The Kindness of Strangers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l93wAqnPQwk&feature=player_embedded

Certainly the biggest social media story of the week has been that of Karen Huff Klein, the 68-year-old bus monitor working for the Athena Middle School District in Greece, New York, who was so brutally harassed by 7th-grade students on their second to last day of school. Apparently doing nothing but her job, sitting quietly and watchfully on the bus, Mrs. Klein became the target of horrific verbal abuse from four, 13-year-old students on their ride home. A student sitting nearby captured it all on his cell phone and then uploaded it to his Facebook page, from which it made its way to YouTube. 

Once in the public domain:

Millions of viewers from around the world watched her humiliation. There were cries of indignation and sympathy, retribution and recompense.

Through posts on social media and the user-generated news site Reddit.com, word spread geometrically, leading to a fund drive created by Redditor, Max Sidorov, on the independent fundraising site indiegogo.com that began with a modest goal of $5,000 to help Klein take a nice vacation and scrub the foul memories of the last days of school from her mind.

Sidorov, a 25-year-old Toronto nutritionist and graduate of York University, who had experienced bullying himself when he first moved to Canada as a young boy from Ukraine, wrote:
 

"I felt deeply sad for Karen . . . I know where she's coming from."

His efforts have paid off in spades. Klein, a grandmother of eight, who only makes $15,506/year, now has $628,233 waiting for her that has been contributed by over 29,000 people, as of this writing on Saturday evening, June 23, 2012, at 8:50 pm. The fund has been growing exponentially ever since it was first established three days ago and the collection site will be up until Friday, July 20, 2012, at 11:59 PM PST.


  

Sidorov is ecstatic. He says:

"Only in my wildest dreams did I think the amount of money raised would reach this much. It's very amazing to put it lightly, the amount that she's got."

Although this isn't the first time crowdsourcing has raised impressive amounts of money, even experts agree that

The response to Klein's plight is a stunning example of the power of people in the new, Me-Media era.

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project and author of "Networked: The New Social Operating System," calls the sheer volume of response to the Klein video "head-scratching." He comments:

"It kind of feels like there aren't boundaries to this stuff."

I, for one, am glad that the boundaries to "this stuff" don't exist in Klein's case and that the fund raising efforts in response to the above video have gone viral across the world. I would like nothing better than to see Karen Klein become an Internet millionaire, while her tormentors are riding their bicycles to and from school because they've lost their privilege to ride the bus.

I'm normally a passive consumer of Internet news -- reading, watching and listening, but not acting; what I saw in that 10-minute video, however, spurred me into action. I've emailed the superintendent of public schools in Greece, New York, along with the principal of the Athena Middle School District from which these disgraceful kids hail, as well as the president of the Greece Central School District Board of Education. And, of course, I've contributed to Karen's fund.

A recent Huff Post Tech article entitled "How The Internet Saved The Bullied Bus Monitor," comments on how 

The story typifies how democratized media and crowd-sourcing can not only keep us informed of injustice, but also can make a difference.

It has certainly made a difference for Karen Klein, as you can see in this interview with Anderson Cooper below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv0iLG6Z7UE

Changing Notions of Identity in an Increasingly Connected World

In my last post, I asked "Who are we now?" when we're connected all the time. This is a question a lot of people are thinking about, perhaps none more so than science writer Michael Chorost, in his 2011 book World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet. In this wide-ranging study, he examines how the opportunity for increasingly dense connection with others provided to us through the Internet is radically changing our notions of self. As our technology progresses, we will become even more intimately connected with others, with a futuristic version of our now hand-held devices possibly moving inside our brains, providing us with a world of connection to others only psychics could once dream of.

     But what will this mean for who we are? How we have always perceived of ourselves as individuals? It looks as those this concept is in for a radical overhaul as we come to accept that we are more a part of a "hive mind" rather than disconnected beings.

     Chorost cites the work of Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, and James H. Fowler, PhD, who, in their book, Connected: How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do, show that we are already profoundly connected with others in far-reaching ways we can barely understand.

      Chorost quotes Christakis and Fowler (p. 116) as saying, "A smoker may have as much control over quitting as a bird has to stop a flock from flying in a particular direction," because of who we are connected to through our far-flung social networks -- connections, in many cases, to people we don't even know exist. True autonomy, maintains Chorost, has always been an illusion. He believes the World Wide Mind will only make this fact more obvious (p. 202).

     As we become more integrated with the Internet, Chorost posits that our concept of individuality itself will have to be radically reconfigured. He writes, "Once assumed to reside in a single human body, a personality may become distributed over multiple bodies. Most of it will reside within an individual body, but not all of it" (pp. 201-202).

       Time magazine writer, Lev Grossman, hypothesizes in his Feb. 10, 2011, article, "2045: The year man becomes immortal", that we might "scan our consciousness into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually" (p. 44). And, he then asks, "If I scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me?" (p. 48).

     Grossman goes on to say that this is an idea that's "radical and ancient at the same time. In "Sailng to Byzantium," W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Grossman then asks, "Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead?" (p. 48). Who knows what possibilities exist for us?

     But exist they do and the futures of those who follow us will look very different from our own. Chorost quotes author Joel Garreau from his book Radical Evolution, when he writes, "Can we picture devotions marking the great significance of a young person getting her first cognition piercing -- awakening her mind directly to the Web of all meaning?" (Garreau, p. 265, in Chorost, p. 138).

     What we see now is only the beginning.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utNHl6AQqTA

The Singularity is coming your way!

At last! The travel app I've been waiting for!

    From TravBuddy.com

I love to travel and I love to keep track of where I've been. For the longest time, I've recorded my State-side travels on a Dover stick-on map (see below) that allows you to paste a sticky of each state onto an outline map of the United States, but this has been limited, and I've been searching for something that would allow me to do this for the world.

By sheer good luck, I came across the TravBuddy.com It's very easy to work with. First, you scroll down until you get to website that allows you to do virtually what I had been doing on paper for years.

Travel Maps and Games in the right-hand column of the site, which will have the following icon underneath it.

Clicking on this icon brings you to a long list of countries, which are broken down into states, provinces and territories for the United States, Australia, and Canada. You can click off the places where you've been, or, in the case of the above countries and countries in Europe, simply choose to have the entire land mass or country colored in, if you have visited any part of it.

Once you've selected all of the places you've been, you then click on "Create Your Travel Map" in the yellow rectangle at the bottom of the page and a personalized map like the one that introduced this blog will appear for you. It's free, it's easy, and you can even link it to Facebook.

So how does TravBuddy make its money? Although the site is set up as an information exchange among other travelers, its creators seem to be very eager to have you share your "future travel plans" on the site. I can only imagine that this is so their advertisers can begin peppering you with emails about places to stay, things to do, restaurants, flights, car rentals, etc., although I can't really say for sure.

All in all, it looks like a fun, useful site, which also has the coolest travel app running!

"We are our real identities online."

Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook delivering a keynote address at the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich, January 2012.


Or so proclaimed Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's second most powerful executive, in her keynote address to the prestigious Digital Life Design (DLD) technology conference, held this year in Munich. Even though she made this statement in the context of explaining that we are no longer anonymous on the Internet and that

 "what we do online and on our mobile devices is increasingly about who we are, about real identity,"

I still take exception to this statement. Anyone can create any kind of identity online. "Sophie" could be "Samuel" in real life, but no one would know the difference until they met him. We may no longer be anonymous, but we're not necessarily "real," either.

The conference's other keynote speaker, Viviane Reding, the European Commission's vice president for justice, is not as sanguine about the use of social media. She is trying to find a way for consumers to control their own data. She firmly believes that the great threat to individual liberty in the digital age comes from companies that use our data to enrich themselves by buying and selling our most intimate details for their own corporate benefit.

Reding believes that individual privacy in today's networked age can only be protected by tighter legislation on what companies are allowed to do with our data and by more agrressive data-protection officers and agencies. To this end, Reding is introducing legislation that will give consumers the

 "right to be forgotten"

on online social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. It is her belief that people should have the right "to withdraw their consent to the processing of the personal data they have given out themselves."

Reding is also very concerned about how personal data "collected in Berlin" may cross international boundaries to be "processed in Bangalore." She regards our personal data as the "currency of today's digital market" and is looking for ways to inbue it with "stability and trust." She feels this can be done in three ways: by creating legal certainty, simplifying the regulatory environment, and providing clear rules for international data transfers.

What both speakers agree upon is that personal data has become

 "the new oil, the vital fuel of our digital economy."

And just as contentious politics over real oil shaped our 20th century industrial economy, commentator Andrew Keen believes that "the politics of data will shape the 21st century digital economy."

So much is at stake here. Small fragments of information about an individual can remain online forever, casting a long shadow over the "real" self of the person who first posted it, a self which may have changed radically since its early adolescent postings. But when do you know to remove something or leave it for posterity? Our technology has given us fabulous new tools, but the questions that have arisen about how to manage them are equally as daunting.