Disclosing 736 daily pieces of self, or what we talk about when we talk about privacy.
We’ve already explored the physical underbelly of the Internet, but what happens to the actual data that it digests? 28,000 MMS messages — multimedia pieces of communication like photos, videos, and voice communication — are sent into the world every second, and cell phone companies record much of the metadata that travels with them, like location, identity of the receiver, amount of data transferred, and the cost of the transmission. The average user has 736 pieces of this personal data collected every day, and different service providers retain this information for anywhere between 12 and 60 months. Network is a remarkably designed piece of motion graphics by graphic design student Michael Rigley exploring the secret life of our MMS data and the tradeoffs we inadvertently face as we choose convenience of communication over privacy and control of personal data.
…a third party, owning nearly four years of your life.”
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Lessons on simplicity, sophistication, beauty, and control from the Buddhist tradition.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs may be one of 2011′s best biographies, but it severely skirts a significant aspect of Jobs’ life. The Zen of Steve Jobs, produced by Forbes and data visualization studio JESS3, is a graphic novella that explores the period of Jobs’s life when he was fired from Apple in the mid-80s and how he dealt with it — by turning to Buddhism and reconnecting with a friend he had met nearly a decade earlier, Zen-Buddhist priest and designer Kobun Chino Otogawa (1938-2002), who not only taught Jobs the elements of Zen practice but also shared his passion for sophisticated design and aesthetic rigor. Though most of the book is speculative, reimagining a narrative based on sparse background facts from a relationship that took place mostly in private, it is unexpectedly rich in its graphic simplicity.
A lot of these ideas of simplicity, sophistication, beauty, control came out of this Zen period. The way that we thought about this period in Steve Jobs’s life is kind of like ‘the lost years’ — it is not only the moment when he is the hero, and goes away, and comes back, and does all these triumphant things, but it’s also a period of his life that we maybe haven’t seen.”
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From the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, the same folks who brought us the secret of life from Steve Jobs in 46 seconds, comes this short documentary segment on the birth of the microprocessor and the dawn of the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, featuring interviews with Steve Jobs, microprocessor inventor Marcian Edward “Ted” Hoff, and other trailblazing entrepreneurs.
We had nothing to lose, and we had everything to gain. And we figured even if we crash and burn, and lose everything, the experience will have been worth ten time the cost.” ~ Steve Jobs
The excerpt comes from the 1998 PBS documentary Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, produced by the Institute for History of Technology the narrated by Walter Cronkite, which was subsequently adapted into a book of the same name.
A notable piece of tech-history ephemera makes a cameo in the film — the 1971 Intel ad announcing the very first commercial microprocessor:
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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it's cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
We’ve already explored the physical underbelly of the Internet, but what happens to the actual data that it digests? 28,000 MMS messages — multimedia pieces of communication like photos, videos, and voice communication — are sent into the world every second, and cell phone companies record much of the metadata that travels with them, like location, identity of the receiver, amount of data transferred, and the cost of the transmission. The average user has 736 pieces of this personal data collected every day, and different service providers retain this information for anywhere between 12 and 60 months. Network is a remarkably designed piece of motion graphics by graphic design student Michael Rigley exploring the secret life of our MMS data and the tradeoffs we inadvertently face as we choose convenience of communication over privacy and control of personal data.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
