The Idea

We should all have good tools for digital socializing, but Facebook and similar programs are not them. These “social networking” tools all share a fatal flaw. While they claim to connect you with the people in your life, what they actually do is connect everyone in your life to the man in the center running the social network. All communication with your friends has to go through the network operator first. Once you tell him, he tells your friends for you. Or sometimes he tells too many people and you get upset. But what are you going to do, stop talking to the people in your life? This is like no social network on earth; it is more like a giant game of telephone where they hold all the strings. And it is systematically unsafe.

Rather than build our digital lives as part of their networks, we need to bring some of our real life social structures to the digital world. In real life we don’t talk to each other through a central intermediary. Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone in your family, or office, or town had to go through a single person in order to talk with each other? In real life we talk to each other directly, which works a lot better. Our digital tools could work like that too. Many, like the internet, were designed with exactly this kind of direct communication structure in mind. We got the centralized, intermediated tools that we have now mostly because the people designing them thought of us as children who could never learn to run our own.

That dismissal of our competence comes up regularly when you talk about moving away from centralized services, but it ignores us too quickly. It is just as possible for everyone to run their own web server as it is for everyone to know how to read, and both should be social goals in the 21st century. To think otherwise is to believe that we can never build tools well enough for people to learn them, no matter how many generations go past, and no matter how central a role those tools come to play in our lives. It is a belief that sells our engineers, our teachers, and our selves short, and one that will only fade as we learn how to run our own communication networks. The alternative is to stay childish and incapable, digitally speaking.

It is time to grow up and take the private communications of our lives back into our own hands. We have all of the individual tools we need, email, IM, photo sharing, etc, but putting them all together into the system we deserve will take a little assembly. Don’t worry if you are not a software developer and you feel like building digital tools is beyond you. If we decide we want tools for ourselves and are willing to lend some time and support, there are lots of great developers out there who will build them as Free Software for everyone to use, learn from, and share. In these next few posts we’ll outline what I think that new network looks like and how we might put it together.

Part 2 – Finding each other: Dynamic DNS Facebook forthcoming

Part 3 – Talking amongst ourselves: Friend-to-Friend Network forthcoming

Part 4 – Putting the pieces together: Freedom Box schematic forthcoming

Part 5 – Making it easy: Look and Feel forthcoming

What I didn’t know, until I watched the Daily Show from Feb, 11, 2010, is anything about Hawaii’s health care system, which apparently has achieved almost universal health care coverage via government mandate and has been using this system for the last 40 years. Until that minute I thought there was nothing in the debate that could surprise me anymore.

When Dog the Bounty Hunter, one of the Hawaiians interviewed on the Daily Show’s Hawaii coverage, has a better ability to express the need for health care than the politicians and media personalities whose job it has been to talk about it for the last 18 months, we need to start listening to different people.

I would suggest we start listening to each other.

Here’s the idea. Take $30 but, rather than giving it to a political group or non-profit, go to the store and buy a webcam. Set it up at your computer and record a video on why you care about health care. It can be 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or however long it takes to tell your story.

Public Voices

I’m lucky, my office really cares about making sure we have great health care coverage, but I still have a couple stories to tell about issues my coworkers are having with insurance right now. And then there are all the stories of my friends in their 20’s who are trapped in jobs they would otherwise leave for more rewarding work but can’t for fear of losing health insurance. I have almost as many of those stories as I have friends in their 20’s.

So I’m going to go get a webcam and record a couple minutes worth of video and post it online. Maybe we put the videos on YouTube and tag them “healthcarestories” or maybe one of those non-profits that care about health care will come forward and we can put them all there. Then we watch each other, listen to each other, and vote for the best videos. Find the ones that make you remember why you care.

If we want to influence the “public voices” in broadcast media, we could all throw in a couple dollars and buy some air time for the videos with the most votes. Or maybe that media is hopeless and we run some ads telling people where to come for the sane discussion, like throwing a lifeline to pull people back onto dry land.

Either way, if we can get a million of these video messages in a bottle together, a million people engaged in actually talking about health care rather than screaming about it, we can convince a lot of politicians that their interests lie in listening rather than talking for once.

Aaron makes reference to a couple of points that are key, both in critiquing Google’s specific practices, and in picking up the discussion from last time.

The first, Paul Ohm’s piece “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization “, does the same thing to the field of information sharing that an expose that condoms don’t work at stopping STDs would do to the field of Sexual health medicine.

Professor Ohm documents the field of “Information reidentification”, and that field’s success in countering so called “anonymization” techniques used to remove the personally identifying bits of information (name, address, SSN, etc.) from things like your medical history or web search history before releasing that information to the public.

In a nutshell, “anonymization” is really just obfuscation; the data we are collecting about people is so rich and precise that we can take supposedly anonymous records and fill in all the missing information by fitting the record into all the rest of what we know. This should be a basic piece in discussions of our digital lives and public policy, but it has gotten almost no coverage since the initial publication.

The second point I want to talk about is that this is not about Google. This is not personal. It is not fueled by some thought-less hatred. We talk about Google and Facebook in these discussions, just as we talk about Apple in discussions of closed vs. free software, not because we have fanboyish love for a different team but because they are the most successful at popularizing practices we are concerned about.

This is a structural critique, just as arguing that banks shouldn’t be allowed to gamble with other people’s money is a structural critique. If you want to talk about whether particular organizations, whether that is Goldman Sachs or Facebook have been malfeasant, or behaved with a lack of respect for the interests of their customers, that is a different discussion.

I spent a year trying to write these posts around the theme of “Towards a Free Facebook” before realizing that the biggest problem with Facebook is how much they have popularized unsafe data systems. That’s what this is actually about.

Privacy was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. I have spent the last year talking with people about privacy and reading about what it looks like in our new network-connected world and everyone agrees: privacy is dead and it was the birth of our information society that killed it.

At some point in the last 20 years computers spread far enough through society that they transformed how we live our lives. Not only could we telecommute and access unimaginable amounts of information through the air while sitting at a local coffee shop, but all the little bits of information we generate by going through our daily lives, all the little things that happen but we never write down, like what streets we walk down, what news articles we read, or what products we look at while in the store, all those little bits started getting recorded for the first time in history. When that happened, privacy died and we all became subjects for sociological study.

Whether it is Facebook trying to figure out your sexual orientation from the activity in your social network, online dating sites trying to map the decision matrix behind whether you will talk to, sleep with, or date particular people, or Google trying to burrow ever farther into your brain so they can better sell you things in the margins of all your daily activities, whatever the particulars, your information is out there and available for study.

Privacy died; everyone agrees about that. But that is where the agreement stops. What does it mean that more information is being recorded about you today than the Stazi were ever able to record about the citizens of East Germany? What does it mean that this information is being recorded by private companies and governments alike? Or that the pieces of information you manage not to share can increasingly be inferred by analyzing the mountain of information that everyone else around you has given over? How does all of this affect your right to a fair trial, or to organize politically, the confidentiality of your medical records, or your ability to receive goods and services as an equal member of society? There is no agreement about the answers to these questions, nor is there generally even discussion of them. Instead most discussions about digital privacy assume the only challenges we face in a networked society are financial fraud and junk mail.

Life without

Part of the reason we never discuss the more complicated structural and social issues involved with privacy is that we have poor instincts for these issues and they reliably lead us to poor conclusions. Consider this example.

In 2005 it became public that the US government had been collecting call records for almost everyone in the country. This caused some outrage. What it did not cause was the kind of outrage that occurred when it was made public in 1971 that the FBI had been following and profiling non-violent political organizers and public figures. Part of the reason for that is that times have changed and people’s expectations for government have changed with them, but part of it is because of how the information gathering was done. In the 1970’s the FBI had to actually follow people to find out where they were going, they had to actually infiltrate the political groups and sit in on their meetings to find out what was going on. In 2005, the NSA could plug directly into the phone company’s central line and get everyone’s records from afar.

Imagine if it had happened differently. What if, instead of going to the phone company the NSA had installed a device in your phone that records every key you press, the length of every call you make and who the call is with and then bundles that information back to a regional NSA building where it is collated with the records from identical devices in the phones of your friends, business partners, and loved ones. Imagine that rather than tapping a central fiber optic cable, the NSA conspired with each local wireless store to install these devices in all our phones, sell those phones to us, and bill us monthly for using the phones.

Can you imagine the headlines when people opened their phones and found listening devices inside, when they learned that the smiling salesperson that recommended them a new phone had installed the listening device in it first? It would have been a firestorm that cut across all segments of the political spectrum. Yet the information collected in this fictitious example is the same as was actually collected by the NSA, exactly the same.

Action at a distance

Information about us used to follow us very closely, physically. Someone knew what you were reading at the coffee shop only if they were standing behind you in the shop. Today the material you’re reading is stored on a website’s server somewhere else in the world and no one has to be standing behind you to tell what you’re reading there, everyone from the website operator, people selling ads on the website, the site’s ISP, the coffee shop’s wireless router, the coffee shop’s ISP, and, most likely, anyone else on the same wireless network, can tell that. But we don’t yet feel intruded upon by the distant watching of our activities. We’re still looking behind ourselves to see if anyone is watching.

This is a dangerous situation. The sense of feeling intruded upon is as important to our lives as social beings as the sense of pain is to our physical lives. Losing this important feedback mechanism has larger repercussions than whether you can make secure financial transactions, just as nakedness has more repercussions than being cold in the winter. Our biggest privacy problem at the moment is not a particular piece of software or changing social norm but that the technology has left behind the instincts we rely on for feeling the wind on our skins and knowing that we are exposed.

The few people with a better understanding of our current reality, the data aggregators, the service builders, spend all their time exploiting our failed instincts by selling us one-sided tools: practices and services that make our lives transparent to them without ever alerting us to how thoroughly we are being studied. We need to take a hard look at what society looks like when some people have that kind of power to strip away the outer layers of our lives. If we miss out on our chance to do so now, as we choose and shape the communication tools of tomorrow, we will end up more than just cold.

If it never occurred to you that how you interact with computers might impact your ability to get a fair trial or choose your political representatives, keep reading. In the next few posts we’ll look at those issues and some ideas for alternative tools to help us control our own communications without turning our lives into a currency for digital power brokers in the process.

Instead of putting snow day suspensions on the Department of Transportation’s official website, the DoT sent the announcement via twitter, an external, closed, data feed service, though admittedly one with many users. So, rather than using smart tools that could send out twitter feeds and update the official site as part of the same action, or using simple tools like the official website, which would let more capable tools like civx process the information into whatever formats you want, the DoT did the digital equivalent of announcing the news at church and assuming all the relevant people would be there.

Twitter is a closed community with membership and the technology of communication controlled by one company. What bothers me is not that the government went into that system to spread public information; I think we should spread public information wherever the public is, which is why in 2008 I advocated running “get out the vote” drives in World of Warcraft, an online video game much more closed off than twitter. What bothers me is that a single, closed, tool has taken the place of meaningful change in how government communicates with citizens.

Spreading time-sensitive information like parking rule suspension or weather-related school closings using a live feed is a great idea. We should do more information sharing like that but we shouldn’t be doing it only in closed communities and only using closed tools. We should not abandon the simple tools like department websites or the open tools like RSS in an attempt to follow users down whatever latest rabbit hole of closed communication tools it is that they’re using today. And if the tools our government has for publishing information aren’t as capable at distributing that information as twitter, then our government needs new tools, not just twitter accounts.

The longer answer is that it is a device I’ve been working on since the summer to more easily convert my paper books into a digital form. I’ve had test hardware working for a number of months but things were going pretty slowly until James decided to build some image processing scripts to accompany the effort. Those scripts became a fully fledged python application around the end of the year, and we’ve since begun documenting the project in earnest.

The bkrpr wiki has all the relevant links, and a nice front page YouTube video of the device in use. Or a very poor YouTube video of the inside of my room, depending on how you look at it.

If you’re curious to check it out, take a look at the site, or grab the processed test pages online or in pdf.

To put it simply, my past caught up to me. A friend, who I had trouble even recognizing at first, friended me on facebook. This one connection was enough to fill my notification streams with the faces of people I hadn’t seen since childhood and pictures I was in before I knew how to read, let alone had heard of something called the “Information superhighway”. My newly rediscovered friend was one of a small handful that I had actually gone to school with continually from Elementary school through High School. Growing up in the NYC School system, that was natural. Equally natural to me was losing touch with most of the other kids as we moved up and between different schools. But now, by reconnecting to a single relationship that ran all the way back in school, I was around them again. Curious, I dove into the stream of new profiles.

What I found was part photo album and part class reunion. Old friends were getting back together, talking about old times and updating each other about all the new things happening in everyone’s lives. Old pictures were scanned and reminisced about, any relationship status of “married” received obligatory public comments of impressed congratulation, and a couple people threw up class photos from back in elementary school, tagging most of the names with either the person’s direct facebook link, or just their name if no one was yet connected to them. That is about when things started getting weird for me.

Something about seeing everyone’s picture streams mesh together Jr. High school, College, Elementary school, and wedding pictures side by side made me a little uneasy. Coincidentally, I had seen one of the posted class pictures a few weeks before while at my mother’s house for the holidays. Looking at the electronic version I realized that it had more people identified than I had been able to identify when trying on my own. On the first grade class picture I couldn’t even find my face without the tag someone put on it. In some ways, facebook knew these events from my life better than I did.

That’s when I realized that this was not just a class reunion or looking through an old photo alum, this was history rebuilding. The activity is much the same, you get together with your friends, talk about the old days and who we all used to be, but when it happens in a social networking site the result is very different. This time, when you reconstruct what happened way back when, it stays reconstructed. The more people that join in, adding details, fleshing out stories, agreeing and disagreeing about how things happened, the better the history becomes, until our childhood photos sit side by side with our wedding portraits in the public profile of our lives and arguments we have forgotten are summarized and immortalized on someone’s Wall.

I was stunned at the ease with which social networking tools allowed this kind of collaborative memory rebuilding to happen. If you had asked me two months ago how to go about getting in contact with my 3rd grade teacher, I would have stared at you blankly. Now, I would just go and reply to her facebook mail (I will soon Ms. Santiago! I just don’t like facebook mail). I almost dismissed the original friend request as SPAM, but the strength of our mutual connection to one of my/our Jr. High teachers made me stare at my friend’s picture until I could put an identity to the face.

If you are a big user of social networking tools you are unlikely to be shocked by anything I’ve said. Even as an arms-reach user I understand that this is simply the tool working as advertised, and I’ve always known that this kind of full-life documentation was possible. I’ve known that it was possible but I always thought of it as a problem for the next generation, the one that is growing up inside the social network right now as the only natives in a strange land. What I didn’t see, or didn’t let myself realize, is just how fast the network is filling in our lives behind us. To a large degree, the online reconstruction of our pasts is happening whether we participate or not.

My childhood happened before the internet, most of my life occurred before digital cameras became mainstream, and I managed to get out of college without anything that current social networking users would recognize as a profile. But the network is there with family and friends on it and the old connections can be re-connected as easily as new ones can be built. If I am going to have to live with this in my lifetime, without the experience or established social norms that would have come along with growing up with such a system, I want good tools and a deeper look at what kinds of things our society might have to change in order to keep up.

The whole experience greatly increased my interest in ideas for a free, and truly user-controlled, social network as well as in the book on privacy, the law, and networked society that I’m attempting to work with Eben on over the course of this semester. More on both later.

At the end of July a small PA lawsuit gained relatively wide coverage when Google, who was being sued, filed papers with the court that mentioned how satellite imaging impacts privacy. The story is interesting not because of what Google said, though that is what most stories focused on, but because of what it shows about the public sensitivity towards Google on matters of privacy.

Background

Back in the spring, a couple in Pittsburg sued Google for posting pictures of their home on the company’s Street View map of the area. They claimed that having a “private road” sign on the street made Google’s picture taking a “grossly reckless invasion on Plaintiffs’ seclusion” and that publishing them in the Street View map of the area caused them “mental suffering and diminished the value of their property,” for which they sought $25,000 in damages from Google, and the destruction of the pictures of the house.

While the “private road” sign might make you wonder whether the pictures should have been taken, the idea that taking them caused mental suffering and diminished the value of the house, or that $25k is somehow warranted to make amends, those just seem far fetched. The couple’s claims seem even worse once you find out that the county’s Office of Property Assessments already had a picture of the house on their own website, as well as a floor plan and details about the price the couple paid for the property, the age of the structure, and the size of the lot.

What Google said, in context

In their reply to the couple’s complaint Google points out that similar pictures of the house were already available on the internet. They also point out that the view of the house is not really private at all, being routinely viewable to the several other families on the road, delivery and salesmen, and other members of the community in the common course of going about their daily business. As additional evidence that no invasion of privacy occurred, Google cites the Restatement (Second) of Torts. The Restatement series are:

highly regarded distillations of common law. They are prepared by the American Law Institute (ALI), a prestigious organization comprising judges, professors, and lawyers. The ALI’s aim is to distill the “black letter law” from cases, to indicate a trend in common law, and, occasionally, to recommend what a rule of law should be. In essence, they restate existing common law into a series of principles or rules.

law.harvard.edu

In this case Google quotes a section dealing with the idea of complete privacy, saying:

[c]omplete privacy does not exist in this world except in a desert, and anyone who is not a hermit must expect and endure the ordinary incidents of the community life of which he [or she] is a part.

Which Google follows up by saying “Today’s satellite-image technology means that even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist” (Google’s filing), a single sentence to help bring the 1977 Restatement into line with our current realities.

Regardless of the comment’s brevity and the fact that Google’s point about satellite imaging is entirely correct, seeing Google state that “complete privacy does not exist” was enough to get people upset and talking about it. Even in the context of elaborating on a quote

Why?

Why did this sentence, or rather the second “no complete privacy” half that most of the coverage focused on, get people upset? Other people have said similar things, and in context it is clearly uncontroversial. But this time Google is saying it.

As a result of their success, Google has become something of a bag man for the information age. They know about the things you like, and the things you are curious about, and they probably know where the bodies are buried. So when they talk about the limits, or lack thereof, of modern information gathering, people get nervous. Even if what they say is obvious, or uncontroversial, or has been said many times by others. It is one of the reasons that bag men don’t talk much, though of course that just adds impact to the few things they do say.

They understand privacy better than we do

People are nervous because Google has them at a disadvantage. Our social sense of privacy is in a period of flux, still adapting to the rise of computers and the digital networking of information around them. The first half of making that adjustment is knowing just what information is currently being kept quiet and what information we are all broadcasting to each other. Google has a pretty good idea, most of us don’t. Though attempts have been made at documentation.

What should bother you

You don’t know

While the privacy implications of Street View are interesting to talk about, it is only a single instance of a larger problem. In the world before networking, we had photographs of every building in every city. Some few iconic pictures became famous and were accessible to a wide audience, but the majority remained in the hands of the original photographer or a small collection of people around the photographer. The change from that world to the world we are entering where all our pictures get networked, and overlayed, and geo-tagged, and are in general becoming available to anyone with an internet connection at any time, that change from isolated pockets of information to wide pools of networked information does just as much to change our expectations of privacy as the movement from small towns to cities.

The thing is, everyone who has moved from a small town to a city, or from a city to a small town, can tell you about the changes in privacy expectations that come with the move. Both ways of life are familiar enough that the trade-offs of space vs. anonymity are well understood and there are social coping mechanisms to help people adjust in either direction. But when I talk with people about the rapid networking of personal information online, about the power and knowledge of your life that you give to other people when you feed everything you do online through other people’s social networking sites and webmail, the changes are so new that there is no vocabulary, no set of examples with which to illustrate the new trade-offs.

It is hard to put your finger on…

Right now, it is hard to even talk about the social impacts of this networking, about the changes in power relationships between family, friends, businesses, and government because those relationships are still changing. Except for an increased risk of credit fraud and the still mention-worthy instances of people fired based on information from social networks, the larger social consequences of personal information networking have not yet started working through society. Because of this newness most of the public discussion of these issues is reactionary, like these pieces about the PA lawsuit. Over time we will move past reaction. Private records of presidential candidates will continue to be inappropriately accessed and large databases of personal information will continue to be lost by government and private industry alike, until it becomes clear just what kinds of new illicit behavior are made possible by all this new information.

In the meantime, I’m trying to work with my boss on a book that will explore how some of these changes can impact the historical social and power dynamics embodied in our legal system and government. Even if contextualizing the issues doesn’t give us a crystal ball to see how they will evolve over time, it should give us a better understanding of what the stakes are and structure some of the wild reactions, like these and other privacy stories about Google. Hopefully it will help the conversation.

Update:

Case dismissed

Looks like the case was dismissed because, among other things, “[t]he Plaintiffs have failed to plead — much less set out facts supporting — a plausible claim of entitlement to injunctive relief”. Not surprising.

In 2006, I read a great blog post that pointed out how the professional media is still working from a very old picture of the American lifestyle. The post, called “Farm Fetish,” explained that more people in the United Stated have World of Warcraft (WoW) accounts than work on farms or ranches. I don’t know exactly where he got his numbers, but the most recent Census ones I can find (2006) list the number of people employed in farming, fishing, and forestry occupations at almost exactly 1 million. Blizzard’s most recently publicized (2008) subscriber numbers claim more than 2.5 million North American players. So the scale of the comparisson is right.

Go where the people are

Ok, so maybe you shouldn’t go to farms or WoW when looking for the statistically average American, but if you’re just looking for votes, that’s different; politicians need to address people wherever people can be found. Even if only a million of the North American players are in the USA and old enough to vote, think of how that compares to the farmer population! And odds are that a significant number of those other million and a half subscribers are simply too young and will be voting eligible by the next presidential cycle.

Take advantage of it

So why shouldn’t political campaigns take advantage of the shared interest? They could hold a “Maintenance Tuesday: Get Out The Vote” campaign to try and get players to commit to voting on Tuesday morning when the North American servers have their weekly maintenance. Using the scheduled maintenance means you don’t have to change anything about the game in order to reach players, and the morning of election day is when lines are shortest.

Talk about it

Since you don’t need to change anything with the game, it can be a very simple campaign, just talk about it. Talk about it in the forums. Talk to other media about it. When talking to people directly, mention it just like you might mention other targeted drives in an effort to get people to vote.

Who knows?

It might work, and you can get great coverage from showing that you actually understand how technology is affecting people’s lives. And it plays in Kansas.

Looking back

Before we mourn losing the word processor we should look back at what it is and what it has done for us. At its core the word processor is virtual paper and the promise of WYSIWYG, the promise that, however you arrange things on the virtual paper, they will look the same on real paper when you print a copy. Other capabilities were built in later, things like change tracking, macro languages, and outlining modes, but these tools never take the spotlight; word processors remain word processors, not outlining tools or version control systems. It is all about the virtual paper.

And it was great. In Jr. High we spent weeks learning how to properly format documents. There were tests on where to place the opening line on a business letter, how many lines to skip between address blocks and the To: or From: lines, and other layout details. We were effectively learning typewriter office skills. Word processors made laying out documents so easy that simple formatting information like this could be stored for us. So, by the time any of us had to write a business letter, we no longer needed to remember how to format it. All we needed to do was pick “business letter” from the template menu of our word processor and remember to replace all the dummy "YOUR NAME HERE" text with our real information.

Problems with virtual paper

It was great, but there were problems. Competing word processors were often incapable of reading each other’s files, locking people into one camp or another. Time and competition between camps brought new versions of the word processor software; new tools were added to allow for more complicated layouts, to help correct common errors, and to make existing features easier to use. These changes increased what people could do but also brought further incompatibilities. New versions of the software had problems using old documents and documents in the new formats wouldn’t work at all with the old software.

Virtual paper began to age. People who had used these virtual sheets as a way to archive documents found that new word processors would corrupt the formatting in old documents and refuse entirely to open some of them. People who wanted to switch from one word processor camp to another had it worst, often having to rely on third party conversion utilities to use their old documents at all.

Digital communication

So virtual paper aged, people got increasingly tied to one format or another, and the internet happened. Now rather than exchanging the paper documents, people began exchanging the virtual paper versions, making it even harder to know what version of what program your document would be opened with. Once .doc and .wpd, and later, .odt documents were being sent around, the promise of WYSIWYG stopped meaning much. What you saw might be what you got but you could no longer know just what the other person was getting.

To regain control of their formatting, people began using PDF, the virtual printer for our virtual documents. By making a PDF of your document you basically trade the ability to edit your document in the future for an assurance that your document will look and print the same on any other computer. While this is useful for documents where formatting is important, resumes are an often cited example, it represents a step backwards for word processors.

Word processors are not the only, or even best, way to generate PDFs. Once PDFs became a standard form of print-ready documents, people built web applications to generate them from any page on a website as well as OS-level PDF printers that let you create a PDF out of any file on your computer. As the tools capable of producing print-ready documents multiplied, the word processor began to lose its place as people’s primary tool for authoring documents.

Simplification

At the same time that PDF was ironing out incompatibilities and creating a nearly universal form of print-ready virtual paper, people started to notice that a lot of their print-ready documents were never getting printed. As people grew more comfortable with digital means of communication they began to rely on them to carry more of the content once invested in paper. People who had once felt the need to attach word processor or PDF documents to their emails began moving the material from those documents into the email itself. Personal correspondence moved not only to email but to chat rooms and instant messaging, places where printing to paper was not a concern.

Free of the complicated formatting necessary for paper, people fell back to the handful of basic formatting options they felt most necessary for communication in a digital context, things like:

>> quoting and
> later
/italics/
*bold*
[ links | to places ] and

paragraph breaks.

Those five, in addition to the rich complexity of our natural languages, turn out to cover most of what people need for communicating the sense of their messages.

This trend, of replacing elaborate formatting, like virtual paper, with lightly marked up plain text, is shrinking the domain of word processors each day. Wikis, the largest document creation projects in history, all use variations of the basic formatting options shown above. Current social networking and publishing tools are the same, as is email. The rise of syndication formats like RSS and ATOM is perhaps the best example of people happily removing all page layout formatting to more easily access the plaintext or lightly marked up text underneath.

Which is not to say that people stopped caring about the visual appearance of their documents. Layout and design remain as important as ever, but all of that information simply moved to the side, into CSS sheets, and blog or social networking theme packages.

The prime example of both these trends is the web itself. While many PDF documents, and some few .doc files, remain available online, they are dwarfed by the HTML ones that make up the web around them. The combination of HTML and CSS has beaten out all previous electronic formatting standards and become the most universal way to format writing since paper. Word processors have never created either format well.

Today

Today I neither send nor receive business letters. Almost all of my professional communication happens over email, including things like negotiating for event space, arranging travel, and handling requests for legal services from our office. I write my documents in markdown, one of the popular lightweight markup systems, and use a program called pandoc to convert them to whatever format I need: PDF, HTML, LaTeX, or odt. Separate style sheets let me easily format the same text for letterhead, publishing on our website, publishing on my website, or general printing. The things I read come to me as websites, RSS feeds, email messages, and, most recently, ebooks (which are really just simple HTML documents re-packaged).

And so the word processor has passed from my life. I realize that it has not passed from everyone’s and it may not have left yours yet, but if the trends towards simple markup and PDFs continue forward, odds are that it will.