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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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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Reflections of an Armchair Luddite

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First we must remember that the Luddites were not opposed to technology that made people’s lives better; they were opposed to the implementation of technology that bruised the lives of human beings. The conflict that lent their name to history occurred in the early 1800s, when they demonstrated a disturbing tendency to burn down the factories housing the mechanized looms that, they asserted, were stealing their jobs and hence degrading the quality of human life.

And now Apple has introduced the iPhone 4S. The S stands, I assume, for Siri – the artificial intelligence-like “assistant” that allows you to talk to your phone, a function not to be confused with using your phone to actually talk to other human beings. In the cool video on Apple’s home page, [http://www.apple.com/iphone/] Siri does the communicating to distant others:

Jogging Guy speaks: “Siri, read me my messages.”
Siri replys: “Great news, we got the go ahead on the project. Can you meet at 10?”
Jogging Guy: “You bet! See you there.”
Siri: Sent.
Jogging Guy: “Siri, text my wife. Tell her I’m going to be thirty minutes late.
Siri: I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.

All right, I made that last part up. Unlike Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Siri seems quite compliant. But you can probably see where I am going with this. Actually, I’m headed in two directions. First is that potentially “Hal-ish” path that asks that we at least reflect on the notion of technological dependency. Consider the fact that we no longer know anyone’s phone number. To call them we just hit speed dial, or touch their picture on the screen, or select their name from a list. We forget that the “code” that Skynet recognizes is a string of numbers. That is, we forget it until we let our cell phone battery run down and we are forced to use another phone, one without our “contacts." We stare at the strange grid of numbers and wonder which ones to push.  And then, of course, there is GPS.   I drove around Chicago last week as if I had lived there for years; a task I could not repeat sans GPS for all the money in the world. Recalculating, recalculating.

I believe those technologies to be helpful. They free up grey matter for more complex tasks; for those issues at the top of the “thought pyramid,” if you will. If I don’t have to worry about the base of the pyramid – phone numbers, addresses, my library card number etc., I can devote my attention to upper level issues; my lecture for this afternoon, an idea for a painting, or wondering about the nature of dark energy. I like that. What does concern me is the extent to which Siri, and his/her even more powerful kin over on the Android platform, are creeping up the pyramid, sucking up more and more “helpful tasks.” Apple’s video goes on to demonstrate:

“Will I need an umbrella?”
“No.”
“What the weather like in San Francisco?”
“Should be nice, highs in the mid-sixties.”
“How many ounces in a cup?”
“Let me think, 8 ounces.”
“Set my timer for 30 minutes.”
“Thirty minutes and counting.”

I worry about what happens if Siri’s battery runs down after we have given it responsibility for much of the seemingly trivial portions of the thought pyramid:

“Siri, where do I keep my shoes?”
Silence.
“Siri, how do I turn on the cable system?”
Silence.
“Siri, what is my credit card number?”
Silence.
“Siri, what was the make of my first car?”
Silence.
“Siri, where is the hospital?”
Silence.

I worry that “If we don’t use it, we will lose it.” And we are talking about our minds. Lurking in the back of my non-Siri mind is what Eric Schmidt of Google once said: "More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

“Siri, I’m bored – what do I want to do?”
“I’m sorry, Dave, I don’t know.”

My second concern is less dark, but more likely. The Apple videos show Jogging Man wearing ear buds and the other Siri users chatting away with Siri in the privacy of their own homes. Somehow I don’t see it working out that way.   Jogging Man will join the growing legions of Bluetooth users who spew their self-important conversations, Tourette-like, into the air; toxic vapors vented into the sphere of public silence. And can you imagine sitting in your favorite coffee shop surrounded by hordes of “Siri speakers”? Will the phones get confused if they “overhear” other “masters” talking to their “Siris”? Will people have to name their Siris to avoid confusion? Can you imagine how that will work in our celebrity-obsessed world?

“Leonardo, turn on the microwave.”
“Beyonce, put more starch in my shirts.”
“Mr. President, text my mother, tell her I’ll be late for dinner.”

Don’t get me wrong – I like my technology for the most part. Much of my life would be far more difficult – at times impossible - without it. But I would remind us that technology has a way of drifting into spaces either unintended, or at least unheralded, by its creators. I remember, in much the same hazy way I remember watching The Mickey Mouse Club, a time when parents assumed that if their children were using the computer they were doing their homework, because it was, after all, just a computer.
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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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Googling Memory

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Our lives are knit up of memories and change.  We mark their course with the artifacts we create; paintings, poems, plays, or simple prose are the signposts we jab into the swirling eddies of our existence to mark the memory of a moment, to capture a perception that was, at that time, true.  A recent experience drove me to reconsider the nature of, and perhaps the validity of, memory.  I am, of course, playing word games to a certain extent.  Yet it is an important word game.  Allow me to explain. 

It starts – as many of my reflections do – in that space between waking and sleep. In youth, it seemed, the bridge between those two pastures was short - the stream was narrow, and on a good day one could simply spring over.  Nowadays, the journey is more studied, as our perception of the world grows likewise more studied.  The waking world seems less inclined to release us.  So we create rituals of transition.  An evening glass of wine, quiet music, a book - gentle inducements to allow the rhythm of reality to recede and make Morpheus welcome.

My own ritual combines a home-grown mode of meditation, blending traditional Reike with some type of “structured mental meandering.”  The nature of the latter shifts depending upon my mood. I have written of the lake where I often take myself.  However, recently, I have been wandering the grounds of my childhood home.

I have clear memories of only one house from those years.  I lived there from a year or two after my birth until my first marriage in 1969.  I have been revisiting the days when I was seven or maybe eight years old.  Old enough to play outside unsupervised, but young and small enough to explore the secret pathways and hollows concealed among the shrubbery.  To me it seemed a world leapt full-blown from the pages of The Jungle Book.  Evergreen branches screened me from the street beyond, and stealthy creeping allowed me access to the full sweep of the front of the house. Bird’s nests occasionally grew in the branches, and squirrels scolded my intrusion.  I have enjoyed the return.  Eventually, I mapped our yard, and pushed out into the neighborhood, poking into corners of dusty memory.  Tasha, the name of the boxer who lived two doors to the west.  A bouncy dog, probably more playful than threatening, but still uncertain in recollection.  The alley to the east - did one or two houses intervene?  Relax, see it.  Ah - a duplex! No wonder the confusion.

It was a somniferous diversion that eased me into slumber for quite awhile, a green and golden ramble through portals nigh unto dreaming itself.  And then the reverie stumbled into wide-awake-world.  "Google Earth", I thought.  If I really wanted to know which lane connected to what alley and where one backyard stopped and another began, well, there was an app for that.  And I used it. It was a strangely disorienting experience that I cannot recommend - but probably not for the reason you might suppose.  For many, wandering past your childhood home will prove disconcerting because your home may have disappeared beneath a McMansion or into a Mall.  Would that were the case.  Mine had merely shriveled, dried up like the shell of cicada, still clinging to a limb but desiccated and empty.

The neighborhood was recognizable - eerily so.  The lots that had been vacant when I was a child remain so more than 50 years later.  The alleyways dissected the blocks.  Stroking the mouse allowed an Alice-in-Wonderland recreation of my bike ride to school.  Everything was smaller, lacking in mystery, devoid of wonder.  I was, at first, deeply saddened as if something quite lovely and once loved had died in my absence.  I had not known and had neither grieved nor said good-bye.  But then I realized that this was not my neighborhood, that structure was not my home.  Oh, the latitude and longitude were, no doubt, correct.  Google gets the numbers.  What the app does not understand is the transformative power of memory.  And that was when I realized that I was not, technically, talking about a memory – I was talking about a memoir.

Memory is what one is supposed to testify to in court.  I was here or there and did this or that at this time or another.  Memory can testify to behavior, just as Google can capture digital representations of the street where once I lived.  But that was not where I traveled when I envisioned the house in which I grew up.  When I lay abed, roaming the world of my childhood, I was wandering through a memoir.  The differences are, as the world of publishing occasionally reminds us, significant.  But I am quite ambivalent regarding the notion of which representation is more “truthful.”

The author who presents a memoir as “factual” is subject to public censure as a liar and a fraud.  Perhaps so.  However, I am inclined to assert that memoirs are more “truthful” than memories, than the “facts” contained in a pristine autobiography.  Memoirs define the truths we distill from memory.  After considerable reflection, I am convinced that memoir is the idealized-self interacting with the distorted-other in a way that results in a preferred outcome which increases harmony.  Memoir equals reality reconstructed. 

I am aware of the problems with that assertion, particularly if it were to find its way into law or public policy: “So you see, your honor, while I did not, in the cold light of the facts, actually purchase the vehicle, don’t you agree I look great in it?”  That is not where I am heading. 

I am moving more in the direction of memoir reflecting that which we should have learned from remembered events had we been more thoughtful, more attentive to the surrounding harmony.  Memories and memoirs are both the product of recollection and interpretation.  Interpretation is mandatory because no input is merely recorded in our brains.  Input is always woven into the tapestry of meaningfulness that is the ongoing product of consciousness.  Perhaps a good way to think about it is that memory is the raw clay, the actual “facts” of the event.  The lessons we learn from the experience over the course of our life, the way we fit those lessons into our chord, into the harmonic life we create, that is memoir.  Memoir is memory, glazed and fired.
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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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One Web Doesn't "Fit All"

There is an interesting story in today's NY Times. The headline is: Health Debate Fails to Ignite Obama’s Grass Roots.

Here is the link to the story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/15/health/policy/15ground.html?th&emc=th

I am surprised that they seem surprised. The author, Jeff Zeleny, appears to have made a classic mistake in assuming that if you pour a message into the "right" media container it will have the same effect as it had the last time you poured a message into that container. No, it doesn't really happen that way. The negotiation that goes on between our communication needs and the technologies that meet those needs is dynamic on all levels. The message, the medium, and the individuals who use the medium to encounter the message, the transformation of the message by all of the preceding, and behaviors resulting from the on-going negotiation - those are all elements in a dynamic process.

President Obama's digital election campaign made significant use of electronic resources to revitalize the PPPE [a Previously Passive Portion of the Electorate :-)] that shared both his agenda and his technology. My guess is that much of the PPPE is under 30, certainly under 40. Healthcare is a hot button issue for FFOFs [Fearful Folks Over Fifty] who, largely, do not "techno-verb": blog, tweet, Facebook or Google. Sure, that is changing, but not to the extent that we can expect the communication strategies that work for the PPPE to be equally effective the FFOFs.

The PPPE still feel immortal. They don't get sick. They want their "healthcare" to deal with accidents - car, bike, skateboard, tri-athletic, whatever. They will not be the important stakeholders in this issue - except to the extent that their lack of attention might make things more difficult for their parents who tend to be FFOFs.

As Mr. Zeleny does point out in his article, to leverage the support of the FFOFs who are concerned about healthcare, the Obama administration is going to have to address the negotiation differently, perhaps starting with a new container.