Life as a Dog

There’s an obvious approach to this essay, but it’s a limiting one and it seems best that we make a pact, from the outset, not to follow it. Therefore: I will endeavour not to be alarmist. You, in turn, must not be alarmed. The whole problem is too interesting for that.

With that solemn contract in place, now let me transgress it immediately. Reassurance will follow.

THEY KNOW YOU’RE A DOG
In 2003, when I should have been working on my thesis, I spent several months rebuilding my personal weblog. As an afterthought, I wrote a stats reporting tool.

Most people who keep a blog use a stats package of some kind. At least until your writings attract regular comments, it is the core charm of the practice—what transmutes blogging from shouting in a fog to a feeling of speaking from the pulpit (or chattering in the town square, if your humility is more mature than that of most bloggers). It gives you some measure of your audience. You learn how many people have visited your site recently, and from where on the web they came. You see—and almost invariably, are horrified by—the Google search queries that brought this itinerant mob to your digital doorstep. You find out what other sites are linking to you, and get the cosy feeling of community membership from it. You find out what times are busiest, what articles are most popular, and often, the geographic concentration of your audience. It is exhilarating and puzzling to see that you have readers in Iran and India. All this knowledge is essentially benevolent, as web writers learn through feedback how to challenge and entertain their patrons.

I tinkered with my stats tool rather a lot in the early months. My curiosity compelled (and my small readership enabled) me to super-charge it. With ten to fifty unique visits a day, I could afford a much finer granularity than any commercial stats package typically offers. Every visitor was listed individually. If you visited my site in early 2004, yes, I knew the site or search whence you arrived and your approximate geographic location. Yours specifically. I knew how big your display was. I knew which pages you accessed, the order in which you accessed them, how many seconds you spent on each page.[1] I knew the minute you arrived, the minute you departed. I could tell if you were still on my site while I was looking at you. Of course, I was only looking at your shadow—even though your stats were essentially unique, I didn’t really know who you were.

Unless you left a comment. In that case I had a name (or a handle), an email address (which could be fake) and possibly a website, if you had volunteered one. And of course, I could associate this information with your stats. On each subsequent visit, I knew it was you—the creature who left that earlier comment.

Soon enough there were limits—in the processing power of my server, and more importantly, in my own curiosity. But what if you had oodles of CPU and data storage, and a business case for being inquisitive? A few years ago, I listened to one of the lead engineers at Google claiming that their server farms stored the internet thirty times over. They have data mining algorithms that make my attempts at log analysis look like finger painting. Across their internal networks they crunch terabytes of data in seconds. So does Yahoo, so does Microsoft. Marginally more specialised, so does Amazon and its subsidiary, Alexa. So do Akamai, Atlas and older players such as AOL. There’s a whole alphabet more. Many major companies have a lot of data about what’s on the internet, and how it’s accessed, and by whom. In recent years storage has become so cheap and ubiquitous that these businesses have no compelling reason discard any data. It accumulates, gleaned from all levels of the technology stack we call the internet.

And most of these players have a business case to mine it. To be curious. Ninety-nine per cent of Google’s revenue (US$21 billion in 2008) is derived from advertising. It is too easy to be cynical about Google’s operating mantra, ‘Don’t be evil’. It turns out to be a vital business principle for companies that operate on the internet—to gain the trust of their users, and to maintain it. Microsoft, always dubious about the online realm and only lately embracing it, has suffered for its reputation. Google has won its userbase largely in counterpoint to Microsoft, by not acting like them, by not maximising the revenue potential of its every momentary advantage. But it’s still an advertising company. Just consider that: a few times a day, maybe hundreds of times a day, you’re telling an advertising company what you want. You’re typing it into a box—what you don’t know, what you’re looking for—and firing it in a little packet directly to their database.

Well, not directly. We could go on for pages about the adventures of that little packet before it hits the database, or the other little packets that are generated by a link click and eventually hit a server. But let’s not be alarmist. Let’s just say that in 2008, the US legislature was prompted by a newish technology called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to find out more about them. They solicited the thirty largest US-based internet and telephony companies for information on what consumer behaviour they tracked online and how they put it to use. A few broadband providers admitted to trialling DPI technology—which makes sense, because it lets them extract behavioural information from the data that is already passing through their infrastructure. It’s also nefarious, because you don’t consider that when you’re telling Google what you’re looking for, you might also be telling Telstra or Optus. It seems likely that this technology, in this form, so obviously analogous to wiretapping, will be headed off by the weight of negative publicity and legislative interest. Many broadband providers in the United States and the United Kingdom have sworn off it, and investment in DPI is drying up.

But those are just other players trying to get in on what appears to be the internet’s main game: advertising. It’s no accident that the advertising behemoths of the internet are also its portals—the way into what’s on it. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft—all provide advertising services and derive substantial revenue from them. This extends well beyond ‘related ads’ to the search you just made. Any ad you see on the internet is typically served up by a major advertising network, and each request registers as a ‘hit’ to their servers. Usually it’s paired with a cookie—something that uniquely identifies you, or at least your computer. Just as I knew you were the creature who left that earlier comment on my site whenever you returned, so to an advertising network you are identifiable as the person who previously visited this page, and that page, and that other page. Increasingly, ordinary websites (or ‘content publishers’) are utilising one or more of the stats packages provided by these same networks, hosted on these same networks’ servers, with the same unique cookie identifying you across all those sites—so that each new site you visit, with or without advertising, is probably adding to your data profile. Your activities are proliferating in these behavioural databases. There are many backwaters of the web, but on the high seas it’s perhaps the exception rather than the rule that Google wasn’t told about what you just looked at.

Responding to the US House Energy and Commerce Committee terms of inquiry, all the key companies in the field stated that yes, they were targeting their advertising, and yes, they were engaging in behavioural profiling of some kind or at least planning it. They emphasised the ‘responsible’ manner in which they did it. Certainly none of them wants a privacy scandal. But the data is all there. Given the absence of storage constraints and legislative edicts (and legislating the internet has proved difficult given its detachment from traditional jurisdictions), and given the extraordinary revenue potential from knowing more about what specific people are looking for, any such company that does not at least store your activity is essentially derelict.

We’re not in the realm of speculation. You see it already, in the ads delivered beside your search results, matched on your keywords. Despite initial controversy, webmail providers display ads beside the emails you’re reading, summoned from the content of the subject line and body of the email you’re reading. You’ve seen websites that invite you to register and provide profile information displaying ads based on the information you gave. E-commerce giants prompt you with products ‘you might like’. Everywhere you see ads related to your location, which the major networks derive from your IP address. Their knowledge of your characteristics leaks back to you.

But there are comforts to take. You have the privacy, not of anonymity, but of the needle in the haystack. There is a lot of data, and those who own it necessarily pick and choose what they look for. Their motivation is not to find out who you are, but how profitable you are. Do you map well to our key models? What turns you into revenue? How can we get you to click on this link? The internet is in a self-regulating phase, and understanding these companies’ motivations is cold comfort, but perhaps some comfort.

Because I am not being alarmist, and you are not being alarmed, let’s agree that the behaviour-based advertising of now and the immediate future is no great infringement of your privacy. That there is some non-trivial distinction between their having access to a record of your activities, and them knowing what you do. That they are looking, but not that closely, because they’re more interested in what makes you click. Is that the sum of it? Who else might be looking?

WE KNOW YOU’RE A DOG
There is an idea, handed down from Neuromancer and Snow Crash and their many predecessors, of virtual life. Approximately: you jack into the grid, immerse yourself in the binary landscape, swim through it, perform actions on it, interact with the digital forms of your fellow humans. It sounds pretty cool, and a lot of people have been waiting for it a long time. A few years ago, it more or less happened, we thought, with the advent of Second Life. A ‘virtual world’, evolving out of computer-game technology and aesthestics—specifically, out of ‘massively multiplayer online roleplaying games’ with the goal-oriented aspects removed.

Let me be dismissive. Second Life, despite its ability to generate sordid headlines, is essentially a red herring. So is World of Warcraft and the other MMORPGs of its ilk. The confusion is in the term ‘virtual’, which implies that our online identities should have arms and legs and if not speech then at least speech bubbles. The notion is far more slippery than that. It’s not about having hands and feet, it’s about your fingerprints and footprints.

Two stories then, neither as sensational as any given Second Life media report. In fact their banality is itself worth considering.

One. Tania is a twenty-something Melburnian with just the mixture of effervescence and superficiality that, well, turns stomachs. A year ago she became engaged to Greg, and used a web service to set up a site for her wedding. It has a burbling little blog, a profile of the bride and groom (we learn that he loves animals), a 700-word account of the proposal, and so on. Via the circuitous trajectories of forwarded emails, it came to the attention of acquaintances of mine, and became something of an obsession for them. They greedily, perhaps cruelly, shared and consumed Tania’s every update, dissecting each one in long group emails. The running joke, as running jokes do, got out of hand. Unpleasant comments were left on the site. Radio duo Hamish and Andy were informed and they lampooned it on air—but perhaps because radio is not the internet, they named no names or URLs. When finally Tania and Greg tied the knot in October, someone snuck into the wedding, taking photos for those in on the joke to share. The joke was, by all reports, hilarious and mostly harmless.

Two. In the midst of an article for Wired magazine about the ‘location-aware lifestyle’, journalist Mathew Honan describes a ‘little experiment’. He observes a woman snapping a picture on her iPhone in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Knowing that Apple’s mobile embeds location data into photographs, later that day he checks Flickr (Yahoo’s image-sharing site) for uploads from that place on the map. ‘Score—a shot from today.’ He adjusts the map to show only photographs by the same user. A cluster of images show up at a particular point in downtown San Francisco. Some of them display a kitchen and bedroom from various angles, and a ‘filthy’ lounge room. ‘Now I know where she lives,’ Honan reports. The hapless subject has effectively no knowledge or evidence that her privacy has been casually violated for the sake of journalism. She remains none the wiser.

It might be too much to pity her, however. After all, she submitted to a public place all of the information that was required to find her. After all, she failed to countenance the possibility that her potential audience included at least one complete stranger (with, himself, a vast and very much countenanced audience of strangers). After all, the public leakage of information that exposed her living conditions to the Wired journalist spills out greater or lesser details on any given creature of the internet.

Why pity the Golden Gate Park girl, why pity Tania, when their fate is no different to ours? You can, without too much difficulty, do the same for Honan, or for me. You can find, for instance, the Twitter message I just sent out asking for suggestions for this essay.

This phenomenon, this agglomeration of data—images and text and timestamps and geocodes and IP addresses and so on—this is your online form. There’s nothing ‘virtual’ about it, because it is not mimicking human experience. Your online self is effectively ubiquitous and if not permanent, then at least incredibly persistent. If ‘real life’ is like walking with wet shoes, your normal activities affecting and affected only in the moment and only by an enumerable crowd of actors and observers, visible for a time before evaporating, as ephemeral as memory is fallible—then ‘online life’ is like walking on wet concrete. Online, you are increasingly the incessant record of your every twitch and grunt.

The availability of your digital form to complete strangers is one thing, and problematic enough. It’s difficult to conceive that someone you don’t know might be curious enough, for reasons beyond your imagination, to dust the internet for your fingerprints. Much more conceivable, of course, and much more complicated, are the people you know—friends, colleagues, relatives, acquaintances.

A third story. A bloke was cut up about a long-distance separation that seemed never to end. His ex-girlfriend’s activities were always surfacing in his Facebook feed. Every status update had a deeper significance, every uploaded photo selected and tagged meaningfully. Or so it appeared to him, in his malaise—of course she was doing no such thing. He lurked helplessly on her profile page, looking for clues that it might not be over. It was crushing him, her constant presence, her ready observability. Every time he looked it brought him down, but he couldn’t not look. There was always something new to inspect, to turn over in his mind. He began to do what he imagined she was doing, ladening his statuses and public activity with secret signals. In short, his online form turned strange. And his hundreds of ‘friends’—contacts of all kinds—could watch as it did, without him really even thinking of them. Eventually, perhaps, this fellow asked an acquaintance to disable Facebook on his computer, in a way that he would not be able to circumvent, to remove this temptation to play out a private turmoil in full public view.

This is what social networks and related services tend to obscure: the normal directedness of communication. It should be to, not just from. This not an inherent facet of the services, because almost all of them—from Facebook to LinkedIn to message boards to anything that displays your email address—offer a way of sending a (relatively) private message. But it is a facet of the way we use them right now, to lay out personal dramas and quotidian minutiae in public. We think of how our communiqués will be received by a significant few, the vocal ones, the ones who respond and leave a comment, and largely forget about everyone else who is subscribing—with a greater or lesser degree of interest—to our feeds. This is exactly how we behave in the physical world; there are things we will not say to everyone, things we will confide only to a few, things that we might say differently to different people, considering the way they are likely to absorb it, no doubt hoping to ensure a particular outcome (a judgement, a response, an action). We know how to attenuate our volume in a crowd, we consider what not to set to paper.

It’s not as though we don’t think this way online. Often, when sober and rational, we stay our hand. We lock our profiles, weigh up friend requests. We write drafts, then perhaps think better of them. But even so, our perception of the eavesdropping crowd around us is dim. Bloggers often cite a rule of thumb: never write anything you wouldn’t want your grandmother to read. It’s not a bad rule for bloggers, shouting in the mist or soapboxing in the square. But the advent of social networks changes things. It insists that we become less writers and more people who express their personage by writing—by, more often than not, broadcasting. This is brilliant, because as we circulate information about what we are doing or thinking, we keep a wide range of contacts in our loop. At any point they can join in, with a casual comment perhaps, and almost effortlessly old bonds of friendship (or whatever) are reinforced, renewed. New ones are formed. The problem of contacting old friends ‘out of the blue’ is solved at a stroke.

But it’s awkward too, because a network is as good as its weakest node. Facebook can lay claim to uniqueness because that weak node might well be Nanna, or your boss, or your eight-year-old nephew. There are many (and better) reasons why Facebook is more subdued than it once was, but one is the necessary caution produced by over-extended friend networks. If you do think about it, there’s not much you can say at all. And friend management is even more complicated than that—some people are simply noisy. Some are indiscreet. Some are chummier than you’d prefer. Some tag you in unflattering photos. Some are relentlessly self-promoting. Recently there surfaced a dead-simple extension to the Twitter service, built by a third party, that surveyed your friends and notified you when one of them stopped following you. It was called Qwitter. It made a lot of people a little bit miserable. There’s a fatal flaw here: you can’t easily refine your network, deleting certain existing nodes and refusing certain new ones, without impairing real-life connections.

It’s a fascinating dilemma, and it occupies many of the entrepreneurs who build these services, who now and then devise ingenious but necessarily incomplete workarounds. It occupies the rest of us, too. The excessively prudent opt out. The moderately prudent shut the hell up. The extroverts gamble on disinterest or an implausibly generous reception.

It’s easy to get carried away expounding the revolutionary aspects of Facebook in particular. It is one very big fish in a wide-open lake, and it has a rival in the similarly monstrous MySpace. But there is a significant difference, an emergent dynamic that distinguishes MySpace as the end of the old and Facebook as the beginning of the new: Facebook made us publish our real names online. First name, surname. A simple policy, which the administrators enforce to an extent but hardly need to, because the real benefits of ‘being on Facebook’ lie in your findability, your real-life recognisability. It is a policy that few of its predecessors had the gumption or the case to make. In one apparently innocuous clause, Facebook ended the masquerade ball. If you want to party, doff the mask. Your handle, that relic of citizen-band radio and dial-up bulletin boards, is merely a liability, isolating you from your network. The glaciers are melting on the internet’s Anonymous Age. MySpace knows it, too—in December it moved to encouraging the same from its userbase.

Anonymity, often confused with privacy, is not a core attribute of the web. We’ve seen that already. It was merely its initial state. There was no good reason to volunteer your identification papers; no-one else did. But as the web has shifted from a top-down publishing platform—a cathedral, a pulpit, a lechery of priests—to ‘user-generated content’—this bazaar where village idiots can yell just as loud as you can—anonymity turned out to be the bane of the system. Once, in a cartoon, it was lauded: on the internet nobody knew you were a dog. In fact, the problem was not dogs but trolls. A more recent and slightly less famous cartoon presented John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: ‘Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad’. If you offer a forum, and let your interlocutors go incognito, you will get fuckwads. It turns out this is an inviolate rule of human behaviour, given a large enough sample size (five to ten ought to do it). Not everyone becomes a troll, but one troll ruins it for everyone.

So the passing of the Anonymous Age should not be mourned. Surely we can ask that a person be accountable for their public actions. The real question, to which we keep returning, is what is public, and how public. It’s hard to come up with a reasonable objection to enterprises such as WikiScanner, which refute the pre-eminence of anonymity and correlate the IP addresses of unidentified Wikipedia edits to a database of corporate IP address assignations. This utility caught out former treasurer Peter Costello in the winter of 2007, in the lead-up to the federal election, when a staffer excised references to a nickname (‘Captain Smirk’) from his Wikipedia entry. A further 125 edits were discovered to have emanated from the Prime Minister’s Office, many on controversial topics. The open dissemination of authorship data, in the web’s market democracy, produces this interesting phenomenon of citizen surveillance. It is repeated on a smaller scale all over the web: the identity of a troll is exposed, and the mob executes mob justice.

The Anonymous Age of the internet is over partly because we’re fed up with fuckwads and are applying processing power and people power towards their eradication. But more significantly it’s over because people are perceiving practical benefits to trading in their anonymity. There are friends to make. There is credibility to be established and guarded. There is the promise of admittance to exclusive clubs and networks. There is profit to be earned. The only downside is increased accountability, and what’s to be accounted for?

Citizen surveillance, any kind of IP address or cookie correlation, makes an informed guess about you. It sees what you are doing through a narrow slit. Given enough data, it builds up a pretty good picture of you, but not one you can’t circumvent with some ingenuity. By contrast, modern massive social networks tie your every activity to your profile ID—everything you do is stamped as yours, as belonging to this entity that did everything else you did. It produces a much more coherent form. As with the search giants and their behavioural ad targeting, you see it in the major social networks: these systems reflecting their knowledge of you, who you might know, what you might want to buy. Similarly, you have deeper interactions with fellow internet denizens, because they can more readily perceive you. These deeper interactions are not something we are likely to give up.

But don’t get too attached to the contemporary networks that facilitate them. Facebook and Myspace are the incumbents, and there are plenty of insurgents who have a better grasp of the radical ideas at their core. Twitter demonstrates that, if anything, Facebook overreacted to early user complaints about privacy. It should have realised they were just teething problems, and that its chief attraction was broadcast mode. That’s what Twitter implements, in its entirety: tell everyone what you’re doing or thinking. Shout out loud. Carry out conversations at the top of your lungs. You can whisper too, or narrow your audience, but if you do that you miss out on the main game. You’re just creating silence for others to fill. Then again, Twitter (or Blogger, which really came first when it comes to broadcast networks) is not the end-point either: for one thing, it’s incredibly noisy, and for any enthusiastic use the signal breaks down. There has always been a niche undercurrent to the phenomenon of social networks—the earliest were all niches—but as our emphasis changes from being online to doing stuff online, they’re moving back to the centre. They address the real and perceived flaws of the massive generic social networks—as single points of failure, as places where your relatives and colleagues are your ‘friends’, as ubiquitous to the point of being uncool. They are allowing recognition to extend beyond who you are to what you do, say and have achieved. And most of the newest crop of these networks bring to the fore broadcast modes of interaction. If traditional communication is discussing and conspiring and arguing and shooting the breeze, one to one or to a few—modern online style encourages us to communicate by publishing and republishing and directing and curating and debating and critiquing and revising and responding out in the open. What were ponderous, public activities now infiltrate our private lives. And they seem simple enough. Everywhere, people are excitedly putting themselves out there. Whatever they are.

HOW TO BE A DOG
Western society has come to perceive technological change as constant and inevitable, and approaches its consequences with something like a Manichean awe. Every change is ‘better’—simplifying or empowering, removing constraints (of time, space, memory, physical capacity, innate talent). Email makes us more productive. Google and Wikipedia make us smarter faster. Your blog makes you a citizen journalist. Or else the change is ‘worse’, trammelling our time-honoured traditions. Reading online shortens your attention span. Console games are making children stupid, unimaginative and violent. Text messages are replacing articulate conversation with barked announcements so illegible as to ruin both participants’ ability to write or talk or even think.

danah boyd [sic], herself an established internet identity, has completed a PhD thesis on the travails of US teenagers participating in networked public spaces. Coming of age, building an identity, forging and reconfiguring personal relationships; these great old dramas are now played out, in part, in the wholly new and mediated environment of the internet. Mediated as in passing through a transformative medium. Mediated far more than the classroom, more than the schoolyard, more than the nightly rotation of phone calls to friends. The social networks where teenagers flock and congregate and soon enough abandon—all of them begin with the question: introduce yourself. To whom? Well, to everyone who’s already here or will soon be here. This is an awkward enough activity for anyone, but in many real-world settings it’s an informal thing. You can size up your new acquaintances, say one or two things, adjust your style in response to their subtle, even involuntary feedback, and begin to fit in. On the internet it’s far more ritualised, a formal ‘who I am’ summary delivered into an unclear and ever-changing context. In Boyd’s phrase, these young adults are ‘writing themselves into being’ every time they set up a profile, with a name, a few sentences not dissimilar to a mission statement, some photos that they think present their best angle, and a motley collection of things they like. Then begins the engagement with everyone else, who has done just the same, commenting and posting and scrapbooking their friendships, the teenage maelstrom of shifting loves and hates and alliances and doubts carried out in 10-point Tahoma. In an environment that is persistent, and searchable, and unstable. The normally tight feedback loop of interruptions and body language cues loosens and recedes. Quiet and shy kids disappear in this place, where written noise is necessary to be. But the more you are, by virtue of your permanent interpersonal oeuvre, the more you risk being taken out of context—of being regarded from an angle you didn’t intend.

It is an important analysis, because Boyd’s subjects are of the age where social theatre has the deepest significance, and because they are the first generation to see the online environment as a place to play it out. They are the ones whose adventures in this massive, unmonitored social experiment have life-altering consequences. They are the first to think it’s normal. But these same challenges confront all of us online. Any time you participate, you’re presenting yourself, not just to the specific targets of your communication (if there are any—but there’s always at least an imagined one), but to anyone who seeks out or stumbles upon it. The vanity search, entering your name into the Google search box, has a bad rap. It’s a reasonable response to the lack of humble ways to monitor and manage the impressions you make, and the absence of small, defined audiences for your performances of self (as Boyd puts it). It’s increasingly a recognition that your impression is beyond your control, that not only can you rarely limit the audience, but others can manipulate your impression. For years I used the esteem Google seemed to have for my blog to lampoon an old mate. Any search for his name brought up a goofy, buck-toothed primary school photo. I made sure of it.

That’s what makes impression management on the web, which we increasingly inhabit with our fingerprints and footprints, so fraught. We haven’t fully realised the way it is being used to learn about others, even as we’re using it that way ourselves. We transition from real-world encounters to online ones and back more and more seamlessly, more and more without perceiving its oddity. But the way we present ourselves on the web right now, and the way the web allows others to interact with us, is, well, roundly abominable. The internet is a playground, a cacophony of practical jokes, goofball antics and heated rivalries. It’s an irrational space, and an infantilising one. Smart people express themselves in ironic baby talk—it’s hard to understand much of what’s said on blogs and social networks without some understanding of the lolspeak lexicon: words like wub and ftw and zomg and nom and kthxbai. But irony is a contract. There’s nothing guaranteed about the context you imagine your words fit within. Even attempts at rationality seem unsustainable: Godwin’s law, which has held since the earliest days of the open internet, states that as a Usenet thread grows, the probability of a comparison to Hitler approaches 1. There is no rarer bird on the net than a reconciled difference.

It’s a Dadaist landscape. Personality quirks are writ large. Memes (most originating from the b forum on 4chan, the web’s vital and nauseating core) lift maladjusted individuals into a pantheon of humour. In congregations we flock to them. And into this landscape, social networks are beginning to reinsert traditional celebrities, real-world identities, long relegated by the internet to nipple-slip curiosities. Many are taking their cues from US political campaigning, which began this incursion, to offer limp PR titbits; recognisable but unexciting. The personalities who flourish in this environment are the ones who engage with it, who have an external profile large enough to generate initial interest, but then get off their pedestals and talk ordinary. Or as US basketball star Shaquille O’Neal puts it on Twitter: ‘even da aliens no me, da ones real far, i speak to them like ibadablaa, Jigamagla, bockeraaa.’

What does it mean when that great twentieth-century boundary—the one between fame and obscurity—is transgressed in this way? What does it mean when the alternative prime minister of Australia pokes a few buttons on his phone to tell us he’s at a Nick Cave gig, and ‘he’s on fire’?[2] Are we ready for the democratisation of public personage?

Because it’s coming from the other direction, too. That the internet has long manufactured its own VIPs is well documented. But as netizens begin to realise the implications of being online, of acting in a persistent, searchable and decontextualising environment, they’re beginning to devise solutions to the challenge of impression management. Thus the newer phenomenon of personal brands. That is, turning to consumer marketing for ideas on how to control one’s presentation. This means consolidating your activity portfolio into a hub, giving it a unified aesthetic, optimising it for search engines, making sure your logo scales down to 64 x 64 pixels (some people still call these things ‘avatars’) and using it consistently. This advance guard tries to guide you through their years of digital artefacts, prioritising the recent. In writing themselves into ‘About’ pages, they imagine an audience as big as the internet—not pretending it is that big, but ready for any random visitor. The effect is safe and soulless, of course. For most of this decade, the New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton has produced an annual report, which documents in an edgy corporate style his various life statistics over the year. How many air miles. How many take-away dinners. It’s a joke, but one that is incidentally emblematic of the recent trend, especially among internet professionals, to rein in their digital form.

Last year Felton co-developed a social network, one that hasn’t caught on and was never particularly likely to, but one that is something of a conceptual milestone. It’s called Daytum, and it prompts its participants to graph the minutiae of their lives, just as his annual reports do. You can devise any metric—say, the number of phone calls you’ve made today—and chart it over time. The significance is that with enough such metrics, you eventually become machine-readable, a set of numbers over time that can be modelled and compared. Other services do similar things. Last.fm, for instance, builds your identity from your music listening habits, silently reported by your music playing software. In that space, you are your tastes, and you share recommendations with comparable taste-entities representing other humans (that’s not how Last.fm pitches it, but that’s what’s going on underneath). Most social networks created in the last three years offer programmatic access to their data—often taking some steps to ‘anonymise’ it—which can then be sliced and diced any which way by third parties. That’s the genesis of WikiScanner, for instance. And that brings us back to the phenomenon of data mining, and who has reason to look for what. Because your digital form is piecemeal and incomplete, but almost wholly public, and there are plenty of reasons to be interested in piecing it together.

And that in turn brings us back to your level of alarm. There are no regulatory bodies ready to swoop in and solve who can capture what, or who can expose what. The knee-jerk reactions are to opt out or blithely to join the fray. Both responses are too simple. Not participating places you at the new social fringes, a crank. Damning the consequences is absurdly cavalier. The task at hand is to learn what you give out, simply to know the cost of an informational transaction just as we know the cost of a monetary transaction. And furthermore to have these knee-jerk reactions, and to reflect on them, if we can identify them: the revulsion or delight that accompanies understanding of a new technology and what it does to how we conduct our lives. And not to harden your opinion against what seems disruptive, and not to proselytise devices and activities in the face of rational unease. The whole problem is too interesting for that.

Where and how Mathew Honan spent Halloween in San Francisco last year

Notes
1. In modern browsers, which encourage non-linear browsing, the assumptions I safely made back then are now more fraught. Back to article

2. There’s a story of which I’m very fond, of Nick Cave as a Caulfield Grammar boy, standing at a tramstop with a giant quiff of greasy hair, lighting a cigarette—and I read Turnbull’s message differently. But that’s OT. Back to article