The Peter Klein Interview

The Digital Tattoo sits down with Emmy-award winning journalist, founder of the Global Reporting Centre, and UBC professor Peter Klein to discuss the media’s changing landscape. He covers topics like how stories are being told, for what reasons, by whom, and will be incorporating it all into his course, JRNL 100A: New Media and Society.

We haven’t been able to avoid the hysteria surrounding Pokémon Go. Just outside the doors of Irving K. Barber library, crowds of students with their faces glued to their phones have been gathering around the fountain and under the clock tower. They’re all searching for Pokémon, and apparently the area is swarming with them. 

We talked with some of the students in the crowd about why the area is so popular, how the game works, and if they have any privacy concerns with it. Check out their responses in the video below, and read on to find out more about phenomenon that is Pokémon Go.

The Virtual Phenomenon

Only one week into its launch, and not yet available in Canada, Pokémon Go is officially the most popular mobile game in history. As of Monday, it had 21 million daily active users, had increased Nintendo’s stock by 7.5 billion dollars, and became more popular on the internet than pornography.

But you don’t need statistics to understand the importance of this phenomenon. Wandering herds of people can be seen all around UBC’s Vancouver campus with their eyes glued to their phones in search of Pokémon. One very popular location is the area around the fountain near the clock tower and just outside of Irving K. Barber. Apparently, players are dropping electronic lures that attract a greater number of Pokémon to the area.

The game overlays virtual items and places—like Pokémon, Poké Gyms, and Poké Stops—on real world locations. This blurring of the real and virtual is called augmented reality. Poké Gyms are places where players can battle other teams and win possession of the area, and are often located at churches. There are also Poké Stops, in-game virtual stores where players can purchase Poké Balls and other items in exchange for Poké Coins, which players can earn or purchase with real money.

This kind of virtual customization of real world locations is one of the ways the app is monetizing its popularity. Businesses can set lures and attract players to their stores. For $100 you can purchase 14,500 Poké Coins, and an eight-pack of lures costs 680 Poké Coins, meaning for about $1.19/hour you can have a bunch of people staring at their phones and loitering around your business. Likewise, professors would be wise to drop a few lures in classrooms to increase attendance during the summer months.

The game is currently grossing 1.6 million dollars a day from iOS installations alone. People are spending more time on the app than Facebook, and it’s been downloaded more than Tinder and Twitter.

The Reality of its Success

I went out and spoke with several people playing the game around the fountain. A student reported that he had been there at two that morning and that the crowd had been about the same size of about fifty people. Another person shared a story about how her roommate had called a house meeting to intervene when she considered joining a rival Pokémon team. They resolved their differences and later fought a losing battle against a car full of eight-year-olds, in the rain, at midnight. This scenario should help to clarify the hysteria surrounding Pokémon Go.

The good thing is that people are getting outside and being active and social as the game encourages exploration and interaction. But augmented reality blurs the distinction between online and offline in ways that can also be negative. A teenager in Wyoming discovered a body while searching for Pokémon near a river, and thieves are reportedly taking advantage of the game by luring players into dangerous locations.

The game also makes an overwhelming amount of requests for permissions to access various services on your phone. Niantic, the company that developed the app in partnership with Nintendo and a Google spinoff, has scaled back its permissions since the launch, but still has access to a lot of information that could compromise users’ privacy. Because the game operates with Google Maps and has access to the GPS coordinates of players as they navigate the world, information about where people go and how long they spend there, could be sold to advertisers or worse.

The terms of service also contain a forced arbitration clause that removes users’ rights to file a lawsuit against Niantic, and also prohibits the user from joining any sort of class action lawsuit against the company. This means that if Niantic sold or breached user data, or violated privacy laws in any other way, the only means of arbitration a user could pursue would be through private mediation, which would be both expensive and time consuming, and whatever resolution was resolved, wouldn’t be applicable to other users. You can opt-out from this clause in the terms of service by emailing termsofservice@nianticlabs.com with “Arbitration Opt-out Notice” in the subject line and clearly declaring that you’re opting out of the arbitration clause of Pokémon Go’s terms of service in the body of the email.

In this edition of UBC Streeters, we have conversations with students and find out where they’re getting their news from. As a follow-up, we posted a preview video of our interview with UBC School of Journalism Professor Peter Klein. He spoke about the impact of Facebook as a news source when compared to traditional newspapers. Where are you getting your news from? Are you aware of Facebook’s influence when you use it as an exclusive source for news?

If you’re interested in learning more about Facebook’s growing power as a news source, check out our blog post. You might also want to check out our feature on social media and take the online quiz.

Logging into Facebook and checking the newsfeed is something that most people do everyday without really considering its implications. According to recent statistics, people of all ages are doing this more often and for more reasons than ever before.

Facebook is now the world’s largest and most powerful media organization. People are using it to find out about more than just their friends; they’re using it to discover what’s happening in the world. And for many people, it has become their primary news source.

Although Facebook is expected to provide the news, it doesn’t operate like a traditional news organization. The newsfeed module is curated by computer algorithms that don’t maintain the same standards of objective reporting that conventional media strives for.

“The idea that algorithms are neutral, unbiased, objective, mathematical … is the most dangerous idea facing the 21st century public sphere” – Zeynep Tufecki, informational and library science professor.

Facebook doesn’t produce the news that exists on its platform, but they do select which versions its users see. Computer algorithms choose the content that appears in the newsfeed module based on a user’s activity. Recently, the ‘Trending Topics’ module became a subject of controversy because leaked documents revealed the role of human intervention in its assembly.

This is a serious issue not only because of Facebook’s growing power as a media juggernaut, but because the public is becoming more vulnerable to manipulation. By limiting exposure to varied opinions, the public becomes less informed and the conditions for bias are created. Some solutions have been proposed that address this looming threat, but nothing has been done to sufficiently address it.

A U.S. Senator has demanded that Facebook answer for its alleged political bias and Mark Zuckerberg has responded. But Facebook aside, a major concern is being overlooked; if the public begins to rely upon any single source to compile all of its information, then one of the most effective tools of a functioning democracy—a well-informed public—is being dismantled.

Where do you get your news from? Do you believe that Facebook can influence the public’s political beliefs? What’s better or worse: computer algorithms or human intervention?

Update: We recently interviewed UBC students about their online news sources. While every student we spoke with uses some form of social media to stay informed, we found that nearly all are relying on Facebook. They’re mostly going to Facebook for news because it’s easier and more personalized than traditional media sources like newspapers and television.

We asked students if they were aware of the influence of getting the news from social media outlets like Facebook. Most were aware of its disadvantages, but also accepting of these limitations. Students are not using social media to get the news out of ignorance of its restrictions; they’re using social media to get the news because traditional media has failed to adapt to their lifestyles and technology.

What does the future hold for news media? Students we spoke with didn’t state that they had any preference for one particular form of social media, be it Facebook or otherwise, and most often checked several at once. They favoured services like Reddit and Facebook because they aggregated news from different sources and were somewhat customizable. Perhaps, if traditional news media were adapt these features, students would be more likely to use their services.

Another update: We spoke with associate professor and Emmy award-winning journalist, Peter Klein, about the influence of Facebook. Check out his professional opinion on how Facebook affects our understanding of the world.