I will be speaking with Gerd Leonhard, Andreas Wiegand, and (hopefully) Jamais Cascio at an event in San Francisco, 10 April 2012, sponsored by Swissex.

The theme is Data is the New Oil: The Journey from Privacy to Publicy. As every web page we visit is logged, and every comment and tweet analyzed for sentiment and intention, more data is being logged weekly than existed on earth a few years ago, prior to the rise of the social web. We will explore the connections between our connected world and the complexities and challenges of a data economy.

If you are interested in attending, please register quickly, since there are only 150 or so seats.

14 March 2012 7 Permalink

Starting from her research into youth, people of color, abuse victims, LGBT folks, and other marginalized groups, danah makes a short and sweet refutation of the premises of normalcy and naturalness of the Google ‘Real Names’ policy. She ends up here:

There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.

Thus, from my perspective, enforcing “real names” policies in online spaces is an abuse of power.

The Zuckerberg Fallacy is a travesty of dogmatic ideology, based on a asbergerish premise of a single public identity to be mandated and used in all contexts.

Zuckerberg said “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” in an interview with David Kirkpatrick, which directly attacks the motives of anyone advancing an opposite argument.

Facebook and now Google have adopted this model because they think of us as consumers, not people. They want to track our doings, for their own ends.

But in a fragmented world online our identity is becoming a network of context-dependent identities, or multiphrenic identity as Kenneth Gergen styled it, and as I explored:

Stowe Boyd, Multiphrenic Identity

We invest ourselves into relationships that are shaped by the affordances of the tools and the particular social contracts of the contexts. Through these relationships new and perhaps unexpected insights into others and ourselves arise. And we participate in dozens of these social environments, possibly with non-overlapping constituencies, each focused on different aspects of the greater world: entertainment, food, news, social causes, health, religion, sex, you name it. We become adept at shifting registers, just like polyglots shift from Italian to Corsican to Catalan without even thinking about it. We are multiphrenic.

It’s an interesting paradox — and one that might spell the limits of Google+ success — that Google has built the Circles capability so that people can break up their monolithic social world into separate scenes. But Google won’t let you be Carlos in one, and Carlotta in another, even if that is how you are known those possibly non-overlapping groups.

I am known as an advocate for publicy: living out loud online. But nearly every time I discuss living openly I make the case for privacy and secrecy, which are essential elements of life for all of us.

A social tool that prohibits fundamental and non-harmful human behaviors is oppressive, and such oppression means that we are justified in breaking their ‘laws’ to the extent that we can.

8 August 2011 6 Permalink

Leon Neyfakh via

Taken together, the information that millions of us are generating about ourselves amounts to a data set of unimaginable size and growing complexity: a vast, swirling cloud of information about all of us and none of us at once, covering everything from the kind of car we drive to the movies we’ve rented on Netflix to the prescription drugs we take.

Who owns the data in that cloud has been the subject of ferocious debate. It’s not all stored in one place, of course — our lives are tracked and documented by a diffuse assortment of entities that includes private companies like Google and Visa, as well as governmental agencies like the IRS, the Department of Education, and the Census Bureau. Up to now, the public conversation on this kind of data has taken the form of an argument about privacy rights, with legal scholars, computer scientists, and others arguing for tighter restrictions on how our data is used by companies and the government, and consumer advocates instructing us on how to prevent our information from being collected and misused.

But a small group of thinkers is suggesting an entirely new way of understanding our relationship with the data we generate. Instead of arguing about ownership and the right to privacy, they say, we should be imagining data as a public resource: a bountiful trove of information about our society which, if properly managed and cared for, can help us set better policy, more effectively run our institutions, promote public health, and generally give us a more accurate understanding of who we are. This growing pool of data should be public and anonymous, they say — and each of us should feel a civic responsibility to contribute to it.

In a paper forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Brooklyn Law School professor Jane Yakowitz introduces the concept of a “data commons” — a sort of public garden where everyone brings their data to be anonymized and made available to researchers working in the public interest. In the paper, she argues that the societal benefits of a thriving data commons outweigh the potential risks from the crooks and hackers who might use it for harm.

Yakowitz’s paper has found support among a wider movement of thinkers who believe that, while protecting people’s privacy is certainly important, it should not be our only priority when it comes to managing information. This position might be a hard sell at a time when consumers are increasingly worried about mass data leaks and identity theft, but Yakowitz and others argue that we shouldn’t let fear of such inevitable accidents cloud our ability to see just how necessary data collection is to our progress as a society.

“There are patterns and trends that none of us can discern by looking at our own individual experiences,” Yakowitz said. “But if we pooled our information, then these patterns can emerge very quickly and irrefutably. So, we should want that sort of knowledge to be made publicly available.”

The power of publicy.

22 June 2011 3 Permalink

Publicy

When the public, not the private, is the default.
(Publi[c] + [Priva]cy)

Writing for TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld described how the advent of social networking and Web 2.0 tools have brought about a shift in social norms:

It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default.

Stowe Boyd, along with others before him, calls this new state of exposure “publicy” (as opposed to privacy or secrecy).

Explaining the concept on his blog, Boyd wrote:

There is a countervailing trend away from privacy and secrecy and toward openness and transparency, both in the corporate and government sectors. And on the web, we have had several major steps forward in social tools that suggest at least the outlines of a complement, or opposite, to privacy and secrecy: publicy.

The idea of publicy is no more than this: rather than concealing things, and limiting access to those explicitly invited, tools based on publicy default to things being open and with open access.

Tumblr is a tool based on publicy. So is Twitter. Tumblr blogs and Twitter accounts default to open unless the user takes great efforts, and as a result the resulting communities are based on sharing of posts rather than membership in closed groups.

As I have said in the past the open sharing model of Twitter and Tumblr will be the dominant motif of all successful social tools of the next decade. This will be the publicy decade, where network effects are induced by growing awareness of the benefits of publicy and the negatives of privacy and secrecy-based social tools, customs, and institutions.

Co-vocabularists are invited to share incidents where they have made public facets of their lives that, pre-Internet, would have remained private.

I guess I missed this February when it was published because of my mother’s illness. Still, nice to see it at all.

However, more academically-minded folks — like danah boyd and Jeff Jarvis — continue to use publicity for this, in a way that I think is confusing, considering how that term is generally used.

25 May 2011 1 Permalink