Category: billblog

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Power to the People

[This is also on the BBC News website at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8618290.stm]

With the Digital Economy Act now law, a digital election taking place
around us, and more media coverage of Apple’s latest shiny electronic
toy than anyone could read in a lifetime the sense that the world
belongs to the wired can sometimes seem overwhelming.

One aspect of this digital triumphalism is a disturbing tendency on
the part of the technologically privileged, a group of which I am
clearly a member, to express incomprehension as to why anyone might
choose not to be online, not to have home broadband, not to set up a
Facebook profile or reveal their whereabouts through Rummble and not
to tweet incessantly about their desire for the latest laptop, tablet
or smartphone.

The reason may be that, as with any elite group, membership has its
privileges but exacts a price. For the Inner Party in George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four it was the ability to acknowledge that the proles
mattered, while we seem to have lost the ability to “decentre” and see
the world from the viewpoint of another.

The term was coined by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget to
describe something that most of us manage to achieve in early
childhood but evidently lose as soon as we get a smartphone with an
unlimited data plan, at which point we start seeing those who choose
not to go online as ‘digital refuseniks’

I’m not talking here about those who cannot get online either because
they lack the resources or they live in areas of limited connectivity.
Many groups and organisations are working hard to get them connected,
and they do a great job in difficult circumstances.

People like Helen Milner, the dedicated and effective managing
director of the , recently-appointed UK Digital Champion Martha Lane
Fox, Gail Bradbrook at Citizens Online and Gill Adams at Digital
Unite, which specialises in helping people over 50 use IT and
organises Silver Surfer Day each year, are motivated, competent and
effective, and we should all do what we can to support them.

But there are others who could evidently afford a computer and an
internet connection yet choose not to take advantage of the
opportunity to sign up and surf the web, and we should not neglect
them.

If, as I do, you believe in the benefits to society and to the
individual that come from being able to use online services and tools
with confidence then making people aware of these benefits and
changing their mind about what the internet has to offer is as much a
part of the wider campaign for social justice as ensuring that
everyone who is entitled to state benefits receives them in full.

And unless we can persuade them that it is worth going online we will
all suffer, simply because real social change will only come about
when everyone has access and everyone can use online services and
tools.

Part of the problem is that “selling” the internet to people who don’t
perceive their lives as lacking requires them to imagine themselves
doing things which seem either trivial, boring or simply unnecessary,
but this is an issue that has faced many technologies throughout the
ages.

There is a wonderful parody of a monk having to be taught how to use a
“book” from the Norwegian TV show “Øystein og jeg” in 2001 that is now
all over YouTube. BoingBoing, the group blog that bills itself as a
“directory of wonderful things”, recently featured a pamphlet
published in 1916 by the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company
that tried to explain why it was worth having an electric supply to
your house.

Home electricity was a hard thing to sell because people used to gas
lighting and the domestic equipment of the time simply could not
imagine what electricity might be used for. As a result the focus is
on the transformative power of the electric light, because it is easy
to describe and easy to illustrate.

Of course the power cable that allows you to have light also lets you
do many other things, and a hundred years later we can easily imagine
electric versions of most devices, from toothbrushes to air
conditioning, but those trying to sell electricity at the time faced a
significant challenge.

A lot of the effort being made to promote the internet today relies on
a similar strategy, focusing on the educational value of the net or
the ability to have video chats with your grandchildren. It’s
understandable, but clearly ineffective for a small but significant
proportion of the population.

Unlike 1916 when even the people selling electricity had no clear idea
of how it might be used in the future we can tell much about the shape
of the information society. And we need to start talking about it in
ways that emphasise the ability of the network-connected computers to
improve our lives, help us build a sustainable economy that will not
make the biosphere inhospitable and provide education, healthcare and
a sense of community for all.

I am not blindly optimistic about technology, and I do not think that
these benefits will come about simply because we all get online, but I
do firmly believe that the internet is one of the best tools on offer
to create a better world, and that we need to work harder to get this
point across to those who see Facebook being bullied into adding a
“panic” button to its website and believe that this is all the network
can give us.

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Who is Watching You?

Surveillance and social constructivism: 
or why being watched is dangerous for us all

There is a pervasive myth that each individual human possesses a ‘personality’, a collection of behaviours, instincts, beliefs and other characteristics that persist over time and mark each of us as somehow distinguishable from and separate from each other.

It is a comforting myth, one that hides the more mundane reality that personality is really the product of environment, defined by the brute physical reality of the world and by our interactions with other people.  

Each of us exists only in so far as we are defined by the spaces we create between other people, our personalities abstracted from the day-to-day and moment-to-moment encounters.  If there is consistency across time it is only because we generally find ourselves in situations which are similar to the recent past – the fragmentation and restructuring of personality when a person is transplanted into a wholly new environment is well-attested, and each of us has experienced the sense of anomie and dislocation that comes with a new relationship, a new home or simply a particularly exotic holiday.

This model of personality as abstraction, as a construction rather than a constant or essential aspect of human existence, gives us one of the more philosophical arguments against the growing surveillance society.  

If we define ourselves as the space between the people we encounter, then we must know something about those people in order to have personalities shaped by them.  But surveillance, by cameras or listening devices or web-based monitoring or keylogging, is done by people we do not know, for purposes of which we are often unaware.  

We cannot shape the person we want to be around our understanding of the watchers because we know nothing of them – certainly nothing specific enough to allow us to carry out the daily act of creation which conjures a reasonably coherent personality from the mass of of sensations, perceptions and emotions which make up the raw material of conscious perception in human society.

And as a result our boundaries become more fluid, our outlines less certain, and the nature of our interactions with other people less well-defined.  We become blurred, unable to mark ourselves out clearly, unable adequately to delineate the boundaries of character or personality.  Society loses clarity of purpose as the individuals who make it up lose the power of individuation, and eventually all that can be observed by the all-seeing watchers is a soup of undifferentiated behaviours, attitudes and affect.

Perhaps the watched society is no society at all, but a hive.

Sent from my iPad

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The Day the Web Turned Day-Glo

The Day the Web Turned Day-Glo

[This is also on the BBC News website at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8598871.stm ]

Anyone with a few minutes to spare online might enjoy visiting
Chatroulette, the finest expression of punk mentality from the
emerging internet generation that I’ve yet come across. It’s not hard
to play, as there are only three rules. You have to be aged 16 or
over. You’re asked to “please stay clothed”. And you can alert the
management by clicking F2 “if you don’t like what you see”. Click ‘New
Game’ to start a game, give the service access to to your camera and
microphone and you begin a video conversation with a random stranger.

That’s it.

Chatroulette uses Adobe Flash to turn on the camera and microphone on
a visitor’s computer and register their IP address with the site. It
then connects that user with another, random IP address and opens up a
connection between the two, so you can start to chat.

Even though it’s getting millions of users, Chatroulette is very
scalable because, like the original Napster, the data doesn’t actually
go through the Chatroulette site itself.

Instead it uses Flash’s peer-to-peer streaming service to make a
direct link between the two computers and only has to keep track of
the IP addresses and “next” calls.

It is also causing an enormous fuss, largely because it is unmediated,
requires no registration or verification and is open to every
exhibitionist, deviant and random stranger online.

My son reckons he is getting a ratio of 14 naked men to one worthwhile
conversation, which sounds about right for a service that is intended
to do for video chat what Twitter has done for communication in 140
characters or less, and show us the real potential of the unfettered
connectivity that the internet makes possible.

Of course it’s a scandal, and of course it is potentially corrupting
and dangerous, though the random nature of the connection and the lack
of any way to choose who you talk to mean that the chances of coming
across someone in the same country never mind the same city or town
are vanishingly small.

Yes, someone could use it to make contact by writing their email
address or phone number on a card or calling it out as soon as a
connection is made, but you’d have to be pretty stupid to think of
this as a reliable way to make new friends or find victims.

The point about Chatroulette is that is has no point, that it strips
away the wooden panelling from this finely modelled room we call the
internet to reveal all the workings beneath and show that in the end
it’s just a space for making connections between people.

It reminds me of the day in 1977 when I went into the sixth form
common room at Southwood Comprehensive School in Corby and my mate
Dougie Gordon played me his newly-arrived copy of God Save The Queen
and everything I thought I knew about politics, music and revolution
coalesced around the Sex Pistols into a punk sensibility that has
stayed with me ever since.

Chatroulette is a pure expression of that punk spirit, delivered
through the tools available to today’s teenagers rather than the
electric guitar and seven-inch single of my childhood, and the anger
with which it has been received by the establishment is a testament to
its disruptive potential.

The kids have arrived online – Chatroulette creator Andrey Ternovskiy
is the same age as the Mosaic browser – and they want to shape it in
their image.

I hope they pull it off, though in another echo of punk history
Ternovskiy is already being wooed by the majors to sign up and sell
out, and the temptation to turn his rebellion into money must be
intense. Rather like Jimmy, the punk-precursor hero of The Who’s
Quadrophenia, he is under pressure to conform from his parents as his
mother doesn’t like the way Chatroulette can be used.

Perhaps he will stay true to punk, like Joe Strummer of The Clash or
Siouxsie Sioux. Perhaps he’ll sell out like Johnny Rotten and we’ll
see Chatroulette used to advertise butter.

But whatever may happen to his site the impact will be felt as other
kids realise that they can pick up a keyboard and become punk
programmers, just as my generation picked up a guitar and learned
three chords. Chatroulette’s launch was the day the net turned
day-glo, and Poly Styrene and X Ray Spex would be so proud.

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Finding Ada: Michelle Martin and her contribution #ald10

Finding Ada in Studio C21

[Bill, Finn, Gareth and Michelle at the Radisson after our SXSWi panel]

I’ve been working on Digital Planet, the BBC World Service technology show, for eight years. The programme was originally called ‘Go Digital’ and presented by Tracey Logan, who did a brilliant job of keeping me in check, ensuring that I made some sense and helping me make sense to the many listeners who don’t have English as their first language and who may be interested in technology but are not quite as obsessed with it as I am. 

Gareth Mitchell, who took over from Tracey some years ago, is equally adept at this occasionally difficult task, but neither he nor I could do anything without our producer, the person who plans the show, sets up the interviews, re-edits the packages to ensure they make sense and sits nervously on the other side of the glass in Studio C21 while we blather on.

Over the years we’ve had more producers than you can shake a microphone at, and they are as remarkably talented range of professionals as you could ever hope to find and a credit to the BBC Radio Science Unit that hosts them and makes the show.

But today, on Ada Lovelace day, I’d like to pay tribute to Michelle Martin, who produced the show for most of last year and will, we hope, be back in the hot seat soon after making documentaries for Radio 4 as well as doing lots of other things that the senior people at the BBC seem to think are more important than our little show. We’ve missed her.

Michelle’s contribution to the world of technology is enormous. She doesn’t code or design systems, but she has to wade through the press releases, announcements, event listings and constant stream of ideas and suggestions from me, Gareth and her other colleagues and decide what matters, what can work and what will be of interest to one of the most disparate audiences imaginable. 

That she does it so well, and remains so calm in the process, is a testament both to her sharp intelligence and great journalistic instincts, but also shows how deeply she thinks about the stories that come our way and how to ensure that we never lose sight of the people involved and affected in our desire to play with shiny stuff.

She is also quite mad, as we saw when she suggested to the organisers of South by South-West Interactive that we do a live edition of Digital Planet as a panel quiz, despite the fact that we’d never done the show in front of a live audience before, had never done a quiz format before, and had no idea who would agree to join the panel.  Then she went and commissioned a web-based app to let the audience answer the questions themselves.  And she didn’t even panic when the one panelist we all knew, and who we felt confident was up to the task of being both entertaining and interesting to our radio audience, pulled out at the last minute.

I salute Michelle for being one of my favourite women in tech, and for being the woman whose understanding of technology makes me a much better journalist and studio expert on a show that I love.

Here’s Digital Planet Live at SXSWi: http://sxsw.com/node/4643 

Here’s the programme website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/digitalp/

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Google’s About Turn in China

My latest BBC column looks at what Google is up to in China – read it on the BBC News website as usual.

Google has responded to what it terms “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure” aimed at getting access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists by announcing its desire to stop censoring search results on its Google.cn website.

Writing on the official Google blog the company’s chief legal officer David Drummon says that “over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law”.

But there is clearly little expectation that this will be possible and Google has apparently decided that it will, if necessary, stop operating in China.

Read the whole thing.

However the story has moved fast – I said ‘

Here in the UK, Peter Barron, former editor of BBC Newsnight and now Google UK’s head of communications, has been all over the media giving their side of the story.

I haven’t seen any response from Chinese government spokespeople, and doubt one will be forthcoming.

Google may be big news in the west, but the decision of one search engine provider to renege on its agreement to follow local laws and ask for an exemption is unlikely to merit a formal response.

But I reckoned without the intervention of the US Administration in the row, which is turning it into a diplomatic incident. Perhaps there was more behind the decision than first seemed to be the case… this one might have legs.

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We Still See Security Through a Lens, Darkly

My latest BBC column was at the end of the year, as I only seem to manage 3 weeks out of 4 at the moment because of the pressure of other things.  It’s about contact lens displays and our inability to design security in from the start, and can be read on the BBC News Website as usual:

As December comes to an end journalists and pundits around the world have been telling us which devices or technologies they think are the most important from the last year.

Here on the BBC tech site Rory Cellan-Jones chooses cloud computing while Jonathan Fildes opts for smartphone applications and Maggie Shiels reveals her love for her Blackberry, to which she is clearly addicted.

Picking one innovation as the most important or as representative of a year is notoriously difficult, but it is at least retrospective.

The iTunes Application Store was one of the year’s biggest successes, whatever one might think of Apple’s arbitrary approvals process or the constraints placed on application authors, and Google really did launch Wave, albeit as an early, buggy alpha release.

Looking forward is much trickier…

Enjoy.

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Nearing the end of 2009

It’s been a hectic year, and I’m currently embedded in the BBC Archive Development team until at least April, though I’ll be continuing my work with Digital Planet, Focus Magazine and the Billboard, as well as other gigs that come up during 2010.

In the meantime, here are two of my stories that I didn’t get round to posting here:

The Media and The Message (BBC Technology site, 16 December)

Like thousands of other people around the world I’ve just spent £2.39 on The Guardian newspaper’s iPhone app.

I can now read the paper onscreen, with some sections nicely cached for offline browsing and a cleverly designed user interface that lets me put the Media and Technology sections at the top of the paper, mark articles as favourites and quickly find related stories.

And Ten Years After Doomsday (BBC Technology site, 8 December)

I spent the evening of 31 December, 1999 in the company of Rolf Harris, Peter Snow and a large number of other people in a studio at Television Centre in London, seeing in the New Year as the nation’s official Millennium Bug watcher.

As anyone who knows about calendars will tell you, the real millennium didn’t start until a year later, but I was there because of the very real fear that major computer systems around the world would crash because they could not handle the rollover from 1999 to 2000.

My job on New Year’s Eve was to interrupt festivities every hour of the evening to report on what was happening at midnight in different countries around the world.

Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate such things, Happy Holidays for those who don’t but live in places that do, and ‘have a nice day’ to everyone else…

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Keeping Cyberspace a Public Space

[As ever, this can be read on the BBC News website]

I recently had an opportunity to re-read a pamphlet I wrote in 2000 for a series on new thinking about mutualism published by the Co-operative Party.  In ‘e-Mutualism, or the tragedy of the dot.commons’ I talked at length about the co-operative basis of the Internet, the need for online public spaces which are not controlled or dominated by commercial interests, and the opportunities that the network offers for mutual organisations of all sizes, from small co-operatives to retailers like John Lewis.

I pointed out that the internet is ‘an excellent example of the power of mutualism, having been created and managed through the co-operative effort of tens of thousands of individuals and organisations’ and that it ‘provides an infrastructure on which mutual organisations can thrive, opening up new potential for fast, effective communication and co-ordination of action, collaborative and consensus- driven decision making and global action.’

Continue reading “Keeping Cyberspace a Public Space”