'Rather ironically, most of the mechanisms required to observe and control subcultures are being invented by subcultures themselves. External forces are merely stepping in to co-opt them. The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions. Just in time too, since the returns on coarser forms of political and economic exploitation are now rapidly diminishing. Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions. And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. ...once marketers working with Big Data get ahead of the cultural curve, you can expect the balance of power to shift decisively in their favor. From detecting subcultures before future members themselves do, to actively seeding, breeding and shaping desirable subcultures, is not a big leap to imagine. It will be a world of pre-cognitive marketing, run by quants in data vats.'

'Reppler is a new online reputation management tool that scans a user’s Facebook profile for objectionable content, privacy leaks, and security threats. The free tool can help users, especially young adults in the job market, ensure that their Facebook profiles don’t jeopardize their future prospects. When users visit the Reppler site, they’re asked for long list of extended permissions. Once granted users must wait a few minutes for their data to be analyzed before seeing the results in four different sections: My Impression, My Inappropriate Content, My Information, and My Privacy and Security Risks. They can also connect their YouTube, Flickr and Picasa account for scanning. While Reppler can’t provide total assurance for one’s reputation yet, it can offer users a reality check of their safety, security and the impression their profile can give.' -- I've seen slave ships off the shores of Orion fire blazin'. (El-P)

'Reppler is a new online reputation management tool that scans a user’s Facebook profile for objectionable content, privacy leaks, and security threats. The free tool can help users, especially young adults in the job market, ensure that their Facebook profiles don’t jeopardize their future prospects. When users visit the Reppler site, they’re asked for long list of extended permissions. Once granted users must wait a few minutes for their data to be analyzed before seeing the results in four different sections: My Impression, My Inappropriate Content, My Information, and My Privacy and Security Risks. They can also connect their YouTube, Flickr and Picasa account for scanning. While Reppler can’t provide total assurance for one’s reputation yet, it can offer users a reality check of their safety, security and the impression their profile can give.' -- I've seen slave ships off the shores of Orion fire blazin'. (El-P)

'I spoke to a couple of Entrustet users, who said they particularly wanted to protect photos stored online, along with hosting and domain-­registration information for personal and business sites. Entrustet also offers an “account incinerator,” to obliterate content its users would prefer not to have linger on after them, and one person I spoke to mentioned having tagged a personal Twitter account for deletion — “it’s just inside jokes, personal ranting and raving” — along with a Gmail account. “I don’t need people judging the personal e-mails that I sent to my friends,” he explained. If we try to control the way we are perceived in life, why not in death, too? It’s not wholly unusual to do this with physical artifacts: letters to be opened only after death, or even to be destroyed. If nothing else, those Entrustet users figure they are leaving behind some guidelines about which bits of their online lives matter, and which don’t.' -- Like tears in rain

'...a stranger in a mall or restaurant could photograph you, then go online to profile you. "People will be able to instantaneously find out about you," Calo says. Still, in a world of pervasive sensors, troubling data correlations are cropping up in unanticipated ways. For instance, most consumers are ignorant about how smartphones equipped with GPS location finders routinely "geotag" photos and videos, embedding images with the longitude and latitude of the location shown in the image. Last summer, industrial designer Adam Savage, co-host of the TV show MythBusters, used his iPhone to snap a photo of his Toyota Land Cruiser parked in front of his house, then posted it on Twitter. In doing so, Savage, in effect, publicly disclosed where he lives.

'Online social media is not just for adults anymore. A new study claims that 80% of children in the western world have some form of social media presence by the time they reach age 2.'

'I suspect that the people who need Digital Mirror the most are the ones who will recognize that need the least. Still, it may help the semi-self-aware to improve their personal relations – or at least to be more aware of the trade-offs they make when they favor one friend or colleague over another. This all reflects a trend toward greater clarity in our relations. Facebook and other social tools operate under the covers: Facebook notices which friends you interact with and whose photos you comment on in order to select the items in your NewsFeed or the ads you see. But Facebook does not show that information to you. Digital Mirror does. Within a few years, this kind of transparency will probably be commonplace, both from Facebook and from ad networks and behavioral targeters trying to derive information about your likely purchases. But right now, only Digital Mirror is one of the few to give you the ability to do the same for yourself.'

'Update your fees with your movements. Geofencing goes social with Google Latitude, Facebook, Twitter, RSS, Email, SMS txt, LinkedIn and Buzz.'

'Not a few sum up their position by saying in one way or another, “The way to deal is to just be good.” But sometimes a citizenry should not “be good.” You have to leave room for this—space for dissent, real dissent. You need to leave technical space (a sacrosanct mailbox) and mental space. The two are intertwined. We make our technologies, and they, in turn, make and shape us. In a democracy, perhaps we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, a zone that needs to be protected. My hope is that we rediscover our need for privacy. To me, opening up a conversation about rethinking the Net, privacy, and civil society is not backward-looking nostalgia in the least. It seems like part of a healthy process of democracy defining its sacred spaces.'

'The most alarming fall-out from Big Brother is that it has ushered in a surveillance society, to which everyone contributes. No specialised area of human life, no tiny detail of behaviour, is now so trivial that we won't report it to each other with high seriousness, as if it were a dispatch from a war zone. And in the intervening years, we've quietly become a nation of housemates, endlessly spied on by authorities and by businesses. The surveyed have become the surveyors. "Them" has become "Us." Ten years of watching human guinea pigs and lab-rats at close quarters, living out their three-month imprisonment in a prefabricated hell, has given us a taste for prying into each other's lives and dramatising the trivial details of our own, while making everything public on electronic screens. Perhaps, like Winston Smith at the end of Orwell's masterpiece, we've finally given in. We love Big Brother.'

'Everything is extreme: So-and-so “is obsessed with.” So-and-so “just had the longest day EVERRRRRR.” They are in a perpetual high pitch of pleasure or a high pitch of crisis or sometimes just a high pitch of high pitch. Holden Caulfield might have called it “phoniness.” -- One of the other great adolescent poses of Facebook is irony at all times. So if you say, “can’t wait for the Lady Gaga concert,” you might add “lol” or you might say “Hey you are at camp and I’m in England, but I just wanted to let you know that I miss youuuu hahaha” to make it clear that you are not really looking forward to anything or expressing an actual emotion in a way that might be overly earnest or embarrassing.'

'...smart, passive checkins. More advanced systems could also guard against “cheating” because they would keep you honest: Your phone is like your IP address. If we can find smart ways to stop fictional checkins, this in turn will make rewards and prizes for loyalty more relevant. The next step, once you have approved the checkin, would be whether you would push this information to Facebook (Facebook) and/or Twitter (Twitter). The option would of course exist to be easily “OffGrid,” if you don’t want to be found. This feature would also make a lot of sense for “swarming.” A swarm is a proactive thing, one of the cornerstones of social networking and a real payoff for geosocial. If a predictive system was implemented, the service could then know when to expect a swarm and how many people would likely be there — data that would be extremely valuable for a variety of businesses. What we want is a passive geosocial experience, and we don’t care who brings it to us.'

'Meet Caterina Fake, the creative spark behind Hunch. Her big idea? Develop a web service that knows what you want before you even want it. Get people talking about themselves — their opinions, tastes, beliefs, idiosyncrasies. Then, once they have shared enough information, mine that data for correlations that provide precisely tailored recommendations for each user. It is a quietly radical premise, implying that our tastes are defined not only by what we buy or what we’ve liked in the past but by who we are as people. There’s only so much it can learn from 1 million users. So Hunch is scouring the Web for information, combing the databases of social sites like Facebook and Twitter for anything that’s publicly available — opinions and allegiances, likes and dislikes, followers and friend requests.' -- Why so curious?

'...the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era. -- In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks. Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers – like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example – which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability. -- In the Babylonian Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes.'

'Standing at the front desk of a restaurant on the phone with a complete stranger was the absolute last thing I expected from a harmless tweet about meeting friends from the internet and a link to my location. "I like to hang out with people from the internet too. Maybe we should hang out sometime. What do you think about that?" -- I haven't been able to stop thinking about what happened. I'm angry. I feel like someone violated an understanding that all of us generally nice people online have – you don't cross the line. I'm also terrified. Who is this person? Who would do something like that?'

'Last week I showed my dental hygienist who else was checked in to the dentist's office on Foursquare at the same time I was, and her first reaction was concern about HIPAA (the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which regulates the security and privacy of health-related data). She decided no one could stop the patients themselves from exposing their own location; she just couldn't confirm to me whether or not she actually knew who those people were.'

Turkle: "There's a kind of self-surveillance that young poeple don't think about... What is intimacy without privacy? This is really a question for this generation. -- Philosophers tell us that we become human when we’re confronted with another face, with a voice, with the inflection of a voice; these kids don’t want to see a face, they don’t want to hear a voice. They want to text. In a way we’re no longer nourished but consumed by what we’ve created. It’s not all good. I see people in retreat as much as they are in advance now that they have all this information. I see people defining a successful self as a self that can keep up with its email. -- We live in a kind of paradoxical time. We’re giving young people a very paradoxical message: The world is more and more complex; on the other hand, we’re only going to ask you a question that you can answer in two seconds. We leave ourselves less and less time for reflection because our communications media push us to quick responses."

'We tolerate the pathologies of quantification — a dry, abstract, mechanical type of knowledge — because the results are so powerful. Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square. For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy.' -- Numbers numb.

'Self-monitoring tends to limit our sense of ourselves to the limits of our measuring equipment. So when we use devices to record data about ourselves it seems like we are adding to our self-knowledge, but actually we are subtracting from it, limiting ourselves to what we have been. "For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask." This strikes me as the saddest and most profound form of alienation humankind has ever known. It seems fueled by the data-driven information economy in which we live; people feel obliged to become more like robots in their effort to better assimilate themselves to the highly tracked, digitized environs. They seem to want to be handled logistically by the “network society”... ...we give up our soul for a spreadsheet.' -- Numbers numb.

'The Blippy updates include the location and the amount of each credit card purchase, and the Blippy member can add extra information including photos of venues and comments on their purchases. If I had to guess I'd say the target user group for Blippy is people who like shopping and also like subjecting every aspect of their finances to communal surveillance by the great all-seeing Eye of Sauron. I can't even speculate who might belong to this special, unique group, except to ascribe some generally qualities like "woefully naïve," "boundary issues," and "no interior life." I'd say I'd like to meet them, but I really wouldn't -- they might start posting stuff about me...'

'In the farther future, who will be the first to tweet their neural feed? The unexpurgated feed that would be captured directly from the brain, not medicated by language, typing, consciousness, and culture as now. As with other successful technology roll-out paradigms, truth culture is likely to be opt-in, and the competitive advantage could likely be with those who do decide to disclose.'

'Send private, anonymous feedback to coworkers, classmates, and friends. Open, honest communication is crucial, but not always easy. Go ahead... say what you really think.' -- MakeMeJustLikeYou

'Carles invites his readers to make explicit the implicit surveillance they are already conducting, led onward by an administered proclivity for passive curiosity and vicarious fascination with famous persons ... and become actual informants, supplying him with information as if he were a Stasi bureau chief in charge of cultural subversives: Recommended TIP submissions: #mild misunderstandings that need more exposure to turn into over-exposed controversies... And so on. Carles's point of course, is to demonstrate how the media machine no longer needs diabolical masters to operate it ... Instead we create the material bases for our own ideological predetermination through our own eagerness to participate in the mystified consciousness and culture industries. By reporting on one another, we feel as though we have become more famous ourselves, more certain that every move of our own is being watched and evaluated...'

"We live in a bubble of fake bullshit." -- Ergo we must build an even bigger bubble of authentic bullshit.

'Emphasis will be placed on discussing the "digital footprints" that we all leave in our daily lives, and how it is now possible for an investigator (or government Agent) to determine a person's likes and dislikes, religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation, habits, hobbies, friends, family, finances, health and even the person's actual physical whereabouts at any given moment, solely by the use of online data and related activity.'

'Today we are not who we really are, we are what google says who we are. Everything is openly connected and we’ve been trying so hard to make things open: making browsers more open, more social and more you, making everything connected, making open IDs. Suddenly we found out: The more we try to design for “you”, the less “you” can express yourself freely. When we talk about user experience, we always say we are engaging in making people’s life better. Nowadays we’re even trying to embed the most intricate and sophisticated human emotions into the consideration of design: like religious needs and sexual needs. However we designed a huge system that ignore the most basic one: The need to lie. Or they need the freedom to lie. If we are really aiming to design a YOU centric web, this question becomes unavoidable and probably be the hottest one in the next 10 years: How do we design a web that people can have real freedom within?'

'Aleks charts how the Web is forging a new brand of politics, both in democracies and authoritarian regimes. Aleks explores how interactive, unmediated sites like Twitter and YouTube have encouraged direct action and politicised young people in unprecedented numbers. Yet, at the same time, the Web's openness enables hardline states to spy and censor, and extremists to threaten with networks of hate and crippling cyber attacks.'

'Thanks to a cooperation with Citi and other third-party data suppliers, Bundle is able to compile detailed statistics about how Americans are spending their money. To get started, you just enter your location, age, income and whether you are married, single or have kids. Bundle will then create an infographic that represents the spending habits of similar households in your neighborhood. From there, you can drill down deeper into the statistics. At its most granular level, Bundle displays where people are spending their money. My neighbors, for example, buy their electronics at Best Buy, Apple and Fry's.' -- Lambs to the slaughter.

'THE INTERNET DISCONNECT -- You feel in a zone that is private and ephemeral. But the Internet is public and forever. -- The psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson argued that adolescents needed an experience of "moratorium," a time and space for relatively consequence-free experimentation. They need to fall in and out of love with people and ideas. I have argued that the Internet provides such spaces and is thus a rich ground for working through identity. But over time, it has become clear that the idea of the moratorium space does not easily mesh with a life that generates its own electronic shadow. Over time, many find a way to ignore or deny the shadow. For teenagers, the need for a moratorium space is so compelling that they will recreate it as fiction. And indeed, leaving an electronic trace can come to seem so natural that the shadow seems to disappear. We want to forget that we have become the instruments of our own surveillance.'

"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" -- ...if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable. -- Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. ...we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.'

'“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John Browning, a lawyer and member of the Dallas Bar Association who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.” -- Mr. Reuland acknowledges that, in principle, anyone who knew Mr. Bradford’s username and password could have typed the Facebook update, but he regards it as unlikely in this case. “This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil,” Mr. Reuland said, adding that the Facebook entry was just “the icing on the cake,” since his client had the other alibis. -- Joseph Pollini said prosecutors should not have been so quick to drop the charges. “...there is a multitude of reasons why someone of that age would have the knowledge to do a crime like that.”' -- Exploitable

Rubbernecking 2.0 -- 'Moore’s [tweeted] coverage was quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike, something that she actively encouraged so she could tell them the truth, rather than the speculative bullshit that was hitting the wires. There was just one problem: Moore’s information was bullshit too. -- ... the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. Her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out; it wasn’t about preventing harm to others, but rather a simple case of – “look at me looking at this.” I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference. And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something...' -- On Neda Agha Soltan's death: '...the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”'

"The presidency of Mr. Obama is truly a landmark event, and I can think of no better way to honor it than with this $2.5 billion advanced digital-imaging project," acting archivist Adrienne Thomas told reporters. "Not only will our sensors provide unprecedented moment-to-moment documentation of a sitting U.S. president, but they will also give the American people the breathtaking realism and seamless layer animation they have come to expect." Many scholars have also praised a feature of the motion capture technology that would allow future generations to digitally alter the president's wire-frame model by retroactively modifying clothing, facial features, skin tone, and even accessories.' -- Shades of PKD's 'The Simulacra'.

'“I stopped living for moments and started living for people.” — Miley Cyrus, 2009 -- I was reading that popular tween sensation Miley Cyrus deactivated her twitter account. It will go down in history as the ‘most tragic’ internet suicide of all time, since she had over 2 million followers. I have read ‘doomsday articles’ that say this is ‘the end of twitter’, since tweeple now have role models who were ’strong enough’ to quit twitter. Instead of mimicking role models who are ‘twitter addicts’, tweens will now be more independent and mimmick role models who are ‘twitter quitters. A lifestream of text filled with 140 character statements just doesn’t give U enough room to BE U. It seems like maybe she turned to ’social media’ to try to replicate human relationships+interactions+socialspheres, but it was just this weird experience of ‘people looking at her.’ -- Just want my life 2 belong 2 me, but also want my life to make other people feel jealous/bored with their own existences.'

'My thought process is private ... the “immediate self” is not a true reflection of what we mean or what we want or what we are. The stream of real-time information to which we are continually supposed to contribute may seem a spontaneous eruption of expression, but it is an expression of pure administration. -- The self we develop in that matrix of perpetual publicity will be more malleable than ever before; there will be no reserve for the individual to draw from, no private experience to shore up a sense of self that the social network rejects or doubts. The endless real-time communication foretells a perfect system for imposing dispersed power on an individual at every moment—to have that individual compulsively referring everything that he regards as significant that he does to the public sphere for comment and recognition, a never-ending compulsion to confess, to invent the anticipated sins and perform the social penances.'

'Peep culture involves watching and being watched, snooping and spying, gawking and gossiping; it means exposing our intimacies with an eye toward bonding with others and growing comfortable with the increasingly common slippage between public and private. Peep culture, like pop culture, informs the atmosphere — it is the atmosphere — in which we live. Writes Niedzviecki, “It’s like that famous line about pornography: you know it when you see it. And you do see it. All the time, everyday, everywhere. -- ...people like Twitter because it's connection with low expectations. And that's a phrase that has stuck with me and has become almost an overarching explanation for the whole peep culture phenomenon. ...we want the feeling of connection without the weight of being expected to do something.”

'Sacramento Municipal Utility District has told 35,000 customers in their monthly bills how their energy use compares with neighbors', and with the district's most-efficient customers. Customers who received the additional information cut their energy use by 2%, compared with a similar group of users who didn't get comparison data. -- Mr. Ariely says people are more likely to take medicines as prescribed if they believe others are watching -- an idea not addressed in typical economic theory. "Why should you care about what other people do? It's irrelevant," to a classical economist, Mr. Ariely says. But not to a behavioral economist.'

'#5) Punctuality: Before mobile phones, people actually had to keep their appointments and turn up to the pub on time. Texting friends to warn them of your tardiness five minutes before you are due to meet has become one of throwaway rudenesses of the connected age. -- #30) Geographical knowledge: With GPS systems spreading from cars to smartphones, knowing the way from A to B is a less prized skill. Just ask the London taxi drivers who spent years learning The Knowledge but are now undercut by minicabs. -- #31) Privacy: We may attack governments for the spread of surveillance culture, but users of social media websites make more information about themselves available than Big Brother could ever hoped to obtain by covert means. -- #37) Personal reinvention: How can you forge a new identity at university when your Facebook is plastered with photos of the "old" you?'

'Augmented ID is a TAT concept that visualizes the digital identities of people you meet in real life. With a mobile device and face recognition software from Polar Rose, Augmented ID enables you to discover selected information about people around you. All users control their own augmented appearance, by selecting the content and social network links they want show to others. Modifying your augmented ID is easier than fixing your hair in real life and, of course, TAT Cascades will make sure you look great! '

'Let them eat Facebook profiles. -- We won’t put a price tag on ourselves or our friends or our pleasures, but Facebook will happily do that behind our backs, in economic exchanges that don’t include us. ...we have become the stuff being exchanged, both in what we are and what we do online. ...no matter how much we might love attention, we can’t use it to meet our basic needs. Ultimately, we all have to participate in the cash economy. -- In order to reclaim the fruits of our labor and stop working on the digital plantation, we may be forced to become self-consciously mercenary about what heretofore we have been content to share out of a spirit of convivial sociality. We will need to start viewing our social behavior as our intellectual property, our various selves as proprietary content to which we retain the broadcasting rights and which we have no intention of licensing for reuse without our express written consent.' -- Awesome reveal of 'free'

'Sharing once seemed to me a simple, straightforward thing, but the way tech and social media companies have co-opted it recently have made me increasingly suspicious of it. ...we aren’t sharing at all, we are working to move information and data into digital space where it can be manipulated and harvested for profit.' -- '...don’t we want actual editors filtering content for us rather than our friends? I would be inundated with more information to process about my friends’ efforts to signal who they want to be. And I would have my own performance to worry about as well.' -- '... [we are sending] the message to the world that it is okay to assume that we are always, always performing. That sort of claustrophobic suffocation precludes the possibility of a true public space, as in not private. Everything that once might have delineated the private is now being compulsively shared or extracted and brought into view. ...always on the verge of boasting.' -- Performance anxiety?

On media ecology and Postman's amusing ourselves to death. Quoting Henry Canbry, 1926: "What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life ... and the prime cause is not vanity ... but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in mass civilization." -- That 'context collapse' makes people to want to discover an authentic self to perform authentically towards 'authentic causes' that reinforce the authenticity of the endlessly authenticating self? Dude needs to read some HRO.

'Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. Quantitative analysis by its very nature seems remorseless and inhuman. Numbers may be useful for epidemiologists and insurance companies, school systems, the military, and sociology professors, but what have they to do with the fabric of our personal lives? ... two years ago, my fellow Wired writer Kevin Kelly and I noticed that many of our acquaintances were beginning to do this terrible thing to themselves, finding clever ways to extract streams of numbers from ordinary human activities. A new culture of personal data was taking shape.' -- Bunch of old men trying to cheat death by uploading their dataselves to the internets. Call this the Kurzweil-Kelly syndrome. By their numbers you shall know them.

'What's happened is you had an idea – which in a way was quite an heroic idea – that each individual could be themselves, could express themselves and become better people. In fact, what happened in that process is that you shifted the idea of risk away from institutions and onto the person themselves, and in that process is what people began to do – far from expressing themselves – began to monitor themselves to see whether they are the correct definition of the individual, whether it's in psychology, how they feel and how they behave; and they begin to search for – and are given – ways of monitoring that as individuals, and that paradoxically leads them to trying to become what they think is the right individual, which actually leads to homogeneity... that idea of total expressiveness... it may be breaking up now as we enter an economic crisis and politicians discover they have power, institutions have power, and that's the way to change the world. The idea of the self may change.'

On the internet: his views on its impact, its potential, and what it has come to represent. -- "The new realism will be something that geniunely reflects to people their experience of the world which is complicated, ambiguous, that we are alone in the world..." -- "Facebook is just a victorian public world reinvented, but it's not the new television because it doesn't tell us stories, and people's experience doesn't tell us stories. Our job is take people's experience and make things out of them which then those individuals will go 'Oh, that's fascinating, it responds to me, I feel that's real but it takes me beyond myself.' -- In our world of individualism, the things that people are really concerned about are being trapped by their own feelings: there is growing sense that people want to know whether their feelings are real, if their feelings are right or wrong, do other people feel these feelings? They want to be taken out of themselves and taken into other emotional dimensions."'

'Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance. -- ...people change their behavior—often for the better—when they are being observed... -- We tend to think of our physical selves as a system that's simply too complex to comprehend. But what we've learned from companies like Google is that if you can collect enough data, there's no need for a grand theory to explain a phenomenon. You can observe it all through the numbers. Everything is data. You are your data, and once you understand that data, you can act on it. -- For many Nike+ users, doing their exercise becomes inextricable from measuring it. "Forgetting my Nike+ sensor, or my iPod battery being dead, just takes the life out of my run."'

'There's a certain psychological power to expressing things with precision, to making nuance explicit, even as it renders the powerful prosaic. One girlfriend is a miracle; 20 is a number. Managers measure things in order to incentivize them, yet the very act of measurement cheapens things. As Stalin once said: "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."' -- Numbers numb

'What makes the creative-writing programs so suspect is... the intense egocentricity they seemed geared toward generating. ...the people of the creative class are fairly certain they are destined to be creative, but can never be certain about just how creative they are. So they must seek outward signs of their blessed inner superiority, must seek or contrive recognition for their creativity whenever possible. This is that class’s essential self-consciousness... Self-proclaimed creative writers are an elite group that teaches the rest of us and the generations that follow how to be minutely worried about the status of the self, the micromechanisms for conveying identity or computing that of the people we encounter. Creative-writing programs institute trickle-down narcissism. The “habit of self-observation” seems to me a most unfortunate curse, an inability to escape from oneself or see past oneself and become immersed in experiences, in dialogues, conversations.'

"Tracking game popularity trends on Twitter." -- When the micro actions within games are so easily tweeted, then I'll get excited. (#virtualworlds: we all 'live' in twitter now)

Not Meant for Public Consumption by Clay Shirky: "Society has always carved out space for young people to misbehave. We used to do this by making a distinction between behavior we couldn’t see, because it was hidden, and behavior we could see, because it was public. That bargain is now broken, because social life increasingly includes a gray area that is publicly available, but not for public consumption. Given this change, we need to find new ways to cut young people some slack. Privacy used to be enforced by inconvenience; you couldn’t just spy on anyone you wanted. Increasingly, though, privacy will have to be enforced by us grownups simply choosing not to look, since it’s none of our business."

1984 vs Brave New World: 'What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.' -- It's both.

'The goal is not happiness itself, the prime minister explained, a concept that each person must define for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he called, in an updated version of the American Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of gross national happiness.” ... the government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index. All of this is to be analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration as well as suicidal thoughts.' -- Engineering a touristy Happyland. Grim.

"On one level, people have understood the power and importance of silence for a long time. It's why we go to the woods, or the ocean, or up on mountainsides to renew ourselves. And why we take up meditation, or spend time in quiet cathedrals. But even the most majestic mountainside loses a large piece of its power to inspire if it has to compete with a cell phone, text reply, or other efforts to stay connected elsewhere at the same time. Or even to record the moment, instead of simply being in it. We also have an ingrained habit of constant connection that makes disconnecting more difficult. And potentially more painful. Where there's a will there's a way, of course. Which is what makes me suspect that at least part of the constant connectivity movement and technology stems from an inherent desire, within many of us, to have all that distraction. We are not, as a species, hard-wired for solitude. We're social animals, made to exist in tribes and packs. And yet ..."

"I have this sense that experiences need to be shared in a much more mediated way to register to myself as having happened. ...since online sharing has become a way of translating my own experiences to myself, without that process readily available to me, I felt dulled at times, alienated from myself to a degree. All of this is to say that I think that the internet has suddenly brought us a much denser experience of interpersonal relationships and sociality that forces us to reshape the way we think of ourselves, as being potentially social at basically all times. We are perpetually present everywhere, with a ubiquity wireless connectivity supplies. The result of this thick intimacy, this perpetual sociality, is that we may have much more difficulty achieving harmony with the natural world, where presence is momentary and fragile, and sociality is limited to the distance our voices can travel." -- Data or it didn't happen.

"The fire was ruled an accident after a tedious review of thousands of digital photos documenting every second of the five hour party."

'The presentation that Adam Greenfield gave at Keio University's DMC Institute, Tokyo, Japan on July 15, 2006. The topic is Adam's then recently published book "Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing."'

"In The Know panelists discuss whether seeing images of dead babies and bludgeoned prostitutes in our sleep is desensitizing Americans to violence."

"Traditionally people have used objects and possessions to demonstrate social status. Now our social lives are measured in equally explicit ways. Every social behavior online has a clear, and often public, metric assigned to it: friends, followers, subscribers, etc. And these numbers are worn online like the Rolex watch at a cocktail party. They create anxiety. They create ambition. I'm not sure what the lesson is, but it's fascinating to think that this is the first time humans have seen their effectiveness as social beings measured in such a conscious way. Certainly it's debatable whether or not these numbers measure the quality of your social life, but never the less they create a new kind of status and new pressures and aspirations for our social lives."

'... is there sufficient pull for mainstream consumer's to turn to some form of nearly-always-worn data glasses? Imagine knowing the tax-bracket of everyone around you - drawing on publicly available tax records and the means to identify an individual in near to real time. Imagine this from the point of view of a would-be lover, a salesman, a charity worker. Extrapolate with mash-ups with Facebook profile, knowledge about your last vacation; previous convictions. Now imagine the advantages you get from access or subscriptions to 'premium channels' - data only available to the select few: from the realtime cop feed; to the wolfpack view of the city; to real-time, real-space casual encounters. A generation hooked on real-time data so compelling that heading out on a friday night just ain't the same without the buzz of a good feed. It'll never happen? How many times a day do you check your email? Facebook? Your twitter stream? People addicted to data? Of course not - it'll never happen.'

"There is indeed a culture of almost constant surveillance and most of it is carried out by family members and friends who record as many moments of one another’s lives as they can. The most effective forms of public manipulation and mobilisation are not to be found in the public sector, or politics at all, but in advertising campaigns and branding. The State is more than capable of losing personal data, but only the private sector will sell our most intimate financial details on to unscrupulous fraudsters for a profit. Totalitarianism is found far more forcefully in private sector team bonding sessions in which you either commit yourself publicly to obvious bullshit or risk losing your job. Orwell was right that society would become atomised and sedated, he was right that abstract forms of communication would feed a permanent sense of displacement and powerlessness... Where he was wrong was in his assumption that capitalism had been beaten."

'“Hipsterism,” is more a fear of irrelevance or phoniness than it is an aesthetic one would purposely adopt. It is the shadow that passes over us when we begin to tentatively plan to do something unconventional, the chill that tells us that maybe it would be safer to do nothing rather than become one of them, trying for cool but failing. That is to say, “hipsterism” is the term for that sinking feeling that cool is at stake in any endeavor, and that nothing can be pursued for its own sake anymore. Of course that is not true, but it often feels like it is, and the image of a stereotype arriviste hipster is there to personify that feeling. And the final twist is that once we begin to fear becoming hipsters, begin thinking primarily about the way what we are doing will be perceived by others who somehow can see through us to the roots of our motivations, we become at that very moment hipsters ourselves.'

'On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect it is having on our society as seen through the eyes of the greatest Internet pioneer youve never heard of, visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.' -- I quit the interwebs

Really nice thoughts on 'multitude' identities, authenticity, plausible deniability (burying bad news/negative impressions about yourself online), and from a branding pov, the long-term value of the trust that comes from allowing an audience and employees to collaboratively break the 'fourth wall of business.'

'Personal sousveillance is the art, science, and technology of personal experience capture, processing, storage, retrieval, and transmission, such as lifelong audiovisual recording by way of cybernetic prosthetics, such as seeing-aids, visual memory aids, and the like. Even today's personal sousveillance technologies like camera phones and weblogs tend to build a sense of community, in contrast to surveillance that some have said is corrosive to community. "Targeted sousveillance" refers to sousveillance of a specific individual by one or more other individuals. Usually the targeted individual is a representative or proponent of surveillance, so targeted sousveillance is often Inverse Surveillance (hierarchical sousveillance).'

'Ideas you can expect to see coming to the mainstream soon are such wonders as self-diagnosis kits and stress monitors. As we advance in understanding what is useful there will be more and more of these services emerging to aid the masses in acute self-awareness. Potentially scary but with great data, comes greater understanding (or at least that's the theory). The technology is already here.'

'#Surveillance: There is no privacy. Get used to it! #Sousveillance: There is no secrecy. Get used to it!'

'#1. (techlaw) Sousveillance will become a major force and industry, despite initial opposition. Like surveillance, sousveillance technology will outstrip many laws, and will be another example of technology moving forward more quickly than the legal framework that grows around it. -- #2. (privacy). Over the past 30 years, sousveillance practice has raised many new privacy, legal, and ethical issues, and these issues will become central as the sousveillance industry grows. #9. (differently abled). The space of those considered to be disabled will gradually expand, over time, as the technological threshold falls and the sousveillance industry grows.'

"In September 2005 the houses in the Horsten-area in the Zuidwijk of Rotterdam got 9 webcams. People living there could watch their own neighbourhood on a secured homepage. Housing corporation Vestia now decided to remove the cameras 1 June 2008 because nobody is watching anymore. The sign says: 'Camera surveillance by tenants'."

'Charlie Brooker sets his satirical sights on news and current affairs. In charting the rise of the public's role in making the news via vox pops and mobile phone footage, Brooker examines the good, the bad and the absurd in citizen journalism. Plus, reviews of two big stories making the news, controversial authored pieces, a poem and much more.'

Adam Greenfield: 'It will be "live feeds from massively distributed embedded sensor networks, extraordinarily complex real-time data visualizations, fully social augmented-reality overlays...” We all will be "minutely and intimately aware of every Indian woman maimed by a spurned suitor in an acid attack, every Iranian kid stoned to death for having the temerity to be born gay, every destroyed textbook in the trashed cafeteria of an abandoned Detroit high school." Unfortunately for us, quoting the Buddha, "awareness is suffering."' -- Jamais Cascio calls the unlimited-bandwidth future the "participatory panopticon," and describes a world where many will broadcast every move of their lives. Everything will be its own broadcast station, its own TV channel: Each subway train, each building, every lamp will be linked in, updating status reports and even live video to the net. The world will be defined by a cacophony of narrow-cast information, all of it begging for attention and analysis.'

'There are different abstraction layers at which you can experience the world and one of them is through the instrumentation of it. It is in some ways the inverse of the surveillance society. Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world. And it allows you have more agency. When people know a lot about you it takes away your agency.' -- 'Being able to understand what is going on the world – How much RFI is there right now where I am standing? What frequencies is it running on? What are the aggregate histograms? Tell me about it. Are people looking at the web around here, or talking on their phones, or sending SMS? Am I in a spot where the thermal signature of lots of people is high or low? What was it like ten minutes ago? Is this typical or atypical of the characteristic histogram of thermal and electromagnetic energy in this space for this time, year on year, day on day, and hour on hour?'

'Equiveillance is a state of equilibrium, or a desire to attain a state of equilibrium, between surveillance and sousveillance. It is sometimes confused with transparency. This balance (equilibrium) allows the individual to construct their own case from evidence they gather themselves, rather than merely having access to surveillance data that could possibly incriminate them. Sousveillance, in addition to transparency, can be used to preserve the contextual integrity of surveillance data. For example, a lifelong capture of personal experience could provide "best evidence" over external surveillance data, to prevent the surveillance-only data from being taken out of context.'

On Twitterification: 'We are expected to be, or become, “omnivorous consumers of momentary trivia.” Not only that, but we are expected to produce that trivia ceaselessly and eagerly. This calls to mind Foucault’s ideas about power exercising itself not as repression—that is, as forbidding us to speak or to act in certain ways—but as permission, as a kind of broad encouragement to speak (albeit through discourses that constitute our identities along certain prescribed lines). Our participation lets power work through us, which we can experience as being exciting—as being part of the action; we are all under surveillance, but we understand that emotionally as “Hey, we’re all celebrities!” Foucault calls it “control by stimulation.” This is why people seem to feel compelled to use Twitter. We want to participate, want to be counted, want to count. -- We are spying on each other and confessing ourselves to everybody else, and mistaking it all for entertainment consumption...'

'Users have tended to migrate from site to site as new services become more fashionable and old services become overpopulated with lame late adopters or worse, too many of those people who cause “contexts to collide”: As Boyd explains, “In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it’s often difficult to figure out what’s appropriate, let alone what can be understood.” When your current friends get to see how you interact with people who knew you decades ago, or when parents can scrutinize profile pages looking for insight into their children’s social life apart from them, it can be problematic.' -- (That 'contexts collide' observation is worth repeating)

"Your stats in a single glance. Ego gives you one central—and lovely—location to check web statistics that matter to you. ...you can quickly view the number of visits to your website (including daily, hourly and monthly numbers), feed subscription totals and changes, and how many people are following you on Twitter." -- Numbers numb

'... college was my big chance to [...] reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self? Perhaps my nieces will find a new way to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation. Perhaps they will evolve through judicious deleting and updating of profile information, through the constant awareness of their public face. It could be that [...] Facebook marks a return to the time when people remained embedded in their communities for life, with connections that ran deep, peers who reined them in if they strayed too far from the norm... Kids [...] will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon [Facebook] and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves.'

"A young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away." -- Tweet

'Simultaneous intimacy and inaccessibility: this also describes our relationship with our own moods. We know our moods well, we feel them directly. And yet, sometimes we fail to notice them, or even mistake them. A person observing us from the outside can say: "Are you angry? You seem angry." And we may have to pause for a minute and ask: "am I angry?" We are both intimate with and separate from our moods, both near and far... -- Margaret Morris: "I interviewed people extensively throughout their use of the application. Most really liked the Mood Map as a means to check in on themselves at any given moment and calibrate their mood over time. The visuals of the map definitely seemed to stick with people - they used the axes to frame their discussions of reactions, possible trajectories, self-correcting strategies, interpersonal dynamics, patterns of groups etc... This self-investigation was interesting to most people and for some, prompted lifestyle and communication changes."'

"That night, a disturbing thing happened. At 3 am, I semi-woke, finding my brain was restructured into a stream where I was waiting for the latest 140 character outburst from the random collection of people I follow--colleagues, old lovers, the guy I know who is building a space elevator. I was dreaming in Twitter. The static electricity of all these quick, fragmentary thoughts made me feel more jittery and caffeinated than if I had drunk three lattes before bed. I spent between the next four hours waiting for something, but I couldn't figure out what. All I knew was that I wasn't satisfied. I thought of cradling my cuddly iPhone with me in bed. I could read tweets in the middle of the night. That thought terrified me. I felt like I was being watched, if not by others, than by myself, scanning through my existence for the next Twitterable moment. I couldn't sleep for longer than two hours at a time."

Three dynamics 'that have been reconfigured as a result of social media. #1. Invisible Audiences. Social media introduces all sorts of invisible audiences. As a result, we are having to present ourselves and communicate without fully understanding the potential or actual audience. The potential invisible audiences can be stifling. #2. Collapsed Contexts. In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood. #3. Blurring of Public and Private. These distinctions are normally structured around audience and context with certain places or conversations being "public" or "private" [and] are much harder to manage when you have to contend with the shifts in how the environment is organized.'