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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,â€? 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.

In thinking about building things on the web, I stopped to consider the raw materials from which we build. HTML markup retrieved from a web server and rendered by a browser, that’s where it all started. But even at that early moment, there was the implied structure of the document. The markup that existed was there to render visible the form of the academic paper. Headings, paragraphs, quotations, tabular data display– these are the formal elements of the document.

And very early on, the metaphor of the page gained purchase. We nodded our heads and spoke of the ‘web page.’ The static web page and the static book page have similar kinds of boundaries. The web page could theoretically be infinitely long, but the usability experts indicated that users didn’t scroll much beyond the length of a book’s page. And just like that, an infinity was tamed. The edge of the world was discovered.

As the content on a web page became dynamic, infinity migrated to the combinations and permutations a database could produce. As long as the data continued to grow and change, the items presented in a particular page could be of an infinite variety. The boundaries to the north, south, east and west remained consistent with the book’s page, but the objects emerging from the depths of the backend could be practically without end.

The document and the page have been structurally ingrained into the architecture of content management systems such that the smallest building block becomes a page linked to a hierarchical document tree. The elements that can be placed into a page are those for which the system has templates. And while most systems allow the manual writing and insertion of raw HTML, it’s a practice that is discouraged because it ruins the uniformity of the CMS’s output. The content management system is an industrial machine for creating hierarchically organized sets of pages.

The other major organizational structure on the web is time-sequenced content. To some extent, news media takes this approach to organization, new material is published each day to replace the material from the previous day. What’s lacking in the model is the continuity of sequence. Yesterday’s news is fish wrap, rather than the next step in a sequence. Blog posts and Tweets (micromessages) have the form of a sequenced set of texts by an author or group of authors. In this sense they are more like the output of a columnist or the writer of serial fiction. Blog posts can also be assigned categories and tags so that they can be sequenced across other conceptual frames. Tweets don’t have the extra infrastructure to house categories and tags, so the practice of adding a hashtag has been bolted on. More elegant solutions like the original track feature have failed to resurface.

Rather than referring to time-sequenced pages, here we more commonly talk about items in a feed. We’re interested in the source of the feed in order to gauge its authority, along with it’s velocity and trajectory. And unlike a hierarchical organization of pages, the items in a time-sequenced feed need have no semantic relationship to each other. The items are such that they can be organized in an arbitrary large variety of collections either within a particular feed or among a diverse set of feeds.

The page and the item converge at the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Because of our page-centric view of the web, here we’d like to say this is the point where the item becomes a page. And yet, the web becomes much more interesting if we resist this temptation. The item has no native context, the page wants to own its context. The item allows the user to create a collection, a playlist, a feed that suits her own needs, wants and desires. The page needs to reinforce the hierarchy of which it is a part. The key to the dynamic context of the item is that it both has a URL and can contain a URL, and it doesn’t have a single right context.

Information architecture has largely concerned itself with pages and hierarchies, and the economics of the web have centered around the page-view model. As the item begins to emerge as a basic building block, it will be very interesting to see what kind of economics and architectural patterns arise. The containers, the playlists, where we assemble items will command an interesting new role in the assignment of context. And in this landscape, the item and the context are always already social, two-way and dynamic.

With the advent of Windows 7 and the upgrades to the MS Office franchise, the talk is that there’ll be a big round of corporate upgrades. Many corporations are still running Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6.x and Office 2003 (or lower). Vista didn’t tempt them, but the good press for Windows 7 is supposed to do the trick. After all, they have to upgrade at some point, right?

If corporate America takes the plunge, one has to wonder if this will be the last upgrade cycle of this kind. The distribution and installation of software on to desktop and laptop computers is a messy business. Businesses require a very compelling reason to upgrade given the current model.

Google has put forward the model of the browser as operating system by working backwards from the Chrome browser to the Chrome OS. The integration of the Office Suite into the hardware starts in the cloud and moves to the local machine. When Microsoft tried a similar move in the other direction, the government stepped in.

Both Google and Microsoft have developed cloud-based Office Suite offerings moving from opposite directions. Looking down the road a bit, we can see that the next upgrade cycle will be “software + services” for Microsoft, and “services + software” for Google. The obvious motivation will be cloud-based software’s cost savings over the current model of distribution, installation, compatibility, upgrade and service of software installed on a local system. The sheer cost and pain of a firm-wide software upgrade is so frightening that most corporations defer it as long as possible. It’s entirely possible that some firms will skip the last installation and jump directly to the cloud.

Collaboration within the enterprise takes place via email, attached documents and shared network drives. The productivity software footprint defines the boundaries of the modes of collaboration. The big real-time innovation was the introduction of mobile push email via the Blackberry. This innovation reduced latency in the work process by detaching email from the desktop and allowing it to accompany a person wherever she might go. The introduction of Sharepoint and network-stored group editable documents is slowly seeping into the work process. But most corporate workers don’t know how to collaborate outside of the existing models of Microsoft’s Office products. Generally, this just an acceleration of the switch from production of hard copies to soft copies (typewriters to word processors). When confronted with Sharepoint, they view it as a new front-end to shared network drives, a different kind of filing cabinet.

Meanwhile in the so-called consumer space, Facebook, Twitter and a host of real-time social media services have radically reduced the latency of group communication and collaboration. In addition to text– photos, audio and video have begun to play an important role in this collaboration stream. For the most part the corporate computing environment has been left behind. This is due to two factors, the desire to maintain a certain kind of command and control of information construction and distribution within the walls of the corporation; and the desire of IT departments to avoid risk by maintaining a legacy architecture. The real-time productivity of the Blackberry has been working its way down from the top of organizations; but the tool set remains the word processor, powerpoint and excel. The only accelerant in the mix is faster mobile email of soft copies of documents.

Ray Ozzie discusses the “3 screens and a cloud” model as the pattern for the development of human-computer interactions across both the consumer and enterprise computing spaces. The missing element from this model is the input device, screens are no longer simply an interface for reading. Bits are moving in both directions, and email is being de-centered as the primary message carrier.

As we look at innovations like Yammer and Google Wave, the question becomes how will the corporate worker learn how to collaborate in real time? Accelerating network-stored documents and their transmittal via email moves the current model to near maximum efficiency. Further productivity gains will need to expand and change the model. Generally these kinds of innovations enter through the back door, or through a skunk works project, within small autonomous teams. But at some point, the bottom up innovation needs top down acceptance and support.

Luke Hohman of Enthiosys works with the concept of serious games in the management and development of software products. The collaboration processes he describes in his presentation to BayCHI may be the foundation for real-time collaboration throughout the enterprise.

• Luke Hohmann on Serious Games: Luke Hohmann of Enthiosys on Serious Games

The lessons that we can take from Twitter and Facebook are that the leap to real-time collaboration is not one that requires a 4-year college degree and specialized training. It’s not an elite mode of interaction that needs to work its way down from the executive leadership team. It’s an increasingly ordinary mode of interaction that simply needs to be unleashed within the enterprise. But for that to happen, the enterprise will need to learn how to incorporate self-organizing activity. (Oh, and let employees use the video camera and microphone built in to their hardware) This will be a difficult move because the very foundation of the corporation itself is the creation and optimization of managed hierarchical organizational structures. It’s only when the activity of serious play can be reconciled with return on investment that the enterprise will come to terms with real-time collaboration.

As we tread water in the flood of information being written into the Network through real-time interfaces, we see the word ‘curation‘ on the lips the VCs and the entrepreneurial classes. The problem was succinctly stated by Clay Shirky as: not one of information overload, but rather of filter failure. The filter of the moment is some form of curation. The firehose of information will be reduced to a rational and manageable collection through a semantic algorithm or a collaborative group filter. The search for the perfect curatorial tool is on– we want the thing that turns our infinite reading list into a prioritized, relevant, manageable collection of consumables.

Collections can take a number of forms. For instance, varieties of butterflies can be put into a frame. Here we don’t look for a rational taxonomy, instead we desire beauty, rarity and narrative in each member of the collection.

Collections can be healthy or neurotic, the Collyer brothers obsessively collected the ordinary detritus of our culture and stacked it in their house. In the end, they accumulated 130 tons of stuff.

The cabinet of curiosity was an encyclopedic collection of items on the boundary of scientific classification systems. The criteria for inclusion included the rarity, the utterly foreign, and especially the example that broke the rules of classification.

Joseph Cornell made an art form of creating collections that embodied contradiction and the irrational. Where scientists worked diligently in creating a rational taxonomy of the natural world, Cornell created an organized presentation of the unconscious.

That filtering tool that we’re searching for seems to produce a rational collection of items based on relevance and similarity. A firehose of items is categorized and prioritized, similar items are reduced to their exemplars, placed on a tray, and made ready for consumption as a collection of hors d’oeuvrers. The items in a cabinet of curiosity, as they are not easily categorized, would probably slip through the cracks of these collections.

The most common filtering tool is popularity. The best tools of this kind attempt to find popularity before it is too popular. Malcolm Gladwell exposed this pattern of meme acceleration through taste-making nodes of a social network. The tools currently available in online social networks, the retweet and the like are the most common accelerants. Discovery of early signs of velocity is the bread and butter of the news business. Once something is truly popular, we become like Yogi Berra, and quip that “nobody goes there anymore, because it’s too crowded.” In the financial world, this might be called selling on valuation. A stock that reaches its potential and now lacks upside, is sold in favor of a new stock showing signs of velocity to the upside.

Sometimes what you want to locate isn’t what’s the most popular, but rather the edge of the debate. The point where the categories break down and the subject of the discussion hasn’t been decided one way or the other. The purpose here isn’t to read what other people disagree about, it’s to be given an interface into the fray itself. Here we aren’t looking for content about some topic, instead we’re looking for a bi-directional connection to the organic thing itself.

The topology of the Network can be expressed in a variety of lexicons. Popularity follows a focused reading model. But as we begin to think of a real-time, read/write, two-way interface on to the Network, we look for a map of argument, the swarm of attention around an undecided direction, the political discourse of everyday life.

The widget is beginning to supercede the hyperlink as a proper response to a search query. You can start to see this with the deals Google and Bing are making, the search engine results page (SERP) can no longer satisfy as just a prioritized page of hyperlinks.

Search returns public social gestures in real time. But clicking a link isn’t necessarily what’s needed in this context, perhaps it’s a ‘like’ or a ‘retweet.’ Maybe it’s a reply. The SERP interface will extend the requisite affordances to enable these gestures.

Search returns videos that are playable inline. Perhaps they can be directed to a playlist which can be shared. Perhaps it finds the news clips and streams that relate to the healthcare debate or the Web conference that’s going on in real time or the public video streams from the protest march. Search returns that quote from a movie and cues the video up to exactly the right spot

Search returns music (Google’s deal with Lala.com) with an option to buy a web-only version or a file download. And, of course, you can listen to it one time for free just to get a sense of whether you really like it or not. Or perhaps it reminds you that you own a copy already and you can play it from your cloud-based record collection. Perhaps you want to add it to a playlist, or see what kind of genius list it generates. Perhaps you want to see who in your directed social graph also has this song in her playlist.

Search finds the debate around the news of the day. The journalism is pulled apart and acted out by the participants in the discussion. The discovery is not separated from the debate.

Search is becoming two-way, social and contextual. It’s not just a connector to a page— it is the connection itself, and it’s exposed through the response to the query. Search is no longer search. It’s a browsing activity, zig-zagging across the Network, it’s berry picking, it’s a bullshit session over a cup coffee, it’s researching and working through a problem, it’s finding out if anything worthwhile is going on right now. It’s not about the efficiency of the link, but the pleasure of the journey and the company we keep. It’s asking a question anonymously, but it’s also shifting modes and filtering the response based on personal identity and social graph. It’s asking in public, but it’s also asking in private.

We sometimes search for context among the things we index. But it’s not things that are semantic, it’s the people. As Wittgenstein notes, the meaning of a word is in its use. And the use of a word is in its social exchange, search begins to search for the real-time moment of exchange– and in that instant search is transformed.

Tonight I’ll be attending a performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome at the San Francisco Opera. Despite the sacrilegious themes and radical music, I doubt there will be any protests. Somehow, opera –in the United States at least– has the ability to present some of the most radical art in the guise of the most conservative. Alex Ross, in his excellent book The Rest is Noise, recounts the circumstances surrounding the second performance of the opera which Strauss himself conducted on May 16, 1906 in Graz, Austria:

…word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale–an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by a British degenerate whose name was not to be mentioned in polite company, a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from the Court Opera in Vienna.

The British degenerate they were referring to was a fellow named Oscar Wilde. The opera is based on his play, written in French, called Salomé. In attendance at that performance were Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, the fictional character Adrian Leverhkühn from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and very possibly a 17 year old Adolf Hitler. The performance was one of the defining moments at the dawn of modern 20th century music.

One hundred and three years later, the work still has the power to shock and disturb people. While the dance of the seven veils may get most of the press, the moment where Salome declares her love for the severed head of John the Baptist is complex blend of power, lust, religion and madness. So dust off your tux, opera, as we all know, is a civilized affair.

We’ve perhaps thought of our lives as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. We’ve thought of our identity as the vessel that traces that path from the starting point to the endpoint. From Descartes we import the idea that our identity can be reduced to single point and be put in opposition to the world. All of an individual’s connections to the world can be snipped, one by one, through the use of radical doubt and skepticism. The doubting, questioning voice is the remainder– by process of elimination, it is human identity. But it is identity without context, without world. It’s nowhere.

This idea continues to play out in the story of the rugged individualist. The person to whom no connection cannot be cut, and no connection is essential. Culture, society and government have no hold on this person, he does as he chooses regardless of the ties that bind. It’s in the film genre of the Western that this story is most completely explored. The man at the edge of society, called on to save society, nonetheless he’s not part of the network of connections that make up society. In John Ford’s The Searchers, Ethan Edwards (as portrayed by John Wayne), his mission complete, doesn’t join the family circle, but instead walks out into the deserted plain alone.

Another formulation was provided by Groucho Marx in a telegram he sent to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills:

“PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER”

In this narrative, our identity is not defined by our difference, but by our capacity for disconnection. However, as we begin to surface in the Network, we find ourselves in a landscape composed entirely of connections. While some connections are private and some public, unconnected nodes are a contradiction in terms. In some sense, we view it as problematic that our identity is splintered across so many containers. We’d like to connect up all the pieces to create some whole that we might call our internet identity. We look at all those things scattered about and say: those are mine, or those are me.

And here’s where we come to the loopiness of identity. We often talk of internet identity as the assignment, and use, of a unique identifier for individual agency. Some fixed token that can serve to differentiate an individual from all other individuals in a name space. But there’s a different sense of identity emerging in the Network. In any number of different online services we see an image of ourselves beginning to come into focus. Social networks provide an obvious example, but these data images also are forming based on our financial data, our medical records, and our purchase histories. There are traces of us everywhere.

We might use an iPod and a special Nike sneaker to establish and update a data loop that models our exercise activity. Our investment portfolio or 401k models our financial state. Perhaps we use a bathroom scale that sends data to a system that tracks the fluctuations in our weight. Or we collect data on how well we sleep at night and transmit it to a system that puts it into the context of other sleepers. In the public sphere, we might contribute to blogs, microblogs and comment systems. The identity we take part in creating unfolds over time, it’s a feedback loop that grows and deepens.

This is where identity and digital product begin to merge. This idea occurred to me while listening to a recording of Adam Bosworth talk about his new health maintenance company Keas. More and more companies are seeking customers who will participate in the creation of an identity loop. As someone who as spent a fair amount of time trying to interest employees in participating in their 401ks, I understand that some loops are very attractive and others are like eating your vegetables. And while this looks like an evolution of the idea of  CRM, perhaps a system where customers also have an account; it might well take the form of VRM or Purpose-Centric web browsing. The core requirement is that data has to come from both sides of the glass with a sense of joint ownership of the loop.

And that’s where we loop back to the identity of the rugged individual. This kind of “connecting” behavior seems to run counter to cultural patterns. Rather than seeking to deepen loops of engagement, we tend to define our identity by what we can disconnect ourselves from (privacy). And the loops we’re most familiar with are the neurotic ones — addiction, compulsion, binging and purging. As our material digital identities begin to emerge in the Network around us, it will be interesting to see whether we will establish ecosystems and engage them in healthy feedback loops, or whether we will reverse course entirely and outlaw them as an invasion of privacy and as inconsistent with our cultural mores.

My notebook is filling up with musings on the real-time web. I keep trying to boil things down to the simplest formulation, the simplest expression of why the Network is moving into a real-time mode. It’s more difficult than one would imagine to create a palatable reduction. While we can apply Occam’s razor at a certain level, so much flavor is lost when the particular is replaced with the abstraction.

Occam’s razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (translating to the law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness). When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question.

When the web was an exercise in reading, there was no need for real-time. The professional infrastructure of writing and publishing didn’t require much change in the move from offline to online. There was a bright line between professionally produced writing and the amateur personal home page. The pace of publication was a function of the competition between professional writing organizations. The reading of professionally produced writing has always been a distributed affair. A scarce number of writers produce writing for the abundant population of readers. Economics and value ensue from these kinds of ratios.

Search engines are largely based on the traditional economic model of the production of writing. What is returned for a search query should not only be what you’re looking for, but should be authoritative on the subject. Historically we’ve associated the kind of writing product emitted from the professional writing and publishing infrastructure as the most authoritative. While there’s not an explicit provenance, there is an implicit one based on the gesture of the citation link.

As originally conceived, the world wide web was a read-write environment. But clearly the two gestures did not occupy equivalent environments. Reading required a computer, web browser and a connection; writing required so much more. This difference in friction determined the early patterns of development for the Network. To some extent it also deferred the disruption of the established writing and publishing infrastructure.

Writing existed on the Network, but it was contained in the backwaters of the UseNet, Mailing List and the BBS. Real-time writing was limited to instant messenger, internet relay chat and the UNIX talk application. Isolated networks like the Plato System provided a highly sophisticated read-write environment that modeled many of the challenges that today’s Network is confronting.

Reducing the friction in writing to the Network, and here I’m referring to the world wide web, really began with the advent of widely available blogging software. This movement was accelerated by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed and others. Twitter, in particular, lowered the level of friction to almost zero. This is why a person can now write about what they had for lunch and publish it to the Network. Each of these services is a read-write social environment with public and private publication/broadcast modes. On the level of public gestures, they provide the same level of connectivity as any other public node on the Network.

So let’s loop back to the real-time web. It’s simply the gesture of writing, of making a mark on the Network, that has necessitated the move to real time. But here when we speak of writing, it is a different writing. We don’t refer to the industrially produced writing product created for mass consumption. Instead we refer to making a mark, a gesture, in a dynamic networked environment. The rather clumsy word Stigmergy has been used to draw a circle around some of these ideas.

Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.

It is derived from the Greek words stigma (mark, sign) and ergon (work, action), and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions

It’s the gesture that necessitates the real-time web. Through public gestures, we make marks in the environment that others can sense and to which they can respond. The latency in the Network needs to be low enough for a flow to occur. The time of the real-time web is a technical speed that enables this flow of marks, traces, actions, gestures to dynamically connect to other marks, traces, actions and gestures in an ongoing loop and become visible to a micro-community that defines the larger emergent social objects.

Writing, in this sense of the word, is no longer about something. It is the thing itself.

Some short fragments on the idea of multitasking. In the frame of the task, the thing to be done owns the attention of the doer. The doer’s attention is released when the task is done. The idea of multitasking is to engage with a portfolio of tasks, rapidly switching attention among tasks, or initiating actions that affect more than one task. The critique of multitasking states that the energy expended on switching and re-engaging among tasks lowers overall productivity. The comparative case is a set of tasks done sequentially with a singular focus. The design of the comparison begs the question about the value of what is learned in process. If the strategy, goal and tasks are static and nothing learned in process will change them, then there may be an optimal sequence to complete tasks. On the other hand, if the information released through engagement with the portfolio of tasks dynamically affects strategy and goals, then the early uncovering of both known and unknown unknowns provides better overall visibility. However, generally, in a corporate setting, strategy and goals are not responsive to the task. The pecking order doesn’t allow information transfer in that direction, especially with top down management styles that neutralize the bottom-up approach by championing it.

The other frame in which multitasking finds itself is in the behavior of rapid switching among electronic media inputs. The critique here is that our attention spans have been shortened and by virtue of the new media environment. Reading a long novel, or some other activity, that requires sustained attention over a long period is thought to be on the way out. We’re only interested in the highlights.

The operational assumption is that consumption of narratives is a process in which an individual starts at the beginning, goes to the end and then stops. Deviation from that model provides evidence of dysfunction, an inability to concentrate attention. Empirical observations show individuals engaging for short bursts and then moving on to the next thing. The short engagement is thought to be a response to the flood of information. Nothing can be fully engaged, so everything is engaged at its most shallow, in a summary form. The depth of the narrative product is untouched. Imagine a person ordering 12 completely different dinners and only having a taste of each course. The equivalent of 1 dinner is consumed, and 11 dinners wasted.

• EconTalk: Tyler Cowen on Creating Your Own Economy:
• EconTalk

It was in listening to a recording of Tyler Cowen in conversation with Russ Roberts that the bit was flipped for me. By simply looking from the reverse angle, the pieces fall into place. The narrative is also on the side of the individual. Cowen posits that individuals have long running narratives for which they collect fragments of information. Perhaps you’re a fan of a baseball team, a particular musician or a kind of dog. The ocean of information and the multiplication of sources is a welcome addition to the environment. Tracking a favorite musician through the ocean of information on the Network creates an efficient filter. Tracking other people who track this musician creates a  micro-community of interest and extends the reach and focus of an individual.

What looks like multitasking turns out to be a single task executed across multiple media sources. What might look like a lack of focus and a short attention span is simply a relentless filter throwing out fragments that don’t enhance the internal narrative. The new media environment affords the possibility, and significantly reduces the cost of, productive research. The connections formed among these diverse sources loop back into the Network as a new node in a virtuous circle.

In an environment of scarcity, narratives might be savored— the story eagerly consumed from the ‘once upon a time’ to the ‘they lived happily every after.’ In an environment of abundance, the rare narrative is the one you’re building for yourself. The one built from the abundance of material uncovered through the Network.

At the outset the frame of defacement is fitted for the conversation. Google’s SideWiki opens the door to an exploration of free speech, owned speech, unadulterated speech, graffiti, the Network as place and home, and what it is to write and read. Of course, the conversation isn’t really about SideWiki at all. Let’s start our exploration with writing.

A text is always already situated within a network of intertextuality. While we think we “have our say,” we assemble our sentences from an ocean of influences and predecessors. The connections stretch out back into history and as it tumbles out, our writing becomes fodder for the next person with something to say. Our writing and speech are never solely ours. The difference is that within the Network, the connections can be made visible. SideWiki, Disqus and Echo all aggregate and surface textual connections. Just as I might cut two related stories from two different newspapers and put them in a single manila folder.

The aggregated view exposes the edges of each piece—it’s that juxtaposition that activates the points of contention, the volatile elements of meaning, the interesting bits. To some extent, this is what we do when incorporate citations or quotations into our writing. We expose the fragmentary edges of a text to our commentary.

We like to talk about a two-way web, or a read/write web— but we still conceive of this as a half-duplex transmission. The revolution seems to be in the ever broader distribution of writing. We’ve yet to understand a full-duplex read/write— a writing that is also reading; and a reading that is also writing. The same pencil both writes and reads. McLuhan talked about this transition in terms of the old media becoming the content of the new media.

The act of reading is re-writing. The text is torn, ruptured and cut to make room for the commentary, associations, orthogonal meanderings, debate, and dialogue. Reading is always already all this. Writing itself could be called a form of close reading. Sometimes there’s ink in the pen, other times we let the thoughts fade away. We even employ Tmesis to insert our commentary into the middle of a word, for example: I abso-bloody-lutely have the right look at your website using Google’s SideWiki.

Roland Barthes describes how we read to create a more pleasurable engagement with the text in his short book: ‘The Pleasure of the Text:’

…we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as “boring”) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening episodes of the ritual (like a priest gulping down his Mass). Tmesis, source or figure of pleasure, here confronts two prosaic edges with one another; it sets what is useful to a knowledge of the secret against what is useless to such knowledge; tmesis is a seam or flaw resulting from a simple principle of functionality; it does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but only a the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.)

The question of reading as re-writing reaches its pinnacle with the transition from quotation to the practice of superimposition. For instance, imagine a program that alters the contents of a browser through adding new layers based on a personal context— I remix on the fly, in real time. Perhaps for every image of Robert Scoble that loads into my browser, a mustache layer is added to the appropriate spot in the image. If I found this to be a valuable or amusing way to consume the web— I have every right to do so. We saw something like this with the recent Kanye West site rewriting. A very amusing way to view the web. The Medium is the Remix:

The Network is becoming dynamic from both sides of the glass. Web servers connected to data stores created the possibility of dynamic pages at the server level. When combined with AJAX techniques, the dynamic set of pages becomes a viewport into which various dynamic data resources are called. A form of personalization can be created from the server’s data store based on the assignment of a unique identity to the user. But as far as this stack of techniques has come from the flat HTML page, it’s still a server-centric stack of technologies and techniques. It’s dynamic from the server’s side of the glass.

It’s here that the actual topic of discussion begins to emerge: the possibility of a dynamism from the user’s side of the glass. Perhaps we begin by painting mustaches on Robert Scoble, but we quickly move to the creation of a personal context that superimposes our purposes on to the web that passes through the browser viewport.

The technologies that make a dynamic web possible from the user’s side of the glass are already well under way. The Firefox greasemonkey plugin exposed the potential of reading/writing browser viewport content. The information card, the selector, KNS and the action card make up the foundational elements of a new ecosystem for the user’s side of the glass. Here’s Craig Burton:

Web augmentation is an incredible phenomenon that we are just beginning to understand and use. There is a spectrum of tools available to accomplish various levels of augmentation. I only talk about two of those here. Greasemonkey and Action Cards.

I stand by my position that Action Card web augmentation changes everything. And that greasemonkey—at its most lofty view—is a mere harbinger of the real thing. Greasemonkey lets you do basic web augmentation with lots of potential problems and drawbacks.

Action Cards—the combination of the selector-based information card, KNS, and cloud-based data is elegant, well thought out, and well architected capable of making long lasting significant changes to the Internet.

Phil Windley provides the example of looking at Amazon.com search results with a superimposition of an indicator telling the user whether a particular book is available at a local library. The personal context might be: whatever I’m looking at, when a book is mentioned, let me know if it’s available at my local library. I might be entitled to discounts based on membership in an organization or club. That context could be made visible when I shop online. The potential for the mobile web is even greater.

The value of dynamism from both the client and server side on the image in the browser’s viewport has yet to be fully understood or imagined. We barely have the language to talk about it. The October 1st Gillmor Gang attempts to start a discussion about users writing to the browser from the client’s side of the glass.

We end, perhaps, where we began, with Windley’s Bill of Rights:

I claim the right to mash-up, remix, annotate, augment, and otherwise modify Web content for my purposes in my browser using any tool I choose and I extend to everyone else that same privilege.

Of course, rights are one thing and capability entirely another. That object floating in the glass between the server and the client is about to become an entirely new kind of collaboration.