ZeroCool

It’s funny how the days quickly roll by as lives are streamed by the various portals of socially charged information. Hello to Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Dopplr…

It doesn’t seem over ten years since our alleged entry into the ethereal arena of cyberspace. And my, didn’t we take it all so seriously ‘back then’.

Over the weekend I re-watched Hacker’s. Director’s Iain Softley’s, 1995, vision of a New York situated cyberpunk culture. Lot’s of smoking, lots of inline - should that be online? ‘waaaaaaay cool dude!’ - skates and 'a 28.8 bps [sic] modem!’. And with Angelina Jolie.

Friends are made, lost along the way, re-made and the movie ends with Angelina getting wet in a pool with not-a-lot-a-on as a result of the games, territorial fights of fancy and the ultimate battle with a ‘big bad wolf’ corporation as led by the hacking community and culture.

So, today, why so 1990s?

One line in the film stands out, when a friend of the ‘PhantonPhreak’s’ asserts, ‘you’re nobody unless you have a handle’ – an individuals self-nominated ‘cyber’ name, the equivalent of what we would use as a username.

Today, it could equally be argued that ‘you’re nobody if you use anything but your real name’. An interesting turn of events. Where once the anonymous identity reigned supreme, now you’re only ‘insanely great’ if your friends can recognise you and be there to track your every movement. To this extent, the Hacker's suggestive nod to George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother ‘I’m watching you’ is suitably fitting.

Today this would be 'we're watching you'... Add to this observation, today the main protagonist ZeroCool would be zero cool, dismissed as a fake persona and consequently receive no friends on Facebook.

There’s been a steady change to the inclusion (intrusion?) of the arrays of technology, applications and resources that supplement our daily social highlights, lowlights and reveal the lowlifes. Perhaps we should all get used to suffering a new malady of data retention.

From today all ISPs will be ‘legally obliged’ to store all details of your internet content and telephony for 12 months. Whilst not the BigBrother central database of communications information – there are longer term outcomes that will affect our civil liberties. One example is how last month Facebook both defended its right to impose, and had users obliged to support, the sites new terms of service. For Zuckerberg this was promoted on the Facebook blog as an opportunity, 'On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information’ – in short, ‘we have your data and we’re not afraid to use it’. Faced with heavy criticism, the threat of legal action and rebel against Facebook by users (the Facebook group, People Against the New Terms of Service, grew to nearly 150,000 members) the company reinstated the old terms of service and with a new Facebook (trust us) group: The Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities (with less than 100,000 members).

One day such events will tempt us to look back and recall not only ‘oh what a funny place that little cyber world was’, but to lament ‘oh how we used to be at liberty’… Now that was a funny old world which was far from ZeroCool.

Some questions to keep in mind: What is privacy? How are we surveilled across networks? What values do should we hold important for personal data? How can governments, corporations, and individuals make information safe?...

Never sitting

The pace of life has accelerated. We are (as my favourite Radio4 panel game ‘Just A Minute’ suggests) without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Actually scrub that last description, there’s a LOT of repetition. This is the rise of the information-centric social society, a shift into the various social settings that are rapid, tumultuous and defined by the networks we share with others. Best described by the immediacy and tracks of social information. An immediacy that is at once(!) shared, broadcast and public. Take as a form of social sorting, socialities are always ‘in flow’, circulating and never arrive at a fixed point of destination. Increasingly actions are moved through ‘inbox’, to trash, to archived folders; only then to be replicated, modified, forwarded and /or re-read in the free flow and movement of the dance of social steps. It is our task and concern to always be current a situating that is constantly re/addressed by the proximity to, and/or relevance of, others.

It is to be said that such observations are not unique to our ‘information-centric’ social state, but are a part of the natural cultural turn of society as we up the social tempo and seek to stratify our influence. Prominence is given to the significance of social actions in determining the to and the fro of activities. The reading of a Status Update can be passed as mere comment, but can also be ‘shared’, ‘posted’, ‘replied to’ and ‘bookmarked’ under the scrutiny of others. Hence the increase in the supply and re/sources of information represent not only a cultural effect, but has social significance where a failure to act is swiftly translated into a failure to be a part of things/the network/a friendship. Irksome and irritating ‘those’ individuals produce a constant disorder of the connection loops and compression of sociability that flits between the optimistic ‘here and now’ contact, all too easily overshadowed by the pessimistic missed, dismissed or ignored as a ‘neither here nor there’. The swiftness with which every factor must be grasped and determined represents the extreme departure of information, heard as an uproar of the specifics of social lives which we come to our attention in dazzling detail. Essential to the social situation is our willingness to be a part of (and take delight at) increasingly complex structures. Delight? Well how else could one explain Facebook’s popularity.

This structure remains open, not only in terms of what we reveal about ourselves to others, but describes the open-ended advancement of information as the context for our experiences. Should we take comfort in this new state, or feel forced into a state of constant anxiety where we must remain vigilant and be socially agile. Is this to keep up with what is going on?, or a messy measure to retain equilibrium and social order?

And when will I get time to pause, reflect and sit down again?...