The Numbers Game

.
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.
.

Secrets in the Social Network

.
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.
 .

Compassionate Privacy

 .

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."
.