Thanks to the various people who popped me Google+ invite… I’ve really not known whether to jump in, and would appreciate any thoughts people have had who have made the switch or tested the water.

The obvious issue is this: have Google made it worth it? If you are going to switch, do you do so completely – and leave Facebook behind, or do so partially and have another bloody set of pages and messages to check?

I read Emma by Jane Austen recently, and there’s a lovely passage where one Mr Frank Churchill goes to pay a visit on Mr Knightley. Mr Knightley is out, which causes Mr Churchill to be furious as he’d walked there across the fields, and Mr Knightley hadn’t even left a message with his housekeeper as to where he was. Austen was writing in her own time, rather than retrospectively, but she brilliantly captures the experience of the vast majority of humanity over history: our inability to mediate our presence. Without telephones, with a very limited postal service and no immediately convenient form of transport, one simply had to take one’s chances with going to visit.

The problem with social networks is that all of that serendipity is taken away… and the end result is the opposite of serenity: a huge anxiety that we might be missing something or someone. So we keep on checking. Just in case.

If there was a way to integrate these various platforms into one ‘inbox’ (is there – will someone say) – or if there is a killer reason why it would be good to switch to Google+, then I’d love to hear it. Picking up a new technology requires time for inhabitation. The question always is whether it’s worth the time and effort to move house.

Thanks to @designbygecko for putting me on to this extraordinary talk by Jim Gilliam at a web conference recently. Jim was brought up a fervent evanglical – and remains so, except that his faith is now truly in the Internet.

He has his reasons for his conversion: he’s suffered multiple cancers and had to have bone marrow and dual-lung transplants, and each step of the way it was other people on the web who pushed for him to be given access to procedures, campaigned for him and gave him encouragement.

Gilliam is serious: the internet is his religion. He believes fervently in its power to build a new world, by connecting people together and giving them a voice and an opportunity to create.

God is what happens when humanity is connected. Humanity connected is God. Each one of us is a creator, but together we are THE creator.

A couple of things I’d want to say about this. Firstly, it connects quite well with Zizek’s view of Christianity. He proposes that in the crucifixion we see the actual death of God, and it is then in the community of the Spirit (who like Google will, as John 14:26 puts is, teach you all things and remind you of everything I’ve said ) who become the risen Christ – embodying God on earth in Marxist collectives.

Marx’s contention was that we are alienated from our labour, and this fits well with Gilliam’s vision, because he sees the internet as the way for us to rid ourselves of this alienation and become fulfilled people. As Zizek put it in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce:

Enclosure of the commons is a process of proletarianization of those who are excluded from their own substance… The present conjecture compels us to radicalise it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination.

In this sense, the internet is one way of radicalising the commons to a level that would have been beyond Marx’s imagination. What I am convinced about is that the route out of our capitalist malaise is via a reinvigoration of ‘the commons’ in its broadest sense: we need to rediscover what it means to share a common life, to act communally and regularly beat down enclosures where we see them encroaching on the common ground which is the theatre within which community life is lived.

But I have my doubts about Gilliam’s internet fervency. Perhaps he is more right than he believes: the internet is rather like a religion, and is thus open to serious power abuse and practices of disinformation. What appears to be ‘free’ and ‘abundant life’ can actually a whole lot of wasted time getting anxious on Facebook, or trying to pump some deadened hashtag into life.

Whereas Gilliam believes the internet will redeem people, unshackle them and allow them to reach their potential, I believe that only other people can do that. The web can inspire people to great acts of altruism, but it can also drag people into grand selfishness and vanity. It is, in other words, only a technology, and, as such, it deserves our worship only as much as a golden calf.

The things the web achieves boil down to connecting people because community structures have failed. The web couldn’t save Gilliam’s life, only an actual donor could do that. So what we should celebrate is community and generosity, rather than modes of connection.

If you watch to the end of the video, I think you may detect a level of discomfort with Gilliam’s ending, and the applause is slightly tinted with sympathy, rather than easy acceptance. I think that this suggests a deep-rooted reflexive skepticism of the internet as saviour. Gilliam’s story is emotionally charged, but we should be careful not to give ourselves to a new religion on the basis of a few ‘signs and wonders.’

Good health to him, and all the best for his start-ups, which look to increase activism and political engagement. But while the internet can help us engage, as I’ve said here before, I’m convinced that it works best only as a tool for arranging physical engagement between actual people.

The net may be a sacrament, but it is not God. God’s ‘absence’ – however we interpret that – has left a troubling hole in our sense of self and community. The net has grown to fill some of that, but we need to be careful.

I’ve recently come across the WordPress plug-in WPBook. I think it’s great, and if you are a WordPress user and have a readership on Facebook too, I’d highly recommend it.

Basically, WPBook means that posts you want will be posted in full to a Facebook app, and comments that are made on FB or your WordPress site will be reflected across both platforms. This, I think, is the key reason I went for it as it can be frustrating when people start commenting and conversing on two separate sites without proper integration. Obviously this requires people to agree to using the app, so we’ll see how that goes.

Once you’ve installed it, you are guided through the process of setting up a Facebook app, which is fairly simple but requires some attention to detail – so follow the instructions carefully. Then it’s a pretty straight-forward set-up, and the settings are fairly self-explanatory.

I’ve not got a Facebook ‘page’ as such – can’t really say I like them – so I’m hoping that the App will allow people to follow this blog right from within Facebook. Be good to know how people find it.

I also use the plug-in WP to Twitter, which creates a tweet from your post, which you can fully customise within the ‘new post’ page. I also have ‘Selective Tweets‘ activated on Facebook, which means that tweets with a #fb tag are automatically posted to my wall too. Ideally I’ll be able to stop using that for actual blog posts, as people will get notifications from the app, but we’ll just see how things pan out.

Anyway, hope there’s something helpful for people – and if you’ve got a better system going, or think FB pages are better than apps, would love to hear it.

I went to see The Social Network the other night, and have been mulling on it since. I have to say, I didn’t really fancy the thought of going to see a film about Facebook, but the reviews have been very good, and I’m a fan of Aaron Sorkin. It’s actually very funny, and very interesting… and made me hate Facebook even more than ever. Of course, the film is fiction – although it can’t be too far from the truth as one would imagine it would be in the courts by now.

No one comes out particularly well in the film – Harvard graduates coming across as self-centred, egocentric frat-boys – but Zuckerberg himself is a very interesting character. Having coded and refused to sell a variety of innovative programmes before college, he resists monetizing Facebook because, as it goes viral around the Ivy Leagues, ‘the site is cool, and advertising is not.’ His own Facebook page gives his mission statement as this:

“I’m trying to make the world a more open place by helping people connect and share.”

I find this really interesting, because my experience of Facebook is the opposite of an ‘open’ place. Firstly because it’s highly restrictive – one cannot get rid of page elements that you don’t like (like ‘meeting hot singles in my area’, FFS) but also because, at a deeper level, I don’t believe that it is promoting human openness. In fact, in my experience as a teacher, I think it is actually making people more anxious and much more self-conscious. Every moment at every meeting with friends now has the potential to be posted, tagged and commented on. So people respond and become more ‘ready’ for that.

Zuckerberg has made insane amounts of money from Facebook, and is known as a bit of a maverick, so part of me wonders if he is still uneasy with the way that the site has turned out. Digging around a little, he has recently donated money to the Diaspora project, which is probably best described as the WordPress of social networks:

The developers aim for it to be a decentralized alternative to social network services like Facebook. In an interview with the New York Times Soafer said “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”

Diaspora works by letting users set up their own server (or “seed”) to host content; seeds can then interact to share status updates, photographs and other social data. A developer preview was released on 15 September 2010 and a consumer alpha is planned for October 2010.

Zuckerberg has described it as ‘a cool idea’ and if he is serious about making the world more open, so he should. What is interesting about this idea is that it ties in nicely with some reading I’ve been doing around the ancient idea of ‘the commons.’ In Lewis Hyde’s latest book, he talks about the legal idea of ‘Common Carriers’ – like roads, telecoms cables and waterways. They are infrastructures put in place for everyone to benefit from.

So my challenge to Zuckerberg is this: if you’re serious about making the world more open, why not turn Facebook inside out and make it a ‘common carrier’? He could remove it from private ownership, fund it through a trust, remove all the ads and free the code under a GPL release. This would make his ‘Code for America‘ idea a little more interesting. What that wouldn’t do is help people cope with living in such a highly networked world. The massively open world he has apparently created is far ahead of our evolutionary ability to respond appropriately to it, and it’s going to be a while before people normalise with it…

Connected to the previous post about Gladwell’s article on ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,’ I’m really excited about the next Apple event, which is coming up on 13th October. Dr Luke Bretherton will be leading a discussion on social media and social action, asking whether Facebook and Twitter have anything to add to community organising and political activism, or if the 1.4 million people who’ve joined the ‘Save Darfur’ group are wasting their time, and fooling themselves.

Details here. Good beer and food. You should be there!

Excellent piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, casting a sceptical eye over the optimistic view that social networks can and do lead to increased social action. His argument is not that they cannot have a good impact, but that the sort of impact they might have is very different from the hard work of political activism that brought about the end to segregation.

Old style activism depended on ‘strong ties’ – people who probably knew one another, and were very committed to a single cause, with their lives and values tied up in it. Whereas…

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

But weak ties rarely lead to high-risk activism. Why? Because high-risk activism is hard. Gladwell notes the example of a bone-marrow campaign which went viral through social networks:

Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

His conclusion is something we need to take careful note of:

Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.

For an community committed to change, to conversion – whatever that means – that’s an important lesson. Real sacrifice will never happen online.

This is actually going to be part of the focus of the next ‘Apple‘ event on 13th October: Dr Luke Bretherton looking at Social Media and Social Action. More details soon, but put the date in the diary – it’s going to be excellent.

In a fascinating interview in the Wall Street Journal, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has admitted that young people will have to change their identities in the future to protect themselves from all the embarrassing photos and information that will be available about them from their ‘misspent youths.’

‘Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood.’

I think this is more interesting than he might have meant it to be, and touches on issues of identity, conversion and ‘rebirth’ into adulthood. Many societies still have initiation rituals which mark a move away from childhood and into full adult membership of a community. They become a new person. The old has gone, the new has come.

With this move, however, the community needs to present a sort of amnesia – the child that you were is ‘forgotten’. In the digital age, this is becoming more and more impossible:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”

To ‘available, knowable and recorded’ I’d add ‘remembered.’ And this could be a problem. Why? Because it will never allow people to move on from the idiocy of their youth, and let’s face it, most of us were idiots at least some of the time.

But perhaps there’s a deeper problem here. The reason why people may be forced into taking new identities is because society, while never being able to allow us to forget, has it self forgotten that we were all young once. In other words, we have become unforgiving. An interviewer who looks up a prospective candidate’s Facebook profile and decides that their drunken photos and stupid utterances exclude them from consideration has forgotten that they probably did the very same things. It’s just that they were unrecorded.

The move into adulthood then may involve a ritual of rebirth, of digital deletion or reassessment, even a conscious attempt to turn over a new leaf and become ‘someone else’, but this must be paralleled with a decision by all of us that we will also be forgiving.

This appears to me to be the dual-role of baptism. The person who disappears under the water leaves behind their old self, and rises a new being. But the community that watches them disappear, and then reappear, has a responsibility to forgive – and this means ‘pretending to forget too.’ When Jesus says ‘you will no longer be called Simon’ he becomes Simon/Peter – a dual identity, with his Simon-self ‘forgotten.’

We might all need these digital baptisms from time to time. Periods when we need to delete, and then pretend that things are forgotten. The infamous university photo of Tony Blair (back row, third from right) is a good case in point. It’s embarrassing, but it’s surely crass to use it to judge him now?

Really pleased to announce that we’ve sorted out three new dates for Apple events over the next couple of months.

The idea behind Apple is to get people thinking more reflectively about technology – whether that be digital culture or tool-use. Humans are tool-makers, and the technologies we use form us, just as we form them. As technology becomes more embedded in the functioning of our relationships, it’s hugely important that we think carefully about the effect it may be having on who we are.

The first Apple in this series will see Pete Rollins doing his only London date for some time speaking around the title ‘Despite Appearances, Some Things Are Real‘ and questioning whether our online personae are actually more ‘real’ than we are.

Details: 12th May, 7:30pm, free, at The Betsey Trotwood pub, 56 Farringdon Road Clerkenwell, London. Map here. Do spread the word.

The other two dates (same time and venue)

9th June – Manjit Kumar from Wired Magazine will be speaking on quantum mechanics, multiverses and the nature of reality.

7th July – Anthony Paul Smith from Nottingham University will be speaking on ‘Is the City a Machine for the Making of Gods?’

Spread the word, and look forward to seeing you there. Just exploring the possibility of Greenbelt coming on board and recording these too, so I’ll post if we have audio etc.

Very interesting conversation last night between Steven Johnson – author of brilliant books such as The Ghost Map, Emergence (for which I owe him a huge debt) and The Invention of Air – and Brian Eno – who defies description or categorization.

They covered a lot of ground over the evening, but perhaps the best line that I came away with was Eno quoting GA Cohen who said:

‘It’s not that socialism doesn’t work, it’s just that we haven’t developed the social tools to make it work yet.‘

Cohen died a couple of years ago, and I wonder what he would have made of the rise of Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. Personally, I think he’d have been really interested in the potential that they have, and I wonder if he, as I did, would have mulled on that quote and wondered if actually socialism might become more realised with the improved social technologies that we increasingly have available.

I’ve been of the opinion that people all basically start out socialist, it’s just that most realise quite quickly just how impossible it is to put into practice, and turn more conservative in their middle years as they have children and look to increase their own wealth and security.

But perhaps a technologically-funded socialism might actually allow things to work a little more effectively. What’s clear is that if it ever is, it’s not going to be the perennially silly, ad-driven crap-stream that is the current state of Facebook. But here’s hoping.

“In the digital age, everything we say, do and write is preserved forever, including antics most would rather forget”

Fascinating piece in today’s Independent on the problem of the net never forgetting. So much of what we do is trackable online now, and as more RF devices are linked in to gadgets, vehicles – our bodies even – we will be churning out huge amounts of data via our searches, purchases and movements which harvesters like Google and Microsoft will manipulate.

One story from the article stood out:

In 2006, on his way to pick up a friend from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, [Feldmar - a well-respected Canadian psychotherapist] tried to cross the US/Canadian border, as he had done over 100 times before. This time, however, a border guard queried an internet search engine for “Feldmar”. Out popped an article Feldmar had written for an interdisciplinary journal in 2001, in which he mentioned that he had taken LSD in the 1960s. Feldmar was held for four hours, fingerprinted and, after signing a statement that he had taken drugs almost four decades ago, was barred from further entry into the United States.

The article goes on to recommend that files that we create have a ‘sell by date’ just as food does – after this date it will be deleted. I’d go further – what I really want is a system that allows me to designate anything as ‘volatile.’ In this way certain emails – the pointless quick information ones – would just delete themselves after a certain period. Quick memos I’ve written on my phone for that day will not be synched and stored in perpetuity on my Mac.

With the stupid amounts of bytes we are generating daily – and the server farms we are having to build to store them – volatility is not just sensible data management, but an environmental necessity too.

We evolved brains that forget for good reason. We’d do well not to forget that.