One hundred eighty degrees of freedom: signs of how open platforms are spreading

I was talking recently with Bob Frankston, who has a distinguished history in computing that goes back to work on Multics, VisiCalc, and Lotus Notes. We were discussing some of the dreams of the Internet visionaries, such as total decentralization (no mobile-system walls, no DNS) and bandwidth too cheap to meter. While these seem impossibly far off, I realized that computing and networking have come a long way already, making things normal that not too far in the past would have seemed utopian.

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Innovation Battles Investment as FCC Road Show Returns to Cambridge

Opponents can shed their rhetoric and reveal new depths to their thought when you bring them together for rapid-fire exchanges, sometimes with their faces literally inches away from each other. That made it worth my while to truck down to the MIT Media Lab for yesterday's Workshop on Innovation, Investment and the Open Internet, sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission. In this article I'll cover:

• Context and background

• Two kinds of investment

• The pocket protector crowd versus the bean counters

• Is network competition over?

• What to regulate

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Pew Research asks questions about the Internet in 2020

Will Google Make Us Stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?

Pew Research, which seems to be interested in just about everything, conducts a "future of the Internet" survey every few years in which they throw outrageously open-ended and provocative questions at a chosen collection of observers in the areas of technology and society. Pew makes participation fun by finding questions so pointed that they make you choke a bit. You start by wondering, "Could I actually answer that?" and then think, "Hey, the whole concept is so absurd that I could say anything without repercussions!" So I participated in their and did it again this week. The Pew report will aggregate the yes/no responses from the people they asked to participate, but I took the exercise as a chance to hammer home my own choices of issues.

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The fate of WIPO, ACTA, and other intellectual property pushes in the international economy

Intellectual property wars are fiercer than ever, although the institutions most affected (including the media) prefer not to talk about them. But we may be in for a pendulum shift.

I recently put out a tweet on this topic and was asked to expand on it. The issues are too big and complex for me to give them a proper treatment here, but I'll throw around a few of them and see whether you think the trend I'm talking about shakes out.

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Being online: Conclusion--identity narratives

An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.

(This is the final post in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

After viewing in rotation the various facets of that gem that we call identity, it is time for us to polish and view them in one piece. This series has explored what identity means in an online medium, the most salient aspect of which is the digitization of information. Consider what the word digitization denotes: the fragmentation of a whole into infinitesimal, fungible, individually uncommunicative pieces. The computer digitizes everything we post about ourselves not only literally (by storing information in computer-readable formats) but metaphorically, as the computer scatters our information into a meaningless diaspora of data fields, status updates, snapshots, and moments caught on camera or in audio--as Shakespeare might say, signifying nothing.

No computer--only a person--can reassemble and breath life into these dry bones, creating from them a narrative.

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Being online: Group identities and social network identities

So may a thousand actions, once afoot,
End in one purpose, and be all well borne
Without defeat.

(This is the seventh post in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

Despite all the variations played on the theme of personal identities in the previous sections, remember that identity is a group construct, not an individual one. If we never took part in groups, our personal identities would scarcely matter.

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Being online: Forged identities and non-identities

Haply you shall not see me more; or if, a mangled shadow.

(This post is the sixth in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

One reason Sherry Turkle saw the Internet through the prism of invented identity--or, perhaps, found the aspects of Internet life that corroborated her own interests as a psychologist with a fondness for postmodernism--was her choice to seek out initial contacts from serious players of 1970s multi-user dungeons. These environments were fantasy lands, entirely concerned with forged identities; indeed, it would be well-nigh impossible to create an identity in those environments that was the least bit realistic.

All the old MUDs survive, and have been joined by even more popular ones such as World of Warcraft, along with more general fantasy environments such as Second Life and IMVU. But they no longer set the tone for Internet participation. The momentum has gone to social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut, where people are asked to bring their external life online in as genuine a fashion as possible. Disclosure rather than concealment is widely recognized now as the trend, such as heard in the conversations of leading Internet watchers at the 2008 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology.

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Being online: What you say about yourself, or selves

Which is the natural man,
and which the spirit? who deciphers them?

(This post is the fifth in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

What we've seen so far in this series would be enough to shake anyone's sense of identity. We've found that the technology of the Internet itself fudges identity (but does not totally succeed in hiding it), that companies use fragmented and partial information to categorize you, and that your actual identity is perhaps less important to these companies than your role as snippet of a statistic within a larger group. This post demands an even greater mental stretch: we have to face that what we say about ourselves is also distorted and inconclusive.

Sociological and psychologists tend to see our activities online as inherently artificial, referring to them as aspects of "the performative self." But the pundits haven't succeeded in getting their point of view across to the wider public. For instance, the millions of people who view personal video weblogs, or vlogs, fervently believe--according to a recent First Monday article by Jean Christian--in the importance of authenticity in people's video self-presentations. Viewers reject vlogs over such telltale signs as overediting or reading from scripts.

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Peer to Patent Australia recruits volunteer prior art searchers

The Peer to Patent project has already earned its place in history. It was explicitly cited as inspiration for the open government initiative in the Obama administration, which recently released a comprehensive directive (available as a PDF) covering federal agencies. The founder of the project, law professor Beth Noveck, began implementation of the directive as Deputy CTO in the US government. But I've been wondering, along with many other people, where Peer to Patent itself is going.

It's encouraging to hear that a new pilot has started in Australia and has gathered a small community of volunteer patent art seekers. You can check out the official site and its Wikipedia page. Because Australia is much smaller in population than the US and sees much less patent activity, the scope of the pilot is smaller but seems to be chugging along nicely.

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Being online: Your identity to advertisers--it's not all about you

Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing

(This post is the fourth in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

Voracious data foraging leads advertisers along two paths. One of their aims is to differentiate you from other people. If vendors know what condiments you put in your lunch or what material you like your boots made from, they can pinpoint their ads and promotions more precisely at you. That's why they love it when you volunteer that information on your blog or social network, just as do the college development staff we examined before.

The companies' second aim is to insert you into a group of people for which they can design a unified marketing campaign. That is, in addition to differentiation, they want demographics.

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Recent Posts

• Being online: Your identity online--getting down to basics on December 20, 2009
• Being online: Your identity in real life--what people know on December 18, 2009
• Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between on December 17, 2009
• Good News: The Daily Me is a stop on the way to richer discussion on December 2, 2009
• Washington Newseum stresses individual heroism, downplays economics and social context on November 27, 2009
• More that sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity on November 23, 2009
• Converting to Electronic Health Records: fits and starts on November 10, 2009
• What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity on October 26, 2009
• Vendor Relationship Management workshop on October 14, 2009
• How the Zeo sleep device works around the limitations of home monitoring on October 8, 2009