Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: social

A Chinese cure for internet addiction
Internet and electronic games addiction is a problem that regularly surfaces in the media. In 2015 a Taiwanese man died after three solid days of gaming while in 2010 a South Korean couple allowed their three month child to starve while they concentrated on playing with a virtual child.

Some Chinese families have taken to dispatching their kids to boot camps to cure their addictions with the New York Times reporting how some are resorting to electrotherapy treatments to wean children off games and the web.

Three years ago the Times posted a fascinating and somewhat distressing video story on those Chinese boot camps with tearful teenage boys writing letters home telling their parents how they felt betrayed.

More telling are the comments by the Addiction Specialist Director of the Daixing rehabilitation camp, Tao Ran, who believes the parents are responsible for what their children’s addiction to what he calls ‘electronic heroin’.

“One of the biggest issues among these kids is loneliness,” he tells a parent group. “Did you know they feel lonely? So where do they look for companions? The Internet.”

The problem of internet and electronic game addiction is real – exacerbated by the incentives for developers and social media sites to maximise the time users spend on their platforms.

It’s also not just an issue for parents and children. For adults and business owners the lost time, productivity and health issues of spending too much time behind the computer are immense – not to mention the distorted view of the world that comes from a narrow slice of information and opinion.

While electroshock therapy certainly isn’t the answer, we do need to be asking questions about responsible and safe use of computers and the internet.

The Chinese response is an extreme, and probably unworkable, solution to the problem of electronic addictions however we will have to find ways to manage it.

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January 29, 2017
On the cusp of great change
Thought of the day. We’re in at point of change in social and consumer behaviour similar to that of the late 1950s.

Sixty years ago the drivers were; the first baby boomers entering their teenage years, the rise of television, an era of accessible and cheap energy, along with rising incomes from the post World War II reconstruction.

Today the drivers are; the baby boomers entering retirement, the rise of the internet, an era of abundant and easily accessible data, the rise of the internet along with stagnant living standards following the late 20th Century credit orgy.

Your thoughts on where this goes?

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October 24, 2015
Local gets left behind by social and mobile in SoLoMo
One of the tech buzzwords, or acronyms, a few years back was SoLoMo – Social Local Mobile. In reviewing the slides for the Future Proofing Your Business presentation next week, the term came up in one of the notes.

It’s interesting look at the fates of the three different concepts over the past few years; mobile has boomed and redefined computing and social has become big business with Facebook growing into a hundred billion dollar company.

Local though has struggled with Google, Facebook and a host of smaller and newer startups struggling while the Yellow Pages franchise dies. Despite the power of maps and geolocation, local just isn’t doing as well as the other two.

This could be down to the difficulty in harvesting the massive amounts of disparate data available to any service trying to draw an accurate picture of what’s in the neighbourhood.

Google Places tried to standardise that information for local businesses but the complexity of the service and its opaque, arbitrary rules meant adoption has been slow and merchants are reluctant to update details in case they fall foul of the rules.

Local services’ failure to take off has also had a consequence for the media as its in hyperlocal services that publishers have possibly their best opportunity to rebuild their fortunes.

That failure to properly harness mobile has also hurt merchants as many local operations are struggling to find useful places to advertise given Google Adwords and Facebook can be extremely expensive places to advertise.

So the mobile space is still ripe for a smart entrepreneur – a new Google or Facebook – to dominate.

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April 20, 2015
Tracking the troll
A BBC journalist hunted down a Facebook troll notorious for posting offensive messages on memorial sites.

He turns out to be sad, bitter and inconsequential man. But we knew that he would be.

What’s sadder is the troll’s view that “he’s done nothing illegal” and so that makes it acceptable.

The idea that offensive, immoral, destructive or unethical behaviour is okay as long as the perpetrator believes it’s “legal” is a rot in the heart of our society.

It’s not just Facebook trolling layabouts living on a Welsh housing estate that have this view – it is shared by many of our business, political and community leaders, it’s tolerated and even encouraged in our political parties, boardrooms and clubs.

We have a long road ahead to fix this.

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February 10, 2012
Is Twitter’s censorship a good thing?
Since Twitter announced they were going to start blocking messages on a country by country basis if required by the laws of that land they have received a lot of criticism.

Most of this criticism of Twitter revolves around the belief that every message should only edited or deleted by the person who posted the tweet.

Anything else a breach of free speech and a threat to the underlying principles of the internet.

That utopian view of the Internet doesn’t translate into real life; the online world is as subject to laws as any other part of life and social media companies have to comply with the same laws as newspaper organisations or fast food chains.

Regardless of what you think of those laws – and in many countries they certainly are unreasonable and oppressive – they do matter.

Were Twitter not to comply then the entire service would be at least blocked in those countries and, should an action be enforced in a US court, then the tweet removed anyway for every user around the world.

By introducing country specific blocking, the service can let the rest of the world see a tweet that would otherwise be lost and in countries with restrictive or authoritarian laws, local people can still use the service.

A particularly clever way of dealing with removal requests is to note that the specific message has been blocked in a country. This adds a level of transparency and accountability to the actions of courts and governments that want to close the service.

We can see that being particularly effective in jurisdictions like the UK where British judges have been quick to apply “superinjunctions” preventing the merest mention of something by anybody.

Should Britain’s overeager judges start demanding Twitter block tweets, those in the UK will quickly realise something is amiss. The effect will probably be to increase the interest in the blocked tweets that can be seen anywhere around the world.

Despite the utopian view that transparency and openess will solve the world’s problems, we don’t live in that world right now and people can – rightly or wrongly – ask that false, defamatory and damaging posts on the Internet can be removed.

Interestingly Google this morning announced they will be introducing a similar system to deal with country specific problems on their blogger platform.

Twitter’s handled this in the best way possible, in many ways this could be a step forward for social media and the Internet in general.

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February 1, 2012