We got a small notebook on Reboot to jot down our thoughts. I made extensive notes during the first half of the first day and during lunch I then managed to lose this book. I’m writing this from memory which should still be very accurate, but might not completely capture my thoughts of the moment.

Jeremy Keith did a presentation early on the first day about Soul online which was a great combination of right and left brain. His talk about soul and provenance was a nice story with a microformat sneaked in here and there. His idea, that who you are online is defined by your presence, ties into current projects which create and combine presence streams.

Transparency

This does raise issues about privacy, authority and reputation. A quote by Gibson says that we cannot escape the power of transparency: “It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.”

People are multifaceted and are becoming more and more transparent. So this way you would be able to see a complete picture of someone and you would have increasing difficulty hiding parts of yourself from people. A big objection to be raised by this, is that by tieing together the story we tell ourselves, we lose control about the story we tell others.

One idea we had to solve this is to create a service which will disinform webservices for you. So suppose you give it your Flickr login, it will create ten more Flickr users under your name with semi-random information and pictures associated to you. This way a casual Googler will have a very difficult time to form an accurate and reliable picture of you. Increasing crap might be our best way to privacy.

Provenance

The concept of provenance —I think a very difficult word for non-native English speakers— is a nice way to check the reliability of people online and to form yourself an image of someone you ‘meet’ online. This is nice but people change their minds, ideas progress and evolve over time. Someone who held one political or religious view in the past, may have changed that.

This is not a big problem, it is in fact very human, but currently people in general do not respect that. Most people are more inclined to trust someone who looks like he is sure of what he is saying and has said the same thing for all his life. People who are not confident or who flip-flop are less trusted.

I hope the future with its unimaginable tools of transparency makes people adjust.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 16:08 and is filed under Reboot, event, life, presence, presentation, privacy.