data usage that is not characteristic of a typical residential user of the service as determined by Comcast.[...]Comcast currently identifies well less than 1% of Comcast High-Speed Internet customers as excessive users each month. [...]Many excessive users consume more data than a business-class T1 line running at full capacity in a month. [T1 is 1.5 Mbit/sec - Comcast claims to offer 12 Mbit/sec for PowerBoost, and 6/8 Mbit/sec standard] [...] Currently, each month Comcast identifies the top bandwidth users of its High-Speed Internet service by determining aggregate data usage across its entire customer base nationwide.

What they are saying is that they use a crude averaging model, and penalize you if you don't fit, for example by using the connection capacity they promise more than 10% of the time. Now, this could be called Procrustean, but it reminds me of The Producers, where Bialystock and Bloom sold a hundred people 10% shares of the show, assuming it would fail. Sadly for Comcast, people like Dave are finding new uses for the net's bandwidth, and not just checking email sporadically any more.

Conventional internet service user models are based on users downloading more then they upload, from common big media sites that can be easily cached. However, as Odlyzko pointed out, citing Lesk's now decade-old work, the dominant form of data creation is photographs. Now all these photographs are actually digital, and we want to share them so others can see them. Because we aren't allowed to run our own servers by the likes of Comcast, we have to upload them to Flickr or Photobucket or Picasa to share them. This gives us an 'upload more than you download' network flow, as we send them up at full multi-megapixel resolution, but browse a few of each others' at thumbnail or reduced size. And that's before we even consider video uploading (which I've noticed Comcast throttles at 0.4 Mbit/sec for me).

Comcast hit the news before by sabotaging Bittorrent transfers by faking reset packets, but what Bittorrent is really doing is arbitraging around the asymmetric network bandwidth delivered by these outdated user models.

Bob Briscoe recently wrote an interesting proposal on handling congestion by TCP signalling to reveal the costs of congestion. This was spun by George Ou as an attack on P2P protocols, but the underlying principle of penalising those who cause congestion is an interesting one. The question I'd like answered is that if I have a gigabit network at home, and the internet backbone is multi-terabit, when Comcast throttles my uploads to 400 kilobits, aren't they the ones causing the congestion?