I just read the section of Solove’s The Digital Person about the records that the US government holds on its citizens and the privacy problems that arise from the fact that so many of them are public.

Of course the meaning of “public” changes when rather than seek out a particular piece of information from a government office you need only go to the Internet and a do a search that will turn up lots of aggregated data on a particular person. This allows for easy speculative searching. It also violates the principles established by the courts that data is publicly available where it is not just sought for idle curiosity or to cause scandal.

Also check out my favourites the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s article Is Your Printer Spying on You?. They have lists of what printers do and don’t print tracking dots.

I also read a New York Times article called “As Surveillance Cameras Peer, Some Wonder if They Also Pry” by David M. Halbfinger. This is from 1998, and discusses the proliferation of security, traffic, and weather cameras and the lack of control over how they were used or where they were placed.

I’ve noticed that people here seem to think of London as the example of the terrible things that happen if you allow security cameras everywhere. It’s kind of interesting, because it doesn’t seem as contentious there as here. Though you do hear people speaking against surveillance cameras in the UK from time to time.

I’m working on a project with some others at ITP, it’s a platform for showing and talking about video and other time-based media. The idea is to start what we hope will be an ongoing conversation about and using video, photos, pictures, text, animations, interactive applets.

We’re going to do curated shows too – the first is about Video Poem. It’s to be short 30-second pieces, done with either an in-camera edit or made on a small pocket-sized camera.

The call for submission and very silly promo video is here: http://videoblast.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/

This is the video I made for Video for New Media. It’s about choices and advertising and eating cake.

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“Social Capital” – Mark K. Smith
I hate the phrase Social Capital – it’s like Human Capital. I remember Padraig Cullinane refusing to call his EU Presidency Conference “Human Capital” rather than Human Resources back in the Enterprise, Trade and Employment days. I’m with him, even more so with Social Capital – reducing the goodwill that exists between humans to some kind of financial transaction doesn’t help with understanding altruism or people in social contexts any better, but forces it into an inappropriate metaphor.

It’s a very scientistic, bean-counting worldview that comes up with that kind of phrase. To be fair, this article isn’t wholly supportive of the phrase, but uses it due to it’s being the current term. That makes sense in many ways, but when a phrase is so offensive instructively, aesthetically, and morally I think it should be put to rest. Also there are some classic examples of the bleeding obvious in this article.

“Science” has discovered that people like it when other people are nice to them. Who’d've thunk it?

“Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat” – Morningstar, Chip and Randall Farmer
This article totally rules. It’s all about these guys who made a cyberspace environment in the 80s using Commodore 64s and some proprietary pre-Internet network. They built this world where people could basically do whatever they want. They realised that the thing that made “cyberspace” was the social connections, not the technology. The quality of the experience is about human interaction, not interaction with computer graphics. Fantastic.

“Autistic Social Software” – danah boyd
Somebody told me this article was lame, but I have to disagree with them. I think Boyd makes a good argument – too much of social software and Internet applications in general is skewed towards the early adopting, continuous partial attention jockeying, neophile, technogeek.

A mode of behaviour and system of values has developed and is accelerating that doesn’t allow for anything to settle, or be built upon, or find its niche, but is a constant search for the next new thing to replace the previous new thing which wasn’t even finished, or useful in any way, in the first place. I can’t see any room for genuine value, real human connection, or life-enhancing technology in a world where it only matters that something is new and exciting and not whether the idea has any substance to it or is worth exploring.

I think she’s right that a society or culture that glorifies newness, lack of attention, constant rapid change, and finding things first is an impoverished one. What are we looking for? How should we connect to one another? What technologies will help us do it right?

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