Today, as the web is being undermined by the rapid dominance of apps for smartphones and tablets, the Iranian police would probably, as the jargon has it, ‘go multiplatform’. That, at any rate, is what their colleagues in the Metropolitan Police have just done: unveiling, ahead of the Olympics, a new app called Facewatch ID.
You enter your postcode, and are shown CCTV images of people committing minor crimes in your area. If you recognise anyone, you can let the police know straightaway using the app. The idea is that, if popular, the app will work as a deterrent while also allowing the general public to share in the burdens – and joys – of policing.
The police – or the people who provide them with the technology – may be hoping for other, less obvious benefits from the new system, which could help prepare the ground for fully automated facial recognition systems.

During the early goings of the hockey riots in Vancouver, last year, the RCMP asked people to tag anyone they knew in the widely circulating pictures, using as much meta-data as possible.

If U have photos of rioters, upload 2 http://tinyurl.com/3easkqp. Geotag or identify time & location 2 help investigators. #canucks #riot

June 16, 2011 via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@rcmpdevries

Sgt. Peter DeVries

In some of my previous work, I traced the use of sporting events as staging grounds for new media technologies. This includes things like television, and serial photography, and a slew of video technologies. Often, these events serve the dual purpose of testing a new technology for military/police use and as an introduction to a wider, public audience. This was the case for CCTV and facial recognition technology. The LRB takes a suitably disapproving tone when talking about this latest tool, but it’s nothing new. In addition to working as a staging ground for new technology, large, public events are also used to recode and re-instill habitual civic behaviours.

In Peter Fritzsche’s fantastic book, Reading Berlin 1900, he describes a game that the Berlin police set up with the readers of the newspaper Morgenpost. The game was called “Augen Auf!”:

On 13 November 1919, the Morgenpost produced a city-wide event that was meant to revive a sense of metropolitan responsibility which had supposedly disappeared since the war. According to Berlin police officials, citizens had grown disinclined to report criminal activity or to help authorities identify suspects at large. As a step toward retraining people to be reliable witnesses and aid the police, the Morgenpost offered 2, 000 Marks to the sharp-eyed individual who called out “Augen auf!” (Eyes Open!) uopon spotting its street-roaming reporter Egon Jameson, whose face peered from hundreds of Litfasssäulen (advertising pillars).[1]

This interactive event married daily media use with a desired social corrective at a formal, civic level. In other words play-vigilance was meant to reinvigorate a sense of responsibility in practicing legal vigilance. Today, someone might call this “gamification” (but please don’t). As in Berlin, as in Vancouver, the Facewatch ID program is as much – and probably more – about forming new practices of co-surveillance that fit with new techniques of media use as it is about actually solving crimes.

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1. Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 83.  ↩

GETTIN’ ILL also means getting familiar with a lot of libraries’ cataloguing systems and paratexts. Sometimes you get some real gems. Like this volume from 1953 that my library had to bring in from Iowa State–look at that crest!–and has been untouched basically since publication. I love that they decided to use the same check-out slip from sixty years ago. Most libraries don’t do this. If they still have the slip attached, its last checkout stamp will usually be in the early 1990s, or whenever they switched to a barcode system. If you look closely, you can see that the last time it was checked out was April 20th, 1955. But what I really enjoyed is the threat of a three-cent-a-day fine. I don’t want to antagonize the fine folks at Iowa State, so I’ll save the precious few Canadian pennies that are left.

]]> http://dylanmulvin.com/2012/04/borrowing-from-friends/feed/ 0 http://dylanmulvin.com/2012/03/the-public-sphere/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-public-sphere http://dylanmulvin.com/2012/03/the-public-sphere/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:05:07 +0000 Dylan http://dylanmulvin.com/?p=390 Continue reading →]]> If you spend any time on a message board, especially an anonymous one, you know it’s like being at the Oxford Debate Union crossed with the most romantic fantasies of 19th century coffee houses. Except it’s exactly like that if you replaced all of that with an acid-fueled garbage disposal.

Sometimes you get the perfect distillation of the message board in the first few comments of a new article. Behold, on the weekend a group of people released some confidential documents pertaining to private donations to McGill. The McGill Daily reported on it before the university even knew it had happened. And the comment section is priceless and, by necessity, just the worst: one part telling the paper how to properly report on the news; one part hate speech; one part “YEAH BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CIA DRUG TESTS??” These were the only three comments as of last night.

]]> http://dylanmulvin.com/2012/03/the-public-sphere/feed/ 0 http://dylanmulvin.com/2012/02/stuff-about-stuff/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=stuff-about-stuff http://dylanmulvin.com/2012/02/stuff-about-stuff/#comments Sat, 25 Feb 2012 05:39:54 +0000 Dylan http://dylanmulvin.com/?p=384 Continue reading →]]> When Dropbox changed their terms of service last summer there was a glaring increase in their emphasis on the use of the word stuff. Stuff appears eleven times in the revised guidelines, including a whole section called “Your Stuff & Your Privacy”–yes, gross.  Those guidelines got a lot of attention for being vague enough to be alarming though maybe legally necessary sounding enough to be understandable. But the use of stuff  was definitely a reason to feel like some things were being glossed over.

If you use the internet–and unless you’re reading this in the end-of-year DYLMANAC I’m assuming you do–then you’ve either been pissed off by Google’s new privacy regulations, the floating pop-up that tells you about those new regulations, or you’ve been pissed off about some other thing–which, really, I can’t help you with right now, but you can email me or something? If you’ve been pissed off about any of the Google changes then you’ve read their warning in that same pop-up that simply says, “This stuff matters.” When you read the provisional guidelines that set out the new regulations, they again use the word, saying,

We collect information to provide better services to all of our users – from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful or the people who matter most to you online.

There’s no real attempt to hide why they’re changing their regulations. While your identity may already be individualized and aggregated from Google’s multiple services (go to google.com/dashboard to see both your “basic stuff” and “complex things”), these changes are meant for the display side of that aggregation; by making your marketable identity float from one domain to another, Google is simply suspending the fiction that the walls between its data gathering operations weren’t always porous and banking on the assumption that the erasure of that fiction will make users more valuable audiences. There is a lot to doubt about online advertising and the (social, economic) sustainability of a model driven by what mostly amount to second-rate classifieds, but that’s a different post. Suffice it to say that the metrics behind the measurement, the “complex stuff,” is already more important than the clickable stuff. The privacy changes are meant to make you more clicky, you’re already super metric-y. (Ok, I think I’ve got a handle on the language now. GET YOUR SEEING STUFF READY FOR MORE WORD STUFF.)

As everybody has already pointed out, this is the most recent departure from Google’s motto “Don’t Be Evil,” which was just another too-cute-to-mean-anything branding from another era of online commerce–Mark Zuckerberg’s personal motto is the Latin for “Maybe one day we’ll look back on all this shit and laugh.” But I’m more interested in the language surrounding policy change of this sort. To paraphrase Google, “stuff” matters. In one sense it’s easy to dismiss the rhetorical choices as state-of-the-industry tech marketingese. But I’m curious about a couple of things. When did this start as a practice, what are the precedents to stuff? And, more importantly, what do we mean by stuff?

When the Dropbox regulations changed the latter question was the central conversation topic. For the most part parsing the meaning of stuff was about ownership, privacy, copyright, DMCA regulations and the like, and a general concern about data storage and sovereignty–concerns that come up repeatedly around the legal status of information in the cloud. Does stuff mean the files I created on my computer? The words inside a Word file? The bits that make up that exact file on the Dropbox server or all instances of those words as long as that file is on the server or was ever on the server? These questions haven’t been answered yet. Unfortunately, stuff won’t mean anything until, probably, it is decided by jurisprudence, when someone will decide the meaning of all that stuff in those clouds.

This is an advertisement for the world’s most terrifying piece of playground equipment. It really looks like one of those robot piggy-banks that mimes eating a coin. In this case it eats and spits out children.

An advertisement for an early portable cassette player, the Sony TC-124. If you’re not attracted to portable audio, maybe this dusty guy and his bare chest wandering the rail-yard will change your mind.

This endorsement of Atlas Shrugged (italics in the catalog are editorial content) is fascinating, if not totally surprising. Bonus glimpse of my weird little fingers.

Finally, the appeal of this ad is obvious.

Note: this website makes no such guarantees.

From: Plus Lady

Hello Dylan,
Thanks, on a related note, I am really going to college to turn into a registered nurse.. I want to get the job done the grave garden shift and I heard it tends to make a little more funds than day time routine several hours.. So what is the normal wage of an RN functioning grave property shift w/ an associates degree starting up out?

Thanks in advance!
Good Job!

Dear PL,

First, thank you for reading! Good Job back at ya!

Now, the good news is that nurses are in high demand, as you probably know. The bad news is that’s about all I know about nursing. College does sound like a place to learn about that. But college can also be very expensive. Instead of college, have you considered watching the complete collection of the NBC/ABC dramedy Scrubs? You can buy the entire series conveniently packaged on ONLY 26 DVDs for $150. That’s just a fraction of the price of college and you don’t have to worry about being popular or about some punk stealing your idea for a faces book!!!

In terms of wages, I checked the BC government’s Wage and Salary guide for registered nurses. They say that you can expect to make anywhere between $31 and $42 per hour. Not bad. But what they fail to consider is the premium hospitals are willing to pay for a true appreciation of Zach Braff’s particular combination of humour and emotional sensitivity. I believe that using the Braffian Method, you could expect to earn anywhere from $400-$1000 per hour, depending on how many hilarious comedy flashbacks you incorporate into your nurse’s duties.

Good luck PL,

–Dylan

The aw-shucks profiles and the hobbyist blog posts smack of the “Rupert Murdoch joins Twitter, is boring” and “Henry Kissinger loves mini golf” and “Margaret Thatcher makes friends while selling friendship bracelets on Etsy” that are routine in news coverage of aging political figures. I don’t know how to describe phenomena that by showing how arch-conservatives are banal just like us end up being both titillating and disappointing. But there is something satisfying about the idea that Fukuyama is finished napalming intellectual thought and is much more interested in remote control toys and tooling around YouTube.

Here are the Hunger Games derivative texts you requested.

First, Holly Laurent’s cover of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games (there is spoiling content). I am really into this song and it makes me think that the lyrical content of Del Rey’s original isn’t very consequential.

Second, as Victoria Johnson’s Awl post about children’s literature maps notes, The Hunger Games doesn’t offer a visualization of Panem, the sad, metropolically centred North Americ-ish country where the games take place. Luckily Johnson points us to the Livejournal (yes, that is where this is going, get used to it) of aimmyarrowshigh, where she spins out a hypothetical map of Panem derived from a partial sinking of the continent and a phi spiral. If you are a fellow Hungerer (I just made that up, and I’m sorry), please check it out.