The first video mash-up focuses on the symposium itself and highlights the different perspectives on the topics of public space and privacy that met during Hyperpublic 2011.

The other combines reflections on the challenges that the digital networked environment has created and will create for society, people, and the boundaries between the public and the private.

The process of creating these two video mash-ups allowed us at the YAM lab to practice important skills for content creators such as appropriation and evaluation of information. After selecting, cutting, and sequencing sentences from the interviews, we proceeded to find songs, photographs, and videos that could be remixed with the different voices, working not only as illustrations of the main ideas but also as rhythmic aids. A crucial part of this process involved the searching and evaluation of audiovisual material with Public Domain and Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-SA) licenses that could be re-contextualized legally. From amateur photographs to electronic music, videos, and animations, we found lots of material that was public and available to be re-appropiated.

Today, I have the pleasure to announce the release of the first batch of short video clips about Hyperpublic (12 short video interviews) that we have produced in the YAM lab. These videos are based on personal interviews we conducted with several speakers and attendees. We invited them to share with us, during the short coffee breaks and in the private location of an empty classroom in the Maxwell Building, their impressions from the symposium and their insights on the themes of privacy and public space. They answered open ended questions such as,  How do they see the boundaries between the private and the public?, How does the symposium changed the ways in which they think about private/public?, What is the biggest insight they have had during the sessions?, and How do they imagine the future of private and public?. Furthermore, some of the interviewees also answered some specific questions related to their areas of expertise. For example, danah boyd talked to us about the strategies teenagers use in networked public spheres, Paul Dourish talked about the use of GPS devices for discovering public spaces, and Julia Scher spoke about architectures of surveillance and performance.

Although each of the  12 short video interviews we are making public today portrays one interviewee at a time, they are intended to resonate with each other (Urs Gasser, Paul Dourish, Mica Pollock, Laurent Pollock, Laurent Stalder, Julia Scher, Jesse Shapins, Jeffrey Schanapp, Herbert Burket, Ethan Zuckerman, danah boyd, Charles Nesson, Adam Greenfield). We edited them short (3-4 minutes) so people can watch several of them through the Berkman YouTube Channel and get an idea of how different perspectives were brought together to the symposium, and what was the significance of it. In the following weeks, we will release a second batch of videos produced by the YAM Lab. We are working in a remix of the 12 interviews, a sort of mash-up video that combines quotations from the different speakers and that explores in a more direct way the interdisciplinary approach of the Hyperpubic symposium.

Finally, as the producer of these videos, I would like to credit the Youth and Media Lab interns that collaborated in their making. Alex O’Dell and Kassra Homaifar created the introductory sequence using photographs and music with Creative Commons licenses (CC-By-SA and CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Claire Kwong, Hannah Deresiewicz, Alex, and me worked as editors.

Last week on June 10 a range of different disciplines came eye to eye to discuss the changing concepts of privacy and public space at the Hyper-Public symposium. Taking note of the influence of design in today’s connected world the discussions unfolded from many different perspectives. Please have a look here for a nice graphical overview of the discussion, video material as well as interviews [soon!] with most of the speakers (by the wonderful YaM team!).

One overarching theme of the day dealt with defining privacy and how this has changed over time. From a rather static concept –where privacy was mainly linked to a place or ‘being indoors or inside’ or – it is during recent years more considered to be a practice, as something that you do. Furthermore, in these earlier times where people were ‘private by default and public by effort’, today it is rather the opposite; people are rather ‘public by default and private by effort’, so claims danah boyd. The act of being private, in other words, must be intentionally undertaken agrees Paul Dourish. This is especially true in the omnipresence digital world of today.

When approached through an architectural perspective similar trends are visible and were vividly discussed during the symposium. There was a clear focus on how to provide private space within the public domain, which shows that in architecture the default mode is gradually shifting to a more public rather than private default. The current challenge lies in creating a space where people can choose to be private while at the same time being public. Jeff Huang,  currently designing a new campus in Ras Al Khaimah, convincingly argued that there should be less necessity to design privacy if, and only if, ‘publicness’ is properly designed which entails that 1) no one owns the data; and 2) the data is accessible to everyone.

This then brings up the question of changing behaviors and shifting social norms that emerge when people are starting to navigate these new spaces. While often being (wrongfully) accused of not caring about privacy youth are discovering and finding ways to carry themselves in this environment. By using language and references to pop culture unknown to their parents they create digital boundaries and by doing so create a private space within a very public environment as danah boyd explained.

This environment then encapsulates both public and private which should be defined as part of a continuum rather than as a dichotomy as the connecting speakers Latanya Sweeney, Gerhard Buurman and Herbert Burkert also elaborated on. Unfortunately, this dichotomized perspective of private and public kept popping up during the day much to the frustration of many people in the audience as well as those following the symposium on Twitter. This shows that the discussion as such needs to take place more often (also, or even especially) in public spaces in order for it to move beyond the probably outdated dichotomized approach to private and public space, at least in the digital realm. 

The symposium was attended by much more than its 120 real life visitors as over 3000 tweets by more than 3200 unique twitterers* were thrown into the public arena hashtagged #hyperpublic. The conference was even briefly trending in the Boston area. And while there were many compliments concerning the quality of information provided from the most active tweeps, there was a shared concern –both on- as offline– that the discussion in the room focused more on privacy protection, than on designing public space. This was promptly exemplified when people noticed there was no live stream of the event.

The Wordle cloud of the symposium’s tweets gives a nice visual summary of the main debate showing that privacy (concerns) dominated the conversation online as well, followed closely by public versus private discussions and definitions. Interwoven in this were the connections many made between private and public versus data and people. Or rather the notion that all parties involved need to take up responsibility in creating, maintaining and (re)designing hyperpublic space as was also illustrated by Adam Greenfield, Betsy Masiello and Ethan Zuckerman for example. Governments and corporations should take responsibility concerning the protection of their citizens and customers and provide them with the tools to act publicly in (now) private domains as well. Citizens and customers should be aware that their changing behaviors in and use of hyperpublic space influences its very existence. The most retweeted comment, originally posted by Jonathan Zittrain, captures the friction that exists between the different domains eloquently: “if what you get online is for free, you’re not the customer – you’re the product”. Hopefully, though, this cycle will be broken by cooperation rather than coercion <link to talk Martin Nowak>.

In the end, Urs Gasser‘s call, with which he openend the conference, was taken up and a step in the right direction has been carefully made:

“In an environment where the lines between private and public spaces are blurring, technology is developing so rapidly, user behavior is in constant flux, complex feedback loops among technology, law, economics, and behavior exist, and where norms become increasingly contextual, fragmented, and ad hoc, our responsibility and challenge as designers – including law- and policy-makers as well as other professionals – should include the creation of advanced spaces for negotiation and conversation about privacy and its boundaries, the exploration of new types of interfaces among spheres and layers, and the creation of hybrid private/public spaces.”

*of who approximately 200 posted original messages, which formed the basis for this word cloud

We invite you to continue that conversation by posting resources, articles, interesting reads, and other materials on the symposium wiki.

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing videos, audio, visualizations, and other outputs from the symposium, the first batch of which can be found on the Berkman Center’s website.

We would encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feeds , weekly events / digital media newsletter, or Twitter feed so that you can be notified when videos and more materials are uploaded. If you blogged about the conference or took notes, we would invite you to share links with us.

Your feedback on the substance, logistics, and setup, and any other comments on the symposium would be welcome.

Thank you again for joining us, and we look forward to continuing the conversation around #hyperpublic.

Best,
The Berkman Center Team

Hyper-Public brought together computer scientists, ethnographers, architects, historians, artists and legal scholars to discuss how design influences privacy and public space, how it shapes and is shaped by human behavior and experience, and how it can cultivate norms such as tolerance and diversity.

As the first post in our series of recaps, we have collected:

(1) Urs Gasser, Judith Donath, and Jef Huang’s introduction:

(2) John Palfrey’s comments from the session on “Delineating Public & Private”:

(3) danah boyd’s talk from the session on “Experience & Recreation”:

(4) Adam Greenfield’s inputs from the session on “The Risks and Beauty
of the Hyper-Public Life”:

More videos from the conference will follow in the coming weeks.

(5) A few members of the Berkman Youth and Media team also put together a visual map of some of the difficult questions and challenges associated with speakers’ provocations:

A longer description and reflection can be found on the HyperPublic blog

Additionally, Joyce Neys of the Youth and Media team reflected on the conference created a wordle from the tweet stream of the event:

The symposium was attended by much more than its 120 real life visitors as over 3000 tweets by more than 3200 unique twitterers* were thrown into the public arena hashtagged #hyperpublic. The conference was even briefly trending in the Boston area. … The Wordle cloud of the symposium’s tweets gives a nice visual summary of the main debate showing that privacy (concerns) dominated the conversation
online as well, followed closely by public versus private discussions and definitions.

As pre-inputs to the conference, David Weinberger, Judith Donath, and Wendy Seltzer offered inputs on various dimensions of the symposium’s framing:

• David Weinberger: Rebooting Library Privacy in the Age of the Network
• Judith Donath: Invisible Walls and All-Seeing Eyes
• Wendy Seltzer: Privacy, Attention, and Political Community

As an introduction to the conference, Berkman’s Executive Director Urs Gasser offered substantive opening remarks, invoking the example of Google’s StreetView to highlight some of the legal, policy, and social tensions in designing privacy and public space.

During the event, Berkman community members David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged many of the discussions that took place during the day:

via Ethan:

• Walls and thresholds – physical metaphors at Hyper-public
• Latanya Sweeney and rethinking transparency
• Data, the city and the public object
• Hubert Burkert – moving beyond the metaphor
• Charlie Nesson and a new vision of the public domain
• Martin Nowak and the mathematics of cooperation

via David:

• Judith Donath’s Introduction
• Session I: Delineating Public and Private
• Session II: Experience & Recreation
• Session III: The Risks and Beauty of Hyper-Public Life
• Herbert Burkert
• Final panel: Cooperation without Coercion

The Harvard Gazette also offered a synopsis of the day’s proceedings.

We encourage you to follow along with are roundups by subscribing to the HyperPublic blog, our Berkman Buzz and Weekly Events+Digital Media newsletters, and keeping an eye on the Berkman front page.

The Hyper-Public symposium might best be described as an unconventional amalgamation, disciplines traditionally divergent brought together to discuss the emerging phenomenon of hyper-public space.  Each session featured interesting speakers and incited many comments, the engagement from the audience significant and nearly without end.  That said, I found myself wondering at the symposium’s conclusion exactly how each speaker connected to the others. Yes, I recognized that each spoke in some way about the concepts of private and public, that many touched upon architectural history and the dangers of extreme publicity.  However, the overall arch of the symposium was unclear to me and, as a result, I found myself visually mapping out its contents.

Below is the outcome of this undertaking.  By dividing the Conference into three distinct parts, the significance of each speaker’s argument and its’ place within the whole became clear, specific definitions, comparisons, and recommendations emerging as a result of this breakdown.

The questions that seemed to permeate each section of the symposium are as follows: (1) What is Privacy? (2) How can we understand the shift in privacy vis-à-vis architecture? and (3) How do we behave in this hyper-public space?  Each of these questions is relevant to the others – each connects to the notion of privacy and to its changing role in the digital world – and each contributes to the growing understanding of the hyper-public landscape.

The first of the three questions plays what might be termed a clarifying role, addressing directly a concept at the symposium’s core.  This question, “What is privacy?” is by no means a simple one and the answers provided by Hyper-Public participants in response differ both thematically and conceptually.  In parsing the definitions provided, two schools of thought emerge, the first considering privacy an action to be undertaken, the other seeing it a quality inherent to a particular space or context.

To this first school of thought belong both Paul Dourish and danah boyd.  For Dourish, privacy is, quite literally, a practiced action, little more than a naturally occurring social relation.  Boyd disagrees slightly, suggesting that privacy is in fact difficult to implement, a concept inorganic in today’s world.  In contrast to earlier times, she explained, in which people were “private by default and public by effort,” people today are “public by default and private by effort.”  The act of being private, in other words, must now be intentionally undertaken, successfully established only with great difficulty.

Laurent Stalder and Beatriz Colomina – both academic architects – consider privacy more a quality than an explicit action.  Both seem to agree with boyd that traditional notions of privacy are outdated today.  Privacy is to them something under attack: once found within the four walls of a building, its supremacy is currently challenged by the emergence of an online world.  Where once existed physical boundaries separating the public from the private, today there exists very little, the walls once standing crumbling in the wake of digital technology.

The second question guiding the conference addresses exactly this phenomenon, responses thereto wondering how the shift away from private spaces might be understood through an architectural lens.  Beatriz Colomina and Charlie Nesson responded to this question in a similar manner, both thinkers highlighting the need for a private space within a public arena.  The current challenge, both suggested, lies not in creating a traditional, walled in private space but in crafting its modern counterpart – a place where people can exist privately while also living under the omnipresent public eye.

This space, perhaps, lies on the continuum between the public and private.  This notion of a continuous space was described at length by the three Connection speakers – Latanya Sweeney, Gerhard Buurman, and Herbert Burket – and by Ethan Zuckerman, all of whom suggested that the private and public not be viewed as dichotomous opposites, but instead as the ends of a single spectrum.  As Zuckerman stated, life today can best be described as occurring in a semi-private, semi-public space, in a place simultaneously private and public.  It seems, then, that we have already begun creating the space desired by Colomina and Nesson.  The difficulty lies in governing this space – in prescribing norms and laws by which people ought to behave.

It is this topic that the third question of the symposium addresses, speakers exploring those behaviors most frequently practiced in this emerging space.  Adam Greenfield, Betsy Masiello and danah boyd all touched upon the importance of etiquette and social norms, describing the ways by which individuals are beginning to navigate this new arena.  danah boyd gave the most concrete explanation, focusing on youth practices as a prototype for more general behaviors.  Youth, she explained, are in a constant cycle of development, creating and disseminating norms to which all are expected to conform.  Through the use of these norms, youth create private spaces in this otherwise public arena, hiding behind practices incomprehensible to the uninformed, taking advantage of language as a medium through which to establish boundaries.

John Palfrey and Laurent Stalder looked ahead in response to this question, suggesting specific actions to be undertaken, discussing not behaviors already practiced, but the need for new threshold devices, new tools that will allow for increased clarification between spheres.  In the absence of the traditional barriers that once differentiated the public from the private, there exists a need for a new form of wall – one that might slow the flow of information, easing the user’s experience, making possible a successful navigation.

How, though, might such walls be developed?  The answer, it seems, lies in large-scale cooperation – a cooperation that draws in actors from realms otherwise divorced.  As Ethan Zuckerman, Martin Nowak, and Nicholas Negroponte implied, such cooperation must bring together corporations, educators, and individuals, all working together towards a common goal, all trying to develop a set of precedents through which to regulate online behavior.  As Nowak mentioned, such cooperation will not always be simple; it requires a significant measure of generosity from each participant and will succeed only when this benevolence is guaranteed.

As of now, there exists no such cooperation, no single mechanism by which the public/private boundary can be successfully patrolled.  This, though, is the direction towards which we ought to be heading, its importance perhaps the greatest recommendation to emerge from the Hyper-Public symposium.

In considering the conference in this fractured way, divided and recombined on a topical basis, its lasting benefit becomes more recognizable, the insights gleaned organized in a manner more accessible.  This separation, for me, brings to life the conference in a way previously unfeasible, allowing for the development of a concrete set of guidelines upon which to base future action.

via Ethan:

• Walls and thresholds – physical metaphors at Hyper-public
• Latanya Sweeney and rethinking transparency
• Data, the city and the public object
• Hubert Burkert – moving beyond the metaphor
• Charlie Nesson and a new vision of the public domain
• Martin Nowak and the mathematics of cooperation

via David:

• Judith Donath’s Introduction
• Session I: Delineating Public and Private
• Session II: Experience & Recreation
• Session III: The Risks and Beauty of Hyper-Public Life
• Herbert Burkert
• Final panel: Cooperation without Coercion

Updates will be posted throughout the day. You can also keep an eye on the active Twitter feed for updates in real time.

Let me introduce some of the core themes of symposium by reporting about an April 2011 court decision of the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland – my home country. In the April ruling, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court required Google Switzerland to take extra measures in the context of its StreetView service to be compliant with Swiss data protection law. The court required that Google not only uses automatic blurring technology to obscure people’s faces and number plates of vehicles, but manually blurs other identifying features, such as skin color and clothing, from people photographed in front of “sensitive establishments,” such as women’s shelters, retirement homes, prisons, schools, courts and hospitals. Also, Google is not allowed to provide views into gardens, backyards, and the like that a “normal pedestrian” couldn’t see when walking by.

The ruling – here used as only as a placeholder for the broader phenomenon – nicely illustrates some of the core themes and topics that this conference seeks to address.

First, the ruling illustrates the complexity of the phenomenon under investigation: the delineation of the private and the public in the digitally networked age. The StreetView case not only serves as a proxy for the ways in which digital technologies shift the boundaries between private and public. It also demonstrates the need for a much more nuanced, granular, and context-sensitive definition of what privacy means – including privacy in the public space such as streets – or libraries, to refer to David Weinberger’s excellent blog post.

Second, the Swiss StreetView ruling – against which Goolge has appealed – reminds us of the power of and responsibility for design choices. The power of design choices in this case obviously concerns the ways in which StreetView is built, from the design of the underlying code to the actual pictures taken. A number of “power effects” can be isolated:

•    Design choices can have enabling effects: In the case of StreetView Switzerland, over thousand companies small and large are offering services that are built on top of StreetView.
•    Design choices may have leveling effects: StreetView allows for instance disabled users to explore cities in ways that have only been available to people without handicap.
•    Design choices of course also constrain what we can do with technology, how we use it and for what purposes. From a cyberlaw perspective, this constraints-perspective has gained much attention. Professor Lessig has popularized it with the equation “code is law”. But as with law, it would be a mistake in my view to put too much emphasis on design as a constraint on behavior. It’s only one facet, and arguably not the most important one.
•    Finally, design choices can produce unintended consequences or spillover effects. Again, Streetview is a good example, where in fact the privacy of people pictured by Google cameras can be compromised.

One of the interesting questions is what are the corrective mechanisms available to balance this power of design choices, both ex ante (e.g. launch of a new app) or ex post. Question of accountability of designer seems largely unresolved.

Third, the StreetView ruling rises the question what role social norms play vis-à-vis technological innovations. How do we think about and evaluate the design that is bolstered by social norms? For example, in case of StreetView a significant percentage of Swiss inhabitants are using this service and seem to support the underlying choices that have been made. And then, perhaps even more importantly, how well equipped are we to respond to instances where certain design choices clash with social norms? Are public apologies a la Facebook earlier this week the appropriate responses, or do lawsuits a la Goolge Buzz do the trick? Or can we envision more productive, discursive responses?

Fourth observation: the StreetView ruling is symptomatic for the types of questions the legal system has to cope with when operating in a quicksilver tech-environment. Technological advancements, commercial practices, and shifts in user behavior put pressure on traditional legal concepts and definitions. E.g., what does “personal information” mean?

The StreetView ruling also nicely illustrates the typical response pattern taken by the legal system: it seeks to subsume new phenomena under old rules and only over time might react with innovation within the legal system – that is typically: the enactment of new rules or application of new doctrines (see Grokster).

Much more could be said about the law. Let me just add one particular aspect: The StreetView ruling is also interesting in the sense that it brings up the question of the legal system’s reasonable expectation vis-à-vis certain design choices and limitations. In this particular case, the law expects perfection: The court didn’t consider it to be sufficient that Google’s blurring technology catches 99% of the faces of individuals pictured.

One could distill several more dimensions and themes from the StreetView ruling for this conference, including economic considerations, which obviously play a key role across the board. Instead, let me conclude by sharing the following thought: In an environment where the lines between private and public spaces are blurring, technology is developing so rapidly, user behavior is in constant flux, complex feedback loops among technology, law, economics, and behavior exist, and where norms become increasingly contextual, fragmented, and ad hoc, our responsibility and challenge as designers – including law- and policy-makers as well as other professionals – should include the creation of advanced spaces for negotiation and conversation about privacy and its boundaries, the exploration of new types of interfaces among spheres and layers, and the creation of hybrid private/public spaces.

I hope today’s conference is a step into this direction.

Created By: Joseph Bergen with James Burns, Kara Oehler, Kyle Parry, Joana Pimenta, Jeffrey Schnapp and Jesse Shapins