Scrutiny

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.

I don’t know if I’m actually going to get around to it — so many different directions to take one’s research, one can’t do them all — so I thought I would just post this and let anyone think it out for themselves. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately, ever since I published my book, about how to study copyright “on the ground,” to move from the places where the rhetoric about digital copyright is produced and circulated, to where the mundane practices that grapple with and, in quieter ways, shift the workings of copyright in the contemporayr moment.

One of the most vital questions for how information is regulated and culture is shaped, and that copyright offers such an ideal insight for understanding, is to look into the particulars of the interlocking of technology, law, culture, and practice. However, most of the scholarship so far has tended to look at the issue on a very broad, macro-social level: Congressional mandates, court decisions, public debates, cultural controversies. (My book is certainly guilty of this top-down and sometimes generalized perspective.) To deepen our insight into these problems, we must also examine not just the biggest changes and the loudest debates, but also the ways these arrangements play out “on the ground.” How do designers of new technologies understand their copyright obligations, and how do they incorporate those obligations into the tools they design, amidst other economic and practical pressures? How do corporate partners collaborate on techno-legal strategies for enforcing their copyrights, and how do they persuade legislators, the courts, and the public to see it their way? How do users come to understand what copyright is, and in what way do they incorporate or disregard it in their everyday habits of acquiring and producing culture? Insight into these practices will illuminate the ongoing debate about copyright in a digital age. But the question extends beyond the particulars of copyright: how are the rules of information production and knowledge in a digital environment conceived and imposed? How do the various participants in this process understand their role within it, respond to pressures, and rationalize their activities? How do their efforts extend, normalize, or undercut these changes in copyright and information regulation. How are we building what will become ‘digital culture’?

The discussion of digital copyright needs much more ethnographic attention to the lived realities of all this. These questions require a methodological attention to the real spaces and practices in which decisions are made, elements come together, problems are grappled with. Getting inside the rhetorical debate means examining people in their actual social contexts: in the cubicles of software designers, in the meetings of industry consortia, in the offices of media producers, in the dorm rooms of users. It will be very interesting to figure out what the right ethnographic sites should be, which information practices and local discourses are revealing of the complex lived tensions between property and not, which arrangements most need to be drawn into focus and dissected. Is it something like Pirate Bay, where the political dimension of copyright violation is most explicitly articulated? (There’s been some recent work about Pirate Bay — I saw a talk a few months ago dealing with just what you’re pointing to, the way Pirate Bay is moving itself from an outlaw community to a legitimate political force.) Is it Brazil, where the mew politics of IP is not just technological motivated, but wrapped up in seeking alternatives to Western models? Is it at Creative Commons, where people are seeking to shift the debate and locate a third way? Is it in the dorm rooms of avid downloaders, where the anti-piracy rhetoric of established industry reaches for the American “digital native”? (I don’t much like the term, but it makes the point.) Is it with musicians, grappling with a shifting landscape of circulation, the long and tortured history of the role of record labels, and the swirling rhetoric? I feel like these are the obvious ones, and that part of what needs to be done here is to ferret out where else this lived experience of information and property needs to be studied. Still, each of these (and lots I’m not thinking of) have real potential.

Unintended consequences are a bitch. Every once in a while, I find myself feeling sorry for the RIAA and their industry partners. Not only did they fail to anticipate the scope of online file-sharing, and refuse to look into it early for business opportunities, and then come down too hard on their own customers. But they went for, and continue to go for, DRM as a solution to their bleeding business model. (I don’t feel this way all that often.)

So, some bits of news from the DRM battlefield that I’ve been sitting on (cleverly digesting? or failing to get around to?), all of which point to not only the miserable failure of DRM, but the ways it has locked the music labels and retailers into a whole set of unexpected, additional obligations and liabilities.

* First, just to finally prove the point, The Guardian reported last month that removing DRM from iTunes downloads has had no discernable effect on music piracy. I’ve only got this secondhand (hey Guardian, where’s the link to the report that states this?) but I presume it means that the DRM-free tracks from EMI were not showing up any more quickly or in any greater numbers on p2p networks than other tracks from other labels. (Perhaps the EMI tracks, which are DRM-free only in the sense that they have no use restrictions, but are still in a closed AAC format that can carry metadata, had markers in it that could be tracked as music appeared on file-sharing networks — I don’t know.) There are a number of explanations for this, the primary being that all these tracks are also released on CD, which also has no copy-protection; also that many uploads come from inside the industry, before consumer-grade technical protections have been applied; also, as is pointed out here by a representative of Big Champagne, there may not be that much overlap between the population of users who buy from iTunes and the population who upload to p2p networks anyway. Still, it doesn’t speak well for the value of DRM. I have argued elsewhere that combating piracy is not the only or even the primary reason why the music labels like DRM; however, it is one aim, and the most public one, and the more it proves illusory, the worse off the music labels are. (Of course, this may also undercut the claim that DRM and other restrictions are actually driving people to p2p networks. If they were, the EMI tracks should be showing up less than the others, one might hypothesize; not having the data, I can’t speak to this.)

* Second, researchers at the University of Washington studied how music industry lawyers were tracking downloading via BitTorrent and sending out their DMCA “takedown” notices, and were able to spoof them into sending letters to users whose devices were not sharing copyright music, weren’t even connected to a p2p network — weren’t even computers. The report, called “Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks: or, Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice” raises questions about the legitimacy of this legal procedure, if it can so easily be exploited to implicate innocent users. The key, it seems, is that the RIAA is monitoring whether a user searches for a file, and not also checking if they followed up by downloading it. This is similar to a point that Steve Worona of Educause made at a recent talk, where he told of the RIAA admitting that universities who use the Audible Magic blocking software on their campus networks can still get DMCA notices, because students could still search for files, even though the block prevents them from downloading them. (And, it should be noted, merely searching for unauthorized copies of copyrighted music is not illegal.)

* Third, Microsoft announced, but later backpedaled when users went bonkers, that they were going to shut down their license servers. The quick and dirty is, if you buy music from MSN for your Zune (or from Apple for your iPod), that music is authorized to play on your particular computer only. Try to move it to another computer, or even reinstall your operating system after a crash, and you have to prove to MSN or Apple that its still you, by entering your password and reasserting your license to those tracks on a new device. (This is how Apple limits how many devices you can move your iTunes tunes to.) So Microsoft didn’t want to deal with this process anymore, and decided that as of August, users would simply be stuck with the device they’re using. They could never move their music again, because that authorization call to Microsoft would go unanswered. People flipped, and so Microsoft flipped. But it’s a little reminder of the business music sellers have gotten themselves into — overseeing authorization to users, to continue to use the music they’ve already purchased… forever.

* Finally, the cruel and ironic reality. Throughout the copyright wars, the persistent fear of the music industry was that their product, once something that reasonably carried a price tag, would evnetually seem free to the next generation of users, like water. They assumed that piracy would cause this change. Perhaps it has. But it is becoming increasingly clear that this may be their only viable business model in the future. This report from The Economist, after detailing the continuing decline of the music industry, notes the deal struck between Universal and Nokia, to create the “Comes With Music” plan. You buy the top-tier cell phone, it gives you a year of access to unlimited Universal downloads, which you even keep if you switch phones or cell provider; Universal takes a cut of the cost of the phone ($60, it is told). Or, yeesh, a “piracy tax” in your ISP bill, as apparently the RIAA has been begging Congress for recently. The Guardian article, noting the Nokia deal, predicts that Apple will look for a similar model to go with the iPod, and imagines a three-tiered future: some high-end music consumers pay a little for DRM-free downloads of superior sound quality; the bulk of us get our music “free” in the form of a flat fee bundled into our technology purchases, and the bottom tier will be free music with embedded ads, a la SpiralFrog.

By embracing what looked like a technological fix, and found themselves unwittingly beaten by a technology company who could play the game better, will the music industry find itself entirely beholden to, or swallowed up by, the technology industry? providers of mere data? When every digital technology “comes with music,” will music become the informational equivalent of cole slaw?

Mmm, cole slaw.

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It was a disconcerting experience to scan the AP headlines this weekend, and amid the terse reports of this political move or that bus accident, was this:

Everything seemingly is spinning out of control

The report is hinged on two polls, by ABC News and AP themselves, where Americans were asked some version of “is the country headed in the right direction?” and only 14% and 17% respectively agreed. But this dismal news of public despair was wrapped in a nearly poetic and deeply distressing tale of everything that’s going wrong in our world. Here’s just a taste:

Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

The report goes on the chronicle the severity of recent natural disasters, exploding food prices and riots, recurrent power outages in major cities, the weak dollar, steroid scandals in baseball, even the TV writers’ strike. The one bit of good news,at least in my eyes, is the observation that such periods of frustration are historically always “followed by a change in the party controlling the White House.” The saga ends with

Why the vulnerability? After all, this is the 21st century, not a more primitive past when little in life was assured. Surely people know how to fix problems now.Maybe. And maybe this is what the 21st century will be about — a great unraveling of some things long taken for granted.

I wonder, among all the apocalyptic signs they note, none is so indicative that all bets are off than the fact that AP feels compelled to drop its terse, neutral reporting style for it.

(Read the full article yourself — just so AP doesn’t blow a gasket at my extensive quoting.)

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.

Update: Thanks to Kim Christen for pointing me to this discussion of the news reports about uncontacted trbes. It is fascinating to know that I am less emdia savvy when it comes to topics I’m less familiar with — I can spot techno-hype, but I don’t have an eye for anthro-hype. Anyway, read the post, it tells a fascinating and more subtle story about how tribes like this one not only have had sporadic contact with the ‘Westernized’ peoples that live near them, but that a number of organizations and governments work very hard to buffer these tribes from incursions by loggers, governments, and gawkers.

So what was it that was so fascinating to me about this story? I imagine, as someone who studies technology and digital culture, there is always this lingering question of what it would be like to have a radically “other” existence, where the trappings of our technological, capitalistic, globalized society simply did not exist. This is one version of the classic fascination (fetishization) of the other, where we project all our hopes and fears and unease about our own world on those we we see as radically different. But there is something tantalizing about imagining a culture that has siply navigated a very different existence; even as we can question whether this technological advance or this cultural phenomenon is socially valuable, its extremely difficult to question it all. So the “lost tribe” moment is a seductive one. And, as Kim pointed out, the real story is its own kind of insight into our global society too: the messy efforts to both interact with those we share the world with and to preserve something unique about our own collective, the aggressive pressure of capital and nation-building that constantly press into the far corners of the world, the tendency to turn difference into the emblem of difference.

This is not related to my work or my broader interest, I just find it utterly astounding.

(CNN) — Researchers have produced aerial photos of jungle dwellers who they say are among the few remaining peoples on Earth who have had no contact with the outside world.

Indians are photographed during an overflight in May 2008, as they react to the overflight at their camp. Taken from a small airplane, the photos show men outside thatched communal huts, necks craned upward, pointing bows toward the air in a remote corner of the Amazonian rainforest.The National Indian Foundation, a government agency in Brazil, published the photos Thursday on its Web site. It tracks “uncontacted tribes” — indigenous groups that are thought to have had no contact with outsiders — and seeks to protect them from encroachment.

More than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, and about half live in the remote reaches of the Amazonian rainforest in Peru or Brazil, near the recently photographed tribe, according to Survival International, a nonprofit group that advocates for the rights of indigenous people.

This notice just came through on the Chronicle for Higher Education’s “Wired Campus” mailing:

Rensselaer Polytechnic Starts ‘Science of the Web’ Program

What is the future of the Web? Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute plans to explore this issue when it launches a new academic program next month focused on the emerging academic discipline of “science of the Web.” The field examines the architectural underpinnings of the Web, its social aspects, and who controls the flow of information, among other issues. The university has titled its program: The Tetherless World Constellation. The program will be publicized June 11 at Rensselaer Polytechnic where a panel of experts from academe and industry, including Timothy J. Berners-Lee–who is credited with having invented the Web–will discuss its future. Web users across the world will submit questions for discussion.–Andrea L. Foster

I’ve recently been in conversation with some of my colleagues at Cornell, from both Communication and Information Science, about how to reimagine and rearticulate (dare I say, re-brand) the HCI program here, based on the presence now of a enough people, and a range of people, to really say its something we do. It strikes me that this might be one way to get at some of what HCI is about, while getting away from some of the limits built into its very name and its particular history.

On the other hand, I saw a talk at ICA last week where a very well known scholar in media studies briefed the audience on the emerging discipline they were trying to create, called “cultural science,” which (from an albeit brief and rapid presentation) looked like a push to soak the study of culture in things like evolutionary economics and game theory. The endpoint of the talk was to focus on the “entrepreneurial consumer” — which I think is the most shocklingly wrong direction that the study of culture, media, and society could possibly take.

A regular concern in my class this past spring was whether the kind of worries about media concentration in broadcasting had any parallel in the online world. While its easy to point to Google / Microsoft / Yahoo as an apparent oligopoly, and Microsoft’s attempts over the last few months to benevolently devour Yahoo seemed confirmation, its not exactly clear that the way that media concentration among broadcasters seemed to dovetail so powerfully with commercial imperatives carried over to these players. yes, Google is, at least financially, primarily an advertising company, their business model is to serve every interest, not narrow to a select few that serve everyone, as with NBC.

But here’s a key glimpse of why these concerns do matter in the new media industries, care of Farhad Manjoo at Salon. and I don’t care about this because its “anti-academic”, as I never used their service myself, but in terms of the driving corporate logic:

Microsoft has announced that it is shutting down Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, two search engines that aimed to index scholarly works that are often difficult to find online. The company is also ceasing its ambitious effort to digitize library books, a project that it had long promoted as an alternative to Google’s own such efforts.

The company says it “recognizes” that closing these services will “come as disappointing news” to publishers and Web searchers. And yet Microsoft says it must shut them down anyway, because letting people search through books and academic journals no longer fits into the company’s business strategy.

What’s that new strategy? Microsoft wants to help people who have “high commercial intent.”

I am not making that up. Satya Nadella, the company’s vice president for search, actually uses those words. Microsoft would simply prefer to build search engine just for people looking to buy stuff.

Sigh.

In the next month or so, I’m going to be attempting to back up a bit in my thinking, to take in the big picture of the issues I’m invested in examining in my scholarship. I’m calling it the Big Think 08. We’ll see if the practical realities of life allow it. But, as I go, I’d like to throw to the blog moments and aspects, in an attempt to partially develop this snapshot.

One issue that has always troubled me is the persistent myth of the liberal media. Many have attempted to address this, so its not exactly a new area of study. But its persistence in the face of this examination is quite amazing, and speaks of something else entirely, the way the press gets played within the contemporary U.S. political context. Glenn Greenwald at Salon has a sharp critique of it today, spurred by a comment made by Scott McLellan, former White House Press Secretary for Bush, in his new autobiography:

“the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.”

Greenwald follows this with a litany of evidence of this deference, from the failings of the New York Times in allowing Judy miller’s reporting to stand, or the press adoration of McCain, or their use of military analysts in their Iraq war coverage that were made available by the DoD. He finishes with:

Press secretaries of all types instinctively view the media as adversaries and typically feel besieged by what they perceive to be the media’s unfair hostility. So if even Scott McClellan recognizes the mythical nature of the “liberal media” cliche and sees political journalists as meek little handmaidens for government propaganda, how much longer can this myth be maintained?

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

I’m in a conversation right now in a pre-conference workshop, organized by Pat Aufderheide, on “Mapping Public Media,” and part of our charge is to think about what counts as public media in a contemporary media environment, and how we might protect and support that. Much of the conversation has turned on how we define public media, in a way that is generous enough to throw its net widely, but specific enough to be actionable by funders and lawmakers. But we’re also coming up with ideas for how to research and intervene in public media in useful ways.

So here’s my idea, built on a suggestion made by Kevin Barnhurst. Kevin’s point is that, rather than identifying something that counts as public media (the new NPR for the digital age) but rather we articulated certain  criteria and principles that public media should honor — transparency of funding and purpose, openness to user engagement, neutrality of platform, commitment to  ublic mobilization — then encouraged media to offer up data on how they serve those functions. This data would be very easy for third parties to scrape and analyze, and offer up to citizens and critics a lens on how our media are serving these various principles. My idea is we add to this a carbon “emissions trading” notion. Those that are serving these principles well would get support as public media. Those that were failing to meet these criteria could “offset” their footprint by buying credits against their “pollution”.

Its only a half-serious suggestion, but I like the idea that FOX News would regularly have to support DailyKos.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say on this one, except that the process of pushing on every possible edge of copyright to their advantage has led the record companies
into a kind of mania. From the EFF:

In a brief filed in federal court yesterday, Universal Music Group (UMG) states that, when it comes to the millions of promotional CDs (”promo CDs”) that it has sent out to music reviewers, radio stations, DJs, and other music industry insiders, throwing them away is “an unauthorized distribution” that violates copyright law. Yes, you read that right — if you’ve ever received a promo CD from UMG, and you don’t still have it, UMG thinks you’re a pirate.

The EFF is, of course, picking up one comment in a brief that is a little more subtle. UMG is suing Troy Augusto for selling the promotional CDs he received from them over eBay.  Augusto claims this is protected under the first sale doctrine, the same rule that lets you sell books to a used bookstore. UMG doesn’t like this. But in the process, they have to follow their tortured logic to its own conclusion:

Augusto testified that “a common way to dispose of them” is to give unsold promotional CD away, or he may throw them away. Both are unauthorized distributions. (from the UMG brief [PDF])

This is the kind of crazy that makes the whole RIAA effort just seem untethered to most people, when they get a glimpse. But what I find more curious is that, among a couple of different claims, UMG is arguing that first sale doesn’t apply here because the promotional CDs weren’t sold. As such, and because they are labelled as a “promotional copy,” Augusto shouldn’t have the right to re-sell them. Unfortunately, this is exactly counter to the argument the music and movie industries had to make when they pushed the NET Act through, and worked to criminalize peer-to-peer downloading: even though no money changes hands when someone trades software or music, the industry considers it a commercial act because it replaced a sale.

There is a logic in our legal system, that the process should be an adjudicated one: the judge decides, and as such, the parties involved can more or less try anything. A trial lawyer is not responsible for deciding if their client actually murdered someone, in fact they are obligated to give them the best defense regardless. In these kinds of copyright suits, except if the court finds a plaintiff to be wasting the courts time or absuing the law itself, the logic suggests that they can throw any argument against the wall to see if it sticks. But its troubling to me that this logic seems to permit stakeholders like UMG to plainly disregard any concern for what’s reasonable, what’s workable, what’s not that big a deal, what might be progressive, what’s tradition, what’s necessary, and instead just push their interests into every conceivable corner of copyright law, and see what these fishing expeditions turn up. At what point are we even asked to think as citizens, as part of society, as having collective responsibility, rather than self-interested individuals within it?

OK, so I went the profound direction. (Well, you can be the judge as to whether I actually got there.)

Professors Troy Schneider and Benjamin Bates have posted some really thoughtful reviews of my book, at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, and the site’s host, David Silver, invited me to craft an author’s response. You can find the reviews here and here, and my response is posted here, and is as follows:

It’s with a sigh of relief that I read the thoughtful reviews from Professors Bates and Schneider — its reassuring to find that readers’ reactions are not far from my own, about the book’s merits and its flaws. How unnerving it would be if someone found a glaring error I couldn’t even recognize. I’m grateful that both found some value in the book, and I completely agree with the main concerns, that the book is somewhat dated, and does more to connect existing scholarship that to veer off into its own. Let me speak to each.

One of my goals in writing Wired Shut was to put three bodies of literature into conversation. Much of the legal scholarship on the digital copyright debates and the (at the time) emerging issue of technical content protection was astute and enlightening. But inside of the traditions of legal studies, this work did not feel the need to approach these questions in terms of the social dimensions of technologies or the cultural formations emerging around them. These were legal and economic questions, either of legally-managed efficiencies upset by technological change, or first principle rights constricted by corporate actors. Technology appeared in these arguments either as cause or context, but almost always as a thing apart from history, social contest, or cultural meaning. So it seemed important to introduce it to the sociology of technology being developed in Science & Technology Studies and the sociology of culture conducted by the more historically-oriented members of my own field of Communication. (I have by no means been the only one working to reconcile some of these literatures: the work of Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chris Kelty, Kieran Healy, Kembrew Mcleod, and Ted Striphas have also helped advance this conversation.) This did mean, I suspect, that my intervention was more about playing host a conversation than being a particularly loud voice in it.

I do hope that there’s a contribution made by Wired Shut, in offering a vocabulary for parsing technocultural dilemmas like copyright. I’m glad Professor Schneider agreed. I still find my notion of the “regime of alignment” a useful insight — that the regulation of a cultural practice depends not just on a forceful legal regime, or a guiding business model, or a moral assertion, but all of the above. Those who are invested in the future of copyright have utilized all of these mechanisms to pursue their particular agendas. Further, each piece helps obscure the others, and diffuse responsibility for the quite vigorous changes in the contours of cultural discourse they’re attempting to generate. An industry lobbyist can downplay the new law they’re asking for by assuring legislators that, in the end, the market will decide; in another venue, the same company can debut their new business plan, placating critics that copyright law will remain a vigilant limit on their reach. This jigsaw puzzle regulation obscures itself through its own fluid complexity, making it hard to pull all of its details into focus. These tactics are by no means exclusive to questions of copyright.

The second concern is that the work is dated, an issue that has haunted me as far back as the start of the dissertation that was the precursor to the book. Whether it was my own work pace or the inertia of the academic publication process, it became clear that I could not write the scholarly analysis I wanted to produce and also keep up with the issue itself. So I resigned myself to thinking of this as a (recent) historical analysis, one that of course has been superceded by events, but still hopefully provides insights with enduring value, insights that may even resonate with those events that have followed. I’m convinced that, at least today, the academic publication machine is structurally unable to handle this kind of analysis, and is in dire need of reform. And while I have been using my blog sporadically to make more timely comments, it has not quite suited me as a viable medium for scholarship, yet, even though others more deft with the format have put it to very good use.

The main question brought on by recent events is, is DRM dead? Apple partnered with EMI to sell DRM-free music, then Amazon partnered with all of the major labels to do the same; Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails conducted high-profile experiments to distribute their albums without music labels and without technical copy protection, while thousands of bands, signed and unsigned, are playing with MySpace, music blogs, and their own sites to offer some of their music free for promotional purposes; the DRM encryption system for the Blu-Ray high-def video format was cracked, causing a stir when the Digg recommendation site first took down user posts about the crack, then reinstated them when users swamped the site with re-posts; recently, Random House and Penguin publishers announced a move to mp3 format for their audiobooks, while more television networks are partnering to provide online streams of their shows, free with advertising. Just as some suggested that music was the canary in the coal mine, a portent of what was to come, it may be that we are witnessing a turn, once again led by the music industry, away from DRM.

Perhaps. In some ways, the reasoning for these apparent about-faces is pointed to in my book. The music labels are not leaving DRM behind because they believe it to be cultural or politically wrong, or even because it never proved to be particularly effective in curbing peer-to-peer downloading. They’ve begun to leave it behind because its costly — not just financially, which it is, but politically. DRM has elevated the hardware makers to a new position of control over price and distribution. Apple, in part because of a technical system foisted upon them, is now the biggest music retailer in the world, and the keeper of the most popular music device in the world. DRM, along with some savvy marketing and quality design, put Apple in this position.

And while the music industry may be willing to swim without the DRM life vest, I suspect that the movie industry shows no such inclination, and is likely not to have to discard it. As I note in the book, Hollywood always been savvier than the music industry in this regard: leasing you access to a film rather than selling it outright, cascading releases across technical environment and price point, and instituting restrictions before their customers get comfortable with freedoms they’re not willing to allow. So DRM has a life in the years to come. Moreover, in many ways we’ve already embraced both the underlying logic DRM depends on — technologies we use that are not our own, content we lease rather than buy, interfaces that closely manage our commercial and experiential engagement with information — and we’re building computer platforms designed for them. There will always be those who hope to manage the circulation of information, whether for politics or profit; we have now encountered, and largely accepted, a new road map for that kind of information choreography, and the political, institutional, and discursive terrain has been reconfigured in ways that will allow, and promote, these kinds of restrictions.

Many thanks, again, for the thoughtful reviews. in the spirit of being timely and engaged, I’ve posted this on my blog, and welcome your thoughts.

I just saw a presentation of an amazing online resource called Metavid. It is overseen by Warren Sack at UCSC and designed largely by his students Michael Dale and Aphid Stern. Its funded by the Sunlight Foundation and a grant from the NSF.

The site houses every second of video footage from the Senate and House floor since January 2006. All of it is searchable online by the text of the speech (scraped from the closed captioning of the CSPAN broadcast), the name of the speaker, the session. You can search, with a really simple and effective interface, not only for what a certain person said on a certian topic on a certain date, but also cross-referenced by some of the information the Sunlight Foundation offers — so, you could request any mention of “health care” by anyone recieving more than X dollars from pharmaceutical industry donors.

Any clip can be very simply embedded into a blog or website. You can jump to the stream of footage and indicate the start and finish point of the clip you want, and that can be added to a blog or website. You can help label clips for content, or even repair text errors in the closed caption transcript. You can combine clips (in an astoundingly nimble drag-and-drop interface) together, and put the montaged clip into your blog or website.

I’m really, really impressed.

Maybe I’m in a grouchy place, from jetlag or lack of coffee or too much coffee. But I think I’ve decided to never use the term “Web 2.0″ again, except maybe to speak critically about it as a construct. I know its almost as popular to bash the term as to use it, so I’m not cutting any edge here. But I’m finding it exhausting in this conference, and I realize that I may have used it in my own presentation - in fact, I’m not even sure if I did or not, which is disturbing.

This is partly inspired by David Berry’s talk, in which he critiques the term as an “imaginary technology,” one that, in fact, was meant not as a category but as a manifesto of principles when Tim O’Reilly first coined it. David made an excellent point, which is that it is dangerous for scholars to turn to study a phenomenon, and do so by accepting a term manufactured to describe it, and manufactured by interested parties. (I particularly loved that he kept calling it “2-point-naught.”) But its also a reaction to the way this term has so insinuated itself into this conversation. Precisely because the conference called itself “Politics 2.0″ has made it such this term, on a regular basis, gets used by presenters as not a manufactured term, or even a set of principles, but a matter-of-fact category of technologies out there.

It is a singularly useless and shamefully promotional term, and plays into our worst habits as academics, intellectual laziness and over-simplification as insight.

I just think its pretty exciting news: WikiCandidate just got covered in New Scientist, and subsequently got picked up in an AFP report. Which means its now been heard about by a whole lot of people, and the site is finally getting  lots of hits and some real activity.

Fenwick McKelvey, a graduate student from Ryerson, working with Greg Elmer, posed an interesting question after our panel. What do we mean exactly when we talk about a new media “platform”? I use the term, but probably not in a particularly analytical way. I suppose in my mind, I was thinking of “platform” as sites that act as vessels for user contributions: YouTube, Flickr, even Craigslist, eBay. Wikipedia suggests that the term does not refer to such sites, but to hardware or software platforms that allow other tools to run, but I feel like I have often heard it used to describe sites that host content, not just tools.

This is worth thinking through. In fact, the main point of my talk today may actually beg that very question. I suggested that there’s a paradox for new media platforms for political involvement, where they may offer up their site as a certain kind of space, but it is the users who end up defining in powerful ways what the site offers and what kind of deliberation it hosts, because each subsequent user arrives at the site filled with their contributions, may only be true because I am thinking about new media “platforms” that have to be offered up first as an empty vessel, a la YouTube or Flickr. But of course, in those cases, the site provider can post their own content if they so choose, and may have at the start in order to get things going — though as the site grows, their contributions are dwarfed by the content provided by others. In our WikiCandidate project, we did not want to “prime” users in any way by putting even space-holding text — but this is an artifact of our particular desire to see what gets built, and to be able to ask communication questions as well as technology and politics ones. I could imagine other sites, like Remix America, where the very point is to fill the site with a certain kind of content, in order to encourage further contributions.

Is “platform” on of those terms, like “peer” or “amateur,” that is being adopted because it does some very particular cultural work in this mew media environment? Is it another discursive way to appear open, to make a promise of technological neutrality? The metaphor of a platform is a pretty compelling one: it raises you up, but it is flat and without walls, so its open to all and privileges no one. Its also worth remembering that the term has been long used in the political venue, in terms of a party’s platform, to suggest that the candidate stands on these principles. Is it a term that needs unpacking, as well as being more analytyically rigorous about it when we do scholarship on such tools?

I’m currently attending the Politics 2.0 conference being held at the Royal Holloway University of London, organized by Andrew Chadwick. The Wikicandidate project that my students and I have been developing made it a natural fit, and we were lucky to have a really good audience for our panel. So while I’m here, I may throw some thoughts to the blog, about the implications of new media phenomena for political involvement.

One issue that emerged from our panel and the discussion that followed, is the tension between engagement and consensus. There is a tension in the ideas about public political involvement and the “public sphere,” between whether the value of public participation in debating the issues of the day is the value of engagement for its own sake, or engagement in order to accomplish something, to reach consensus or resolution. I don’t know Habermas’ body of work as well as I should, so I don’t know if he addressed this directly or not. But it seems to be a persistent but often implicit question when we actually build for political involvement. Are we building spaces for people to come together to debate, because debate is a good thing, because it makes us better citizens overall, because it is the symbolic heart of democracy as an ideal? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want that debate to accomplish something, to reach a resolution on some pressing issue, to take an informed vote on some bill, to set the agenda of an governing body? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want people to reach consensus, to agree?

One point a made in my presentation was that wikis, and especially as instantiated in Wikipedia, seem to emphasize consensus over engagement for its own sake. Though some trumpet Wikipedia for its collaborative nature, the priorities at Wikipedia are about the resource produced – I think Wikipedia would prefer an encyclopedia entry that is fair and accurate but written by one person, to an entry that’s flawed and incomplete but built by many. And the wiki is technologically designed to highlight the consensus produced over the discussion that produced it: the tool foregrounds the entry and backgrounds the discussion, history, and edit functions. (You could imagine an alternative-universe Wikipedia where, when you go to the entry on “democracy” you’d arrive first to the page where users debated how to present the concept of democracy, then could click to see what they came up with. This is just as technologically possible as the one we have, but already seems counterintuitive. Its not so far from the way a Usenet threaded discussion on democracy would look.)

So if there is a tension between engagement for its own sake and engagement for the production of consensus, and remains an open question about which has greater value (or what combination of the two we require), new media platforms are being built today that decide on an answer to this question, without the question being asked.

One of the most important steps we can take as scholars is to demand that, as new answers are being offered to old questions, the question at least gets asked.

I liked this brief discussion on the design of Obama’s campaign website, especially his use of the Gotham font. Since my students and have been working on WikiCandidate for the last few months, a lot of our discussion have been about how to design the site to most closely approximate the sites set up by the current presidential candidates. We’ve tried to draw from all of them to find what is apparently the convention these days for candidate sites — not far from the conventional “content management” site, the obvious profusion of red and blue, plus some surprising commonalities of site categories, button location, and aesthetics. But I have to agree with Heller and Collins, Obama’s use of the Gotham font does do something for his site that the others do not quite match.

I think I could be a font nerd, if I knew a little more about them.