We sat around a couple of bottles of red wine, as one does on a chilly autumn evening in the UK, chatting about this and that and the topic of music came up, as it does when talking to the younger generation.

One of the group is working on her Master’s thesis. It deals with the topic of music and at the same time explores new forms of user interfaces. But her take on user interfaces is fascinating. She is looking to see how, traditionally, people have moved things around.

For instance have you noticed how many times a day you open and close a door? Is that how we store and move stuff around? Surely that is how the computer surface should be working by allowing the user to figuratively open and close doors. Touch screens here we come. No more clicking of a mouse. Nice topic for a future conversation, me thinks.

While working on her thesis she has explored trends of music and how popular music reflects the thinking of its time. For instance the sixties music reflected the peace, flowers and dope times. The popular 1967 Beatles’ song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ being a good example.

But what was even more fascinating was that her interpretation of the now generation, the youth of today, is that it is a ‘whatever’ generation. Listen to Lily Allen and her lovely chirpy music, depressing ‘whatever’ type lyrics. Her song ‘Smile’ talks about her partner cheating on her and she turns to her ‘friend’ to get some happiness. One does have an idea what friend that is. ‘When I see you crying, it makes me smile…;’ Depressing!

The music appealing to the youngsters is about ‘whatever’. With other words, the message is that we don’t really care about politics, economics, college, work, relationships and ‘whatever’. Everything is ‘whatever’. Have you heard the way this generation says ‘whatever’? It provides a whole new meaning to the word.

So what should find it’s way onto my computer screen shortly thereafter, but a hugely interesting article by Bert Olivier, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Port Elizabeth South Africa, who introduced me to the writings of Sherry Turkle a clinical psychologist who is also Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT.

Sherry Turkle talks about ‘Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet’. In this particular article she discusses the role-playing of people who take part in MUDs or role-playing games. People who really live their avatars or online characters tend to suspend disbelief. The online world becomes the real world in the moment of playing the game.

For different games the players compose or invent new characters and during the course of the game they immerse themselves in this particular world. In this way it could mean that the user adopts several different identities. None of them are real.

However, these online games allow players to assume or construct a range of personalities and realities. These may become more real than the player’s real life. Life becomes simulation and the game’s story becomes a representation of the self, society and reality. Life itself becomes the stage where one acts out ones fantasies.

With the progress of science and technology it could very well become a fact of life that simulation and real life become indistinguishable. As an example of this check out the ‘Reality TV Shows’. These shows are anything but based on reality, yet viewers become so involved in the show they buy into the simulation of life, not realising that they are being manipulated with every minute of broadcast.

So if the game player does not know what reality is anymore, then nothing will get them excited anymore. They are just observers. They no longer participate, except of course by clicking the mouse. The players take life’ at interface value’ says Sherry Turkle and ‘suspend belief’.

This of course plays into the hands of advertisers, politicians, spin doctors or corporate business for instance. If we have suspended belief then any message could be received provided it fits into a game and takes on wonderful images. Just enjoy the pretty messages, the users are not going to get the significance of the manipulation.

The internet has become hugely important in the American presidential campaigns. Suspend belief is the political message. Don’t worry about the troops in Iraq. Never mind Afghanistan. No problem with Sudan. Once those oil wells have been secured and big business has its contracts, we will move onto other greener pastures. Oh and as for the economy, and the financial problems. No worries. A few heads will roll. Business as usual. Aren’t these flowers pretty, dear?

I was not going to bother with another article on Facebook, or any other social networking site. But then this video flitted across my Mac and it just forced me to take up the pen again, or pull up the keyboard and touchpad.

There are two things I want to point out. And for the rest, I anticipate that the intelligent reader will join the dots, make the connection. With other words, dear reader, if you are member of a social network site such as Facebook, you might want to be cautious as to what you post on it.

First of all, here is an excerpt from the terms, which you would have agreed to when you joined, which I cut and pasted off the Facebook site. Bit long, but worth fighting your way through. Odds are you didn’t when you signed up. They state as follows:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

In plain English that says that Facebook can take all of the info you have posted onto Facebook, whether about yourself or your friends, and use that information as it wishes to. If anybody reads that differently, let me know. I would love to be wrong on this one.

What’s more, even if you choose to remove what Facebook calls your User Content, or what you would call the info you have posted onto their site, Facebook retains the right to keep archived copies of your User Content. With other words, information on you is still owned and used by Facebook for however long they would like to make use of it.

Have you ever tried to get yourself deleted off a dating site? I have. Even when I caused a riot, the administrators of the site emailed me to say that my information was no longer visible but they had nevertheless archived it. That was the best deal I could get. And they sounded surprised. Not many people have insisted on the same, by the sounds of it.

Secondly. Lets have a look at who invested money in Facebook and who could have a say in how that information is used. The first bit of venture capital, half a million, came from Peter Thiel previously founder and CEO of PayPal. Peter Thiel is now involved in Vanguard PAC an American ultra conservative organisation.

Then Accel Partners gave Facebook $12.8 million in venture capital in May 2005. Accel’s manager and Facebook Board Member James Breyer previously served on the board of NVCA with Gilman Louie CEO of In-Q-Tel. To get an idea of what In-Q-Tel is about, check the copy on their Our Aim page which states the following:

“Launched by the CIA in 1999 as a private, independent, not-for-profit organization, IQT was created to bridge the gap between the technology needs of the Intelligence Community and new advances in commercial technology.” Read more here.

Guess what. It’s the CIA. For those not in the know, the CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency of the States. The American equivalent of the Secret Service. In addition James Breyer has other connections to ‘spooks’ and American secret services. View the video that tripped across my Mac for further information.

So what do we have here. We have a private organisation that openly states in its terms of service that it intends to use any information you post on its site, for any purpose it feels like. And we also see that there is some fairly straight forward connection to the CIA with a member of the Board. And thirdly, we have an organisation that need never destroy your data.

Shouldn’t you be a lot more careful as to what you put up on Facebook? Those drunken and debauched pictures of you as a student were really fun to take and share. But they could stop you from getting a senior job in ten years time. Never mind the immediate penalty of having the university’s disciplinary body chasing after you as happened at Oxford in July 2007.

Then there are those third generation Iraqi immigrant friends of yours. Totally fabulous people, but with the names they have, you are at risk in the USA of suddenly having card carrying membership of Al-Qaeda just by virtue of the fact that you might know somebody with an Arabic sounding surname. And yes, the US Department of Homeland Security has that level of paranoia. Just check some of the stories on Amnesty International on detainees at Guantanamo.

So have you joined the dots yet? If you have a Facebook profile do filter your future content through a multi-layered process. Regrettably you can’t do anything about the stuff that is already there! Ask yourself: is what I am posting ok for my career, reputation, personal safety and is my ID secure from fraud amongst many other questions. With other words, is it really worth playing the Facebook game?

There are more than 540 000 words in the English language. This is apparently about five times more than during Shakespeare’s time. Amongst the many new words or meanings fighting to get accepted onto the hallowed pages of the Oxford English Dictionary would be ‘twittering’ and that would not involve birds.

It was early February of this year that I was introduced to a demonstration of Twitter and the verb to twitter. It was the occasion of the Twitter Tea Party that made me realise that this little bit of software, running on the internet, or on a phone near you, seemed to have a future.

The Twitter Tea Party was being held at our house and was a celebration of the fact that we had all survived the festive season and the subsequent Christmas sales and were ready to face the new year. Everybody brought cake and most participants brought their computers as well. No self-respecting geek leaves home without one.

During this festive occasion the twitter site was open on most of the computers with conversations being tracked and responded to while munching through a huge pile of cake. In fact, the entire happening, from walking to our house, cake consumption, socialising, leaving and arriving at home again was shared with the Twitter community.

At this point, it might be an idea to expand a little on what Twitter is. It is the quintessential micro-blogging service. No message may be longer than 140 characters. Definitely short story time here. The Twitter website acts like a clearing house. All messages are routed via the site and one may pick up the conversation either via the site or sms’d to ones mobile phone.

There are variations to this service of course. One particular nice feature is that one can set up temporary Twitter communities to share special occasions with. This would apply to such events as conferences, political rallies or even family celebrations. All it requires to work would be participants. And to go big, the actual Twitter page could be streamed onto a huge wall with the help of a data projector. That’s sharing for you.

This kind of sharing of all things important and trivial with other people who are not necessarily friends but could purely be following one another, almost a case of stalking one could surmise, was something I couldn’t really relate to. I vaguely asked the group as to who would want to know that I was now consuming a muffin, and the chorus back was – I would. Wow.

So I signed up for a Twitter account shortly thereafter. As with all of these networking sites available, one needs to work at them, which is something I haven’t done. Nine months down the line I have four people I follow and seven followers on Twitter. Ms Popularity? Not. There just seemed no reason to want to find out what kind of muffin people were eating or where they were going to have a mid-morning cup of coffee.

But then, I think, I am totally missing the point here. It’s not about the muffin, or the cup of coffee. It’s all about sharing a simple human action that is watched by others and responded to, that makes one feel part of a community. Facebook on the hoof, so to speak.

In the fragmented world that we live in, where there is no job or home security, where relationships might not last that long, or your favourite techie tools are obsolete within a few months, it is really re-assuring to know that there are people out there who want to share with you the ordinary bits of life. It is almost as if this easy communication, in 140 characters or less, provides a stability that other parts of our life don’t anymore.

To add to this insight, yesterday I found out about the really useful side of Twitter.  We had a meeting arranged at London’s Canary Wharf. From Brighton this is a convoluted two hour long journey – one way. It occurred to us to Twitter to see how public transport was measuring up. Lo and behold, a broken down train and emergency repair services were blocking the stretch between Brighton and Gatwick causing up to 90 minutes delay.

Thus warned, the way around that was to take the car to Gatwick. The website for the train service would have carried that delay on page three if at all, with other words, nobody would have considered checking.

Is this a sign of the times, to have a fairly popular communications tool and growing as we speak, that only allows a max of 140 characters per message. Do we only have time for such short bursts of communication and does that not make our lives seem the poorer for it?

Or perhaps it is only really an indication of the way we want to  communicate and that is in abbreviated text messages.  A tool pops up that allows us to do just that and is an extension of the text messaging used on mobile phones.  Whatever the social reasoning behind the phenomena of micro-blogging, I have decided that I want to become a Twitterer. So, who can I follow?

Three days of wonderful inspirational stuff at the Flash on the Beach conference has regrettably come to an end. As an aside, I get a beach towel and beach thongs, or flip flops for the South African readers, in my free handout kit. It’s all of something like 14 degrees during the day and 4 degrees at night in Brighton, hardly beach weather. In the twelve months I’ve lived in Brighton, I have yet to stick my toe into the surf – what surf. And here I am, coming from Cape Town!

But I digress. One of the talks that I went to was by Richard Leggett. His talk was on ‘Touching the Future’ which looked at Human Computer Interaction and the web in 2012. This talk kind of fitted in with my speculations on whether the PC had run its course. I had spoken about this in a previous article. Much to my surprise it had caused quite a fair amount of discussion and speculation. So I looked forward to this presentation to give me more ammunition with respect to my own guesswork as to the demise of the PC.

One of the first points Richard made, and apologies if I don’t get the order right as it’s so dark in the conference venues one can’t make notes, is that we will all be online all the time. That is actually a huge concept on its own. Of course one must remember we are talking Europe and the developed world here. The developing world is lucky if it can dial up to the internet.

Not only will people be accessing the net permanently, but they will be on the net with any gadget that they can grab at that moment in time. There will be a growth in surface based computing. This could be a panel on the wall in the lounge or your coffee table as Microsoft has shown in demos. With other words, touch surfaces will become more popular. Makes sense to me.

There will be greater development in intelligent software that will allow people to use the internet more intelligently. That means that the search software will be able to attempt some kind of logical interpretation of the search requests. He gave the example of a task somebody might want to complete that would query what language the next economic super power of the world would speak.

This would mean that the search engine would be able to evaluate what criteria would need to be met in order to determine what would be considered an economic super power. Once the criteria had been identified, then only would the search engine be able to propose possible economic super powers of the future. For most of us it seems obvious that the language in question would be Mandarin!

Richard Leggett also felt that there would need to be a much more logical and central way of filing one’s digital possessions. This would mean establishing libraries for DVDs, music, eBooks, photos etc. with retrieval and pre-view systems. He demonstrated an available software application, Delicious Library, which had some fascinating features already, even though only at v1.6.6 of its development.

Talking about libraries, a great way of lending out an eBook for instance would mirror the existing hard copy where one quite willingly lends a book to a friend and receives it – one hopes – back again in one piece. One would be able to lend out the eBook and the Intellectual Property attached to that book. As this eBook would continue to be recorded in our library, we would know who had it at any one time and would be able to terminate this right when we wanted the eBook back. A much safer way to lend something to somebody. Once having taken the right to the IP back, your friend wouldn’t be able to open the file again. How clean is that.

A further development that Richard saw, making the point by presented a demo using a live subject much to the amusement of the audience, was the ability of the new gadets to scan the user’s face or iris and in this way identifying the person. The facial ID would tie in with all the other personal details already accumulated on the web and available to whoever was looking for it.

As an example, the video camera on the gadget – in this case a PC but could quite easily be a mobile phone – would scan the face onto the machine/gadget. And if one was visiting Amazon for instance, Amazon would be able to take the image and search through the internet information available on you, such as your Facebook friends and what they were interested in and what books or movies you had discussed with them on Facebook. Amazon would then present these options to you for possible purchase decisions.

One of the important points made during this presentation was the fact that the human computing user would be using many gadgets and that the gadget would fit the circumstances of the user’s needs. But what seemed fairly obvious was that for the private user the standard PC would probably not be at the top of the list. Hand held devices and touch screen technology would feature strongly in the future.

Presently computing power is being developed to fit onto smaller and smaller chips in this way allowing tiny but powerful devices to come onto the market. To augment this, the innovation in the field of computing is now in the software arena with small teams of developers producing the next level of intelligent applications and that would be software that has the ability to reason.

Science fiction anybody? And just like science fiction, let your imagination run freely for a moment and imagine how wonderful it will be to have little hand-held gadgets to point, click or manipulate text, photos or video with. Or you can swipe across a glass surface to get your task done. Isn’t it time the Qwerty keyboard got ditched and we could move files around without having to use a mouse or trackpad. And trash that 15 or 17″ monitor, what’s wrong with using that 63″ plasma TV screen. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

On the other hand, for those of you out there who are clutching onto your laptops and desktop PCs for dear life, you will be happy to hear that at least 90% of the computer nerds attending the conference were never far away from their Apple MacBookPros, the forest of lit-up Apple logos a dead give away in the dark auditoriums!