My name is unusual enough that if you use it as a Google search term, my blog and other information about me pop right up. Then I realized that using my name plus a word, e.g. Kent Schnake Drugs would usually take someone straight to blog posts I had written that included the word drugs.

At first I felt a bit uncomfortable about that degree of transparency, especially since I have written quite a few very personal essays in my blog, facebook, etc.

Then I had and epiphany: the vast majority of my life has been observable by other people. My appearance, my body languge, much of what I say, and much of what I do has often been seen by my fellow humans (including the information from hundred of “security cameras”). Those fellow humans have been free to tell virtually anyone they like what they have seen of me or heard from me. They are also free to bias their observations in the telling. So why should I be worried about the sort of transparency afforded by the WWW? Compared to the amount of data collected about me by human observers, it is minor.

I am all for “total transparency” as long we get rid of the currently predominate top down, one way systems in our society and replace them all with networked alternatives (energy, government, education, media, etc.). At the moment to many people in gatekeeper positions are running windows 3.1 in there brains, to easy to get to a brave new world scenario with that user base.

Perfect Personalisation is a really failed vision. Personalisation to an extend is good. But if I am given choices according to my older preferences only, how would I explore the beauty of this world?

I suppose this entails stricter moral standards for us all. Public figures will have to be saints. Or else society will have to adopt a more tolerant attitude toward personal indiscretions and a more realistic view of human nature.

I think that, like everything else, morality evolves. Steven Pinker’s talk at TED showed us this is happening. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/163 I think these technologies will have a big effect on this trend and I hope we’re all better for it.