Infocalypse

I continuously skitter along the narrow edges of terminology between pretending to be a digital native and being labeled a well-adjusted digital imigrant. The generations coming after me, due to growing up with computers, are nowadays labeled digital natives. While their forbearers, those having grown up in a carefree live devoid of the hectic of modern communication, are colloquialy called digital imigrants. At least those who do not entirely refuse to work with computers are called imigrants, the rest is (lovingly) called digital fossiles.And then there is the digital hermit. They are often highly skilled individuals. Some of them are socially reclusive, others just bland and a few behave like rock-stars in their niche of expertise. What they all have in common, is their desire and actively pursued interest in eradicating any and all traces of their existence on the web. They grave anonymity, scorn any attempt of surveillance and cherish the notion of being a ghost in the machine.

As to my experience, carefully managing ones online identity is worth the effort, yields useful benefits and requires an amount of time that is still manageable. Just carelessly becoming a transparent digital citizen and therefore a cheap target for identity theft may be a easy way of digital living, but delivers a big and potentially very damaging package of pain. To complete the spectrum, the digital hermit spends as much time as the digital native, if not more, on the web but to eradicate all traces he may have left there.

My gripes with the way of the hermit are mostly that it is a life led by fear. Sure, in the cold war bomb shelters where all the rage and people had a good reason to believe so, but always preparing for the worst case will not make a happy life. So, in my personal opinion, prudence in ones behavior of usage is the best rule of thumb.

Still, after a few events lately, I sometimes feel the urge to become a digital hermit. Why, you may ask, and the answer is largely one of patterns I see and how the scare the living daylight out of me.

The First Sign of the Infocalypse: iPhoto ‘09

The new iPhoto offers facial recognition. So I can just tag a photo with the name of my loved ones, spend a few pictures in training the software and et voila, out of a few thousand shots, I can find each and everyone where those people are depicted. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Next step: native Facebook and Flickr integration, thus easily syncing data back and forth and using the vast amount of photos available on those networks to automatically train the software. Even if this is not entirely 100% accurate and/or involves users giving their consent, what it amounts to is the following:

The more people use iPhoto and Facebook and/or Flicker, the better the systems get at recognizing persons with little input on the users side. So eventually, someone I don’t even know will make a snapshot of me. They will put this up on Facebook and - Booom - suddenly the system knows I’m in that photo. Even if the information is not revealed to the photographer, because we are not connected in the network, the information is there.

Next, with a little patience and the right skills, someone could jury rig a real-time surveillance of my whereabouts. How? Well, simple, with a gazillion picture-capable mobiles and digital cameras out there, the likelihood of someone making a picture of you any second - at least while you’re in public - is a given.

Did I mention the new places feature in iPhoto 09? Well, it utilizes the fact that ever more cameras and phones come equipped with GPS and therefore can not only tell you who is in the picture, but also where that picture was taken. Finding those informations is a snap - just google it. Connecting it all together? Take Yahoo pipes and with little technical skill you can aggregate various data from various sources in one place. Visualize it? Every decent web-developer these days should be able to put those informations on a map and animate it nicely. The result? Probably flakey real-time surveilance on a persons whereabouts, doings, communications and so on. Do this with a group of connected people and you will get a very solid coverage.

Maybe this is some idea a promising young entrepreneur will pick up and monetize, effectively superseding boulevard magazines and their paparazzi. Maybe this is the limit of exhibitionism digital natives will take, or its just the beginning.

I, for my part, am disturbed by such developments.

The Second Sign of the Infocalypse: Palm Pre

It’s small, it’s sleek, and it offers everything a very vocal community of iPhone users and haters always wanted: A keyboard, copy and paste, IM integration, etc. It’s the Palm Pre. Admittedly it’s sexy and evolves on a few concepts introduced by the iPhone. From my perspective it’s the first real contender to the JesusPhone and I will eagerly pursue how it fares.

The reason I’m mentioning it here, is one central concept of the Pre: It makes the users live easier by automatically collecting data. You have accounts on various social networks? All providing different information for the same personalities? No problem, the Pre all collects it for you. It even shows you where all the data is from, in case you should be wondering where the picture, or martial status, or their nieces’ birthday is coming from.

That’s all sweet for those who want to spent time on doing things vs. spending time on collecting things, but for those aware of what is actually happening, this means that there is a trend to automate those aforementioned collecting of data. Digital natives are embracing such behaviors and companies won’t say no to the generation of consumers becoming more and more the financially dominant generation with every passing day.

Infocalypse, the Conclusion

We are at the beginning, fellow digitals. Information will get more in quantity, more in detail, more distributed, more connected, more collected, better filtered, less redundant, less tangible and far more easily available. Should you ever have considered to take the next exit left, now is probably better then tomorrow. Should you appreciate the development, welcome in the 21st century.