Category: Four pillars

You may have noticed that I push back against badly designed DRM and IPR. There are many reasons: I am not in favour of laws that treat everyone like criminals; I do not believe that the internet is primarily a vehicle built for Hollywood to distribute its “content” while protecting itself against “criminals”; I believe that intellectual property legislation is dated, irrelevant, no longer fit for purpose and inherently unusable; I could go on and on.

It’s not just about intellectual property. The same is true when it comes to discussions about the other two “i” words, identity and the internet. For identity also read privacy, for the internet also read net neutrality.

Where all this comes together is in the context of waste. Wasted opportunities, particularly in education, in healthcare and in government, opportunities wasted because people, often ill-informed, make decisions, often ill-judged, that continue to treat the internet as an extension of Hollywood, the music industry and publishers. And, buoyed up with the moral indignation that precedes such actions, and by the self-satisfaction that succeeds them, it is normal and understandable that nanny-state decisions then follow.

Which is why I found what Bill Thompson wrote instructive. Do take a look at a recent post by him in Index on Censorship, headlined Fools Rush in Where Programmers Fear to Tread. I particularly like this bit:

The real danger is not that politicians ask for things that the current network architecture cannot support, but that the network could be changed to make those things possible.

The Web is live, it is two-way, it is writeable. That is what makes it the Web, its interactive participative nature. The value proposition of the web in education, in healthcare and in government relies on this two-way-ness.

The Web is not about broadcast, it is not about access control, it is not about audiences and content. It’s not about Publishing 1.0, or for that matter Publishing 0.0.

If the people who make such decisions insist on using the metaphor of the Information Superhighway, then let us try and stop them from putting cattle grids every 100 yards. Because that is what is happening. Cattle grids that slow us down, make us more vulnerable to attacks from highwaymen.

There is one overarching reason. The waste of it all.

Cloudy
My thoughts are scattered and they’re
Cloudy
They have no borders, no boundaries
They echo and they swell
From Tolstoy to Tinker Bell

Simon and Garfunkel, Cloudy

Hugh has a great post on “the cloud” today. One that should make all of us think. As Tim O’Reilly tweeted, this is an important post. Monkchips‘ observations here, as referenced by both Hugh and Tim, are worth reading.

I have always had this sense that there is no longer any room for artificial monopolies, that the market will provide a self-correcting mechanism. But I have always been wrong on this. We can argue about why this is so, but not about the fact. Microsoft, Google and Apple are facts.

Open standards, open platforms and open source are ways to prevent this happening. Ways to guarantee that history won’t repeat itself. But this needs coherent communal action, something that is hard to achieve in emergent environments.

Maybe the VRM community should take this on.

I started this post with a quote from a Simon and Garfunkel song. We need to make sure that what we do in cloud computing doesn’t sound like the end of that song:

They don’t know where they’re going/And, my friend/Neither do I.

So read Hugh’s post. Read what James Governor has to say. And help us all figure out how to prevent what would otherwise be the expected outcome.

[After publishing this post, I walked into the kitchen, to be greeted by Joni Mitchell singing Big Yellow Taxi. And it reminded me: I really don’t know clouds…..at all…..]

People working in the realm of information technology love polarising arguments, something I’ve touched upon a number of times. [Just type in “blefuscu” into the search box for the blog and you will see the posts]. Over the last five years or so, one of the arguments I have been fascinated by is that surrounding the value of “web 2.0” tools to the developing world. The question at the heart of the debate is simple, and germane to policymakers worldwide:

Is investment in technological infrastructure by itself a significant factor, when looking at the development needs of a country?

Morten Rask has been studying this question, and he put forward a number of hypotheses to be tested in answering it, looking at correlations across a number of factors. Here’s a graphical representation of his findings:

You can see the whole article here.

His conclusions are given below:

In spite of some claims, Wikipedia is generally more suitable for participants from developed countries. However, participants from less developed countries can benefit from involvement in Wikipedia. These findings contradict some of the promises (Cairncross, 1997; Friedman, 2006; Negroponte, 1995) discussed earlier in the paper. In contrast to some of the enthusiasm for Wikipedia — where only an Internet connection is a precondition for participation (Baumann, 2006; Economist, 2006d; Tapscott and Williams, 2006) — we conclude that an adequate technological infrastructure is not sufficient alone. These findings agree with earlier studies that recognized the importance of socioeconomic and other factors in e–business (Bouwman, 1999; Doern and Fey, 2006; Fesenmaier and van Es, 1999; Kraemer, et al., 2006; Steinfield and Klein, 1999; Steinfield, et al., 1999) and e–policy–making (Barzilai–Nahon, 2006; Kraemer, et al., 2006). For policy–makers, investments in technological infrastructure are not solely significant, but need to be considered along with improvements in literacy, education, and standard of living. For some businesses and other organizations, an examination of Wikipedia in specific markets can be useful as a screening and monitoring model.

My gut feel is that while most of the statements he makes are correct, his overall assertion is wrong. More specifically, I believe that the correlation between technological and economic factors needs to be looked into further. Rask uses the Human Development Index (HDI) as a proxy for “economic factors”, but I think in doing this he underestimates the recursive nature of that relationship: how the technological infrastructure itself directly influences the level of the HDI.

Rask’s work is structured and scientific, and should bear a lot more weight than my untutored assertion. It’s a hunch, nothing more. Having majored in Economics and Statistics at university, I am acutely aware that my assertion is weightless in comparison to the excellent work he’s done. So this is not an attempt to rubbish his work, but to suggest that a key conclusion bears more examination.

Why do I have this hunch? Simple. I have seen the impact of mobile telephones in developing countries, and I believe in that particular context that it is very simple to prove that the very act of investing in that technical infrastructure pushes the HDI up significantly. Any offers?

I think people underestimate the economic, social and political value of affordable connectivity; that the individual hypotheses in Rask’s work are all correct and not surprising at all; that at least one of the key conclusions he draws deserves further analysis, because of the recursive nature of the correlative relationship he relies on, that between technological infrastructure and HDI.

Only connect.

I couldn’t resist picking up the phone and talking to Doc, especially when he came “back at me” after my Real A-Listers post. Take a look at what he said. More importantly, do comment and suggest the ones you think are Real A-Lister sites.

And while on the subject of Doc. I found out that my recent chat on Cluetrain Plus 10 (at 2gether08) had been placed online, so I asked the authors what they thought, with some trepidation. Here’s what Chris said. [And yes, I am delighted. Now all we have to do is to finish that book. Which we will, one day :-) ]

Censorship is not necessarily something that everyone experiences. Which is why I remember my first experience vividly. It was December 1975, we were fresh out of school and preparing to go to university, discovering new habits and freedoms, experimenting in many ways and places. Heady days.

They were also dangerous days, particularly in a city and state known for its intellectuals and their rebelliousness. I remember a bunch of us, all schoolmates, going to a bar on Park Street for a bottle or beer or three. It was a hot December afternoon, the 29th or 30th I think. We seemed a gregarious group, and a few regulars at the bar joined us. As did a foreign visitor. Who was a journalist. Who told us about this terrible mining disaster he had just come from, at Chas Nala in Dhanbad. Maybe a thousand dead. Very little in the papers.

We were youngsters then, still idealistic, not a shred of cynicism in the lot of us. And while we’d heard rumours about some problems at a mine, while we’d even heard the name Chas Nala, it wouldn’t have occurred to us that this was a censorable incident.

But it set me thinking. It was the first time I had experienced censorship, the first time I’d really understood the concept of a media-generated alternate reality. Until then, I guess I was comfortable with the ideas of poor reporting, poor journalism, errors and omissions, but not explicit censorship, unknowledge as it were.

So I spoke to my father — after all, the family business was journalism — and he told me about how things worked in this regard. I was soon to learn a lot more, given that it was the Emergency. In a matter of weeks, we were publishing magazine issues with “missing” leaders, with intentional blank spaces in articles.

[An aside. One of my favourite apocryphal tales about journalism, handed down to me by my father. The New York Post and the New York Star were at loggerheads, the air was blue with insults afresh. Somewhere in the exchanges, the Post called the Star a “dirty dog”. The next day, the Star’s leading article was brief and to the point: “The New York Post called the New York Star a “dirty dog”. The attitude of the Star to the Post is that of any dog to any post.” That’s all she wrote. Priceless.]

Since then, I’ve always been intrigued by censorship and its implications. As with knowledge, I think there are at least two types of censorship, tacit and explicit. If I know that there has been a filter applied to what I see and read, then I think of it as one form of censorship. Not knowing that what I see and read has been filtered, that’s a different form of censorship altogether.

Which is why I found this article in the latest issue of First Monday very interesting. I went to the site where they discuss the implementation of CenSEARCHip, and tried out their example. Here’s what I saw:

Two different views of one search. One from a US perspective, one from a China perspective. Search term? Tiananmen Square.

We live in a complex age. Airbrushes and Photoshopping. Hollywood-inspired DRM and IPR, ostensibly assuming universal human guilt about all kinds of things.

As the Web becomes more and more central to the way we do things, we face greater and greater risk of tacit censorship. It is up to us to ensure that does not happen. Before we lose the ability to ensure it does not happen.