Brief glimpses of other lives

It’s nearing a year since my book, Rewire, was published. I’m thrilled that some critics have liked it, and that it’s had some recognition, notably from the lovely folks at Zocalo, who are hosting me at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art this evening to speak about the book. Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking about Rewire with Italian journalists and activists at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, where friends Luca diBiase and Jillian York were kind enough to share the stage with me and discuss the potentials and limitations of digital cosmopolitanism and the ways in which the internet does and doesn’t connect our conversations.

Follow Bias

The most satisfying outcome of the book, though, has been working with colleagues to build new tools that might help us break out of our cognitive bubbles and experience a wider world. Last year, Nathan Matias and Sarah Szalavitz developed a tool called Follow Bias that examines who you follow on Twitter and offers a simple overview in terms of men, women and brand and bots. If, like me, you discover you’re following a lot more men than women, Follow Bias can act as an encouragement to broaden your horizons and find new, remarkable women to follow.

@EthanZ Looking to increase followers diversity? u should follow m! #ThankYou #Cool_Insights #Meeting :))

— Hanan Abdel Meguid (@hmeguid) May 7, 2014

I showed the tool to Hanan Meguid, an Egyptian tech entrepreneur, the other day and she immediately tweeted me to alert me that she was a remarkable woman I should be following. And now I am.

Follow Bias includes a basic recommendation engine, suggesting women other users recommend I follow, and alerting me that I’d need to follow 93 women to raise my personal statistics by 5%. It’s not hard to imagine a version of the tool that’s expanded so it helps you see and address geographic or other biases in who you’re paying attention to on Twitter.

Catherine d’Ignazio’s Terra Incognita tracks geography, not gender. If you’re a lucky alpha tester of the tool, Terra Incognita lives in your Chrome browser and keeps track of what news stories you read and what cities are mentioned in them. When you open a new tab in Chrome, you’re greeted with the map of a city you’ve not read about and suggestions for articles you might read about the city. There’s a game layer to the system – you can gain credit for reading the most articles about a city, or for suggesting the best reading for that city.

Part of the challenge of building Terra Incognita has been finding appropriate, engaging readings associated with a thousand global cities. (Each UN member nation is represented by at least one city, even if it’s tiny. After that, the list includes cities with urban populations of over 100,000 or so.) It’s one thing to catch a glimpse of a city on a map, and something significantly more complicated to find a reading that offers an introduction to what makes a city unique and worth knowing about.

Since Catherine began working on this project, my attention has been drawn to projects that give you a glimpse of what life looks like in an unfamiliar part of the world. Part of what makes Terra Incognita such a beautiful system is that (once you’ve installed it), it offers you a glimpse of somewhere unfamiliar every time you open a web browser. These invitations to wander, I think, are all too absent from a vision of the Internet that’s often obsessed with efficiency, with giving you exactly what you want, when you want it.

My friend Kevin Slavin and his students have been working on a poetic and beautiful project based around the idea of multiple, sustained glimpses of another person’s life. 20 Day Stranger is a mobile phone application that matches you with a geographically different stranger. For twenty days, you and your partner catch glimpses of each other’s life, photos selected from Flickr and Foursquare that illustrate places you’ve been near, without revealing your exact location. The ap tells your partner when you’re moving or still to provide context, but offers no interaction with your partner until the end of the 20 days, at which point you have an opportunity to send a single message. Kevin’s partner on the project is the Dalai Lama Center on Ethics and Transformative Values, suggesting that there’s a deep significance to watching – and, perhaps, caring – about someone from afar.

The notion of offering a glimpse into another part of the world is not a new one: “video wormholes” are continually open videoconferencing channels that attempt to link distant offices or workspaces, allowing casual interaction between people who work together but would rarely meet in the halls. There’s one in the corner of MIT’s State Center, connecting a lunchroom there to one at Stanford. I’d love to do a project that connects similar but distant locations across languages and cultures – a KFC in Canton, Ohio with one in Guangzhou. But I suspect some of the most effective tools for unexpected encounters with a wide world are inadvertent.

I heard about Larry Larson’s 4’33” ap on TLDR, On the Media’s short-form net culture podcast. (I’ve been publicly revealed as a podcast addict this week, so there’s no reason to keep hiding my habit.) 4’33”, of course, is John Cage’s most famous composition, a piece of music where the sound is the “silence” of the performance venue, which is far from silent (as all spaces are.) The 4’33” ap invites users to record a performance of 4’33” in their own space and upload the results.

A map of 4’33” silences. No silence in Africa? Or no one willing to pay $0.99 for silence?

The 4’33” ap site features a map of recordings, each a 4’33” snippet of silence… which often turns out to be the fascinating and intricate background noise from a different corner of the world. (You need to purchase the $0.99 ap to enjoy the silence. Yes, it was all I ever wanted, all I ever needed.) It feels a bit odd to assemble a playlist of silences, but the net effect is a much quieter version of exploring We Are Happy From, the remarkable collection of georemixes of Pharrell’s “Happy”.

I’m a country mouse: the only city I’ve ever lived in is Accra, and that was twenty years ago. I’ve never developed the big city habits of averting my eyes from an unblinded window. When I stay in big city highrises, I inadvertently end up staring into other people’s living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms. I think we need ways to catch glimpses of each others’ lives, locally and around the world, that somehow balance the power of serendipitous connection and protection from the creepiness of voyeurism. I’m glad smart people are working on the problem.