Recently, I wrote a post about Government 2.0 predictions for 2010-12, and one of them was that government would "always be on-the-record."

By that I meant that the combination of (1) the proliferation of tech-savvy citizens with mobile camera/video devices, (2) the prevalence of wi-fi or other Web connections, (3) the massive number of people using social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and (4) the great interest that people have right now in a number of controversial issues like our current wars, health care, and climate change that people could and probably would start documenting everything that government officials do and say, where they go, who they meet with, for how long, what their staffers eat for lunch and with whom, and so on.

And you don't need to be a professional journalist to do this, or even to do it well. An entire site along the lines of Gawker.com could be started around this, in fact. GovernmentGawker.com, anyone?

Well, I was doing some research to look at planes versus trains to get home for the holidays (in light of the recent blizzard that's affected transport in the DC-NY-Boston corridor), and I came across a fantastic video that essentially puts the Amtrak Acela First Class service on the record for the trip between New York and Boston (7 min edited clip). Check it out.

Now, imagine if someone did the same thing, but wanted to document a day in the life of Senator Ben Nelson, currently in the middle of heated debate about health care legislation. It's not hard. You check the general schedules of his committees and such beforehand, research powerful, under-the-radar staff and other relevant people on the Washington Post's WhoRunsGov.com, go through simple security at the Capitol (far easier than an airport), find Nelson's office in the Hart building, camp out in his waiting area, maybe ask the person at the front desk some questions, find some press in the hallways and ask some questions (maybe visit the Russell rotunda, where the television crews do their spots), stalk the cafeteria (there's a great coffee shop called Cups in the basement) and listen for people saying "Nelson," go back to his office and see him leaving to walk down the hall to a committee hearing, take photos of the staff with him on your Samsung ST-1000 with wi-fi and geo-tagging and upload the pics to Bing Maps and Facebook, go to the sub-committee hearing and tape it from a Flip in your coat pocket while you tweet live notes, upload your Flip video to YouTube while you follow Nelson to his next meeting, and so forth.

(Note: This post has nothing to do with Sen. Nelson or health care, it's just an example "ripped from the headlines" - I've even met and chatted with him when he spoke about energy at the Defense Department, he's a nice person.)

You can surely imagine at this point many variations on this for political appointees you don't like, lobbyists you're interested in, principal deputy assistant secretaries that make important decisions but don't necessarily travel in armored vehicles with bodyguards, various members of the press who might be meeting with sources at Capitol Hill bars, etc. Trust me, this isn't hard. If you live in Washington, DC, you probably realize how very easy this is, in fact, when combined with some good traditional news sources like the Post, Times, The Hill, and Politico. (If you live in Washington, DC, you also know that it's incredibly common to know where various officials live, eat, and so forth - I used to live about two blocks from Senator Obama's pad.)

But why would someone want to create an "ambient stream" of Senator Nelson or anybody else's life? (Besides it being fascinating in a lowbrow Gossip Girl kind of way, of course.) Well, most people wouldn't. But so what? It's just like Wikipedia - only about 1% of people who use Wikipedia actively edit it; about 9% do sometimes, and 90% just read it. Twitter is not unlike that either - only about 10% of users contribute 90% of the tweets.

So what if 1% of U.S. citizens started doing this? Roughly there are 300 million people in the U.S., say half of them are adults, so we have 1% of 150 million as 1.5 million. Now, if everyone just did this at the state, local, or federal level one day a year, and generated one "amateur journalism piece" from that day, that's about 4,100 videos/blog posts/tweet sets generated PER DAY. That's a lot of government on-the-record.

1. One Billionth Spam Message Stats -- from the honeypot project comes a pile of stats about which countries spam, what they spam for, when they spam, etc. One intriguing insight our data provides is that bad guys take vacations too. For example, there is a 21% decrease in spam on Christmas Day and a 32% decrease on New Year's Day. Monday is the biggest day of the week for spam, while Saturday receives only about 60% of the volume of Monday's messages. Enjoy your day off spam. (via Bruce Schneier)
2. Flowing Data's Five Best Data Visualization Projects of 2009 -- I think I listed at least four of these in this year's Four Short Links. You're welcome!
3. Six Degrees of Separation -- tiring of "Sound of Music"? This BBC documentary on the science of social connection may help.
4. Nanoscale Snowmen -- The snowman is 10 µm across, 1/5th the width of a human hair.. (via BoingBoing)

Which is the natural man,
and which the spirit? who deciphers them?

(This post is the fifth in a series called
"Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

What we've seen so far in this series would be enough to shake
anyone's sense of identity. We've found that the technology of the
Internet itself fudges identity (but does not totally succeed in
hiding it), that companies use fragmented and partial information to
categorize you, and that your actual identity is perhaps less
important to these companies than your role as snippet of a statistic
within a larger group. This post demands an even
greater mental stretch: we have to face that what we say about
ourselves is also distorted and inconclusive.

Sociological and psychologists tend to see our activities online as
inherently artificial, referring to them as aspects of "the
performative self." But the pundits haven't succeeded in getting their
point of view across to the wider public. For instance, the millions
of people who view personal video weblogs, or vlogs,
fervently believe--according to a recent

First Monday article by Jean Christian--in the
importance of authenticity in people's video self-presentations. Viewers
reject vlogs over such telltale signs as overediting or reading from
scripts.

The touchstone for discussions of people's appearances and what their
appearances say about them is Erving Goffman's classic
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, whose lessons

I applied to the Internet in a recent blog.
The book suggested that we fashion our appearances not to
hide our true selves, but to reveal them in a manner
others find meaningful. My blog reinforced this insight, pointing out
that, although we do prettify ourselves online as

claimed in one newspaper article,
we can't compartmentalize aspects of ourselves. In other words,
whatever presentation we make in one context or forum is likely to
leak out elsewhere.

In

another blog about Goffman,
I focused on the signals we give out and pick up instinctively about
each other in real life, indicating that they have to be specified
explicitly in online media (although graphics and video now bring back
some instinctive reactions).

Goffman's career ended before the Internet became a topic of
sociological analysis, so at this point it's appropriate to bring in
the chief researcher in the area of identity and the Internet,
psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle. She claims that we
do maintain multiple online identities, and that this is no
simple game but reflects a growing tendency for us to have multiple
selves. The fragmentary and divided presentation of self online
reflects the truth about ourselves, more than we usually acknowledge.

Turkle's research, unfortunately, got channeled early in the
Internet's history into landscapes that don't reflect its later use as
a mass medium. She became fascinated, during the early years of
popular computing and gaming in the 1980s, with the whims so many
people indulged for portraying themselves as someone of a different
age, gender, or profession, or just for hiding as much as they could
in order to try out a different personality. This orientation colors
both of her books on the subject, The Second Self (1984) and
Life on the Screen (1995), and relegates her work to a study
of psychological deviation.

Still, Turkle's work can make us think about the vistas that the
Internet opens up for the Self. Surveying the multiple identities we
create online and the ways we represent or misrepresent ourselves, she
finds that people don't do this just for play or to maliciously
deceive other people. Many do it to don identities that are hard to
try on in real life.

A woman pretending to be a man might open up scenarios for practicing
assertive behaviors that would produce a backlash if she rolled them
out in real life. A shy person might learn, through an invented
personality, how to flirt and even to practice mature love. Both of
these forms of mimicry, which go back at least as far as Shakespeare's
As You Like It, have proven useful to many people online.

But beyond these simple sorts of play-acting (for which real life
provides its settings: acting classes, long journeys, spiritual
retreats, "What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas") we glimpse
in online personas a contemporary view of the self that is
multi-layered and multi-faceted--by no means integrated and
consistent.

Turkle also explores the psychological impact of computer
interfaces. In particular, programs that act like independent,
autonomous decision-makers push us to rethink our own human
identities.

In the 1960s, people would spend hours typing confessions into the
psychologist persona presented by Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA
program. Trying out ELIZA now, it's hard to imagine anyone could be
enticed into a serious conversation with it. But as we've grown more
sophisticated, so have the deceits that programmers toss at us. Turkle
reports an interaction with a robot at the MIT AI Lab that drew her in
with a veracity that made her uncomfortable. "Despite myself and
despite my continuing skepticism about this research project, I had
behaved as though in the presence of another being."

Affective technologies have leapt even further ahead since 1995.
Someday, robots for the disabled and elderly will try to reflect their
feelings in order to provide care that goes beyond washing and
feeding. Turkle draws on many strands of psychology, sociology,
neurological science, and philosophy to show how our intellectual
substrate has been prepared throughout the twentieth century for the
challenges to Self that sophisticated computer programs present. Had
the field of synthetic biology existed when Turkle wrote her books, it
would have provided even more grist for her thesis.

This is one place where I part company with Turkle. I don't believe
we're getting more and more confused about the dividing line between
Computer Power and Human Reason (the title of a classic book by
Weizenbaum, ELIZA's creator). I have more faith in our discernment.
Just as we can see through ELIZA nowadays, we'll see through later
deceptions as we become familiar with them. Simulated intelligences
will not perennially pass the Turing test.

Turkle's view of online behavior is more persuasive. I'm willing to
grant that exploring identity on the Internet can help us develop
neglected sides of our identity and integrate them into our real
selves. She expects us to go even further--to develop these sides
without integrating them. We can quite happily and (perhaps) healthily
live multiple identities, facilitated by how we present ourselves
online.

Let's review the social setting in which Turkle inserts her
arguments. Looking over the period during which the technologies and
social phenomena Turkle researches have grown--the period from 1970 to
the present, when MUDs and other online identity play developed--we
see an astonishing expansion of possibilities for identity throughout
real life. We have more choices than ever in career, geographic
location, religious and spiritual practice, gender identification, and
family status--let alone plastic surgery and drugs that alter our
minds or muscles. People have reclaimed disappearing ethnic languages
and turned vanishing crafts into viable careers. And people are
experimenting with these things in countries characterized by
repression as well as those considered more open.

Changes in speech and clothing allow us to try out different
identities in different real-life settings with relative safety. We
can sample a novel spiritual rite without relinquishing our
traditional church. But of course, doing all these things online is
even safer than doing them in physical settings.

Global information and movement lead to what sociologist Anthony
Giddens, in his 1991 book Modernity and Self-Identity, calls
reflexivity. I showed in the previous section how reflexivity
works in the data collected by advertisers and corporate planners.
Toward the cause of producing more of what we want and marketing it to
us effectively, the corporations are constantly collecting information
on us--purchases, web views and clicks, sentiment analysis--and feeding
it back into activities that will, on the next phase, produce more
such information. Reflexivity is a fundamental trait of modern
institutions. But individuals, as Giddens points out, are also
reflexive. We imitate what we see, online as well as offline. Online,
it's even easier to try something and learn from the results. Goth
clothing and body piercings we pick up online are cheaper and easier
to discard than real ones when we have to clean up our image.

However, we're becoming more circumspect over the past few years as we
realize that people will be able to tie our online forays back to us
in the future; this may cause the lamentable end to experimentation
with the Self.

Turkle refers to a story that was widely circulated and much discussed
in an earlier decade, of a male psychiatrist who posed as a disabled
but capable woman on CompuServe. He quickly entered supportive online
relationships with a number of women. But as the relationships became
too deep, he had to extricate himself from his virtual friends'
dependencies, leaving a good deal of anger and numerous sociological
questions.

But the most interesting aspect of the story to me is that no one can
verify it. It appears to be a conflation of various incidents
involving different people. In a way, drawing any conclusions at all
would be pointless, because we don't know what emotions were involved
and can't investigate the participants' positive and negative
reactions. Thus does an influential and highly significant case study
about Internet identity take on a murky identity of its own.

Today's digital trails are more persistent than those ones that
created the legend of the CompuServe psychiatrist. Anyone engaging
with strangers today would probably carry on through social networks,
blogs, or wikis that do a better job of preserving the trail of logins
and postings.

Thus, I return to my assertion that identity is becoming more unified
online, not more fragmented. We may not be exactly as we appear
online, but for the purposes of public discourse, what we appear to be
is adequate.

When college student Jennifer Ringley began her famous webcam of daily
life in 1996, it was seen either as a bold experiment in conceptual
art or a pathetic bid for attention. Soon, though, the inclusion of
cheap cameras in cell phones fostered a youth culture that captured
and distributed every trivial moment of their lives, a trend driven
further by ease of using Twitter from a cell phone.

Handy access to networks by cameras and video devices made it
inevitable that people would impulsively send sexually suggestive
photos of themselves to people with whom they were having intimate
relationships, or with whom they wanted such relationships.
A rather unscientific

survey
by

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
found that 20% of teenager send nude or semi-nude photos
of themselves to other people.
A less sensationalistic

report from the Pew Research Center
finds only 4%, but raises the mystique-shattering admonition that the
trust shown by the senders of the photos is routinely violated by
their recipients, either right away or later when the relationship is
ruptured.

Addressing the safety issue in an

earlier article,
I suggest that "along the spectrum of risky behaviors young people
engage in (eating disorders, piercings in dangerous locations, etc.)
to deal with body image problems that are universal at that age, a
nude photo isn't so bad."
But I would love to see a deeper psychological inquiry into why young
(and not always young) people perform deal such blows to their own
privacy. I think such counter-intuitive behavior embodies the very
contradictions in image and reality that run through this series of
articles.

Perhaps the eroticism of releasing intimate photos over the network
reflects the core contradiction people sense in online identity. The
nude photo is a unique token of one's deepest identity, without
actually being that identity. Like
René Magritte's famous pipe painting,
the photo of you is not you. But by sending it to someone with whom
you want a sexual relationship, you're saying, "Hey bud, this could be
me if you follow through in the flesh."

For a long time the Internet was praised as a place to shed the
baggage of race and other defining traits ("nobody knows you're a
dog"). But as researchers such as Lisa Nakamura point out, postings
that brim over with images and videos reintroduce race, gender, and
other artifacts of daily life with a vengeance. And research by
anthropologist danah michele boyd shows that people self-segregate in
social forums, reinforcing rather than breaking down the social
divisions that frustrate the prospects for mutual understanding among
different races and groups.

One could throw in, as another consequence of the growth of identity,
the oft-observed tendency to read only political articles that
reinforce one's existing views. Unlike other observers, who look back
wistfully at an age where we all got our information from a few
official media sources, I

have applauded the proliferation of views,
but agree that we need to find ways to encourage everyone to read the
most cogent arguments of their opponents. Censorship--even
self-censorship--does not contribute to identity formation in a
healthy manner.

There's also more than a hint of the trend toward asserting identity
in the participatory culture chronicled and analyzed by Henry Jenkins:
the fan fiction, the commentary sites for X Files and The
Matrix, the games and consumer polls held by movie studios, and
so forth. This participatory culture is mostly a community affair,
which creates a group identity out of many unconnected
individuals. But surely, creating an unauthorized sequel or
re-interpreting a scene in a movie is also an act of personal
expression. I would call it placing a stake in the cultural ground,
except that the metaphor would be far too static for an ever-changing
media stream. It would be more apt to call the personal contributions
a way of inserting a marker with one's identity into the ongoing reel
of unfolding culture.

It's a lot easier nowadays to be real when you're on the Internet. But
some people still, for many reasons, adopt forged identities or
non-identities. We'll explore that phenomenon next.

The posts in "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between" are:

1. 
   Introduction
   
   



2. 
   Being online: Your identity in real life--what people know
   


3. 
   Your identity online: getting down to basics
   


4. 
   Your identity to advertisers: it's not all about you
   



5. What you say about yourself, or selves (this post)




6. Forged identities and non-identities (to be posted December 26)




7. Group identities and social network identities (to be posted December 28)




8. Conclusion: identity narratives (to be posted December 30)

The

Peer to Patent
project has already earned its place in history. It was explicitly
cited as inspiration for the open government initiative in the Obama
administration, which recently released a comprehensive directive
(available as a
PDF)
covering federal agencies. The founder of the project, law professor
Beth Noveck, began implementation of the directive as Deputy CTO in
the US government. But I've been wondering, along with many other
people, where Peer to Patent itself is going.

It's encouraging to hear that a new pilot has started in Australia and
has gathered a small community of volunteer patent art seekers. You
can check out the

official site
and its

Wikipedia page.
Because Australia is much smaller in population than the US and sees
much less patent activity, the scope of the pilot is smaller but seems
to be chugging along nicely.

The pilot started on December 9 and plans to run for six months,
offering 40 patents for review in the areas of software and business
methods (the same ones as the US Peer to Patent project). Among
participating patent applicants are IBM, General Electric,
Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, CSIRO, and Aristocrat. Right now, 15 patents
are posted, each has at least one volunteer reviewer, and one boasts
two suggestions for potential prior art.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald of the Queensland University of Technology,
the Project Leader of Peer to Patent Australia, says, "Peer to Patent
allows people from anywhere to plug into the patent examination
process and to add what value they can. And from what we have seen in
the US, it works: examiners are relying on the Peer to Patent prior
art notifications. Our aim is to help build an international platform
for the project as well as embed its benefits within the Australian
patent system. We ask you to join the Australian project and help
contribute to the development of Peer to Patent on a worldwide basis."

While the U.S. pilot is undergoing evaluation, Peer to Patent's
executive directory Mark Webbink says, "Signs are good for a potential
restart of the program some time in 2010. Dave Kappos, the Under
Secretary of Commerce and Director of the USPTO, has long been a
supporter of Peer to Patent, and the prior art contributions appear to
be proving useful. The worldwide economy produced some drag on program
expansion when the UK Intellectual Property Office delayed its
anticipated pilot. However, the Japan Patent Office, which previously
ran its own peer review pilot, now appears interested in expanding its
program. IP Australia and Queensland University of Technology are to
be commended for moving on the pilot so quickly." Brian Fitzgerald
says that China and other Asian countries are watching Japan and
Australia with interest.

I have followed Peer to Patent since fairly early drafts of the
proposal, have written about it frequently, and believe it is both
viable and necessary. The recent ruling against Microsoft Office shows
that patents in software, at least, are way out of control. Prior art
cannot in itself solve a broken system, but a robust examination
process can at least make applicants think twice about trying to exert
ownership over routine concepts such as separating a document's markup
from its content. (That's the purpose of markup in the first place.)
Incidentally, Australia has its own version of the famous

Bilski patent case
ending the practice of business patents,

Grant v Commissioner of Patents.

In fact, the progress Peer to Patent has made in many countries proves
my faith in it. Just think about the inertia of government agencies
and the impenetrability of both the individual patent application and
the patent process as a whole. Who would imagine, putting all those
barriers together, that Peer to Patent could have accomplished so much
already?

We're not on Internet time here, but on policy time. Peer to Patent is
still a baby, and with enough care and feeding it can thrive and grow
strong.