[Reprinted from my Red Herring blog, 2004]

Lists are the white noise of information. They're everywhere, and we all make them, but they're so familiar they escape our notice. What's on a to-do list is what matters; the list itself as a thing—as a way of organizing information—isn't worthy of attention.

This has been true for a couple reasons. First, lists are incredibly simple, yet incredibly versatile. They can represent anything from an inventory of goods to a set of tasks to be completed. Second, lists are functional things, tools to get a job done. It's what we can do with a list that matters, not the list itself. It's the message that matters, not the medium. Finally, lists aren't like literature. Everyone knows how to make them. There are no aesthetics of list-making, no such thing as a stylish or elegant list, no difference between a list made by Ernest Hemingway or your Uncle Ernie.

But to invoke the overused Marshall McLuhan phrase, the medium is becoming the message. In the online world, lists are starting to morph from tools for managing complexity, to tools for projecting identity. This transition reveals something about what happens when old and new information technologies converge.

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]

Recently BBC World had an article on baby blogs-- blogs that parents will keep about their children, the digital equivalent of baby books. Coincidentally, that same day I posted my 500th entry on my blog about my children, which I started soon after getting a digital camera. Like most articles about blogs, its substantive points were mixed up with a measure of alarmism and technical naivete. Some of it was taken up with worries about what pedophiles unmentionable things could do to those cute baby pictures, and fretting over how revealing details about your child's daily routine isn't very smart. (Hello? Ever heard of password protection?)

The article also suggested that baby blogs were invasions of privacy. What if, twenty years from now, the merest acquaintance could read about your child's potty-training exploits, or their first visit to Grandma's house? Wouldn't making those details of your child's life available to people they barely know violate their privacy, and make it harder for them to get dates? (At this point in the article I wanted to pump my arm and shouted "Yessss!" My five year-old daughter is only in nursery school, and already I've guaranteed that she'll spend her college years undistracted by a social life.)

My efforts to archive my children's lives stand in stark contrast to the scanty documentation of my own past. My entire childhood is preserved in just under two hundred pictures, a few letters, and a couple yearbooks: it all fits in a single box. In contrast, I can take two hundred pictures of my daughter at a birthday party. The constantly-falling cost of digital media lower the barriers to recording everyday events, and preserving every last picture and audio file. At my current rate, each of my children are in danger of having me take 50,000 pictures of them by the time they turn 18.

Of course, parenting is one long invasion of privacy, but the idea of baby blogs coming back to haunt their subjects later in life is still an interesting one. Technology promises to take a ritual that had traditionally been a painful but very limited rite of passage-- the baby books shown to the fiance, the clever candids shown at the wedding reception-- and make it into a full-time affair.

It also shows that the relationship between privacy and technology is really pretty complex. Worries about technology affecting privacy are perfectly reasonable; but worries about specific technologies are often misplaced. To really know what to worry about, you have to think a bit more about what privacy is, and how technology can affect it.