Meta-thoughts
Inequality /
-“cultural imperialism,”
-elitist to insist that developing countries progress through all of the stages of the industrial revolution
before they’re allowed to browse the web.”
-need to be cheap, robust, and intuitive-to-use—in a word, human-centered.
Intrusion /
-psychotropic time-out?
-Cookies are electronic footprints that allow web sites and advertising
networks to monitor our online movements with granular precision.
-“People at Charles Schwab tend to like Memoirs of
a Geisha”—that kind of thing.
the more such intrusions occur, and are not legally blocked, the lower our
expectations become. The law is set up to protect our privacy in proportion
to our reasonable expectations—a nasty little circle if ever you saw
one. Reduce your expectations, and your rights follow suit. It is up to us,
the public, to make sure that our expectations of privacy are not unreasonably
eroded. - Jeffrey Rosen
-there is more good than bad in the creation of a
fluid, adaptive, personalized, and rapidly responsive environment.
-“You already have zero privacy: get over it.”
-is that our technologies be responsive to our individual needs, including our
occasional but important need for privacy.
-We live, after all, in a society where a great deal of behavior, which is
neither illegal nor harmful, might if made public impact negatively upon
our lives and careers.
-As the lives of the populace become more visible, our work-a-day
morals and expectations need to change and shift. It is time for the real
world to play catch-up with our private lives, loves, and choices.
Uncontrollability /
-increased human-machine symbiosis directly implies decreasing control
-we be micromanaging every detail of every operation, but that the surrounding systems provide usable, robust support for the kinds of life and projects we value.
-This is precisely the goal of
human-centered technologies anyway.
-Super-Cannes, J. G. Ballard depicts a highly engineered environment (“Eden-Olympia
-there are no more moral decisions than there are on a new superhighway.
Unless you own a Ferrari, pressing the accelerator is not a moral decision.
Ford and Fiat and Toyota have engineered in a sensible response curve. We
can rely on their judgment, and that leaves us free to get on with the rest of
our lives. We’ve achieved real freedom, the freedom from morality.
Overload/
-mail e-stodge.
-unnoticed shift in the relative costs, in terms of time and effort, of
generating messages and of reading them
-“e-nough is e-nough” unplug
-Donald Knuth, a computer scientist who took this very step,quotes the novelist Umberto Eco, “I have reached an age where my mainpurpose is not to receive messages.” Knuth himself asserts that “I havebeen a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an emailaddress.”19
-business etiquette / 007
Alienation /
- “harmfully degrade how people value themselves and treat each other.”
- Just as having a pet tortoise does not make a child less likely to want to play catch with her
parents, having highly limited interactions with software agents won’t blind
her to the much wider range of interactions available with her parents.
Narrowing/
Deceit/
-Catpcha (Completely Automated Public Turing-Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart)
- in 2001, was “infested by cyber-bots.”30 These were programs able to log
on to the chat rooms, and posing as humans, send messages directly to
other people in the chat rooms, enticing them to visit specific company
web sites.
Degradation/
- Slashdot, a bulletin board serving, at first, a small
group of friends in the small town of Holland, Michigan
- Apart from locking out the truly offensive or totally
irrelevant, these lieutenants had an added power: the power to rate the remaining
contributions on a scale of 1 to 5
- It was the kind of thing that could only have happened on the web. A twentytwo-
year-old college senior, living with a couple of buddies in a low-rent
house—affectionately dubbed Geek House One—in a nondescript Michigan
town, creates an intimate on-line space for his friends to discuss their
shared obsessions, and within a year fifty thousand people each day are
angling for a piece of the action.
Disembodiment /
- As feedback links become richer and more varied, our experience
will rather become one of multiple ways of being embodied; akin, perhaps, to
the way a skilled athlete feels when she exchanges tennis racket for wetsuit
and flippers. In