I had a hard time reading this chapter. It seemed a bit sloppy to me, all over the place with random comments about portraiture. I think a useful discussion in class would be to try to organize the different nuggets in the chapter, make a little outline.
I liked some of the themes that he pointed out. I was particularly taken by the role of the portrait artist in creating the portrait - both directly, in making the image, and indirectly in being the force that chooses what tropes to include.
I'd been thinking of online portraits as some sort of computer generated automatic thing. That we'd have one master program that looks into all our data and produces "the" portrait. But of course, that's too rigid. If we did that, we'd lose out on all the fun quirky stuff where the artist and the subject themselves choose the idiom of their portrait, the type of stuff displayed, the arrangement, etc.
Online portraits should be personally generated. I want a system that just associates an image with all my email. It's up to me to define my image, it's my own portrait. Then encoruage a bunch of digital portrait artists to write programs to help generate images. I could then choose which program to use, which portrait type to have.
I'm very frustrated with the debate about privacy in the online age. We're still at the basic liberatarian "don't get any data away!" vs. the company's "we'll collect lots of stuff and not tell you what we collect." Where's the middle ground?
Some other sources.. We have a privacy mailing list at the media lab, privacy@media.mit.edu, archived at /mas/doc/mail/archive/privacy-issues. Lots of detail there dating back to 1991, lots of discourse in the lab.
In addition, David Brin has been writing some provocative stuff about privacy, including a book and a short Wired article called "The Transparent Society" in Wired 4.12. The basic idea is that there will be no privacy, in the idea of hiding information so that no one knows it. Instead, in the Brave New Society, we will all know everything about each other. So everyone knows your business, but we know everyone else's either. I'm not sure I really like his arguments, but they're interesting.
Anyway, the best answer for privacy and portraits to me is again to give the control of the portrait entirely up to the person being portrayed. But where is that problematic? What if I want to draw a characiture of someone else?
I remember being very disappointed that lab cards had no meaning. Sigh.
It's quite difficult to actually make random Media Lab colour bars, I've tried. If you naively paramterize the space, you get 7 colours in 4 bars, with about 6 different places to put the divisions. So that's 7^4 * 6 = 14406 possible colorbars. The actual number is something less, because some combinations are ugly.
Anyway, this rigid paramterization makes it awfully hard to do anything expressive, like a portrait. I prefer to think of the possible colorbar encoding as a characterization of a person, their role.
For instance, the colours could be used to indicate roles, and the relative length of the bar could be time. Maybe the first colour is whether a person is faculty, staff, or student and how long they've been here. Then the second colour is whether they're in TTT, NiF, or DL, and for how long they've been associated. The third and fourth colours could then be what SIGs they're interested in.
That's an awfully cold and rigid portrait. I don't know how to do something more pleasing, I need to think more about it.
| Nelson Minar | Created: October 28, 1998 |
| <nelson@media.mit.edu> | Updated: December 15, 1998 |