by Ethan Johnson
November 22, 2008

The older I get, the more intellectual kinship I feel with people like Dave Rogers, who says "technology doesn't change what we do, just how we do it." Actually, I am finding that the older I get, and more to the point, the busier I am with other concerns, the less interest I have in whatever purports to be "world-changing". I suppose this is why a blog post titled 5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History caught my eye and inspired me to respond publicly.

I will quote the section titles and selected text from the cited blog post. Read the original post to get the full context of the author's remarks.

1) Everyone will have the ability to know what you did and who you were with on a daily basis.

What were you doing on July 14th, 2008? Unless it was your birthday, you probably don’t know.

It may seem like an insignificant question, but 20 years from now, knowing what you did or who you were with during a certain day could be great for reminiscing about the good old times. Or maybe you’re a researcher that needs to pinpoint the exact movement of a new virus. Or you’ll want to prevent the election of a presidential candidate with embarrassing information.

My comments: This seems particularly compelling, as why else does one keep a journal if not to jog one's memory or create an "in the moment" record of a specific time? However, and this point will loom large over this entire exercise, social media and the like is purely electronic until it isn't. If I never print off copies of my material here at ethmar.com, I will never have a tangible record to refer back to. Neither will anyone else, assuming that the material has not been archived electronically elsewhere, either with or without my permission or involvement. (cf The Wayback Machine)

Additionally, such trivia as what I was doing on a specific date chosen at random may not rise to the level of historical significance. I grok that the author is trying to be forward-looking and presume that perhaps what I believe to be mundane details about my personal life will indeed provide some much-needed historical context to concerned parties in the mid-term to distant future, but I am skeptical that a purely electronic medium is the best or most reliable source of that information.

2) Historical trend analysis will leap to a new level of precision.

How about 2004 to 2008? There’s a stark difference. (Read source post for full context - ed) We have Twitter, Facebook, blogs, websites, forums, and search habits. We can start to trend how search terms increased, what events triggered visceral reactions, and how people of both sides reacted to the political opinions of the day. The information is archived, easily organized, and a large stock of it is readily available to the public.

My comments: Again, fairly compelling in the wake of an intensely secretive presidential administration, but outside of my stock pessimism concerning a reliance on purely electronic records, I will argue that if one is something of an exhibitionist, one will find a way to make oodles of personal information available publicly, electronics be damned. Charles Dickens attracted a large literary following without the benefit of any electronic media, for example. The US founding fathers wrote a fair number of letters and papers in their day. Even talking to people in person, some will provide all sorts of personal data, including date of last period, medical history, or date of last sexual encounter and with whom. And these are at best acquaintances. The real confiding is reserved for close friends. (Grin)

My next line of retort is to note that the blog author seems to be putting a high value on what Neil Postman decried as the "news of the day." Most news, he argued, is certainly "information" but doesn't serve much of a purpose. One may counter that it is to inform, but "inform" how, and why? Does it matter that Britney Spears dyed her hair (assuming she did)? Does it matter that [person] wanted to check out a library book today but the desired selection was already out on loan? Perhaps hair stylists or booksellers have a need to know these things. But the vast majority of us do not. If one chooses to make reams of personal data public, then the machinery and consequences of that public disclosure must be reckoned with. I will note here that any public exposure is subject to the workings of that machinery. (Cf Me taking a photo of your photogenic kid at the soccer game because it made for a good picture.)

3) We will not use history to learn from our mistakes, but to prevent them before they happen.

Google’s recent partnership with the government is an example of the prevention phenomenon in action. Google has been giving the Federal Government information on flu-related searches in order to track and contain epidemics before they begin (you can find the public version of the tool here). We can track the history and progression of the flu with stunning accuracy. In turn, we can use that data to prevent the outbreak of the next drug-resistant virus. (Refer to original post for more context and links - ed.)

My comments: I was going to rebut this at length, but Tom Cruise just arrested me for the Future Murder of Randall Scott. (Who...? I guess I'll never know now.)

More seriously, not to put too fine a point on it, but refining human fucking nature will allow us to prevent mistakes before they happen. Not sure how a flu outbreak is a preventable "mistake" in this example. "Mistakes" seem to be "anything undesirable that negatively affects a large population". If only Osama bin Laden were using Facebook and Twitter. We'd have some sort of advance warning of what he was up to and prevented "9/11". Oh wait.

And, I'm sorry, but doesn't one need to have an inkling as to what one's "past mistakes" were to have the necessary insight to prevent future occurrences? Taking this a step further, if I didn't learn not to touch the hot stove anymore after the first painful burn, how might I prevent this future occurrence while not learning from that past mistake? Might I develop a methodology for avoiding all stoves, lest any be hot, yet not drawing the conclusion that touching hot stove with bare hand = bad idea? I need clarification on this point, please.

4) There is little room for hiding details about our lives.

Less than flattering pictures on Facebook have already disqualified tens of thousands of people from jobs. But when someone of the current teenage generation runs for President, what do you think will happen to every tweet or blog post they ever wrote? It will be analyzed and checked. Embellishing about your life story will be difficult, because we can go back and see if you were an angry person in your childhood or who your friends really were.

My comments: Where has the author been? Presidential candidates routinely have their closets cleaned. Does he not know that Barack Obama "knew William Ayers" before Twitter and Facebook were invented? Well, that's what happened. And through the magic of today's information propagation apparatuses, that point got beaten deeply into the ground, among others. (cf "News of the Day" material above)

I strongly disagree with the closing remark that "embellishment" will be difficult. Partly because it does not seem to have been fully thought through. Suppose I shutter this site, disconnect my internet service, and never again interact with the world through computers. It's entirely possible that someone could be using a service like Twitter and say something like "Ethan Johnson is being a total ass right now," but that a) might not refer to me, as there are other Ethan Johnsons in the US, and b) might not be true. Next time you see someone on a cell phone call, walk up and shout "OMG stop trying to rape me" in the direction of the mouthpiece. Was the caller trying to rape you or anyone else? How might the person on the other end know this was a rude prank? In the Twitter example, what if that is the only piece of corroborating data? Does it get discarded as being unsubstantiated, or would scholars of sorts be compelled to say "some say Ethan Johnson acted 'like an ass'" because a random "tweet" said so? And finally, "embellishment" happens all the time, in many ways, and despite the most techno-topian (?) vision of the future cannot be fully corroborated or refuted. Prove my back didn't hurt today.

5) An ethical war over the use of this information will arise.

If the government can use search data to track disease, what else can they use it to track? Is it right to charge a political candidate with guilt by association just because they were Facebook friends with an eventual criminal? I can’t even begin to imagine the ethical debates such detailed history may cause.

My comments: Apparently not, as this was poorly thought out. Really, the government might be called out for compiling personal data without one's knowledge or consent? How unprecedented! Good thing we have "social media" nowadays, or nobody would think to ask the FBI for "their file" or suspect that the government might be engaging in warrantless wiretapping or other electronic eavesdropping.

Yes, this is dripping with sarcasm. See? I was being an ass! Guilty guilty guilty!

Refer back to the Barack Obama/William Ayers association mentioned above. This is different from being loosely associated through a service like Facebook, how, exactly?

Ultimately, I regard the original post to be grounded in something of a love affair with current - and emerging - technology. We had ways of communicating before the written word or the printing press. We had work to do before the advent of the corporation. We had the ability to move from place to place before the advent of the automobile. Technology improved those things, certainly, which is to say technology allowed us to engage in these acts rapidly. I did not say "better". Does Twitter make us better conversationalists? Does driving a car make us more attentive to our surroundings as we move about, or exercise good judgment as to whether the journey was worth taking? Does the rapid dissemination of information improve our collective lot? Or is it merely an amusement to fill time? Does it matter now that Barack Obama once reportedly "snapped at" a reporter on the campaign trail after being interrupted at breakfast? Does it matter now that [celebrity] once checked into rehab?

The irony is not lost on me that I have chosen a public and electronic medium to rebut the above points. This was deliberate for a few reasons. In the end, as I have foreseen, it just plain will not matter.

Gotta go refresh Twitter. <EM>