CNN has an article entitled “The Internet and the ‘End of Privacy'” which has some interesting facts, raising interesting points, but does not really go to the bottom of the issue. Louis Gray has an article that shows how transparency works to his benefit. 

It struck me that the persons who stand to gain most from total transparency are those who are the best suited for their societies. The willingness to share the significant details of their lives provides them with the opportunity to prove this suitedness, and therefore can serve as an asset when applying for a job, finding a partner, running for office, or whatever. The more social networking sites succeed in prizing information about ourselves into the open, the greater will be the tendency to base selections on people who are both well within the radar of the internet and have a clean track record (within the parameters that companies, potential partners, acceptance committees and others may set). 

Eric Schmidt’s much-quoted remark from last December that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” epitomizes well the limited imagination of those who are in charge of the social networking tools we use. Since we still live in a society which has fairly narrow constraints about what constitutes acceptable social behaviour, political views, religious beliefs, etc., and the world of potential employers, immigration officers, juries, constituencies, housing committees, etc. may be even narrower, glass walls best favor those who fall well within the conventions.

Those who can afford to take responsibility for their nonconventional behavior, divergent political views, heretical religious beliefs, outrageous behaviour, etc. may also derive benefit from transparent transactions with social media, of course, as long as they are operating within the parameters of what is acceptable in their chosen sub-cultures.

(The illustration is the book cover of Evgeni Zamyatin’s 1920s science fiction novel, We, whose characters live in glass-walled flats.)

I’ve gone back to Facebook for a while to learn about some of the changes happening there, and have just been reading an article by Jesse Stay about new possibilities regarding Facebook lists. Facebook lists are interesting, and, like Twitter lists, could be used to manage Facebook when one is dealing with thousands of friends (I’m not, and most people aren’t – but if the intention would be to use facebook as more than a way of staying in touch with a few friends, then it might become relevant).

Lists seem to have 2 main purposes, but these can be mutually contradictory:

(a) To enable broadcast to a specific group of people who may be interested in a certain kind of posting (below the status box, click the lock icon, then Customize, then “Specific People”, then choose name of list).

(b) To enable a filtered view of activity (click Friends on left margin, then choose the list name).

I just made a list called M.E. Peace, Israel & Palestine Issues. I could use this list to (a) broadcast links to news stories on these issues. And (b) I could use it to read stories from people who have something to say about these issues.

The problem is that not everyone who is interested in this kind of posting would have something interesting to say about the subject area.

It would therefore be necessary to create 2 similar lists – one for broadcast (which would be kept private) and the other for receiving, which could be visibly placed on the profile page.

The Brahmanic view of the universe is one in which human beings play an intimate and essential part in the natural cycles and systems of our world. We cannot be just consumers, and yet we can produce nothing by ourselves. We are full participants in the processes of creation and destruction. These processes depend upon us, but not only on us.

In the brahmanic universe, it was not only a question of planting seeds, waiting for rain and sunshine and then harvesting crops. There was the necessity to give something back. This giving took the form of a reverential relationship toward all life. It involved sacrifice and gratitude. Such an attitude affects the way in which we treat animals, the soil and the resources we need to survive upon the planet.

Yesterday evening we went to a Sulha meeting at the Everest Hotel in Beit Jala, since Dorit had to present something there.  The atmosphere was quite good, though not so many young Israelis (lots of older ones). More young Palestinians, and also older ones.  Lots of drumming and singing.

Then we went to hear a concert by Iqbal Ahmad Khan, featuring the music of Ameer Khusro.  As so often with Indian musicians, he attempted to explain the mechanics of the compositions and, as usual, I didn’t understand any of the explanation.  But the music was wonderful.  I wonder why Indian musicians feel a need to explain their art?  Obviously any art inspires because it follows certain rules of aesthetics.  We know that the Mona Lisa is a wonderful painting without understanding what makes it so.  So they played for an hour and a half and then stopped, and I was moved to tears and left feeling that I hadn’t quite heard enough. 

With Facebook accounting for 25% of US pageviews and their conquest of the internet growing by day, it looks like the rest of the web is on the way to becoming terra incognita – a dangerous place with dragons and headless face-chested men.  But still a more interesting hangout than Zuckerberg’s insipid blue and white diner.  It seems the only hope for the social web is in tumblr. 

I wish Tumblr and others success but hold out for opensource blogging software on cheap shared hosts like tubu.net.  Here, I’m not in competition for coolness or influence. It’s just what interests me.  Facebook, Twitter, Google and these other companies make me feel like I’m their commodity. Most users don’t even seem to mind. 

In the 20th century we only had to worry about our credit rating.  In the 21st century we increasingly have to think about our “social rating” or however it eventually comes to be defined.  In such a world, I prefer to drop out.  It may not be true today, but I predict that the hippies of our era will make sure that they remain under the radar of the commercial social networks.  Truly we need a new social movement: not a ludite web-rejecting canaille, but a tech-savvy coterie that embraces FOSS and open source distributed social networks such as Appleseed or Diaspora are trying to cook.

Ubuntu 10.10 doesn’t work with Sun’s weblog publisher for OpenOffice.  In the comments, it seems not to have worked since Ubuntu 10.04.  I have installed ScribeFire, a Firefox extension.  I wonder why WordPress hasn’t found an easier way to set up email-to-blog.  That looked like such a laborious process that I gave up.  I’m new to ScribeFire, so we’ll see…

Okay – but a little bit buggy.  The possibility of editing an original post (rather than publishing anew) is greyed out.  And the control box on the right appears and disappears.  But at least it publishes.

Today brought the news that the developers of the Haystack project – which sought to enable Iranian citizens to use the web anonymously, have had to halt the project due to a security review. It appears from news reports that the project was never safe in the first place and may have placed Iranians more at risk for using it than if they had not used it at all.

In Britain, a 17 year old who launched an abusive email to President Obama after a night of drinking, was tracked down by police, photographed and informed by the US government that he is barred from setting foot on US soil for life.

Without noticing, we have moved from a period in which we regarded the internet as the ultimate tool of democracy, allowing anyone anywhere to read and make the news, to a period in which the internet seems like the ultimate tool of totalitarianism.It keeps an indelible and unforgiving record of what we are doing and thinking. This record is available to just about anyone, while governments and security forces are able also to trace us through IP addresses and scrutinize internet traffic. Some countries demand complete access to all information, including cellular telephone records, as came out in the recent fracas between RIM (makers of the Blackberry) and the Indian government.

We have come accustomed to surrendering information that is used by companies in order to make us more suitable targets for their marketing. We provide the tools for social network analysts to measure our level of influence based on the number of followers and friends. New location technologies and simple social network updates announcing our whereabouts add another level to the way our privacy is compromised.

The end result is that while the internet indeed allows us to read and express almost anything, the consequences are dire, and not only in countries with repressive regimes. We expose ourselves not just to the whims of government officials but to potential employers, insurers, lenders, landlords – anyone with an interest in learning all about us. Every petition we sign, every blog post we write, every link we share, every forum discussion we take part in, every political or religious opinion we express, every status update we unthinkingly splurt out, every compromising or unflattering photo in which we are tagged, shows up in search engines and remains there for years. The end result is that if we value our personal freedom, the internet has become a dangerous place to hang out. And this only stands to get worse.

Saturday was a quiet day. Windows closed. Quiet hum of the A/C. So many days of our lives pass dimly, without attention having been paid to them. We are busy doing stuff, but if you ask us in what exactly we have been engaged the following day, there’s no telling. And now I was just reading in Tinker Creek,

“What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. … I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

The TV is blaring in the background, in the evening’s sticky heat. Multiple distractions, those that are borne in from the environment reverberating with the internal noise. And with all this I am trying to focus on what Annie Dillard has said.

The problem is that she is describing (here) a state of absorption. The only quiet that most of us know is when our consciousness is absorbed in something. Afterwards, we emerge from our absorption as if from a great absence, from a spell of time that has been subtracted from our lives. If the experience was powerful, it may survive in memory as a shadow of what was and we may hanker after it.

But the secret, the real trick, is to be fully present without being either absorbed or distracted. No one needs to haul us away. The noise of the TV does not prevent us from being silent.

Along the river bank in Rishikesh, on the Swargashram side, are saddhus’ cottages. Plying the path that passes by them are cows, tourists, pilgrims and young guys on motorbikes – who violently honk their horns at all the rest.

Noise is ever present. We can shut it out by self-absorption or we can give up on meditation and stay with the noise. Neither is a good option, because being truly alive means to be alert to all levels of being. Such alertness is not subtracted from our lives like half-forgotten dreams.