On Second Thought: the iHUMAN issue

2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council

fall 15

on

[the iHUMAN issue]

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Photo by Joleyn Larson, Mandan, ND

BEING HUMAN

note from the executive director When I introduce myself to new people as the director of the North Dakota Humanities Council, I often find myself explaining what the humanities are and why a nonprofit would dedicate themselves solely to their pursuit.

Technically, the humanities are the study of history, philosophy, literature, anthropology, archaeology, and those areas of study that all seek to answer the same question, though through different approaches. That fundamental question is: What does it mean to be human? That may seem like a simple question, but we believe it has profound significance because it’s what separates us from the rest of the known universe. How we answer this question defines who we are and where we are going as individuals and as societies.

On an individual level, the humanities are about a life well lived. They help you discover what it is that gives your life deeper meaning and content by drawing from the collective wisdom of the ages. When you experience a different culture, learn a new language, explore a religion, go to a thought-provoking play, read a good book, or visit a museum, you are experiencing the humanities, and all of these experiences give your life a richness that cannot be undervalued. Isn’t it the goal of every human being to live their life as fully as possible?

On a societal level, we know that a nation that does not know who it is and what it stands for cannot flourish. The values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution were discovered through the humanities, and it is the work of the humanities to continue to define and uphold the ideas of freedom, justice, and equality, because we are still striving to build a more perfect union. We have seen from the recent marriage equality decision by the Supreme Court that we are still debating what equality looks like in our

country. The riots in Baltimore and Ferguson show us that unequal access to justice is a problem of our legal system.

Because we don’t always live up to our values, the humanities remind us of the people we want to become at our best, but also show us who we are capable of becoming at our worst when we continue to ignore small injustices. They impel us to think with our heads, but lead always with our hearts so that we may move forward into a brighter future for everyone.

That is our vision at the humanities council.

One of the exciting programs we sponsor to reach that vision is the GameChanger Series, an ideas festival which examines an issue or idea that is rapidly changing the world.

We invite innovative thinkers to share their thoughts on how to manage that change in ways that lead to a better, more prosperous world for all of humanity. These are issues that affect all of us, and no matter how big the issue, each of us has the power to influence change.

This year’s GameChanger focuses on how digital technology is creating both amazing new opportunities and major challenges.

The goal is to share with the audience information and ideas of how each of us, as consumers of technology, can use it to enhance our humanity rather than detract from it. We have an amazing line-up and we hope you will join us on September 26 in Bismarck, or log in and watch the event through live streaming. And if that date doesn’t work for you, there are plenty of other humanities opportunities happening across the state throughout the year. Please plug into the North Dakota Humanities Council and become a part of building a more thoughtful, informed, and just world.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt Executive Director

Cover art by Maria Witham.

iHUMAN

4 Who Owns the Future?

By Jaron Lanier

14 Cyberspace on Our Minds

By Noreen Herzfeld

24 How Video Games Led Me to a PhD

By Richard Van Eck

32 Facebook Nation

By Lori Andrews

42 How One Stupid Tweet

Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

By Jon Ronson

50 GameChanger Series 52 iHuman

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Supervising Editor Janet Daley Jury, Associate Editor To subscribe please contact us: North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

ndhumanities.org Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the North Dakota Humanities Council.

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Lanier was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world...

JARON LANIER has been on the cusp of

technological innovation from its infancy to the present. A pioneer in virtual reality (a term he coined), Lanier founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products, and led teams creating VR applications for medicine, design, and numerous other fields. He is currently an interdisciplinary scientist at Microsoft Research. He was a founder or principal of startups that were acquired by Google, Adobe, Oracle, and Pfizer. In 2010, Lanier was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.

In recent years, he has also been named one of top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy magazine, one of the top 50 World Thinkers

by Prospect magazine, and one of history’s 300 or so greatest inventors identified by the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 2009 Jaron Lanier received a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE, the preeminent international engineering society.

A Renaissance man for the twenty-first century, Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, artist, and author who writes on numerous topics, including hightechnology business, the social impact of technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism. Lanier’s most recent book is Who Owns the Future? He offers

a critical and insightful perspective in his talks on big data: who owns the data, what it all means for our society, and the quest for a sustainable digital economy. Lanier looks at the large patterns shaping the digital world, such as the 2008 financial crisis, NSA surveillance, and the implementation of healthcare. gov. Who Owns the Future? remains an international bestseller and was awarded Harvard’s 2014 Goldsmith Book Prize.

Jaron Lanier’s first book, You Are Not a Gadget, A Manifesto, was on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe. The book was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Time Magazine and The New York Times, and won top honors at the San Francisco Book Festival. In the spring of 2015 Jaron Lanier will publish an ebook version of a collection of essays entitled When Dreams Grow Up, and he is also working on a new book, Dawn of the New Everything: First Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, tentatively to be published in fall 2015.

Lanier’s writing appears in Discover, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harpers Magazine, Atlantic, Wired Magazine (where he was a founding contributing editor), and Scientific American. He has appeared on TV shows such as PBS NewsHour, The Colbert Report, Nightline, and Charlie Rose, and has been profiled on the front pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times several times.

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WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?

By Jaron Lanier

THE PROBLEM IN BRIEF We’re used to treating information as “free,”* but the price we pay for the illusion of “free” is only workable so long as most of the overall economy isn’t about information. Today, we can still think of information as the intangible enabler of communications, media, and software. But as technology advances in this century, our present intuition about the nature of information will be remembered as narrow and shortsighted.

We can think of information narrowly only because sectors like manufacturing, energy, health care, and transportation aren’t yet particularly automated or ’net-centric.

But eventually most productivity probably will become softwaremediated. Software could be the final industrial revolution.

It might subsume all revolutions to come. This could start to happen, for instance, once cars and trucks are driven by software instead of human drivers, 3D printers magically turn out what had once been manufactured goods, automated heavy equipment finds and mines natural resources, and robot nurses handle the material aspects of caring for the elderly. (These and other examples will be explored in detail later on.) Maybe digital technology won’t advance enough in this century to dominate the economy, but it probably will.

Maybe technology will then make all the needs of life so inexpensive that it will be virtually free to live well, and no one will worry about money, jobs, wealth disparities, or planning for old age. I strongly doubt that neat picture would unfold. *As exemplified by free consumer Internet services, or the way financial services firms can often gather and use data without having to pay for it.

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Instead, if we go on as we are, we will probably enter into a period of hyperunemployment, and the attendant political and social chaos. The outcome of chaos is unpredictable, and we shouldn’t rely on it to design our future.

The wise course is to consider in advance how we can live in the long term with a high degree of automation.

We should seek a future where more people will do well, without losing liberty, even as technology gets much, much better.

PUT UP OR SHUT UP For years I have presented complaints about the way digital technology interfaces with people. I love the technology and doubly love the people; it’s the connection that’s out of whack. Naturally, I am often asked, “What would you do instead?” If the question is framed on a personal level, such as “Should I quit Facebook?” the answer is easy. You have to decide for yourself. I am not trying to be anyone’s guru.* On the level of economics, though, I ought to provide an answer. People are not just pointlessly diluting themselves on cultural, intellectual, and spiritual levels by fawning over digital superhuman phenomena that don’t necessarily exist. There is also a material cost.

People are gradually making themselves poorer than they need to be. We’re setting up a situation where better technology in the long term just means more unemployment, or an eventual socialist backlash. Instead, we should seek a future where more people will do well, without losing liberty, even as technology gets much, much better.

Popular digital designs do not treat people as being “special enough.” People are treated as small elements in a bigger information machine, when in fact people are the only sources or destinations of information, or indeed of any meaning to the machine at all. My goal is to portray an alternate future in which people are treated appropriately as being special.

How? Pay people for information gleaned from them if that information turns out to be valuable. If observation of you yields data that makes it easier for a robot to seem like a natural conversationalist, or for a political campaign to target voters with its message, then you ought to be owed money for the use of that valuable data. It wouldn’t exist without you, after all. This is such a simple starting point that I find it credible, and I hope to persuade you about that as well.

The idea that mankind’s information should be made free is idealistic, and understandably popular, but information wouldn’t need to be free if no one were impoverished. As software and networks become more and more important, we can either be moving toward free information in the midst of insecurity for almost everyone, or toward paid information with a stronger middle class than ever before. The former might seem more ideal in the abstract, but the latter is the more realistic path to lasting democracy and dignity.

An amazing number of people offer an amazing amount of value over networks. But the lion’s share of wealth now flows to those who aggregate and route those offerings, rather than those who provide the “raw materials.” A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing economy, could come about if we break out of the “free information” idea and into a universal micropayment system. We might even be able to strengthen individual liberty and self-determination even when the machines get very good.

This is a book about futuristic economics, but it’s really about how we can remain human beings as our machines become so sophisticated that we can perceive them as *…though I’ll make a suggestion at the end of the book.

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autonomous. It is a work of nonnarrative science fiction, or what could be called speculative advocacy. I’ll argue that the particular way we’re reorganizing our world around digital networks is not sustainable, and that there is at least one alternative that is more likely to be sustainable.

MOORE’S LAW CHANGES THE WAY PEOPLE ARE VALUED The primary influence on the way technologies have come to think about the future since the turn of the century is their direct experience of digital networks through consumer electronics. It only takes a few years, not a lifetime, for a young person to experience Moore’s Law– like changes.

Moore’s Law is Silicon Valley’s guiding principle, like all ten commandments wrapped up into one. The law states that chips get better at an accelerating rate. They don’t just accumulate improvements, in the way that a pile of rocks gets higher when you add more rocks. Instead of being added, the improvements multiply. The technology seems to always get twice as good every two years or so. That means after forty years of improvements, microprocessors have become millions of times better. No one knows how long this can continue. We don’t agree on exactly why Moore’s Law or other similar patterns exist. Is it a human-driven, self-fulfilling prophecy or an intrinsic, inevitable quality of technology? Whatever is going on, the exhilaration of accelerating change leads to a religious emotion in some of the most influential tech circles. It provides a meaning and context.

Moore’s Law means that more and more things can be done practically for free, if only it weren’t for those people who want to be paid. People are the flies in Moore’s Law’s ointment. When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive. It used to be that printing presses were expensive, so paying newspaper reporters seemed like a natural expense to fill the pages.

When the news became free, that anyone would want to be paid at all started to seem unreasonable. Moore’s Law can make salaries—and social safety nets—seem like unjustifiable luxuries.

But our immediate experience of Moore’s Law has been cheap treats. Yesterday’s unattainably expensive camera becomes just one of today’s throwaway features on a phone. As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes correspondingly cheaper. Thus, it has become commonplace to expect online services (not just news, but 21st century treats like search or social networking) to be given for free, or rather, in exchange for acquiescence to be spied on.

ESSENTIAL BUT WORTHLESS As you read this, thousands of remote computers are refining secret models of who you are. What is so interesting about you that you’re worth spying on?

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

There is no long-term difference between an ordinary person and a skilled person in this scheme. For now, many kinds of skilled people do well in a softwaremediated world, but if things don’t change, those who own the top machines will gradually emerge as the only elite left standing. To explain why, consider how advancing technology could do to surgery what it has already done to recorded music.

Musical recording was a mechanical process until it wasn’t, and became a network service. At one time, a factory stamped out musical discs and trucks delivered them to retail stores where salespeople sold them.

While that system has not been entirely destroyed, it is certainly more common to simply receive music instantly over a network. There used to be a substantial middleclass population supported by the recording industry, but no more. The principal beneficiaries of the digital music business are the operators of network services that mostly give away the music in exchange for gathering data to improve those dossiers and software models of each person.

The same thing could happen to surgery. Nanorobots, holographic radiation, or just plain old robots using endoscopes might someday perform heart surgery.

These gadgets would perform the economic role that MP3 players and smartphones took on in music delivery.

Whatever the details, surgery would then be reconceived as an information service. The role of human surgeons in that case is not predetermined, however. They will remain essential, for the technology will rely on data that has to come from people, but it isn’t decided yet if they’ll be valued in terms that lead to wealth.

Nonspecialist doctors have already lost a degree of self-determination because they didn’t seize the centers of the networks that have arisen to mediate medicine.

Insurance and pharmaceutical concerns, hospital chains,

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and various other savvy network climbers were paying better attention. No one, not even a heart surgeon, should pretend to be indefinitely immune to this pattern.

There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper. This book will propose an alternative, sustainable system that will continue to honor and reward those humans, no matter how advanced technology becomes. If we continue on the present path, benefits will instead flow mostly to the tenders of the top computers that route data about surgery, essentially by spying on doctors and patients.

THE BEACH AT THE EDGE OF MOORE’S LAW A heavenly idea comes up a lot in what might be called Silicon Valley metaphysics. We anticipate immortality through mechanization. A common claim in utopian technology culture is that people—well, perhaps not everyone—will be uploaded into cloud computing servers* later in this century, perhaps in a decade or two, to become immortal in Virtual Reality. Or, if we are to remain physical, we will be surrounded by a world animated with robotic technology. We will float from joy to joy, even the poorest among us living like a sybaritic magician. We will not have to call forth what we wish from the world, for we will be so well modeled by statistics in the computing clouds that the dust will know what we want.

Picture this: It’s sometime later in the 21st century, and you’re at the beach. A neuro-interfaced seagull perches and seems to speak, telling you that you might want to know that nanobots are repairing your heart valve at the moment (who knew you had a looming heart problem?) and the sponsor is the casino up the road, which paid for this avian message and the automatic cardiology through Google or whatever company is running that sort of switchboard decades hence.

If the wind starts to blow, swarms of leaves turn out to be subtle bioengineered robots that harness that very wind to propel themselves into an emergent shelter that surrounds you. Your wants and needs are automatically analyzed and a robotic masseuse forms out of the sand and delivers shiatsu as soon as you contemplate the wind’s whispers from your pop-up cocoon.

There are endless variations of this sort of tale of soon-toappear high-tech abundance. Some of them are found in science fiction, but more often these visions come up in *A “server” is just a computer on a network that serves up responses to other computers. Generally home computers or portable devices aren’t set up to acknowledge connections from arbitrary other computers, so they aren’t servers. A “cloud” is a collection of servers that act in a coordinated way.

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ordinary conversations. They are so ambient in Silicon Valley culture that they become part of the atmosphere of the place. Typically, you might hear a thought experiment about how cheap computing will be, how much more advanced materials science will become, and so on, and from there, your interlocutor extrapolates that supernatural-seeming possibilities will reliably open up later in this century.

This is the thought schema of a thousand inspirational talks, and the motivation behind a great many startups, courses, and careers. The key terms associated with this sensibility are accelerating change, abundance, and singularity.

THE PRICE OF HEAVEN My tale of a talking seagull strikes me as kitschy and contrived, but any scenario in which humans imagine living without constraints feels like that.

But we needn’t fear a loss of constraints. Utopians presume the advent of abundance not because it will be affordable, but because it will be free, provided we accept surveillance.

Starting back in the early 1980s, an initially tiny stratum of gifted technologists conceived new interpretations of concepts like privacy, liberty, and power. I was an early participant in the process and helped to formulate many of the ideas I am criticizing in this book. What was once a tiny subculture has blossomed into the dominant interpretation of computation and software-mediated society.

One strain of what might be called “hacker culture” held that liberty means absolute privacy through the use of cryptography. I remember the thrill of using militarygrade stealth just to argue about who should pay for a pizza at MIT in 1983 or so.

On the other hand, some of my friends from that era, who consumed that pizza, eventually became very rich building giant cross-referenced dossiers on masses of people, which were put to use by financiers, advertisers, insurers, or other concerns nurturing fantasies of operating the world by remote control.

It is typical of human nature to ignore hypocrisy. The greater a hypocrisy, the more invisible it typically becomes, but we technical folk are inclined to seek an airtight whole of ideas. Here is one such synthesis—of cryptography for techies and massive spying on others— which I continue to hear fairly often: Privacy for ordinary people can be forfeited in the near term because it will

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become moot anyway.

It is all too easy to forget that “free” inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.

Surveillance by the technical few on the less technical many can be tolerated for now because of hopes for an endgame in which everything will become transparent to everyone. Network entrepreneurs and cyber-activists alike seem to imagine that today’s elite network servers in positions of information supremacy will eventually become eternally benign, or just dissolve.

In the telling of digital utopias, when computing gets ultragood and ultracheap, we won’t have to worry about the reach of elite network players descended from today’s derivatives funds, or Silicon Valley companies like Google or Facebook. In a future world of abundance, everyone will be motivated to open up and be generous.

Bizarrely, the endgame utopias of even the most ardent high-tech libertarians always seem to take socialist turns.

The joys of life will be too cheap to meter, we imagine. So abundance will go ambient.

This is what diverse cyber-enlightened business concerns and political groups all share in common, from Facebook to WikiLeaks. Eventually, they imagine, there will be no more secrets, no more barriers to access; all the world will be opened up as if the planet were transformed into a crystal ball. In the meantime, those true believers encrypt their servers even as they seek to gather the rest of the world’s information and find the best way to leverage it.

It is all too easy to forget that “free” inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.

THE PROBLEM IS NOT THE TECHNOLOGY, BUT THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY I will argue that up until about the turn of this century we didn’t need to worry about technological advancement devaluing people, because new technologies always created new kinds of jobs even as the old ones were destroyed.

But the dominant principle of the new economy, the information economy, has lately been to conceal the value of information, of all things.

Meanwhile, trinkets tossed into the crowd spread illusions and false hopes that the emerging information economy is benefiting the majority of those who provide the information that drives it.

If information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued in economic terms. If, however, “raw” information, or information that hasn’t yet been routed by those who run the most central computers, isn’t valued, then a massive disenfranchisement will take place. As the information economy arises, the old specter of a thousand science fiction tales and Marxist nightmares will be brought back from the dead and empowered to apocalyptic proportions. Ordinary people will be unvalued by the new economy, while those closest to the top computers will become hypervaluable.

Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle class in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn’t improved.

Digital technologists are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything—and they’re doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.

We’ve decided not to pay most people for performing the new roles that are valuable in relation to the latest technologies. Ordinary people “share,” while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes.

SAVING THE WINNERS FROM THEMSELVES Is the present trend really a benefit for those who run the top servers that have come to organize the world? In the short term, of course, yes. The greatest fortunes in history have been created recently by using network technology as a way to concentrate information and therefore wealth and power.

Whether these elite new presences are consumer-facing services like Google, or more hidden operations like highfrequency-trading firms, is mostly a matter of semantics.

In either case, the biggest and best-connected computers provide the settings in which information turns into money.

However, in the long term, this way of using network technology is not even good for the richest and most powerful players, because their ultimate source of wealth can only be a growing economy. Pretending that data came from the heavens instead of from people can’t help 9

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The human condition is an evolving technological puzzle. but eventually shrink the overall economy.

The more advanced technology becomes, the more all activity becomes mediated by information tools. Therefore, as our economy turns more fully into an information economy, it will only grow if more information is monetized, instead of less. That’s not what we’re doing.

Even the most successful players of the game are gradually undermining the core of their own wealth. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. A market system can only be sustainable when the accounting is thorough enough to reflect where value comes from, which, I’ll demonstrate, is another way of saying that an information age middle class must come into being.

PROGRESS IS COMPULSORY Two great trends are colliding, one in our favor, and the other against us. Balancing our heavenly expectations, there are also countervailing fears about such things as global climate change and the problem of finding food and drinking water for the human population when it peaks later in this century. Billions more people than have ever been sustained before will need water and food.

We bring the great problems of our times on ourselves, and yet we have little choice but to do so. The human condition is an evolving technological puzzle. Solving one problem creates new ones. This has always been true and is not a special quality of present times.

The ability to grow a larger population, through reduced infant mortality rates, sets up the conditions for a greater famine. People are cracking the inner codes of biology, creating amazing new chemistries, and amplifying our capabilities with digital networks just as we are also undermining our climate, and critical resources are starting to run out. And yet we are compelled to plunge forward, because history isn’t reversible. Besides, we must be honest about how bad things were in lower-tech times.

New technological syntheses that will solve the great challenges of the day are less likely to come from garages than from collaborations by many people over giant computer networks. It is the politics and economics of these networks that will determine how new capabilities translate into new benefits for ordinary people.

PROGRESS IS NEVER FREE OF POLITICS Maybe the coolest technology could get very good and cheap, while at the same time, crucial fundamentals for

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survival could become expensive. The calculi of digital utopias and man-made disasters don’t contradict each other. They can coexist. This is the heading of the darkest and funniest science fiction, such as the work of Philip K. Dick.

Basics like water and food could soar in cost even as intensely sophisticated gadgets, like automated nanorobotic heart surgeons, float about as dust in the air in case they are needed, sponsored by advertisers.

Everything can’t become free at once, because the real world is messy. Software and networks are messy. And the sprawling miracle of information-animated technology rests on limited resources.

The illusion that everything is getting so cheap that it is practically free sets up the political and economic conditions for cartels exploiting whatever isn’t quite that way. When music is free, wireless bills get expensive, insanely so. You have to look at the whole system. No matter how petty a flaw might be in a utopia, that flaw is where the full fury of power seeking will be focused.

BACK TO THE BEACH You sit at the edge of the ocean, wherever the coast will be after Miami is abandoned to the waves. You are thirsty.

Random little clots of dust are full-on robotic interactive devices, since advertising companies long ago released plagues of smart dust upon the world. That means you can always speak and some machines will be listening.

“I’m thirsty, I need water.”

The seagull responds, “You are not rated as enough of a commercial prospect for any of our sponsors to pay for fresh water for you.” You say, “But I have a penny.”

“Water costs two pennies.” “There’s an ocean three feet away. Just desalinate some water!” “Desalinization is licensed to water carriers. You need to subscribe.

However, you can enjoy free access to any movie ever made, or pornography, or a simulation of a deceased family member for you to interact with as you die from dehydration. Your social networks will be automatically updated with the news of your death.” And finally, “Don’t you want to play that last penny at the casino that just repaired your heart? You might win big and be able to enjoy it.”

This work was originally published as chapter one, “Motivation,” in Lanier’s book, Who Owns the Future? (2013, Simon and Schuster). Reprinted here by permission of the author.

iHUMAN:HOW IS TECHNOLOGY CHANGING HUMANITY? 1 - 6 pm, September 26, 2015 Legacy High School Auditorium Bismarck, North Dakota

This ideas festival is for anyone interested in the future of our digital society. Whether you are a plugged-in tech addict or an off-line skeptic your assumptions about technology will be challenged. Leading innovators and researchers will share their insights into the ways rapid advances in technology are creating both amazing opportunities and dangerous new challenges. Understanding the power and pitfalls of technology allows us to remain its masters instead of its unthinking servants.

Featuring Jaron Lanier, The Father of Virtual Reality

TICKETS ON SALE AUGUST 15 GameChangerND.com Meet the people, ideas, and events changing our world.

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Herzfeld’s current research investigates the intersection between computer technology and Christian theology.

NOREEN HERZFELD is professor of theology and computer science at St. John’s University. She received a BA from St. Olaf College in mathematics and music, an MA in mathematics and an MS in computer science from Penn State, an MA in theology from St. John’s University, and a PhD in theology from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Herzfeld teaches courses in both the department of computer science and the department of theology at St. John’s University: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Theory, Ethical and Religious Issues in Computing, Science and Religion, Islam, and Religion and Conflict. Her current research investigates the intersection between computer technology and Christian theology.

Her books include In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit, Technology and Religion and The Limits of Perfection.

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By Noreen Herzfeld

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Two different professions, the computer scientist and the brain researcher, are rallying around a single metaphor for our intellectual lives. Our physical brain is like the “hardware” of a computer, they say, while our mind and mental activity are akin to “software.” This shows just how much computer technology has shaped our modern understanding of human nature. Technology is literally changing our minds. . . . The virtual world of computers alters both the hardware and the software. Computers have changed how we define intelligence and what we call reality in our social and aesthetic lives. These machines may be altering the very biology of our brains as well.

Computers give us a means to amplify or enhance our mental experience. We seek an alternative to the corporeal mind in artificial intelligence (AI), we use computers as tools to expand our mental powers, and, increasingly, we use them to provide a new world for us to explore and in which we can interact with one another. We speak of cyberspace as a place, a place that some young people find increasingly hospitable.

The computer revolution has also deeply engaged the world of religion. Despite the assertion by some that religion is “otherworldly,” it is, in fact fundamentally anchored to the physical world. Any altered perceptions of the world will very likely influence religion.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus asks followers to plunge into the world: “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15).The church itself remains in the physical world, declared Pope Paul VI. “She remains as a sign—simultaneously obscure and luminous—of a new presence of Jesus, of His departure and His permanent presence.”1 Muhammad also saw life as being deeply engaged in the world. He eschewed monasticism. Expecting his followers to live active lives rather than only “sit in the corner of a mosque in expectation of prayers.”2 Now, computers are changing the world. They are forcing us to assess how the “virtual” world may affect our “real”-world relations to God, others, and the natural order.

HUMAN AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE What is the mind? Where is consciousness? Do we have souls, and if so, how do they relate to the mind or the body? These questions underlie many of the ethical issues that bedevil both scientists and politicians in the twenty-first century. Controversies surrounding abortion and stem-cell research are rooted in varying views of when a new human soul comes into being. Euthanasia asks a similar question in reverse, namely, when does the soul depart in death? If our mental reality is, as the computer scientists and brain researchers suggest, analogous to the hardware and software of a computer, we must now also ask whether a computer itself could have a soul.

The key to this puzzle is in how we define intelligence and soul. These two concepts are not as easy to define as we might expect. Most of us have an intuitive understanding of what we and others mean when using those terms, but would find it difficult to give a satisfactory definition of either. Yet a clearer

[Computers] are forcing us to assess how the “virtual” world may affect our “real”-world relations to God, others, and the natural order.

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understanding of both is crucial if we are to sort through the controversies mentioned above. Our approaches to designing artificially intelligent machines give us one avenue toward understanding the different aspects of intelligence and how they relate to the vexing question of the soul.

THREE APPROACHES TO INTELLIGENCE In designing an AI computer, the first approach has been to define intelligence as the ability to solve problems. This definition fits our intuitive notion of intelligence, based as it is on the model of activities that we consider indicative of highly intelligent people, such as the ability to play chess or solve complicated equations in mathematics or physics. Computer scientists in the 1960s and 1970s took mathematics as a model (after all, most early computer scientists were mathematicians). Just as the field of geometry is built from a finite set of axioms and primitive objects such as points and lines, so early AI researchers, following rationalist philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alfred North Whitehead, presumed that human thought could be represented as a set of basic facts. These facts would then be combined, according to set rules, into more complex ideas. This approach to AI has been called “symbolic AI.” It assumes thinking is basically an internal process of symbol manipulation.

Intelligence seems to be a quality that is larger than can be captured in any symbolic system.

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Symbolic AI met with immediate success in areas where problems can be described using a limited set of objects or concepts that operate in a highly rule-based manner.

Game playing is an obvious example. The game of chess takes place in a world in which the only objects are the thirty-two pieces moving on an eight-by-eight board, and these objects are moved according to a limited number of rules. Other successes for symbolic AI occurred rapidly in similarly restricted domains, such as chemical analysis, medical diagnosis, and mathematics. These early successes led to a number of remarkably optimistic predictions of the prospects for symbolic AI. Symbolic AI faltered, however, not on difficult problems like passing a calculus exam but on the easy things a child can do, such as recognizing a face in various settings, riding a bicycle, or understanding a simple story. One problem with symbolic programs is that they tend to break down at the edges; in other words, they cannot function outside or near the edge of their domain of expertise since they lack knowledge outside of that domain, knowledge that we think of as common sense.3 Humans make use of billions of bits of knowledge, both consciously and subconsciously. Often we do not know what bits of knowledge or intuition we have brought to bear on our problem in our subconscious minds. Symbolic AI programs also lack flexibility. In 1997, the computer Deep Blue beat

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then reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov. In the ten years since, Deep Blue’s successors continue to play chess—and only chess. Kasparov, on the other hand, has become a politician and presidential candidate in Russia.

Intelligence seems to be a quality that is larger than can be captured in any symbolic system.

A second way to look at intelligence is as the ability to act within an environment. This means that, first of all, intelligence is embodied. Of course, any intelligent agent would be embodied in some way. Deep Blue did not have what we would think of as a body; it could not pick up the chess pieces and physically move them. However, the program was embodied in a bank of supercomputers.

So, the question is not whether intelligence requires a physical body but what kind of body. Does a human-like intelligence require a human-like body?

Our bodies determine much of the nature of our interaction with the world around us. Our perception is limited by our physical abilities. For example, we think of a location in two-dimensional terms because we walk rather than fly. We evaluate a situation primarily by sight and sound; anyone who has ever walked a dog knows that the animal evaluates with nose to the ground, receiving a whole different data set from what we see. In a similar fashion, our physical makeup determines how we act within the world. Our opposable thumbs, combined with the softness and pliability of our skin and underlying muscles, allow us to grasp and manipulate objects easily. When we ride a bicycle, we need not calculate equations of force, trajectory, and balance; our muscles, nerves, and inner ear do the work for us. In fact, should we begin to make such calculations consciously, we are likely to fall off! Most athletes know that they perform at their best when their minds are in a meditative, rather than a discursive mode. As one of the characters says in Frederich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”4 In human history, the tools we make reflect our embodied state of intelligence. Anthropologists pour over ancient blades, weapons, and agricultural devices to understand past modes of thinking. The extended physical experiences of our forebears shaped the ordinary things we use today. Philosopher John Haugeland explains: Think how much “knowledge” is contained in the traditional shape and heft of a hammer, as well as in the muscle and reflexes acquired in learning to use

it—though, again, no one need ever have thought of it. Multiply that by our food and hygiene practices, our manner of dress, the layout of buildings, cities, and farms.

To be sure, some of this was explicitly figured out, at least once upon a time; but a lot of it wasn’t—it just evolved that way (because it worked). Yet a great deal, perhaps even the bulk, of the basic expertise that makes human intelligence what it is, is maintained and brought to bear in these “physical” structures. It is neither stored nor used inside the head of anyone—it’s in their bodies and, even more, out there in the world.5 Our designs and behaviors arise through and out of interaction with the environment. And the type and extent of this interaction are determined by the body.

At first glance, it seems that our ability to make plans could break this new rule of embodiment. Certainly, we can plan a vacation, draw up a new living-room design, or arrive at a political opinion by “the mind alone.”

Neuroscience, however, reveals a more complex situation.

In 1983, Benjamin Libet conducted a series of experiments in which the subject was asked to make the simple decision to move a finger and to record the moment this decision was made. Sensors also recorded the nerve impulse from brain to finger and found that the impulse was on its way roughly half a second before the subjects consciously registered that they were going to move their fingers. Thus, it seems that the choice preceded conscious reasoning. The subconscious mind and the body had things underway before the conscious introspective mind knew about it.6 Anyone who has driven a car while talking on a cell phone, or while thinking over the day’s schedule, knows that the subconscious mind and body can keep things in hand, up to a certain point, while the conscious mind works on other things.

The idea that a computer needs a body has always had its niche in the world of artificial intelligence. Almost every artificially intelligent computer that has appeared in the realm of science fiction has been a robot, often with a more or less human-like body.7 Rodney Brooks at MIT notes that the basic problems with symbolic AI are rooted in the fact that the problem-solving programs it produces are not situated in the real world. Brooks, and others at a variety of AI labs, have built a series of robots that act within the world on the basis of data acquired through sensors. Brooks began with a series of insects, later moving on to the humanoid robots Cog and Kismet, which acquired some of the rudimentary skills of a baby through interaction with human beings. None of these robots comes close to human-like intelligence, but some seem to have a niche in their environment. Consider the Roomba,

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a roboticized vacuum cleaner that navigates around a room looking for dirt, avoids furniture and stairs, and plugs itself in when it needs to be recharged.8 One might argue that Roomba shows as much intelligence as many animals in its ability to navigate in a local environment, avoid hazards, and forage for sustenance.

...the question is not whether a machine can have emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent if they do not have emotions.

During World War II, the British mathematician Alan Turing found a way to unscramble German codes, revealing their battle plans to the Allies. Naturally, this brilliant exploit prompted him to think about the nature of intelligence. He concluded that it is a relational process—which is the third kind of approach seen in artificial intelligence today. We guess at someone’s intelligence, in other words, by talking to that person. In his 1950 landmark paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing presented a test for deciding if a computer is intelligent. In this test, an interrogator slips written questions into a room through a slot and, by the written replies that come back, tries to decide whether the denizen in the room is a human or a computer. If the interrogator fails as often as she succeeds in determining which was the human and which the machine, the machine could be considered as having intelligence.9 Turing predicted that by the year 2000, “It will be possible to programme computers … to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than a 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.”10 This, like most predictions in AI, was overly optimistic. No computer has yet come close to passing the Turing Test.

Turing was not alone in turning to discourse as a hallmark of intelligence.

Discourse is unique among human activities in that it subsumes all other activities within itself, at one remove.11 Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores assert that cognition is dependent upon both language and relationships.

Objects we have no words for do not exist for us in the same way as those we name. We make distinctions through language. Without words to describe difference, distinctions cannot be held in mind nor shared with others. But discourse is essentially a social activity. The act of speaking to another is not simply the passing of information. Winograd and Flores note, “To be human is to be the kind of being that generates commitments, through speaking and listening. Without our ability to create and accept (or decline) commitments we are acting in a less than fully human way, and we are not fully using language.”12 Understanding arises in listening not to the meaning of individual words, but to the commitments, expressed through dialogue. Thus, understanding is both predicated on and produces social ties.

To navigate the world of relationships, one needs what has recently been termed “emotional intelligence.” When viewed superficially, emotions seem to obscure rational thought. However, recent research has shown that emotions, far from getting in the way of thought, are actually necessary for cognition. In Descartes’ Error, Dr. Antonio Damasio notes that patients who have had a brain injury to the parts of the brain that govern the ability to feel emotions also lose the ability to make effective decisions, even decisions as simple as what to have for lunch. Neurophysiologist J. Z. Young notes that “even the simplest act of 18

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comparison involves emotional factors.”13 If we have no fear, no desires, we have no reason to value one choice over another. Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene has used brain-imaging techniques to study moral decisionmaking. He notes that our brain automatically generates a negative emotion whenever we contemplate hurting someone. Greene’s data suggest that psychopaths cannot think properly because they lack normal emotional responses. “This lack of emotion is what causes the dangerous behavior.”14

places that form us as persons.

Can a computer have emotions? As computer scientist Marvin Minksy quipped, the question is not whether a machine can have emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent if they do not have emotions.15 Damasio’s and Greene’s data show that the answer is no. But how far have we gotten in programming emotions into a machine?

Not very far. MIT scientist Rosalind Picard has shown that a computer can be programmed to recognize emotion in either facial expressions or tone of voice. The cute robots in the MIT lab, Cog and Kismet, express a variety of emotions, like fear, amazement, or pleasure.16 However, while computers can be programmed to recognize or express emotion, actually feeling emotion requires a level of self-consciousness current machines lack.

While the ability to design a body amuses, the greatest seduction of a bodiless existence lies in the fact that our bodies are mortal, subject to sickness, aging, and ultimately death. Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, suggests that cyberspace provides a place where we can evade the mortality of the body by downloading our brains into successive generations of computer technology. Kurzweil writes:

Turing, Damasio, Winograd, and Flores all view intelligence as based upon some form of social activity.

Though they approach it in different ways, each suggests that the idea of an individual intelligence is meaningless; intelligence has meaning only in encounter. Whether a computer could have the capability of entering into true relationship with human beings remains to be seen.

WHAT ABOUT THE SOUL? In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes famously argued that the soul and body are utterly separate. Today, it might seem that the insights of computer-science brain research—with their emphasis on the hardware of the body—would destroy this “Cartesian dualism” once and for all. Oddly enough, this is not the case. The concept of a self separate from the body has been given a recent boost, precisely by computer technology. Many computer enthusiasts today spend large amounts of time interacting in a bodiless world—a “virtual” world that Descartes could hardly imagine.

Activities that once took place in real space now take place in cyberspace. Consider: we communicate via chat rooms, text messages, and e-mail; we shop, bank, and do research on the Internet; we amuse ourselves with video games, MP3s, and streamed videos, or as avatars in a “Second Life.” We project our minds across vast distances or into fictional realms and have experiences in those

This does, of course, have several advantages. Neal Stephenson, in his novel Snow Crash, notes that in cyberspace, “If you’re ugly, you can make avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup.”17 One can project an image of oneself, and that image is utterly malleable, changed at the flick of a bit.

Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our hardware. When the hardware crashed, that was it. For many of our forebears, the hardware gradually deteriorated before it disintegrated … As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file. We will be software, not hardware … As software, our mortality will no longer be dependent on the survival of the computing circuitry … [as] we periodically port ourselves to the latest, ever more capable “personal” computer … Our immortality will be a matter of being sufficiently careful to make frequent backups.18 Kurzweil thinks we might achieve this new platform within the next fifty years. He is not the sole holder of this expectation, though he may be among the more optimistic in his timeline. In The Physics of Immortality, physicist Frank Tipler conjectures that the universe will cease to expand and at some point end in a contraction that he calls the “omega point.” Tipler sees this omega point as the coalescence of all information, including the information that has made up every person who ever lived. At such a point, the information making up any given individual could be reinstantiated, resulting in a form of resurrection for that person, though Tipler is vague as to how such a reinstantiation might come about.19 Both Kurzweil and Tipler hold a worldview that would seem, at first glance, to be at odds with the reductive physicalist position held by many scientists today.

Yet their views actually are quite consistent with this 19

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worldview. They suggest that the soul is, first of all, nothing more than the collection of memories, experiences, and thoughts that we hold in the neural connections of our brain. In other words, our soul is information. This is seductive for the computer scientist who sees the world in terms of os and 1s. Our soul is the information that emerges from the state of consciousness, a quality only held by matter that has evolved or selforganized into a sufficiently complex system.

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.... YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A PACK OF NEURONS.” – Francis Crick

Biologist Francis Crick expresses this view well: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.... You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”20 The “you” that Crick speaks of here is not initially disembodied but arises from the workings of the brain. Without such a material basis, “you” cease to exist. But what we identify as “you” is not the brain itself, but the information stored in that brain. In this view, the soul, as information, though dependent on the body initially, later becomes completely separable from the body.

Here we have a first sense of the concept of soul as that part of the self that transcends our mortality. Is doing so on a different platform, such as a computer, consistent with the Christian understanding of the soul’s immortality? Not really. The Nicene Creed states that our resurrection is one “of the body,” and Paul makes clear that the resurrected body will be a new and different body than our current one (1 Corinthians 15:50). The problem with computer hardware as the platform for this new body is that it is not a part of a new creation but a continuation in this creation.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––– The physicist and theologian Bob Russell once put it to me this way: “Immortality does not just mean more time.” After all, we all know—scientists and theologians alike—that the earth is temporal and finite, that “heaven and earth will pass away” (Mark 13:31).

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In this post-Cartesian age, we have come to realize that human beings have a single nature with two inseparable elements, a selftranscending mind and finite body. Denying the body has led to a worldview that denigrates both the natural environment and women. For if we could live in the bits of a computer, of what use is the natural world?

If we can replicate ourselves through backup copies, who need babies or even sexual differentiation? Here I note, however, that, while it serves no reasonable purpose, proponents of cybernetic immortality are loath to give up sexual experience itself.

Tipler waxes eloquent on the possibility of fulfilling all our sexual desires at his omega point, and Kurzweil is equally enthusiastic about the possibilities of disembodied sexual experience.21 But these experiences are viewed only in terms of self-gratification, not as true relationship, with all the complexity that that entails.

The relational nature of intelligence suggests that the model of an artificial intelligence that holds a separate identity and acts by itself in the world, as a replacement for human intelligence, is the wrong model. What we truly need are machines that complement what people do, working with human beings to accomplish tasks we cannot do alone. Yet there is one caveat. Human beings are far more flexible than computers. We easily overidentify with and overuse our machines. We all see this in our society’s current obsession with quantifiable data. Programmer and commentator Jaron Lanier suggests that, should a computer actually pass the Turing Test, it might not be the case that the computer has become smarter or more human but that our immersion in a computerized world has led humans to become more like machines. Miniature Turing Tests happen whenever we adapt our way of acting or thinking to our software; “we make ourselves stupid in order to make the computer software seem smart.”22 Ethicists Joanna Bryson and Phil Kime have pointed out that our overidentification with computers has led “to an undervaluing of the emotional and aesthetic in our society. Consequences include an unhealthy neglect and denial of emotional experiences.”23 The moral of the story? We can protect the emotional richness of life if we see intelligence as a complex phenomenon, rooted firmly

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in our bodies as well as minds.

Does an embryo have a soul? When does the soul depart in death? Could a computer have a soul? Perhaps the questions that bedevil us in the twenty-first century do so because they are the wrong questions. The very nature of these questions presupposes the Cartesian dualism of a separate soul, distinguishable from both body and environment. The relational nature of intelligence raises the possibility that thinking of soul in individual terms may be misleading. The mystical sides of many religious traditions have long suggested that we are deeply connected to one another. The nature of this connection is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, our current understanding of intelligence, both human and artificial, tells us that intelligence, consciousness, and yes, probably the soul as well, are meaningless outside of the context of the human being in a web of relationships with other humans and with the environment.

The complete version of this article with endnotes can be found NOTES 1 Pope Paul VI, “Evangelii Nuntiandi” (Dec. 8, 1975), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/apost_exhortations/ documents/hf_p-va_exh_19751208_evangelii-nuntiandi_en.html.

12 Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986; reprint, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 68

2 Abdullah Suhrawardy, The Sayings of Mohammad (London: Constable, 1910), http://muslim-canada.org/hadiths.html.

13 J. Z. Young, Programs of the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 194.

3 John McCarthy, “Some Expert Systems Need Common Sense,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 426 (1984): 129–35.

14 Reported in Jonah Lehrer, “Hearts and Minds,” The Boston Globe, April 29, 2007.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Viking, 1954), 146.

15 Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).

5 John Haugeland, “What is Mind Design,” in Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artifical Intelligence, ed. John Haugeland (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), 26.

16 Rosalind Picard, Affective Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), chapter 2.

17 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 2000), 33.

6 Benjamin Libet, “Do We Have Free Will?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 8-9 (1999): 47.

7 The main exception to this is the computer Dave in the film 2011: A Space Odyssey.

8 For descriptions of a variety of mobile robots developed at MIT, see Rodney Brooks, “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990): 3–15.

9 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in Haugeland, 29–32.

10 Ibid., 38.

11 While most in the AI community accept the Turing Test as sufficient, an opposing view can be found in John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417–24.

18 Ray Kurzwell, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), chapter 6.

19 Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Doubleday, 1995).

20 Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 3.

21 Tipler, 255.

22 Jaron Lanier, “One-Half of a Manifesto, Wired 8, no. 12 (December 2000): 4.

23 Joanna Bryson and Phil Kime, “Just Another Artifact,” http://www. cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/web/aiethics98.html.

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Van Eck entered the PhD program at the University of South Alabama and worked as an instructional designer or developer on several learning games there.

RICHARD VAN ECK is a professor of instructional design and technology at the University of North Dakota. He has a BA in English and Psychology from the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, an MA in English from the University of North Dakota, and a PhD in instructional design and development from the University of South Alabama (USA). He has been studying games and learning since 1995 when he entered the PhD program at USA and worked as an instructional design or developer on several learning games there, including Adventures in Problem Solving (Texas Interactive Media Award, 1999), and Ribbit’s Big Splash (Gulf Guardian Award 2002; Environment Education Association of Alabama’s 2002 Best Environmental Education Award). Since then he has been a researcher and designer on several other STEM games, including PlatinuMath (mathematics game for preservice teacher education), Project NEO (science game for preservice teachers), Project Blackfeather (programming game for middle school students), Contemporary Studies of the Zombie Apocalypse (mathematics game for middle school students), and Far Plane (leadership game for high school students and adults).

He is a frequent keynote speaker nationally and internationally on the educational potential of video games, including more than seventy-five presentations on games and learning, including talks at TEDx talk and South by Southwest. His publications in this area include two edited books, seven book chapters, thirteen refereed publications, and six invited publications. In addition to his work in serious games, he has also published and presented on intelligent tutoring systems, pedagogical agents, authoring tools, and gender and technology.

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ORIGINS As I write this, my personal and professional experiences appear to have led logically to this point in time. Yet the path to this point was not so clear to me as I lived it. Like many in this emerging field, I have come to games and learning via a circuitous route. My background is in psychology (undergraduate), creative writing (undergraduate and graduate), and instructional design and technology (Ph.D.). To start with, I was never much interested in technology (perhaps because my father was a systems analyst in the 70s, and nothing your parents do is “cool”), nor did school engage me, for that matter. I preferred reading science fiction to doing homework. When I was in middle school, however, my father brought home Colossal Cave Adventure (http://www.rickadams. org/adventure), and my brothers and I played it nonstop on our Heathkit H-8 computer. Technology became relevant for me because of this game, although I learned just enough about the computer to run the game. The time and effort I put into winning (including mapping that infernal maze) far exceeded my school experience in both work and reward. For the first time, I recognized something I enjoyed as much as reading but which also seemed to me to be even more relevant to learning. It was reading that convinced me that learning could be engaging, and games that showed me that hard work could be engaging.

This realization was not an epiphany so much as the germination of my general belief that school should be more interesting and challenging. In 1976, however, it certainly did not feed into my career plans; games were played (for the most part) in arcades, and while I spent a good share of my teenage years in Flipper McGee’s and Mickey Rat’s pinball arcades in Ann Arbor, the idea that my interests could somehow lead to any kind of career choice not only did not cross my mind but would have been greeted with ridicule had anyone suggested it. By the time I went to college, I was interested in understanding how humans think and behave; creative writing was something I did because of my love of reading.

In retrospect, of course, both of these areas have a lot to do with games and with making education more relevant and engaging.

At the end of my master’s program in English, I took on the editing of a publication of student work from composition classes. The process that had been used (literally typing up stories on camera-ready blue sheets) seemed antiquated and inefficient even to a technology neophyte like myself in 1991. I asked my dad what he thought, and he suggested I look into Adobe PageMaker (4.0) instead. For the second time in my life, technology became relevant to a problem I had to solve, and once again I taught myself just

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MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON DIGITAL GAME-BASED LEARNING, OR

HOW VIDEO GAMES LED ME TO A PHD

By Richard Van Eck

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enough to solve it. I graduated the next year, and began applying for English teaching positions. As it turns out, a college in the Southwest was looking for a Media Arts and Communication Program Coordinator to advise the student newspaper and student magazine and teach both English and desktop publishing. I was hired primarily because I was the only candidate able to successfully complete a desktop publishing task using (you guessed it) Adobe PageMaker.

solving, and motivation. No single discipline had all the answers, and while a few were doing direct measurement of video games and learning (Cognition and Technology Group and Vanderbilt; Patricia Greenfield at UCLA; Mark Lepper at Stanford; and Thomas Malone at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), most of my work required synthesizing what was being done in multiple fields of learning research to formulate a conceptual framework for the design of my own game to promote transfer of mathematics skills.

Technology became a major part of my professional focus, and I learned a lot about technology in the following three years there, culminating in the creation of a multimedia authoring lab in 1994 for faculty to develop multimedia.

My interest in making learning more engaging and challenging now had a place in the work I did, and I wanted to show faculty how to build multimedia. But I felt I was missing something significant; how do you know if what you’ve developed is effective? What theories and principles exist to guide the development of multimedia?

I started looking for graduate programs in multimedia and computer-based training and eventually found my way via educational or instructional technology to the field of instructional design. In contemplating returning to school, I knew I would have to do research (which I was not excited about), and began thinking about what I could study. I had continued playing games all through graduate school, and I realized that the gap between multimedia and games was small: if I could reasonably study the one, the other was also a viable research area.

The research I did during this time was instrumental in formulating my beliefs that the answers to complex questions can best be found at the intersection of disciplines rather than within them, a concept one of my mentors and colleagues, Art Graesser, later would refer to as a “fish scale model,” based, I believe, on Don Campbell’s chapter “Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fish-Scale Model of Omniscience.”1 The lesson I learned in the process about the need for interdisciplinary awareness in the study of games and learning has never left me, and remains as critically relevant to games studies today as it was to the design of my own educational game in 1999.

I had one question of the programs to which I applied: Would I be able to do dissertation research on the educational potential of digital games? In 1995, only one program—at the University of South Alabama—thought that was a potentially productive line of research, so that is where I went.

WHY INTERDISCIPLINARY? As I write this now, I am struck not only by how much progress we have made in this field but also by how far we still have to go. And that is why this book exists. Over the last decade, no one can deny that this field has made significant strides in public opinion, theory, and practice. It is now commonly accepted that games have SOME benefits, whether or not one believes games have a place in formal education, or that the benefits outweigh the risks. This is a far cry from the shock Patricia Greenfield’s assertions were met with in 1984 and from Marc Prensky even 16 years later.

That games can educate is no longer the radical notion it once was, and the growing canon of research in this field is no longer possible to capture in the space I have here.2

My initial search for graduate programs was my first indication that technology and pedagogy were not the same thing and that what I needed was not technology but learning theory. You can learn a given technology and know nothing about how to use it for learning, but if you know how people learn, you can teach yourself a technology and be well on your way to designing effective learning. Applying this lesson to games was another matter, however. I spent much of my time in graduate school struggling to identify “the” theory behind games.

Because instructional design is itself interdisciplinary (education, psychology, communication, and technology), many of theories I found were applicable to learning in games, and formed the basis of my dissertation: situated learning and cognition, anchored instruction, context, pedagogical advisement, transfer of learning, problem

Yet as much progress as we’ve made, there are significant gaps in our praxis. This is partly due to the youth of our field and the need to establish new theoretical models and concepts. But it is also because too many have approached this field as if it were a completely new area of study with no theoretical antecedents in other disciplines. This is perhaps a natural progression for any new field, but it nonetheless presents one of our most significant challenges. It is time we stop and take notice of the work that different disciplines are conducting, to explore new ideas and approaches that perhaps have been overlooked and to attempt to synthesize multiple theoretical approaches to the field. Some of the work that is going on in this field is unknowingly duplicative because of different terminology, publication venues, and readerships; integrating these different studies will allow us to see patterns instead of discrete findings. It will also allow

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It is now commonly accepted that games have SOME benefits... us to identify areas that need further study and perhaps new theories that are attributable to the medium and amalgamation of different theoretical approaches.

Perhaps most importantly, we have to make sure that those entering this field understand that video games are still a somewhat new technology, not (necessarily) a new pedagogy. To be sure, we have uncovered new learning strategies, outcomes, and principles, and we will continue to do so. But we cannot tell the difference between what is new and what is existing theory wearing a new face if we don’t understand how existing theories are instantiated in games. While the serious games field itself is interdisciplinary, that does not mean we take full advantage of each disciplinary perspective where and when we address them. Whether because of a lack of expertise or awareness, we at best use theory and practice from other disciplines to support minor points and perspectives.

My hope is that by making interdisciplinarity the focus of a work on games, we may find important distinctions and profit from prolonged critical analysis and application. If nothing else, we perhaps become more consciously aware of the breadth and depth of interdisciplinary practice within the growing field of games.

ABOUT THE BOOK The chapters you are about to read are unique, in some cases because authors who don’t always write about games have brought their specific disciplinary focus to bear on the topic and in others because authors who do write about games have made a specific effort to bridge disciplines. The result in all cases, I believe, is both unique and valuable. The chapters represent 13 different disciplines (digital culture, digital media, rhetoric, communication, educational psychology, literature, theater, sociopsychology, instructional design, instructional leadership, educational administration, library science, and game design), not counting various flavors of psychology and media studies, by authors from 5 countries (Australia, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, and the United States of America).

Many of the ideas that are dispersed across multiple disciplines are easily missed when viewed across different venues. But contracted together within a concentrated space, they become visible and are thus able to inform us in important ways, much like gas molecules in space produce nebulas when concentrated. It is of course challenging to capture different disciplinary perspectives:

cast too wide a net, and you’ll capture too many disparate ideas—too narrow, and you’ll get too much of the same thing.

Much of what you will read in these chapters will be familiar in focus but will differ widely in language and perspective. I urge you to read closely to ensure that what seems familiar to you does not in fact differ in important ways because of the disciplinary perspective it comes from. Interdisciplinarity is highly challenging, and even confrontational—much of what we do when we read is assimilation, but accommodation is the heart of human development, and no field can grow without it. It is my hope that you will find much that you like and recognize here, but more that is unfamiliar and difficult; if it is not hard for you to read, one or both us have failed.

Each chapter is the result of an original proposal, each of which was reviewed by three peers in a double-blind review process. In doing so, I assigned reviewers chapters based on interest, expertise, and in the case of reviewers who were also authors, on the potential of the authors to benefit from a different disciplinary perspective on work similar to their own. Based on these proposal reviews, some authors were invited to submit full chapters, which were again reviewed using the same process.

Based on my readings and that of the reviewers, I have organized these chapters into five sections: Genre, Classification, and Definitions; Theoretical Perspectives; Research; Theory into Practice; and Future Directions.

These sections loosely reflect my beliefs about disciplinary process, in that each relies on its predecessor and informs its descendant. The first section in this book focuses on language and terminology for what we mean by games and related concepts. The second section discusses theories from different disciplines that can inform research and design for educational games. The third section presents research that both adds to our understanding of games and that serves as a model for future research on theoretical constructs and models. The fourth section comprises chapters on how theory and models inform practice in the design of games for learning purposes, and the fifth section identifies two promising future directions for the field. You will find both a short and long version of the table of contents, the latter of which provides my own summary of what each chapter is about, so I will confine my comments here in the preface to a discussion of each section of the book and how I think each chapter 27

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contributes to that section.

GENRE, CLASSIFICATION, AND DEFINITIONS That this is a young field could be gleaned from nothing more than the inclusion of three different chapters in the first section, each attempting to define what games are from a different disciplinary perspective. Äyrämö and Koskimaa describe the results of their analysis of game designers’ implicit and explicit definitions of narrative in nine respective game design books, while Kallay and Sherlock each attempt to propose new game classification systems based on, respectively, narrative psychology and rhetoric. Game classification is perhaps one of the most generative research areas in games right now as we struggle to reduce the overlap and illogicality in competing definitions and systems. Language allows us to think differently about our subjects and is arguably foundational to our ability to develop theory, models, research, and practice in any discipline, so this is far more important than a tomay-toe/tomah-tow argument.

While many researchers are naturally attracted to the design of new games or the study of existing games, without a precise language to describe our practice, theory, and results, our research and design will proceed in a fragmented and duplicative fashion that leaves little potential for synthesis.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES The three chapters that make up this second section are divergent in topic and approach, and illustrate the power of looking to different disciplines to refine our explanations of phenomenon. Yanuzzi and Behrenhausen reconceptualize one aspect of what we often refer to in 21st-century learning as critical self-reflection. They illustrate the critical reasoning and theory-driven approach necessary to quantify and define our often nebulous descriptions of the benefits of game-based learning. At the same time, they point the way toward the design of future educational games. Low provides a similar treatment of the often used and misused concept of motivation in games. Her chapter pulls together some of the most significant research findings and definitions of motivation and learning from educational research, which should guide future research on motivation and games.

Friedlander concludes the section with a fascinating amalgamation of theater, literature, and comparative religion that is in many ways reminiscent of Huizinga’s discussion of play and culture. He identifies a promising approach to the design of engaging, cross-cultural games that rely on sacred scenarios and in doing so illustrates why it is so important to seek out and synthesize divergent perspectives from different disciplines.

RESEARCH Few would argue that there is a pressing need for research in this field, but this need exceeds our capacity for 28

conducting it at uniformly high quality levels. The authors in this section provide good examples of how research methodology and implementation must flow from sound theory, models, and practice. The findings themselves are of interest and importance to the field, but the chapters are perhaps at least as significant for promoting high-quality future research. Jin describes a variety of strong research methodologies, the questions they are best at answering, and examples of research on games that reflect these methodological considerations. Sharritt, in his chapter, and Mailliet and Martens in theirs, propose two different models from different disciplines that they then validate through research. In addition to making important contributions to the field now, their chapters also serve as case studies for the generation and validation of models for the study of human interaction with games.

THEORY INTO PRACTICE Theory by itself is of little value outside of academic circles; it must also lead to practice and real change. It is only through the application of our theories that we are able to test, validate, and refine them as we move toward becoming a discipline rather than a collection of ideas. What is sometimes lost even in this, is that practice itself gives rise to theory, thus perpetuating knowledge through a cyclical process. The chapters in this section illustrate this. In the first chapter, my co-author and I describe current theory and research on the design of instruction to promote problem solving, which itself is often cited as a primary benefit of game-based learning. We pull equally from games research and theory and instructional design to illustrate the variety of different problems that make up problem solving, the cognitive structure and thinking skills these different problems require, and the kinds of gameplay that may best support them. Wilson and Williams provide a rare, detailed case study of the application of existing game design models and processes to the design of an educational game in an academic environment. Gaydos and Squire illustrate the design processes associated with building an educational game that instantiates current thinking in science literacy and 21st-century learning. Together, these chapters illustrate how theory informs practice and how practice in turn informs theory.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS While it could be argued that each of the preceding chapters suggests future directions for research and design, the chapters in this section suggest two avenues of practice that have the potential to make a significant impact in our future practice. In their chapter on girls, games, and the role of libraries in digital game-based learning in schools, Farmer and Murphy highlight the need for systemic thinking when it comes to truly reforming educational practice. As scholars and practitioners of librarianship, the importance of this chapter further highlights how critical it is that our field looks to other disciplines for new approaches and ideas. In

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the final chapter in this volume, Chris Crawford brings more than 30 years of experience as a pioneering game designer and author to his analysis of interactivity as both a learning process and game design principle.

The result has the potential to change game design in fundamental ways and could help educational game designers get over one of the most significant hurdles they face: how to build engaging games that support learning outcomes seamlessly.

A FINAL NOTE I struggled to decide how to refer to this field in the title of the book, my discussion here in the preface, and in my co-authored chapter.

Serious games is a powerful term because of its wide acceptance and its inherent ability to address one of the primary misconceptions about games; that they are frivolous entertainment and therefore have no place in education. The term is also valuable for its ability to encompass the wide diversity of games, including those intended to promote health, to persuade, and to achieve educational outcomes. On the other hand, it is less useful in a volume like this where the focus is exclusively on games and learning. I am also troubled by the use of the word “serious,” which implies that there are games which are frivolous. Terms like this are more the reflection of the intent of the game designer or the player during gameplay than of the game itself. Commercial games are quite serious in their cognitive and emotional outcomes, and serious games as a term relies on what Sherlock refers to in his chapter as “definition-throughnegation.” This creates a challenge for our field in terms of classification, genre, and definition.

My preference is for the term digital game-based learning in reference to the kinds of learning discussed in this book, as the term captures both the medium (digital game as opposed to other kinds of games) and the full range of implementation of games as designed instructional experiences, as environments that can support learning outcomes, and as a continuum of integration within existing formal and informal school settings. But the purpose of this book is to solicit multidisciplinary perspectives that inform our field, not to discuss what the field itself should be called. There is no question that the label “serious games” has caught on equally with practitioners, researchers, and the public, and its value in bridging audience perhaps outweighs its drawbacks. It did so to the extent of titling this volume, in any case.

My hope is that you will find the different perspectives represented here as fascinating as I do both for the ideas they present and as evidence that theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners must make a conscious effort to look to other disciplines as we strive to advance our field, no matter what we call it.

This article originally appeared as the preface to Interdisciplinary Models and Tools for Serious Games: Emerging Concepts and Future Directions, edited by Richard Van Eck (2010, IGI Global). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. To read more of Dr. Van Eck’s work in the field of gaming and education, see Gaming and Cognition Theories from the NOTES Learning Sciences, also published by IGI Global in 2010 and edited by the author.

1 Originally published in Sherif and Sherif ’s 1969 book Interdisciplinary Relationships in the Social Sciences, published by Aldine.

2 See Bernard Perron and Mark Wolf ’s The Video Game Theory Reader 2, 2008 (Routledge) for what may be the best and last reasonable attempt at identifying the most important works and which is now out of date less than a year after publication.

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Andrews is currently focusing on how social networks are changing our lives, for good or ill.

LORI ANDREWS started her consumer activism

when she was seven and her Ken doll went bald.

Her letter to Mattel got action, and she has been fighting for people’s rights ever since. Now she works on the edge of new technology. She has advised companies, politicians, and consumers around the world about the personal and social impacts of genetic technologies, reproductive technologies, and nanotechnologies. Andrews is currently focusing on how social networks are changing our lives, for good or ill.

Her path-breaking litigation about technologies caused the National Law Journal to list her as one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.”

The American Bar Association Journal calls Andrews “a lawyer with a literary bent who has the scientific chops to rival any CSI investigator.” In her current project, she is writing a constitution that will cover social networks.

Andrews is a distinguished professor of law at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent School of Law and director of IIT’s Institute for Science, Law and Technology. She has been a visiting professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She received her BA summa cum laude from Yale College and her JD from Yale Law School.

Professor Andrews is the author of 11 nonfiction books, including I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did. She is the author of more than 150 articles on biotechnology, genetics and social networks. Professor Andrews is also the author of three mysteries involving a fictional geneticist: Sequence, The Silent Assassin, and Immunity.

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FACEBOOK NATION

By Lori Andrews

When David Cameron became Britain’s prime minister, he made an appointment to talk to another head of state—Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, that Mark Zuckerberg: the billionaire wunderkind, the founder of Facebook. At the meeting at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Cameron and Facebook President Zuckerberg discussed ways in which social networks could take over certain governmental duties and inform public policymaking.1 A month later, Zuckerberg and Cameron had a follow-up conversation, later posted on YouTube. Cameron, dressed in suit and tie, chatted with Zuckerberg, who wore a blue cotton T-shirt.2 “Basically, we’ve got a big problem here,” Cameron pointed out to Zuckerberg, describing the U.K.’s financial woes.

Zuckerberg outlined how Facebook could be used as a platform to decrease spending and increase public participation in the political process: “I mean all these people have great ideas and a lot of energy that they want to bring and I think for a lot of people it’s just about having an easy and a cheap way for them too to communicate their ideas.”

“Brilliant,” Cameron said.

Within a year, Zuckerberg had a seat at the table with government leaders. In May 2011,

he attended the G8 Summit, the annual meeting of key heads of state (named after the eight advanced economies—France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada, and Russia).3 The media reported that world leaders from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to French President Nicolas Sarkozy were more in awe of Zuckerberg than he was of them.4 Zuckerberg summarized how Facebook had played a role in worldwide democratic movements and pressed his own policy agenda—urging European officials to back off of proposed regulation of the internet. “People tell me on the one hand `It’s great you played such a big role in the Arab spring, but it’s also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people,’” Zuckerberg said.

Is it odd to think of Mark Zuckerberg as a head of state? Perhaps. But Facebook has the power and reach of a nation. With more than 900 million members, Facebook’s population would make it the third largest nation in the world. It has citizens, an economy, its own currency, systems for resolving disputes, and relations with other nations and institutions.

After watching the video chat between Cameron and Zuckerberg, I became intrigued by the concept of a social network as a nation.

I began to wonder, what kind of government rules Facebook? What are its politics? And, if it is like a nation, should it have a Constitution?

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Social networks have become ubiquitous, necessary, and addictive. Social networking is no longer just a pastime; it’s a way of life.

People are drawn to Facebook, as early settlers are drawn to any new nation, by the search for freedom.

Social networks expand people’s opportunities. An ordinary individual can be a reporter, alerting the world to breaking news of a natural disaster or a political crisis. Or an investigator, helping cops solve a crime. Filmmakers and musicians at the start of their careers can find large followings through social networks.

The power of people is harnessed in new ways on social networks. Art itself is redefined as bands and novelists post early works and use crowdsourcing to change the music, lyrics, and story lines. Anybody can be a scientist, participating in a crowdsourced research project. In the Galaxy Zoo project, members of the public classify data from a million galaxies and publish the results in scientific journals. Facebook itself uses crowdsourcing to translate its pages into foreign languages.

Social networks also provide new ways for people to interact with government. The White House asked its Twitter followers for comments on a tax law.5 An official from the National Economic Council then posted a blog with links to questions raised by the Twitter followers, eliciting a discussion about the direction tax policy should take. In 2011, the social network created by the city of San Francisco introduced a phone app that allowed citizens to take photos of potholes and other things that needed maintenance and upload them directly to the proper city office to order repairs. Through that same network, people with CPR skills can volunteer to help in an emergency. If someone has a heart attack on a golf course, a smartphone app will recruit volunteers in the area based on their GPS position and ask them to rush over to Hole 7 to render aid.

And when people get fed up with their government, they can use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to incite others to join them in the streets to protest. While previous forms of political protest required a charismatic leader, that leader could be killed or his headquarters destroyed. It’s much more difficult to stop a widely dispersed group of antagonists such as the citizens of Facebook Nation. It’s harder to put out thousands of revolutionary fires burning across the Web. Social networks have enormous benefits, helping us stay in touch with people from our pasts and introducing us to people who share our interests. They create a much-needed comfort zone. As philosopher Ian Bogost points out, “Public spaces in general have been destroyed, privatized, and policed in recent decades, but the public life of teens and young adults has been particularly damaged, due to additional fears of abduction, abuse, criminality, and moral corruption.”6 According to Bogost, social networks provide a place to hang out, akin to the main drag or the video arcade of the past.

Social networks have become ubiquitous, necessary, and addictive. Social networking is no longer just a pastime; it’s a way of life. People expect to be able to log on to Facebook or Myspace wherever they go and to tweet their every thought. Until recently, cell phones and internet use were banned in certain places, like courthouses, but now social institutions have largely abandoned their efforts to keep someone away from their Facebook friends or Twitter audience. As a result, there’s a whole new set of issues, with judges friending defendants, jurors looking up witnesses’ Facebook pages to assess their credibility, and lawyers blogging about confidential interchanges with their clients.

————————————— It’s easy to understand why people flock to Facebook and other social networks. But it’s harder to anticipate what will happen to you when you become a citizen of this new world. If you were to move to a kibbutz in Israel, teach English in Japan, enlist in the army, or move to a rural farm, you’d have 34

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some sense of what you were getting into. When you join Facebook, you don’t know enough about the ramifications of social network citizenship to understand where that decision will lead and how it might transform you and your life. The governing rules of Facebook—its terms of service— shift rapidly and without warning. One day, it promises you that your friends are private; the next day, it makes them public.

One might think that Facebook enhances the Constitutionally protected freedom of association since it allows groups to form. Class of 1995 Reunion Committee. I Love Justin Bieber :)). Free the West Memphis Three. Yet people’s Facebook associations have been used against them.

Judges have been disciplined for “friending” lawyers on Facebook, even though it is completely acceptable for judges to be friends with attorneys in real life. In one case, a prison guard in England was fired after he friended prisoners on Facebook.7 And a crucial part of the freedom of association is the right not to reveal your associations. In 1958, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the civil rights organization for African Americans, the NAACP, to keep its member list secret from the government of Alabama. The NAACP argued that compelled disclosure would “abridge the rights of its rank-and-file members to engage in lawful association in support of their common beliefs.”8 In deciding not to compel disclosure, the Court held that people might be afraid to exercise their freedom of expression and engage in collective action to further those beliefs if their membership in the organization was known. Exposing a person’s membership in a group could lead to “economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility.”9 Yet social networks have revealed associations that people had expected to be private. When, without any notice, Facebook changed its policy in 2009 so that lists of friends and affiliations were made public and no longer subject to people’s privacy controls, the repercussions were felt around the world. In Iran, authorities questioned or detained the Facebook “friends” of Tehran’s U.S.-based critics. People were beaten. Americans traveling to Iran were detained and had their passports confiscated just for having a Facebook page.

Unlike in a democracy, Facebook is unilaterally redefining the social contract—making the private now public and making the public now private. Private information about people is readily available to third parties. At the same time, public institutions, such as the police, use social networks to privately undertake activities that previously would have been subject to public oversight. Even though cops can’t enter a home without a warrant, they scrutinize Facebook photos of parties held at high school students’ homes. If

they see the infamous red plastic cups suggesting that kids are drinking, they prosecute the parents for furnishing alcohol to minors.

You might think you are posting information just to family members, but with a modest change in computer code, the privately run Facebook can send that information anywhere. Both inadvertently and through conscious decisions, Facebook and other social networks have put private information, including medical test results, credit card numbers, and sensitive photos into the wrong hands.

Unlike Vegas, what happens in Facebook doesn’t stay in Facebook.

The precursors to social networks were multiplayer online games, where people interacted through avatars they’d created that often bore no resemblance to the real person they represented. But what you do in today’s social networks doesn’t involve playing a role. And the implications are much greater than winning and losing loot, treasures, and experience points.

Unlike games and previous social networks, Facebook asks the user to submit his or her real name and email address.

And the actions taken on Facebook and other social networks have real world consequences. Women have been fired because their Facebook posts showed them wearing provocative clothing. Straight-A students have been expelled from school for criticizing their teachers on Myspace. When, the day before a criminal trial, a cop posted on Myspace that his mood was “devious,” a parolee charged with gun possession used that post to persuade a jury that the cop had planted a gun on him.10 Colleges and companies routinely search Facebook and Myspace to determine whether to admit or to hire people.

A background-checking service called Social Intelligence Corp. accumulates files on the Facebook photos and posts of any user with privacy settings marked “Everyone.”11 The company keeps each person’s file for seven years—so even if you delete that photo of you in your “Free Charlie Manson” shirt, you’re still going to have a hard time getting a job.

————————————— Our digital identities on the Web—email, personal websites, and social media pages—are starting to overshadow our physical identities. As we work and chat and date (and sometimes even have sex) over the Web, we are creating a digital profile of ourselves that redefines us—and could come back to haunt us.

Not only does Facebook make the private public, it makes the public private. Government officials used to have to 35

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obtain warrants to find out private facts about people. Now they can monitor Facebook postings and Google searches to gain access to intimate and revealing information about people. Law enforcement officials troll public profiles for clues to crimes or to anticipate emergency situations, like the Department of Homeland Security’s monitoring of the use of certain terms on social networking sites—terms ranging from “Organized Crime” to “Quarantine.”12 In its January 2011 initiative, the Department of Homeland Security listed 350 terms to be monitored, including “Pork,” “Vaccine,” “Pirates,” “Body Scanner,” “Guzman,” and even “Social Media.”

A 2008 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services memo even recommended friending citizenship petitioners to monitor the validity of their relationships, searching for evidence, for example, that a marriage doesn’t meet the department’s legitimacy standards.13 Noting that the “narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ . . . provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS [Office of Fraud Detection and National Security] to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities,” the memo also identified social networking sites popular among certain ethnic groups (such as MiGente.com, popular with Latinos, and Muxlim.com, popular among Muslims).14 ————————————— Social networks are transforming the activities of cops and judges, often challenging cherished principles of democracy. Police sweep social networks for signs of misconduct and create fake profiles to befriend and monitor gang members.15 The IRS searches Facebook and Myspace profiles for evidence of taxable transactions and the whereabouts of tax evaders.16 Courts consider social network posts about a parent’s partying to be signs of parental neglect. Although such institutional uses may be touted as furthering law enforcement, they conflict with traditional due process rights and the principle that citizens should be free from constant scrutiny.

These trends raise troubling questions. Governments in democracies exist to protect their citizens and uphold their rights. Public health officials, like other government agents, are limited in the type of data they collect and publicize

about citizens. Similarly, the police need probable cause and search warrants to collect evidence. Constitutional restrictions on governmental action apply. But what happens when state and federal agencies circumvent those rules by turning the job of evidence gathering over to private citizens using social networks—or ask the social networks themselves for private information from people’s photos and posts? Should that evidence also be subject to Constitutional constraints?

Google searches involving flu symptoms provide a better indicator of the geographic areas where a flu outbreak is spreading than do traditional public health measures.17 But should state and federal public health officials be allowed access to private searches? And what if they learn that someone is searching for information about a communicable disease? Should public health officials be able to track down that person and quarantine him? When citizen pseudo-cops reach the offender before the real cops do, what’s to prevent them from taking the law into their own hands? As the line between governments and social networks blurs, who should be held accountable when something goes wrong?

Facebook does more than just supplement governmental functions. Facebook is a nation in its own right. It has an economy. It has certain rules of governance. But unlike any democratic nation, its operating procedures are more like a computer manual than a Constitution. All the rights run in one direction. Facebook holds the cards, and its citizens have little recourse—other than to leave the service entirely. In fact, several federal laws—created for the internet before social networks were even contemplated—protect social networks from almost any liability. Because of these laws, social networks cannot be sued for invasion of privacy, defamation, or criminal acts based on people’s postings.

Social networks turn people’s private information into the networks’ own income streams. Facebook makes most of its money as an advertising platform.18 Facebook sells ad space on its site and helps advertisers personalize their advertisements and direct them toward specific members by using the information from the Facebook member’s profile and entries.”19 Advertisers choose keywords or details—such as relationship status, location, interests, activities, favorite books, demographics, employment information—and then Facebook runs the ads for the targeted users.20 Facebook earned over $3 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, 85 percent of its total revenue.21

Facebook is a nation in its own right. It has an economy. It has certain rules of governance.

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Facebook also makes money through revenue-sharing agreements with companies that offer the more than 550,000 applications that run on the site,22 including games such as Mafia Wars and FarmVille. In 2011, Facebook told all game developers that they will be required to accept payments through the social network’s new currency, Facebook Credits.23 This will have a significant impact on Facebook’s earnings because Facebook will keep 30% of the amount of the credits, gaining a sizeable chunk of the half-billion dollars earned annually by apps.24 ————————————— People are understandably drawn to social networks. For individuals, social networks allow people to stay in touch, performing some of the same functions performed by telephones and letters in previous eras. But laws protect us against outsiders tapping our phones and reading our private mail. Even prisoners can send mail to their lawyers without having those letters read by prison officials. But everything we post on social networks is fair game for the engineers behind Facebook and any other data miner.

Facebook and other social networks are transforming huge swaths of our lives—how we mate, shop, work, and stay in touch with the people we love. They are also changing the political process itself. When John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debated on television, concerns were raised that politics would deteriorate into a contest where the most telegenic candidate won. But TV debates took place out in the open—anyone could tune in. And the Federal Communications Commission adopted regulations so that opposing candidates were granted equal time to present their views.

With social networks, it’s not the most telegenic candidate who wins, but the one with the best data crunchers.

Barack Obama was swept into office largely because of his presence on the Web.25 His social network campaign was managed by one of the founders of Facebook, 24-yearold Chris Hughes, who took a leave from the company to propel Obama into office.

The Republicans did Obama one better and stormed Washington in the 2010 elections through targeted use of social network data. Data aggregators used data from social networks, such as people’s interest in the Bible, past political contributions, voter registration status, shopping history, and real estate records to identify conservative voters by name and provide that information to Republican political hopefuls. The candidates could then email the people directly, making promises and taking stances that were never revealed to the public—and were shielded from scrutiny by their opponents.

With not only the rights of individuals at stake, but the future of the political process itself, it’s time to analyze

how we as social network citizens can be protected. What responsibilities should individuals bear? What rules should govern what can be done with our digital selves and our data by the social networks themselves and the third parties who gain access to that information? What rights should social network citizens have?

The complex issues raised by social networks came to the fore after the 2011 British riots. Prime Minister David Cameron, who’d previously felt that social network communities were “brilliant,” felt differently once rioters began to communicate with each other via Facebook, Twitter, and BlackBerry Messenger to share information about what shops to loot.

“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised by social media,” the prime minister told the House of Commons. “So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers.”26 Member of Parliament David Lammy pointed out that rioters had used BlackBerry Messenger to send encrypted and almost untraceable messages to each other. He urged Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, to shut off that service entirely until order was restored in the streets.27 The prime minister similarly asked Twitter and Facebook to remove messages, images, and videos that could incite riots.28 Civil rights advocates reacted immediately. “How do people ‘know’ when someone is planning to riot?” asked Jim Killock, the executive director of online advocacy organization Open Rights Group. “Who makes that judgment?”29 Legitimate advocacy and well-grounded protests will be stifled if social networks and websites are pressured to censor their members.

Social networks have stunning benefits. But the citizens of Facebook Nation who see those benefits may not realize the downside. The young nation was founded only recently, less than a decade ago. Its original citizens were college students who are probably still too young to have experienced rampant discrimination in jobs, romance, or credit lines based on what they’ve posted. They may not yet realize the extent to which their offline self is being overshadowed by their digital doppelganger.

People came to Facebook Nation for freedom of association, free expression, and the chance to present an evolving self. But unless people’s rights are protected, social networks will serve to narrow people’s behavior and limit their opportunities, rather than expand them. Already 37

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people are being fired for undertaking perfectly legal activities, such as when a photo of an employee drinking wine is tagged on Facebook. And new norms of behavior are emerging that do not reflect off-the-grid life, such as forbidding judges to “friend” lawyers.

Social networks are taking over many of the traditional functions of government without any legal protections for their citizens. The underlying economic goal of social networks—monetizing personal data—is invisible to their citizens and may in fact be herding them into a land that they wouldn’t want to inhabit.

The United States Constitution was penned by philosopher-politicians gravely concerned with the metaphysical question of what was necessary for individual and social flourishing. They understood that living socially and with aspirations meant adopting principles to deal with everything from resolving disputes to encouraging innovation, from structuring relationships with other nations to protecting individual rights.

They recognized the value of protecting people’s privacy and assuring oversight of actions of the government. They required that the governing rules about the relationship between citizens and the government be clearly stated in advance and not changed without adequate notice and citizens’ input. They favored openness about what the government was doing, believing, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said a century later, “sunshine is the best disinfectant.” They also saw the value of being able to remake oneself, to start afresh.

Instead of philosophy, computer engineering and data collection are the driving forces behind the policies of Facebook Nation. The quest for more and more information about more and more people is what stimulates the Facebook economy because the service makes its money on data. The executives behind social networks often disregard the values that are central to the U.S. Constitution. The Facebook founders, for example, view the desire for privacy as something to be outgrown.

In a 2010 interview, Mark Zuckerberg commented on Facebook’s decision to make certain previously private information public: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.”30 Former Facebook programmer Charlie Cheever said, “I feel Mark doesn’t believe in privacy that much, or at least believes in privacy as a stepping-stone.”31 And the very structure of social networks prevents you from reinventing yourself. Once information about you and photos of you are on the Web, they can be used against you in perpetuity.

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As we each begin to live a parallel life on Facebook, it’s time to figure out, as with any new country, what principles should govern this new nation. Do the principles on which the United States and other democracies were founded still resound with people today? Could they provide guidance for the governance of social networks?

The project of proposing a Social Network Constitution may seem foolish. Facebook, Myspace, Google, Twitter, and YouTube are private entities, and the U.S. Constitution governs only the actions of the government, not private actors. But that is not the case in other countries, such as Germany, Ireland, South Africa, and the European Union, 32 where the fundamental values expressed in the national constitution can apply to companies in addition to governments. After all, companies may be more powerful than some governments—that’s certainly the case with Facebook.

And even in the United States, the fundamental values expressed in the. U.S Constitution provide guidance for the private realm. The Fourteenth Amendment’s idea of equal protection under the law provided the foundation for Congress to enact civil rights laws that govern the conduct of corporations and private citizens. The Fourth Amendment’s protections for privacy provided judges with the inspiration to allow lawsuits against individuals and corporations that disseminated a person’s private information without consent.

We needn’t think of a Social Network Constitution as a set of rules, like the Internal Revenue Code, that would govern in minute detail what a social network should or shouldn’t do. Instead, think of it as a touchstone, an expression of fundamental values, that we should use to judge the activities of social networks and their citizens. These principles could be used to frame the societal debates about social networks—guiding not only the decisions of citizens about what technologies they should reject but also the decisions of courts and legislatures about what principles should govern.

In many instances, the principles would help courts make a determination in a case, analyze existing laws, and decide whether or not to let evidence in at trial. These values could also guide legislators who are considering adopting new laws to regulate social networks.

The very nature of social networks is constantly changing.

New technologies are introduced and individual users face new issues. A set of strict, rigid rules governing the use of social networks might be effective now, but will quickly become outdated just as other laws that are intended to protect people, such as wiretapping laws and consent laws, fail to protect and serve the needs of the current online community. Unlike the rigid, formula-driven Internal Revenue Code, a Social Network Constitution should be flexible and recognize basic principles that we should never outgrow.

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Its provisions would address the actions of government agencies, social institutions, and society at large.

14 “Social Networking Sites and their Importance to FDNS,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, May 2008, https://www.eff.org/files/ filenode/social_network/DHS_CustomsImmigration_SocialNetworking.pdf.

Every democratic nation has governing principles about what rights its citizens have over property, privacy, life, and liberty. The citizens of Facebook Nation deserve no less.

15 Megan Sayers, “Social Media and the Law: Police Explore New Ways to Fight Crime,” March 30, 2011, http://thenextweb.com/ socialmedia/2011/03/30/social-media-and-the-law-police-explore-new-waysto-fight-crime/.

The complete version of this article with endnotes can be found as chapter one in I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy by Lori Andrews (2011, Free Press). Reprinted here by permission of the author. This article has been abridged and used here with permission of the author.

16 Laura Saunders, “Is ‘Friending’ in Your Future? Better Pay Your Taxes First,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 27, 2009, at A2, http://online.wsj.com/ article/SB1251326700981985.html.

NOTES 1 Nicholas Carlson, “Mark Zuckerberg Goes to England, Meets the Prime Minister,” June 21, 2010, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article. cgi?f=g/a/2010/06/21/businessinsider-mark-zuckerberg-goes-to-englandmeets-the-prime-minister=2010-6.DTL; Ian Burrell, Power Profile,” Feb. 15, 2011, www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2011-02/15/gqcomment-business-profile-joanna-shields-facebook; Number10Gov, “PM and Facebook Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg,” July 8, 2010, www.youtube. com/watch?v=b5bzi7s1Ko. 2 Number10Gov,” PM and Facebook Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg.”

3 “What is the G8?,: G20-G8 France 2011, www.g20-g8.com/gi-g20/ english/what-is-the-g8/what-is-theg8/what-is-the-g8.847.html.

17 Miguel Helft, “Google Uses Web Searches to Track Flu’s Spread,” The New York Times, Nov. 11, 2008, at A1, www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/ technology/internet/12flu.html.

18 Mark Sullivan, “How Will Facebook Make Money?,” June 2010, www. pcworld.com/article/198815/how_will_facebook_make_money.html.

19 Ibid.

20 Justin Smith, “10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook Ads Every Performance Advertiser Should Know,” July 27, 2009, www.insidefacebook. com/2009/07/27/10-powerful-ways-to-target-facebook-ads-that-everyadvertiser-should-know/.

21 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Amendment No. 8 to Form S-1 Registration Statement for Facebook, Inc. at 10-11, 13, May 16, 2012, http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512175673/ d287954ds1a.htm.

22 Sullivan, “How Will Facebook Make Money?.”

4 Mark Duell, “That’s Some Social Network! Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Schmoozes with World Leaders at G8 Internet Session,” May 27, 2011, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391380/G8-summit-2011Facebook-CEO-Mark-Zuckerberg-schmoozes-world-leaders.html.

23 Deborah Liu, “The Next Step for Facebook Credits,” Jan. 24, 2011, http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/451.

5 Michael Scherer, “Obama and Twitter: White House SocialNetworking,” May 6, 2009, www.time.com/time/politics/ article/0,8599,1896482.00.html.

25 Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta, “Barack Obama and the Facebook Election,” Nov. 19, 2008, http://articles.cnn.com/2008-11-4/politics/exit. polls_1_exit-polls-obama-camp-john-mccain?_s=PM:POLITICS; “Exit Polls: Obama Wins Big Among Young Minority Voters,” Nov. 4, 2008, www. usnews.com/opinion/articles/2008/11/19/barack-obama-and-the-facebookelection.

6 Ian Bogost, “Ian Became a Fan of Marshall McLuhan on Facebook and Suggested You Become a Fan Too,” in Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on Your Mind?, ed. D. E. Wittkower (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2010), 21-32.

7 David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 205.

8 NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449,460 (1958).

9 Ibid. at 462.

10 Jim Meyer, “The Officer Who Posted Too Much on MySpace,” The New York Times, March 10, 2009, at A24, www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/ nyregion/11about.html.

11 Jackie Cohen, “ALERT: Job Screening Agency Archiving All Facebook,” June 20, 2011, www.allfacebook.com/alert-job-screening-agency-archivingall-facebook-2011-06.

12 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Privacy Impact Assessment for the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning: Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Update,” Jan. 6, 2011, www.dh.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_pia_ops_ publiclyavailablesocialmedia_update.pdf.

13 Jennifer Lynch, “Applying for Citizenship? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Wants to be Your ‘Friend,’” Oct. 12, 2010, www.eff.org/ deeplinks/2010/10/applying-citizenship-u.s.-citizenship-and.

24 Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 232.

26 Prime Minister David Cameron, “PM Statement on Disorder in England,” Aug. 11, 2011, www.number10.gov.uk/news/pm-statement-ondisorder-in-england/.

27 Tom Pettifor, Andrew Gregory and Josh Layton, “UK Riots: Untraceable BlackBerry Messenger Should Be Suspended, Claims Tottenham MP David Lammy,” Aug. 20, 211, www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology/2011/08/10/ukriots-tottenham-mp-david-lammy-calls-on-blackberry-to-suspend-network-tostop-rioters-organising-trouble-115875-23333287/.

28 Josh Halliday, “David Cameron Considers Banning Suspected Rioters from Social Media,” Aug. 11, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug11/ david-cameron-rioters-social-media.

29 Ibid.

30 “The Crunchies Awards,” UStream (Michael Arrington interviews Mark Zuckerberg), video from Terrence O’Brien, “Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Claims Privacy is Dead,” Jan 11, 2010, www.switched.com/2010/01/11/ facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-claims-privacy-is-dead/.

31 Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 203.

32 Stephen Gardbaum, “The ‘Horizontal Effect’ of Constitutional Rights,” 102 Michigan Law Review 387 (2003).

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Fascinated by madness, strange behavior and the human mind, Jon Ronson has spent his life exploring mysterious events and meeting extraordinary people.

JON RONSON is a gonzo journalist in the spirit of the great Hunter

S. Thompson, but with the comic styling of the legendary Monty Python.

An award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker, his unique brand of intellect and comic wit has been described by comedian Jon Stewart as “satirical investigation.” He is a regular contributor to the BBC and NPR and he is the author of seven books, including the bestsellers The Men Who Stare at Goats, Them: Adventures with Extremists, and The Psychopath Test.

Fascinated by madness, strange behavior and the human mind, Jon Ronson has spent his life exploring mysterious events and meeting extraordinary people. In The Men Who Stare at Goats, he goes behind the scenes of the U.S. Army’s secret paranormal warfare program to expose a strange and comic set of characters. The book was originally a BBC documentary series and later a major motion picture starring George Clooney. In its review, The New York Times called the book “a twisted treasure hunt…outstandingly artful and chilling.”

Jon is also the author of the bestselling book The Psychopath Test, which The San Francisco Chronicle called “…no ordinary piece of investigative journalism.” In the book he explores the concept of psychopathy and how we define sanity, insanity, and eccentricity in our society and in ourselves. The book was adapted into a story for NPR’s This American Life and has become one of the show’s most popular episodes of all time. Published in 2012, Jon’s latest book Lost at Sea is a collection of his essays that originally appeared in The Guardian (UK). Among the stories chronicled in those essays are Jon’s adventures with America’s real-life superheroes and an interview with a man who has tried to split the atom at his kitchen table.

For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming—meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. He reveals his findings in his newest book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

When not spending time with extremists, psychopaths, and the shamed, Jon likes to spend time with his wife and son. He lives with them in New York

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HOW ONE STUPID TWEET BLEW UP JUSTINE SACCO’S LIFE

By Jon Ronson

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As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel. There was one about a fellow passenger on the flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport: “‘Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”

Then, during her layover at Heathrow: “Chilly—cucumber sandwiches—bad teeth. Back in London!”

And on Dec. 20, before the final leg of her trip to Cape Town: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

She chuckled to herself as she pressed send on this last one, then wandered around Heathrow’s international terminal for half an hour, sporadically checking her phone.

No one replied, which didn’t surprise her. She had only 170 Twitter followers.

Sacco boarded the plane. It was an 11-hour flight, so she slept. When the plane landed in Cape Town and was taxiing on the runway, she turned on her phone. Right away, she got a text from someone she hadn’t spoken to since high school: “I’m so sorry to see what’s happening.”

Sacco looked at it, baffled.

Then another text: “You need to call me immediately.”

It was from her best friend, Hannah. Then her phone exploded with more texts and alerts. And then it rang. It was Hannah. “You’re the No. 1 worldwide trend on Twitter right now,” she said.

Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever.” And then one from her employer, IAC, the corporate owner of The Daily Beast, OKCupid and Vimeo: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on

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The furor over Sacco’s tweet had become not just an ideological crusade against her perceived bigotry but also a form of idle entertainment. an intl flight.” The anger soon turned to excitement: “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/ voicemail” and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”

The furor over Sacco’s tweet had become not just an ideological crusade against her perceived bigotry but also a form of idle entertainment. Her complete ignorance of her predicament for those 11 hours lent the episode both dramatic irony and a pleasing narrative arc. As Sacco’s flight traversed the length of Africa, a hashtag began to trend worldwide: #HasJustineLandedYet. “Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can’t look away. Can’t leave” and “Right, is there no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, Twitter! I’d like pictures #HasJustineLandedYet.” A Twitter user did indeed go to the airport to tweet her arrival. He took her photograph and posted it online. “Yup,” he wrote, “@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town International. She’s decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.”

By the time Sacco had touched down, tens of thousands of angry tweets had been sent in response to her joke. Hannah, meanwhile, frantically deleted her friend’s tweet and her account —Sacco didn’t want to look—but it was far too late. “Sorry @JustineSacco,” wrote one Twitter user, “your tweet lives on forever.”

In the early days of Twitter, I was a keen shamer. When newspaper columnists made racist or homophobic statements, I joined the pile-on. Sometimes I led it. The journalist A. A. Gill once wrote a column about shooting a baboon on safari in Tanzania: “I’m told they can be tricky to shoot. They run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.” Gill did the deed because he “wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.”

I was among the first people to alert social media. (This was because Gill always gave my television documentaries bad reviews, so I tended to keep a vigilant eye on things he could be got for.) Within minutes, it was everywhere.

Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

Still, in those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and

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effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

at Halloween who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim.

I felt so terrible for her.” She meant Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, who posted a photo of herself in her Halloween costume on Twitter. Lynch wore a running outfit and had smeared her face, arms and legs with fake blood. After an actual victim of the Boston Marathon bombing tweeted at her, “You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died,” people unearthed Lynch’s personal information and sent her and her friends threatening messages. Lynch was reportedly let go from her job as well.

Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media. Whenever possible, I have met them in person, to truly grasp the emotional toll at the other end of our screens. The people I met were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow— deeply confused and traumatized.

I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif., when a stupid joke popped into his head. It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles. He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me. “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle. . . . It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”

One person I met was Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who posed for a photograph while mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. Stone had stood next to the sign, which asks for “Silence and Respect,” pretending to scream and flip the bird. She and her co-worker Jamie, who posted the picture on Facebook, had a running joke about disobeying signs—smoking in front of No Smoking signs, for example—and documenting it. But shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead. Worse, Jamie didn’t realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public.

Four weeks later, Stone and Jamie were out celebrating Jamie’s birthday when their phones started vibrating repeatedly. Someone had found the photo and brought it to the attention of hordes of online strangers. Soon there was a wildly popular “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page. The next morning, there were news cameras outside her home; when she showed up to her job, at a program for developmentally disabled adults, she was told to hand over her keys. (“After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client,” read one of the thousands of Facebook messages denouncing her. “Woman needs help.”) She barely left home for the year that followed, racked by PTSD, depression and insomnia. “I didn’t want to be seen by anyone,” she told me last March at her home in Plymouth, Mass. “I didn’t want people looking at me.”

Instead, Stone spent her days online, watching others just like her get turned upon. In particular she felt for “that girl

Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph. He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture.

It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming.

The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it. She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. A day later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired.

“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” he told me. (Like Stone and Sacco, he had never before talked on the record about what happened to him. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further damaging his career.) “I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears, but”—he paused—“when I got in the car with my wife I just. . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”

The woman who took the photograph, Adria Richards, soon felt the wrath of the crowd herself. The man responsible for the dongle joke had posted about losing his job on Hacker News, an online forum popular with developers.

This led to a backlash from the other end of the political spectrum. So-called men’s rights activists and anonymous trolls bombarded Richards with death threats on Twitter and Facebook. Someone tweeted Richards’s home address 45

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along with a photograph of a beheaded woman with duct tape over her mouth. Fearing for her life, she left her home, sleeping on friends’ couches for the remainder of the year.

Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone had launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if Richards was fired. That same day she was publicly let go.

“I cried a lot during this time, journaled and escaped by watching movies,” she later said to me in an email.

“SendGrid threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.”

Late one afternoon last year, I met Justine Sacco in New York, at a restaurant in Chelsea called Cookshop. Dressed in rather chic business attire, Sacco ordered a glass of white wine. Just three weeks had passed since her trip to Africa, and she was still a person of interest to the media.

Websites had already ransacked her Twitter feed for more horrors. (For example, “I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night,” from 2012, was unearthed by BuzzFeed in the article “16 Tweets Justine Sacco Regrets.”) A New York Post photographer had been following her to the gym.

“Only an insane person would think that white people don’t get AIDS,” she told me. It was about the first thing she said to me when we sat down.

Sacco had been three hours or so into her flight when retweets of her joke began to overwhelm my Twitter feed.

I could understand why some people found it offensive.

Read literally, she said that white people don’t get AIDS, but it seems doubtful many interpreted it that way.

More likely it was her apparently gleeful flaunting of her privilege that angered people. But after thinking about her tweet for a few seconds more, I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege—on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors. Sacco, like Stone, had been yanked violently out of the context of her small social circle. Right?

“To me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make,” she said. “I thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal.” (She would later write me an email to elaborate on this point. “Unfortunately, I am not a character on ‘South Park’ or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform,” she wrote. “To put it simply, I wasn’t trying to raise awareness of AIDS or piss off the world or ruin my life. Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world. I was making fun of that 46

“I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours.”

bubble.”)

I would be the only person she spoke to on the record about what happened to her, she said. It was just too harrowing—and “as a publicist,” inadvisable—but she felt it was necessary, to show how “crazy” her situation was, how her punishment simply didn’t fit the crime.

“I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours,” she told me. “It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are.” She released an apology statement and cut short her vacation.

Workers were threatening to strike at the hotels she had booked if she showed up. She was told no one could guarantee her safety.

Her extended family in South Africa were African National Congress supporters—the party of Nelson Mandela. They were longtime activists for racial equality. When Justine arrived at the family home from the airport, one of the first things her aunt said to her was: “This is not what our family stands for. And now, by association, you’ve almost tarnished the family.”

As she told me this, Sacco started to cry. I sat looking at her for a moment. Then I tried to improve the mood. I told her that “sometimes, things need to reach a brutal nadir before people see sense.”

“Wow,” she said. She dried her eyes. “Of all the things I could have been in society’s collective consciousness, it never struck me that I’d end up a brutal nadir.”

She glanced at her watch. It was nearly 6 p.m. The reason she wanted to meet me at this restaurant, and that she was wearing her work clothes, was that it was only a few blocks away from her office. At 6, she was due in there to clean out her desk.

“All of a sudden you don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” she said. “If I don’t start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself.”

The restaurant’s manager approached our table. She sat down next to Sacco, fixed her with a look and said something in such a low volume I couldn’t hear it, only Sacco’s reply: “Oh, you think I’m going to be grateful for this?”

We agreed to meet again, but not for several months. She was determined to prove that she could turn her life around.

“I can’t just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself,” she said. “I’m going to come

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back.”

After she left, Sacco later told me, she got only as far as the lobby of her office building before she broke down crying.

A few days after meeting Sacco, I took a trip up to the Massachusetts Archives in Boston. I wanted to learn about the last era of American history when public shaming was a common form of punishment, so I was seeking out court transcripts from the 18th and early 19th centuries. I assumed that the demise of public punishments was caused by the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual, I thought, because a person in the stocks could just lose himself or herself in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Modernity had diminished shame’s power to shame—or so I assumed.

I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to scroll slowly through the archives. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. I scrolled faster, finally reaching an account of an early Colonial-era shaming.

On July 15, 1742, a woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, had been found “naked in bed with one John Russell.” They were both to be “whipped at the public whipping post 20 stripes each.” Abigail was appealing the ruling, but it wasn’t the whipping itself she wished to avoid.

She was begging the judge to let her be whipped early, before the town awoke. “If your honor pleases,” she wrote, “take some pity on me for my dear children who cannot help their unfortunate mother’s failings.”

There was no record as to whether the judge consented to her plea, but I found a number of clips that offered clues as to why she might have requested private punishment.

In a sermon, the Rev. Nathan Strong, of Hartford, Conn., entreated his flock to be less exuberant at executions.

“Go not to that place of horror with elevated spirits and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there!” Some papers published scathing reviews when public punishments were deemed too lenient by the crowd: “Suppressed remarks . . . were expressed by large numbers,” reported Delaware’s Wilmington Daily Commercial of a disappointing 1873 whipping. “Many were heard to say that the punishment was a farce. . . . Drunken fights and rows followed in rapid succession.”

The movement against public shaming had gained momentum in 1787, when Benjamin Rush, a physician in Philadelphia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote a paper calling for its demise—the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than

death,” he wrote. “It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.”

The pillory and whippings were abolished at the federal level in 1839, although Delaware kept the pillory until 1905 and whippings until 1972. An 1867 editorial in The Times excoriated the state for its obstinacy. “If [the convicted person] had previously existing in his bosom a spark of self-respect, this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. . . . The boy of 18 who is whipped at New Castle for larceny is in nine cases out of 10 ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.”

At the archives, I found no evidence that punitive shaming fell out of fashion as a result of newfound anonymity. But I did find plenty of people from centuries past bemoaning the outsize cruelty of the practice, warning that wellmeaning people, in a crowd, often take punishment too far.

It’s possible that Sacco’s fate would have been different had an anonymous tip not led a writer named Sam Biddle to the offending tweet. Biddle was then the editor of Valleywag, Gawker Media’s tech-industry blog. He retweeted it to his 15,000 followers and eventually posted it on Valleywag, accompanied by the headline, “And Now, a Funny Holiday Joke From IAC’s P.R. Boss.”

In January 2014, I received an email from Biddle, explaining his reasoning. “The fact that she was a P.R. chief made it delicious,” he wrote. “It’s satisfying to be able to say, ‘O.K., let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.’ And it did. I’d do it again.”

Biddle said he was surprised to see how quickly her life was upended, however. “I never wake up and hope I [get someone fired] that day—and certainly never hope to ruin anyone’s life.” Still, he ended his email by saying that he had a feeling she’d be “fine eventually, if not already.”

He added: “Everyone’s attention span is so short. They’ll be mad about something new today.”

Four months after we first met, Justine Sacco made good on her promise. We met for lunch at a French bistro downtown. I told her what Biddle had said—about how she was probably fine now. I was sure he wasn’t being deliberately glib, but like everyone who participates in mass online destruction, uninterested in learning that it comes with a cost.

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“Well, I’m not fine yet,” Sacco said to me. “I had a great career, and I loved my job, and it was taken away from me, and there was a lot of glory in that. Everybody else was very happy about that.”

Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing.

Sacco pushed her food around on her plate, and let me in on one of the hidden costs of her experience. “I’m single; so it’s not like I can date, because we Google everyone we might date,” she said. “That’s been taken away from me too.” She was down, but I did notice one positive change in her. When I first met her, she talked about the shame she had brought on her family. But she no longer felt that way. Instead, she said, she just felt personally humiliated.

Biddle was almost right about one thing: Sacco did get a job offer right away. But it was an odd one, from the owner of a Florida yachting company. “He said: ‘I saw what happened to you. I’m fully on your side,’ ” she told me. Sacco knew nothing about yachts, and she questioned his motives. (“Was he a crazy person who thinks white people can’t get AIDS?”) Eventually she turned him down.

After that, she left New York, going as far away as she could, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She flew there alone and got a volunteer job doing P.R. for an NGO working to reduce maternal-mortality rates. “It was fantastic,” she said. She was on her own, and she was working. If she was going to be made to suffer for a joke, she figured she should get something out of it. “I never would have lived in Addis Ababa for a month otherwise,” she told me. She was struck by how different life was there. Rural areas had only intermittent power and no running water or Internet. Even the capital, she said, had few street names or house addresses.

Addis Ababa was great for a month, but she knew going in that she would not be there long. She was a New York City person. Sacco is nervy and sassy and sort of debonair. And so she returned to work at Hot or Not, which had been a popular site for rating strangers’ looks on the pre-social Internet and was reinventing itself as a dating app.

But despite her near invisibility on social media, she was still ridiculed and demonized across the Internet.

Biddle wrote a Valleywag post after she returned to the work force: “Sacco, who apparently spent the last month hiding in Ethiopia after infuriating our species with an idiotic AIDS joke, is now a ‘marketing and promotion’ director at Hot or Not.” “How perfect!” he wrote. “Two lousy has-beens, gunning for a comeback together.”

Sacco felt this couldn’t go on, so six weeks after our lunch, she invited Biddle out for a dinner and drinks.

Afterward, she sent me an email. “I think he has some real guilt about the issue,” she wrote. “Not that he’s retracted anything.” (Months later, Biddle would find himself at the wrong end of the Internet shame machine for tweeting a joke of his own: “Bring Back Bullying.” On the one-year anniversary of the Sacco episode, he published a public apology to her on Gawker.)

Recently, I wrote to Sacco to tell her I was putting her story in The Times, and I asked her to meet me one final time to update me on her life. Her response was speedy. “No way.” She explained that she had a new job in communications, though she wouldn’t say where. She said, “Anything that puts the spotlight on me is a negative.”

It was a profound reversal for Sacco. When I first met her, she was desperate to tell the tens of thousands of people who tore her apart how they had wronged her and to repair what remained of her public persona. But perhaps she had now come to understand that her shaming wasn’t really about her at all. Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same as Sacco’s own—a bid for the attention of strangers—as she milled about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see.

Jon Ronson is the author of many nonfiction books, including The Psychopath Test, Lost at Sea, Them: Adventures With Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats. This article is adapted from the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015, Riverhead Books), and a version appeared in print on February 15, 2015, on page MM20 of the Sunday Magazine with the 48

[ihuman]

“THE WORLD LEADERSHIPwhich has come

to the United States cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be solidly founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the Nation’s highest qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and the spirit.” – National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965

DONORS SINCE APRIL 2015 SUPPORTER $500 OR MORE Jack Hoeven Jack & Leane Schaffer ASSOCIATE $250 - $499 Marilyn G. Cunningham Kara Geiger Betty Mills

CONTRIBUTOR $100 - $249 Paige & Joan Baker Julie Burgum Robert & Michele Daugherty In Memory of Edward Mashek Cami Dixon Tamara Eide Joann Ewen Melissa Gjellstad Patricia Hinkle Roger G. Johnson Rita Kelly Joseph B. King & Marsha Drechsel Alice E. Kotchman Nancy Lervik Vivian Mashek Eleanor McKay Leslie W. Peltier Ken & Debi Rogers Laura Schmidt-Dockter Herbert L. Schultz Joshua H. & Sara M. Simmers Ellinor Sorenson Sarah Vogel John M. Warner

FRIEND $99 AND BELOW Bethany & Levi Andrist Irene Askelson Gladys Bain Lois Dawn Ballmann Claudia Berg & Robert Matz Jerry Berger Anita Bertsch Roxy Boelz Jan & Bruce Brooks Kevin Carvell Dora Diepolder Virginia & Paul DuBowy Jody & Darryl Eidler June Y. Enget Dave & Kathy Fagerland Mary G. Frojen Brenna & Thomas Gerhardt In Memory of Edward Mashek Dr. Daphne Ghorbani Tina Grumbo Nancy Guy E. Bruce Hagen Dr. Marie D. Hoff James Johnston Paul Koetz Loren Kopseng Kelly Krein T. Brent Larson Elizabeth A. Lucas Madeline Luke Rhonda & Paul Milbrath State Historical Society of ND Foundation James H. & Mary P. Olson

Margaret Page Pamela K. Phillips Fern Pokorny Bridgette & Randy Readel Karen Ryberg Greg Sanders Stacy Schaffer Susan Schlecht Gerald K. Schultz Janice M. Schultz William C. Sherman Phyllis V. Snow Marvin J. Snyder Lucille Speidel Cheryl Stein Jessie Veeder Scofield Sarah & Jacob Warren In Memory of Boyd Xavier Warren

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*Curiosity, this pursuit of the unknown has kept us moving forward for generations - creating, building, exploring. Here at the North Dakota Humanities Council we want to further this culture of curiosity and collective inquiry around the ideas that will lead us into tomorrow. We want to allow others to learn how to think critically, to reason, and to examine life’s biggest questions. Through the support of donors, we are able to make this vision a reality. We invite you to join in our journey and support the humanities council today so we can continue to further this culture of curiosity!

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PULITZER PRIZE EDITION SEPTEMBER 24, 2016

B I S M A R C K , N O R T H D A K O TA Featuring a lineup of Pulitzer Prize winners talking about the game-changing stories they have uncovered.

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GAMECHANGER SERIES We live in a rapidly changing world. Travel, technology, and economics are uniting us in ways we could not have imagined just a short time ago. Advances in science and engineering are providing unheralded possibilities for problem solving and discovery. Major cultural and political shifts are transforming the global landscape overnight, leading to unrest at home and abroad.

In response to these challenges, the North Dakota Humanities Council created the GameChanger Series, an annual ideas festival focused on a major event or issue significantly changing the face of our world. We invite people close to the action to share their ideas for managing these changes in ways that will lead to a better, more prosperous world.

Our hope is to create a culture of curiosity and collective inquiry around the ideas that will lead us into tomorrow. Our goal is to equip emerging leaders and everyday citizens with a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing us in the twenty-first century and the creative solutions we need to address them. We invite you to join your neighbors and community leaders as we embark on this learning journey together.

GAMECHANGER SERIES COMMUNITY ADVISORY COMMITTEE CLAUDIA BERG, Executive Director, State Historical Society of North Dakota FRED FRIDLEY, Director of Public Affairs, Sanford Health KELVIN HULLET, President, Bismarck-Mandan Chamber of Commerce TJ JERKE, President, Bismarck-Mandan Young Professional Network TANNA KINCAID, Director – Technology, Bismarck Public School District DAWN KOPP, Executive Director, Downtown Business Association of Bismarck GARRETT MOON, Co-founder, Todaymade & CoSchedule

TOM PETRIK, Director of Practice Development, Sanford Health MARNIE PIEHL, Director of College Relations, Bismarck State College MURRAY SAGSVEEN, Chief of Staff/Ethics Officer/ Director of Legal Services, North Dakota University System MIKE SEMINARY, Mayor of Bismarck KAREL SOVAK, Associate Professor, Gary Tharaldson School of Business, University of Mary NATHAN STEFFEN, Associate Professor of Political Science, Bismarck State College TONY WEILER, Executive Director, State Bar Association of North Dakota

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iHuman

How is technology changing humanity?

1–6 p.m.

Saturday, September 26, 2015 Legacy High School Auditorium 3400 Calgary Avenue Bismarck, North Dakota Livestream: www.gamechangernd.com Facebook/gamechangernd Twitter @gseries Instagram/ndhumanities

series

Tickets on sale August 15. Limited seating.

Advanced general admission $45 General admission $60 To purchase tickets visit www.gamechangernd.com or call 701.255.3360

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This ideas festival is for anyone interested in the future of our digital society. Whether you are a plugged-in tech addict or an off-line skeptic, this program will challenge your assumptions about technology.

Leading innovators and researchers from both the tech industry and academia will share their insights into the ways rapid advances in technology are creating both amazing opportunities and dangerous new challenges. Digital developments are changing everything from the way we worship to the way we wage our wars. We can harness the power of virtual reality to create more dynamic learning spaces for our children, but we must also be wary of the threat to personal privacy when so much of our lives are now uploaded.

Understanding the power and pitfalls of technology allows us to remain its masters instead of its unthinking servants.

FEATURED IDEAS Who Owns The Future?

by Jaron Lanier, The Father of Virtual Reality and Named One of History’s 300 Greatest Inventors One of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, Jaron Lanier reckons with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks. Lanier predicts how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it. But there is an alternative. In this talk Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.

What Good Is Heaven If You Never Die?

by Noreen Herzfeld, Professor of Science and Religion at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict As Francis Crick once said, “You are nothing but a pack of neurons.” If the essence of the self is merely the information stored in our brains, then at some future date it might be possible to upload this information to a computer, thus letting the self persist despite the death of one’s body.

Transhumanists look forward to this new form of digital immortality. But is this sufficient? Christians have looked forward to a resurrection of the body. But why? What does a body give us that life in cyberspace does not? Is the notion of heaven becoming obsolete? In her groundbreaking talk, Noreen Herzfeld explores how religious scholars respond to new challenges created by technological advances.

The Power of Video Games to Reshape Learning

by Richard Van Eck, Associate Professor, Instructional Design & Technology, University of North Dakota

With 174 million gamers in the United States alone, we now live in a world where every generation will be a gamer generation. But why, Richard Van Eck asks, should games be used for escapist entertainment alone? In this groundbreaking talk, he explains

how world-class researchers, game developers, and digital entrepreneurs are harnessing the power of computer and video games to create sustainable solutions for society’s biggest social, cultural, scientific, and economic challenges. These changes have significant implications for educational systems as well, yet these solutions challenge traditional teaching environments and techniques. Are we ready to change our educational systems and practices? Accessible for gamers and non-gamers alike, this talk illustrates that the future of education involves leveraging the power of games to tap into learning environments that support a more knowledgeable, compassionate, and committed citizenship.

I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and The Death of Privacy

by Lori B Andrews, Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law Social networks—the defining cultural movement of our time—offer many freedoms. But as we work and shop and date over the Web, we are opening ourselves up to intrusive privacy violations by employers, the police, and aggressive data collection companies that sell our information to any and all takers. Through groundbreaking research, Andrews reveals how colleges routinely reject applicants due to personal information searches, robbers use vacation postings to target homes for break-ins, and lawyers scour our social media for information to use against us in court. And the legal system isn’t protecting us—in the thousands of privacy violations brought to trial, judges often rule against the victims. Providing expert advice and leading the charge to secure our rights, Andrews proposes a Social Network Constitution to protect us all.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

by Jon Ronson, Award-Winning Writer, Journalist, and Documentary Filmmaker For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming—meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. This is the perfect time for a modern-day Scarlet Letter—a radically empathetic book about public shaming and about shaming as a form of social control. It has become such a big part of our lives it has begun to feel weird and empty when there isn’t anyone to be furious about. Whole careers are being ruined by one mistake. A transgression is revealed.

Our collective outrage at it has the force of a hurricane. Then we all quickly forget about it and move on to the next one, and it doesn’t cross our minds to wonder if the shamed person is okay or in ruins. What’s it doing to them? What’s it doing to us?

Ronson presents a powerful, funny, unique, and very humane dispatch from the frontline, in the escalating war on human nature and its flaws.

Meeting of the Minds

Panel discussion led by questions from the audience.

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North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

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We have ways of making you think.

Board of Directors CHAIR Melissa Gjellstad, Grand Forks

VICE CHAIR Elizabeth Sund, Minot

Bethany Andreasen, Minot Aaron Barth, Bismarck William Caraher, Grand Forks John S. Heinen, Dickinson Leslie W. Peltier, Belcourt Carol Kapaun Ratchenski, Fargo Richard Rothaus, Bismarck Nate Steffen, Bismarck Ken Schmierer, Ellendale Jessie Veeder Scofield, Watford City Iris Swedlund, Velva STAFF Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Stacy Schaffer, Development Director Angela Hruby, Administrative Assistant The North Dakota Humanities Council is a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.

“Today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.