Cuttings: July 2014

How to think about writing – Oliver Burkeman column in The Guardian. "The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is 'cognitively unnatural'. For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can't see your readers' facial expressions. They can't ask for clarification. Often, you don't know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this? Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach 'joint attention'. Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? 'When you write,' Pinker says, 'you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing.'"

Facebook reveals newsfeed experiment to control emotions – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "[Facebook] has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of 'emotional contagion'. In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' 'positive emotional content', resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to 'negative emotional content' and the opposite happened. The study concluded: 'Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.'"

Facebook emotion study breached ethical guidelines, researchers say – article by Charles Arthur in The Guardian. "Researchers have roundly condemned Facebook's experiment in which it manipulated nearly 700,000 users' news feeds to see whether it would affect their emotions, saying it breaches ethical guidelines for 'informed consent'. James Grimmelmann, professor of law at the University of Maryland, points in an extensive blog post that 'Facebook didn't give users informed consent' to allow them to decide whether to take part in the study, under US human subjects research."

The BBC informs, educates and entertains – but in what order? – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "It is precisely the noisy jumble of cultures within the BBC that has been one of its strongest and most exciting characteristics. In 1935, the pioneering documentary maker John Grierson made a film for the GPO called BBC: The Voice of Britain. The two musical stars of the film were Adrian Boult, the great conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the toe-tappingly brilliant Henry Hall, band leader of the BBC Dance Orchestra. Between them they represented the extreme edges of rarefied and populist culture then projected by the BBC. There is a similar bifurcation in drama: while the film shows the delightfully homemade sound effects being created for a broadcast of Macbeth, the lighter end of theatre is represented by Eric Maschwitz, the debonair head of variety, seen urging a producer to make sure a music-hall act’s jokes are cleaned up (‘It won’t get by for a moment, old boy’)."

The BBC: how the voice of an empire became part of an evolving world – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "In the psychological warfare conducted by the BBC [during the 1930s and '40s], its great weapon was the truth – which is neither as simple nor as pious as it sounds. Truth became a formidable force, skilfully deployed, difficult to combat by the enemy. According to Webb: ‘The truth can be self-flagellation, government-bashing, and admitting failure. But admitting failure gives you more strength, and that is what Goebbels didn’t get, and that’s what the BBC learns in the war. And the BBC also learns that if you keep doing that, so if there’s a consistency in the way you report failure and problems, then you end up with even more credibility.’ By the time decisive allied victories such as El Alamein and Stalingrad finally came, the BBC had built up enough trust for its accounts of them to be believed."

We shouldn't expect Facebook to behave ethically – article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "When the story of this period comes to be written, one thing that will astonish historians is the complaisant ease with which billions of apparently sane people allowed themselves to be monitored and manipulated by government security agencies and giant corporations.... I suspect that once the fuss has died down most users will continue to submit to the company's manipulation of their information flow and emotions. Those who the gods wish to destroy, they first make naive.... The idea that corporations might behave ethically is as absurd as the proposition that cats should respect the rights of small mammals. Cats do what cats do: kill other creatures. Corporations do what corporations do: maximise revenues and shareholder value and stay within the law. Facebook may be on the extreme end of corporate sociopathy, but really it's just the exception that proves the rule."

Can we take something positive from the Facebook furore? – article by Pete Etchells in The Guardian Headspace blog. "A central ethical tenet of psychological research is the requirement for informed consent – people should be able to make a decision about whether they want to take part in a study, based on an awareness of what the research actually involves. In some cases it’s acceptable to mask the true purpose of the study, but nevertheless people should be (at the very least) aware that they are being tested. This didn’t happen with the Facebook experiment. By all accounts, the researchers involved took advantage of a clause in Facebook’s data use policy which states that '…we may use the information we receive about you… for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.' ... I can’t help but feel that we risk missing a huge opportunity to improve the process by which digital research is conducted in the future. We’ve been offered a glimpse of the potential insights we can get from social media research. We’ve also been warned about what needs to change for that work to be ethical and responsible."

Amazon at 20: billions, bestsellers and legal battles - article by Mark Hooper in The Guardian, summarising key events and key products in Amazon's history, year by year, from 1994 to the present. "It's 20 years since an ambitious entrepreneur named Jeff Bezos registered the company that would become Amazon. How did it get so big so fast?