A privacy law shambles

Andrew at IMPACT blog points us to an "[i]nteresting article on The Independent website" From the article's introduction:

Legal Opinion: An over-complex privacy law may trigger new legislation

"There may never have been a simple answer to the question: what is the law of privacy? But a recent spate of cases has added to the dense jungle of rulings and legal principles through which even experienced judges are finding it difficult to navigate..."

This topic begs a very thorny question: precisely what constitutes "personal" information? Information is generated as we interact, in a rich, fuzzy and complex way, with one another and with the world around us. Ownership of that information is surely bound to be moot in very many cases...

A paen to the social web

A great post from Euan Semple which resists partial quotation, so here it is in full (presented under the terms of a Creative Commons license!):

A recent client engagement combined with reading Nick Carr's review of Everything Is Miscellaneous have yet again made me question whether those of us who drank The Cluetrain kool-aid seven years ago are mad or simply facing the growing pains of a new world as it emerges from the old.

Sometimes it seems that the naysayers are right. There is nothing fundamently different about the web and human nature stays the same no matter what technologies we have to hand. Having read John Gray's Straw Dogs I am aware that ideas of progress are pretty relative and while that at one level technology has enabled us to save more people through medicine it has also enabled us to kill more people more efficiently. Did the printing press make the world a better place or did it just allow ideas to circulate faster and wider?

The apparent simplicity of what we are talking about also presents challenges. In a world where real work takes effort and things worth doing are hard the apparent promise of the transformative effect of "getting it" appears, and sometimes feels, naive. Helping people to "get it" appears a soft option in contrast to doing or building.

And yet, and yet ....

I am only half way through David's book but I have to say I am loving it just as much as I loved The Cluetrain and Small Pieces Loosely Joined. What has happened to me since embracing the web has felt transformational and enabled connections and relationships that would never have happened otherwise. And these are not just appealing because they enable cozy conversations between like minded people. They enable exchange of ideas at a frequency and a quality that I never experienced before. I have also seen at first hand the effect this capability can have on an organisation. Being able to get quick, quality answers to questions, get collective heads around major cultural issues, and fostering connections that spark innovation are all non-trivial things that all organisations aspire to but which are notoriously difficult without web approaches.

It is good to catch ourselves sometimes and question the things we take for granted - whatever our views. But I am glad to report that I still get excited about the ways that the web is making the world different as described so well by David and others and I feel lucky that I get to pass on that excitement to the people I work with.

Ironically, given that Nick Carr makes much of the fact that he didn't get past page 9 of David's book I gave up on his tedius, rather self-indulgent post after the first couple of paragraphs.

Euan, you really put your finger on the issue here. The naysayers are too busy seeing the fragments of the evoving web to see either the mysterious and majestic evolution of the whole or the incremental increases in intelligence enjoyed by each one of us who engages authentically within conversations with others who we just wouldn't have been able to dialogue with pre-web.

I know that I am a more effective thinker and communicator than I used to be thanks to my blogging (although I also know there's still infinite room for improvement—which, of course, is a great motivator to continue the process), and I see you and all the other bloggers I read becoming better thinkers and communicators each post, week, month and year that goes by.

What a blessing!

The City as a Green action focal point

Bruno Giussiani, reporting on a new initiative by the Clinton Foundation to tackle climate change with action around energy efficiency of buildings in cities, summarises "the possible role of big cities in tackling global problems such as climate change":

The basic idea: If cities start acting as global actors towards sustainability, new mobility solutions and traffic strategies, clean energy, water resources management, etc, when you add it all up there could be significant progress even without national policies and international treaties.

I guess we can easily relate to cities both as obvious causes of the climate change problem, with their massive energy use per capita, but also as the creative and entrepreneurial centres that can produce solutions for that problem. It is always easier to galvanise people to action when they can identify clearly with a simple set of concepts and a clearly-defined associated community. It seems that the City is becoming a key focal point in this regard for climate change action.

UPDATE—Jerry Fishenden of Microsoft (who are the technology partner for the Clinton Foundation project) has some intelligent words to say about this issue.

IM bots masquerading as humans

Seamus McCauley observes that on the internet, not many people know that you're a bot:

J: Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.

I hear worse jokes told by real people almost every day. And the above, of course, was the product of two chatbots talking to one another (Discover, via BoingBoing).

The Turing test is all very well, but in artificial lab conditions where you've been told to watch out for one robot and one human you've got a 50/50 chance of getting it right just by guessing. People just aren't generally paying that much attention, and at a time when many "people" communicate (almost) exclusively via 160 or even 80 characters of text I'm not at all convinced we'd spot the robots if they made up three-quarters of the online population.

It's not hard to imagine lots of devious phishing applications of these kinds of chat robots—they could be primed to ferret a certain kind of information out of you, such as your shopping preferences.

And the moral of this story? Don't waste your life indulging in the inane drivel of chat rooms, Twitter and so on? ; )

Pub wisdom

photo by weaverluke

This one's for you, Glyn. : )

Keywords, natural language and search

Seamus McCauley has written an interesting piece on "Keywords vs. 'natural language'":

Keyword-based search works so well, so intuitively, because if you watch people interact with other people you'll see them watch out for the keywords too. Google's trick wasn't to invent anything - it was just to pay attention to how we were doing things already and then train computers to do it too. Which really isn't good news for all the people striving to make search work more like "natural language".

As usual, Seamus's observations are most thought provoking, and he's quite right to point out just how serviceable keyword based search has turned out to be for very many use cases. However, I wonder if he isn't rather glossing over the extraordinarily richness and precision of natural language in implying that we can dispense with it for search. My cursory reading around natural language syntax has left me with a strong suspicion that the fuzzy and interlinked hierarchical syntactical structures that researchers are devining within natural language syntax are what enable us to resolve the meaning of individual words within the complex webs of semantic and social contexts that we use to order our understanding and perceptions of the world (try typing that sentence into Google and see just what kind of insights it comes up with!).

Of course, web search predicated on the matching of isolated keywords to unstructured and semi-structured web pages does clearly provide massive value, as Google's extraordinary success proves. Unlike in the case of a pidgin speaker of a language, who might get their basic needs met to an extent with a few keywords and phrases, but who will struggle to understand much of the information they elicit with their questions, native speakers who use keyword based search are able to use their fluent language skills to sift through and analyse the rich language of their search results. Also, it turns out that very many combinations of two or more keywords are sufficient to narrow down search results with at least a tolerable degree of accuracy.

However, when it comes to a question like "what highbrow movies that my friends rate are showing on Sunday evening in the town where I am holidaying?", keywords alone are clearly never going to cut the search mustard. The rich set of highly-personal social and semantic contexts that this phrase evokes implies the need for a very different approach to search than that of brute keyword crunching, if we are to make search into something that is not only intuitive but also truly personalised.

So, while keywords have enabled the creation of incredibly valuable search services like Google, let's not throw the rich-personalised search baby out with the natural language bathwater. To understand natural language would be to go a long way to understanding how we perceive and understand our world—and that is surely going to be key for the continued evolution of search.

STOP PRESS:

The friend I had arranged to meet at the British Library turned up at the British Museum (we spent ten minutes phoning each other trying to work out why each couldn't find the other!). Oh well... ; )

The intrinsic limitations of identifiers

Mike Neuenschwander, wrestling hopefully with OpenID, has encountered there an intrinsic problem with identifiers:

OpenID ... calls into sharp focus something I’ve believed for years. It’s a kind of axiom, so I’d like to give it a name. I’ll call it, “identifiers.axiom.neunmike’s.axiomproxy.info”—that way you can easily refer to it unambiguously from anywhere. Here it is:

There are no identifiers, only attributes

Names are slippery. Most people have many more than one legal name, none of which are unique. They also have several dozen nicknames. There’s no practical way to get any of these every-day-use names onto a global namespace. And what’s a name after all but a synthetic attribute—a foreign key that we hope the receiving party stores somewhere so we can remember them later? Names are invaluable communication aids, but they have little to do with recognition, which is what’s at issue in most identity management contexts. Biologically, creatures don’t recognize others based on names but rather the confluence of attributes appearing within a certain context.

Lao Tzu (who goes by several dozen names) had a pretty good post on this idea over 2000 years ago. In a section called “Ineffability,” he writes:

The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;
The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind. (chap. 1, tr. Waley)

I understand why from a programmer’s perspective, it would be so much more convenient if everybody could simply have one globally unique, unambiguous, resolvable name. But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality.

The tech industry is adolescently ID-fixated. But I’ve had it to here with IDs! Would somebody please start seeing my avatars as something more than identification objects? So here’s to being an OpenAttribute power user!

I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with Mike's axiom. I'd go further still, and extend the thought it embodies to its logical conclusion: the location metaphor for digital networks (like the web) that the concept of unique "identifiers" entail is completely unsuited to the modelling of our perceptions of identity—or our imagination—which are themselves not bounded by 3D limitations.

Personal data mining: benefits and costs

Nic Brisbourne has written a thoughtful post called "Mining personal data - the next big frontier":

[Last] week Eric Schmidt of Google said he would help us answer questions like “What am I going to do tomorrow?”. I applaud the sentiment here, I really do, but I don’t think Eric is the right guy for the job, and he certainly isn’t going about it the right way.

A lot of people have a bad reaction when Google does things like this - Does Eric Schmidt want to sniff the armpits of my mind? is a very funny example, and indeed this post was in part inspired by some friends saying at dinner last night how much Schmidt’s arrogance pissed them off.

Underlying all this are some very real privacy concerns which I will come back to, but first I want to focus on how useful these sorts of services could be.

Nic goes on to discuss how some potential benefits to end users of allowing their behaviours and preferences to be tracked in exchange for cheap/free services and better ad personalisation could offset their privacy concerns.

I'm looking forward to chatting with Nic this week in preparation for a post I'm planning on "Identity for web startups—opportunities and threats": I'm sure his insights into the economic aspects of the topic (Nic is a Venture Capitalist at Esprit) will be extremely helpful.

Genomics, privacy and economics

Glyn Moody reports on disquiet around developments in personal genomics:

Good to see some others concerned by the imminent arrival of personal genomics:

In addition, many scientists fear cheap genome sequencing could have other, worrying consequences. Professor Steve Jones of University College London, said: 'If you make your genome public, you are not just revealing information about yourself and what diseases you might be susceptible to, you are also giving away crucial data about the kind of illnesses your children might be prone to. Each of your children gets half your genes, after all. They might not want the world to know about the risks they face and become very unhappy in later life that you went public. Your other relatives might equally be displeased.'

And by its implications for civil liberties:

However, there are other concerns, as Professor Ashburner points out. 'Anyone who commits relatively minor offences can have their DNA taken and analysed. At present, the main use of this process is to create a DNA fingerprint that can be used to identify that individual. But soon we will be able to create an entire genome sequence of that individual from a swab or blood sample. We will end up knowing everything about their genes. In the end, we could have millions of people on a database and know every single genetic secret of each person. That has to be a very worrying prospect.'

We had better think carefully about these issues, for genetic information is, ultimately, just another kind of information, and information wants to be free. Google's investment in a genetics startup is also worth noting. However, given the high value of our personal genetic information, it seems likely to me that we will try to guard and control it much like we do the money in our bank accounts.

One of the biggest strategic uncertainties facing any business, government or organisation these days is that of privacy and its associated economic ramifications:

• how will attitudes towards privacy evolve across society and its constituent demographics?;
• where will each demographic seek to draw lines between high-value, private information and low-value public information?
• what technological, legal, business and social factors could undermine the ability of people to maintain such segmentation between public and private information?
• to what extent will re-aggregation of lots of pieces of low-value information enhance its aggregate value?

No-one knows the answers to these questions yet, but they are among the ones we will need to keep asking ourselves and each other if we are to work together to create a future society we want to live in.

Mobile moolah

Om Malik reports another example of the convergence of "real" and "virtual" currencies:

Necessity, they say is the mother of invention. It couldn’t be more true in case of Africa, where pre-paid airtime is fast becoming the ‘virtual’ currency for Pan-African trade, overcoming conventional currency exchange and lack of banking infrastructure. It started out as phone users in Nigeria, especially in the rural areas trading minutes, but then the transactions took a mercantile trend.

Instead of paying cash, people started paying in airtime. Minutes became moolah and since the trend has caught on, and is being used for cross border trade as well.

Networked technology enables us to codify and transact information in a systematic way. It stands to reason that people will find more and more ways to tie the ephemeral values of that information to tangibly valuable things and services. And they don't need banks or governments to mediate the process (although the taxman is bound to take an interest soon enough!).

Amendments to the FOI - bad news

Andrew at IMPACT blog laments the impending weakening of Freedom of Information in the UK, as the Bill proposing changes to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for England & Wales and Northern Ireland looks set to progress:

Given that the Freedom of Information regime is, broadly, about the public interest in the good government of this country, it is disgusting that a Bill cutting out the very heart of the legislature from its effects could make it through. Parliament does nothing to improve its public perception by seeking removing itself from public scrutiny.

I quite agree: citizens must watch the watchers if we are to keep their power over us in check. This Bill seems designed to make sure that we cannot.

China abandons blog identity plan

BBC News reports:

The Chinese government is backing down from plans to force millions of Chinese bloggers to register their real names.

There are an estimated 20 million bloggers in the country and the plans announced last year provoked huge protest from Chinese internet users.

At the time, the government said it thought the system would make bloggers more responsible for their behaviour.

But Chinese bloggers condemned the proposal as an attempt by the government to control information.

The situation in China with regards to freedom of expression is more nuanced and complex than the mainstream media would have you believe. This development seems to be a sign that the increasingly economically-focused Chinese government is beginning to recognise that information wants to flow freely in a prosperous modern society.

Googling spacetime

Dave Birch writes: "[T]he 'tagging' of real world items so that we can google spacetime (as the phrase goes) is a significant and inevitable trend."

Sounds plausible. And the prospect of "googling spacetime" makes me feel like a citizen of the universe. Rock on!

Angelina Jolie's semantic tattoos

The Daily Mail reports: "After attending the world premiere of her latest movie, Angelina Jolie revealed her latest set of body art - geographical map coordinates accurately detailing the countries of birth of each member of her 'rainbow family'."

Well, that's one way of performing your identity, I guess!

The Green Web?

Katie Fehrenbacher writes:

[O]rganizations and companies are gravitating towards using the web to organize and communicate about climate change. Media, content distribution, collaboration tools and communications are all migrating to the web, so why not put them to use for a crucial issue.

The topic of climate change is also uniquely suited to the web. The information is often localized and action-oriented — what’s the best public transportation route in my city, or where do I recycle my e-waste. The topic also has a feeling of urgency (if not at times alarmist) which helps to quicky disseminate it around the web.

I'm sure Katie is right that the web can become an incredible tool for concerted and focused positive Green action. On the other hand, the production, use and disposal of technology itself creates a very significant negative environmental impact. Let's just hope that the Green benefits of the web begin to outweigh its costs. As both an ardent technologist and commited inhabitant of Planet Earth, I sincerely hope they will, and massively so.

Kate Moss as cultural vanishing point

(I think) Sam Jacob thinks we are at once subsuming and exploring our individual identity within our cultural identity via Kate Moss:

Every culture has its centre of gravity, every era its ground zero - a vanishing point that everything disappears into and flows out of. Often it's an abstract idea like beauty, truth, valour, or honesty. And often that quality is personified in figures like John Bull or Liberty, Right now and right here, that might well be Kate Moss.

Last month saw the Kate Moss / Top Shop launch that had been anticipated in magazines as varied as Vogue & Take a Break. We've seen this kind of deal before - celebrity-designers with ghost-written collections for high street retailers, (most recently Madonna's terrible Weimar lesbian outfits for H&M). We've had high fashion designers knocking out mass-market clobber causing riots at opening time. This time it feels different - and it's a lot to do with the protagonists. Both Kate and TopShop fascinate because they scrape across the normal stratification of culture.

It's a collision of the everyday with the singularly unique, of high style with high street of individual liberty and mass consumption. They are opposites that folds in on product like a Klein Bottle, a non-orientable surface with no distinction between the "inside" and "outside" that keeps on flowing into itself. Counter culture flows into shop counter.

I find the interplay of identity contexts Sam is grappling with here quite fascinating. The concept of a governing quality for a culture at any given point in history is also attractive at first glance, but I suspect that that quality is in the eye of the perceiver. Surely there is a whole, evolving web of attributes that inform the direction and focus of a culture, and the particular one that Sam sees as primary may be secondary to another observer? An intriguing piece, nevertheless.

Googlephobia growing

Ivan Pope reports on growing Googlephobia (and that in advance of their launch of a mobile phone network that will know where you are and what your voice sounds like):

You know something is hitting the popular imagination when it makes front page news. Today the Independent, with a hint of sensationalism, has put Google on the front page. So what’s brought it to this? The Independent story starts with Eric Schmidt’s somewhat daft comment that “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’.” However, there is a lot more to it than that, as anyone who follows online news will be realising. The Techmeme news service is flooded day after day with Google stories as they make the tech weather. Here are seven recent Google stories that go into the Googleophobia mix:

1. Google want’s to tell you what to do tomorrow (see above)


2. Google buys Feedburner and knows what RSS feeds we are reading


3. Google invests in human genetics firm


4. Google buys Doubleclick to control the human sum of banner advertising


5. Google wants us to report ‘paid links‘ so they can police them


6. Google launch their ‘Web History‘ product and reveal just how much they know about you


7. Google installs ‘virtual spyware‘ on Dell computers

That personal and personalised information Google is tracking is all adding up...

NEWSFLASH: O2 to deliver Google's mobile network

A fairly senior source at O2 confirmed to me this morning that O2 is indeed working with Google to deliver a Google-branded mobile network in the UK, as speculated by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch yesterday. I can't vouch for the reliability of that information, but it sounded pretty definite the way my source told it.

Justin.tv—sousveillance personified

Jamais Cascio points us towards Justin.tv:

"Justin of Justin.tv [...] wears a live-streaming wireless camera on his hat all day, every day, recording everything he sees."

This guy is sousveillance personified! Not sure I can see hat-cam wearing catching on with the public at large, though—can you?

Identity web as mirror

Joshua Porter writes:

Over time, we’re going to learn a tremendous amount about how people interact socially with one another because we can record things on the Web. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had lately with designers that ended up like “well, we’re doing design, too, but we’re really doing a ton of psychology”. The amount of effort and design energy being focused on the social interactions of people around a service is growing.

I have often observed on this blog that networked technology is a tool that allows us to extend our innate ways of relating to one another and expressing our identity. Interesting, then, to be reminded that it can also provide us with insights about how we do these things by reflecting our behaviours back to us.

So the Identity Web could be a hologram, superstring universe and mirror all at once? Well, I guess if we could contain it within a single metaphor, it would lose its mystery!

Traffic wardens get video cameras

BBC News reports:

Traffic attendants in Salford are to become the first in the UK to record their work on video.

Some wardens in the area will start to wear head-mounted miniature cameras from later this month.

NCP, which supplies traffic wardens in the city, will use the film to resolve disputes over tickets and to prosecute motorists who assault or abuse staff.

Good grief.

Real and virtual currencies converging

Another sign that real and virtual currencies are converging:

A UK panel is urging governments to start treating virtual currencies in the same manner as real life money to help combat fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion.

Value is value, whatever its manifestation. And where there is value there will be people trying to filch it.

Identity: personal and personalised information

If we take the subjective experience of identity as being the most practically-useful definition of identity (as readers will know I do on this blog!), then we can say the following of an individual's online projection of their identity:

The online projection of your identity is made up of information that is both personal (about you) and personalised (of interest to you).

Online identity is often equated exclusively with personal information, but that approach proves to be pretty limiting for designing personalised services in the pseudonymous and probabilistic world of the web.

Taking the broader concept of identity, conversely, we can approach the intimately related topics of personalisation and identity management within a self-consistent conceptual framework. And that should make thinking about all this stuff simpler!

Of course, a observer may not be able to tie your personalised information to you as a unique entity in any given instance: for example, Google cannot when you make an anonymous search. However, Google will be able to infer the valuable insight that you belong to a certain demographic or group identity from your search queries and the links you click in the search results (and track you as a defacto persistent individual or group identity via your IP address on your return, of course, unless you know how to hide that information from them).

Furthermore, your personalised information may be far more detailed and rich than your personal information is. After all, it includes not just the huge quantities of information we generate implicitly through our surfing and searching, but also the information we explicitly (co-)create and express—such as this information I am expressing right now, on this blog! (In codifying it into my own words, I am literally "personalising" the information that I have absorbed from others or encountered in my own imagination.)

Your personalised information is not only relevant to your own experience of your identity, then: it is also highly relevant to observers of your online presence who seek to obtain insight into your identity (and then show you just the right adverts, for example). Personalised information allows those observers to build a much more complete, albeit fuzzier, picture of your identity than they could just from your (uniquely-identifying) personal information.

And, of course, should observers be able to tie your personal and personalised information together, they gain oversight of a very complete picture of your identity indeed.

Technologies of connectivity—and alienation

Sherry Turkle is techo-disillusioned. She writes:

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected—or more alienated.

...

We live in techno-enthusiastic times, and we are most likely to celebrate our gadgets. Certainly the advertising that sells us our devices has us working from beautiful, remote locations that signal our status. We are connected, tethered, so important that our physical presence is no longer required. There is much talk of new efficiencies; we can work from anywhere and all the time. But tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.

Sherry offers us "five troubles that try my tethered soul" (she clearly has something of a poetic bent):

• There is a new state of the self, itself
• Are we losing the time to take our time?
• The tethered adolescent
• Virtuality and its discontents
• Split attention

Sherry's full post is well worth a read—I found it hard to find much to disagree with, although I would suggest that just because we increasingly have the opportunity to be "networked" in every moment, that doesn't mean that we cannot learn to turn down that opportunity as our soul's care requires. I'm certainly enjoying putting some boundaries around my blog reading time (strictly on the exercise bike in the morning only!).

Google to launch mobile service in UK?

From TechCrunch:

We’ve heard from a good source in the mobile industry that Google may be preparing to launch its own branded mobile network in the UK in the next few weeks. If our source is accurate, Google will become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) via a deal with UK mobile phone company O2.

So we Brits could be the guinea pigs for a seamlessly Google-mediated virtual life? Well, I guess we are the global leaders in the evolution of the Surveillance Society...

I Am...

What a great image! Roll over the picture above to put it in context of loverfishy's other images. Then click on it, and roll over the word "fat" on the original image.

Don't you just love all that identity recontextualisation? ; )

Image courtesy of loverfishy.

The Emperor's New Identity Web

Piers Fawkes imagines:

...a possible future where we'd have to manage our identity in a way similar to the way we manage our image today. In the same way we dress and style ourselves to say something (or nothing) about ourselves, we will dress our personal information to do the same thing. Some of will don red coats to show off, some will don black coats to hide.

The basic premise behind this vision is that our privacy is dead. Our data is already out there.

I don't suggest that 2007 will see us trying to don our red coats just yet - for one thing the tools are not built to do this just yet - but I do think that the general public will have a privacy epiphany as they become aware of their lack of privacy and flow of personal data.

I engaged with Piers in the comments section of his post:

Interesting piece, Piers.

I completely agree with you that privacy, in its traditionally-understood form, is dying. [weaverluke readers will know that I have written as much on this blog.]

However, what you seem to be getting at with your (admittedly evocative) "red coat, black coat" analogy, but don't spell out, is that, as more and more information about us is available online, coats of either colour will increasingly become as invisible as the Emperor's New Clothes to those observers who choose to look through them to the "naked identity" of the wearer.

Even that metaphor breaks down when you examine it, because all we can ever see online are assertions, which we ascribe to certain people, about other things and people (or about themselves). (Of course, we cannot see people or things themselves, because they exist in the physical world!) But how do we really know who such assertions are from, and if we can trust them?

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of the Identity Web (as the Kathy Sierra debacle illustrated all too well). All we can do is establish relatively strong hypotheses—and, until the sophistication of identity-mediating technologies approaches the incredible efficacy of our human cognitive perceptual mechanisms, those hypotheses will very often remain moderately confident at best.

Posted by: weaverluke | May 20, 2007 1:48:14 PM

Thanks for your great comment, Luke. In response:

We can never really be sure what's what or who's who in the slippery world of real life. Think of a time you interviewed someone for a job - you never know whether their CV was 100% true or 100% false. And I'd bet that despite your cognitive mechanisms, you'll only know slightly better by the end of the interview too.

Posted by: Piers Fawkes | May 20, 2007 8:30:52 PM

Piers,

Very true! However, if you then met and talked with that person again, your ability to verify their facial appearance, voice print and body language would allow you to be almost certain that they were the same person as you met before. This is not really the case on the web, where the cues may be hugely diverse, but the identification methods available to us are far less integrated than our biologically-evolved ones.

Conversely, it is easier to build a rich picture of *someone* (even if you are less than certain of the persistence of their underlying identity across all the constituent pieces of information than you would be having grilled them face to face!) online than offline.

Then again, if we consider our extended offline social networks as analogies for the links of the (social) web, it becomes clear that—as you say—we rely on pretty fuzzy cues for identifying the deeper characteristics of people offline too: we ask friends' opinions of other friends and so on.

My takeaway from all this—we must learn deeply about the "Human Web"—how we interact with one another and our world via our intricate and sophisticated, biologically-evolved organism—if we are to understand how to build an effective Identity Web. And privacy is a concept, of relatively recent provenance, which may prove to have relatively shallow roots in that organism.

Garlik DataPatrol report

So my first Garlik DataPatrol full report has arrived, some three weeks after I registered (this follows an initial credit report which arrived just a couple of days after registration).

The report is beautifully presented (online), and contains some really useful information—such as a view of how the credit agencies see you and a demographic analysis of your residential area. I also learned where to go to stop junk mail—the Mail Preference Service—and that I could opt out of the Electoral Roll ("just put a cross in the box on your annual Electoral Roll renewal form") and restrict access to Companies House information on me (also with the MPS), all in order to reduce my risk of suffering Identity Theft.

However, I am apparently doing a Bad Thing in putting a link to my CV on my blog, and using my real name on my blog. This is a tricky one, because the professional benefits to me of having this information openly discoverable are considerable. But it does bring home to me why many bloggers blog pseudonymously...

One aspect of DataPatrol that doesn't work well yet is the Connections section, where your supposed personal and company connections are listed. Perhaps this is partly because us bloggers put ourselves virtually around somewhat, but the results here really don't give a good picture of my important connections. I haven't even met many of the individuals listed—they simply work for a company that employs someone I do know.

The other thing that was a bit creepy was having many of the people who live on my street listed by name and address! That just brings home the perils of being on the Electoral Roll, I guess. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I want to snoop on my neighbours. Perhaps Garlik should consider omitting this category of information from their reports?

These niggles aside, I would certainly recommend my UK readers give Garlik a try—it doesn't take more than ten minutes or so to register, and you will surely gain some useful and thought-provoking insights into how your identity is represented in the public sphere.

Mobile operators poised to mediate identity management

Dave Birch writes:

[T]he position of the mobile handset as the basis of practical identity management in the real world is becoming unassailable. [...I]t passes all of the tests: it's portable, has secure storage, has its own keyboard for PIN entry and so on. But [...] it is controlled by the mobile operators, so people who want better identification and authentication to be used by "ordinary" people (ie, not nerds like me) such as governments and banks will end up having to cut a deal with them. But why wouldn't they prefer to pay the operator a penny every time you log on to your home banking if it saves them millions and millions in development costs, operating costs and fraud?

I'm sure Dave's right that our mobile will increasingly become our tool of choice for asserting our identity as we go about our lives—and that the mobile operators are in a fantastic position to take advantage of the massive new markets that will emerge around such identity management.

Exogenously unbounded identity

Kermit Snelson writes:

A few days ago, David Weinberger issued the following challenge to the readers of his new book: “Can you come up with the Everything Is Miscellaneous elevator pitch? Lord knows, I can’t.”

How about this: “To equate identity with location is an instrument of autocracy.”

A more verbose but less gnomic summary of the argument might go like this: In the physical world, everything must occupy a single location. In the realm of identity, however, different rules apply. The fact that the Mona Lisa cannot “be” in the Louvre and in the Prado simultaneously doesn’t mean that it cannot simultaneously “be” a piece of old wood, a masterpiece, and a tourist attraction. Laws of physics and laws of identity are not of the same ontological order.

I couldn't agree more. Indeed, this was one of the key points that John Madelin and I argued in our white paper of 2006: we unconsciously reproduce the 3D limitations of our physical world in the location metaphor of the the web's addressing architecture (DNS), but in so doing we distort the web's ability to mediate our exogenously unbounded, subjective perceptions of identity.

More of my thoughts on the original post as a whole are in its comments section.

Your network increases your effective intelligence

Jamais Cascio, pondering trends in outsourcing, writes:

Ironically, it's entirely possible that the carbon footprint of shipping may add so much cost to outsourced manufacturing that those jobs get re-localized, whereas the knowledge jobs (needing only an Internet connection) end up being globalized.

So are we headed to a world where the only stable jobs are those that absolutely require hands-on contact—health maintenance, grooming, and the like? Or to one where wages even out across the world of skilled workers? Neither strikes me as terribly appealing or stable.

I think Jamais' observation about the likely re-localisation of manufacturing is quite persuasive. However, I have a feeling he's a bit off target with the second paragraph. While stable jobs for all but the most worker location-dependent tasks may come under threat, my guess is that the economic well-being of the successful knowledge workers will actually only continue to follow a power-law curve, with the richest continuing to get richer.

Knowledge workers don't get hired only for what they know or what they can do, but also for who they know—and, as Clay Shirky long since pointed out, winners take all in social networking. Why do people with great networks get hired? Partly through plain old nepotism, of course, but also because who you know effectively increases both what you know and what you can do by enabling you to outsource task fulfillment across your uniquely-valuable network.

Is music the universal language?

Laura-Lee Balkwill asks of a neurologist, a psychologist and an anthropologist, in a most wonderful All in the Mind podcast (30'):

Is music the universal language?

One person's spoken language might sound like gobbledy gook to another - but when it comes to music do we beat to a common evolutionary drum? Could music be the universal language - linking minds across cultures and ancestral time? And, which came first - music or language? Don your headphones and climb aboard for an acoustic adventure. Does music lie at the heart...and brain...of what it means to be human?

An excerpt from the podcast transcript that summarises the interests of each speaker:

Laura-Lee Balkwill [interviewer]: So why is music interesting – that's a complex question with a lot of different answers depending on who you talk to.

Catherine Falk [ethnomusicologist]: Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own specific, very culturally specific ways.

Laura-Lee Balkwill [psychologist] : I find music interesting because of its power to evoke emotion, to express emotion, to make people feel. And that's how I got into studying music and emotion to begin with because I wanted to explore how that worked and whether that worked the same across cultures.

Ani Patel [neurologist]: And it presents science with opportunity to study the relationship between brain function and complex cognition, which is one of the big topics in neuroscience today: how does brain circuitry give rise to the mental experiences that we have of the world? And music is a wonderful domain to explore that because of its complexity and its reducibility, I would say.

A summary of some other points that fascinated me:

• Cathy Falk: archeological evidence of Neanderthal dwellings suggests music may pre-date language;
• Ani Patel: alternatively, we may not have evolved a capacity for making music so much as creatively adapted other cognitive mechanisms such as those responsible for language;
• Ani Patel: "modern neuro-imaging has shown us that both sides of the brain are very much involved in processing music. Language as well – but language does have a strong left hemisphere bias whereas music seems to draw on both sides of the brain – and does importantly, integrate different aspects of brain function in [...] waves of integration as opposed to simple processing chains";
• Laura-Lee Balkwill: Some aspects of music, such as certain fundamental characteristics' evocation of particular emotional responses, seem to be universal;
• Patel & Falk: whereas many others are culturally-specific;
• Ani Patel: "Some very deep and evolutionarily ancient reward centres of the brain [are] activated by [...] music. And these are areas that are typically activated by biologically significant behaviour such as eating, or reproducing or so on, and yet they [are] activated by this abstract acoustic stimulus with no obvious survival value";
• Cathy Falk: "Music is not an universal language any more than language itself is an universal language. I don't understand Swahili; it is a language. People construct the syntax of music very much in tandem with the way they construct themselves socially in their own very culturally specific ways."

I very much recommend listening to the podcast itself, which is interspersed with some great audio illustrations of diverse musics.

Music taps into our richest, deepest selves: our emotions, our language skills, our imagination, our universal humanity and the culturally-contextualised aspects of our identity. To understand music (and, in many ways, we are only just beginning to) really would be to go a long way to understanding what it is to be human.

Widgets and identity

The Chinwag event last night on "Media Widgetized"* was well attended by people from startups and big technology brands alike. The panel all had interesting and informed things to say, and Steve Bowbrick was a funny and effective Chair. Two good writeups of the content of the debate are here and here.

For readers who don't know what a widget is, take a look at the first writeup link above for a choice of explanations and a picture of some widgets.

My identity angle: widgets enable us to track, interact with and remix diverse information-based "stuff" (weather updates, stock prices, mini games, our social network profiles etc.) within the unifying framework of our own online personas, both public (blog, public start page etc.) and private (desktop widgets, private start page etc.).

Widgets are as much about performing our identity superpublically as they are about witnessing the world through the filter of our identity (i.e. our preferences and interests). Which is precisely why the commercial world is at once desperately keen to leverage widgets to extend the reach and resonance of their brand, and yet also petrified of their potential for disrupting and subverting that brand.

A notional example: would McDonalds want a Big Mac mini game widget placed ironically on a high-traffic blog documenting that company's role in the ongoing destruction of rainforests? I think probably not. It will be interesting to see how masters of big media marketing like McDonald ("I'm loooooving it!") cope as the web encroaches increasingly on their branding comfort zones.

One thing's for sure, though: widgets are conspiring to make the process of brand identity evolution a whole lot more fluid, transparent and predicated on authentic engagement and relationship by the brand with its community. And that has to be a good thing.

*"Widgetized" spelled with a z for search engine optimisation, seemingly—though quite why Chinwag prefer to get the attention of Americans and Australians at the expense of us Brits who are the ones likely to attend their events I'm not entirely sure!

C21st living: act locally, be surveilled globally?

Bill Thompson writes:

Those of us living in the west, with cheap easy access to computers and the internet and a sophisticated technological infrastructure surrounding us, are increasingly living our lives online.

This is no more frightening than any other vast social change, but it will be resisted by many who see in the loss of privacy something threatening, who believe it is dangerous or dehumanising or somehow against nature.

But we should never forget that we make human nature, it is not given to us, and we can therefore remake it.

Our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing, so it should not surprise us that we are finding new ways of constructing an identity online.

As I spread myself around over the network, updating my Facebook profile, commenting on MySpace, flying through Second Life, blogging, twittering, updating my calendar and posting photos and videos and audio I am finding a new way to be Bill Thompson.

While it's a nice sentiment, I think we need to consider the broad sense of Bill's notion of "remaking human nature" in the context of the insights of evolutionary psychology: our psychological experience is founded on our evolutionary heritage, which has, for example, seemingly optimised us for social interaction within relatively small groups.

However, at the same time, I wholeheartedly agree with the previous clause of the same sentence: that "our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing." I have myself argued that, in a world where information flows ever more freely and pervasively, we have no choice but to completely re-conceive the role of privacy in our lives. Given the relatively recent provenance (as Bill points out) of the Western concepts of privacy and individual identity, it seems likely that their roots only penetrate the topsoil of our culture rather than the deep clay of our evolutionarily selected traits (such as our predeliction for interacting within small groups), so it may be that we can reinvent this aspect of our experience.

Perhaps we will continue to seek out small groups to engage with proactively while at the same time coming to tolerate, accept or even enjoy the fact that our audience for that engagement may be unknowably diverse and global.

My question remains:

How can we find sustenance and protection for our intricate and bounded, biologically-evolved, deeper, softer selves in the always-on "surface" world we are creating?

Yahoo and Google try to out-Green one another

This kind of tussle for the technology behemoth Green brand identity high ground can only be a Good Thing. : )

Identity web as hologram

A metaphor that I like to use for the identity web is that of a hologram. Just like when you shatter a hologram, each piece reflects cloudy images of the whole original, the identity web promises to embody an ever-greater proportion of the web’s knowledge in each of its nodes—which, in principal, would come to obviate the need for a location-based discovery and navigation metaphor for the web.

I am brought to mind of those multi-dimensional tangles of superstrings that physicists tell us may be coiled up within each of the tiniest spaces of our universe. Perhaps that is our challenge in evolving an identity web—to roll up the web into a billion locations, thereby making the very concept of information “location” redundant?

And yet, each node also defines what it is not by its differences from the whole. The piece of the hologram embodies the whole within the unique context of its identity.

[This post was inspired by a blog conversation with Kermit Snelson—thanks, Kermit!]

Sound branding

Noel Franus writes about "Building Brand Value Through the Strategic Use of Sound":

Most organizations have relied almost exclusively on the sense of sight to communicate who they are, what they do and why they matter. Pirates have their unmistakable skull-and-bones flag. Nearly all religions have their own unique symbol. And today, practically every brand on earth has its own visual identity. Other senses are rarely part of the equation.

Yet sound has unquestionable potential in creating impressions. Consider the sonic snippets in your life—imagine Chariots of Fire or Rocky without music, a PC commercial without that Intel Inside bongggg, or a Harley-Davidson hog without its expertly calibrated tone. Sound triggers recall and reactions. And much like good visual or industrial design, it also has the ability to convey value and strengthen brand reputations.

Forward-thinking brands are catching on. In this first of a two-part series based on my co-presentation at the “Gain” conference last October, we introduce the practice of audio branding and identity – the intentional use of music, sound and voice to create a connection between people and organizations.

The full post has some great examples of the use of sound for brand identity enhancement. As a musician and identitologist, this topic fascinates me. Music has the ability to resonate with us on so many levels. The "food of love", indeed!

At Chinwag tomorrow

In case any readers are going to be in the central London area tomorrow evening, I will be attending the Chinwag Live event on "Media Widgetized" and would love to see you there!

Virtual relationships—eroding authenticity?

Kermit Snelson laments the erosion of authenticity in a world of virtual relationships:

Even if the old question "Who are you?" has increasingly lost its meaning as we all become Google-able, another old question should probably remain: "Have we met?"

I'm sure that's very true. You just can't beat a good old face to face natter—which is why I'm excited to about the great new venue for London OpenCoffee, the tech entrepreneur and investor meetup event on Thursday mornings!

Simple is viral

Eric Sundelöf points out that a viral marketing message needs to describe the identity of your service or product in a really simple, intuitive and exciting way. I'm sure that's right: bringing simplicity out of complexity is one of the most valuable things anyone can do for us in this crazy age.

I am building, with friends, a web service* that will provide "TLC for your blog". Does that phrase cut the mustard as a viral marketing message? I sure hope so.

*More details to follow as we move towards our private alpha launch... : )

Memory loss treatments discovered

From BBC News:

Mental stimulation and drug treatment could help people with degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's recover their memories, a study says.

Scientists found mice with a similar condition to Alzheimer's were able to regain memories of tasks they had previously been taught.

This is great news for Alzheimer's sufferers. And given that our sense of identity is tied up intimately with our memory, could the following conversation be heard in doctors' surgeries in a few years?

Patient: "Doctor, doctor, I feel like my identity is disappearing, I just can't remember who I am or who anyone else is. Who are you, by the way?"

Doctor: "Don't worry, just take four Identilux daily with a glass of water and you'll be right as rain in no time!"

; )

Kettle Chips—a product identity perspective

Charla and I love Kettle Chips—they are an indulgent pre-dinner snack we occasionally treat ourselves to when a long week in the city has pummeled us into submission. Once opened, the whole contents of a large bag invariably disappears within ten crunchy minutes.

Kettle have been the leading premium potato crisp brand in the UK for some years now, but they haven't rested on their laurels one bit: they are always coming out with some new flavour, complete with evocative title and expressively-designed wrapper. The flavours are usually delicious, and when they are less than that, improved versions are often forthcoming pretty quickly. Kettle Chips also strike a friendly yet respectful tone in encouraging customer feedback—I get the strong impression that the company is run by people who are genuinely passionate about creating amazing crisps.

So what's not to like? Well, nothing at all, but I do have a hopeful observation about Kettle's product identity and branding to offer them.

While the titles and wrappers of each flavour are boldly differentiated from one another, the flavours themselves are far less so—while each tastes great, it does so in a way that is far more similar to the other flavours than it is different.

The pack of the Mango Chilli flavour, "Angry Fruit" (pictured above), proclaims: "the chilli takes time to arrive, but when it does you'll know!" Well, not really—the chilli is really very mild. There is a mismatch, a disjunction, between the pack's promise of a wild and challenging tastebud adventure and the actual soothingly familiar and pleasant crisp experience of perfectly crunchy, salt-savoury-with-just-a-hint-of-something-exotic munching. It's a bit like searching for a barely-perceptible note of cinnamon or aniseed in a delectable high-class dark chocolate ganache that is far too refined to shout out its differences from the others in the box.

Kettle, be bold—have the courage of your branding convictions and give us chillies that burn, limes that bite, and mangos that sweeten us! Let the identity of your crisps, so brilliantly captured by your marketing department, shine through the humble potato itself. Take us on the daring crispy escapades you promise us, and you will have (at least two) loyal customers for life.

"Global privacy invaders" awards

Kim Cameron points us to this story:

Privacy International announces global privacy invaders

02/05/2007

In an event in Montreal, Canada, Privacy International ran the first International Big Brothers Awards ceremony. At the 'Computers, Freedom and Privacy' (off-site) conference, with over 200 attendees, PI outed the most invasive companies, projects, officials, and governments. A special award for the 'Lifetime Menace' was also announced.

Background

PI's 'Big Brother Awards' have been running for nearly ten years, with events run in eighteen countries around the world. Government institutions and companies have been named and shamed as privacy invaders in a variety of countries and contexts.

This year was the first time that Privacy International ran an international event to identify the greatest invaders around the world. The event was hosted by 'the pope', as presented by Simon Davies in full regalia [my emphasis!]. Previous hosts include 'Dr. Evil' and 'The Queen of England'.

Nominees and Winners

After reviewing the variety of nominations received from around the world, Privacy International and leading international privacy experts selected the following nominees and winners in the following categories:

Most invasive company

Nominees

• Google, for their retention practices and their purchase of Doubleclick, an on-line marketing and profiling firm
• Choicepoint, for their vast databases of personal data, sold to nearly anyone who wishes to pay
• SWIFT, the international banking co-operative for sharing personal financial transactions with the U.S. government
• Booz Allen Hamilton, the international consultancy, for taking the knowledge and contacts of their senior executives, mostly from U.S. intelligence agencies, to sell and share their experiences with firms and governments around the world

Winner: Choicepoint

Worst Public Official

Nominees

• Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, for his relentless work over ten years to expand the UK into the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations
• Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, for returning the surveillance policies of his nation to the age of the Cold War
• Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and now undersecretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, behind and at the forefront of most disastrous U.S. surveillance policies, most recently the EU-U.S. agreement on Passenger Name Records transfers
• Alberto Gonzales, current Attorney General for the U.S., for pushing expansive interpretations of the U.S. Constitution in order to create new powers for the Bush Administration without Congressional authorisation and judicial oversight

Winner: Stewart Baker

Most Heinous Government

Nominees

• China, for implementing even greater surveillance policies and continues its oppression of various groups, and moves towards the international stage with the Beijing Olympics with additional surveillance schemes
• The U.S., for leading the world down the path of greater surveillance and its disastrous influence on policy and technology
• The United Kingdom, for being the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations, rivaling only Malaysia, China and Russia as it also leads other countries across the EU down its same path
• Tunisia, for being stupid enough to have invasive and despotic practices even while hosting a UN summit on the information society, and then oppressing guests and groups from around the world while in the public eye
• The European Union, for pretending to be founded upon a bedrock of civil liberties and fundamental rights but then spending decades establishing invasive policies without any democratic oversight

Winner: The United Kingdom (for more information please see Taking Liberties documentary (off-site))

Most Appalling Project or Technology

Nominees

• U.S. Border Policy, and most recently the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, for fingerprinting visitors from around the world while hoisting fingerprinting and ID card programmes upon citizens around the world, including Americans
• International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency, for implementing a variety of invasive policies behind closed doors, including the 'biometric passport' and passenger data transfer-deals
• India's Ministry for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions for requiring government employees to disclose their menstrual cycles on job appraisal forms
• the CCTV industry, for promoting a technologically 'effective' policy around the world despite all the evidence to the contrary

Winner: The International Civil Aviation Organization

Lifetime Menace Award

Nominees

• The Biometrics Industry, for selling a limited technology to governments and public institutions around the world, promising much while delivering very little except for minimisation of personal privacy
• The Military Industrial Complex, for being behind almost every invasive surveillance policy around the world, where we showed the example of General Dynamics, contractor to a variety of governments, who own companies such as Anteon (UK) who in turn own 'Vericool' (UK) who is responsible for selling surveillance technologies to schools that want to fingerprint their students to verify class registries, library privileges, and cafeteria purchases
• The Intellectual Property Industry, for promoting and pushing invasive policies around the world in order to keep track of the habits of on-line users to pursue their agenda of 'protecting' content
• Communitarianism and the proponents of the 'Common Good', because every bad policy around the world is justified based on the philosophy that is good for society and the individual must sacrifice his or her selfish rights in favour of the needs of the many

Winner: The 'Common Good'

Winners were given the classic BBA award, a golden statue of a boot stamping upon a human head, as promised by George Orwell in 1984 on a vision for the future.

Sounds like it was quite an evening!

Don't just do something, sit there!

As I fuss around with this and that this morning, achieving very little satisfaction, my cluttered and somewhat chaotic state of mindbody reminds me of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh's ironic adaptation of Bhudda's words:

"Don't just do something, sit there!"

So I'm going to stroll onto Hampstead Heath and sit me down on a sun-kissed park bench (my favourite one on Parliament Hill) for a little life contemplation.

: )

Snap previews—like 'em or loath em?

As an experiment, I've turned on Snap previews for the links in these posts and in the sidebar too. Roll over a link and you'll see what I mean. Usually, you will see a miniature image of the linked-to page, but for Wikipedia pages, Amazon product pages and various other kinds of sites, you will see specially-formatted summaries of the page's content.

Hopefully this provides a useful timesaving functionality to my readers, but it could, conversely, becoming a bit annoying to have those boxes pop up all the time? Let me know if you have strong feelings one way or the other—I'm happy to turn Snap back off if you all hate it!

Sexuality, violence and vunerability

Seamus McCauley points out the illogicality of the media's conflation of real and virtual paedophillia in their discussion of recent disturbing happenings in Second Life. He also contrasts this reaction to virtual sexual abuse with the widespread tolerance of extreme virtual violence. I recommend a reading of the post in full, too long and integrated to reproduce here.

My thoughts: Sexuality can be one of the most vunerable and emotive aspects of human identity, so it's perhaps no surprise that people often switch off their higher brains when thinking and talking about its abuses. By contrast, violence numbs and brutalises us, and it seems we find it far easier to distance ourselves emotionally from its virtual depiction.

Gordon Brown promises an ID Card review

So, according to tonight's Evening Standard (no online version available!) Gordon Brown will review the potential impact on civil liberties of the ID Card scheme when he becomes Prime Minister. That's good news if he really means it (you never know with these politicians). After all, with the right technology (and only with the right technology), a government-issued ID Card could be a useful thing for both citizen and government.

Meanwhile, the government also chose today to sneak out the news that the scheme has gone even further over budget. A massive budget overrun for a UK public sector IT project? I suppose we would be rather amazed if that did not happen!

LSE's Identity Project site

Anyone interested in the London School of Economics' work in advising the UK Government not to accelerate the arrival of a Surveillance Society with a poorly-conceived ID Card implementation might want to check out their project site.

Google as "the Internet"

Seamus McCauley muses on "Google" as synonym for "the Internet" (click the link for a nice bonus photo illustration!):

I've been wondering for a while how it came to pass that "Google" became visual shorthand for "the Internet" amongst advertisers.

The current campaign for Thomson holidays exhorts holidaymakers to use "our Google Maps" (which turns out to be a slightly customised version of what is very clearly Google's Google Maps). Mobile phone companies in particular, when they started wanting us to know that we could access the web on our phones, showed us phones with Google on them. Here's another one.

So I'm intrigued by the sudden cultural shift implied by Nokia's latest online ad for the N800 (left), a phone with Internet access, majoring on the BBC website and Flickr and MySpace and Wikipedia without a mention of Google. "Take the Internet to new places", it says. Or, in other words - not just Google search.

Google has an incredibly powerful brand (BBC) that for the last couple of years has been semiotically synonymous with the Internet. Assuming, not unreasonably, that advertisers are on the cutting edge of understanding cultural significance, that psychological dominance of what people mean by the Internet may be coming to an end as consumers are considered able to accept more nuanced symbols of the web.

When millions of people identify your brand with the Internet itself, you know you have a decent business. Whether or not Google can continue to convince the masses that they are "the Internet" will play a huge part in determining their future fortunes.

However, it's also intriguing to note that the growing privacy concerns around Google provide them with the inverse challenge of convincing people that they are not too omniscient for their users' comfort—when striving for omniscience kind of goes with the territory of trying to be "the Internet". This would seem to pose Google with something of a strategic and branding conundrum.

There's money in that there identity—we just don't quite know where yet.

[also left as a comment on Seamus's post]

A new low for the British service industry?

I tried to chase up a hospital appointment yesterday afternoon, and after being ping-ponged between the referring clinic and the x-ray department a couple of times, I got to talk to the appropriate staff member.

"I'll just go and check your file."

1 minute passes.

Voices can be heard chatting in background.

5 minutes pass.

Voices continue to chat in background.

8 minutes pass.

I hang up and ring back immediately.

No answer after twenty rings.

I look at my watch: it's 4:50pm.

It seems they have clocked off for the day.

Naming baby for Google

Nick Carr writes:

Here's a sign of the times. Expectant parents are beginning to google prospective baby names to ensure that their kids won't face too much competition in securing a high search rank.

In Britain and elsewhere, surnames traditionally served to denote the shared identity of a family trade, as in "Smith", and first names were drawn mostly from a relatively small and familiar stock. These days, names are having to carry the weight of our desire to stand out from billions of others—we want them to function as our unique identifiers.

Well, while I have now met another L. Razzell, Google has yet to inform me of another Luke Razzell...

The Encyclopedia of Life

Well, this is a grand identity project indeed: The Encyclopedia of Life!



The species information tree-navigation interface (shown in the video) looks pretty cool too.

[Via BBC News]

A virtual identity custody battle

Dave Birch writes:

Who cares about custody of the quids [sic] when there's virtual assets at stake! A divorcing couple in China are fighting for the custody of virtual identities in the Zhengtu Online virtual world. The couple met each other through the game in September 2006 and got married in November. The two jointly own more than 10 Zhengtu Online accounts (each of which is, in essence, a different virtual identity) that are each above level 100. This, incidentally, makes them a liquid asset as they can be sold for 10,000 Yuan each online. The husband wants all the game accounts and in return is willing to give their newly purchased and renovated apartment to his wife: in other words, he wants the virtual stuff and she can keep the real stuff. As they say in Yorkshire -- or they did in the era when my mother was born in Catterick -- there's nowt as strange a folk. The dispute? The wife wants to split the real and virtual stuff equally... how old fashioned.

Which is all further proof that "real" and "virtual" aspects of value are becoming practically indistinguishable—if someone cares about something, it has value, whether that something is a game-world avatar or an apartment.

Innocent family: not so innocent?

Innocent, purveyors of the eponymous smoothies, are playing happy families:

Hello.

We were wondering if you'd like to join the innocent family. Don't worry - it's not some weird cult. It's just our way of staying in touch with the people who drink our drinks i.e. you. Every week we'll email you our news and give you the chance to win lots of drinks. We'll also invite you to nice events like Fruitstock (our free festival) and maybe send you the odd present if you're lucky. Finally, we'll very occasionally ask you what you reckon we should do next, as we sometimes get confused.

All the practical aspects of this—engaging with customers, giving them perks, asking their opinions—are clearly great ideas, but I can't help finding the "join our smoothie-kissed happy family" thing rather creepy.

Families are groups of people bonded for life by shared bloodlines, and may be happy and harmonious, unhappy and discordant or (in very many cases) a rich mixture of both. A company, by contrast, provides products and services to customers, once or over a certain period of time, in exchange for money. Relationship exists in each case, but of a very mutually-different kind.

Innocent make great smoothies—so why don't they concentrate their marketing activities on conveying their passion for doing just that, rather than spinning us with some delusional fantasy of intimacy?

Participation ladders and value spirals

Charlene Li at Forrester blogs about their new "Social Technographics" report. The report's executive summary:

Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed – a blog here, a podcast there – to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term "Social Technographics" to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other company pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers' Social Technographics first, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.

There's a nice "participation ladder" diagram in Charlene's post which I dare not reproduce here from fear of their terrifying Terms of Use. ; ) Nevertheless, what I find interesting about the ladder metaphor is that it focuses the potential for a customer's relationship with a company to evolve to encompass ever-greater degrees of pro-activity on that customer's part. This is very much like my Value Spiral metaphor in the "Towards the Identity Society" paper (section 5.2.2 in this pdf). (And I guess if you combine ladders and spirals, you get DNA...)

I suspect that human relationships in any context may be usefully described in terms of such iterated evolution. Of course, that evolution ceases when one or other party in the relationship feels that the relationship has reached a ceiling of potential value—there's only so much personal information I wish to share with any given social web service, for example, and this is where Google may begin to run into trouble as it continues to diversify its integrated web service offerings.

weaverluke gets a strapline

I've been thinking that weaverluke blog needs a strapline, so I came up with this one (displayed beneath the blog's title):

"Drawing together the threads of Identity"

I guess I better make sure I put in at least one wrong stitch into my tapestry in case God gets angry with me (hmm, somehow I think that shouldn't be a problem then... ; )

Shaping the evolution of human language

BBC News reports:

Researchers in the US say they have firm evidence that apes communicate using gestures - shedding light on the development of human language.

The team analysed the way bonobos and chimpanzees used hand and limb gestures to make themselves understood. The scientists found the apes used gestures more flexibly than the way they used facial and vocal expressions. They say the findings support the theory that human language developed through the use of hand gestures.

These research findings would seem to chime nicely with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's ideas about overlapping cognitive processes for visual and auditory gestalts forming one basis of the evolution of human language. My speculation (which may very well not be original): having learned to gesture, did our distant ancestors take inspiration from the shapes both of the objects around them and of their own gestures to form the sonic shapes of their first, rudimentary words?

Not-so-not-so-green Apple?

This news is a few days old now, but I wanted to update readers further to my "not-so-green Apple" post: Steve Jobs has blogged positively about Apple's environmental footprint, current and future, and Greenpeace have given him a qualified thumbs up. There is some intelligent commentary from Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm.

Complexity and risk in branding and life

Grant McCracken writes about complexity and risk-taking for brand marketing:

What we want are brands that invite our involvement and then reward it. Involvement takes complexity and the willingness to open the brand to a variety of interpretations...

Much like with interpersonal relationships, really. Rewarding relationships always entail the risk of messiness and vunerability.

Stefan Brands podcast

Dave Birch recently interviewed leading cryptographer Stefan Brands, whose company Credentica has developed a set of technologies that enable "multi-party security": for instance, allowing the government to vouch securely for my age, but also for me to "spend" that assertion with the local pub (via a smart card) without either the government knowing I have done so or the pub knowing any more than that I am over 18.

If adopted in schemes such as our national ID Card here in the UK, Credentica's U-Prove technology could transform our ability as citizens to negotiate control over information (rather than that control being hard-wired into the technology, as the current government scheme would entail). It's a really important issue for people to understand, so I heartily encourage you to listen to the podcast:

• listen now (mp3)
  
• subscribe in iTunes

Deborah Orr on the transparent society

Deborah Orr rails impassionately against the creeping progress of the surveillance or "transparent" society (thanks to my mum for bringing my attention to the article). The conclusion to a highly thought-provoking piece:

[M]aybe the transparent society really is sinister, for reasons that are spiritual rather than practical. Maybe it is unhealthy for a society to behave itself not because it is underpinned by morality and watched by its caring family or neighbour, but because it knows it'll get caught and punished if it doesn't toe the line.

Maybe we need our privacy not because we want to hide particular things, but because we need a place where we can retreat psychologically, whenever we want, and to be alone and unobserved. Wise parents understand that their children need their privacy to be respected, even if, in their privacy, they do nothing unusual, remarkable, or wrong.

And maybe, our watchers, with the power to watch us, and the inclination not to be watched themselves, are inevitably corrupted by something inherent in the process of believing that there is nothing they can't see.

This all raises more questions than answers for me, as I try to imagine with my feeble little brain how the shifting patterns of information flow might actually play out in the evolution of society.

The only thing that seems certain is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to control who one's audience is (for all the world has been a stage for a while, after all) as one goes about performing identity in all but the most secluded, un-networked places. Will that fact encourage us to conform to rigid, lowest-common-denominator social mores, or conversely serve to free us from the inhibition that can come from being over-aware of one's audience?

Hum...

Sidebar revamp

I have just revamped the content of weaverluke's sidebar, in the hope of making the blog:

1. more accessible to new readers,
2. more useful to existing ones, and
3. more informative for my professional contacts.

Take a look and let me know what you think—all constructive criticism welcomed!

Spiders

Thanks to Jamais Cascio for this link to Spiders, an "alternative history of the Afghan/U.S. war" in comic form that imagines a socially-networked technological future for warfare. With a name like that, it seemed like apposite material for a weaver's perusal. ; )

Fair Tracing: product identity transparency

The New Scientist reports on the Fair Tracing project:

Proving food's ethical origins

You know the price of a jar of fair-trade coffee before you reach the checkout, but how can you be sure of its ethical cost? Now techniques are being developed to tag goods with information about their entire production history, to reassure consumers that what they are buying has genuinely been ethically made.

The Fair Tracing project was established by a UK team including Ann Light at Sheffield Hallam University. "When consumers buy something they want to know: is this really part of a fair process? Is it really organic, as it claims?" says Light.

The researchers are exploring techniques to store information in barcodes, to be read by consumers using hand-held readers such as camera phones. Products would be tagged when they are made and further information added at each point in the production process, for example, how much the item cost the trader and how much it was sold on for. "You could work out whether the traders along the chain have been paying their workers a decent wage by looking at the profits they are reporting," says Light. "It's an attempt to use technology to give a voice to people who are being exploited and otherwise wouldn't be heard."

Light and her colleagues have already begun working with coffee growers in southern India and vineyards in Santiago, Chile, with positive responses. "We've been explaining the benefits to ethical traders of giving out this information," says Light. "They can get credit from consumers for their good practices."

This sounds like an amazingly powerful way to make the rich identity of a product—including the economics of the supply chain, and the stories of the people in that chain—transparent to the customer. This is something I have looked forward to for some years now. Yay!

Robotic dangers

BBC News reports:

Robot future poses hard questions

Scientists have expressed concern about the use of autonomous decision-making robots, particularly for military use.

As they become more common, these machines could also have negative impacts on areas such as surveillance and elderly care, the roboticists warn.

The researchers were speaking ahead of a public debate at the Dana Centre, part of London's Science Museum.

Discussions about the future use of robots in society had been largely ill-informed so far, they argued.

Autonomous robots are able to make decisions without human intervention. At a simple level, these can include robot vacuum cleaners that "decide" for themselves when to move from room to room or to head back to a base station to recharge.

Military forces

Increasingly, autonomous machines are being used in military applications, too.

Samsung, for example, has developed a robotic sentry to guard the border between North and South Korea.It is equipped with two cameras and a machine gun.

The development and eventual deployment of autonomous robots raised difficult questions, said Professor Alan Winfield of the University of West England.

"If an autonomous robot kills someone, whose fault is it?" said Professor Winfield.

"Right now, that's not an issue because the responsibility lies with the designer or operator of that robot; but as robots become more autonomous that line or responsibility becomes blurred."

Accountability may become a tricky issue indeed in these kind of circumstances. After all, robots will always be imperfect mirrors or conduits for our human identity...

Britishness through others' eyes

An overheard fragment of conversation between two young American guys I passed on the street yesterday:

"...So I like introduced myself and I thought they'd greet me but they just didn't."

"You have to flirt with people here..."

Still losing it

I weighed myself on Monday for the first time since the completion (year end 2006) of my weight loss bet with my dad. It looks like I've not only kept the weight off, I've even lost another 1.75 pounds: I now register at a mere 184 pounds, or 13st 2lb (fully clothed)! This pleasantly surprises me, as looking in the mirror made me wonder if I might even have put on a bit.

And I must say weaverluke blog was way ahead of the fatblogging trend we've heard so much about lately. ; )

Sadly, my dad seems to have put on just a couple of pounds, but I'm sure he'll bounce back (the extra padding should help).

Speaking at chinwag live: dark side of social media

I have been invited to speak at the chinwag live event on June 19 in Soho, London. The topic is the "dark side of social media":

Despite the hype there are downsides to social media - virtual problems are invading our real lives, or is it vice versa..?

Identity theft, scurrilous accusations, libel, stalking, scams and even violence. Social media, once hailed as the great new "Naked Conversation" where the planet would talk to itself in a spirit of open debate and companies would 'crowd source' fantastic new products, is starting to turn sour.

High profile bloggers like Rachel From North London and Kathy Sierra have been stalked online. Teenagers are finding out the downside to having a MySpace page as cyber-bullying takes off.

Brands are finding that their carefully crafted marketing campaigns are being remixed and mashed-up in a way they never intended. Political sites are swarmed with negative comments. Comment spam is hampering open debate. Splogs are stealing content. Social Media is turning out to have a very unsocial dark side. What can be done about it?

Can an online code of conduct have a hope of succeeding? Will freedom of speech be affected? How can organisations prevent their interactions with social media from backfiring? Chinwag Live: The Dark Side of Social Media will look at all these questions with a panel of experts.

Lots to get our teeth into, then; it promises to be a pretty lively debate!

weaverluke blog—an introduction

Q: What do psychology, economics, id cards, memory, shopping, the web, brand, the environment, ethics, neurology, privacy and surveillance (and myriad other topics) all have in common?

A: Identity. I believe that approaching our experience of ourselves, each other and our world in terms of identity—and its corollorary concept, value—enables us to draw together diverse threads of enquiry into a self-consistent intellectual framework.

Within such a framework, it would be possible to attain wisdom about what makes us human beings thrive, individually and collectively (in social groups, companies, nations, as a race), where only fragmented understandings have previously existed.

At the same time, understanding identity is ever more crucial to the achievement of very specific and tangible challenges—such as how to manage brands, deliver personalised advertising, evolve effective business models, create a workable id card scheme, create successful virtual worlds and virtual currencies and facilitate ethical and environmentally sustainable consumer behaviours.

This blog, founded in summer 2004, is my attempt to contribute towards our understanding of identity in both broadly abstract and tangibly specific ways. (And because that quest can come to seem awful serious sometimes, along the way I look for opportunities to indulge in a little silliness.)

I warmly invite you to join the identity conversation at weaverluke by subscribing to blog updates—and adding your thoughts, if you are so inspired, in the post comments. If you would like to explore a particular sub-topic on the blog, please click on the links in this post, above.

Headless goat or headless chicken?

Sony has created a storm with its Playstation 3 game promotion featuring a decapitated goat:

The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centrepiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company’s PlayStation 2 console.

Guests at the event were even invited to reach inside the goat’s still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach.

Sony is going from blunder to blunder these days. In that light, it's interesting to note the resonance of the headless goat image with that of a headless chicken: is Sony unconsciously expressing the current confusion of its corporate identity?

Computers get a little brainier

Scientists have just about managed to simulate half a mouse brain, albeit rather slowly. What an intricate bit of kit our brains must be!