Musings & Meanderings

It is rare for me to sit still for a video presentation.

Anil Dash compelled me not just with Dan Pink’s drawing power, but with a connection to me personally when he told me that his tastes also ran to faster speeds, but that this presentation was nevertheless worth the time.

Anil further told me why he took the time… “far more impressively, [Dan Pink] created his own presentation in the format, and it’s a smart and thoughtful look at the emotional expressiveness of signage in public spaces.”

My first takeaway was on the title, ‘Emotionally Intelligent Signage’. I think that this describes the method or process used by the sign writers very effectively, especially for the signs that address a common anxiety. The signs which give me a reason, though, such as the ‘keep off the grass’ sign or the ‘hand dryer’ sign, go a lot further to invite response and involvement from the reader.

When I’m reading those signs, I’m being asked to think, consider, and participate, to make a conscious decision by getting involved rather than just reacting. It’s similar to my POW acronym on great blogging. The power of why …why I should care.

Communicators have been using emotional triggers for as long as we’ve had emotions, but asking me to make a conscious decision to care is a lot braver than haranguing me about why I should or trying to trigger it reflexively. It tells me two things: that you have a good reason to be asking and that you respect me enough to ask for my involvement.

Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein’s Pecha Kucha form is a delightful example of marrying discipline to creative energy, and considering it led me to my second takeaway.

I often go on about integrating different points of view and expanding horizons to embrace various perspectives. Here’s an illustration.

Reverse these…

‘All form and no substance.’
‘Form follows substance.’
‘If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing well.’

…and then put the results beside the originals, like an equation that expands their meaning. This is how I see Pecha Kucha.

What are your takeaways?

The value of free is in access to knowledge.

Knowledge is gained by learning. Learning is something we actively choose to do and is distinct from education. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have a great teacher or two along the way, and this can be a family member or mentor as often as a teacher in a scholastic setting.

The most important components of the freedom we enjoy in the modern western world are free access to information, the freedom to share it, and the freedom to use it. Freedom of information isn’t a property right. Property right is a right to one’s own tangible or intangible human product or creation, not to information.

Should all information be free to everyone? Of course not. Freedom includes a right to privacy, and we should (imo) value our personal information more highly than we generally do. The collection, and also analysis, of highly specialized information by experts is performed as a paid service for whatever their market will bear, and is a human work product. Artistic and creative works are the same kind of product. Each of us also has the right to give our time and our work product to others, including to the society as a whole, where ownership vests in the public trust. If an artist creates a work for the public trust, then no individual has the right to charge for and thereby deny access to it. Anyone, however, is free to study it, learn from it, take inspiration from it, and, together with all the other information they have collected and used as a basis for their knowledge, create something new which they are then free to either donate to the public trust or to own. We, individuals and businesses alike, usually benefit most by doing both.

On the important issue of net neutrality, which most people have never even heard of, we would do well to promote a better understanding of rights.

Free press advocates and free enterprise advocates often have a way of settling on opposite ends of a political spectrum. In my experience, this is usually a construct based on agendas and motivations which most commonly serve to limit freedom. The agendas are usually about control of information (censorship), and the motivations about power or money (or both). Free is a powerful word.

Even if we could take in all the free information available, we would not necessarily become knowledgeable. The value of free information resides not in the information itself, but in what we do with it.

Value is created in the propositions we develop and make to ourselves and to one another, human to human. Every one of us initiating interaction with others is making propositions all the time, often without even seeing them as such. Every time we respond (or don’t) to one another, we are choosing from a wider spectrum of responses than we usually realize. Rarely do we stop and take time to consider that full spectrum, but if we did, we’d be amazed at how many opportunities to create, innovate, and build things are at our disposal all the time.

Free in computers and on the internet can be viewed in as many ways as there are individual perspectives: as a valuable gift or a shared treasure, as a windfall, as getting lucky or getting away with something, as a marketing tool, as stupidity, as a lure, as a trap.

All this free noise sometimes distracts us from what makes freedom valuable. It isn’t the raw information that has value in itself. It’s what we learn from it and what we do with it, the conclusions we draw, the theories we develop and prove, and the propositions we develop and make, that enable us to create value for ourselves and others.

I’ve learned enough about the origins and early days of the internet, read enough about the principles of a free internet, to make me a firm believer in and supporter of open source. The difficulty, of course, is finding time to learn to use it.

As long as the internet remains free, it provides a means of communication, connection and enablement of free speech as well as free enterprise. As long as the majority of its users are free individuals, moreover, they will have the ability to use their freedom to protect it. In the early days of the net, and even fairly recently, this was understood and appreciated by most people who spent time online, but is that still the case?

Of the billion people online today, what percentage knows how to build and operate all the tools they’re using? 2%? 5%? That’s high, but the exact number isn’t important. What is important is that for the overwhelming majority, its ability to understand and become fully empowered by this medium is severely limited.

It is mostly the creations of profit driven corporations that have enabled the size of this population, and, as far as I can see, it is their agendas which continue to drive both adoption by users and most new development.

This is very much in the usual tradition of all development in modern history, industrial and technological, for it takes highly knowledgeable specialists to create new marvels of engineering or technology, and those specialists, by their nature, are employed by the highest bidders, who are invariably private and government interests. The resources of these large entities enable them to pay the largest salaries to brilliant programmers and developers. What is most likely to be developed, therefore, will not enable the individual or benefit society specifically, except through by-products, and, perhaps, or perhaps not, in terms of long term change.

Granted, there are as many new small communities, including not-for-profit, being built daily as there are social media apps, but the majority of these are created on specialized and limited platforms created by small entrepreneurial businesses for that purpose alone. Citizens for Clean Water in XXX City would exist whether they had an internet based community portal or not.

There is a fair sized contingent of socially responsible developers who contribute online tools for individuals and communities, and it has become the norm to offer a basic free version together with paid versions accompanied by more advanced features. These developers are running small business, which may or may not be profitable, but they are essentially a more sophisticated version of the website developer who built a portal for your small chain of local stores, and most are producing a limited community version of a narrow slice of enterprise software without a commerce component.

For any non-tech community or group of any size and complexity, however, the options to develop organically online are almost non-existent. This, I fear, is a factor which marginalizes the free internet to the extent that it may eventually exist only on the fringes, with the mainstream belonging to large powerful entities.

Perversely, it seems that the very developers who pay the most attention to their targeted consumers adhere to the principle that internet use should be mindless and painless, and as a result are directly contributing to disenfranchising the vast majority. We should be learning what we can do and invent ourselves here rather than waiting to be entertained and served, but even those of us actively desiring these opportunities find more obstacles than options to the pursuit of this desire.

eBay, in its early days and before it became a ‘big business’, was such an opportunity to a limited extent. Millions of ordinary, non-tech people joined in, bringing to the ongoing event a kaleidoscope of interests and knowledge, connecting as sellers and collectors, forming into natural communities, creating sole proprietor businesses, and much more. Many gained some technical knowledge, motivated by their new online activities. eBay was originally a platform, not a programming platform such as .net, but a human platform where not just the content but some of the activities were as much defined by individuals and groups as by the developers of the site, who followed as much as they led.

What online site is doing that today? Blogging platforms? Social media sites? The ‘platforms’ for people and their chosen activities are becoming so sophisticated as developers continually try to offer a better targeted product that few users will ever do more than use the basic tools initially provided. This reality is an argument for open source in itself, except that the complexity of building anything to meet and advance current uses and expectations is and will remain too big of a learning curve away from the vast majority of users.

There are any number of projects which could truly enable the majority of users more fully, but there aren’t any that I’m aware of which are a human platform (such as eBay was) as well as a programming platform, where the form and function is being developed in tandem with user activity. Releasing a social app, early and often, isn’t the same thing. The full human platform requires a range of human activity that includes wide varieties of both social and commercial enablement for individuals and groups. Personal and societal balance requires both. We all have to make a living as well as dream, play, and socialize, and we further become a rich and thriving society by contributing to the public trust as well as by taking responsibility for our economic roles.

Can such human platforms really be built? Only if tech and non-tech communities collaborate.

Can that happen? What say you?

—–
later…
Open Peer-to-Peer Design quoting Linus Torvalds:
“I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.”

One of this week’s high points for me was visiting Tara Hunt’s weblog ::HorsePigCow::. Tara is a fellow Canadian, who is now in San Francisco. My loss, not to have met her before she left Toronto.

Tara is writing on the community roles we play. In her post titled Archetypes in Communities - The Caretaker, she profiles her own Jungian personality type, and refers to the ways in which interaction between people in different roles is an architectural component of healthy communities (my words).

I’ve valued Jung’s theories highly since discovering his work as an adolescent. This discovery was occasioned by reading that Carl Jung collected case studies of children who saw mandalas. I also sought out the definitions of mandala and learned that I had been one of the children who saw them.

In her second post the next day, Tara reviewed a primary list of archetypes, asking What’s Your Archetype?. Although I do agree that these personality types are more behavioral models than true archetypes, the work that Tara is doing in studying our roles in communities is most welcome.

Visit her post to find the url of a site where you can take a Myers-Briggs typology test to determine your personality type. If this sort of test interests you, check out the Personal DNA link in the sidebar here as well. Most tests such as these are far too short and standardized to give an accurate in-depth representation, so using a variety, and reading further about the various theories is the best practice. Understanding ourselves better is usually beneficial to all our relationships and interactions in life, too.

The understanding of communities, and the complex dynamics of people in them, is (imo) one of the essential steps toward creating online resources that address needs and desires we all have that go beyond personal gratification, that connect us to one another on more than a superficial level. I can also easily imagine a myriad of other online applications for more of this kind of mapping.

Go Tara.

The title isn’t a mistake. You are reading Vera’s weblog, and I still hold the same views about irresponsible and malicious behavior being encouraged and enabled by anonymity online.

The important word there is irresponsible, the opposite of responsible.

I’ve long understood the value of anonymity in many specific circumstances, but that understanding was fairly fragmented until now, because I did not relate to anonymity personally. This was, ironically, despite the fact that I guard my privacy fiercely, and even my personal support of causes is done privately or anonymously. I also have a healthy respect for the potential power of machines (which I’ve been using since 1982-3) in certain hands. People wiser and more experienced than I about the internet, however, support anonymity strongly, and therefore I have continued listening harder than ever to understand why.

Matt’s post on Moderating Internet Forums handed me a final key to seeing the whole picture. Thank you Matt. You have my respect and loyalty. Your voice on the subject of freedom has resonated with me since I first started reading here, and your occasional post on the importance of anonymity was also instrumental on getting me to ‘listen’ even harder.

Anonymity online is not about my identity, about whether I go by Vera Bass or one of my handles. Yes, I have handles …in communities I’ve been part of over the years… where people get to know each other over time and many of us also sign our real names in forum posts, exchange email, etc.

Anonymity protects my privacy and my freedom. This is related not to whether I choose, as I do, to speak openly and stand by my words, it is related to my abilities to protect the rights and privacy of my family and myself.

Last fall, when I first started blogging, I wrote posts, and participated in related conversations as well, protesting the division of the web into an either or experience. My posts such as Them and Us, followed by UsThems, insisted on the viability of a free society where commerce and other pursuits could co-exist naturally, based on mutual respect. Over the past year, and during my prolonged absence, the growth in ‘free’ web services, such as social sites and personalized search engines, has increased dramatically (not surprising given the sale of MySpace and then Youtube more or less a year ago).

Over the same period, the proliferation of these companies has increased the tracking and information gathering on our activities to the point where a blog or web site with ads and other services cycles through dozens of trackers before loading.

Unless we re-claim the permission we have become accustomed to granting tacitly, no company, from Google to Facebook, has any incentive beyond public relations to grant us participation and choice in the information collection processes. When public protest against current practices grows a little too loud, it is typically silenced with a token concession that is usually mostly meaningless. There is no sign so far that initatives such as open ID can gain the massive adoption that would be required to stem this tide.

On Jeff’s post titled What’s Worse Than Crashing?, about how the insidious can be worse than the blatant, I commented that the answer lies in education. Good habits and practices are taught to us by the people around us who care, the same way that I admonished incessantly every one of my family members when they first started using computers, until they formed basic habits, such as saving, backing up, etc. I have always been meticulous about not keeping anything truly critical on the machine I use to surf and blog. I’m a heartless consumer of trees, relying on paper via fax machines and hard records for many highly sensitive things.

There are people with ill-intent, both online and off, although, as my late and much-loved mother-in-law used to say, in her Brooklyn accent and with a half-smile and a cute shrug, “Whaddaya gonna do? …things are tough all over.”. I can’t personally do much about the behavior of predators beyond the scope of my vision, but I can do plenty about my own behavior and about contributing to the education and awareness of those around me.

Now that I finally comprehend anonymity used, not to hide behind, but as an instrument of freedom, and especially free speech, many of the issues of online behavior that were lumped in discrete categories such as Code of Conduct, Policies, etc. are coalescing for me perfectly as citizen rights in a free society.

—–
August 31, 2007

Blogger Blog post on malware in Blogger includes links to two sites on computer safety:
The University of Pennsylvania’s Information Security portal.
US-CERT safety tips.

…even if you don’t personally need to learn more about computer safety, you may have family and friends who could benefit from reading all the pages on these sites. Of course you may have to bribe reward them.

—–
August 20/06:
Bringing scambaiter SnosKred’s Six Part Internet Safety Primer up out of the comment dungeon.