Having to De-annonymize

I have always trod with caution when it comes to social networking. My blog has presence all over - Facebook to Foursquare but personally I stay out of everything. My buddy C takes annonymization to extremes only alpha nerds can take things to. He does not have a rewards card for any store, he usually pays with cash and makes sure he does not follow any kind of "buying pattern". His goal in life is not allow himself to become a data point for retailers today and context brokers in the future.

I am curious about what Google+ is trying to do with the idea of Circles for non-intersecting areas of people's lives. A step in the right direction certainly but with their track record, with the whole Buzz episode I would be skeptical for a long time to come. Specially when their competition believes that de-annonymization is necessary and almost inevitable. 

Anonymity on the internet has been of particular significance to me. More than ten years ago, when I desperately needed help understanding what was going in my marriage and the chances of me being able to work through all that ailed it, having an anonymous email address saved my life. I did not have the courage to open up and share the deepest, darkest secrets of my life with anyone who knew me. I did not have the ability to get professional help without my putting myself in harm's way. More than anything else I was very afraid - I cloak of anonymity gave me the courage I sorely lacked.
I knew that not telling everything in the most painful detail would make it impossible for anyone to understand my situation or be able to help me out. Using my assumed name, I reached out a large cross section of people - psychiatrists, university professors, therapists, counselors and yes even the occasional psychic who promised to read the stars in my horoscope . 

It was a desperate cry for help and the response was quite overwhelming. A lot of people wrote me back with their insights into the situation, recommended what they thought would be the best course of action based on what information I had provided. A lot of them observed my message was brutally honest - exactly as I had wanted for it to be. 

Between the dozen or so responses I got from a wide cross section of people I had reached out to, I was able to see a the couple of distinct themes that helped my chart the course of the rest of my life. If I had not reached out anonymously, a lot of these wonderful people may not have been able to respond with the candor they did with. What is more, I would not have been able to muster the courage to present them with the unvarnished, unflattering and ugly truth. We had made a connection between one human heart and the other which made every other barrier fall way.

For many years, this blog has been where I was able to share what I thought, events in my life that I felt had potential to offer someone somewhere a little something of value. Over the years, many readers have reached out to me anonymously, shared secrets that would never have with someone they knew in real life, thanked me for writing something that touched them very deeply. In a sense, I used my blog as a way to give back what I was given in a time of great crisis. If I had to de-annonymize myself or required anyone who wrote to me to do so, it would break the very foundation on which this can all work. 

Randi Zuckerberg, demonstrates a staggeringly limited comprehension of the human condition when she makes her case of stripping anonymity online.“People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.” In every age, the media of social communication and interaction have lent themselves to a variety of abuse - it is no different now. Anonymity is not an invention or artifact of the internet or social media. To suggest stripping it online and "exposing" people is somehow for the greater good is disingenuous at best. 

Terror Of Anonymity

An essay titled The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz is one of my favorites. Each time I read it, there is something new to ponder over. I have blogged about certain themes he discusses in it. In my most recent reading, I found myself thinking about  Deresiewicz's analysis on how connectivity and creativity converge at the our modern desire for visibility at some level. "The great contemporary terror is anonymity". If you search someone's name online and nothing comes up, it is as if this person does not exist. Whether or not that is terrifying for the person being sought, it is certainty disquieting for the seeker. I find the author's characterization of MySpace particularly easy to relate to :

"The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self. The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden."

As the mother of a tween, I am naturally apprehensive about how J (when her time comes) will choose to communicate who she is to the world at large. It may no longer be MySpace then, but whatever replaces it is unlikely to any less "performative" or invasive .

Mother's Day

Each Mother's Day, J has made me a gift of some kind - usually a hand-made card and some objet d'art to accompany it. In her pre-school days, these productions were supervised and indeed orchestrated by the instructors at daycare - the importance of the day was impressed upon the kids and J never felt like she had quite done justice to the love she felt for me. To that end, I would receive many tokens of affection for a week preceding and days following Mother's Day. 

As much as I cherish them all and feel humbled to be loved as much as I am, I always thought it was particularly wrong to get children to feel like they had to do something to demonstrate their feelings for their mother (and father). J is now eight and a veteran of Mother's Day gift making and gift giving. Even with all that experience she is never sure she is able to translate her feelings well and that leaves her somewhat anxious and disappointed. When I tell her, all I need is a big hug, she is not convinced that is enough to mark the momentous nature of Mother's Day. 

Then there are friends who start to call and leave messages wishing me Happy Mother's Day. Each year, I feel socially awkward because I was not the first to wish. Not every mother I know calls me and I never end up calling them either. It is amazing how much angst a Hallmark holiday can create.

Vestigial Organ

Somewhat lengthy but interesting interview with a self-confessed book pirate.

The parts that made the most sense to me were :

Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale.

Folks like me who depend on the public library or second hand book stores for their reading needs, would be very unlikely to buy a new book at retail or even slightly discounted prices. If it were easy enough we may browse a book on-line but we would not have bought the book even if were not there to read for free. To that extent the argument about each download being a lost sale is not valid just as this book pirate notes.

I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die – I don’t know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to some extent a different animal. In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty “stealing” from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multi-millionaire like King.

This is almost in line with the reasons why open-source software is as popular as it is. People will contribute their time and talents to something for which they  cannot make more than whuffie and admiration. As an consultant, I almost always encourage my clients to consider open-source alternatives when they are getting ready to spend ungodly sums of money on commercial products. A lot of product development companies have come to resemble "vestigial organs" in the world of open-source and not everyone loves them.

Micromanufacturing

Got caught up with Clive Thompson's blog recently and particularly enjoyed reading his thoughts on what he calls the Micromanufacturing Revolution. I have been reading Ellen Ruppel Shell's book Cheap The High Cost of Discount Culture where the author makes an impassioned case against the death spiral created when retailers out-discount each other to everyone's detriment - including that of the penny-pinching consumers'. 

Along with everything else that is nice about the burgeoning micromanfacturing trend, it is also relatively immune to the forces of discounting undress duress. If everything a seller makes is bespoke and the buyer has the both the discernment and the budget to chose it over the deeply discounted, mass-produced offerings of big box stores, chances are that the seller can ask and get what they believe their creation is worth. 

If more and more people become sellers, it might even be possible to trade using a barter system.Micro-financiers could step in to help those who have everything else it takes to get a micro manufacturing business going except for the seed money to begin their venture.

Quick Fixes

Any ideas on fixing pothole problems always grabs my attention. Anyone who has spent time in the 80s and 90s in Kolkata when the metro project was gestating knows a few things about potholes. Tyler Cowen cites the example of a German municipality short on funds, selling the rights to fixing pot-holes to the public in return for the ability to put a text of their choice on the pothole they fixed.

At first that seems like a good idea - except for the visual pollution of unco-ordinated text all over the road. A small price to pay if the alternative was for someone to break a limb or two stumbling into a pothole in the dark not to mention the wear and tear on vehicles and the bone rattling experience of being a aboard one of them. To me, just about anything that fixes a pothole seems like a wonderful idea.

Then I read the comments on the article. By when I was done, I wasn't sure if unfixed potholes were quite as terrible a thing as I had thought. The creative thinking in some of the ideas on how to game the pot-hole fixing scheme was quite amazing.

Connecting

A variation Kevin Bacon game is frequently used in team building, ice breaking exercises. Each person has to find something in common with two others so that the whole group is connected to each other through a set of links. Having played it a few times in the past and once recently, I thought about how it helped me. Where it was a struggle to come up with a thing each in common with two team members, it signaled to me that I would need to make an extra effort to reach out and gain trust or credibility and generally come across as personable.

It would require quite a bit of work to get to the point where we could be having casual banter, non-work conversation around the water-cooler and better still appreciate each other's sense of humor. Where the connections came about quickly and with a number of people, the inter-personal relationships were probably at a better level. Sometimes it has also revealed which connections were not worth the investment of time and effort because the returns would be minimal.

Spotting Food

Foodspotting is a lot like Foursquare except it is only about food. This is different from a restaurant review or recommendation in that "Foodspotting is a visual local guide that lets you find dishes instead of just restaurants. It's powered by Foodspotters, who can share their food photos and expertise while building a rich collection of foods and where to find them."  

My zipcode yielded no results (why am I not surprised) and invited me to be the first Foodspotter in the area. As with any niche social media application, this one has its own vernacular "Noms are for foods you've tried and loved best. But there's a catch: You only get 5 noms to start with and must earn the right to nom more foods after that! The more reputation points you earn, the more noms you're allowed to give out."

As the languages are lost in a globalized world, new dialects such as this are being created.

Greatness Today

Reading this article by Anil Dash on the perks and perils of being on Twitter's A-List, brought to mind lines from  Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and of course the irony in having made that connection itself :

"but be not afraid of greatness: some
are born great, some achieve greatness, and some
have greatness thrust upon 'em."

In the Twitter situation, Dash has had "greatness thrust upon" him but as a blogger, did "achieve greatness" on his own . In that both are true are true for and about him, one might hazard a guess that he may have also been "born great" as in he had always possessed some innate, natural ability that would turn him into something of a celebrity geek in due season.

In Shakespeare's view greatness could come by in one of three ways to an individual - and presumably they were exclusive. But the modern world, challenges that notion. Greatness and fame are related and Francis Bacon considered some questions about the nature of fame:

What are false fames; and what are true fames; and how they may be best discerned; how fames may be sown, and raised; how they may be spread, and multiplied; and how they may be checked, and laid dead.

Extending the Twitter parallel, Biz Stone has probably given us the modern response to Bacon's question " how fames may be sown, and raised; how they may be spread, and multiplied;". It would probably fall to Dash and other like him to determine "how they may be checked" or if they were so disposed "laid dead"

Chat Roulette

Another take on Chat Roulette in this article titled Human Shuffle. The author describes his expectation as : an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind. He found out that there was some distance between expectation and reality : I hadn’t felt this socially trampled since I was an overweight 12-year-old struggling to get through recess without having my shoes mocked. It was total e-visceration. If this was the future of the Internet, then the future of the Internet obviously didn’t include me.

Anderson describes his whole scale rejection by random strangers of all stripes, a slightly better experience when he and a male friend went on Chat Roulette together and even more friendly reception when he went there with his wife. He gets to the heart of what is wrong with this mode of social interaction : The default interaction on ChatRoulette is roughly three seconds long: assessment, micro-interaction, "next." This might seem like yet another outrage of the Internet era—the Twitter-fication of face-to-face interaction. The results can be good or bad but they would always been in tiny chunks.

As with all things online, the goal is always to maximize - the number of friends, followers, interactions - or whatever the currency is for that particular application and experience. Obviously with high quantity comes compromise in quality. In Anderson's words : Eventually, I realized that clicking “next” was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible.

In the world of on-line dating, a lot of people find it impossible to stop looking and settle - there is always the possibility of meeting another person merely by clicking next, who is more perfect. The decision to move on is made a lot quicker online. The investment is very little to begin with so there is not much to lose. The nano-second interactions on Chat Roulette takes uncommitted, superficial social interaction to a new high. It will be interesting to see if this mode of unfiltered, unmoderated interaction catches on in the world of social media. In nature, entropy always increases until it nears maximum value near equilibrium. Maybe it is unnatural to try and limit chaos as in a well-ordered social network and Chat Roulette may be what all things sociall media will ulimately resemble.

A very well written article and definitely worth reading in it's entireity.

Fifteen Minutes

Anyone who is able to create a well-lit watering hole on-line these days can have a kinds of wannabes beg to give their content away for free. The gathering place can be resultant of the creator's celebrity, notoriety, quirkiness - just about any adjective can work as long as the amplitude is high enough. The content offerings will come pouring like like an algal swarm.

There are a few reasons for this phenomenon. Everyone believes they have a shot at fame and even deserve it. If they are not able to gain a direct entry into the hall of fame, the gathering places may be their second best shot - maybe they will get the recipe right and even go viral. This was simply not how people perceived themselves or their place in the world back in the day. Celebrity was a rare thing and the rest were happy to stand by and clap for the select few.

I am hardly the social network hub and despite that I know no less than ten published authors - they run the gamut from fiction, non-fiction, music appreciation, children's' literature, crafts and hobbies, cookbooks to technical books. If having some fan following on MySpace and a CD or two counts for success in the world of music, then I know about the same number of "published", concert giving musicians as well.

A generation or two ago, regular people like me did not count authors and musicians among their friends and acquaintances and that too in such copious numbers. They looked upon such people with some awe and assumed that their worlds were not meant to intersect. The transformation I believe this has a lot to do with the declining standards of what finds it way to the market. With the means of distribution having become so egalitarian and the channels so numerous a lot of sub par material is finding its way out there.

We have all experienced reading a "critically acclaimed" book and wondering how such drivel makes to the top anything list. Those who have the chops and determination may go as far as to think they could do a lot better than that and actually make it happen. So you have a rash of books by unknown authors who vanish without a trace after their debut offering. I don't keep up with current music but have to imagine it would not be a lot different.

One woman of my acquaintance was looking for book on  a niche subject to help her prepare for a certification exam. Frustrated with not finding one, she ended up translating her notes and research into a book that found a willing publisher. Suddenly, she is a published writer of a technical reference book and it may be the last one she writes.Having written a technical book or two is becoming common enough that having that on the resume is no longer guaranteed to make it stand out from the crowd.

In such a fluid enviornment, snatching the spotlight for fifteen minutes from the clamorous (and capable) contenders needs a watering hole and those who meet this huge pent up need stand to make a killing if they know who to snare and how.

Fine Math

Reading this article on the bizarre math for calculating traffic fines in Finland, I could help wondering how such a system might work out in other countries if they could even get to the point of implementing it. It is hard to imagine how the citizenry is not up in arms protesting the inequity - specially those who are hit the hardest by it. As it turns out an overwhelming majority think it is quite okay. When a culture and a people have such an high bar for egalitarianism, it would probably reflect in all areas of civic society making them a great role model for other societies. In considering Finland as a blue print for American society, Robert G. Kaiser writes :

In the end I concluded that Finnish society could not serve as a blueprint for the United States. National differences matter. Ours is a society driven by money, blessed by huge private philanthropy, cursed by endemic corruption and saddled with deep mistrust of government and other public institutions. Finns have none of those attributes.

Nor do they tune in to American individualism. Groupthink seems to be fine with most Finns; con-formity is the norm, risk-taking is avoided — a problem now, when entrepreneurs are so needed. I was bothered by a sense of entitlement among many Finns, especially younger people.

Could not help thinking about India when I read that. We seem to a little bit of both worlds. We are cursed by endemic corruption and saddled with deep mistrust of government and other public institution like America but also have some Finnish traits :  groupthink, conformity and risk aversion. Maybe with a combination like that we can neither be a take no prisoners style capitalistic society and neither can we be egalitarian. 

List Of Ten

List of the past years' best and worst are inevitable around the end of December. When it becomes the business of revisiting the first decade of a new millennium, the lists turn even more ubiquitous and voluminous. Of the many that I have read in the last few weeks, this list of ten from The Atlantic is my favorite.

I don't entirely agree that all of the ideas are American but they most likely found fertile ground in this country to blossom and were definitive of the decade. Numero Uno :  Everything is Free (or It Should Be) is clearly a big theme of the decade and it is not only Gawker Media and Huffington Post  that have "found fortunes in aggregating and repackaging free news".

Further afield from the likes of Gawker and HuffPost, are rag-pickers of all stripes making a living  from ferreting out content from free on-line sources that they can rehash, recycle, repackage and sell as compilations web or print. Since a book in print still enjoys cachet with folks who write, those with the marketing smarts and business savvy are able to turn this to their advantage. In return for credit to the author (a bio, a permalink and a token of appreciation), they assume the rights to what they will do with the content. The author (or garbage generator to keep the narrative in synch with rag-pickers) may find this a fair trade (or not) depending on the reach and size of their on-line audience.

If only two people including their mother had read a piece of writing now on its way to  being in a book, they figure it's not such a terrible deal. The rag-picker has a vested interest in making that book sell and for their trouble, they get to keep most if not all of the proceeds.There is certainly a lot of effort that must go into the selection process given the sheer volume of content that is out there so it can be argued they are only being compensated for their work.  

The right to free that is increasingly becoming implicit can cut both ways depending on which side of the equation you find yourself in and sometimes it is impossible to be certain of the side or to know if you are winning or losing in the deal.

Featured Loser

I found this story about Facebook monitoring users with low or no wall activity and prompting their friends to write on their wall, somewhat disturbing. I have a FB account for my blog but not one for my real self. I find the constant connection and interaction with hundreds of friends and acquaintances very suffocating. If my real self did have FB profile, it would probably not see much wall or any activity for that matter. One sided communication can last only so long - after a while folks would simply stop poking me and writing on my wall. With that, I would be a prime candidate for FB's Featured Loser program.

FB assumes that a person's social standing is directly proportional to the volume of activity on their wall. What if the person is on FB simply because everyone else in their social circle is but they are not into social networking at all. Making them feel like a loser is not likely to get them excited about a medium they are lukewarm about to begin with. Upping activity and usage stats is all fine and dandy but this is probably not the smartest way to go about the job.

Interactions

Love the concept of Ideapaint - the ability to make turn any surface into a dry erase board. For parents with toddlers who at the age when the want to draw and color ever anything their hands can reach, this would be such a blessing. There is almost a throwback quality to this very modern product. Like our ancestors who drew on the walls of their caves, we could be recording our lives on the large expanses of painted white-board in our homes, offices and schools. We might find ourselves interacting with family, classmates and co-workers in completely novel and different ways.

While on the topic of new ways of interacting, Foursquare comes to mind. Spending some time watching the messages scroll down the screen is a fascinating experience. The flurry of activity is overwhelming. The creators of the site ask users to think of Foursquare as an "urban mix tape". Make your own, share it with friends and strangers in your neighborhood. That is just the beginning you find out as you read the Learn More section. This is hyper-local interaction on steroids and a lot like Twitter you either get it and want in or don't and sit out.

Ideapaint and Foursquare - two very interesting and different takes on urban interaction.

Universal Authorship

Seed Magazine has this article on society moving from universal readership to universal authorship and what that may mean. One statistic the authors uses to makes their case is that by 2013, 100% of the world's population with will authors in some kind of media. At first glance that seems like too much too soon. There are countless people out there today who have access to every form on-line publishing, are perfectly capable of publishing content should they want to but are not authors. They just don't care to publish their ideas and opinions to the world - it is not important or interesting to them.

There is no reason why this kind of person in the next four years will suddenly morph into an author. Likewise, the legions of illiterates in the world will not likely become Twitter savvy in short order. That said, it the statistic is confusing. The other points the article makes are good ones - the degree of influence and the pace of social change and revolution even that burgeoning number of published authors will bring are definitely phenomena to watch for.

Internet And Libraries

The Internet has competed for my woefully few reading-for-pleasure hours - ever since I have had it around 24/7. Before that books had my undivided attention. That said, I am able to appreciate Ray Bradbury's tirade against the internet. He has the following to say about it :

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

Distracting, unreal and ether-based - absolutely but meaningless is perhaps a little too harsh an indictment. Bradbury loves libraries and is fighting to keep them around and well-funded - needless to say this is the right thing to do. If you do have the good fortune to have unlimited access to libraries, the internet may not been a life-saver but in a poorer, more backward country where libraries are a luxury, access to the web would be what it takes to bring the citizenry from figurative darkness to light. It can make the difference between making it across the digital divide or being left behind in technology prehistory. That is not meaningless.

Even if that were an over-statement given the not so erudite ways the medium is put to use by those who stand to benefit the most from it, the power of the internet is undeniable.

Mapping The Sins

It's hard to tell from these maps exactly what is going on in terms of the seven deadly sins in your neck of the woods in America (assuming that you agree with the operational definitions and the method of measuring each) but it is an interesting study all the same. Apparently, where I live there is a bit of lust and pride going on but everything else is just about average.

I guess that must be a good thing. It would be interesting to see what if any correlation existed between sins the big issues facing folks these days - unemployment, foreclosures, out of control health care costs and the like . A material disincentive to sin may work as a much better deterrent than simple censure or even punishment.

Teen Relationships

Some years ago, after the book Rainbow Party was published, it fell to disgrace because the material was a little too sensationalist to have credibility - at least in the opinion of its critics. Once again the issue of oral sex becoming commonplace for pre-teens and teens in America, is making news and a documentary. Until parents start to become ostriches with heads buried in the sands of denial, this story will likely do its rounds, get discussed and commented on.

Film-maker Sharlene Azam hits the nail on its head when she traces back the behavior of these pretty girls from affluent backgrounds who by their own admission have had wonderful childhoods. In short, there is no reason for them to engage in casual prostitution. She believes that many of them have been hurt and in love and do what they do to protect themselves from bing hurt again.

Azam said she thinks the "no strings attached" romances could be a defense mechanism against a greater disappointment.

"A lot of girls are disappointed in love," she said. "And I think they believe they can hook up the way guys do and not care.

"But unfortunately, they do care."

Claire Shipman advises parents to be constantly engaged in the lives of their children to prevent them from engaging in such activities. That and open communication, rules and boundaries says Shipman should do the trick. While she is right on the importance of all of the above, it would not be enough to deter a young girl who has been hurt and wounded deeply enough to consider doing whatever it takes to protect herself.

The answer may be in getting girls to value themselves very highly and recognize that there are many other accomplishments in life that are worth pursuing besides being in a relationship - specially one that expects sexual favors to sustain. Needless to say, positive and empowering female role models are very important in the lives of young girls.

A sense of purpose, a healthy self-esteem and a generous dash of ambition can act as effective deterrents against such reckless behavior. A girl who is driven to achieve and excel is less likely to need validation from a boy. She is likely to get a lot of male attention even without seeking it because she exudes so much charm and confidence. That would do enough to boost her confidence as a desirable woman. Her goal should not be to be the one who is most willing to offer sexual favors to have boyfriend, instead she be so far above the fray that she would never need to settle for anything short of a deeply loving and respectful relationship.

Boys Left Behind

While the author does not explain why the current education system is not serving boys well (if at all), the numbers she presents are concerning. She argues that No Child Left Behind equals All Boys Left Behind. This WSJ article on the same topic has some insights into why this may be happening :

The lifestyles and habits that worked so well for men in more dangerous times may not be working so well for them in the information age. In every age from the caves right on through the second World War, it worked for men to take big risks, have short attention spans and be driven by ego. These days, those things are more likely to get in the way of doing a good job. Hunting wild boar and hunting through Wikipedia require a different set of skills.

That makes a great deal of sense in a workplace situation and can possibly be tied to a the process of learning even at the grade school level. Taking big-risks, short attention spans and being driven by ego don't seem to be the most valuable characteristics for success there either. The challenge for educators and parents must then be how to instruct boys in a way that is compatible with their natural traits in a world that appears not have much use for them.