When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

With Facebook, [Mark] Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook””if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large””this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.
Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed””and been ashamed of noticing””that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?

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Google is expanding its feature film streaming service, says a source who’s been briefed on the product. The service will likely be an expansion of the current movie rental/streaming test launched by Google earlier this year. Announcements should be made in early 2011, says our source, and will be heavily marketed.

Ex-Netflix executive Robert Kyncl, who was hired by Google earlier this year, is negotiating studio deals, says our source. The service will initially focus on top tier films and to focus marketing efforts there, including pairing with Google TV. A deeper library will be added over time. Existing rental titles are certainly not new release top tier films.

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A ‘Blogging bishop’ who is a University of Bradford graduate has been announced today as the next Bishop of Bradford. The Rt Revd Nick Baines (53), who is currently Bishop of Croydon, will be the 10th Bishop of Bradford, following the retirement of the Rt Revd David James last July.

Nick Baines is renowned for his media expertise – he is an experienced broadcaster and writer and he blogs and tweets almost daily. He has been Bishop of Croydon (an area bishop in the Diocese of Southwark) since May 2003. He makes use of his experience working with other faith leaders in London following the 9/11 attacks in representing the Archbishop of Canterbury at various international interfaith initiatives.

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With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.

The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.

The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time ”” a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming game Angry Birds.

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This is the site mentioned in the previous article, may sure to take a moment to explore it.

Perhaps the biggest collection of words ever assembled has just gone online: 500 billion of them, from 5 million books published over the past four centuries.

The words make up a searchable database that researchers at Harvard say is a new and powerful tool to study cultural change.

The words are a product of Google’s book-scanning project. The company has converted approximately 15 million books so far into electronic documents. That’s about 15 percent of all books ever published. It includes books published in English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew.

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Considering that you couldn’t turn on your TV, go to the movies or hit the bookstore this year without seeing Mark Zuckerberg, it’s absolutely fitting that the 26-year-old founder of Facebook was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.”

At the same time it’s astonishing that, at such an early stage of his career, Zuckerberg finds himself on the receiving end of an honor that places him in some remarkable company.

He is the second-youngest to receive the nod, edged out only by 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He becomes only the second recipient from Silicon Valley, following Andy Grove in 1997 — who was honored almost 30 years after founding Intel. Among other tech titans, the list is a short one: Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com in 1999 and Bill Gates in 2005 (though for his charitable works).

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Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, likes to say that his Web site brings people together, helping to make the world a better place. But Facebook isn’t a utopia, and when it comes up short, Dave Willner tries to clean up.

Dressed in Facebook’s quasi-official uniform of jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, the 26-year-old Mr. Willner hardly looks like a cop on the beat. Yet he and his colleagues on Facebook’s “hate and harassment team” are part of a virtual police squad charged with taking down content that is illegal or violates Facebook’s terms of service. That puts them on the front line of the debate over free speech on the Internet.

That role came into sharp focus last week as the controversy about WikiLeaks boiled over on the Web, with coordinated attacks on major corporate and government sites perceived to be hostile to that group.

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From the Vatican Press Office:

Without venturing to evaluate the extreme seriousness of publishing such a large amount of secret and confidential material, and its possible consequences, the Holy See Press Office observes that part of the documents published recently by Wikileaks concerns reports sent to the U.S. State Department by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See.

Naturally these reports reflect the perceptions and opinions of the people who wrote them and cannot be considered as expressions of the Holy See itself, nor as exact quotations of the words of its officials.

Their reliability must, then, be evaluated carefully and with great prudence, bearing this circumstance in mind.

The British ambassador to the Vatican warned that Pope Benedict XVI’s invitation to Anglican opponents of female priests to convert en masse to Catholicism was so inflammatory that it might lead to discrimination and even violence against Catholics in Britain, according to a secret US diplomatic cable.

Talking to an American diplomat after the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, met the pope in November 2009, Francis Campbell said the surprise Vatican move had placed Williams “in an impossible situation” and “Anglican-Vatican relations were facing their worst crisis in 150 years as a result of the pope’s decision”.

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As every avid Twitter user knows, there are only 140 characters in a “tweet” and that includes the empty spaces.

The bishops gathered at the ancient Council of Nicea didn’t face that kind of communications challenge and, thus, produced an old-fashioned creed that in English is at least 1,161 characters long.

No wonder so many of the gray-haired administrators in black suits in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops struggle with life online.

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In the latest twist in the drama swirling around the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group, British police officials said on Tuesday they had arrested Julian Assange, its beleaguered founder, on a warrant issued in Sweden in connection with alleged sex offenses.

Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, was arrested by officers from Scotland Yard’s extradition unit when he went to a central London police station by prior agreement with the authorities, the police said. A court hearing was expected later.

In a statement, the police said: “Officers from the Metropolitan Police extradition unit have this morning arrested Julian Assange on behalf of the Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape.”

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Is WikiLeaks a serious journalistic enterprise or a wrecking party? The organisation had given the impression that it had been trying to be more responsible in the past month, after having been accused of endangering the lives of US troops and their helpers by releasing the Afghanistan war logs. But yesterday’s publication of a list of facilities deemed vital to US national security is a step back in the wrong direction. There is a dangerous nihilism in the refusal to distinguish between information that embarasses the powerful, and information that potentially puts lives at risk.

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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, will hand himself in to police – possibly as early as Tuesday – after a fresh European Arrest Warrant was issued by the Swedish authorities.

Mr Assange is expected to voluntarily attend a police station within the next 24 hours, and will then appear in a magistrates’ court. He is wanted over allegations of sexual assault in Sweden.

He is currently in hiding in the south-east of England but police are understood to have the necessary paperwork to arrest him.

Mark Stephens, Mr Assange’s British lawyer, said: “We are in discussions about him going to the police by consent.”

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Ninth grade was supposed to be a fresh start for Marie’s son: new school, new children. Yet by last October, he had become withdrawn. Marie prodded. And prodded again. Finally, he told her.

“The kids say I’m saying all these nasty things about them on Facebook,” he said. “They don’t believe me when I tell them I’m not on Facebook.”

But apparently, he was.

Marie, a medical technologist and single mother who lives in Newburyport, Mass., searched Facebook. There she found what seemed to be her son’s page: his name, a photo of him grinning while running ”” and, on his public wall, sneering comments about teenagers he scarcely knew.

Someone had forged his identity online and was bullying others in his name….

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Social networking is changing the American political scene and helping South Carolina politicians stay directly connected to the voters. Media experts say those who aren’t using such sites as Facebook and Twitter are missing out.

Gary Karr, a Washington, D.C-based public relations executive, one-time S.C. political reporter and press secretary for former Gov. David Beasley, said in the 1990s the political realm depended on snail mail, e-mails and media outlets to deliver messages. Today, officials can shape their reputations, control their message and get the word out to a big audience in real time.

“Everybody is their own media channel now,” Karr said.

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Most civil lawsuits are about the money, even when the issues raised are serious ones. So it is refreshing that a federal lawsuit brought by a Franklin Park couple against Google Inc. was settled for $1 in Pittsburgh this week. The issue raised in this case was unusually interesting, pitting the right to privacy against the abundant data available online and the purposes to which it may be put.

The lawsuit was filed by Aaron and Christine Boring, who objected to an image of their house being posted on the Internet by Google as part of its Street View feature. According to their attorney, Gregg R. Zegarelli, the issue was the implication that Google can assemble unlimited data on people.

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After years of debate, the Federal Communications Commission is moving forward with controversial rules intended to preserve the open Internet. The FCC chairman outlined the proposals this week and criticism came quickly, from all parts of the ideological spectrum.

Ever since he took the job, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has been promising new rules of the road for the phone and cable companies that provide broadband access, as well as the companies and consumers who depend on it.

“It is the Internet’s openness and freedom ”” the ability to speak, innovate and engage in commerce without having to ask anyone’s permission ”” that has enabled the Internet’s unparalleled success,” he said.

In a brief appearance Wednesday, Genachowski sketched out the rules that he said would ensure that broadband providers treat all of the data on their networks equally ”” an idea known as net neutrality. But some public interest groups have seen a few more details than Genachowski announced. They say the proposed rules are net neutrality in name only.

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As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.

The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.”

That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power ”” and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States.

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In one cable from January 2010, Spanish prosecutor Jose “Pepe” Grinda Gonzales claimed that in Russia, Belarus and Chechnya “one cannot differentiate between the activities of the Government and OC (organised crime) groups”.

Judge Grinda led a long investigation into Russian organised crime in Spain, leading to more than 60 arrests.

A cable from the US embassy in Madrid talks about the “unanswered question” of the extent to which Mr Putin is implicated in the mafia and whether he controls its actions.

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In a confidential diplomatic cable sent back to the State Department, the American Embassy warned of increasing mistrust of the United States by its northern neighbor, with which it shares some $500 billion in annual trade, the world’s longest unsecured border and a joint military mission in Afghanistan.

“The degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars, twist current events to feed longstanding negative images of the U.S. ”” and the extent to which the Canadian public seems willing to indulge in the feast ”” is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada,” the cable said.

A trove of diplomatic cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, disclose a perception by American diplomats that Canadians “always carry a chip on their shoulder” in part because of a feeling that their country “is condemned to always play ”˜Robin’ to the U.S. ”˜Batman.’ ”

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Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook and the chief digital organizer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, knows a thing or two about building online communities.

Now he is applying his expertise to a new venture called Jumo, which aims to connect people with nonprofits and charitable organizations.

The site, which is being unveiled on Tuesday, aims to “do what Yelp did for restaurants,” Mr. Hughes said, indexing charities “to help people find and evaluate them.”

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The idea of a do-not-track mechanism that could be built into Web browsing software is gaining steam in Washington. This week, a House subcommittee on consumer protection is holding a hearing about do-not-track proposals and the Federal Trade Commission is expected to release an online privacy report that will promote a do-not-track mechanism.

Officials from Mozilla and Lotame are expected to appear at a separate panel this week to discuss how the industry could create its own do-not-track mechanism before “government tries to legislate how browsers function,” according to the event organizer, Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an Internet-industry funded think tank.
The group will discuss a technical method that would allow Web browsers to broadcast a “do not track” message at a user’s request.

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A journalist working closely with WikiLeaks says that secret documents about the Vatican and the volatile territories of North Korea and Israel are to be made public soon.

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The [New York] Times has…erected a series of filters between the 250,000 raw documents that WikiLeaks obtained and complete public exposure. The paper has released only a tiny percentage of the cables. Information that might endanger informants has been redacted. Specific cables have been put into context with broader reporting.

Yet it might be useful to consider one more filter. Consider it the World Order filter. The fact that we live our lives amid order and not chaos is the great achievement of civilization. This order should not be taken for granted.

This order is tenuously maintained by brave soldiers but also by talkative leaders and diplomats. Every second of every day, leaders and diplomats are engaged in a never-ending conversation. The leaked cables reveal this conversation. They show diplomats seeking information, cajoling each other and engaging in faux-friendships and petty hypocrisies as they seek to avoid global disasters.

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The Times was the only American news organization to receive a massive cache of government documents that were released by WikiLeaks, the “stateless” Internet organization that specializes in exposing government secrets through leaked information.

But the Times wasn’t on WikiLeaks’ list of original recipients. The newspaper got its hands on the trove of about 250,000 cables thanks to the Guardian newspaper of Great Britain, which quietly passed the Times the raw material that it had received as one of five news organizations favored by WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks had worked with the Times this summer in releasing about 90,000 documents prepared by U.S. military sources about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the group pointedly snubbed the Times this time around, offering the State Department cables to two other American news outlets, CNN and the Wall Street Journal. Both turned WikiLeaks down, deciding that its terms – including a demand for financial compensation under certain circumstances – were unacceptable.

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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has denounced the release of classified diplomatic cables as an “attack on the international community”.

She spoke after the release of some 250,000 messages from US envoys around the world by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

The cables offer candid and sometimes unflattering views of world leaders and frank assessments of security threats.

But Mrs Clinton said diplomats often needed confidentiality to be effective.

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It is de rigeur for anyone starting a business today to use keywords like ‘virtualisation’ and scoff at the thought of paying for real estate and overheads.

With laptops, tablets, smartphones and teleconferencing, staff can work for their multi-national from practically any location. And cloud computing – storing information on remote servers rather on local PCs – means that projects can be synced effortlessly, no matter where you are.

But even in the early adopting world of tech, place still seems to play an important role. In New York, there is now talk of a ‘Silicon Alley’ because of all the start-ups. England has its own mini-hub around Cambridge. Germany has Munich.

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