March 18, 2005
This Register article, Don’t let etopians define net literacy, is based upon a larger paper, Influence and Control: Getting Citizens to Behave in a Digital Society, part of Manifesto for a Digital Britain from the Institute for Public Policy Research. While the Register article is something of a muddle, the paper has a clearer, albeit surprisingly disturbing, message:
The current state of the Internet is often characterised as being in the midst of a battle between anarchy and control: a fight between proprietary models and the open source movement, consumers and producers, rights-holders and the “copyleft,” and moral guardians against misbehaving users. The outcomes of these battles do have important public policy ramifications, especially for the intellectual property regime and the mere conduit status of ISPs, which should be taken seriously. It is important the Government consider in the long term the choices we are currently facing and that, should either side win outright, the public is likely to be the loser.
For the majority of the public, the battles go unnoticed, and bear no direct relevance to the every day workings of their lives and we should not lose sight of this. In so far as it is the role of regulation to protect the public, we need to find a policy approach which navigates a way through anarchy and control, does not compromise the functionality of the Internet for all but only provides choice where choice is needed. […]
[…] If media literacy is about empowering consumers and enabling them to go online with confidence then providing so much choice will lead to failure. Instead there is a strong argument for limiting choice, in Internet terms the number of available sites to visit, with a focus on fitting the services to the citizen. This is not to recommend the World Wide Web as a whole be filtered to provide only government-endorsed services citizens feel safe with, but instead to recommend the provision of a ‘walled garden’ service aimed at adults, and with a non-commercial bias that can provide access to functional services –– e-banking, local government information, news etc. –– limit choice and empower citizens to use the Internet in a way which works for them, rather than being forced to consider the ‘battles’ that may rage in the wider Internet world. […]
[…] A ‘‘limited’’ World Wide Web in the sense suggested above, combined with an eBay-like rating system, would provide a guarantee of safety and validity of content accessible within the walled garden. It would thus reduce chances of individuals accessing harmful or undesirable content accidentally and could limit calls to the government to further censor the Internet using ‘cleanfeed’’ technology.
Of course this system may not meet all of the future challenges the entirety of the Internet poses. However it limits the panic that suddenly people will have no idea what and when to watch programmes with the absence of a watershed. Even in the absence of such a longstanding regulatory tool it is likely that people will continue to stick with known brands, such as the BBC, Channel 4 etc. and watch output created by them. They may do it at times more convenient to them, and powerful brands may not remain the BBC and Channel 4 for long, but nonetheless consumers will not be thrown into a frightening wilderness without assistance.
“Panic?” And here I thought that the perception was that the US policy paradigm was too paternalistic. This is spooky stuff, arguing that we need to regulate the internet for the good of the mass consumer.
And, although she asserts that the copyright/control fight is somehow beside the point for the majority of online users, I would argue that a large number of the agents responsible for the “panic” among online users are acting specifically to advance their position in the fight between copyright and information anarchy.
Yikes...! <snide> Yeah, let's just give it over to the big media companies. People don't need a way to make their voices heard. </snide> Damn it.
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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Yikes...! <snide> Yeah, let's just give it over to the big media companies. People don't need a way to make their voices heard. </snide> Damn it.
Posted by: Shawn Van Every at March 20, 2005 12:02 PM