Wired for life - the internet and you
- The social construction of reality is yielding to an individual
construction of reality.
-
In this piece I offer some analysis of
the impact of information technology upon the boundaries between the
personal domain and the public arena. I have
changed the names and the details so as to avoid further intrusion
into the life of someone who privacy has already been invaded by the
internet. This may have happened entirely without their knowledge -
in fact, they might not even be an internet subscriber. They could,
of course, be you!
"What do you know about the Reverend Bilbo Baggins?" I was asked,
by someone who had just learned that he was to be their new vicar.
"Never heard of him", I said, "but give me five minutes and I'll
try to come up with something". I logged on and went to one of the
major internet search engines, typed in the name, and was offered
several hits. One of them led me to "Nori and Ori's European
Vacation, Summer of 1998". A full log of an extended holiday in the
UK, France and Germany, staying with various friends and
professional contacts.
These elderly Americans had noted every detail of their hosts'
accommodation and lifestyle, and had written them up in a chatty
style that reminded me of some people's annual Christmas letters.
And yes, they had stayed with the Revd Bilbo Baggins (nickname
"Baggy") and his family, whose intimate details were carved in
cyberspace, their various mannerisms laid bare in a series of
keystroked grotesques.
So now I know all about the weekends in Wales at a particular
cottage where the front door key is hidden in a cleft of the
apple tree, along with several other rather telling breaches of
personal security. I think I've said enough: maybe it's time you
did a search on your own name, just to see what folk are saying
about you.
- Open to all
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I've heard it said that you are more likely to be murdered by
someone you know than by someone you don't. As the psalmist
indicates, "mine own familiar friend" is the one to watch. Are your
passwords changed on a regular basis? Do you take care not to use
the same one twice? Do you always use a combination of letters and
figures that are without meaning? Do you give a different reply to
every system that asks to record your mother's maiden name? Do you
check whether anyone is looking over your shoulder? And do you
always memorise rather than put pen to paper? Even if you can say
"yes" to all these things, you are still at risk! So, what is the
answer? I have always maintained that the art of privacy lies not in
the avoidance of being overheard, but rather in the elimination of
any possibility of being understood by those who listen. Even this
maxim breaks down in the face of "open living", where we give others
the opportunity to place our private affairs in the public domain.
"Open government" promised us a whole new world of public
disclosures. Already the curtains are being drawn once again, and
this should not really surprise us. In the heady days of Prestel,
the BT public subscription viewdata service, we saw a sudden
curtailment of British Rail information concerning travel delays,
after a group of commuters successfully challenged officially
published performance figures with their own statistics carefully
gleaned from constant downloads of Prestel travel pages showing
things as they really were.
- Whose side are you on?
-
So far we have assumed that the challenge will come from people who
mean well but still manage to trip us up. Suppose we now imagine a
person who acts out of sheer malevolence. They can publish all
kinds of material about you on the internet whilst claiming to be a
close associate. Indeed, those details concerning the Revd Bilbo
Baggins may simply be a pack of lies put about by someone who just
wants to cause trouble. How do we know? Whom can we trust? Alan
Turing asked how we could tell whether we were in contact with a
human being or a machine. Most of us can recognise the synthetic
tones of "Digital Dot", the voice of BT, but for how much longer
will we know for certain that this is not a human being? I
remember once making a very silly mistake in the input I fed into
a program running on Telecom Gold (pre-internet!) - my keying
error meant that I was asking a huge number cruncher to work out
something as simple as two multiplied by two. The answer flashed
up obediently on my terminal, together with the observation "That
was easy!". It shook me rigid; I just sat and stared at the screen.
Of course, it was just a very creative piece of programming, with
an error trap that produced a really cool comment. Nevertheless,
it felt as though I was inter-acting with a real person, and I
remembered the "candid camera" spoof of the letterbox that said
"thank-you".
Smart cards and electronic signatures will help to check our
identities, but counterfeit websites are going to become a real
problem. In the United States, where they have test screenings of
new movies, there are web authors who have become notorious for
infiltrating such events and producing early reviews, sometimes
quite damaging to the future release of the film. Hollywood has
hit back by setting up its own decoy sites, purporting to be
undercover agents but actually containing material that the film
makers want us to read. The whole thing becomes a complex propaganda
war, and we face the same problem as Patrick McGoohan's "The
Prisoner": who are the warders and who are the inmates? Which are
the genuine sites and which are the spoofs?
- Push 'n Pull
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The distinction may be clear or it may be blurred. Each person will
contribute their own two-penn'orth, and we must sift for the truth
as when reading the newspapers. An established journal, with
contributors whose style and bias we can identify and interpret, is
a comfort in the storm. Its internet edition will hopefully
maintain the same flavour as the traditional printed format. This
marks an interim stage, when we are still "pulling" information off
the net in much the same way as we reach for a newspaper or tune to
a radio news bulletin. However, the pundits speak of a movement
from "pull" to "push", where automated intermediaries scan the net
and glean for us a personal portfolio to print out and read on the
train to work. With intelligent profiling, this will fetch more and
more of the stories that really interest us and less and less of
that which we are slow to digest. Rather like the mother bird who
chews the food before putting it into the mouths of her young.
It's already beginning to perplex the business strategists whose
task is to place products in specific markets at particular prices.
The distinction between business and personal products has been
eroded, as (for example) pagers migrate from business to personal
use. In the reverse direction, executives go home and continue their
business use of fax and telephone during hours that are intended
for social use at the cheaper evening and weekend rates. For years
the advertising analysts have been able to carve the market up into
class-related categories. Now they are experimenting with the
four-fold notion of resistors, embracers, pragmatists,
traditionalists. Having initially welcomed "niche" products, the
marketing gurus of today are faced with the prospect of a
centrifugal flight into a market of a million segments.
Equally the Church may be looking at a breakdown within
denominations that is much the same as the breakdown in nationalism
which I highlighted in my last article. For instance, there are
those within the Church of England who would no longer speak of
themselves as Anglicans, but rather as evangelicals,
forward-in-faith, reform, community church, or whatever. Similar
potential fault-lines could be traced across the other mainstream
denominations. Even within local churches, there may be sub-groups
who have little in common beyond the fact that they use the same
premises but at different times of day - the "eight-o'-clockers"
shun the "family service" folk.
- All together now
-
Yet the new technology also offers some wonderful opportunities
for people to work together on common projects from a great
distance. It is interesting to note how the CCUG executive has now
arrived at a very mature way of day-to-day decision making within
clearly established and well-disciplined online conference
structures. These are still supported by face-to-face meetings at
which the emphasis is on relationship building and policy
brainstorming. There are business enterprises that have developed
office buildings where no-one has their own desk, and all
facilities are held in common. The paperless office has even
yielded to the office-less office in some parts of the USA, where
executives are out on the streets with mobile phones and portable
computers.
The internet naturally offers unlimited opportunities for
extended co-operation. The human genome project, building up
databases in Japan, the UK, and the USA, is a good example of
web-based synergy. It's a far cry from pooled programming on
extensions to the VTX modem operating system, which helped the
Sinclair Spectrum to launch thousands of pages on Prestel and other
viewdata systems. The principle, however, is the same: by reading
daily of one another's breakthroughs, we can achieve a pooled level
of expertise that is far greater than any one individual could hope
to achieve on their own. Except - what about ownership? Who gets
the copyright? What about the financial reward?
- A question of authorship
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Colaborative ways of working are a significant challenge to the
established social order. The positive side is co-operation, the
negative shows up as plagiarism. All of which is part and parcel of
the post-modern package, typically driven by stylistic promiscuity
and a fragmentation (through space and time) of the artistic
encounter. Expressions can be mapped and re-mapped, formed and
transformed, figured and transfigured. Writing more than ten years
ago in Church Computer, I referred to the enormous significance of
being able to export and import data in and out of online
applications. With the advent of the web, it's all become so
seamless; we can conjure new visions simply by stacking up pointers
to other sites. For the economist, it's a problem of how to
measure the value added by those who stand on the shoulders of
others. For the lawyer, it's an issue of intellectual property
rights. So, what does the theologian have to say? Please speak
after the bleep!