Procrast-Nation

A picture say it all:

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If you are a regular reader, you know by now that I am obsessed with starting these seemingly insane and pointless projects.  Well its time for another one, but this one I think has real potential.  As many of you may remember, project inbox overload was originally an attempt to see if it was actually feasible to fill a gmail account.  Sure enough, with the help of friends, I was able to reach the 7 gigabyte or so limit gmail provided.  I then found out that Yahoo offered “unlimited space”, so I immediately started a yahoo account and began signing it up for news letters and email updates and giving the email address out to sketchy websites that would spam it.  With some work, I was getting a couple thousand emails a day, over half of which for some odd reason were advertisements for Indian and plus sized breast porn.  Anyway, it didn’t take long for Yahoo to screw me out of my unlimited space.  Essentially the account broke.  It started accepting less and less emails and locking up more and more frequently until eventually, whenever I tried to log into the email I’d just recieve an error message.  The error message indicates that I should contact support, who were of course, non responsive.  The account had reached around 70,000 emails when this happened, which were, based on some calculations and estimating, under 2 gigabytes worth of space total.  As I predicted, yahoo’s unlimited space was a scam and their email was far inferior to gmail.  Anyway, the whole point of this past project was to test the limits of the free service, and also to see how easy it was to get signed up for a bombardment of emails.

Now, what does this have to do with Neil Ludd you may ask?  I will explain.  Recently people have used email less and less and have been spending more time and energy on facebook and other social networking sites. The amount of data transferred over these sites is ridiculous. People make hundreds, in some case thousands of “friends” to whom they send messages, post pictures, invite to events, play games with, and in essence, spam. For some crazy statistics, follow this link:

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Facebook-Statistics-2010.jpg

To highlight a few, there are over 400 million active users, 60 million status updates each day, 3 billion photos uploaded each month, and 5,000,000,000 pieces of content are shared EACH WEEK!

I feel that facebook, more than anything else, epitomizes the information glut that Neil Postman talked about in modern society. I figured, why not do a little experiment. I wanted to see how much facebook does to prevent people from over-using and distributing information, so I made an account under the alias Neil Ludd.

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A bit ago I noticed that Facebook.com activity peaks around midnight to 1 in the morning, at least with my own friends. Then again - I hardly ever log on. Out of the curiosity my observation generated and a bet with a friend I installed Greasemonkey and spent 10 minutes to write a script.

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In light of the recent Megan Meier story, we might all review the Terms of Service each website we visit. Lori Janine Drew was indicted of “accessing protected computers without authorization” because she made a fake Myspace account, something against the Terms of Service published by Myspace. In terms of the legal system, this sets a new precedent. Breaking a customer-corporation agreement can be used to land you in jail under laws originally meant to deter and punish hackers. I have neither witnessed nor read about a Terms of Service agreement used this way prior to this event. At what point do we use the evidence that people click through these agreements to discount the agreements as evidence for legal cases? Does making a fake Myspace page count as “accessing protected computers without authorization”? Are web crawlers bound to these agreements? These sorts of thing have been talked about in depth before.

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If you use Facebook regularly, you may have been sent an invitation to an application known as “Jetman” or at least seen a box displaying game stats for this game in someone’s profile. Jetman is essentially a clone of a game that has been copied a million times; an object moving through a cavern avoiding obstacles. The only control is a single button which causes the object to move up, otherwise it falls. The object moves at a constant rate horizontally through the tunnel and all the player must do is control its vertical motion to avoid obstacles. The creator of this game took the original concept and expanded it greatly, allowing multiplayer, many different characters and different modes of play. The majority of these features are fairly repetitive and bland, with the exception of an “arena” mode which piqued my interest. The arena mode takes three different prominent figures in a given category and pits them against each other. Users may play as any of the figures and at the end of each game they play with the character their score is added to this characters total score. The individual with the top score out of the three is currently “winning.” In the image below, I have added 1753 points to Obama’s score.

Now, of the arenas, the delegate arena is the one I took the most interest in. This arena was created when the republican primary was all but finished and Hillary and Barrack where still competing for the democratic nomination. The three delegates were McCain, Hillary and Barrack. Not surprisingly, McCain and Barrack’s scores skyrocketed compared to Hillary’s and once she lost the nomination her point total remained virtually unchanged. Circumstantially, her lag in score makes sense, but I think the nature of the game also has influenced that. The current scores are prominently displayed so a player knows at any given time who is ahead. Since a third wheel is awkward and doesn’t often last, usually it seems one of the choices falls behind and then the other two are left to combat for first place. Jet Delegate and Jet Host arena’s follow this pattern, but interestingly Jet Rehab does not. This may be due to the satirical nature of this category. People are generally more opinionated about the other two categories.

So assuming that the Jet Rehab arena is an exception rather than the rule, which I admit is a difficult claim to make with such a small sample, one might beg the question why two are so close together instead of having one delegate pulling very far into the lead and two lagging behind. I believe this can be attributed to the fact that when someone sees the candidate they support falling behind the rival candidate, they will try harder to raise that candidates score than if the candidate was in the lead. If the candidate is in the lead, there is less motivation to improve their score basically. This sort of check and balance has kept McCain and Obama’s scores very close together since the invention of the arena. Will one candidate eventually pull far ahead of the other? It is possible, but I believe an external event would have to occur defaming or glorifying one of the candidates to change the current status quo. The other two arena’s outcomes don’t really matter because there is no actual contest between hosts or stars in rehab, the world can support all the candidates easily. The presidential arena is significant because ultimately one person will win the election and become president, so there will be a clear winner and loser. A question I have is, how accurate of an indicator is Jet Arena of how the public will vote come November?

The answer will not be known until the ballots are counted, but it will be interesting to see how the Jet Votes correlate with actual votes, if at all. Obviously, the sample in the Jetman Voting is tainted because it represents a very small percentage of the population with a lot of time on their hands and each of them may cast multiple votes, having only to spend their time in exchange for these votes. Skillful Jetman players will be able to cast votes quicker, but ultimately it is a matter of how much time one wishes to spend to raise the candidates’ totals. That coupled with the fact that players know the current vote totals and vote accordingly indicate that it is probably not a very good indicator of actual public sentiment. Even so, it is interesting to imagine a world where Jet Vote determined the next political leader of the United States. It really wouldn’t be significantly different than the current system, except that instead of purchasing advertising to obtain votes, the candidates would have to pay players to sit at the computer and play Jetman all day. Either way, whoever had the most money would most likely win.

If you want to join in and add to these totals, the application is available on Facebook. In addition, you can take part in the currently 24343 post argument about politics located conveniently under the actual game when you take part in the delegate arena. Within these posts you can find thousands of the most asinine, uninformed and infuriating comments from tools all around the country. It is truly a tool to extend any procrastination endeavor.