Caution: your future children are reading your blog.

Mark Everett is 40, the lead singer of The Eels, and has never known his father. As documented in an epsidode of the PBS series Nova, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, Everett goes to meet the people his brilliant physicist father once knew. This journey, uncovering the man who died when Everett was only 18, becomes a sort of emotional quest for understanding.

What does this have to do with how IT is changing our society? In the past centuries, most of an individual's personal history has been tied up in their friends' and family's knowledge of them, plus maybe a few self-penned letters. Now, imagine the child being born today. When he is 18 he'll easily be able to turn on the his computer, Google his parent's names, and learn everything there is to know about them.

It is especially interesting that much of previous generation's parent's personalities from when they were 20 and younger have been hidden, in such a way that it becomes hard to imagine them before we ourselves gained consciousness. Well, that time is over, as all of the blog entries you made when you were 14 will one day be read by your children. You will become very real through your YouTube videos of drinking parties and your Facebook page full of nonsense.

Will these things be around in 20 years? I think yes: as technology makes it cheaper and cheaper to store things, and marketing make it more and more valuable to keep them, all those things you've put online will probably stay there indefinitely. Especially consider that, once something is online, anyone can make a copy of it.

Now I have to wonder, how will this development affect our society and culture? Will people grow up with a greater sense of their own impermanence? Will we be born into a culture of perspective, a culture where everyone knows their place in history? Or maybe the opposite... once everyone's parents become a flawed, blog writing 14 year old, a son would know where his father would fit into his current teen aged landscape ("my father watched anime??") and lose any and all respect for them

E-mail ripped from the President's hands

As a bit of a follow-up to the story that Barack Obama will be the first YouTubing sitting president, here is an interesting (and sad) story via the New York Times. Apparently, it is expected that he'll have to give up things like e-mail, twitter, blackberrys, etc:

"But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas."

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 (as per the archives.gov archive of it) established all correspondence by the president as public record if it has "administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value," subject to the review of the Archivist of the United States.

Another big issue here is security... how much email can a president send out before his account his hacked in some way? I don't know a lot of the details of the hyper-secure email world, though, but the assumption is that when a lower level staffer sends the same email it is somehow safer? I doubt it.

Some ideas:

Even though it seems to be a foregone conclusion by those in the know, here are some ideas.

1. Check out Executive Order 13233. This amendment to the Presidential Records Act affords the status of protected correspondence, based on factors of executive privilege, to basically every letter by the president. This was signed into Executive Order in 2001 by George W. Bush, in an effort to protect items of national security.


2. As referenced in 13233, the Supreme Court has said "Unless [the President] can give his advisers some assurance of confidentiality, a President could not expect to receive the full and frank submissions of facts and opinions upon which effective discharge of his duties depends." A modern leader uses e-mail like someone else would use an in-person conversation. Can't these all be considered discussions with advisers?


3. Finally, the security issue that is dropped a couple times in this article, but never really fleshed out: I think the government is at its best when it sees a need for a technology that is not readily available. What do they do? Throw a lot of money at it and bring it to life, so that everyone can enjoy it. (Think: the Internet itself.)

Its sad to see that a president can't use email, but considering the only president who came into office during the Internet Age has been Bush... I guess its not terribly surprising. At least Obama says he will be the first president to have a laptop in the Oval Office.

The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him. [...] It’s a time burner. It might be easier for him to say, ‘I can’t be on e-mail'
(Diana Owen, leader of the American Studies program at Georgetown University)

President-elect screen-side chats

According to change.gov, President-Elect Obama has begun what will be a weekly address via online video to the American people. This is very reminiscent of FDR's fireside chats of the Great Depression.

It's nice to see that Obama realizes the potential of the Internet to do more than just raise millions and millions of dollars. Obama's resolve to open up the processes and ideas of the White House to some awareness and scrutiny by the public will hopefully be a breath of fresh air to American politics.

That being said, the message being imparted this week is somewhat bleak and disheartening. I think he is trying to make the crisis very real for those who have yet to be touched strongly by it.

"In particular, we cannot afford to delay providing help for the more than one million Americans who will have exhausted their unemployment insurance by the end of this year. If Congress does not pass an immediate plan that gives the economy the boost it needs, I will make it my first order of business as President."