SXSWi Day 2

Danah Boyd, uncanney valleys, and privacy is not dead.

Favorite new term and concept of the month: "uncanny valley." Previous to this it was the phrase, “insofar as” because I love words that have come together over time to make one word; “whosoever” is another. Such evolutions display the flexibility of the language and its ability to change organically to mold to our needs. Will social media adapt to human needs or will we adapt to the rules established by social media? After hearing Danah Boyd give today’s opening keynote at SXSW Interactive, I wonder.

“Uncanny valley” is the term used to describe a robot that is trying to look human but doesn’t quite get there. It was actually coined by a Japanese roboticist in the early 20th century. Illustrators and technologists are starting to use the term to describe similar visual characteristics in gaming characters. You know the feeling. You see a life-like robot or illustration, and you may even think it’s an actual human until it moves, and then you have a slight feeling of revulsion. The “uncanny valley” is the dip or gap between how much you like the robot and how much you are repulsed by it. The goal for roboticists and gamers is to bridge the gap.

I first heard the term last night during a lively margarita-fueled conversation that ranged in subject from Keanu Reeves in Point Break to pre-Irish Dark-Age literature and the Book of Kells. You can imagine my surprise when it came up again in Boyd’s keynote address this afternoon. Boyd, who is a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, gave a talk about two key topics that continue to crop up in the conversation around social media: private and public information. She used the afore mentioned favorite term in reference to Google Buzz, saying, “Google managed to find the social equivalent of uncanny valley with Google Buzz.”

Google Buzz is the company’s social networking tool that was launched in February to near unanimous criticism. The platform was to use Gmail to show and share typical social networking dynamics like photo and video sharing, status updates, etc. Technologically, the system worked fine. But according to Boyd, Google made some key non-technical mistakes that amounted to what she calls “a privacy fail.”

“Google tried to integrate a public facing system into email, one of the most private spaces online,” Boyd said. “People believed that Google was exposing their email to everyone. It didn’t actually happen but people thought they were.”

Uncanny valley.

The Google example was the key point underscoring Boyd’s larger theme that privacy is not dead on the Internet, and that it shouldn’t be. She went so far as to say that those who hail the death of privacy online as a necessity for transparency are essentially propagandists for corporations who would benefit from lax privacy rules.

Facebook’s recent change in their privacy laws was held up as another example of things veering off course. What they did was to essentially create a “public by default community.” In other words, Facebook is a sign of a common occurrence throughout the social Web: we start with everything public and we have to choose what we want private. That’s the complete opposite of how the real world works, which is that you start with what’s private and you choose what you want public.

That, insofar as this reporters humble opinion is concerned, is uncanny valley. And according to Boyd, whosoever thinks the debate over privacy on the Internet is dead is wrong. It's far from over.

The image is from a tech demo for new video game Heavy Rain.

Sam is the director of publishing for frog where he oversees frog's global content, editorial, and digital publishing strategy. He is also the editor of design mind, frog's print and online media platform. Sam is the author of numerous books of non fiction and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, GOOD, and other magazines.