(no subject)
Mar. 22nd, 2012 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAnother Immodest Proposals salon the other night. I'm... not sure I can adequately define the parameters of the discussion. It was a wide ranging conversation about information and communication technology and their impact on the smallest details of our lives.
Our starting point was the notion of cloud memory- our tendency to invest more and more of the information required to live our lives in the internet. Storing address books in the cloud, storing to-do lists in the cloud, storing all manner of personal information in social networks... But also storing facts in places like Wikipedia and other online databases rather than retaining that information.
I don't think the conversation went where anyone among us expected it to go. I thought there'd be a lot more trans/post-humanism in the conversation, but it was a smallish crowd, only about 15 people, the majority of whom were ImP regulars comfortable with sharing ourselves with each other. So we got personal, told stories about our work being influenced by the Internet, our social lives altered by the internet, our constructions of our identity being altered by the Internet.
We talked for several minutes about the way advertising on the internet is targeted to us, because so much information about us is stored and available to advertisers. Someone discussed the way it felt like the advertisers knew her, because the ads were so uniquely geared to her, and seemed to make intuitive leaps from "if she likes this kind of event, she will like that kind of event." Other people discussed failures of advertising, like a Jew getting ads for Christian dating sites because he listed a belief in God on various social networks.
We wondered if it would ever be possible to really erase some of the cloud's information about us, and if not, how that would have to change our culture. We talked about erroneously bad credit ratings and twitter rumors about celebrity deaths, how the cloud stores bad information alongside good, with at the moment only poor mechanisms for distinguishing. (I didn't mention it, but it now occurs to me that several SF novels have suggested that the best way to erase a person's sins is to drown them out in miasmas of misinformation- 'jazz' in Melissa Scott's parlance, for example) We talked about namespace overlap and how all of the good and bad deeds of every John Smith in the world are shared, to a degree. We contrasted that to the uniqueness of phone numbers and the quasi-uniqueness of usernames like seekingferret, and brought it back to the idea of cloud memory by folding it into the question of whether, in the future, we will remember phone numbers or rely on our computers to remember them for us.
We discussed a variety of new complexities the Internet has forced us to juggle- what is the etiquette of sending a text message, placing a phone call, making an email, poking someone by facebook? What do each of these things mean, in terms of formality, in terms of level of interruption? Our moderator suggested that this question could form a useful proxy for a lot of new questions about how to handle workflows high in interruptions, and we pushed on to a new thrust of the discussion- how to fight back against the cloud and build a world that isn't too dominated by electronic interruptions, without rejecting all of the good that the internet can do for us.
Various social engineering hacks were offered, like using a timer to enforce limits on internet use. I mentioned my old high school technique for forcing myself off the computer: playing Eiffel-65's deplorable pop hit "Blue". (Somebody: "You put it on repeat?" Me: "I didn't have to.") We talked about how cigarette breaks had once sort of served the role of punctuating the intensity of the working day with a moment for your self, and how even in our more health-conscious society, that sort of artificial biological imperative to leave the beck and call of the computer had value.
Then the moderator offered his experiences with meditation as an alternative, and discussed the way the mind could be trained to offer focus. Others chimed in with similar experiences, but lamented the difficulty of allotting sufficient time to this kind of mental preparation.
And then the conversation kind of went off the rails. A newcomer starting monologuing, and it was a difficult, meandering monologue that was hard to figure out how to respond to. We tried to recapture the flow, but it didn't really manage to happen before the end of the night.
Oh well... it was an interesting conversation, though definitely a bit unmoored in places.
Our starting point was the notion of cloud memory- our tendency to invest more and more of the information required to live our lives in the internet. Storing address books in the cloud, storing to-do lists in the cloud, storing all manner of personal information in social networks... But also storing facts in places like Wikipedia and other online databases rather than retaining that information.
I don't think the conversation went where anyone among us expected it to go. I thought there'd be a lot more trans/post-humanism in the conversation, but it was a smallish crowd, only about 15 people, the majority of whom were ImP regulars comfortable with sharing ourselves with each other. So we got personal, told stories about our work being influenced by the Internet, our social lives altered by the internet, our constructions of our identity being altered by the Internet.
We talked for several minutes about the way advertising on the internet is targeted to us, because so much information about us is stored and available to advertisers. Someone discussed the way it felt like the advertisers knew her, because the ads were so uniquely geared to her, and seemed to make intuitive leaps from "if she likes this kind of event, she will like that kind of event." Other people discussed failures of advertising, like a Jew getting ads for Christian dating sites because he listed a belief in God on various social networks.
We wondered if it would ever be possible to really erase some of the cloud's information about us, and if not, how that would have to change our culture. We talked about erroneously bad credit ratings and twitter rumors about celebrity deaths, how the cloud stores bad information alongside good, with at the moment only poor mechanisms for distinguishing. (I didn't mention it, but it now occurs to me that several SF novels have suggested that the best way to erase a person's sins is to drown them out in miasmas of misinformation- 'jazz' in Melissa Scott's parlance, for example) We talked about namespace overlap and how all of the good and bad deeds of every John Smith in the world are shared, to a degree. We contrasted that to the uniqueness of phone numbers and the quasi-uniqueness of usernames like seekingferret, and brought it back to the idea of cloud memory by folding it into the question of whether, in the future, we will remember phone numbers or rely on our computers to remember them for us.
We discussed a variety of new complexities the Internet has forced us to juggle- what is the etiquette of sending a text message, placing a phone call, making an email, poking someone by facebook? What do each of these things mean, in terms of formality, in terms of level of interruption? Our moderator suggested that this question could form a useful proxy for a lot of new questions about how to handle workflows high in interruptions, and we pushed on to a new thrust of the discussion- how to fight back against the cloud and build a world that isn't too dominated by electronic interruptions, without rejecting all of the good that the internet can do for us.
Various social engineering hacks were offered, like using a timer to enforce limits on internet use. I mentioned my old high school technique for forcing myself off the computer: playing Eiffel-65's deplorable pop hit "Blue". (Somebody: "You put it on repeat?" Me: "I didn't have to.") We talked about how cigarette breaks had once sort of served the role of punctuating the intensity of the working day with a moment for your self, and how even in our more health-conscious society, that sort of artificial biological imperative to leave the beck and call of the computer had value.
Then the moderator offered his experiences with meditation as an alternative, and discussed the way the mind could be trained to offer focus. Others chimed in with similar experiences, but lamented the difficulty of allotting sufficient time to this kind of mental preparation.
And then the conversation kind of went off the rails. A newcomer starting monologuing, and it was a difficult, meandering monologue that was hard to figure out how to respond to. We tried to recapture the flow, but it didn't really manage to happen before the end of the night.
Oh well... it was an interesting conversation, though definitely a bit unmoored in places.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-23 01:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-23 12:51 pm (UTC)My argument was that it doesn't matter if at present the ads are only mediocrely targeted. The point is that our information is already out there and the algorithms for understanding our needs will only get better with time and practice. But the other thing it's important to realize is that advertising is just the tip of the iceberg, and a lot of other applications of that data will turn up very soon, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-23 05:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-23 12:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-23 06:04 am (UTC)Gmail at one point was advertising something about bed bug removal to me. I was like, "I have NO clue what this is about..."
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-23 04:49 pm (UTC)Yeah, I know someone who refused to quit smoking for years partly because of that effect. My personal trick is to go get coffee and chill while the coffee machine does its thing... but that doesn't involve going very far (or outside in good weather) and doesn't take quite as long.
Part of the problem is that it is still easier, culturally, to justify taking a smoke break than most of other types of breaks.