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Legibility, Privacy and Creativity: Linked Data in a Surveillance Society
Christopher Brewster(Aston University)
andDougald Hine
(http://dougald.co.uk )
1
Legibility
• Concept comes from James Scott’s Seeing like a State -- desire of the state to “arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription and prevention of rebellion”
• Typically expressed in maps, catalogues, standards, and many types of infrastructure.
• Initiatives included building roads, single currencies, cadastral maps, imposition of a single language, census, ID cards and video surveillance.
• Privacy is a specific form of illegibility. Due to inability on part of the state to capture data.
• Much technological progress driven by or resulted in increased legibility
• Closely related to concept of “that which is measured is managed”
3
Privacy and Anonymity
• Privacy is a modern phenomenon found in the city
• Privacy did not exist in the village or nomadic tribe
• Privacy arises due to atomisation and alienation and the technological gap between the creation of cities and the need for legibility
• Telecommunications and the Internet have “shrunk” the globe -- McLuhan’s “Global Village” is a reality
• As a village, we have also lost privacy:
• Consensual loss via social media, cookies, bank cards etc.
• Unintentional loss via telecom metadata, cross-site tracking, video surveillance
4
Types of Freedom
• Privacy currently seen as a human right
• ... but really is just one type of freedom among many
• Much of technology provides some freedoms and removes others e.g. road networks
• We now can communicate around the globe at almost zero cost - great freedom but loss of privacy
• With each technology, different groups gain freedoms, others lose e.g. railways lines, digital file copying
• Freedom to be creative, to innovate, typically has occurred in cities
• Usually explained as due to cluster of ideas, skills, opportunities.
• Perhaps illegibility is important factor (e.g. Internet)
5
The Semantic Web, Linked Data and IoT
• Core capability of Semantic Web and IoT is naming of things
• URIs and IP addresses provide unique “names”
• Linked Data and Open Data represent a vision of ever more data on all human activity
• Open Data is politically acceptable face of a transparent total surveillance society
• SW and IoT are standards like weights and measures, roads, etc. Potentially provide specific freedoms, and limit others
• SW and IoT are part of ongoing project to make everything more legible (to the State)
6
Unintended Consequences
• A society with total surveillance:
• loses trust
• has a tendency to conform
• everything will be known rather than explored (cf. Google Glass)
7
Unintended Consequences - 2
• Most worrying - potential loss of creativity
• Village societies are stable but no or limited complex civilisation, limited arts, limited innovation
• Loss of creativity and innovation will make society incapable of change.
• Parallel with USSR, they were good at chess, gymnastics, and poor at innovation.
• Total security = total classification
• Total classification = one may not be able to think the other
8
Conclusions
• Semantic Web and IoT may provide some new freedoms
• but may reduce the illegible space
• loss of illegibility potentially very damaging
• culturally
• politically
• agility and innovation
• What next? Keep looking for the spaces between the raindrops.
9
Acknowledgements
• Funding: This work was partially supported by the FI PPP FIspace project (http://www.fispace.eu )
• Images:
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RAIN_DROP_TREES.jpg
• http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/morris/31-Dot-Map-Jewish-Pop-Amsterdam.jpg
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/taedc/9314162413/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/500hats/795842899/
• http://www.opinno.com/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/screenshot-amphionforumintelkeynote-2012.jpeg
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/63787005/
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