Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (Part 1)
The following is an excerpt from Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis. Public Parts defends greater society’s move to public displays of personal information in an age of the Internet, social media and blogging.
We are publishing two excerpts from the book over the next two days, and today you’ll learn about the value of opening our data to online companies such as Google and why talking about our health publicly can actually help us in the long run. Tomorrow we’ll publish the second excerpt from Public Parts on this blog.
From Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis. Copyright (c) 2011 by Jeff Jarvis. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster.
The more we open, gather, analyze, and share our knowledge, the more we all know. Google’s engineers found that by tracking search queries for “flu,” they could map the spread of the disease around the world ahead of the U.S. Centers for Disease control and Prevention, helping health-care officials forecast the need for vaccine and treatment.
If each of us went only to our own doctors to seek information, it would be much more difficult to aggregate, track, and analyze that information. That we ask the same third party, Google—and can do so anonymously—adds up to public knowledge. For that reason, Google co-founder Larry Page told European regulators they should not be too quick to erase search data out of privacy concerns. To map trends and anomalies over time might allow Google and health officials to plot and predict the course of the next pandemic. “That could possibly save a third of the world popula- tion,” Page claimed at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York in 2010
U.S. Chief technology Officer Aneesh Chopra told how the government’s releasing hospital data in an open standard allowed Microsoft’s search engine, bing, to plot that information on its maps so users could find not only the nearest but also the best hospital to treat the flu.
As I’ve said, there’s nothing more private than our health information. But why? What’s the harm of sharing that data? There are many concerns. One fear is that insurance companies will reject us. But they already force us to sign over our medical histories. That is why the so-called Obamacare outlawed rejecting customers due to preexisting conditions. The law deals with the problem by restricting the use, not the flow of information.
Another fear is that we won’t get hired because of a medical problem. That, too, is society’s problem to solve. If employers may not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, race, religion, or disability, should they also be forbidden from discriminating on the basis of health? As many of us get our DNA mapped, will we need to forbid discrimination on the basis of genes? A larger fear of sharing health information is the stigma associated with illness. That stigma is most certainly society’s problem. Why should anyone be ashamed of being sick?
Consider a condition that is, by its nature, visible and thus public and carries its own stigma: obesity. There’s no hiding fat. Many countries now face crises of obesity and are grappling with its health risks and costs. New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ordered restaurant chains in the city to post the caloric content of every item (it has changed the way I order a nosh at Starbucks, i can tell you). By tracking public data, students at my journalism school working with a colleague dug deeper into factors that contribute to the problem of obesity in poor neighborhoods, where the high cost and lack of availability of fresh, healthful food—tied to the low cost and easy availability of high-calorie fast food—contribute to obesity and diabetes. Open information about the problem will help us address it.
Rather than refusing to talk about weight because we think it is embarrassing for the overweight person, isn’t it better—isn’t it healthier—to encourage people to discuss their problems openly and to encourage others to offer solutions and support? A young star reporter at The New York Times, Brian Stelter, wanted to lose weight, so he tweeted everything he ate, reporting his diet publicly to pressure himself. That also allowed others to support and pressure him. Stelter confessed in The Times that he had problems at first telling even Twitter the truth and fell off the social wagon, not fessing up to a late-night slice of pizza. Then he found an audience. “We’ll be your support group,” said one reader. His brother started a Twitter diet alongside him. Friends told Stelter he was changing their habits by example. His disclosure became an act of generosity, helping others. He came to want to share. Exposing fast food’s fat and calories became his cause. “Monday, started w/McD’s, cinnamon melts and hash browns, 600 cals/44% of day’s fat—awful, and made me feel ill,” he tweeted. He even summoned the courage to buy a Wi-Fi scale that tweets one’s weight automatically, for all to see (no lying possible). Stelter lost ninety pounds on the Twitter diet and tweeted: “i haven’t fit into jeans in give or take ten years . . . Jeans shopping for the second weekend in a row. and i must say, it feels great.”
There’s a twist in Stelter’s story: He started his career writing the definitive blog covering the cable news industry, called cableNewser. He wrote it anonymously because he was only nineteen years old. If his industry audience had known he was a mere teen toiling in a dorm room, they likely wouldn’t have paid him much attention. The Times outed his age in a page-one feature. He sold his blog to another company, expanded it to cover broadcast news, and when he graduated, he got his job at The Times, where his byline is appearing on page one with regularity. Stelter found shelter in anonymity and then benefit in publicness.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, said at a Google conference in london in 2010 that the data we make public become yet more valuable as they mix with other data. We can find new correlations, trends, and cause and effect in the aggregation. He argued that in government and elsewhere, we should make data public by default, using standards that enable such analysis. At the event, privacy advocate Shami Chakrabarti, director of the U.K.’s National Council for civil liberties, attacked Berners-Lee. She bristled at the idea of massive databases, jumping to the conclusion that they would violate privacy. Berners-Lee countered that after eliminating data that hold personal information, there is still an untold wealth of knowledge to be found in what remains, and we should not lose the opportunity it affords us. Mining that data may become the gold rush of our age.
A start-up called Kaggle facilitates contests to analyze open data. In one, government agencies in Australia put up data on traffic patterns and challenged the 364 teams that entered to find better ways to predict delays, enticing them with a $10,000 prize. The winning team’s analysis found, counterintuitively, that traffic jams can propagate both ways—that is, a slowdown behind you can end up catching up with you. Also on Kaggle, Ford offered $950 to come up with an algorithm that takes various data points—phone calls, conversations, eating, fatigue—to help determine which drivers are distracted. The Heritage Health Prize, which Kaggle administers, offered $3 million to the team that can best predict who will be hospitalized in the next year. These projects are made possible with open data.
Just look at what we have created with shared data so far: Wikipedia; Google search, which is built on using our links and clicks to learn which sites are most relevant; Wolfram|alpha, which tries to make sense of more complex data; Google Maps and open-source mapping projects, which collect our photos and annotations; review sites such as tripadvisor for travel, Yelp for restaurants, and rotten tomatoes for movies; PatientslikeMe, where patients share details about their medications and treatments; Twitter, Facebook, and Quora, which give us a place to ask questions and get answers; Ushahidi and seeclickFix, which let people report anything from graffiti to disasters around them . . . the list can and will go on and on.
Photos courtesy of Simon & Schuster
Tomorrow we’ll publish the second part of this excerpt from Public Parts. Come back tomorrow to learn how the “myth of perfection” is a lie and how being public, warts and all, can actually grant us more freedom.