President-elect Barack Obama wants to keep his BlackBerry even after taking office.
He made that clear in a video clip this morning on ABC's Good Morning America, from an upcoming interview with Barbara Walters (It's online, with Walters' question at 4:35).
The One's own Blackberry has never been far from his hand or his belt, a routine communications channel not only with his campaign staff but with a group of friends and presumably anyone else who has his email address.
[What do you think should happen with Obama's emails? Take the poll]
He told Walters that wants to keep his BlackBerry or some equivalent. He's working on "breaking through the bubble that surrounds the president," he said. So he's negotiating with the Secret Service, lawyers and others on "ways to get information [from] outside the circle of 10-12 people who surround my office in the White House. I want to make sure that I keep my finger on the pulse of the struggles that people are going through every day."
We all saw how well the bubble-breaking shtick worked with Joe the Plumber, who only had to express his doubts about The One's tax policies to be pilloried, psychoanalyzed and investigated.
And the Obama campaign has pioneered the use of online and mobile media to smother its critics in traditional media.
BT security chief Bruce Schneier has an interesting take: the "ephemera" of our digital lives are not in fact emphemeral -- emails, along with tweets, blog comments, IM dialogs and all the rest leave an indelible, identifiable, and for all practical purposes eternal trail. Our life story, or our life's stories, like an ever-present digital wake behind us, with us. These need to be safeguarded for private citizens, and made accountable for public officials, Schneier argues. Meaning, more laws.
I'm not quite convinced. If the only bulwark of privacy is a legal one, that's seems a pretty thin defense. Privacy's nature lies in the nature of the person, specifically the person's inherent dignity. But those are concepts being steadily eroded not only by law but by culture. Digital life seems to allow us to create a new self, one that we assume is private but in fact is not. If your self is a digital construct then it's public, shared, and hackable, as Sarah Palin discovered when her private email account was violated.
The other issue is the simply the nature of these "ephemera" -- spontaneous, immediate, unscripted, typically though not always one-on-one, precisely because they are presumed to be "private." The word "intercourse" is apt: a "running between" to use the Latin root.
Digital intercourse is more like a Internet marriage of exhibitionists and voyeurs.
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Cox is a senior editor at Network World.
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