Day: 30 December 2007

Freewheeling about being Private in Public

As the name of this blog suggests, I was born and brought up in Calcutta. I have no way of knowing for sure, but it seems reasonable for me to assume that my core thoughts about privacy were formed during the 23 years I lived there.

It’s a crowded city. A lot of middle-class people live “vertically”, in highrise apartments. My family were no different; while the number of people at home fluctuated between 7 and 12, the floor area remained at the 1500 sq. ft. mark. So you could say we were densely packed at home.

The school I went to may have been thought of as elitist, but it was no different from many others when you look at the numbers. Around 40 students per class, 4 classes per year, 1500 students in the school. Normal. Dense.

Most people I knew used public transport, which was plentiful. And dense.

Amidst all this denseness, the sense of community was very high. And it was normal for things to be communally owned. Particularly at home, ownership was something associated with a family and not a person.

This sense of community pervaded everything we did. We tended to play together, study together, work together, laugh together, cry together. Memories of home, of school, of college, all revolved around spending time with others. And eating.

Even the food we ate was communal; easily stretched to accommodate more people. The adda was really a physical blogosphere.

No surprise then that our identities were also communal; who we were quite quickly became a function of family and neighbourhood and occupation and employment. [In this particular case, when one looks at naming conventions, there was no real difference between east and west. Maybe the difference came with affluence and with disruption of the social fabric, as single-person dwellings and single-parent families became more common in the west].

Communal ownership. Communal identities. Communal rites of passage and communal meeting places. All in an environment where everything was densely packed: the home, the school, the neighbourhood, the workplace, public transportation, the city itself.

Against this backdrop, you can imagine how intriguing I found concepts of privacy when I turned up in the UK. Of course we had privacy in India, but not the twitching-net-curtains variety. Much of our privacy was what we made of it, and it was out in the open. There was nowhere else.

So maybe it’s an environment thing, maybe it’s a culture thing. If that’s the case, then the results of a recent Pew Internet study, entitled Digital Footprints, make interesting reading. I quote from the summary (my emphasis):

Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago. However, few monitor their online presence with great regularity. Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it and 74% have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

Indeed, most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information. Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online.

Maybe things are changing; that’s what I am trying to work on.

Now there are a hundred experts out there working on this, so why would I be arrogant enough to think I can do better? Don’t worry, I’m not. I try my best to read what they have to say, and to discuss it with as many of the experts as I can meet. Those active in the Identity space tend to be accessible and gregarious, which is a good thing.

The difference between what the experts are doing and what I am doing is one of perspective. I am asking myself the question “what happens if I take my beliefs on abundance and scarcity and overlay that on public and private, if I start thinking that abundant equals public and scarce equals private?”

That’s the question that keeps me awake when I want to be kept awake. I’m too old to be kept awake any other way, I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. And often do.

Views? Comments?

Brooding about “secondary orality’

Last night I referred to this article in the New Yorker, and promised to revert to it today. So here goes.

The central premise is worrisome for someone like me, brought up in a culture of reading: that it’s not just my biased perception, people really are reading less. Why worrisome? Because of the implications of such a state of affairs, implications that I hadn’t considered deeply enough.

Here are some excerpts from the article, let me try and encourage you to read the whole thing:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely. In fact, doubt of any kind is rarer. It is easy to notice inconsistencies in two written accounts placed side by side. With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information. The trust that a reader grants to the New York Times, for example, may vary sentence by sentence. A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.

No effort of will is likely to make reading popular again. Children may be browbeaten, but adults resist interference with their pleasures. It may simply be the case that many Americans prefer to learn about the world and to entertain themselves with television and other streaming media, rather than with the printed word, and that it is taking a few generations for them to shed old habits like newspapers and novels.

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.”

As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

We never had a television at home, and for sure that influenced my reading habits and those of my siblings. I don’t particularly like the idiot box; I tolerate it for period drama, sport and humour. Wherever possible, I’ve switched to the laptop or handheld device. Part of this switch was driven by my not liking broadcast media. But another part was this need to balance graphics with text. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an endless diet of pictures alone creates modern cavemen.

When graphics entered the hitherto text-based world of computing, I loved it. Not by sacrificing text,  but by augmenting text with graphics. [When I speak at conferences, where listening aids are called for, I tend to use a mixture of words and graphics, a word or phrase supported by a picture or two.]

I’ve never experienced anything other than a literate culture, so I was fascinated by some of the observations of what an oral culture represented. My thanks to Halley Suitt again for pointing this article out to me, there is now something else for me to research and learn about.

Much of the article intrigued me; some of it fascinated me; and some of it worried me.

The most worrying thing, from my perspective, is the apparent increased risk of groupthink and herd instinct. I had never considered the secondary orality issue before. I think it’s so important that I’ll repeat the quote here:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

The world has enough bigots and narrow-minded people and intolerant people already. I dread to think that we could be creating an environment where there will be more such people. If that is what TV 2.0 is likely to mean, then I guess I need to consider moving. To Mars maybe.

Musing about things I can do with Twitter that I couldn’t easily do before Twitter

Whenever I come across a new social media tool, I don’t tend to jump in just to be cool, I’m way too old for that. [Sometimes I have to wait anyway, because the thing is in private beta and for some reason private betas find it hard to cross the Atlantic, even in the 21st century.] Most of the time, I sign up and then watch. I try and see what people do with the tool. Which is not necessarily the same thing as what the tool was originally designed for. [I guess that comes from having children, and observing them as they develop, flower and come to maturity. A wonderful experience… ]

When I watch, there is some method to my madness. Once I get the hang of what people are doing with the tool, I start playing with it myself. And then I place three gates in the way, gates that must be passed before I really get engaged with the tool:

Gate 1: Is it a Martini thing, anytime anyplace anywhere?

Gate 2: Are the barriers to entry and participation sufficiently low?

Gate 3: Is there at least one thing I can do with this new thing, one thing I couldn’t do before with anything else?

This post is about Twitter’s Gate 3.

Someone started following me a few days ago, can’t remember who it was. I did the usual thing, a quick check on the person’s Twitter profile, a flit through to that person’s blog, a scan of the people being followed, a minds-eye snapshot of recent tweets and a courtesy “Return of the Follow“.

While doing that, I noticed a tweet from someone I hadn’t connected with for a while, Halley Suitt. Yes, a Suitt Tweet.  [Try saying that quickly after a few drinks.]

What Halley said was interesting. She said “Best thing I’ve read all week”, while describing an article in the New Yorker. [And thank you, New Yorker, for not sticking the article behind a paywall”.]

Now that’s useful.

Blog Friends and equivalents let me know what a person’s surfing, Facebook mini feeds show me what someone’s sharing, there are many social bookmarking tools and RSS readers available, there are even shared readers available.

But so far none of them gives me this kind of information as succinctly as Twitter. Now of course the value didn’t come directly from Twitter, it came from Halley. I know Halley. I know she reads a lot. And I trust her opinions, without having to agree with all of them. And when she says “Best thing I’ve read all week” I sit up and take notice. I take a look. I wander over to where she points.

And boy was I glad I did. This is the article she pointed me towards: Twilight of The Books: A Critic At Large.

Fascinating article. There’s a lot I want to say/ask/share about it, but I’ll leave it for a separate post. Tomorrow.

In the meantime, maybe some of you out there have similar examples of stuff you can do with Twitter you couldn’t do before. In this particular instance what got me excited was how person A could let others (others who were interested in Person A’s opinions on a particular subject) know about an object and its rating simply and efficiently.

Comments and views?