» Media Desert of My Real Life

{November 2, 2009} Differences in Media

I’ve been thinking lately about the differences between media types. This thinking was inspired by the new movie Disgrace based on J. M. Coetzee’s novel of the same name. I will definitely see this movie (if it is ever released throughout the US) but I’m worried about the choices that the filmmakers have made. I thought Coetzee’s novel was brilliant because it was told from the point of view of a character who is somewhat reprehensible. But, of course, his reprehensibility must only be hinted at since he himself wouldn’t think he was reprehensible. The subtlety of the novel is difficult to convey in a film. And so the filmmakers have made choices that reduce the brilliant ambiguity of the novel. And that makes me wonder whether I’m interested enough in the plot of the novel to enjoy the movie.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD. The original series aired on television and so the commercial breaks are obvious on the DVD. In the most recent episode that I watched, a character is in a room with a spiritual advisor, discussing a recurring dream. At a dramatic moment in the telling of the dream, the screen goes black, clearly a commercial break. When we return to the story (without having to watch a commercial, which is why we like NetFlix), we enter the story at exactly the same point that we left it. We left the story at a tension point so that we would be sure to come back after the commercial. This technique works well in television.

The same technique does not work well at all in novels. I read and hated Dan Brown’s novel, The DaVinci Code. I really wanted to like this novel. Dan Brown, after all, is from New Hampshire, and the premise of the story is intriguing. But I couldn’t get past the poor craftsmanship of the novel. The characters were two-dimensional and indistinguishable from each other. I figured out the “secret” of the novel (which I won’t spoil here) about half-way through. But my biggest problem was the chapter breaks. Dan Brown writes really short chapters, some of which are a page long. And often it is completely unclear why these chapter breaks occur. Why have a chapter that is one page long and then have the next chapter start right where the action of that really short chapter ended? I felt as though Brown had thought about moving these two chapters around, away from each, in order to build tension, in much the same way that Battlestar Galactica’s breaks for commercials build tension. A good editor could have made sure these two chapters did not appear one right after the other, unlike the two scenes with the commercial break between them. These examples remind me that different media require different production techniques just as they require different analysis techniques.

On a side note, the use of the made-up word “fracking” on Battlestar Galactica is getting on my nerves.

{July 18, 2009} New Kindle Developments

I was talking to my dad tonight about the Kindle. He’s a fan and wants one, but feels as though he doesn’t read enough to justify the expense. I’ve written about the Kindle before and have said that I have a problem with Amazon’s high pricing of electronic books. Now Amazon has screwed up in another way and I have mixed feelings about that.

Recently, Amazon removed all traces of the digital versions of two of George Orwell’s classic novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, from their web site so that Kindle users can no longer purchase them. That action is not controversial. Amazon’s other actions, however, are controversial. Amazon also removed all digital traces of the novels from the Kindle devices of users who had purchased the novels. It turns out that the publisher who sold Amazon the rights to distribute the novels did not actually own the copyrights (in the US) for them. When Amazon determined that they were illegally selling the digital version of the novel, they stopped selling it. But they also retroactively removed the digital versions of the novels from those who had purchased it. People in the blogosphere writing about this issue have conflicting ideas concerning Amazon’s reaction. Some are outraged while others think Amazon did the right thing.

The difference in these two points of view comes down to values. Those who think Amazon did the right thing liken this to the police confiscating a stolen car from your driveway. You never had the right to own the item, whether you purchased it knowing it was stolen or not Those who think Amazon did the wrong thing believe that the users had purchased the item in what they thought was a legal manner and, therefore, Amazon should have left well enough alone. In fact, many are making the argument that situations such as this are arguments against digital distribution of content since the ownership of digital content is so ephemeral. The truth seems to be somewhere in between these two extremes, I think. There are two reasons that this is not the same as the police confiscating a stolen car. First, Amazon had a duty to determine that they were selling a legal product. They failed in this duty and should be held liable in some way for that failure. Second, once Amazon discovered their error in illegally selling the product, they were less than forthcoming about the remedy. They did refund the purchase price of the novel but they didn’t clearly explain what had happened and clearly notify those who had purchased the novels that they were being removed. Instead, Amazon surreptitiously removed the novels from the Kindle devices. That’s wrong. On the other hand, Amazon is not the devil in this situation. They honored the copyright of the novels and, most importantly, they refunded the purchase price. They tried to do the right thing.

As in so many situations, the real issue here seems to be about Amazon’s lack of forthrightness about the issue once it was discovered. The cover-up of the crime once again turns out to be worse than the crime itself. Did we learn nothing from Watergate?

{May 22, 2009} NeMLA 2010

There have been quite a few stories that have captured my attention in the nearly six month break that I’ve taken from writing entries in this blog. I will be sharing several of those stories in the next few days. In the meantime, I recently had a panel proposal accepted for the Northeast Modern Language Association conference that will be held in Montreal in April 2010. Here’s the call for papers for my panel:

Playing Web 2.0: Intertextuality, Narrative and Identity in New Media

41st Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

April 7-11, 2010

Montreal, Quebec – Hilton Bonaventure

A recent Facebook spoof of Hamlet by Sarah Schmelling illustrates the current proliferation of experiments in narrative form and intertextuality found in new media. Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs and social networking sites, allow the average web user to actively participate in online life. Given our societal bent toward postmodernism, it is not surprising that much of this online participation is characterized by a proclivity to challenge and play with traditional conventions. This panel will examine play, defined in the broadest sense by Salen and Zimmerman as “free movement within a more rigid structure”, using Web 2.0 tools and new media. Some questions of interest to the panel include: Are there particular attributes of new media technologies that encourage play? How is new media play different from/similar to play found elsewhere? What impact do new media technologies have on our notions of play? What are the motivations of those who engage in play via new media technologies? Some example topics for the panel include: experimentation with new literary forms using social networking conventions (such as the 140-character status update); creation of online identities using text-based tools such as blogs; development of fictional worlds by fans of popular culture narratives using wikis and blogging tools; the use of casual online games to influence attitudes and behaviors concerning issues of social importance.

Submit 250-word abstracts to cleblanc@plymouth.edu.

Deadline: September 30, 2009

Please include with your abstract:

Name and Affiliation

Email address

Postal address

Telephone number

A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)

The 41^st Annual Convention will feature approximately 350 sessions, as well as dynamic speakers and cultural events. Details and the complete Call for Papers for the 2010 Convention will be posted in June: http://nemla.org/.

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.

Travel to Canada now requires a passport for U.S. citizens. Please get your passport application in early.

{December 31, 2008} Failed Predictions

Predicting the future is a notoriously difficult endeavor and yet there is never a shortage of people willing to play the game, especially at the end of a year.

Many of the predictions for 2009 seem to involve world politics. For example, over at Psychic World, Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker predict that an assassination attempt on Barack Obama will occur in 2009. They posted this prediction on October 9, 2008 and then updated the entry on October 27, 2008 (in red font, just so we know that it’s an important update). The update tells us (and I can almost hear the breathlessness with which this important information is stated) that this prediction already came true! Apparently, the vague assassination “plot” by two neo-Nazis thwarted by the ATF in October constitutes an assassination “attempt”. The fact that these men did not actually begin to implement the plot, which involved first shooting over 100 black people in Tennessee and following that spree up with the assassination of then-Senator Obama, doesn’t matter to the psychics who made this prediction. It still counts as a success for their ability to predict the future. An even bigger issue for me is the fact that they predicted the assassination attempt would take place in 2009. Clearly, this plot was discovered in 2008. The psychics never discuss how useful it is for a prediction to be that far off in its timing and details.

As amusing as I find the predictions of psychics who claim to be able to “foresee” the future, the predictions that I’m most interested in are the ones made by those who examine trends and then predict where those trends will take us. People who make these kinds of predictions are called “futurists” or “futurologists” and, unlike psychics, claim no mysticism in coming to their predictions. Instead, according to Wikipedia, futurologists study “yesterday’s and today’s changes, and aggregating and analyzing both lay and professional strategies, and opinions with respect to tomorrow. It includes analyzing the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in the attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures.” Although futurologists make predictions about many different fields, I’m particularly interested in the area of technology, especially because technological change is very rapid and vast. I think technology shows despite their claims to scientific methodologies, the predictions of futurologists are typically as wrong as the predictions made by those claiming to have a mystical insight into the future.

The technological futurologist that has gotten the most attention in the US in recent years is Ray Kurzweil, the author of a number of books that have captured the popular imagination. Kurzweil is a computer scientist from a time when computer scientists were rare. When he was just a teenager, long before computers were widespread and common, he created computer software that wrote impressive musical compostions using the patterns it discovered analyzing great masterworks. He also developed the first optical character recognition software which led to his invention, in 1976, of The Reading Machine, which read written text out loud for blind people. Since that time, he’s invented musical synthesizers, speech recognition devices, computer technology for use in education, and a whole host of other useful tools. He’s obviously a smart, creative guy who knows a lot about technology and how to use it to benefit humans. Kurzweil’s faith in technology is so great that he considers himself to be a transhumanist, advocating the use of technology to “overcome what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death,” according to Wikipedia. It is in this area that many of his predictions fail.

In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, about the impact of artifcial intelligence on human consciousness, Ray Kurzweil made a number of predictions about technology at the end of 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099. Since we are just about to begin the year 2009, I thought it might be interesting to consider how likely it is that Kurzweil’s predictions can come true in the next year. Chapter 9 of the book, which makes predictions for 2009, can be read online here.

The chapter is divided into sections called The Computer Itself, Education, Disabilities, Communication, Business and Economics, Politics and Society, The Arts, Warfare, Health and Medicine, and Philosophy. Although some of Kurzweil’s predictions have indeed come to be reality, the vast majority of them are still far off into the future. In fact, some involve technological tangents that seemed interesting in 1999 but that our society has chosen not to pursue.

Kurzweil predicted that the computer itself would be much more ubiquitous than it actually is and that they would be smaller than they actually are. Because computers are so ubiquitous and small today, it’s difficult to imagine how someone might have overestimated these trends just ten years ago. But that’s the problem with Kurzweil. He is such a technology evangelist that he tends to go too far. In the case of the computer itself, he predicted that the average person would have a dozen computers on and around her body which would communicate with each other using a wireless body local area network (LAN). These computers would monitor bodily functions and provide automated identity verification for financial transactions and for entry into secure areas. The technology he describes is nearly available now in the form of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips which are common in some warehouses and which are now part of every US passport. Most of these RFID chips are passive devices, however, which means that they can only be read by an external device and do not provide computing power themselves. In addition, there has been something of an uproar over the increased use of these chips. For example, I recently received a new ATM/credit card from my bank that had an RFID chip embedded in it to make using the card easier. I would no longer need to swipe the card to use it. Instead, I could simply tap it against any reader. But because it doesn’t have to be swiped, anyone who got close enough to me with a reader could read the chip. I didn’t see the advantage of having such a chip in my credit card and saw many disadvantages and so I returned it, making a special request to get a card without the chip. I suspect there are others out there who have similar concerns. Kurzweil did predict that privacy issues would be a concern in 2009 but I’ll talk about that later.

Some of the other things about the computer itself that Kurzweil got seriously wrong involve the way in which we interact with our computers. He predicted that most text would be created using continuous speech recognition software–in other words, we would speak to our computers and they would transcribe our speech into text. This is clearly not going to become the norm in the next year and I’m not sure we would want it to become the norm. As I sit typing this blog entry, for example, I have the television on (because multi-tasking is the prevalent way of interacting with the world–something that Kurzweil does not mention) and Evelyn is sitting next to me interacting with her own computer. Neither of us would want the other to be talking to her computer at this moment. This might be an example of a place where a cool technology would actually be an obstacle to the way most users interact with their computers. But Kurzweil did not stop there. He also predicted that we would wear glasses that allowed us to see the regular visual world in front of us but with a virtual world superimposed on it using tiny lasers. Such glasses do exist but they are novelties, used only in experimental situations. And I think most people would find such a superimposition to be a distraction. Until some benefit can be shown for this technology and how it allows us to interact with the world, I think it will remain a novelty.

Another area where Kurzweil predictions have not come to fruition (yet) is the area of disability. It is in this area that Kurzweil betrays his transhuman biases. He predicted that by the end of 2009, disabilities such as blindness and deafness could be dealt with using computing technologies to the extent that such disabilities are no longer considered handicaps but are instead mere inconveniences. Although significant progress has been made in the area of augmenting such situations using computing technologies, we are nowhere close to where Kurzweil predicted we would be. Kurzweil’s zeal in the advancement of technology once again led him to overestimate the progress that we would be able to make in ten years. The history of technology is filled with such zeal and overestimation.

I won’t detail every area that Kurzweil gets things wrong but I do want to touch on the area of politics and society. The Obama campaign rode its unprecedented use of technology to a presidential victory but in ways that were not predicted by Kurzweil. Kurzweil predicted that privacy issues would be a primary political issue and although there are groups of people who are very concerned with privacy in our society today (both because of technical issues and because of political issues involved with the War on Terror), I don’t think too many people would say that privacy is a primary political issue in our society, although I, for one, wish it was a bigger issue for most people.

I’m curious to see which of Kurzweil’s predictions do eventually come to pass. My guess is that anyone who pays close attention to technological issues could attain the same level of accuracy that he does. At least he doesn’t claim to have some mystical connection to what the future will bring.

{November 10, 2008} Missing in Action

Clearly, I have been missing in action. The only thing I have to say about that is that my real life (as opposed to this, online, unreal life) has been crazy. I have thought about several posts but have not had time to actually write any of them. I’m hoping that things will settle down in a few weeks. In the meantime, here’s a excellent post from Drawing In starring one of my favorite actors, Jodie Foster. And it’s about a kind of technology that we don’t see much any more. Enjoy!

{September 13, 2008} Digital Rights Management

Back in the late 1980’s, I worked as a volunteer on a running race. Because I had a background in computer science, one of my tasks was to set up a database of all the race entrants and then to enter their finishing positions after the race so that we could publish the results in the local paper. A friend of mine had an Apple II computer with a database management program on it. I think the database program was AppleWorks. In any case, the database management program had a primitive copy protection mechanism, a scheme for ensuring that users of the software did not give copies of it to their friends. Each time I started the program, I had to answer a question from the user manual. The question might be something like: On page 37 of the manual, what is the fourth word in the third paragraph? This was in the days before copy machines were widely available so the thinking was that the software would not be very useful if you didn’t also have a copy of the user manual. It was a very primitive way of trying to prevent users from giving the software to all of their friends, of trying to protect what the software developers felt was their right to limit the copying of their software. Of course, this mechanism would not work today since it’s extremely easy to copy user manuals. But even back then, the critique of this protection mechanism was that it was easy to circumvent if you were determined to do so but it was simply an inconvenience for legitimate users. What if you lost your user manual, for example?

Since that time, digital rights management has come of age. DRM is a hot topic with owners of digital content claiming that their rights cover all sorts of things, allowing them to do all sorts of things to our computers without our consent. And yet, it is virtually impossible to use technology to prevent the copying of software and other digital content. So DRM is typically criticized for not actually protecting against illegitimate copying while making the lives of legitimate users very difficult. A number of stories about DRM have been in the news recently.

What is digital rights management? According to Wikipedia, it is a generic term that refers to any scheme that a hardware manufacturer or copyright holder implements to prevent illegimate use of their hardware or copyrighted materials. In 1998, the United States passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) which among other things, made the circumvention of any digital right management mechanism a crime. In other words, if a company used the DRM mechanism that I described above (asking users to answer questions from a user manual), then copying the manual and giving it to a friend would violate the DMCA. But the situation for users of digital content is even more dire than that. DRM mechanisms today are wide-ranging, claiming all kinds of rights for the owners of digital copyrights, at the expense of your right to control what happens on your own computer.

I have been thinking about the DMCA since its passage because of its immediate impact on the research of computer scientists. Soon after the passage of the DMCA, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) ran a contest that challenged researchers to break their latest digital watermarking scheme. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, chose not to sign any of the confidentiality agreements that would qualify him for the monetary prize of the contest. Within three weeks, he and his team had broken the watermarking scheme and wrote a scientific paper that described the techniques they used. When the SDMI and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) found out that the team was planning to present this paper at a conference, they threatened to sue, citing violation of the DMCA, specifically the portion of the act that makes it illegal to circumvent DRM schemes (of which the digital watermarking scheme was one). Felten withdrew the paper but also sued the SDMI and the RIAA and sought a ruling that presenting the original paper should actually have been allowed. Because Felten had not actually been sued and therefore had not been harmed, his case against the SDMI and the RIAA was dismissed on the grounds that he lacked standing to sue. Since then, the Justice Department has said that any threatened legal action against researchers such as Felten under the DMCA is invalid. But this judgment has not yet been tested in a court of law. And in the meantime, content providers have gotten bolder in their uses of DRM technologies.

In early 2007, Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission after it was discovered that music CDs from the company contained software that was secretly installed on any computer on which the CDs were played. This software “limited the devices on which the music could be played, restricted the number of copies that could be made, and contained technology that monitored their listening habits to send them marketing messages.” Because the software gave access to users’ computers to Sony BMG, it also opened up holes on those computers to any intruder who knew about them. In addition, the software, once discovered, was unreasonably difficult to remove. The Federal Trade Commission said that this secret installation of software violated federal law. The settlement was a financial and public relations disaster for Sony BMG and should have put that kind of DRM technology out of business forever.

But the long-awaited release of Will Wright’s new game, Spore, from Electronic Arts earlier this month shows that DRM is alive and kicking. The reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative due to the existence of SecuROM, a particularly nasty implementation of DRM. This software was developed by Sony DADC, does not announce that it is installing itself, limits the user to 3 installations of the game (even if it has been uninstalled), and is very difficult to uninstall, even if the game is uninstalled. It remains to be seen what kinds of security risks are opened up on the computers that have SecuROM on them. The biggest complaint seems to be about the limit of three installations because of how strict this limit is. Apparently, changes in hardware make the software believe that a new installation has occurred. So if a user upgrades her video card, she may use up one of her Spore installations. This software sounds very similar to the software that Sony BMG got slapped down for using so I can only imagine what is going to happen as these thousands of disgruntled gamers make their dissatisfaction known. Of course, the developers of Spore claim they are just trying to stop piracy. The problem with this argument is that the DRM scheme was broken before the game was released so anyone intent on pirating the game will be able to do so. Only legitimate users of the game will be harmed by SecuROM.

Legitimate users of Yahoo Music recently learned the lesson that purchasing DRM-protected content is actually like renting, rather than purchasing, that content. Yahoo Music Store will close its virtual doors at the end of this month. If you are one of the unlucky legitimate customers who bought your music through this store, you will no longer have access to your music because of Yahoo’s DRM scheme. When the store closes, the DRM license key servers will shut down. If you can’t get a DRM license key, you can no longer listen to music that you legitimately purchased. Meanwhile, those who pirated that same music will continue to enjoy what they pirated.

Content providers need to stop creating roadblocks for their legitimate users. These roadblocks do nothing to protect content.

{September 9, 2008} Fringe

I am watching a new show on Fox tonight. It is called Fringe and it’s from JJ Abrams, the guy who developed Lost which is one of my favorite shows of all time. It’s a cross between X-Files, Lost and Heroes, all of which I have really enjoyed. But here’s the thing. One of the major plot developments in the pilot involves a Harvard faculty member who was institutionalized 17 years ago in a psychiatric hospital. He is released from the hospital and goes back to the Kresge building at Harvard. His lab had been in the basement of that building which has been used as storage for the last 17 years. Lo and behold, his lab is pretty much intact, with microscopes and lab equipment just as he left it all those years ago.

This series is science fiction but this particular plot point was the most difficult one for me to swallow. If Harvard is like most institutions of higher education (including my own), space is at a premium. There is no way that such a large space would be left alone for 17 years while the primary user of that space languishes in a mental institution! It’s funny to me that it’s this mundane detail rather than the many sci fi potentialities that makes me question the reality of this show.

{September 7, 2008} We ARE Telling Stories

As I suggested in a previous post I don’t understand why FaceBook calls each status update a story. I said that if we were to consider each update a plot point in a longer story, then I could understand the use of the word story. Clive Thompson, in a New York Times article, explains that part of the reason these status updates (no matter how banal they might seem individually) are compelling is precisely because taken together, they tell us a story of our friends’ daily lives that we wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s a fascinating article. Thanks to Liz for pointing it out to me.

I can now be found on Twitter. I look forward to reading 140-character installments of your life story there.

{July 21, 2008} Non-FaceBook Friends, Beware

Pat sent me this article from the New York Times. So if you’re a non-FaceBook friend of mine and I don’t return your phone call, I hope you’ll understand why.

Hey, Friend, Do I Know You?

By DAVID CARR
Published: July 21, 2008

Not that long ago, I needed some advice on the book business and thought to ask my friend Buzz Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights” and “A Prayer for the City.” The only sticking point was, we’d never met.

Although he used to be a reporter, we are not what I would call peers. He wrote one of the greatest sports books ever, and oh, one of the best books about city government ever. “Friday Night Lights” became a movie and then a television series and apart from me being a hopeless fanboy of the show, we have nothing in common.

Other than Facebook, of course, where we are “friends,” after he was referred by our mutual friend Vernon Loeb of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Taking that supplied noun as a permission, I sent Mr. Bissinger a message on Facebook and asked for advice. We got on the phone and I found out exactly, precisely what I wanted to know from, as they say in the Web world, a highly trusted source.

Isn’t “friendship” wonderful?

Facebook, which I had always thought of as a guilty diversion just a step up from Funny or Die, does have its social — and business — prerogatives. The network is on a tear right now, achieving numerical parity with MySpace in global reach.

Last month, according to comScore, Facebook had 123.9 million unique visitors and 50.6 billion page views worldwide while MySpace had 114.6 million unique visitors and 45.4 billion page views. MySpace still dominates in the United States, but if my page is any indication, a lot of people who aren’t texting OMG about the guy sitting in the next booth feel a need to opt in to social media.

According to company executives, Facebook, which has over 80 million subscribers worldwide, doubled the number of subscribers under 35 last year, but it tripled the number of subscribers between 35 and 54. Early adopters of Facebook, which was the province of students until 2006, must wonder who let all the old guys in. Sometime in the next day or so, Facebook will unveil a major new design for the site, which users can opt-in to.

As we speak, my Facebook page, a couple of months old, is crawling past 200 friends. There are people on there whom I have known since they wore skinny ties and distressed sport coats, and there are others whom I would not know if they walked up with name tags on the size of sandwich boards. But we have friends in common, and in the parlance of social media, we are connected.

Skeptics slag Facebook and its ilk as e-mail with pictures, but do not underestimate the value of a photo — oh, he seems nice — along with a referral. If the person pinging you is friends with five friends of yours, shouldn’t that person be your friend?

Once you jack in, Facebook creates its own imperatives. Why am I uploading pictures of my last family trip to the lake in the Adirondacks at 11:45 p.m.? Because I want someone, anyone, to see them. But from a business perspective, it creates some more complications. Say the head of a media company that I occasionally cover wants to “friend” me. Seems O.K., but should he really know what I look like with my shirt off? (Trust me, don’t let the image linger. I shower with my shirt on.)

I neither want to be strategic in my postings nor selective in my friending, but I should probably be doing one or the other. I am also not religious in maintaining my profile, in part because I have no personal assistant to update my page, as one executive I know told me he does.

Its viral effects can be profound. Peter Shankman, founder of Help a Reporter Out (gee, wonder how I found that?), began that mission on his Facebook page in November of 2007. The endeavor outgrew its Facebook nest and was reborn a few months later as www.helpareporter.com, which offers sources to reporters who post. It started out with 694 members; now it has more than 15,000.

I think of Facebook as a middle ground between business and pleasure, sort of MySpace for post-adolescents or LinkedIn for professional late adopters like me. Facebook, developed by Harvard kids to keep track of each other, was unleashed on the world in 2004 and has become an Ivy League at large for the land-grant set, a place where it’s not whom you know, it’s whom you kind of know.

But some people want no business mixed with their pleasure.

“Web sites are similar to TV and radio stations: people expect some form of programming format,” wrote Tyler DeAngelo, interactive creative director at DeVito/Verdi. “I don’t want to hear country music on a rock station, so why do I want to hear you talk about financial reports in the same place I discuss who I have been hooking up with?” (Besides, he adds, “I’m not sure you want Tom from accounting checking out your hot daughter in her bikini last summer.”)

Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president of Facebook, noted that the site is not primarily a business tool. “We are not going to help you close a deal, but Facebook is a social utility that is relevant in many contexts, including business,” he said. “As you get older, there is this huge tapestry of your life, with many inflection points from where you went to school and the jobs you had, and as more and more people connect with you, it rapidly increases the utility.”

But at some point, you lose utility as well. As Simon Dumenco noted in Portfolio, Bill Gates dropped the habit after getting 8,000 requests a day to be friends. Some social truisms — the rich will always be popular — still hold in the supposedly flat world.

When a new media winner like Facebook comes over the horizon, who loses? In my case, it’s probably my real actual friends. As a reporter, I learn to hate the telephone during the day, but at night I feel somewhat social again and step out onto the porch to call buddies for a little nocturnal quality time. Now I am too busy checking their status updates to actually speak to them.

{July 20, 2008} Identity Management

We joined millions of other Americans yesterday and went to see The Dark Knight. An interesting side note regarding my previous comments about immediacy–the movie opened Friday and the current Wikipedia web page on the movie today says: “Based on 195 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, The Dark Knight has an average overall approval rating of 94 percent, with a weighted average score of 8.5/10.” And: “The film also surpassed the $151.1 million opening weekend record of Spider-Man 3 with an opening of $155.34 million, including a record breaking IMAX opening of $6.2 million, surpassing the $4.7 million of Spider-Man 3.” The opening weekend isn’t over yet. That’s what I call immediate!

I loved this movie. It’s even better than Batman Begins. A big part of the plot of The Dark Knight has to do with the Joker trying to get Batman to turn himself in to the police so he can receive punishment for his vigilante actions. Doing so would require him to remove his mask, revealing his “true” identity. Bruce Wayne presents himself as a clueless playboy. But then he puts on Batman’s mask and becomes the courageous hero. Or perhaps he’s a cowardly vigilante who craves power and should be punished for taking the law into his own hands. An interesting question raised by the movie has to do with rules of conduct. if Batman breaks the few rules that he has laid out for himself for how he fights crime, will he still be a hero? If he doesn’t break those rules, can he be effective in his fight?

This theme of identity management, controlling how you present yourself to the world (and to yourself), comes up over and over in the movie. The Joker tells two stories about how he got the scars on his face, each story appropriate to the situation and the points he’s trying to make at that moment. We want to know how the Joker became the monster that he is but we are thwarted in our attempts to make sense of him because he won’t tell us the “truth” about how he got his scars. Identity management also comes up in the part of the plot dealing with Harvey Two-Face. Harvey starts out as an idealistic prosecutor, earnestly fighting corruption wherever he finds it. The Joker manufactures such horror in Harvey’s life, however, that he is pushed over the edge and becomes a killer. Batman and Commissioner Gordon are so worried about how Gotham will react to Harvey’s crimes that they cover them up, making sure that Gotham still sees Harvey as a hero. There’s a great scene near the end of the movie in which we’re looking at the destroyed half of Harvey’s face and when Batman and Gordon decide they will cover up his crimes, Batman turns Harvey’s head to hide the destroyed half. We now see only the pristine half, the face of the hero.

By coincidence, one of the movies we had at home from NetFlix was Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s classic from 1967. The movie apparently has several interpretations but I saw it as a movie about identity management. The movie starts with a long sequence of images (film in a projector, an erect penis, a nail being hammered into a hand, and so on) shown one after the other. As I watched this sequence, I thought of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the unconscious. Then we see a young boy reading on a bed in a white room with what appears to be a movie of a woman’s face being displayed on the wall next to him. He slowly reaches up and tries to caress the woman’s face.

And then the main narrative of the film begins. Liv Ullman plays a famous actress who has some sort of a breakdown during a performance. She now refuses to speak to anyone. Bibi Andersson plays a nurse who is hired to take care of the actress as she recovers. On a doctor’s recommendation, the two women go to an isolated beach house together. The film then shows several evenings in which the nurse talks almost incessantly while the actress watches and listens, never speaking. The stories that the nurse tells become increasingly personal, until she reveals a story about a sexual encounter that she has never told anyone else before. As the film goes on, she tries to get the actress to speak. She says that she understands how the actress feels: that because one has to present a mask to the world, play a variety of roles every day, every utterance is a lie and it’s easier not to speak than to have to pretend all the time, especially with the horrors that are going on in the world today. These horrors are shown as the actress watches television one night and sees footage of a self-immolation. One day, as the nurse brings the mail to town, she reads a letter that the actress has written to the doctor. In this letter, the actress tells the doctor about the nurse’s sexual encounter and says that it’s been interesting to study the nurse, that she thinks the nurse has fallen in love with her. The nurse feels betrayed and eventually has a sort of breakdown herself, hitting the actress and making her nose bleed. Near the end of the movie, the actress’s husband shows up at the beach house and speaks to the nurse as though she’s his wife. The nurse protests at first but eventually responds to the husband as though she was the actress. Then we see the nurse and the husband lying in bed together with the actress watching. In the last scene of the main narrative of the movie, the nurse has a monologue about the actress pretending to be a happy mother but in fact really hating motherhood and even hating her child. We see the scene twice, once from the perspective of the nurse and once from the perspective of the actress. This ends with an image of the two women’s faces merged together into one. The final scene of the movie shows the actress on a movie set at the beach.

So my interpretation of the movie is that the actress and the nurse are the same person. The nurse is an actress in her own life. Bergman seems to be saying that our lives are one long performance (like a movie) in which we are constantly playing roles and observing ourselves playing those roles. In the face of the horrors of the world, it is impossible to act authentically to do anything about those horrors. This is why the actress refuses to speak. She refuses to participate in the performance. And yet, in the end, she gives in and resumes her role in the movie. What else could she do?

What do these movies have to do with technology and society? I’ve been thinking a lot about identity management since I joined FaceBook, about the identities that we present to the world in various contexts. I’ve written about this issue before based on a conversation with Ann. But it seems like it’s becoming a more pressing issue for me as I explore the use of Web 2.0.

I think there are (at least) two major issues involved in identity management online. The first has to do with the content of the identities that we present. We want to be able to present different aspects of ourselves to different audiences. The second issue involves the management of that content. That is, we want control over the identities that we present.

The content issue has gotten a lot of publicity. Some FaceBook users have not managed their content well. They post pictures and comments that reveal a side of themselves that might be unflattering. The most common issue seems to involve party activities. When employers or potential employers discover that content, negative job consequences have sometimes been a result. Another potential consequence of the content issue hasn’t received quite as much attention. At the Eastern Communication Association convention in May in Pittsburgh, one group presented a study they had done concerning what students think is appropriate for professors to reveal online. (The findings were that students tend to Internet stalk their professors but don’t necessarily want to know significant details about their lives–similar to my freak out in eighth grade on discovering that my softball coach did laundry at a laundromat.) Ann and I have talked about this a fair amount and I think the main point is that we need to be conscious of the choices that we’re making concerning content. Of course, we don’t have complete control over what’s out there since others can post content about us.

The second issue involves the management aspect of all this content. We want to be able to control who sees what. That is, we want to be able to create separate identities and present those to different audiences. FaceBook has some significant controls for identifying who we want to be able to see which content. The problem, however, is that FaceBook doesn’t allow us to assign different roles to the people with whom we’re in contact. Everyone is a “friend”. And so I cannot easily present one identity to my student “friends” and a different identity to my faculty “friends. The other problem I have with FaceBook is that you cannot see what you’re friends are going to see. I would like to be able to put in someone’s name and then view my page the way they view it. A second part of the management issue arises from the growth of the social networking aspect of the web. I now have a FaceBook page, a LinkedIn page, an (unused) MySpace page, a Flickr page, this blog, and my regular web page. And those are just the pages I can think of off the top of my head. If some aspect of my life changes, I probably want to update each of these pages. It would be nice to have one tool that would aggregate my online identity spaces to allow coordination of the profiles in those spaces. While we’re at it, I’d probably also like to have a tool that updates me whenever something happens in one of my identity spaces so that I don’t have to log into each one separately to check.

The technical view of identity management has been focused on distribution and management of credentials (such as a user name and password) for the purpose of authentication (that is, verifying that someone is who she says she is). In other words, the focus has been on the security of the content (and the systems on which the content resides), to be sure that it is changed only by someone who is allowed to change it. The challenge for the next generation of identity management tools will be to allow more fine-grained control of the presentation and viewing of online identities.

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