CNN – February 11, 2011 . . . “If you want to liberate asociety, just give them the Internet," Ghonim said Friday”. Wael Ghonim was identified as a Google marketingexecutive.

I’m not sure I buy into the suggestion that Facebook (via theInternet) brought down the Egyptiangovernment. Nor am I necessarily an advocate of “liberating”societies. If the Internet is truly an instrument of liberationthen perhaps we should fear it. In reality it is no more a tool ofliberation than the guillotine was in 18th century France. Societyhas always found ways to affect change throughout history.Revolutions, coups, overthrown governments, social and politicalupheavals are commemorated throughout human existence. ThomasJefferson advocated regular reassessment and change: “Everygeneration needs a new revolution”. So I think it is a littlearrogant to assume that Internet social media tools causedthe downfall of a corrupt government.

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What about the “revolution” in Egypt? How much can really beattributed to Facebook and other electronic social media tools? Any type of change in a socialnetwork or structure requires some sort of dialog. Societies bytheir very nature depend upon communication between the individualsthat comprise that society. It doesn’t matter if you are a honeybee or a Homo sapien you need to communicate with other members ofyour society. As a race we have experienced a steady progression inthe ability to communicate with increasing numbers of individualsin ever quicker ways. The 20th century has seen a virtual explosionin communication technologies. We have transitioned from papermedia to radio to telephone to television to the Internet. It isinteresting that the technologies that drove the telephone, theradio, and television also provide the underpinnings of theInternet.

What’s Old is New

What we call social media today isn’t a new phenomenon—it’s alogical extension of what humans have been doing forever. TheJapanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941was a transforming experience. Within minutes most of the UnitedStates was made aware of the attack. And how were they made aware?By the telephone. Radios were in widespread use in 1941 andcertainly everyone tuned to their set once they heard the news, butpersonal interaction was the primary means of notification. Samething when President Kennedy was assassinated 22 years later.Television had become omnipresent in the western world but onceagain some form of personal interaction alerted everyone to theevent. Jump forward another 38 years to September 11, 2001. TheInternet was highly available yet most individuals were alerted tothe tragedy by a phone call, word of mouth or e-mail. When humanswant to communicate rapidly with one another they use someintrusive form of communication. And there have always existedintrusive forms of communication—before the 20th century. What mostsocial media tools provide is what I would describe as an “opt in”approach to communication. What characterizes the Internet socialmedia is the ability of members to interact and actually providethe content that is communicated. That leads us to a very strangesituation.

Authoritative Source?

Traditional “old school” means of publishing have built inchecks and balances. Scientific publications are peer reviewed,publishing houses are reasonably careful to print what appears tobe the truth. Newspapers are careful to validate and find alternatesources for published news stories. Colleges and universities haveself-governing procedures to assure that professors and instructorshave the proper training and foundation of knowledge before theyinflict themselves on students. The Internet has changed all that.Anyone can declare themselves an expert and disseminate whateverself serving, inaccurate information they choose to. The Internetoriginally held the promise of becoming a modern Library ofAlexandria. Unfortunately it is rapidly evolving into a Library ofBabel with the possibility but not the expectation of veracity.

It’s All About Information

So what about Facebook? Is it truly a tool of change? Icreated a Facebook account but soon disabled it. Interestingside bar – disabling your account does not delete your data fromthe Facebook databases. Far too many people who had become myfriends were compelled to describe the daily minutia oftheir lives. I simply cannot imagine how anyone has the time toeither publish or consume all that information. How could Ipossibly care that someone I went to high school with years ago hada great day at the lake? I suppose with the current unemploymentrate there are many individuals who have the time to spend hours onFacebook or YouTube or whatever. Then I wonder: If everyone is onFacebook, who is watching all that reality TV? We really havebecome a culture of people who live vicariously. I digress.

The thing about Facebook is they really want you to think it’sall about interacting with others and having meaningful dialogs.The reality is that these tools are all about capturing yourpersonal information. The money comes from selling all thatpersonal information you so willingly put in your profile to peoplewho want to sell you things. And that is the tip of the iceberg. Ihate to think what a truly nefarious group or organization could dowith all the private information we so willingly provide.

Recently an incident was described where a young man was able tohack personal e-mail accounts and obtain very private informationabout the owners of those accounts. When I say he hacked theiraccounts I should say that he didn’t use any sophisticatedelectronic tools to penetrate flaws in the system. He was able toobtain access using nothing more than information provided in userprofiles. All of the “free” Internet services we use are funded bythe selling of advertising targeted to our profiles and the sale ofthe profile information itself. I received a notice this week as Iwas logging onto a free e-mail service. The notice asked me toprovide a current phone number just in case they needed to contactme to reset my password. Right….and they were going to buy mylunch, too.

No Thanks

There is a great deal of concern about Internet privacy. Wetremble before the notion of a national Internet ID which the Obamaadministration is discussing, yet we willingly provide personal andprivate information to organizations that use that information tomake a profit. I would prefer that my personal information remainprivate but I accept the fact that my banks, my employers, myphysicians, and my insurance providers keep some data on me. I evenunderstand the need for the government to maintain certaininformation although I would prefer they didn’t. What I don’t abideis providing Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts with that sort ofdata. I cannot determine any useful value I would accrue byproviding it. I am sure it’s all available elsewhere, but I am notgoing to compile my vital statistics and hand them over for free toan organization that is just going to resell that information.

Web SSO

Has it ever occurred to you that the same people who maintainyour data also maintain your usernames and passwords that provideaccess to edit that data? That is scary. I would suggest thatuniversal third-party organizations provide Web identitymanagement. Imagine a trusted organization like the W3C (World WideWeb Consortium) that would provide a claims based identitymanagement system that could be consumed by Internet sites andservices. A user would securely log on to the trusted providerusing multi-factor authentication. When a user goes to their onlinebanking they enter some credentials that trigger a redirect to theclaims provider who returns the user with a ticket validating theiridentity. If the Obama Internet ID takes that direction I maysupport it. I would rather have a small finite number of trustedidentity management systems controlling Web access than the goatrodeo we now have.

Play While You Work

There is another significant aspect of the Internet that is evenmore disturbing. Consider what the Internet has become. In thosenow famous words of John Gage (the 21st employee of SunMicrosystems): “The network is the computer.” My laptop, my tablet,and my smartphone are all just different devices that provide awindow into the data and information that defines my life. They mayhave different tool sets. I don’t write code on my tablet but Icould. I can actually use terminal services to access a server Ineed to work on from my smart phone. At any given time thesedevices may be using different methods to access the world butultimately they are all commonly connected with the Internet andother networks.

That is all very interesting but is also so commonplace that wetake it for granted. What I see as a real paradigm shift drive bythis model is that we now have completely blurred the lines betweenwork, pleasure, and social media. We use the same devices toaccomplish all these things. And we access those devices 24 x 7. Ithink I understand the difference between work time and play time,but I wonder if current and future generations will know thatdifference. I wonder if it even matters.

North America has already made the transition from a productioneconomy to a service economy. A nation of information workers andservice workers may not require a hard demarcation between work andplay. If a worker is assembling a jet engine (which we still dovery well in North America) that line is critical. If a worker iswriting code for a time management system the distinction may notbe all that relevant.

I remember writing assembly code for an IBM 360. It was prettymuch me, the code editor and the mainframe. Now programmers rarelyneed to really write any code. Blogs, message boards and how-to Websites provide code samples for virtually anything they may need.That code may not be the most efficient and it may even have somebuilt-in trap doors, but for the most part the hard work has beendone. Social media has become an accepted part of the workingenvironment, at least for complex repeatable process like softwaredevelopment.

Bad Neighborhood?

So as we erase those distinctions between the tools we use forwork and play, what about the Internet itself? The Internet seemsto be unique in that it is an enabling technology framework that isshared by social media, purveyors of pornography, online banking,and so on. It is the distribution channel for illegal distributionof cracked software, stolen movies, and music. It is also theplayground for an assortment of hackers. Some hackers are quiteskilled while others are nothing but script kiddies who rundestructive code written by others. The common thread is that theyare all destructive.

It is also host to an assortment of political activists whorange from those trying to take down legitimate sites to thosetrying to bring down nations by leaking stolen confidentialinformation. If you were describing a part of your town that hadall these characteristics your reaction would be stay away. So whydo we embrace the Internet?

SLA Anyone?

The Internet poses this incredible dilemma. Do we really want toco-exist with a porn sales organization? Do we want to share thesame SLA’s with a Warez site? That pretty much describes what weare doing when we embrace cloud computing. Or when we use theInternet for communications between remote offices. Even so-calleddedicated circuits use the same infrastructure. I am not saying allthis poses a problem, but it sure sounds like one.