Twitter announced on its blog yesterday that it’s rolling out an optional location identification feature across 65 different countries to help provide context to tweets.

According to the post,

“…you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location.”

A well-strategized foray into the geo-local hotbed, Twitter positioned itself as the unifying piece between the two most popular geo-local players: Foursquare and Gowalla. The move gives users access to standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla, if users click on a Twitter Place, many of which correlate to check-in points generated by these services.

Stripped of virtual goods and rewards (which, in recent times, have demonstrated tremendous economic potential in the West, after a long history of success in the East), Twitter Places could be the singular feature that renders these services irrelevant, as late-adopting geo-local media users shift toward a community with a markedly larger user base. Despite the laudable achievement that  Foursquare accrued users at an initially faster rate than Twitter, the fact is that the competitive landscape is significantly different than it was for Twitter in 2006.

Some, like GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram, look at Twitter’s move as ensuring the longevity of Foursquare’s and Gowalla’s services. Integrated into Twitter’s offering, they will have a place for their own niche, given their gameplay lure that Twitter lacks. Perhaps.

My intuition, however, is that Twitter aims to relegate its would-be competitors to the world of interesting but subservient sub-brands. While I believe that virtual goods and its cousins have yet to reach a saturation point of unearthed demand in the West, I do believe that the space lies across a tech-loving threshold that many potential users are unwilling or don’t care to cross. I may be wrong, though. Hell, FarmVille is a pretty big deal.

The different faces of geo-locality in social media

Geo-locality is undeniably one of the hottest sources of conversation in the social media world. But how, as a concept, it is best utilized and, for lack of better words, serves as an indispensable function remains as unsettled as the Wild West. That is, the question remains: why should we care about geo-locality?

To that end, I’ll assess potential uses and share some thoughts on different applications of geo-local functionality in social media.

1. Sharing relative position to ongoing deals: In my mind, this application has the most promising potential for monetization, and many are already of the same mindset. Charging businesses for places in the virtual geography of the commercial world, companies like Yelp are releasing powerful mobile applications that can show people’s locations relative to ongoing places where they can spend their money. Add the ingredient of people wanting to share deals with others (getting validation of their value-seeking mindset), and you’ve got a good reason for social geo-locality.
2. Making news about large-scale events discoverable: Proclaimed as a powerful tool to monitor the goings-on of the World Cup, Twitter Places (as well as other geo-local functionalities) enables users to follow large-scale events in real-time from the perspectives of those there. While a bright idea, I wonder whether this is actually a service that many should care about, as real-time updates and streaming online video are nearly ubiquitous and available from sources that are much more informative than a person’s Twitter feed.
3. Broadcasting to your social network: While Foursquare and Gowalla have unearthed a significant amount of demand for broadcasting one’s location to her social network, I struggle to believe that this is something the general public will ultimately want in a big way. Frankly, there are many points in the day where I have no interest in telling everyone in my social network where I am. The key winners if I’m wrong about this trend: parents and stalkers. The key losers: those who want private lives.
4. General context to commentary: Most useful to the Twitterers with proclivities to comment about varying internal states and sights and sounds of surroundings (who, unfortunately, are many), providing general context to commentary isn’t the least reasonable application of geo-locality in social media. The real question, however, is whether the tell-all generation will continue on its merry way or pull back once it realizes that it’s not the best idea to broadcast every aspect of one’s life to her social network.

The linchpins of geo-locality in social media

Whether these applications of geo-locality will succeed hinges on the general public’s sentiments toward a couple broad trends, I think.

1. Privacy: Traditional paradigms of private life are now challenged everyday by the titans of social media, with Facebook leading the way. Personal boundaries are increasingly stretched, but there are some signs of push-back. The adoption of geo-locality in everyday use will largely be a consequence of whether people will want to share their location with others. Unless a better array of tools to segment and target one’s social networks arise, I predict that the answer is ‘no’.
2. Sharing useful info with others: That people want to help others with useful information may be the saving grace of geo-locality in social media. Whether citizen journalism or sharing great deals, people seem to want to tell others about useful public information. That is, when witnessing a public event or participating in a public activity (such as shopping), my intuition is that people are more inclined to share their locations with others.

How this all plays out remains to be seen, but I’d to hear your thoughts in the comments section on what the future looks like as we live it.

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Five years ago this past Monday, three former employees of early PayPal — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim — founded the ever-pervasive video-sharing platform. The site now boasts over 2 billion views per day or, as YouTube’s blog puts it,

“…nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.”

Click on this image to see a larger, more readable version of this very informative graphic about YouTube's first five years of existence.

As the story goes,  Hurley and Chen conceived YouTube after having trouble sharing videos shot at a dinner party at Chen’s San Francisco apartment. The mission was simple:

“…give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.”

Aligned with this mission, YouTube’s celebratory channel prompts users to upload videos and share their YouTube stories, some of which are chosen for the channel’s video wall. Also home to an interactive timeline of some of the most important moments and memes in YouTube history, the channel also hosts big names like Conan O’Brien, Vint Cerf and Katie Couric, who curate playlists that showcase their favorite videos.

YouTube’s Rise: Striking Fear into the Hearts of TV Networks

A few fun facts:

• Users upload over a day’s worth of video to YouTube every minute;
• YouTube broadcasts live sports to over 200 countries;
• and the average user spends about 15 minutes per day on the site.

Needless to say, YouTube’s staggering success is changing the way TV networks are thinking about both their audiences and themselves. As Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk writes, YouTube’s doubling the viewership of the United States’ three major networks

“…hints at an eventual tipping point when the internet could become the world’s dominant video delivery system, Mark Cuban’s predictions aside.”

YouTube, however, may be more of an ally than a foe for TV networks. As Van Buskirk astutely observes, unlike their counterparts in the music industry, TV networks not only own their content, but they also have the leveraging power of having similar, successful projects already in play — e.g., Hulu (ABC and NBC) and CBS.com. This will certainly work in their favor as they make the plunge of officially posting their old content on YouTube.

More interestingly, Van Buskirk notes, YouTube is changing our viewing behavior, and our computer content viewing habits will inevitably alter how we consume TV programming.  The trend toward bringing the internet to TV is already well in motion:

• YouTube reaches TV-using gamers through Nintendo Wii’s and Sony PlayStation’s ability to connect to the internet;
• set-top boxes like D-Link’s Boxee Box are making it possible to stream high-definition and even 3-D YouTube videos onto a TV;
• and Google will soon unveil its next-gen set-top box in partnership with DishNetwork, Intel and/or Sony.

TV networks aside, I think the real losers in this trend may ultimately be TV manufacturers. Recently, I personally opted to buy a large computer screen instead of a TV, given how little I actually consume TV programming (, which was the case even before YouTube,) and the wide-spread availability of those TV shows I do want to watch online. It’s no wonder, then, that companies like Samsung are running to novel technologies like 3-D to reinvent their businesses.

A New Creative Class: New Media Content Entrepreneurs

As YouTube’s director of strategic partnerships Kevin Yen recently noted in his article on CNet, new media like YouTube are giving rise to a growing creative class. While few in the mainstream know of them, new media’s emerging creative class often command weekly audiences that dwarf network television’s biggest shows on a good night, Yen observes.

For example, Phil DeFranco, who runs the seventh most popular channel on YouTube, “has beaten ‘Larry King Live‘ and ‘The O’Reilly Factor‘ in daily audience,” according to a recent article in Fast Company.

Of this creative class ilk, Yen writes:

“They are not only the actors and stars of their show, but they are the producers, the copy editors, and cinematographers; they work to market themselves, close advertising deals, and sometimes employ a team to support and promote them.”

Online video content companies like Machinima, Next New Networks, and Demand Media collectively represent billions and billions of views, which they have converted into dollars (primarily from advertising). Nascent rental services for YouTube content only supplement an already robust toolkit for online content creators to turn their projects in money-making enterprises.

That said, YouTube undeniably is still home to a plethora of crap. Among that crap is the first YouTube video ever posted, “Me at the zoo” (see below), which features founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The nineteen seconds you’ll spend watching it is probably nineteen seconds too long. Thanks, YouTube, and happy birthday!

Thanks for reading! I hope to read your thoughts and concerns on YouTube, the future of TV networks & manufacturers, and new media’s emerging creative class in the comment section below. If you’d like to contact me directly, you can reach me through my newly added contact form.

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Last week’s security lapse that exposed personal Facebook chats was embarrassing for both the social media giant and its users, materializing  many’s most salient concerns about sharing private information over the social Web.

Personal lives are broadcasted across online social networks. Are young people more apt to act with indiscretion? Conventional wisdom says 'yes'; recent studies say 'no'.

The New York Times’ Laura M. Holson recently reports, however, that the tell-all generation (those between 18 and 29-years-old) is learning to keep things offline. Holson writes: 

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

Young adults in their 20s, in fact, more frequently delete unwanted posts and more actively limit profile information, according to a soon-to-be released report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. This fact, the report suggests, is indicative of heightened diligence among young adults in exerting control over their digital reputations.

Says Mary Madden, lead researcher on the forthcoming Pew report:

“Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you. Now you are responsible for everything.”

Recent academic research by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology attest to young adults’ online vigilance. In the UC Berkeley study, which explores how young adults differ from their elders when it comes to information privacy attitudes and policies, the sentiments are especially clear:

• 88 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds believe laws should require websites to delete their stored information;
• and 62 percent say they think laws should require that people have access to what websites know about them.

Interestingly, as Holson highlighted, this runs counter to conventional wisdom about young adults’ online behavior on social media. The Berkeley study succinctly describes the misconception, which is fueled by frequent media coverage of the risks of social networking:

“Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.”

According to the study, however, the apparent license with which the young behave online stems from a gap in privacy knowledge. In general, it seems, young people know very little about privacy issues:

• 42 percent of young Americans answered all five online privacy questions in the study’s survey  incorrectly;
• 88 percent answered only two or fewer correctly;
• and the problem is even more pronounced when presented with offline privacy issues – post hoc analysis showed that young Americans were more likely to answer no questions correctly than any other age group.

While many sites offer tips for maintaining one’s general online privacy, substantial guides for navigating social media privacy concerns are limited, largely due to the ever-changing privacy policies of our favorite social media giants.

As the future of privacy online is necessarily unclear, whether the ‘tell-all generation’ remains ‘jacked in’ or ‘checks out’ is now a more relevant question than ever.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to read your thoughts, comments and concerns on social media privacy in the comments section below. I’ll leave you with this relevant cartoon by The Joy of Tech by Nitrozac and Snaggy.

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Gizmodo scooped a rare, public in-person meeting between Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt.

Last week, I was shocked to read Gizmodo’s scoop that Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were spotted in person at a café in Palo Alto. As arguably two of the most ‘jacked in’ people in the world, I was intrigued that they would prefer to meet face-to-face for a conversation that could very well take place over GoogleTalk or iChat.

A couple days ago, I attended a Boston Ad Club event with foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, during which Xconomy’s Wade Roush interviewed him on the start-up’s meteoric growth and the rise of location-based social networking. Again, I was somewhat surprised that this type of interview — of a tech CEO by a tech writer — was conducted primarily, if not solely, in person.

Foursquare's Dennis Crowley is interviewed by Xconomy's Wade Roush on the rise of location-based social networking at a recent Boston Ad Club event (photo taken on my Blackberry).

As someone who currently works in the brand experience space, I’ve heard both my colleagues and others report that, with budget cuts and public scrutiny, many companies are committing their events budgets to the virtual world.

For some reason, though, there seems to be an intuitive, primitive inclination to have our most important meetings in-person — to see who we’re speaking to face-to-face. Why is that?

The Scientific Point-of-View on Face-to-Face Interaction

Of the innate desire for face-to-face social interactions, The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande notes the ground-breaking research of Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, with baby rhesus monkeys.

In the mid-1950s, Harlow began breeding his own monkeys to save money on experimental research. Raised in nurseries under conditions similar to human infants in contemporary hospitals, Harlow gave the monkeys food, warm blankets and toys, but isolated them from others to prevent the spread of infection. While physically healthy and, in fact, larger than their counterparts in the wild, the lab-bred monkeys were more than a bit off-kilter. They were prone to staring blankly ahead, rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively and mutilating themselves.

Wondering what was off with the rhesus (not to be mistaken with Reese’s) monkeys, Harlow and his graduate students tinkered with variables like diet, light exposure, and antibiotics. Then, one of Harlow’s researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their blankets, and Harlow contemplated whether the strange behavior was due to isolation from their mothers. So, he tried giving them artificial ones, and — long story, short — the baby monkeys became deeply attached to the most life-like of the fake mamma monkeys, though remained psychologically abnormal.

Harlow’s later studies that examined the effect of total isolation from birth found that released test monkeys

“…usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by… autistic self-clutching and rocking…One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later…Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.”

Such monkeys were permanently withdrawn, social outcasts in monkey society,  and were victims of regular attack by wild monkeys.

Gawande further notes studies among neglected and orphaned children who sustained similarly deep and sustained damage. Results among adults — particularly, prison inmates and long-distance solo sailors — also seem to indicate a predisposition to long for in-person social interaction. It is no wonder, then, that astronauts are screened for their tolerance of long periods of isolation, though they have radio and video communication for social contact.

The Business Rationale of Face-to-Face Meetings

In his white paper “Why Face-to-Face Business Meetings Matter”, Prof. Richard Arvey of the National University of Singapore Business School describes why ‘computer-mediated processes’ simply don’t cut it for some types of communications:

“Group processes and outcomes that require coordination, consensus, timing, persuasion of others, etc. are less effectively accomplished using computer mediated communication modalities. Indeed, according to Straus and McGrath, the type of communication medium is likely to affect outcomes “when there is a need for the expression of emotions, when tasks require coordination and timing among members’ activities, when one is attempting to persuade others, or with task require consensus on issues that are affected by attitudes or values of the group members.” (Straus and McGrath, p. 163).”

More interestingly, Arvey explicates the advantages of face-to-face meetings:

“Face-to-face meetings allow members to engage in and observe verbal and non-verbal behavioral styles not captured in most computer mediated communication devises. There are nuances associated with hand gestures, voice quality and volume, facial expressions, and so forth that are simply not captured in email discussion, chat rooms, and the like. Even videoconferencing does not capture all of the dynamics of group members (e.g. the expression of others while one member is talking, etc.).”

Interestingly, Gizmodo applied analyses of these type of behavioral attributes to Jobs’ and Schmidt’s recent meeting (provided by Janine Driver, who has taught CIA and Scotland Yard members how to read body language).

Beyond body language, face-to-face meetings are important, Arvey avers, because

“…business meetings allow participants opportunities to develop important exchange relationships among themselves. These exchanges can be in the form of business negotiations, personal favors, promises, understandings, etc. that cannot often be achieved via other forms of communication because of their personal and informal nature. One psychological theory that emphasizes this notion is “social exchange theory” where human relations are viewed as an exchange of rewards
among individuals or achieving equity between “what you put in” compared to “what you get out” of relationships.”

Most salespersons will agree: face-to-face sales meetings, while costly and time-intensive, typically have the best results.

…..

To end, I’ll provide this brief excerpt from Atul Gawande’s beautifully written article in The New Yorker:

“Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.”

I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue. Please feel free to leave your questions, comments and concerns below!

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Unveiled on March 16, 2010, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan outlines an ambitious vision to make broadband internet speed ubiquitous and affordable in the United States. As reported in the New York Times:

“Fewer than 27 out of every 100 Americans have broadband service, compared with 33 in South Korea and 38 in the Netherlands. The average advertised download speed is 8 megabits per second; in France, it is 51. And according to a study by the F.C.C., the average download in the United States occurs at about half the advertised speed. Meanwhile, the poor, the elderly and other vulnerable groups remain cut off from broadband technology, and therefore from such things as online government services, medical advice and jobs.”

The plan’s aims, far-reaching in scope, are as follows:

Once most known for its censorship of lurid content in media, the FCC is expanding its scope to making ubiquitous internet access a national priority.

• Goal 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.
• Goal 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.
• Goal 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.
• Goal 4: Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 Gbps broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings.
• Goal 5: To ensure the safety of Americans, every first responder should have access to a nationwide public safety wireless network.
• Goal 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

At roughly 7 times the speed of the internet connection I’m using to write this post (provided by my Comcast cable connection), I’m all for universal broadband. But why should it be a right, if it should be?

The Notion of Rights & The Hohfeldian Analytical System

Talk of ‘rights’ is often muddled, given the varied nature of moral history across cultures. Many, including famed philosopher Jeremy Bentham, think the notion of natural rights are nothing more than “rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.” The good news for us plebes is that most modern thinkers — and, more practically, legislators — tend to think otherwise.

In considering whether internet access ought to be a right, it’s helpful, I think, to understand the form of rights, which will provide a framework for looking at the issues at stake. Legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld (1879-1918) articulates four elements of rights (which are known as “The Hohfeldian incidents”) that are particularly useful for this exercise: the privilege, the claim, the power, and the immunity.

For a more technical description of these elements, check out the Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy, but I’ll attempt to give a quick and dirty explanation of what these terms mean for those who aren’t as familiar with the ‘φ‘ symbol. For those less theoretically-inclined, feel free to skip to the next section.

• The privilege (liberties): You have the right to do something because you have no duty not to do that thing. For example, you have the right to pick up a coin that you find on the ground because you have no duty not to pick it up.
• The claim: You have the right to claim a certain action from someone because s/he has the duty to do that action for you. An employee, for instance, has the right to be paid for her work, because of the duty the employer acknowledged in their contract.
• The power: You have the right to alter your own or another’s Hohfeldian incidents, if an agreed upon set of rules allows it. A boss, for example, can create a new duty or for her employee or lessen her authority over others, because the rules of employer-employee relationships allow it.
• The immunity: You have the right to not have your Hohfeldian incidents altered by another person, within a given set of rules. For example, US citizens have immunity from being forced to practice a religion that the government prescribes.

Broadly speaking, there are a lot of different types of rights, and it’s easier to see how rights can come into conflict when we take a look at their different characteristics.

Some Issues at Stake

Approximately 100 million Americans do not have broadband at home. The FCC aims to change that.

• Education. Both scholars and common sense tell us that internet access is one of the biggest pedagogical boons since the invention of the printing press. Beyond being the vastest free repository of information in the history of humankind, interaction with its content provides users with the skill sets needed to survive and thrive in information-based economies. Parsing through large amounts of data and navigating various conceptual categories are among the many skills frequent internet users acquire. So, if education is a right, then it certainly seems to follow that internet access should also be right–especially given the importance of learning outside the classroom.

• Public Safety & National Security. Since 9/11, the government has failed to create a functional interoperable communication network for first responders to both security threats and natural disasters. The results, as seen during 9/11, can be life-changing. PCMag’s Chloe Albinisius writes: “Police could not warn fire department officials about falling debris. Port Authority police could not tell state police to get out of a building, and so on.” Aside from interoperable communications, ubiquitous internet access would give citizens more immediate, multimedia information about important events from more sources in real-time than other communicative media –  e.g., cable TV, telephone networks.

• Taxation: While most of the National Broadband Plan is supposed to be covered by television spectrum auctions and private investment, some initiatives, such as the aforementioned public safety interoperable network, will come at the cost of additional fees for broadband users. Though FCC spokesman Rob Kenny claims the fee would be less than a dollar, many uber-libertarian types are angered by yet another tax, clamoring for immunity from such a fee.

• Private Enterprise: TV broadcasters are miffed at the thought of lost business opportunities by their auctioned spectrum space, and some telecom companies are worried by the imposition of government standards to increase their delivery speed. The equivalent of online ‘eminent domain,’ auctioning currently unused TV broadcasters’ spectrum is a prime example of sacrificing private interests for the public good.

The issue is complex, to say the least. In my opinion, the educational and national security claims are large enough to warrant internet access as a right. But what do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the comment board below.

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A graphic provided to convey differing opinions on privacy by the The New York Times in its 'Week in Review' Section on February26, 2010.

Contrary to most contemporary intuitions about media treatment of stars like Tiger Woods, the court ruled, as related in an article by MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan, that:

“…posing for the photographs did not mean Dumas and Menken had surrendered their rights to privacy and dignity, even if they consented to do just that during a heady romantic moment. These rights trumped any commercial property rights the photographer might have claimed, the court said.”

For most Americans, this ruling, along with the recent ruling against three Google executives in Italy for passively allowing ‘privacy-infringing’ videos to be posted on YoutTube, is troubling.

Beyond the need to fine-tune Google’s passive distribution policies for offensive content, this case highlights a deeper ideological divide, which Dumas’ case also exemplified. As The New York Times‘ Adam Liptak writes,

“… it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.”

In the  abstract (no, I didn’t read the entire paper) of Yale law professor James Whitman’s paper ‘The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,’ Whitman (or, more likely, some editor of the Yale Law Journal) clearly describes the issues and implications at stake:

Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and continental Europe. Some of the differences involve questions of everyday behavior, such as whether or not one may appear nude in public. But many involve the law. In fact, we are in the midst of major legal conflicts between the countries on either side of the Atlantic–conflicts over questions like the protection of consumer data, the use of discovery in civil procedure, the public exposure of criminal offenders, and more. Clearly the idea that there are universal human sensibilities about privacy, which ought to serve as the basis of a universal law of privacy, cannot be right.

The article (achem…abstract) later argues:

European privacy norms are founded on French and German ideas of “personal honor.” Continental “privacy,” like continental sexual harassment law, prison law, and many other bodies of law, aims to protect the “personal honor” of ordinary French and German folk. American law takes a very different approach, protecting primarily a liberty interest. The Article traces the roots of French and German attitudes over the last couple of centuries, highlighting the French experience of sexual license in the nineteenth century and the German experience of Nazism…

Throughout, the Article argues, American law shows a far greater sensitivity to intrusions on the part of the state, while continental law shows a far greater sensitivity to the protection of one’s public face. These are not differences that we can understand unless we abandon the approach taken by most privacy advocates, since such differences have little to do with the supposedly universal intuitive needs of “personhood.” Instead, they are differences that reflect the contrasting political and social ideals of American and continental law. Indeed, we should broadly reject intuitionism in our legal scholarship, focusing instead on social and political ideals.

For those of you still reading the post after reading through that quote (it might be a bit dry for some), I tend to disagree with Whitman’s rejection of the notion of some universal concept of ‘personhood’, though I also (unsurprisingly) lean toward sympathizing with American ideological and, hence, policy decisions.

The differing opinion lies in what I believe to be a false dichotomy that Whitman presents: between ‘dignity’ and ‘liberty.’ The value of ‘liberty,’ I think, draws its compellent force, like ‘privacy,’ from an intuitive notion of ‘personhood’ or ‘human dignity.’ And so, the dichotomy instead lies between ‘liberty’ and ‘privacy.’

Like most talk of ‘rights,’ however, these discussions are muddled by differing foundational concepts, not to mention differing laws (premised on those differing concepts) across national boundaries.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, we must weigh the value of ‘liberty’ against ‘privacy,’ knowing that that the results will vary by situation. I wouldn’t, for example, value a voyeur’s autonomous choice to spy on someone through a window over the watched person’s desire not to be watched while changing. More broadly, it’s understandable, too, that there should a sliding scale for the threshold of what constitutes tolerable infringements of either value across different cultures and national boundaries.

University of Michigan Internet law professor Susan Crawford also cautions against cagetorical thinking in the aforementioned NYTimes article:

Privacy is a broad enough concept, and Europe and America are varied enough, that it is easy to find counterexamples. Britain, for one, is only slowly moving toward the Continental model.

Something tells me, however, that the ideological divide will continue and deepen as online media continues to proliferate. I wonder how French courts would feel about the sale of copies of of Dumas’ and Mencken’s photos on this NY state-based site.

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Action Comics No.1 (1938), the first appearance of Superman, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.

Earlier this week Action Comics No. 1, which features the first appearance of Superman, sold online for a record-breaking $1m (£640,000).

This event marks an important cultural milestone in media for a few different reasons, all centered on some notion of populism.

1. Internet commerce. The comic was sold through one of the many successful but niche, mom’n pop auction websites borne by the internet age — ComicConnect.com. Unprepared for heavy traffic after news of the sale spread, the site was down yesterday, except for a press release.

From this perspective, Action Comics No. 1’s sale highlights how far internet e-commerce has come. Less than five years ago, making purchases on the internet was a scary thought to many, especially those 55 and older. And the notion that someone would spend up to a $1m on a less-than-secure-looking, website for a comic book would be laughable.

Shortly after I wrote this post, Detective Comics No. 27 (1939), which features the first appearance of Batman, exceeded Action Comics No.1's sale price, going for $1.08m.

ComicConnect.com’s big sale is indicative of a broader trend toward trusting non-big brand e-commerce sites, a sentiment ushered in by trailblazers like eBay and innovated by upstarts like Threadless. As trust in online purchasing burgeons and apprehension dissolves, the internet’s democratization of information will have increasingly populist effects on e-commerce, providing a relatively level playing field for any who aim to sell their wares to the internet’s vast audience.

2. Comic books as high art. Long before recent ventures into new formats, comic books were one of the first popular forms of multimedia art, combining elements of literature and visual art in one medium. For much of their history, however, comic books have been regarded and treated as a low-brow form of children’s literature. But, with the conceptual treatment of mass-produced art in the pop art movement, some artists (like Roy Lichtenstein) took style elements from the medium’s early practitioners and elevated it through their own critically-acclaimed work.

Separately, as many who witnessed comic books’ maturation as a medium are now grown up, academia and other ‘elite’ cultural arbiters have started to treat comic books with some intellectual respect, instead referring to them as ‘graphic novels.’ Action Comics No. 1’s sale marks an important step in elevating a medium to high art: someone paying a boatload of money to acquire a piece of it. Roughly tripling the past highest paid sum for a comic book, the purchase puts comic books in the big league. Hell, auction house Christie’s online hub places the upper end of the price filter for paintings at $600k.

3. The story of Superman and his creators. After five years of failure and waiting, Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster published Action Comic’s No.1 through National Allied Publications. As two young Jewish men in the American midwest during the early stages of WWII, Siegel and Schuster aimed to create a just and powerful embodiment of their frustration with a world that they perceived as unjust and unlistening to the plights of the powerless. Each, too, had personal stories that contributed to Superman’s inception. Siegel’s father was killed in an armed robbery, and Schuster was refused from military service due to his horrible eyesight.

The rise of Superman’s importance in popular culture, evidenced by Action Comics No.1’s sale, is indicative of a broader ideological trend — the valorization of the outcast martyr. An alien stranded on earth, Superman was raised by human parents to desire the attainment of social justice. As some Superman scholars note:

Among the things that made Superman popular was his fight for social justice, rather than law and order. The Superman of late 1930’s had no qualms about doing all sorts of illegal things in order to right what he felt were wrongs. This included getting confessions out of crooked politicians by threatening to injure or kill them, kidnapping and forcing weapon makers into fighting on the front lines of a war and trapping a Mining Company owner and his rich friends in an unsafe mine that his employees worked in. Some people would criticize Superman and superheroes in general because of these types of stories, saying they taught “might makes right” and were fascist.

And further, as others note, Superman’s experience resembles, in some ways, the plight of unpopular teenagers in high school and Jewish people trying to adapt to an anti-Semitic society. Like their presentations of self to society at large, the character is Clark Kent, and Superman puts on a ‘mask’ (glasses & street clothes) as his disguise as a normal person.

To end, I’ll leave you with a favorite painting of Superman by Alex Ross, one of my favorite ‘graphic novel’ artists. As my vernacular would suggest, I’m a bit of a comic book geek (, which would also explain why I’d write this post…).

Alex Ross' version of Superman.

Note: This post was written days before the sale of Detective Comics No. 27, which features the first appearance of Batman. While Batman’s story is certainly less populist in content (given Bruce Wayne’s elite upbringing and place in life), points 1 and 2 of this post remain extremely relevant. Not only that, but many might posit that, like Superman, ‘Bruce Wayne’ is Batman’s disguise, and Batman is the true character.

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An MQ-1 Predator drone returned from a mission to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with a new paintjob, courtesy of StevenDuque.com.

In his book Wikinomics, business strategist Don Tapscott writes:

“Employees drive performance by collaborating with peers across organizational boundaries, creating what we call a ‘wiki workplace.’ Customers become ‘prosumers’ by cocreating goods and services rather than simply consuming the end-product. So called-supply chains work more effectively when the risk, reward, and capability to compete major projects—including massively complex products like cars, motorcycles, and airplanes—are distributed across planetary networks of partners who work as peers (1).”

According to a recent article in The New York Times, unmanned surveillance drones are currently collecting more video intelligence than analysts are able to handle. The volume of footage taken from last year’s surveillance efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan nearly triple what it was only a few years ago–a grand total of roughly 24 years’ worth of footage, if watched without break. As operations in Afghanistan will certainly escalate in the near future and U.S. troops are withdrawn from both countries over time, the problem of excess, unmanned surveillance will only compound.

What if, as customers of national security, citizens aided the government’s counterterrorism surveillance efforts through mass collaborative online efforts? The government could post snippets of video on a centralized media hub, and citizens could review videos, comment on them, and flag them (if they see something suspicious). The government might even provide incentives for quality interactions — say, a fiscal or honorary rewards for good citizenship. Perhaps other citizens could rate others’ interactions, providing an element of peer evaluation and competition. Government intelligence officers could use the number of unique flags and/or comments to make triage decisions, and users could help screen the verity of flags by giving them a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down.’

Citizens would become ‘prosumers’ of national security, adding value to the end product of counterterrorist intelligence because of their vested interest in U.S. national security.

There are undeniably both interesting and disconcerting aspects of this proposition. I’ll address what I see to be the most immediate issues at stake.

The Big Brother Effect & and Society of Distrust. If implemented, social surveillance should be limited to foreign threats, most would agree. Mass collaborative surveillance of faraway lands would foster national antagonism (in addition to a sense of social responsbility) toward threats external to a nation’s society. If focused inward, however, our trust in one another might suffer from fear of Red Scare-like accusations, akin to how many around the world distrust police. Separately, dislike for Americans in the international community may be exacerbated by citizens’ participation in military surveillance efforts.

Securispam and Poor Intelligence. For those of you familiar with the comment boards of YouTube, you’ll find that some of the comments are sometimes, well, pretty crummy and downright idiotic at times, even on serious videos. Inviting open commentary on quasi-sensitive information could result in a deluge of crappy ‘intelligence,’ not to mention create PR-nightmares that may result from less-than-politically correct commentary that media outlets — both domestic and overseas — catch wind of. Additionally, opening up participation to the online world could create security windows for foreign intelligence operatives to spam video surveillance posting boards with faulty intelligence. Imagine how many times you’ve watched a crummy video or read a stupid article because of how many diggs it received.

Needless to say, there are plenty of holes in my half-baked plan for wikicounterterrorism. But, the problem remains: as our government is increasingly inundated with an endless streams of surveillanc edata, a better system of reviewing what could be important information is needed. While creating an open wiki-hub for commenting and flagging video may not be the right answer, I tend to think there is something right in the proposition to incorporate mass collaborative techniques, at least structurally, into the processes for reviewing large amounts of sensitive data. Whether that means opening up the surveillance data to the American general public or limiting who can access the information — e.g., to government officials and/or outsourced private military companies — the excuse that there’s simply too much surveillance out there will not suffice, if national security threats pass under the radar.

To end this post, I’ll leave you with a  comment from then-Senator Barack Obama on citizen participation in national security efforts:

“”To succeed [in the War on Terrorism], we must improve our civilian capacity. The finest military in the world is adapting to the challenges of the 21st century. But it cannot counter insurgent and terrorist threats without civilian counterparts who can carry out economic and political reconstruction missions – sometimes in dangerous places. As President, I will strengthen these civilian capacities, recruiting our best and brightest to take on this challenge. I will increase both the numbers and capabilities of our diplomats, development experts, and other civilians who can work alongside our military. We can’t just say there is no military solution to these problems. We need to integrate all aspects of American might.”

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An image pulled from DeviantArt by CrapsY (username).

The first was with an old friend, Michael P. (whose facebook profile I took the below quotation from), who forsook the life of  a Harvard-graduated consultant to work in a coffee shop and live as a Central Square hipster. Our conversation, which ranged from ‘catching up’ to ‘big issues,’ gravitated toward Michael’s thoughts on an emergent counterculture that he termed ‘the unplugged’ — that is, those who refuse to subscribe to a lifestyle that increasingly depends on modern technology. A proponent of this lifestyle, Michael made significant efforts in the last couple years to reduce his online footprint, pare down his digital interactions, and do things like increase the size of his record collection and work on a screenplay about an 80’s record producer.

As I understood them, Michael’s views (and those of ‘the unplugged’) are premised on the notion that technology detracts from our lives’ experiences by drawing our attention away from our real-world experiences and interactions. Michael posits that those who are ‘plugged in’ misguidedly reify technological advances as ‘progress.’ While technological artifacts seemingly make our lives better, they actually distance us from one another and definitively human activities — e.g., expressing ourselves through art and engaging the world through our tactile senses (sound familiar?).

The ‘unplugged’ view, I think, tends to overly romanticize the past and a (purportedly) simpler way of socializing, expressing oneself, and interacting with the world. Though I understand the love for and actually tend to prefer activities that more intimately (in a physical sense) connect me to the product of my work, I (and, I think, many others) view technological artifacts as just another set of tools we can use to interact with the world — e.g., a paintbrush, a pencil, a pair of glasses. In other words, technological advances most directly affect media, not expression. Or, more simply, technological advances most directly affect the tools we use, not how we use them.

That said, the forms of expression undeniably change as a result of the given media through which they are expressed. The notion of ‘friendship,’ for instance, has changed dramatically. In a world where roughly 30 percent of the facebook friendships of those between 18 and 24 are people whom they have never actually met, ‘friendship,’ it seems, certainly means something less substantial than what it perhaps once did. For photographers, the development of Adobe’s Creative Suite has changed how they view their craft.

In this light, I think the dichotomy between ‘unplugged’ and ‘plugged in’ is misguided. The analogy implies a reliance upon a sort of technological energy for functionality. But technology is more than that–at least for me. It enriches, enhances and augments my reality; it creates opportunities to share information, connect with others and learn about things I never would have been able to otherwise. In many ways, my subscription to a life filled with technological artifacts is more akin to the Matrix’s ‘jacking in’ — that is, it’s a choice to participate in a whole other experience of reality (I recognize the negative implications that this term may hold. My use of this term is also an admission that there is certainly something lost in exchanging the simplicity of more immediate physical interactions with the world for a view shaped by a world in which technological advances are a given). In contrast, a life without technology, I think, is a rejection of participation in this world and its benefits — and so, I will term it ‘checking out.’

This distinction leads me to think of the second conversation I had on this subject. During my final interview presentation with Jack Morton Worldwide, where I now work in business development, Liz Bigham, the Director of Brand Marketing, asked me if I perceived a pull-back reaction to a world saturated with social media — a desire for real, physical connections with other people. During the interview, my first response was that the nature of interactions is being transformed by media and the capabilities of technology. That is, the line between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experiences would continue to erode as time progressed, and any desire for ‘physical’ experiences could eventually be entirely satisfied by virtual ones.

But thinking back on this question, I’m not certain this is the case. I anticipate that the ideological divide between ‘jacked in’ and ‘checked out’ peoples will only increase as technologies transform our experiences of reality more dramatically. Michael’s disdain for technology isn’t fading quickly, and there’s something intuitively appealing about his rejection of the ‘jacked in’ life that evokes sympathy. Don’t I also enjoy it when I get out to nature, leave behind my cell phone and computer, and cut myself off from the technological world? But my memory of the practicality of using technology always seems to win out. I like having a world of information at my fingertips, the people I know available at the touch of a button, and the host of possibilities technology provides me. I suppose, though, that’s the divide–some people don’t.

But perhaps there is something to my initial intuition in my conversation with Liz, and the ‘checked out’ counterculture will ultimately have less ammunition to fuel its ideology. At the core of disdain for technology, I think, is disdain for ‘the complex,‘ a purportedly enhanced reality in which our actions must conform to the constraints placed upon them by the limitations of technology. What this disdain fails to recognize is that accompanying the trend of technological complexity is an ever-increasing tendency toward simplicity in design. User interfaces are becoming more elegant and intuitive, despite increasingly complex back-ends. Physically, technological artifacts — e.g., televisions — are also becoming less cumbersome and streamlined. This tendency toward design simplicity will only become more apparent as  futures waves of technological artifacts reach us.

My guess: ‘checked out’ people will resist until Apple comes out with a strong enough ad campaign for its iTablet.

“As I look around the contemporary American scene I am puzzled by what seems generally to pass for a historical object or monument…With us the association seems to be not with our politically historical past…what we cherish are mementos of a bygone daily existence without a definite date. Archie Bunker’s armchair will recall–at least to the present generation–not only the many hours agreeably spent watching television, but also the environment, the setting, of a popular program, though not necessarily the program itself.”
- J. B. Jackson

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