echovar

Thinking about what it might mean to stand at the intersection of technology and the humanities has resulted in an exploration with a very circuitous route.

The Network has been infused with humanity, with every aspect of human character— the bright possibilities and the tragic flaws.

On May 29, 1919, Arthur Stanley Eddington took some photographs of a total eclipse of the sun. Eddington had gone to Africa to conduct an experiment that might determine whether Newton’s or Einstein’s model was closer to physical reality.

During the eclipse, he took pictures of the stars in the region around the Sun. According to the theory of general relativity, stars with light rays that passed near the Sun would appear to have been slightly shifted because their light had been curved by its gravitational field. This effect is noticeable only during eclipses, since otherwise the Sun’s brightness obscures the affected stars. Eddington showed that Newtonian gravitation could be interpreted to predict half the shift predicted by Einstein.

My understanding of the physics is rather shallow, my interest is more in the metaphorics— in how the word-pictures we use to describe and think about the universe changed based on a photograph. Where the universe lined up nicely on a grid before the photograph, afterwards, space became curvaceous. Mass and gravity bent the space that light passed through. Assumed constants moved into the category of relativity.

The Network also appears to be composed of a neutral grid, its name space, through which passes what we generically call payloads of “content.” Each location has a unique identifier; the only requirement for adding a location is that its name not already be in use. You can’t stand where someone is already standing unless you displace them. No central authority examines the suitability of the node’s payload prior to its addition to the Network.

The universe of these location names is expanding at an accelerating rate. The number of addresses on the Network quickly outstripped our ability to both put them into a curated index and use, or even understand, that index. Search engines put as much of the Network as they can spider into the index and then use software algorithms to a determine a priority order of the contents of the index based on keyword queries. The search engine itself attempts to be a neutral medium through with the nodes of the Network are prioritized based on user query input.

Regardless of the query asked, the method of deriving the list of prioritized results is the same. The method and production cost for each query is identical. This kind of equal handling of Network nodes with regard to user queries is the search engine equivalent of freedom, opportunity and meritocracy for those adding and updating nodes on the Network. The algorithms operate without prejudice.

The differential value of the queries and prioritized link lists is derived through an auction process. The cost of producing each query/result set is the same—it is a commodity—but the price of buying advertising is determined by the intensity of the advertiser’s desire. The economics of the Network requires that we develop strategies for versioning digital commodities and enable pricing systems linked to desire rather than cost of production. Our discussions about “Free” have to do with cost-based pricing for digital information goods. However, it’s by overlaying a map of our desires on to the digital commodity that we start to see the contours, the curvaceousness of this space, the segments where versioning can occur.

We’ve posited that the search algorithm treats all nodes on the Network equally. And more and more, we take the Network to be a medium that can fully represent human life. In fact, through various augmented reality applications, human reality and the Network are sometimes combined into a synthetic blend (medium and message). Implicitly we also seem to be asserting a kind of isomorphism between human life and the Network. For instance, sometimes we’ll say that on the Network, we “publish everything, and filter later.” The gist of this aphorism is that where there are economics of low-or-no-cost production, there’s no need to filter for quality in advance of production and transfer to the Network. Everything can be re-produced on the Network and then sorted out later. But when we use the word “everything,” do we really mean everything?

The neutral medium of the Network allows us to disregard the payload of contents. Everything is equivalent. A comparison could be made to the medium of language— anything can be expressed. But as the Network becomes more social, we begin to see the shape of our society emerge within the graph of nodes. Sigmund Freud, in his 1913 book entitled Totem and Taboo, looks at the markers that we place on the border of what is considered socially acceptable behavior. Ostensibly, the book examines the resemblances between the mental life of savages and neurotics. (You’ll need to disregard the archaic attitudes regarding non-European cultures)

We should certainly not expect that the sexual life of these poor, naked cannibals would be moral in our sense or that their sexual instincts would be subjected to any great degree of restriction. Yet we find that they set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity the aim of avoiding incestuous sexual relations. Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.

Freud is pointing to the idea that social organization, while certainly containing positive gestures, reserves its use of laws, restrictions and mores for the negative gesture. The structure of societal organization to a large extent rests on what is excluded, what is not allowed. He finds this common characteristic in otherwise very diverse socio-cultural groups. Totems and taboos bend and structure the space that our culture passes through.

In the safesearch filters employed by search engines we can see the ego, id and superego play out their roles. When we search for transgressive content, we remove all filtering. But presumably, we do, as a member of a society, filter everything before we re-produce it on the Network. Our “unfiltered” content payloads are pre-filtered through our social contract. Part of the uncomfortableness we have with the Network is that once transgressive material is embodied in the Network, the algorithms disregard any difference between the social and the anti-social. A boundary that is plainly visible to the human— and is in fact a structural component of its identity and society, is invisible to the machine. Every node on the Network is processed identically through the algorithm.

This issue has also been raised in discussions about the possibility of artificial intelligence. In his book Mirror Worlds, David Gelernter discusses a key difference between human memory and machine memory:

Well for one thing, certain memories make you feel good. The original experience included a “feeling good” sensation, and so the tape has “feel good” recorded on it, and when you recall the memory— you feel good. And likewise, one reason you choose (or unconsciously decide) not to recall certain memories is that they have “feel bad” recorded on them, and so remembering them makes you feel bad.

But obviously, the software version of remembering has no emotional compass. To some extent, that’s good: Software won’t suppress, repress or forget some illuminating case because (say) it made a complete fool of itself when the case was first presented. Objectivity is powerful.

Objectivity is very powerful. Part of that power lies in not being subject to personal foibles and follies with regard to the handling, sorting, connecting and prioritizing of data. The dark side of that power is that the objectivity of the algorithm is not subject to social prohibitions either. They simply don’t register. To some extent technology views society and culture as a form of exception processing, a hack grafted on to the system. As the Network is enculturated, we are faced with the stark visibility of terrorism, perversity, criminality, and prejudice. On the Network, everything is just one click away. Transgression isn’t hidden in the darkness. On the Network, the light has not yet been divided from the darkness. In its neutrality there is a sort of flatness, a lack of dimensionality and perspective. There’s no chiaroscuro to provide a sense of volume, emotion, limit and mystery.

And finally here’s the link back to the starting point of this exploration. A kind of libertarian connection has been made between the neutral quality of the medium of the Network and our experience of freedom in a democratic republic. The machine-like disregard for human mores and cultural practices is held up as virtue and example for human behavior. No limits can be imposed on the payloads attached to any node of the Network. The libertarian view might be stated that the fewest number of limitations should be applied to payloads while still maintaining some semblance of society. Freud is instructive here: our society is fundamentally defined by what we exclude, by what we leave out, and by what we push out. While our society is more and more inclusive, everything is not included. Mass and gravity bend the space that light passes through.

The major debates on the Network seem to line up with the contours of this pattern. China excludes Google and Google excludes China. Pornographic applications are banished from Apple’s AppStore. Android excludes nothing. Closed is excluded by Open, Open is included by Closed. Spam wants to be included, users want to exclude spam. Anonymous commenters and trolls should be excluded. Facebook must decide what the limits of speech are within the confines of its domain. The open internet excludes nothing. Facebook has excluded the wrong thing. The open internet has a right to make your trade secrets visible. As any node on the Network becomes a potential node in Facebook’s social/semantic graph, are there nodes that should be taboo? How do we build a civil society within the neutral medium of the Network? Can a society exist in which nothing is excluded?

In the early days of the Network, it was owned and occupied by technologists and scientists. The rest of humanity was excluded. As the Network absorbs new tribes and a broader array of participants, its character and its social contract has changed. It’s a signal of a power shift, a dramatic change in the landscape. And if you happen to be standing at the crossroads of technology and the humanities, you might have a pretty good view of where we’re going.

In a recent post, Clay Shirky talks about The Collapse of Complex Business Models. In essence, the idea is that in the television business, you were able to support a high cost structure and complex production environment through massive distribution of the product through specialized video broadcasting services. While not sufficient, it was necessary to produce a high-quality product to achieve mass distribution, consumption and profit margins. Shirky’s point is that the same itch is now being scratched by non-commercial, low-quality product that also achieves mass-distribution over the Network. The question television executives face is: how do we compete with that?

This is reminiscent of the moment when the Coca-Cola corporation discovered that it wasn’t just competing with the Pepsi-Cola corporation for dominance of the cola-flavored beverage market, or the soda market in general. They were competing against water. Television executives are looking for their version of Coca-Cola’s Dasani— a bottled water product that delivers similar margins to their soft drinks. Although the attempt roll Dasani into the European markets exposed what most people already knew. Water was readily available from their taps as a utility.

Shirky’s focus is on the moment when complexity, and adding more complexity/quality to the mix, no longer delivers a positive revenue margin over expenses. And unlike the banks that make up our financial system, the big media corporations are not perceived as too big to fail. As the business models of the media giants are hollowed out, change will come. At the end of his post, Shirky makes some predictions:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

While measuring the value of complexity in the equation of a business model may be one signal of an institution’s chances in the ongoing transformation of the media ecosystem, there’s an older Shirky post that should be brought into this context. The post is called “Gin, Television and Social Surplus.” In this post, he contemplates the 200 billion hours spent watching television each year in the United States. Should that energy be refocused in another direction, what might it unleash?

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

When I linked these two ideas together, a changing media/technology ecosystem and a large cognitive surplus, and third pattern emerged that provided a distressing context. It’s interesting that when speaking of media and business models, we look blithely on at the destruction and upheaval occurring. We zero in on the inflexibility of institutions, the fact that they can’t adapt to change as the sad, but predictable, cause of their extinction. When Shirky adds together a socialized Network and a large cognitive surplus he comes up with experiments that ultimately are integrated into society and transform it. There’s a beautiful optimism implied there, one that imagines peaceful progress mimicking the periodic updates of web-based software over the Network.

The distressing context that emerged was that the contours of what Shirky describes begins to resemble the historical period before World War I. We’re living through an era of accelerating change in technology, communications, media, manufacturing and politics. The ecosystem of the dominant broadcast media is evolving into something else, and potentially unleashing billions of hours of human energy. In the forward to her book “The Proud Tower,” Barbara Tuchman writes:

The period of this book was above all the culmination of a century of the most accelerated rate of change in man’s record. Since the last explosion of a generalized belligerent will in the Napoleonic wars, the industrial and scientific revolutions had transformed the world. Man had entered the Nineteenth Century using only his own and animal power, supplemented by that of wind and water, much as he had entered the Thirteenth, or, for that matter, the First. He entered the Twentieth with his capacities in transportation, communication, production, manufacture and weaponry multiplied a thousandfold by the energy of machines. Industrial society gave man new powers and new scope while at the same time building up new pressures in  prosperity and poverty, in growth of population and crowding in cities, in antagonisms of classes and groups, in separation from nature and from satisfaction in individual work.

and a little later:

…society at the turn of the century was not so much decaying as bursting with the new tensions and accumulated energies. Stefan Zweig who was thirty-three in 1914 believed that the outbreak of the war “had nothing to do with ideas and hardly even with frontiers. I cannot explain it otherwise than by this surplus force, a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had accumulated in forty years of peace and now sought violent release.”

While it’s unlikely that there will be a note-for-note replay of the fin de siècle era, there is a significant risk that what was multiplied a thousandfold by the energy of machines, will be multiplied by orders of magnitude and distributed to millions of nodes across the Network. The question we might ask is whether we have a strong enough central agreement about morality and civilization to curb our darker instincts. Can the center hold?

Before the turn of the millennium, Scott McNealy declared privacy dead:

The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said Monday that consumer privacy issues are a “red herring.”

“You have zero privacy anyway,” Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company’s new Jini technology.

“Get over it.”

McNealy’s comments came only hours after competitor Intel (INTC) reversed course under pressure and disabled identification features in its forthcoming Pentium III chip.

At one time, privacy was a function of a general laziness and the unlinked quality of information. While there may have been lots of publicly available information about a person, it was rather difficult to track down and assemble. We’ve developed a whole mythology around the kind of person who can root out the details about a person and put the pieces together into a picture that makes some kind of sense.

There was a kind of power in the invisibility we once had. Oddly, it was a kind of anonymity that was derived from the density of the urban environment. The city was a place you could go to get lost, to start over, to create a new identity. That’s why it took a detective to find the traces and clues that filled out the picture of a person. Today, that kind of invisibility has mostly vanished. If I want to know something about Sergey Brin, I can use any number of services that will scour the Network looking of publicly available information, and then I can pay for information that’s more obscure or privately held. Shoe leather is no longer a requirement.

Just as there’s a kind of ‘security through obscurity,’ there was a kind of privacy through obscurity. The methods by which information about a person used to be stored were enshrouded in shadow, even darkness. One piece of information wasn’t linked to the next. The trail was obscured, you had to stumble through the darkness to get from one piece of information to the next. Now information is linked into a web– it’s created, searched, and collated. In the UK, surveillance cameras are used to create a visual real-time mesh of video that can track you through your day. You are being recorded, it’s just a question of whether anyone is currently looking at the data or not.

…under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste, loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

The private moment, that little space between this and that, the in-between time when no one is looking— this invisible space is growing smaller and smaller, the more connected we become. Privacy through obscurity is no longer a dependable strategy. The things that were hidden in plain sight, are now easily found.

There is some data that remains private. Our medical records and financial records are two examples of personal data that is actively encrypted and kept private. Generally a court order is required to pry open these vaults of information. In some sense, that’s the new definition of privacy. It’s data that can be accessed by the individual, the data custodian, and, by court order, the government. In addition, should this data inadvertently leak out from the data custodian, the individual has a well-established legal recourse against the custodian.

In order for the private to remain truly secret, it would need to be unconnected. As the connections between us are made visible by our electronically networked environment, we begin to see that we have always inhabited networks of one kind or another. To be unconnected to all networks is to no longer be among the living. The private is something that we are prohibited from sharing based on a social or legal contract. Viewed as a system, the private requires more energy to maintain its contracts regarding the non-sharing of information. Linking private personal data among private systems of record while still honoring the non-sharing contract takes even more energy. The network itself doesn’t distinguish between private and public information packets.

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

And just as we can deduce the nature of hidden facts based on the dog who didn’t bark in the night, the private can often be deduced by correlating public gestures/connections to and through the locus of personal identity. But privacy isn’t dead, it’s just as it always was– an agreement among a group of people to enact useful boundaries on the sharing of information.

The Swan
by Rainer Maria Rilke

This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.
And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on
and cling to every day,
is like the swan,
when he nervously lets himself down into the water,
which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan,
unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried,
each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.

translated by Robert Bly

Darkness, night, unconsciousness– all these things dispelled by the candle, the lamp and then the light bulb. Day extended into night for both work and leisure. The sun displaced as the only source of light, fire quantized and tamed. The networks of electrical power–the grids– laid down across the earth to feed electric light and create a new social environment in the night.

There’s an emotional quality to the color of light. But in the age of grave ecological imbalances, we rush toward toward a transition to the cold flat light of the compact fluorescent bulb. The ‘eco’ aspects (both ecology and economics) seem to favor the transition. It’s as though the visibility granted through light was something without quality– digital in character, a bulb provides light or it doesn’t.

The decision to recolor the night is a political one, one that may even be given the force of law. The quality of light, it seems, must be sacrificed to the economics of energy. One can imagine a point in the future when all electrically-produced light will fill the night with its cold blue radiance. We wouldn’t think of these light sources as bringing day to night, but rather some other quality altogether.

Reading the paper the other day, I was pleased to see that a company had created an incandescent bulb that complied with new energy efficiency standards. The quality of light may only resurface as a deciding factor once the ecologics and economics are equalized. Of course anyone involved in designing light for human environments has been distraught over the stampede to the aesthetics of the meat locker. Some actually thinking of starting to hoard incandescent bulbs for the time when they will be outlawed.

Should this recoloring of the night proceed unimpeded and reach its goals of replacing the incandescent light space, I wonder at what point we would begin to notice the new emotional character of night?

A few thoughts that need to be captured before they return from whence they came. I’ve been re-reading Baudrillard’s Simulations– thinking about it in light of the possibility of Internet Identity. Online identity is already a concept that’s overloaded; it’s become a blank slate on which entrepreneurs, privacy advocates and open source geeks project their hopes, dreams and ambitions. Binding code to the soul to create a hard link posits a kind strong symbolic order that we’ve seen before in the pre-industrial era.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

- free video poker how to play backgammon no deposit bonus online casino 888 no download casino play roulette craps game black jack download american roulette play video poker baccarat free casino game no download online casino free money on line casino wagering roulette online online casino betting free online casino slots free craps best casino roulette gambling internet casino gambling uk best casino online full pay video poker no deposit casino code best craps game black jack tournament best online casino site craps online game newest online casino free slots no download play blackjack online free dueces wild video poker black jack gambling online video poker game free casino cash no deposit video poker tutorial play free video poker how to win at black jack casino roulette casino guide how to win at roulette rules of craps casino game online real money backgammon baccarat casino online free video poker game play free video poker video poker odds video poker tournaments Ecclesiastes

Baudrillard looks at three orders of appearance and examines them with regard to mutations of the law of value:

• Counterfeit is the dominant scheme of the “classical” period, from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution
• Production is the dominant scheme of the industrial era
• Simulation is the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by code.

In the first period an individual (an identity) is assigned a place of rank, or caste, irrevocably– class mobility is non-existent. Baudrillard calls this strong ‘symbolic order’ a ferocious hierarchy. There is a strong binding between an individual and a set of signs. The binding of identity is assigned by the circumstances of birth; Identity and signs are not arbitrary in this schema.

The industrial era puts an end to the problem of uniqueness, or the importance of the point of origin. Signs and objects are produced on a massive scale (two or n identical objects). The key phrase for me was: “In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other. And so, along with the objects, do the men that produce them.” In the industrial schema, you are what you do. Identity is useful with regard to the role it plays in production– workers are interchangeable parts in the machinery of production.

“Leibniz, that mathematical spirit, saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system that counts only the zero and the one, the very image of creation. The unity of the supreme Being, operating by binary function in nothingness, would have sufficed to bring out of it all the beings.”

- McLuhan

In the age of simulation, there is no labor involved in producing copies. In a sense, there is no original digital artifact– it is a copy at its origin. When we look to origin, we look to the code of DNA. Identity is linked to the curration of collections of simulations.

Identity is generally thought to be an inward quality of a person. Through this sketch, we can hold it up and look at it as an external binding of a system of signs, a kind of exoskeleton. And as we look at the mutations in the binding point of identity, we can see that it matches the mutations in the instantiations of value.

This morning over a cup of tea and the NY Times, I discovered a major new Identity System. On the edges we argue about user-centered identity, aggregated/fragmented identity across social networks, or the meaning of custodial identity and its role in commercial or financial transactions. Sharon LaFraniere, of the NY Times, writes about bestowing names, the written Chinese language and databases — and a new identity system for China’s 1.3 Billion citizens.

By law, every Chinese citizen must carry an identity card– the legacy system is a handwritten card. The government is transitioning to a computer-readable card that will feature a color photo and an embedded microchip containing data including: home address, work history, background, ethnicity, religion and medical insurance. Within this transition we can observe what is lost as we move from the handwritten to the computer-readable.

Let’s start with some numbers:

• There are roughly 55,000 written Chinese characters
• China’s Public Security Bureau database is programmed to read 32,252 Chinese characters
• A government linguistics official has suggested that the new standardized list will only include 8,000 characters
• About 3,500 characters are in everyday use

Although China has a large population, it has very few surnames:

• 100 surnames cover 85% of China’s population
• 70,000 surnames cover 90% of the U.S.’s population

Because many people have identical surnames, it has become common to bestow an unusual given name to create a unique identity.

“Government officials suggest that names have gotten out of hand, with too many parents picking the most obscure characters they can find or even making up characters, like linguistic fashion accessories. But many Chinese couples take pride in searching the rich archives of classical Chinese to find a distinctive, pleasing name, partly to help their children stand out in a society with strikingly few surnames.”

While the Chinese writing system may be one of the most difficult in which to manage data, it is also the oldest system of writing in continuous use. Since these new identity databases can’t read unusual characters, the government will be asking people to change their names to something machine readable. Given a logographic written language, a handwritten identity card could accommodate an infinite variety. Alphabetic writing systems don’t have this problem as they attempt to convey phonemes rather than morphemes.

This story surfaces a number of issues with regard to technology and identity. The first and most obvious is what personal data should be contained on a government-issued identity card– who controls that data and who has access to it. A more subtle issue is: what is possible with language (written and spoken) as humans use it, and what is possible within the subset of “language” that machines can “understand.” If your name can’t be parsed by the Government’s identity database do you exist? And further, should you change your name to suit the system? Should the landscape change its features to accomodate the limited technology of map making? And if you’re creating an Internet Identity system, should it be in English? Should it be national or global? How should it relate to writing systems, the marks we make to suggest things or states of the world?

What does the technology of identity reveal about the identity of technology?

The malleability of the digital is perhaps its essence. Everything in the digital world is constructed from a combination of ones and zeros, and because of that anything can be changed into anything else. The freedom to rearrange those ones and zeros is the basis of our information economy. But as signifiers pointing to actual events in the world, the digital is an unreliable narrator. There’s a sense in which the raw capture of the world through digital sensors is considered the starting point, the beginning a a series of digital transformations.

We’ve seen movie stars from another era reconstructed digitally and made to sell products to which they had no connection. We’ve seen digitally altered photographs released through newswires purporting to give us an eye witness view. What happens when we want digital media to authentically transmit the raw capture of an event? Can we ask the digital to put aside its transformational qualities and stand as an honest witness? The question about how we prove the authenticity of a digital artifact is a difficult one. A witness swears an oath and tells us what she has seen. A man signs a paper with wet ink to attest to the truth of statement he has written.

John Markoff of the NY Times recently reported on a new approach to preserving the authenticity of witness testimony encoded digitally. The process involves creating a cryptographic hash of  timestamped digital material. This signature is unique and any change to the digital material would result in a new signature that would not match the original. It’s a process commonly used to ensure the integrity of a message as it is transmitted from one point to another on the Network.

…a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first portion of the Rwandan archive. This system is intended to be available for future use in digitally preserving and authenticating first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities and genocide. Such tools are of vital importance because it has become possible to alter digital text, video and audio in ways that are virtually undetectable to the unaided human eye and ear.

In the digital world we have uncertainty surrounding all the elements: personal identity, signing or attesting and the digital document which contains the testimony. And even if we can verify that the digital document has not been altered, we have to apply all the usually filters to the testimony itself. In our courts, we have a bias against “heresay.” Wikipedia’s article shows us what degree of scrutiny we apply to this kind of testimony.

The theory of the rule excluding hearsay is that assertions made by human beings are often unreliable; such statements are often insincere, subject to flaws in memory and perception, or infected with errors in narration at the time they are given. The law therefore finds it necessary to subject this form of evidence to “scrutiny or analysis calculated to discover and expose in detail its possible weaknesses, and thus to enable the tribunal (judge or jury) to estimate it at no more than its actual value”.

Three tests are calculated to expose possible weaknesses in a statement:

1. Assertions must be taken under oath
2. Assertions must be made in front of the tribunal (judge or jury)
3. Assertions must be subject to cross-examination.

Assertions not subject to these three tests are (with some exceptions) prohibited insofar as they are offered testimonially (for the truth of what they assert).

The basis for our scrutiny of witness testimony is that it is a recounting of the past. The memory of an event from a single point of view is not considered highest form of trustworthiness. In that sense our idea of witness and truth rely on the social character of truth, we ask for a corroborating witness or evidence. We ask for the right to cross-examine an assertion, and hear the story from other points of view. It’s through this process that we come to terms with what happened.

In his TED talk from 2006, Peter Gabriel talks about Witness, an organization that seeks to spread the use of digital cameras, blogs, and cellphone cameras around the world. Their battle cry is “See it, Film it, Change it.” By capturing human rights violations on digital video and making that footage available through the Network, we can see what’s happening for ourselves. This kind of communication isn’t conclusive, but rather it is the start of an investigation. Here we must rely on the authority of the person capturing the event and Witness, as an organization, to guarantee its veracity.

This brings us around to the real-time web and its role in this process of “See it, Film it, Change it.” A cellphone camera with the capability to instantly publish an image to the Network changes things substantially. A cellular telephone with live video capability changes things further. A cellular telephone with live video capability, GPS and a verifiable timestamp changes things even more.  A real-time witness has a very different standing; many real-time witnesses bring in the social element of corroboration. While the world may not always be listening, real-time capability changes the political equation.

We’re very early in our understanding of the real-time web. As with any technology, this real-time capability can be used for good or evil. And the technology itself will be the target of repressive political forces. We’re already seeing the Taliban threatening to attack cell phone infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan. A real-time infrastructure changes the conversation from ‘what should have been done in the past, and bemoaning our lack of foresight‘ to ‘what’s happening right now, and how can and should we change it?’

I’ve loved Maira Kalman’s work for many years. Her paintings and illustrations are so entwined with the everyday life of the mind. They illuminate and bring out the joy and humor in life as it unfolds around us. Kalman’s blog on the New York Times site is a perfect combination of complex and simple technology. It brings us paintings and illustrations as commentary, as another part of our daily conversation.

Kalman’s blog entry on the Inaguration of Barack Obama features 16 or 17 paintings from her experience of that day. I watched the event live on television and listened to the various commentators attempt to interpret the significance of the day. For me, Kalman seems to have captured it perfectly, not just the event but the life around it.

While photography allows us to capture the visible world with a great deal of ease, the paintings and drawings of Maira Kalman capture much of what is invisible. Technology did a superb job of capturing the event and distributing it around the world in real time. The paint brush, pencil, and palette of paints was perhaps a little slower– but it got to the heart of the matter.

I was listening to Wolf Blitzer on CNN talking with the captain of the President’s plane, Air Force One. After 9/11, the airplane was fitted with videoconferencing equipment to allow the President to address the nation while in flight. The pilot described a process where the video signal could be sent to the major television networks for distribution to the nation and the world.

If you were designing that distribution pattern today, you’d send the video to YouTube first. Previously, only the the major television, radio and cable networks had the distribution power to reach the nation. To the extent that YouTube can accomodate realtime broadcast and provide an archive for timeshifting, it will become the primary distribution channel for political communication. The media networks will pick up the signal from YouTube for rebroadcast in realtime. They’ll provide context and analysis as a value add, but in that pursuit, they will be competing with a full range of microbroadcasters.

The dominant distribution pattern has been inverted; there were a few people who saw this historical change as it emerged over the last year. Obama, and his team, saw the possibilities of bottom up communication and executed on the insight beautifully. It will be interesting to see how this pattern becomes firmly woven into our culture over the next year.