Culture | writing notes

ReTweet: the power of twitter

An interesting thing happened at a conference I was attending last week. The were three speakers giving talks to all the attendants (c:a 300 people). First up was the minister of communication (unexciting but well formulated explaining new broadband policy), the was James Boyle discussing Cultural Agoraphobia (an excellent presentation on the public domain). Finally was a CEO who was supposed to be talking about mobility but spent the entire time promoting his own company and explaining why they were great.

In most such situations the crowd fidgets but endures. But not with a crowd that has access to twitter. The first tweets were bored comments about ill concealed marketing but this was soon followed by harsher comments. The tweets were ReTeeted and commented upon. There was an amazing difference between the online/offline reaction to the speech. Like an iceberg, the real action was under the surface.

Obviously he should not have been invited as a speaker. Nor should he have accepted to speak. And at least he should have respected those sitting listening to him enough not to turn his time into a blatant advertisement.

One of the questions tweeted at the time was why there wasn’t a screen where the speakers could see the reactions of the crowd. But is this a good idea? What are the social conventions of twittering in lectures? In non-tech situations we may allow our minds to wonder, occupy ourselves, maybe talk to our neighbors. Or in a gesture of our dissatisfaction walk out of the lecture hall.

Angry tweets to the world seem acceptable – But would nasty comments flowing along on a computer screen in front of the speaker be considered ill mannered?

Twitter has already been the subject of discussion in academic circles. In October (2009) Laura Bonetta Should You Be Tweeting?

In May of this year, Daniel MacArthur, a researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge…reported live from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) meeting Biology of Genomes.

A participant from the online news site Genomeweb protested that MacArthur was twittering and blogging about the meeting. The basis of there protest was that while media had to obtain permission to be able to report from the meeting but MacArthur was attending the meeting as a participant and therefore was not required to obtain permission. As a result of this complaint the CSHL notified a change of its rules:

“any participant intending to blog, twitter or otherwise communicate or disseminate results or discussion presented at the meeting to anonymous third parties must obtain permission from the relevant presenting author before communicating any results or discussion to third party groups, message boards, blogs or other online resources (other than your own lab or departments).”

But this seems to be an extreme way to go…

Posted on November 7, 2009 by mklang

Its dead already!

An absolutely brilliant cartoon from BrownSharpie. Wonderful, it made my day!

Posted on October 28, 2009 by mklang

My fellow second class scientists or proles…

Can you hear the hordes of Germans academics chanting fight, fight, figth in the background? Apparently the argument stems from the German Wikipedia newsletter Kurier which contained a this text:

Im besten Fall werden Blogs von zweitklassigen Wissenschaftlern betrieben, im Normalfall vom Prekariat.

For those of us language-challenged non-German speakers, there is google translation which gives:

At best, blogs are run by second-rate scientists, usually from precariat.

Damn as a blogger I don’t even understand when I am being insulted. I needed to look up precariat and with the help of German Wikipedia and Google translate I get:

Precariat is a term used in sociology and defines “unprotected end of the work and the unemployed” as a new social grouping. The term itself is a neologism that is fragile from the adjective (difficult, dangerous to dubious) analogy to derive the proletariat. Etymologically, the word “precariat comes” from the Latin precarium = one bittweises to revoke granted tenure status

So as a blogger I am either a second class scientist or a prole?

All I can do from over here is to support my fellow German second-classers or proles and chant fight, fight, fight… or as google translate would have me say:

kämpfen, kämpfen, kämpfen…

Posted on October 27, 2009 by mklang

Us Now documentary

Us Now is a documentary film that explores the ways in which web2.0 technologies are changing the way in which we interact and thus changing the fundamental roots of society. It’s “A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet”.

In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?
New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation.

From what I have seen so far this is an insightful and interesting film which presents the viewer with many questions about our society. It is filled with interesting people and examples revealing interesting new social organizational forms and asking questions about the way which will could and should be governed in the future. There is an underlying demand for true participation in the ways we are governed.

The film is also released under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.

Here is a blurb from Vodo.net

Can we all govern? Us Now looks at how ‘user’ participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever. Us Now follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager; and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers.

Check out the trailer:

Posted on October 27, 2009 by mklang

Free Culture Forum Barcelona

I always think its a good idea to be in Barcelona. But unfortunately I will not be there this weekend. But for those of you who are in the area this coming weekend, you should seriously consider attending the Free Culture Forum:

Across the planet, people are recognizing the need for an international space to build and coordinate a global framework and common agenda for issues surrounding free culture and access to knowledge. The Free Culture Forum of Barcelona aims to create such a space. Bringing together under the same roof the key organizations and active voices in the free culture and knowledge space, the Forum will be a meeting point to sit and put together the answers to the pressing questions behind the present paradigm shift.

Representatives from Creative Commons Spain, Students for Free Culture and Wikimedia will be in attendance (among many others), so it’ll be a great opportunity to meet plenty of people in our community. Registration is free and open to the public, but there are more details on how to get involved here.

(via Creative Commons)

Posted on October 26, 2009 by mklang

The top 10 laws of the Internet

In its effort to supply basic education to readers who daily use the internet but may be unaware of its history The Guardian today lists the top 10 laws of the internet. Very nice! Well to be honest I did not know all of them but I have definitely followed most of them.

Here is the list – but dont forget to read the whole article with explanations, examples and discussions:

1. Godwin’s Law
The most famous of all the internet laws, formed by Mike Godwin in 1990. As originally stated, it said: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” It has now been expanded to include all web discussions.

2. Poe’s Law
Not to be confused with the law of poetry enshrined by Edgar Allen Poe, the internet Poe’s Law states: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

3. Rule 34
States: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” See also Rule 35: “If no such porn exists, it will be made.” Generally held to refer to fictional characters and cartoons, although some formulations insist there are “no exceptions” even for abstract ideas like non-Euclidean geometry, or puzzlement.

4. Skitt’s Law
Expressed as “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself” or “the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.”

5. Scopie’s Law
States: “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room.” First formulated by Rich Scopie on the badscience.net forum.

6. Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law)
States: “If you have to insist that you’ve won an internet argument, you’ve probably lost badly.” Named after a user on the role-playing gamers’ forum RPG.net.

7. Pommer’s Law
Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person’s mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”

8. DeMyer’s Laws
Named for Ken DeMyer, a moderator on Conservapedia.com. There are four: the Zeroth, First, Second and Third Laws.

The Second Law states: “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.”

The Zeroth, First and Third Laws cannot be very generally applied and will be glossed over here.

9. Cohen’s Law
Proposed by Brian Cohen in 2007, states that: “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that… …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”

10. The Law of Exclamation
First recorded in an article by Lori Robertson at FactCheck.org in 2008, this states: “The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters.”

Posted on October 24, 2009 by mklang

The three main hurdles in the path of free culture

Today it’s the Free Culture Workshop at the Berkman Center (@ Harvard) in Boston and I was going to be there. Unfortunately I missed the whole thing because I had to attend a funeral in Stockholm instead. Check out the event. Here is a short position I was asked to write for the workshop, since I will not be using it I will post in here:

Social advances (albeit unequally distributed) have granted people the leisure time to focus on the production of non-essential products and services. Advances in technology have radically reduced the costs for preserving and communicating these cultural artifacts beyond the boundaries of time and space. However it was not until the last 150 years where we have seen the technical and social advances necessary to enable widespread dispersion of the tools of cultural creation and communication to a wider group of users – the amateurs.

The oldest of these technologies is the art of reading and writing which challenged the status of memory. Plato was aware of the conflict and wrote about the art of writing in Phaedrus:

“…for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

This criticism tends to repeat itself with each new technology that redresses the shift of power among those who create culture and those who create culture with the aid of new technology. Arguments similar to those presented by Plato were used in the discussions of the relationships between photography and copyright. Mediating culture with technology brings about discussions on which of the forms of culture are more valuable and deserve protection.

In USA, after Congress amended the Copyright Act to include photography in 1865 the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony[1] discussed whether the photographer Sarony could have sole rights to his portrait of Oscar Wilde. The United States Supreme Court ruled that photographs could be “representatives of original intellectual conceptions of an author.” While in the UK the courts stated in the Graves’ Case, (1869)[2] that it was “…difficult to say what can be meant by an original photograph. All photographs are copies of some object.”

From these illustrations it is my intention to show that the discussions of culture, technology, value and protection are under constant discussion and movement and therefore are neither fixed nor moving in a linear development from one stage to the next. With the widespread dissemination of a cheap and simple (both terms to be take relatively) technology of digitalization coupled with an open communications infrastructure further barriers to amateur production of culture were removed.

This leads us up until today when the hurdles facing the individual wishing to become a cultural producer are no longer issues of time, economy or technical know-how. What are left are the two major barriers of creativity and copyright. Since it is beyond my ability to discuss the creativity of others I shall limit myself to developing what is meant by the limiting factor of copyright on the creativity of individuals by presenting the three main copyright related hurdles to free culture. The three hurdles are FUD, DRM & copyfraud. The common factor for these three hurdles is that they prevent the free use of cultural material in the development of new cultural artifacts and since our common cultural heritage provides the “raw material” in cultural production the means to develop new material is seriously curtailed.

Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD)

The complexities of copyright have created a great deal of uncertainty among those actors attempting to create cultural artifacts while remaining within the limits of the law. The results of FUD favor inactivity since the perceived risks of violating copyright are seen as too great to risk. FUD is an important factor in different situations, for example: (1) where the creator intends to expose his/her product in a more formal setting e.g. a young film maker may easily add music or images to his/her film without permission but this will limit his/her ability to display the works to the public. (2) Orphaned works i.e. when the author of a work has been “lost” it becomes impossible to ask permission to reproduce and valuable cultural information is lost to the world. (3) The ability of museum and archives to reproduce or present their material to the world. At present the conflict between the National Gallery and Wikipedia provides an excellent illustration of this point.[3] The latter is a great source of concern to many public cultural heritage institutions.

Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)

In an attempt to ensure control over intellectual property many organizations and individuals are implementing digital protection measures. The goal of these measures is to ensure that the copying and spreading of copyrightable material is prevented. However these digital measures tend to create rights for the owners that often go beyond the fair use rights of those attempting to consume the cultural artifacts. In addition to this, legislation intended to prevent users from circumventing digital protection measures have been enacted in most jurisdictions. The effect of such legislation is to make moot whether or not the user has fair use rights under copyright since he/she is illegally circumventing a digital protection measure.

Copyfraud

The general state of confusion surrounding the extent of protection granted by copyright is being used (intentionally and unintentionally) to claim copyright over material which either may not be copyrightable or material for which the period of copyright protection has passed. These illegitimate limitations to the public domain may of course be contested in court but such actions are costly, entail an element of risk and favor the party with better lawyers. Therefore material, which under copyright legislation is available to all, is prevented from becoming part of our common cultural raw material that may be freely used.

[1] l l lU.S. 58 (1884).

[2] 4 L.R.Q.B. 715, 722

[3] BBC News “Wikipedia Painting Row Escalates” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8156268.stm?lsf

Posted on October 23, 2009 by mklang

Is snitching a social good?

In 1984 one of the basic premises of state control was to be found in the dictum “He who controls the past, controls the future”. This can be seen as a version of the popular quote from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“.

One of the themes in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the way in which the repressive society encourages friends, neighbors and family to spy on one another. The informer was seen as a hero by the state. In particular Orwell writes that parents lived in fear of their children.

The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

This is based on the story of Pavlik Morozov, a child who denounced his father to the soviet state and became part of soviet mythology and naturally part of the the fear of the soviet state.

Now we could dismiss the whole thing as a fiction set in a far away place, in a far away time but this is not what Orwell wants. The same year Nineteen Eighty-Four was published he wrote in a letter*

My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

Today we are again and again being actively encouraged to destroy not family but society. We are supposed to discover and report “suspicious behavior” for the good of us all – in the name of terrorism. The most reason slick version of the state asking us to denounce anything different comes (via BoingBoing: What to do if you smell a terrorist). It’s about a video released by the LA police department in a campaign called IwatchLA.

The video is slick, sleek and personal. It encourages people to denounce anything unusual – even an unusual smell – and let the authorities decide if its terrorism. This is what Orwell feared. The goal of terrorism prevention is a praiseworthy goal but the destruction of social trust by creating universal suspicion is not the way to go.

—

* The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4 – In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 p.546 (Penguin)

Posted on October 21, 2009 by mklang

Al Jazeera blogs

In January Al Jazeera created a Creative Commons licensed news repository using, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited. Now Al Jazeera goes a step further in sharing…

Al Jazeera has just launched the latest of its online project called Al Jazeera Blogs.

The website features blog posts written by prominent journalists and correspondents from the global Al Jazeera television network. It also hosts several sub-blogs sections divided by geographical areas, such as the Africa, Asia, Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition, Al Jazeera has a blog focused on international business and the ongoing financial crisis.

The project also features interesting tech extras such as integration with OpenCalais’ semantic tagging system.

Credit once again goes to Al Jazeera English’s Head of Online, Mohamed Nanabhay. Mohamed also happens to be the author of the first commoner letter for this year’s annual campaign, and was one of the key players who made Al Jazeera’s amazing CC repository a reality.

Posted on October 20, 2009 by mklang