Jeber’s

When social networks are one-way streets

Social networks are the latest rage on the internet among the technorati. I’ve joined several; Plurk, identi.ca, Popego, nearly all in beta or early development. The two I enjoy and use the most are Friendfeed and Twitter. These services are used by the people I follow the most, technology insiders like Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte, to name just a few. Every day they post comments I like and comment on. But this is primarily a one-way street. The posts I make are rarely liked or commented on by them, even though most of them subscribe to me.

The reason for this is that we inhabit two fundamentally different worlds of interest.

Most of these people are in their 20s and 30s and are employed in technology or closely related fields. As I said, they are techo-insiders; they either work for companies heavily invested in cutting-edge technology or they own a brand identified with that world.

My world is a bit different.

My introduction to bits and bytes was in the 1970s, when I enlisted in the Army and was privileged to be assigned to the National Security Agency as a member of the Army Security Agency. There are two primary types of people employed by the Agency, cryptographers and analysts. Cryptographers write and break codes. They are mathematical wizards, comparable to programmers in the software industry. I was an analyst. We took the decrypted intelligence and studied it for patterns and created estimates based on the data we collected. We didn’t break the codes. We tried to make the intelligence useful to our customers. I used a Cray supercomputer for my work and was trained in Fortran and Cobol even though neither was necessary for analysis.

Shortly after I left the Army I moved to Idaho and was uninvolved with technology for the next 13 years. Those years saw the birth of the internet and the development of the personal computer. I was only vaguely aware of all this. I still loved technology but I was totally out of the loop.

It was around 1997 that I once again found myself in San Diego and around those who were fascinated by this fairly new World Wide Web. I was quickly hooked and it wasn’t long before I bought a shiny new Gateway computer with a massive 500Mhz processor and a membership in AOL. I learned as much as I could about computers and in a couple of years I felt I knew enough to want to share what I’d picked up. I found Chris Pirillo’s newsletter and shortly after that his forum. At the same time I joined Scot Finnie’s forum, also based on technology. There I met people whose interests mirrored mine. They were building their own computers and sharing websites they found interesting and informative. While I had accumulated a reasonable amount of knowledge about hardware and computer security that I could pass along to those in the forum, I realized at heart I was still an analyst. My primary interest was in making sense of the various opinions I encountered. I would read and listen to those with more knowledge than I possessed then try to distill that wisdom into something comprehensible to those just getting started. I truly enjoyed being able to pass along esoteric knowledge to those in need, in a form they could easily grasp. In a way I was performing the same function in the world of technology that a priest plays in the world of theology. I was taking obscure wisdom and attempting to make it intelligible to the common man. But where a priest is deeply involved in the world of theology, in the world of technology I was still an outsider. I had an opportunity to listen to those on the inside, but I was not a member of the club.

Primarily through my association with Chris and Scot I’ve been allowed to eavesdrop on conversations I might otherwise have never been privy to. I’ve learned who the influential are. They are those who have worked at Microsoft since the early days, they own start-ups, they write software, they often determine what will become popular among the rest of us users and what will fail to attract attention. They write for industry magazines or have websites that constantly rank in the top 100 of influential sites.

I’m not one of them.

I’m an analyst, a writer. I enjoy writing humorous commentary. My primary focus is social, not technological. I want to make technology understandable to others less out of a love of technology than a deep concern for people. Where once I had wanted to become a priest to bring god to the masses, now I’m a priest of the internet. I want others to get as much out of this medium as I have. My websites are concerned with the social issues I believe are important to humanity. I espouse social reform and technology plays a major role in that.

As a result, my contributions to social networking sites are seldom noticed and rarely commented on. The movers and shakers are focused on technology, I’m focused on humanity. We live in two different worlds that occasionally overlap. Social networks, for me, are one-way streets. I try to make my voice heard above the chatter about the latest service, the newest shiny gadget. But my input is of little value. They know I’m not one of them. I’m an interested voyeur, a watcher, a listener. I’m a simple techno-priest among the internet gods. My understanding is far below theirs.

Still, I love the networks I inhabit. I enjoy my role, even when I post an insight that’s overlooked but widely commented on when repeated by one of the insiders. I’ve learned to accept my position as a guest in the technorati society. I hope others who often feel left out of the conversational flow in their favorite network take my tale as encouragement to stay involved, keep connected. What you learn is as important as what others might learn from you if they would only listen. We can all drive on this one-way street. Some of us just have to accept that this particular road isn’t leading toward our destination. It’s still a fun ride, though.

Slow Down

On the web no one knows you’re …

In the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, a Peter Steiner cartoon revealed a truism.

The cartoon was funny, but the message it conveyed turned out to be one of the most valuable features of the internet.

Suddenly no one could judge you (with the implied and find you wanting) based on your age or gender or race. You could recreate yourself as an avatar of your mind. Everyone you ever met in cyberspace would only know the you that you allowed to be known, and nothing would be more the eYou than the words you used, the thoughts you typed out for us to read.

Those of us who for years have been humanists, believers in the basic decency of humanity, saw this next medium of communication as a real chance for people around the world to share their common humanity with anyone else with whom they could connect. It would no longer matter if you were a poor child in Vietnam or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The quality of your mind would be the leveler. Here was a means for people to get to know each other at a less superficial level than judging them by their age, gender or race. We were idealists.

“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist” George Carlin

There’s talk around the internets about racism again. Many of us have spent years objecting to and rallying against racism. The internet gave us a reason to hope racism would quickly disappear from the mind-pool. Once race was no longer obvious or easily discerned, it would cease being of any importance. We further hoped this race-ignorant attitude would speedily spread throughout the real world. We may have been overly optimistic.

Louis Gray has written up the latest chapter in this sad saga on his blog, LouisGray.com. If you want to delve deeper into this situation, check out the conversations on Friendfeed.

It’s good that these conversations are taking place. Racism, like sexism, shouldn’t be allowed to avoid scrutiny. Those of us who find racism ignorant need to speak out against its infection of the internet. The racists should be held accountable for their attitudes.

Freedom of speech? I’m all for it. Being held responsible for the attitudes you espouse? I insist on it.

The internet still has the potential to help humanity evolve to the next level. We can leave behind our less-than-noble fears and superstitions (the breeding ground for racism) and let the internet guide our real lives. See others for who they are, not what they are.

The alternative isn’t good.

eDisaster Averted

The biggest story to break this week will likely receive little mainstream attention. It may not even interest a great number of people. I mean, it’s all so geeky and weird, what do all those strange terms mean?

Even Lou Luddite would agree that like it or not, computers, networks and the internet form a real infrastructure within our society from top to bottom. From bank to boardroom, we depend on the internet and our local networks in the same way we depend on our other utilities; it’s just supposed to work. We don’t have to reboot the refrigerator (yet), when we turn the tap we expect water. When we open our browser we expect to find the internet, just the way we left it.

Recently our relationship to the internet was threatened not by thieves but by a flaw. An error (found and corrected) could have allowed hackers to cause massive mayhem on anyone using the internet.

Many people were involved in this effort, and I applaud them all.

Internet flaw could let hackers take over the Web

Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.

Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.

“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.

“You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”

The flaw would be a boon for “phishing” cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.

Attackers could use the vulnerability to route Internet users wherever they wanted no matter what website address is typed into a web browser.

“People should be concerned but they should not be panicking,” Kaminsky said. “We have bought you as much time as possible to test and apply the patch. Something of this scale has not happened before.”

Kaminsky built a web page, DoxPara Research, where people can find out whether their computers have the DNS vulnerability.  (Source)

Laptops in the classroom

According to a recent New York Times article, the presence of laptops in the classroom is being reconsidered.

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse…

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

I don’t feel that it’s fair to either the schools or technology to demand instant results from such a new experiment. Schools haven’t had much time to figure out the best way to incorporate technology into the educational process. The technology can be adapted to meet the needs of students and administrators both, but that takes time as well.

Computers are here to stay, and as with many new “gadgets”. the young will often be the first-adopters. We can’t expect schools to adopt a Luddite-like attitude toward computers in general and still meet the needs of the students. While I might agree that laptops in the schools create more problems than they solve, and may never be appropriate for the classroom, desktop machines that have software to control access to the internet and that can be locked down or turned off during tests, etc., need to be included in the learning process. Further, I don’t think this issue is limited to laptops or computers. The same debate is being waged over the place of cell phones on campus. New technologies require new policies, and those take time and research before being implemented.

Schools need to determine how best to use computers in the classroom. Students need to learn how best to use the internet as part of their education. Computing is not a single solution, it needs to be integrated sensibly and practically into the current system.

I also don’t believe that technology is contributing to the decline of humanity, as some pundits have suggested. It has introduced new elements into society, and some of those deviate drastically from what we’re used to. We can’t turn back the clock and pretend that computers don’t impact our lives. It achieves nothing to be overly nostalgic for times gone by and to suggest that past lifestyles would somehow be workable in our modern times.

We are no longer a rural society. There are still remnants of that lifestyle here and there, but it’s nowhere as predominant as it once was. Change may not always be perceived as good, but it is often inevitable. We are headed into a future where technology will touch on nearly every aspect of our lives. We can either learn how best to deal with that eventuality, or we can attempt to live in denial and fall further behind the curve. Everyone will have to make their own decision.

But the schools, in order to prepare students for their futures, need to accept the presence of computers in their lives and find the best way to introduce that element into the classroom.