You’ll have come across the stories, talks and interviews about Clay Shirky’s new book: Cognitive Surplus.

I think that all of us get – and recognise – the basic idea. Most of us spend/waste so very much time watching television. That’s typically pretty passive. However, an increasing number of people are doing something different.

We’re online, but not surfing. We’re making. Making videos and blog posts and discussing photos and creating reviews and all sorts of mad stuff. Here’s the man himself, explaining it all:

That is good:

• It engages the brain – to a greater or lesser extent. The couch potatoes are sprouting!
• It is intrinsically social. When we create stuff, we try to find audiences for it — for feedback, reward, because it deserves it (or not) — and the best way to do that on the Web right now is to do it in a social manner. Maybe making leads to social in an intrinsic way.
• We’re making fabulous stuff as a result. The whole of Wikipedia involved 100mn man-hours. But Americans spend that amount of time watching adverts in a single weekend. Open Source is typically unpaid. The possibilities are endless!

I’ve got to broadly agree with that. Brains, making, social – they’ve got to be good things. Shirky anticipates a trillion hours a week of time that people will spend on doing good stuff apart from watching TV. Woot!

But… I feel like I’m running out of cognitive surplus since I got a new job. The same way I did in 2008 when I started my last job and every time that happened before I started blogging.

And I find I am not alone. The majority of blogs contain the expression ‘sorry for not posting’… blah blah blah I’ve got a new job. The majority of open source projects, forum communities, web memes — run dry when the main person behind them gets a job.

Bertrand Russell recognised that there was a conflict between the productive use of leisure time and working life when he wrote his fantastic essay In Praise of Idleness in 1932. He writes of a wonderful vision:

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

But Russell recognised the conflict between working and doing cool stuff in your leisure time in a way that Shirky appears to be oblivious to. Most people are knackered at the end of the day. Are so many people under-employed that this is not self-evident? (I also enjoyed this spirited defence of TV by Tess Alps, representing the concerns of commercial TV, that appeared on the Guardian website today).

So yes, cognitive surplus. Wonderful notion. And when most people’s working hours are reduced to four a day, as Russell proposed, we might genuinely start to see what those trillion hours can do. But we need time off, too.

picture credit: Karen Norburg (found here)

Update:  I meant to include this terrific quotation from Milan Kundera, but I got lazy: “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy”. Is this a fair description of some social media enthusiasts? ;-)

Bruce Sterling “Shaping Things” (Lift09 France EN) from Lift Conference on Vimeo.

The video is of Bruce Sterling at the Lift conference last year, reflecting on his 2005 book Shaping Things. I’m going to summarise it, so if you haven’t got 22 minutes and a strong tolerance for poor audio editing, read on. It is about the Internet of Things, the idea and practise of giving objects in the physical world an Internet presence, through RFID tags, stickybits or somesuch.

One example is the Internet fridge that know when you’re running out of milk and orders some more. Another is Tower Bridge’s Twitter account. Proponents of this sort of technology imagine a future where everything is tagged – where you can Google your car keys to find out where you left them, or a clean pair of underpants. Shops could automatically charge you for the things you leave with, as you move through the scanner at the door. Theft becomes practically impossible since the location of objects is always trackable. Sterling coined the word ‘spime’ for these tagged, findable, identifiable objects – since they have co-ordinates in space and time.

In the video, he mainly talks about the ways in which his vision has gone awry or changed since he wrote the book.

Taxonomy – tagging or labelling things turns out to be trickier than it seems at first glance. This is the ‘magic word’ ontological problem. a) People disagree about the names of things — is it a bap, a barmcake or a bread roll? b) Our names for things change over time: e.g. ‘Web 2.0’ seems quite an old-fashioned expression now, just five years after its invention. c) There are numerous regional/demographic linguistic variations that actually describe semantic and psychological differences – seven words for snow in Inuit, that sort of thing. d) What about the components of the thing you are tagging – do they get tags too? And how deep do you go with that – if you started tagging a laptop, for example, where would you stop?

Ownership – tied with this is the problem of who does the tagging. Should it be the government and large corporations, as was the case with the implementation of barcodes? Or should these tags develop more democratically, a folksonomy, if you like? Naming is a form of ownership, so the latter may feel more politically acceptable, if not perhaps as well-organised.

Privacy and Tracking – Googling your car keys sounds like a cool idea, but what about if other people can do that? Who would you trust with that information and how could you control it? People are understandably anxious about revealing their location, the status of their underwear and so forth. Sterling suggests that there are ‘about a million bad ways’ to implement this sort of thing – and that we’ll probably try half a million of these before we find useful techniques.

Recycling – a possible big win for item-tagging is making us more aware of our waste, something towards which we tend to have something of a natural aversion. If we continue to ‘own’ the items we discard, it ought to make us more careful about their disposal and less likely to destroy the planet. However, we probably need to act a bit faster than this is likely to happen as a technology.

Sterling closes by remarking that these debates may just disappear as spimes become the norm. This seems likely to me, as uneasy as that makes me feel. We are very quick to change our social mores to take advantage of new technologies. I bought my first mobile phone ten years ago. Before that point, it was effectively impossible to make (or break) ad-hoc arrangements with friends that weren’t physically present. Now it is the norm, and we don’t think twice about it. The moral and social dilemmas surrounding this have simply become invisible.

Perhaps surprisingly, spimification is happening to people faster than it is happening to objects. Nearly all higher-end mobile phones today have an embedded GPS device and a unique identity code – its ESN – that connects it to you. The ones that don’t can still be located using cell tower triangulation. I would imagine that under some circumstances, probably more than we know, the authorities can use this as a Verichip (the chips people inject into their dogs – or children – so they can be found). The only difference between your phone and the ankle-bracelets they put on bailed prisoners is psychological.

That won’t be necessary in the future. The location status game Foursquare has more than three-quarters of a million members and allows you to voluntarily do this to yourself without MI5 lifting a finger. People are already turning themselves into spimes. You don’t even need to make a decision: the data you produce is already enough to reveal all sorts of information about you. Today, these behaviours may seem potentially risky, odd and perhaps egotistical. Tomorrow, it may seem equally odd – even suspicious – if no-one knows where you are and what you’re doing.

picture credit: *janina*

Been in prison for the last six months? While you were inside, Location-Based Services (LBS) became the new cool. Some of this new generation are status games (Foursquare, Gowalla); some of them are about local reviews and services (Yelp, Rummble, Poynt); there’s probably a bunch of others that haven’t registered on my radar. There’s also maps and routefinders, of course.

I’ve installed and mucked about with some of these. Here are my 140-character reviews.

Foursquare: Get badges for ‘checking in’ to places. Looks cheesy to others. Scared of ever becoming a mayor.

Gowalla: Not tried it. From what I see, it’s more featurey than 4sq but with fewer users. Otherwise same thing.

Yelp: Local reviews of restaurants, bars and coffee shops. Didn’t have much in my locality. Harden’s better for reviews.

Rummble: iPhone and Android apps only: great way to rule out 80% of your potential audience.

Poynt: Local cinemas, restaurants, businesses. Directory rather than reviews. Actually quite useful, esp. for cinema listings. BBerry and iPhone only.

Latitude: ‘See where your friends are right now!’ says Google’s page. But only the four who have signed up. And uhm… why?

So not overly impressed, then. These services face a few problems:

Low User Numbers

User-generated review and location applications that only have a few users are pretty useless. They should partner with e.g. Time Out to seed the database. Arguably, Time Out should buy the technology for a pittance once some of these services are close to going bust and then make their own on the cheap. (Time Out currently only has an iPhone app, so loses 85% of potential users, but at least they got it sponsored).

Platform Dependence

A reminder from an earlier post (these are worldwide figures):

Overall, Nokia has 38% of mobile device market share. Samsung has 20% and LG 10%. The fourth and fifth place are taken by SonyEricsson and Motorola.

If you restrict the sample to smartphones, Nokia is again way out front with 39% market share. Then it’s RIM (Blackberry) with 21%. Apple has 15% and HTC (Android) just 5%.

Smartphones represent only 13% of the mobile device market. On the other hand, 95% of phones can do WAP and every phone can now do SMS. Over 90% of phones are capable of 2.5G or faster transmission speeds now, so this isn’t the WAP you remember from the nineties. 53% of the phones in use world-wide can do Java apps.

You’re definitely better off making a mobile website that degrades gracefully. Making iPhone your platform priority is stupid for a consumer application.

Non-Existent Use Cases

How often do you want reviews of local restaurants? Answer: never. You ask people you know or you tried them out ages ago. How about if those reviews come from total strangers with no credentials? Answer: less than never.

You quite often hear this in pitches: “Imagine you’ve just got into town and you’re dying for some Peking Crispy Duck. But how do you find the best place for that?”

How often does that actually happen? And why don’t you ask the people you’re there to meet or a hotel concierge?

Gimmickiness

Badges, really?

Meet the New Uncool

Planet mobile has always been susceptible to hype. How long have we been reading about the mobile Internet? Watching TV on your phone? It’s made great strides in the last three years with all-you-can-eat tariffs and more usable devices, but it’s still basically a young teenager. If you combine this hype with a bunch of gadget-fanatic geeks then what you end up with is funding for gimmicky, useless services that work on less than a fifth of people’s phones.

Location-Based Services have existed for years, of course. And they are extremely useful. It’s just that they rarely get any popular press. Developed by deeply unglamorous people like SAP, the real use cases are mostly B2B and corporate B2C.

Logistics/Supply Chain: Where is that delivery and how long will it take to get here? Who are my most efficient drivers? Why has Tony taken a diversion through Canterbury on his trip from Brighton to London? When do I need to order more sprockets so that they’re ready when the widgets come through?

Couriers: We’ve got a job on Oxford Street. Where’s the nearest bike?

Service Engineers: A pipe in Richmond has a leak. Who’s the best person to send? Where is the nearest place to get the part they need?

Sales: Your nearest store is here. How are you fixed for a presentation at 3.00? I need to visit every baker in London – how can I find them and what’s the best route?

picture credit: almarmon

Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington believes that the era of trying to manage one’s online reputation is almost over:

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

I can kind of see what he means. Yes, it’s quite likely that bad reviews of you, your business and your dog will appear on the Web, and there won’t be very much that you are able to do to prevent or correct that. Indeed, we will need to become thicker skinned and more forgiving of people’s indiscretions.

However, there are multiple flaws in the argument.

Pretty much the show-stopper for me is the total confusion between ‘online reputation’ and ‘bad things some people say on the Web’.

What is (for example) TV chef Jamie Oliver’s reputation?

His food and restaurants tend to get fairly good reviews. He’s campaigned to improve the nutritional value of children’s school dinners, a popular move in the eyes of pretty much everyone except pie manufacturers. His shows keep getting commissioned, so are presumably popular. Recently, he’s apparently been having a hard time convincing the US of the virtues of healthy eating, but got sympathetic stories and an appearance on Oprah as a result.

But then… it took me about two seconds to find this, this and this (sweary, not-so-positive websites about JO). And quite a lot more where they came from.

So what to make of that? Chirpy chap or mockney tw**?

The main way we gauge someone or something’s reputation online is by Googling them. As Clive Thompson wrote ages ago in Wired:

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

So, if you’ll allow me to take Google as the arbiter of reputation, when you search for Oliver then the top result, after the news, is his own site, followed by his restaurant’s sites, followed by his other brands. There are no negative references on the first four pages of the Google search for his name. And having discovered that, if you then bump into one of the bad sites, then you’ll take what they say with a pinch of salt. They still exist, but it is the mix and sum of the data we can acquire, their provenance, their credibility and how Google sorts them which goes to form an online reputation.

What Oliver is doing by creating all these sites and content is called managing your online reputation*. And it quite clearly still works.

picture credit: tommatsch

*Oliver’s been blogging since 2003, which is pretty impressive by any measure.

We tend to imagine computer gaming as being about fantasy, but the really important thing that this new, commercially successful breed of games all have in common is the way they blur the boundaries between fantasy/online and meat-space. Farmville is about your real-life friends helping you out; Wii Fit is physical as well as virtual; Achievements is a meta-game about social status. Then we have Nectar points; Club Card points; Caffe Nero points; Petrol points; Alcohol Units (what? you’re not supposed to collect them?). Gaming is becoming ubiquitous.

The video’s URL is http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/ in case it doesn’t show. (Internet Explorer users. tssk).

From completely the opposite direction, the desire for authenticity in a world that is becoming increasingly more virtual is a theme Schell touches upon and has been a frequently mentioned topic on this blog.

My key piece of recent evidence: the renaissance of the ukelele. What’s that about if it isn’t a deep hunger for something (a) physical; (b) crafty and © nostalgic? More seriously, there’s so much stuff all over the place about hand-crafted this and authentic that. Crafting communities. Photowalks. Meetups. We’re mad for a spot of reality, an oasis of organic in the desert of digital.

Schell invokes this — and I really must get this book about it that he mentions — but then somehow segues between that and this approaching world order in which everything you do potentially scores you points. I’d agree that ‘gaming everywhere’ seems a likely future – one that’s already partially arrived, but I’m not sure that this will satisfy any of these other desires for a more real, visceral experience of life. So some sleight-of-hand there, I think. Brilliant presentation, nonetheless.

picture credit: Dreambagz

But because, as the programme pointed out, new media is always analysed through the lens of old media, this leads to much wailing and gnashing of teeth:

• because people don’t pore over the same source for several hours, as they do with a book, the Web cannot allow the same degree of reflection and depth of thought.
• because there is no training, code of professional ethics and industry guidelines, a blog cannot be as reliable as a newspaper.
• because the production was done with zero investment over a very short period of time, this online video cannot have the same quality as a feature film.
• if your doctor spent their research time skimming abstracts rather than reading a learned journal, you’d probably feel quite anxious.

These are straw men proposals, though, based on choices and comparisons that aren’t necessary. When you start forgetting about biased comparisons and look at the value of knowledge creation and discovery on the Web on its own terms, then it starts to look a lot better. For example, it fosters the spirit of enquiry; it gives people access to creative and publication tools for free; it creates communities of learning; it teaches people to question sources; it allows easy access to contrasting opinions; fosters new and non-partisan links between diverse people; and collaborative problem-solving is built-in.

I’m fine with all that. It’s great.

I also agree that our valuation of culture needs to re-calculated to understand what is added by collaboration. The Great British Sandwich and One and Other are online and offline works co-ordinated through the Web and created by thousands, but the lack of auteur confuses establishment reactions to the oeuvre *cough*.

But. The problem comes for people who work as creatives in some respect: artists, writers, photographers and musicians. (It’s also of concern if you think books, music albums and newspapers etc. have intrinsic value and ought to have a place in the world). If modern audiences only pay attention to content for seconds in the context of a continual flow, then your chances of those people stopping to pay is zero. If you try to insist, then you’re likely to simply be removed from those readers’ river of information: your content ends up in its own isolated oxbow lake as the river seeks only the most efficient route to flow freely and follow its gravity.

So perhaps the ultimate answer is to give up on the idea of the creative making a living from the sweat of their brain. To instead embrace the exciting and new opportunities of the creative cloud where every work is ultimately collaborative in some respect. William Owen wrote an interesting blog post last week in which he suggested that the advent of cloud collaboration spells the death of the author:

We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves and attach our name to, and in the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private.  This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).

Owen’s thoughtful post does seem indicative of the sort of change that’s taking place and the sort of mental change that – over the next couple of generations – may well take hold. I do worry, though, about the idea of ‘responsibility’ in this arena, though. I wonder whether culture can possibly be created without responsibility. Others have talked about the necessity of curation to creating something that actually has any value – whether it be the editor of LOLCATS or Comment is Free. They’re another group of people that need to get paid, but whose value won’t necessarily be recognised by feeders from the stream.

Going back to Cultural Studies, the idea of the creative as a special sort of person producing a special category of goods has a very short and specific history that arguably began with Wordsworth and began to end with Warhol. As Raymond Williams observes in Keywords (1976), ‘Art’ referred to any kind of skill, from carpentry to angling, between the C13th and the C16th, when it started to acquire the distinct types of specialisation it has had since, with those becoming mainstream by the C19th. He suggests that division between ability in the creative arts and other kinds of skill is a consequence of their devaluation in the industrial revolution. It was:

…related both to changes in the practical division of labour and to fundamental changes in practical definitions of the purposes of the exercise of skill. It can be primarily related to the changes inherent in capitalist commodity production, with its specialisation and reduction of use to exchange values. There was a consequent defensive specialisation of certain skills and purposes to the Arts or the humanities where forms of general use and intention which were not determined by immediate exchange could be at least conceptually abstracted.

In other words, the idea of creativity as a livelihood has required a form of special pleading for 200 years. With cloud culture, as further changes in production and distribution dramatically make the exchange value of many of these forms of specialised and practised skill even lower, these divisions cease to carry much weight.

All rather bleak for me! But thinking of web users as (increasingly) people living their lives in a stream has also made me think that Media and the Arts are looking in the wrong places for solutions. Paywalls and micropayments cannot work for these undemanding yet voracious audiences because they work against the culture of the Internet. Advertising, by its nature is interruptive and attempts to hijack the flow of the stream: it won’t be effective. Taxes on ISPs to support struggling journalists and musicians seem incredibly unjust: the argument that they should get a proper job seems insurmountable. More opaque funding for public creative projects — from statues to concerts and local newspapers — feels better, but again smacks of special pleading and artificial markets. Maybe the real answer does lie in creatives accepting that the market value, for now, of what they would ideally like to do is zero. I have been thinking about some ways out, but this post is already too long.

[See Jaron Lanier’s interview in this morning’s Observer for some more on all this, and the consequences. I’m not especially impressed by his solutions, though.]

picture credit: rachel_thecat and unknown

The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and Search during the Super Bowl comes from two hot-spots of media attention:

1. Google Search is continually used as the prime example of the power of word-of-mouth over traditional forms of marketing: ‘…and they never spent a dollar on advertising it!’ says the social media guru.
2. The slots between segments of the Super Bowl are famously the most expensive and sought-after TV ad-spots of the year. (On the official site, linked above, a link to a video of the commercial slots was the top item when I looked!)

The Internet and the Super Bowl last intersected so heavily ten years ago, in 2000, called — at the time — ‘dotcom bowl’, when ten heavily-funded, but mostly impractical internet start-ups spanked $40mn in venture capital in order to secure the slots, at an average of $2.2mn for 30 seconds. Twelve months later, all but two of those start-ups had gone bust. Internet companies have tended to avoid the Super Bowl since then for obvious reasons.

So you might take this appearance as an indication that either Google has given in to Old Media; or conversely that the value of old media has dropped so low that even the biggest advertiser on the Internet will give it a go.

Personally, I take it as a sign of changed understandings of old and new media and of how persuasion through advertising works. Hell freezes over indeed.

Firstly, dividing old and new media into two separate, enemy camps that will have nothing to do with each other is nonsense. You aren’t a Luddite if you use TV; you aren’t progressive if you use the Web. This false dichotomy has held both sides back for too long. Old media still have massive reach compared to the Web: and telling more people about your stuff is mostly good, especially if you have a consumer product, like a new web browser, to give them. To give an example: the highly favoured Compare the Meerkat campaign — created by VCCP – had digital end-locations but depended on a massive TV, newspaper and outdoor campaign to create its success (400% increase in traffic and 80% more quotations given for client Compare the Market).

Second, Internet advertising isn’t a very good platform for persuasion. Sorry. You have one five-or-so-word opportunity and (maybe) a graphic that has to fit into a fairly small space. Most people ignore you. The people that click on your ad are stupid, bored and poor. Or are your competitors and their agents. What’s good about it is that it’s so cheap that you can throw a small amount of money at it (compared to traditional media) and create a lot of clicks, it generates great CPA information and, if correctly targeted at long-tail keywords, then yes, it sells.

It won’t change people’s minds, though. You need longer periods of time and richer engagement to do that. I read today that cinema advertising revenues went up 5% [PDF] last year. What’s that about – apart from creative agencies loving them? It’s about the realisation that advertising-as-experience (and therefore, ‘something that might influence someone’s opinion’) still doesn’t happen very often, predictably or inexpensively on the Web.

This is the truth. We live our lives not offline or online, but inline. We’re continually in both spaces and don’t draw much distinction between them, contrary to what a lot of commentators would have us believe. This is especially true of younger people, who’ve grown up with the Net at their side. We don’t ‘jack-in’, as Neuromancer and countless successors imagined, we accommodate.

[PS. Throwing irony upon irony, this is also the year that Pepsi, long a Superbowl standard, decided not to bother and devote the money to social media *cough* philanthropy instead.]

[PPS. What I wonder about is why Google cares so much about Chrome? It’s given none of its other products, consumer or business, remotely the same funding or attention…]

You’ll have seen this word flying about recently and it’s time for some explanations.

Err… don’t you mean ‘publically’? [’publicly’ if you’re American]

No. Well, in some ways, yes, I do. Let me explain.

In the past, there has been an assumption that privacy was the default state of human existence. It was only when you, someone or something else acted on that state that your privacy was broken. You did something ‘in public’, ‘went public’ or ‘published’. But if that was ever really the case — I’d argue that it’s partly a symptom of late C20th urban living — then it most certainly not true at this point in the early 21st Century. There’s a database entry just a few seconds after your birth that stays attached to you for the rest of your life. Everyone has got information on you — lots of it — from the government to the police to the supermarkets you use. And they’ll probably lose it or allow it to be stolen at some point.

Things get even worse when it comes to the Internet: your ISP is monitoring your data stream; Facebook is keeping your teenage indiscretions alive forever; Google is retaining your search history. Our brave new world of mobile applications sometimes seems particularly geared to recording (and judging!) your location to within a few yards using GPS.

So one part of the meaning of publicy is this status of not having privacy, for which historically we haven’t had a single word, so strong is the assumption that privacy is the natural state of affairs.

People aren’t entirely happy about this being the case, of course. And that draws in the second part of the meaning of the word. But first, some background…

We have strong personal, social, professional and political reasons for having an attachment to secrets and lies. While we’re told that we have nothing to fear from lack of privacy; unless we’ve done something wrong, in which case we deserve what we get. That’s not really true. In fact, it’s not true at all.

Secrets and Lies

Most religions and philosophies suggest that ‘telling the truth’ is a moral necessity. But this isn’t entirely the case. Secrets and lies are arguably essential to our psychological well-being. Certainly, they’re essential to everyone getting along without a fight every two seconds. By some accounts, we lie 200 times a day just to keep the peace.

Personal lies: ‘No, of course you’re not fat’; ‘No, it’s great that your mother is coming to stay’.

Social lies: ‘How am I feeling? Really good thanks’, ‘Oh yes, how is [child-name]? Do you have any more pictures?’

Professional lies: ‘great work, Bob’; ‘it’s been a pleasure doing business with you’; ‘we have the utmost respect for [competitor company]’.

Political lies: ‘We will cut taxes and maintain quality of public services’.

Secrets – probably best not to tell your mum that you take drugs, your wife that you fancy one of your colleagues; your boss that he stinks; your wartime allies that you think they are crass vulgarians. The place of secrets in our lives is more difficult to describe than the necessity of lying, but rather than dredge the literature right now, I think we’ll agree to agree (won’t we?) that we all have secrets and that their remaining secret is important to us.

The other difficulty is that this rise in public information has happened a lot more quickly that our society’s ability to come to terms with the consequences of that. We’re not especially good at forgiving and forgetting, for example, preferring instead to remember forever and condemn you for that one stupid thing you did five years ago.

So… Publicy?

Ah yes. The other part of the meaning of the word is very much akin to ‘publicity’. You see, there are two common tactics to coping with the loss of privacy:

Disinformation. Some 50% of teenagers post false information about themselves onto the Net. It’s been observed that if you look at the registration data, 10% of MySpace users are aged over 100, which seems rather unlikely, unless you factor in that you’re not supposed to register unless you’re 14 or over. [see the video below for more on this and other stats I cite]. Apparently, everyone lies on dating sites (men say they’re more successful; women that they’re younger and slimmer). If you counter the number of true facts about you that exist on record with a similar number of complete lies then the reliability of all the data is seriously compromised.

Curation. We make sure that the information that appears is, to the best of our ability, sanitised, presenting our ‘best side’. We untag drunken pictures of ourselves on Facebook; we don’t check in to FourSquare when we’re in McDonald’s and do when we’re in the Ritz; we remove ‘dodgy’ music from our Last.fm profiles. We use pseudonyms when we’re on networks that don’t reflect what we want to be part of our professional reputation. If someone or something is producing information about you, then you make sure to produce more, better quality information.

From the Economist’s report this week on Social Networks:

Research published last year by Pew showed that some 60% of adults are restricting access to their online profiles. In an earlier study the institute had found that, contrary to received opinion, many teenagers and young adults are also using privacy controls to restrict access to online information about them. Nicole Ellison, a professor at Michigan State University who studies social networks, says that over the past few years she has noticed that her students have become steadily more cautious about whom they share information with.

This corruption or correction of the information available about ourselves is the other side of the idea of ‘publicy’. Publicy isn’t the opposite or the death of privacy: it is the way we live when it is less available.

These ideas aren’t yours, are they?

No, ‘course not. To my knowledge, the word was coined by Laurent Haug, who founded the Lift conference among other achievements. Stowe Boyd wrote about this being the decade of publicy last month, with some great examples of the way different cultures accept certain pieces of information as ‘naturally to be disclosed’ or private. PR-man Brian Solis wrote about it last week, together with some fascinating data-points (taken from this study) about people’s attitudes to social networks that I’m still digesting. e.g.:

How do you pronounce it?

I don’t know: it’s that new. It’s either ‘publicky’ or [more likely] ‘publissy’. I quite like this ambiguity because it reinforces the dual meaning of ‘living in public’ and ‘generating publicity’. I also like that while it’s an utterly ugly word, this ugliness communicates its modernity rather well.

Anything else to say?

Maybe. Disinformation and curation both seem like coping mechanisms, both of which have drawbacks. Disinformation leaves a trail of lies and half-truths that might make a person seem like some sort of Walter Mitty fantasist when subjected to scrutiny. Curation requires time, judgement and skill — while it’s well-suited to a seasoned PR professional, it’s perhaps less so to those vulnerable people who will suffer most from complete disclosure.

Elements of society move at different speeds, as I’ve already remarked. Until we’re able to guarantee an internet Statute of Limitations on how long being an idiot lasts and under what circumstances it counts, then there will be a disconnect between the abilities of technology to record us and the abilities of the people we deal with to cope with that data. My belief is that it takes several decades — maybe two generations — for this sort of change. Until then, we’ll have to suck it down.

I don’t make any judgement on the fact that we now live publicy and not privately. That’s like railing against the incoming tide.

And this video?

It’s Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working for Intel, talking about secrets and lies on the Internet at the 2008 Lift conference. I’ve cited it before, but it’s well worth a second look. Don’t forget to leave a comment, though.

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• Web 2 Icons
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In this online radio interview, internet visionary Jaron Lanier talks about the danger of Web 2.0 turning us into a collectivist digital mush. He’s got a new book out, so doing a lot of PAs lately.

The problems, to paraphrase, are these:

Collectivisation We’ve reached for the wisdom of crowds, and this silences individual voices. This blog post becomes the expression of a meme, rather than me talking, and serves to fuel advertising machines. This is a particular problem if you make your living from music, photography, writing and other creative disciplines. There’s always the next result in your Google search.

Failure to forget It’s become impossible to re-invent yourself because the Net remembers everything about you. There can’t be a new Bob Dylan because the Web will remember Robert Zimmerman forever.

Religion We’ve fetishised the Web to the extent that we regard it as a living, omniscient entity. Advertising is regarded as the most important element of the Internet, to the detriment of the individuals who create the content. This is typical of the first steps towards creating a new religion, argues Lanier.

Youthiness A popular defence is that the social web is built to reflect the norms and expectations of young people. Lanier counters that he’s spoken to a lot of young people who feel the same as him. The people speaking for young people are likely to be middle-aged business people who work in advertising.

Bubbles The Internet gives us the opportunity to meet all sorts of different people, yet the design of many social sites makes the pack mentality easier and more efficient than ever. We stick to our own bubbles and never come across these different people.

I’ve written on most of these themes before and have considerable sympathy for his opinions, while still retaining enormous enthusiasm for a lot of what’s going on. Jaron’s views (and mine) might be regarded as the next stage of the hype cycle, whereby the impossibly high expectations created around new technologies are discovered to be unattainable. This leads to the ‘trough of disillusionment’ whereby the same technologies that were previously held in such high regard are regarded as worthless or detrimental. In time, the theory goes, we recover from this disillusionment and find out what’s actually useful in this innovation.

But that would be to collectivise his opinion – and I should probably avoid that.

In the latter part of the interview, Jaron gets to debate David Weinberger, who remains an evangelist for the social web, so it’s well worth listening to the whole thing.

Jaron is coming to London in a couple of weeks, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing him speak at the RSA.

picture credit: vanz