Odyssey Online

…the BBC web site ran an interesting piece by Rory Cellan-Jones on Google’s new feature Dashboard. The article is titled My Life Online–Time to Delete? and ponders uploaded information.  Dashboard allows one to see what information that one has uploaded to save is associated with what Google feature. Ergo, what you’ve given Google to mind and where Google has put it.  It’s a fine check, but as Cellan-Jones reflects, it’s your information out of your hands and in Google’s…forever?  Does on want all of one’s online discourse (like this blog post) saved forever?

…the article mentions Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,  which is an extremely well written study of the social utility of forgetting, set against the new digital storage technologies. Well worth the time to read it…

…recently Derek Thompson put up an interesting post at Atlantic.com titled Where is the E-Reader Revolution Leading Us? which argues that e-readers are pushing technologies toward a Swiss Army Knife model: a mobile technology that can do many things.  It actually seems to me that the e-reader (with all thy faults I love thee still…) is more akin to Donald Norman’s idea of an information appliance, well articulated in his book The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products can Fail, the Personal Computer is so Complex, and Information Appliances are the Solution. Norman makes a convincing case for what an information appliance could be and could do…

…his book The Psychology of Everyday Things (subsequent editions are titled Design of Everyday Things) is essential reading on the day-to-day implications of design…

…since the Obama Administration’s ruling on supporting network neutrality (reported on here at Odyssey Online), the debate has come more into public focus, the politics of said have become a little sharper.  The Washington Post reported that the FCC is drafting the specific rules that will keep ” Internet providers as acting like gatekeeprs,” and also reported that CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, favors network neutrality but thought it would be “a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.” Atlantic Magazine provides ran a useful Political Primer on network neutrality, identifying the players and what they are after.

…today’s Boston Globe has an interesting piece on Facebook, friends, and guilt.  It gets gently to the heart of the matter, is Facebook really about friends.  I suppose that is one positive associated with Facebook: it encourages people to think about what friendship really is.  Can you sustain a friendship over Facebook with photographs and wall posts.  Try an experiment–take someone whom you regularly Facebook (is this a verb like google too?) and write them a letter. You know, stamps, envelope, the whole nine yards. If your immediate response is “But, I’m too busy to write a letter…” you can consider that the results of the experiment.

…and while it’s been promoted here before the best thing ever written about Facebook is by Michael Gerson…

…back to blogging, and with October break here plenty of blogging time. Network Neutrality is back in the news…a few weeks back we mentioned Network Neutrality here and linked to Edward Felten’s fine guide to what it is.  Network Neutrality is back in the news with a number of prominent Republican Senators asking FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s decision to create new network neutral rules, note here and here. Which perhaps caused the appearance of a few interesting commentaries on the whole thing–Preston Gralla details how Network Neutrality issues are playing out between Google and AT & T, and  interesting commentary in the Wall Street Journal by Holman Jenkins Jr. on how hand held digital technologies may turn the whole issue on its head.

…while I spent much of the summer running up and down the shelves looking for books to recommend, it didn’t mean I wasn’t near obsessive about following blogs…couple of interesting pieces from that sphere…firstly a nicely titled Are Kindles and iPods the End of Culture Snobbery? which investigates…contrasts…books with content.  The piece also has an interesting take on how we translate people by what they read.  On a like topic the author of that piece, Derek Thompson, reports on Amazon’s trials and tribulations establishing the user-license that will to Kindle content bring. One of the elements to Kindle that may substantively change the human relation to discourse is whether, if the Kindle becomes norm, one will in fact own the book, I mean content, once it has been Kindle-ized.

Also, to file under knowing blogging, before retiring from Obsidian Wings Hilzoy (pen-name) wrote blogged Good to Know, a narrative about how an unsubstantiated report moves around the blog sphere. For all that is good about the “new journalism” which blogs create/inspire they are still a buyer beware market that beg critical reading…

…researchers at Ohio State University have concluded a study which links Facebook use to lower grades.  While the researchers freely concede that Facebook might be more of a symptom than a disease, they can definitely point to a letter grade drop in excessive Facebook habitues.  Read Thoreau: simplify, for finals swear off Facebook, television, and popular music written after 1980….

…from the Boston Globe, all the reasons to dislike blackberries…a wonderful rant…reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon where a priest is looking out at his congregation saying,”We will now pause for a moment of silent texting…”

…lots of ranting about various things digital,  I realize. Summer hiatus from that coming up (but don’t worry, we’ll be blogging on this summer!)

…an interesting (if long) piece on Facebook by Vanessa Grigoriadis on Facebook which comments on, among other things, how people use and misuse it, what it really sells, where it is going as a business, what it sells, how it might fail. Also some interesting commentary on how web 2.0 has conquered the “old web” and what that means.   For interesting commentary on that see Jonathan Zittrain’s wonderfully titled book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (ODY TK5105 875 I57 Z53 2008).

Quite a bit of editorializing on Google last time out, and I will stop to return to more properly bibliographic posts, but one more shot at Google and the idea of “opting out.” What Google has done, most importantly, is turned copyright responsibility on its head. Rather than asking permission of authors, they ask the author whose book is in Google Books or the home owner whose house is in Google Street View to tell them “no” and then they’ll comply. While Google would invoke necessity (we can’t possibly ask everybody), the fact they don’t ask, that they feel inclusion is a right, a normalcy, makes the hairs on the back of the neck tingle.  It’s rude, for starters. Secondly, there seems to be a serious case of overreach here. While there is precident, I realize, with things like the phone book or census, Google’s approach relies on a self-generated and self-venerated sense of their innate goodness (the whole Don’t Be Evil, after all), but, can’t one think about “opt out” has being the same as my neighbor helping themselves to my vegatables in my vegatable garden because I haven’t asked them not to and then only stopping when I catch them red-handed with a beet.  It’s cooperation by self-justification…and well, it’s rude.

Google is rude, this is what we’ve learned…

…it has been widely reported today that villagers in a small English hamlet turned back a car out taking pictures for Google Street View–the service within Google Maps that allows one to actually see what a street looks like. Yet another break through for Google managing data, and yet another Google tentacle that touches on privacy issues.  Interesting commentary on the whole thing here, here, and here. Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Googlization of Everything has much interesting commentary on Street View.

Google’s response to all of this is its usual “opt out.”  There is simultaneously calming and cloying about Google’s postion. Calming in that Google seems to be suggesting that life has a Edit/Undo command after all, and it’s opting out of Google.  It’s cloying to in that there is indenablely a taunt in Google’s promise. “Go ahead, opt out, see where that gets you.” They are going on with their plan to digitize the world, opt out and marginalize yourself (or so I hear Brin and Page snickering somewhere in California).  It reminds me of the subtle and not so subtle taunts in books and papers like those written by Bill Gates or Marc Prensky which suggested that anyone who resisted conforming their institution or life to digital technologies risked marginalization and, well, being on the wrong end of creative destruction.  One really can find one’s way without Google Maps, without Google Street View, without having every molecule of one’s life digitized without every having to opt in.

That’s it I guess, this time next year we’ll have “opt out” day when we read books, use print maps, road atlases, talk on a rotary phone, etc…