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al_robertson

Listed below are comments made by al_robertson between Monday, 13th July 2009 and Thursday, 30th July 2009.

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Piracy - what's your line? 11:55am on 30 Jul 2009 Hmm, fascinating (and rather concise, I thought!). And agreed, all this did develop more into a set of thoughts about privacy. Anyway -

>> Uploaded picture to porn girl, Aleks' porn pic, Sir Alan

Something fascinating here about different levels of anonymity / cultural presence on the part of the original person, which for me means that each appropriation is operating in a different way, and thus is at a different level of fair game-ness.

In the case of the porn girl, the image is entirely anonymous; the issue is a purely personal one, and for me has both a valid ethical and commercial basis. Ethically, an image of her has been appropriated for sexually orientated purposes she no doubt doesn't approve of, and (had she had the chance) would not have given permission for; definite bad.

Economically, the image-snatcher is making money from someone else's creative work, and not reimbursing them for it; had they used the image on (say) an entirely healthy and positive DVD of photography tips, the economic crime would still be the same. The question here - how to police this kind of thing? Something like clear Creative Commons (or equivalent) marking of all web content would seem to be a step in the right direction, but how do you enforce?

Secondly, Aleks and Sir Alan. They're different from the young girl, in that both have deliberately created a professional media presence for themselves. She's out there because the web's a handy way of sharing content; they're out there because it's their job to be out there, which for me changes the way that any appropriation of their images should be judged.

My assumption is that Aleks dealt with her transgressor in a 'that's regrettable but inevitable' kind of way; I suspect he's the digital version of the kind of fruitbat that would previously have sent in long, mad missives scrawled in crayon on toilet paper, and who's unavoidable once your public profile achieves a certain kind of critical mass.

Of course, this kind of appropriation is wrong; but, for me at any rate, it's less wrong than the one above, because it's a non-commercial and difficult to avoid by-product of a process of being in the public eye that is for the most part positive and productive. I hope also that it was easily dealt with; taken down by the relevant image sharing site, etc.

And then there's Sir Alan. Yup, I have seen that - and, rather than being an appropriation of something personal, it seems to me to be a witty counterblast to the way he's presented in the programme. Rather than being a personal attack on Alan, or a mad re-use of his image, it's a deliberate critique of a particular media construct rather than of Sir Alan himself, based on footage designed to be seen and consumed by a wide public. Fair use in action!

So, given the above, and trying to wander back to the theme of all this, I'd say only the first one qualifies as a true case of piracy. The other two are more about privacy, and about a complex set of negotiations between personal privacy, the demands of having a career or career component that is (more or less) lived out in public, and differences between fruitbat and more considered responses to that kind of public presence.

All this has set me thinking about something quite interesting too - we still don't know what a fully mature (ie complete life spanning) web presence will look like, and we probably won't for another 50 or 60 years or so.

One fascinating question is what kind of search tools will evolve to help people root through the data mass (there'll be an awful lot of stuff!) - for example, will there be GoogleProfessional that only pulls out all your speeches, conference attendances, CVs, etc, and GoogleHome that only gets your baby pics, drunk party mayhem, and last year's camping trip? And will part of our curating job be to make sure that there's a clear divide between the two, to make it easy for people to look in the right places for the right info? Perhaps the lack of online privacy we're experiencing now will lead to development of more clearly defined lifelong open / friends only / family only areas of web presence for each of us?

Yup, I saw vanboy74 too - fascinating to think that googling could be an active handicap to good interviewing!
revolution round-up: week one 11:08am on 28 Jul 2009 Hmm, power on the web consumer examples - Ben & Jerry's crowdsourcing new ice cream flavours, 'Bring back Wispa' campaign, airline passengers bill of rights (written up in the Clay Shirky book)...
Piracy - what's your line? 10:43am on 28 Jul 2009 Hmm, fascinating. Ive been thinking quite a lot lately about how the web breaks the illusion of control, but very much in marketing terms. This broadens that out. Over and above ease of reproducibility, I wonder if part of whats going on is that the web allows something previously hidden to be seen; the lack of control we have over how others perceive us.

So, taking Aleks porn mashup image as an example (sorry Aleks!) historically, someone so disposed might have looked at an Aleks byline photo and *admired* it, but any images that that *admiration* created could not have left their imagination. Now, they can recontextualise the byline pic and create a shareable artefact, one that escapes their mind and heads out into the world. A reductive act of image appropriation, driven by an extremely one-dimensional view of Aleks-ness, has moved from being an entirely private act to becoming a potentially very public one.

Whats exposed is our inability to control beyond a certain point the way that the world perceives each of us, and uses that perception for its own ends. Interesting to think about that in terms of the job interview thing mentioned elsewhere, too. Historically, thats been a locus of deep control, a performance combining CV, dress, portfolio, responses to questions, etc, designed to present a very specific view of the candidate.

But to some extent that control is an illusion; I tend to assume that most interviewees are broadly capable of doing the job theyre up for, and that the real questions that the interview answers are more subjective ones. Could I sit next to this person 8 hours a day, 47 weeks a year? Theyve got the technical chops, but does their work style suit mine / ours? Is their personality a good fit for our company culture? Etc.

None of these are questions that an interviewee can constructively control the answer to. If they manage to take the interviewer in on this level, chances are theyve created a more or less fictionalised version of themselves that will be rapidly exposed once they start work in a given company or, if not exposed, that will cause them considerable psychological effort and pain to successfully maintain.

This too is a loss of control; no matter how we try to present ourselves, we cant escape from what we are. Beyond a certain point, we have to be passive before our selves, and let others judged us based on years of accreted self-ness, rather than the particular needs of a given moment. The web externalises that kind of judgement by making the years of self-ness easier to access, and making it clear that each of us is judged as much on our deep, accreted selves as on our momentary, controlled presentation of convenient aspects of those selves.

Having said that, cant help feeling that editing is key; and in particular that new social norms will develop to support and encourage editorial behaviour on behalf of people viewing us. Now, we automatically look away from certain intimate events that take place in public (a couple kissing, a mother breastfeeding her baby, etc) I wonder if well start to look away from more personal online content in the same way?

I wonder also to what extent this is a generational issue? For the moment, the younger you are, the more online content youre likely to have about yourself and that content will be mostly you getting drunk at parties etc, because thats what you do. I wonder what more mature standard internet footprints will begin to look like? And I wonder also how the way people engage with that content when everyone has a combination of more personal and more public stuff online, so senior interviewer and junior interviewee can google each other and get the same kind of mix of the embarrassing and the impressive?

Which ramble doesnt really answer the question about what would make me uncomfortable online! As for that, Im not sure. Id be really annoyed about someone using my unadulterated work for economic gain without acknowledging and rewarding me appropriately, but thats more of a passing off / theft issue than a privacy one; if someone used an image of me or similar in the service of a whacky private obsession, Id take appropriate steps to try and stop them, but I hope that people would put it in the context of the rest of my web presence, and see it as more of a comment on the oddness of the perpetrator than on me or my potential endorsement of them.

So perhaps the best way to guard against that is a dense, consistent online presence, that makes it clear that you're a certain kind of person, and that the appropriated image is an aberration?

Oh, and surely the finest ever example of image appropriation Bert meets Bin Laden at a Protest Downtown!
the web is... too good for us? 10:47pm on 13 Jul 2009 >> Everything was good for a while. People talked about the levelling ground of the web, where class, gender, race and physical ability didn't matter, where everyone could be self-actualised, where society could transcend the physical, graduating into the cerebral. We didn't need to be constrained by our corporeal inequalities anymore: society would advance online in a whole new and wonderful way. All our needs would be met through this technology. The kernel of revolution was born, as it had been many times before.

Now, with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, we know these crazy dreams belonged to the digital utopians.

Hmm rhetorically speaking, Im quite suspicious of the way this paragraph brings together two different idea sets, and then uses one to denigrate the other.

It seems to begin by defining one of the webs key and authentically novel properties the way that it creates a geography of interest, and allows people to set the terms on which they engage with others within that geography.

Then, it equates that with the nuttier promises of transcendent digital utopians, who created a fundamentally Gnostic myth structure within which the spiritual purity of discorporate online life would break the muddy material negatives of meatspace.

By making them equivalent, its able to trash both equally. Personally, I think the digital Gnostics deserve the trashing; but to use them as a stick with which to beat the webs broader hierarchy breaking / distance removing / relationship enabling qualities seems (to me, at least) in this context a bit conservative.

Im intrigued also that you read the establishment of groups and hierarchies as a kind of fall, and that that hierarchy-creating fall problematises the free sharing of data.

Peoples tribal self-organization might lead to all kind of them-and-us based negatives, but it also leads to the creation of deep mutual connections that help create clearly defined, very substantial knowledge bases. Those knowledge bases can help people learn more about, and make far better use of, open data than would otherwise be the case.

(eg anything from the development of Linux over the last fifteen years or so, to the way that obsessive fans get together to decode programs like Lost online, or communities that help people create machinima, creative stuff like magnificent EVE Online dramas Clear Skies 1 & 2, new Star Trek episodes, solutions to big corporate scientific / R&D problems, etc)

Of course, hierarchy persists within these groups but (at best) these are hierarchies based on engagement and contribution ie ones whose terms are controlled by the user groups themselves, rather than externally imposed, and which support and encourage real and substantial productivity within each group, rather than maintenance of a less productive status quo.

Surely this is an ideal context within which to release data? One where highly knowledgeable people are highly motivated to apply their abilities to data, do interesting things to it, and share the fruits of that action with anyone else whos similarly obsessed?

Oh, and Im fascinated by the corporate control thing and agree that its really central to how the webs developing but I think its part of a broader argument about who controls the architecture of our lives, whether on- or off-line, and to what extent were willing to let our personal interests be merged with / overwritten by commercial interests in general.

The webs a lightning rod for all this because it can be so obvious there and a lightning rod for other key modernity issue as well looking forward to seeing how youre going to bring this kind of wider context into the programs, and use the web as a way of talking about modernity in general.

And finally, because the BBC blogging set up doesnt seem to let me link back out to me-ness (which is a bit surprising, as for me one of the points of blog comments has always been to lead to interesting new people who are obsessing about whatever the blog post's about), I ramble even more about all this sort of thing here (media and marketing), here (fiction, poetry and music) and here (Twitter). Apologies for the self-plugging, but alas there doesnt seem to be a way to do it more subtly / traditionally!

Anyway, great event on Friday, good to say hi there, and looking forward to seeing where all this leads.

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