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In 10 Years, Every Human Connected To the Internet Will Have a Timeline
Presto Vivace writes: O'Reilly Radar has an article about how ubiquitous tracking and collection of data will fundamentally change how we live. Quoting: "This timeline — beginning for newborns at Year Zero — will be so intrinsic to life that it will quickly be taken for granted. Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage. Those with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall, suggestions for how to curry favor, ease maintaining friendships and influencing strangers, unthinkably higher Dunbar numbers — now, every interaction has a history. This isn’t just about lifelogging health data, like your Fitbit or Jawbone. It isn’t about financial data, like Mint. It isn’t just your social graph or photo feed. It isn’t about commuting data like Waze or Maps. It’s about all of these, together, along with the tools and user interfaces and agents to make sense of it."
This is already the case - we don't have to wait ten years. Except to actually have access to our own timelines - right now they are under tight government/corporate security.
Great, so now the breakup of my ex-girlfriend from years is going to be used by others when judging my worth in relationships, or maybe health data. Or finance. Data is beautiful, but it can be really evil. Deeds will no longer be forgotten at some point; we'll be the sum of all of our decisions on the inside *and now* the outside for everyone to see.
In 10 years, half of humanity will have had enough of this bullshit and will have hacked their way to privacy, or have decided that the internet just isn't worth it, or will have adapted multiple identities so as to confuse others.
And I should know, as I am traditionally an early-adopter, and have taken all three paths myself. I am also currently at the point of thinking it's better to destroy the current internet and rebuild it -- but without all the bullshit.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Those without a timeline will be at a huge advantage
There, fixed that for you. If influencing strangers is named as an advantage, I strongly disagree. Strangers more likely influence anyone with a publicly available profile. Remaining anonymous gets more important every day.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Does this mean that the follies of your youth become held against you for your entire life? Even if we were somehow shielded until we're 18, youthful mistakes don't stop then. There has been quite a bit of study now that important developments in the brain continue into the mid 20's. Heck, since we often accept anecdotal fiction as evidence around /., think of Scrooge. He had a life-changing event relatively late in life.
At one extreme, we freeze everyone into the patterns of their youth. At the other, "I've changed, I've learned since then," becomes a mantra that absolves all responsibility. The difference here is that in the real world, people know you, your speech and actions, and how they all change with time, so they're at least equipped to make a decent judgement, even if that doesn't always happen. In non-meat-space those things aren't necessarily true, especially as so much incoming information is filtered to confirm one's current world-view.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You might call it "Timeline" I call it "Big Brother". Same difference.
Edit the time line and you have edited history.
And the advantage is doubleplusgood.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage.
you told me the same thing about google plus, facebook, myspace, twitter, instagram, youtube, vine, secondlife, and tumblr. I seem to have suffered no loss in "advantage" though. Let me put it in your terms, maybe that will help. #GETOFFMYLAWN.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If I can google for where I left my keys last night, they can have all my privacy and keep it. For fucks sake where are my keys!!?!?!
We have enough ways for small groups to try and keep a stranglehold on the lives of others already. The very last thing we need is some manipulable artificial construct to dehumanize us in our real world relationships like we already are online. Will we have to live under rocks to get some kind of peace of mind in the future?
Screw it, let's go make a new Amish colony. We'll have conversations in person where we can actually see that we're not talking to robots, and mirror neurons will actually mean something. We'll be human again. Who's with me?
For now the big 3 credit reporting agencies can't even make a decent snapshot of what I *am* now, never mind any past history.
I am constantly surprised by incorrect addresses, wrong phones, misspelled names and other such junk (mostly because data entry clerks elsewhere can't be bothered to enter data right, or poorly designed "business systems" don't handle it properly).
My driver license from one state was not properly canceled, when I moved and obtained license in another - so for a while, unknowingly, I had two parallel driver licenses and separate records (even though presumably states share that information).
The only place where information about me seems to resemble anything like reality is my own linkedin profile, and that's because I care to keep it correct.
That's not to say there isn't a ton of information on each and every one of us, and the amount keeps growing. However, most of that information is of poor quality, and not organized - something I wouldn't expect to change anytime soon. The only danger I see is that new generation is conditioned to maintain their own timeline and do the information-cleaning job for the big corporations and government for free. So, let's wait and see, shall we.
A couple of generations ago this was also true for most people. In a small town everyone knew you, your family, and everything about you. It some places that's still true. You did (and do) have the option of moving away; but that meant you were starting out in a new place with no timeline.
Knowing a slightly abridged version of the life story of everyone who walks past you in the supermarket instantaneously.
I have spent the last 20 years growing. I am not the very hostile and shy person I was years ago.
To have people bring up things from 20 years ago and use it to judge me now would be a nightmare. At least with people who have known me all these years, they have seen the changes and have mostly forgotten or let go my past behavior. But to have people who see my past without context and the long and hard work I have put into being a better person would ruin me.
Technology is increasingly removing our ability to make mistakes and move on with our lives. That is a hellish future.
Anyone who believes this garbage deserves what they get. Time to go outside for a bit, people. Your virtual existence is not real, and if you think it defines who you are, you're as sick as the junkie who thinks the most important thing in their life is their next fix.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
His concept of a timeline is simply the opposite of privacy.
All the gains he thinks are present are gains for other people.
He refuses to realize that those gains for other people come at a cost - and the cost is paid for by you.
Timelines are great - for advertisers.
They are not great fore you. They do nothing good for you, except make it easier for other people to judge you.
Guess what, we already have something like that - it's called a credit history.
Yeah, a few - less than 10% - people benefit from having a credit history. But far more people suffer from having it. There are identity thieves, there are bad (and damaging) decisions made based on false ideas about credit history every single day - like hiring/promoting people based on it.
This guy is wrong about everything he believes in.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The movie, In Time, touches on the subject of a timeline for a person. As Wikipedia relates, Harlan Ellison had already written a similar story as well as a few others.
Despite this, I can see people not appreciating or caring about a timeline. I know it's hard to believe but there are millions (billions?) of people who use the Net strictly for general communication and research rather than the be all and end all to life.
As we've seen with smart phones, more technology does not necessarily make our lives easier. People are becoming so addictive to being connected, of needing to see if their lives are validated through tweets and pictures, that this timeline may send some over the edge as they desperately search for something to make themselves seem like someone.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Private social media sites exists for the rich and famous. How long before we have two social media sites. One that is public and one just for our close friends and family?
In a way, we are already doing this through the privacy settings (public, vs friends, etc.). It's just not as finely tuned or as effective as it should be.
My point is that even though people will have full timelines on the Internet, people will be taught from an early age what should be public and what should be kept private. The biggest problem today is that we are still figuring this out and people aren't trained to think this way, so almost everything is public
I considered that, and have cut/am cutting off other forms of voluntarily information/thought exposure. But with /. there's no point. This has been my homepage for 15 years. I can't imagine how many reams of e-paper I've written on here in that time. I am absolutely easily doxxable, and anybody who's mining this site already knows everything I think. And you can't delete your accounts and posts. I'm already naked here, so there's no point being modest now.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
What is all this babble about?
- a modern mentalist
- how to curry favor
- Dunbar numbers
- Fitbit
- Jawbone
- Mint
- Waze
- It’s about all of these, together
What kind of parallel universe do you come from?
I usually don't mind looking up a new term or name on Google or Wikipedia, but this author just keeps throwing up, and it doesn't look appetizing.
Why, so I can learn about "Ancient Aliens"? Or learn about how items are priced when pawned? Or keep track of the doings of "Swamp People"? I support your idea (learn history!) but watching the History Channel is one of the worst ways to do that.
Enigma
A few random thoughts on this:
Influencing people by having instant recall is a classic sales trick. Old school sales people wrote notes in their Rolodex to remember spouse's names, birthdays etc,. Today, Salesforce, Zoho, and the like (hell, even linkedin) handle this role. However, as soon as you realize that the sales person remembered something using a CRM rather than actually remembering it, that interaction quickly becomes awkward. In the past, sales techniques like these weren't well known outside of sales circles. Nowadays, everyone knows about them and they're less effective. The value in the technique is that people weren't aware it was being used and mistook the sales person remember personal details as actual friendship, rather than just a sales trick. Same will happen with timelines - we'll quickly sort those who use it as a gimmick and those who are sincere.
Another angle is the fitbit/life tracking. You know who obsessively tracks everything they do in hopes of improving themselves? People who obsessively track everything in hopes of improving themselves. The rest of us don't. Those people will always be around and will use these tools, the rest of us won't.
More importantly on the personal side of things: anyone who's accumulated a lifetime's worth of photos knows you never really go back an look at them in an detail. Sure, once in a while you'll reminisce, but you never do the detailed analysis of your past that these data hoarding stories predict. Instead, you live your life in the present, learning from the past with an eye toward the future. A few million years of evolution has made our brains very good at that. Every attempt to document and catalog our lives externally has failed to really live up to what our brain already does (hint: we likely don't have perfect recall for evolutionarily important reasons).
From the corporate side, data will be tracked as long as it can be traced back to profits. Right now, most of the profits are going to companies selling big data analysis services. It's only a matter of time before their customers move on to the next marketing trend.
trl;dr: live in the present and stop trying to cheat nature. :)
-Chris
ps: yes, the government collecting all this data is scary as hell. Voting can help fix that (at least in America - it'll take a few elections, but it's possible).
In 10 year All of humanity will have ascended a higher plane of existence in which link-baiting, trolling and attempts at viral propagation of marketing propaganda will become so ineffective people will no longer bother to try.
Comparing "timelines" could make body image issues look like child's play.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Not everyone is going to give a damn, to be honest - we don't all live and breathe for things like Twitbook or whatever they are called.
I mean, I'm hardly a luddite, being a UNIX sysadmin, developing web applications in J2EE and so on, but I have only just got my first smartphone - and I have spent most of the time getting rid of crap I don't need or want. It's possible that sales guys actually believe in the hype when they go 'This Change Everything!!!!' from time to time, but it doesn't really. Think about it realistically; the internet has changed many of the ways we interact with information, but in many ways it is still the same sort of shape: Wikipedia has replaced the Encyclopedia and made it a lot easier to find out about things, but it is still, basically, an encyclopedia. On-line shopping is still shopping; we look at things, we pay for them etc. The internet, for at it's usefulness, has not "changed everything", it has just made the same old thing more convenient.
There is a sort of Darwinian-like selection that goes on in all this: a lot of new technology is developed all the time, but most of it does not survive; in many cases because it isn't acutally that useful. Will it be compellingly useful to have complete timelines for every person on the planet? I doubt it; a lot of the data that can be collected will come from involuntary sources - such as the cheap, disposable computing devices that are one the way in. Never heard of them? Not surprising, perhaps, but there are in fact companies already now that make business from producing ultra-thin, printable computers, which can collect their electric power from ambient sources, and which will be fully networked. So, much of the data from people's "timeline" will come from such devices embedded in wrapping paper, cardboard boxes and clothes. There will GB of data from your underwear, just for starters. How useful is that going to be? People's video logs will be a very minor part of it, I can guarantee you. It's a fad, nothing more.