Line between public and private beginning to blur
As humans, we are compulsive documenters. We have long kept diaries, photos, ticket stubs and the like to help us tell the story of our own lives. We create narratives out of the everyday flotsam and jetsam of our activities. In today’s digital life, though, this centuries- old habit is easier and more prevalent than ever before. We tweet, we track our runs with our fitness apps, we register our opinions of the hotel we stayed in and the restaurant we ate in last night. No moment is complete, it seems, unless we take a picture of it and post it to Facebook.
And we share. Oh yes, we love to share, as anyone who has been subjected to brag- y status updates about people’s gym workouts can attest! But what if all that trivial, enlightening, touching, and banal documentation could add up to something more than just the statistical details of an individual life? What if it could actually bring us closer together as humans, and as a community?
As we replace our analog devices with digital ones, we’re starting to inhabit a culture of “constant capture,” where the default is that we have a record — a digital trail of our behaviours, movements, tastes, and preferences.
Location- based technologies now tie our digital data points to real, physical locations. We take pictures that are date, time, and location- stamped. Our phones “know” where they — and hence we — are. We know what our friends are up to without needing to talk to them because we saw them ‘ check in’ on FourSquare, or mention what they were up to on Twitter.
In part, this is scary, of course. Consider facial recognition technology, for instance. On my CBC Radio show, Spark, a little while ago, we looked at research out of Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers were able to identify one in three anonymous people out and about on campus by using facial recognition technology. They simply compared their images to Facebook profile pictures. Increasingly, we don’t even seem to mind being publicly identified. We tag ourselves in photos, and let others tag us too. This kind of linking between the digital trails we leave and our daily selves can be uncanny sometimes, and it’s rapidly changing conventional boundaries of public and private. Down the road, we’ll likely have lots of insight into what people in the street around us are like. Already, we have a service like Highlight. If you’re using the Highlight app on your phone, it will show you the profiles of other users of the service who just happen to be standing around you.
Beyond the obvious privacy concerns, however, our “digital doppelgängers,” also carry tremendous power, and that’s the power of connection and shared information. We’ve already seen this in embryonic form in the way social media allows us to overcome social isolation. People with chronic health conditions, for instance, use services such as Patients Like Me to connect and share information with others who have the same condition. The Internet has long allowed us to connect without regard to physical proximity. More and more, though, the Internet allows us to create more social, more responsive local communities. Cities like Vancouver have lively “meetup” cultures, for instance, where people who have never met come together in real, physical space over shared interests and hobbies. As our cities get bigger and populations are more mobile, these tools will develop as means to find others, engage in activism, and develop a shared connection to our communities.
What fascinates me is the “constant capture” future in which our lives are accompanied by a digital layer of information about us and our experience of the world around us. Properly anonymized, it can provide valuable insights. To use just one example, on Spark, I interviewed Usman Haque about his start- up Pachube ( now called Cosm). He provides a platform for people to gather and share sensor data about what’s going on around them. People in Japan began using the platform to gather and share Geiger counter data after the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis. That’s an example of using our urge to document and share to effective ends. As our cities become data- dense, information-rich environments, we can play a role in shaping what that information is used for. Imagine the insights we could gain into our communities, and the bonds we could forge, if we were gathering and sharing more vital information than what we ate for breakfast this morning.