Preoccupations

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

New Scientist on the social networking revolution

New Scientist — Living online: The end of privacy?

Offline, it is easy to compartmentalise the different aspects of your life - professional, personal, family - but online, where social networks are so much larger and looser, the distinctions become blurred. These issues have not gone unnoticed by social network providers. They are reluctant to offer too much privacy because this makes it harder for users to communicate with people they don't know. Yet too little privacy means that users lose control over the information they post. "There is a fine balance between protecting and revealing - for users as well as providers," says Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who researches privacy and information security and is looking at the difference between online and offline behaviour. …

For those wishing to keep out prying eyes, most social networks do offer additional privacy tools. Users of MySpace and Facebook can chose to reveal their profiles only to friends, for example. But recent research shows that many users don't make use of these tools, even if they are worried about privacy. A survey of Facebook users published in June by Acquisti and his colleague Ralph Gross found that even among users who were concerned about a stranger knowing their address or class schedule, 22 per cent still gave their address on their Facebook profile, and 40 per cent published their class schedule. 

What can be done to prevent what Acquisti and Gross call "an eternal memory of our indiscretions"? Some recommend drastic measures. "Anything you put on the internet has the potential to be made public and you should treat it as such," says Jones. "If you put something on MySpace or Facebook, ask yourself whether you would be comfortable shouting it out at a family reunion. If the answer is no, then don't put it up." As newspapers report more stories about students being kicked off their courses and bloggers being sacked because of their online revelations, users might well feel compelled to tighten up their online privacy. This semester, students moving into campus accommodation at the University of California, Berkeley, will even be required to attend a class in social networking to make them aware of the risks. 

It could go another way, though. As people become more tolerant of online openness, we could see a shift in attitudes and a rethinking of what we consider private. "People tend to adapt to new environments of revelations," says Acquisti. "The new generation may be used to people talking online about their drug use and sex lives." 

Their attitudes may depend on what profession they end up in. Lindsey, a law student in Philadelphia who we contacted, has noticed some interesting trends among her friends. "Friends who work as DJs, record-store owners or graphic designers express themselves far more freely than friends who work in more traditional professions," she says. She has also noticed that most of her friends who are teachers don't have online profiles. "They've realised that there's nothing worse than walking in to teach your calculus class only to have them holding copies of the photograph of you on the beach."

More NS links: 

This is your space – Discover how social networking evolved, how it works and how it is already revolutionising the way we live, socialise and work 

I'll have to ask my friends – Instant messaging, Wi-Fi and cellphones allow us to be constantly plugged into our social networks. Sociologist Sherry Turkle worries this is transforming human psychology 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google – A short story by Bruce Sterling 

The internet could be so much better – Social networking websites like MySpace or YouTube owe everything to the genius of Ted Nelson, who invented hypertext in the 1960s 

Give it a try – Feeling left out of the social networking revolution? There are many ways you can get involved, so take a look

This from This is your space:

It seems inevitable that a meta-network linking together all the various social networking sites will emerge - and an individual's full identity, shown from all sides, will live online. We will carry this meta-network with us in small wireless devices so that our virtual identities become seamlessly integrated with the real world. We will be more autonomous and mobile than ever, and at the same time discover an unprecedented form of collectivism. For the MySpace generation, this won't seem strange at all.

Technorati tags: New Scientist, public, private, social

Some Aula videos ... and three others

In moments this last (busy) week I caught up on some podcasts and video stuff. The first ones below are from, or arise from, Aula: Movement, a series of conversations on social technology held in Helsinki in June 2006. (More information about Aula here.)

Via Loïc Le Meur, Joi Ito and Cory:

I was at Aula in Helsinki for two days (thanks Marko, it was great!) and took a series of video recordings, here is a video podcast with my friend Joi Ito, a 50 minutes conversation on online games (WOW and Second Life), video, online music and copyright. You can view it below or download the video file (itunes/ipod .m4v about 300 Mo) or the audio file.

Cory Doctorow's closing speech: 'The big picture is about the world of self-determination'.

Via Jyri, on Blip.tv:

Matt Jones and Matt Webb on Digital Parkour (comics, Parkour, psychogeography, maps, senses, pataphysics, robot readable planet … digital fingertips and foot candy)

Joi Ito on MMORPGs (the polychronic reality of World of Warcraft; 'Second Life is very interesting, but it's not fun')

I would have watched danah on MySpace, but the link on Blip.tv isn't working for me.

Also from Aula, but August, 2005, Ben Cerveny talking about 'Meaning at Play' ( mp4 [large res], mp4 [small res]). Some notes (mine) on areas Ben touched on:

Play is about exploring boundaries and the organisation of constraints in behaviour — it helps us understand the constraints between ourselves and others. Then we formalise, creating formal rule spaces. A third element of what brings meaning into play and makes it important is collaborative improvisation. A fourth is the creation of metaphoric frameworks in play; these are also windows into the culture that is the originating context of the game. Next, interpretation (Tarot), composition (in computational gaming) and performance — and the tide of movement in and out between active play and compositional re-arrangement. Finally, presence and state machines (from camphone to posting-on-Flickr takes about 5 minutes —an almost real-time awareness of where and what your friends are doing): SMS has a lightness to it that is playful — contrast e-mail; simulations are metaphors or skins on top of an abstract computational space and, once you're familiar with the game, you don't need the metaphors in order to continue playing — players internalise the model of the game in a very abstract way, and this process parallels the way we build internal models for understanding how other people behave (it's the same type of state machine); we can express our own states through simulation behaviour.

The dynamic systems of play and the modeling involved in MMORPG and simulation games are portable and artists who understand them can use them in creating their work. New languages will evolve within, and from, the media we are now beginning to use to communicate with each other.

'In play we're going, I think, to be given more and more opportunities to use our own content.'

Finally (and not to do with Aula):

Bruce Sterling speaking at the 2006 LIFT Conference (Six Trends for Objects: RFIDs; geo-location; Googling and auto-Googling objects; 3-D modeling, computer-aided manufacturing; rapid-prototyping fabjects, blogjects; cradle to cradle recycling. Objects as hard copies of a data support system)

ZeFrank at TED (I liked the 'Atheist' game)

MoBuzz on privacy issues (Facebook, etc) … 'customers would like some shades of grey. And, of course, by 'shades of grey' we just mean control.'

Podcasts and videos can, of course, be very time-consuming. If I were a commuter and had significant periods in the day to fill, I might watch more but, as it is, the short YouTube video works much better for me (and, I guess, is why in part YouTube is so successful: it fits many a lifestyle). So I don't use either podcasts or lengthy online videos very much. If you, too, are short of time, I still recommend watching all the Aula pieces above. MoBuzz on privacy is also excellent — and short.

Technorati tags: Aula, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow, Matt Jones, Matt Webb, Ben Cerveny, Bruce Sterling, ZeFrank, design, play, MMORPG

Guarding our data

BBC NEWS:

The mass of personal information on government databases must be protected or public trust will be damaged, ministers are being warned.  Information Commissioner Richard Thomas says getting details wrong or mixing them up has huge costs to the people concerned, government and businesses.  Details should not be shared just because technology allows it …

Experts estimate that information about the average working adult in the UK is stored on 700 databases. They include information about people's health records, credit checks and household details. "Never before has the threat of intrusion to people's privacy been such a risk," said Mr Thomas. He said many databases were being used to good effect - such as systems for renewing car tax online rather than waiting in Post Office queues. But there can be problems, such as when the Criminal Records' Bureau mistakenly labelled thousands of people as criminals. …

There were severe consequences for people if information on (a) database was out-of-date, inaccurate, or given to the wrong people, he said. He pointed to the case of a father investigated by social services after his young daughter said he had "bonked" her - it turned out he had hit her on the head with an inflatable hammer. While social services had closed the file, police and health authority records were not updated and said the man had been suspected of child abuse.

Information Commissioner's Office; Annual Report, 2005–6 (pdf).

Technorati tags: trust, Information Commissioner

Women and children first

March of this year and Wendy Grossman reports in the Guardian on the fingerprinting of children in UK schools:

Last week, news emerged that Primrose Hill primary school in north London had been fingerprinting pupils without their parents' consent. It seemed shocking yet should not have come as such a surprise. Micro Librarian Systems' Junior Librarian has been marketed in the UK since 2002 and is estimated to have fingerprinted hundreds of thousands of British children.

That so many schools have been happy to install such systems, often without thinking it necessary to consult parents, is a reflection of how this technology is infiltrating society. We can expect more of the same, for children and adults, should the ID card, debated once more this week in parliament, become reality.

May, and here's the Yorkshire Post:

A Yorkshire school is taking fingerprints from pupils – to keep a check on payments for school trips. The system, which means pupils can be instantly identified when they touch a scanner attached to one of the school computers, is expected to recoup the £2,500 cost of its installation by saving time on form-filling. If the experiment in "biometrics" works, it might be extended.

… The organisation of trips at Ilkley Grammar involves a turnover of £250,000 a year, mostly collected in £10 or £15 instalments. It means close to 20,000 transactions a year. The fingerprint recognition system means that when a pupil takes a payment instalment to the school office, his or her account can be called up automatically, with no question of any confusion between names.

Head teacher Gillian James said in an explanatory letter to parents that the system would store a number based on a fingerprint reading. No fingerprint images would be stored. The Information Commissioner and the Department of Education and Skills had said they had no concerns.

… 42 of the 1,532 current pupils, aged 11 to 18, had been kept out of the fingerprint registration process for one reason or another. One of the objectors is Christian White, a journalist who reports on Westminster for the BBC but lives in North Parade, Ilkley, and has a 14-year-old step-daughter at the school. He said yesterday: "Mrs James has effectively admitted this is not just a trivial bit of bureaucracy. It is the thin end of a wedge, the start of a process which could eventually enable the school to track our children every minute of the day. And it is a matter of proportionality. You do not give any organisation more intimate information than it needs to do its job and if my bank can manage my salary without getting my fingerprints, I don't see why the school cannot manage a couple of £12.50 payments from a 14-year-old for a trip to Lightwater Valley."

The Ilkley system was installed by Pinecone Associates of Carrington, Greater Manchester. Its marketing manager, Martin Parsons, said yesterday: "It is misleading to talk about fingerprinting children. The fingerprint is just a convenient shape to read to create an identity profile."

That last bit is priceless.

3 July. The Daily Mirror — back to school libraries and Micro Librarian Systems:

FURY erupted yesterday after it emerged an estimated 700,000 children are being fingerprinted at school. Systems in 3,500 primary school libraries allow pupils to take out books by scanning their thumb prints instead of using a card.

But campaigners warn the technology is a massive invasion of privacy and a step towards a "database state". With an average primary school size of 200 pupils, pressure group No2ID says at least 700,000 pupils are regularly having their fingerprints scanned. And there are fears schools having children's fingerprints could lead to the information being stored on government computers with DNA records and personal details. It is also seen as "softening up" resistance before people are asked for biometric data such as eye-scans to put on compulsory identity cards. …

Andy O'Brien, managing director of Micro Librarian Systems which makes the fingerprint systems, insisted there was nothing sinister about the new scanning technology. He said: "Ultimately, this is completely optional. If parents object because they don't like the use of biometrics their children can still use a library card or pin number. But this can make libraries a really cool place to go for children."

Advertisement

Another priceless moment in that last sentence.

Leave The Kinds Alone campaigns 'against schools fingerprinting our children'. ARCH supports 'equality, choice, respect and privacy for all children and young people'.  Thanks to ORG for some of the links here. No2ID is here.

I go back to the end of the Guardian article:

Stephen Groesz, a partner with the law firm Bindmans, has been consulted by parents from Charles Dickens school in Southwark, and believes the system is illegal on several grounds. "Absent a specific power allowing schools to fingerprint, I'd say they have no power to do it." Police legislation, for example, is specific about when, by whom and how fingerprints may be taken and what they may be used for. "The notion you can do it because it's a neat way of keeping track of books doesn't cut it as a justification."

Privacy advocates say these systems have a more subtle danger: habituation. Andre Bacard, the author of The Computer Privacy Handbook, said if he wanted to build the surveillance society, "I would start by creating dossiers on kindergarten children so the next generation couldn't comprehend a world without surveillance." But who needs dossiers when you have fingerprints?

Thank God for the news that it may be a while yet (not 2008!) before ID cards become reality — Sunday Times and BBC News.

Technorati tags: fingerprinting, schools, ID cards, children, rights, surveillance

Goldstein and attention

I have been paying attention to Attention (eg, here). But not enough.

Talking with a colleague the other night, we both referred to Tuesday's Guardian report, Surveillance on drivers may be increased:

The case for cameras to be focused on people using mobiles as they drive is made by the independent adviser to the transport select committee, Robert Gifford, of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (Pacts). … He argues that automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology should be applied in new ways to help defray costs of cameras and to catch offenders. "One of the good things about ANPR is that people are often multiple offenders so it would provide useful intelligence," he said. "Those responsible for 7/7 got to Luton station by car."

Mr Gifford said expanding the use of technology for tracking the movements of cars could lead police to people who had committed other offences in the same way that Al Capone was eventually caught through his income tax evasion. He claimed that for greater safety and "the greater good of society", most people would be prepared to accept "a slight reduction of our liberty".

A slight reduction of our liberty … No-one will mind.

How many times of late have I heard, under this government, a Labour government, the case advanced for small reductions in our liberty, incremental reductions … adding up to something quite other than "slight"?

Think Goldstein, said my colleague. As in 1984.

But hang on, who's behind Root Markets (an attention engine)? Goldstein.

C-o-i-n-c-i-d-e-n-c-e. Of course. (Though apposite).

And the point remains. If you watch me, you may watch me for my benefit — but also to my potential detriment.

Where are we going?

Technorati tags: rights, attention, surveillance

Information trends, capturing technologies and self-creation

My best wishes to all friends, readers and visitors to this site. I hope 2006 proves both prosperous and peaceful for you.

At the start of the New Year, I just wish to set before us all here the sobering fact of the unceasing explosion in information! These tables come from the research project, 'How Much Information? 2003', School of Information & Management Systems, Berkeley. The first is useful in itself, but it's the second that really concerns me here.

From the study: 

Information is recorded, stored and distributed in four physical media – paper, film, magnetic, and optical. Good data is available for the worldwide production of each storage medium, providing an upper bound for the potential production of original information and copies. There are often good estimates for how much original content is produced in each of these different storage formats, particularly for the advanced economies that produce the most information. Where those data don’t exist we have adopted working assumptions to make our estimates; these assumptions are documented in the full report and, as in 2000, we welcome suggestions for improving them.