Scrutiny

This is certainly not the time in this world to be a one-issue voter — if there’s ever a good time to be one. And if you’re going to pick a single issue to base your vote for President on, make it repairing the economy or rebuilding public schools or getting out of Iraq or a forward-thinking energy policy, not whether the candidate has the right policy on the Internet. That said, this is my area of interest and perhaps expertise, so I pay a little extra attention to it. And I do agree with a number of recent commenters, that a technology policy belongs on that list of priorities; we are still in a formative time around information and communication technologies, where the policies we set today, in Congress and ther courts, will resonate for decades.

So I wanted to highlight some recent discussion of McCain’s missing technology policy statement. Obama released his several months ago, and it hits the mark on most issues, if perhaps it lacks some specifity and hews to a gentle line of progress and not a bolder one. But McCain has not released any official campaign statement about technology yet, and many have connected this both to the Bush administration’s severe and devastating disinterest in promoting scientific and technological innovation towards progressive ends, and to McCain’s campaign trail admission that he’s an Internet “illiterate,” has never emailed, and relies on his wife when they need online information. This is simply reprehensible, though again not exactly of the same scope of other crucial campaign issues. There are lots of people who do not and cannot use the Internet, of course, in this country and elsewhere. But it is primarily because they cannot afford the tools or the process of developing the skills, and/or they work in jobs that do not depend on computing. Neither of these is true for a U.S. Senator. And, as today’s Salon piece on this issue notes, it is not simply that he is older; they cite a recent Pew report that 3/4 of Americans 65 and older are on online. I think its striking that former FCC Chairman (and Obama supporter) Reed Hundt has said “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte, and proud of it.”

The Salon piece goes on to discuss McCain’s role in Congress over the last decade and a half, regarding policies relating to the Internet. Their emphasis is on the fact that McCain voted against the Telecommunications Act of 1996 because it was too regulatory — a bill that, in my opinion, has been more harmful than good because it handed too much of the shaping of the Internet over to private companies, i.e. was too deregulatory — that he worked against the “E-rate” elements of that bill, that gave federal breaks to public schools to help them establish Internet access, and most of all for co-sponsoring the Internet School Filtering Act in 1998. This one is, in my mind, the most egregious. It was co-sponsored with Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, who tech and law enthusiasts will know as one of the worst offenders in the digital copyright world, proposing bills that would have required all digital devices to incorporate DRM, at the behest of the entertainment industries. The bill required schools receiving the E-rate funding to install filtering software on their school computers, at a time when filtering software was proving to be deeply flawed, easy to circumvent, and most importantly, an easy means to censor vital online speech. And, it would have given the responsibility for imposing this rule to the FCC, a vast expansion of their jurisdiction. As Salon noted, even conservative tool Rick Santorum disagreed, and threw his support behind a gentler version of the bill — that still obligated public schools to invest in filtering software, pointlessly, at their own cost.

Whether or not McCain has personal familiarity with the Internet is less the issue here. Because you can be an Internet user and still see it as a devil’s playground full of porn and baddies, or as an pristine field perfect for the construction of a corporate shopping mall. My greater concern is the parallel with the Bush administration’s approach. Whatever McCain doesn’t know about the Internet is counterbalanced by his apparent commitment to hand over the task of guiding the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to private corporations, and then allowing government to simply ignore the issue altogether.

Update: McCain has posted his technology policy. Lessig dissects it and finds it wanting here.

This is completely off my usual topic, although its not clear that I really have a usual topic. But I just read Andrew Leonard’s latest “How the World Works” post at Salon, and he quotes a radio ad for AM/PM mini-marts:

A woman is criticizing her husband for the excessive indulgence of his 64-ounce soda. He scoffs. “Too much soda? That’s like saying someone can have too much money! Or too many private jets!”

An announcer finishes off the commercial: “More is MORE!”

He suggests that “More is more!” could be America’s epitaph. I don’t disagree. But it reminded me to actually look up how much sugar that represents. I’ve been intrigued by an emerging field of research (for instance, this or this) that considers how socially beneficial ends might be encouraged by the strategic presentation of information and careful design of technology — for instance, if you had a real-time readout next to every light switch that told you how much power you were using and how much it was costing you, would you be better about conserving? I’m not so comfortable with mandating such things, so they probably have to come about through encouragement and subsidy and personal choice — I might want that in my house, because I want to conserve, I’m just bad at remembering. It’s a little harder to imagine a mini-mart that makes its profit on giant soda posting a similar “discouraging information. So I don’t know why it would ever be there, (guerrilla sticker operation?) but I like imagining a label on the AM/PM soda fountain that says:

your 64oz soda…
= 216 grams of sugar
= 7 candy bars
= 0.47 pounds of granulated sugar

with a picture of a large cup with 7 candy bars sticking out.

(I used Coca Cola Classic for soda, with a sugar content [12oz soda = 40.5 grams sugar] reported here; for a candy bar, with sugar content [1 2.07oz bar = 30 grams sugar] reported by M&M/Mars here. For the weight-to-volume conversion, which strikes me as so high that it just might be incorrect, I used this site.)

I know sugar isn’t the only health issue here; most candy hits you with a whole lot of fat too, and most colas have a whole lot of other toxic nastiness to consider. Still, I’m trying to envision the guy who grabs a 64oz soda on his way to work, instead, powering down 7 Snickers, or just spooning down a half pound of sugar. I remember Morgan Spurlock doing this in Super Size Me, when he visited a school that had a mason jar full of sugar on a classroom shelf, representing a can of soda a day.

Hmm. I’m so trained to be skeptical of techno-utopian talk, that I have often wondered whether I’ll be fundamentally unable to appreciate when a substantive and consequential technological change actually occurs. Luckily, I still also have a rich supply of techno-fetishism, where new gewgaw gadgets thrill me in a way that wants me desperately to forget that technologies don’t, in fact, change the world.

So, with the caveat that this might be me getting intellectually gooey about what could just be a snazzy new toy, I have to say I’m pretty bowled over by this. Machinist at Salon has a sneak preview of a new gaming headset coming from Emotiv, that reads EEG brainwaves as input for the game experience. Apparently this device is going to be on the consumer market this year, for $299. I highly recommend reading the post, and watching the following video, which is Emotiv’s product demo.

There’s been a series of research successes recently where scientists have been able to train chimps to control a video game with their brains — but these have involved implanting chips to read brain activity more directly than an outside sensor can. But Machinist, who got to play with the headset and the game that comes with it swears that it works, and is great fun.

Of course, the implications I could dream up feel intriguing at the start, but wither a bit with analysis. Here, the things you can “pick up with your mind” are virtual objects, digital boulders and trees in a gamespace. But as this technology progresses, it would be easy to imagine the input going to a mechanical device that actually manipulates the physical world. Of course, we already seem pretty capable at moving physical objects with the kinds of technologies that don’t need brain input, that only need a “joystick” — i.e. the bulldozer, the shovel, the simple lever. OK, but the manipulation of digital information with such a means is intriguing, beyond the video game context, if the sensor can distinguish between increasingly complex and subtle commands: not just “move” or “run” but “file this under documents” or “email this to Jeff”. Still, we can do this quite well with our fingers, even with voices.

I’m not an expert in HCI, but it seems that the bottleneck that input devices typically represent (the computer / machine only knows what we want in terms of what we input, and the input device — keyboard, joystick, mouse, Wii-mote — only lets certain information in) only matters when (a) more subtle information can’t get through, or (b) the input mechanism itself is unwieldy or disruptive to the activity. So until a brainwave sensor can get more from us than the input mechanisms we currently have, it’s a novelty, except for those moments or users for which we can’t perform other kinds of input activities — which is why I imagine this innovation will very interesting to the disabled community.

So I can’t quite explain why this strikes me as important, beyond its novelty and its specific applications for entertainment and for the disabled. But I have often wondered what innovation will be the next means around which social and cultural relationships change, which thing our kids will do that really will finally just seem foreign to us. Maybe this is the remnants of my techno-fetishism hiding behind my intellectual commitment to question determinist fantasies.

Just a reminder, as the “DRM is dead” refrain echoes, that this isue is by no means gone. Netflix has been offering streaming movies to the PC for some time now, and just recently made news by offering a set-top box for watching your Netflix streams directly on a TV. But they still don’t have streaming for Mac, or for Firefox on Windows. Guess why:

A key issue for delivering movies online is that the studios require use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) to protect titles. And that’s our holdup for the Mac - there’s not yet a studio-sanctioned, publicly-available Mac DRM solution (Apple doesn’t license theirs). I can promise you that, when an approved solution becomes available for the Mac, we’ll be there. I’ll also say that Silverlight 1.1 looks like a promising candidate - but that its DRM isn’t likely to be fully available until 2008.

That’s from Steve, a project manager for Netflix’s “instant watching” streaming project, on their community blog. In this matter-of-fact post you can see both the control impulse of DRM, the way it absolutely interferes with technical innovation, and the way it gets played in the intra-industry competition around platforms.

So… Silverlight. Here’s the promo for the new “cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-device plug-in” for Microsoft. I love corporate-speak. Of course, you have to download the plug-in to see the promo for it. What it will show you is that Microsoft still loves Powerpoint, and maybe Minority Report. But it aspires to be a one-stop vehicle for high-def online video, streaming, interactive presentations, etc etc. While its free, it looks like Microsoft is aiming to offer streaming video in a “cloud computing” form, where small scale providers can let Microsoft host and stream their videos, for a fee or paired with advertising. Oh, and

Silverlight will support digital rights management (DRM) built on the recently announced Microsoft PlayReady content access technology on Windows-based computers and Macintosh computers.

So… PlayReady, Microsoft’s new DRM system. As I argued in Wired Shut, Microsoft makes little pretense about the fact that the “content protection” at work here is not protection from piracy, but protection of a commercial transaction:

Microsoft PlayReady technology provides the premier platform for applying business models to the distribution and use of digital content.

Microsoft PlayReady supports a wide range of business models for digital content providers, including:

• Subscription: Provide access to an entire catalog of content in exchange for a recurring fee.
• Purchase: Offer content for purchase and download.
• Pay Per View: Provide pay-per-view choices for all content types.
• Rental: Enable rental scenarios with time-based licenses.
• Gifting: Allows one person to pay another person’s fees for a service or its content.

Microsoft PlayReady supports many different options for distributing content:

• Basic and progressive downloads: Content can play while downloading.
• Streaming: Content can be streamed to devices.
• Sideloading: Sync content from a PC to a mobile device supporting Microsoft PlayReady.
• Direct License Acquistion Over-The-Air: Content and license can be provided direct to a mobile handset over wireless networks.
• Super-distribution: Content sent over user-to-user distribution channels such as e-mail, messaging service (MMS), ad hoc WiFi networks, Bluetooth, and so forth can be monetized by providers.

Oh, and just as a dead giveaway for the way Microsoft think copyright works — and so that I can instantly violate their legal demands with my own dead giveaway — the PlayReady White Paper [PDF], available online, includes this statement in its Legal Notice:

Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation.

(Oops.)

I think this is exactly the kind of slipperiness between businesses and businesses models that is keeping up the demand for DRM, even when it seems increasingly unwieldy, is arguably too expensive for its own good, and disliked by users. Netflix wants to serve up streaming movies, partner with Windows (both because they want to first reach the bulk of users and because Microsoft wants to play chaperone to protected media content), can’t as easily serve Apple users because Apple has chosen to build its business model on linking its content delivery and its platform, and then finds itself turning to a plug-in format, developed by Microsoft, that has the heft to reach Mac and PC alike, but with its requisite host of DRM limits built in, to smooth a set of commercial transactions that all the businesses involved appreciate. Q.E.DRM.

If you’re interested, Joe Karaganis’ edited anthology Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, has been made available online for free. I have a small piece in it on regional coding in DVDs, but the entire antholgoy is really superb. Below is the table of contents.

* Presentation, Joe Karaganis
* The Past and the Internet, Geoffrey Bowker
* History, Memory, Place, and Technology: Plato’s Phaedrus Online, Gregory Crane
* Other Networks: Media Urbanism and the Culture of the Copy in South Asia, Ravi Sundaram
* Pirate Infrastructures, Brian Larkin
* Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production, Mizuko Ito
* Pushing the Borders: Player Participation and Game Culture, T. L. Taylor
* None of This Is Real: Identity and Participation in Friendster, danah boyd
* Notes on Contagious Media, Jonah Peretti
* Picturing the Public, Warren Sack
* Toward Participatory Expertise, Shay David
* Game Engines as Open Networks, Robert F. Nideffer
* The Diablo Program, Doug Thomas
* Disciplining Markets in the Digital Age, Joe Karaganis
* Price Discrimination and the Shape of the Digital Commodity, Tarleton Gillespie
* The Ecology of Control: Filters, Digital Rights Management, and Trusted Computing, Joe Karaganis

One of the most challenging tasks in teaching a class on new media is to get past Internet-centric stories about contemporary change. We could call this “technological determinism,” the tendency to explain social change by pointing to the Internet as the cause, but I think that actually doesn’t help. There are many claims made about how a new technology causes change — “hey, the web is changing politics!” But even when scholars and critics are trying not to simplistically pin their explanation on the technology, there is a convention of using technologies to discursively mark and comprehend moments of change. It’s a kind of shorthand, like “The Industrial Age,” where the author may not actually think that the cotton gin or the assembly line changed everything, but they need a reference point to make sense of a broad period of time when ceertain kinds of things mattered and took effect. Its also an acknowledgement that certain technologies, the Internet certainly one of them, often motivate a public attention to changes, changes that may already have been underway but that become clear or problematic around a new technology. And, as new technologies emerge in certain moments, amidst change, they often become playgrounds and battlegrounds for the exploration of contours of that change, and so become entangled with it.

But this does tend to do an injustice to the process of understanding these changes and the forces behind them, because the technology often figures way too prominently in the discussion, and can often stand in as a shorthand explanation. So how do we talk about the Internet and politics, or new media and journalism, or online advertising, without incessantly telling a pre- and post-Internet story, and without having to claim that nothing has changed?

In the course of teaching this class, I’ve noticed one tactic I find useful: drawing attention to changes that were already underway, that predate the Internet, but that got taken up around new media. This draws on a tradition in the sociology of technology, that suggests that technologies are the product of social negotiation rather than the other way around, and from a lesson I learned from Phil Agre in graduate school, when he said “instead of studying the Internet, study the social phenomenon you’re interested, then consider the 5% of that phenomenon where the Internet matters.” (I’m paraphrasing; its been a few years.) Of course, one of the challenges is that you have to really know the social or political phenomenon in question, and you need a sense of history, something I find under-emphasized in my department’s curriculum.

This insight keeps arising for me, even in surprising ways. So I’m re-reading Zizi Papacharissi’s article “The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere,” from New Media & Society 4.1 (2002), where she astutely examines the question of whether online political discussion is fostering or undermining a public sphere, in Habermas’ sense of the term as well as his critics’. She works through lots of the issues around how online discussion spaces work (or worked: the article pre-dates blogs, wikis, and social networking), including issues of access and overload, diversity and fragmentation, and commercial pressure. In her conclusion she notes a concern raised by Breslin, that “the internet promotes a sense of sociality, but it remains to be seen whether this translates into solidarity.” (21) But her reaction is excellent: that while we may wonder if online communities and political debate can match the kind of organized solidarity that communities or unions or political organizations or rallies could, that may in fact not be how political engagement works anymore. Forty years of “identity politics” have moved the political discourse from solidarity to individual expression as a political gesture. And the political use of the Internet may fit much more neatly with that version of political discourse. So its not, “is the Internet helping or hurting the political process?” but rather “as the politicla process continues to struggle with structural tensions, for instance around communal versus individual political engagement, how does the Internet get taken up in this process, play into or against that tension, and afford unanticipated opportunities that other communication technologies did not?”

The most striking moment in the course so far, where I felt like a rich sense of cultural history would help focus us on a long change that predates but tangles with the Internet, is around journalism. We discuss the question of whether newsblogging is a form of journalism, mostly because it helps reveal the complexity of journalism as a social category, how it has always tangled with the shape of the dominant media form, and how ideals and arrangements get re-thought in light of a new medium. But as we discussed the history of media journalism, especially around the superb Frontline documentary “News War” (part three is especially relevant, but its all good), it became clear that, rather than thinking about blogging as this radical new form that throws journalism into disarray, that it was useful to think about two longer-term trends (maybe others are relevant here as well): the intersection of news and entertainment under increased pressures on news organizations to turn a profit, and the increasing public skepticism around the ability of mass media journalism to take an independent and forceful position in relation to government.

Journalism once enjoyed high regard in the public eye in the days of Watergate, it has squandered that in the days of a de-fanged Reagan press corps, the embrace of infotainment formats like newsmagazines, a series of scandals about falsified news reports, and cost-cutting in the newsroom while demanding higher profits. As David Simon, onetime Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of “The Wire,” put it in a recent Salon interview, the Internet isn’t exactly what is killing newspapers:

“Making an 18 percent profit and thinking that there was nothing else on the horizon and you were the only game in town … You can’t tell me that they were saving the money for a rainy day. Nobody knew that the Internet was going to be what it was. Nobody at my paper did, anyway. And now it is what it is, and there is no money, and they didn’t spend the window that they had building something that was so essential and so vibrant and so necessary to understanding the world well that you couldn’t do without it.”

And, in competition with more and more outlets for news, especially with the rise of cable, news providers needed to distinguish themselves, one of the ways they did so was to emphasize punditry, political stripe as brand, a la Fox News. The rise of talk radio in the 1980s and television news punditry in the 1990s, combined with the emergence of “citizen journalism” and “peace journalism” all highlight a call for more user involvement to break the chokehold that professional journalists had on the agenda and presentation of wordly events.

To see newsblogging in this context suggests that, rather than blogging emerging from what the Internet offers technically, it is the expression of some long-brewing frustrations with traditional mass media journalism, and does so by, not surprisingly, extending those shifts that were already bubbling up: subjective voice, the blurring of news and commentary, user involvement.

If we want to extend our historical lens even further, this in fact situates blogging as just the latest step of a very long back-and-forth in American journalism, about whether the provision of public information should be political or commercial or independent, amateur or professional, local or institutional. I’m cribbing here from the masterful work of Michael Schudson on the history of American journalism and political participation.

So the question I’m left with is, how to best incorporate this perspective in the classroom? How do you know enough history, and teach enough history, to really put these changes and tensions into sufficient context? There’s a part of me that’s tempted to teach classes not in the Communication framework, but like American Studies classes: that to understand the Internet you need to understand Western society, culture, and politics of the last century — maybe longer, and maybe beyond the Western context even. My courses have always had a historical dimension, but only in the sense that phenomena we were examining were always understood as historically situated. But if your class is full of kids who were born in the 1990s, how do you give them a rich enough sense of the historical context itself, for them to get that the contemporary phenomena they know emerged from it?

I’m proud to say that WikiCandidate, a research project developed by two of my graduate students and that I’ve hopefully been somewhat helpful on, launched this week. Take a look: WikiCandidate08 — what you’ll find is the campaign website for a contender in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. But the candidate is entirely the product of what you, and anyone else who joins the site, comes up with. Every element of the site, from the candidate’s biography to their stance on issues to news reports from the campaign trail, is editable, using a familiar wiki format.

Who would your ideal presidential candidate be?

I’ve just posted the syllabus for my graduate reading course on technology and society
that I’ll be leading this fall; it was developed with the help of Dima Epstein and Erik Nisbet, and aims to visit the foundational work in Sociology and Communication that tackles the relationship between technology and society. Some people asked that I post it to the blog; here you go. It’s also available here, neatly formatted. Comments are very welcome.

Much of the contemporary literature dealing with information technologies, new media, and digital culture either overlook or oversimplify the complexity of technology as a social phenomenon. It is often remarkably ahistorical as well, as if the examination of communication technologies began alongside the arrival of the Web. For those of us who deal with information and communication technologies in our own work, the various demands of our research projects rarely allow us the chance to revisit the traditions that produced these areas of study. This semester we aim to rectify that. This reading course will explore some of the foundational works in Sociology and Communication that aim to understand the relationship between technology and society. We will generally read one scholar per week, in order to read them deeply. In our meetings we will discuss the readings on their own, and then try to identify what they might offer to the current literature on new technology and society. The outcome will certainly be a better understanding of this area, and a rich set of theoretical tools we can each bring to our own research.

Week one: Aug 27-31
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination: excerpt from introduction [1959]
Martin Heidegger “The Question Concerning Technology” [1977]
Carl Mitcham, “Types of Technology” Research in Philosophy & Technology v1 [1978]
Leo Marx, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept” Social Research 64.3 [1997]

Week two: Sept 3-7
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [1925/1978]: 3-62
Max Weber, Essays in Economic Sociology [1924/1999] (Richard Swedberg, ed.) 41-115, 155-178
Max Weber, “The Bureaucratic Machine”

Week three: Sept 10-14
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems [1927]: 1-184
John Dewey, “What I Believe,” in Collected Works

Week four: Sept 16-21
Karl Marx, “Ch 1: Commodities” and “Ch 14: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in Capital, Vol. One [1867] (125-177, 492-587)
Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process” in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things [1986]: 64-94

Week five: Sept 24-28
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization [1934]: 3-106, 321-446 [available as e-book]

Week six: Oct 1-5
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society [1954/1964]: 3-22, 64-162, 319-343, 412-436
Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor [1986] 3-120

Oct 8-12 - Fall Break…

Week seven: Oct 15-19
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society [1984] xiii-xxxvii, 1-40, 162-280

Week eight: Oct 22-26
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication [1951]: 3-142, 156-198
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media [1961]: 3-61

Week nine: Oct 29-Nov 2
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form [1974]: 1-157 (all)

Week ten: Nov 5-9
James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society [1982]: 13-36, 113-230

Week eleven: Nov 12-16
James Beniger, The Control Revolution [1986]: 1-30, 291-438 [available as e-book]
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish [1977]: 195-217

Week twelve: Nov 19-23 [Thanksgiving]
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New [1988]: 1-231 (all)

Week thirteen: Nov 26-30
Judy Wacjman, Feminism Confronts Technology [1991]: 1-167 (all)

Week fourteen: Dec 3-7 [note: after classes end]
Thomas Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture [2004]: 1-174 (all)

MIT Press just posted their first podcast in their authors series — me — on iTunes. You can either try this direct link (thanks Daithí), which should open iTunes for you, or search under “MIT Press Podcast” in the iTunes Store, and it should come up. Chris Gondek did the interview, it’s about 13 minutes long, and ranges over fair use, Jack Valenti, film industry tactics, and the pressures of commerce.

UPDATE: Apparently, when it is officially released as a full episode, I’ll be paired with an interview with Sherry Turkle, about her edited collection, Evocative Objects:

In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things…

Whether it’s a student’s beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes–the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.

In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound.

Among the essays are pieces by Henry Jenkins (death-defying superheroes) and my friend and colleague Trevor Pinch (synthesizer). Very cool.

According to Machinist and CNet News, Google has promised the court that it will launch a technology for YouTube designed to automatically locate and take down material that infringes copyright. Google is being sued by Viacom and by a consortium of European sports teams for not sufficiently patrolling the video site for instances of their content being posted by users. The law requires Google to respond to take-down notices submitted by copyright owners; the case, if it doesn’t get settled before going to court, will deal with what counts as a reasonable response.

The plan to automatically filter YouTube for infringing content should take us right back to the Napster case. As I predicted in the book, we’re already collectively forgetting that the court did not shut down Napster. It merely required Napster to filter its network, blocking users from accessing copyrighted material on other users’ computers by removing it from its search results. There was a lot of back and forth about how effective the filter that Napster installed was, and how diligent the RIAA was about providing Napster with the information it needed to filter out its member companies’ content, but it didn’t matter because, with so much music unavailable, the network dried up and users went elsewhere.

So, what’s different here? First, in the intervening time, the technology for filtering has certainly improved. Google has not gone into detail about how their YouTube filter will work, but it will certainly benefit from six years of innovation in such tools. Moreover, all the content is stored at YouTube. Napster had to recognize in real time that a logged-in user was offering something they shouldn’t, whereas Google has the entire database just sitting there, ready to be scanned and filtered. And, in terms of long-term consequences, the value of YouTube is not overwhelmingly its provision of copyrighted content, they way Napster’s was — an effective filter is not likely to kill off the site.

On the other hand, part of the problem is that YouTube is a massive and constantly fluctuating corpus — precisely the problem Google is being sued for in the first place. Despite being diligent about removing content, they can’t seem to keep up with all the users uploading clips from TV shows and movies, and all the take down notices coming from the studios and broadcasters. Presumably, an automatic filter is intended to improve on whatever they’re currently doing. But, it will also presumably suffer from the same problems Napster’s filter did. First, users will game the system, trying to beat the filter. Napster users started renaming files with obvious spelling errors, to avoid the early filter that looked for artist names, even going so far as converting them to pig latin, i.e. “itneybray earsspay,” or reversing the name, i.e. “yentirb sraeps”. More importantly, the filter will likely identify false positives, removing content that shouldn’t in fact be removed. And there’s great incentive for Google/YouTube to over filter (to appease the court and avoid a lawsuit) and little incentive for them to protect those users who get caught up in that net, or to reinstate their videos.

My particular concern is that the filter will depend on some form of visual recognition and pattern matching — i.e., it will look for what is likely to be Stephen Colbert’s face, and assume it has liekly located an unauthorized clip from The Colbert Report. Napster upgraded its filter, from one that blocked according to filenames to a system of audio recognition that compared the music itself to known songs. The risk, as usual, is for fair use. Would a news documentary or a video parody that included a few seconds of Colbert get caught in the filter plans to impose?

One of my favorite activities is putting together a syllabus; I love how I can look at a beautifully crafted course and see the whole exciting journey laid out, all the pieces already in place.

I just came across this course, taught by Michael Shanks, called Ten Things. Shanks is an archaeologist at Stanford, and his course draws together his field with work in the sociology and history of technology to help students rethink the relationship between technology, culture, and society. Each week focuses on one artifact, from the pyramids at Giza to Wedgewood china to the mouse, as  a way in to undermining some commonplace assumption about technology. Then each student develops their own portfolio on an artifact of their choice.

His notes on the final class, where he talks about “thing theory“, are a lovely synopsis of what the sociological study of technology, and particularly actor-network theory, have to offer.

An interesting post from Mosaic designer and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who apparently started his first blog five weeks ago, where he reflects on the experience of blogging and its potential as an emerging form of communication. It’s an intriguing combination of astute observation and fundamentalist cybergush. One comment was particularly interesting:

Fifth, writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.

I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly)…

This of course assumes that you’re not trying to make a living writing magazine articles or books, or you’re not trying to get tenure as a professor by publishing peer-reviewed research papers.

Many have fretted about the way online communication — particularly e-mail, though blogs get tyhis criticism too — is diminshing the quality of writing. Perhaps there’s a risk there. But I think there’s something to what Andreessen is saying here, the way traditional “publication” imposes a kind of barrier — not just about who gets to publish and where, but the concomitant expectation that what you’re writing has to be perfect, polished, complete. As a writer, I can attest, this is an intimidating and powerful barrier. Blogging seems to have developed a set of cultural norms where rough draft quality is acceptable, even expected, where what Andreessen calls “incremental thinking” is acceptable, where revision is acceptable. I certainly aspire to being a superb writer, and have a special place in my heart for those (be they scholars, novelists, or bloggers) who have that gift. But I also think there’s value to the kind of loose freedom associated with blogs, where its best to just get it there, get the conversation going.

Of course, the last piece of Andreessen’s comment is crucial — this is not just a question of shifting cultural norms, but also of the inertia of infrastructural arrangements: economic relationships, reputation economies, professional expectations. I can blog all I want, have rich conversations with academic colleagues and everyone else by doing so, but that still (at least right now) would guarantee that I wouldn’t get tenure, if I did so to the exclusion of writing peer-reviewed journal articles and scholarly books. [the last bit was added in response to Eszter’s comment.]

I’m right now in the process of developing a graduate reading course, with my students Dima and Erik, on the foundational thinking around technology and society, so it was opportune that a note about this book just floated in on my never-ending river of email. The book is a collection interviews in which the same five questions were posed to many of the leading thinkers in the philosophical and sociological study of technology. It’s an excellent list of people (ready? Joseph Agassi, Mario Bunge, Harry Collins, Albert Borgmann, Paul Durbin, Andrew Feenberg, Joan H. Fujimura, Peter Galison, Allan Hanson, Donna J. Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Don Ihde, Ian C. Jarvie, Bruno Latour, Bill McKibben, Carl Mitcham, Andrew Pickering, Daniel Sarewitz, Dan A. Seni, Peter Singer, Susan Leigh Star, Lucy Suchman, and Isabelle Stengers.) And, the questions are provocative:

1. Why were you initially drawn to philosophical issues concerning technology?

2. What does your work reveal about technology that other academics, citizens, or engineers typically fail to appreciate?

3. What, if any, practical and/or social-political obligations follow from studying technology from a philosophical perspective?

4. If the history of ideas were to be narrated in such a way as to emphasize technological issues, how would that narrative differ from traditional accounts?

5. With respect to present and future inquiry, how can the most important philosophical problems concerning technology be identified and explored?

I won’t dub this “required reading” yet, because I haven’t read it all. But I just spent some time on the website for this book, which offers excerpts from one answer from each of the scholars. The writing is of a refreshingly high quality, and is lush with insights.

Curiously, my two favorite comments are not about technology at all, but about academia. The first comes from Susan Leigh Star, who notes the way that academic scholarship so regularly fails to allow attention to the marginal, the personal, the frail, and leaves us with philosophies of technology that remain distant from real human experience. She gives these academic techniques amusing names, one of which is

the Wall of Infinite Sequels. Such as “in future work we hope to extend this analysis to include such important issues as context, affect, and a more qualitative expansion of the independent variable, inequality.” Or “It was beyond the scope of this study to include more variety in the sampling framework, such as women, minorities, or pay rates. Too much variability in the independent variables managed here would have produced a combinatorial explosion.”

The second is from Bruno Latour. In response to question two, he balks at the idea that he has revealed anything to anyone, in part because we’re all so unwilling to see the complex entanglements of the technological and social elements of our world — but mostly because academics are intellectual troglodytes:

Academics, as a rule fail to appreciate so many things, that it is hard to know where to start! There is this near impossibility with modernism and modernists in general to be sensitive to what is given in experience that baffles me. There are still people who fret in sociology, anthropology and may be philosophy, because in my definition of techniques “I give a role to non humans”… and they pronounce this sentence as if they were saying “Latour is a pervert, a zoophile” or something of the sort. So we have been connected, attached, folded with non-humans for millions of years, and especially for the last three centuries, and it would come as a surprise for academics?! How strange. In my experience, academics live in a world that still predates all the industrial and technical revolutions. They are sort of upper paleolithic – and even that is unfair because in that time they had already lots of stones… and when you see the way philosophers treat stones, it is not encouraging…

Sony introduced Crackle yesterday; it’s their overhaul of Grouper, a user-generated video site a la YouTube that Sony bought for $65 million last year. Crackle is now designed to offer not “amateur” web video, but the work of aspiring filmmakers and animators.

Farhad Manjoo at Salon pointed out yesterday that part of what Sony is offering is the benefits of its own diverse corporate assets:

The company is now leaning on what MBA-types might call “synergy.” Sony owns many entertainment properties — movie studios, record labels, a huge video game business — and can thus offer attractive rewards to creators looking for more than YouTube fame.

The rewards Crackle offers to filmmakers for uploading their videos include a potential pitch to Columbia Pictures, a two-day apprenticeship at Sony Imageworks Animation Lab, and a night performing on the stage of The Improv. As far as I can tell, Sony does not own any of The Improv, but is certainly in a position to negotiate sweet deals with partner organizations to assemble its rewards for its content providers, not unlike what they do for Survivor or Project Runway. User votes will decide who receives these rewards in various categories.
I just wanted to point this out; I suspect you will see more about Sony on this blog in the months
to come. What we’re seeing is a series of corporate players working out the viable economic and cultural positions they’re willing to occupy and their customers are willing to embrace, all amidst the shifting dynamics of digital culture: changes in the economics of information and distribution, current re-thinking of the evaluation of amateur and professional expertise, the appropriate relationship between culture and commerce. One viable intersection point seems to be the YouTube model: company makes possible the uploading of content and the maintenance of the community that forms around it; advertising is delivered alongside for the purposes of revenue. Another seems to be this contest model, where company hosts content loaded there in pursuit of rewards, viewers are offered both the content and the role in adjudicating the contest. Farhad’s observation is one reason why I think this is an appealing model to the Sony and the like: the contest can also deliver, dirt cheap, the cream of the crop into their entertainment / star system, and presumably on their terms — just like American Idol contestants winning exclusive but restrictive recording contracts with a Sony/BMG sub-label and a management contract with Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. User-generated content also becomes a form of A&R, with user votes replacing the assessments of music label reps.
I think Sony is in an intriguing, though perhaps not unique, position in regards to these maneuvers — being a company that offers content and tools, hardware and software, computational technology and consumer electronics.

I’m a week late on this one, but the list of Seven New Wonders of the World was announced on July 7. The selected sites, in alphabetical order, are Chichen Itza (Mexico), Christ the Redeemer (Brazil), the Great Wall (China), Machu Picchu (Peru), Petra (Jordan), the Roman Colosseum (Italy), and the Taj Mahal (India), with the Great Pyramid of Giza (Egypt) as an “honorary candidate” — the only remaining “Ancient Wonder of the World”.

and, still…
Some technology-related thoughts. First, I think it’s fascinating that all seven new wonders are made of stone. The rules stated only that the sites had to be man-made, completed before 2000AD, and be an in acceptable condition. Among the 20 finalists were some other familiar stone creations, including Stonehenge, the Acropolis, and Easter Island, as well as some structures not made of stone: the Sydney Opera House, the Statue of Liberty and, my vote for one to include, The Eiffel Tower. Its fascinating to me that, as we commemorate the “new” wonders of the world, we seemed to have avoided the whiff of novelty we so often celebrate, and gone back to the building material we almost never use. (Sorry, Industrial Revolution, you’re still a blip on the historical map.)

Which brings up the question of who “we” are. According the Wikipedia entry and the sources it cites, the list is controversial. It was organized by a private entrepreneur, Bernard Weber, and based on votes from the public, allegedly over 100 million, by phone or online. 77 monuments were initially nominated by an expert panel, and the private Foundation narrowed the list to 20, apparently based on votes already tallied. Theres was no limit on people voting multiple times, and there was plenty of gaming the system: according to Newsweek, Brazilian telecom companies helped support Rio’s “Christ the Redeemer” statue by waiving phone charges for calls to the Foundation’s voting line, and text messaging all of their customers with an urge to vote. The Petra received 14 million votes just from within Jordan; Jordan has a population of 7 million. And the Taj Mahal apparently leapt from #14 to #3 in the final month of voting, after a massive campaign that included every major newspaper and television station urging people to vote.

It’s also a testimony to our vast communication networks that this project was based on public votes, regardless of the details. The Seven Ancient Wonders of the World (The hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis as Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, the Colossus at Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Great Pyramid of Giza) may have been selected by Antipater of Sidon, a Greek poet, or Herodotus and Callimachus, Greek scholars — which also explains why the monuments are curiously all crowded around the Mediterranean. So whatever you think about the populist claims about the Internet, and not to over-valorize a glorified call-in poll, but there is something changing here about how we establish expertise and make history.

Finally, I love that this list is apparently in competition with a 2006 list produced by USA Today and Good Morning America — which included the Internet.

Self-professed “communication junkie” Dima Epstein is proposing a CommFree Day on the first Saturday of every month, beginning August 4. The idea is that, for those of us who love media and information technology, but also understand on some level that it shapes and shifts how we are in the world and can swamp our other priorities, that one day a month without our computers, cellphones, and TVs would be an enlightening and refreshing experience, a way to gain perspective. Or as Dima puts it,

I am not suggesting doing that out of hatred towards technology… Quite the opposite. I suggest that because I think we need this break to reflect on where we are heading and reflect on the role media and information technologies play in our lives. I think it is a healthy practice, and the key for it success is it becoming a practice…

My additional suggestion was that, if you’ve take part in CommFree Day on Saturday, then Sunday should be a “Day of Attunement” — what I want is for people to spend a day using their communication technologies all they want, but doing so in a way that is attuned to the role they’re playing, to how they mediate their relationships, their citizenship, their social identity.

Here endeth the lesson. I’m going to stop reading Dima’s blog and get back to work — on my computer.

This video includes a demo of an image application called Photosynth, that can scrape all the pictures from Flickr of, say, Notre Dame, and assemble them into a single navigable visual space. It’s even more amazing than it sounds. Watch:

[Thanks to Eszter for the link.]

In the short time that Apple has become the third largest music retailer — not digital music, mind you, music altogether (recently passing Amazon, behind only Walmart and Best Buy) — its easy to forget that the major music labels have only ever had short contracts with Apple to sell their music. Despite the confidence with which Steve Jobs has commandeered the market for online music, he has always been a hair’s breath away from finding himself without major chunks of his library.

This week, Universal Music Group, which is responsible for roughly one in every three major pop music release, announced it would not renew its two year contract with Apple, opting only for a month-to-month arrangement. [Thanks to Adam Engst of TidBits for pointing out the New York Times article.] This seems to be part of the ongoing scuffle between Apple and the majors about pricing — Jobs has stood firm on a flat fee, whereas the labels want to be able to price songs and albums differently depending on popularity and release date — and the fact that iTunes downloads are formatted to play only on iPods — the labels want some compatibility with other players, whereas Jobs, umm… doesn’t.

I think it’s fascinating to look at this news in light of the recent decision by EMI to allow Apple to sell its music without DRM copy protection. It was easy for many to see the EMI announcement as the leak in the dam that would inevitably lead to the rjection of DRM. Universal’s decision may be related or not to EMI’s move — could they be jockeying for a good negotiating position for price and control as they let go of DRM? or could they be flexing their muscles as a gesture that they need not follow suit? But it’s certainly a stark reminder that Apple is negotiating a precarious balance here. Play the “no DRM!” card too hard, or hold too tight to the iPod exclusivity, and they may find that a very large chunk of their music is suddenly only available at Microsoft? And its a reminder — and this was my point in the book, though I’ve been wishing lately that I had made it even more pointedly — that these questions of ownership and technical protection measures are, at their base, very much economic strategies, though fitted with compelling rhetorical rationales, between companies jostling for control of a precariously fluid market.

I just put together a “Listmania” at Amazon for the best books on copyright, technology, and digital culture. The image below is a composite of he nineteen covers; click it to see the entire list.

Any suggestions for that twentieth slot?

There’s a very good video demonstrating the recently unveiled Microsoft Surface computing interface, put together by Popular Mechanics, that’s worth watching, if you’re into such things: