@ Martyn
Thank you, I will check out Ghostery. It seems like one more useful tool to protect privacy on the internet.

@ Jeremy
You raise some very interesting points here! I wholeheartedly agree that the issues of privacy need to be taken much more seriously in our public discourse, regardless of whether our data are collected from a government entity or a private business. You are right when you say that information like “likes Latin American music” or “likes winter sports” on their own seem rather inconspicuous, but the point to be made here is that over the more such seemingly useless factoids merge to create a stunningly accurate profile. This reminds me of how after the Snowden leaks people tried justify the warrantless NSA surveillance programs citing that they only collected metadata when in fact metadata (who did you talk to, when were you in what place, where did you use your credit card how much money, where did you go regularly, who was with you during those times, etc.) can potentially present a much more accurate description than the content of phone calls.
I read recently that Uber could easily infer from their user data how likely someone was for having an affair with someone (and where) simply by looking at driving patterns of people regularly driving some place in the evening and driving back home in the early hours of the morning. Knowing that some private company can so easily obtain such sensitive information feels quite unsettling for me.
I think that algorithms first discover identity but that as they become more aware of your existing identity and as they form a filter bubble for you they tend to influence you with their suggestions, possibly shaping your identity as you interact with their services more and more. In any case I think that privacy has to be protected if we want to live in a free society.

I really liked the Verge article you shared here too: ‘Here’s how well Google’s search engine knows you’. I do think these privacy issues are really important, and will become increasingly so, however I couldn’t help thinking about how simple some of the ‘results’ of this profiling seemed. ‘Winter Sports’, ‘Latin American Music’ – those don’t seem very specific, and nor are they defining characteristics, are they? But perhaps the algorithms will get better, and ever more detailed profiling can take place.

Nevertheless, I think there is an important theoretical point to raise here about identity: whether it is innate and waiting to be discovered (by algorithms, for example), or whether it is constructed (by society, for example). The ‘Google Gender’ category in particular got me thinking about this. So, does an algorithm ‘discover’ a gender that was already present, or are our actions subsequently categorised as either ‘male’ or female’ according to agreed societal norms. The first example in that article seems to show how algorithms are involved in the construction of gender?

I wondered if you might want to reflect on some of these issues further. Is privacy premised on the idea that we have core innate characteristics, unique to us, that have to be protected? And if identity is constructed, rather than innate, does that mean we don’t need to worry about privacy?

Nice breakdown of your YouTube activity here too!

I hope you’ll post an audio recording of the song to EDC, if you ever do compose a melody for it : )

I made a very short video to express something of the ethos and ‘creative’ purpose of my MOOC (Future Learn, National Film and Television School), so I can very much identify with your approach here. differences between my MOOC and yours were that mine explicitly encouraged participants ‘to take their work outside of the MOOC. It does have third party streams, if you check my mini ethnograph, but it was the fact that one section of the MOOC community went on to set up their own Facebook page with the aim of making a film. Maybe we could do a cross MOOC remix, with your song and melody and my extended film clip (which I’m planning on doing)? Great stuff.

I thought I would share some additional comments about the course and the community that I observed.

Early on in the course you learn that song writing is all about making choices – what idea do you want to convey and how do you do it? Ideally you have one central idea and everything else supports that central idea while the buildup of the song adds more heft to the central idea – you go from the general to the specific. Since I couldn’t pack nearly as much information as I wanted into the song without breaking its structure and flow I will add some details here that I found out about the MOOC’s community.

The MOOC uses Coursera’s internal discussion forum system and no attempt is being done by the course organisers to move it to other social networks. The forums itself, however, are highly organised. There are four main forums (General Discussions, Study Groups, Video Lectures and Assignments) and each of these main forums itself has 6 subforums, one for every week of the course. Including the “Signature Track” forum this adds to 29 forums in total. As a result each forum is frequented only rarely as people move from one subforum to the next as the weeks progress.

As mentioned in my song, the songs we have to analyse as part of our quizzes are available on YouTube (independently uploaded from the course) and it’s interesting to see that in the video comments it’s almost guaranteed that there is at least one mention of “Coursera” to the tune of “Hi from Coursera” or “Coursera brought me here”. These shout outs to fellow course members show a sense of identification with the community within the course. Futhermore, while Coursera is mentioned, I did not see the answers to the questions related to the songs spoiled in the YouTube comments which shows relatively high maturity (for YouTube standards) and a willingness to learn (and letting others learn). The students are mostly novice songwriters with little to no experience in writing songs but many play at least some type of instrument. People were in general very helpful and honest with each other on the forums.

Analysing the discussion forums on Coursera and other sources like MOOC review sites reveals a major issue that generates a lot of sentiments and reactions: The peer review grading process is under heavy criticism. 40% of the total grade is received from completing multiple choice quizzes while 60% come from peers. Since songwriting is an artform after all people don’t take criticism of their work all too lightly and many showed signs of frustration, especially since feedback is given anonymously and in case a lower grade has been awarded it often lacks proper reasoning. As a result the most discussed forum threads, aside from the one asking students to introduce themselves, are either about expressing discontent with the peer review in general or people asking for higher quality peer feedback that more specifically addresses the issues we are focusing on in our weekly assignments. Overall it looks as though many people are open to sharing their work in the forums and inviting constructive feedback.

Writing the song was much more challenging than I thought but it was definitely a fun experience. We are now getting into the sections where we are learning how to compose melodies to go with our lyrics and I am looking forward to finding out what software tools are recommended to assist with that.

I hope this gives a little better insight into the MOOC’s community than the song ever could and I’ll be happy to answer any further questions!