What could it mean?

The article quotes privacy expert Daniel Solove, who has written that the way that Facebook uses the ‘Become a Fan’ feature is actually against privacy law in all cases:

Suppose Michael Jordan says on national TV that he likes Wheaties. Does this allow Wheaties to use his image on its cereal box or in a commercial? The answer is no. The fact that Jordan says he likes Wheaties can be used in a news story; it can be used in a biography of Jordan. But it cannot be used in a commercial advertisement.

By extension, Solove argues, if Michael Jordan decides to ‘Become a Fan’ of Wheaties on Facebook, that information cannot be used in a commercial advertisement either – but on Facebook, it often is.

I’ll be speaking at a symposium at the Columbus Museum of Art on May 1 and 2. Tying in with the CMA’s George Tooker exhibition, the symposium “addresses the ways in which the visual arts confront or collude with surveillance, and the particular effects of surveillance that the visual arts might be best at revealing or manifesting.” I am super excited; the lineup includes artist Julia Scher and a keynote by David Simon (creator of The Wire).

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A need for privacy, however– also listed by psychologist Gary A. Davis as an attribute amongst creative people– seems much more dubious, particularly in the age of Facebook.  In fact, as it pertains to creativity, nobody’s discussing the matter at all.

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He said: “We show the parents their pictures, recover the weapons and make sure they know that behaviour is unacceptable.

“We have large kitchen knives, axes, samurai swords, baseball bats, a huge number and different type of weapons – in simple terms weapons that can kill.”

Samurai swords?

Strangely when a friend of mine got stabbed at a New Years Eve party in Austin, TX several years ago, the police found his assailant because he was posing with knives on MySpace.

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Vali, Murtaza. “The New Normal: Artists Space, New York.” Bidoun Magazine. Fall 2008: 190-191.

Across the pond, the BBC reports that membership lists for the extreme right-wing British National Party have been leaked, and that members now face threats.

Both Prop 8 supporters and BNP members are targeting minority groups, but do they deserve to be able to do so in privacy? Or is this kind of transparency a necessary check on the politics of hate?

Kurtz says Obama is “economical and clear and to the point,” while Palin is “smart, but she’s very scattered and all over the place and wants people to recognize her and know who she is.

In 2006, Cabinet Magazine released a collection of Presidential doodles. In the intro of that book, David Greenberg wrote about the doodle as a kind of private information:

Offering glimmers of and glimpses into the private president, doodles constitute small sources of potential understanding to a public that is forever striving to gain insight into its leaders.

In 2006, Greenberg reported that his efforts in Presidential doodle hunting has come up against the roadblock of an increasingly secretive Executive Branch.

Despite a 1978 law mandating the release of most presidential records, George Bush Sr found a loophole to deem reams of official documentation off limits to the public. Bill Clinton, too, has refused to make any available for publication, and his presidential library in Arkansas, having just opened, has yet to yield any either. The present incumbent has also rejected requests for doodles – surpassing even the paranoid Richard Nixon (who was willing to draw doodles for collectors) in his secretiveness in this respect.

Let’s hope an Obama administration will set a new standard for doodle transparency.

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