Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

‘Delete‘ looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. ‘Digital technology empowers us to find and share information as never before, but we do not always foresee the consequences of these new powers.’

The talk was done as a conversation with OII Professor Helen Margetts. They looked at the important role that forgetting has played throughout human history: ‘from the ability to make sound decisions unencumbered by the past to the possibility of second chances.’

Things touched upon included: the Panopticon, self-censorship, social networking sites and employers, memory and time, ‘the curse of perfect episodic memory‘, decision making in the present, cognitive psychology, forgetting and forgiving, memory and mood, organisational change, compartmentalisation of data storage (and making connections across silos), creating a comprehensive image from disparate data, information context, anonymisation, ’solving the problem’, information privacy rights and law, information ecology post-9/11, the age of information retention, digital abstinence, Web 2.0, cognitive adjustment (can we share conditionally?), and … reviving forgetting.

Thought-provoking stuff, all of it.

And er it fell to me to record it, in a slightly last minute detour away from my competence zone. So I spent the evening lurking in a corner with headphones, surrounded by small complicated machines and (some) wire.

And yes, ‘Delete’ was precisely what I was attempting not to do.

So here goes. It isn’t at all comprehensive (sideways glance at best) and some of it may be only of erm academic interest now, but still … there’s some good, funny, serious and thought-provoking stuff here from past students and tutors.

So. SDP2009 (’the one about Creativity’) was held in Brisbane (QUT). Co-organiser (and SDP2004 student!) was Jean Burgess who blogged: OII Summer Doctoral Programme to be held in Brisbane in 2009. Nils Gustafsson blogged his Collegial Consultation with Bernie Hogan and Rami Olwan recapped the OII SDP 2009. There was an SDP2009 Flickr group (and yes, there are photographs of kangaroos).

SDP2008: Oxford (’Webscience’) was one that I got a bit excited by … fortunately I was able to decamp to the overflow room for the fortnight. SDP2008 seemed to be marked by a certain amount of introspection re ‘What exactly is webscience, then?’ (eg Sonny Zulhuda on Web Science in the Making – Or is It?)

There are recaps from Tobias Escher: Summer Doctoral Programme 2008 – Last Words, Oshani Seneviratne: Chaos: Summer Doctoral Program, and Sonny Zulhuda: Quotable Quotes from SDP 2008.

SDP2007 was hosted by our long-standing partners at the Berkman Center (Harvard University). This was the first year that the group seemed to throw themselves into the blogosphere. Berkman Director John Palfrey started things off with some personal thoughts: Summer Doctoral Program(me) Comes to Cambridge.

Michael Zimmer blogged his SDP2007 Presentation: The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine, Joris van Hoboken blogged his end-of One Full Summer Doctoral Week in Boston and there were posts by tutors Urs Gasser: Cambridge, Summer 2007: A Few Impressions and A Thank You and Ethan Zuckerman: Summer doctoral program at Berkman and Daithí Mac Síthigh, who tagged a whole series of SDP2007 posts … as did Ismael Peña-López on his blog ICTlogy (tagged as SDP2007).

There are also recaps from the Berkman Buzz, from Joris: SDP 2007; My Final Report, Cuihua Shen: OII SDP recap – Cool widgets, and Ismael: OII SDP 2007 (Epilogue): Last Thoughts About Web Science And Academic Blogging Or Why Did Not Academia Came Up With Wikipedia. And Some Acknowledgments Too.

There was an SDP2007 Flickr group.

SDP2006 is starting to retreat into ‘not terribly online’ territory. But two notable things: a post by Urs Gasser on a seminar by John Palfrey discussing a paper by Jonathan Zittrain: JP/JZ Mash-up: Live from OII SDP. And student Nick Anstead kept an SDP blog.

SDP2005 was held in China. I seem to have found nothing from China. So I guess we move on to SDP2004 (Oxford), and Kylie Veale’s SDP2004 Blog.

And 2003. Well, 2003 was a long long time ago.

I have undoubtedly left things out (let me know if so!) .. just thought it might be useful to do a little hunting and gathering. Go explore, have fun!

But it seems to have been completed. So Friday lunchtime seemed a fine time to give it a look over ..

The Ashmolean, 1845 frontage (camera died before could get onto the models of the new perspexey bit, behind; .. maybe next time)

WELL! There are lots of stairs and lots of glass and light. And it’s all pretty amazing, actually. Double the display and exhibition space, with the 39 new galleries all nicely integrated with the old bits (which remain untouched). So I spent most of the time just exploring the building, which is actually what everyone else was doing ['New Ashmolean' on Flickr].

And the modern art’s back! Though I was a little confused. My favourite gallery (the Sands gallery) is (was?) a small, nicely understated one, with about 40 mostly small, mostly British C20 canvases (Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, Walter Sickert etc) and some Epstein and Hepworth. The Observer (2001): ‘It’s a patchy account, full of lacunae, but its very inconsistency reflects the eccentricities of English interwar painting.’ And yes, it did feel slightly odd and totally charming .. a nice place to stand and stare and ponder.

But I’m not sure it’s there anymore? I think it might have stood on the old / new building divide, so I think (as far as I can tell) that it has been turned into a sort of modern art (transition space? articulation? elbow?) between all the old art and a staircase. It was full of people milling and staring at the building / each other, so perhaps worth a closer look in a few weeks, when everyone has calmed down. 

This is what the Guardian had to say about the Sands gallery when it opened in 2001: Ashmolean plunges into world of modern art

And the Observer: That Sickert feeling…

The Ashmolean always was a nice museum to pop into for an odd hour. And now it’s even better. So go, go to the Ashmolean, and gawp.

Light and glass and light: a new way of climbing stairs

And errrrm. The Internet? None of this is very Internet, admittedly. But if you prefer your museums to be about technology we do have a webcast about the redevelopment of the computing galleries at the Science Museum (London), from a talk given by curator Tilly Blyth at the OII in 2008.

That is my Internet transition, or articulation.

Jessica is a Clarendon scholar at the Institute, a member of Balliol College, and is working on the OII’s Fifth Estate Project.

Since 2002, the Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) has gathered politicos and technologists in the United States to learn from each other, network, and glimpse the future. This year, the conference brings its focus on using technology to make governance more transparent, participatory and effective to Europe.

Featured speakers at this year’s forum include Ellen Miller, Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation; Julian Assange, Cofounder of Wikileaks; Stephen Clark, Head of Web Communication for the European Parliament, Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety.org; Dominic Campbell, Founder of FutureGov; Scott Heiferman, Founder of Meetup.com; several Members of European Parliament; and many more.

Issues raised by this conference include using the Internet to open politics beyond party systems, using social media to transform the relationship between voters and their representatives, and how to navigate new media vs traditional media.

Jessica will be reporting back from the forum, so watch this space!

Location: Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LU. A reception will follow the talk. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk

Speakers:

• Professor Bill Dutton, Director, Oxford Internet Institute (Chair)
• Dr. Bernie Hogan, Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute (Moderator)
• Dr Monica Whitty, Nottingham-Trent University
• Professor Barry Wellman, University of Toronto and Director of NetLab
• Professor Joe Walther, Michigan State University
• Assistant Professor Nicole Ellison, Michigan State University

The Oxford Internet Institute will host a public panel discussion focused on the significance and impact of the Internet on interpersonal relationships. This follows an all-day forum on the topic, and will highlight the day’s findings.

This event is supported by a grant from eHarmony®, through its support of the OII project Me, My Spouse and the Internet.

The programme runs from 5-16 June 2010. And we are back home in Oxford this year (having done Queensland in 2009, Boston in 2007 and Beijing in 2005).

So not much else to say at the moment other than .. if you are doing doctoral research relating to the Internet and other ICTs, and you feel you need an exciting and intensive fortnight of learning and sharing and networking with an amazing group of students and tutors .. make sure to apply by 22 February 2010!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be scraping together content from some of the previous programmes, to hopefully give a bit of a sense of what everyone gets up to / where the SDP alumni are now.

Tutors and academic partners are still being confirmed: if you would like to know as they are signed up, check the SDP2010 webpage, or sign up to OII News.

This ‘uncanny valley‘ may explain why some films (Beowulf, The Polar Express) have attracted criticism (as being soul-less / dead eyed / eerie / creepy etc).

Why bring this up? WELL! according to a recent paper in PNAS it seems that monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley too.

We presented monkeys with unrealistic and realistic synthetic monkey faces, as well as real monkey faces, and measured whether they preferred looking at one type versus the others (using looking time as a measure of preference). To our surprise, monkey visual behavior fell into the uncanny valley: They looked longer at real faces and unrealistic synthetic faces than at realistic synthetic faces.

The paper has been covered by BBC News (early origins for uncanny valley) and WIRED (Monkeys Fall Into ‘Uncanny Valley,’ Just Like Humans).

Monkey avatars: they creep monkeys out (image: BBC News)

Want to spend time in the uncanny valley? Well, there are obviously loads of weirdly realistic (= creepy) Japanese robots on Google Videos.

And there is the famous Philip K. Dick robotic head (basically an expressive mustachioed head stuck onto a slouchy body in shirt and jeans: see Philip K. Dick robot on YouTube) that follows people’s movements with the cameras in its eyes and (at least in theory) seems to believe that it is Philip K. Dick.

There is also a very bizarre Einstein head on a robot that clumps about declaring ‘I am Albert Einstein. I am a physicist’ (head by David Hanson, Robotics designer)

But probably the most realistic robot I found on YouTube is called Jules (eg watch Jules ponder his sexuality, and Jules discuss his being switched off).

Why do these objects make us feel uneasy? There are lots of theories about the uncanny valley, but according to MacDorman and Ishiguro:

An uncanny robot elicits an innate fear of death and culturally-supported defenses for coping with death’s inevitability … [P]artially disassembled androids… play on subconscious fears of reduction, replacement, and annihilation.

It seems that monkeys get freaked by this too.

I met up with him this morning to go out into the chill November air to discuss photographs and communities and digital things over coffee. He started off by telling me about the online photographer communities he studies and the fact that … they are aware that they are study objects. It sounded like they were being slightly hilarious by ganging up on him (in an affectionate way .. eg by giving him a slightly patronising pet name etc.) but I guess this is an occupational hazard for any ethnographer studying intelligent curious people.

‘These people just rearranged their lives around the technology,’ he said. He happened to be sitting there in a quite cool T-shirt with a big camera on it. So I asked if his years of studying and interacting with these communities had actually come to affect him in any way (preparing myself for something complicated and reflexive). He thought for a moment, then smiled: ‘Well. I had to spend A LOT of money on cameras’ and went on to describe how he has been developing a deep engagement with photography himself.

We hovered over many things: access to Flickr data and what you could do with it / Flickr recently introducing the (Facebooky) ability to tag Flickr users within photographs, and whether or not people liked this / where is Flickr going? / Microsoft bringing out the SenseCam that is ‘designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn’ / tagging and searching and metadata and ubiquity and surveillance and all of that / people as brands / photography as habit / and video: what’s with that?

We finally veered into the area of photography as artform (history of / implicit snobbery within / boundaries and boundary-busting / subversion etc. the usual stuff, I guess). I suppose we are all amateur professionals (or professional amateurs) these days, and that everything we do is beautiful and wonderful and important … but surely there must be a lot of terrible terrible stuff being uploaded out there? So I wondered: ‘Is there such a thing as objectively bad photography?’ [I have since spent time looking up 'mistake failure rubbish awful' etc on Flickr and ... well. Not actually as funny or interesting as I thought it might be. Hem. Rather boring and depressing, actually.]

Edgar’s own Flickr account is at: Tesista (A veces de pata de perro) [Flickr]

So we looked at his own photos for a while (seriously worth a look). And then it suddenly became very cold and we scuttled back inside.

Edgar blogs (and keeps his publications) at: Tesis-Antítesis (mostly in Spanish but with some posts in English), and his research group in Barcelona is at: http://mediacciones.es/

Edgar will be at the OII until December. He is giving a DPhil seminar on his research (24 November 09) and then a brownbag seminar (1 December 09) later this term with OII Research Fellow Eric Meyer.

Soooo … the subject of coffee being newly placed in my mind I asked Tim (who has access to STATS for the OII library’s coffee machine) for an update on what’s hot and what’s not. And thanks to Excel, there is a graph. (No time component however; therefore no trending or sense of how much is actually being drunk: that’s apparently beyond a coffee machine’s data handling capacity.)

A nice graph of fairly meaningless data

So, my favourite (the ‘cappuchinochoco’) is not actually amazingly popular. And 22 people asked for ‘hot water’ (or maybe one persistent user). Tim assures me that it might actually be the coffee machine man skewing the data by running hot water through when he repairs it. But maybe there are people out there who just happen to like hot water. Also, picking up on the ‘effete / European’ theme … ‘cafe au lait’ seems vastly more popular than ‘white coffee’?

According to the OII library page: ‘All members of the University are invited to use our library for research and study’, and I guess it should add ‘and access a range of hot beverages including cafe au lait and hot water’. The library is open Monday to Friday (09.00-16.50) during Term and Vacation. Bodleian card holders can take out books. All the books are catalogued on OLIS. The coffee is FairTrade.

And those are all my coffee thoughts for this month.

A Distinguished Visiting Professor at the OII, the lecture came at the end of a week’s visit, during which he gave (six hours of!) graduate seminars on Communication Power, co-taught with Bill Dutton an online doctoral course on interdisciplinary analysis of the network society, and met with students to discuss their research.

We also have a webcast of a lecture he gave during his visit last year: Communication Power in the Network Society (23 October 2008).

Manuel Castells