I’m at the Web 1.0 conference, at the MIT Media Lab, organized by Amber Case [@caseorganic]. It’s a celebration of sites that can be built by a single person, she explains.

The subtitle of Amber’s opening talk is “Where did my data go?” She talks about hosting sites that folded and took all the home pages with them. After AOL Hometown got angry comments about this, it AOL Hometown “solved” the problem by turning off comments“solved” the problem by turning off comments. Other bad things can happen to sites you build on other people’s sites. They can change your UI. And things other than Web sites can be shut down — including household items in the Internet of Things.

She shows the Maslow Hierarchy for Social Network Supermarkets from Chris Messina. So, what happened to owning your identity? At early Web conferences, you’d write your domain name on your ID tag. Your domain was your identity. RSS and Atom allowed for distributed reading. But then in the early 2000s social networks took over.

We started writing on third party platforms such as Medium and Wikia, but their terms of service make it difficult to own and transfer one’s own content.

The people who could have created the tools that would let us share our blogs went to work for the social networking sites. In 2010 there was a Federated Web movement that resulted in a movement towards this. E.g., it came up with Publish on your own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE
).

Why do we need an independent Web? To avoid losing our content, so businesses can’t to fold and take it with it, for a friendlier UX, and for freedom. “Independent Websites can help provide the future of the Web.”

If we don’t do this, the Web gets serious, she says: People go to a tiny handful of sites. They’re not building as many quirky, niche, weird Web sites. “”We need a weird Web””“We need a weird Web because it allows us to play at the edges and to meet others.” But if you know how to build and archive your own things, you have a home for your data, for self-expression, and with links out to the rest of the Web.

Make static websites, she urges…possibly with the conference sponsor, Neocities.

QA

Bob Frankston: How can you own a domain name?

Amber: You can’t, not really.

Bob: And that’s a big, big problem.

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The Emerson Engagement Lab (of which I am a fan) is having me in for a talk that is apparently open to the public on Monday at 2pm. I’m talking to Paul Mihailidis‘ course in Emerson’s Greene Theater about whether and how we’ve managed to let the Internet become just yet another mass medium or possible the Worst. Mass Medium. Ever. I’ll be talking about why my aging cohort had such high hopes for the Net, how well the Argument from Architecture has held up, and why I am not quite as depressed as most of my friends.

This is an odd talk in part because I’m not using slides or notes. That changes things. For the better? Well, there are reasons why people use slides and why people like me, who only have three remaining neurons devoted to memory, use notes.

Has anyone seen my keys?

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to talking with Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information this afternoon. I’m giving a talk about our changing ideas about how the future works, but I believe there will be lots of time for conversation.

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Just in case you’ve confused the Internet with the entities that bring us access to the Internet or with the machines that instantiate the Internet, here’s an actual goddamn definition:

RESOLUTION:

“The Federal Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition of the term “Internet”.

“Internet” refers to the global information system that —

(i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons;

(ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and

(iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.”

This is from a 1995 report by The Federal Networking Council, which is too old even for the Wayback Machine. According to Wikipdia, the FNC was “was chartered by the US National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Computing, Information and Communications (CCIC) to act as a forum for networking collaborations among US federal agencies…” It was dissolved in 1997. But its words are still good.

More than good. The definition quote above comes recommended by a coupla guys who know something about the topic: Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf. In their classic article, What is the Internet?, they refer to it as follows:

The authors believe the best definition currently in existence is that approved by the Federal Networking Council in 1995, http://www.fnc.gov and which is reproduced in the footnote below [xv] for ready reference.

Keep it ready for reference the next time an access provider complains about regulations as if the access providers are or own the Internet. The Internet is bigger than that. And deeper. And ours.

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Stop the presses!

The good news is that the New Republic seems to be making an effort to include articles about race that are not by white liberals — not that I have anything general against white liberals since I am one . The even better news is that that article credits the Internet with enabling a flowering of African American intellectual thought, rather than the magazine once again (and again and again and again) thinking it’s being oh-so-daring by criticizing the Net as the source of all that is dumb and crass.

In “Think Out Loud,” Michael Eric Dyson argues:

Along with [Ta-Nehisi] Coates, a cohort of what I would like to call the “black digital intelligentsia” has emerged. They wrestle with ideas, stake out political territory, and lead, very much in the same way that my generation did, only without needing, or necessarily wanting, a home in the Ivy League—and by making their name online.

He describes how “the Net enables these voices to be heard”the Net enables these voices to be heard, and how it helps them to form and pursue their ideas through community and social engagement. (It’s a great example of what some of us would describe as the networking of knowledge.)

And, in a generous way that embodies the best of the Net, Dyson in this article is using his position as a well-established voice to give a boost to the upcoming cohort—one that notably includes many women.

Nicely done all around.

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Atlantic.com has just posted an article of mine that re-examines the “Argument from Architecture” that has been at the bottom of much of what I’ve written over the past twenty years. That argument says, roughly, that the Internet’s architecture embodies particular values that are inevitably transmitted to its users. (Yes, the article discusses what “inevitably” means in this context.) But has the Net been so paved by Facebook, apps, commercialism, etc., that we don’t experience that architecture any more?

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The project with Doc that I mentioned is a new set of clues, following on The Cluetrain Manifesto from 16 years ago.

The clues are designed as an open source publishing project: The text is in the public domain, and we’re making the clues available at Github in various computer-friendly formats, including JSON, OPML and XML.

We launched this morning and a happy hell has broken loose. So I’m just going to posts some links for now. In fact, I’m copying and pasting from an email by Doc:

• @DaveWiner’s listicle version of New Clues (at listicle.io, one of his many creations).
• Dave’s blog post on New Clues, and working with Doc and me.
• New Clues on Medium’s Backchannel (courtesy of @StevenLevy).
• @Cluetrain on Twitter. Also @dweinberger and @dsearls
• The New Clues group page on Facebook
• Halley Suitt’s interview with Doc and me at the Globe’s BetaBoston
• Doc’s blog.

Gotta run…

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Talk about “civility” on the Internet always makes me a little nervous. For a bunch of reasons.

First, I generally try to be civil, but I’d hate to see a Net that is always and only civil. Some rowdiness and rudeness is absolutely required.

Second, civility as a word feels like it comes from a colonial mentality, as if there are the civil folks and then there are the savages. I’m not saying that’s what people mean when they use the term. It’s just what I sometimes hear.

Third, civility is so culturally relative that demanding that someone be civil can actually mean, “Please play by our rules or you shall be removed from the premises!” Which is I guess what gives rise to my second reason.

Fourth, civility seems to be more about the form of interaction, the rhetoric of the interchange. That’s fine. But given a preference, I’d be hectoring people about dignity, not civility. You can be civil without according someone full dignity. If you treat someone with dignity, the civility — and more — will follow. For example, you’ll actually listen. (Note that I fail at this frequently.)

Fifth, civility and dignity are not enough to make the Net the place it ought to be. I would love to see being welcoming taken as a core value for the Best Net, that is, for the Web We Want. Welcoming the stranger is one of the originary traditions of the West, from Abraham inviting strangers into his tent, to the underlying theme of The Odyssey. (Another of our originary traditions: killing or enslaving strangers.) In embracing the stranger, we accord them dignity, we recognize our differences as something positive, and we humble ourselves. So, given a choice, I’d rather hear about a welcoming Net than a merely civil one. (Here’s a shout-out to the new Pew Internet study that reports that we’re not welcoming unpopular views on social media.)

Point five-and-a-half is: Just as welcoming precedes civility, safety precedes welcoming. This is a half point not because safety is a half point but because the outstretched welcoming hand entails reassuring the stranger that she is safe. And more than safe. Safety is essential, but it is obviously nowhere near enough.

Let me be clear, though. When I talk about “the Net,” I’m being misleading. The entire Net is not going to be characterized by any one set of values. And we don’t need the entire Net to be welcoming, civil, and a place where all are treated with dignity. (Safety is a different matter.) But we do need more of the Net to be welcoming, civil, and dignifying. And we absolutely need the networks where power and standing develop to go far beyond civility.

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Dan Brickley points to this incredibly prescient article by Tim Berners-Lee from 1992. The World Wide Web he gets the bulk of the credit for inventing was thriving at CERN where he worked. Scientists were linking to one another’s articles without making anyone type in a squirrely Internet address. Why, over a thousand articles were hyperlinked.

And on this slim basis, Tim outlines the fundamental challenges we’re now living through. Much of the world has yet to catch up with insights he derived from the slightest of experience.

May the rest of us have even a sliver of his genius and a heaping plateful of his generosity.

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Judith Donath is giving a book talk to launch The Social Machine. I read it this weekend and it is a rich work that explores the ways in which good design can improve our online sociality. I’m a fan of Judith’s and am looking forward to seeing what 25-minutes’ worth of ideas she selects to talk about tonight, given the richness of her book.

Judith begins by saying that the theme of the book is the importance of online social interaction and designing for it. Our interfaces may look sophisticated but they’re primitive when it comes to enabling social interaction. She uses a Mark Twain story [“Was the World Made for Man?“] about an oyster’s point of view to remind us that online design isn’t really all that evolved. One big issue: We can’t see the interactions.

We like being with other people, Judith remindsd us. We like seeing how they look, feeling the energy in a room, etc. This is hard to perceive when you’re looking at screen. Our computers connect us to tremendous crowds, but we don’t see the level of activity or the patterns. She shows a work from 25 years ago when she spent a summer in Japan. Her friends were in Boston on computers. The “who” command let her see who was online and how active they were; it was an old-style computer print-out of a list. She came back from Japan trying to design a more useful display. In the early 1990s she came up with “Visual Who,” a text-based visualization of the people online, filterable by interests, etc. She shows some other ways of displaying social network maps, but such maps aren’t yet integrated into the social network interfaces. Maps like these would help manage Facebook’s privacy settings, she ways. Or we could use them as an interface for keeping up with people we haven’t interacted with in a while, etc.

Legibility is a huge issue, she says. Information is non-spatial, so it can be hard to parse. Judith points to the Talk pages where Wikipedia pages are discussed and edited. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg did a visualization (History Flow) of the edits on the Chocolate article. This lets you see what’s controversial and what isn’t. They then took the same data and looked not at every edit, but sampled it at fixed times. It’s a much smoother diagram. That shows the reader’s experience, while the first version showed the writers’ version.

Now Judith talks about “Beyond Being There” (a paper by Hollan, Nielsen, Stornetta, et al.). We can do things with these tools that we can’t do face-to-face. (The fact that we’re in public looking at our cell phones indicates that we’re getting some meaningful social connection that way, she says.) Judith shows the interface to “Talking Circles,” [pdf] an interface for audio conferences. It consists of colored circles. When someone speaks, their circle’s inside moves with their voice. Circles that are near each other are able to hear each other. As they move away, they can’t hear each other. So you could have a private conversation over this digital medium.

These interfaces change the social dynamics around a space. E.g., the “Like” economy induces some to use Intagram to try to gather more likes. Judith points to the Karrie Karahalios and Viega’s Conversation Clock“, a table top that shows who spoke when and who overlapped (interrupted) another. E.g., the fact that we’re all being watched (or think we are — Judith references the Panopticon) shapes our behavior. She points to the EU’s decision that Google has to remove links upon user request.

Judith points to a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, who looks young in a painting done when she was 65. If you think about data as portraying someone, you become aware of the triangle of subject, audience, and painter, each with their own interests. (She says that two years ago another portrait of Elizabeth from the same time and studio shows her looking very old indeed.)

When you think about doing portraits with data, you have to ask how to make something expressive. She points to “The Rhythm of Salience,” a project she created using an existing conversation database. She picked out words that she identified as being about the individuals. At heart, a portrait takes what’s representative of someone, exaggerates it, and shows the salience. She shows the Caricature Generator by Susan Brennan. You can do the same thing with words, e.g. Themail by Fernanda Viegas and Scott Golder. People save their email, but generally they don’t use their archives. People are more interested in keeping the patterns of relationships than in the individual emails. So, Themail shows a histogram of the month-to-month relationship with anyone in your archive. The column shows the volume of messages, but the words that compose the bars show you the dominant words. [I didn’t get that exactly right. Sorry]

She ends by showing Personas by Aaron Zinman (and Donath). You type in your name and spits back a little portrait of you. It searches Google for mentions of your name and characterizes it.

All of these raise enormous questions, she says.

Q&A [extra special abbreviated version]

Q: [me] Is this change good? Or pathological? You show an incredibly fluid environment; is this changing our f2f relationships?

A: Jane Jacobs wrote the Life and Death of Great American Cities not to judge cities but to make them better. My book tries to show ways we can use design to make our social relationships better. Right now we deal with one another differently f2f and in the real world. In 10 years, that distinction will be much less pronounced. E.g., as Google Glass type products and better interfaces will have much more important affects on f2f. That’s why it’s important that we think about these issues now.

Colin Maclay: And as danah boyd says, for the youth it’s not offline or online life. It’s just life.

Q: What’s the difference between info that you put up and info about you that others post and use?

A: There’s very little use of pseudonymity online. Usually it’s your real name or you’re anonymous. Judith shops online for most of her stuff, and she reads reviews. But she doesn’t write reviews in part because she doesn’t want her deodorant review to come up when people google her. That’s where pseudonyms come in. Pseudonyms don’t guarantee complete anonymity but for everyday use they enable us to gain control over our lives online.

Q: Nicholas Negroponte: You were doing social networking work decades ago. Why is it taking so long for the evolution we’re waiting for?

A: The Web set design back tremendously. The Web made it easy for everyone to participate, but one of the costs was that the simplicity of the interface of the Web made it hard to do design or to have identities online. It slowed down a lot of social design. Also, the world of design is extremely conservative because companies imitate one another.

Q: GPS is causing a generational difference in how we navigate space…

A: Tech is often designed subconsciously so that there are insiders and outsiders. [I’ve overly shortened this interchange.]

Q: Email vs. text messaging?

A: There are fashions. Also, IM has its uses…

Q: How can sites guarantee what they intend to provide, e.g., privacy? How can they ensure trust? E.g., people have figured out how to take screencaptures of snapchat, subverting the design.

A: Design doesn’t guarantee things. But we should have spaces where we have good enough privacy. We need better interfaces for this. Also, many things you see online don’t let you have a sense of how big your audience is or how permanent will be what you say. Some of the visualizations I’ve talked about give you a sense of the publicness of what you’re saying.

Q: Pseudonymity does reign supreme on Reddit. And whatever happened to Second Life, which seems to address some of the issues you talked about.

A: About every 7 years, a new avatar-based space comes out, so we’re about due for the next. Our original work with Chat Spaces was in response to The Palace. I’m not a big fan of that type of graphical chat space because they’re trying to reproduce the feeling of being f2f without going “beyond being there. ” E.g., a student [?] wrote a paper on why there are chairs in Second Life. Good question. Q: What about skeuomorphism? That metaphor holds things back. Is it just an art to come up with designs that break the old metaphors?

A: The first part of the book deals with that question. There’s a chapter on metaphor. If your metaphors are too heavy handed, they limit what you can do. E.g., if you use folders, you have to figure out which one to put your email in. If you used labels (tags), you wouldn’t have to make those decisions. A lot of the art of design is learning how to use metaphors so you can do something more abstract while still being legible, and how you can bend the metaphors without breaking them.

Q: How does Internet balkanization affect your viewpoint and affect designers?

A: How do we use language and images to bridge cultures? Designers have to understand what images mean. It’s an enormously difficult problem. It’s crucial to try to be always cognizant of one’s own cultural issues. E.g., Caricatures look different depending on your cultural norms. In the book, I did not write about caricatures of Obama in white and black publications, butepending on what norm you use, you get different results about what’s salient.

Q: If you could give people a visualization of how they behave in negotiations, that could be useful when people get stuck.

A: The Conversation Clock’s design has done some work on this. Who’s saying no? Who’s interrupting. It’s difficult for people to notice.

Q: The iPhone has just moved away from skeuomorphism. Do you know how long it takes for us to move away from this?

A: Much of this has to do with style and fashion.

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There’s a new Pew Internet [twitter: @PewInternet] report on American access to the Internet via mobile phones. Here’s a summary from their PR mailing:

The main finding is that 63% of adult cell owners now use their phones to go online, a figure that has doubled since we first started tracking internet usage on cell phones in 2009. In addition, 34% of these cell internet users say that they mostly go online using their cell phone. That means that 21% of all adult cell owners now do most of their online browsing using their mobile phone—and not some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer.

The full here report is here, for free as usual. Thanks, Pew Internet!

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