Leaning over his keyboard, author Andrew Keen typed the word “Why?” into the search bar. Keen, who believes that the internet is “cannibalizing culture,” is also fascinated by the secrets of our online universe. He plays with a keyword research tool—a website feature that ranks the frequency of billions of questions inputted into search engines—and the results of his one-word query are sorted into a tidy graph.

“Oh my,” says Keen as he reads down the list. “This is interesting.”

At the top of the graph, with almost 4,000 searches per day: “Sigmund Freud: Why do we dream?” For Keen, this is an uncanny result. Only moments before, he was comparing Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams to what he sees as its modern equivalent: the interpretation of search trends. Freud delved into the human psyche through the analysis of dreams, but the internet is providing a window to the subconscious on a massive scale.

“Freud had to come up with a whole theory of guessing what people were thinking through dreams,” said Keen. “Marx had his theory of thoughts being driven by the reality of economics. Religious people of course have their theory. But in a sense, the people of Google know more than anyone.”

In the U.S. alone, 250 million internet users seek answers from search engines every day.

Keen has been actively raging against what he believes to be the culturally destructive force of the internet since his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur. This self-labeled polemic accuses internet users of feeding themselves willfully into Google and creating a monster. The search engine, Keen says, is the “Big Brother” of the modern world. “We pour our innermost secrets into the all-powerful search engine through the tens of millions of questions we enter daily,” Keen writes. “Search engines like Google know more about our habits, our interests, our desires than our friends, our loved ones and our shrink combined.”

Our ignorance is Google’s power, according to Keen, as all our freely given information is manipulated for massive commercial gain. Websites competing for traffic use search engine optimization—the art of catering to search engine rules in order to grab a top spot in their page rankings—and try to interpret search trends so that they can create pages depending on recurring terms or hot topics. The relationship between search engines and websites is financially interdependent. The more information search engines accumulate from users, the more advertising they can sell. The more traffic websites catch, the more advertising revenue they earn. Everyone is vying for clicks, and that means knowing as much as possible about web users.

“Never before have we given out so much information so publicly,” said Keen. “That’s the thing about search that is so shocking, and that most people don’t know—Google is keeping information. Every time we search we’re adding to the intelligence of Google and not being paid for it.”

And what is it that the “people of Google” know about us? Aside from the numerical data that makes up our governmental and financial identity, search engines know the questions we are seeking to answer through the internet. More than 2.5 million people every year search for “How to talk dirty to my boyfriend.” Almost 1.5 million want to know “What does a hymen look like?” and approximately 800,000 people are asking “Where can I buy guns online?” In one of the most popular search categories—the “How to” query term—more than 2.1 million people annually want to know “How to give head” and 1.6 million people want to know “How to have sex”. It is impossible to gauge whether or not these terms are being dictated by bored, uninformed teenagers, but certain results imply something more sinister than curiosity. The 13th most popular term, with 2,500 people a day and 900,000 annually seeking its content, is “How to kill a fetus at home.”

“I think it reveals how pathetic a lot of people are, that they would ask these kinds of questions,” said Keen. “It’s a mystery to me.”

Keen has been widely criticized for his pessimistic view of the internet’s social value, notably by his nemesis Lawrence Lessig, who described The Cult of the Amateur as “shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance.”  He has been called an “elitist” by bloggers who disagree with his view that the internet is killing our long-established cultural gate-keeping system by democratizing information to the level of lowest common denominator. Bloggers are also quick to point out that for someone who thinks blogs are the amateurish evil of the internet, Keen updates his own–a blog called “The Great Seduction” – daily.

Keen believes he is separated from most of the blogosphere by being a “pre-existing professional artist” for whom the internet is an “exciting vehicle”–a medium that works as a supplement to the real world, not as a replacement. The internet, Keen believes, is nothing more than a pool in which to view our own reflection.

“This technology is a mirror,” said Keen. “The theological and deeply philosophical nature of the internet is such that now we can know what people are really thinking. We didn’t know before. We could only guess.”

Just like Freud’s dreamland – where our anti-social thoughts and repressed behaviors come out to play – something about the internet brings out the primitive, desirous and socially forbidden in us. Whether revealed in a list of search trends or through dream psychoanalysis, desires such as sex and aggression are a deep-rooted part of humanity’s instinctual nature. But in Freud’s theories, the dark side of human behavior was usually kept locked up inside the walls of the subconscious. Dreams were the only place it could flail around unleashed, unguarded by Freud’s super-ego, the moral conscience, the ten-commandments, the inner watchdog who cages wrong from right and polite from perverse. Seventy years later, we have a new playground: an entire virtual world that we can live in real time. And there is no Super-ego here to guard us.

The pleasure of anonymity, according to Cyber-psychologist John Suler, encourages people to “deliberately create a specific online personality for themselves.” Suler writes in his online text The Psychology of Cyberspace that the freedom of the internet allows people to “have some conscious control over the same kind of wish fulfillment that fuels dreams.” Like dreams, virtual online space encourages people to act “out of unconscious fantasies and impulses, which may explain some of the sexuality, aggression, and imaginative role playing we see on the internet.”

In chat rooms such as www.4chan.org, users are given unedited freedom to be as sexually explicit and aggressive as they like. Pornographic pictures are posted into the adult chat rooms every second, and all it takes to access the content is one click on the “I agree” button. One anonymous user describes in chronological detail how he meets women in clubs and drugs them before taking them home, raping and torturing them. “I go out in clubs and spike drinks, get ‘em drunk and take ‘em home,” he writes. Another anonymous user offers “human meat” for fellow cannibals. “I’m not a serial killer,” he writes, “but I have a connection to buy human meat. I am a cannibal. Does that work for you?” In the “random” chat room, a user posts pictures “to piss Christians off” – anonymously, of course. The image shows a figure kneeling, with another figure holding a gun to its head. Underneath, the text reads: “The cure for Christianity.” Another anonymous post follows a thread about the best knives for causing bodily harm. “Blade goes in, twist, twist back, remove,” the user describes. “The bleeding most likely won’t stop without cauterization within the first few minutes. By then he’ll either have been stabbed again or be dead depending on where you got him.”

On average, more than 35,000 users post to 4chan.com every second, with hundreds of posts feeding the site continuously. Although much of the traffic may be driven out of harmless curiosity, sexual and aggressive internet behavior–displayed in public forums or through search trends – can also indicate a more formidable threat. Hans Christian Jasch, who works for the Justice, Freedom and Security department of the European Union – one of the largest and most prominent world organisations tackling global terrorism – believes that the internet has become a breeding ground for extremist ideology and an almost infallible communication device for terrorists. “There is basically no control,” said Jasch. “It is impossible to control the internet.”

Cases of anti-social behaviour encouraged by the internet happen every few seconds. “Because of the nature of the Internet, people are anonymous,” said search engine optimization consultant Michael Gray. “They can go and act like a jerk online and nobody is really going to care – a lot of people do that.”

In the industry, these people are known as “trolls.” Trolls lurk in public forums, waiting for the moment to attack anonymously. Their comments splash individual blogs and respected news outlets alike with vulgar criticisms and personal assaults designed to cause disruption and outrage. “The Internet is so big, so powerful and so pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life,” says Andrew Brown, a journalist and blogger for the British newspaper The Guardian.

Of course, the internet isn’t just a breeding ground for uninhibited alter-egos. A major shift has occurred in recent months, as social networking websites have officially become more popular than pornography. Facebook, the master of the social networking universe, more than doubled its user base last year by targeting the global market. In Europe alone, the site’s user base increased from under 9 million members in June 2007 to more than 35 million in June 2008. Globally, the site grew by 153 percent. Approximately 14 percent of all Americans have a Facebook account, and more than 580 million people – making up 7 percent of the world’s population – belong to a social networking site.

But Facebook and similar sites are still dwarfed by search engine use. Google has consistently remained the number one website in the world, with 75 percent of the market share. The exponential growth of the internet has meant a guaranteed increase in search engine use and created the perfect environment for big business.

“Websites and publishers who are able to figure out what people are searching for are going to do a much better job of capturing the traffic,” said Gray.

Figuring out what people want has become a vital skill in the online world. More websites are gearing themselves toward the most popular search terms in the hope of attracting the 250 million daily visitors from search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Every taboo, embarrassing or perverse question – along with many innocent ones – typed into the search bar creates a virtual model of the human mind that SEO experts use as a basis for the mass psychoanalysis of internet users. Google CEO Eric Schmidt describes the search engine as “a giant supercomputer” with dozens of data centers around the world. They keep logs of every website visited and every corresponding IP address – meaning that each word typed into the search bar can be easily traced back to the user. Schmidt says that Google is “reasonably satisfied” with their privacy controls and that the company works hard to ensure that private information cannot be accessed and used for harm. “Although you can never say never,” he added.

Right now, a tool called “Google Trends” allows anyone to view the world’s top search queries down to a specific day and year, country and province. Most websites that offer information—such as news sites and guide pages—regularly check Google trends and create pages specifically to catch search traffic. For example, one of the top “How to” search trends – “How to have sex” – has accumulated 36 million pages in Google. There are more than 28 million pages for the next most popular term – “How to give head.” The question, “Why do we dream?” corresponds to more than 25 million pages. Bringing eyeballs to pages means advertising revenue, so web pages are constantly being created to match consistent search terms – such as “How to have sex.” With topical search terms – such as “Smallville, final episode” or “Sarah Palin SAT scores” – it’s a fast-fleeting competition to catch searchers before their interest in the subject matter wanes.

“It’s sort of an arms race,” said Gray.

Search engines and SEO teams compete to analyse and understand inputted information. For search engines, the more specific model of the human mind they can create, the better targeted advertising can be. For SEO experts, paying close attention to search trends is essential for building websites that will drive traffic. Search engines want to produce the most specific and accurate results they can filter, while SEO experts want to create pages that will rank highly in search engines and get clicks. The relationship is fraught with competition.

“Google is doing everything they possibly can to prevent us from manipulating the search engines,” said Gray. “Because if it’s completely manipulatable, then they’re not in control and we are. That’s a bad spot for them to be in.”

The information that Google accumulates about how and why people search is kept a tight secret. These “algorithms”, which determine how Google ranks pages, are the secret recipe that every internet entrepreneur wishes he could get his hands on. Google is constantly adjusting its methods depending on the terms being typed into search bars every day.

“Google says that every six months, 50 percent of their search terms are new,” said Gray. “But people are always going to searching for the same problems that human beings have been trying to solve forever.”

In internet terms, that means sex and communication – pornography and social networking. In Freudian terms, it represents the fundamental struggle between primitive instincts and social behavior. Freud believed that it is “impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built on a renunciation of instinct.” According to Freud, the animal in us all lies dormant in the recesses of the subconscious. It might be the case that our dream playground has become virtual reality through the internet and the ravaging animals within us are tearing down the walls of polite society. The unfiltered information we provide to search engines may be posing a threat to personal privacy and national security, as well as building mass corporations with God-like omniscience. Or it might just be the case, as Keen suggests, that the internet is nothing more than a shimmering pool of information allowing us to drown in our own reflection.download serial mom

I am a graduate student at the University of Southern California. I am of Latin American descent; I  grew up, and live in East Los Angeles. From what I knew of white people when growing up is that they lived far, and my mom cleaned their homes.

As I got older, I came to understand the circumstances of my presence in the United States. There was a war back home in El Salvador, my mother, who held a Bachelors degree in Business Administration fled to this country, and was reduced to this work. It was fine work—honest, decent, but at the expense of so much more.

For the most part, I have lived my life in safe zones, interacting with white people from a distance. Not because they were scary to me, but because most just didn’t “get it.”

Now that I am at USC, at the Annenberg School of Journalism, I hear a fair amount of talk on the role of journalists who covers stories that are nitty gritty, the stories of marginalized, low income, communities of color. A community that surrounds USC, yet is absent from the campus. The school—at $18,000 a semester—definitely draws an upper-class student body, earning it the nickname, University of Spoiled Children.

In a recent roundtable discussion, a few professors noted that student journalists need to be comfortable in going into the community and talking to folks. To this I ask, which journalists?

The students in this mid-city academic institution who grew up in the surrounding neighborhood—South Central, ground zero for the Rodney King riots—aren’t uncomfortable. The problem is that their (our) voices aren’t as loud.

While white students feel uncomfortable around people of color what about the students of color who are surrounded by white people?

A tall bald white male student spoke about his experience in South LA, and how he, for the first time, felt like a minority.

The issue of cultural and ethnic sensitivity comes to mind. The stories of economic plight, the stories of people overcoming, the story of the former gang member who got his/her life together, these are not stories where white journalists become “white saviors” because they were able to put some ink to it.

These are stories of real people, that occur every single day, and it takes journalists, who regardless of race or ethnicity have an innate ability to understand the complexity of the human condition.

As one of a few Latinas at Annenberg who comes from an urban setting with a mix of street and academic knowledge, I always find myself contemplating these thoughts. All the time.

I love USC and my program and I have wanted to be a Trojan all my life. But, it’s moments like these that really solidify my presence, my viewpoint, and my understanding towards how stories should be covered, and the importance of community journalism.

We are not all blessed with having grown up in beautiful East or South LA. We are not all blessed with understanding concepts like intersectionality or outsider looking in perspectives, but I hope, that we can at least try to share our stories, without feeling like we just saved someone.

Yes, it’s true. It’s called Blackbird (powered by Mozilla) and it was designed by African Americans for African Americans (kind of like FUBU). The free browser was developed with these Pew Internet 2004 findings in mind: “(1) there are 20 million African Americans online who need tools to build and foster community now more than ever, (2) 85% of African Americans prefer online news and information from the Black perspective, and (3) African Americans are twice as likely to be among the first to discover new trends and use advanced technology compared to the general population.”

Blackbird’s goal is to make it easier for black people to find African American news and relevant content online, interact with members of the African American community, share stories and comments, and watch videos through the browser.  The video section features content from online TV sites like DigitalSoulTV, NSNewsTV, UptownLiveTV and ComedyBanksTV. To me, the best part of the browser idea is the ‘Give Back’ program, which gives donations to several nonprofit organizations. Blackbird also plans to give ten percent of its 2009 revenues to their nonprofit partners, which seems pretty generous.

This browser opens up an interesting conversation around “what is black content?” Is the content provider black? Or is it content written with black people in mind? And by the way, who is considered black? Will content by and for people of multi-ethnic and bi-racial backgrounds be included? Hmmm..

In addition to the questions surrounding a “black browser,” I’m not entirely convinced black people needed a “separate” black browser. (Maybe I just love my Firefox one.)  Who knows? It might be just what my life was missing.

With the economy in serious trouble, automakers and financial institutions are seeking a government bailout. And the banks and financial folks got one to the tune of $700 billion. Well, The New York Times recently reported that Six Apart, the maker of Moveable Type blogs called TypePad, has created a bailout program of their own: “The Journalist Bailout Program.” (Spoiler alert—they interviewed me!)

The new initiative is designed to help journalists who recently lost their jobs get back on their feet. Once accepted into the program, Six Apart will give 20 to 30 individuals a TypePad pro blog with full technical support (worth about $150 a year), inclusion in its advertising program (which is an opportunity to earn money) and his or her blog featured on Blogs.com, a blog aggregator site. Six Apart’s Moveable Type software and platform is used by some great sites like Barack Obama’s campaign site, The Washington Post, and NPR—just to name a few. This is a huge gesture and generous offering for struggling journalists who may need both financial and technical help to start blogging.

About a week or so ago, I saw a Tweet about the program. (I’m a bigger Twitter user and advocate.) So, I immediately clicked on the link and saw blogger and Six Apart vice president, Anil Dash’s, blog post about the opportunity.

Dash wrote: “Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.”

I read Dash’s invitation and thought the program was perfect for me. Although I haven’t been laid-off, I’m concerned about the availability of jobs for myself, fellow journalists and graduating students. And as I said in the New York Times article, this program is perfect for journalists who now have to build their careers more guerrilla-style by constantly selling their stories and promoting their work. I viewed the “bailout program” as an opportunity to increase the visibility of my stories and the chance to earn some revenue from my work. I’m hoping to take my site, CaramelBella.com, and another online site in the works to the next level.

The media industry is changing to a world where journalists have to be entrepreneurs and good marketers, as well as great writers. Writers who are solely depending on writing and hoping for success, are doing themselves a great disservice. We need to be writing and promoting. Journalists can’t afford (literally) to be quiet wallflowers.

And I know for many journalists, the current state of the industry is discouraging and depressing. Lately, the future of journalism is all we talk about in class and in the real world. Yet despite the seemingly bad news and continuous layoff reports, I’m optimistic about the possibilities and opportunities. Yes, there are less “traditional” jobs with big media organizations, but there are new opportunities being created, especially online, even as I type.  And I’m jazzed about that.

Abraham Biggs, a 19-year-old college student, committed suicide last week in front of his Web cam, after first posted a link on a bodybuilding site inviting people to watch. Twelve hours after Biggs took a combination of opiates and benzodiazepine and went to sleep on his father’s bed at his home in Pembroke Pines, Florida, police arrived. The Web cam was still running and people were still checking in on Biggs’ status.

According to the Associated Press, which has a full description of the events leading up to Biggs’ suicide, this wasn’t the first time that someone has killed himself while broadcasting online. But the response from some of the viewers of Biggs’ Web cam has led to questions about behavior on the Internet—is there not some line (encouraging a troubled teenager to kill himself) that shouldn’t be crossed?

The Web site that hosted Biggs’ Web cam, justin.tv, has deleted the video and the comments people made while viewing it. The AP spoke to someone who claimed to have viewed the suicide and reported that as Biggs lay on the bed, other viewers cracked jokes. When police officers entered the room, in addition to “OMG” responses, viewers posted “lol” and “hahahah.”

An investigator for the local medical examiner’s office told the AP that before Biggs killed himself, some viewers encouraged him not to do it, others egged him on, and still more debated how big a dose of pills he needed to take for it to be effective.

The beauty of the Internet, of course, is that we’re all as invisible as we want to be. It is highly unlikely that investigators will be able to track down all the people who encouraged Biggs to kill himself, either because it will take too much time or because the viewers are simply untraceable.

The Biggs case has echoes of another instance of suicide precipitated by Internet users. Jury selection is currently under way in the trial of Lori Drew, an adult who created a fake MySpace profile of a teenage boy and used it to torment one of her daughter’s former friends, Megan Meier. (This New Yorker story has the gripping and haunting details.) Meier killed herself after the fake boy said hurtful things about her.

While Biggs was taking medication for bipolar disorder and Meier for depression, the more interesting connection is the role Internet trolls played in both cases. After Lori Drew’s connection to Megan Meier’s death was made public, the Drew family quickly became the target of the trolls’ wrath. They learned the Drew address and telephone number, harassed the family and made death threats.

With Biggs, the trolls weren’t just responding to someone’s death—they were implicitly involved in it. One could argue that in the Meier case, the trolls gave Lori Drew the punishment she deserved—they were the good guys. But watching as someone takes a handful of pills, and possibly encouraging him to do so? That has to show a complete lack of morals. At least stop watching the Web cam. [Ed note—or, you know, call the police?]

In August, the New York Times Magazine attempted to enter the world of the Internet troll, and asked if there was a line that shouldn’t be crossed. One notorious troll, Weev, argued that posting bright, flashing images on an epilepsy forum site was going too far. In a later interview with the Web site Corrupt, he identified the moral limits to trolling. “Goodness, beauty, and the meek are valued amongst my comrades and I,” Weev said.

Presumably a 19-year old bipolar college student is one of the meek. But what to make of the viewers who laughed at his death (even when others attempted to notify Web site administrators about the serious situation)? Maybe, in the unregulated life of the Internet, the only recourse we have for viewers who mocked Abraham Biggs is to hope the trolls do find them, and teach them some lesson they surely deserve.

Is there anything worse than hearing about a suicide watch-party and joining in? Making a list of more depraved behavior (watching a rape or murder) makes me hope even our morally suspect online personas don’t allow us to sink that low.

Second grade English teachers wince at texting shorthand’s butchering of the English language, but even the staunchest of linguistic purists recognize the convenience it offers. When it comes to Facebook status messages, however, there is no good excuse for such mangling of the English language.

“_________ is relaxes after a bout of house work.”

See, the default for a Facebook status message is “name is gerund something something.” Chris is walking his dog. Not too complicated. To call the rampant, blatant disregard of the most generic of all verbs irreverent would give these rogue grammarians much too much credit.

“_________ is has a big headache and playing hookie from school tonight.”

What these lazy bastards don’t realize is that by choosing not to double-click and hit delete before offering an inane description of their momentary state of being to the world, they are essentially defining themselves as their inane, momentary state of being.

“_________ is go see slumdog millionaire.”

So that’s what you are, eh? That is your essence, the fiber of your being? Danny Boyle is a great director, but I’ve never been so exuberant about his work as to tell someone “I am go watch Trainspotting!” Unless, of course, he was willing to give me five percent of net box office. (psst, ten percent will get you a forehead tattoo).

For the record, I am the guy that insists on spelling everything out and fully punctuating, whether I am on email, IM, my iPod touch, or my cell phone. That probably makes me more technologically OCD than it makes all of my friends inept when they don’t diagram their Facebook statuses before posting.

But just as the spell-checker has undone much of the meticulous work Dr. Huyler did in ninth grade honors English, this small, seemingly insignificant oversight by thousands on a daily basis serves to degrade our perception of each other as intelligent human beings.

Chris is why does cyberspace make him so grumpy.

President-elect Barack Obama is hip and technology savvy. In fact, many political analysts contend that his use of technology and email during his presidential campaign contributed significantly to his win in the age of Web 2.0. Yet according to a recent New York Times article, as president, Obama may be forced to lose his favorite campaign device: his BlackBerry.

Because of the Presidential Records Act, Obama’s BlackBerry (a hacker liability) poses a national security risk. It also allows the president’s location to be trackable via GPS and cell networks. And the law makes all of his correspondence available for the public to review should they be subpoenaed by Congress. There is no “work only” clause either; his personal emails to his daughters, wife and friends would be combed through as well.

Unlike his self-proclaimed technophobic contender from the general election, Obama will definitely feel the loss. Like most of us (including this author), Obama’s BlackBerry has become a part of his life. For him, the device may have been one of his few escapes to the real world and a much needed lifeline to his friends and family.

“Given how important it is for him to get unfiltered information from as many sources as possible, I can imagine he will miss that freedom,” said Linda Douglass, a senior adviser who traveled with the campaign to the NYT.

In the transition days ahead, our president-elect may have to wean himself off his BlackBerry like he did cigarettes. The former may be harder than the latter.

As someone who had to carefully monitor the advent of the iPhone 3G, for example, I’ve had to witness the impressive display of toady-like behavior a Jobsian device can elicit in many.

Yesterday was no different. The company announced a newer five pound aluminum version of the MacBook Pro.

Though I’m a musician who loves photography and is obsessed with iTunes, I’m one of the few people I know who doesn’t own a Mac.

That’s right. I’m writing about a Mac on a PC. Touche!

But I’m surrounded.

My classes present an array of black, white and silver company pieces. Cafes—in LA and especially in San Francisco are riddled with jasmine-green drinking, ardent Mac users.

I once had one of my favorite professors, an awe inspiring photographer, take one look at my Compaq baby and say, voice thick with amused disgust, “just scrap it.”

Sigh.

But that’s it. I can’t do it. I’m morally opposed! My dad taught me to question Macs. Frankly, I don’t even know why. But he’s my dad and a computer whiz, so I trust him. Now that I’ve developed some of my own opinions (uh…hopefully), I don’t want to cave in out of sheer stubbornness. Apple says “think different”? Well ok, I will. Won’t get one. Nope.

But…my abashed admission: they’re elegant, light, functional, sleek, practical, fast, maintain long battery lives and are perfect for any Web-based musical or artistic activities. I kinda want one (blush).