devlog

I flicked through a lot of pictures taken at etech on flickr , and the ones that drew my attention were taken by, or taken of, people i knew. When pictures were unlabelled, especially if i didn’t recognise people in other pictures taken by the same person, i gave less attention to the pictures i was flicking past. The experience is better when people annotate things, is better when you know those people, and when you can get to meet them or see more of what they have to say. When recordings are made by people you know, they become more interesting, create more associations with you.

In English we can pay attention to something, or we can give attention to something; to give attention to, to give notice to, to take notice of, to make note of, to think of to be note. Noticing a noticing. Those who notice it, think they can make an advantage, profit from imbalance, between themselves and those people who are not taking so much notice.

Some people think that from a great height, a picture of a collective intelligence can be correlated. I think the talk is of harnessing the semantic energy in people. Cross-referencing information trails from many different places - what gets described at a simple level as a mashup or an aggregation of different data sources - allows you to build up a kind of consensus picture of what people think, and what people think about what they think. Services spring up to collect peoples’ input and commentary trails in different media, or about different kinds of objects - things in physical space, things happening over time, images of things happening, addresses of messages talking about what is happening. Speculators see this group perception as something to be centralised and homogenised; they talk about the wisdom of crowds finding the fittest path, and the potency of decision markets for optimising decisions about generating the most common value.

For me, value in information increases exponentially the more it is nearby me. Narratives and records created by friends; information about what is happening around me, and about the history of the places near the space i am in, about people and places that i feel a connection to. The great social networking fad fizzled partly because the web services built in that phase were not connecting outwards to different kinds of information, to different protocols.

The Friend Of A Friend project was one attempt to build a framework of similar resources in a more distributed, interconnected fashion. Some people thought that FOAF files, sitting on peoples’ webservers in public, exposed too much, did not offer people enough privacy. Nor does handing over a lot of correlated sources of personal data to a large company combining hundreds of thousands of different peoples’ data sources, offer much in the way of privacy. I prefer to think in terms of autonomy here.

Privacy is contained by a narrative of property: private property, property protection, proprietary. Privacy is narrated as ownership, as self-possession. Property used to mean the same as quality, attribute, thisness; the meaning of the word changed to suggest ownership, the possession of a quality, the covering over and delimiting of it. Autonomy is a process of self-ruling, of establishing local common standards and sticking to them, of maintenance, even control, of the information resources which one participates in generating.

Rufus talks of access to information, patent and copyright questions as the elephant in the room that so many people are ignoring. The collective rights of people to media participation; the discoverability and availability of information sources that could make a lot of difference to research and development efforts; the ability of hackers to build interesting applications, on open and re-engineerable platforms, can become constrained, covered over.

In projecting a dystopian scenario, i would only want to urge more future awareness.