Matthew T Grant

There are (at least) two worlds.

There is the physical world, the “real” world, where spatial distance makes a big difference. For example, depending on which side of the United States’ border with Mexico you live, you may actually find trucks filled with corpses blocking a major thoroughfare or disemboweled social media activists hanging from an overpass, or just read about it.

There is also the Web world, in which every point is equidistant from any other point (just a click away). This world is more like a shamanic spirit world that you can enter from any point in the physical world and always wind up in the same place.

Of course, a spirit world is a blessing and a curse. As Andres Monroy-Hernandez points on in this essay, the rise of social media and its promise (or at least appearance) of anonymity, can be very powerful when you are operating in and against a murderously dangerous environment. It allows people to speak out virtually and anonymously when they are too terrified to do so actually and in person.

But since this “speaking out” bursts into the real world wherever the internet can be accessed, it poses a real threat to the terrorizers, who then lash out, when they are not able to strike back directly.

The question that Monroy-Hernandez raises is this: What obligation do the private wardens of the Web have to protect the anonymity of its users/inhabitants?

This is a slightly different take on the question of “net neutrality.” While the current debate focuses on whether or not the owners of the “pipes” should be able, or not, to control the flow of information through them based on who owns the information, there is a broader, more political debate to be had about whether the pipe overseers should or should not take sides when the content flow is woven into a potentially or actually violent conflict.

If the overseers reveal identities, they are inevitably taking one side. If they refuse to do so, they are taking the other.

Does this mean that, in this world, there is no truly neutral space, but, instead, only the decision that each individual or corporate entity makes to take one side or another?

Yesterday I was to meet with a fellow, Charles Hamad, so naturally I Googled him.

Among the treasures that Google served up was this article from 1974 describing Hamad’s work as a graduate student on a talking trash can named “Arthur.”

Here’s a clip from a spot the BBC did about this novel application of behavioral psychology to the problem of environmental pollution:

Enabling a trash can to talk in an effort to curb litter reminded me of the more recent work of BJ Fogg in the area of persuasive technology.

More importantly, it reminded me also that technology can be used for good, and not (just) evil.

Litl launched the litl (though Wired seems to think it’s called “the Webbook”– clarification guys?) yesterday and they invited folks to check it out at the local Starbucks (here’s some photographic proof that I was in attendance).

Given my years of ingrained computer-user habits, I did not find litl’s card-metaphor desktop, novel controllers (buttons, rollers, etc.), and unique capabilities (bend-over-backwards easel mode) intuitively usable, though the friendly litl people happily walked me through it and one beta-tester told me that, while she had the same experience at first, after a while she found herself missing some of the litl features when she was back in her “native” computer environment.

Similarly, the head of one beta-tester family (he, his wife, and his three children all test-drove the litl) told me he found that the younger the user, the quicker the adoption of litl. As he put it, his middle child had enough computer experience to complain about missing or “different” features, while his youngest took to it like a duck to water.

Of course, the main point of the litl is this difference. It looks like a laptop, but it’s different; it sounds like it’s a netbook, but it’s different; it acts like a traditional computer, but it’s different. This emphasis on difference is both litl’s strength – it is really a new kind of thing – but also its greatest vulnerability.

I told the litl folk that what they are attempting is bold and, for that reason, fraught with entrepreneurial peril, in part because the device doesn’t ask people to do one thing differently, it asks them to do a lot of things differently (store all your data in the cloud, rely on web-based apps instead of software, think in terms of “cards” rather than pages or docs or whatever). And no matter how much we celebrate diversity or shout “Vive la différence,” getting people to do things differently is frickin’ hard.

Innovation by definition means doing things in a new way, but there is a limit to how much “new” people can handle, particularly when they don’t see the clear advantage or the critical difference.

I believe that this “difference limit,” and not just the $700 price tag, is the most daunting hurdle facing the litl team. Getting around it will probably involve partnerships with companies that have the reach and sway to influence technology buying behaviors, or an aggressive “seeding” program that gets litl webbooks into the hands of the 7-and-under crowd (kind of like Apple did by getting Macs into the hands of college-age kids making the leap from typewriter to word processor back in the 1980s).

Of course, knowing the people involved as I do, I’m sure they’ll come up with something completely different.

Image Courtesy of lucky_lucas.