Just remember your password

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) – Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.”

… [The prosecution] used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.

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In the early days of the internet, back when I was in highschool, my mother warned me over and over again about the dangers of posting personal information – especially pictures! - on the internet. Address/phone number/real name/town/highschool … those can all lead back to you, the real you, not the miZH0tR0d who’s trying to make waves in cyberspace. Compromising statements can hurt your job prospects. Pictures of you doing illegal or really stupid (read: fun) things can land you in jail. Naked pictures – well, they’re embarassing, and they’re blackmail material in the wrong hands …

So I’m glad I paid attention.

I did talk to a few stalkers, of course (what teenager doesn’t?) – but I kept my cool, and I kept my identity to myself, and somehow – I still have no idea how – I made it through puberty and the simultaneous rise of The Internets, relatively unscathed. Although, yes, somewhere out there, there are IRC records of me successfully – geekily – finding pictures of people, starting with their IP address. And even worse, someone, somewhere, must have a record of me signing on under a fake name and hitting on my then-boyfriend, to see if he’d bite.

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So no, don’t bother googling me; there’s no point. There’s just nothing that exciting about me on The Internets (yet).

But here’s the thing: If I hang with a crowd of my techno/sexo/psycho-logically emancipated peers, surely, someone in the crowd has posted naked pictures somewhere. Surely, somewhere, everyone I know is on record having a one-night-stand with the ugly guy/girl from Physics, trying the gallon-in-an-hour challenge, doing drugs, posting inflammatory messages to online communities, admitting an infatuation with Paris Hilton, waking up still drunk, face down in a gutter …. you name it. None of us is perfect. Everyone does stupid things – I’d even argue that doing stupid things – on purpose! – is the best way to discover yourself, even (sometimes) the best way to learn how to make good decisions. The most interesting people are those who’ve lived interesting lives.

So everyone’s done it.

And some of us have done it on the record.

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But here’s the thing; sure, there are a few nutjobs out there systematically gathering images for their private ‘collections.’ We call them stalkers, and we prosecute. There are a lot more normal people who’ll enjoy your images without ever trying to put names to faces; they’re not interested in backstory, as it were. Unless you become really, really famous (Paris Hilton, again), none of those images will ever matter, no matter who sees them.

This is not true of the ‘official’ images, the ones you posted on facebook, that you posted on your blog, the ones on your myspace page, the ones someone tagged of you on Facebook. Those are the ones you really have to worry about.

They’re searchable.

They’re easily linked to you (no deniability).

They’re clearly your fault – you put them there, or you were an idiot around people stupid enough to do so, and you didn’t de-tag yourself/remove them/speak sternly to your friends.

So let’s face it: being able to take images down is as important – if not more important! – than whether or not you took ‘em, or posted ‘em in the first place . . .

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So:

–> KNOW what information about you is out there

–> Don’t give info out, don’t get your picture taken doing stupid things – if you can help it.

–> And finally, above all, Remember Your Password.
You can always take everything down later, but not if you can’t access the site.

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And no, the boyfriend didn’t hit on my characters back, not once – though I now suspect it was my transparency, and his overinterest in video games that did it, rather than any particular loyalty on his part …

Knowledge is the new Information

Talk to anyone who invests in the stock market. He (or she) will tell you: success takes a lot more than just knowing the facts. These days, all the information you’re likely to use on a daily – or even monthly – basis is at your fingertips, just a search or a click away. Want to know the price of gold, who won the World Series in 1918, stock trends for Apple versus IBM, the price of mangoes in Guatemala – it’s all right there, and if you can’t find it, the odds are really good you can connect with someone who can.

Getting the facts just isn’t the issue any more.

The issue is knowledge.

Knowledge is cognition, thought, connection. It involves seeing the connections between previously (apparently) disparate, unrelated pieces of information. Success, in turn – whether social or in the business realm – is about leveraging those connections in a profitable way. In other words,

The facts: Music can be digitized. We can make very small hard drives. We can store music on them. We can use hard drives to play music on headphones.

Knowledge: those pieces fit together to make a portable music player.

Success: Steve Jobs says “hey, I bet we can sell these things”…

Netflix’s founders knew the facts – Blockbuster was charging too much for rentals, people are working longer hours, the internet was widespread enough to support the movie habits of a generation used to ipods and online networking – but putting them together – seeing the direction and the trends – that’s knowledge. They leveraged it. As of now, Netflix is trading at 30.18…

If you plan to invest in Real Estate, knowing what the prices have been, and what they are today isn’t enough. You have to take a step back and see the trends. You have to look at social pressures, jobs, the price of oil (affecting transportation costs), location, weather – on and on -

you can’t get effective leverage on a situation, however isolated it seems, until you understand the big picture.

Knowledge is the new Information

Which brings me back to the title of this post. Facts used to be harder to collect, and often the collection of facts forced one to examine and understand their connections. This is no longer the case.

When I was young, my local library had a card catalog. At thirteen I did a research project on the Great Depression. While I was reading, I had to take notes on related topics – dates, people, events – so that I could do other, more effective, searches in the card catalog. In other words, to save myself time and effort - and to research effectively – I had to understand what I was reading, while I was reading it.

In highschoool, I did another project, on the massacres in Tiannamen Square. My highschool had just begun using an internet-based card catalog. New to the internet, I “researched” by searching for keywords. I ended with stacks of unrelated material, and no idea what I should read first. I almost didn’t finish the project.

Last year, I did research on the Cold War and Terrorism. This time, I found most of my information online, in online databases and journals. I didn’t just find it, I read it online. I did read some books in hard copy, but often scanned my reading so I would have it later, no matter where I was. I didn’t complete the project (passed it along to the next research assistant), but wound up amassing thousands of pages, hundreds of articles, multiple bibliographies – and I’m still not sure that the multiplicity of information actually added to my understanding. All the information simply meant I had access to a much larger picture. More information, more timelines, more bibliographies, more, more more. However,

Reading, thinking, and writing helped me – just like in 7th grade.

And the implications are ….

So, once upon a time, knowing the facts implied knowledge of the situation – it implied an understanding of connections. Now, knowing the facts simply implies you’re good at using Google.

Furthermore, the average US citizen today has access to an exponentially larger number of facts (and/or rumors) than s/he did ten or twenty or sixty years ago. It takes time to wade through that many facts. It can be difficult to focus (raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten lost on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Amazon.com, the NYT, Wired, Wikipedia, Google maps, the IHT, the BBC, Flickr, Twitter, The Onion… I can go on and on). Our hyperlinked world is increasingly searchable. (Check out the Liquid Information project, read articles about it here and here)…

So what. Big deal. There’s more information, there’s more people looking at information, disinformation is harder and harder to pull off … can’t be a bad thing. … right?

We’re back at knowledge versus facts again. Knowledge – new knowledge, and useful or correct knowledge, is about making connections previously unseen, then leveraging them. This means you have to know what – out of all the chaos of mostly-true facts – is important. You have to know how to choose the most important data points.

The issue isn’t about which facts to keep, any more – it’s how to know which ones to ignore.

We have to train our brains to act like our eyes. Our eyes detect motion much better than stillness, largely because trees don’t jump out at us, while tigers (and the occasional snake or angry neighbor) do – and did. Knowing what was important, fast, was a survival trait.

I suspect it will soon be the same with data, if it isn’t already.

Having information just isn’t enough any more. It just means you can do a keyword search. It just means you can spell close enough to correctly to get google to spellcheck for you. It means you can use Wikipedia.

Having facts just doesn’t imply knowledge any more. It doesn’t imply understanding. It doesn’t imply you know which data points to ignore.

Ultimately, that’s the bottom line. Knowing what to ignore is as important now as knowing facts.

Information just doesn’t cut it.

I’d forgotten how addictive Facebook is

… I brought my computer (a Mac! a Mac!) home to *my* apartment for the first time, and hooked into the internet without deadlines, and without feeling like I should be doing something else. Thoughts as I go along: – it looks cold in Pittsburgh- many of my friends look great, a few the worse for wear (i wonder if Facebook means people actually think more about image, and therefore exercise more, ’cause they’re posting pix of themselves all the time…?)- I am living a pictureless existence and should figure that out. I.e. buy a camera. – The people whose pictures I most want to see don’t post very often on Facebook. Also those who do post often post pictures of things I’m not interested in. Like random objects. You know who you are. Also, yes, I’m a stalker, but a lazy one. – When I joined facebook in college, everyone was my age or older. Now there are highschool kids (hell, middle school) on it. And my uncle. I want to come up with some grand theory about parallel exclusionary/inclusionary social networks, but again. Lazy. – I go back through my pictures (especially my profile pictures) and it’s like going back through time; each picture means something, carries a memory or two or ten. Taken all together, my pictures (not just the profile ones, but all of them posted to Facebook) span five continents and almost as many years. I’m getting older. In theory, at least, I’m getting wiser.- I wonder if everyone changes as much as I feel I have in the past four or five years. Wonder if everyone’s so obsessed with understanding the way people work. I suspect not. … then I wonder what other people think about all day. I bought a mattress and a white comforter, and these deep yellow/gold 1000-count sheets. Something I learned from the last place I stayed in; this Australian guy (who rented me his place for a month while he was gone) didn’t have a lot of furniture, but he had all the essentials down right; the most comfortable bed I’d ever slept in, lots of pillows, an extra-wonderful shower head, alcohol in the fridge/freezer. I suspect after those essentials, everything else is immaterial. There are these signs up in the bus system here; a wine bottle and a water bottle, both on their sides, heads pointing inward. Says above the wine “nice to have” and above the water “essential.” Earthquake warnings. I have an earthquake kit in my drawer. A brick of food that could feed you for at least ten days. Water. Bandaids. God knows what else. … i think i’m too tired to be blogging. talk to you later :) ‘night…

Your Cyborg Future is Here

You Are a Cyborg (from Wired)

…I have nagging worries. Sure, I’m a veritable genius when I’m on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I’m not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world? …

This guy has a point; I can’t remember my brother’s phone number, and I’ve been trying for months. I think it starts with 551, couldn’t be sure, let me check a second. Someday I’m gonna really need to call him and not have his number. Yeah, it starts with 551. What comes next? …

I lost my cell phone the other day, and needed to call a friend. Found myself running through the numbers I knew offhand (about 8, including an exboyfriend I can’t call any more), and then trying to think which of those people was likely to answer who would have the number of a person who might have the number of the person who likely had the number I wanted to call …

… clearly, the solution is that I need all this information accessible off the ‘net, either at the touch of my thumb on a universal screen, or perhaps just encoded into a bracelet I could pass across a screen to get at everything I want …

I remember my mother’s first cell phone; it was huge, and the cord got caught in the steering wheel when she made a turn. Talk about a first impression! I remember when I was out in the middle of the Pacific, and I was surprised that my friends could call home on their cell phones. I remember when there was less coverage, less security, less insta-resource. More ingenuity required?
… Guess I wonder, like this author, what kind of effects my cyborg life is having on the rest of me …