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alexandraerinHmmm, here's another questionable leap in logic that supports the preconceived notions of Ogas and Gaddam while ignoring any kind of scientific rigor or basic knowledge of how the internet works and how people use it...
In a piece by Dr. Ogas himself over at Psychology Today, the good doctor purports to answer the question of how... when analyzing records of search terms people used... he can recognize which searches represent a genuine sexual urge and which represent morbid curiosity. Now, this sort of question gets to the heart of his "research"... I say this sort of question because he's choosing here to address the tip of the iceberg in the guise of answering the real fundamental objection to his methods.
The question he was asked when this book was titled Rule 34 was how could he hope to correlate what some anonymous user was doing over the internet with what was happening in the user's brain. The answer, obviously, is he can't. He doesn't see this as a problem, because his goal is to build a model that accounts for and predicts these things.
But his model is based on the data he receives about how people use the internet and the data he receives is interpreted based on his model... it's all very circular. It's an ouroboros. His beginning point and his ending point are the same: his not-at-all new, groundbreaking, radical, or maverick assumptions about how men and women's brains work with regards to sexuality.
Basically, he's a meteorologist standing outside saying, "My latest model predicts we will have a sunny and dry day today." And when the clouds open up and dump a bunch of rain on him, he nods and says, "Ah. Yes. My model predicted that some sunny and dry days would have a ton of rain."
...but I digress.
In answer to the question of how he can tell who's really into what, Dr. Ogas states that they looked at how often the search for a given term was repeated. See the problem? By that logic, those of us who use Livejournal the most are the people who Google "Livejournal" most often.
Now, obviously Livejournal is a single website... but certainly somebody who's interested in a particular topic might search for it more than once? Of course, but by the same token the people who are most interested in it won't keep searching because they'll have found better portals than a search engine. They'll be trading links in forums and chatrooms. They'll belong to communities dedicated to it...
And there in that word "community" do we see the stumbling block that Ogas and Gaddam ran into a year and a half ago. They really don't understand the medium through which they are conducting their research. In their own words, they don't care to because it's not the medium that they care about. They're not sociologists or anthropologists, so why do they need to take communities and interpersonal dynamics into account? They don't think they need to.
I told them at the time that if their topic is the ocean floor and not ocean water they still need to be prepared to immerse themselves in water or everything they see will be distorted.
I think that sadly their book is going to sell fairly well because the popular zeitgeist is with them (hence why they got a book deal in the first place), but these guys and their schtick have a very limited shelf-life. As the first Internet Generation continues to mature and the next generation comes up, the number of people who don't recognize right off the bat how full of crap they are when they misuse terms like "anime" and "hentai", when they mistakenly define fanfiction.net as an adult site full of slash fiction... this kind of slipshod research and reporting is close enough for the Oprah crowd, but that crowd is both aging and shrinking.
It's kind of amusing because in calling themselves "mavericks" and using things like the Freakonomics blog to do outreach and datamining the internet they're trying to position themselves as cutting-edge rebels who are ahead of the curve, but what they're really doing is positioning themselves in the same column as Old Media dinosaurs trying to appear "hip" and "with it".
They're like the episode of Generic Forensic Cop Show that tries to do something about first person shooters or MMOs or internet chatrooms. They're like somebody's grandparent with a brand new Facebook account. Other people have made the Dunning-Kruger observation here, and while I admit I'm not qualified to state that definitively when it comes to the science bits, I can say it absolutely holds true about the internet: They don't know what they're talking about or what they're looking at and they don't have the basic level of competency needed to know this.
If they weren't trying to pull their data off the internet... and weren't making up their criteria about what that data means as they go... this wouldn't be a problem. But they are, and so it is an insurmountable one.
In a piece by Dr. Ogas himself over at Psychology Today, the good doctor purports to answer the question of how... when analyzing records of search terms people used... he can recognize which searches represent a genuine sexual urge and which represent morbid curiosity. Now, this sort of question gets to the heart of his "research"... I say this sort of question because he's choosing here to address the tip of the iceberg in the guise of answering the real fundamental objection to his methods.
The question he was asked when this book was titled Rule 34 was how could he hope to correlate what some anonymous user was doing over the internet with what was happening in the user's brain. The answer, obviously, is he can't. He doesn't see this as a problem, because his goal is to build a model that accounts for and predicts these things.
But his model is based on the data he receives about how people use the internet and the data he receives is interpreted based on his model... it's all very circular. It's an ouroboros. His beginning point and his ending point are the same: his not-at-all new, groundbreaking, radical, or maverick assumptions about how men and women's brains work with regards to sexuality.
Basically, he's a meteorologist standing outside saying, "My latest model predicts we will have a sunny and dry day today." And when the clouds open up and dump a bunch of rain on him, he nods and says, "Ah. Yes. My model predicted that some sunny and dry days would have a ton of rain."
...but I digress.
In answer to the question of how he can tell who's really into what, Dr. Ogas states that they looked at how often the search for a given term was repeated. See the problem? By that logic, those of us who use Livejournal the most are the people who Google "Livejournal" most often.
Now, obviously Livejournal is a single website... but certainly somebody who's interested in a particular topic might search for it more than once? Of course, but by the same token the people who are most interested in it won't keep searching because they'll have found better portals than a search engine. They'll be trading links in forums and chatrooms. They'll belong to communities dedicated to it...
And there in that word "community" do we see the stumbling block that Ogas and Gaddam ran into a year and a half ago. They really don't understand the medium through which they are conducting their research. In their own words, they don't care to because it's not the medium that they care about. They're not sociologists or anthropologists, so why do they need to take communities and interpersonal dynamics into account? They don't think they need to.
I told them at the time that if their topic is the ocean floor and not ocean water they still need to be prepared to immerse themselves in water or everything they see will be distorted.
I think that sadly their book is going to sell fairly well because the popular zeitgeist is with them (hence why they got a book deal in the first place), but these guys and their schtick have a very limited shelf-life. As the first Internet Generation continues to mature and the next generation comes up, the number of people who don't recognize right off the bat how full of crap they are when they misuse terms like "anime" and "hentai", when they mistakenly define fanfiction.net as an adult site full of slash fiction... this kind of slipshod research and reporting is close enough for the Oprah crowd, but that crowd is both aging and shrinking.
It's kind of amusing because in calling themselves "mavericks" and using things like the Freakonomics blog to do outreach and datamining the internet they're trying to position themselves as cutting-edge rebels who are ahead of the curve, but what they're really doing is positioning themselves in the same column as Old Media dinosaurs trying to appear "hip" and "with it".
They're like the episode of Generic Forensic Cop Show that tries to do something about first person shooters or MMOs or internet chatrooms. They're like somebody's grandparent with a brand new Facebook account. Other people have made the Dunning-Kruger observation here, and while I admit I'm not qualified to state that definitively when it comes to the science bits, I can say it absolutely holds true about the internet: They don't know what they're talking about or what they're looking at and they don't have the basic level of competency needed to know this.
If they weren't trying to pull their data off the internet... and weren't making up their criteria about what that data means as they go... this wouldn't be a problem. But they are, and so it is an insurmountable one.