You've accurately described why I'm taking the time to comment: some of us, perhaps many of us, are living in the '70s. Funny and scary, that is.

Not me! I'm firmly rooted in, oh, the late 1980s. So there.

Actually, since magic in lazy fantasy is too often a one-to-one replacement of tech items with magic items, like magelight for flashlights, what would be the magical substitutes for Twitter and crowdsourcing?

(Insert standard horror-writer rant about all of the traditional plots made completely ridiculous in a world with ubiquitous cell phones.)

It's worse when your family strongly resembles one another. I strongly remember how, as a teenager, I walked into a new-to-me hospital in my city and was immediately pinned by an emergency nurse I'd never seen in my life as 'Mrs ___'s daughter!' She recognised me by the family schnoz.

I was mortified, but in retrospect it could have been so very much worse.

Until you're a crime victim and the cops use CCTV video to track down the perp.

Internet access from a plane is flight is pretty new, AFAIK.

What I saw in Charlie Stross's blog, it seems wi-fi internet access at big events is barely usable. Cell-phone might not be good either.

There are still black holes to put a story in.

That means that surveillance need not be constant to be perfectly effective; and what that means, in turn, is that the means to make it perfectly effective are not prohibitively expensive.

I suppose privacy will become a luxury. We're already seeing some of that playing out with the US gov't reaction to Wikileaks, and increasing reliance on secrecy and classification. Maybe in the future rich people's private jets will forbid everyone but the privileged few from carrying their smartphones. (Rich executive gets to tweet photos of his stewardess's ass, but she doesn't get to record him making a crude pass at her.)

I was just reminded of that by Stross's Rule 34.

Over a decade ago, when Kevin Maroney and I worked for a small company that was developing games for cellphones, Kevin handed out copies of "Maneki Neko" at a meeting with the suggestion that everyone at the company should read it. (I already had.)

Reality burbles along, however. I've seen various articles indicating that police in China have crowd-sourced identification work for very unpopular crimes, such as the injured toddler passed by by numerous strangers. No indication whether that has led to the kinds of misidentification problems that arise from Megan's Law and its ilk. But we wouldn't necessarily hear about that.

(And more recently still, on the 15th anniversary of NTK. Oh, I feel old!)

I have a little list of titles: Clouds End, by Sean Stewart; Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce; Worlds' End, by Neil Gaiman....

David G., #27: Journeys End by Poul Anderson.

I think in he future people will probably decide that a crowd-sourced panopticon is not worth the hassle, assuming they have the resources to run one.

As for the panopticon, we can still opt out, at least until face recognition technology becomes widespread. That actor's mistake was mixing too much truth in with his lies. If he had switched the famous actor he claimed to have worked with to, say, Brad Pitt, then he would have remained invisible.

Avram and Xopher 11/14/15: I've been a big fan of Law & Order: UK. They made thorough use of the London CCTV cameras - which, in show terms, were conveniently malfunctioning or had poor image quality or the suspect was wearing a hoodie whenever the plot needed to keep the perp unidentified for a little while longer - for solving crimes. Whenever they did, I couldn't help thinking of the cameras in "V for Vendetta," and the little girl sticking two fingers up at them and saying "bollocks" when she suspected that, hallelujah, they weren't working any more. And I always shook my head a little and thought "those cameras used to be fictional, and they existed in a dystopia." The show was set up to put me on the side of the people using the cameras... but I always had that little twinge.

In 2003, I was working at a bookstore (the late Cody's Books in Berkeley, California) when Bruce Sterling did an author appearance. He predicted that a really effective global civil society would look "kind of like Al Qaeda, only not murderous."

So now we see the answer to Weber's question: not countries but networks, like Al Qaeda and WikiLeaks. They use individual countries, the way one uses a coffeeshop that has a particularly lenient free wifi policy.

I wrote more about this last year (and also used the phrase "crowdsourced panopticon").

But to answer Avram's question: I am biased and think that my spouse Leonard Richardson's book Constellation Games is pretty reasonable in terms of portraying a networked near-future. Its anarchic aliens participate in "fluid overlays" (networked leaderless organizations), and the human characters are constantly networked via phone, IM, videochat, etc.

Another author: Zen Cho's short modern fantasy story "Prudence and the Dragon" practically starts with an explanation of why Prudence hasn't heard of the dragon.

*Naq cnegvphyneyl gur fgbel bs gur zna tnvavat pbzsbeg sebz jngpuvat uvf qrnq jvsr naq puvyq.

The bit you refer to in your ROT-13 was a short story first. It's called "The Light of Other Days", and is one of my ten favorite short stories, ever, anywhere. Though I can't read it without choking up. Or, perhaps, because of it.

A mere three words together, no matter how odd, is probably not enough to be reliably unique in that sense.

(Google turns up a number of instances prior to today...)

Some adult characters don't have cell phones. Not having a smart phone is okay, but not having a cell phone at all? Again, not acceptable unless the character lives where there's limited connectivity.

Amen.

Sometimes, I like to tell my young relatives and the college interns that work for me "don't do anything in private that you're afraid to admit to in public." Now, with the internet, it's all public all the time. Frankly this is why the internet scares me. Only here, the quiet introverts are called "lurkers" (or they were -- who knows what they're called now) instead of "so and so, who keeps to themself".

There's always the Mandy Rice-Davies answer¹, usually misquoted².

This is where crowd-sourcing, and a lot of journalism, fails. Some of this story can be checked, but there are no witnesses to the key details that we can rely.on.

The events on the plane could be fake. Or thy could be all true, or it could be something in between.

^{1 "Well, he would, wouldn't he."
2 "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he."}

I'm conflicted about how to feel over this. Part of me is all "F-YEAH, how do you like it NOW, you millennial IDIOT with your settings-auto-resetting-to-ALL-CAN-SEE website?!?" But he's a twenty-something guy who just got married, and I can see this leading to a lot of seriously not cool behavior towards him.

I don't think he'll even get the point of it, because I honestly believe he can't even conceive of why all of us object so strongly to his site's repeated insistence that nobody WANTS much privacy ...

In real life, they have a tendency to do that whenever there's a question about police conduct. Although ubiquitous phone cameras are doing a lot to help even things out.

I'm an adult living in an extremely tech-saturated area, and I don't have a cell phone of any kind. There are still a few holdouts.

But the amateur or professional detective in a mystery or thriller should have one, and if he or she doesn't, there needs to be a) a good reason why and b) someone else around with one.

Issues of time placement in fiction can be tricky. I saw a submission recently that was supposedly contemporary (and there were computers and other tech that looked right) but internal evidence indicated that it was actually set in the early 1980s (it was set in NYC so there was factual stuff that I could easily identify as being wrong, as well as references to certain post-WWII events being in the recent past).

* Upon consideration, this sounds more and more like a case of the "Oh, I'm so clueless!" defense that some men pull when called on sexist or stalkery behavior. Oh, he doesn't mean any harm by it, he just doesn't UNDERSTAND, you need to go easier on him...

Not disappointed. Well done LongStrider @#49. Stross even said Rajaniemi may be doing this thing better than he is. Which is quite some praise indeed from the author of Rule 34. That book had me in a constant state between future shock and "is this even sci-fi? Wouldn't most of this be possible *right now*?"

Pretty sure that's the first time in the history of the English language that the phrase "crowd-sourced panopticon" has been used.

===

12 November 2007: Felix Cohen, "A Crowd-Sourced Panopticon," on his blog Open Democracy: Free Thinking for the World.

19 May 2010: Phrase also used by commenter "humbleauthor" in the comment thread of Patrick Meier's "The Future of News: Mobilizing the Masses to Write the First Draft of History," posted 02 May 2010.

11 March 2012: Tweet by Mike Cooper (@coop): "a crowd-sourced panopticon" - Me, on personal robot helicopters, at Do Some Damage today: http://bit.ly/zUPNI4

===

That's another way the world has changed: you can query and document an assertion on the fly. It'll be interesting to see whether this makes us bolder or more cautious.

As for living with the result (as distinct from extrapolating-from-actual-tech) of universal involuntary permanent visibility: Damon Knight contemplated it in "I See You" back in 1976.

One thing I've been mulling-- the recent progress on gay rights was only possible because neither the laws nor the social norms could be thoroughly enforced.

Privacy leaves room for positive unknown unknowns.

What pervasive mistakes (as distinct from general aggravatingness) might result from lack of privacy?

In my use, at least, social media is a lot like a Making Light open thread. People can bring up a conversation topic, whether it's something in the news, or a request for advice, or just a HLN (Hyper-Local News) update, and then other people can continue the conversation on that topic or not.

It's not about posting all the trivia of your daily life, at least not for me and my friends. It's about "So, I had an interesting thought or experience, or saw an interesting thing on the internet, and I thought you guys might be interested in hearing about it. Thoughts, opinions?"

I think if you understand the impulse to post on a comments thread, the impulse to post on a social media site is rather similar.

As for sharing your location multiple times a day -- I think that impulse is part "Look at all the cool, interesting places I go!" and part "Hey, friends, if you're nearby, let's meet up!" I can grok those impulses, but they're totally overshadowed for me by my extreme aversion to the idea that anyone might expect me to "check in." I hate the idea of feeling like I might have to justify or explain where I chose to go -- or why someone saw me or my car somewhere, but I hadn't checked in publicly.

There do seem to be points -- different for different people -- beyond which social networking gets creepy or offensive, and people will start resisting it. And most people do seem to want to be able to put some limits on it, even if they don't consciously know what those limits are until they've been breached. A lot of people post everything on Facebook as "public," but never think that anyone other than their friends would bother to look -- and then something like Girls Around Me happens, and people feel betrayed and angry. They don't want "public" to be that big.

Or the backlash against Klout. Klout does almost exactly what Jeff @ 44 mentions from the "Uglies" series -- essentially scores your internet popularity, and gives you prizes for being more popular. But pretty much the instant it became widely known, it also became widely disliked. People don't like the feeling that they're being publicly judged and found wanting, and a lot of people get that feeling from Klout -- even people who would probably get a very high internet popularity score (e.g. Xeni Jardin and Randall Munroe).

I think that would be an interesting theme to explore in fiction. When does networking run into social backlash, and how does that shape the way a society is networked?

The brilliant recent film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has some lovingly-shot scenes of offices and typing pools and secretaries and buff folders; it's really hot stuff if you're a stationery fetishist. (And if you're an ex-smoker like me, the constant smoking of beautiful, beautiful, verboten cigarettes will have you drooling.)

Steve with a Book @70, have you seen any episodes of Mad Men? It's a meticulously recreated period drama about advertising in the 1960s.

My name isn't obviously commonplace, but there are numerous FB profiles that share my name (down to the not-so-common 'Marc' with a 'c'), and I know of at least one name-alike who lives in the same state as myself who probably has a stronger net presence (he's an artist, manages an estate, and is very active in his field).

Searching for me, for instance, brings up a lot of signal-to-noise stuff I'd imagine would occur to quite a number of people.

Someone like Miss Garcia on "Criminal Minds" would be savvy enough to know there were two people out there with the same name, but would need legwork to sort out which data belongs to which person.

while in the evolving universal sousveillance society, everyone gets to watch everyone else.

I'm fairly sure that there will always be a class of people with sufficient money and power to opt out or to afford countermeasures. They may be officials of the surveillance system, or plutocrats who can buy officials, or even lowly programmers who leave trapdoors in system code, but they'll be there. Even the effects of cellphone cameras can be countered, especially if everything talks to the cloud, as seems to be the trend.

Pfusand @ 43:

The other two books of WJW's trilogy started by This Is Not A Game are out, and they get into some other questions about the interactions between social media and politics, revolution, regime-change from without, and creating utopia from dystopia in the panopticon. Recommended reading for this sort of discussion.

Dave Bell @ 52:

This is why Vinge's phrase "the Net of a millon lies" is so apt. Maybe more accurate (though less poetic) might be "the Net of a vast but unknown number of truths, half-truths, and lies".

Daniel Klein @ 64:

Sure most of the tech in Rule 34 is possible right now, but it takes years for the kind of systems described there to be planned, built, incrementally enhanced, and become routine for everyone's use. I could build CopSpace tomorrow (at immense cost, because most of the hardware wouldn't be COTS), but how long would it take for it to be tried out, accepted, and in routine use by trained users, in a large majority of the police departments?

When he went to the restroom, I looked him up on my phone. I saw he had written a number of articles, and that was enough to remind me - he had written a well-known article with my synagogue's rabbi 30 years ago (books have been written responding to this article).

He saw me looking at my phone, and said, "That's cheating." I said, "not really, there was nothing in the phone about that article, just seeing that you had written articles in the field reminded me that you had co-authored that paper." He was still a bit bothered about it, though.

I do wonder in my darker moods whether the very concept of a relational database is inherently totalitarian; its terrible uses are uniquely terrible; it makes doing many awful things so much easier. Did Codd do something permanently damaging to the public sphere? And can we do anything about it now, short of prohibiting certain classes of SQL query on pain of death?

I predict that sometime in the next couple of years there will be a breaking story about a burglary ring that chooses its targets by (1) picking a street that looks promising, (2) doing reverse-lookup to find out who lives at each address, and (3) following those people on FB or Twitter to find out when they're on vacation. If I can think of it, you know a professional burglar can.

Fragano Ledgister@81: we can't be very far now from a complete family tree for the entire world, or at least that portion of it that records births properly. Unify all the reliable genealogical records on the Internet, and all that can be inferred from publicly-available sources, and you'll probably be within shouting distance. The number of people who have ever lived is only in the billions; the directed graph showing descent will be sparse. I was wondering about this sort of thing when reading recently about how nepotistic the US Presidency is, for really really weak values of 'nepotistic'.

Maybe both. Maybe we'll se more people adopting professional names. Perhaps in the future a typical person will be Sam Smith in his private life, but Fly Fornication Blorglethorpe for work purposes. ("Fly Fornication" is an old Puritan name, but thanks to George Carlin I think it'd be a good name for a golfer.)

That solution won't work for people who want to use their professional status to gain bennies in their private life, though, like our horny airplane passenger.

The incident geekosaur referred to was actually worse, iirc--the person whose home was broken into was the mother of the person seen with the money, who no longer lived at the parental home. The money was, in either case, no longer at the person's home (so the person was only a little stupid, I guess?).

Birth records only go back so far; wars and population shifts make older records inaccessible at best, destroys them at worst. When you get back before about 1800 outside of Western Europe and its colonies, it gets harder because there are no surnames, so tracking families is harder.

Speaking as someone who frequents Ancestry.com and JewishGen.org, that is.

E.g., I can track much of my mother's family, the branch that was in Lithuania, back to the middle 1700s. That's mostly from census records, rather than birth/marriage/death records. Beyond that, there are no surnames and few records. For the majority of the family that was in Poland or Russia, the records don't exist, or haven't been found & translated, so I can't really go beyond records of those who came to the US.

Fortunately, another genealogist tracked down the Argentinian cousins on Dad's side, but nobody knows what comes before my great-great-grandfather, and that only because my great-grandfather was interviewed by Andy Logan for a profile in the New Yorker in 1949.

Actually, one of them, a 77-year-old retired doctor of my generation (even if I'm 46, the spread among 13 great-aunts and -uncles means a wide range in ages after a couple of generations), was in the news for having been beaten to death in Argentina in a robbery gone bad, a couple of years ago. Weird to find that as the result of google-searching distant relatives.

I started with computers about the same time the BBS got invented, and that connection immediately struck me as part tech-info network (lots of explaining modem setup strings and such) and part pen-pal club. Usenet forums extended that model, but Facebook turns the clubhouse into something much more public (even though any virtual passerby can read, say, Making Light)--like trying to hang out with your friends out in the intersection instead of inside the corner bar. There's another forum where I spend quite a bit of time, and even though it's viewable by anyone who can find it, it doesn't have that sitting-in-Macy's-window feeling that I get from Facebook. And I still tend not to inject what feels private into our chats--even though I've met many of the members in the flesh and would not hesitate to talk about, say, my health or vacation plans or job prospects in a face-to-face conversation. And then, circling back, there's the fact that I'm just not that gregarious to start with. (I hope that doesn't get picked up and used against me somehow.)

"Everybody comes to Abi's Internet Café Américain!"

On the panopticon: wait until we get lifelogging for real, on a mass scale. We're within spitting distance of the storage and hardware needs already. All we need are bluetooth webcams and suitable data tariffs for our mobile phones, and software to back up everything we see and hear into the cloud ....

If this isn't happening within 5 years, it will not be because it isn't possible but because, like the proverbial food pills, not enough people want it.

Not here, it won't.

Or I can just opt out of it all, which is limiting. A mobile phone is now a social necessity, and in the future it seems that not utilising some of the various social things will mean that you just don't get certain opportunities etc.

Ranting nerd #61 - I've been reading Brin's blog on and off for a year or two and don't recall him ever saying he'd do an update to The transparent society. Rather he refers back to it at times as if he thinks there isn't much that needs updating.

(This seems not unlikely considering the number of things that start to atrophy due to underuse in microgravity. If you're not using it, the body's not going to waste energy maintaining it.)

With regards to magic "tweets", we got to talking about that in a Victoriana game (magical steampunk roleplaying; technology is a cross between the-way-the-future-was and magic substitution) and immediately decided that there were, in fact, tweets in this world, and it was done by, quite literally, sending flocks of small birds. Who had to be paid with seeds in order to diverge their very short messages (birds can't carry much weight, after all).

Much giggling ensued.

I too have been contemplating the opposite of this - reading a lot of Cornell Woolrich stories and noting the technological limitations that make them work - for instance, although I was perfectly aware there were no cel phones in 1940, it hadn't occurred to me that all the "public" phone booths were inside restaurants or stores; thus, in several stories a character can witness a crime or discover an important clue late at night, then spend a half hour trying to find a place that's still open so s/he can call the cops, by which time of course all evidence has been wiped away.

Yesterday, I concluded that in the early part of the 20th century, it was not unusual for a young person to move permanently to another (usually larger) town in search of work; that it was also feasible for those with some money and leisure to spend a month's vacation with distant relatives or at a rented cottage; but that it was much less justifiable to travel across state lines for a one-day event like a family wedding -- hence the plots that turn on someone not knowing their in-laws by sight or vice-versa.

Earlier this year, Josh and I were en route via subway when there was an announcement that all trains were skipping Union Square. Now, for those who don't know the NYC subway system well, Union Square is a major station. It doesn't get skipped. Smaller stations get skipped. It certainly doesn't get skipped by everything. It doesn't get skipped, and it doesn't get closed, not even for the Halloween Parade, which complicated foot traffic in the area.

"Hm," said I. "What protest is going on that I forgot about?"

As soon as the train came above ground, I checked on my smart phone. It was the Million Hoodie March.

For conventions, they're the bees knees.* Other than that, they're way to much work and money. And they're not finished.*

* I generally try to get people to text me. The voice reception, especially in the bowels of a convention center, means that I can barely understand what the other party is saying, and I find that incredibly stressful.

"God Is an Iron" is the short story. I think of that book every time I set up an auto-pay for a bill.

OTOH, shortly before public phone booths virtually disappeared, there was a period when most of them were more like phone cubicles, just a couple of short wall segments and a ledge for the phone book (this was done in an effort to keep vagrants from using them as urinals), and there was a whole series of jokes based around Superman hunting desperately for an old-style phone booth to change in.

I knew Fly Fornication Blorglethorpe. Fly Fornication Blorglethorpe was a friend of mine. You, Sir, are no Fly Fornication Blorglethorpe.

You either have to handle things as a proper historical, or you have to Sherlock it.

Let's take an example...

Lord Peter Wimsey was in a war and suffered severe PTSD. That's pretty easy to cover and, in a British context, when you look at the military careers of the Monarch's sons and grandsons, it wouldn't be implausible. Wimsey is backed by old money. Sandhurst and the Army for a second son would work.

His PTSD could even give him something of a distaste for cellphones, though Bunter would carry one. Look at what you can use for photography, these days.

These days, you'd get headlines in the more rabid parts of the press, but the death penalty has gone. That shifts the Harriet Vane situation in new directions. And some of the deadlines aren't there any more.

But I cannot see how you could do Five Red Herrings after Beeching had his way, and society has switched to personal motor cars.

IMO, the easier it is to send a signal, the more likely it is for the signal to be noise, or worse. A while back, somebody here explained to me what teens and tweens mainly do with their cell phones. When I was in Keds, they called it "gossip" and said that we shouldn't do it because somebody might get hurt.

@Dave Bell #112: Make the "red herrings" a bunch of people who do tweet and blog and Skype and so forth; the culprit is the one who knows how to diddle the time stamp software.

IMO, the easier it is to send a signal, the more likely it is for the signal to be noise, or worse. A while back, somebody here explained to me what teens and tweens mainly do with their cell phones. When I was in Keds, they called it "gossip" and said that we shouldn't do it because somebody might get hurt.

@Dave Bell #112: Make the "red herrings" a bunch of people who do tweet and blog and Skype and so forth; the culprit is the one who knows how to diddle the time stamp software.

Either that was the fastest manuscript-to-market turnover I've ever heard of, or it's downright prescient. My knowledge of Project Byzantium (through the people I know who are involved in making it come to pass) meant that about halfway through the book my jaw started hitting the floor.

Superman is the reason I assumed there were street-corner phone-booths, but I'm beginning to wonder if that was a later trope for the character - I can't recall him using one in the Fleischer cartoons, for example, while I do recall him ducking into broom closets or behind curtains.

My comics-fans spouse is now looking this up - he's found a reference from 1942, and a statement that the trope started on radio; but the panel is a tight close-up so I can't tell if the phone booth is on a street-corner or inside a building.

I wonder if Wimsey could be rebooted in the modern age? The social commentary aspects of the fiction would work, I think. And we've seen contemporary detectives who are members of the nobility, so that wouldn't be a barrier. He'd be a metrosexual (lol) and there would be speculation about his sexual orientation, at least until Harriet showed up.

He'd quote the Beatles and The Lord of the Rings along with John Donne and Shakespeare. Perhaps Harriet would be in danger of being extradited to the US, which would open the death penalty back up.

Does Oxford still have Gaudies?

I think it's her niece who clues her to social networks, though.

I do find Facebook useful for arranging parties, but I also keep an e-mail list of the people I want to invite who aren't on Facebook; that's just common courtesy. Aside from that, most of what I use it for is passing along links, because I don't trust it for anything much more personal than that.

No idea how the detective would crack it, though. (And does the Met still have a height requirement? I'd be sad if Peter never got to dress up as a policeman officer.)

IMO, the easier it is to send a signal, the more likely it is for the signal to be noise, or worse.

That puts something very neatly that I didn't have phrased.

I had the more roundabout concept of wondering what Ben Franklin would have thought of a high proportion of people having a combined and very cheap printing press and post office in their homes. Would he have predicted spam?

The idea that they might be interested in the trivia of my daily life is even more mysterious. *I* am not interested in the trivia of my daily life. That's why I carry a book with me: so that I have something to do while pumping the gas.

Wow. I read while I am brushing my teeth. I read while I am putting on socks. But you, sir, are a champion Warrior Against Boredom.

I don't think I have ever pulled out reading material while waiting for gas to pump. Maybe I should try it.

(Mind you, my car is equipped with an S. J. Perelman collection in case I ever have to wait for a towtruck, or the passage of an extremely long freight train. These days, e-books in a smartphone might serve this purpose, but I formed these habits long before smartphones.)

I wouldn't want to do it with a Kindle because occasionally I would slip in the mud or something; also I can drop a paperback, stuff it into my pocket a bit too hard, etc., and not be out more than $0.50. (I buy them used.)

Texting is rapidly taking over from phoning because it's considered less intrusive; the textee can keep doing whatever they're doing and still get the message later, where a phone call has to interrupt someone's day. (you'd think answering machines would be an equalizer here, especially considering by how long they predate texts, but they still don't seem to be. Something about the written word vs. the oral, I suppose).

Colin heard a radio program where someone was asserting that modern etiquette requires you to text someone (not a business, obviously) to find out if it's a good time to phone them, not phone out of the blue. Colin and the friends (30s, 40s, late 20s) he shared this with, even the most texting-inclined, thought that was absurd ("maybe you should send an e-mail to see if you can text." "And mail a letter to see if you can e-mail" "and send a carrier pigeon...") but one of them mentioned it to some younger coworkers, and they got into a serious debate about the point.

Personally, I didn't have a cell until this year; my husband didn't have one until late in my pregnancy, when it occurred to me that, while I wasn't likely to have problems getting hold of him if I was the one out of the house when I went into labour (find me a business that wouldn't let me borrow a phone under that circumstance - and many random strangers on the street, for that matter**) I'd have a bear of a time reaching him if I was home and he was out. Then his new job gave him an iphone, and I got the extant one. I've used it twice, carried it around almost never, and been bothered by a wrong number at 4 AM once. Not sure that quite balances out...

*The Middleman series' handy social networking/video site of dodging trademark issues.
**Would this be the cell phone equivalent of herd immunity?

I think it's only Apple that seal the case shut - I've never seen a phone where you couldn't take the battery out.

Lenora Rose @ 130: Texting is rapidly taking over from phoning because it's considered less intrusive; the textee can keep doing whatever they're doing and still get the message later, where a phone call has to interrupt someone's day. (you'd think answering machines would be an equalizer here, especially considering by how long they predate texts, but they still don't seem to be. Something about the written word vs. the oral, I suppose).

I personally _hate_ speaking to machines, so I'll never leave a message if it can be avoided.

Crossing the Atlantic in a small plane has never been the norm, so I found that aspect of Clouds of Witness pretty riveting.

It threw me enough out of the world and story that I only got a few chapters in before giving up.

One of the Internet's hoax RFC(*) documents is IP over Avian Carriers - carrier pigeons. In 1990, it was implemented by pigeon fanciers/hackers in Norway, and the report is fairly extensive. The ping output shows two-hour packet round trips.

(*) RFC stands for "Request For Comment", the Internet's standards. Traditionally, joke RFCs are often issued April 1st. At least two, "The Naming of Hosts" and "SONET to Sonnet translation" would be right at home here.

Television characters, whether on sitcoms or crime dramas or family sagas, were always doing something: going somewhere or talking to someone or dealing with a problem or buying something. Watching television is, for dramatic purposes, like taking a bath or sleeping or waiting for a train. It's going to be edited out, on television, and maybe mentioned briefly in a book. There are aspects of what we do with the net that are like that: reading a newspaper or watching a movie or ball game doesn't become interactive because I'm doing it here rather than using newsprint or a television set.

But there's also a different sort of merging of things, I think: once upon a time, if I was in New York and dating someone in Boston, we'd have spent a bunch of time on the phone if we could afford it, and that would be more focused, or sent lots of letters. Now, we can chat on IM and interweave that with looking at blogs, petting the cat, phone calls from our mothers… it's not just the amount of time spent looking at a screen, it's the ways we interact with other people via the screen, which a person watching television doesn't.

WJW wrote on his blog after Deep State came out that he'd lucked out by having the Arab Spring become news in the West at about the same time as the release of the book. He'd finished the book early in 2010, I believe, and it followed the normal publishing cycle. But aside from luck he deserves the credit for some really good research and careful extrapolation from that.

And if you haven't, be sure to read the 3rd book, The Fourth Wall. It's different ...

In the books, there's a reference to Lord Peter having problems with giving orders, because in the war it so often led to people getting killed.

Though I don't recall whether that is authentic Wimsey, or the authorised sequels...

Update to current military operations, and every soldier carries a two way radio, earpiece and mic, in constant contact with their superiors. It might not be everyone hearing everyone, but it's possible that Wimsey has given an order, and heard the man die.

And that's where the no-cellphone idea came from.

I have an uncomfortable feeling that this is deriving from the authorised sequels. Did DLS go into detail about his PTSD? It is part of his character, but how explicit is she?

Though I don't recall whether that is authentic Wimsey, or the authorised sequels...

It's mentioned in Busman's Honeymoon.

In Travel by Wire, I think I remember that Clarke has teleportation in Britain being run by the Post Office, because of course it would be.

Thanks, that fits with my hazy memory, something like Bunter explaining something to Harriet.

The starting point would be Wimsey in his early thirties, which would put the Dowager Duchess in the ambiguous fifties of her life.

(Oh, all right...)

He's a shell-shocked war veteran, she's his widowed mother. Together they fight crime!

(Sorry.)

(Well, not really. Imagine what you could do with some redubbed clips of Sherlock. Una Stubbs could pass as a Dowager Duchess.)

(I might be starting a manic phase...)

Dave Bell (147): He's a shell-shocked war veteran, she's his widowed mother. Together they fight crime!

I'd read that.

Ghod, I love geeks....

I'd never consciously noticed before the lack of TV-watching on TV shows (I've noticed the lack of book-reading, but figured that's because it's boring to watch....) but I suppose I should give a counter-example; in "The Big Bang Theory" they do watch TV (or, rather, they start to before said TV-watching is comically interrupted), and the characters refer to watching TV regularly. However, off-hand, that's the only show I can think of where this happens.

Latest phone accessory; designer Farraday cages! (If someone hasn't started marketing these, they should....)

There are authorized Wimsey sequels? I never knew! Are they any good?

Thrones, Dominations, which Dorothy L Sayers, started to write, is quite good. A Presumption of Death, based on some DLS notes, is reasonable. The Attenbury Emeralds, which ppears to be made up out of the whole cloth, is neither good nor reasonable.

Thanks; I'll look actively for the first, read the second if I come across it, and ignore the third!

(Newbie question; when doing the link-back, should I put the first-name last-name as above, or is just the first name sufficient? This question not just for you, but all multi-named people. Trying to learn the social norms here....)

It's probably worth using both names for me, as there are other Nancys on the board.

Plus, there's the whole "don't remind folks that they're in a work of art," where you don't (in the course of your melodrama) have the hero say to the villain, "You sound like the villain in a melodrama!" no matter how true it may be.

Okay, we're abandoning that sentence.

Anyway, it's either that or it's me calling someone to talk. Not everyone has forty minutes to sit and chat, even for fairly active values of 'sit'. I've made appointments via email before, but texting would work too.

There's some murky disputed territory between historial fiction and alt-history; it's all alt-history in the sense that it never happened, but the 'straight' historical fiction author operates under a sort of parole which forbids mucking around with big stuff. Invent a 19th-century town or Congressman, but not a State or President—that would take you into a different sort of contract between author and reader.

TV shows where no-one watches TV are one thing; worse are SF shows (and books) set in the present day where no-one has ever seen any SF, or learned any lessons from it. (Let's go back in time and change history / oh dear it hasn't worked out as well as we thought it would / how could we ever have known? Stephen Fry's Making History, I'm looking at you.)

Remembrance of the Daleks, the best of the very late era old-Dr Who stories, takes the action back to the day (November 23rd, 1963) of the first ever episode, and playfully almost shows us a TV showing us the first episode of Dr Who.

The book is set in 2061 and the premise concerns what is and isn't possible in a full-immersion VR game.

The series has problems-- they're SF in genre but not SF in the genre conversation, for one thing-- but I love them for that line alone.

Wait - do the emeralds get stolen again, or is this a prequel to (spoiler)?

Steve, #161
Making History, I'm looking at you

Had it been a larger group of people, I would have been surprised that no one was worried about the consequences of altering the timeline, but with an unauthorized two-person project, I just assumed neither person was an sf fan; also, one was young and naive, and the other was very convinced that no turn of events could be worse than what *had* happened.

My experience of E.E. "Doc" Smith is limited, but I was struck by how his space engineers have no concept of an electronic flight computer - the crew always has to include at least one live navigator with a slide rule, making course corrections on the fly. It also took me a while to realize that what he called "plates" were video screens.

That said, the jargon of his engineers and pilots struck me as oddly believable, probably due to being modeled on that of the aircraft engineers and pilots of his own time.

Cassy, #154: I tend to stick with first names unless there are multiple regulars with the same name, for whom I include a last initial or some other specific identifier. This is because I'm lazy and don't want to type any more than I have to. :-)

Jim, #157: "... and happy endings only occur in theatrical productions." - The Mikado

But as no-one here should read the book, I don't really need to avoid spoilers!

I was re-reading soome Arthur C Clarke the other day, and noted portable music players and e-books. I am impressed with the prediction of these; but would have been more impressed if he had also managed to predict wrangles over DRM, copyright infringement &c.

Tubes are never mentioned in the context of calculators, IIRC, but are noted (complete with glowing filaments) in enough other contexts to make it clear he never imagined the transistor, much less the rest of the semiconductor revolution. Given that imagined tech level, it is not surprising that he didn't imagine such a beast being small enough to fit on a ship.

Then there's Seinfeld, where a whole story arc concerned a fictional sitcom about Jerry Seinfeld...

Steve with a book (161): It has occurred to me that all* fiction is arguably alternate history: the characters (mostly) don't really exist, and neither do a lot of the locations. Or the events.

But that's too broad a definition to be useful.

*Except possibly the kind of historical fiction that tries to hew as closely as possible to known history and personages, only inventing conversations and the like.

They were not very designerly, but I have used small Farraday cages while testing wireless insulin pump controllers. They were about the size of a thick hardcover novel, solid metal with a copper mesh gasket, and a toggle latch to hold the cover tightly closed.

One pitfall to this approach is that, for example, Mary Aileen's first name is Mary Aileen.

Jim 157: OTOH I remember someone in some show somewhere saying "Oh, spare me the supervillian riff!" Or words much like those. I think it may have been a Whedon thing, but

google google

No, it was Stargate SG-1. That show was almost as full of pop-culture references as Farscape. My favorite was Sam saying she could "MacGyver something together," and Jack (played by the same actor who played MacGyver) telling her never to say that again.

And the actor who said the "spare me" line above also played Q, the closest thing to a supervillain ST:TNG ever had.

If I don't come back from the attic in a decade or two, please send search party.

Q:
In come I, just call me Q
I do whatever I want to do
Leaping through any and all situations,
I'm simply an animate plot complication

-- from "King Boreas and the Vulcans," by JMF, with help around the edges from EM

Can we trust ANYTHING Melissa Stetten says? Model who tweeted actor's in-flight advances has history of stretching truth | Mail Online

The items listed as actual lies include:

- Not giving her age to agencies. Not a surprise in Hollywood. If the article has her age right, she lies by at most a year or two.
- possibly liking/ not liking an actor. or possibly changing her mind. Good lord help us.
- a probable April Fool's joke, which if it wasn't, is the one of the lot that's serious.

It also mentions her talking about a miscarriage and a rocky relationship, but never actually dares to say these things didn't happen. It lists them in close conjunction with the above lies or "lies", but only says her blog includes posts about them. The way it reads to me is that they wanted to make that association in peoples' minds without actually courting a slander case.

Oh, also mentioning she took an antidepressant. Because that has something to do with lying or not.

I don't know if he hit on her, but if this is the level of the reporting against her, I'm sickened for a lot of other reasons.

I think we're finding more and more mentions of genre within TV shows and books these days, if only because the very nature of fandom has expanded in an adaptive radiation reminiscent of the Cambrian Explosion. My favorite recent example was a couple of seasons back on Castle a TV show about a mystery writer who partners with an NYPD detective and wears a windbreaker with "WRITER" on the back. While interrogating a Chinese covert agent Castle unexpectedly showed fluency in Mandarin. His partner asked him if he'd studied the language in college. He replied, "Favorite TV show". The joke is that Castle is played by Nathan Fillion, who also played Mal Reynolds in Firefly, where he spoke in Mandarin frequently.

The giant dreadlocked warrior gets nicknamed Chewie almost immediately: "Easy, Chewie".

Charlie Stross @ #93: You've just described the milieu of Mira Grant's "Newsflesh" trilogy, at least for reporter/bloggers.

Vicki @136: The old "All in the Family" show was novel at the time for having Archie Bunker sitting and watching TV. The camera angle was from the direction of the TV, so you never actually saw the TV, but it was clear that was what the character was watching.

Sarah @165: IIRC, one of the WWII admirals (Nimitz or Halsey) credited Doc Smith with inventing the concept of a ship's C3I center (Command, Control, Communications and Information) on the Directrix in "Galactic Patrol" (or one of the other Lensman novels). A concept they successfully implemented and took advantage of in WWII and ever since. He may well have invented some of the jargon now used by engineers ;-)

Other stuff: fan of J.D. Robb here. "La Nora" is a good writer in general, and just a class act all around. As for genre, I think of the Eve Dallas novels as Cyberpunk. Not a term you see much anymore, but they are, as is the new TV series "Person of Interest".

An influence that is inarguable was described in an 11 June 1947 letter to Doc from John W. Campbell (the editor of Astounding magazine, where much of the Lensman series was originally published). In it, Campbell relayed Captain Cal Laning's acknowledgment that he had used Smith's ideas for displaying the battlespace situation (called the "tank" in the stories) in the design of the United States Navy's ships' Combat Information Centers. "The entire set-up was taken specifically, directly, and consciously from the Directrix. In your story, you reached the situation the Navy was in—more communication channels than integration techniques to handle it. You proposed such an integrating technique and proved how advantageous it could be. You, sir, were 100% right. As the Japanese Navy—not the hypothetical Boskonian fleet—learned at an appalling cost."

Of course, this rather conveniently ignores the C3I system developed by Fighter Command of the RAF, successfully used in 1940.

How I Met Your Mother incorporates TV a lot, though usually they're watching movies on tape/DVD. In one episode, Ted makes his soon-to-be-fiancee watch Star Wars (the right one) to see if she has "the right stuff" to be his wife. One of the main characters is a tv newsreporter (for various fringe channels) and the other characters frequently watch her broadcasts and have even appeared on her program once or twice.

On Big Bang Theory, the tv watching isn't always interrupted before it gets started; sometimes we come into a scene where they are watching something (and have been for a while, judging by internal evidence) and then something disrupts the gathering.

Modern Family includes tv watching several times a season, though tv-watching usually breaks down along gender lines. The men watch sports; the women watch stuff that makes them cry. The exception is nature shows, which fascinate everyone.

There was a Doctor Who episode where some characters were watching EastEnders; you could see the screen and if you were a fan of the soap you knew exactly what was going on.

In The Great Game episode of Sherlock, John and Sherlock are in a cafe when a program comes on featuring a recent murder victim; John says that he and Mrs. Hudson frequently saw her program (since they're home all day with nothing to do). Sherlock is later shown watching tv and being twitchy; John complains that he should never have gotten Sherlock hooked on crappy television. (They talk about tv in A Study in Pink but do not watch anything in that episode.)

(That made me wonder what the first British novel was in which all the main characters habitually watched TV. It may well have been Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

Karen Gillan (who plays Amy Pond on Doctor Who) is apparently a big fan of Community .

"Anviliciously". Great word. Must steal....

In Orwellian England, television watches you.

Sarah @193, if you're looking for examples from comics, television is a great big deal (with more than one plot thread depending on it) in American Flagg.

Bruce @184 - I think the Castle/Firefly crossover is even better in the part where his daughter tells him he stopped being a Space Cowboy years ago.

Finally, on the topic of where sharing information online gets complicated in ways we don't currently deal with:
As more of a person's online and offline activity gets recorded and cross referenced, it will be difficult to distinguish between what they read and what they do. Legally, you can make the distinction as there's plenty of precedent. But what impact would it have on you to know that 90% of the porn your coworker watches shares a number of characteristics with your appearance? It might be they're incredibly creepy. It might be that they think you're cute. It might be that they actually have you off their radar entirely because they're devoted to their partner. But once you find this sort of thing out, I don't think you can avoid it affecting you.
Are you willing to go camping with someone who has 5x as many edits on Wikipedia articles about serial killers as anybody else? Are you willing to meet them for a date?

Few, if any, contemporary stories leverage this, and fewer in a real-world manner (i.e. not "magic AI" or ridiculous zoom-in a la Bladerunner.) But, quite a few recent contemporary-setting novels I've read have the hoary old "villain mails photos to character" trope going; I've never seen anyone flip that around to "villain reveals secret lair by mailing photos to character."