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CNN.com - The Internet imagined: 'We are immigrants to the future' - Jan 26, 2005

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The Internet imagined:

'We are immigrants to the future'

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- Is the Internet vulnerable to a terrorist attack?

Sixty-six percent of the 1,286 technology experts surveyed in a recent study said they believe at least one devastating attack will be launched against the Internet infrastructure or the U.S. power grid within the next 10 years.

More than half of these same experts also predicted that the Internet will be deeply integrated into our lives through both objects and physical environments, often with higher-speed connections (and more surveillance).

In November, I wrote about participating as an expert in a Pew Internet & American Life and Elon University study, "The Future of the Internet."

In it, a diverse group of technology experts and ordinary Net surfers offered their visions of what could happen with online technologies and society in the next 10 years.

The experts study is now complete, and investigators have published the results.

Because participants were solicited online and not randomly selected, the statistics are not considered applicable to larger social groups, but the response rate (and the prominence of the Internet experts who participated) give the study credibility.

Half of the experts were online before the advent of the graphical World Wide Web in 1993.

The experts predicted the most radical changes caused by the Internet will hit news organizations and publishing, citing blogs as a catalyst.

By contrast, most of them said religious institutions will experience the least radical changes because of the Internet.

Education is another area of significant agreement among the experts. Fifty-seven percent predict virtual classes will become more widespread, with students grouped by interest and skill in the future, rather than by age.

But in their comments many expressed frustration at how resistant educational institutions were to technological innovation in the past 10 years.

Fifty-six percent said telecommuting and home-schooling will expand, blurring boundaries between work and leisure, affecting family dynamics.

Fifty percent of the experts say they believe anonymous and free Internet file-sharing on peer-to-peer networks will be as common 10 years from now as it is today.

The experts didn't agree on everything. Half the respondents disagreed that people would use the Internet to support political biases and stop reading anything that disagreed with their views.

Also, half disagreed with a prediction that online voting would be secure and widespread by 2014.

As much as I enjoyed completing the survey, I also loved digging deeply into the extensive typed responses posted to the Web site, comparing my own responses to those of some of my "Internet heroes" and writers whose work I read avidly.

Some said what I expected: Howard Rheingold predicted flash mobs or "Smart Mobs" (the title of his book) will mobilize political action with cell phones and digital assistants, sooner in some countries than others.

David Weinberger said "hyperlinks will subvert hierarchy," a common theme on his blog and in his book, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined."

"We the Media" author Dan Gillmor said traditional kinds of "intermediaries" will be undermined, and new intermediaries will emerge.

But those who follow Gillmor's career know he believes this so strongly about journalism that he left his job at the San Jose Mercury News to commit himself to a grassroots project to envision new journalistic intermediaries.

Perhaps some of the anonymous predictions were bolder:

Soon being offline will not be an option. ... There will be huge demand for: security, wireless access and entertainment. Advertisers will continue to flee print and broadcast media, fracturing that market and forcing them into niches. When everything is available to everyone at the same time there will be no dominant killer-advertising channel.

Ethernet originator and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe could still imagine wildly futuristic visions, predicting that people would stop moving to cities, the Internet would replace schools, and video blogs would replace television channels.

This experts survey was conducted from September to November 2004. Four thousand predictions made from 1990 to 1995 are already compiled in a database accessible at the same Web site.

The expert survey responses are being added to that database. The ongoing research project forms an amazing time capsule to look back on as Internet cybercultures evolve into the future.

As one anonymous respondent put it, "We are immigrants to the future. It's all in our children's hands now."

RELATED

• Imagining the Internet: Predictions Database
• Collection of expert predictions on each survey question
• Formal report on the expert's survey

CNN.com - Tsunami relief effort may break new ground in fund raising - Jan 19, 2005

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/01/19/web.tsunami.aid/index.html

Tsunami relief effort may break new ground in fund raising

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- The devastating tsunamis in southern Asia have inspired an unprecedented global outpouring of relief. Now some philanthropists are looking to "hot-wire"a tsunami relief effort on the Internet.

The Disaster Relief Project adds an interesting twist to Internet fund-raising by organizing "EAid... for the tsunami victims." More than 100 experts, business leaders, motivational speakers, authors and celebrities are sharing the secrets of their success. Included in the group are the authors of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" along with management guru Tom Peters and senior vice president of the NBA's Orlando Magic, Pat Williams.

To raise money for the charity, the project is auctioning off online access to these speakers in several different electronic formats, from audiocasts linked to Power Point slides on the Web, to one-hour video Webcasts with question-and-answer sessions. The auctions, webcasts and seminar materials and the charity are all online.

Money raised is funneled to tsunami relief through the American Red Cross International Response Fund, the Save the Children 2004 Tsunami Relief Fund and Habitat for Humanity International.

Other charity auction items include face-to-face lunch sessions with some high-end speakers and tickets to exclusive or special events.

Larry Benet, founder of "Outside the Box Philanthropy," which is sponsoring the effort, says many of the speakers can get $75,000 to $100,000 just to give a talk, but they are donating time for the tsunami effort.

Benet says anyone who donates any amount on the Web site, whether $20 or $2,000, will get access to most of the digital content, including Webcasts and teleconferences, what he calls a "webinar," or a Web version of a seminar.

He notes that donors will get more than just the satisfaction of contributing to an important cause. They get a chance to hear insights from experts in the areas of peak performance, leadership, sales and marketing, health and fitness, sports and investing. The project will even offer one-on-one encounters with professional athletes and tickets to some Hollywood premieres.

Meanwhile, the lunch series and other exclusive tickets and features will go up on eBay with a series of rolling 10-day auctions that could start this week. Benet says he hopes the first "webinars" can begin by February 1.

Speakers are still volunteering to join the project (there's a volunteer link on the site). Web designers and corporate sponsors are donating services and bandwidth to deliver the digital content as well.

Benet says 90 percent to 95 percent of the donations will go directly to the three charities, but if more corporate sponsors join in, he hopes that will approach 100 percent. Even the company processing the online credit card donations has waived some of its fees to allow the project to get off the ground more quickly.

The project actually started before the tsunamis hit, intended for hurricane victims in Florida, but as the scope of the tsunamis became known, Benet says it was a natural extension of the project's mission. One quarter of the money raised in this drive will still go to hurricane relief.

Ken Kragen, creator of "We Are the World" and "Hands Across America," is one of the motivational speakers contributing to the project. He writes that "E-Aid... for the tsunami victims" has the potential to create another type of fundraiser, just as "We Are the World" did 20 years ago.

RELATED
The Disaster Relief Project
List of mentors donating time for digital tsunami relief
Volunteer as a speaker or digital contributor

CNN.com - Passport chips raise privacy concerns - Jan 6, 2005

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Passport chips raise privacy concerns

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- A controversy is brewing over a U.S. State Department decision to put identification chips inside all new passport covers, a program scheduled to start by late 2005.

The passport chips differ from those now commonly used for building entry or identifying the family dog. Those chips only provide one piece of information -- a unique identification number -- when pinged by a radio receiver.

The passport chips will hold much more data, from 64 kilobytes to eventually 514 kilobytes, as much as the first personal computers. They will hold the same information as a paper passport plus a digitized photo and face template for the still-unproven facial recognition software, which also is supposed to identify you from a distance, unnoticed.

The fact that passport data can be read unencrypted, with no physical contact, from up to 30 feet away, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, upsets privacy advocates for two reasons.

First, groups such as the ACLU note that information on your activities could be collected by government agencies (or commercial and marketing interests) without your knowledge.

The ACLU obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act that it says show how the U.S. government pushed the idea of unencrypted chips through the standards-setting International Civil Aviation Association over objections from Germany, Britain and other nations. The ACLU says the United States is trying to get a global biometric database online with little debate within the United States, where there is strong resistance to a national I.D. card (see the link to the ACLU white paper in the sidebar to read more).

Second, many people are concerned that criminal or terrorist "data-skimmers" could set up chip readers to grab information from your passport and find out more about you, or "clone" your information and make fake passports, again without your knowledge.

The State Department says it doesn't want to encrypt that data because the system will be too expensive for poorer nations to implement. It says it is still working on a way to block the free range broadcast of unencrypted personal information, and for now at least, the readers are too big for criminals to carry around.

Privacy advocates say a "smart card" swipe system like credit cards would have been just as efficient and far more secure, but passports couldn't be read without a person knowing about it. Awareness that one is being watched seems to be a key sticking point on both sides of this issue.

If the system is implemented, there are steps you can take to protect your personal data from skimmers.

Wrapping your passport in aluminum foil actually works. It is called a "Faraday Cage," and it's the same thing that protects you from the microwaves as you watch your popcorn pop. The foil blocks electromagnetic waves so a nearby chip reader can't force your passport chip to perk up and say "howdy."

Try it out with your work I.D. card or a toll-booth pass. I wouldn't recommend wrapping your micro-chipped dog in Reynolds Wrap, however. Neighbors might think you were planning a barbecue.

RELATED
Global Identity Cards
U.S. State Department travel information
Current U.S. requirements for machine-readable passports
International Civil Aviation Association statement on passport biometrics

CNN.com - Invasion of the podcasting people? - Dec 8, 2004

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Invasion of the podcasting people?

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- If you've seen the classic camp remake "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," you know what "pod people" do when they find a human who has not been replaced with an identical alien born of a pod: point and screech open-mouthed at the non-pod person.

That may be how some are feeling these days with the infiltration of MP3 players into mainstream consumer culture -- like outsiders as iPod people walk around with their earbuds, apparently hearing voices from some alien mothership.

Podcasts are like radio broadcasts for MP3 players, but that's about where the similarity ends.

So let me say right off that I'm not trying to "sell" anything. "Podcasting" is becoming a bit of an overused buzzword in some circles, while others haven't heard the first thing about it. It is a movement worth watching, but I'm more of a critical early adopter than a "trend of the week" bandwagon-type.

Podcasting gets its hipster name from the Apple iPod, but it has no direct connection to Apple. You can get podcasts on any player, or just through your computer, if you are set up for it.

The idea was a gleam in the eye of the former 1980s MTV veejay Adam Curry, who worked out the technical details with Dave Winer, a co-creator of RSS, the Web feed syndication system that launched a gazillion blogs. (See my two previous columns on blogs and news feed readers for background)

Curry and Winer fixed blogs to feed audio and video files as well. They first called it audio blogging, until the cool name came along and stuck.

Curry's podcasts, most from his homes in Amsterdam or now near London, or from conference hotel rooms, feel a lot like radio from back in the day when I could still tolerate radio, before the ads became screechy and annoying. Curry runs musical interludes and segues, and talks in his professional DJ style. I imagine him sitting in a studio with a big fuzzy mike and slider board like I learned on in college, but he probably just uses a laptop with its little mike. I prefer the image in my mind's eye.

As podcasting gained momentum, online visionaries began seeing a grassroots opportunity for homegrown talk radio.

But they added a twist. They emphasize that free podcasts can be heard on the subscriber's schedule, the same way people with digital video recorders time-shift television programming.

They say podcasting does for audio what TiVo did for video, with more diverse, grassroots programming you build yourself by subscribing to RSS feeds.

I used something like podcasting before it was cool, at a fee-based site, Audible.com.

Audible is an audio bookstore, and I've been hooked on audio books for years. They download seamlessly into iTunes and on most MP3 players and computers, unlike the setup for podcasting, which can be technology-intensive for some newbies.

You can pay to get some daily NPR programs such as "All Things Considered" at Audible. Sure, I can listen to "All Things Considered" free at the NPR.org web site (time-shifted), but Audible kicks it right into my music software. I had a free promotion for a month of a New York Times audio reader at Audible, but the reader's voice put me to sleep. At least podcasters are living out their DJ and talk radio fantasies with energy and enthusiasm.

I can see other uses for podcasting as well. Teachers could use it for sharing class recordings as audio lessons, for instance. Audio distance learning is cheaper than video-conferencing with an entire classroom, as is done at some universities.

In the end, if MP3 players become so ubiquitous that we are invaded by ear-bud-wearing podcasting people, they will probably be too pre-occupied with choosing from all these programming options to screech and point at those not connected to the mothership.

RELATED

• Podcast.net
• Podcast Alley
• Audible
• Adam Curry's  'Daily Source Code'
• David Slusher's  'Evil Genius Chronicles'

CNN.com - Imagining the future of the Internet - Nov 10, 2004

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/10/internet.future/index.html

Imagining the future of the Internet

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- I had more fun than I had any right to the other day. I looked into my crystal ball and imagined the future of the Internet.

What I really did was participate in a study by Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Database by taking an intriguing online survey. A big part of this prestigious study is longitudinal, taking place over a long period of time.

More than 10 years have passed since this research project began, so the database is full of predictions made in the early 1990s. The researchers intend to continue the study into the future, to judge the success of the predictions.

The site is open for browsing and searching, so you can hop in and read some of the famous, humorous and edgy predictions from pundits, journalists and ordinary people about what the Internet could become. As years go by, this should become an absolute treasure trove, but it already is an amazing read.

Make your predictions first!

But wait! If you plan to take the survey (and it is open-invitation, so go for it! Click the link in the sidebar) don't read the predictions before you start. This keeps your ideas from being influenced by all those other folks. The survey includes both quick multiple-choice questions and open-ended short answer space where you can describe your prophetic visions in greater detail.

What, you don't have prophetic visions? Sure you do. Whatever your point of view, dark and dystopian or utopian and blissful, it is worth recording, like in a time capsule. If you are interested enough to read this column, you too have something to say.

The questions range from topics such as what will happen to democracy and online voting, to predicting the future of creativity and art, personal entertainment and online media environments. The survey also asks participants to look back on the past 10 years and consider the impact the Internet has had on our lives, or where it has fallen short of expectations.

A surprising thought experiment

Because on certain days I am both dark and dystopian and utopian and blissful, I found myself writing many long-winded paragraphs on each answer. Each question prompted me to take on the thought experiment in a different way, so I found myself writing things that had never occurred to me before.

I've been studying Internet cybercultures and interfaces since the early 1990s, so as I went along in the survey I also started having a sense of déjà vu. I realized I had taken the same survey before, sometime around 1993 or 1994 when I was starting grad school. It may not have been associated with the Pew Foundation back then, I don't remember, but I see other people I knew at that time cited in the predictions. I think many of us participated because we were at an engineering school.

I wish I could remember what my answers were back then. That's why I decided to save a copy this time, by copying and pasting them into a text document. I recommend all participants save their own predictions for posterity, just to be able to look back on their own ride in Jules Verne's visionary balloon.

RELATED
• Elon University/Pew Internet & American Life Database
• Take the survey and make your predictions
• Check out samples of predictions made by participants

CNN.com - Can you prove you're not a machine? - Oct 13, 2004

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Can you prove you're not a machine?

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- Sounds like something out of "The Twilight Zone," doesn't it?

I've been thinking about something called the "Turing Test" lately because some of my personal e-mail has come back undeliverable. Evidently the servers, in an attempt to screen out machine-generated spam, think that my e-mail is spam, too.

I hate spam as much as the next person, but I resent being censored and unable to communicate certain ideas in online discussions. Sometimes I like to make jokes about how spammers think everyone on Earth is a potential customer for Viagra. But if I use the word "Viagra," my e-mail bounces.

Alan M. Turing was a mathematician and a co-founder of computer science and cryptography. He developed the Turing Test. Turing postulated that in developing a thinking machine or "artificial intelligence," the machine shouldn't have to duplicate human thinking processes exactly. All that should be required of a thinking machine is that it be able to "pass" as a human.

The Turing Test imagines a questioner and two unseen correspondents, one human and one machine. The machine would pass the Turing Test if the questioner couldn't correctly guess which of the two was the machine.

Josh Berman and Amy Bruckman at Georgia Tech created an online interface in the late 1990s that played with another aspect of the Turing Test: a gender test that went beyond gender to guessing all kinds of identities -- religious, ethnic, etc. Their work involved studying how people negotiated identities, made assumptions and acted or lied to outfox the questioner. It illustrated both how fluid online identities are and also how hard it is to lie about who we are.

The other day I wrote an e-mail describing a favorite actress and her movies as part of a fun online film discussion. On one film in particular, I said this actress played a "sexpot." I think that is a perfectly fine discussion point about the kinds of two-dimensional roles that are available for women, but with the word "sexpot," one server kicked back my e-mail and banned me from sending e-mail through that server ever again.

Actresses are still playing sexpots, but talking about them playing sexpots is verboten?!

The servers (machines) suspect that I am a machine. The question is, online, how can I prove that I'm not?

In the future, how much of my daily energy will have to go into acting sufficiently un-machinelike just to be able to "pass" as human?

More recently, AOL (a division of Time Warner along with CNN Headline News) informed my friends with AOL accounts that they're banned from sending or receiving posts to a private mailing list I own. Our group of about 40 women discusses wide-ranging current events. We don't go out of our way to cuss, but we don't censor our language either. Our virtual air is hardly blue.

What's going on here? I'm less likely to blame a culture of rigid morality than I am to blame spammers and pornographers who allow their machines to monopolize certain words, preventing the rest of us from using them in normal conversation and not be suspected as a machine by machine culture.

What other words are being removed from our shrinking online vocabulary? Will we be able to write about breast cancer awareness, or will the word "breast" lead to e-mail bouncing?

Now I wonder if anyone will be able to read this column because I've used the taboo words. At the very least, parental filters will block it. These are dangerous ideas after all.

RELATED
• Wikipedia on Turing Test   
• The Turing Game
• Josh Berman and Amy Bruckman's research into The Turing Game

CNN.com - Will cyber journalists turn the tables on big media? - Sep 15, 2004

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Will cyber journalists turn the tables on big media?

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- I've been reading a new book by Dan Gillmor called "We the Media." Actually, I'm reading the e-book, but I already know I will pony up for the print version as well.

This book picks up on a line of thinking popularized online by something called "The Cluetrain Manifesto," also available as a print book.

"The Cluetrain Manifesto" was widely loved and criticized for its sheer tongue-in-cheek audaciousness, and for the presumption of overstating its case, or as logic sticklers would say, "begging the question."

After all, it had the nerve to begin: "People of Earth ... markets are conversations."

"The Cluetrain Manifesto" asserted that audiences are rising up to take control of media messages, and if top-down big media controllers didn't get on the "cluetrain," audiences will simply move on without them.

That seemingly innocent shift belies a power struggle.

Gillmor is an experienced journalist/columnist/blogger with the San Jose Mercury News. He's writing in cyber culture and in print, but in a more serious tone.

The main point of "We the Media" is similar: Journalism is a conversation in this era of the citizen journalist working in dialogue with other citizen journalists.

Gillmor touts the blog movement as a primary sign of this new participatory journalism, but he notes that blogs are only one visible sign of something much larger.

Traditional journalism generates content, but it also acts as a gatekeeper, selecting which stories are blessed and visible, and which are cursed to invisibility.

With participatory journalism, readers act as editors/explorers of the news landscape. They also can become producers, adding story content and becoming part of the larger conversation. True dialogue has the power to shape that conversation, possibly to frame issues differently than professional journalists would.

In 1996, I wrote a magazine essay about the new role of reader as active explorer and dialogue agent. I thought it would lead to more critical questioning and critical thinking.

My idea was: "Why not get to know a subject the way a kid gets to know the woods?"

It is a mythic ideal of how kids explore a common "woods," playing hide-and-seek, building forts, damming creeks and avoiding the mean dog behind that one house in the neighborhood. It is active, unlike the more passive experience of reading a newspaper or watching TV.

Consider instead the media landscape preferred by public relations people, political handlers and message "spin doctors." We're in the middle of two well-funded presidential campaigns right now. Given the carefully crafted messages and repetition put out by the campaigns, it would seem that political handlers assume audiences are empty cups, waiting to be filled up with their "talking points."

What happens when the audience talks back? The Howard Dean campaign was the first to harness that powerful blog energy as well as other online tools such as "Meetups." Campaigns at all levels have discovered how much more quickly small campaign contributions add up when collected online.

Gillmor could be anticipating the power of citizen journalists, rather than noting their arrival. I believe we are still deep in the power struggle between top-down message control and interactive reader/journalists getting to know their political candidates the way kids get to know the backwoods.

I'm still not sure which side is winning.

RELATED
• We the Media
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Meetup.com

CNN.com - An Act that induces a lot of reactions - Aug 18, 2004

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An Act that induces a lot of reactions

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- I was deeply troubled a few weeks ago when the Senate Judiciary Committee listened to testimony about a proposed bill called the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (S. 2560) introduced by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont.

In their quest to put a stop to illegal online music swapping, these lawmakers to have written a law that would make MP3 players, such as Apple iPods, illegal.

The bill allows copyright infringement liability lawsuits against the makers of any device or software utility that "induces" or encourages users to make illegal copies of copyrighted digital material. The bill is targeting peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing such as Grokster or Morpheus, but some claim it is so broadly worded that even Apple iPods would become illegal.

I read the articles on the proposed Induce Act and mulled them over, looking for something in the commentary that I just wasn't seeing. Don't get me wrong. There is plenty of good information on the Internet for critical thinkers to evaluate the so-called "Induce Act" on their own -- articles in the popular media, the full text of the bill, a demonstration of what a lawsuit filed under the Act would look like at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and even a Web site called "savetheipod.com."

But I want to consider a larger issue behind the so-called Induce Act: What makes a good law?

One principle I find important for a law is that it be consistently applicable. I'm not too fond of laws that create loopholes as if they were the U.S. tax code, you know, where the law only applies to people with green hair hopping on one foot every second Tuesday.

I also want to think about the overused word, paradigm. I know it tends to induce giggling, but I am talking about its primary meaning: a model or exemplar. We ought to be thinking about the Induce Act in terms of what models it is using for digital copying.

With new inventions, we tend to model how we think about them with items we've used before; for example, before a car was a car, it was a "horseless carriage."

Sometimes people think about computer hard drives as being like a bucket, something in which to catch and carry things around. But what if a bucket isn't the best model for thinking about a hard drive? What other models might we use? A ditto machine? A telephone? Those models have different primary functions beyond catch and carry.

In their quest to put a stop to illegal online music swapping, these lawmakers seem to have written a law that would do more than make iPods illegal. Based on its model, any item that can hold and reproduce digital copies could be illegal. The law appears to catch in its bucket all personal computers, as well as digital cameras, including the ones attached to cell phones. Even office copy machines would have to be thrown out.

And in principle, all copying would be suspect, including film cameras and video recorders. If we apply the principle presented in the Induce Act's model to all media, even the lowly pencil could be construed as inducing people to break the law.

The people who get to decide on the models actually have a lot of power. And the Induce Act is trying to do just that, to remodel the evolving landscape of cyberspace. There's a lot more to this Induce Act than meets the eye.

CNN.com - Surviving crashes: A cautionary tale - July 29, 2004

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Surviving crashes: A cautionary tale

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- Most of the time we think it will never happen. Then it does -- the dreaded computer crash.

I've been interacting with my computer on a daily basis since 1989. I've suffered major crashes before, replacing some parts, cobbling components together and upgrading the entire machine, usually only when a breakdown forced me into it.

You know how it feels when your car goes in the shop and you're faced with how dependent you are on it? You toss and turn at night, worrying about the transmission, worrying about the bill.

But a car is duking it out in the world, battling rush-hour traffic on your behalf. We expect our cars to take some wear and tear. I'm hard on stuff I take out of the house, which may be why I avoid laptop computers. They're too big an investment to expose by tripping on some stairs or spilling a soda.

No, my computer stays safely at home. It had no right to crash.

Unlike with my car, I feel obligated to fix the computer myself. It's part of my fantasy of being some kind of insufferable electronics know-it-all.

Which is why I felt so stupid when my first attempts to fix the problem failed. It dawned on me that it could be a major problem, could even be permanent. Then I realized it had been more than six months since my last massive CD-ROM backup.

I wanted to cry. I'd done a nominal backup before upgrading the system. To make space on the internal hard drive, I moved all my family photos to an external SCSI hard drive, not suspecting the upgrade itself would kill the drive and lock out my backups. (I still haven't given up on it.)

It is a truism, a maxim, a mantra: always back up your work -- always, always, always. I've taught classes and preached it to my students. I was mean when they came with excuses of why their homework wasn't done: The printer died, the network swallowed it, the laptop keyboard shorted out, the Ethernet connector broke off.

There were a million excuses in the naked city, but I had no sympathy. I pointed a long baleful finger at the paragraph in my syllabus that said, "Failure to back up your work is not an excuse for missing a project deadline. Assume anything could go wrong with the computers at any time and prepare accordingly."

Most teachers have such policies these days. After all, there's no need for the dog to eat your homework when the computer does a much better job.

I guess my chickens came home to roost.

The moral of this story should be the importance of setting up automatically scheduled global backups or investing in a tape backup drive. Solving this problem does take more than religiously repeating a mantra, and machine discipline is better than human discipline.

But my mom e-mails family pictures from Alaska because I don't get home very often. I didn't notice how important such small things are. They accumulate. We don't pay for them the way we pay for hardware or software. Yet they were my only copies of those photos, and for all I've invested in my computer habit over the years, those are what it hurts the most to lose.

So I'm re-thinking my social relationship with the machine, with a sense that I must take bolder steps to preserve regularly those seemingly insignificant personal data files. The slow accumulation of what Philip K. Dick called "kipple" may turn out to be the most valuable part of the machine.

CNN.com - There once was a woman who lived in her computer - Jun 21, 2004

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Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/06/21/smart.home/index.html

There once was a woman who lived in her computer

By Christine Boese
CNN Headline News

(CNN) -- I've been abuzz lately with a fantasy of a "smart home." My mom and I share a hobby of obsessively drawing house floor plans, but mine are always a little goofy because I try to cram every gizmo I can think of into them. At the very least, I have visions of server closets dancing in my head: the whole house networked and wireless. I can dream, can't I?

But when I jump online to research what are starting to be marketed as "smart homes," I get irritated. They don't match my daydreams at all. Instead, with Internet refrigerators and toasters, all-seeing sensors monitoring my every burp and gurgle, I think I'd feel more like a prisoner in my own castle. I have paranoid fits just thinking about it.

Which is why I don't want to waltz into my first smart home without thinking about how the technology will shape me more than I may be empowered by it.

Basically, I want to shift my frame of reference from thinking of technology as objects I manipulate to thinking about technology as an immersive environment.

Or, to put it more simply, instead of thinking of a computer as a beige box of fans, chips, drives and a motherboard, I want to start thinking of my home as a large, walk-in computer.

I'm reminded of how early automobiles were given the limited nickname "horseless carriages," as if that were all a car culture could or would become. Social structures will always shape and twist technology into uses few can foresee.

In a past column, I wrote of Marshall McLuhan's concept of technologies as extensions of our physical selves outside our bodies: the car an extension of the foot; a book an extension of the eye, etc. As long as we think of technology in terms of gadgets outside ourselves, I believe we will continue to become more fragmented and extended. We are dependent on our calculators just as the classical Greek orators lost their memorization skills with the advent of writing technologies and literacies

But McLuhan wrote of how we "interiorize" technology as well. He looked at how a technological culture "writes" and shapes our inner worlds. The thoughts we think in an Internet chat room are vastly different than the topics that come up by candlelight or around a campfire.

Once distributed among many people, lowly personal computers became much more than the sum of their scaled-down parts. With many contributors, the technological environment expanded rapidly. Some computerized objects stayed very small, such as digital cameras or music players. Meanwhile, networked systems began to grow that beige box of the PC to the size of a house some of us would actually consider living in, just like the old woman who lived in a shoe.

How will this immersive environment shape the interiors of our minds? Will we master and direct the technology to our needs? I also have a nightmare where my maxed-out smart home does nothing but blink 12:00 over and over.