Web 2.0 Life Changing and Everyday
Social media reminds us that the web is more than just a tool. Today we get news about Iran from Iranians Twittering the election uprisings, for instance. Web 2.0 gives us a bottom-up way of organizing that's impossible for businesses and governments to ignore, that often leaves them scrambling to control. While social media can be grandly disruptive; however, it's usually life changing in little, seemingly mundane ways, insidious ways that we learn to live with, but that can be disconcerting.
Weddings are big, noteworthy events. Before your wedding, your best friend from high school RSVPs, as does your college roomate, your in-laws and their bridge cabal, and Surprise!!-- thanks mom -- the family who lived next door when you were in 6th grade. You see your next door neighbor's son bumping on the dancefloor with your mother's arm-flailing sister, and think, wow -- all these people under one tent. They mingle together with ties and elegant dresses and claim disconcerting familiarity with your past as they swap stories and pass commentary about you, the weather, and your dearly beloved.
Facebook is the quotidian, Everyday-Martha-Stewart-now-available-at-Target version of your wedding. Your high school best friend "friends" you, as does the nerdy guy from the band step ("Remember me?"), along with your brother's wife's brother, the college pal you don't remember to well from that night, and the co-worker you'd like to think highly of you.
Sure, you can segregate the various cohorts, but do you have the energy to devote to being more efficient at online networking? Go ahead, post to impress, chat casually about the red wine's dusky cherry, book leather and balsam with tobacco overtones that you're drinking in Paris with your svelte new wife. But you are unforgettably someone else too, because your freshman dorm mate has simultaneously posted something about "old pictures he found and thought would be fun" something about "that time we drank too much Bud Lite and crashed the sorority party."
Technology may indeed be reaching revolutionary potential but everyday technology brings strangers into our lives in an intimate and less heady ways. Everyday technology unpredictably changes how we interface with friends and acquaintances, old and new, dead and alive.
Identity Theft 2.0
The internet can save loads of time and money, on greeting cards for instance, but where will we end up? Perhaps in the faces total strangers thanks to image search technology, and I'm not talking about standing on the doorstep of a colleague in a foreign country.
A US family who posted a family Christmas photo on their blog was surprised to learn that a grocery story in Czechoslavakia had downloaded and enlarged the photogenic foursome, pasting them onto a life-size poster advertising his store's delivery service. Gone was the leafy background of the Salt Lake suburb behind the smiling family on the e-greeting card, swapped out with a supermarket-tacky, yellow, green, and red background; Czech writing; and the American family unwittingly beaming about the grocery to Czech shoppers. The shop owner he would have sent a bottle of wine to the family as an apology, but for the high postage. Děkuji!
In another case misappropriated identity, the LA Times reported on a South Korean man who was surprised to learn that a photo he posted on his internet site had been appropriated by a Tokyo television station, altered, and released as the long sought photo elusive son of Jim Jong II. North Korea likes technology when it produces missiles it seems but not photos, since the only photo of the dictator's apparent heir is decades old.
To emphasize the likeness, the Japanese television station superimposed the dictator's eyes on the sunglasses in the photo the South Korean man had posted on his website. Voilà, suddenly a South Korean construction worker became the son of King Jong II.
Piracy, Censorship and Damn Youth
While your image may be appropriated so might your work. Pirated software and copyright infringement is common on the internet, because with a few clicks one person can make another's work his own, without a printing press, without even buying the book. This happens constantly in the digital world, where it was relatively rare in the analog world. Recently, China announced it was requiring censoring software on all computers sold in China. But confusingly, the software they're imposing may actually be authored by an American company then pirated by a Chinese company to be deployed for the policing effort.
While Iranians Twitter away about the uprising, China has said that the oddly named Green Dam Youth Escort censoring software must be installed on all imported computers. 1 China, intent on "purifying social civilization" seems determined to implement the rule despite protest from its citizens, American software makers, and the company who claims that "Green Dam" contains its sourcecode.
Solid Oak Software says that the Green Dam source code is pirated from its CYBERsitter software, while the software's contracted author, Chinese company Jinhui Computer Systems, says that the similarities in the software exist because all the software blocks the same pornographic web sites.
While the software may be falsely attributed, it also contains major security flaws according to the University of Michigan Department Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The censoring software may allow any website the user visits to take control of the PC running Green Dam (June 18, 2009).
Theft used to be more physical, someone lifting your wallet, or literally breaking into your physical abode. Now code can be stolen and identity compromised. No glass broken, but internet theft is just as personal, and causes just as much anguish, but is silent and easier and more widespread.
Attribution and Authorship
A less frequent occurrence but also more common with digital media than analog, is false attribution. For instance Google Books has now magnanimously shared authorship of several books written by influential economist, political and developmental economist Albert Hirschman.
Adding a your name to the author field of a book was decidedly more difficult in an analog world. But in the 21st century, If your a dead economist, like Joseph Alois Schumpeter, you might roll over one day and find out that an entity called Google utilized 21st century scanning and internet technology to give you authorship of a new book. It's true that Schumpeter, who died in 1950, posthumously authored "History of Economic Analysis". But he did not co-author "Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action", with Albert Hirschman in 1979. Hirschman is the sole author of the book, a collection of essays based on lectures Hirschman was invited to give in memory of Joseph Schumpeter.
Google also has Hirschman sharing authorship of "The Passions and the Interests" with Amartyra Sen, who wrote the forward of the book, but was not an author.Identities and accomplishments confused, lost, and also gained on via technology, every day. Revolutionary?
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1We've discussed ideas about technology and progressive change before, for instance here. Sometimes it seems that technology truly could bring progressive change, and other times it seems the technology will always eventually be wrested away by the most powerful players, be they corporations or states.
