The very Western privacy myth.

The fantastic NYT: Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options info graphic above was probably among the most widely user syndicated items today.

As this debate rages on, we must remember that the idea of privacy - the very concept itself - is a uniquely Western mental construct, not a universally accepted state of being.

In many Asian and Eastern-European languages there is no word that describes the concept of privacy¹. There is an every evolving body of case law on the topic in the US, but there is no right to privacy in the US Constitution, and the interpretation of what privacy is varies by US Appellate Court District.

Privacy, and the risks associated with a lack thereof, are in the cultural eye of the Facebook beholder.

Like free will, our belief in privacy may be necessary for our survival. But but the mental constructs we create for our psychic health are not proof of their existence.

Posted via web from Plastic Spoon's Posterous

Grant Green ~ Street of Dreams

I recently stumbled across these photos on my hard drive. I was working across the street from the World Trade Center when I collected them. It was December of 1999. I was shooting with the 2.3 mega pixel Fuji MX-2700, my first digital camera.

No one can make sense of what has happened since that time, nor can any one person truly comprehend how fundamentally our lives were altered on 9/11/2000. My son was born in August of 2000. At one month old, even his existence was altered beyond recognition in ways he'll never know.

On a personal, hyper-microcosmic level, these photos are not unlike the photo of my father dancing with Daniela Teoc. As was the case in 'Ritmos Latinos,' the photos themselves, the original data set, is unaltered. But the historic events between the now and the time each image was taken have so altered our perception apparatus that the data set is obscured by its subjective metadata.

I happened to rediscover these images just as I began immersing myself in the Marvel Comics' Civil War series, a thinly veiled commentary on 9/11 and the events that followed, particularly the Patriot Act.

I didn't grow up reading comics, though, as an adult, I occasionally find myself indulging as a furtive, guilty pleasure of sorts. But as soon as I read Civil War #1, I was obsessed with tracing the back story through all of the issues I had missed as well as with following all new issues as they are released monthly.

The marriage of type and image has been a passion of mine for decades. In my mind, the tradition out of which comics are born dates back to such works as William Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell,' possibly even back to illuminated manuscripts. So in my mind, it is only fitting that comics address issues such as our loss of civil rights, our having sent our solders to fight a false threat only to make ourselves doubly vulnerable to the true threat of two rogue states eager to test the limits of their newly acquired nuclear power, and ineffective to take arms against the genocide in Africa.

And as I devour the Marvel Civil War books, as I secretly away to scour comic shops to find precious missing issues to complete my suddenly robust collection, only to return home and discover these photos of the pre-9/11 New York City financial district, it occurs to me that I have not yet come to terms with post-9/11 America, not yet dealt with the feelings terror, rage, loss, and, most of all, of betrayal.

Like freewill, security is a dangerous opiate. No civil rights, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are worth exchanging for the fleeting illusion of governmental protection. Privacy, the right to speak freely, to travel, to face your accuser, these are our only weapons against tyranny. 'National Security' is a brilliant tag line, second perhaps only to 'Just Do It.' In both cases, the product behind the positioning statements is suspect.

Ritmos Latinos

This is a photo of my father. The woman with whom he is dancing is not my mother, though I am old enough to be her father.

I stumbled upon this photo on Blogger last night while searching on my last name to see if my nascent blog would turn up.

My blog was among the results.

So was with a student essay about Ella Fitzgerald that cited
an article I wrote for Good Times in 1996.

Also among the results was the blog featuring this photo.

Here's the photo in its original context. The news clip is dated September 6. My mother was overseas at the time, attending to an ill sibling.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There was a programmer with whom I worked who used to say 'data is data,' and I was somehow reminded of him when I saw this photo.

While the morals at play are suspect even to those who know nothing of my father, he is certainly doing nothing illegal or even elicit. And while he has never mentioned Daniela Teoc, he makes no secret of the fact that he goes out dancing with people that no one in our family knows.

Can the photo be explained away as a data set that merely activates phosphors and diodes? If so, rumination ends right here. But if not, what is it that imbues this data set with meaning above and beyond its mapped color values? Or put another way, from where does the data get its subjective metadata? And exactly what have I done by taking this publicly available data set and repackaging it here? The data set is an exact duplicate of the original but it would seem that the the subjective meta data has been manipulated by the data set's new context.

Data is our Christmas lists, our Blogs, our music, our home movies and feature films, our professional life, our life's savings, our self-expression, our greatest works of art, and our greatest protection against tyranny. But we have to be mindful of the data we generate explicitly (as I am doing right now) and implicitly (as my father and Daniela did on September 6). For while data is data, so too is data married to subjective meta data powerful enough to inspire, to nurture, to excite, to hurt, to destroy, and to ruin lives.