Jeff Jarvis

The Art of Conversation

Having watched Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together presentation, which included some follow-up questions from Aleks Krotoski, I went in search of more on Turkle and tripped across a brief TechCrunch conversation she had with Andrew Keen where they specifically address privacy and Facebook:

Later, watching Turkle’s TED Talk, Connected, but alone?, and noting her comment that social media draws us to “sacrifice conversation for mere connection”, I was reminded somehow of Gary Nunn who writes for the Guardian’s “Mind your language” blog. A recent post by Gary titled Small talk? It’s not big and it’s not clever prompted me to tweet a suggestion that he needed to visit Ireland where “small talk is an art form”. He was gracious enough to reply. I was being a tad flippant, but I do feel that the art of conversation, whether trivial or consequential, has long since peaked and is descending at pace towards a monosyllabic base camp.

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr.
Source: Wikipedia

On the other hand, Jeff Jarvis and his plea for “publicness”, reminds me of one of my favorite authors and broadcasters, the late William F. Buckley Jr., who once quipped “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.” Buckley, the founder of National Review, whose command of language and rhetoric is abundantly evident in his sublime essays and in his Firing Line debates, also humorously noted that he “would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.”

Daffy Duck & Immanuel Kant

After watching several videos and reading innumerable articles this week on the themes of digital identity, the public vs the private, and the appropriate place for technology in our lives, I confess I felt somewhat overwhelmed. So what follows is of necessity a perambulation around borders.

Aleks Krotoski

Aleks Krotoski
Source: The Guardian

Aleks Krotoski, in an informative article in the Guardian, Online identity: is authenticity or anonymity more important?, compares and contrasts the “authentic identity” model being promoted by Facebook and Google with the “return to anonymity” goal of 4Chan’s Christopher Poole and the Tor Project’s Andrew Lewman. “The ability to forget, to start over is important,” argues Lewman, while Facebook’s Richard Allan believes that authentic identity provides a credibility and security that will work in Facebook’s favour.
A 2014 article in Wired, The Online Identity Crisis, comes at the same subject from a slightly different perspective. Rather than focusing on anonymity the author talks about compartmentalization and the notion of only revealing specific aspects of identity depending on the social context. This is contrasted with the “single sign-on” being pushed by Facebook, Google and others, which, whilst having obvious appeal, results in an aggregated user identity which breaks down trust relationships established between users and individual service providers, and in the end serves only to further Facebook and Google’s goal of monetizing user interactions.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that sharing is the new social norm finds a willing adherent in Jeff Jarvis, the author of “What Would Google Do?”, whose brief video, How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live touts transparency, “publicness”, and his book “Public Parts”.

Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov
Source: The Guardian

Should you be mulling the purchase of “Public Parts” might I suggest that you first read Evgeny Morozov’s scathing review The Internet Intellectual in the New Republic, which dismisses Jarvis as a lightweight and the book as a “wordy marketing brochure”. Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion” and “To Save Everything, Click Here”, is not without his detractors and is, to put it mildly, an Internet sceptic. That said, his 7,000 word excoriation of Jarvis is thorough and was welcomed by some, including Milo Yiannopoulos in The Kernel, who noted “Jarvis takes great pleasure in underscoring his academic credentials, but not all professors are made equal, and this felt like Daffy Duck being decapitated by Immanuel Kant.”