I finally gave into temptation and bought myself a Kindle e-book reader, which I'm so far very impressed with.
I immediately went to manybooks.net and downloaded a couple dozen literary classics (Candide, Metamorphosis, Ulysses, etc.), all free. I also transferred a couple dozen philosophy PDFs that I've been meaning to read.
Unfortunately, one of these was a scanned-image pdf (JSTOR style), which didn't transfer at all well. The Kindle shrinks images to fit, so I could barely make out the words. So much for JSTOR. But I was relieved to find that the others (including ordinary text-based PDFs) convert and display perfectly reasonably well. I think the only other downside to bear in mind here is that you lose page numbering. Kindle includes a replacement measure called "location", but that won't be much help if you're trying to sync with other people who are reading non-Kindle versions of the text. Oh, and logical symbols get mangled -- '$' in place of the existential quantifier, etc.
Other than that, I have no serious complaints. I find the Kindle very pleasant and comfortable to read from -- the main selling point is, after all, its ink-based display technology -- there's no glare, so it feels like reading a book, unlike backlit computer screens. (Minor aesthetic complaint: the background is a newspaperish gray rather than pure white.) It's small, light, and easy to hold. Some people complain that it's too easy to accidentally bump the 'next page' button, but I haven't found this a problem myself, so long as I put it to sleep when carrying rather than reading it.
I like the navigation a lot. It's actually quicker and easier than turning a page in a regular book. Granted, you can't flick through multiple pages nearly so well, but there is a 'search' feature which more than compensates for this. Other options allow you to 'highlight' text, 'add notes', or 'bookmark' pages for future reference. And you don't need to worry about losing your place, since whenever you open a document, it picks up from wherever you previously left off. (I should note that the tiny keyboard is made for thumbing, not typing, so you won't be writing treatises in the margins. But it's handy enough for jotting down quick thoughts as you read.)
Aside from comfortably reading e-books and online papers, the other great feature of the Kindle is free mobile internet. The display is a bit awkward, and - combined with the clunky little keyboard - you certainly wouldn't want to use it as your primary form of internet access. But it's nice to have access to email on the go, and my feed reader (bloglines) works tolerably well on it, too. (I'm sure the iPhone is much better in these respects, but I'm deterred by the price tag.)
Other features are fun but superficial. There's an mp3 player, but the sound quality isn't great. There's a (black-and-white) picture viewer, and it's nice to be able to carry around photos of loved ones, but the resolution is far from photo-quality. I hear you can even play Minesweeper, but I fortunately haven't gotten that bored of reading yet!
Is it worth $399? It is for me, though it may not be for everybody. There's a lot of free digital content out there that I can now take full advantage of. In particular, my main reason for buying the Kindle was to read online philosophy papers, which it's great for. But now that I've got it, I find that I'm also appreciating the opportunity to read all those old literary classics that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten around to. I don't expect to buy much paid content from the Kindle store, since I don't tend to buy much of anything, but you might want to compare prices if you're into that kind of thing. (I gather the Kindle versions tend to be slightly cheaper than hardcopies, and they're conveniently "delivered" to your device in minutes.) At present, selection seems to be limited mostly to new bestsellers and old public domain works. So be warned: anything in between may not be available.
Full disclosure: Amazon will give me a 10% referral fee if you buy it via this link!
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Review: Amazon Kindle
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Clay Shirky on Participatory Media
Watch the video, or read the transcript. First, the depressing:
Wikipedia... represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought...
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
Then, the hopeful:
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.
See also my review of Clay Shirky's book.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Document Freedom Day
Googleblog notes that today is Document Freedom Day. This reminds me that I should stop locking up my work and other information in Microsoft's .doc format, and instead use the standardized open document formats (.odt), which are universal rather than vendor-specific.
Imagine if we all wrote in invisible ink that could only be read by wearing special Microsoft-designed glasses. That would seem unwise, at least if there were better alternatives available (i.e. 'open inks' that anyone's glasses could read). What if not everyone has the special glasses? (Do you really want to make being a Microsoft customer a precondition for communicating with you?) Further: how can we be sure that these special glasses will continue to be made in future? We would be needlessly exposing ourselves to the risk of being unable to read our own words a few decades down the line.
Do yourself and your non-Microsoft-using friends a favour, and download an open document application today. (I personally recommend Open Office, a free and high-powered alternative to Microsoft's entire office suite.)
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Publish Then Filter
A common theme in analyses of the Internet is the transformation from a 'filter then publish' to a 'publish, then filter' world. The high costs of publishing previously forced the former model on us: anyone who wanted to see their work in print first had to win over the gatekeepers (editors of newspapers, journals, etc.). But now anyone and his dog can publish for free over the Internet. So the contemporary challenge is post-publication filtering, i.e. how to find the gems in the torrent of information out there.
One option is to turn to the old gatekeepers for guidance. Anyone can self-publish, but not everyone can publish in the pages of the NY Times or Nous. So we can keep ourselves in a world of informational scarcity if we limit our attention to particular locations which impose pre-publication filtering.
That's fine as far as it goes, but it is an extremely conservative response to the new information ecology. It makes us no worse off than before, at least. But it's worth raising the question: might we have an opportunity now to improve the way we do things? I've already mentioned open-access, which is of course a no-brainer. But that is just a minor tweak, still firmly within the old 'filter then publish' paradigm. To be clear: I think there is an important place for this, at least for the foreseeable future. But I wonder whether we could supplement this with some form of more widely distributed post-publication peer review.
I imagine, for example, the Philosophy Papers Online database could be expanded to allow registered philosophers to rate and/or review the papers found therein. (If measures are needed to 'guard the guardians', these reviews themselves could be subject to peer review -- Slashdot style -- and weighted accordingly. Other online communities have already solved the technical question of how to create a software infrastructure that supports peer production. All we have to do is implement it.)
This would make PhOnline a vastly more valuable resource, since users could browse the most highly rated papers, using these peer ratings as a guide to the most important new scholarship. (At present, users may search by author, title, or date, but there is no way to gauge quality.) This would only work if other philosophers put in the effort to review their colleagues' work. But we already do this for journals, so I don't see why we wouldn't also do this for each other. Depending on how it's set up (i.e. not anonymous review), there could be additional incentives to perform this service, as quality reviewers would benefit from reputational gains within the profession. It could even be technologically enforced, e.g. by requiring that users offer a few reviews before they are allowed to submit another paper of their own to the database.
(In that case, perhaps it would be best to start this project from scratch, rather than trying to build upon an already existing database of papers.)
John Holbo offers a variation on this sentiment (but restricted, I take it, to work that has already passed through the old channels of official credentialing -- I would want to expand this to "unpublished" drafts):
If overproduction is inevitable, which I grant, the primary question is not how to fund it but how to ameliorate the damage it does us. (Having gone overboard by describing excess scholarship as 'effluent' I should probably add: producing things no one wants to read is perfectly harmless so long as these undesired things do not collectively block the road.) The question is how to overproduce with intellectual dignity?
The answer, I think, is that a supplement is needed to a pre-publication peer review process that inevitably hyper-produces hypertrophic 'conformist excellence within the heuristic contraints ...' The supplement should be a hyper-efficient post-publication peer review process that tells you what you might actually want to read.
A simple normative principle. Every scholarly book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed and reviewed - should have it's own lively blog comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a modest measure of sustained, considerate, intelligent chat from a few dozen souls who specialize in that area shouldn't have been published as a book - i.e. after several years labor and an average production cost of $25,000. Turning the point around: any book worth that time and expense, that fails to be widely read, discussed and reviewed - that is not given it's own blog comment box - has been dramatically failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born. [...]
Why is this really quite low normative standard of healthy discussion not presently met? The technological barriers are non-existent, the financial barriers negligible. It's cultural dysfunction. Sheer institutional sclerosis.
The Real Circulation Problem - of which low book sales are a symptom - concerns ideas, not paper. The academic humanities have simply never grown hyper-efficient networks for post-publication peer review that are remotely adequate to the excessive volume of peer-reviewed scholarship generated, especially in just the last few decades. This is the real scholarly argument for moving aggressively online, although it is bolstered by many economic arguments. As I have written before, the beast has poor circulation. The only way to get the blood of ideas moving is to rub its sorry limbs vigorously with ... conversations. Intelligent, bloggy bookchat by scholars, to label this crucial ingredient as the essentially unpretentious thing it is. That isn't scholarship; but - in a world with too much scholarship - it may be an indispensable complement to scholarship.
Cf. Tyler Cowen, for a more radical long-term projection:
I don't envision the free access system as the status quo but free. Papers would be ranked directly in terms of status and popularity rather than ranked through the journals they are published in. Ultimately there wouldn't be journals and this would make a big difference as journals are the current carrier of selective incentives and status rewards...
I'm not sure about this -- what about blind review? We'll presumably want to retain this somehow, if not by journals than via some similar formal means of competition. (Though others have suggested that googling spells the doom of blind review, in which case it's hard to imagine why journals would survive in the long term.) In any case, journals certainly aren't going anywhere in the short term. So I'm really proposing a supplementary system (not a replacement) that I think we'd all benefit from right away.
Update: I've shifted discussion of my specific proposal to a new post.
Monday, March 03, 2008
Review: Here Comes Everybody
Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations explores the power of new communications technology and social media to transform society. As a blogger, it's a topic I find very appealing.
Shirky begins with a premise about human nature: we're social animals and like to form groups. Recent changes have radically reduced the costs of doing so, broadening access to "capabilities [e.g. publishing] previously reserved for professionals" (p.17) and thus empowering people to organize themselves, with occasionally spectacular results. Shirky writes (p.22):
The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.
The fuller explanation involves Coasean economics. (1) Note that transaction costs would skyrocket if everyone worked freelance, constantly negotiating in the marketplace. That's why we have firms ("organizations"): it can be more efficient to have managers simply order their employees about. (2) However, managerial overhead brings its own costs. This implies what Shirky calls a Coasean floor, beneath which lie potentially valuable activities that cannot be profitably realized by either market or institutional means. However (p.47):
Now that it is possible to achieve large-scale co-ordination at low cost, a third category has emerged: serious, complex work, taken on without institutional direction. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure, because they lay under the Coasean floor.
The cost of all kinds of group activity--sharing, cooperation, and collective action--have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath the floor are now coming to light. We didn't notice how many things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.
It's a nice enough analysis, but the real value of this book lies in its illustrative examples. Shirky discusses everything from Flickr, blogs, and open source software, to flash mobs, political protesters, Wiccan meetups, and Catholic lay groups self-organizing for the first time ever to reform the Church.
There are also little insights scattered throughout the book. Consider, for example, the common disdain felt towards the "drivel" posted on Livejournal and the like (pp.85-6):
We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us... if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, as opposed to reading their post, it would be clear that you were the weird one...
Most user-generated content isn't "content" at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a relative is "family-generated content." Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life--gossip, little updates, thinking out loud--but now it's done in the same medium as professionally produced material.
I also liked his point about the impossibility of full-blown interactivity with the famous, no matter what technology we might come up with. To be famous is to receive more incoming attention than one could realistically hope to reciprocate (by any means). So even bloggers, when they hit the big time, are forced to become mere broadcasters rather than responsive participants in an open conversation. (A good reason not to desire fame, I should think!)
The book also contains some interesting thoughts on political and social change, especially the importance of "lower[ing] the hurdles to doing something in the first place, so that people who cared a little could participate a little, while being effective in aggregate." (pp.181-2):
Having a handful of highly motivated people and a mass of barely motivated ones used to be a recipe for frustration. The people who were on fire wondered why the general population didn't care more, and the general population wondered why those obsessed people didn't just shut up. Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves.
One thing Shirky emphasizes throughout is the way that so-called "cyberspace" is growing increasingly intertwined with meatspace. He discusses using his mobile phone, and a service called 'dodgeball', to learn that a friend of a friend was currently in the same NYC bar. Conversation ensued: "I'm Clay. If Dennis were here, he'd introduce us." (p.219) Pretty amazing, really, and something we can expect to become increasingly common.
Finally, a couple of cute philosophy quotes:
The groups now adopting social tools form the experimental wing of political philosophy, a place where hard questions of group governance are being worked out. [p.? lost it.]
Wikis take on one of the most basic questions of political philosophy: Who will guard the guardians? Their answer is, everyone. [p.272]
Note that if you're looking for a rigorous academic work on social media and the promise of peer-production, you can't go past Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks (available for free, here). But Here Comes Everybody offers an accessible introduction to the broad issues raised by social media, so I would especially recommend it to non-specialists who are curious to learn what all the fuss is about.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Defining 'Fair Use'
[I]t is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines: no one (well, nearly no one) would watch Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs” as a substitute for “Star Wars”; a book review is no substitute for reading “The Naked and the Dead.” They are complements to the original work, not substitutes, and that makes all the difference.
This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web. Fan guides like the Harry Potter Lexicon or Lostpedia are not substitutes for reading the book or watching the show, and that should be the end of the legal questions surrounding them. The same goes for reasonable tribute videos like this great Guyz Nite tribute to “Die Hard.” On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.
We must never forget that copyright is about authorship; and secondary authors, while never as famous as the original authors, deserve some respect. Fixing fair use is one way to give them that.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Safekeeping Cyberspace
[Part Six in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]
We've seen that the Internet, as a more open and accessible public media space, creates new opportunities and advances important democratic values. It makes the broader culture more transparent and responsive, it empowers citizens to express themselves creatively, and it enhances autonomy by broadening the range of possibilities open for us to choose between. The end result – if this opportunity is recognized – is a more ‘conversational’ public sphere, whereby citizens can deliberate together in an ongoing dialogue, at least to a greater extent than was possible under the mass-mediated industrial model that dominated the twentieth century.
These benefits are not inevitable, however. Private control over its physical infrastructure could threaten the democratic potential of the Internet, for example:Clearly, when in 2005 Telus, Canada’s second largest telecommunications company, blocked access to the Web site of the Telecommunications Workers Union for all of its own clients and those of internet service providers that relied on its backbone network, it was not seeking to improve service for those customers’ benefit, but to control a conversation in which it had an intense interest. (p.398)
Possible solutions to this might involve public provision of broadband and/or open wireless network infrastructure, as several U.S. municipalities are currently investigating (pp.406-7). Public provision of this essential infrastructure would also help overcome the ‘digital divide’ that excludes non-connected residents from the full benefits of networked citizenship.
Other threats include excessive IP laws (e.g. copyright extensions) that diminish the public domain and crowd out peer-production in favour of incumbent commercial industries. Further, hardware "fixes" -- i.e. the crippling of information devices, so as to preclude the very possibility of copyright infringement -- inevitably overreach, equally obstructing "fair use" and other perfectly legitimate actions.
Past posts in this series have highlighted the Internet's incredible potential, based on the distinctive ease with which people can use it to produce and share information. If we don't want to see its value squandered, we need to be wary of lobbyists and legislators who would undermine these distinctive qualities of the Internet (thus precluding its distinctive benefits). So, this is an important political issue for citizens to be aware of. In light of the democratic potential of the Internet, it would be an awful shame for our laws to convert it into just another commercial medium.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Activating Citizenship
[Part Five in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]
"The easy possibility of communicating effectively into the public sphere allows individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners to potential speakers and participants in a conversation. The way we listen to what we hear changes because of this; as does, perhaps most fundamentally, the way we observe and process daily events in our lives. We no longer need to take these as merely private observations, but as potential subjects for public communication." (p.213)
This leads to “a fundamental change in how individuals can interact with their democracy and experience their role as citizens” (p.272):Ideal citizens need not be seen purely as trying to inform themselves about what others have found, so that they can vote intelligently. They need not be limited to reading the opinions of opinion makers and judging them in private conversations. They are no longer constrained to occupy the role of mere readers, viewers, and listeners. They can be, instead, participants in a conversation. Practices that begin to take advantage of these new capabilities shift the locus of content creation from the few professional journalists trolling society for issues and observations, to the people who make up that society. They begin to free the public agenda setting from dependence on the judgments of managers, whose job it is to assure that the maximum number of readers, viewers, and listeners are sold in the market for eyeballs. The agenda thus can be rooted in the life and experience of individual participants in society—in their observations, experiences, and obsessions. The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the public sphere. They no longer need be consumers and passive spectators. They can become creators and primary subjects. It is in this sense that the Internet democratizes.
This ‘conversational’ approach represents a deliberative-democratic transformation of the public sphere itself (p. 180):The Internet allows individuals to abandon the idea of the public sphere as primarily constructed of finished statements uttered by a small set of actors socially understood to be “the media” (whether state owned or commercial) and separated from society, and to move toward a set of social practices that see individuals as participating in a debate. Statements in the public sphere can now be seen as invitations for a conversation, not as finished goods. Individuals can work their way through their lives, collecting observations and forming opinions that they understand to be practically capable of becoming moves in a broader public conversation, rather than merely the grist for private musings.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
How the Internet Enhances Autonomy
[Part Four in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]
We’ve seen that a networked information environment can enhance citizen autonomy in two key respects:
- It empowers citizens to express their creativity through the production of social media (from amateur film and music “mashups” to critical blogging).
- Better access to information (including “niche” information) enables citizens to consider a wider range of alternatives, and so make better informed decisions.
Benkler (pp. 138-9) elaborates on the first point:
In the industrial economy and its information adjunct, most people live most of their lives within hierarchical relations of production, and within relatively tightly scripted possibilities after work, as consumers…
The emergence of radically decentralized, nonmarket production provides a new outlet for the attenuation of the constrained and constraining roles of employees and consumers… We are seeing the emergence of the user as a new category of relationship to information production and exchange. Users are individuals who are sometimes consumers and sometimes producers. They are substantially more engaged participants, both in defining the terms of their productive activity and in defining what they consume and how they consume it. In these two great domains of life—production and consumption, work and play—the networked information economy promises to enrich individual autonomy substantively by creating an environment built less around control and more around facilitating action.
The emergence of radically decentralized nonmarket production in general and of peer production in particular as feasible forms of action opens new classes of behaviors to individuals. Individuals can now justifiably believe that they can in fact do things that they want to do, and build things that they want to build in the digitally networked environment, and that this pursuit of their will need not, perhaps even cannot, be frustrated by insurmountable cost or an alien bureaucracy. Whether their actions are in the domain of political organization (like the organizers of MoveOn.org), or of education and professional attainment (as with the case of Jim Cornish, who decided to create a worldwide center of information on the Vikings from his fifth-grade schoolroom in Gander, Newfoundland), the networked information environment opens new domains for productive life that simply were not there before. In doing so, it has provided us with new ways to imagine our lives as productive human beings. Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia may have seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far from delusional.
He adds: "Human beings who live in a material and social context that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others, are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. We can live a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by the material and social conditions in which we find ourselves. At least we can do so more effectively than we could until the last decade of the twentieth century."
As for the second point:
The emergence of the networked information economy makes one other important contribution to autonomy. It qualitatively diversifies the information available to individuals. Information, knowledge, and culture are now produced by sources that respond to a myriad of motivations, rather than primarily the motivation to sell into mass markets. Production is organized in any one of a myriad of productive organizational forms, rather than solely the for-profit business firm. The supplementation of the profit motive and the business organization by other motivations and organizational forms—ranging from individual play to large-scale peer-production projects—provides not only a discontinuously dramatic increase in the number of available information sources but, more significantly, an increase in available information sources that are qualitatively different from others. (p.162)
This diversity of information sources is important, because our autonomy is enhanced by putting the full diversity of human experience on display. Why? Because learning about other ways of life is vital for making a fully informed and reflective decision about our own:
In order to sustain the autonomy of a person born and raised in a culture with a set of socially embedded conventions about what a good life is, one would want a choice set that included at least some unconventional, non-mainstream, if you will, critical options. If all the options one has—even if, in a purely quantitative sense, they are “adequate”—are conventional or mainstream, then one loses an important dimension of self-creation. The point is not that to be truly autonomous one necessarily must be unconventional. Rather, if self-governance for an individual consists in critical reflection and re-creation by making choices over the course of his life, then some of the options open must be different from what he would choose simply by drifting through life, adopting a life plan for no reason other than that it is accepted by most others. A person who chooses a conventional life in the presence of the option to live otherwise makes that conventional life his or her own in a way that a person who lives a conventional life without knowing about alternatives does not. (p.151)
By making it possible for many more diversely motivated and organized individuals and groups to communicate with each other, the emerging model of information production provides individuals with radically different sources and types of stories, out of which we can work to author our own lives. Information, knowledge, and culture can now be produced not only by many more people than could do so in the industrial information economy, but also by individuals and in subjects and styles that could not pass the filter of marketability in the mass-media environment. The result is a proliferation of strands of stories and of means of scanning the universe of potential stories about how the world is and how it might become, leaving individuals with much greater leeway to choose, and therefore a much greater role in weaving their own life tapestry. (p.175)
Creative Media
[Part Three in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]
Creativity is a key value promoted by the new media environment. The enhanced capacity for both individual- and peer-production enables our transformation from passive consumers to engaged producers of social media. This is not to wholly replace polished, professional ("Hollywood") production, as Benkler notes (pp.55-6):It does not mean that there is no continued role for the mass-produced and mass-marketed cultural products—be they Britney Spears or the broadcast news. It does, however, mean that many more “niche markets”—if markets, rather than conversations, are what they should be called—begin to play an ever-increasing role in the total mix of our cultural production system. The economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen—more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost.
The point, again, is to supplement commercial mass-media products. Peer-produced niche products and information may prove valuable to diverse audiences, but – no less importantly – their production engages the creative capacities of their amateur producers, which – as every amateur hobbyist well knows – can be an extraordinarily empowering and meaningful human experience. As Benkler (pp.134-5) writes: [Home-made film] Jedi Saga will not be a blockbuster. It is not likely to be watched by many people. Those who do watch it are not likely to enjoy it in the same way that they enjoyed any of Lucas’s films, but that is not its point. When someone like Cejas makes such a film, he is not displacing what Lucas does. He is changing what he himself does—from sitting in front of a screen that is painted by another to painting his own screen. Those who watch it will enjoy it in the same way that friends and family enjoy speaking to each other or singing together, rather than watching talking heads or listening to Talking Heads.
Social media creates communities, and empowers the participants. They become contributors to their culture, rather than passive “consumers” of an (often imported) mass-media. Such cultural engagement exemplifies the core ideals of democracy, whereby active citizens work together to build a society, sharing their individual and collective experiences.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Democratizing Culture
[Part Two in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]
"Culture, shared meaning, and symbols are how we construct our views of life across a wide range of domains—personal, political, and social. How culture is produced is therefore an essential ingredient in structuring how freedom and justice are perceived, conceived, and pursued. In the twentieth century, Hollywood and the recording industry came to play a very large role in this domain. The networked information economy now seems poised to attenuate that role in favor of a more participatory and transparent cultural production system." (p.274)
Networked culture is more participatory because anyone can contribute: The radically declining costs of manipulating video and still images, audio, and text have... made culturally embedded criticism and broad participation in the making of meaning much more feasible than in the past. Anyone with a personal computer can cut and mix files, make their own files, and publish them to a global audience. (p.275)
When anyone can produce and share information, bypassing industrial bottlenecks, the resulting culture is far more diverse:[H]owever one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience. They have diverse interests—as diverse as human culture itself. Some care about Viking ships, others about the integrity of voting machines. Some care about obscure music bands, others share a passion for baking. As Eben Moglen put it, “if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It’s an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another’s pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone.”
It is this combination of a will to create and to communicate with others, and a shared cultural experience that makes it likely that each of us wants to talk about something that we believe others will also want to talk about, that makes the billion potential participants in today’s online conversation, and the six billion in tomorrow’s conversation, affirmatively better than the commercial industrial model… (p.55)
It also has the effect of making culture more transparent, by opening commercially imposed meanings to criticism. Benkler (p.277) points out: A nine-year-old girl searching Google for Barbie will quite quickly find links to AdiosBarbie.com, to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), and to other, similarly critical sites interspersed among those dedicated to selling and playing with the doll. The contested nature of the doll becomes publicly and everywhere apparent, liberated from the confines of feminist-criticism symposia and undergraduate courses. This simple Web search represents both of the core contributions of the networked information economy. First, from the perspective of the searching girl, it represents a new transparency of cultural symbols. Second, from the perspective of the participants in AdiosBarbie or the BLO, the girl’s use of their site completes their own quest to participate in making the cultural meaning of Barbie. The networked information environment provides an outlet for contrary expression and a medium for shaking what we accept as cultural baseline assumptions. Its radically decentralized production modes provide greater freedom to participate effectively in defining the cultural symbols of our day. These characteristics make the networked environment attractive from the perspectives of both personal freedom of expression and an engaged and self-aware political discourse.
To reiterate: networked media enable citizens and other non-commercial actors to contribute to our shared understanding of the world, and to respond critically to existing cultural symbols. These characteristics of participation and transparency make a culture fundamentally more democratic than is possible in an exclusively mass-mediated environment.
WoN: Information Economics
[Part One in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]
How does information production differ from the production of material goods? Two key differences that I want to explore in this post concern (1) access to the means of production, and (2) the "non-rival" nature and marginal cost of information.
1) The means of production are more widely distributed and accessible than ever before. Anyone with a computer and internet connection is capable of contributing valuable information to society, through such “peer production” efforts as Wikipedia. Add the right software into the mix and they may also contribute to our cultural stock, through creative or satirical “mash-ups” and other media production. As Benkler explains:The high capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working, and communicating information, knowledge, and culture, have now been widely distributed in the society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for the large organizations that once dominated the information environment. Instead, emerging models of information and cultural production, radically decentralized and based on emergent patterns of cooperation and sharing, but also of simple coordinate coexistence, are beginning to take on an ever-larger role in how we produce meaning—information, knowledge, and culture—in the networked information economy. (pp. 32-33)
Individual human capacities, rather than the capacity to aggregate financial capital, become the economic core of our information and cultural production. Some of that human capacity is currently, and will continue to be, traded through markets in creative labor. However, its liberation from the constraints of physical capital leaves creative human beings much freer to engage in a wide range of information and cultural production practices than those they could afford to participate in when, in addition to creativity, experience, cultural awareness and time, one needed a few million dollars to engage in information production. From our friendships to our communities we live life and exchange ideas, insights, and expressions in many more diverse relations than those mediated by the market. In the physical economy, these relationships were largely relegated to spaces outside of our economic production system. The promise of the networked information economy is to bring this rich diversity of social life smack into the middle of our economy and our productive lives. (pp. 52-53)
Peer production involves breaking a task up into discrete “chunks” that may be easily completed by volunteers. The cumulative effect of these non-market contributions – spurred on by diverse human motivations, from reputation gain to the artistic thrill of creation – is the production of a hugely valuable information resource. Wikipedia is but one example; SETI@home is another, whereby ordinary citizens contributed their spare computing capacity towards creating the world's most powerful super-computer. (The SETI@home screensaver performs computations when the user’s computer is otherwise idle, and then send the results over the internet back to SETI.) “Peer to peer” networks, or p2p, have shown themselves to be among the most efficient information distribution mechanisms society has yet discovered – much to the chagrin of incumbent industries.
It's worth noting that peer produced ("open source") software is often judged to be of higher quality – more dependable and secure – than its closed, proprietary, counterparts. As Eric S. Raymond put it, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." (Proof: compare LINUX to Windows.) Hence, the U.S. Presidential Technology Advisory Commission “advised the president in 2000 to increase use of free software in mission-critical applications” (p.321).
2) The economics of information production differs importantly from material production. Information is non-rival: when one passes along information, it does not make the provider any poorer (unlike if I passed along their jewellery!). Distribution of pure information has a zero marginal cost – additional listeners do not raise the production costs at all. Since economically efficient pricing is, by definition, the marginal cost of the product, it follows that any (non-zero) pricing for pure information is necessarily inefficient.
This inefficiency may be tolerated for the sake of incentivizing initial production. (Hollywood won’t make blockbusters for free; by artificially restricting access to the digital information film-makers produce, we encourage them to produce it in the first place.) But we shouldn’t blindly assume that granting ever stronger exclusive access rights (“Intellectual Property”) over information will necessarily improve outcomes, the way we might expect of markets in material property. In addition to the local inefficiency of excluding those unwilling to pay the artificially inflated price – who could otherwise have gained a benefit at no real cost to anyone else – there is also the “big-picture” concern for stunting down-stream production.
Present info-cultural productions build on our info-cultural heritage, or what past production has contributed to the public domain. This is known, with reference to Isaac Newton, as the “on the shoulders of giants” effect. But if today’s info-cultural productions are locked away behind excessively strict and long-lived IP protections, this raises the costs for tomorrow’s producers. Balance is thus needed to ensure that present incentives don’t become future disincentives.
In summary: The combined effect of these two general observations is to highlight the economic desirability of open access to information, in at least some contexts. The information economy increases the viability of widely distributed, large-scale production efforts that take place outside of both state and market action. Such production is valuable and efficient enough to be worth nourishing, but is highly dependent on open access to “the shoulders of giants”. Although some artificial restrictions on information access may be beneficial, we should be aware that IP extremism diminishes the public domain, and may thus prove an obstacle to future creativity. Further, much information production is not motivated by IP revenue in the first place -- the growing role of peer-production should not be neglected -- so for this class of activities, strengthened IP law imposes costs without any corresponding benefit at all.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks
This is the "contents page" for a short series of posts that will highlight my favourite bits of Yochai Benkler's brilliant book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. (Though if you want to read the whole thing, download the free PDF of the book!)
The individual posts will cover:
1. "Growing Knowledge" - the economics of information
2. Cultural Transparency and Participation
3. Creative Values, Peer-Production, and Social Media
4. How the Internet Enhances Autonomy
5. Shifting from Passive Consumers to Active Citizens
6. Safekeeping Cyberspace
Friday, November 10, 2006
Documentation Wants to be Free
Someone should create a secure and trustworthy online archive to which we can upload official documents (e.g. academic transcripts, GRE score reports, etc.). That way, instead of having to send out dozens of original certified documents to all the people/institutions that demand them, we could simply organize to have one original sent to the official database certifiers, who would scan it and put it on the net with their trusted seal of approval, so that I'd merely need to pass along the URL to everyone else. They could even offer password-protection for privacy purposes.
Why does this service not exist? It needn't be centralized, even. Each document-granting institution could simply be responsible for its own online certifications. Why don't universities make their official transcripts freely available online (again, password-protected if necessary)? It wouldn't be that hard, surely, and it'd be so much more convenient. If they're worried about losing money, I'd pay just as much (or more!) for this service. After all, who in their right mind would use snail mail now that instant access is possible?
(Is security the problem? But surely if internet banking is possible, then these sites could be made hack-proof too...?)
Friday, May 05, 2006
Permission Culture
Rad Geek defines bureaucratic rationality as "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may have something good in their life without your authorization." Oddly enough, a related fear seems to beset the nominally "libertarian" followers of Ayn Rand ("propertarian" is a more fitting label, as they take property rights to be more fundamental than freedom). I'm talking about those who accept the "if value, then right" theory of creative property. Lawrence Lessig, in his outstanding book Free Culture, characterizes the view as follows:Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy.
(This Randian [via PC] puts the point in terms of "the cardinal virtue of productiveness", but it shares the same propertarian core: "injustice would lie in denying creators the right to set their terms" for the values they create.)
Lessig continues:[This] is the perspective that led a composers' rights organization, ASCAP, to sue the Girl Scouts for failing to pay for the songs that girls sang around Girl Scout campfires. There was “value” (the songs) so there must have been a “right” — even against the Girl Scouts.
More generally, propertarians are beset by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might enjoy a value without first obtaining permission from all who played a causal role in creating that value. This leads to intellectual property rights extremism, i.e. the view that creators should have absolute control over who else may benefit from their creations, and how.
To see just how ludicrous this position is, note that it makes singing in the shower a form of piracy, as you enjoy a value without paying the composer. Indeed, merely imagining the tune in your head could be an equally immoral rights-violation. These propertarian extremists (now quite obviously not any form of libertarian) are committed to accusing us of thought crimes!
The fear that someone might obtain "something for nothing" is not entirely new. Lessig describes how, when the camera was first invented, the reactionary propertarians of the time tried to restrict the value people could get from them. They argued that photographers should not be allowed to obtain free value by taking images of targets without permission. Thankfully, the courts rejected propertarian extremism back then, and instead ruled in favour of the "pirates". Thus we now enjoy photography without the burden of legal regulations that would effectively put this technology out of reach of ordinary citizens. Things could have turned out very differently.
Imagine how much emptier our lives would be if the propertarian extremists got their way, so that all values are privately "owned" and absolutely restricted by default. In the extreme case: you may never feel any happiness caused by another without first getting their permission. You may never think any valuable thoughts inspired by another without their permission. You may not creatively build on their work, or parody them, or create original "mash-ups" from unoriginal parts; not without permission. You may not conduct your private business using methods patented by your competitors -- and good luck getting their permission!
Of course, few propertarians would explicitly praise such a dystopia. But this is what their principles entail. If it's always wrong to get something for nothing, to freely enjoy a value without the creator's permission, then you mustn't hum your favourite tune. It's that simple. The principle is absurd. We should reject it.
That's not to say that there should be no intellectual property rights at all, of course. We need to create incentives for creators, and reward them appropriately. But we should recognize this pragmatic basis as the justification for our intellectual property system, and organize the latter accordingly. Once we get over the absurd and pernicious propertarian principle that creators have an absolute natural right over their creations, then we can instead start to look at the real, practical, issues.
We ought to arrange our institutions in whatever way would best promote creativity, reward innovation, and generally produce a flourishing culture. We should not simply assume that a propertarian "permission culture" is the answer here. In fact, we have ample reason to believe that it's not.
This should be especially clear to (real, Hayekian) libertarians. As Lessig puts it:The charge I've been making about the regulation of culture is the same charge free marketers make about regulating markets. Everyone, of course, concedes that some regulation of markets is necessary — at a minimum, we need rules of property and contract, and courts to enforce both. Likewise, in this culture debate, everyone concedes that at least some framework of copyright is also required. But both perspectives vehemently insist that just because some regulation is good, it doesn't follow that more regulation is better. And both perspectives are constantly attuned to the ways in which regulation simply enables the powerful industries of today to protect themselves against the competitors of tomorrow...
Free market[s] and free culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an overregulated market... A permission culture means a lawyer's culture — a culture in which the ability to create requires a call to your lawyer... The transaction costs buried within a permission culture are enough to bury a wide range of creativity. Someone needs to do a lot of justifying to justify that result.
See also: Applied Aesthetic Metaphysics.
