Mea Vita: Carpe Diem

1. The Invention of Writing (Circa 3200 BCE)

• What Changed: Oral traditions gave way to written records, enabling information to be preserved and transmitted across generations and distances.

• Impact: Writing centralized knowledge within institutions like temples and royal courts but also democratized access to ideas over time. Societies had to learn to value written contracts, laws, and literature over oral storytelling.

2. The Printing Press (15th Century)

• What Changed: Johannes Gutenberg’s invention made mass production of books possible, transforming knowledge from an elite privilege into a public good.

• Impact: The spread of books, pamphlets, and newspapers fueled the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution. However, it also necessitated new skills, like literacy, and created challenges such as the dissemination of propaganda.

3. The Telegraph and Telephone (19th Century)

• What Changed: Communication became nearly instantaneous over long distances.

• Impact: The flow of information accelerated commerce, politics, and personal relationships. However, it also created a demand for new protocols and etiquette around remote communication.

4. Mass Media (20th Century)

• What Changed: The rise of radio, television, and film centralized information dissemination, placing control in the hands of a few corporations or governments.

• Impact: Mass media shaped public opinion and culture on an unprecedented scale. Societies grappled with issues like censorship, propaganda, and the influence of advertising.

5. The Internet (Late 20th Century)

• What Changed: The internet democratized access to information and gave individuals the tools to publish content globally.

• Impact: The transition required societies to navigate new risks, such as cybercrime, misinformation, and digital divides, while also embracing the possibilities for global collaboration and education.

6. The Rise of Algorithms and AI (21st Century)

• What Changed: Algorithms began curating information for individuals, creating “filter bubbles” and personalized content streams.

• Impact: This shift parallels earlier technological revolutions but adds complexity due to the opacity of algorithmic decision-making and its potential for bias or manipulation.

Societal Adjustments Across Transitions:

• Critical Thinking: Similar to learning literacy after the printing press, people now need “digital literacy” to evaluate the credibility of online information.

• Ethical Norms: Societies create new rules or guidelines for acceptable behavior in response to technological shifts, such as copyright laws or content moderation policies.

• Power Dynamics: Each transition alters who holds power over information and who can challenge authority, from the scribe to the independent journalist to the social media influencer.

These transitions often involve disruption, but they also open opportunities for progress, creativity, and greater inclusivity. The key challenge for each era is learning to wield new tools responsibly.

The following are additional thoughts to my earlier piece.

E-mail was the Wild West in the 1990s, without any non-repudiation regarding the authenticity of the sender of an e-mail. There was no simple way to confirm that an e-mail was sent from the e-mail address in the from field. 

High-tech fixed that problem, for the most part, with spam filters and refusal/authorization lists (formerly known as blacklists/whitelists). 

Now, social media faces a similar problem when people pass fiction as fact with harmful intent that violates laws, terms of service, security, etc. This is exceptionally easy and dangerous since these platforms amplify the content, especially using curated means (humans or algorithms).

What's the solution?

Social media needs to take on more publishing responsibilities like the classified ads in a newspaper. One way is by creating a third category in Section 230 other than publisher or service provider for platforms that amplify content.

It doesn't matter if it's hard to scale. High-tech needs to figure it out.

Summary

The current state of social media reminds me of the early days of e-mail in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. E-mail was a godsend in that we could communicate with people around the world in a matter of seconds; but security and spam were out of control. It was the Wild West. Now, we have an opportunity to fix social media the same way we fixed e-mail, through laws, technology, and regulation

Background

Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This protects social media websites since they’re not generating content like a news service. But, there’s obviously a problem since misinformation can be promulgated as truth, typically faster than fact. Also, the more content is amplified, the more authority it has, even if it’s false information. This is know as Brandolini's law.

Solution

Here’s my solution that doesn’t violate the First Amendment:

FCC Section 230 should differentiate between platforms and actions that amplify content (e.g. retweeting on Twitter, resharing on Facebook, etc) and platforms that don’t allow amplification (e.g. Instagram, WordPress, etc). If a platform allows content amplification or curation, regardless if it’s done manually or via an automated algorithm, then it’s no longer a service provider but rather a publisher.

If this degree of editing and censorship sounds like an administrative burden then take a look at the lack of child porn found through search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. There is none, but certainly not from a lack of trying. And while the CAN-SPAM Act doesn't eliminate all spam, it does a great job (certainly much better than the wireless network providers when it comes to spoofing caller ID, etc).

Just as a news service doesn’t pass along fact as fiction without liability (libel) neither should social media. This clarification to Section 230 will cut into the profitability of social media companies, but they’ve reaped the benefits (and revenue) and it’s time to be more responsible now that we understand its impact on our way of life.  

This post began as a tweet, but Twitter is down.

"That's the challenge," said Sugar Jones as she raised her drink.

When I was in high school, I considered joining the Air Force. "Aim High." It seemed to be a natural fit for my high tech interests. At school, one of my classmates began sporting a military style crewcut – he'd signed up to join the Army after graduation. Shortly after that, I saw a Marine Corps recruiting ad in a magazine. The only thing I knew about the Marines was that they had, inarguably, the toughest and longest boot camp training in any of the Armed Forces. I asked my father, who had served in the Army, "Why would someone join the Marines?"

"Some men want a challenge," he said.

Some men want a challenge... that resonated with me, which I've written about in Six Four One. As a kid, it resonated like, "You did a good thing for a bad man," from a Bronx Tale. Since then, I've loved the challenge of boot camp, plebe year, OCS, jump school, and overseas deployments. Now, in my more seasoned years, I find myself seeking more conveniences and complaints than challenges and commendations. Every so often I need a refresher.

A couple weeks ago, Sugar Jones and I were discussing Instagram. Instagram has been around since 2010. In 2012, with only 13 employees, it was purchased by Facebook for about $1B. It's only grown in popularity since then. Instagram's key differentiator was two fold. It was simple to post and photographers could apply filters. Since cameras on smartphones, back then, weren't as good as today, applying a filter helped distract from the graininess by adding an artistic spin.

I told Sugar that I didn't like Instagram. Sugar responded with a small look of silent disbelief. "I prefer Flickr," I said, explaining that I was begrudgingly moving to Instagram.

"Why don't you like Instagram?" asked Sugar.

"Every photo has to be square," I said with disdain. I pompously believed that the artist should choose the aspect ratio.

"That's the challenge," said Sugar.

That's the challenge... Ah-ha! Those three words, which she so profoundly said, instantly sunk in.

One hundred and forty characters is the challenge of Twitter; that's what makes Twitter unique and the haiku of a new millennium. How could I have missed a similar challenge with Instagram?

To hijack and repurpose from Breaking Bad...
When I heard the learn'd Sugar.

In the ancient days of social media (circa 2008) people frequently said, "I don't get it." Back then, people didn't realize that social media was simply taking our spoken conversations about nothing and moving them online. But, as more and more people got involved an interesting crowdsourcing phenomenon began to unfold.

I first observed this crowdsourcing solution in the fall of 2008 when Guy Kawasaki forgot his MacBook power supply.


At the time, I was at home about 40 minutes away and I could have easily made it to Coronado by the top of the hour. After thinking about it for five minutes I responded to Guy's tweet but it was too late. Jerry Jones had sealed the deal. However, I did get an honorable mention from Guy (back then, my Twitter username was @JoeLeo.)

About two years later, I explicitly and successfully tried crowdsourcing to figure out the name of song. It's amazing when it works.

What struck me, today, is that crowdsourcing via social media still works. So much so that we simply take it for granted.

Last week, I reminisced about telephone landlines. I was imagining a home phone solution where my cell phone would link to a ringer so that I could hear it ring throughout the house without carrying it from room to room.

A college buddy quietly observed my tweet and found what I had described when he was shopping at Costco, today. We joked that he was my personal social shopper. He found several models, but the Panasonic KX-TG155 seemed to foot the bill as he passed along a photo of the collateral.

The beauty of Twitter is that it's simply 140 characters of text. Shorter than an SMS text message - akin to a headline. Any other payload in the message is a hyperlink which is also text.

Why only 140 characters per tweet? Because it was designed to fit into a 160 character SMS message preceded by the sender's user name:
"@joemoreno: Just arrived at the Top of the Rock. http://epics3.com/piqk"

Which begs another question: Why only 160 charters for an SMS? Because the inventor of SMS, Friedhelm Hillebrand, typed out random sentences and noticed that they fit into 160 characters.

Worthy Competition
There have been some alternatives to Twitter, but they're just copies. What's the point of making a copy of Twitter if it still suffers from the same Achilles' heel: a centralized single point of failure controlled by one corporation?

A worthy competitor to Twitter requires fundamental integration into the Internet's infrastructure. This shouldn't be too difficult, after all, it's just text --- or another way to think about it, it's just TXT.

DNS? Seriously?
The Twitter alternative that I'm proposing simply uses DNS. In other words, a tweet would simply be stored as a DNS TXT record. Since it's widely recognized that DNS is the Internet's single point of failure, it has multiple, redundant and distributed, servers to keep it running. DNS servers have impeccable uptime stats because, without DNS we have no practical Internet connectivity.

Advantages.
1. No additional servers required. Simply add a new DNS record for each TXT tweet.

2. Redundantly propagated across multiple DNS servers.

3. Server load distributed to ISP DNS caches. In other words, massive traffic for a single tweet would not need to go back to the authoritative DNS server. Set a long TTL for the TXT tweet, say 24 or 48 hours, and each local ISP should only hit the authoritative DNS server once every day or two to refresh a particular tweet's TTL.

Disadvantages
1. Can't easily delete tweets since they're cached at each ISP's DNS server, especially if added with a long TTL.

2. Tweets would need to be inserted into TXT records using a robust API - the only one I'm aware of is Amazon's Route 53 API.

3. Each TXT tweet would need to be a linked list to the previous tweet; or, perhaps, a double linked list to both previous and next TXT tweet.

4. Each TXT tweet would need an embedded timestamp (either UNIX timestamp: 1342472514 or a human readable dateTime object: 2012-07-16T20:38:00Z).

5. TXT tweets, unlike Twitter tweets, can be edited.

6. TXT tweets can expire after the TTL timesout.

TXT Tweet Proposed Standard
Since the TXT tweets are a single (or double) linked list, we need to know where to start. The logical place to start is with the most recent (i.e. last) TXT tweet. That could be defined in the domain's root TXT record which can be found via the dig command:

dig -t txt joemoreno.com
joemoreno.com.   1 IN TXT "2012-07-16T20:38:00Z|tweet4.joemoreno.com"

So, the most recent TXT tweet is at tweet4.joemoreno.com. (A simpler naming convention could be host names with integers, such as 0.joemoreno.com, 1.joemoreno.com, 2.joemoreno.com, etc.)

Left for the Student
Several services need to be built on top of this proposal. Displaying a single user's TXT tweets can be rendered by a simple script running on a web server to display a specific user's feed. Mixing different user feeds, chronologically, is a little harder, but very doable.

However, where it gets challenging is how to handle "follows" and "mentions." In both cases, a server would need to either push or pull these notifications in real time. Pulling could be simple polling, like an RSS feed query. But, push notifications can be a bit more challenging. I'll have to think about how this part would work.

Video chat is the future of social media.

Social media allows companionship without being present. Generally, media is fixed, meaning that it's recorded on paper, hard disks, etc. But, if we focus more on the social aspect, and less on the media part, then it can also be a live stream without necessarily being recorded such as a telephone call. While there are many aspects of social media that are entirely new, one, in particular, is very interesting to me: random video chat.

I've had several technological epiphanies in my life as I suddenly recognized that a new technology was going to be transformational and innovative.

Epiphanies
All of the world's information was instantaneously at my finger tips.

While video chat sites, such as Chatroulette, Stickam, and Tinychat, that first gained attention a couple years ago, have a bad rap on the surface, there's something about them that's amazing on a deeper level.

Sites like ChatRoulette truly fall into the art category.

Most connections last less than a second, but it's not unheard of for a conversation to last many, many hours.

I was thinking that her story wasn't real - this was all too fast and easy - but her info all checked out via Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Where were websites like this when I was a young, single guy???
Innovation
Social video chat is the very definition of innovation, which is anything that reduces the cost of a transaction in terms of time or money – live and in person. No longer is it necessary to visit single's bars or dating sites that lead to so many dead end first dates. Now, you can experience personal connections in any safe and personal environment of your choosing.

The one night stand, perfected in the 20th Century, has now evolved into the one hour stand with video chat, "Don't worry, Baby, I'll still respect you in 60 minutes."

Even more chilling is that any child can log on to these video chat websites simply by attesting that they are over 18 with a simple check of a box. While the interaction is random and probably too distant for the possibility of a physical interaction, it's still frightening to think about how impressionable children can be.

After the spectacular LinkedIn IPO a lot of people have been asking if this social media company is really worth almost $8 billion or could this be another bubble? For that matter, what, exactly, is social media?

While participating in a strategic planning meeting, recently, I was asked, "What will communications look like in 2020?" After some thought, my answer was, "social media." Social communications, just like mass communications, has been around since the dawn of civilization, however, the media used to convey social communications is very new.

Mass media (the medium, not the industry) began with the printing press which was invented in the 1400s. As a result of technological advances, mass media exploded in the first half of the Twentieth Century with radio and T.V. and it continued growing with the adoption of the Internet.

Social media, however, is truly a new media. Whereas mass media is a one-to-many method of communications that is one way, social media is a two way, many-to-many, communications channel.

Social media, like many new, unexpected, forms of communication, was first looked upon with skepticism. We saw skepticism like this in the mid 1990s as cell phones became popular. The first few times I noticed people talking on cell phones in public, even when polite etiquette was followed, my reaction was, "What's so important that you have to talk now?" Yet, today, talking on a cell phone in public is not a big deal. However, in the case of new media, many still have the same reaction when everyday-people blog, tweet, and use Facebook on a daily basis.

Why does someone need to "tell the world" what they're doing when it's as mundane as, "My cat just rolled over?" In the case of social media, this could easily lead to a conversation between cat lovers who didn't know each other. Everyone enjoys spending some time engaging likeminded people. Social media simply extends the social conversations that we have at the water cooler, on the phone, or during dinner, and moves them into cyberspace.

While specific media and technologies may come and go, such as the 8-track, telegram, or the fax; other, more fundamental forms of communication are here to stay. However, new forms of media do not quickly replace the old ones any more than the telephone has replaced radio communications, or that e-mail has replaced "snail mail".