edrickettsEd Ricketts was a marine biologist, philosopher, music lover, and writer during the first half of the 20th century.He was also a close friend of John Steinbeck, who cast him as characters in several novels, most famously as Doc in Cannery Row.

It’s said of Ricketts that he had boundless curiosity and that he practiced listening as an art form, a trait which Steinbeck described In Cannery Row:

“Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom.”

As a Renaissance man and scientist, he was somewhat of an anachronism in an age of increasing specialization. In his scientific work he believed that each species can only be understood in relationship to every other. In this regard, he was ahead of his time and he practically invented the field of ecology.

Welcome to The Listening Web

This ability to listen creatively and to change nonsense into wisdom is one that’s beginning to take root, towards various ends, on the Internet today. If the early days of the web were about one-way communication from publishers to readers, and Web 2.0 was about community and user-created content, we are now entering a new phase of the web. A web involving creative listening.

One example of this new phase of the web is a new service called Crystal, which uses information gathered about people on the web to predict different aspects of their personality. This information is presented to users in order to help you know how to talk to or email a person. For example, Chris’ Crystal Bio reads: “Chris loves making new friends and is usually one of the more social people in a room, but he must balance team work with ‘me time’ to get things done.” Read the whole profile here.

karenAnother new example of the “listening web” is Karen, a game / art project by Blast Theory. The premise of the game is that Karen is a life coach who will be helping you with your problems through a mobile app. Over the course of about 10 days, you have periodic appointments with Karen during which she asks you questions about yourself and gradually becomes uncomfortably familiar with your personal preferences and personality — making you question decisions you make to reveal information about yourself over the web. At the end of the game, you have the option of purchasing the psychological profile that the game put together about you.

Do we care that they’re listening?

As Google seeks to organize all of the world’s data, and everyone else seeks to understand this data, some organizations are getting pretty good at using it in both worthwhile as well as unprincipled ways. It’s likely you’re already seeing customized ad experiences that feel a little too close for comfort. Apps like Karen and Crystal remind us that everything we publish to the world wide web and everything that others say about us forms a profile of us.

The potential for creative listening and scientific analysis of our public profiles is alarming for privacy advocates, and it’s something that we should all be considering. We often do have control over what we share, but we’re not always aware of the value and what can be done with what we do choose to share. For example, can an app that tracks your exercise routines collect data that might be useful for someone seeking to find out your preferences in coffee? Is this possible? Should an app be required to disclose what it is collecting and how it will be used? Is this something that we need to worry about? Are you willing to give up information about yourself in order to get free things if you know that this information is being used to build a highly accurate psychological profile of you?

All of us, as well as the philosophers, marketers, scientists, and law makers are all seeking to understand the meaning of privacy and our relationships as individuals to everyone else in this vast ecology of the Internet.

What can we do?

Brenda Ueland writes, “Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.”

As individuals, we appreciate being listened to, but when we find that the information being listened to is being used to create psychological profiles aimed at tricking us, it becomes our responsibility to push back.

We also need to adapt to the changing conditions. This new environment is one that will require increased regulation (and the enforcement of regulations). But, it will also require an increased trust and communication among friends and communities, perhaps even offline.

The Art and Science of Listening
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