Gumption

Thingamajiggr II: Attentionality, Surreality and Sexuality

I attended Thingamajiggr, "a party celebrating the innovative Pacific Northwest tech community", last night. The party - organized by Waggle Labs and O'Reilly Radar, and held at the 911 Media Arts Center - was fun, and the presentations preceding the party - by John Medina, Scotto Moore, Dan Savage and others - were very engaging ... as were the presentations preceding the main presentations.

Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Radar) was MC for the event, and he started things off by introducing some of the organizers and sponsors of Thingamajiggr, a few people who plan to run workshops at BarCampSeattle this weekend, and other friends. Adrian MacDonald (911 Media Arts Center and Editor of On Screen Magazine) gave a whirlwind tour of the projects going on at the 911 Media Arts Center [Note to self: see if I can entice my kids to enroll in one or more of their youth programs.]

Brady then introduced Shelly Farnham (Co-Founder of Waggle Labs, and part-time consultant at Strands Labs Seattle) who gave us an overview of Pathable, a lightweight social networking tool for events where people are matched based on social tagging data that is printed on badges, which was being used at the party (and BarCampSeattle). Thingamajiggr attendees who preregistered could peel off their badge from the wall near the entrance (see left photo, with Shelly and Waggle Labs partner Peter Brown) and place it somewhere on their body - some placement sites offer better viewing than others, of course. The badges include attendees' names, title, affiliation, category, a few self-describing tags and a list of people who are "matches" and "opposites" (based on those tags and perhaps other profile information on the web registration form (see my badge, in the right photo). It's a great idea, but I do admit some nostalgia for the stamped round metal buttons they used last time I was a Pathable participant, at FOO Camp 2007.

We were then treated to a preview of the upcoming Seattle Power Tool Drag Race & Derby by Rusty Oliver and Jeremy Franklin Ross Divide of the HazardFactory. The event involves people reconfiguring power tools - some of which have been augmented with flame spewing attachments - to run on a race track. The videos of past events provide a much more effective sense of the chaotic fun than any words I could use to further describe it.

John Medina, author of Brain Rules, was the first of the headline speakers at the event. After making a wry observation about the brain having evolved to learn in outdoor environments, in near constant motion - and how most lecture halls (such as the one at 911 Media Arts Center), classrooms and office environments are thus antithetical to promoting learning - John focused our attention on what he called the attentional spotlight in the brain, and helped us understand why people don't pay attention to boring things (Rule #4). Demonstrating attention to attentionality, John frequently paused throughout his talk to ask us "Do I still have your attention?" - an unnecessary question, as he is an extremely engaging speaker.

The brain processes meaning before detail, and this meaning has evolved based on how the brain perceives the answers to three sets of questions:

• Can I eat it? Can it eat me? (tastes and threats)
• Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? (sex)
• Have I seen it before? (pattern matching)

He then went on to claim that the attentional spotlight in the brain (Brodman Area 10) is sequential - it cannot truly multitask (i.e., process tasks in parallel). Although frequent task switching (which many of us call multitasking) appears to be increasingly the norm - for example, he average computer user has 17 windows at any given time (I currently have 25 open, but it's early on a Saturday morning) - it is not very effective, at least as it can be measured with respect to time to completion and error rates on tasks. In experiments comparing task switching to uninterrupted time on task, the time to completion of a task in the task switching condition is twice as long as in the uninterrupted condition, and results in 50% more errors.

Among the implications of these results are the dangers in using mobile phones while driving. John presented a chart - shown on the right - comparing the mean response time (MRT) of people under three conditions: normal, legally drunk (blood alcohol content of 0.08) and talking on a mobile phone (while sober). The chart shows that the MRT for a sober person talking on a mobile phone is considerably longer than for a person who is drunk. This is because when you talk with someone on the phone, you are visualizing them, in the same way as you visualize characters and scenes in a book by Faulkner or Tolkien (for example). Thus, your attentional spotlight is drawn away from your real world activity (e.g., driving) and into an imaginary world ... and this happens whether your mobile phone is in your hands or not (i.e., "hands-free" use of mobile phones). [I imagine that listening to audiobooks while driving would be just as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, talking on a mobile phone while driving ... so perhaps we'll see some laws prohibiting this combination of activities in the near future.] John noted that talking with someone on a mobile phlone is qualitatively different from talking to someone next to you in the car, because in the latter case your brain does not have to visualize or imagine your conversation partner - they are part of the real world scene. It is also different from listening to music ... except when listening to really good music - what I like to call "goosebump music", but which John referred to even more evocatively as delivering a dopamine lollipop - that has strong personal meaning to (and effect on) you ... so perhaps we'll see prohibitions against listening to meaningful music while driving, too. Personally, I think that the most dangerous driving situation is a parent with small, unruly children in the back seat, so if we really want to make our roads safer, we ought to prohibit that as well ... but I digress (do I still have your attention?).

I'll wrap up this section by noting that in thanking John after his talk, Brady noted that his book was published by Pear Press, which walks the talk of uninterrupted task focus by publishing and promoting only one book per year (!).

Scotto Moore was next up, presenting Intangible Method, A Digital Fairy Tale [Scotto's talk held my attention so effectively that I never even thought to take a photo, so I'll insert an image from his web site.]. The fictional story - created in the summer of 2006, and set in the summer of 2008 - is about a woman, known only as sarah-in-motion, who's everyday activities are captured and posted to the web ... by someone referred to as IntangibleMethod. This starts off with a daily series of YouTube videos on "sarah's walk to work", each of which generates tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments. The videos eventually move off the street and into her home with a series "sarah around the house". After she is BoingBoinged, she becomes totally immersed in the online postings of and about her, and things start changing for the worse, leading to her losing her job, her house, and eventually prompting a series of darker videos: "sarah sleeps in park", "sarah looks for change", "sarah spots new doorway". The ending brings the plot full circle again, with a provocative note from sarah-in-motion: ""my body was just an avatar. see you in second life." Scotto finished off promoting his upcoming play, Interlaced Falling Star, epic science fiction told on a budget of under $300, showing at the Annex Theatre from July 25 - August 23.

Dan Savage, author of the Savage Love column and blog (or slog), rounded out the evening presentations. Brady didn't remember the exact title of Dan's column during his introduction, and so Dan reminded him (and us) several times during the presentation that he has been writing this column for 17 years (or, as he frequently directed the reminder toward Brady, "longer than you've had pubic hair").

Dan led off by telling us that he sees his job (if not his mission) as "abstinence reprogramming" for college students, trying to undo the damage wrought by $1.2B in federal government funding during the Bush administration for sex education programs that promote ignorance as a virtue and amount to nothing more than "reproductive biology". He likened the way we typically teach sex education in our schools to driver's education that teaches students how a car's internal combustion engine works, rather than informing them about turn signals, traffic signs, how to avoid accidents and other rules of the road.

If John Medina's refrain was "Do I still have your attention?", Dan's refrain was "Any other questions?" After his introductory remarks, he spent the rest of his time in a question and answer session with the audience of about 100 people.

Responding to a question about how the Internet had affected the newspaper column profession, Dan complained that the web, and weblogs in particular, "ruined a sweet deal" for newspaper columnists: he used to get by working for two days, scrambling over the weekend to get the paper out, and then spend three days getting high and watching movies (telling his editors that he was trolling for materials). The news cycle is no longer weekly (as at The Stranger), daily or even hourly, but momently. And with the advent of web 2.0, it's no longer enough to simply write blog entries, with podcasting, everyone has to be a radio station, and with YouTube, everyone has to be a TV station.

However, there have been some advantages. Before the Internet, he was frequently asked for referrals or define terms - both of which are now easily accessible to anyone with a web browser. He also used to receive long, flowery descriptive letters of various genital sores, now he gets digital photos of them in email ... from people who are, ironically, too embarrassed to go see a doctor about treatment. He may turn these photos into a flipbook ... although there have been some drawbacks to these emails, as he related a funny story about a time when one popped up unexpectedly when he was on an airplane flight, and a woman called out ("Oh my god, he's masturbating!").

A somewhat less ambivalent advantage to the Internet is that it promotes his goal of deprogramming ignorance- abstinence-based sex education: as he puts it, "the web is sex education in America" (reminding me of Avenue Q's song, "The Internet is for Porn" ... which further reminds me, the show is playing at The Paramount Theatre right now). Now we just need to carry the message to the streets - Dan suggested putting up advertisements for the Scarlet Teen web site ("sex ed for the real world") on middle school buses.

Interestingly, despite his promotion of openness, he reported that his son has never seen a computer, a copy of The Stranger or the book Dan wrote about adopting him, "The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant", despite the fact that many other kids his age have cable TV in their bedrooms. When people started clapping, he counseled "Don’t be smug Seattle applauders".

Dan also shared a funny story about an interview he conducted with a man who married his horse on his Savage Love Radio. At the end of the interview, he asked, "Are you married to a boy horse or a girl horse?" Drawing himself up rather huffily, the man replied, “I am not a homosexual!” ... even people who practice bestiality have to draw the line somewhere, I guess.

All in all, it was a great set of talks, and although I didn't stay long afterward, many of the people in the audience - seemed just as interesting as those presenting at the front of the room. I'm sad I am missing BarCampSeattle this weekend, as I'm sure many of these people will be leading sessions at the unconference, but I'm glad that I at least got o enjoy a little taste of the local tech community at Thingamajiggr!

Religion, Politics, Racism and Invisibility: Obama and Wright vs. McCain and Hagee

Robb's comment on my post about the Capitol Steps show in Seattle got me thinking - and writing - [again] about some of the religious and racial issues in the U.S. presidential race. I started to write a comment in response to Robb's comment, but as it grew longer and longer, I decided to move it into a separate blog post.

Robb is a good friend from college who grew up in the U.S. but has spent many years living in New Zealand, where he has been increasingly appreciating the natural beauty of the land (especially the mountains), the indigenous people - Maori - and their culture ... and writing inspiring prose and poetry about his experiences and growing appreciation in his Musings from Aotearoa blog. In his comment on my post, Robb, raised a number of provocative issues:

I find this issue of 0bama "throwing" Wright "under the bus" to reveal the real dark side of this issue, old fashioned racism. I still fail to see what he, Wright, has actually said that can be construed as being either inflammatory or has anything to do with 0bama directly. What are people so afraid of here, or should I write, perhaps inflammatorily, what is conservative, entrenched, white America so afraid of here? I am trying to track where I read it down, but I recall reading somewhere John McCain's religous mentor saying the New orleans devastation was the "wrath of God on those people". Where is that in the news media? 0r what things are spoken from the pulpit of many white churches on any given Sunday in the land where Emmett Till was murdered? Where is the balance?

Good questions! I want to spend a bit of time reviewing some of Wright's recent remarks before exploring McCain's religious connections.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of the current Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, has made a few appearances lately. I enjoyed watching Bill Moyers interview Wright on PBS a week ago, a venue in which Wright came across as a relatively reasonable - and clearly passionate - man. I did not watch Wright's more recent National Press Club speech and Q&A last week, but it was carried on C-SPAN (and there are segments posted on YouTube), and Fox News has posted a transcript; I had seen and heard snippets of commentary during the week, but it was not until Robb's comment that I decided to sit down and listen the entire speech and read the transcript.

As with my earlier experience in reviewing the larger contexts of Wright's sermons from which short snippets have been repeatedly rebroadcast in the mass media, and which have been reportedly perceived as so inflammatory by so many, I found myself agreeing with nearly all of the views expressed by Wright in his National Press Club talk on "The African American Religious Experience; Theology & Practice". And, in an effort to help provide a larger - or at least different - context than has been offered in most accounts of this talk, I wanted to share some of the excerpts that I found most inspiring.

Wright starts off describing the relative invisibility of the black church and black religious tradition, beginning with its roots during slavery, and continuing through the present day, referencing The Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison - implicitly and explicitly - throughout his remarks, and I think this invisibility characterizes - or cloaks - many of the issues that are arising throughout this controversy. As he progresses through the talk, his presentation become more inclusive, promoting liberation for all peoples, urging acceptance of differences without presuming deficiencies, and closing with an invitation to reconciliation, through which greater unity can be achieved ... and I can't help but note that the theme of unity is one of the key messages of Wright's [former?] church member, Barack Obama.

Robb's reference to "throwing Wright under a bus" highlights the unfortunate, but understandable (given the mass media focus on the most controversial aspects of Wright's views), tone of Obama's response to Wright's most recent remarks, in which he condemns the "outrageous" and "destructive" nature of some of those remarks. I find Obama's assertion that Wright is "giving comfort to those who prey on hate" to be particularly interesting. Wright's refusal to recede into the background - to become invisible - may be giving ammunition to those who prey on hate, but I don't see how it offers any comfort to anybody. The explosive charge of that ammunition is more the result of media coverage of Wright's comments than the comments themselves, which, in my interpretation, represent more of a challenge to those who promote and prey on hate rather than a comfort to them.

Anyhow, before offering further interpretations and judgments, here are some extended exerpts of the actual words spoken by Wright during his National Press Club speech: 

The black religious experience is a tradition that, at one point in American history, was actually called the “invisible institution,” as it was forced underground by the Black Codes.

The Black Codes prohibited the gathering of more than two black people without a white person being present to monitor the conversation, the content, and the mood of any discourse between persons of African descent in this country.

Africans did not stop worshipping because of the Black Codes. Africans did not stop gathering for inspiration and information and for encouragement and for hope in the midst of discouraging and seemingly hopeless circumstances.  They just gathered out of the eyesight and the earshot of those who defined them as less than human.

They became, in other words, invisible in and invisible to the eyes of the dominant culture.  They gathered to worship in brush arbors, sometimes called hush arbors, where the slaveholders, slave patrols, and Uncle Toms couldn’t hear nobody pray.

...

The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the 61st chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive. Liberating the captives also liberates who are holding them captive.

It frees the captives and it frees the captors.  It frees the oppressed and it frees the oppressors.

The prophetic theology of the black church, during the days of chattel slavery, was a theology of liberation.  It was preached to set free those who were held in bondage spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes physically.  And it was practiced to set the slaveholders free from the notion that they could define other human beings or confine a soul set free by the power of the gospel.

The prophetic theology of the black church during the days of segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, and the separate-but-equal fantasy was a theology of liberation.

It was preached to set African-Americans free from the notion of second-class citizenship, which was the law of the land.  And it was practiced to set free misguided and miseducated Americans from the notion that they were actually superior to other Americans based on the color of their skin.

The prophetic theology of the black church in our day is preached to set African-Americans and all other Americans free from the misconceived notion that different means deficient.

...

This principle of “different does not mean deficient” is at the heart of the prophetic theology of the black church.  It is a theology of liberation.

The prophetic theology of the black church is not only a theology of liberation; it is also a theology of transformation, which is also rooted in Isaiah 61, the text from which Jesus preached in his inaugural message, as recorded by Luke.

When you read the entire passage from either Isaiah 61 or Luke 4 and do not try to understand the passage or the content of the passage in the context of a sound bite, what you see is God’s desire for a radical change in a social order that has gone sour.

God’s desire is for positive, meaningful and permanent change. God does not want one people seeing themselves as superior to other people.  God does not want the powerless masses, the poor, the widows, the marginalized, and those underserved by the powerful few to stay locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more equal than others in that same society.

...

God does not desire for us, as children of God, to be at war with each other, to see each other as superior or inferior, to hate each other, abuse each other, misuse each other, define each other, or put each other down.

God wants us reconciled, one to another.  And that third principle in the prophetic theology of the black church is also and has always been at the heart of the black church experience in North America.

...

To say “I am a Christian” is not enough.  Why?  Because the Christianity of the slaveholder is not the Christianity of the slave. The God to whom the slaveholders pray as they ride on the decks of the slave ship is not the God to whom the enslaved are praying as they ride beneath the decks on that slave ship.

How we are seeing God, our theology, is not the same.  And what we both mean when we say “I am a Christian” is not the same thing. The prophetic theology of the black church has always seen and still sees all of God’s children as sisters and brothers, equals who need reconciliation, who need to be reconciled as equals in order for us to walk together into the future which God has prepared for us.

Reconciliation does not mean that blacks become whites or whites become blacks and Hispanics become Asian or that Asians become Europeans.

Reconciliation means we embrace our individual rich histories, all of them.  We retain who we are as persons of different cultures, while acknowledging that those of other cultures are not superior or inferior to us.  They are just different from us.

We root out any teaching of superiority, inferiority, hatred, or prejudice.

And we recognize for the first time in modern history in the West that the other who stands before us with a different color of skin, a different texture of hair, different music, different preaching styles, and different dance moves, that other is one of God’s children just as we are, no better, no worse, prone to error and in need of forgiveness, just as we are.

Only then will liberation, transformation, and reconciliation become realities and cease being ever elusive ideals.

During the Q&A following his speech, Wright was asked about about his recent remarks about the political nature of Obama's recent remarks renouncing some of Wright's earlier remarks.

Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls.  Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors.  They have a different person to whom they’re accountable.
...
He didn’t distance himself.  He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American.  He said I didn’t offer any words of hope. How would he know?  He never heard the rest of the sermon.  You never heard it.

Wright was also asked about his earlier assertion that "the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color" - still, for me, the most disturbing of his statements during the increasingly infamous sermon snippets. He referenced the books Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional?, by Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington, and went on to say:

I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven’t read things, then you can’t — based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

I share Wright's distrust of our government, though I still do not believe his earlier assertion. However, given the larger scope of all he has said (at the National Press Club, during Bill Moyer's interview, and in his sermons I have watched on YouTube), I am not willing to dismiss all of Wright's views based solely on this one questionable dimension ... and I can think of many, far more destructive, examples of questionable assertions by political and religious leaders.

Speaking of which, getting back to Robb's comments, and his reference to a hateful "wrath of God" condemnation of the victims of Hurricane Katrina by a religious figure associated with U.S. Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, I tracked down an article on "McCain’s faith: Pastor describes senator as devout, but low-key" in the Associated Baptist Press. McCain's pastor, Dan Yeary, notes some controversial religious connections for McCain:

The candidate endured some criticism in February after San Antonio pastor and Christian Zionist leader John Hagee endorsed him. Catholic and Jewish leaders denounced Hagee for statements he has made in the past that could be interpreted as anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic.

Hagee claimed the critics had misunderstood and de-contextualized his comments. Nonetheless, McCain’s campaign issued a statement in which he distanced himself from the preacher’s more controversial remarks without rejecting or repudiating the endorsement.

The senator has received less media scrutiny for a separate endorsement of his candidacy by Ohio pastor Rod Parsley. Parsley, who leads a charismatic multi-media empire, has been criticized for statements insisting Islam must be “destroyed” and for denigrating gays, the separation of church and state and secularists.

This led me to another article, "McCain, Hagee and the Politics of God's Wrath", in The Nation blog, which provides references to John Hagee - not McCain's pastor, but an endorser (and we know Obama has been criticized for people who have endorsed him) - and his "wrath of God" condemnation(s):

Hagee, whose views about a host of social issues give new meaning to the term "hateful," is not McCain's pastor. They have no personal or spiritual relationship. Rather, Hagee is a close political ally of McCain and an ardent supporter of the Arizona senator's presidential bid.

McCain sought Hagee's endorsement and continued to defend and embrace the pastor – saying he was "glad to have the minister's endorsement – even after Hagee said that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans because of the city's "sinful" acceptance of homosexuality.

"What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God…" Hagee explained after the city experienced a national disaster that cost at least 1,836 lives – making it the deadliest hurricane in American history – and permanently dislocated tens of thousands of Americans from not just their homes but the communities of their birth and upbringing.

I hadn't heard about this rather hateful comment that Robb mentioned - it was, one might say, invisible ... leading me to wonder about the relative visibility and invisibility of religious and political connections as they apply to white presidential candidates and black presidential candidates - but it reminded me of the many hateful pronouncements by Christian Coalition of America founder, former minister and erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson (who has endorsed many other Republican candidates over the years). [BTW, I was surprised to discover there is a Christian Coalition in New Zealand.] One example of hateful speech by this self-described "Christian" was uttered in response to Gay Days at Disney World:

"I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you, This is not a message of hate; this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs; it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor."  

I'm further reminded of some of the hateful speech associated with other conservative commentators, such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity, but do not want to digress further. I'll simply note that while Hagee is not McCain's current or former pastor, his unsolicited endorsement of McCain seems to be far less visible in the mass media than some of the unsolicited endorsements by controversial figures that Obama has received.

Speaking of media, further on in his comment, Robb notes:

I am not at all acquainted with American television these days, hardly with New Zealand television for that matter, but I must say when I do watch television here I find the best, and most informative, and most balanced programs on Maori Televison. And even as "enlightened" as white New Zealand claims to be, I readily recall the battle in the late 90's it was to get that up and running. Privileged people are always afraid of change it would seem.

The reference to Maori Television was prompted, in part, by my reference to 1995 testimony in which Senator McCain claimed that cable networks are less biased than PBS and "superior in some cases". Robb's observation that "privileged people are always afraid of change" really strikes a chord, and reminds me of an unfinished post I started months ago - after finishing Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks, and after hearing an interview on NPR with Tony Blair, in which he shared his father's perspective that "if you became successful then you became Conservative" - and may just prompt me to finish (and post) my rumination on the issue of incumbency, and the encumbrances that incumbents sometimes erect to maintain their unfair advantage(s) ... which, in my mind, relates to issues of religion, politics, racism and invisibility.

The Dalai Lama and the Reflectance and Resonance of Greatness, Understanding and Humility

His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, is in Seattle this week. I don't know if I'll get a chance to see him, personally - I've just returned from Florence, Italy (CHI 2008), with a really bad cold - but I just read a report by Ward Serrill in The Seattle Times on connecting Eye-to-Eye with the Dalai Lama when he first arrived in town that resonated deeply with me:

We don't speak a word. As he moves in front of me, my hands involuntarily reach out to grasp his. As our hands meet he looks up into my eyes and my world stops spinning. His eyes reveal a deep gravity. I see the serious work behind his childlike humor and spontaneity. The man has suffered much and discipline has made him into a spiritual warrior. This is serious work, these eyes tell me, this inner work to discover peace and being.

His attention is riveted. In this moment he is not a busy spiritual leader but simply a human looking gravely into the eyes of another. In this moment I see his greatness. It is this:

Humility is not a discipline; it is not a practice with him. Humility is simply what he is. I see in this moment of eyes meeting that he is incapable of placing himself above or below me. I am stunned by the reality of our equality.

And then he is gone, swept out of the room by his handlers. For the next three hours I am nearly incapable of speaking, stunned as I was with the presence of this understanding.

Ward's experience reminded me of the altered states and magnetic attraction of awakened people I experienced at Pop!Tech 2007, which had, in turn, reminded me of some earlier reports of this kind of high-resonance experience:

I was also reminded of Oriah Mountain Dreamer's observations in her audiotape, Your Heart's Prayer - which I'd earlier projected onto the practice of unfolding through blogging - about people who come into contact with spiritually enlightened individuals, such as Mahatma Ghandi the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa, likening the experience to what happens when two tuning forks coming into proximity of each other: the strong vibration of the spiritually enlightened person transmits energy to any other person that comes near.

[Having just listened again to the passage, I've amended a memory / transcription error in the original post above ... all the more apt because Oriah had actually referred to the Dalai Lama not Ghandi.]

As I have continued to reflect on how highly enlightened people have such a great impact on us, I am reminded of Don Miguel Ruiz' insights into the ways that people act as mirrors for us - enabling us to better see who we really are ... and/or what we could be. As he notes in the introduction to The Four Agreements, where he relates the enlightenment of a Toltec man:

He had discovered that he was a mirror for the rest of the people, a mirror in which he could see himself. "Everyone is a mirror", he said. He saw himself in everyone, but nobody saw him as themself. And he realized that everyone was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they really are. They couldn't see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke between the mirrors. And that wall of fog was made by the interpretations of light - the Dream of humans.

I would expand this to claim that highly enlightened people act as highly reflective mirrors for us. When we encounter highly enlightened individuals, there is less fog in the local atmosphere, and so we are thus better able to see the light in ourselves being reflected back more clearly.

Ward had made earlier comments in the Seattle Times on developing his film, The Heart of the Game, that further resonate with all of this:

"I am in awe of the journey right now," said Serrill. "It really is a labor of love that's gotten bigger than me. It's really opening its own doors right now."

Although I have not yet seen the film, Ward's comments suggest that he is not a stranger to greatness, understanding and humility, himself, and I would not be surprised if his film acts as an agent of reflection and resonance for others.

And I can't help but reflect on my last post - Do YouJustGetMe? Do I Even Get Myself? - and wonder how well highly enlightened individuals might score on guessing or being guessed in a personality test. [And, reflecting on humility, I wonder if the subtitle to that post should have been "Can I Even Get Over Myself?"] Somehow, though, these ideas regarding reflectance and resonance suggests that there may be a deeper level - perhaps deeper than western science can effectively probe - than guessing or being guessed. That the ultimate goal is simply to understand and accept ourselves, exactly as we are ... and to mirror that understanding and acceptance to others.

Amy, who cut out the article for me while I was away, just pointed out her favorite passage, which resonates with all of this, and aligns closely with our own view(s) of religion ... and humanity:

When asked about his [Dalai Lama's] religion of kindness, he replies, "... all these things: compassion, charity, patience, forgiveness, joy; these do not belong to religion. One does not need religion to understand or practice them. They are simply the expressions of what it is to be human."

[Update: having mistakenly attributed Oriah's remarks as referring to Ghandi rather than the Dalai Lama, I decided to go back for a more attentive listening of the passage in Your Heart's Prayer (Side 2b, about 18 minutes in), during which I saw the further connection that involved another filmmaker. I transcribe the passage as attentively and faithfully as I can, below:

I had a dream a number of years ago, this was after I'd heard a couple of stories about people being deeply affected by being in proximity to the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa. One was the story of a man who was a friend of a friend, and he happened to be somewhere where the Dalai Lama was, and he wasn't particularly interested in hearing him speak, but for some reason, encountered him coming out of the lobby of the hotel. And the two of them spoke to each other and the two of them had this moment, and this man just felt this sense of incredible love and well-being in himself.

And another dear friend of mine who's made a film about Mother Teresa, talks about one of the first times she tried to talk to Mother Teresa about making the movie, and my friend, who is Ann Petrie, was on a bus with Mother Teresa, knelt down and had her sunglasses on, and mother Teresa flipped her sunglasses up, and Anne was ready to launch into the business of when can I film you, and Mother Teresa said to her "You're so tired, why don't you just stop for a minute?" And Anne had this experience of this sort of bolt of light going through the center of her body, not from Mother Teresa, but what she felt was really from God. And she had been in her own words a lapsed Catholic for many years.

So I had been hearing these stories, and I had a dream one night, where the grandmothers, who I mentioned earlier, said here is how it works: I saw an image of a glass cylinder filled with coarse salt, and then somebody poured a pink fluid, like colored water, into the container and it started to come up from the bottom up through the salt. And they said, this is what a person is like. The fluid being poured in is like their level of consciousness of who they really are, that what they are is a participant in this sacred life force, and the higher their level of awareness, two things happen: the more the salt dissolves, so the more there is a dissolving of all the structure of the identity that they think they are; and the other thing that happens is that everything becomes colored with this awareness. And when they are in proximity to someone else, because we're all made of the same stuff, it sets up a similar knowing in the other person.

So what people have a flash of when they are near someone who is very conscious of that Chui-ta-ka-ma, that life force energy that they are, is they experience the same thing in themselves. It's a little like bringing a tuning fork next to another tuning fork. So it's not so much they get an awareness of the other person being that divine life force but themselves.

The good news for me about this is that the task, then, is to just try to be with that awareness to the best of my ability, and that will create a ripple effect in ways that I can't even anticipate, because of the nature of our interbeingness. And it means we can have an enormous effect on the world by simply paying attention.]

Commenting on Validation / Validating Comments

Ever since my last post, which started out about locked-in syndrome (inspired by The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), but which developed into a revisitation of a frequently discussed topic [on this blog] - "the need for approval ... for validation ... for appreciation ... for mattering" - I've been attuned to validation in a variety of forms and forums.

The stream of comments that followed my initial post were incredibly engaging and validating - to know that two people I admire so much were touched by the post, as was another person who serendipitously stumbled upon it - and all of them helped draw me a bit deeper (and more broadly) in a followup comment into the topic(s) I'd touched on in the initial post ... culminating in my revisiting one of the most validating poems I've ever encountered: "Love after Love", by Derek Walcott ("... You will love again the stranger who was yourself ...").

However, another comment on that thread - and a number of other recent comments on a number of other posts - initially appeared validating, but upon closer inspection (and reflection), seem less so. In an earlier post, in which I was commenting on commenting, I explicitly named - and thus (I believe) alienated - a friend who had posted a validating comment which had a very similar syntactic look and feel to other comments which I labeled spampliments - thinly, though sometimes effectively (due to my incurable addiction to validation - online or offline), disguised spam compliments. Such comments appear to be primarily intended to add "google juice" to various web sites - by incorporating a URL in the comment itself and/or in the commenter self-reference. I'm tempted to delve deeper into this shadow - I tend to be very self-referential in both my blog posts and comments on this and other blogs - but given my perception that I lost a blog commenter (if not reader (if not friend)) last time I ranted about this, I think I'll simply drop it, but not without first noting that validating comments that [initially] appear to be validating me (or my blog ... not that I think the difference is significant (and therein lies the rub)) is an ongoing challenge. I do want to be very explicit, though, that I really do appreciate (and feel validated by) comments from people who are in some way moved by what I write. [Ironically, I recently noticed that the number of comments on my blog has superseded the number of posts ... and that trend may reverse itself [now] ... but I feel impelled to write what I think and feel.]

Anyhow, returning to the original thread, yesterday, during the 4+ hour drive down to MyStrands HQ in Corvallis, OR, I had an unusually long time for audio engagement. During the first portion of the drive, I listened to the audiobook rendition of The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz. I've already written about his second agreement - don't take anything personally (the same post in which I explored my shadow(s) about commenting on commenting) - and his fourth agreement - always do your best (about which I [still] feel strongly ambivalent). One of the things that jumped out at me during this particular listening experience was his description of how, as young children, the adults in positions of authority (parents, teachers, ministers) hooked our attention, and "domesticated" us by cultivating an addiction to future attention ... resulting in, among other things, our willingness - and even desire - to [try to] be who we are not simply to please other people ... i.e., just to receive validation (from others).

I then switched on the radio, to catch some NPR news ... which was immediately followed by Terry Gross' Fresh Aire interview of Sheryl Crow, one of my favorite artists (make no mistake). During the interview, entitled Sheryl Crow: Gracefully Navigating "Detours", she spoke - among other things - of her need to be accepted and appreciated for her music, not [simply] for her physical beauty. She said she intentionally dressed in a bedraggled style and used black makeup in the photo shoots for the cover[t] art on her first two albums - Tuesday Night Music Club and the self-titled Sheryl Crow (I always thought it odd to have a self-titled second album) - in an attempt to obscure her visual attractiveness, so that people would be better able to hear and appreciate her aural artistry. Well, at the risk of dating myself, and without delving too deeply into this shadow, her first two albums were my gateway into opening up again to popular music, after a nearly 20-year "dry spell". Her musical talents shined brightly (for me), and despite her attempts to hide her physical attributes, those too shined through pretty clearly (I'll briefly note that Pink Floyd's song, "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond", was released near the end of what I consider the [last] golden age of rock and roll). Anyhow, the point I really want to emphasize here is that I find it reassuring that even an artist as immensely talented as Sheryl Crow still feels the need to be validated ... which makes me just a wee bit less self-conscious and more accepting about this need in my self ... perhaps enabling me to better love [myself] with a paper thin heart.

Marketing, Monitoring, Mattering

USA Today ran an interesting front-page article on Monday about Marketers Take a Close Look at Your Daily Routines, detailing some of the ways and means that companies have employed to better understand the everyday use -- and potential use -- of their products. Much of the article focused on the monitoring tools and techniques used in market research, but what I found most interesting was the motivations of those who agree to be watched, which I would summarize as mattering (or, at least, wanting to matter [more]).

The article describes a number of examples of market research:

• Microsoft, which has 300 people now devoted to observing people in the home, spent a few hours every three months videotaping people using Vista in their home.
• Procter & Gamble, which spends $200M each year on consumer-focused research, has videotaped men (in swimsuits) showering in their homes, and followed women at home (including into their closets), at the office, shopping and dining out.
• Kimberly-Clark uses a Consumer Vision System (mini video cameras mounted to visors and linked to a recording device) to better understand how people change diapers.
• General Mills, which has shifted focus from focus groups to individuals, used artists in REI stores to visually depict [prospective] customers' vebal descriptions of ideal energy bars, and opened a Corner Market in Plymouth, MN, in which shoppers are paid to be observed while they shop (the term Panoptistore comes to mind).
• Arm & Hammer sent teams of researchers and videographers into homes to investigate the contents and use of refrigerators and litter boxes.
• Nissan took hundreds of photos of the trunks and interiors of the cars owned by young people.

I suspect the fact that this article was published on the first day of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI 2007) -- that I'm attending (and will blog about later) -- is entirely coincidental. CHI is one of the premier venues where companies who are willing to be open about their research present and/or demonstrate their innovative tools and techniques for gaining consumer insights. Microsoft has a significant presence here, but I can't say that I've encountered anyone from any of the other companies listed in the USA Today article, and it was difficult to track down references to most of the systems and sites listed in the article -- the photo to the left was from a Brandweek article on the Consumer Vision System -- and those companies don't appear to have [m]any unsanctioned externally facing blogs, or otherwise score high on the radical transparency scale ... even though they are, in effect, inviting their customers to be partners ... but I digress.

What I found most interesting about the article is a topic I've blogged about before: mattering. Microsoft offered free pizza and a free computer to the participants in its observation studies, Nissan paid its participants $50 for their time and efforts, and I'm sure the other companies offer participants some kind of financial or other tangible reward for their service. But what really mattered was mattering. Having some influence on the development of products and services is a significant motivation for those who agree to be monitored. The family observed by Microsoft affected the decision to rename "tools" to "folders" in Vista; a woman whose car was photographed by Nissan helped persuade Nissan to add more storage compartments (front seat CD holder and trunk separators) in its 2007 Sentra.

In addition to these examples of direct influence, I also suspect that simply being the subject of a study -- being videotaped, interviewed or otherwise being the object of focused attention -- also feeds people's natural desire to feel like they matter. This is probably a big factor in the popularity of YouTube, Flickr and other social media sharing sites ... including blogs ... er, including this one, which, despite my originally articulated goal of blogging for myself as a form of practice, does occasionally gain some attention ... and I will admit that I enjoy [that] attention ... I just don't want to be driven by it.

In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz talks about how we humans get "hooked on attention" at an early age, and how that desire for attention is what renders us susceptible to "domestication" -- subsuming, and in some (many?) cases even submerging, our dreams, desires and delights in order to please others (rather than our selves). I regularly struggle with issues of acceptance, interdependence and the tension between wanting to be true to myself and wanting to please others (especially those who are important to me). I suppose that one of the appealing aspects of mattering through monitoring by market researchers is that subjects are asked, insofar as possible, to simply be themselves and go about their daily activities, so that new products and/or services can be better designed to support those activities. Seems like a mutually beneficial arrangement to me.

On Virginity, Vulnerability and Vaccines

Last night, I discovered of The Virginity Project (via Shel Israel's blog), a book project in which Kate Monroe is compiling a list of stories about how, when and why people lost their virginity. On the drive in this morning, I heard a segment on NPR's Morning Edition entitled "Young People and Sex: Parents, Can We Talk?" by Johanna Greenberg of Blunt Youth Radio. It turns out -- surprise, surprise -- that the parents of most of teens [that Johanna interviewed] have never said anything about sex to their kids, and of the few that had, it was mostly focused on the mechanics of sexual intercourse, or the risks of [unintended] pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The preceding NPR segment was on one such STD, human papillomavirus ("Detecting High-Risk HPV in Older Women"), and an earlier segment on local NPR affiliate KQED, in the locally produced series, Perspectives (I think), was an opinion piece by another young woman, Alana Germany, about The HPV Vaccine (Gardasil), focusing on the social and economic issues surrounding its availability, and the political issues surrounding the proposed school attendance requirement for the vaccine in California middle schools. Reading Kate Monroe's most recent post, "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but ...", she writes about her motivation behind pursuing this project, and in so doing, exhibits great openness and vulnerability (reminiscent of Shel and Robert Scoble's openness in Naked Conversations):

I, like most human beings, am innately insecure. There are questions that I need to ask - but I don’t think I am the only one who wants to know the answers. I want to know what other people really felt about having sex for the first time. Not the version that we tell our friends around the pub table but the no holds barred version. The reality, the joy, the pain, the sheer physical sensation of allowing somebody so close for the very first time. And if we take a step further toward truth, how does this one-off experience compare to our present arrangement? How good have we got? ... We all want to know that we are improving and we all want to know that we are normal.

Upon further reflection, I see vulnerability and sexual intimacy as deeply intertwined, and one's first sexual experience -- the loss of virginity -- as among the most vulnerable. [It's interesting that virginity is always lost ... what is gained?] I feel very fortunate that my first sexual experience (er, with someone else) was very positive, but I've often wondered about others' first experiences. I suspect it is generally, and perhaps drastically, different for men and women, but the only person I've ever spoken with about first experiences is Amy (and we did have different experiences of our first sexual encounters). I felt very vulnerable that first time, not really knowing quite how to proceed (although I was later told that my lack of experience was not apparent at the time), and feeling great fear and joy simultaneously. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I still often feel fear before, during and after a sexual encounter, and for similar reasons -- does she want to? am I being too selfish? am I doing it right? was it good for her? Fortunately, I also still [often] feel great joy, too. Johanna Greenberg's recommendation was that parents should talk more openly with their kids about their feelings and values regarding sex (wow, talk about vulnerability!). Amy has been more forthright with our kids in talking about sexual matters, which is ironic, as I generally like to think of myself as so open and communicative. Given that my 15 year-old daughter sometimes reads (and comments on) my blog, I suppose this post may represent some kind of potential opening. My feelings about sex in my own experience are often conflicted, and they become all the more so when I project them onto anyone else ... especially if that someone else is, in a significant respect, the outcome of a sexual encounter (i.e., my daughter (or son)). I already mentioned my experience of the fear and joy of sex. As for values, I value honesty and trust in all my relationships, and I believe these qualities are all the more important the more intimate the relationship ... and the more intimate the exchange. Over the weekend, I watched the movie Munich; in one scene, one of the Mossad agents is found in naked and dead in his hotel bed, after having last been seen heading in the direction of an attractive and flirtatious woman in the hotel bar. I was thinking "What was he thinking?" (he was part of a team had been involved in several assassinations, and must have known that they, in turn, were likely targets). How can such a person -- or at least a person in that role -- trust anyone, much less leave himself as vulnerable as one becomes during sexually intimate encounters (or, at least, as vulnerable as I become ... but I probably wouldn't cut it as an assassin, anyhow). Turning to the third "V", the HPV vaccine (Gardasil), I am glad that the vaccine is available, but I'm not convinced that requiring it to be administered to all students is the best policy. It seems to me that other vaccines required for school attendance are for diseases that can be transmitted through casual contact, or simple proximity. While I hear and read that casual relationships (or "friends with benefits") is on the rise, reports of any kind of sexual activities -- especially among youth -- are often greatly exaggerated, on an individual and/or aggregated basis. Taking measures to prevent the transmission of disease to others who are simply in the same room on a daily basis seems like a reasonable precaution. Mandating such measures to prevent transmission that requires a great deal more, er, engagement, seems overreaching. So I don't support mandatory vaccinations, but I am totally in favor of making [other] more casual or incidental prophylactics more widely available ... especially among youth ... who are, after all, especially vulnerable.

Cyberbullying: Prevalence, Preventability and Politics

Perhaps due, in part, to things I've read, thought and blogged about recently regarding cybershaming and accountability, and the fearful overreactions of parents and other authorities over teens' use of MySpace, I had a more skeptical reaction to a Wall Street Journal article this week on "Schools Act to Short-Circuit Spread of 'Cyberbullying'" than the last time I read, thought and blogged at any length about cyberbullying (nearly 3 years ago!).

The article alludes to the case of an 8th grade girl, Kylie, who suffered emotional distress over the purported creation of a web site titled "Kill Kylie Incorporated" by classmates ... a site of which I can find no trace, other than references in other articles (most of which are simply referring to the WSJ article). It goes on to catalog varying degrees of preventative measures considered or enacted by different schools and school districts, and the legal issues surrounding the prospect of schools intervening into affairs that take place, in large part, off campus.

Given my recent [re]priming of the MySpace overreaction, I started wondering how prevalent cyberbullying really is. The first few pages of results returned after googling for "cyberbullying statistics" yielded no results that I would consider statistically valid  An organization named i-Safe has a statistics page claiming that "42% of kids have been bullied while online" and that over half have sent or received mean messages online. Leaving aside the question of where they have drawn the line between receiving mean messages and bullying, I cannot find any information about the methodology by which the statistics were gathered (phrasing of questions, sampling method, numbers of responses, etc.). Another site, by Qing Li at the University of Calgary, provides a surprisingly small amount of methodological information (for an academic institution) -- a survey of "177 grade seven students (80 males and 97 females)" -- before noting that 54% of survey respondents had been bullied and 25% had been cyberbullied. Once again, it's not clear (to me) what bullying (or cyberbullying) means to the surveyor -- or surveyees -- but assuming that cyberbullying is simply the online equivalent of whatever bullying is in the offline world, it is interesting to see that cyberbullying appears far less prevalent than bullying (at least in this limited sample).

There are, of course, numerous articles about cyberbullying, just as there are numerous articles about abuses associated with MySpace. But it is not clear to me in either case that the use of online tools is increasing or even magnifying instances of "bad behavior". I'm not saying that aren't examples of horrendous deeds being accomplished through the use of online tools, it's just not clear how frequent or widespread such instances are.  And if one were to be able to somehow measure the overall frequency and/or severity of bullying (or other forms of abuse) -- combining online and offline incidents -- I wonder whether there really is a significant or demonstrable increase in either dimension.

I also wondered whether online tools might be used to mount more effective responses to bullying -- online or offline -- by offering a platform from which victims can mount defenses, or perhaps even counteroffenses, by shining a light on perpetrators and presenting rebuttals to unfair accusations or attacks ... another example of virtually "shooting back".  Perhaps schools could devote more effort to helping students understand how to utilize the technology more effectively in defending themselves or rallying to the defense of friends who are under fire ... of course, that would require the repeal of DOPA, and that seems like too much of an optimistic stretch of the imagination.

Reflecting further, on the relationship between cybershaming and cyberbullying, it seems like a rather fine line between them ... with the former seeming somehow justified and the latter seeming unjustified (picking on someone who deserves it vs. picking on someone who doesn't deserve it). I started wondering whether Kylie had done anything to incur the cyberwrath of her classmates (I can't find anything that says anything about events leading up to the creation of the purportedly humiliating site) -- I suspect it was a reaction (or overreaction) to something.

Probing a wee bit deeper, I started questioning whether anyone really deserves any kind of shame or bullying, cyber or otherwise. In my most recent post on cybershaming, I noted that my satisfaction in reading about web sites being used to highlight unacceptable (or at least unaccepted) behavior felt rather smug. I felt a twinge of embarrassment in writing [that part of] the post, and I feel it more keenly in this one. Did Kylie really deserve the purported humiliation she was allegedly subjected to? And who am I (or anyone else) to render such judgment?

I've also been noticing a smug satisfaction I've experienced in the increasing shame -- online and offline -- that U.S. President George W. Bush is being subjected to over the devastating consequences of his judgment and actions regarding the Iraq War.  As usual, I could not bring myself to watch or listen to his State of the Union address (though I could watch and listen to a parody); in the snippets I heard on NPR subsequently, he seems to have lost a bit of his hubris, and while I wouldn't go so far as to suggest he actually feels any shame, humiliation, guilt or remorse, I suspect he at least recognizes that, in the eyes of [many] others, he has done wrong. And I feel a sense of guilt over this feeling of smug satisfaction, especially given how many are suffering and dying -- and will likely suffer and die in the future -- in what Senator Harry Reid recently referred to as the worst foreign policy disaster ever.

Bringing the focus back to cyberbullying, I believe the greater transparency afforded by the growing array of easy-to-use online tools will ultimately reduce attacks by children against children, by giving them weapons with which they can fight back ... and, as I've noted before, I hope that adult citizens, inside and outside of government, will also learn how to use these tools to increase transparency and accountability, and reduce the frequency and severity of poor judgments by our leaders.

Monitoring MySpace: Parental and Political Pacification

The Wall Street Journal reports that News Corp. is planning to offer free software that parents (and others with computer administrator privileges) can use to track the name, age and location provided by any users of that computer who access an account on MySpace. The article reports that "dozens of teens have been molested and some even murdered by people who first contacted them through MySpace, according to law enforcement officials".  In the next paragraph, the article notes that MySpace has 60 million monthly users in the U.S. <sigh> Yet another example of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of The Wrong Things.

danah boyd has written extensively about youth, social networking services, and the interactions of the former through the latter. Last May, she (and Henry Jenkins) gave a scathingly insightful critique of the misconceived and misguided Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) -- which, unfortunately, is now law -- and highlighted many of the positive aspects of the use of MySpace by America's youth. In a more recent post -- a few more thoughts on child abuse, sexual predators, and the moral panic -- she comments on, and includes some graphs from, an article by Peter Reilly on The Facts About Online Sex Abuse and Schools.

Clearly, "online predators" ought not to be the biggest concern. A recent Pew Internet study reported that 55% of 12-17 year olds are using online social networking services ... and "a few dozen" have been molested?! If we are really serious about reducing the threat of sexual predators, we ought to be mandating the installation and monitoring of nannycams (or, perhaps, daddycams or unclecams), which would have the potential for far greater impact. In fact, I wonder whether MySpace is -- or could be -- used by youth to report on molestation ... yet another twist on cybershaming.

Americans are notoriously ineffective in analyzing statistics and assessing risks, and our government officials are notoriously effective in amplifying risks and imposing policies that seek to "mitigate" risks at costs that far outweigh the cure. The threat by 33 state attorneys general to take legal action against New Corp. over MySpace is not so different from the threat of the Bush Administration to invade Iraq over concerns of weapons of mass destruction. I hope that more reason will prevail in the former than was employed (or attended to) in the latter.

[Update, circa May 2007, posted November 2007]

In helping my daughter with some research for a report on parental fear of MySpace last spring (she chose the topic, not me), I found 33 cases in the past 6 months allegedly involving MySpace in what seems to be the best source for predator crimes involving MySpace (and other online sites), MyCrimeSpace. 30 of them were arrests, which works out to 5 per month (or 60 per year) - and note those are arrests, not convictions (of which I could find only 4 during the 6 month period).

A Wired article in February 2006 on Scenes from the MySpace Backlash   notes that "An August study by the National Center for Juvenile Justice estimated there were about 15,700 statutory rapes reported to law enforcement agencies in the United States in 2000, based on an analysis of data collected by the FBI."
Not all the cases listed on MyCrimeSpace are statutory rape, and if overall rates of statutory rape are declining, that 15,700 figure would be lower for 2007. But 60/15700, or 0.4%, may offer a rough estimate of how many cases involve MySpace or other online social networking services.

Of course, there may be more cases than those listed on MyCrimeSpace, so let's say that maybe up to 1% of statutory rape cases somehow involve MySpace. The aforementioned Pew Interent study released in April 2007 on "Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks: How teens manage their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace" suggests that over half of teens are MySpace users. I don't know how many teens ages 12-17 there are in the U.S., but I think it's safe to say there are at least many tens of millions of them. So, if we have 60 cases - and again, those are arrests, not convictions - among tens of millions of young users, I would estimate the risks to be somewhere on the order of one in a million (0.0001%), and that's probably a very generous upper bound.

I'm not an expert statistician, but even if we grant an order of magnitude of error, this rather cursory analysis suggest that MySpace use is not a significant risk factor in exposing teens to sexual predators. In fact, I would not be surprised if young MySpace users are more likely to be more informed about the risks of molestation and other forms of sexual predation - online or offline - than those who are "protected" from the popular online service by their parents.

Citizen Accountability Projects

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition included an article by Jennifer Saranow entitled "The Snoop Next Door" that contains a roundup of a number of web sites dedicated to documenting deviancy from social norms, large and small. The title and photos led me to prepare for an alarming expose on the abuses of using the web to highlight transgressions, but I came away thinking that this trend toward capturing and sharing examples of unacceptable behavior on the web is, by and large, a Good Thing. It seems like a conceptual mashup of citizen journalism and whistleblower support organizations such as the Government Accountability Project ... a collection of citizen accountability projects.

With the proliferation of cameraphones, blogs and photo sharing web applications, it has become easier for people to create sites that make it easier for people to post stories and/or upload photos of actions taken by [typically] other people that they don't approve of ... things like bad parking, bad driving, loudly talking on mobile phones, leering, littering or police brutality. And, so, more of these sites are appearing, with varying degrees of specialization, participation, and impact.

The article includes a number of specific stories, but none of them strike me as vigilantism taken too far ... indeed, I found myself feeling a rather smug sense of satisfaction that justice was being rather well served, as I've often felt exasperated by others' inconsiderate driving, parking and talking on mobile phones. Of course, I acknowledge that I, too, have driven, parked or talked loudly without being fully conscious of how my actions might be affecting others. Perhaps I'll see myself (or my license plate) on one of these sites one of these days.

I've written about other episodes of cybershaming before, and I'd heard about some of the stories, groups and web sites noted in the article. There were a few new items of particular interest. One was the Texas Virtual Border Watch Program, wherein anyone can watch webcams along the border and contact authorities to report a crime. 14,000 reports were filed during a month-long trial of the program in November (no mention was made of the number of reports that were either acted upon by law enforcement authorities, nor how many arrests were made). This idea of citizens being given access to cameras is very much in alignment with scenarios envisioned by David Brin in his book Transparent Society nearly 10 years ago (a world filled with surveillance cameras, which can either be monitored by "authorities" or the public) ... but the notion of people being encouraged to turn other people in is reminiscent of futuristic scenarios envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 (a world in which people are encouraged to report transgressions to the Thought Police).

Another item that was news to me was the use of phones and cameras in a football stadium, though with humans very much in the loop:

Since August, spectators at Cincinnati Bengals home games have been able to call 513-381-JERK to complain about rowdy fans. When a call comes in, security zooms in on the area with stadium cameras, confirms there's a problem and dispatches security. Initially, the hotline was receiving more than 100 calls a game, about 75% of which were crank calls. Reports were recently down to about 40 a game, with less than 25% being crank calls.

I found myself wondering what would happen if, rather than showing the alleged transgressors on private video monitors seen only by authorities, the camera images were shown on the large public screens at the stadium. I suspect this may increase rather than decrease rowdy behavior, which may not be perceived as shameful by many members of the audience ... add to that the TV viewership potential, and I think we'd see a marked increase in this sort of thing.

This, in turn, reminds me of the happy slapping phenomenon, where a [typically] young tough walk sup to an unsuspecting stranger and slap that person, while an accomplice captures the event on a cameraphone, and the photo or video is later posted to a web site. I have no idea how prevalent this practice is (though I suspect it is relatively rare), but it seems to be the reverse, or perhaps converse, or at least a perversion, of cybershaming, as it is celebrating shameful behavior.

I have not yet heard of an incident where the victim of happy slapping pulls out a cameraphone to capture (and post a photo) of the perpetrators, but that would be an interesting twist on Steve Mann's rather futuristic notion of shooting back. An even more interesting (and inspiring) twist is anti-slapping, in which random acts of kindness, rather than violence, are captured by camera[phone] and posted to a web site.

Finally, I'll note one more interesting and inspiring example of using cameras and the web to promote accountability (and transparency): a video of a campaign speech by Virginia Senator George Allen, in which his attempt to shame the man filming his speech, whom he called "Macaca" (a derogatory term), backfired. It's all the more ironic, as he starts off his speech by saying "My friends, we're going to run this campaign on positive, constructive ideas, and it's important that we motivate and inspire people for something" and then, in the very next sentence, uses a negative, destructive word to refer to the videographer. Although this was not the only, nor necessarily the most important, issue in the campaign, Allen was, ultimately, held accountable, and lost the election. I hope we will see more of these kinds of citizen accountability projects in the future.