Privacy by design MyMoMe

Speaking of Memory and Media ….

A new site was just launched in Denmark “MyMoMe” - My Mobile Memories. Watch an intro video of it here. And get a tour of it here. It’s a site targeted youngsters where they can “Create memories out of content, and share it with others”. You create “memories” on an account (e.g. with images and videos) and are asked to fill in the date of the memory and to describe how it made you feel. You can also add which one of your friends took part in the memory and perhaps those friends can add to your memory with their own collection of the event. And so you have an online collective memory. One can also create one’s own lists of e.g. sad memories and happy memories. (Mind has really been extended into matter!)(Bergson)

I appreciate the fact that MyMoMe has privacy as a default setting –  that privacy is not something you have to add! Strangely, in the light of all the present discussion about digital media and privacy, Facebook just decided to make users’ profile information even more accessible with their new privacy settings.

Having witnessed the immense movement of users over the last couple of years, from the more open social network sites to the more closed network that Facebook used to be, I am puzzled over this decision. And Facebook’s reasoning for this change of their privacy settings is actually a little bit annoying. According to Zuckerberg “Privacy is no longer a social norm”. People – particularly youth – have so radically different norms around what they like to share with others – that privacy should be something you add online – and not something that you can assume.

I hear these kind of arguments all the time. Often from someone who claims to be more in touch with the “true nature” of the internet. It seems that  if  you today claim privacy for yourself online, you belong to an ancient rare species of oldies, determined to withhold information from others, not having a clue about the internet and its origins, and thus doomed to be alone and pitied.

But it’s really a little bit of a “pop”-opinion. Yes, we do have slightly different norms around what we share and consider public and private. And media in general did play a role in this development. But not a determining role. People still appreciate privacy. And kids do too.  They are not these futuristic media tech borderless shared identity blurps. Kids create their identity and form their identy lines in a different environment with different possibilities than we did as teens. But I know from my many years of work with children and media that they still appreciate very much their privacy and do not necessarily want to share everything with everybody.

I’m sure if we all had had the choice from the beginning, we would have chosen privacy by design online. We (and I here also include kids in the “we”) expect privacy by design in our physical surroundings and we would appreciate it in our online environments too.

Yippi kay yay…

… mother fucker!” (and then the airplane with the escaping bad guys explodes in a gigantic fire explosion) … probably one of the most famous quotes by Bruce Willis aka John McClane in Die Hard 2 – the christmas one.

It’s a Christmas movie with a pessimistic imaging of new technologies from the beginning of the 90’s.  The time when a nerd was really a nerd and not a trendsetter, and where it was actually cool not to be able to send a fax. 

Imagine a hero of the 21st century by the caliber of McClane who does not know how to use new technologies and actually despises everything with a button and a screen or a weird beeping sound. That is NOT cool today.

But “it’s the nineties” – the time of (…McGyver…) the “fax machine” and the “AIR PHONE!” as McClane’s wife extaticly announces over one of them just before she gets caught in air by tech savvy terrorists.

And in the nineties new technologies are threatening. The tools of terrorists and a threat to human empowerment as such – placing control outside the human body.

The control tower of a capital airport is being controlled from the outside by an ex military man and his terrorist team with a mission. They are superior throughout the movie predicting every step of the police and causing menace with their ever so cunning wit of technologies.

And then comes McClane “Yippi kay yay mother fucker!” he hollers – superior and all smug – while using the worlds’ oldest technology to put an end to the evil technologists of the 90’s: Fire. Kapow.

Well, that was the 90’s – a time where you could actually imagine a world without the mobile and the internet and believe it to be a better and cooler place. Yippi kay ay and Merry Christmas.

Memory and Media

CNN had an article last week on how we use technologies as archives of our past Do digital diaries mess up your brain? (yes it is indeed a very sloppy title!):

“…today’s technology creates opportunities for greater, moment-by-moment record-keeping. Archives of your blog, Facebook or Twitter feed — both in text and in pictures — might reveal exactly what you ate on important occasions, the papers you were proud of and the outfits you wore”.

The article made me think of Leonard in Memento who says: “The present is trivia, which I scrible down on fucking notes”. Actually, as a media studies student at Goldsmith’s College many years ago, I remember writing an essay about the film Memento using it as an example of the contemporary virtual/human mind where the present moment in a way suppresses the past. As Leonard so elegantly puts it at the end of the film: “Now, Where was I?”. (Perhaps a too extreme and pessimistic description of the state of things. But I was a student. I don’t know what CNN’s excuse is…).

I have lost the essay now, but I remember that I was using my all time favourite Henri Bergson’s description of “the memory-image”, which are past experiences, that are unrepeatable because in our consciousness they are placed in the past in spatial and temporal contexts. The “memory-image” was to Bergson that what constitues “actual memory” – the essence of human consciousness.

I often regret that Bergson does not live today to experience the effect of technologies in our everyday lives. I wonder what he would have thought about Microsoft’s SenseCam (described in the CNN article) – an attempt to create “memory-images, that is, exact recollections of what happened. Or the status updates on Facebook that places our narratives of the present in a temporal context with the exact time of the status update.

However, what intrigued me the most in the CNN article was the thought that our behaviour and path in life might be effected by our consiousness about the technological archives we are creating about ourselves on e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc. As Barry Barry Schwartz, professor of social action and social theory says in the article:

“If we have experiences with an eye toward the expectation that in the next five minutes, we’re going to tweet them, we may choose difference experiences to have, ones that we can talk about rather than ones we have an interest in,”

Increasingly, and I really think this is the case, we will change our actions according to the archive we are creating about ourselves. Of course we are nothing without a memory of the past, as Bergson believed and as Leonard 100 years later became the perfect image of in Memento. And thus we are everything our past presents; that is, both our physical actions in the past and our (and others!) virtual actions on social network services such as Facebook and Twitter. This is really what is interesting about the technological archives we are creating – that they influence the way we choose to live our lives. This is also what Joshua Meyrowitz refers to as a new “sense of caution” effected by the different “sense of place” that we are experiencing with digital/electronic media. But then again, is it a new thing? People have always been more or less aware about the narratives they present about themselves. Perhaps the new thing is an issue of control. Who or what controls the individual’s personal narrative today?

It’s a bit scarry actually that in my work with raising children in the network society, I am working exactly with this issue. Telling kids to be aware of the archives they create, telling them to be cautious when developing their  identity. It’s a dilemma between letting kids develop their identity in their own generational framework and attempting to mold them in my own generation’s image. But I guess this has been the all time dilemma. Being an adult that has to protect both children’s right to free expression and participation and to protect their rights – and others – to exercise this right in a somewhat “risk reduced” framework.

(I am in a way saying the same thing in this article: “”When moblogger met little brother – Or how new technologies influence behaviour”)

Order in chaos…

Although I never get tired of hearing it repeated, it is really not rocket science anymore to proclaim that media have played a significant role when it comes to the breaking down of social limits and borders. In the 80’s, Meyrowitz was already talking about how electronic media contributed to the restructuring of social situations in the same way as if we were pulling down walls and opened doors. And this development has of course only been taking up pace ever since the internet was paved into our everyday lives in the mid 90’s. (Yes! I repeat it and repeat it. But I am actually experiencing a moment in time where we are still wondering and obsessing about the newness of the network society and the changes that have been taking place so rapidly within the last 20 years. So please, future generations, just bear with my obsession and thrill. Of course you will not appreciate it in the same way as me). Okay. Back to my point, which is really not my point, but rather a whole tradition of brilliant academics’ point. Although, physical and social borders between inside and outside, private and public and so on have been somehow brought down by the technological development of digital media, it is not complete chaos yet. Most girls will still be girls online, lads will be lads, Danes will be Danes and so on and so forth. There are still very explicit social and cultural principles of organization (I think this was Lash and Urry who used this term) that govern our daily digital lives – the way we interact and where we interact.

SO HERE’S A TEST: Do you feel at home, understand, appreciate, know how to respond to the following (look at the comments to the videos):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAh_4tXUh_0

http://www.youtube.com/user/julieg713

http://www.youtube.com/user/FizzicsEd

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO1qcwnd0ok

(this is Danish, so if you are not Danish, you won’t get the point here , sorry):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITak3arfak0

IF YOU DON’`T GET IT OR ARE LAUGHING RIGHT NOW: Don’t worry, you just don’t belong to the social and cultural community of the people who does understand and know how to behave within these communities.

Is this not order in chaos or what?

Logningsbekendtgørelsen

What is Media Literacy?

Media literacy is to the 21st century what literacy was to the 20th. To be media literate is a precondition for participating fully in the network society. However, the notion that access and technical skills automatically lead to full participation should be questioned. The media literate citizen today needs not only a connection and technical skills, but s/he also must have the skills to read and write various media forms as well as the social and ethical skills to navigate competently within the digital media environment.

 

What is media literacy? The first skills that come to mind for many people when we talk about media literacy are the purely functional skills. We think of a tool; a medium that one needs to command. It is the technical skills needed to use the tool and the medium that are emphasized. And not the social and ethical skills needed to navigate in a digital space. And these images of media literacy are still haunting the schools systems around the world.

But of course – we all know better…

Unfortunately, there is a tendency to think that access and technical skills automatically lead to all the skills that are necessary to live and interact in a digital environment.  The Negroponte initiative ”One laptop pr. child” somewhat reflects this perception. Not to say that it is not a fine initiative with a great political signal value – access and functional/technical skills are truly preconditions for participating in the network society. However, it’s not the only precondition. To have a computer does not result automatically in the skills needed to take advantage of the full potential of digital media and to be able to interact in a digital environment responsibly. This goes for countries where the penetration of internet access is not very high and it goes for countries where it is high.

One very good example that exemplifies this notion is the ethnographic studies of internet users made by Professor Don Slater from The London School of Economics in Ghana some years ago. Ghana was one of the first African countries to access the internet in 1994. And since then there has been an explosion of internet cafes in the country. However, although the internet is accessible in Ghana, the internet users were here not using the internet as a source of information. The internet was used to chat with foreigners. Only one internet user had by coincidence accessed ccn.com and she was not completely sure about what it was.  Predominant societal power structures were here reflected in the Ghanesians use of the internet.

So what is media literacy if it’s not access and technical skills only? Media literacy is no less than ”literacy” was perceived in the 1970’s and 1980’s where campaigns were focusing on the importance of being able to read and write texts in order participate in the wider society.  And what is literacy? Literacy is: “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals, to develop his or her knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in the wider society.“[i]  

If we recognize the role of ICT in the wider society as the World Summit of Information Society is doing in its declaration of principles[ii], we can also argue that media literacy is in today’s society a right.  And to strive towards eradicating media illiteracy worldwide should therefore be a priority.

Access to ICT is increasing worldwide. But as argued, access does not result in media literacy. The public library did not automatically result in literate populations.  The first to create a somewhat “public” library were of course the Romans.  However, the power structures in the wider Roman society were only transferred into the library.  Only the ones who could afford an education could and would use the library. (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_library)  

That said…when it comes to the definition of Media Literacy there is presently an ongoing debate that media literacy should not be distinguished from literacy in general. This argument is based on the recognition of the role of ICT in the wider society. However, as I, and many others, see it, it is also important that media literacy is understood on its own terms; that we conceptually distinguish it from previous forms of literacy. A general misconception in the educational systems today is that media literacy should be approached as traditional literacy skills have been approached. But we need to focus on the ”newness” of the skills needed in the network society – we need to distinguish these skills from skills needed in earlier societal stages. ICT has brought something new and different into our lives – something that we cannot compare with other moments in the history of mankind. The skills needed here are not just the skills to use a new form of medium per se, as eg. the skills to read a book were. The skills needed to use ICT are the skills needed to participate in a digital space that extends our everyday life and space.   So what one needs today in order to participate fully in society is something new and different from before digital media became integrated into our everyday life and societal processes.

So what kind of definition of media literacy do we want? We want one that recognizes the role of ICT in the general society and thus build on a general definition of what skills are needed: ”to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals, to develop his or her knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in the wider society”. And we need to define what is new and different from the skills needed in the ”pre- network society”.

So, what is media literacy? To be media literate is to have the skills to[iii]:

-          read and write many forms of “languages”/ systems of signification (to be able to read and write text, image, sound, structure etc.) 

-          to use the technical tools of digital media ( the computer, mobile etc.)

-          to relate the “systems of signification” to broader social and cultural contexts (And what is specific about these contexts when we talk about the new media environment is that these contexts are fluid, constantly changing. So not only do you need to know different languages (your own and English), but you also need to be able to interpret different ”texts” from different types of ”authors”. You need to know the social and cultural norms of the communities you move between etc.)

But ”media literacy” is even more than just the interpretation of the language of new media and the ability to interpret the social and cultural contexts of the sign systems. Perhaps we should even move away from using the term media literacy. To be able to achieve your goals, to develop knowledge to participate fully in society, you today also need a specific approach to life; the capacity to behave and navigate within an environment that per default is digital, to be creative, intuitive and practical, to be critical, to be open-minded and individually responsible. These are skills that are to a certain extent very different from the skills that traditionally were and in many cases still are prioritized – that is to say:  the ability to focus, to listen, to respect the authority on a subject etc. (see the post below on teacher’s traditional media culture Vs children’s digital media culture)

So these are the skills that are necessary to participate fully in the wider society today:

1. Characteristic of digital culture: The blending of the private and the public…

Skills: The ability to keep private in a public place

1. Characteristic of digital culture: The access to numerous pieces of information here and now…

Skills:The ability to prioritize, categorize and choose between much available information

1. Characteristic of digital culture: The immediacy and reach…

Skills: Ethical and moral competences when distributing information and interacting with other people

1. Characteristic of digital culture: The combination of many forms of communication…

Skills: The ability to read and interpret images, form and structure as well as text and words

 

 

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[i] (UNESCO Education Sector, The Plurality of Literacy and its implications for Policies and Programs: Position Paper. Paris: United National Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2004, p. 13, citing a international expert meeting in June 2003 at UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001362/136246e.pdf )

 

 

[ii] “We recognize that education, knowledge, information and communication are at the core of human progress, endeavour and well-being. Further, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have an immense impact on virtually all aspects of our lives. The rapid progress of these technologies opens completely new opportunities to attain higher levels of development. The capacity of these technologies to reduce many traditional obstacles, especially those of time and distance, for the first time in history makes it possible to use the potential of these technologies for the benefit of millions of people in all corners of the world.” (World Summit on the Information Society – from Declaration of principles, Geneva, 2003)

 

[iii] Definition based on a definition in “Current trends and approaches to media literacy in Europe“, a study carried out for the EC by the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, 2007

The clash

Molding tomorrow’s citizens into aware and empowered digital citizens should be an easy task. We’ve done it for centuries -raising children to become empowered in the society of tomorrow, that is. But there is a tiny problem though. In this very moment in the history of man, the velocity of technological development has been unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like it. And we are a little bit stunned. The point is that our everyday life is digital, so we need to be digital ourselves. The easiest thing I could do right now would be to blame the digital generational gap between children and their adults, point a big fat finger at the adults and say “Get used to it and educate!”It would be so easy. But of course I cannot do that.  In Denmark we do have a rather strong political focus on our role as participants in a globalized network society. Though, a recent survey evaluating IT in the Danish school made by the Danish evaluation institute EVA in corporation with the Danish Ministry of Education recently showed that teachers still need more training, that ICT is present in the school, but not functioning, that IT is not integrated well enough in the actual subjects, that knowledge sharing systems are primarily used for administrative purposes and that individual IT initiatives were not supported sufficiently by the school management. These are some of the factors that influence the way in which we bring up kids to become functional empowered citizens of tomorrow.  But there are also the cultural and social factors. And what I see in the classrooms is a conflict between two sets of everyday meanings and practices (that is to say: two different cultures) that clash when students -that have grown up with digital media as natural elements of their everyday lives – and teachers -that have grown up in a completely different media environment – meet in the classroom.

New to Twitter

I have recently become a Twitter user – yes I know I am behind with creating an account… however…

This means that I am completly new to the social rules and customs of this specific community. And this is a great feeling. I guess this is the great thing about our internet communities in general; that we constantly have to recreate ourselves, moving between the many online  social and cultural spaces.  It  demands from people to be flexible.

On Twitter I love the  search engine where I can search any term I want and then being met with a list of “twitters” – moods, information, links, whereabouts – from people all over the world and fields.  

At the present I feel a tiny bit lonely on Twitter though. I have only two “followers”, and I am not sure if I am providing them with anything useful with my twitters since they are 1) situated on each their site of the world and 2) work in two very different fields. The only thing that connects them in this world is me, because I know (or at least I have known) both of them at some point in my non-virtual life. 

Well, somehow this is what makes the internet a great place to explore: The connecting points between the physical world and the virtual are people. And thus the life we live online is made of the stuff that makes us people: dreams, identity, ideas, imagination.

Time Mag’s Person of the Year

Okay, I take the “oops” back (see one of my earlier posts). Time Magazine’s elected person of the year 2008 is definitely NOT an “oops”…

The future of the internet – anything new?

The third survey on the future of the internet 2020 from Pew Internet & American Life Project just came out. It predicts the impact of the internet on society etc.

But its not a magic glass ball! More like a compilation of expert science fiction and opinions. And of course opinions born out of our various perspectives and approaches to the internet and its impact on society and people. It’ s the same story over and over again. For example: Will the democratic dimensions of the internet inflect a more tolerant behaviour – yes or no? etc. 

And then there are the obvious predictions about the future development of internet, mobile and society: We will primarily use the mobile to access the internet, the real and the virtual as well as traditional borders betweeen work and leisure time will disintegrate…and so on…

Com’on look around you! It’s already here (at least in some parts of the world)! It’s not 2020. It’s 2010. And not a prediction at all.

I dont really see anything new in this survey and it’s not even entertaining like real science fiction. And perhaps not even half as intellectual as one of the good old science fiction films with touch screens, portable cameras for the public and super computers. There are no new inventions or predictions that we can get inspired by in this survey - nothing that can contribute to produce the future.

If I really want to know something about the immediate future of the internet, I’ll look here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/opinion/16tue3.html?_r=2. And if I want to shape and inspire the future, I’ll make a Science Fiction movie…

YouTube Symphony

The times when I love my Internet historic moment in time the most, are the times when I hear about projects and ideas that truly make use of the democratic potential of the medium. 

The YouTube Symphony is one of these projects. This is the channel where you can participate in a symphony created specifically in the collaborative spirit of the internet. You can choose your instrument, download the nodes and watch your personal own conductor video to practice your part of the symphony. And then take part in this collaborative video symphony by uploading your video to the YouTube channel. How great is that?

Let’s see and hear more about these positive examples of mobs using the internet for what it was originally made for….great things….

Social media is…

Either we are thrilled or we are worried. Social media has made us addictive, lonely and deprived us of human contact OR it has made us extremely social, loving and caring. This is at least the usual discourse about social media- which is actually quite boring. Let me say this once and for all: Social media does neither! Social media is neither the cause of loneliness nor extreme happiness.

Social media is:

• the framework for digital social interaction 
• a tool to administrate our social network
• an extension of our everyday social life
• a social space where your private and public social network unfolds at the same time in the same space 
• a space with different qualities than physical space – or rather an extension of physical space that adds a “different” dimension to physical space
• a place with a different dimension, which is really not that complicated: things can be copied, distributed widely and they are searchable. 
• a potent and powerful tool that can be used for extremely good things or extremely bad things
• a social sphere where you are the one with the power to make things good or bad (not the medium itself)- so just use social media responsibly (“mediamocracy”). 

Social media has different qualities than “physical space”. And its here now!We learned to walk among each other on earth – I am sure we can also learn to do the same on the internet.

Images with “something else” attached to it…

It is often said that with global media the world has become smaller. We talk about “the global village” connected by wires and images that transgress and transform traditional borders – geographical and cultural. A place where the images and voices from around the world provide us with a greater “feeling” of cultures different and distant from our own. Media images let us know how “they” look, what “they” think, what “their” agendas are etc.

This is actually a very beautiful, but also very naive thought about how media affects our lives! 

I was supposed to fly to Mumbai last night the 27th of November. But the night of the 26th of November, while I was getting ready for my trip, images of horrific events far away in Mumbai started sieving in through my television into my little secure homespere. And suddenly the world seemed so much smaller to me. Suddenly Mumbai was as close as the images I saw on CNN. I was folllowing the events as they unrolled as if I was there myself. And that’s when I realized that it’s not every day Mumbai seems just around the corner to me.

In the end I didn’t fly to Mumbai, but somehow it feels as if I have already been there. And this really made me think about how global media does not mean global consciousness. Although, I myself can thank global media for having grown up with a greater understanding of “the other”. I still believe that the media images we see every day are really just perceived as icons of what they represent. It is not until we attach the texture of our feelings to the media images that the world suddenly seems smaller. Our consciousness about the world is very much rooted in our everyday life experiences, choices and feelings.

We still need to add the “something else” to the images, before we can truly call the world a “global village”.

From the year of “me” to the year of “oops!”

Every year Time’s Magazine awards the person of the year. In 2006, this person was by no surprise “me”. Well, not me as in “me Gry Hasselbalch”,  but “me” as in “me the web 2.0 user”. The award was an aknowledgement of the web 2.0 development and the excitement evolving around it.  A development where “I”, the average person, suddely got the means to publish stories about myself and to build my online identity with images, texts “blurps!” etc. And boy were we  thrilled with the new ways of expressing ourselves?

See ME travelling! See ME with my new born baby! Hear my opinion about malls, lobsters and vitamins and politicians and tall buildings and cars with three weels! See here I am at the party, so happy, beautiful, loved by other people and OOOPS.. so drunk, picking my nose, blurbing out with my strong opinions in the wrong context.. hey stop taking those pictures….

Ok, so 2006 was the year of “me”, the year when we the ”I” generation took the media and used it to its very limits to express ourselves. The public debate was rolling over its own borders of excitement over all the new possibilities that we suddenly had to express ourselves with:

Blogging, moblogging, youtube, SecondLife, myspace, Linkedin…uuhh nice….and twitter and jaikuu!!! and and and….

And then came 2008, the hang over year, the year of “OOPS” when ”me” the average person suddenly realise what I actually put out there. Organisations, media and even politicians start talking about the responsible media use and user, about how we should think about what we put out there. Campaigns, regulations, codes of conduct, guidelines, recommendations….

And meanwhile the “I” generation are frantically trying to delete the blurps and pictures that do not quite fit into the picture of “me”

… Delete… damn  com’on… DELETE… hmmmm…..DEEEELEEEETE….

Suddenly we are no longer the “I-generation”, but the “ooops-generation”

December 2008: Okay, I take the “oops” back: Time Magazine’s person of the Year 2008 was NOT an ”oops”

“What if” movies

This is a side track from my usual posts. But I just had an idea about a genre of movies. You could call them the “what if” movies – “What if” movies could be defined as a cross genre. They are movies that exist in many different of the more traditional genres such as comedy, science fiction, horror, disaster.  But they are still very similar in terms of a narrative question they pose. By cross genre I mean that although they officially belong to very different genres they have one very similar defining characteristic in the narrative of the films. The “What if” movie are thought experiments that takes their point of departure in the question “What if…?  What if there was zombies everywhere and I had to survive. What if I woke up the same day over and over again?  What if the ice age started all over? What if humanity stopped being fertile? 

Answer the question and you have yourself a “what if” movie.

Currency of today is personal data

Information about ourselves has become today’s currency. It’s no news that information is capital. But it is increasingly becoming more spelled out that we pay with personal data in order to participate in the world around us. We see it in the “contracts” we sign daily. Everyday we sign new contracts in order to be able to participate. If you for example want to install the latest fun free application on your online profile, you need to give the application access to your personal information. Thats the rule of the game. So it’s really not free, the currency has simply changed appearance. I guess its a type of exchange system, where capital is not just “information” in general, it is “useful information” targeted, exact, clearly defined in time and space – it is “personal information”.

The phone booth! – an image of ”old media use”

Okay so we don’t have a distinction between old media and new media. At least if you make that distinction you display your blunt ignorance of how old media has developed and become “new”. However, there is really a great difference between “old media use” and “new media use”. And most of the time this is also the difference between how children use media and adults use media – AND how we understand the world around us differently.  I think that the best way of describing this is to use Marc Prensky’s description of the digital immigrants and the digital natives. While children have grown up with digital online media as an integrated element of their everyday lives adults have had to get used to the new online world at a much later stage of their lives and thus speak the digital language with an “accent”.  I really think that this is not just a difference between how adults and children use the media, it’s a difference between how we fundamentally understand and think about the media.  For example, while many adults think about the internet as MEDIA per se, where they read the news, search for information, send an email and wait for a reply etc., children think of the internet as a “place” where they meet their friends, play games with each other debate things in debate forums, go shopping etc.  

I like to say that while most children think in networks, adults think in “boxes”. If you sit inside a box you cannot see what is going on at the outside, and reversed no one on the outside can see what you are doing inside your box. There is a heavy distinction between being “inside” and “outside”, “privately in your box” or “publicly outside your box”. And if you want to get in touch with the outside world from your box, you’ll make a very conscious effort by for example picking up the phone to reach the outside world. And this of course influences your mode of thinking about the world. Children however think in open networks, when life is online, there is no physical distinction between being inside and outside etc. Your box is non existent. You don’t need to make a conscious effort to get outside your box, because you are always “outside” via your mobile or internet connection. A network is a system of interconnected things. Things that influence each other in spite of physical borders – organised according to a set of different principles that are more cultural and social than they are anything else. 

So what does a PHONE BOOTH have to do with all of this? Well, I think that the phone booth is the best image of “old media use”. I am thinking of one of the red phone booths placed in the buzzing public sphere of London streets. I’ve read that there are 15000 of these in the whole of Britain and 946 placed in London. And 2400 of the phones are listed as heritage sites! If you step into one of these and close the door, you will be completely sealed of from public life to make your private phone call.  It is really “old media use” in a nutshell and so significant of how we used to use media in confined spaces: TV after dinner in the living room, cinema on saturday nights in the dark cinema hall, the book in the living room arm chair or in the bed – “but lights are turned off at 22.00!”, telephone calls at home or from the office, etc. Each medium had its place and time or should I say “box” both physically and symbolically sealed of from the outside. Just like the phone booth where it was attempted to seal of the “privateness” of the phone call from the buzz of public life. But how many people now a days feel an urge to step inside one of these boxes? Today you have the mobile and you see people walking around on the streets of London absorbed in private conversations with no need what so ever to be sealed of from the buzzing public life around them. Perhaps “old media use” is being replaced by “new media use” - and in this case I really mean “replaced”.  

“Old media use” should be listed as a heritage site!

This blogposting has now become a “real” article. Read it here

 

 

Being private in the online public sphere – the difference between being private and being personal

Who has not had this experience: An obnoxious person is sharing private details with you and a whole bus full of people by having an embarressingly private and loud conversation on the mobile with a friend. It’s annoying. Incredibly annoying, indeed. This person really gets us on our nerves because of the lack of “social etiquette” that he or she is displaying. How can someone be so PRIVATE in a public sphere, we ask ourselves, shaking our heads in discomfort while the person is blabbering on.

But hey isn’t the two spheres merging? Isn’t that what we are always hearing? – The private and the public sphere are becoming one. That’s what the introduction of the internet and the mobile into our everyday lives has done. So we should be less annoyed with the intrusion of other people’s private lives in the public scene. Because apparantly we are getting less and less concerned with keeping the two spheres separated. Just think about all the “private” junk we share with our Facebook “friends” -mostly colleagues from our very public work environments.

Well, not completely. I believe that we are still very much concerned with keeping up our public appearances and separating our private lives from public life! Actually I do not think there has been any point in history where we as individual people have been so incredibly concerned with nurturing and designing a public appearance as now in the age of online social networking! (ok. it might be an overstatement. But honestly earlier it was more about keeping up the public appearance of the “family”. Now its the “person”). Part of this concern with the public lives of our personas today is to keep the “too private” details to ourselves and just share the symbols and signs of being a person, meaning, the “personal details” with others. The people who does not know how to do this we do not consider socially competent people. As for example the obnoxious loud person on the bus. Or the teenager who shares her very private diary on the internet . We wrinkle our nose at those people.

There’s a thin line between being “too private” or “just personal” in the age of mobile space and the social internet. It demands a good sense of social etiquette not to cross it. And we all know when the line is being crossed. We do not like to hear the embarressing “private” details of another persons sex life, diseases, alcohol problems etc. when we are engaging in public life. That is just not a behaviour proper. However, the personal details of our designed “online personas” such as our political views, favourite foods, interests, marital status etc. we share willingly on for example online social profiles. We even gladly share our personal images. But again the line is easy to cross. When is an image for example too private to share? It’s all about small details such as a gaze, another person in the photo or the portrayal of a particular situation. Small details that makes the image “too private” to share on the internet.

So my question is: IS the private and public sphere really merging? Or is it not just that the “signs” and “symbols” of what we see as the “private sphere” are being incorporated in the public sphere?

And by the way my favourite colour is red. Am I being too private now?

The internet – the result of human imagination

I have been working on an article in connection with work on self-regulation among internet users (actually it is online now – see “Articles in English”). I think one of the most important aspects of the development of the internet today is the way in which the users shape their online environments. I mean yes, the internet is a technological system, it’s a medium. But more importantly it’s a social space, where people interact and define and negotiate social and cultural values and norms. Thus it is shaped primarily by the users. Thinking about the way communities are shaped on the internet, the starting point is always a given type of users. What comes after are the service providers’ support of the users’ self-regulating culture. It usually doesn’t work the other way around. Any attempt to form any “formal code of conduct” or centralised type of regulation by e.g. the service providers will always be met with great resistance from the users.  So I think that the principles of organisation on the internet are different from the principles of organisation of our physical social spaces first and foremost because we perceive “free will” as one of the most important basic rights when we are online. The internet is primarily the result of human imagination, a kind of resistance to centralised power systems. Its’ starting point is what we imagine we can do with it. Possibilities for play perhaps etc. It’s not necessity. Or am I dreaming here? 

I think it is quite intriguing to theoretically place this new form of organisation in the framework of Deleuze and Guatarri. And I am not trying to be pseudo academic here. But I guess their theories are also theories of “emancipation”? If you think about the particular structure of power/ or thought that they refer to as the Rhizome, I think that the way that the communities are shaped by users with implicit rules and forms of governance taking departure in each individual user’s understanding AND interpretation of the common social and cultural norms of a given internet community you’ll see something interesting. I am sure there must have been someone more scholarly than me who has made this conclusion before!  The Rhizome is such a good metaphor for understanding our systems of self organisation on the net.   I think it is SO important to try to understand these “new principles of organisations” that on the net are primarily “social “and “cultural” in nature. I guess, I’ll look more into that soon.  

 

User types on social networking sites

I’ve recently held a training seminar on children’s use of the internet and the mobile. When preparing for the course I was going through  different social networking sites thinking about how to present them to the participants at the course. I noted that they were all very similar in functions. Actually the main difference of the sites was the different cultures – of course based on the different types of users on the sites. So here’s the deal: you need to be able to perform according to the different cultural norms you encounter online and you definitely need to be able to decode the cultural signs of a given online community in order to become a success J.  This might not be rocket science and definitely not based on empirical evidence or any deeper thoughts of any kind. But these are the different user types I found on the social networking sites I visited:  

• The Idealist (I’m changing the world with my videos) Cultural Context: Politics and Media debate
• The Jack Ass (Look at me! See what mad things I can do) Cultural Context: Teenage Life and MTV
• The family father, mother etc. (See my new born child!) Cultural Context: Everyday Life
• The Film director (See what I can do with the medium!) Cultural Context: The Film School  
• The Researcher (The world is there to explore and I am right there documenting it) Cultural Context: Knowledge about the world (not necessarily academia) 
• The Promoter (of art, music, films etc. – ones own or others, as company or individual)(Look at this) Cultural Context: Public Relations
• The Exhibitionist (Look at me!) Cultural Context: Reality TV (???hmmmm)
• The Artist (I’m an artist and the world is my canvas ) Cultural Context: or rather world view?
• The Friend (– or the teenager)(See my friend list, I am a cool person)  Cultural Context: Youth Culture

The usual discussion of Public – Private: but what about the mobile?

A gifted person recently drew my attention to the fact that our portable devices such as the mobile and the portable computer has a huge impact on the way we perceive the internet in a very particular way. The difference between the traditional use of the internet accessed via stable computers e.g. in the private sphere of the home and the wireless internet accessed via e.g. the mobile or the portable computer is in terms of the general perception of the medium and accordingly social uses of the medium. The internet was in the general public traditionally used mostly in the private sphere – at home. One major factor in regards to the use of the internet has therefore been the clash between the public and the private sphere, that is, the access of the public sphere into the private sphere – the home and most importantly into the child’s playroom. An important safety measure in regards to to eg. raising one’s child in the network society has therefore traditionally been to make children aware of the public nature of the internet when using it, e.g. when they produce content on the internet. But what if the use of mobiles to access the wireless network will cause a move of the internet from the private realm back into the public realm in terms of perception? And will this actually mean that people in general (and children) will become more aware of the public nature of the internet and accordingly new social rules connected with the use of the wireless network will automatically emerge? hmmmm….that might be the case. at least it’s a challenging thought. And by the way the man who drew my attetion to this and that I have just referenced is called Francesco Lapenta and is a lecturer in Visual Sociology at The University of Roskilde