Author: JP

My eldest daughter’s mobile phone decided to go to that great hunting ground in the sky. Without warning. So she in turn decided to get another one, and to use the opportunity to get it this time in her name rather than mine. Her bill rather than mine. Which meant she shopped around for deals, and the best deal required her to change her number. Which she did.

[Oh these rites of passage, when your young ones go and acquire their own bills and reduce yours]

That’s when it got interesting. She updated her Status on Facebook, as you would expect, saying that she’d changed her phone number. She then did something else. She set up a new Group, and invited a bunch of her friends to join. The invitation told other people about her change of number.

Fascinating. So I asked her why she did it. It was because she was really using some of the granularity of Facebook privacy. Not everyone on her friend list could see her status changes, many were on Limited Profile. She used Groups as a way of getting to the ones she needed to.

I think we’re going to see a lot of this happening. Variants of “giving someone a missed call”, we are going to see Generation M using things like Facebook creatively and differently, using the functionality in ways we do not expect. More importantly, using the functionality in ways that may not have been designed for, yet remain possible.

Regular readers of this blog are likely to be aware of my stance on the expert-versus-amateur debate. Suffice it to say that I believe in formally acquired expertise and in wisdom-of-crowds, that I am prepared to learn from so-called experts and from amateurs alike, that I do not insist on looking at the future through the eyes of history alone. My children teach me things. I learn from the behaviour of “fresh” graduates. In fact I learn quite a bit from observing what babies do. All this does not stop me from learning in other, more traditional, ways.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have watched the traditional command-and-control structures come under increasing pressure, and a newer, more democratised structure emerge. This has happened at home, in educational establishments and at work, and has been covered extensively by many who are more qualified than me to comment.

More recently, I have begun to understand something else about this switch from hierarchical to networked, particularly in the context of expertise. Experts need power. Experts knew how to acquire power in the hierarchical world, in terms of the trappings needed. Trappings at home, in academia and at work. Trappings in the form of titles, letters before and after your name, size of room, number of windows. Trappings worn as necklaces and garlands and ties and medals. Trappings.

Some experts have found this loss of power disconcerting, and it can be amusing to watch the consequences as a result. A classic example is that of the “expert” speaker and his audience. The expert expects the audience to respect him and what he says, to listen diligently, perhaps even to take notes. To ask questions at the end, when invited to do so.

We don’t have audiences like that any more. Maybe they still exist, but not at the kind of conferences I attend.

An aside. One way to understand the difference between the audience of yesterday and the audience of tomorrow is by looking at how Blackberries and Macs get used in the enterprise, at meetings and conferences. Yesterday’s generation look surreptitiously at their BlackBerries, pretending to pay attention to what is being said. For some strange reason, they think that no one will notice. Tomorrow’s generation, on the other hand, put their Macs on the table and use them to take notes, to look up references, to stay connected. And they pay attention to what is being said. While everyone else thinks they aren’t listening. So one generation pretends to listen, actually does something else, and goes around in the benighted belief that no one will notice. And the other generation pretends not to listen, knows how to multitask, and does all this in the open. Hmmmm.

Which brings me to the point of this post. It must have been over four years ago I first came across Joi Ito’s Hecklebot, and I just loved it. I have this real conviction that the evolution of the Hecklebot has real value in education, and intend to do something about it.

So I found this anecdote in New Scientist quite amusing.

It’s a new world out there. We can’t go around saying “But Miss, they’re not listening to me”. We have to earn the respect of our peers. But remember, in a networked society, everyone is a peer.  Your professors. Your children. Your subordinates. Your bosses.

Everyone’s a peer.

Live with it.

A few days ago I read a report about the dangers of making one’s date of birth public on the web. “After all, unscrupulous people can make use of that data and commit some sort of electronic theft.”

And I thought to myself, what utter tosh. That’s about as meaningful as saying “Most car accidents take place within three miles of home, so don’t drive near home”. Or even “most murders are committed by people known by the victim, so it’s best not to know anyone”.

Currently there’s a lot of personal data freely available on the web, particularly with the advent of electronic social networks. And currently it is possible to misuse that data in order to commit some crime or the other.

So something has to be done.  Agreed. But. Rather than make people “hide” personal information, surely the answer lies in making better security “devices”. Surely the answer lies in making a person’s date of birth (or for that matter a person’s mother’s maiden name) less “valuable”.

I don’t know, I must be growing old. Sometimes I look at what we do, and I think to myself: First we take living things and make abject skeletons out of them. Then we carefully build cupboards around the newly formed skeletons. And then we wonder why we have skeletons in cupboards.

We shouldn’t have to hide simple information about ourselves. We shouldn’t have to worry about the Semantic Web, and how people are going to misuse personal information for the most heinous of crimes. We shouldn’t have to worry about “our past catching up with ourselves”. We should not build systems that make use of simple easily-accessible information as security tokens and devices.

Of course we should teach people to be prudent about what information they make available on the web. But let’s not forget that the web has always been about openness and transparency. That this is a good thing.

For centuries people have been putting spare keys under mats and in plant pots and over door ledges. For centuries unscrupulous people have found the spare keys and put them to nefarious use. The answer to that problem was not to change the locks, but the unsafe practice. The right unsafe practice. In this particular instance, the unsafe practice is the use of dates of birth and stuff like that as security tokens.

Just musing.

Over the last seven years or so I’ve read the Cluetrain Manifesto maybe five times, cover to cover. By that you could probably figure out that I like the book. A bit.

During that time, it’s been my privilege to get to know three of the four authors pretty well, and to count them as my friends: Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. In fact as chance would have it I have met and spent time with different cluetrainers in 4 different countries.

Yet, in all that time, I’ve never been able to meet all three at the same time. Until today:

It was really good to see Chris, I hadn’t seen him for a few years. We share many interests and attitudes, including of all things a birthday. I turn 50 in less than a week; Chris, in typical larger-than-life form, has to go and outdo that and make 60 on the same day. Oh well. Incidentally, completely serendipitously, Doc has a family birthday on the same day. As does Neil Young, one of my favourite artists, who happens to be playing in Denver today.

I couldn’t get tickets for the Neil Young concert, but I did get something else I’d been waiting a long time for: a triple-signed first-edition Cluetrain (yes, I’m crazy enough to have carried one around waiting for just this opportunity!). The Sign of Three.