Well, just on TV, but still... Last night I happened to catch a program on our local public TV station called "Beyond Human: Body Electric." Mostly it was about the use of prostethics & cybernetic implants to help people recover from injury and disease. The latter third of the program, however, focused on the extension of the senses into the digital realm. In other words, having glasses mounted with cameras connected to a universal database of faces as described in _The Transparent Society_. DB made two comments that I noticed. The first had to do with the possibility of people having microchip implants in their brains. I'm not sure if he was describing his own response to the idea or his idea of the average person's, but he basically was saying something along the lines of, "[paraphrase] I'm not letting anybody put a chip in my brain until a million other people have had it done first and I know it works. I felt the same way about laser eye surgery; now there are guys with a stands on streetcorners practically who will do this surgery, but when it first came out I thought, 'Not till a million other people have done it first.'" The second interview was pretty much straight from _TTS_. DB talked about how in 15 years we'll have glasses that can ID people on the street for us and provide reputation information--what we say about ourselves plus ex-spouses' dissenting opinions, if applicable. The show ended on the typical note of "A brave new world is coming; it might be good or it might be bad. Will the increase of interconnection make up for the increasing lack of privacy?" Of course, the program didn't bother to focus on the key issues of power and accountability, but it did mention the theme that the we may find ourselves returning to the "small village" mode of living, in which everybody knows everybody else, at least by reputation. One of the interviewees did note, however, that while we might return to the village mode of increased personal knowledge, we have lost the manners and courteous habits that make living in such close quarters possible.... Marvin Long Austin, Texas
