Social Cooling – How big data is increasing pressure to conform

I think the creator may be better off conducting a through philosophical investigation in efforts of pinning down the concept. You would be much better off giving full citations to Foucault and Deleuze, and full analysis into the Snowden incident and the fallout rather than a sort of half nod to, what I think, are the foundation beams of this concept.

This page kind of assumes the audience is already willing to admit social cooling as a legitimate phenomena, and if not, will be convinced to do so after a few short bullets and very little in the way of actual analysis (ironically, this sort of approach leverages one of the modern patterns the piece could tackle--short bursts of information, instant delivery, decreased skepticism and amounts of reflective thought).

Also, I'd highly recommend avoiding the global warming comparison. It does a disservice to your cause. It basically comes off, at least to me, as saying "our problem isn't a substantial thing in its own right so lets compare it to this other big problem people already care about and hope the very loose and forced analogy strings them along"

All this being stated, ya'll should check out Horkheimer's essay "The Concept of Man." He wrote it in ~1952(might've been 53 or 57, I'm forgetting the exact date)--and it's crazy how prophetic that essay turned out to be. It shows how all our innovation really just led to an amplification of social structures and patterns that were already emerging during the dawn of automation and mechanization. I think it's relevant to your project.

I really feel that engineers need to wake up to this kind of thing.

I'm not saying we should stop (although that's what might happen), just that we pause and consider what this is doing to the world. It is the undercurrent for so many profound changes going on right now.

Are we really comfortable as individuals building systems which predict someones mental (ill) health, personality traits or ethnicity just so we can sell them things, or worse, not sell them things?

Hmmm...

There's one side of this which is straightforward. Companies and governments are compiling data for their own purposes, which range from modeling user behaviour to profiling you so that they can sell you stuff or arrest you for dissidence.

The lines we previously defended for privacy, freedoms of conscience, affiliation and speech have been disturbed, to say the least. This has generaly been done under the surface, without involving users. It is increasingly felt on the surface, via the ads you see on FB or the recomendations youtube feeds you.

The other side of this is what I think of as a "post-history" problem. We're now transitioning into a period where reality is simply recorded. Your comment on Chelsea Manning's release is now a matter of public record. Your next Tinder date might see it and so might the HR manager reviewing your application for senior talent accumulator in 2032.

There are all sorts of implications to that, but mostly people just feel weird about it for now. Anxious and uncertain.

So... FB (HN, whatever) is a space for casual discussion. Casual generally meant private in the past. Now, some of the most casual discussions mean an extreme opposite of private. This inevitably comes with stress.

Calling it a hilling (or cooling) effect is evoking a political dimension, one that speaks to the first part of the issue. The second issue, that's more of a social issue. It's political too, but I don't think that's where the centre of mass is.

I agree with the general premise, but I think privacy is not the perfect weapon here: if someone is making a public statement (e.g., a personal view expressed on a weblog) they cannot claim that it is a private statement. The goal (I think) is to prevent them being hounded for it outside the channel where it was expressed.

One option is to bring back anonymity so people can make public, anonymous comments. Anonymity has been sharply curtailed (because terrorism) and this is, IMO, bad for society.

Another is to mandate short term limitations on use. For example if the employer wants to look at your online presence they can only look at last week of your posts and only for initial employment consideration. IMO employers should not look there at all, but maybe this may be a palatable compromise.

The chap in HR is not itching to dig dirt on employees -- he just has a distorted notion of due diligence forced on him. If he has a clear, legal definition of what he can and he cannot look into I suspect he will gladly comply. My 2c.

>It is planning what it calls a “social-credit system”. This aims to score not only the financial creditworthiness of citizens, as happens everywhere, but also their social and possibly political behaviour.

This already exists across the world in the form of credit rating agencies and social media. It's merely an issue of data integration