Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll

Now here’s an interesting idea. Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll, by Emily Nussbaum, is the lead article in New York Magazine (Feb. 12, 2007 issue) and it’s about the new generation gap between our students and us. They have no problems smearing themselves all over the web, we worry about our privacy.

More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.”

We worry about how their life stories (and pictures of them on Facebook drinking) will be misused. They assume people will understand the context and understand them better. Perhaps if everyone is doing it they will be private in the crowd. Or they will realize their parents and profs are getting into Facebook and move off.

The Exchange Online

Robert Townsend has a Review of the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure Report in the The Exchange Online of the Association of American Universtiy Presses. He is critical of the report, arguing,

To make its case, the commission simply ignores skeptics who ask whether the rush to mass digitization could hurt reading and scholarship, and whether there might be other casualties on this road to progress. This offers a rather narrow view of the “grand challenges” facing the humanities and social sciences, and limits the array of problems that might be remedied by a developed cyberinfrastructure. This seems part of a larger rhetorical strategy in the report, however, which positions potential problems and the costs of digitization as external to its vision of technological progress—limiting them to social, political, or financial failures that can be assigned to publishers and “conservative” academics.

He rightly points to the ongoing costs of maintaining digital projects, “Like Jacob Marley‚Äôs chains, link-by-link we forge these digital burdens that we can never seem to lay down.” (Great image.) He is worried about the place of non-profit publisher who might get left behind if there is massive investment in cyberinfrastructure that goes to the universities who then cut out the publishers. I’m tempted to say that this is an old refrain, but that doesn’t make the issue go away. Frankly I doubt cyberinfrastructure investment will endanger quality publishers, but it may change their relationship with the academy. More importantly I think the Report (see previous blog entry) was making the case for investment in humanities and arts cyberinfrastructure so we can do our research, including research around digital publications.

YouTube: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us is a great short (4.3 minutes) video on digital text, hypertext and XML. It makes the point about how XML and tagging enrich text with knowledge that can be manipulated in innovative ways. The video does this by showing the editing of text where what is typed is the message and demonstrates the message. This is by Michael Wesch, a Cultural Anthropologist at Kansas State. See the Digital Ethnography group blog his is part of.

Thanks to Terry for this.

Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers

Image of Ada CoverAda: The Enchantress of Numbers is a biography of and selection of Ada’s lettes by Betty Alexandra Toole (Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1998). The work is, as the author writes in the Acknowledgements, “the result of more than twenty years of addiction to Ada.” (page ix) This addiction shows itself in, for example, Toole’s e-mail, “adatoole at well dot com”. Toole seems concerned to protect Ada from claims that she was a drug addict and addicted gambler, though she doesn’t so much argue the case as unleash it. The paperback version (and hardback) is published by Strawberry Press: “Strawberry Press publishes reference books for the succulent world …” and much is made of the cover designer, Leah Schwartz (whose book, Leah Schwartz, the life of a woman who managed to keep painting was also published by Strawberry Press.) I’m not sure I would keep painting covers like the one for Ada.

Despite the strange presence of the author/editor and cover designer, the book nicely gathers Ada’s letters and her notes on Babbages Analytical Engine with biographical context. The correspondence with Babbage is startling as it is clear how firm Ada was with Babbage about her publication of the translation and notes (she refused to let Babbage append a rant about funding and almost fell out with him over this). The annotated selections from her notes on the Analytical Engine also make clear how they were an original reflection on the Engine. I’m curious now about what they thought “analysis” was then.

What comes through about her personality is that she was a brilliant woman, constantly sick, struggling with her mother (who pushes her into mathematics), and socially connected to many of the leading scientists and mathematicians (like Babbage) of the day. Her last months as documented by Toole are heartbreaking.

BBC: Fifteen years of the web

Image of Trojan Room Web PageThe BBC has a nice interactive timeline on Fifteen years of the web. It includes such “firsts” as the first webcam to go online – watching a coffee pot at Cambridge University (picture of it being disconnected here). Apparently the coffee percolator went offline in 2001 and was sold to Speigel (who seem to have put it, or another one, back online.)

I suspect that dot.com crash was due to a lack of coffeecams. The timing of the disconnection is suspect.

State of the Union Parsing Tool

Image of VisualizationYet another George W Bush, State of the Union visualization tool can be seen at State of the Union Parsing Tool. I commented earlier on the New York Times, State of the Union in Words. It seems that Bush’s State of the Union addresses are becoming the standard text for visualizations.

This one on Style.org colorizes the lines with the found words. You can set the size of the words (and therefore text representation.)

NT2 | Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualit?©s.

NT2 LogoNT2 | Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualit?©s is a lab directed by Bertrand Gervais at UQAM that “promotes the study, reading, creation, and archiving of new forms of texts and hypermedia works.” (My translation from the French.) They have an excellent news blog, Activit?©s, that comments on cyberculture and research. Here are the questions they are asking:

Quel est le statut du texte litt?©raire, de l‚Äôart, du cin?©ma sur Internet? Quel est le statut de toute ?ìuvre, ?† l‚Äôheure de l‚Äô?©cran reli?© et de ses technologies? ?Ä quel type de mat?©rialit?© sommes-nous convi?©s? ?Ä quelles formes de lecture, de spectature, d‚Äôinterpr?©tation? (Pr?©sentation)

Edward Tufte: Beautiful Evidence

be_cover.jpgEdward Tufte’ Beautiful Evidence is the latest in a series of impressive books about visualization and design. I can’t help thinking that this time he has overstretched himself.

First, he doesn’t really tackle the “beautiful” in the title. What is the difference between beautiful evidence and informative evidence? What makes evidence beautiful and is that different from informative? Underlying this is a question about the difference between design and art, which I think he has chosen to ignore as I can’t find it discussed in the book. He is, however, aware of it – here is a quote from a long (PDF) interview in Technical Communication Quarterly:

Beautiful Evidence follows a growing concern in my work: assessing the quality of evidence and of finding out the truth. The other side is that sometimes displays of evidence have, as a byproduct, extraordinary beauty. I mean beautiful here in two senses: aesthetic or pretty but also amazing, wonderful, powerful, never before seen. In emphasizing evidential quality and beauty, I also want to move the practices of analytical design far away from the practices of propaganda, marketing, graphic design, and commercial art. (Page 450)

Second, the book reads like a collection of essays. He has put the The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint and an essay on sparklines in the book, even though they don’t quite fit. Finally, the book ends with plates of his sculpture which seem to be an ad for his sculpture and only loosely connected to evidence.

Many Eyes

Image of VisualizationMany Eyes is an IBM site for shared visualization and discovery. If you get an account you can upload data sets and then try different visualization tools on them. Others can create visualizations from your dataset and/or can leave comments on a visualization. See for example this visualization of bible names.

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project. (From About Many Eyes)

What is interesting is the “democratic” nature of the site – a sort of Flickr for visualization.

Thanks to Judith for pointing me to this.