Preoccupations

Things (and quite a few people) are talking to me

One of the bits of our new course for Year 9 that has given me the most pleasure to write is the part about microblogging. We have a number of students nurturing entrepreneurial ambitions and, when their ideas hit some kind of maturity, the next thing they may come to talk about is how to get themselves known. Looking at how Stephen Fry has used Twitter to reach a lot of people is something instructive to put before these students (if only because of what makes him so different), but everyone can benefit from looking at this sequence below. There’s much food for thought here — about celebrity and the web, brands and the web, scale, writing for unknown audiences, creating and sustaining (and providing confirmation of) your digital identity, the relationship between the person posting and the companies she/he is associated with … as well as “just” microblogging in general, of course. (Roo has a very good post, How do you use Twitter?, that I recommend to our students.)

 

 

That’s one strand.

Then, all those things now a-twittering: Andy House, Botanicalls0106, Mars Phoenix, the Shipping Forecast, Tower Bridge … old Father Thames.

Oh to be young now and see how this all works out. Matt: "treating the web not as a web of pages and websites but as a web of data"; "digital and physical things—and, increasingly, excitingly—things that can’t make up their mind which they are". Russell: "The stuff that digital technologies have catalysed online and on screens is starting to migrate into the real world of objects."

In just one lesson (35 minutes) a week, in just one year group, sometimes we can’t do more than give a heads-up (omitting so much), but I hope our nascent engineers, software developers, designers, advertisers, planners of cities, architects, climate scientists, privacy activists, politicians, doctors, civil servants … in short, all wide awake citizens-to-be are getting this.

 

 

PS   I haven’t even mentioned Google Profiles — have you created yours (or taken the decision not to)? Or used that new Contact info tab yet? There’s a bit about them, and Windows Live Profiles, in Lesson 17. Jyri just twittered, “Google profiles reached that state where it was time to point my blog’s About link there”.

Technorati tags: Twitter, things, physicality, microblogging, coral reef, profiles, Google Profiles, social networks, Windows Live Profiles

Our work (so far) this year

It’s again been an exhilarating experience to teach our first year’s (13 year-olds) their ICT course. The pace of adoption by them of technological developments still surprises: once again, I notice how this year’s cohort is just that much further on than the equivalent year group last year. It’s not just us, the adults, who notice this: where we might think that teenagers swim in all this digital stuff like fish in water, it’s eye-opening to watch only slightly older students being amazed at what 13 year-olds now know. So last month, a year on from when I last posted here about this course, I was feeding back to colleagues whose specialism is not ICT:

Last year, for example, we taught about tabbed browsing, but this year we didn’t need to: our 13 year-olds are experimenting freely with different browsers, wasting no time in downloading and adopting the recently released Google Chrome. They joined the school knowing more than last year’s 4ths about operating systems and several have experience of Linux. They are keen to learn about how they can maintain their personalised experience of computing (by exploiting web apps) when using the school’s networked machines and many were already using iGoogle before joining St Paul’s. One 4th former routinely uses PortableApps and showed others how to do the same. Others know about running Firefox from a memory stick, retaining all their individual settings no matter what PC they are on. There is a wide range of hardware in use and the barrier between desktop machines (hitherto commonly taken to be synonymous with computers) and mobile devices has gone — notebooks, mini-books, smartphones, the iPodTouch, iPhones ... all proving their computing worth in day-to-day life. Location-based services are being widely used on mobile phones; such services are coming soon to browsers (Firefox, Chrome) and operating systems (eg, Windows 7).

Some further context here: a year ago, iGoogle was alien to nearly all our first years; memory sticks were used more or less only as … memory sticks — running apps off of them was a fringe experience; browsers and the exploitable differences between them simply hadn’t the popular prominence they have now. Most interesting in many ways to me is the demand for Open Source software: because of 13 year-old, pupil-led demand we are networking Open Office, running it alongside MS Office. It’s up to the user which product he/she wants to use. I’m also interested in reports from colleagues about 13 and 14 year-old pupils, when asked to create a document or to collaborate, opening web-based apps as a matter of course.

So, the course as it is evolving this year is currently online here. I have no doubt, though, that we are now at a watershed and, as I also summed things up for colleagues, ‘The current course, revised from that of last year, will need fundamental revision for next year in order to keep pace with the changes afoot and the rate of adoption by young teenagers’. In particular, I think we’re now ready to make a fundamental shift towards the creative — and this pleases me a great deal.

They don’t have blogs, or I’d link to them, but my gratitude to the team with whom I co-teach this course (Richard, Andrew, Olly, David) is great: my thanks to them for all their hard work and enthusiasm.

This year has been very busy on a number of other fronts. We took the decision late last academic year to re-design our website and asked Clearleft to undertake the work. As I knew it would prove, it’s been a pleasure to work with Clearleft: we’re somewhere around halfway through the project and I’ve learned a great deal from them — about web-design, for sure (we had fun with affinity diagrams and played with post-its), but also about how good design work probes and challenges a company’s perception of how it’s promoting itself. I recommend the experience.

We’ve also been working a lot with Firefly, the company who write the software that powers both our website and our intranet. Simon and Joe, the founders and developers of Firefly, were pupils at St Paul’s and wrote the first iteration of Firefly whilst studying here. With the great help of Jess and Serena from Headshift, we have worked together, discussing how the interface and capabilities of Firefly might be developed, and this month saw the release of the new product. Thank you, Joe and Simon, for all your work on this. In summary: comments can now be enabled on all pages; we have blogs; the editing interface has been re-worked and made in-line, write-access is on by default and key editing options are immediately visible in hover-over mode; RSS has been made both much more obvious and widely available; the permissions dialogue has been improved and made more transparent; search has been improved both in UI and performance; template documentation is on its way, as is tagging; shared workspaces are available; calendaring now supports iCal; pages are owned by their creators but stewardship of a page is assignable (useful with classes, projects, etc). These are major software improvements for our intranet (which has amassed some 25,000 pages), providing us with something to build on collaboratively (staff and pupils) and develop further.

When we were deliberating the next iteration of our ICT Development Plan, I wanted green computing to be high on the agenda and I’m delighted that we worked with Gavin at AMEE and are now poised to start aggregating our energy data for the school (ie, the whole site) with AMEE. Our building program recognised the importance of sustainability from the outset.

We’ve been in discussion with Google about starting a branded YouTube channel. We filmed most of this year’s talks (see below) and have these and other stuff to go up. All this takes time, of course, but it’s coming.

This year we also began what I sense is necessarily a thoughtful, slow and sensitive engagement with games and gaming. These have a poor standing in schools, yet their cultural influence and their ubiquity in the lives of many younger people (by no means “just” students) is evident and widely reported. Grand Theft Auto originates from Paulines, of course, and it was high time to address the whole “matter”. We founded a society this term, met a couple of times (the first time without anyone, perhaps, realising it was meeting) and grew it out of two influential, important talks (see below). Next term we move the throttle forward and give it some more oomph. Those involved (it’s pretty popular) bought the idea of everyone reading more about games, and we’ll start with Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.

We’ve had a great run of speakers so far this year, with more to come. Last academic year I blogged these talks as we went, but this year things have been too busy for that (along with all the work detailed here, I’ve also switched to commuting daily, which involved decamping mid-term from my school flat and giving some much overdue attention to our own home — and then there was learning to live with First Great Western …). So here’s the run-down …

Kayaking

The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it.
— Scott Bradner, former trustee of the Internet Society (quoted in Here Comes Everybody)

The communications tools broadly adopted in the last decade are the first to fit human social networks well,
and because they are easily modifiable they can be made to fit better over time. — Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody, p 158) 

Back before Easter, I was at the ICA for the Eno/Shirky evening. One of the books I then read over the break was Here Comes Everybody. I’ve been meaning for some time to put down a few notes about it here. This has grown to be a long post as I’ve added to it, wanting to get a few things out on the page and, so, clearer in my own mind.

It’s a great book to suggest to friends who are not familiar with the technologies Shirky discusses as it hides its knowledge well — but there are still leads to follow up. The modest ten or so pages of the Bibliography threw up a number of articles I'd either not heard of before or hadn’t visited in a long while. In the former camp, I recommend: Anderson: More Is Different (Science — 1972); R H Coase: The Nature of the Firm (pdf) — a 1937 economics paper; Richard P. Gabriel — Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big: worse is better (1991); Alan Page Fiske: Human Sociality. (There’s an online “webliography” here.) And chapters 8–11, covering so many big topics — social capital; three kinds of loss (some solve-a-hard-problem jobs; some social bargains; negative aspects to new freedoms); small world networks; more on social capital; failure (‘open source … is outfailing’ commercial efforts, 245); more on groups (‘every working system is a mix of social and technological factors’, 260) — hit my Amazon Prime account hard. (Incidentally, there’s a Kevin Kelly piece on “more is different”, Zillionics, that appeared earlier this year. See also Kevin Kelly’s The Google Way of Science and Wired’s The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different.)

Further reading to one side, a number of things discussed in the book particularly interested me straightaway. Firstly, sociality, privacy and exposure online. Leisa recently posted Ambient Exposure, an update (of sorts) to her post of last March, Ambient Intimacy. The titles tell their own story. Early on, Clay writes about ‘how dramatically connected we've become to one another … [how much] information we give off about our selves’. This took me back to Adam Greenfield’s recent talk at the Royal Society (I’ve also been re-reading Everyware). Our love of flocking is being fed handsomely by means of the new tools Clay Shirky discusses so well.

Privacy is always coming up in conversations at school about online life, and what I’m hearing suggests our students are beginning to look at privacy and exposure with growing circumspection. Facebook’s People You May Know functionality has made some sit up and wonder where social software might be taking us. We’re slowly acquiring a stronger sense of how seduction through imagined privacy works (alone in a room, save for screen and keyboard) and a more developed understanding of what it means to write for unseen audiences. Meanwhile, there are things to be unlearned: ‘those of us who grew up with a strong separation between communication and broadcast media … assume that if something is out where we can find it, it must have been written for us. … Now that the cost of posting things in a global medium has collapsed, much of what gets posted on any given day is in public but not for the public’ (90).  In the Bibliography, Clay refers to a post of Danny O’Brien’s — all about register — which is a longtime favourite of mine, too.

Then there was what the book had to say about media and journalism. Simon Waldman, well-placed to pass comment, on chapters 3 and 4:

The chapters most relevant to media/journalism - ‘Everyone is a media outlet’ and ‘Publish first, filter later’ should be required reading for pretty much everyone currently sitting in a newspaper/broadcaster. It’s certainly the best thought through thing I’ve read on this, and the comparison to the decline of the scribes when the printing press came in is really well drawn. 

The summary to Chapter 4 (‘Publish, Then Filter’) runs, ‘The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact’. ‘Filter-then-publish … rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means the only working system is publish-then-filter’ (98). (Language like this can sound an utopian note that rings on in the head long after the book’s been closed, as if we’d entered a world beyond old constraints. And look!: the Praetorian Guard of elite gatekeepers is no more.)

I was interested, too, to read Shirky’s thoughts about the impact of new technologies on institutions. His application of Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper and, in particular, the idea of the Coasean floor (‘activities … [that] are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way’), was very striking: the new tools allow ‘serious, complex work [to be] taken on without institutional direction’ and things can now be achieved by ‘loosely coordinated groups’ which previously ‘lay under the Coasean floor’.

We didn't notice how many things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. (47)

Later in the book (107), he comes back to institutions, taking what is happening to media businesses as not unique but prophetic — for ‘All businesses are media businesses … [as] all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the world’:

The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organisational structures, is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be. The linking of symmetrical participation and amateur production makes this period of change remarkable. Symmetrical participation means that once people have the capacity to receive information, they have the capability to send it as well. Owning a television does not give you the ability to make TV shows, but owning a computer means that you can create as well as receive many kinds of content, from the written word through sound and images. Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of "consumer" is now a temporary behaviour rather than a permanent identity.

‘Every new user is a potential creator and consumer’ (106) is reminiscent of Bradley Horowitz in Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers (2006).

*****

Adactio hits St Paul's

It was such a pleasure to welcome Jeremy Keith to SPS last Tuesday, to talk about 'Designing for the Social Web'. As expected, it was a tour de force — but one which artfully concealed its learning and expertise so that everything was at once informed and accessible to the interested but not geekily literate.

Jeremy blogged the talk and visit here: I like his succinct overview of his talk as being about 'small world networks, the strength of weak ties, portable social networks and, inevitably, microformats'. Adam blogged it here; Alex, here. Jeremy's slides are available on Slideshare.

Adam's blog post captures very well much of what the talk was about. Part of his overview runs:

He began by outlining a brief history of the internet working his way from mailing lists and BBS to the modern social web, comparing and contrasting how they functioned and detailing the pitfalls of each. He gave specific weight to problems such as trolling and flaming, catalyzed by communities (usually over the dunbar limit) which lack a central aim and the methods by which these problems could be minimized, including keeping the community focused around groups. He named a few websites which managed this issue well (last.fm, delicious) as well as lambasting digg for failing on this front.

*****

A word about Web 2.0. Now over two years "old" — two years, that is, since Tim O'Reilly's classic paper, What Is Web 2.0; (see, also, his 2006 posting, Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again) — Web 2.0 means all things to all men: rounded corners and drop shadows; tagging; business models; leveraging collective intelligence … I hope the link to Tim O'Reilly's paper may be useful to some who attended Jeremy's talk, but this was not a talk that put this buzzword at the centre.

*****

Networks can scale very well but people don't. This is the challenge for social software design. Jeremy singled out four things to focus on and I've found myself digging back into these in the days since he spoke:

1) Social objects (eg, events — Upcoming; photos — Flickr; bands/albums/songs — Last.fm). This made me go back to Jyri's classic blog post, Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality (2005). (And see, too, his 2007 blog posting, What makes a good social object.) I recall, also, Stewart Butterfield talking about Flickr in these terms — something I blogged about here.

2) Community guidelines: 'be civil' (Jeremy's Irish music site, The Session); 'be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members' (Flickr); 'use common sense while posting' (Last.fm). As a school, when we go to set up a site (on Flickr, on Last.fm), guidelines are what we we soon start to think about. The advice here is sane, straightforward — and necessary.

3) Phatic communication. We miss this online. We long ago adopted emoticons, and some emergent social software just is phatic: eg, Twitter. (Facebook does phatic well.) Jeremy mentioned Leisa Reichelt's work on ambient intimacy (March, 2007) and Twitter:

I’ve been using a term to describe my experience of Twitter (and also Flickr and reading blog posts and Upcoming). I call it Ambient Intimacy. Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. … There are a lot of us … who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.

I remember, too, Ian Curry's Twitter: The Missing Messenger (February, 2007):

It’s basically blogging reduced to what the Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin referred to as “the phatic function. (see note below)” Like saying “what’s up?” as you pass someone in the hall when you have no intention of finding out what is actually up, the phatic function is communication simply to indicate that communication can occur. It made me think of the light, low-content text message circles Mizuko Ito described existing among Japanese teens - it’s not so important what gets said as that it’s nice to stay in contact with people. These light exchanges typify the kind of communication that arises among people who are saturated with other forms of communication.

This brought us on to the network effect of weak ties, which made me think of Joi Ito writing (in 2003) about Granovetter's classic 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties:

Strong ties are your family, friends and other people you have strong bonds to. Weak ties are relationships that transcend local relationship boundaries both socially and geographically. He writes about the importance of weak ties in the flow of information and does a study of job hunting and shows that jobs are more often found through weak ties than through strong ties. This obviously overlaps with the whole 6 degrees thing. … What I can see emerging is a way to amplify the strength of weak ties.

And here's Grant McCracken, How social networks work: the puzzle of exhaust data (July, 2007):

Naturally, networks, especially really distributed, anti-hierarchical ones of the kind we like, are profoundly reciprocal enterprises.  So it is especially true here that, as George Herbert Mead observed, our knowledge of ourselves depends upon what (and that) others know about us.  Or, to put this another way, we we find ourselves when others find us. … I'm ok and you're ok.  This means the channel must be ok, and this means that the network must exist, and this means that the network is ok, and this means that the network is active, and this means the network is flowing.  There is a "superorganic" concept of the network at work here, according to which every small moment of phatic communications so reverberates that we are briefly and tinyily reminded of our larger network and social connections.

This has all left me thinking I want to revisit network theory and weak ties.

4) Open Data: we make these sites (an old argument, as we all know). APIs, RSS, microformats all enable us to get away from the idea of a web site as a place and enable us to extract and redeploy our and others' data. We have mashups (photos+events; maps+photos …), lifestreams. (The time stamp is key.) Jeremy has written about lifestreams here and his own is online here. (See, also, Thomas Vander Wal, Life Data Stream :: Personal InfoCloud. And, on Jaiku as lifestream, Are You Paying Attention?: Twitter vs. Jaiku vs. Loopnote.) 

Questions about privacy follow, inevitably. As Jeremy suggests (following Jeff Veen), there may be a generational difference here, younger people tending to think "my data is public except where I say it is private". I was glad Jeremy found time to talk about his experience with the Flickr API, Lock up your data: 'I don’t know the answers but I’m fairly certain that we’re not dealing with a technological issue here; this is a cultural matter'.

*****

One thing even the successful social software sites don't share well so far is our social groups — which brought us swiftly to the idea of portable social networks. Here are a few touchstone reference points I've collected recently:

"If you add content to a site, then you should be able to take that content with you. You should also be able to take all associated tags and metadata. You should be able to move your content from one site to another." MoveMyData.org

"… you should be able to import or preferably subscribe to your profile information [and] your social network from any existing profile of yours. In addition it would be nice if preferences around notifications [and] privacy also transferred between profiles" Social Network Portability

"it seems like a no-brainer to design systems that allow for simple import/export of your social network. ... Today I want to walk through the mechanics of how Dopplr is working on helping you migrate your social network." LikeItMatters

"Great experiences & trust are going to be key differentiators. ... We’ve seen this movie before and walled gardens eventually get about as interesting as Biosphere 2. ... make your networking data open ... it’s the smart play given how the Web works" LikeItMatters

A lot of the data that's needed to make social networks portable is out there in the URLs, the microformats (XFN, hCards ...). Provided we accept a Pareto-like solution (over the semantic web — which works well in places with very structured data such as museums and universities), we can get to a very good end-result of portability.

*****

Finally, two things I read last night that I think are wise about how we should proceed with social software and networking. The first is a blog posting, the second a comment on the same. (Adam's argument is that 'the whole milieu in which these concerns of openness and portability are contained is broken - and not just a little broken, but badly so'. His argument challenges, as he says, a hugely popular approach to social networking online. For my part, I think Mike's comment is dead right.)

Adam Greenfield: 

For all of these reasons, I believe that technically-mediated social networking at any level beyond very simple, local applications is fundamentally, and probably persistently, a bad idea. From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with.

I understand that this is very much a minority opinion, and one which will not carry the day. But neither is it simply the knee-jerk, reactionary rejection of technology; I see it as a demand, rather, that we use information technology for the things it’s good at, and keep it far, far from the things it damages at first touch. I feel far too strongly about my friends and about the experiences we’ve shared, and which I cherish, to submit any of them to the idiot regime of social networking as it is currently understood.

Mike Migurski: 

The only sane social network relationships I’ve seen are modeled in terms of the objects featured on that network: who gets to “see your trips” or “view your photos” is a superior description of a relationship than “friend”.

Technorati tags: social networking, web, friendship, friending, semantic web, portable social networks, lifestreams, social objects, phatic communication, ambient intimacy, weak ties, microformats, open data

Thomas Vander Wal at St Paul's

A great pleasure yesterday to have Thomas speak at St Paul's — on 'Going Social'. A talk written for us, but anticipating Thomas' FoWA talk tomorrow, it was a great overview of social software and social networking and, no surprise, of social tagging. It meshed with much of what we're now trying to do at St Paul's, from our programme for our first year students (13 year-olds) with its introduction to online, collaborative working, to the work throughout the school on social software (now fully available to students).

               

Those attending the talk may want to explore further some of its more technical aspects — eg, folksonomy triads. Thomas has a number of key talks and blog postings online: Folksonomy (Online Information, 2005), Folksonomy Definition and Wikipedia (November, 2005), Understanding Folksonomy: Tagging that Works presentation posted (September, 2006), Understanding Folksonomy (d.construct, 2006).

Given the current impact of Facebook, it's important to gain a perspective, see its origins and limitations (specifically, but also in the context of the general state of social networking sites — let us extract our data; give us portability; let us refind stuff)

      

and remember (or discover) that quite un-Facebook-like sites are ... social. I'm grateful to Thomas for setting out all of this and more. Like him, and like Demos, I place a lot of value in social bookmarking sites (such as del.icio.us) for educational use.

Technorati tags: Thomas Vander Wal, folksonomy, social networking, social networks, social bookmarking, Facebook, del.icio.us, tagging

Talk at St Paul's

I spoke this morning to our first two year groups — years 9 and 10 (14 and 15 year-olds) about some aspects of the web and digital life, generational gaps in understanding these, search, mediated publics, Facebook … and schools. The slides are available online here. (I wish Slideshare could also make my slides' notes available — or maybe I've missed something? I've added the notes in the comments to the slides.)

I was finishing the slides early this morning when I finally ran through Tom's slides for his Reboot talk. I'd already included several shots of Facebook's privacy pages/options; inspired by Tom's coverage of the same, I added a couple more! I think I Twitter'd earlier this year that privacy options within Facebook were rendering me battle weary.

Technorati tags: teenagers, teens, youth

Fame and Glory

At the weekend, the Observer Music Monthly published a column about YouTube videos of pop stars throwing tantrums.

This is Elton saying he makes music, not films, whilst his team and the film people stand around and endure the paddy. (There's an Olbermann special on another Elton flare-up, here.) Then, also behaving badly: Grace Jones; yet another Liam Gallagher moment (apparently in February this year and, this time, in front of his five year-old); Preston (from Ordinary Boys) walking off Never Mind the Buzzcocks (Simon Amstell is merciless —€” who's behaving badly?); and Bjork — 'my motherly instincts took over'.

But in a different league altogether is The Bee Gees meet Clive Anderson (1996). I've heard about this on and off over the years, but this is the first time I've seen it — and to see is to be amazed by Barry Gibb's reaction to Anderson's wind-ups. The best moment is the one the Observer picked out:

Barry Gibb: 'We used to be called Les Tossers.'

Anderson: 'You'll always be Les Tossers to me.'

Some of this might come in useful when we get to discussing (in ICT) online-posting, privacy and forgetting. I'd want to work this in with danah's reflections on narcissism and "MySpace". Obviously this is germane:

One of the reasons that celebrities go batty is that fame feeds into their narcissism, further heightening their sense of self-worth as more and more people tell them that they're all that. They never see criticism, their narcissism is never called into check.

danah's focus, though, is designedly elsewhere:

What i do know is that MySpace provides a platform for people to seek attention. It does not inherently provide attention and this is why even if people wanted 90M viewers to their blog, they're likely to only get 6. MySpace may help some people feel the rush of attention, but it does not create the desire for attention. The desire for attention runs much deeper and has more to do with how we as a society value people than with what technology we provide them.

I am most certainly worried about the level of narcissism that exists today. I am worried by how we feed our children meritocratic myths and dreams of being anyone just so that current powers can maintain their supremacy at a direct cost to those who are supplying the dreams. I am worried that our "solutions" to the burst bubble are physically, psychologically, and culturally devastating, filled with hate and toxic waste. I am worried that Paris Hilton is a more meaningful role model to most American girls than Mother Theresa ever was. But i am not inherently worried about social network technology or video cameras or magazines. I'm worried by how society leverages different media to perpetuate disturbing ideals and pray on people's desire for freedom and attention. Eliminating MySpace will not stop the narcissistic crisis that we're facing; it will simply allow us to play ostrich as we continue to damage our children with unrealistic views of the world.

Once again, it's not the technology that's the problem, but as we "teach" the technology we can expect these social and ethical and psychological issues to make themselves known. Increasingly, I think the ICT teacher, and the teacher using ICT, is called upon (almost first and foremost) to be pastorally skilful. We haven't been focusing on this in ICT, instead looking nearly always at the technological skills. We need both, but I think the pastoral is going to prove crucial.

Technorati tags: narcissism, attention, celebrity, fame, MySpace, ICT, ICT skills, danah boyd

Forgetting, again

A post by Abe Burmeister set me thinking, again, about forgetting.

A friend said yesterday, 'After all, when we were young, at some point, we all did something, whatever it was — ran naked down some street, something …'. A photo taken then meant that we were caught forever, always running naked down that street, but it might have disappeared for much of its life, gathering dust in some drawer. Now that photo makes it (straight) to the web and to a kind of permanence and presence (even ubiquity) never before possible. The years pass, but the (by now distributed) photo doesn't.

Back in 2003, Fabio Sergio wrote about how,

… with everyone apparently fascinated with ways to remember I find myself toying with the idea of "technologies for forgetting" … All in all we are facing a future strung tight between the ideal, pacific world of the Memex, where man will be given "access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages", and one where Lenny Nero will feel at home, characterized by our collective inability to let go of our past.

I keep hoping (and working) for the first scenario to become our future, but recognize it will require active involvement from everyone, driven by ample awareness of what's at stake.

Over at Abstract Dynamics yesterday, Abe was saying something similar (in a piece about Gmail and Google's goal of "organizing all the world's information"):

Some information is meant to disappear, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Google it seems is not willing to make that distinction, although ironically they more than any other entity have the power to make things disappear. …

'Some information is meant to disappear', or be mediated. The memory of that time when as a kid you ran naked down some street can linger on in the telling, to be recalled years later, embellished and without its sting, a source of amusement, leg-pulling and amicable, entertaining embarrassment — your children delighted both at your discomfort and at discovering that once you were just like them. But a stark photo on the web, that's copied and posted again and again, sent to the senior partner of your new firm the day you're about to start working there, published in a newspaper years later …

Fabio imagines an angry argument between Mr A and Mr B, and imagines it twice — unfilmed and filmed. In the first case,

After a few days they hook up again, matters having cooled off and all, and they talk about the incident, re-living the discussion while trying to clear things up.The inherent fuzziness of their recollection helps in dumbing sharp edges down, as we have been proven to remember positive things better and negative things less clearly, and in the end they agree on a common explanation of the argument, thus creating the possibility for their relationship to evolve around the event. What is important here, though, is that what actually happened matters as much as what they mutually agreed happened. The final experience, mediated through their second conversation, has the opportunity to change from negative to positive, leaving clarification in place of contrast. All's well that ends well, right?

With filmed evidence of what actually happened,

… there will be simply less room to maneuver for both of them, less room to mediate experience into memory. Due to the timelessness quality of the digitally-produced artifacts, which potentially shine as new forever after they've been first created, Mr. A's descendants will still be able to hear (and judge) Mr. B's words and attitude. Take this one social magnitude level higher and what you get is a society unable to let go of its past's tiniest details.

Forgetting strikes me as something we need to pay a lot more attention to as we go forward with digital technology. It crops up in surprisingly different contexts (IT departments should check out danah boyd's post about teenagers and passwords — 'Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting').

And now I remember it, Anne Galloway wrote back in 2003 about forgetting:

We need to forget certain things to survive and stay together. What will happen if everything is tracked and recorded. How will we be able to forget? Will the owners and administrators of the data allow us to forget? For example, we have social and cultural practices (expectations and norms) in place that accommodate comments MADE IN PASSING ... what if certain comments are not allowed to pass?

And also this from 2004, on the Forgetting Machine:

So I was reminded of my Forgetting Machine. And that I am trying to build something that reminds us that not all things can or should be remembered. A tricky task, for sure! Part of this involves the creative corruption of information - along the lines of bricolage or remixing - as well as the selective and wholesale deletion of information.

Anne's paper (2006, I think), 'Collective remembering and the importance of forgetting: a critical design challenge', is available here (pdf). From the Abstract:

Memories are understood as relations of power through which we, as individuals and groups, actively negotiate and decide what can be recollected and what can be forgotten. And without being able to decide what we can remember and forget, we are effectively left without hope of becoming different people or creating different worlds.

That's absolutely my concern for the teenagers posting photos and stories about themselves and each other. I want for them (as I want for my own children) the possibility of their becoming different people, to have the chance to let experience grow into memory and to be allowed to let go, to forget.

Anne has a fine phrase in her paper, 'ubiquitous machines of merciless memory' — 'there is such a thing as too much memory … we need to forget in order to live'. Fabio Sergio asks: 'Are we heading towards an über-politically correct world, where we'll be forced to always ponder all of our words for fear of getting quoted 20 years from now … a future devoid of the room for doubt?'

This, then, is something we also need to be talking about in ICT: forgetting and remembering. I commend Anne's paper very warmly. It asks wise questions — 'What does it really mean if the memories held by our machines never change or get forgotten?' — and remembers that forgetting can be 'a kind of affirmation rather than … a denial. … the value of forgetting is its ability to interrupt time or escape temporal continuity, and thus (re)imagine human experience'. Her paper challenges designers to remember all this, too, and to design accordingly and wisely.

Technorati tags: memory, remembering, forgetting, Fabio Sergio, Anne Galloway, ICT, IT

1984 revisited: 'the future, eventually, will find you out'

Fine piece by William Gibson in the NYT:

Today, on Henrietta Street, one sees the rectangular housings of closed-circuit television cameras, angled watchfully down from shop fronts. Orwell might have seen these as something out of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, penal theorist and spiritual father of the panoptic project of surveillance. But for me they posed stranger possibilities, the street itself seeming to have evolved sensory apparatus in the service of some metaproject beyond any imagining of the closed-circuit system's designers. …

The media of "1984" are broadcast technology imagined in the service of a totalitarian state, and no different from the media of Saddam Hussein's Iraq or of North Korea today — technologically backward societies in which information is still mostly broadcast. Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society. …

… driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information. …

Orwell's projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.

That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. … 

… truths will either out or be outed … I say "truths" … A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily. … 

Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. … But the ground of history has a way of shifting the most basic of assumptions from beneath the most scrupulously imagined situations. … "1984" remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present. We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.

Date of publication? 25 June, 2003 …

Article found via Foe Romeo's del.icio.us links.

Technorati tags: William Gibson, 1984, Orwell, future, futurism, surveillance, sousveillance

From the horse's mouth: Google's Global Counsel

Busy week last week, culminating with a trip to Brixton Academy on the Thursday to hear Pete Doherty and Babyshambles. There is musicianship and lyrical skill in there (I'm convinced of it! Some of my friends who are musicians are … less certain, shall we say), but this populist, narcissistic evening obscured most of that. (I found myself thinking how strangely reminiscent of Blair he is: needing to be loved, yet coming over so much of the time as considering himself … special.) We move on.

Friday afternoon and a quick trip to the Oxford Internet Institute where Andrew McLaughlin, Google's worldwide policy counsel, was speaking on Google vs. ?: Challenges to Freedom of Information on a Global Network:

Andrew McLaughlin is Head of Global Public Policy for Google Inc. Central policy issues for Google include privacy and data protection, censorship and content regulation, intellectual property (including copyright, patent, and trademark), communications and media policy, antitrust/competition, and the regulation of Internet networks and technologies. The leading countries for Google's government affairs activities include the US, Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, China, India, Australia, Russia, Germany, France, the UK, Israel, Egypt, and Ireland. Andrew co-leads Google's Africa Strategy Group.

Now that was a well-spent hour+. Some notes: 

Google faces a number of challenges: 

1. Censorship: repressive regimes are what one immediately thinks of here and of these China is the only one to which Google has made any accommodation. User-generated content is highly sensitive to the powers-that-be in Saudi Arabia, China, Iran … (So that's blogs, then.) Less obvious forms of censorship include interpretations of what "has to go" because of concerns about child protection and issues to do with cultural protection. Pay close attention to the EC Audio-Visual Services Directive (formerly, TV Without Frontiers) — an effort to create content control — and the Online Content Directive (I think I got this down right, but I can't find anything about it online). 
2. Copyright: without Fair Use rights, Google would not exist. Copyright must be revised so as to seek a better balance between the rights of creators (to whose benefit copyright law is currently skewed) and the rights of users. Andrew showed three videos which, in different ways, re-mix copyright material: Shining, BSB-I want it that way and The Grey Video. (BSB was, he said, a huge phenomenon in China.) Currently, no meaningful Fair Use rights exist in Australia. 
3. Discrimination by carriers: network neutrality; quality of service. 
4. Security. For example, Google Earth maps the world and you can swoop in on … a Chinese nuclear facility. The UK's attitude is 'no security through obscurity', but China, Russia, India and others are not so happy. So far, Google hasn't blurred or blocked a single image at the request of a government. During the recent war in the Lebanon, there was no real time coverage of the action (within Google's technical ability to do) and served images are, on average and approximately, 18 months behind the present, except during national disasters when all the stops are pulled out and images are as current as possible. (This is all to avoid any unhelpful clash with governmental agencies and consequent, restrictive legislation.) Finally, out of concerns about privacy, image resolution will never go so low as to allow identification of individuals.

Google chooses not to geo-target users by ISP address and then use this to enforce a government's repressive/restrictive laws. So, google.de users can go to google.com to search for what Germany requires Google to block on Google Deutschland. (Yahoo! was forced to implement a ban in France on accessing yahoo.com, but this was in a specific case and established no generic principle.)

Chilling Effects maintains a database of Cease and Desist orders.

Some positive things to celebrate or look forward to:

1. Statistical machine translation: one day IM chat in two different languages will be possible. Saudi Arabia doesn't like the service (it was being used to translate English > English, generating an unblocked — new — URL in the process). 
2. Cloud computing. 
3. Ubiquitous connectivity: mobile telephony; spreading wireless access; increasing deployment of fiber connectivity. 
4. Other specific initiatives: eg, Google Literacy, US Government Search.

After the talk, I asked Andrew about Google Desktop and, specifically, Search Across Computers: 'The latest version of Google Desktop provides a Search Across Computers feature. This feature will allow you to search your home computer from your work computer, for example'. (To access this option in Google Desktop Beta Preferences, right click on the Google Desktop icon in the system tray > Preferences > Google Account Features.) I wasn't surprised to hear that the take-up of this has been limited. Many of us seem to be happy-ish with our email residing on Google's servers, but putting our documents there seems to cross some kind of psychological barrier. I suspect that this will change over the next few years as we slide into using more tools that work both online and off, but users haven't taken to this just yet.

By the way, I note that IWR reports: Microsoft and Google have joined forces with the British Library in calling on the government to radically overhaul the intellectual property (IP) law.

Technorati tags: Google, Andrew McLaughlin, censorship, network neutrality, security, Google Earth