Facebook Fright
“Truth about Facebook” by Vishal Agarwala - original presentation in Flash
In part, this is about grassroots journalism. The original flash has 3170 “diggs” at the time of this writing, having been created sometime in 2006. AlbinoBlackSheep picked it up from there, and then others used screen-capture software to make videos of the presentation and upload it to YouTube. The video above is just one of several copies you can find there. As different people of various Web 2.0 attention spheres discover it at different times, articles pop up about it reporting it as fresh news. I actually just got it sent to me in my email.
This phenomena of gradual, cascading discovery across the net may have given the piece more attention than if an A-list media outlet had covered it and made everyone consider it “old news”. For his part, Vishal Agarwala made the thing and moved on, working on some pretty cool indie music blogs.
So, why haven’t big media outlets jumped all over this? Don’t they usually love scare-mongering? I can think of many reasons, but here are my top-3:
- Reporters get really gun-shy about reporting anything that has to do with government information gathering. There are many, many reasons for this. It’s beyond the scope of this blog. For now, let’s just take it as a given that at the moment journalists seeking to become “mainstream” considers this topic taboo.
- Facebook is huge, but still not so huge that CNN or Reuters expects most of their audience to have used it. The world-in-15-minutes set has the same slogan that Congress does: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
- The real “gurus”, the Web 2.0 / Virtual World / Singularity / Futurist junkies who have popular blogs and speaking engagements as experts aren’t really seeing the problem. In fact, many are quite in favor of the creation of services that record much more detailed information about you and expound on the incredible knowledge that could be gained by the aggregate data.
Maybe I should expand on that last point. You see, most anyone who wants to consider themselves a futurist talks about the wonderful things that life-logging will make possible. While the official Pentagon-funded Lifelog program is dead, many feel that logging every little detail of your life is the way to go.
Kevin Kelly sites these big advantages:
- A 24/7/365 monitoring of vital measurements such as body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and presence or absence of bio-chemicals. This data could serve as a warning system and also as a personal base upon which to diagnosis illness and to prescribe medicines.
- A digital memory of people you met, conversations you had, places you visited, and events you participated in. This memory would be searchable, retrievable, and shareable.
- A complete archive of your work and play, and your work habits. Deep comparative analysis of your activities could assist your productivity, creativity, and consumptivity.
- A way of organizing, shaping, and “reading” your own life.
To the degree this lifelog is shared, this archive of information can be leveraged to help others work, amplify social interactions, and in the biological realm, shared medical logs could rapidly advance medicine discoveries.
If you want to find out more, his is the definitive article.
What’s interesting about it, though, is that the problems with life-logging are a quick footnote to be resolved… well… sometime after we’re already dealing with them. See, futurists sell solutions to problems that we don’t even realize we have. If we do realize we have those problems, a futurist quickly loses interest. You can’t look clever by pointing out what everyone already knows, after all.
I’m not picking on any one person here. This is a universal phenomenon. Not too long ago I came across a PowerPoint presentation detailing a technical solution to life-logging. There’s a quick half-slide mention near the end of the social problems of everyone having a lifelog. Here’s the list: “Privacy, Laws, Hostility and fear from society, First person experience capture vs big brother scenario.”
Stupid society. Whatever. Any questions?
