Still from a recent Apple launch

In his iconic novel “1984”, George Orwell envisioned omnipresent “telescreens” in every home, business and on every street that could be monitored by the government.  These screens were especially powerful because the subject never knew when the screen was being monitored or if, in fact, monitoring ever occurred.  One had to live as though one were watched at all times.

As is often the case, truth seems to lie somewhere between the totalitarianism of Orwell’s “1984” and the hedonistic consumer dystopia of Huxley’s “Brave New World.” As two recent stories point out, our actual telescreens cost hundreds of dollars and have designer labels.

The useful GPS technology that allows us to navigate our way through city streets also allows government agencies to track our movements.  Not in theory, but in practice.  A recent story notes that agencies have made rampant use of cellphones to track the physical movements and identities of individuals.  As long as we are not up to any wrongdoing, who cares?  Except that the definition of “wrongdoing” is a tricky one.  One Alabama sheriff used the technology to track his daughter’s whereabouts when she stayed out too late.  Even more unsettling is the story of Michigan police who used the technology to note the identities of protesters at a labor union rally.  And these are just the abuses that had been reported thus far.

Having taken part in many marches and protests during the Bush years, I observed that police utilized cameras as weapons of intimidation, recording the faces of each and every protester for purposes that remain unknown.  Did they do this to create a record or merely the belief that such a record might exist?  Was their object to record identities, prevent illegal activity or to intimidate peaceful protesters?  In any event, it seems that these tactics have moved from digital cameras to mobile telephony.  So while tools like Twitter and text messaging have been used by protesters around the world to organize and mobilize, mobile telephony may be just as useful for officials to monitor protest and “chill” dissent.  

 Meanwhile, do you know that little camera that sits on top of your computer screen or laptop–the one that may be pointed at you right now?  How do you know that nobody can see you through it?  If that seems silly, then you should read this story from CBS News about a high school sophomore who was spied on in his home by his school using the webcam in a school issued laptop.  In this case, the danger is that this technology is not only exploitable by overeager officials, but by child predators either within the school system or who may hack into the school’s system.  That is, it might not only be Big Brother who is watching, but Big Pervert.  The FBI is investigating the incident, but it is unclear if they are looking for wrongdoing or pointers.  

 When a Philadelphia mainline school district starts taking pages from the playbook of Orwell’s Oceania, privacy advocates and consumers should take note.  With mobile computing on the rise, hundreds of millions of Americans are using objects that may be used to track their movements and to view their lives.  As cameras and GPS systems become more prominent in these devices, there is every reason to suspect that our personal devices may not be as personal as they seem.

MICROMEDIUM

We can think of digital interfaces like Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and other virtual platforms as “micromediums”—media that are:
1. Private
2. Unique
3. Convergent

Private

Televisions, radios and telephones are distinct mediums that could be produced by a variety of manufacturers.  The programming that came through these as either one way (radio and television) or two way (telephones) could be produced by a variety of communicators and bore no direct relation to the manufacturer.  But digital interfaces privatize mediums. You may have hundreds of “friends” and “followers” but there is a unitary Twitter, Facebook etc.  When the popularity of these micromediums fade, as fade they must (remember when everybody you knew was on Friendster?), then the micromedium itself will fade.

Unique

Micromediums are so unique in their capabilities as to often bear little resemblance to one another, even within categories like microblogging and social networking.  Despite their clear lineage and similar function as “social networking sites” Friendster and Facebook are worlds apart.  They have unique terminologies and tools that define not only how the user interacts with them, but how the user understands communication.  This is why a company like Squidoo insists on calling its user generated webpages “lenses.” This is why Twitter “Tweets” and Facebook “Friends”.  In naming a thing, we both mark it as our own and distinguish it from similar products.  The highly competitive, global and growing nature of the web demands that these differentiations manifest through both unique language and function.

 Convergent

Micromediums are not so unique as to be truly distinct mediums (in the way that the telephone was).  They are often variations, remixes and evolutions of preexisting mediums that come together in new and changing ways.  The open source nature of applications that may run on these micromediums only increases this blurring and converging of technologies.  This technological convergence, combined with corporate conglomeration leads to walled gardens of compatible technologies such as the Google owned Blogger, which integrates the Google owned Picasa/Gmail/YouTube/etc. into a single format that is both recognizable as a micromedium but still belongs to the larger medium of the blog.

MONOMEDIUM

While digital interfaces have fragmented and become highly specialized, the physical objects on which we access them have changed as well.  Mobile computing tools like the iPhone are characterized by their flexibility rather than functionality.  They cede control of their interface to the digital micromedia that they channel.  A heavily mechanical device like the Blackberry, with its tiny keypad and other strong physical attributes is looking antiquated in comparison to the blank and fully plastic interface of the iPhone.

As microcomputing brings our screens and processors closer together and physical objects like mice and keyboards cede to touchscreen technology, we can look forward to a future in which our virtual interfaces are more real and recognizable to us than the physical interfaces through which we access them.

 *

Anyway, these are a few thoughts I’ve been having.  They aren’t fully matured to the point where they might constitute an article.  I’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts and suggestions for evolving this subject.

A colleague who is travelling the long, lonely road of dissertation writing recently dropped me a note about her own version of Montaigne’s château:

Just downloaded this program called “Write or Die.”  On the “kamikaze” setting if you fall behind your self-assigned words-per-minute typing speed, it starts to DELETE your existing writing.  (The more gentle settings just play an unpleasant noise.)

Having wrestled with writer’s block in the past, I thought I’d give this cunning bit of software a go.  Sure enough, when I fell behind I was confronted by the horrifying sight of my words being gobbled up by an invisible Pac-Man-like entity (my reference dates me, I know).  While I’m not sure that the program is capable of generating good prose, soaked as it is in the musk of fear, it certainly boosts word count.

This is just the latest bit of software I’ve seen that imposes some sort of temporary condition to help the user focus.  Some programs (like Write or Die) maintain focus through incentives, others, like Freedom or SelfControl (which block internet access for preassigned blocks of time) maintain focus through obstructions.  What all these applications share, however, is a common enemy: digital distraction.

 In 1967 Marshall McLuhan wrote that “All media work us over completely.  They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”

I think many of us are aware that the internet is working us over completely and in ways that have yet to be fully discovered.  Distractions come at us from many directions: from the steady stream of emails that bludgeon us at work, at home and on our mobile devices, to the newsfeeds of our social networks that update us on every sniffle and whim of our hundreds of “friends”, to the omnipresent temptation to ramble the midway of the endless carnival called the internet.  Few would argue that being online all the time has not had an impact on our ability to focus and function.  What is unclear is whether the new distraction is purely environmental or whether it is actually rehardwiring our brains (as writers like Nicholas Carr suggest), like the trauma of war can rewire the brains of soldiers. 

McLuhan, despite the caricature of him as a blind technological cheerleader, was by no means oblivious to the dangers of new technologies.  Indeed, the ultimate goal of his work was to provide people with the tools to do battle in a “global information war.”  Like some memetic Zen master (or mustachioed Canadian Yoda), he drills the reader with koans, riddles, puns, aphorisms, and visual and linguistic games in order to make the them aware of the active processes that create their media environments.  He writes: “The environment as a processor of information is propaganda.  Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.  You must talk to the media, not to the programmer.” 

Talking to the media is just what programs like Freedom, Write or Die and SelfControl do.  And what they are saying (as another blogger recently quipped) is “Stop the Internet, I want to get off!”  They allow us, however briefly, to turn the medium back upon itself, creating an antienvironment that both makes visible and transcends the tendency toward digital distraction.