http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/fashion/12THISLIFE.html?ref=style

WHEN I was growing up, we used to play a game that went something like this: If you could invite any five people from history to dinner, who would it be? That game seems to have lost popularity of late, and I’m beginning to think I know why. These days, everybody I know invites the same guest to dinner. Who’s this ubiquitous invitee? The answer is sitting in your pocket.

Few rules of contemporary society seem more unanimous right now than the strict admonition against using a smartphone at mealtime. Of the 40,569 surveyors who rated restaurants for the 2011 Zagat guide to New York City restaurants, 64 percent said that texting, checking e-mail or talking on the phone is rude and inappropriate in a restaurant. “Emily Post’s Table Manners for Kids,” published in 2009, says bluntly, “Do NOT use your cellphone or any other electronic devices at the table.” As Cindy Post Senning, the book’s co-author, told The New York Times last year, “The family meal is a social event, not a food ingestion event.”

Laurie David, the Oscar-winning producer and a Hollywood doyenne, goes even further in “The Family Dinner,” her new cookbook manifesto. “Do not answer the phone at dinner,” she writes. “Do not bring a phone or BlackBerry to the table. No ringing, vibrating, answering, or texting allowed.” If someone violates this rule, she says, the host should snatch the phone immediately and keep it as long as necessary

But wait? What if a few clicks of the smartphone can answer a question, solve a dispute or elucidate that thoughtful point you were making? What if that PDA is not being used to escape a conversation but to enhance it?

Consider the case of the banana split. Not long ago, my mother decided to make a big production over the first banana splits for her four young grandchildren. She ordered glass banana split boats, had the children paint their own designs, and then she collected all the ingredients. After dinner, she pulled out a pad of paper. “Now what type of ice creamwould you like on your banana split?” she asked. Mint chocolate chip, one person screamed. Raspberry sorbet, another added. Dulce de leche.

“Hold on,” I said. “You can’t make a banana split with all these froufrou flavors. A banana split has to have strawberry, chocolate and vanilla ice cream.”

An uproar ensued, at which point I whipped out my BlackBerry and proposed I look up the origin of the dessert and ascertain the founders’ original intent. An even greater clamor then erupted. As my father put it, how could I ruin this warm family moment with something as unfeeling, untrustworthy and unhurried as a Google search? But, I countered, wasn’t the point of the exercise to teach the children a bit of Americana?

Who was right?

Many people I’ve encountered clearly believe that the blanket prohibition of cellphones at the table also extends to checking, say, what year Qatar will host the World Cup, what is Teddy Roosevelt’s relationship to Franklin or just how old Cher really is. Derek Brown, a bartender in Washington, complained on the Atlantic’s online food section recently that smartphones were “obliterating” the bartender’s traditional role as “the professor of the people.” Once upon a time, he wrote, the barkeep was “expected to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of sports, history, politics and science. If an impasse was met in opposing sides, the attention of both claimants naturally turned toward the bartender. If the bartender said so, you were wrong.”

Another reason to keep search engines out of the salad course is that they have the unfortunate tendency to produce a winner. A friend of mine was recently having a meal with his wife’s sister and her new fiancé. My friend asked his future brother-in-law what song the couple would use as their first dance. “Let My Love Open the Door” by the Who, he said. “That was actually on Pete Townshend’s solo album,” my friend corrected. The fiancé politely disagreed and promptly pulled out his cellphone. After Googling the answer, the outflanked name-that-tuner told my friend curtly, “You’re right,” before proceeding to sulk for the rest of the meal.

Despite these downsides, I’ve found far more people willing to support bringing much needed truth into dinner-table debates. These advocates include some of the most vocal critics of technology’s intrusion on contemporary life. Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley inventor who pioneered the term “virtual reality,” warned in his jeremiad, “You Are Not a Gadget,” published earlier this year, that technology is limiting the ability of humans to think for themselves.

http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16036/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=wwcupaNA

In social media election, the GOP capitalizes

NEW YORK (AP) - In the final minutes of one of the most watched and fiercely contested races of Tuesday’s midterm elections, the campaigns of both Sen. Harry Reid and the Republican challenger to his Nevada Senate seat, Sharron Angle, were working social media.

“Thirty-five minutes to go-every vote is needed!” read Angle’s Facebook page shortly before polls closed. “You, your neighbor, your mother-in-law … GET OUT & vote, NV!”

Reid, who was also exhorting his followers to relay his messages online, ultimately prevailed. But the postings showed that at the most crucial moments in the 2010 election, social media was in the thick of it.

For an entity that effectively didn’t exist just years ago, social media has rapidly flourished as a political force.

“This is the election when it became more deeply embedded in the rhythms of campaigning,” says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “It’s not so much that as a single thing it influences people’s votes but that it’s now so inextricably a part of the political communication landscape.”

The 2010 elections may also have been when Republicans truly embraced it. The change was evident at the finale, when House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner tweeted congratulations to a litany of triumphant Republicans and fellow Twitter users.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin played an active role in the elections with posts on Facebook that were instant news; the 10 most popular political videos on YouTube were all Republican videos.

“There was much hand-wringing over whether the Internet was a fundamentally democratic or liberal platform for communication, versus a conservative one,” says Steve Grove, the head of news and politics at YouTube. “We always felt like the reason that it was more used by Democrats was just they weren’t the party in power, and parties not in power look for innovation when trying to communicate with voters in new ways.”

The reverberations the Internet can have on an election cycle have been well-known at least since Howard Dean let out an unusual battle-cry during the 2004 presidential election. But 2010’s election was the first where social media was virtually ubiquitous.

In 2008, Facebook had one-fifth the active members it now has. Twitter was nascent, its news value not yet realized. Location-sharing services such as Foursquare and Gowalla didn’t exist or had just been created.

This year, most major candidates had a Facebook page. Election night results went directly to smart phones. And everything - the campaigns, the ads, the voting - was filtered through social media.

More than 12 million clicked Facebook’s “I Voted” button on Tuesday, more than twice the 5.4 million from two years ago.

Asked if Facebook is contributing to a heightened awareness of elections, Adam Conner, associate manager for privacy and global public policy at Facebook, said that he’d “like to think that we are.”

“It’s important when the message comes from places like Facebook but I think it’s really exciting when people’s friends are telling them, ‘Hey, it’s an election. Make sure you vote. Make sure you participate, it’s important to me,’” says Conner.

Networks and news organizations sought to weave social media into their coverage. Reporters and TV anchors tweeted through the night. ABC partnered with Facebook, NBC posted video on Twitter and CBS worked with Google. The Washington Post was the first news organization to sponsor a “promoted trend” on Twitter with the hash tag “Election.”

The flow of Twitter updates from selected sources was enough to usurp TV coverage for some users.

“By ‘tuning into’ Twitter on election night, I was able to get timely updates on the races that mattered to me from people I’ve already decided that I trust,” said Mark Rosch of New Mexico. “Social media, particularly Twitter, gave me the ability keep up with the far-flung contests I was most-interested in, as well getting more information more quickly on local races.”

Foursquare encouraged users to vote by awarding a special “merit badge” to those who went to polling places. More than 50,000 of its 4 million users received it.

Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others used their power to get out the vote, supplying easy links for locating one’s nearest polling place. That could have helped voter turnout, which was projected at 42 percent of registered voters, about 1.2 percentage points higher than the 2006 midterms.

Mindy Finn, co-founder of the online political media firm Engage, said politicians are spending less than 5 percent of their budgets on social media. She cautioned overestimating its effect.

“Do we assign impact to people talking to their friends and neighbors in the same way we assign impact to people knocking on doors and making phone calls for a particular candidate or political party or cause?” said Finn. “On a basic level, it’s the same and things haven’t changed. Friends are still contacting friends and neighbors are still talking to neighbors.”

One of the most buzzed-about candidates of the election didn’t win. Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate who ran for the Senate in Delaware, had the most-viewed politician channel on YouTube. (YouTube counted 450 candidates with official channels.)

Her campaign ad in which she began by saying, “I’m not a witch,” was watched by millions. It was parodied on “Saturday Night Live,” set to song in a popular “Auto-Tune the News” video and creatively co-opted by countless YouTubers with their own political messages to distribute.

Those clips, combined with the many older videos of O’Donnell that circulated widely, made her one of the most viral candidates - yet she still lost badly to Democrat Chris Coons.

Facebook claimed correlation between social media buzz and election success. It said that 74 percent of House and Senate candidates with more Facebook fans than their competitors won on Tuesday.

The social networking platform also co-hosted a town hall meeting with ABC News. The sight was telling: a room full of people on laptops gazing at a giant Facebook “buzz wall.”

They were far from alone in their Internet-tethered election experience. Akamai Technologies Inc., which delivers about 20 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, showed traffic peaking around 6 p.m EDT at over 5.6 million global page views a minute. That’s one of Akamai’s highest traffic rates in five years of measurement - even more than during President Obama’s election night win in 2008.

Come two years and the next presidential election, social media is likely to be vital territory sought by Democrats and Republicans.

“In 2012, this will be a very contested battlefield,” says the Pew Internet’s Rainie. “It’s not a sidelight to politics right now. This is a central venue.”

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Associated Press writer Leanne Italie contributed to this report.

http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16026/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=7YryYML5

EU wants tighter online privacy

Internet companies, privacy activists and the EU’s executive commission are likely to wrestle over the specifics of the rules, which cut to the heart of funding models not only for technology firms but also many online news sites and blogs.

“People should be able to give their informed consent to the processing of their personal data,” the European Commission said Thursday in a new strategy paper.

It also wants users to be able to modify and delete any information that has been collected, giving them “a right to be forgotten.”

Thursday’s strategy paper will form the basis for an overhaul of the EU’s 15-year old laws on data protection scheduled for next year. It is open for public consultation until January and the commission aims to propose legislation by mid-2011. Any new laws would have to be approved by the European Parliament and national governments.

Tracking an individual’s search history to target online advertising is a key revenue source for companies such as Yahoo! Inc. and Google.

Other firms use cookies - small files placed on a user’s computer - or pop-up windows to track the websites a user has visited in the past or the books and clothing he has bought online.

The more closely ads can be linked to a user’s interests, the more likely they are to be successful.

But privacy watchdogs have raised concerns over whether this information can be linked to an individual’s name or address, what it could be used for, and how long it can be stored.

Technological advances and the many players involved in so-called behavioral advertising “make it difficult for an individual to know and understand if personal data are being collected, by whom, and for what purpose,” the commission says in its strategy.

Websites should be more transparent about who is collecting data, and why, and how Internet used can “access, rectify or delete their data,” it adds.

However, Thursday’s document doesn’t say whether the EU intends to require users to specifically “opt in” to having their data collected, or whether it is enough to allow them to “opt out.”

Another key question will be how prominently websites have to display any opt-out buttons or links and how complicated the process could be. Google, for instance, already has a small “Privacy” link on its homepage, through which users can edit or clear their Web history.

As it stand right now, the commission’s strategy looks “ambitious,” said Wim Nauwelaerts, a counsel at Brussels-based law firm Hunton & Williams who has advised several technology firms on privacy issues.

“The EU’s data protection framework already had the reputation of being one of the most stringent out there,” said Nauwelaerts. “And this only reinforces it.”

Google and its big rivals say that they never link an individual’s data to his name or address and that they don’t collect information on sensitive issues such as health or sexual orientation.

Google has come under fire after vans collecting data for its StreetView application also scooped up sensitive information from unprotected wireless networks.

Facebook last month acknowledged that 10 of its most popular “apps” transmitted information about its users to advertisers and data-gathering firms.

Google declined to comment on Thursday’s strategy paper, saying it was too early in the process. Facebook and Microsoft Corp., which runs search engine Bing, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Privacy experts in the U.S. said they were encouraged by the EU’s push to strengthen online privacy laws.

New EU rules are certain to create a “spill-over effect,” that raises the bar for privacy standards around the globe, including in the U.S., said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The U.S., he said, has been reluctant to update rules governing the collection of personal data online and has instead placed “blind faith in self-regulation.”

But “the EU directive is a wake-up call,” said Rotenberg, who last week testified on privacy issues in the European Parliament. “The U.S. will now have to work to catch up.”

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will soon issue a report outlining recommendations on how to ensure that consumers know what information is being collected about them on the Web and how it is being used, and give them control over that data.

The National Information and Telecommunications Administration, part of the Commerce Department, is also preparing a report on the issue. And the Obama administration’s Office of Science Technology Policy has created a new subcommittee to develop broad principles on Internet privacy to guide legislative action and regulatory policy.

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AP Business Writer Joelle Tessler in Washington contributed to this article.