Being Evil: It's Complicated

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Harry Potter's parents were killed because their personal data, data that they thought was secure and would not be used without their consent, was compromised by Peter Pettigrew, the very person to whom they had entrusted the data. Pettigrew leaked the data to Voldemort who, having thus learned the Potters' location data, came and killed them.  It's a lot like shopping at Target.  No, no, wait. I'm serious.  A student just sent me a link to a story about a pregnant teen being "outed" to her parents by Target's "targeted" advertising.  Aside from the murders, the story contains a lot of parallels to the tragic tale of the Potters' demise.

Here's what happened.  It seems that Target does a lot of data-mining when you shop there.  According to the Forbe's article, "Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources."  Then Target mashes the data around and looks for patterns that might reveal clues to purchasing preferences and they mail the owner of the "data bucket" a personalized flyer full of coupons that will "help" them save money on those items in which Target's "bucket algorithm" asserts they are interested.  Well, some time in the not too distant past, Target's algorithm elves zipped out a flyer to someone the algorithm assured them was pregnant. 

Problem: The recipient of flyer was an unmarried high school student whose irate father showed up at the local Target store demanding to know why Target was encouraging his daughter to get pregnant.  Further problem: the algorithm was right, the daughter was not only pregnant, but due to give birth almost exactly when the Target algorithm predicted.  Dad apologized to the manager.  A creepy tale for our time, but neither as unique nor as simple as it appears at first blush.

Perhaps our naive assumption that the data we trail behind us in cyberspace will be used to our benefit can be traced to Google's famous founding motto, "Don't Be Evil."  Yet, in the last week Google has revealed that it has been messing with the code in Apple's Safari web browser to enable Google to do much the same type of data tracking globally, that Target has been doing within its organization. The revelation of "Safari-gate" has prompting calls for an FTC investigation of all things Google.  Calls which, by the way, have fallen on deaf ears at both Google and the FTC. One wonders how long such stonewalling will be successful?  Still, it has been going on for quite awhile, and by now I would guess that Google and Facebook are the two companies that know more about the lives of millions of people in the world than any other entities.  No doubt governments would love to know more, but they don't have Google's or Facebook's budgetary and technology resources. Besides, the CIA will probably soon be able to buy the app for their iPads - after giving Apple it's 30% piece of the pie.  The companies targeted by these negative headlines staunchly assert that any excessive gathering of personal data has merely been the result of unintentional missteps in their efforts to provide the services we demand of them. I wish that were a bald-faced lie.

You see, the fly in ointment for those crying to stem the current tsunami of data mining, crunching and selling is this: we freely provide most of the data being mined.  No one holds a gun to our head and demands that we use our Preferred Customer Card at the local grocery, clothing, or hardware store.  We pay for the Groupon that feeds data into that bucket.  We fail to install "Do Not Track" software. We blithely click "Like" and "+1" all over the web.  We Tweet and Retweet our little fingers off, pouring more and more data into the busy maw of the data miners.  Do we really think that all those "services" are provided to put money into our pockets?  Let me tell an old story about a free lunch .  .  .  . Those "services" generate huge profits for a kaleidoscope of companies whose entire raison d'être is to lighten our wallets; to slide cash out of our accounts and into theirs.  And that's OK.

No, really, it is OK.  That is the core of capitalism, of a marketplace economy.  It is what the nation has been about since our earliest days, and no one seems to have come up with a better system.  The more nuanced issue is fairness and intent.  My simplistic perspective is "tell me what you are asking from me, tell me what you know about me, and tell me what I am getting in return."  If that information is open and up front, and if I can easily choose "not to play," then fine.  I will not gripe. But that is not, it seems, how data mining works.  Data miners work on the assumption of "what they don't know won't hurt them."  They take our data, often in surreptitious ways,  and use it to significantly increase their profits, or they simply repackage and sell the data to others.  But, opine the data-miners, we gave it to them, the data are in their hands as a result of our own actions or inactions.  No harm, no foul.

Increasingly, I have grown less convinced of the case for "no harm."

The case of revealing the teen pregnancy is one obvious example of harm being done.  It is probably no big deal in the life of a large corporation like Target, but it is certainly a big deal in the life of that youngster and her family. The discordant dialogues within families are difficult enough without being brought to light by the blunders of a clueless crew of anonymous digital hucksters.

But I believe there is a deeper and more primary harm, and that is the re-conceptualization of the private.  Our species began in private.  Privacy was imperative or the faster, stronger creatures would kill us.  We were relatively harmless little packages of protein, if the carnivores could find us. Then, across the millennia, we evolved into clans and tribes, towns and cities, nations and empires. We put on public faces to perform the public tasks necessary to maintain the complex institutions integral to civilization.  Privacy became not so much a case of the survival of the species as it was a comfort, a soothing retreat from the rough elbows of public life.  A private place became a space apart, became something to be valued and pursued.  In America, one became fully vetted in the dream when you owned a "home of you own." Nothing was more painful in the recent recession than losing that cherished private place, your home.

Yet now various hip "cyberati" inform us that "privacy is so 20th century." In the 21st we share it all, posts and reposts on your timeline from womb to tomb. Every private thought and action is made public, often at the very instant of its occurrence. Yet, if that were really the undisputed state of the current culture, why would the various intrusions into our data stream cause such indignation? Perhaps it is because we are upset by the realization that in a purely public world we lose the unique opportunity to construct truth from our private existence, because that existence is no longer private.  Our insight into our personal past now flickers on Ancestry.com, open to anyone with the price of admission. Our personal present scrolls by on a variety of social media. The comfort of conversation is peppered with quick consults of the electronic oracle to ascertain any questions or assertions of fact, history or locale. The distinction between public and private has blurred beyond definitional agreement.  We seem to recognize those spheres only by the most egregious trespasses: "Not only do I not need to know that, I am offended by having been made aware of it," and, "How dare you seek to intrude upon that part of my life?"

Our inability to consistently or accurately discern the various shades of gray between those blacks and whites, between obvious good and unfettered evil, may well arise from the fact that good and evil often seem to wear the same masks and live in the same digital spaces, and those spaces are increasingly public spaces.  Our lives, taken as a whole, have become more public than private.  Which leads to this question: Is there an evolutionary advantage to lives lived primarily in public? If I am being asked to jettison the comforting quiet of the private in favor of the roar of lives lived in full public view, what do I gain?  As an individual? As a species?  To date the dominant response seems to be "better shopping." That is not yet enough for me. I'm still willing to settle for humble wine before a fire that is neither HD nor crackling in surround sound, but is quietly comfortable in a private, friendly circle built for two.
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Magnifying Minutiae

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With an impending IPO we are once again knee-deep in all things Facebook.  Part of that frenzy is an interesting article in PC World about how to block Facebook's new Timeline feature. That feature, on the off chance you have managed to avoid hearing about it, is an unfolding womb-to-tomb dossier that records in excruciating detail and precise chronological order every post, picture, like, dislike, poke, twiddle and bleep that you have ever entered on Facebook.  The article's author, Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, was apparently concerned about the ease with which others could jump back years, into the midst of her posts as a less circumspect youngster.  The steps necessary to bar that door are absolutely byzantine.

For me it was a "be careful what you ask for" moment.  You see, almost exactly 7 years ago I wrote an article in Flow asking for such a device.  I was asking for a digital "trunk in the attic." Let me quote myself:

The gradual, expressive, maturing of the digital environment makes me hopeful that an old communicative fantasy of mine may be edging toward reality. I have always been delighted by the creativity of others. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to be in the presence of another’s insight or expression and find myself reduced to a state of delighted confusion: How did they do that? And, how did they even think of that? The desire for real answers to those questions often drives me to Google to find an author’s or artist’s or musician’s or scientist’s email address and ask them. You would be amazed at how often they respond. The problem, of course, is that on occasion they have been so rude as to die before answering my questions – sometimes decades ago. 

The frustration of their ultimate inaccessibility always reignites my desire for a “virtual biography.” I want to know what Einstein ate, what the streets he walked along looked like. I want to share the music to which Georgia O’Keeffe listened; I want to hear the sounds of London that Shakespeare heard. I want to be able to participate in some way in the experiential reality that must have shaped the creative flame within those souls. And I want to feel the firelight and hear the wind that whipped around the farmhouse winter nights in South Dakota when my father was a boy. I want to see the pages of the books that entranced my mother as a young girl in rural Pennsylvania. I want interactive, real time biographies that move beyond words on a page or flickering images sprung from the imagining of filmmakers and TV producers.
 
Such living histories would be incredibly difficult and expensive to create. To reassemble the past from fragments of mostly discarded data, to attempt to reconstruct from them a facsimile of the creative, reflective, experiential reality of one long dead is a daunting, if not impossible, task. However, assembling such works to chronicle lives in the present, using digital technology, has become surprisingly feasible.
 
Think about it. All you really need is a “capture device” – something that can record the visual, auditory and textual experiences of a life, a “structuring device” – something that allows one to edit, order and organize those collected experiences, a “storage device” – someplace to store both the collected data and the constructed representations, and a “publishing-distribution device” – something that allows for the sharing of the constructed representations with others.

In short, all you needed was Facebook.  Of course, at the time Facebook was barely a year old and was primarily a tool that let socially challenged Ivy League college students hook up.  So I look at Timeline with a kind of horrified fascination: "No! No! That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all!" What I envisioned for the "Digital Trunk in the Attic," or my later, more intricate, notion of a "Legacy Library" was employing the power of digital technology to capture the insights of those among us who have enriched the human condition with beauty and wisdom.  Funny cats, dancing hamsters, or dancing drunks - these were not the artifacts I had in mind.

As the Republican primary unfolds around us with all its hedge-funded hoopla, I cannot help but recall the 1988 Vice-Presidential debates when Lloyd Benson chided Dan Quayle, "You, Senator, are no Jack Kennedy."  So I say to Facebook's Timeline: "I proposed the Legacy Library.  The Legacy Library was a friend of mine. You, sirrah, are no Legacy Library, you are no digital trunk in the attic!"

Whew.  Now I feel better.
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The Sands of Time

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Last week's very public, very digital confrontation over SOPA and PIPA may well have marked the moment when the "digitally dependent" drew a line in the sand and declared "here you may tread, but no further." And America's politicians, ever the facile navigators, hoisted their sails to run swiftly before the prevailing winds of public opinion. In this instance I approve of their self-serving agility.  The bills address issues of import, but both were penned by the lobbyists of the same dog in the fight - big content. Rupert Murdock's craggy visage became, no doubt to the horror of Hollywood's sleek elite, the poster child for "fighting Internet piracy."  The plucky hobbits arrayed against this Sauron of the cinema were the youthful scions of the united wiki-worlds, the google-eyed champions of the keyboard-tapping children of a brave new world.

It is probably not that simple. Despite the narrative clarity offered by depicting this conflict as being one of young versus old, that is an analogy which in itself affirms a misconception I feel driven to dispel: The sands in which this line has been drawn are not the sands of time; this battle is not, despite appearances, at its core generational.  It is about the nature of the media, and the conflict is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

"The media" themselves have always been rather mundane containers: a flat space on the cave wall, a plane of rough paper, canvas or wood, grooves on a spinning disk, and now pixels on a glowing screen, vibrations in the air.  The tools of communication have always been inert products, clever constructions of capable machinists and engineers.  They are animated only by the magic of human communicative intent.  When they come to contain and distribute the product of human minds and imaginations, then they acquire value because then they enable art and artifice, power and profit.

Mature media are those containers that have come to dominate the manifestation, distribution and marketing of those contents, contents that enable the acquisition power and profit through the distribution of information, influence and entertainment; their contents define the broad sweep of the culture in which they exist. Cave paintings, symbols on stone and mud, papyrus, paper, illuminated images dancing on silver screens, electrical bursts fleeing along copper strands, cathode ray tubes, all these containers - and the companies that controlled them - have had their days of dominance. None passed the torch willingly.  In every era the guilds, unions, and corporations whose power and profits depended on the dominance of a particular container sought - usually by seeking the succor of the current crop of rulers - protection from emerging forms of containers.  Old media companies always oppose new media companies unless they can co-opt them and maintain their hard won place in the world of power and profit. The current hue and cry over SOPA and PIPA is the latest iteration of the grinding of gears and the gnashing of teeth that have forever accompanied the inevitable turning of the wheels of change.

What concerns me in the current discussion of the nature and mandate of the media, of the nuances of our immediate transition into "digitally contained culture," is the increasing presence of a new "elephant in the room."  We have a grand tradition in American cultural discourse of choosing to - if I might invent a word - "obliqueocize" important but uncomfortable issues.  Race, gender and sexual preference or identity have all been genteelly ignored while people at the "adult table" blithely made paternalistic policy for "the kids in the next room."  I would like to draw our attention to another group of "OAs" -  "obliqueocized Americans" - folks over 55.  That is 25% of the population, with a disproportionate amount of leisure time and expendable income.  I suppose there are certain businesses and industries that can ignore that demographic group - we don't buy a lot of hip-hop music or toy helicopters that we control with our cellphones.  We shouldn't buy spandex.  But the seeming marginalization of those over 55 by the new media moguls is a significant strategic faux pas.  Finding references to seniors in tech-based advertising, websites or other dominant forms of digital content is a lot like trying to find people of color or women outside a kitchen in 1960s TV – “Oh, look there’s one! Aren’t they cute?”  Now, as then, a huge resource, and a huge market are being overlooked.

The FacewikiTweet+ demonstration of online political moxie demonstrated by the technorati blunting, at least for the moment, SOPA and PIPA should not persuade those actively shaping the digital environment that they have got it right.  Actually, they aren't even asking the right questions.  You don't know the world better by simply knowing it faster, by just keeping the systems open and speedy. That notion is so 27 seconds ago.  There is a difference between successful media and mature media – and you can have one without the other.  Successful media generate revenue, sometimes massive amounts of it as reflected in the economic muscle of Google and Facebook. Sometimes the money is accumulated by profiting unethically or illegally from the work of others like the folks at Megaupload or Pirate Bay demonstrate, and the legitimate commercialized web, with its high profile start-ups and publicized IPOs, certainly gives more than passing kudos to acquisitiveness.  But despite the cool T-shirts, the person who dies with the most toys doesn't really win, they just die like everyone else, only a little more foolishly.  Bling doesn't do much for a casket, and often trivializes the significance of its contents.

The point is this, mature media are those that enable, distribute and archive the wisdom of the culture in which they exist.  Despite their current fixation with the quick and the glib, there is certainly nothing to prevent today's new media from maturing.  Examples may already exist, they just haven't been in existence long enough to demonstrate that they will have lasting cultural legitimacy.  It is inevitable that today's new media will become tomorrow's old media.  But the mantle of tomorrow's mature media is not inevitable, just as wisdom itself is not mandated by age. Both require effort and study.  Without effort and study we simply grow old.  My hope is that new media will seek new ways to address and benefit from more mature audiences – our cultural reservoirs of wisdom and literacy - and that those mature audiences will find creative ways to return the favor by taking a more active and attentive role in the development of the next iteration of mature media.
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The Pathos of the Gator

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It was, at first glance, a classic “jock-mobile.” A large black SUV, tall enough that the license plate was at eye-level as I pulled up behind in my little Yaris. From that vantage point I couldn’t help noticing the various “shout-outs” to the reptilian team from points South. Above the standard “Yukon” logo was an equally-sized ornate “Gators” written in chrome script. Level with my hood was the towing hitch, capped by a grinning Florida ‘gator.  The license plate frame surrounding the prestige plate declared “Florida Gators – National Champions.” The date was conveniently omitted, allowing the claim to ripple out across the decades.

“Jock-mobile,” right? Well, that aspect certainly can’t be over-looked. But as my Grandfather used to say, “Alles ist nicht so einfach,” – “It is not that simple,” or as Facebook would assert – “It’s complicated.” I told you it was a prestige plate. Six letters, no symbols, one word: PATHOS.

Whoa, there Nelly Bell!

I’m having trouble reconciling what seem to be the discordant worldviews etched across the back of this vehicle. Obviously sports, and certainly fandom, is all about emotion – but it is most often guy-type, fist- and chest-bumping passion – “I AM A WARRIOR!” Prevents any misinterpretation of all the butt slapping that goes on in pro sports. But “pathos?” Come on now, I mean it is Greek and it doesn’t stand for a fraternity. You encounter it in courses in literature, art and cultural criticism – not PE for crying out loud. The seeming contradiction in the juxtaposition of these various sets of symbols was, well, mysterious. And I love that.

You see, most days it feels like much of the mystery is draining out of human interaction. In just the last week Facebook has announced the release of “Actions”, which along with “Timeline”, “Ticker” and other various Apps, allows you to “instantly and seamlessly share” what you are doing, listening to, thinking about, eating, etc., etc. with all your “friends.” Google countered the next morning with Search Your World – which sends Google’s search spiders scurrying out through all your Google+ contacts, and includes their posts, reposts, pictures and whatever in the results of your normal Google searches. Just what I need to know, what do my second cousin’s school age children in Montana think about the candidates competing in the Presidential primary in South Carolina?

Let me share with you ancient hieroglyphic inscription by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993.

"On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog" Quaint isn’t it?   The notion that on the Internet nobody knew who you really were. It is now ancient, the idea that the Internet was this huge Carnival, a Masked Ball where mystery and intrigue were only a mouse click away. "Who was that?" "What did they mean?"

Now, almost two decades later, I know the "mysterious stranger" just had the egg and cheese biscuit at the McDonald’s on Western Boulevard, while listening to Colin Cowherd on ESPN radio. Also they are looking for a parking place in the parking structure off Dan Allen Drive while tracking the campus bus that they hope to catch out to Centennial campus because parking out there is just terreeeeb! And maybe they have a little cold coming on because on their pillow this morning . . . .

Do we really want to know? Is there any way we could possibly care?   Zuckerberg may believe that privacy is so 20th century, but this old guy clings to the notion that a life without secrets, without mystery, without romance, is not worth living.

No, I don’t really need to understand "the pathos of the gator" to take comfort in the knowledge that something that mysterious is gliding through some swamp, somewhere.
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Happy New Year! - More or Less

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I'm not really playing the Grinch here, but conversations about New Years usually deal with "more or less."  We want to weigh less, we want to earn more.  We want to spend more quality time with those we love, we want to be less driven by the demands of work. We wish Congress would do more, and spend less time explaining why it is always the other guy's fault that nothing gets done - stuff like that.  So I thought it would be fun to take this first essay of 2012 to look back at 2011 to see  - from a digital technology perspective - when "more" was a good thing, and when, instead, "more" was really less.


When more really is more: The Lytro Camera

The Lytro camera [http://www.lytro.com/] claims my top spot by virtue of the fact that it is "more" in a sense far beyond "more of the same."  Lytro is more in the sense that it increases the total of what we had before - it is "more" in that we never had this before.

Never had what before?  Excellent question.  Everyone who has ever taken a picture, from the gods of Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White to the worst Facebook projectile photo poster, has had the experience of wanting a "do over."  "If I could only go back and focus more on their faces!" "I wish I could see both the foreground flower and the background mountain better."  But the shutter had snapped and marched on and no amount of fretting could undo the compositional decision made at that moment - until now.

Lytro is a light field camera for the masses, and you can Google "light field camera" if you want to read the long explanation.  In a nutshell, it means that a light field camera like Lytro gathers all the light waves bouncing off the scene in front of the camera's lens and stores them as a data set that can be manipulated after you trip the shutter.  Focus points, depth of field, light dark, framing - you can mess with everything.  Just thinking about the creative possibilities that arise when you add Lytro to our already existing bag of Photoshop goodies is enough to make a photo geek - dare I say it? Swoon?

One can preorder the Lytro for $499.00 for a 16 MG version, $399.00 for 8MG, so it still isn't an impulse buy item, but compared with the far more expensive, far less portable previous generations of light field cameras, that is an exceptional price for some really sweet technology.

And the downside is?  Well, just as a word processor can turn you into a sloppy writer, I can see the Lytro making one a sloppier photographer.  Back in a previous life when I taught photography, I would ramble on at length over the arcane aspects of f-stops, shutter speed, depth of field and the aesthetics of composition.  Now, I must admit to more than one instance when I came across some natural or urban vista and realized that there was a good photograph "in there somewhere."  However, rather than seek it out, compose and shoot the desired image, I would simply loosen the frame and shoot the wider image, capturing mega-megapixels, and trusting Photoshop to allow me to do the compositional work necessary to find the good photograph in post-production.  Sloppy, sloppy! A "where's Waldo" approach to photography.  The Lytro gathers far more information in each exposure than the most muscular digital cameras - and thereby possibly increases our inclination to "shoot now, compose later."  That, I must admit, concerns me.


When more is less: Social Networks

Facebook is the worst, simply because it is the biggest and can bring us even more of the "more that is less."  I could wax tiresomely on and on about my concerns regarding the trivializing of social ties that spin out from the "culture by the herd" churned by social networks, but I will limit myself to just a couple motes of "more is less."

The first I dubbed "Marley's Digital Chains," in a previous essay [http://awholenewbucket.blogspot.com/2011/08/marleys-digital-chains.html].  The core of the problem is this: when you "friend" or "connect" or "co-join" or whatever with someone via a social network, you also invite his or her other friends/contacts/accomplices onto your screen as well.  The result, without hiring a professional programmer to prevent it, is that entering the realm of "your" social network, is akin to walking into what you thought was going to be your class reunion or your family Thanksgiving dinner only to discover that most of the people there are utter strangers - strangers seeking to engage you in embarrassingly personal conversations regarding individuals you neither know nor about whom you care.  Yeech.

The other problem stemming from social networks and the general increasing transparency of the Internet is a loss of intentional private communication, whether with another individual or a group of close friends.  Google+ seemed to be addressing this issue with its notion of circles, but it was in the context of what I thought was a close and closed Google+ circle, that the notion of Marley's Chains first became apparent. One invited circle member signed in, and trailing behind him was a digital chain ponderous beyond all imagining. Friends and friends of friends clung to his coattails, and posts upon re-posts from utter strangers stretched off to the far horizons.  Another time, I posted an anonymous comment on the website of a TV show, only to have it show up - with full attribution - during one of my infrequent visits to my Facebook page.  I have no idea how it got there.  It was more than slightly creepy.  I worry that perhaps privacy really is a fading relic of the previous century.

And the upside is?  The rebirth of snail mail?  Of personal correspondence?  I have a friend who still mails cards of his own photographs with brief, but tangible, messages of commemoration or remembrance.  The experience is unusual enough as to be slightly disorienting.  But the notes affirm that if I REALLY want to send a private message to just one person perhaps I need to take up a writing implement of some form or another, mark meaningful symbols upon a page, download postage from the USPS website [Heheheheh] and mail the letter.  Does that guarantee privacy?  Of course not - but it greatly reduces the number of possible peekers.


When I'm not really sure whether more is more or less: Free books in the Kindle store. 

Hello, my name is Robert and I am a mysteryoholic.  I read them the way I used to smoke cigarettes - back before cigarettes were a health hazard and cost less than a steak dinner or a small car.  You weren't really aware that you were smoking, but then at the end of the day there was this empty pack in your shirt pocket.  Huh? Weird, wonder who smoked all my cigarettes.  Now it's "Damn, finished another mystery.  When did I start that one, and where is the next one coming from?"

Obviously then, when I mosey on over to the Kindle store and search the top hundred free offerings, I am immediately drawn to the mysteries and thrillers.  Actually, I don't even have to do that anymore.  Given the transparency of the Internet, my Amazon history, and the increasing sophistication of "personalized search,"  Amazon now emails me the top free and 99 cent mysteries each week in a personal email.

I download a few.  I start them all.  Some die, along with the vic, in the first few pages.  Some last only a couple of chapters, and a surprising number I read completely.  But remember, I do have an addiction in this area. The issue you see, is that we are fast moving into an era when a self-published book, the product of what we used to call a vanity press, is - in a digital format - indistinguishable from a publication by an established publishing house.  That is until you begin to read it.  The self-published book often makes it into the hands of a reader without benefit of a second opinion, let alone an editor.

The results are as varied as stars in the sky.  A few are delightful, even shimmering.  More, like dark matter, are best appreciated unseen.  I don't know where this glut of electronic novels will lead.  I think we are going to have to wait out 2012 and the evolution of e-readers and the digital publishing industry before hanging the "more is more" or "more is less" label on these Saturday Night Special Digital Mysteries.  Maybe the good ones will find their way to established houses or digital cooperatives and return a living to their authors.  The bad will, no doubt, remain with us due to imperturbable self-confidence of their creators.  But with any luck at all, the ugly will end up swimming with the fishes in that dirty, dark river, Denial.

So then, forward into the New Year with eyes wide open - more or less.
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Carbonated Communication

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I often stumble upon ideas for these posts while crashing back and forth between waking and sleep; dreams, events and memories bumping into one another - struggling to find a cogent narrative. In this morning's episode I found myself at a large, professional, academic meeting; a venue I no longer frequent. But there I was, expected to present my paper to a large, obviously enraptured, audience - good evidence that this was, in fact, a dream. But my laptop had been stolen and I had no hard copy of my paper, only the conference program with its title: Carbonated Communication. I ransacked the room until the program chair, who was a dead ringer for an old professional antagonist, announced to the suddenly present TV reporters, that "Dr. Schrag's paper has been withdrawn!"

Going back to sleep was not an option. So I got up, made coffee, and sat down in the morning room to pick the dream apart.

The title of the paper, Carbonated Communication, gave me my first clue. A few days ago we had been watching The Iron Chef, and the secret ingredient had been "Halloween Candy." Yeah, I know.  For the first time I can recall, I felt no envy for the judges. But both chefs used something called "carbonated candy." This is apparently a new incarnation of Pop Rocks from back in the 1970s, only now they "effervesce on the tongue." The old fear that if you ate them while drinking a carbonated drink your stomach would explode, seems to have dissipated. They are now sparkles that disappear into nothing leaving only a hint of flavor behind. OK, got that.

So, maybe the second piece was also a foodie thing. Yesterday, I was listening to The State of Things program on WUNC radio, over in Chapel Hill. The host, Frank Stasio, was talking with cookbook author Michael Ruhlman and food writer Kelly Alexander. One interesting idea they explored was the notion of a "lost generation" of cooks.  Apparently, in the 50s and 60s a generation "forgot" how to cook. The culprit, they opined, was that the cool new suburban appliances did it for us. Frozen dinners and packaged meals, TV trays and microwaves. We didn't cook so much as we opened, thawed, nuked, served and tossed everything that was left over into the trash compactor. The lessons once handed down from generation to generation faded. The old way became passé. So now, the authors asserted, cookbooks have to teach the basics, we must learn anew the "complexities" of boiling eggs, roasting a chicken, baking biscuits and making gravy - oops, preparing a sauce.

Alright, now what I think might have been the third part: Last night I invited a recent graduate back to campus to speak to my graduate seminar, "The Place of Text in the Digital Age." She was going to talk about a variety of digital tools the students might find helpful in constructing their final projects. The guest had created a "digital media resources-resource" as part of a directed study with me a couple of years ago, and I knew she had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things digital. She arrived even more amped than usual, which is hard to imagine. Seems that she had just gotten a job offer to work on an "AR Project" [Augmented Reality - think, your smart phone overlays Yelp restaurant data on top of the street you are viewing through the phone's camera. A website that lets you put the dress they are selling on a picture of you, so you can see how you look in it. The "heads-up" view pilots get of the instrument panel. That sort of thing.] with a very hip, very high end Design firm in NYC. She was as close to giddy as a very hip, very high end, digital design person can allow themselves to be. She talked with incredible knowledge about beta versions of digital message construction and distribution applications of which I had only the vaguest knowledge. The ideas popped and sparkled. And maybe that is what my lost paper, Carbonated Communication, was going to talk about:

I worry that in our current fascination with the pop and the sparkle of digital in-your-face, on-the-screen communication, we are forgetting how to communicate ideas and feelings thoughtfully, with depth. I am concerned that Twitter is our microwave, that Facebook is the trash compactor. We slip things with amazing speed across the glittering surface of the Internet - microblogs, the image of the instant, the tune passing through our earbuds right now! They effervesce, sparkle and disappear, leaving only a hint of flavor behind.  I am afraid that a decade or two down the road someone will have to "discover" the elegance of prose, the power of poetry, the awesome complexity of the analog novel. I am afraid we will have to reinvent all those wonderful wheels because we will have become lost in the snap, crackle and pop of carbonated communication.
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Photoshopping the Filter Bubble

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Eli Pariser first noticed the phenomenon that he calls the “Filter Bubble” when his conservative “friends” began to disappear from his Facebook page.  Now you might think that for Pariser, co-founder of the unabashedly liberal website MoveOn.org, this was good news.  Not so, he asserts in his book titled, not surprisingly, The Filter Bubble. Pariser is apparently a throwback to the days of the founding fathers when savvy politicians believed in keeping their friends close and their enemies closer; when you learned by studying the perspective of your adversary. So, he wanted to find out why the Tea Party had left his Facebook party.  Not their choice, Pariser came to discover – they had been filter bubbled out.

What Pariser learned in the course of researching his book was that Facebook had shown his conservative friends the door because Facebook, or rather Facebook’s filtering algorithm had decided, based on the fact that Pariser did click on his Tea Party buddies less often than his MoveOn cronies, that he really wasn’t all that interested in them.  So why clutter his page with them?  “Off with their heads!”

I advise you to read the book.  It is interesting, and more than a little chilling.  Basically, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of what is going on:  Most of THE INTERNET makes its money from advertising.  The ubiquitous little ads that pop-up on the pages you go to while online.  The hosting page – be it Google or Lands End, the Gap, Spotify, whoever – gets a bigger piece of the ad revenue if you actually click on an ad.  Hence the more the page "knows" about you the more it can push – in split seconds – ads onto the page that are tailored for your very personal profile.  Try this – do a Google search for Labrador retrievers, play around on dog pages for a while.  Now go to some other site – like Amazon or Yahoo news.  Look at the ads.  Seem a little more “doggy” than usual?  I told you it was a touch creepy.  There are very large, very wealthy companies that do nothing but gather our “click streams” and sell them to the algorithm-makers.

You can actually understand it from a business perspective.  Advertisers are simply trying to place their products in front of people whose own Internet behavior indicates that they are interested in the product.  Seems harmless until we remember the case of the vanishing conservatives.  THE INTERNET isn’t simply tracking and constructing filters based on the products we like, it is also building filters that keep out the ideas that we don’t like, while foregrounding our proclivities.  Internet algorithms try to construct, and lead us to, our vision of “a perfect world.”  You know the saying – someone asks you a question and you respond, “Well, in a perfect world .  .  .”  What we mean is in our perfect world,” the world as we would like it to be. 

In the movie Heaven Can Wait – the 1978 Warren Beatty version – the welcoming angel tells Beatty’s character that heaven is “a product of your image and that of those who share your image,” a perfect world, defined by what we, and our “friends” believe a perfect world should be.  That is a very prescient “internet-algorithm-esque” concept for a 1978 chick-flick!

There are, however, problems inherent in letting Internet algorithms define a perfect world for us, based upon their perception of our behavior.  I am reminded of the elementary schoolyard where I played as a child.  It was, by contemporary standards, a death trap.  Asphalt paving everywhere except on the fields where we played baseball and football.  Those were dirt, not grass, dirt.  The slides were really tall – you sort of had to lean back to see the top.  They were shiny steel with four-inch sides.  Sliding down on summer days was a delicate balance.  The heat seemed to increase your speed, but if you were too light to get all the way off the end, you stuck.  First degree burns on your butt.  So you leapt off to the easier embrace of the landing area, which was, remember, asphalt.  Similarly, sliding in a baseball game was a decision to which one did not come lightly.  You measured the transient heroism of victory against the possibility of major abrasions and a tetanus-shot trip to the nurse’s office.  All in all we had a good time.

My daughters grew up as playgrounds were transitioning into “a perfect world.”  Everything is now low and slow, plastic and padded.  No doubt injuries still occur, though it seems you would probably have to put some planning and effort into it.  According to the TV ads, successful injuries are dealt with by a phalanx of perfect moms welding spray-on antiseptic and instant bandages.

The point is this – sometimes the world that is constructed by others for our “own good” damages the depth of our experience and compromises the legitimacy of our conclusions.  Internet filters that show us only that which we already believe and desire, destroy the opportunity for the serendipitous discovery that comes from going somewhere we have never been before.  They deny us the opportunity to learn from those who think differently than we.  They create a perfect world in which everything seems low and slow, plastic and padded.

But wait! There is a software fix for this world in a bubble that might even increase Internet profits.  Listen up, moguls.  Photoshop has a feature that lets you select parts of an image; either parts that you click on, or parts that share a color.  Point is that it lets you select part of an image based on certain criteria.  Once you have selected those parts of the image you can go to the “Selection” menu, where among the options is: Select Inverse - which means "select all those elements that I have not chosen."

You see where I am going here?  If the algorithm can decide what it thinks I want, can’t it also decide what I don’t want?  Wouldn't it be cool if I could tell Google to “Select Inverse?”  Create a search based on the notion that what I haven’t experienced might be more intriguing than what I have already done?  Think about it as a clock face.  You are standing in the middle and facing 12 o’clock.  Noon is “a perfect world.”  Midnight is what the algorithm predicts you want it to find.  Six o’clock is “Select Inverse.”  Why can’t I ask for that “six o’clock search” instead?

And let’s not forget the numbers in between.  Photoshop also has a slider attached to many of its functions called opacity or intensity.  Essentially, it a function rheostat.   You move from, say, 100% opacity, where you cannot see through an image at all, to 0% opacity where the image disappears and only the background is visible.  Why not a “Search Slider” that lets you move the algorithm around.  Say 1:00 o’clock equals a search with your characteristics intensified 30%, 2:00 o’clock is “you” intensified 60%.  And 11:00 o’clock reflects a search with your characteristics deflected by 30%, 10:00 o’clock and “you” are deflected 60%.  Fader Bar Search. Why not?

There are obvious and intriguing existential implications in the fact that moving in both a “positive” and a “negative” direction will eventually bring us to the same 6:00 o’clock “Select Inverse” world that stands in algorithmic opposition to the perfect world that the Filter Bubble seeks to create for us.  But, in the final analysis, shouldn’t we be allowed to choose the direction and intensity of the journey?  Isn’t that really what “searching” means?
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The Numbers Game

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Maybe primitive cultures had the right idea when it came to counting: one, two, more, a whole lot.  For one thing it made things like “credit default swaps” impossible.  But the evolution of civilization eventually drove us forward to those banes of school kids everywhere – long division and “making change”, social diseases almost completely eradicated by the invention of the calculator, and now unknown in the civilized world since the calculator app has come to the smartphone.

Still, I remember when numbers had the power to both shock and surprise us:  “Hundreds of cars were involved in a pile-up on icy I-95 just south of the nation’s capitol.” “20,000 Fans Crammed into the RBC on Saturday to See the Wolfpack take on the Tarheels!”  Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands – big numbers, but numbers close enough to our own lives to have meaning, to be understood, to be confronted. 

Studying and teaching about digital culture brings me into regular contact with a class of numbers that need a new name.  I vaguely remember a math professor talking, during my freshman year [back when one was allowed to call it that], about “imaginary numbers” – a number with a negative square, hence, a number that could be defined but did not exist.  When I read about the Internet I find myself constantly running into a different kind of number - a number that exists but is really beyond our imagination.  Perhaps we could call them whelms: "numbers, the implications of which capsize us, overrunning our understanding.” [And that, “to capsize, to over run” is, according to the OED, the meaning of “whelm.” “Overwhelm”, strangely, means the same thing – but if I’m going to make a noun from a verb – whelm seems the better choice.]

So what are some whelms currently in play? 

700 million: the estimated population of Facebook Nation.
1.5 – 2 billion:  searches performed by Google every day.
200 – 400 billion: the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is but one of approximately 500 billion galaxies in the visible universe, which is only 4% of the entire universe.

The thing about whelms is that they encourage us to go for a walk, or make a sandwich, or watch TV, go shopping, head for the bar, anything - because there is just no way we are ever going to get our heads around numbers of such magnitude.  .  .  .  except sometimes they sneak up on us, and we are startled into considering the actual implications of a whelm.  It happened to me yesterday.  As some of you know, because you are them, I spend a good deal of time browsing the wonderful world of digital information looking for fascinating stories to pass along to my students.  Yesterday PC World provided us with this whelm:

“Facebook estimates its users' photo archives will reach 100 billion images by the end of the summer.”

Here is the context that allowed me to consider the whelm.  One of the hats I occasionally wear is that of an “artist.”  I claim the hat not solely to justify the amount of time I spend creating images and constructions, but more pragmatically, because people have actually spent money to acquire said works.  Still, one of the places where I would least like to wear the artist hat is at a place like Artsplosure – a large arts festival held annually here in Raleigh.  It ended just a few days ago.  It is your standard art fair.  Hundreds of artists set up their booths and people wander through, gazing at the wares and pawing through the bins.  There are far more shoppers than buyers.  I have never bought anything at Artsplosure.  It is certainly not because there is nothing worth buying.  On the contrary, there is always some very nice work on display – but buying art is, well, it's complicated.  And it was within that complicated context that I considered the whelm of images on Facebook, and how it might inform the world of art.

In the complicated mix of art buyers, you have folks for whom art is an investment – like LinkedIn stock or pork bellies.  You buy low and hope to sell high.  That has nothing to do with art – that is business.  Then you have folks who buy art with their ears – they have heard of the artist.  “Oh, my! Is that a High Falutin, there above the sofa?” “Yes, one of her early works.  .  .”  But I hope that for most people buying a piece of art is a personal and important decision.  Think about it.  How much wall or display space do you have in your home?  How often do you change the objects on your walls or on your counters?  This is the environment you have created in which to live – hopefully it defines you and gives you pleasure.  We ought to fill it with great care.

An artist at an art fair is working at the very edges of the art world.  Most people are there with their kids for the street vendors and the music.  High school and college kids cruise the booths and the bars nearby.  Not many attendees are really there to spend real money to bring home a major purchase to put in their homes.  Oh, certainly, sometimes one stumbles across just the right piece, something grabs you, you love it and whip out the plastic.  And that outside chance is precisely why all those artists are sitting there in their director’s chairs with smiles on their faces, despite the heat and humidity.  But, ordinarily, the art we allow to share our homes is chosen with far more care.  We go back to the gallery, or the artist’s website several times.  We agonize.  We decide, and “un-decide” and decide again.  And finally we make the purchase and move in together.

“Facebook estimates its users' photo archives will reach 100 billion images by the end of the summer.” Flickr, a more tony image site, hit 4 billion images a few years ago.  Other sites like Picasa and various social networks also contribute to the growing pictorial whelm. Hmmm.

Now, it is true that most of those images are personal and trivial – they have meaning only for those people who posted them, or for whom they were posted.  But ask for a moment where, today, can we encounter the works of “real artists”?  It is true that there are still galleries where one can view the works of artists whose “significance” is to some extent vetted by the reputation of the gallery.  But the gallery, no doubt, also has a website and an email list, as do the major museums of the world.  The point is that the Internet has blended fine art into one huge art fair and the number of fine art images available for our consideration has become, like Facebook’s billions, a whelm.

It makes me wonder how Michelangelo would have done on Facebook?  Would the Hudson River School page on Fickr be seen as quaint, but minor? Mary Cassatt, a Picasa wannabe?  Warhol – just a point-and-click, copy-and-paste, make-a-photobook kind of guy?  Isn’t there an app for that?  More importantly, would we have even seen their work if it had had to fight for attention in the swirl of the whelm?  It was hard enough to compete for attention among a few hundred, maybe a thousand, important artists of their day – how does one surface among the billions?

Does a whelm of art define an awesome increase in options and opportunity for artists, or does it herald an age of almost certain anonymity where savvy Internet marketing will determine what art our era bequeaths to the ages?

My apologies, but this is one of those times when the question ends the essay.
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Converging Media Conforming Lives, Or Convergence 2.0

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In the beginning there was the stream.  Ones and zeros ionizing the atmosphere, streaking through silicone, rushing through wire; then held in abeyance in multiple forms of memory until once again they were converted to their previous incarnation as text or image or sound.  Convergence 1.0 marked the reductionist movement that reduced all human expression to that never-ending flood of 1s and 0s.

Convergence 1.0 also led, albeit briefly, to a period of diversification and specialization.  The challenge was to create environments to massage the digital streams of ones and zeros in the service of old media, better music, photography, writing, painting, math and science; more efficient gathering and manipulation of data of all types. We popped open the CPUs and stuck in sound-boards and graphics cards.  But inevitably those divergent streams found a common canyon - the Internet.  It was a Renaissance re-conceived.

The polymaths of the first Renaissance, the Michelangelos and da Vincis, had to put down the paintbrush to pick up the chisel, lay aside the lute to gather parchment and caliper.  They had to, literally, shift gears and spaces to cast their inspirations in different media.  In the converged digital Renaissance the screen became a single workbench for "everymedium," the keyboard and the mouse, "everypalette."  Multimedia became the lingua franca of the new age.  The mantra was not "word or image or sound" it was "this and that and the other."

It was not long before commonality of modality fostered common intention.  What, after all, does one do with a platform capable of producing all the creatures of this strange new world - while still, of course, making a profit?  And one must remember that the Internet is an American creation, and America is as much a creature of the marketplace as it is a product of the Constitution.  In America one is free to pursue whatever Quixotic quest may call to you.  Those that endure tend to pay the bills.  In this regard, the Internet is as American as Apple pie.

It is undeniable that the Internet provides safe haven, information and solace for individuals previously “alone” in the world.  My just-completed serendipitous Google search for one-handed violin players did not come up empty.  And many tout the ability of the “long-tail of the Internet” to gather thousands of isolates together in the joyous warmth, or sometimes, sadly, the vicious darkness, of a previously unimagined community.  But on the Internet real profit, real power, is measured in hundreds of millions of users and billions of clicks.

What I call Convergence 2.0 is based on an increasingly obvious dominant Internet business model.  Not long ago it was common to refer to “walled gardens” on the Internet.  These were online spaces created by content providers with an eye toward keeping us within their environment.  We were to be well cared for.  Shopping, entertainment, stock reports, sports, communication, community, even government would be within easy reach here in our gated-community; as would be the advertisements from the companies affiliated with this particular garden. But as history has proved again and again, it is a short step from walled-garden to ghetto.  One wonders, even in the most gilded of cages, what is going on outside? And it has been that curiosity that has led to the destruction of the walled-garden model. It has been replaced by what is now variously known as Web 2.0, or even more vaguely, social media.  We might beneficially think of it as “The Internet Tour Bus.”

Consider the challenge that confronts today’s major Internet entities: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Yahoo, et. al.  In order to attract the hundreds of millions of users necessary to gain traction in the Internet marketplace, you cannot create an entity that attracts exclusive audience demographics.  Rather you must devise a business model that allows you to provide everything that a global audience indicates that it values and desires. You need to provide a Tour Bus from which your users can vicariously participate in the world around them, but from which they do not stray – allowing you to direct their attention to the ubiquitous, revenue creating, ads posted inside the bus, where the eyes of weary riders rest between stops. Hence, it becomes a business necessity to discover, encourage and market those “tours,” or apps, defined by characteristics that appeal to everyone. "Lovely revolution.  Good job.  Now please step back on the bus.  What can we get you for lunch?"

Two paths diverge from such a model. The first path is the more hopeful, although I fear will be less dominant.  That path actually increases our appreciation for the complexity of the world:  I may just be a kid from Smalltown, Anywhere, but the Tour Bus can take me to The Getty, in Los Angeles, USA, or The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.  I may be housebound in Poughkeepsie, but the Tour Bus allows me to make friends with folks around the world. I may be steeped in one cultural, political perspective, but the Tour Bus allows me to visit, understand and perhaps even appreciate others.

The second seems more common, more likely, and is directly driven by increasing convergence.  Call it Internet Nation.  I steal the idea directly from ESPN’s Sports Nation, although the notion is mirrored across a range of media from serious news sources such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to the delightfully silly and irreverent cotton candy of The Fashion Police with Joan Rivers.  The idea is that the tour guide poses a question to the passengers on the bus. They vote and truth is revealed.  67% believe Bin Laden is dead.  Fine.  Next question, please.  Which is better, Coffee or Tea?  How many hurricanes will come ashore this year?  Is there life after death?  Do fish have souls?  Post the numbers that generate “truthiness” and move on.

As an educator, Internet Nation is a terrifying concept for me; truth defined by a vote of the likely uninformed.  Just because 110 million people believe that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, do we overlook the fact that most historians assert that it wasn’t actually signed until August 2nd of that year?  Yet, truth by acclamation seems an increasingly popular phenomenon.  The phenomenon would also signal the end of meaningful diversity and minority reports, for as Sports Nation clearly demonstrates, no one really remembers who lost.

My reasons for finding the latter path the more likely of the two are twofold:  First, and most important, it is the more profitable option.  Appealing to a common denominator draws a larger crowd, and the larger the crowd the higher the advertising revenue.  For that reason alone the Internet business community will favor the continued convergence model, Convergence 2.0.  The second reason derives from the first.  As the Internet business community pours more resources into the convergence model, that version of the Internet becomes more efficient and user-friendly.  Why seek to create an Internet-based environment that reflects your particular perspective of the world when you can simply fold your group into the larger GoogleFacebookiLifeLinkedIn TwitterMacWindows world?  To do otherwise requires effort and reflective thought, focus and attention.  And, alas, those qualities and abilities, current research indicates, are precisely the ones being eroded on the single workbench of the Internet-based re-conceived Renaissance.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, is only one of a spate of recent publications that assert that we lost intellectual, as well as physical, muscle when we no longer had to pick up the chisel to free the sculpture from the stone.  Seemingly, the kinetic act of slapping paint on canvas, of hoisting the book down from the stacks, of hauling the Sunday Times up the stairs, sharpens our critical skills, and deepens our appreciation of appreciation itself.  The Internet is point and click, cut and paste, thumbs up, thumbs down.  Quick, slick and often silly.   But, is the “evil Internet” really sucking our brains out through our eyes and fingertips?  I sincerely doubt it.  It is after all, just electricity in a box – no matter how sweet or sleek the box.  The task that confronts us, therefore, is not to break the boxes.  It is, rather, to reinvigorate the mind.  The mass Internet beguiles us with the banal.  It masks the silly as profound.  We must, as we always have, reclaim the medium, resisting the call of the effortless Internet, where appearance masquerades as substance.

I remember well when the Macintosh first brought multiple fonts to word processing.  Students felt compelled to use them all in the course of a three-page paper – and in the process covered those three pages with glitzy graphics, but fewer words and fewer thoughts.  We seem to have weathered that storm.  Today’s most articulate and arcane challenges to technology’s slippery slope leap initially from keyboard to screen. Use the beast to confront the beast. To mash the Bard, the fault, dear reader, lies not in the Internet but in ourselves.  Certainly much of what is slapped on our screens via the Googles, Facebooks and Twitters of the world will fade into deserved obscurity.  But others will find a place in the canon of human intellect.   Convergence 2.0 simply provides the enticing communication environment that inclines us to the trivial.  It in no way mandates that we follow that inclination.  We choose the trivial .  .  .  .  or not.
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Secrets in the Social Network

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Facebook and other social networks combine with micro-blogging sites like Twitter to create an online environment designed to encourage the immediate sharing of our lives.  The interface inclines one to post the momentary reality, to share the “wisdom of the herd.”  Such an environment carries certain cultural assumptions.  One of these, articulated at various times by such luminaries as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt, is that privacy is, at best, moribund.  In the brave new digital world it is more acceptable to shatter secrecy, to discourage contemplative privacy - at least online if not in life, assuming for the moment a life beyond online.

I am bothered by that perspective.  It is often the unsophisticated or the intolerant who believe “there should be no secrets.”  The unsophisticated equate privacy with secrecy, and keeping secrets with lying.  It is a youthful error, and never a surprising one.  The assumption implies another naive notion; that one should answer inappropriate questions.  The idea of either discretion or silence vanishes.  After all, if discrete silence came again into vogue we would be forced to live without either Facebook or reality TV; Twitter would perish utterly.

Such a guileless view of the world is what provides the humor in the current Gieco commericial in which a rotunde Mary Lincoln inquires of the President if her dress makes her "backside look big." Honest Abe is unable to maintain a discrete silence, and Mary flounces off with feelings hurt, leaving the President, we assume, to a night on The First Couch. A lose/lose situation that is somehow valued because it was "honest", because the President refused to keep his perception "secret."

Intolerance is almost easier to understand.  The intolerant eschew secrets because if thoughts or actions are kept secret, then those holier-than-we are denied the pleasure of pointing out the errors of our ways and punishing us for them.  The “necessity” of their own secrets is often wrapped in a “special relationship” with a “higher power.” It is a convenient duality: My secrets are good, yours are bad.

Much of our ambivalence regarding secrets springs from the fact that there are secrets, and then, there are secrets. Some secrets are encased in bubblewrap and velvet.  They rest enshrined in memory, devotion and belief.  They are secret, not because they are wrong or evil, but rather because they are too precious to bear the crass scrutiny of the masses - they are moonflowers that bloom only when sheltered from the harsh light of the sun.

And then, some secrets are cancers.  These secret thoughts, ideas and behaviors eat away at people’s lives.  They are born most often from hate and ignorance, of others or of ourselves. Such secrets rob our lives of sunshine, casting all into the shadow they inhabit.  The challenge, of course, is telling which is which.

Most often we learn the difference over time.  You see, most of our secrets look the same when they are babies. It is only as they mature and begin to influence our lives that we learn their true character, discovering which should be cherished and which must be excised.  So, confusion is a common bloom in our youthful secret gardens.  At first blush, love and obsession look much the same.  Bravery and bravado are often mistaken for one another.  Acquiescence may be taken for agreement.  Hopefully, as we grow older, we prune our cancerous secrets. We leave them behind, molted with the rejected alternative selves of our intolerant youth.  Equally desirous is a growing ability to shield the softer secrets of our better selves, allowing us to aid without fanfare, to succor without glory.

Given what I feel is the complexity of the issue, I am uneasy regarding the animosity with which the architects of social media appear to view privacy, with their tendency to conflate privacy with secrecy. How does one repair the damage done when those same architects, by implementing what seems like a “cool feature,” reveal private relationships in public spaces?  Wikileaks seems content to serve as judge and jury regarding the secrets they expose.  I wonder if Julian Assange's certainty is warranted?  How does one apologize, how does one "make it right" if the "cancerous secret" you have just exposed to the world is, on closer inspection, a secret more worthy of the protection of bubblewrap and velvet?

As with many of the life’s ambiguities, the notion of “keeping a secret” most likely has no inherent morality.  Secrets are now, and have always been, employed for both good and ill.  Still, I would prefer that I, and not my software, make that decision.
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Life Before a Lens

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We went to a birthday party the other day.  A young friend was turning 40.  It was a lovely gathering, and one of those days for which folks move South.  The air was soft, daffodils nodded sleepily, and trees covered with white and pink blossoms perfumed the air and cascaded petals with every passing breeze. The guests were a mixed lot, generationally speaking.  We were not the only couple beyond 60, and there were a number of thirty-somethings with toddlers in tow; older children in their late teens and early 20s amused their younger siblings. I knew enough about the crowd to know that the photographs being snapped were going to end up on online. “Interesting crew,” I thought. “Young enough to Facebook, and old enough to think about it.”

I taught photography once, at a university long ago and faraway, and have always been fascinated by the effect of cameras on people; on both subject and photographer.  As a photographer, I was well acquainted with the camera as shield.  Despite being more than a little chary of heights, I could peer fearlessly into the most dizzying abyss – as long as I did it through a camera’s viewfinder.  Strange, not? More interesting though, is the effect of cameras on the people before the lens.

The one photographic affinity I can claim with the iconic Ansel Adams is that we both married women who hated to be photographed.  Far more common is the urge to be seen, and seen in a particular way.  Pointing a camera at a group of kids is a transformative act.  They pose, they smile coyly, they smirk, they fain the total disinterest of the Gap kids they see in the magazines and store windows.  In short, they present to the lens the version of themselves they wish to be made public; they perform.

My undergraduate degree is in Theater, and for the first couple of decades of my life my plan was to become God’s gift to the American stage.  God, apparently, had not been informed.  I did, however, learn a great deal about the nature of performance.  I had the good fortune, while studying at Kalamazoo College, to be directed by visiting artist Karl Malden, who had trained under Lee Strasburg at The Group Theater in New York.  Malden, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Streetcar Named Desire, taught us that performing meant, in part, filling the theater with your character’s personality.  You had to "be" the role so completely that you radiated the character’s essence with such intensity that you “spoke” to the back of the house even while silent.  It is emotionally, psychically and physically exhausting.  And if you do it long enough, it is not difficult to lose track of where the self stops and a character begins.  There are real personal risks to a life spent in performance.  Ask Charlie Sheen.

So, I found myself musing as I looked around the sunny birthday scene, how does a life change when you expect every moment to be captured, chronicled and Facebooked? What is the nature of a life lived before a lens?  What is the result of perpetual performance?  Does “who we become” change when more people know us via a “performed existence” in social media than know us as the result of a shared life in the real world?

This is when I am supposed to lay a little wisdom on you, to give you a thoughtful answer to the questions I just posed.  I would if I could.  Instead, I am afraid I can offer only guesses. My guess is that we put too much stock in photographs these days.  We spend too much time recording and distributing events.  We should be more focused on living the event than on reporting it.

Does that mean we stop taking photographs?  Call for a moratorium on home videos?  Of course not.  Whether we pay the local 15th century portrait painter, or snap a shot with our 21st century smartphone, we will always try to capture the precious moments of our lives in a way that aids memory when memory begins to fade.  And we will want to share those experiences.  But I would caution us about watering the wine.  You sip the best vintage straight.  Perhaps it is the 20th century in me, maybe faint echoes of even earlier times, but I still feel that the most precious memories, the deepest emotions, deserve the honor of, if not privacy, then at least a degree of exclusivity.

You can now “friend” the Pope.  “Yo, Pontiff! Wazzup?”  I think not.  If I have a concern for young people growing up before a lens, "performing" their self even as they construct it, it is that they will lose sight of their precious individuality as they co-mingle it with the other 500 million folks living before the lens.  Against the backdrop of a conflagration, the flickering of a single candle seems insignificant.  And yet, it is quite lovely.
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Compassionate Privacy

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It would be nice if Mark Zuckerberg had actually said, "Privacy is so 20th century." But if he did, I can find no credible reference. However, the phrase does seem to capture the essence of his remarks about "changing social norms regarding privacy" that Facebook seeks to champion. There is evidence, though, that Eric Schmidt, the out-going CEO of Google, did actually say, "We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about," and "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Taken as a whole, these remarks reveal an unsettling trend toward mandating excessive sharing; like making you eavesdrop on cell phone calls about medical procedures in a coffee shop. Yeech.



This move to obsessive openness isn't a generational issue. Yes, Zuckerberg is 26, but Schmidt is 55. The phenomenon seems more a kind of “BigTech”-induced simplemindedness. Both Internet "A-listers" appear to view "privacy" as an archaic abuse of privilege: someone - your parents, your boss, "the man" - is “hiding” something to advantage themselves and disadvantage you, your friends, or "the people." I do wish privacy were that simple.



Certainly, there is a whole realm of hidden information that is venal and vindictive. We have seen too many examples of the misuse of governmental, corporate and personal secrecy to blithely assume an open and truthful world. People are "disappeared," elections are engineered, banks collapse, lakes become sewers, and the Gulf of Mexico is despoiled. One would be a fool to deny that webs of secrecy enable these human failings. But those webs of secrecy have been around for centuries. Their existence does not entitle the new digital Dons to rip away the gentle curtains of privacy that shield every human life. To acknowledge deceit does not deny the need for compassionate privacy. The Internet’s ability to peer into the most cherished and sheltered spaces in someone’s life does not legitimize the practice.

Perhaps much of the confusion surrounding the debate regarding Internet privacy stems from different entities using similar words to mean different things. “Privacy” and “secrecy” have become co-mingled to the extent that they are erroneously seen as being synonymous. However, the Oxford English Dictionary defines privacy as “The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; seclusion; freedom from interference or intrusion.” While secrecy is defined as “the quality of being secret or of not revealing secrets; the action, practice, or habit of keeping things secret.”

The “open life” advocates, among whom I would place both Zuckerberg and Schmidt use “privacy” when they really mean “secrecy.” Julian Assange provides perhaps the most salient contemporary example of the difference. As the majordomo of Wikileaks, Assange is secrecy’s fiercest antagonist. He obviously believes that, in the public sphere, no secret is sacred. For Assange, when governments and businesses are concerned, awkward transparency trumps the effective “habit of keeping things secret” every time. However, when the issue is what transpired in a Swedish bedroom among adults, privacy, “the right to be free from public attention” suddenly reigns supreme in his worldview.

Still, Zuckerberg and Schmidt did get a couple of things right. First, it is “complicated.” As personal information becomes increasingly valuable in the core human arenas of conflict and commerce, the ceaseless dance of Spy versus Spy drives the development of Internet-based applications that allow the gracious sphere of privacy to be punctured as never before. Second, those routine perforations of the very fabric of our lives have rightfully relegated many naïve assumptions regarding privacy to the previous century. What I believe Zuckerberg and Schmidt have gotten wrong are the implications of these realities for public policy.

The “open lifers” seem to reason that since privacy currently lies in tatters, we should simply affirm that state as acceptable: what is, is right. I have trouble with that notion. I believe we are capable of a more nuanced approach to life in the digital age, that we can devise processes that deliver the advantages of the Internet without turning our private lives into peep shows.

Let me close with a story from my life. When I was in college, shortly after the surrender at Yorktown, we were required to live in the dorm. There were 10 young men on my hall, in their teens, away from adult supervision for the first time. “This,” I thought, “is what they mean by ‘chaos theory.’” There was no privacy, ever. Oh, certainly, you could retreat to your room where only your roommate, and whomever he brought to visit, punctured your solitude. But that was as tranquil as it got. Graduation changed my life in many ways. In retrospect, one of the most profound shifts was the ability to live in a house where I could walk in and close the door. And behind that door I found “the state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention.” I found privacy.

I do not believe that, as a culture, we are intellectually or technically unable to craft hardware, software, and policy that allows us to occasionally turn off the lights of the Internet and just "shut the door."
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New Media, Old Problems

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It is, increasingly, a familiar story – young, political idealists sound a call to action via Facebook and Twitter.  Thousands sweep into the street demanding that established, authoritarian regimes cease their nefarious ways and return power to the people.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  In the summer of 2009 we waited with baited breath to see Mir-Hossein Mousavi swept to power in Iran on the wings of a Green Revolution powered by Twitter.  It didn’t happen.  Then a couple of weeks ago in Tunisia it did, sending President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family packing.  Today, in Egypt, it is anyone’s guess.  Mubarak lies low, and the army disappears while cellphones, Facebook and Twitter take a back seat to bricks and clubs, blood, bodybags and bandages.

As technologies go Facebook and Twitter are relative babies. Were they children, neither would be old enough for middle school.  However, they are huge babies.  Were Facebook a country, at 500 million users, it would be the third largest in the world, trailing only China and India in population.  It makes a strange sort of sense then, that revolutions fostered by these new media often founder on adolescent arrogance and childish assumptions.

Egypt provides a painful example.  Fed by Tunisia’s success, the opponents of Mubarak’s long and often churlish regime assumed that they, too, could Tweet thousands into the streets and break the tyrant’s grip on power.  And, like many adolescents, they were right – almost.  Mubarak, as the opposition planned, ceded power, but only in that he declared he would not seek re-election.  “WTF?”  And now he has, at least for the moment, faded into the mist – neither present, nor gone.  Similarly, the official trappings of power have withdrawn from Tahrir Square, apparently replaced by the “non-governmental” thugs who have often been the unofficial enforcers of unpopular policy during the Mubarak years.  The protestors had childishly assumed that the old regime would be swept away by a flood of digital demands and the sun would rise on a new Egypt – fresh and full of promise.  Instead the sun set on bloodshed and the morning is very much in doubt.

The opposition’s vision may yet materialize.  But I am quite confident that it will not be done in 142-character Tweets, or with Facebook status updates. New media, we are learning, are powerful tools for claiming the moment, for mobilizing the mob, for occasionally winning the election.  But they have yet to prove themselves in the more pedantic arenas of governing, democracy, and compromise.  In the adult world the devil is in the details.  And those details, it seems, are still hammered out the old-fashioned way: face-to-face, word-by-word, and person-to-person.
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Marco! Polo!

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I have recently been rereading The Complete Sherlock Holmes.  It is a wonderful submersion in the life and language of a past century.  It is amazing how many witnesses in Holmes’ cases were unable to testify because of a sudden onset of “brain fever.”  And yes, the game seems always afoot.

I am currently in the midst of one of the lesser-known short stories, The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, written in 1921.  As with all artistic creations, the meaning of the piece is a co-creation of author and reader.  The author wrote wrapped in the meaning of his mind and time; I unfold the story within the context of mine.  Different fogs inform us. Doyle creates in the mists of London between the wars.  This time, I read the story through the Kindle application on my Droid phone.  A delicious dialectic, not?

With similar irony, an old friend and I were recently emailing each other bemoaning our students’ seeming addiction to social media.  I mused that my intuitive sense of the issue was that students begin to feel a significant amount of angst when they are separated from their social media - despite the fact that the messages exchanged within the environment are trivial. An apt analogy emerged.  You know the game Marco Polo that kids play in a swimming pool? They close their eyes and the kid who is "it" hollers "Marco!" and the other kids holler "Polo!"  The kid who is “it” then tries to catch the others in a boisterous human imitation of the echo-location skills of bats, whales, porpoises, et. al. 

There is an early episode of the television show Bones [Season 1. #22: The Woman in Limbo] that puts an insightful twist on the game. Temperance is trying to reconnect with her older brother – there is a long backstory to the episode that is unimportant to the current observation.  The relevant idea is that after their parents disappeared, her brother became her protector. She would be sitting in class at school, or out on the playground and she would hear him call "Marco!" When she could she would respond "Polo!"  But even when she couldn't echo “Polo!” - she felt connected to him, she felt "taken care of."  I think that feeling of “being connected” blends into the same emotional space as “being taken care of”, of being “OK,” and lends significant import to social media's seemingly shallow interactions. I post "Marco" and the "friends" respond "Polo."  I believe it is that security, that feeling of "belonging" in a fractured world, to which my students, and many others, are addicted.

And, what, you may rightly ask, does that have to do with The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone? Elementary.  In the opening scene of the story Watson is upset to see Holmes looking even more gaunt and emaciated than was his custom.  When Watson asks why he does not eat when deep in a case, Holmes replies that digestion takes blood away from the brain, the blood necessary for his unparalleled feats of intellectual sleuthing.  He concludes: “I am a brain Watson.  The rest of me is a mere appendix.”  But he then goes on to express real pleasure at seeing Watson, the only friend Holmes ever acknowledges.  He entreats the good doctor, “Let me see you once more in the customary armchair.”

As the pages scroll past on my Droid, I am again struck by the fact that the Internet with its myriad social networks, through which we are wont to holler “Marco” to scattered “avataristic” friends in digital space, is in many ways “mere appendix.”  We hear the electronically multiplied “Polo Polo Polo Polo Polo Polo Polo Polo” of Facebook.  We may even find comfort in that cacophony. But I am increasingly inclined to believe that the tide will turn again - and sooner than we might expect – to the notion that a true friend is the one we see “once more in the customary armchair” sharing real warmth from a real fireplace, taking real shared comfort in a real room.
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Maybe There is a Reason We Lost Touch

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I just learned from The Washington Post that, "Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web."  I hate that.  Oh, I understand why they are doing it.  They are doing it for the same reason any media company has ever done anything - to make money.  They are, after all, companies formed for the purpose of making money - otherwise they would be non-profits.  I do not begrudge them that - but they have spoiled us with the free e-mail service.  They made us think it was our e-mail, now they want to "Facebookize" my e-mail so they can generate more advertising revenue.

I guess I am amazed by the fact that all these e-companies assume we want to share our lives with all the people to whom we send email - and, further, that we want to make it possible for people to whom we have never sent an email to find us and "friend" us through any of several "invasion by default" portals. Those include Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yelp, Pandora, Classmates, etc., etc. - any website that makes information about us publicly available without having specifically received our permission to do so.

Here is the thing - there are reasons that we choose to affiliate with other individuals.  In our childhood our friends we most often determined by proximity that was determined by where our parents lived.  As we moved on with our lives we chose our own path, job, inclination, opportunity, lots of variables there.  But the point is that as we moved we tended to retain the contacts that were deeply important to us while others fell away from mutual neglect. Social media work from a different assumption: that we let relationships die that call out for resurrection.  I doubt it.

I blanked my Facebook profile last week.  But in the last couple of years I had received 10, maybe 15, "friend requests" from folks from my past.  My response has varied from "Oh, interesting," to "We never spoke in high school, why now?"  Most fell somewhere in between.  But the reality is that none of those contacts - even the interesting ones - have resulted in the renewal of friendships that were often tentative 30 or 40 years ago.

I realize that one's use of social media is probably generational to a certain extent.  If you have emailed or texted with your BFF all your life then sharing the details of your life electronically with a cluster of acquaintances may come more easily.  But I would assert that even the most dyed in the wool digital native would like to define those relationships by personal choice as opposed to letting your email client establish them as a "default setting."

And that, for me, is the unsettling issue.  I still believe that technology enables us, empowers us in wonderful ways.  Yet, we are subtly allowing that new power to be leached away to serve the economic goals of the Yahooians of the world. Letting Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter create our list of "Friends" is not unlike removing the front door to your home; it is no longer your prerogative to invite people, any wandering soul can just stroll in. As I said before, the friends of our childhood were determined by where our parents chose to live.  But, we're the adults now, right? We should get to choose.
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Deserted Campus

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It was what passes for a winter’s day here in the South.  A few inches of snow clung forlornly to bushes and iron railings.  Birds huddled disconsolately on telephone wires, debating, no doubt, the wisdom of winging off to Florida. I coasted into the parking garage across a thin sheen of slush, pulled the laptop out of the trunk and, clutching my coffee, headed inside to videotape my class lecture.

Maybe it was the paucity of cars that first tickled my antennae, but it really struck me when I left the garage to make my way through the little park that sits between the large brick office buildings – there was no one around.  There were lights in windows, the heating and AC units tucked in behind the shrubs hummed away – but there were no people.  It was all very “rapturesque.”

Soon a few other left-behind slackers joined me on the way to the elevator, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of being alone.  I was whisked up to the 5th floor where I walked into the studio, checked the lights, set the camera, fired up the computer, and sat down to talk to my students – out there somewhere.  Mind you, I actually like this kind of teaching.  It feels far more personal than the evolving norm - standing before a couple hundred students in a high-tech classroom, fighting Facebook for attention.  When I talk to my students in the studio I know that the student on the other side of the lens is there because they have chosen to be there.  They are actually listening.  That is very cool.

But it doesn’t fully assuage my uneasy feeling of a deserted campus, of an increasingly vacated world where social relationships play out in digitized worlds creepingly devoid of physical human interaction.  It may be a generational notion.  Boomers – the fastest growing demographic group on Facebook – use digital spaces primarily to maintain or re-establish relations that were initiated in a face-to-face world.  But X-ers, Y-ers, Millennials, etc., define an evolution of intimacy moving increasingly toward the purely digital.  My wife has two-year old grand-nieces who regularly Skype with their grandparents – and on the children’s end the interface is a large flatscreen hi-def TV.  Shades of Star Trek: Nana is a hologram. The dominant venue for the relationship is digital.

A colleague and I, in a far too rare face-to-face chat, wondered how long it would be before digital versus face-to-face became a quaint distinction overwhelmed by the hegemony of converged interaction.  Second Life as Real Life, avatar as actuality.  I wonder if my unease with the notion is purely the case of a generation on the cusp – 20th century man bemused by 21st century implications.

Somehow, Patricia MacLachlan’s Newbery Medal winning novel, Sarah, Plain and Tall, comes to mind.  Sarah is a mail order bride who arrives in Minnesota in 1910 to become a wife to Jacob and mother to Anna and Caleb.  The book describes a series of relationships that began in a newspaper ad and moved into “snail mail” letters, all written words – the Internet of the early 1900s.  But the relationships could not become “real” until they were played out face-to-face; until they were actualized by physicality. 

I wonder to what extent our love-affair with social media is de-valuing that physicality?  If I can interact with lots of my friends simultaneously on Facebook, does that reduce my inclination to actually go have coffee with one or two of them.  And further, if I have never met someone face-to-face, perhaps never even seen a real photo of a cyber-friend in Second Life, would the idea of a physical meeting even occur?  Obviously in romantic relationships where an intimate future, marriage, family, etc., is the object, physicality remains imperative.  But what about all those other relationships in which the physical is tangential? What happens there? Is a digital hug OK if your entire relationship has been conducted in virtual worlds? I really don’t know.

And a final thought: Much has been made of the notion of the digital divide, of the differences among those who have access to robust digital media and those who do not.  Imagine the complexity of rapprochement between segments of society who literally experience “reality” differently.

I left the studio and headed back to my car.  Outside of the thoroughly wired and “wi-fi-ed” tower of brick and glass and steel, a mix of rain and sleet gusted across the plaza.  There were more hardy souls about now as Southerners ventured out into the “terrible weather.”  I pulled my head down into my collar.  Brrrrrr.  Felt human, felt good.
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There’s A Buzz in the Bucket

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OK, there is now a little “buzz” icon on my gmail page – looks like a chat balloon in red, yellow, blue and green.  The page looks a bit like my Google Wave page; little thumbnail images of people I know, other little images of people I might want to know.  Both pages bear a bit of a resemblance to my Facebook page, but I don’t go there very often so I would have to check.  Same with my Linkedin page, which I visit even more infrequently, and the Ning Community I created a couple of years ago.

I guess I keep hoping that one of these cool new tools will actually increase the quality of the information being communicated.  I should know better.  Garbage in, garbage out; that little bon mot has been with us since the dawn of the computer age.  Certainly, the bucket containing the information will have its inevitable impact.  But the essential nature of the information is dependent upon the care and effort that went into its creation. Buzz will not improve the quality of the images formerly posted on Picasa or Flickr.  Placing fragmented observations on Twitter make them no more profound than when they were posted on Facebook.  The current thinking seems to be that we all wish to be heavily invested in the surface of hundreds of lives, and each company wants to deliver the environment that best facilitates such emotional dilettantism.  Less considered is the reality that if we spend our energy maintaining hundreds of tangential relationships, we must necessarily reduce the effort we expend on those true friendships that actually sustain us.

I sense, in the current introductory flurry of online and in-the-hand devices, an unusually disjointed cycle in the perennial negotiation between the communicative exigencies of a culture and the technological responses to those pressures.  Perhaps the issue is not, as it has often been, that we lack the tools to address our communicative needs.  Perhaps the current situation reflects a glut of tools to handle increasingly myopic perceptions and expressions.  I can show people around the globe pictures of my puppy a dozen different ways, but representatives from two different political parties cannot see common ground across a narrow aisle in a single room.  I can listen to my favorite pop star on four different devices secreted about my person, but theologians are deaf to any voice save their own; governments seek to constrain the flow of digital information to “protect” their people from “inappropriate” messages.

The paradox is almost amusing; the power of our communication technology seems, at the moment, to far outstrip the uses to which we put it – a wonderful paring knife for skinless grapes.
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