On the value of second-hand experiences
Amanda Parks recently wrote for The Social Interface about the expectation that we share our experiences via social media, and wondered if becoming pre-occupied with our media activities sometimes gets in the way of the experience we're supposedly enjoying. A few days after reading Parks' article, I happened to be seated on a train carriage behind a couple busily photographing and filming a good part of a trip from New South Wales' Southern Highlands to Campbelltown.
Prior to owning a digital camera, I rarely took photographs at all because I found that the photographs rarely reproduced much of the experience that had inspired me to take them. This may say something about my ability as a photographer. Since purchasing a digital camera, I've been more inclined to take photographs while hiking or travelling alone, and I find that looking back over them does frequently evoke the memory or being in that place even if the photographs aren't going to win any awards.
I still almost never take photographs while socialising. Sometimes I think it might be nice to be able to look back over a record of a good time, and I do occasionally glance over photographs taken by friends. But while I'm actually engaged in the socialising, it seems awkward and artificial to dig out a camera. Watching the couple filming their train ride, I thought: why don't you stop fiddling with those awkward-looking tablet things and just enjoy the experience? And whatever happened to that advice to never look like a tourist?
Presumably Sydney's intercity rail network is less mundane to that couple than it is to me. And obviously plenty of people feel that they can pull out a camera with a lot more aplomb than me. But how much does anyone actually care about the results? Well before anyone coined the term "social media", I remember comedians getting plenty of laughs out of travellers boring their friends with post-holiday slide shows. Parks similarly concludes her article with an anecdote illustrating the disappointing result of sharing photographs that seem wondrous to the person who experienced the event, but are only cheap second-hand experiences for everyone else.
Perhaps being better photographers would improve our friends' experiences. After all, talented photographers, film-makers and writers can make a living out of travel books and documentaries. But, to go by my own experience of writing publishable papers, I doubt that even those talented folks publish everything they record. However the act of recording might affect the experience itself, perhaps we need to remember that frequent communication is not the same as good communication.
The joy of engineering and the banality of products
I recently happened upon an article from Today's Engineer in which Doug Lamm contrasts the views espoused in Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy (1976) and those espoused in Samuel C. Florman's The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976). Scitovsky worries that populating our world (or, at least, the United States) with labour-saving and comfort-providing devices might leave devices' users with no challenges to meet, leading to boredom. Florman writes of the pleasures that engineers experience in the act of engineering, which provides exactly the challenges that Scitovsky worries we might engineer out of life.
Scitovsky and Florman's views are not mutually exclusive: engineers may very well have a wonderful time developing products that leave their users bored and lazy. This prospect might seem fairly depressing for a profession that takes pride in its ability to produce artefacts that improve people's lives.
Of course another way of looking at it is that the pleasure experienced in doing engineering is as valid and good a pleasure as any, so what further justification do engineers need? I don't feel any need to justify a Sunday hike, say, with any benefit to society beyond my own pleasure, so what other motivation should I need to write software? Is whatever pleasure I might experience in developing software diminished if the end result isn't particularly useful to anyone?
Yet I have to write software that pleases users if I expect the users to pay me for it. Perhaps the knowledge that I need to earn money from software development prevents me from taking quite so care-free an attitude to software as I do to hiking. Things might be different if I could afford to undertake software development purely as a hobby. Yet, even then, having adoring users surely increases an engineer's pride in his or her work, even if the users don't pay a cent for the product.
Engineers are perhaps fortunate that there is so much demand for what they do: engineers can make a living by performing work that they find challenging and satisfying. If the world appetite for roads, machines and computers ever diminishes, engineers might find themselves in a position similar to those of present-day artists who want to devote their lives to their art, but must make ends meet by doing odd jobs in which they can't make use of their skills.
Lamm concludes that technological innovation is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad, and that it is "the development of wisdom regarding the satisfying use of technology" that matters. He alludes to the example of rock-climbing: there may well be easier ways of getting up mountains than climbing the rock, but people nonetheless buy rock-climbing equipment because they enjoy the challenge of doing it this way. For the engineer and his or her sponsors, the trick is to realise when to build rock-climbing equipment, and when to build an elevator.
Selling digital media: someone else's problem
Some mis-communication of my views on Suelette Dreyfus' recent Conversation article about the effect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Internet server providers drew my attention to a false dichotomy that seems to exist in apportioning responsibility for combatting on-line copyright infringement. Dreyfus fears that the Trans-Pacific Partnership might make Internet service providers more or less completely responsible for the enforcement of copyright on-line. The proposed methods being draconian, she suggests that "the motion picture and music publishing industries should pay for and manage their own security." If Dreyfus' characterisation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is correct, I suppose there are at least a few in the media industries who hold the view that the computer industry should pay for and manage the same security. As I discovered, an attempt to explore a middle view is prone being interpreted as a view from one of the poles.
Dreyfus goes on to trot out the hoary old suggestion that media industries "simply trial new models for making money." I suppose that the media industries could point out that monitoring network traffic for commercial material and charging for it is a new model for making money. But whatever merits such a model may or may not have, insisting on a dichotomy shuts down any innovation that requires the participation of both the computer and media insdustries.
I'm reminded of an interview in the film The Corporation (2003) in which the interviewee describes corporations as "externalising machines" that will take any opportunity to transfer the costs of their activity to someone else. (Economists call such costs "externalities"). In the context of on-line copyright enforcement, the computer industry would like to sell the Internet and have the media industries provide the wares that make the Internet desirable, while the media industries would like to distribute their wares across the Internet and have the computer industry pay for upholding the law that makes this financially rewarding. Bill Rosenblatt argues that some of the problems with digital rights management systems stem from the media industry's pursuit of exactly this kind of externalising, leading the computer industry to develop the cheapest protection technology that it can get away with.
Rosenblatt may have a point, but of course funding the development of copyright protection technology is only part of the process. Even if the media industries meet all the costs of developing and managing copyright protection technology, the computer industry controls the environment in which this technology must be deployed. Whoever funds the technology itself, it won't be of any use if the computer industry can't be convinced to deploy it in the appropriate places.
Anti-DRM commentators play to this dichotomy when they claim that they respect content creators' interests, but go on to reject any attempt to protect those interests because it interferes with users' sovereignty over their computers. Extreme proposals from the media industries are the other way around. Yet playing media on a computer necessarily intermingles media and computer, and on what basis could the media become owned by the computer, or the computer owned by the media?
On the structure of computing revolutions, part 2
I was a little surprised to read that "P2P networks are yet another manifestation of the shift of information systems' control to individuals" in an article by Tom Kirkham and colleagues in the September/October 2013 issue of IEEE Security & Privacy (p. 14). Everywhere else, I read that information is moving to the cloud. Cloud enthusiasts might even point out (rightfully) that the series of examples of peer-to-peer social networks that follow the statement are rarely heard of outside technical circles, and do not appear to pose the slightest threat to Facebook or Google.
I suppose that Kirkham and colleagues are trying to leverage the enthusiasm for the "disintermediation" and "user-generated content" that made a buzz around 2000-2005, and live on as "social media" now. Cloud computing and disintermediation aren't necessarily incompatible: individuals can and do create their own content and store it in cloud-based services like web hosts, virtual worlds, Facebook and Twitter. (The particular proposal made by Kirkham et al., though, is very un-cloud-like.) I'll come back to this later.
The same issue of Security & Privacy has Gary T. Marx writing about the line between citizens assisting with law enforcement and citizens pursuing vigilantism (pp. 56-61). Despite the recent prominence of citizen journalism and success in apprehending suspects after the bombing of the Boston marathon, Marx observes that cooperation between law enforcement and the public is hardly new: governments have been encouraging citizens to report crimes for decades, and, in the more distant past, routinely employed citizens as auxiliary law enforcers.
All this had me groaning: is anything ever new? A moment's thought assured me that surely something is, since plenty of technology exists now that didn't exist a hundred years ago. My reaction to the claims of both Kirkham et al. and their opposites in the cloud computing camp is really a reaction to sweeping claims that computing is centralising, or de-centralising, or intermediating, or disintermediating, or converging, or diverging, or whatever. At any one time, surely some things might be de-centralising (like creation of web pages) while others are centralising (like hosting of the same web pages), depending on the most efficient and effective way of using the available technologies. To claim that there is any overall trend seems pretty bold, to say the least.
Whatever technology is doing, however, we remain human and we continue to struggle with rights vs responsibilities, privacy vs accountability, individuality vs community, and a hundred other tensions that likely existed before anyone ever rubbed two sticks together, let alone built a computer. Technology may change the means by which tensions like these are expressed and resolved, but it hasn't made us a whole new species with whole new needs and desires. Facebook may have appeared only ten years ago, for example, but it's hardly the first time anyone had a social network.
I've previously observed that commentators can generate a lot of nonsense by mistaking a change in one aspect of computing for a computing revolution. I should perhaps extend that observation to include mistaking a change in technology for a change in humanity.
The bad guys are the enemy of the good guys, and vice versa
Recent articles on surveillance and privacy from Ashlin Lee and Peta Cook on The Conversation and John Leyden (quoting Art Coviello) on the The Register provoked some fairly predictable responses from anti-surveillance commenters. Said commenters insist that surveillance is self-evidently something that Big Bad Government does and should be stopped, and seem confused that anyone else would think otherwise.
Lee and Cook's argument, as I understand it, is that many of us like displaying certain aspects of ourselves to others, including people who we do not know beforehand, and that we therefore cannot simply reject all surveillance out-of-hand as "Orwellian". This idea, however, seems to be incomprehensible to commenters like Ben Marshall and Damien Hayden, who attempt to define the problem out of existence by insisting that "surveillance" refers only to watching someone without that person's permission, and that such a thing is self-evidently bad. We could, indeed, reserve the word "surveillance" only for whatever kinds of watching we don't like. But this won't eliminate our desire to express ourselves by exhibiting chosen characteristics, with the implication that we actually want people to pay attention to us when we do so.
Leyden reports the view of Art Coviello, the executive chair of RSA Security, that "anonymity is the enemy of privacy". Such a statement, of course, makes no sense to the classical security technologist's view that privacy is about never revealing anything, and that privacy and anonymity go hand-in-hand in protecting computer users from interference. Coviello's argument, as it is described in Leyden's article, isn't completely clear to me, but seems to be something like: anonymous miscreants are able to attack security systems with impunity, thus revealing the private data protected by said systems. Perhaps Coviello meant to say that anonymity is the enemy of security, and allude to the well-known tension between freedom and security that appears in nearly all debates on law enforcement.
While working in information security myself, I came to the view that security technologies can be used both by the good guys to protect themselves from the bad guys, and by the bad guys to protect themselves from the good guys. I therefore don't see much sense in making sweeping statements about the moral or political merits of anonymisation technologies, surveillance technologies, and other such things without reference to the context in which they are used. The statement attributed to Coviello is an example, and is difficult to interpret for this reason. But sweeping anti-surveillance statements are no more enlightening: how many people dress in ninja costumes whenever they're outside the house, lest others "surveil" what kind of t-shirts and haircuts they like to wear? And if people like to express themselves off-line, why wouldn't they want to do it on-line as well?
