i tweet therefore i am ... a psychopath?

Next week at DEFCON, the good people of the Online Privacy Foundation will be giving a talk on their research regarding what a person's twitter usage reveals about their personality. Specifically, they are examining the (dark triad) psychological traits of narcissism, psychopathy and machiavellianism with a view to answering the question "Can twitter really help expose psychopath killer's traits?"

In particular, they propose to address:

1. Public understanding of psychopathy;

2. General public focus on whether we can spot psychopaths and therefore predict crime; and

3. Public perception that detecting personality from social media is infallible.

Of course, given that this is a talk by the Online Privacy Foundation, I would expect that they will touch on the troubling privacy implications of their research. The participants in the study were volunteers (cheered on by Stephen Fry, which could be said to be under the duress of awesome); participants in any sort of real world application of the research would not be, and we would find ourselves stuck in a bind between privacy and security. While its always difficult to know which way public policy is going to turn on these questions, something (PATRIOT Act) gives me a clue... 

In any event, I imagine that this is a talk that will touch a few raw nerves this week. In fact, I would be worried that current events might overwhelmingly colour reactions to the topic.

Apparently the paper is going to be published a month-ish after DEFCON, so watch this space.

digital dualism vs augmented reality

In his recent piece in The New Inquiry, Nathan Jurgenson discusses the fetishization of 'real life' (as opposed to web life) in contemporary culture.

He argues that the discursive valorisation of 'the real' can be understood as a reaction to the proliferation of mobile technology. Indeed, he argues that the constancy of our interconnection/-nectedness has left us longing for a more pure or authentic pre-digital self, manifesting in the celebration of tropes of the homemade, the offline, the rustic.

However, Jurgenson takes the view that the romanticization of the meat world is based on a false assumption that there is dualism between our online and offline worlds. Rather, he argues that we are living in an age of augmented reality, where the online and offline are interconnected, mutually constituting and reinforcing, and that there is artificiality at play in suggestions that we have 'collectively lost the offline experience'. Instead, he claims that we are now able to appreciate offline life in a way we were never able to before.

It strikes me as cynical to suggest that we appreciate something more because it has been compromised, and i don't think that Jurgenson pays enough attention to the way that the online physically (and psychologically) disrupts and coopts our experience of the offline (doesn't he care that his friends are on their phones during dinner?), but I do think he makes a good point regarding the dissolution of the divide between offline and online life when he says that "the clear distinction between on and offline, between human and technology, is queered beyond tenability."

And maybe, as Jurgenson alleges, this isn't a bad thing. Perhaps, the more comfortable we get with our augmented reality, the better we will be able to manage the new rules of the game - and the less we will be bothered by our friends tweeting through dinner.

But for me - and you can call me old fashioned - there will always be room for a twitter free zone, for conversation that is not mediated by a character limit and for loose talk, muddled up, spontaneous opinions that aren't edited to most flatter the opiner. Does that mean I reject the augmentation of our reality? Do I think we have to switch off to plug into the 'real world'? No. But I do think it's important that we keep discussing the way that the various modes of 'real life' both online and off intersect, bounce off and shape each other, and the way that senses of self are profoundly informed by the way that that self is performed and communicated. 


What do you think? Is it a zero sum game? Or can it be both and neither?

multiple selves

It has become almost redundant to refer to the web as the technological apparatus for the emergence of multiple selves. Sherry Turkle talks about the way that web allows us to “recast identity in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives” and explore multiple aspects of self in parallel. Laura Robinson notes that “these technologies present self-ing opportunities for an ephemeral self, without commitment to a masterself that becomes an ‘I’ or ‘me’.” 

Clearly, the theoretical paradigm of multiple selves reflects the postmodern critique of the narrative of the essential self with its attendant rejection of the ‘myth of wholeness’. And it is the desire to preserve this revolutionary potential of multiple selves - the choose your own identity riff that Chris Poole lionises - that has led to so much uproar around ideas like google passport.

But how much are we actually walking the walk of all this prismatic identity talk? More and more the read-write-webverse seems to be trending towards an interconnectedness of self that forces us to be one person online. 

In fact, an emerging consequence of the collapsed contexts of the web seems to be that we are perhaps more our selves online than in the real world - I am me in ways I didn't have to be me before, I am the same me to my mum and my boss and my friends, even when once I would have preferred to keep those versions of my self separate and distinct.

Is this leading to a situation - like a certain social network founder would have it - where privacy itself is no longer a relevant ambition? Is the web finally going to catch up to the Australian legal system? Or are we going to find new ways to carve out private spaces in the share-everything landscape of the web? 

Of course, it's still early days in the evolution of the web and it's hard to predict what it will look like five years (or even a year) from now. But I worry that the longer we allow things to continue as they are - where we rely on the privacy settings of corporations with absolutely no interest in protecting our privacy - the more we will disenfranchise ourselves from the conversation and handover control of a big part of our identities to 'the man'.

What do you think? Can we still have private places in open spaces? Or do we need locked wall garden internet communities to keep our secrets for us?

Connected, but alone

In Sherry Turkle's recent TED talk, the Life on the Screen author turns her analytical gaze on the paradox of why she loves to receive texts even as she worries that too many texts may be a problem. In essence, she is interested in exploring the way in which the increasing ubiquity of technology may be changing the way we relate to each other - and the way we relate to ourselves. For Turkle, the central difference between the excitement she felt 15 years ago with regard to technology and the concern she feels now is the fact that 15 years ago we would go online, hang out - and then turn off. 


It is the absence of turning off that gives Turkle the sense that technology may be taking us places we don't want to go. She cites what she refers to as the 'Goldilocks effect' of technology - the ability it gives us to moderate our self-presentation, interactions and relationships in such a way as to keep other people 'not too close, not too far, just right'. In so doing, she argues, we have lost the ability to have a real conversation, and we have lost the ability to be alone, with the result that "we expect more from technology and less from each other". Sadly, a lot of the examples she gave of the increasing alone/togetherness of our social lives rang true for me. 


What do you think? Are we trying so hard to be constantly connected that we can't be by ourselves? Are we editing and retouching ourselves so much that we are no longer able to experience authentic intimacy? Is the way that we communicate online inauthentic, or just a new kind of authenticity?