Richard Keith Latman - The Blog

All Publicity is Altered Publicity

"All publicity is good publicity" It may have been true at some point, but it certainly is not true today. Nor will it be true forever more.

Instead, the motto has changed to "All Publicity is Altered Publicity"

The reality is that in todays ultra competitive chase to get your attention , if something you say or do is seen by more than 100 people, someone is going to attempt to re-purpose it to their own benefit or amusement.

In essence, the internet has put us all under a form of digital arrest.

"Everything we say or do, can and will be used for or against you on a website somewhere at some time, from now and ever-more"

There will be someone there with a camera phone to memorialize the mustard that dripped on your shirt from your hotdog and some website will use it to explain how the stress of "fill in the blank" is getting to you.

Someone will keep a picture from your 5th birthday party when your sister dressed you up as a Spice Girl. Your local newspaper will write an article saying how cute it was. Then some website or tv show, produced by someone who doesn't like you, will use it to try to convince their readers that you are gender confused and here is proof that it started at an early age

Silly examples for sure, but real.

The one thing the internet lacks that will forever change us all is Context. There is no way to retain context when you cut and paste. No matter the original intent of the words or pictures, anything on the net probably will find its way into situations for which they were never intended

Publicity, in fact all information used to have a shelf life. Newspapers were relegated to the hassles of microfiche. TV became a box or tape on a shelf somewhere. You could find it, but the cost in dollars and time were significant. Which of course reduced its use.

Thats no longer the case. Between the internet archives and search engines Everything is Everywhere. Forever.

The Net is a beautiful, wonderful utility but it certainly not an innocent medium.

Don't friend people over 29

It happens all the time. Some new technology or application comes out , it catches on like wildfire and then someone in the media writes an article about the technology being "for the young". Then about 18 months later the technology becomes more mainstream and an article is written about "baby boomers" using the technology , platform or application.

The shock of it all. 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 year olds using a social network ? Sending Text messages ? Bowling on a Wii ? Who knew ?

It seems like thoee who write these articles think all of the baby boomers and their parents were asleep over the last 25 years. Did they not notice the PC revolution? Could anyone miss the IBM Charlie Chaplin ads 25 years ago ? Did they never quite manage to figure out what that modem in their home pc was designed to do ? Even if it came with free software to test and try The Source, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL and others ?

Technology. Digital Communications. They are not new. They are not news. They are old news. But thats not what is interesting about these articles.

What is interesting to me is not that articles are written showing surprise that the geriatric generation and their kids are going online , despite the protests of their grandkids. What is interesting to me is how few in the media, regardless of platform, be it TV, Newspaper, magazine , blogger or twitterer, have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the history of the technologies we are using.

There seems to be some delusion that all technology and applications are new. Invented from a cloudburst with no historical context. That as new, the technology is the province of the young, with anyone over 29 too old to understand and too confused to actually use it.

If it were up to those in the media, the new phase for high school and college kids today would be
"Don't friend people over 29"

In this day and age, 25 years post the first IBM PC, pretty much everyone is able to adapt to, accept and become accomplished with consumer technologies.

Your granddad is going to want to be your friend, text or IM you and get a GPS enabled phone.. Get used to it.

Google as friend, or Big Brother

The Sunday Times Magazine has a huge piece on Google. Who's looking at you?, by former Observer (etc) regular John Arlidge, who visited the Googleplex like a good travel writer. It shows how the behemoth looks to someone who isn't a tech specialist, which is to say, scarily like some sort of Big Brother operation that wants to plant chips in our brains and track us everywhere:

Google's overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have visited, every search query we have typed into its home page, every ad we have clicked on, and everything we have bought online. It wants to know and record where we have been and, thanks to our search history of airlines, car-hire firms and MapQuest [sic: he means Google Maps], where we are going in the future and when.

But don't worry, it's all for your own good:

“Brin and Page were obsessed with recording, categorising and indexing anything and everything, and then making it available to anyone with internet access because they genuinely believed -- and still do -- that it is a morally good thing to do. It may sound hopelessly hippie-ish and wildly hypocritical coming from a couple of guys worth £10 billion each, but Brin and Page insist they are not, and never have been, in it for the money. They see themselves as latter-day explorers, mapping human knowledge so that others can find trade routes in the new information economy.”

Sadly, if you read the story online, the Times Online's Web staff have lost almost all the last page of text (page 43 -- roughly 25%, at a crude estimate) and it ends in mid air: "If, however, you share your web history with Google, it will know that you like Italian food best because you search for it the most, and it will know the area you."

Since this is a color magazine story, you will naturally expect a feeble conclusion, but here it is anyway:

“[Google] does not simply want to be a good search engine on the web, it wants to be the web.
Will it get there? In the end, it's up to us. Google has only gone from being the most famous misspelling since "potatoe" to a verb recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary because you, me -- in fact, almost all of us -- use it. If we carry on logging on, it will carry on growing. And growing. If we don't, it won't. The choice -- the click -- is ours.”

That would have been reasonable enough a few years ago, but it ignores all the interesting questions about what happens when Google owns the Web, if it doesn't already. Google isn't just harvesting clicks, it is changing the whole online environment for the worse.

For example, many sites are no longer designed just for readers, and sometimes not for readers at all: they are designed to score well in Google, and in particular, to drive revenue from Google AdWords.

And for the tens or hundreds of millions of sites that live or die by AdWords, Google has life or death power over them. It can change the rules at any time, and you are not entitled to know this. Nor are you entitled to know what the rules are. As I've said before, Google acts as its own policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner, and you have no right of appeal. The best you can do is suck up to Google and hang on to a percentage of the money your efforts generate, while Google rakes in billions.

Google is, of course, benign, but there is always a feeling that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Come back in five years when Google is 100 times more powerful.