Talks of Note

From time to time I come across some very interesting podcasts. Here are a couple that I have found very interesting.

Ibiblio hosts a number of interesting talks. Back in September Danah Boyd, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information gave a very interesting talk about "digital publics". She asks what has happened to the things we did growing up, like biking around neighborhood, hanging out and doing nothing. These activities have been scheduled out of kids' lives. Kids' lives are now scheduled from 7am to 7pm. Danah says, in addition, a critical informal learning period when kids figure out status, learn to socialize and negotiate communities, and gain a cultural understanding has also been scheduled out. Instead kids go online on and attempt to learn these lessons. She ties in a lot of her research and thought and delivers an interesting discussion.



USC's Center on Public Diplomacy, hosted Bruce Schneier, security expert, to address public diplomacy and technology.

"Both data storage has dropped to free and data processing has dropped to free. As these things get cheaper it is easier to keep the data than it is to throw it away... so we are now leaving digital footprints... everywhere as we walk through our lives... so this is a problem because at least in the United States this data isn't owned by you."

He goes on to talk about how these "footprints" are used for identification and further, identification for security. Bruce feels these checks are a fiction and challenges the idea that identity somehow maps to intention. Can we actually pick out evil doers or terrorists? Criminals yes, but terrorists? It is becoming possible to offer wholesale surveillance where we can follow everyone and listen to every phone call. However, Bruce says this does not improve security. Trying to identify threats from all this data is like looking for a needle in a haystack while adding more hay. He talks about the bias for identification within the security industry, that identification makes surveillance easy, except that threats come from out of the blue.




You marketers must love this. Imagine being able to identify who someone is, how much money they earn, how much they have bought from the store and what as they walk into the store. Automatically you know employee know how to treat that person.


The next one I plan on listening to is this talk by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.