I think this is the end of the news. Not the end of journalism, end of news. And I think the whole discussion about business models, or quality, or trust, or ethics are secondary to what is the real problem, which is a cultural problem and a social problem.
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The framing of what we design is very important to how we go about it. We have not been framing these things as contexts. We’ve been framing them as products, services, and a whole other series of terms that are— Tools, for example. And these are things that are mostly transactional. They’re not things that are meant to be inhabited.
We’ve got two paradoxical trends happening at the same time. The first is what I call in my book “the cult of the social,” the idea that on the network, everything has to be social and that the more you reveal about yourself the better off you are. So if your friends could know what your musical taste is, where you live, what you’re wearing, what you’re thinking, that’s a good thing, this cult of sharing. So that’s one thing that’s going on. And the other thing is an increasingly radicalized individualism of contemporary, particularly digital, life. And these things seem to sort of coexist, which is paradoxical and it’s something that I try to make sense of in my book.
What I want to talk about is something that has plagued me and concerned me for a long time now, which I guess one technical term for it is “gradualism,” how much worse things have gotten very slowly. And I think it’s really true in the privacy/security area. It’s true in a lot of places that have to do with technology because normal people are a little intimidated by it and they don’t know enough to know what they should be watching out for.