 Welcome, everybody, to the Birkman Tuesday Munch series. I'm John Helfry. Welcome you here for the Birkman Center. It's a great crowd we have today and a fun, celebratory topic. We're kicking up this fall a series of events celebrating the, and so again, the spirit of being 10 years old. We want to do both some reflection on what we have brought, and you've learned over the last 10 years, but also move to the next decade of work in this area. And today's session is jointly in celebration of one web day, the brainchild of Professor Susan Crawford, Joseph Cardoso, and many others in the community, as well as a chance to start this process of web reflection and looking ahead. And we had more than 40 people who were willing to come to lunch today. We have been turning people away, but we're delighted to have all of you have made it in under the cut. And to those who weren't able to join us, I hope you will another time, and to all those passionate webcasts, welcome to the Birkman Center. One of the things that's key to our 10th anniversary Birkman Center is seeking to reach out to other schools at the university. We try to bring in so many people. So, here in the design school and education school and computer sciences and so forth, it's just a great and happy thing and a good way to start this off. So, if you're interested in following slash faculty, we'll introduce you to the topic of the future of the Internet. And Jonathan, as a book that we have on this, he will, that's why he gets to go that. But Gene, then, or Wendy, then Gene, then Gene will go first. So, maybe Wendy will help you. Alright, thank you. Thanks very much. And I'm going to start by being a bit disruptive to the subject here because David and John asked me to speak about the future of the Internet. And I demurred because I'm not a very good futurist and, plus, I think that the present of the Internet is much more exciting than any particular future that I could predict. Plus, as a law professor, you know about the medical issue when you start out. Because I think it leads to a light cone of lots of possible futures of what could happen with the Internet. And if we're forced to choose one of those futures, we set ourselves down of course in that direction that closes off lots of other exciting possibilities in those other possible directions. And I don't want to have to choose between a peer-to-peer marketplace where individuals can offer up the things that they've discovered in their attic or the things that they have built and a commercial marketplace where a big commercial, the polished emporium offering the goods online that they had previously offered off-line. The eBay or the Barnes and Noble.com choice. I don't want to choose between professionally produced music offered in professionally packaged downloads and the individual singer-songwriters who go and find collaborators online or independent production companies that spring up to offer their wares there. I don't want to choose between journalism as produced by the New York Times and journalism as produced by those the Times might have referred to as its dear readers just a few years ago. And 10 years ago we had been asked to make this same sort of prediction about what the net would look like now. Would we have predicted that typing a query into a bar in our web browsers would bring up nearly always a good answer to that query and then that good answer would be produced not by the top-down coordination of a world book or in Cardo or Britannica but by hundreds of thousands of individuals typing in their own self-interest into web logs and web bulletin boards and answer forums and even sometimes going and editing and online and set up media to reflect their interests and subjects of expertise. We have predicted the take-off of social networking sites the current Darling Facebook developed out of a dorm room here. We have predicted the sharing of photos and travel and likes and hates and loves based on what we individually wanted to share with friends and not necessarily based on what marketers wanted us to help to elaborate their product offerings. Would we have predicted that the biggest and currently most successful video sharing site would have been developed not by the current leader in portals or in text search which was trying very hard Google to develop its own video but by a few unknowns working jointly the new tools that were out there available to all of us to develop something that eventually Google bought because it couldn't produce in-house something that was equally good. If we were trying to regulate based on our years ago predictions would we have left the network open to these user-driven innovations I'm afraid we wouldn't have and I want to warn us against that kind of single future thinking regulation today. Because the beauty of the network today has been that it's allowed the unplanned development because the tools are cheap college kids in their dorm rooms can build products and services that compete with the college dropouts informed companies of a decade or generation earlier because the connectivity is cheap they can network in collaborators and collaborate and co-develop with the users of their software and services because they don't need permission from any central regulator they can launch sites that compete with established business models they don't need to have a business model that they can present to a regulator or they launch their sites and tools I'm sure Jonathan will talk about the spammers and scammers and other problems that this unregulated network allows to proliferate but the network and the offline world have also been helping us to develop the tools to fight those and I think there too rather than try to predict all of the evils we should plan for the openness that allows us to self-generate the tools to help ourselves to fight them so as I said I'm not trying to predict any particular future but to make us think of all of the possibilities that are just germinating now and to continue to regulate this space with the light touch that will allow today's users to become tomorrow's innovators and co-developers of the nation I think it's quite wonderful, thank you as we're doing the questions I think what we'll do is just keep plowing ahead with the different commentators and then go for that to the discussion after that if you want to just talk about the rhetorical questions I wonder if ten years ago you would have said roughly speaking the same thing when you were here as one of the first students at Burton Center I think the answer is you might see the impact of that which is we should leave open opportunities and that's a strong normative statement effectively about what the future ought to be if not yes well I think that that was one of the first things I learned coming into the Burton Center ten years ago I've seen openness in so many different places throughout the nation Jean Koo heard it and felt like someone working on a slightly different set of topics but fortunately I saw him nodding a lot I think the internet will become increasingly important in supporting and sustaining our civic communities and I believe the 3D virtual worlds are illustrating how technology will help make that happen and online games in particular within those worlds suggest the shape of what a future civic life might look like and I came to the internet later than a lot of the people who are affiliated with the Burton Center during the heyday of web-based forums about you know 1999-2000 and there I found rich communities and I made deep friendships and a lot of my non-virtual friends found those relationships puzzling, maybe even troubling and today we see that same dichotomy between acceptance and rejection of 3D worlds as real or not real but the trend I think is toward assimilating a larger and larger percentage of the population with each technological breakthrough whether it's 3D virtualization whether it's in second life or half life or kinetic motion like the Nintendo Wii or something that hasn't even been thought of yet except maybe at the media lab down the street from us and traditionalists worry that this kind of assimilation will destroy our existing civic life and on the flip side metutopians actually look forward to that disruption but I think Yochai Benkler is right to find the middle ground between the two positions that virtual networks often extend rather than replace our physical networks my colleague Eric Gordon at Emerson calls this embrace net locality and what you do every time you pick up your cell phone and you ask where are you because we're still grounded in the physical reality even as we're also projecting into the virtual one but I don't think it's a coincidence that the computer game industry is advancing many of the technologies and the techniques that are making all this happen games are about engagement and it turns out that what engages human beings most is really other people and game developers are figuring out how to get people to form teams and achieve goals together and corporate managers are taking notes and those of us who care about civic and political engagement should take notes too Robert Putnam worried about people who are bowling alone anyone who has seen World of Warcraft would stop worrying about whether the internet can build social capital I think it can and instead wonder how is it going to help us to spend that capital when I see two future worlds in one we have the matrix virtual worlds become the new obit of the disempowered masses and we emigrate as Ted Casanova puts it and never look back and in the other we have what best obit calls to be the video game our institutions of work and governance learn from and adapt the technologies we play and in that vision of the future virtual worlds allow us to enhance and make more meaningful our relationships to our employers, to our governments and most of all to each other say at this workshop you referenced the MIT Media Lab do you see it as serious the MIT Media Lab is a great desire at the end of the year you will not refer to yourself as one of us we'll be the first, the second but rather the other way those are the significance of the final point so now you're hoping we would all disagree but I'll start by saying that what I also wanted to talk about is how much what people really want to see is other people and what I was thinking about when I was asked to talk about this is what happens with search when it comes about people we're starting to see the beginnings now intelligence searches where your results look different when what you're searching for is a address you get a map, if you're searching for something to buy, you get a list of stores so there's beginning to be some intelligence and said looking at the type of thing you're searching for changes the type of form you put the results in and a lot of people are looking for if you look at Google's list of the top made things like the news and somebody's friend there's all kinds of things like that so what does search end up like when Google or some other company says okay we're going to think about those specialized your results for person and let's think about this in a couple of different contexts because one part of it is right now as Wendy said 10 years ago we do really expect all the useful information that's up there and I'd like you to think about what are the things that we don't expect to find out about someone when we put their name on Google now but in 10 years it might be possible because 10 years ago there were no social networking sites people weren't writing every single thing they did at a party last night they're not discussing the details of their miscarriage on a blog but that stuff is all out there right now and so when you start to think about in 10 years we'll have a couple of generations of people who've grown up with the idea that one you can put everything in private, some of them are clearly public I didn't really thought about them as public and some are places that maybe they're private today but what happens when everyone moves on from Facebook and it goes out of business it's part of the fire sale all that information maybe like a company that will put it all up will be the ones that will help them bail out their creditors who know so a lot of this information is going to be increasing me up there you walked into this room today and you were told this is being webcast isn't that funny? it's online, it's all part of your permanent record now think how fascinating it is and then we just could have introduced themselves by name exactly, so here's your name it's all very clear of you are that you were in this room on this day on this place and you're not in this or you're disagreeing with something else and so when I start to think about these little bits of information the fact that your name is linked to how much you've paid for your house in the place, it really is going to be much more so than today's 3D graphical world a real step in life where the types of things you might be able to feel and see about other people by seeing them walk down the street is there a kind of pale shadow of the richness of what you can get to know about someone by googling their name but some of the things we need to think about perhaps on a positive side in some good ways is how to make this happen it's a fascinating world where what will come up is this amazing data portrait perhaps with some temporal elements you can see the patterns you can get to all their conversations you can know all the things they said their level of activities you can see because of all the social networks they've been and you can get links to all their friends you can see them in this extraordinary rich context but that also gives us another perspective for thinking about how we want to see how we want to make people think about where their information is going what I think is the inability of this kind of beautiful rich data portrait how do we see whether it's regulation of privacy how we want to think about the use of names, the use of anonymity what are the things you really find a way of getting a website what are the things we want to think about whether they're technological or social solutions or hiring information about people for even better understanding of what information is significant what's true what are the things that this person has what are the things that they dispute is there a personal Wikipedia where you can have a discussion page of all the things that everybody said about you so that was my reaction to thinking about the future of the web is the question about what is the future of what will people look like on the web what so Jonathan are you there I'm in here so here you're marching orders in five minutes you have to accomplish three things one is to talk about the book that you spent several years writing to crystallize that secondly tie together the disparate threads of three people you've just heard and third be sure to disagree and create some dynamic tension out of which conversation will flow in this room okay then where are you by the way I come from cyberspace the new home of my future I ask you of the past to leave us alone oh sorry that's John Perry Barlow's declaration of the independence of cyberspace while written ten years ago seems to put the bill through the bill my sense is that we live in a time of fashion and fear fashion is the wonderful set of ads for the iPod of those silhouettes completely faceless people dancing around but looking so much cooler than you sitting on the couch not dancing around watching them on your television fashion is an expression of your identity but as we understand fashion today it's kind of a superficial expression it's like do you want a blue iPod or a red iPod thank you very much I did it in your honor John and in that sense fashion is kind of giving your proxy away to some other entity that's going to help you decide what's cool and what's not that's the prevailing mode of fashion right now we gather in Milan or New York or we read the newspaper that tells us about the gatherings there as to what's cool and what's not and what we should rush out and buy the other element that seems to be running around today is fear we live in a time where we're scared that many moment really bad people with whom we have nothing in common and only want to hurt us and hate us for our freedoms are perhaps garnering the tools to actually hurt us and make our lives very difficult and I think that fear also tends to have us give our proxies away to ask people with expertise with power in a position different from ours to take responsibility for making us safe and I'm concerned that these two phenomena of fashion and fear can be leading to trouble when Tim Berners-Lee was designing the net he said at one point the web that is he was thinking of building into HTTP protocol a way of saying if you couldn't get to a server because back in 1993 or 1994 servers weren't that reliably accessible you could ask nearby computers on your net by the way has anybody recently visited this server and if so do you have the page I'm trying to get that was almost built into just background HTTP and then he never got around to it and it turned out not to be all that necessary because servers were very accessible it's funny now that as servers become inaccessible due to filtering and other blockages it would have been nice to have had that feature all along and it kind of emphasizes just how much our network architecture actually affects how much a response to fear could change the internet that we have and I'm a little bit sad that the internet that apocryphally is said to be nuclear war resistant and that was one of its motives although why anybody would want to check out after a nuclear war is not clear to me is in fact not that the kinds of technologies like peer to peer have ended up being used for purposes in the public eye and demonized such that they're not developing so quickly and web 2.0 is very much of the let's pick a server and access it model and that means that should there come a moment when somebody wants to shut down the party that the previous colleagues were so excited about and actually to me would not be that part of thing to do they've said famously that society is nine meals away from total collapse anybody that hasn't eaten for three days is ready to pretty much do anything to get a happy meal and I wonder how many downed servers we are away from actually depriving ourselves of the net as we know it from genes pay-ons to online games and such that's just one server the entire world of Warcraft is yankable with one plug calls to mind the South Park episode on the subject in which the grave executives at Blizzard software look at each other and say this could be the end of the world of Warcraft as we know it Wendy's talk appeared to be if I may summarize in five seconds the enemy is big media but we don't have to kill it we just have to compete with it on a level playing field but even there that boils down to elements of net architecture because Wendy's chosen means of competing is to have teenagers in dorm rooms cooking up new stuff that's really compelling to each other and eventually to us and our net architecture that allows that right now I worry is falling victim to fashion, appliance creation and fear the kinds of lockdown we would see if the internet is used as an instrument of disruption by people who are really out to get us finally Judith told us about the link between fashion and fear that as we blog about everything and do it as expressions of our identity the way that fashion is we could come later to regret it and not really know how to pull back a little bit, offer less than we mean to in a way to keep a private sphere and so I offered that a creative tension between the ideals of the digital preservationists Storchiebers among us has been thinking a lot about that who are looking at decades and centuries as to how to preserve our content our data, our texts I think we in a way owe ourselves to think through net architecture in a way that's meant to preserve our ability to innovate for decades and centuries, not just for a little while and yet Judith reminds us that it's not just digital preservation it's digital retraction and digital deletion how to actually maintain some level of control over the net so that we preserve our identities even as we preserve the net itself we did all three themes but people will still buy the book because you didn't give away the archive alright so thank you to the board it's simply the and this is in the spirit of one web day rather than a sort of debate that you've set up here but as a matter of appreciation of where we are now which is actually the idea behind one web day if it weren't for of course we could say if it weren't for the web none of us would be here I suppose I certainly wouldn't be here I might just be another poster retirement marketing guy who still did some writing on the side when the web came along in the mid 90s which is something I saw coming and when I first heard about it in the early 90s I looked at it as a kind of salvation for somebody whose writing did not fit any particular mold I failed to sell my writing to pretty much every PC magazine that was out there even though it's really good but I couldn't sell it eventually Linux Journal approached me I knew nothing about Linux but I wrote about everything that Linux touched which was mostly connected on the web and I've had a hell of a time just thinking out loud about things that the web touches and especially the web itself and I have to say I go back and forth but I'm getting over to the big point and where we're going in the future between the dystopian model of all the things that are going to go to hell and how the bad guys are going to be out to get us and the idealistic almost utopian model which I think it is utopian except we happen to live in utopia so we've already gotten there as far as I'm concerned so how do we keep utopia that's kind of a taller order than making one I think in some ways we sort of stumbled into it and now we're thinking about what it is what are the core values what are the core architectural natures of this thing what is it about us speaking to Jonathan's point about generativity that sustains this place what is it that we each bring to it personally that make all of us more valuable and all of us that contribute more valuable I'm even fascinated by what the fact of the Web in our midst does to definitions of things of words like information which for the longest time we treat it as something static information as something that you put into a server or something but in fact this comes out of a conversation I know Tim O'Reilly years ago about the problem both of us had with the term information which is that we have this static idea about it and yet it's derived from the verb to inform which is what we do when we hear each other it's what we do when we learn from each other we are all either Tim's words or mine I forget who's it was we are all authors of each other we are all changing constantly so to address Judith's point how do you follow that it isn't just an avatar walking through the world it isn't just a history it's what we do to and with each other that is profoundly human and yet very very hard to describe or to nail down so anyway that's just sort of a general appreciation of where we are right now which I feel very privileged and lucky to be part of I keep looking at Andy because Andy's doing a lot of cool stuff and I see he's here I feel like he's here when you were talking I was thinking of Marshall McLuhan at one point I thought after all he was a big guy in the 70's and a lot of people were talking about it and he was totally in for hearing but I was trying to think if I could apply anything of what he said to the web and I didn't find anything that much new but he talked about hot media and cool media hot media I give you everything you need so they envelop you and you don't have to you don't have to think in cool media that you put something in between so the internet is definitely a cool medium because now you can post a news article and you can also take things and rematch them and mix them up so we distance ourselves from information from content we have more control now since we're on this theme of information that's been introduced to Jonathan throughout a publication we also have Terry Martin here who has just recently announced his retirement to leading preservationists and artists and I wonder if I might put either or both of you on the spot in response to Jonathan I mean it's a little tricky because much of the very concrete work I've done on long term preservation of I guess you could call it information it's scholarly articles some of those contained others don't I've heard it all on the off chance in the long run we'll be able to figure out which is which to a certain extent the methods that I've proposed granted for the short to medium term have been a bit blood-eyed so for instance there are these problems with our utopian or dystopian I'm not sure because it's not clear what's going to happen in over the decades in terms of preserving all this digital material there's a worry that we could be creating the modern equivalent of the library of Alexandria by publishing all of our journals online and so the alternative that I've proposed and in fact been helping implement is this kind of kind of backward to use the one mechanism we know can preserve data, namely acid free paper to preserve all of these online journals so it sounds a little silly the best method I know of for preserving scholarly articles is to print them out and put them in a library so on the one hand there's this worry, I mean it's a very strange situation on the one hand there's this worry that the web won't be around long enough to be in archival medium in the sense that librarians be in archival media so we need to resort to these prior technologies and on the other hand information is going to be around so long and it's so difficult to get rid of this that we're going to have this dystopian situation where every accidental thing that you ever do that happens to get caught will be available for anyone to peruse and take advantage of in the long term and I'm not sure how those two how those two how those two worries can both coexist since they seem to be contradictory but somehow they're both true so do you have thoughts to go next but I think for John's purposes and others we've been joined by our founder Charlie Nessens to come to the back of the room and none of this would have happened but for Charlie's inspiration with northies and various others more than 10 years ago to be short so welcome Charlie thank you so much John but I haven't tuned in enough on the comments you're not on this but I just wanted Jonathan out there to know that you were back you can't quite see you I see it looks to be a turtleneck so this would be quick but this is somewhat bringing together the themes of fashion and fair and information because I'm also very interested in fashion and I think there's a very strong relationship between fashion and information and one of the things that fashion does is it's this constant demand I look at things in terms of signals you know if you're trying to signal that I am cool you have to the thing that you are signaling I'm cool or I am a company like IBM there's been a forefront of everything you still have to keep changing how you do it so if you're a person dressing if you're taking clothes you have to wear you have to keep changing if you're a company like IBM two years ago you have to like social networks and this there's fashions in everything but one of the things being a forefront of fashion is about dealing with fear because it involves taking risks you know for all of your computer programmers you know that when you decide to use a new language you know the week it's released you will spend more time learning a language which is either going to be obsolete or you're going to be the one debugging it so that cutting energy of fashion always involves a tremendous amount of risk and we have an innate fear of change but we're living in a society that changes at an unprecedented rate and the net and the web are doing a huge amount to accelerate that and so I think there's a very important relationship and while fashion may seem frivolous it is this external sign of willingness to change willingness to constantly adapt that you're willing to give up something that was comfortable that you knew and just constantly reinvent and do things what you do whether it's good or bad it's still a review token we should be right at this whole good part we can be voting whether these are good or bad but I think one of the things about net is the fantastic rate of change that it enforces on everybody and I think what we are just beginning to understand is whether it's being a limited culture in which there is this level of constant change so that's the fashion that makes it different so fashion may be as single as your willingness to adapt and why once we reach a certain age we start accepting the fact of all of this external sign that maybe we're not adapting to it Siri Martin, you led the Harvard Law School by the world's greatest collection of books at this moment that have changed and with lots of fashions for us I think and if you're the student and gentleman I think the literature is fairly I just want to say something about fashion the best thing about fashion is that it can't be copyrighted I don't know I'm very special to explain why that hasn't made our money poverty stricken but I mean Stuart is correct in that we know how to preserve paper better than we know how to preserve digital stuff I mean so there's a lot of experiments for digital preservation MIT has their deep space which means they go and they capture it and they put it on the computer someplace and if somebody wants it at some point in the future they will figure out how to get it out of the computer and display it before you don't do it then Stuart has a different approach in that it defines a number of formats in which you can deposit digital objects so we'll take a PDF because we know what a PDF is and if there's something better than a PDF in the future we can figure out how to convert current PDFs into something else neither one of those is probably going to be perfect I know this space is going to hit some stash of data that they won't in 20 years figure out and Harvard is going to be collecting some stuff because of the format so we'll do this show but but it's not really economically possible for all the digital information that we're sending out and you miss a lot if there's something that's three-dimensional I think it's two-dimensional so the world is going to be digital librarians are struggling with how to do that so we're just knocking on the door pieces at the time we've got the Stanford approach which is basically to throw it out onto the world they have their personal box box and copies to keep stuff safe it doesn't keep them willing to put their own little server back up so it's got a future you can understand why some of you sits on an earthquake Jonathan are you on an earthquake right now dig a rabbit hole dig a very large hole right outside I'm not sure why feels a little earthquake here Jonathan before we go to Dorothy do you have any of these comments no no let's sit down and keep going if I could I'd like to add a personal note and a somewhat different tack I had ten years at Harvard Medical School in biochemistry and then got very interested in sort of the social psychology politics of science and in the 60s was what was then known as the head section man for Eric Erickson and Harvard who was then the big man the big man on campus and a psychoanalyst of some distinction and now I serve on committee that is thinking through where would a mind like Erickson's been today and one of the questions I had Jonathan this goes back to something he raised on how to preserve our identities and I was thinking of social psychological identities because if you look back to the 60s I think it was the beginning of when parents were no longer the only transmitter of values and the culture that the peer culture began to take over now you've got the net and the difference between where the parents are by and large and where younger people are and what I brought up at the Erickson Institute is how does one think about identity between a therapist and a patient or client when the therapist inhabits one world of thinking and the client younger client another and does this make a difference and even though therapists who we assume will always be somewhat older than the patient is hip about what's going on in the net does the fact that the client has been brought up on this as reality and the first reference I mean I was just thinking today why don't I remember to bring my laptop with me it's just so I do meaning to but I simply never do and everything I do on this is learned it's not automatic and so I guess what I would love to see someone somewhere in this group begin to think through is what's the impact on cognition and you've got at least four or five people working on that problem about ten years ago I began to notice that my students thought very differently from me we may have gotten to the same answers but we got there by a different group and it's understanding that you knew the answer and they googled it a very very different kind of approach like again Jonathan when you were speaking I had a thought I had not had in many decades which was when I was a young part of grammar school I had a wonderful teacher a woman when we were learning about the Gettysburg address she said the words never go away and Abraham Lincoln's words are still out there and someday we're going to know how to get them back and I feel that's where I am now in a way of pulling out what we always thought had disappeared but it's there thank you before you call on the professional sociologist I wasn't quite yet but anyway you go ahead you have some top psychologists from Stanford well just to me it calls to mind Charlie's observation from the very beginning you know cyberspace is a rhetorical space and it's a place where you fix a message you understand it as a message and I think it's right for Dorothy to ask what is the message or the set of messages that our kids get now that they plug in like to something like Club Penguin so early and learning about what's out there on the network and I fear that the kind of cyber crypto libertarians among us don't really think that through too much it's just hey it's our job just to keep the tumbleweeds in the middle of the western town and everybody with a holster that has a good sick shooter in it and everything else has sorted itself out and of course I don't think the quote unquote sort of family values people who are just terrified of any form of thinking that isn't mainstream really to figure this out either it calls to mind to me something Andrew Solomon actually just pointed out in his blog there was a video posted on youtube of a very young woman who'd been asked to sing the Star Spangled Banner at like an NBA playoff game or something and she forgot the words in the first verse and you know it's a pretty high stress situation she's forgotten the words people are sort of laughing and kind of like a bunch of dishes fall at the dining hall people sort of applaud a little bit and then a coach of one of the teams comes over and stands next to her and starts the song again with her singing along with her and then the entire audience starts singing with her too and by the end it's like tears are streaming down everybody's face as we celebrate how great America is the thing that the reason I thought of this right now was because there's an example of a viral video that isn't the normal punchline of somebody screwed up I'm so glad it wasn't me check this out and it has an element of social cruelty to it and as Humber Simpson would say it's funny because I don't know him and trying to figure out how to structure the environment so the messages that bounce around aren't just the capability we have to laugh at each other in a cruel way but to celebrate each other I want to pursue at least briefly this idea of identity that circulated in many of the comments thus far because of a feudal state of affairs one in which work home and play are integrated do all in the same place and with more or less the same people and you very rarely move in your life and those conditions conduced to an extremely stable integrated sense of and projection of self everybody knows you and knows you in all guises in your town and among the features of modernity carried to its extreme in the United States is the fragmentation of each of those conditions so work, home and play are differentiated and they come to be engaged in different places with different people and moreover people move homes move, jobs move avocations radically and of course they're low lives and what this facilitates is a fragmentation on the one hand of community, no surprise there a fragmentation of identity in which you can be different people in different settings and different people at different moments over time and state of affairs that postmodern theory celebrates other people will admit so one, so here's the hypothesis is that in some ways the technology of which we are concerned is corroding the conditions of modernity and returning us to a feudal state of affairs in that once again work, play and home are coming together work from home and they merge their like how many people here use different emails for their personal stuff and their work stuff probably not many, most of us have an email a primary email address and we integrate across them you know work when you get up in the morning and you play in the middle of the day it's sort of swirl together and then the preservation information that Jonathan Judith were emphasizing is corroding the capacity to remake yourself over time remake yourself afresh over time you are continuously aware of your past and other people are continuously aware of your past and future so weirdly those are the conditions of feudalism and stable identity now on a global scale rather than a village scale so are we going to abandon the fragmentation of self that was the condition of modernity it's possible but so here's the hypothesis despite the return of conditions that led to the stable self in say the 15th century we can't go back on this front and we're going to have to we already are accepting a degree of fragmentation in the new environment and it's in some tension with its sociological and technological conditions and maybe we want to go further and to facilitate it like Jonathan's idea I don't know of the of identity bankruptcy when you decide to wipe the slate clean of your accumulated reputation and start over again be one conceivable way of achieving this another form might come to pass in politics so to go back to Jean's theory about whether this is going to go for civic life as we have accepted in most democracies certainly in the United States for about a century a Victorian compromise in which we tolerate a whole lot of oddity in behavior as long as it's private but what we insist upon is as a well scrubbed public phase up a politician's career is the revelation in public of what we have compelled to remain private whether it's Bill Clinton's behavior or whatever and that may not be possible soon that our access to all the information over time of every person's life may compel us to accept fragmented imperfect in the political arena as we increasingly are obliged to do so in the private arena and to abandon our our puritanical insistence upon the well scrubbed phase in politics as well as in private life just some hypotheses For those who don't know I have a question I've posed for those who know rather more about all this than I do that is one of the things that I would think might be happening in the next ten years on the web is that it may be contributing to the rapid demise of a text based intellectual society and I think that's a great question and I think that's a great question for intellectual society I suspect that people have thought about this but the library discussion was all around text and at least among my children's age text is going away and one of the things that the web makes possible is the exchange of information and all kinds of things in ways that are no longer primarily text based What's the next step from texting because I think that gets around the fact that it might be omnipresent in us because we're talking about invents of chips and government initiatives to be able to identify you anywhere at any time and where do you take that when they can find you but when your information is available all the time to anyone and you're communicating ways that go beyond simple texting do you then have that break between people who are bloodites and the people who have basically rolled over for the benefits that are conferred by identity to find out who through the system can completely identify a concerned person who never would mind What's the impact on identity when we say do such a wide range of activities using a fairly limited number of say interface widgets for a lot of the term so we use interface widgets to like do our food shopping or buy a book on Amazon or do consumers activities and we also use those same widgets to express love and express our deepest emotions and that's sort of it's sort of the opposite of the fragmentation that's being discussed it's more of a every kind of emotional activity becomes one kind of formal activity and I guess that's just another thing that I and obviously the 3D world have new interfaces that put that into question but they're still the mouse and the keyboard and the like 5 or 6 interface widgets that exist in HTML and kind of you know they've been made prettier over the years but they haven't really changed fundamentally and we live our whole lives through drop down boxes, text scrolls buttons and radio boxes and what you know I just I kind of wonder how well those are going to change certainly I wonder what the implications of that are so extensively my brief talk was about virtual worlds but I think as I'm listening to this conversation another contrast between but is it really between virtual and worlds or 3D technology and graphics or text but rather I hear a lot about identity and individual identity and what I think I was trying to also convey is the contrast between that and identity and coming having to come together and so I come up with a question of the identity issue from the perspective of you, how does that help us come together as groups, how do we find our common interest and how do we for political or civic organizing purposes find the commonality across our identities so that we can come together as people so I'm excited I'm interested in hearing discussion at the level of groups coming together that's interesting to me about Facebook and all the other social networks so it's just simply looking at only individual privacy or individual identity or individual economy movement from text to other digital forms of information to say one of the components at the heart of lots of the excitement that I was trying to describe was the ability to mash up information that we find and so far it's the easiest to do that and so lots of the coolest things that we see are text analyses and combinations of text or easier numerical data from multiple sites and multiple sources so there are possibilities both cool and somewhat disturbing as that mashup ability is carried over into new streams of data what happens when videos of us can be annotated to note where it is that we have been in both our online and offline travels possibly without our permission or consent to those kinds of monitoring what happens when our voice and our vital signs can be as been to that picture and what can we do if it's not granting ownership of that data regulating it from that direction to reach toward fair ways of dealing with data that has shared ownership and shared interests thoughts about the next 10 years as I thought about it are pretty much the same as they were the last 10 years and in some way they proved out over the last 10 years and I expect them to prove out more the essence of the environment is as John puts it a rhetorical space a communication space an open network and it challenges at both the individual and the institutional level at the individual level I feel we're all in the posture of having to live in a more open environment and coming tuned into it getting used to the idea that privacy has really changed and maybe Scott was right in 1992 and he said it's dead at the same time it's obviously not but it sure is on the move and has been and so I for example have felt comfortable having the sig on my email stayed explicitly that my email is subject to be public and if someone wants it and expects it to be private with me let me know rather than working the default the other way around I feel in some way that that's expressive of our life to a much greater extent and individually it challenges you to live a more integrated life I was always told by a friend friendly who was my mentor tell the truth it's the easiest to remember and the idea of having the truth be the same in all your lives and possibly exposed in all your lives is a personal challenge in some way life becomes easier if you can live it in many separate spaces at the very same time that managing those spaces get hard and then at an institutional level it has struck me from the beginning that what's happened is we've moved into an environment in which transaction costs of connection have dropped to a point where it's no longer a function of capital this was a totally open environment nobody filled it to begin with we didn't understand what the potential was but you could understand that the potential lay in connection and when we see something like Wikipedia we see that there are new forms of organisms that are possible that aggregate huge amounts of collective energy and their inventions these are actually conceptual inventions and they aggregate power I believe over the next 10 years that we will see increasing innovation in the ways in which we aggregate collective power through the net and I'm optimistic about it because I've always felt that it was to aggregate good will than it is to aggregate evil and so in some sense in the grand battle of good and evil I feel there's a certain divinity in the net I feel we're on the right side so what I'm looking for myself in the next 10 years is I'd say a solid business plan for the open net a way in which the people and institutions who benefit from the open net come increasingly to see the open net as a source of benefit and participate in structures for supporting it and protecting it against the forces which would disaggregate it I'm very hopeful that that's the direction in which we're moving Charlie, awesome, what a great way and thank you everyone for being here