A while ago, I wrote a short post on the
meaninglessness of frictionless sharing. Since then,
I've had a few additional thoughts on what frictionless
sharing is trying to accomplish (aside from pure and simple
marketing), and what we should be trying to build.
The article about
Target targeting pregnant women
with advertisements caught my attention, not particularly because of
Target's practice, but because it gives us a useful way of looking at
the history of privacy. What Target did isn't at all surprising.
Target's data systems noticed that some women were suddenly buying
extra large handbags (for holding diapers), over-the-counter medicines
that could be used to fight morning sickness, and skin creams to hide
stretch marks. The store concluded that these women were probably pregnant and
targeted them with ads featuring products for pregnant women. (If you
believe the rather self-serving story about how one girl's
father called the store furious about what these ads were implying,
then called back the next day to apologize, you're less skeptical than
I am.)
It's not surprising that this makes the news, but I asked myself
what's really new here. And my answer is, "not much." Think back to
the first half of the 20th century. A girl walks into the local
pharmacy and buys bicarb for an upset stomach. The pharmacist notes
that this girl has never bought anything like this before and also
notes that she's looking a bit thicker. He has also seen the girl at
the lunch counter and knows she has an iron stomach.
He puts two and two together,
makes a mental note, and knows what to recommend the next time she's
in. And soon after the pharmacist knew it, you can bet that everyone
knew it; people never needed the Internet to form networks.
I would gladly bet that this story played itself out
thousands of times.
What's interesting is what happened in the years that intervened
between the '50s and the present. The small town culture (which may
never have really existed) in which everyone knew everything about
everyone disappeared as we moved into suburbs, where nobody knew
anything about anyone. And that's really where our notions of
"privacy" arose. The local pharmacies started disappearing, to be
replaced by big chains like CVS and Walgreens. As
Douden's and
Jolly's
disappeared from local culture, so did the local pharmacist who
knew and remembered who you were and what you bought, and who was able
to put two and two together without the help of a Hadoop cluster.
Around 60-70 years ago, we didn't
really have any privacy; Scott McNealy's infamous
statement
that "you have zero privacy anyway ... get over it" would have been
meaningless. We grew attached to our privacy in the intervening
half-century, as the demands of industry created population
concentrations that broke the bonds (wanted or not) attaching us to
our local neighbors. In the past, we "heard it through the
grapevine," but by the time the Internet was invented, that grapevine
had been uprooted.
I am the last person to claim that the '50s were some sort of paradise
when all was right in America and the world. In many ways, the '50s
were a sick and deformed conformist culture. But
the '80s were no party either. I was in grad school
at the time, and all the non-students I knew (mostly engineers in
Silicon Valley) were bemoaning the lack of "community." They
lived in anonymous apartment complexes in insipid suburbs; they were
tired of the people they worked with; there was no good way to make
friends, no good way to be social. The big social story of the '80s
and '90s was the decline of "social" and the continued
rise of suburban cocooning
in detached houses. In this environment, the rise of
Facebook and Foursquare (and MySpace, and Friendster, and Orkut and
others) was inevitable. Given the boredom of mid-'80s
apartment complex existence, software developers did what came
naturally and invented a software solution.
We have to look at automated sharing of the music we listen to, the
books we read, and the restaurants we visit in light of that arc. As
anyone who is interested in books or records knows, the first thing
you used to do when you visited someone's house was look at their
bookshelves or their stack of records (or CDs). You might lend me a
book or a record that I was interested in, moving a step up the ladder
from acquaintance to intimacy. That still works, but
at O'Reilly's recent
TOC conference, it
was clear that even publishers understand that the age of print is
coming to the end. SOPA and PIPA have more to do with the entertainment
industry realizing that CDs and DVDs have come to an end than they
have to do with so-called piracy.
Print books will survive as fetishized items, as will vinyl LPs:
expensive coffee-table books for display, a few high-priced show
editions, but nothing as interesting as what you'd find on my
bookcase. That inevitable shift signals a profound change for the
social nature of reading and listening. While looking through
someone's bookshelves is fine, it's not socially acceptable to look
through their iPods and Kindles.
In this context, it's surely correct to put a kinder interpretation on
automated "frictionless sharing" of your songs and book purchases on
Facebook. Yes,
if someone is giving you a service for free,
you're not the customer — you're the product. It's
reasonable to be unhappy that your likes and dislikes are being bought
and sold like pork bellies on the Chicago Merc. But there is an
oddly pathetic humanity behind automated sharing: It's a clumsy and intrusive
attempt to solve a very real human problem with technology. After
all, that's what technologists do. Asking a software developer
not to write software when faced with an obvious problem is like
asking a fish not to swim. As I said, that's how we got Facebook in
the first place.
Automated, frictionless sharing is certainly not a solution. As I've
often observed, human problems are almost always solved by human
solutions, very rarely by technical solutions. We have to ask
ourselves what the real solution is, given that we've negotiated an
arc from immersion in a social community (with all that entails) to
helplessly private insularity to immersion in a virtual world that
lacks privacy, but that also lacks human contact. It may be that
dating sites are so consistently popular because they are the only
online services that require human contact to work.
So how do we think about a solution? Privacy, data, and our social
nature are inevitably entangled — always have been and always will be.
How do we build satisfying human connections back into our lives
without the superficiality and invasiveness of automated sharing? We've
given up privacy without gaining the benefits of increased openness,
which are tied up with social interaction. Back in the '80s, I
couldn't look at your bookshelves unless you invited me to your party.
That's real friction. Now, I can see your data, but even if you send
me a personal email with your playlist, there's no party. And that's the
challenge: bring real human connection back to our sanitized
technology. The world isn't just about Facebook and Twitter, or even
Google+. It's about making connections and having real parties with
real food and real people. Gregory Brown, founder of
Mendicant University,
and one of the
authors I've worked with,
is having a party this Spring
for "people with interesting ideas." I sure hope I'm invited because
that's the only way out.
Photo: Soda fountain by LandVike, on Flickr
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