An Open Book

From: doublebinding

“A Toronto woman denied a flight to New York as part of a cruise trip wants to know who told U.S. border agents about her history of mental illness.

     Ellen Richardson says she was turned away by a U.S. customs agent at Pearson International Airport on Monday because she had been hospitalized for clinical depression in June 2012.
     She missed her flight to New York City and a Caribbean cruise, for which she had paid $6,000, as a result.”
— CBC via Huffington Post
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If border officials are making decisions based on medical records, what’s to stop them from checking on reading habits as well?

“For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
     The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.”
— Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal
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“As recent weeks [July/August, 2013] of revelations [about the flagrant invasiveness of the NSA] have shown, there's a pretty wide gap between our expectations of privacy, and the privacies that an increasingly digitized world actually affords us. Whatever your feelings about your own privacy, the complexity and opacity of technology means it's often hard to know exactly what information you might be sharing at any given time. And while browsing in a local library, buying a book – with cash – on the high street, and reading at home or on the bus are pretty anonymous activities, as soon as ebooks are involved they're not.”
— James Bridle, The Guardian
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Facecrime

"[…] If all of this summons thoughts of George Orwell’s fictional dystopia 1984, you’re not alone. In an August 2011 ruling that blocked the U.S. government’s attempted warrantless seizure of subscriber location data from Verizon Wireless during a criminal investigation, federal judge Nicholas Garaufis wrote, 'While the government’s monitoring of our thoughts may be the archetypical Orwellian intrusion, the government’s surveillance of our movements over a considerable time period through new technologies, such as the collection of cell-site-location records, without the protections of the Fourth Amendment, puts our country far closer to Oceania than our Constitution permits.'
     Take Cisco’s vision of Songdo (and by extension the new China), an urban civilization powered by ubiquitous two-way video screens, and fold in the latest in biometrics. It would be hard to design a more flawless replica of Orwell’s 'telescreen,' which pumped out propaganda while watching vigilantly for hints of dissent.
     As Orwell wrote in 1984, 'It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: Facecrime, it was called.'
     Peaceful Chongqing is just a warm-up for Cisco. The market for surveillance products in China is growing at double-digit rates. It’s a future where police, bureaucrats, employers, and hackers may look out from every screen we look into."
— Anthony M. Townsend, Salon
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“A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.” — Henry James

Raold Dahl's writing hut (from: hermastersvoice)

"Is there something frankly embarrassing or shameful about being a 'writer'?

The public identification does seem just a bit self-conscious, at times. Like identifying oneself as a 'poet,' 'artist,' 'seer,' 'visionary.'

Yet you are, are you not, a 'writer'? After all these years?

If I’m required to identify myself on a form, I write 'teacher.' I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve been writing. [Pause.] I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who writes — or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage.

A curious and unconvincing sort of modesty! Your name is on your book covers, after all.

But my name is not me."

— Joyce Carol Oates, The Washington Post
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