….waiting in our boats to set sail/ Sea of Joy

Steve Winwood, Sea of Joy. Blind Faith, Blind Faith, August 1969

Steve Winwood. One of my all-time favourite musicians. Someone whom I heard for the first time in the early Seventies, someone whom I’ve been an ardent fan of ever since. Even went to a pub in Gloucestershire decades ago because I was told he drank there, just to see him in the flesh. He wasn’t touring then. He has, since, resumed touring, and I’ve been fortunate enough to see him maybe half a dozen times since. I was able to see him “live” twice this year, and I shall be doing so again next May. In fact, I took the photograph above while watching him play with Eric Clapton at Wembley Arena earlier this year. But that’s not what this post is about. [Even if I did enjoy being able to link to the concert using setlist.fm; what a lovely service!].

Sea of Joy. One of my all-time favourite songs, taken from one of my all-time favourite albums, Blind Faith by Blind Faith. A song dating back to times when working out the meanings of song lyrics was a hard thing to do…..”Once the door swings open into space, and I’m already waiting in disguise”……There was a time when I used to try, until I heard what might have been an apocryphal tale about the Doors and Mr Mojo Risin’. Erudite people had written erudite essays about what Jim Morrison may have meant in his repeated use of the phrase “Mr Mojo Risin” in a number of Doors songs. Extremely erudite essays about the meaning and role of mojo at the time, in terms of hoodoo and voodoo symbolism and representations of power and sex-appeal. And it is possible that Jim Morrison may have been influenced by all that when he chose to use the phrase as a motet. But. But then I heard the story of a little old lady who wrote in to some magazine some years after Morrison’s death, wondering what all the fuss was about. She said that the Morrisons used to live next door to them when little Jim was growing up. And Jim used to come and play in their yard. And her husband made up the phrase Mr Mojo Risin’ to describe the young James Douglas Morrison, who would have been 67 last week if he hadn’t died so tragically in 1971. Her husband liked crosswords and suchlike. And Mr Mojo Risin’ is a perfect anagram of … Jim Morrison. As I said, the tale is apocryphal. I don’t have a shred of evidence to back the story. And yet I believe it.

But that’s not what this post is about either.

This post is about a sea of joy. Maybe even an ocean of joy. Oceans of joy.

The internet.

I know, I know, comparisons can often be odious. And while pictures paint thousands of words, they come with frames. And anchors. Which can constrain imagination.

Nevertheless.

I’ve always imagined the internet to be a whole heap of rivers, feeding many seas, feeding one large ocean. Living, breathing, moving. A giant organism which is more than just a space. Containing water, that wondrous substance that helps keep us alive. A place where people swim and frolic, laugh and play. An environment of magic, of depth, of beauty we’re still discovering. A place full of life in all its brilliance. A repository of rich resource we can mine and use, sensibly and sustainably. And yet a place where danger lurks, where death too can be found. With pirates. And with pollution.

Despite all that, a sea of joy.

Which is partly why I’ve found recent discussions about Wikileaks intriguing to say the least. For some time now I’ve been talking about having to “design for loss of control”, referred to here and here, here and at the TED Salon here.

Humour me for a moment or two.

Imagine it’s raining outside. [For some strange reason I find this very easy to do. Perhaps it's because of where I choose to live.] Imagine you go for a walk around your house, with a beaker in your hand, collecting rainwater, getting absolutely drenched in the process. [For an even stranger reason I've done this, as part of a school Physics question set by Resnick and Halliday, in 1974....I remember the question as "Drops are falling steadily in a perpendicular rain. You need to get from A to B in this rain. In order to encounter the least number of raindrops in your journey, would you (a) travel at your fastest speed (b) travel at your slowest speed or (c) travel at some intermediate speed you determine? Explain your answer."]

Anyway, where was I? More importantly, where were you? Oh yes, I had you out collecting rainwater. Imagine you have a beaker full of rainwater. Imagine you take that beaker of rainwater and pour it into a nearby brook, which feeds a river, which empties out into a sea and forms part of the oceans.

For the sake of argument, let’s leave aside the philosophical question of whether you “own” the rainwater you collected. Imagine just trying to find that rainwater in the ocean, something you’re going to have to do if, for some reason, you’re keen on staking a claim to your rainwater.

Hmmm.

The sea is designed to be plentiful, abundant. Quite different from lakes and ponds, which are contained and isolated, controllable. And often stagnant. [No, I'm not going to enter into angels-dancing-on-pins arguments about the Caspian Sea or for that matter the Dead Sea here].

Making things that are abundant by design somehow appear scarce is not an easy task. As I’ve said before, and said many times before, every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance; over time, the artificial abundance will win. Region coding of DVDs and music DRM are simple examples of the principle.

So it is with the internet. When you make something digital, you have something that is cheap to copy. When you connect that digital something to the internet, you have something that is cheap to distribute far and wide. That is why Kevin Kelly called the internet a “copy machine” in his seminal essay, Better Than Free, from which the illustration below is taken. If you haven’t read it yet, stop here and follow the link. It’s a must-read.

So now the internet exists, does it mean no one can keep a secret any more? No. It’s just like in the good old days before the internet: if you want to keep something secret, try not telling anyone.

The internet is designed to share.

There are many things that people don’t want to share, for a variety of good reasons: personally identifiable information; commercially sensitive information; and information demonstrably pertaining to national or international security. Sometimes it’s because the information is held asymmetrically and misused; in polite society we would call this “blackmail”, and in the civilised world this is illegal. Sometimes it’s because the information is considered “private”, and a right to privacy is seen to exist, a right not to be embarrassed because something you said in private somehow makes its way into the public domain. Which is why the recent spate of leaks has caused such consternation. Contrast this with Eliot Spitzer and the Wall Street firms he went after, the whistleblower/leak aspect of all that happened, and the difference in reaction then. Contrast this with Talking-To-Journalists 101, which says Nothing Is Ever Off The Record. In England, thirty years ago, when I was given rudimentary media training, I was told “always imagine that anything you say, everything you say, could be on the first page of the Mail tomorrow”.

Bruce Schneier, an erstwhile colleague and someone whose writings and sayings I pay attention to, wrote a wonderful little piece on the subject, making five simple points:

• Encryption is not the issue
• Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them
• Access control is hard
• This has little to do with Wikileaks
• Governments will have to learn what the music and film industries have been forced to learn already, that it’s easy to copy and publish digital files

You should read the whole essay, which I’ve linked to here. Bruce is brilliant, terse and trenchant as ever.

Clay Shirky, another writer I have a lot of time for, writes a very balanced piece here, about the importance of the legal process in all this. Any medium of communication, any method of publishing and propagating, needs to have its principles and guidelines, and over time, its laws and its regulations. Of particular importance is the following paragraph from his post:

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the U.S. trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us, “You went after WikiLeaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”

Due democratic process is always important; it is doubly important when we’re dealing with an emergent, valuable phenomenon. Such as the internet and all things digital.  Which is why I was so concerned with the apparently trivial all-downloaders-are-thieves approach that Mandelson et al sought to steamroller through via the Digital Economy Act. Which is why I remain concerned now. [Incidentally, I'm delighted that BT was part of the lobby that fought for, and won, a judicial review into the DE Act].

Not that I have anything against secrets per se.

Secrets are important, and there is a place for secrets. There are ways of keeping secrets secret.

Sharing is also important. And there is a place for sharing. It’s called the internet.

And it is really important that there continue to be ways of keeping shared things shared.

Which is why I appreciate the tireless work of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in all this; John Palfrey, and, more recently, Urs Gasser, do a great job there. Which is why I look up to people like Charlie Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig as they strive to make sure that the law cannot be confused with genus Equus subgenus Asinus, and that due democratic process is followed when new laws are constructed. Which is why I appreciate the time that people like Doc Searls and Cory Doctorow spend on this. Which is why I appreciate the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; of the Open Rights Group; of Creative Commons; of the Web Science Trust, particularly for their work on open data. People in all these places have somehow found the time and the motivation to devote to this cause. I am privileged to count many of them amongst my friends, too many to list here. You know who you are. Thank you.

You see, it’s not really about Wikileaks. Artificial scarcities will continue to be met by artificial abundances. There will be many more Wikileaks. In many places. At the same time. And some of them will be very damaging. Which is not a good thing. But. There is a right way to stop it. It’s called the democratic process.

The internet is about sharing. It’s about making it easier to copy things and to move them around, to publish at scale. It’s about making it easier for Linus’s Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. It’s about the power of democratised access. Access to publishing. Access to editing, to changing. Access to reading. Access to community skills and talent.

The internet makes it possible for us to do things we could never do before, like the World Wide Web itself. Like Wikipedia. Like Craigslist. Like being able to listen to “A symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom” live yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum, as thousands of us were able to do yesterday.

The internet is capable of transforming lives at the edge, making radical impacts on education, on healthcare, even on government. Of course the internet is dependent on all of us having ubiquitous affordable connectivity, something I continue to be optimistic about. It will happen. Perhaps not in the way we thought it would. But it will happen. And there won’t be a digital divide. Because that too would be an artificial scarcity….

Steve Winwood, when he penned Sea of Joy, also had these words to say in the song:

Having trouble coming through,
Through this concrete, blocks my view
And it’s all because of you.

All because of you. The “you” in that phrase is us. We have a responsibility to future generations that the internet is governed the right way, that the right laws are formulated and promulgated, that the right process is followed.

Because there are generations to come….

Waiting in their boats to set sail, Sea of Joy.

You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

Andrew Largeman, a character in Garden State, a film that was written and directed by Zach Braff some years ago.

A group of people that miss the same imaginary place. That phrase really stuck in my head when I saw the movie, and it’s stayed there ever since. Go see the film if you haven’t already, you won’t regret it. [And you don't have to take my word for it either. An IMDB rating of 7.9, spread out over 90,000+ votes, nearly a thousand reviews, that's some going.]

It wasn’t long after that when Jyri Engestrom started riffing with the idea of social objects, and when Hugh MacLeod picked it up and spoke to me at length about the concept, part of me was still completely stuck in the Andrew Largeman mindset. The same imaginary place.

And that’s part of the reason I share some of the things I do via twitter: The music I listen to. The food I’m cooking or eating. The films I’m watching; the books I’m reading; the places I go to. Sometimes what I share is in the immediate past, sometimes it’s in the present, sometimes all I’m doing is declaring my intent. Because, paraphrasing John Lennon, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

When we share our experiences of sights and sounds and smells, we recreate the familiar imaginary places we share with others. We use these digital objects as the seed, as one dimension of the experience to flesh out the rest of that experience. So we take the sound or image or location or even in some cases the smell, and we extrapolate it into a rich memory of that particular experience. Which is often a worthwhile thing to do, for all the people who shared that “imaginary place” with you.

This has become more valuable as a result of phenomena like Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, that have made it easier for you to share the digital objects with the people you shared the original experience with. Which is why any tool that helps you capture what you’re watching or reading or listening to or visiting or eating is worth experimenting with.

This is something I’ve been doing for some time now, playing with every tool that comes on to the market, trying to see what it gives me that others didn’t. [When I started doing this, I had to come to terms quite quickly with the fact that some people don't like being on the receiving end of all this "sharing". More than once, I thought long and hard about segmenting my stream so that people could tune in or tune out of the particular segment. But I've stayed "whole" nevertheless. More on this later].

I’ve written about social objects a few times, even touched on the topic of something analogous to a graphic equaliser for an individual lifestream, yet I felt it was worth while in discussing them further in the context of “a group of people that miss the same imaginary place”. This time around, I want to concentrate on the ecosystem, on the tools and conventions we will need. Because that’s how sharing of experiences can become simpler, more extensive, more valuable.

I think we do five things with digital objects:

• Introduce the object into shared space
• Experience (and re-experience) the object
• Share what you’re experiencing with others
• Place in context that experience
• Connect and re-connect with the family that has the same shared imaginary place

So to my way of thinking, once I start going down this road, every music site, every photo site, every video site, every audio site, they’re all about helping us introduce digital objects into shared space.

Many of these introducer sites also double up as experiencer sites: so you can watch the videos, hear the music and so on.

Every community site then becomes a way of sharing the experience of those objects: every review, every rating, every post, every link, every lifestream, all these are just ways of sharing our experiences, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without.

As more people get connected, and as the tools for sharing get better, and as the costs of sharing drop, we’re going to have the classic problems that we’ve already learnt about from the web in general. There are too many firehoses. It becomes hard to know what is out there, harder to find the right things. Errors, inaccuracies, even lies abound. (Digital objects are easy to modify).

So metadata becomes important. Preferably automated, so that authenticity is verifiable. Preferably low-cost and high-speed. Preferably indelibly associated with the digital object. Preferably easy to augment with tags and folksonomies and hashtags. Times, places, people. Names and descriptions. Devices involved, settings for those devices. History of views, listens, access, usage, editing. The edits themselves.

Authenticity becomes even more important. Watermarking the object while at the same time allowing copies of the object to be modified.

Search tools have to get better. I’ve been reading and re-reading Esther Dyson’s The Future of Internet Search for some time now, linking what she’s saying to what I’m thinking about here. Esther has been a friend and mentor for a long time; when she has something to say, I shut up and listen.

Visualisation tools also have to get better, which is why I spend time reading stuff like Information is Beautiful, why I visit feltron or manyeyes.

Sometimes many of these things happen in one place, elegantly and beautifully. That’s why I like Chris Wild’s Retroscope, why I like How To Be A Retronaut. It helps us place into context some of the things we share, some of the things we used to share.

Sometimes the tools for doing some of this move us into new dimensions, as in the case of layar and augmented reality, or for that matter AR spectacles. Noninvasive ways of overlaying information on to physical objects, ways that allow us to share the imaginary place more effectively.

As a young man, I was an incurable optimist. While time has tempered that optimism, my outlook on life continues to be positive, so positive that people sometimes claim I’m almost Utopian. Yet I still remember two quotations that were like kryptonite to the Superman of my optimism.

The first was Thoreau’s: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. And the second was Burke’s: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing“.

There are many things we have to get better at, and many people working hard to make sure that, collectively, we get better at them. Feeding the world, eradicating poverty and the illnesses associated with poverty. Making sure every child has access to basic education. Improving healthcare, moving from cure to prevention, moving from symptom to root cause. Being better neighbours. Being better stewards of our environment.

I have never found it easy to accept that so many people are fundamentally lonely; I have never found it easy to accept that so many people are fundamentally depressed. And I have always wanted to do whatever I can to prevent these things from happening.

The tools we have today can help us eradicate loneliness and depression in ways that pharmacology can only dream of. Those tools can and will get better.

Of course there are things that come in the way, things we have to deal with first. Concepts like intellectual property rights have to be overhauled from the abominations they represent today, rebuilt from the ground up. Concepts like privacy and confidentiality have to be reformed to help us bring back community values that were eroded over the last 150 years or so. Human rights have to be reframed in a global context, the very concept of a nation re-interpreted, a whole new United Nations formed.

But while all that happens, we can help. By continuing to create ways that people remember the familiar shared imaginary places, by reminding ourselves what family means.

Family is not about blood alone, it is about covenant relationships. When something goes wrong in a covenant relationship, you don’t look for someone to blame, or even sue. You look for ways to fix it. Together.

Families don’t just share a past, they share a present. And a future. Social objects are, similarly, not just about the past, they’re about the present, they’re about the future.

We’re on the start of a whole new journey, and so we spend time learning about sharing by declaring past and present experiences. Soon we will get better at sharing intentions.

Soon we will get better at sharing imaginary places that are in the future, not in the past or present.

Soon. to paraphrase the prophet Joel,  our old men shall dream dreams, our young men shall see visions.

Those traits in me make some people believe that I’m a wild-eyed optimist, whatever the truth might be; this is particularly true of people who tend to believe that two and two make five, who are quick to draw conclusions on superficial evidence.

Against this backdrop, factor in the following: I was born in the ’50s, grew up in the ’60s and early ’70s. I cite Jerry Garcia, Stewart Brand and Lewis Hyde as early influences (people did read in the ’60s and ’70s); I learnt to dance to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen (it’s harder than it sounds); I love spending time in San Francisco; and I call myself a retired hippie.

So some people think I’m a pinko lefty treehugging wild-eyed optimist. In short, a Utopian.  And you can’t blame them.

Which is why, when I make assertions like I did last night: suggesting that the Web actually reduces barriers to entry when it comes to “expertise”, and that traditional experts (myself included) are becoming less scarce, less distinctive, less “valuable”: I need to back up the assertions with some concrete evidence rather than just theory.

Which is what I intend to do tonight.

I want to point you towards evidence of the Great Leveller status of the internet. Some evidence I found intriguing at first, compelling as I got into it, and finally inspiring.

Sugata Mitra: courtesy of the TED Blog

So let me tell you the story of Sugata Mitra, polymath, professor, chief scientist emeritus. A man with an incredible vision and the willingness to do something about it. He speaks English and Bengali, a little German, spent time in Calcutta, works with computers and is passionate about education. So maybe I’m a little biased. Bear with me.

Professor Mitra is responsible for introducing me (and a gazillion others) to the concept of Minimally Invasive Education or MIE. In simple terms, over a decade ago, he ran an experiment called Hole In the Wall which took PCs and stuck them in walls in slums, with no explanation or instruction. And watched as children learnt.

Some of you must be thinking, he must have gotten lucky, a flash in the pan. Yes. Eleven years later. Nine countries later. 300 Holes-In-The-Wall later. 300,000 students later. You could say he got lucky.

I prefer to think he called it right. I was privileged to hear Professor Mitra at TED, and to shake his hand. I have had an instinctive and long-seated belief in the incredible potential of humanity, and hearing his story reinforced my belief. You can find his TED talks here and here.

One of my favourite practitioners and writers on leadership, Max De Pree, characterised leaders as people who do just two things: set strategy and direction and say thank you. In between those two things, he said leaders are servants and debtors. Since reading some of his works in the late 1980s, I’ve considered “getting out of the way” to be an essential component of good leadership.

If you ever wanted rebuttals to abominations like the Bell Curve; if you ever wanted refutations to arguments about the web making us dumber; if you ever wanted evidence to challenge assertions about the cult of the amateur; then look no further than Sugata Mitra’s research. Thank you Professor Mitra. And thank you TED, particularly Chris Anderson and Bruno Guissani for bringing Professor Mitra to my attention and then giving me the chance to meet him.

All teachers are learners. All learners are teachers. Teachers and learners are not just passionately curious a la Einstein; they want to see everyone discover their potential, achieve it and improve upon it.

Stories like Sugata Mitra’s inspire me. They make me believe that battles to ensure ubiquitous affordable connectivity are worth while; they make me believe that wars to eradicate inappropriate IPR are worth while; they make me believe that the Digital Divide can be avoided.

They remind me of the incredible potential every child represents. The incredible responsibility every parent, every teacher, every human has towards generations to come. The critical value of education in that context.

So if people want to believe the internet dumbs people down, fine. That’s their choice, and I don’t have to agree with them. It will not stop me wanting to use the internet to level the playing field, to help ensure that access to information, to knowledge, to wisdom is not the birthright of the privileged few alone.

Another data point. Last year I spent some time in Italy with my family (it was our 25th wedding anniversary, and we took the children to Sorrento, where we’d honeymooned in 1984). And we went to Pompeii. Where we met a fantastic guide called Mario. Who was 65 years old, a real expert. And he was stopping working for a while. Going back to school. Because the web had reduced the value of his expertise.

The problem, the weakening of the value of “expertise”, is instructive. His response, to go back to school at 65, is even more instructive. You can read all about it here, in a post I wrote at the time.

[By the way, thanks for your comments yesterday. I will wait for further comments tonight and tomorrow, and then try and round things off in a final post later this week.]

Information can be asymmetric in a number of ways. The first, and simplest, is asymmetry-in-access. If you can make sure that no one else has access to information that you have access to, if you’re in a position to deny others access to the information, then you can do something useful with it. In the old days this was called keeping a secret. Keeping something secret is not wrong per se. But if that secret is privileged information, there are many things you cannot do with it. Like trade on it. Or blackmail someone as a result of it.

Nevertheless, for centuries, people have made money by having asymmetric access to information. And for the most part they’ve done it legally.

A second form of asymmetry is in effect a special case of asymmetry-in-access: asymmetry-in-creation. If you create/originate the information in question, then it is possible to prevent anyone else from knowing it. All you have to do is make sure that you don’t tell anyone. Kenny Dalglish, while managing Liverpool in the mid-to-late 1980s,  was asked how he’d managed to keep Ian Rush’s return from Juventus a secret. In answer he said ‘It was simple. I didn’t tell anyone”.

If you choose not to share something you’ve created, then you are in a position to be the only person in the world to enjoy it. Take a work of art or music or literature. As creator, you can choose to share whatever you’ve created with nobody; with just one person; with just a few people; the choice is yours. And you can charge for this access. Some people may think you’re being selfish, some people may consider you “sad” as a result, but you have every right. What you’re doing is legal. You’re protecting the scarce nature of what you’ve created, and seeking to exploit that scarcity.

For centuries people have made money out of creating unique things, scarce things, and then charging others when they want access or ownership.

A third form of asymmetry is really a derivative form, where the information is itself not of much use without some way of comprehending it, parsing it, interpreting it: asymmetry-in-education. Equality in educational rights may be a much-vaunted goal, but it’s not there. Equality of opportunity continues to be mandated, and may well happen in your lifetime. Equality of outcome cannot be legislated. Asymmetry-in-education has therefore continued to persist despite the efforts of well-meaning people over the past century or so.

This form of asymmetry has been exploited by experts in many guises: doctors, lawyers, priests, even IT consultants. And their theme song is simple. “You didn’t have to work as hard as I did to know what I know. It’s complex, you won’t understand it.”. In many cases, this situation was exacerbated by the use of foreign languages, preferably dead foreign languages. And, just in case that wasn’t enough, the smoke and mirrors of specialist terminology, jargon, abbreviation and convention was used to obfuscate the environment.

For millennia experts have exploited this asymmetry and wielded power and amassed wealth as a result.

There is a fourth, and final, form of asymmetry: asymmetry-by-design. This is where you take something that is essentially abundant and, through fair means or foul, get it redefined as scarce. Most implementations of Digital Rights Management are attempts to create asymmetric access, make something scarce by design. At a level of abstraction, iPhone and Android apps are essentially the same thing in disguise: thinly-veiled attempts to make abundant things scarce.

Creating artificial scarcity out of something that is essentially abundant is also not wrong per se. But there can be legal and moral implications. Building a dam near the source of a river and charging people for access to the water may sound reasonable; on the other hand, there may be strong grounds for “grandfathered” rights to that water. Society, through the ages, has seen fit to protect the view (as in “ancient lights”), walks (as in ramblers’ rights) and even open spaces (as in commons).

[Speaking of commons, permit me an aside. There appears to be a tendency for people to use the term "by hook or by crook" to mean the equivalent of "by fair means or foul". This is inaccurate. If you wanted to chop down wood for firewood, you were entitled to use your hook or your crook to get to branches and limbs of trees in the commons. Only fair means. No foul means.]

Asymmetry in access. Asymmetry in creation. Asymmetry in education. Asymmetry by design.

Asymmetries all of them. Asymmetries that allowed people to wield power and to amass wealth. For the most part legally.

Then, along comes the internet. Along comes the Web.

The world’s biggest copy machine, as Kevin Kelly reminded us.

Suddenly asymmetry of access was weakened, holed amidships below the waterline. One of the nicest things about the web is that it levels the playing field for access. More accurately, it is capable of levelling the playing field for access. And it is for this reason that “net neutrality” arguments tend to get most heated where there isn’t any true competition for access. Given real transparency and real competition for access, there would not be a need for legislation.

Copying machines are not designed to make things scarce. As a result, anything made available on the internet was relatively easy to copy. Which in turn meant that anything that was expressed as a digital object was difficult to make scarce. Many many industries have made money for many many years on the basis of relative scarcity; their concepts of pricing were based on scarcity models. So they tried to make the inherent abundance of the internet into something scarcer by using DRM or its more sophisticated new form, the App.

This approach, asymmetry-by-creation, and its alter ego, asymmetry-by-design, are about creating artificial scarcity. This is fundamentally doomed. I’ve said it many times. Every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance. And, over time, the abundance will win. There will always be more people choosing to find ways to undo DRM than people employed in the DRM-implementing sector. Always.

So when people create walled-garden paid apps, others will create unpaid apps that get to the same material. It’s only a matter of time. Because every attempt at building dams and filters on the internet is seen as pollution by the volunteers. It’s not about the money, it’s about the principle. No pollutants.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. There’s been a lot of talk about the web and the internet making us dumber.

I think it’s more serious than that. What the web does is reduce the capacity for asymmetry in education. Which in turn undermines the exalted status of the expert.

The web makes experts “dumb”. By reducing the privileged nature of their expertise.

I have three children born since 1986. One has finished her Master’s and is now a teacher. One has just finished his A Levels and is taking a “gap year” before starting university in a year’s time. The third is still in school.

The web has made them smarter. They know things I did not know at their age, and I had privileged upbringing and access. They know things more deeply than I did. Their interest in things analog is unabated, they think of the web as an AND to their analog lives rather than an OR.

Many of you reading this are experts; I myself am considered an expert in some things. And the status bestowed upon us by our expertise is dwindling

So what?

We should rejoice that access to the things that made us experts is now getting easier, cheaper and more universal.

We should rejoice that generations to come will out-expert us in every field we care to name.

We should rejoice that we continue to enter a world where the economics of abundance is displacing the economics of scarcity.

We should rise up every time there is an attempt to pollute the path of open access.

The web is not making us dumb. It is the expert in us that is being made to look dumb. And that is a Good Thing.

Views? Comments? I suspect this post might attract a few flames….

There were many things I learnt, much that was brought to mind. Some of you probably think I read too much Jane Jacobs (and for that matter, Christopher Alexander) for my own good. So be it. I’d happily re-read The Death and Life of Great American Cities every six months or so; if you haven’t discovered Jane Jacobs stop reading now, go to the book-buying web site of your choice and order pretty much anything by her. Alexander’s A Pattern Language is probably somewhat less accessible, but still definitely worth a read.

So what did I learn?

I learnt that the buildings in Pompeii that had arched and domed rooms and gateways fared much better than the rest.

I learnt that Pompeii was a cosmopolitan place where they’d worked out the importance of using culture-crossing graphics and symbols rather than words.

I learnt that they had interesting models of re-use: for example, they used the fragments of ceramics smashed in the earthquake of 62AD to form and decorate floors:

I learnt that they took real care in their design, making the roads work as rainwater escapes as well: the city was built on igneous rock which was less than perfect as a flood plain. But then it would be hard for people to cross the streets, so they embedded the streets with crossing stones at regular intervals:

I learnt that they used natural materials as cat’s eyes, embedding pavements and floors with reflective stones as shown below:

I learnt that they cared about waste and recycling, saw what they built under the rooms (and for that matter how they reused urine as fertiliser).

I learnt that they had open standards and component architecture. For example, they had 38 different sizes of container for food and drink, and everyone used the same sizes to mean the same things:

I learnt that they did all this with time for beauty and enjoyment in their architecture and layout:

I learnt that they did all this under the shadow of Vesuvius, a fragile and beautiful peace in the presence of danger:

But you know what? I could have learnt all of this from a book. I could have learnt all this from the internet.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Mario. 65 years old this year. Been doing the job of personal tour guide for 48 years. A wonderful, passionate man, passionate about everything he does, passionate about Pompeii, its history and culture, passionate about archaeology, passionate about learning. Someone who has seen the impact of bad decisions from an archaeological perspective, someone who cares enough to celebrate the learning that comes from those decisions.

All this time I was seeing things in Pompeii, and thinking about the internet.

But Mario changed all that. He saw things in the internet and started thinking of Pompeii.

You see, Mario’s stopping work for a year or two. He’s not retiring, even though he’s 65. He’s going back to school.

Why? Because of the internet. He realises that the internet (particularly the web) reduces the barrier to entry for information and knowledge; that it exposes paucity of knowledge, and raises the bar for standards in professions where knowledge is a form of expertise.

He has seen his colleagues and peers, so-called experts, fail to hold the attention of crowds, as they bleat on about things we can all find out from the web. He is too passionate about his profession, his skills, his way of life to allow the internet to weaken him. He is too passionate about Pompeii, about its history, about his history, to roll over and give up.

So Mario, aged 65, a consummate professional, a passionate expert at what he does, is going back to school.

Because of the internet.

And you know what? He’s looking forward to it.

So I will be back in a few years’ time, to see Mario. To see what he has learnt. And how he keeps ahead of the internet.

In manufacturing we speak of a “China Price”. Maybe Mario’s tale suggests that for knowledge we should start speaking of an “internet price”.

In the meantime, here’s to Mario, and to all the Marios of this world. Passionate about what they do, choosing to embrace and extend the internet.

The question was simple. If you have 128 people playing in a knockout tournament, how many matches will it take to complete the tournament? Assume no draws or replays.

When we were asked the question, everyone knew the traditional way to get the answer. 128 people. 64 pairs. 64 matches in the first round. Then 32. Then 16. Then 8. Then 4, then 2, then 1. Giving us 64+32+16+8+4+2+1 or 127.

Later on that day, a few of us got into conversation with the teacher, and an alternative route was broached. 128 people. How many winners? One. So how many losers? 127. So how many matches will that take? 1 loser generated per match. 127 matches.

How I loved the simplicity of that approach. Just work out the number of losers and you will have the number of matches. I could have danced all night.

I felt the same way when I first learnt about decimals. Why some decimals “terminate”. Why others “circulate”. How beautifully they do this.

The way I was taught it was something like this. Think of a fraction. Convert it into a decimal. Think of another fraction. Convert it into a decimal. Do this a dozen times with different fractions, and observe the results.

It soon became clear that most fractions didn’t terminate cleanly, they “recurred”. Fractions like 1/3, 2/7, 3/11. Some fractions, on the other hand, ended cleanly, fractions like 1/2 and 2/5 and 3/10. It didn’t take too long to see that the only fractions that terminated were those where the denominator contained factors of 2 and/or 5.

2 and 5. In a base 10 world. Oh yeah. That bored me. So what did I find interesting about decimals? Again, it took a question.

And the question went something like this. Other than those with 2 or 5 as denominator, all fractions that have a prime number as denominator recur when expressed as decimals. The length of the recurring number or numbers is called the period of recurrence. So for example 1/3, or 0.333333…. has a period of 1, 1/11 or .090909…. has a period of 2. What is the maximum period of recurrence of any fraction where the denominator is a prime other than 2 or 5?

Which led to a lovely meandering journey. To convert a fraction into a decimal you have to divide the numerator by the denominator. You keep carrying the residue over until it is zero (in which case the fraction terminates). Or you keep carrying over and over and over.

When would a fraction circulate? When it hits the same residue again and starts the same sequence of residues as a result.

So how long before the same residue must be encountered? That depends on how many different residues can be had before that. What is the maximum number of different residues? One less than the denominator prime.

Discovering that 1/97 indeed has a period of recurrence of 96 filled me with glee. 96 different residues before the same residue is encountered. How beautiful.

There are so many others, little stories and techniques and tricks and tips that have helped me keep a passionate amateur interest in mathematics, particularly in the theory of primes.

The trouble with being an amateur like me is that you start getting idealistic about the subject. And you believe in things like elegance and simplicity. Which means that I’m one of those guys who still believes that there must be an elegant solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. A solution that could not be jotted down in a book about Diophantine equations, but a short and elegant solution nevertheless.

My love for mathematics exists because others put their love of maths into me first. They spent time with me and explained things to me and taught me and filled me with wonder and amazement.

It’s the same thing with so much in life. Whatever you love, whoever you love. Love has to be shared in order to grow.

So when I think about copyright and patent and stuff like that, when I think about music and art and stuff like that, I think about love. The love that a creative artist puts into his or her creation. And how love has to be shared in order to grow.

The Feltron Report. Nick Felton’s report on his activities during 2008.

Absolutely fascinating. As the cost of such data acquisition drops, and as the cost of storing such data drops as well, the possibilities are tremendous.

From an enterprise perspective, what the report represents is a part of the future of two things: CVs and appraisals. Nick’s work reminds us that you can now tell a story about what you did in ways you could never have done before. As with anything else, there are opportunities to game the “system”, but that is not what I want to concentrate on. I want to look at the positive benefits of having such facilities, my world is littered with half-full glasses and half-open doors.

Why am I excited about this?

Firstly, because of the importance of feedback loops. Because feedback loops of this sort are valuable as learning tools. As I learn more about what I really did with my time, I learn more about what I would like to change in that context; the feedback loop of “actuals” helps me do that. As I learn more about what I liked and what I disliked, I learn more about how I can keep doing the things I like doing; collaborative filtering helps me do that. As I learn more about what others perceive as things I did well and did badly, I learn more about how I can improve my strengths as well as my weaknesses; the feedback loop of “reviews” helps me do that.

Secondly, because of the value of “independent” low-cost data collection in this context. Writing down every song I listen to, and writing down all the time I spend listening to music, is painful. But rating songs as I listen to them, and having something like last.fm do the aggregation of my listenstream, it takes that pain away. Now if activities at work could be aggregated in this way, people would think differently about time sheets. Today too much of what goes into a time sheet is a lie.

Thirdly, because of the ability to share the information so gained. In the past, whether it was a CV or a “performance review” or an “appraisal”, what went into the report was very subjective, very biased. As a result people didn’t like sharing the information with others. When the data is collected independently and objectively, this unwillingness to share goes away.

Finally, because of the value we can unlock in teaching. Take the enterprise context of “induction”. You know what I mean, that strange process when you try and explain what you do to someone completely new. When you can give someone a “Felton Report” for a particular role, there is so much rich information there. The report could be an exemplar’s actual report, it could be a synthetic report made up of a number of exemplars averaged out.

We can learn so much. About differences in locations and geographies and cultures.

I’ve kept my comments to the enterprise context, but actually they apply everywhere. Everywhere where people want to learn. Felton Reports will become valuable in the context of education everywhere.

Which is why I am not surprised that I learnt about their existence from glassbeed. [You're a good man, Clarence Fisher.] I follow Clarence Fisher because he’s that rare breed, a teacher who really means to make use of modern technology in the classroom to the benefit of the people he teaches.

I loved school. I loved the thought of going to school, of spending time there, being with friends there, working, playing. I loved everything about school. Being at school was something I really looked forward to. It was a wonderful time, and I was privileged enough to be able to spend nearly 15 years in one Jesuit institution, from primary school through to university: St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta.

It was one of those places that truly deserved being called an institution. There was something about it that was destined to transcend time; it was a living piece of history by the time I got there, at which point it was barely a hundred years old. A wonderful location, a wonderful set of building and grounds, and wonderful staff. We were privileged to have some really great teachers. [It was with some sadness that I learnt of the death of Thomas "Tommy" Vianna a few weeks ago, he was one of those greats. [Tommy Vianna, Requiescat In Pace].

During my time there, as with many others, I had some purple patches, there were times when I was first in class, times when I played well for class and school teams, times when I excelled at something or the other. Of course I remember them well. But there were many times where I did not excel, sometimes because I hadn’t worked at all; sometimes despite my working really hard; and sometimes because I just wasn’t drawn or attracted to whatever it was I was being asked to do.

I remember talking to my maths teacher when I was about fifteen, a time when my sole interest was to become a maths professor, aspiring to do all the things that someone in high school in the early seventies would want to do: grow a beard and long hair; walk around in jeans and t-shirts reading books like Godel, Escher, Bach (which hadn’t actually been published then); learn to play guitar; do something meaningful in the theory of numbers in the footsteps of Ramanujan; and of course solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. Not just solve it, but solve it elegantly, elegantly enough to fit into the margins of a book on Diophantine equations. Maybe smoke a pipe. Have some pastis. Lovingly restore a 16th century book.That sort of thing.

My “hippie maths professor” reverie was rudely interrupted by said maths teacher, who pointed out where he was living, what he was earning, how hard things were. He was adamant that I should go nowhere near teaching; instead, I was to spend time making money; money that I could then plough back into education at a later stage.

And I guess I listened to him. Which is why, when I retire, I will build a school. For sure. It’s something I think about every day. There is something about the sheer inclusiveness that a good education brings; I detest the thinking behind The Bell Curve, I believe with all my heart that everyone has potential; of course social, economic and environmental factors affect every individual’s ability to develop and reach and extend that potential, but not in the way bell-curvers think.

That belief in the power of education is the reason why I got involved in School Of Everything; there is something very fulfilling about the premise behind SoE; I’m also very excited about the possibility that we can create a mechanism to unlock trapped potential amongst people who are otherwise unable to participate, usually because of generation or gender.

That belief in the power of education is the reason why I joined BT; I have this deep-seated belief that ubiquitous, affordable connectivity is an absolute must-have as we strive to improve health, education and welfare worldwide, as we strive to make the world a better place, as we strive to become better stewards of what we have. As we strive to change ourselves.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about education, about what it really means. Not dictionary definitions, not semantic arguments. What does “education” mean to me?

It’s not about “committing to memory and vomiting to paper”.

It’s not about learning to sit tests. It’s not even about learning to pass tests.

These things are useful, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for us to be able to be anything, do anything.

So what is it about?

I think it’s about these things:

• learning how to learn, which involves a lot of watching and listening
• learning how to love, which involves even more watching and listening
• learning how to lose, which involves quite a lot of watching and listening
• learning how to be with yourself, which also involves a lot of watching and listening
• learning how to be with other people, which also involves ….watching and listening
• learning how to solve problems, which also involves ….. watching and listening
• remembering what you’ve seen and heard, and being able to assimilate it
• learning how to express yourself in word and deed, how to take the things you’ve learnt and do something with them

The more specialised the things you watch and listen to, the more you’re acquiring a particular skill. Sometimes there’s more watching, sometimes there’s more listening. Whenever I had to concentrate to see or hear or express something, I really felt for people who couldn’t, people who didn’t have the full use of their sensory equipment, people who didn’t find it easy to deal with their feelings. I’ve always had a sneaking admiration for people who are autistic, more specifically people with Asperger’s, because there’s a part of me that feels I belong there.

Just musing. What does “education” mean to you?

Incidentally, this post was triggered by my reading today’s Randall Munroe special:

At the back of my mind was all the recent kerfuffle caused by the publication of Don Tapscott’s recent book, a subject I shall revert to later.

Incidentally, if any of you prefer to take the discussion offline, DM me via http://twitter.com/jobsworth

“I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards.”

James Boswell, quoting Samuel Johnson in Life of Samuel Johnson

I love that quotation; by all means replace the word “English” with whichever language you prefer, the sense is what matters to me. [Incidentally, my thanks to Joan Downs of New York, who referred to the quote in a letter to the Editor of the New York Times a few days ago, thereby making it serendipitously accessible to me for this blog post]

It was January 1972. I was in Class 8D at St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta, the school year was just beginning. We had a new form teacher, Mr Desmond Redden. (Calcuttans will understand why he was nicknamed “LalMurgi” from the day we met him). Mr Redden was unusual, to the extent he had just joined the teaching staff at the school; whereas the 40-strong class he faced were, on, average, 5-year veterans of the school, and quite used to being with each other. If the school practised streaming, it was not visible to us as students; every year, we would notice that a few students went to another class, and a few joined us. The bulk of us stayed together from infancy through to the time we selected subjects for what was then our “Senior Cambridge”, our University of Cambridge Overseas Examinations Syndicate Ordinary Levels, to give them their full name.

Anyway, to the point of this post. Mr Redden met us for the first time, and it was likely to have been more daunting for him than for us. And to break the ice for the first class of the first day, he asked a number of us what we did during the Christmas break. When it came to my turn, I told him I played games with the family, lazed a lot. And read comics. Lots of comics. Every day.

He went ballistic, and was more than just scathing about my reading habits. Made a big deal about how reading comics was a treasonable offence, how it spoilt a person’s grasp and command of the language and corrupted his writing ability. I was young enough to feel ashamed; red-faced, tears in my eyes, hot-flushed, that sort of thing. Still standing up, hoping the ground would open up and eat me alive. You know that feeling? Happened to me a lot when I was young, probably built character or something like that.

A few minutes later Mr Redden was done with the icebreaker Part 1, and went on to Part 2. Analysing his portfolio, looking at what he “knew” about the children in his care. Looks like we have a fine soccer team, can do better on the cricket, and so on. And then he said something like “I’m particularly delighted to know that we have at least one serious creative writer in the class, someone who won the school short story medal while still in Class 7, unheard of. Well done. Who is it?”

It was my turn to stand up, and yes, I was gracious in my victory. To be fair to Mr Redden, that was a one-off; he was a good teacher and kept us together and motivated for a fine school year. But his antics on day one help me illustrate the point that Johnson was making.

My parents were very liberal in their approach to children reading at home; every week, we had a man come to the house, a travelling one-man library service for books and magazines. And comics. Lots of comics. In fact our name for the guy was Comic Wallah.

This travelling Comic Wallah was a wonderful invention for us. His name was Mullick, I think his children still run the shop on Free School Street. He was still alive and at the shop when I last went there in the late 1990s. He’d come home every week, with books (ranging from Agatha Christie through Erle Stanley Gardner and Max Brand to even Mills and Boon) and magazines (from Time and Newsweek and Life and The Saturday Evening Post through to Woman and Home and Women’s Weekly and even “glamour” mags. And comics (mainly American, but covering all the genres).

You have to imagine all this coming into a house that had a lot of books already, and quite a few magazines on subscription. And newspapers galore. [In fact, ever since I was 12, we used to have TWO copies of the Statesman delivered home, along with the Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Hindustan Standard; why TWO copies of the Statesman? So that my dad would have a pristine copy of the Times crossword awaiting him, while the other copy was first-come-first-served competed for by me, my brother Anant, cousin Jayashree and aunt Vijju).

So we were brought up to read anything first, just to establish our love of reading. We were left to our own devices to figure out what was good and what was bad, with little hints thrown our way. What kind of hints? Collaborative filters. I watched what my dad read, and followed suit. What my older cousins read. What their friends read. So I moved from Perry Mason to Pynchon, from Max Brand to Mailer, from Christie to Chaucer. My way. I read what my elders read.

And what they recommended. We didn’t have reviews. We didn’t get sold to via advertisements. We didn’t have television. While we did have commercial radio, there were no related ads there either.
Over time, we learnt what we should read and what we shouldn’t.

But.

More important than anything else, we learnt to love reading. We’d read aloud to each other; it was normal for me to walk into a room and hear someone quietly guffawing, if guffaws could be quiet. it was normal for us to “fight” to be next in line to read a book; sometimes this involved bartering favours, sometimes it could even get mildly physical.

That love of reading has stayed with me. With my siblings. With my cousins. And, from what I can see, it has found its way into the next generation. Not by force but by example.

We just loved reading. I remember when I saw a children’s film called Short Circuit sometime in the 1980s, where a robot called “Number 5″ turned out to be alive. Now this robot went around everywhere muttering “give me input, give me input”. That’s how it was at home. And we so enjoyed it.

Today, things have changed. Apparently people don’t read as much as they used to. But maybe they do, if we count all the ways people can read today. So let your children read online if that’s what attracts them, let them read comics online, news online, whatever. Just as long as they learn to enjoy reading.

While they learn to enjoy reading, teach them how to read. What not to read. How to spot poor writing. How to spot pornography. How to spot perversion. How to spot brainwashing. How to avoid all of them.

It used to be said “It is better to teach a man to fish rather than to give him fish”.

I think there is a parallel in reading, particularly in reading online. Teach your children how to filter, don’t just impose filters on them.

And all the time, help them learn to enjoy reading.

Maybe it’s the Calcutta in me, but I love stories such as the one above, where creativity blossoms forth in the midst of adversity, and then manages to thrive despite everything.

Before you ask. This was not a random find…. once every couple of weeks or so I visit The Daily F’log, something I’d come across via StumbleUpon. My thanks to both.

Why do I keep doing this, referring to the process I went through to find something? Because I think it’s important. I find tools like Blog Friends, a Facebook application (albeit not developed by Facebook), truly useful. As we learn more about learning and about teaching, we are going to find ourselves increasingly looking at the “audit trails” of how people learn. As more and more information becomes digital, our capacity to do this increases almost exponentially.

Which reminds me. It will not be long before I write Part 9 of my Facebook and the Enterprise series, looking at the importance of ecosystems. I will be looking more closely at apps like Blog Friends within that post. Then, as signalled earlier, I will close off the series with a post on Privacy; if there is enough interest, I may then write a brief “compendium” post summarising the whole series. Let me know if you’re interested.