Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
All good comments and questions that reflect the general
misunderstanding as to what is taking place between location and
app sharing. Jon, you seem to assume people have actually taken the
time to understand and tighten up what privacy IS available to them. Or
maybe I misunderstood? In either case, I'm not sure they actually do
much at the platform level of their settings, and I doubt few pay much
attention to the permissions being given for the multitudinous apps
they are downloading onto their smartphones.

In one respect, GenY doesn't seem to care about online privacy at all;
they have been raised in a collaborative and sharing environment and
until they experience something horrid that gets their attention, they
just roll with it. Their idea of a social disconnect is to just tell
someone to "lose my number" and they expect it to happen.

For us older folk, this transition is a major shift in the way we
think about social connections. I've been raised assuming my privacy
was part and parcel of my understanding of what it means to be living
in a free country. Now that we are living in the age of War on Terror,
I've watched those liberties and privacies evaporate with the Patriot
Act and the incredible intrusion of Homeland Security and NSA into my
so-called freedoms - and much of that is being done digitally. So there
is a reactionary stance on my part and I flinch when these issues come
up.

I know you are right and I know it's the future. I'm just not
comfortable with it yet. And the burden is on us to maintain our
freedoms online and on the ground.
  

    
I recently sketched out a plot for a sci-fi novel to be written in the
near future (40 years out). Privacy was long gone and the only right
you had was to your identity and that was primarily protected by your
personal AI. Strangers could not even meet one another without both
person's AI's having first screened it as okay.

It was so depressing I decided not to bother with it. (Except to pass
that bummer vision along to you all.)
  

    
Here's my take on it:

<http://www.realeyz.tv/en/blog/the-ward-report/english-thanks-for-sharing-now-g
o-away.html>
  

    
There are GenY people talking about this, including privacy labs at
Harvard and CMU with grad students doing research on the topic.
  

    
Ed, I love the way you write, it always makes me smile as I'm reading.
< I'm willing to share a little bit. Or a lot. But I decide, not a
piece of software in my phone.>

That's it exactly, for me. 

We've stirred up a hornet's nest here. It's a big issue, possibly
generational. And I think we've gotten great inputs. (jet) thanks for
that about GenY.

Jon, I have a sense that you are baffled a bit by our reactions to
what seems comfortable to you. Underneath all this is another aspect of
the emergence of social media and that is trust and social capital
within networks. 

That's a real yardstick for me in how I decide whether to follow
someone or not, whether it's Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, or whatever.

Can we all talk a bit about that? Tech Crunch has an excellent article
on this
(http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/21/klout-kred-peerindex-radian6/).

I use PeerIndex, Kred, and Klout...not for an ego trip, or to game the
system (although I did at first), but rather as a measurement of how
well I'm using the tools and platforms available to connect to people I
want in my own learning network. But I don't choose people based on
their scores. I still use the old fashioned method Ed talks about in
his piece above - word of mouth, experience over time, face to face,
and more recently, live video chats. 

How about you all, how do you decide to connect?
  

    
(What's the buzz? Tell me what's a-happening. playing in my head every
time I think of this next issue)

Ed, aggregation and curation are having a huge effect on media and
journalism (another future driver). Here's a take on it from
GigaOM(http://gigaom.com/2012/03/19/if-you-have-news-it-will-be-aggregated-andor-cura
ted/).

I know this affects you directly. Where's it all taking us?
  

    
For those of you off the WELL, please feel free to chime in. Send your
questions or comments to: inkwell@well.com and they will be posted
here.
  

    
Ted, I'm not really baffled by concerns about privacy that are greater
than my own. I've always been more public about what I do, and I've
also always had a pretty good sense about what I should represent
online and what I should keep offline - e.g. if you search my info you
won't find a lot about my family, other than my wife Marsha, especially
as she's become more comfortable having an online presence. 

I'm also not creeped out by marketing entities tracking my behaviors
algorithmically and trying to sell me their widgets in a more targeted
way. In fact I prefer that over spam.

So how do I decide to connect? 

When I first joined social systems, I would find a couple of friends,
then look through their friend lists to find people I know. Eventually
I had a basic set of connections to friends and acquaintances. I've
moved through a lot of scenes, and owing to the breadth of my interests
and activities, I know a lot of people - writers and journalists,
artists, hackers, activists, musicians, futurists, network
technologists, business people, social media mavens, etc. Over time
I've become connected to a lot of people. 

Now that I have a pretty established set, I rarely initiate
connections, usually because I've met somebody I find interesting and
want to keep track of 'em. And now there are tools that will allow me
to find my Facebook friends or Twitter follows on new systems that I
join. So, for instance, when I started using Instagram, I already had
an established base of Instagrammers I could follow.

SInce I know a lot of people, I find that people who know them will
sometimes want to connect. If it's Facebook or LinkedIn, where it's a
connection and not a follow and I have to approve it, I look at who
they are, what they do, and who else they know that I know.  I have
clusters of friends that are like neighborhoods of affinity - different
clusters tend to have the same clusters.  If they're in one of those
neighborhoods and the affinity is pretty clear, I'll usually approve
the connection even If I don't think I've met them. I know that
Facebook will suggest connections by affinity, and I assume that's how
people I don't really know find me and decide to connect.

When you have a lot of connections, managing the flow of information
is more of a challenge, so there's a good reason to give a lot of
thought to each added connection, which increases potential connections
and data flows exponentially. Some people are just greedy about
connections or think they'll get a business benefit by connecting to a
lot of people - of course, I avoid those folks.
  

    
> So how do I decide to connect? 

You don't control all of those connections, tho.   You can give me
some purportedly anonymous data and I can match it to someone else's
database.   In my personal case, my wife and I are the only two people
in our county that own the pair of vehicles we own.   Tack on "no
kids" and we are a direct hit in marketing media traded by businesses.

The recent article on how Target knows when a woman is pregnant
explains a lot of stuff that people in the industry do quite legally
to profile a customer's lifestyle.
  

    
Here's the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all


<quote>
The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the
past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major
field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds
of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely
well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire
statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief
scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the
ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push
to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one
of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of
us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke
University estimated that habits, rather than conscious
decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and
recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we
think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety,
depression and addictions. 
<end quote>
  

    
Now, let's say Target (or Wal-Mart or whomever) decides to "anonymize"
that data by removing your name and sells or trades it to other
marketing firms.

Without your name it's anonymous, right?  Well, not if you're us.
  

    
As far as I can make sense out of that GigaOM article, there's one
thing that never comes up in these discussions: no matter what the news
is, if it's actually news and not just a collection of
readily-observable facts, a trained person or several of them have to
gather it. 

I remember the moment at SXSWi a couple of years ago when some
Libertarian twit was practically peeing his pants about replacing New
York Times reporters with crowd-sourced news gatherers and David Carr
made the remark that the two big stories in the paper that day were a
report on life in the narco-slums of Mexico's border towns and a couple
of billion dollars in U.S. currency which had unaccountably gone
missing in Iraq. 

His question was, who among these "citizen reporters" would be willing
to live for a month undercover in Mexico to that that story, and how
many of them were fluent enough in both Arabic and forensic accounting
to follow the Iraqi paper-trail and prove that this aid money or
whatever it was was, indeed, missing? Both of these kinds of reporters
or reporting teams are professionals, and need to be paid as such. 

This raises another of my horror scenarios, in that if it's no longer
possible to make money at something -- journalism, the arts -- the only
people who'll be doing it will be people who already have money. A
class issue arises there, and there's already enough of an
overclass/underclass thing going on in the States. We've got to figure
this out, and yet there's too much "wow, ain't it cool" going on with
all the new tech for anyone to pay attention to it. And when they do,
they're derided as old stick-in-the-muds. 

I'm certain a solution will come, although whether I'll have died from
starvation long since is a question. And I'm certain the solution will
partake of the virtues of the new tech and the old ways of gathering
information in more or less equal parts. 
  

    
Jon, thanks for that post <85>. I follow pretty much the same pattern.
I imagine your comfortability comes from having done it so long. I
lurked for over a year when I first came to the WELL before I made my
first post. The flame wars were just too intimidating for me back in
those days.

I didn't decide to go social until a year ago and am amazed at the
growth of my own network and the richness of the associations. And now
it has all become about pruning - strong ties and week ties - and
trying to get a balance of input. I don't need to hear the choir
singing all the time.

Adding new people has become a hard choice for me. There are only so
many you can effectively keep up with. More importantly, it's a
network, so there has to be sharing on my part and I need to be a
valuable tie by my own contributions.

Also, I agree with you about the marketing aspects. They can strip my
personal data and peddle it all they want. I'll ignore it the same way
I ignore TV ads. And yes, my spam is dramatically down.

(jet) your case is somewhat unique, but I get you concerns. You would
certainly have them about location apps as well. It points out how
savvy we all need to be in respect to how digital affects our personal
circumstances.
  

    
Ed, really good point about the need for professionals. Those of us
who curate are not about to be embedded. My particular focus is on
finding links to people and articles for people who do have a sustained
interest in a select area. 

No question digital is disruptive and you are right it eventually will
sift out with a blend of old and new. Bumpy ride now though. And too
much focus is on the shiny new thing. For the life of me I can't
understand the hubbub about iPad3, I'll pass.
  

    <scribbled by jet Thu 22 Mar 12 10:08>
  

    
What other things are on your minds in respect to our digital futures?
Anything else that grabs your attention or causes concern?
  

    
> (jet) your case is somewhat unique, but I get you concerns.
 
Three of my nearby neighbors all have unique families relative to the
"average, normal" family.  Unusual mixed-race couple for this part of
the world with two new kids; single-parent family of excellent
athletes who are all in college, all cars have vanity plates, mom died
recently in a car crash; lawyer couple who are locally active in
pro-resident politics, recent weddings of kids, wife is fighting her
second round of cancer.
  
All average, normal people, just like everyone else in this burgh.
Hard to tell 'em apart, even!
  

    
Yeah, depending on what you're mining for, <jet> either blends into
the wallpaper or sticks way out. And that's the problem for him and the
rest of us: unless you're waaaay mainstream, you're very visible. 

Now, I use social media -- primarily Facebook because I've never
figured out LinkedIn and I hate Twitter -- for self-promotion. Nobody
else is promoting me, so posting a link to my weekly realeyz blog or my
personal blog or the audio of a Fresh Air piece or (occasionally) my
two Kindle short books is how I get people to check those things out.
  

    
Ed, the  smart view about bloggers vs journalists is that there's no
vs, no either/or. Journalist bloggers like Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor
have suggested that bloggers and journalists could form partnerships.
There are many bloggers on the ground and they don't have the same
constraints as journalists - e.g. they can continue pursuing a story
after it's "stale" and possibly facilitate deeper digging and better
understanding. Bloggers have been known to revive stories thought dead
by coming up with additional facts. 

So I think any idea of bloggers replacing journalists is a non-issue,
it ain't going to happen. The real problem for journalists is that
their traditional employers are no longer making enough money to pay
them what they're worth, in fact many news organizations are in danger
of extinction. This is partly because there are so many channels for
information, mindshare is less focused, it's harder for any one
organization to attract a huge number of eyeballs. Many advertisers are
spreading their spends over many more publications (and forms of
publication). It's sort of the opposite of walmartization, where a big
box moves into town and wipes out the smaller players. Here the smaller
players are emerging and scattering attention originally focused on
the big box, which as a result has trouble making overhead and may have
to fold. 

There's also Craig's list and similar online platforms for free
classified advertising. Big losses for newspapers as a result. 

Lots of innovation happening in news right now, but the economic
questions persist. We need new business models for news, and bloggers
may be part of the deal. HuffPo is a profitable news organization built
on blogs, for instance.
  

    
I never mentioned bloggers. I am a blogger. 
  

    
<92> Pittsburgh has always been an interesting place.  I went to
college there in the mid 60's.  The mills were running 3 shifts at the
time, everyone was working, there was great music up on the Hill,
Forbes Field let students into the bleachers for free after the 7th
inning, and there was shared humanity and respect between the mashed up
populations.  Even the y'ins and you'ins were cool. 
  

    
Ed, when you mentioned "crowdsourced news gatherers" I assumed you
were referring to bloggers.
  

    
Nothing that organized, I'm afraid.
  

    
The point I was getting to is that these two statements can both be
true:

- I am collecting data about you using the XYZ App on your phone in an
  anonymous way where I don't log data that identifies who you are.
  Nothing you give me identifies who you are, just what you did with
  the XYZ App.

- I can later correlate/match that collected data with information
  purchased from other companies and quickly learn alot about who you
  are..  If you use the XYZ App to pick and watch movies then rate
  those movies, I could match that information with data purchased
  from movie rental companies and make a decent guess about what else
  you like and possibly who you are.
  

    
<jet>, I don't think they care who you are. They only care about
targeting purchases.  The guys who care who you are have probably been
doing this much longer, more quietly. 

This might be a good place to mention Doc Searls' Project VRM, the
focus of his Harvard fellowship. The project grew out of Doc's
relationship with the Identity Workshop and the various discussions
about personal data. VRM is an acro for "vendor relationship
management" - the name came up in thinking about how this creates more
of a symmetry with tools for "customer relationship management," where
the vendor collects and "owns" your data, and can do pretty much
anything with it. The idea of VRM is to build tools that empower the
customer or consumer, allowing them some control in relationships with
vendors. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_relationship_management for more
information.

"The primary theory behind ProjectVRM is that many market problems
(including the widespread belief that customer lock-in is a 'best
practice') can only be solved from the customer side: by making the
customer a fully empowered actor in the marketplace, rather than one
whose power in many cases is dependent on exclusive relationships with
vendors, by coerced agreement provided entirely by those vendors." -
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/projectvrm

One of the most useful experiences I had at SXSW 2012 was an offsite
meeting with Doc and Gregory Foster, a colleague of mine.