Draft of my talk on the end of information at the Berkman Center

I have been working for weeks on a talk I’m giving at a Tuesday lunch at the Berkman Center, where “work on” means erasing more than I’ve written. I’ve done more complete rewrites than I can count, mainly because I can’t figure out what the point of the talk is. I started out knowing what the point was, but as I actually wrote it, I knew less and less. So, here’s a rough outline of the current sorry state of the talk.

I. Information has been the dominant metaphor

This is the easy part. From cradle to grave, we’ve reconceived of ourselves and our world as information. But, except for the technical definition, we don’t know what it is (and most of how we’ve reconceived of ourselves has nothing to do with the technical def, and most of us don’t know the technical def anyway).

II. A discontinuous history

“Info” has two ordinary senses that precede its take-over by Claude Shannon in 1948: It’s something you’re about to learn, and it’s the content of tables. Shannon then introduced his technical definition, which only a tiny percentage of the population understands. Nevertheless, info became the dominant paradigm. So, what enabled it to take over our culture? Two notes: 1. I am explicitly not going to talk about its utility or its politics of control and mastery, both of which are obviously crucial to the answer. 2. I am going to contrast the Info Age with the Link Age (or whatever we’re going to call the new epoch).

Enabler 1: Information scales

Info scales sufficiently to enable large corporations to manage themselves. But its scaling strategy is to exclude everything that doesn’t fit its rows and columns. E.g., the personnel database contains only a tiny bit about what employees know about one another. In the Age of Links, we include everything. Links create a world of abundance. The irony is that while the Info Age’s strategy was to exclude bad and useless info, in the Age of Links we’re better able to manage the abundance of crap than the abundance of good stuff.

Enabler 2: Info is a resource

It’s a resource in that it’s useful to us. We can retrieve stuff from it, using the criteria of precision and recall: Did our query get only the right stuff and all the right stuff? In the Link Age of Abundance, however, getting all the right stuff is a disaster. (Which is why we invented two new criteria: relevance and interestingness.)

Furthermore, info is a resource from which we fetch nuggets of value. The Web, though, is a place that we enter and navigate. The irony is that in the Age of Info, we thought about entering an info space as becoming Jeff Bridges in Tron. Or, we thought that if we entered the info space because it engulfed us, it would be a cold world of men with clipboards, as in movies such as Desk Set. In the Link Age, the place we enter is fully social, and is becoming completely integrated with the real world space.

Enabler 3: Bits apply to everything

We sometimes talk about atoms vs. bits because anything can be turned into a bit. Bits are thus coextensive with the universe. But, bits can represent anything in the world because they are so fundamentally unlike the world. Every other measurement measures some property of the world (height, weight, shoe size, whatever), but bits measure pure difference. The world bits model always shows itself in particular ways, in particular properties. Bits are thus profoundly unnatural; they exist only because we take them as bits. They are thus very much unlike atoms.

Further, bits reduce everything to the simplest of differences: yes/no, 1/0. Links, on the other hand, are put in place to find and tease out differences that are complex enough to require language and to be worth pointing out.

Enabler 4: Information explains communication

Although Shannon expressly was not trying to explain human communication, his diagram matches our basic view of communication as the movement of code through a conduit. (Paul Edwards is good on this, as on many other issues.) Plus, Shannon’s popularizer, Warren Weaver, expressly said the theory applies to people speaking, pipers piping, dancers dancing, and just about every other form of communication. Still, we have to ask why think of communication as the process of moving symbols through conduits when so much else is required, and so much more is implied, by even the simplest of human conversations. Part of the answer is, I think, our Cartesian metaphysics that thinks that we experience representations of the world, and thus can only communicate by shipping messages to others that affect their representations of the world. The world itself has dropped out of this equation: We only have heads and conduits between them.

This basic picture of communication of content moving through a medium to a receiver treats communication as an obstacle to be overcome, for noise keeps banging on the conduit. This is how the world looks if you come out of an experience where communication was difficult, as was the case for the early info scientists, some of whom had worked on how to improve communications on a noisy battlefield. (Paul Edwards again: The Closed World is excellent.) But hyperlinks are neither content nor medium; more exactly, they’re both. Like a path, a hyperlink assumes an existing world, a shared ground. (Links are a very special sort of path, though, because they are generative of their world.)

Enabler 5: Information lets us understand the world

Models let us find what is essential and common among all that which they model. But they deny the abundance of the world and the fact that the world doesn’t behave the way we want. The contingent does show up in the Info Age view of the world. It shows up as noise. In the Link Age, succeed by making the world noisy: creating a path among ideas that differ. (This is not noise in Info Theory’s sense.) Of course, we rightfully worry that amidst this differential linkage we will only seek that which is familiar and reassuring. The success of the Link Age depends upon it remaining as noisy and full of difference as possible, the opposite of how the Info Age measured success.

So, as I write this out, I can see some sections that don’t really add up. For example, Enabler 3’s discussion is pretty incoherent. But that’s why I’m writing this out now.

I have one day left to get something presentable out of this, since I am out all day on Monday. And I’m jetlagged and pretty exhausted now. Ack.

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While Apple has blocked the Someecards app because some of the cards have made fun of public figures, Google has asked the app to port on over to Android phones.

(BTW, I got a Droid today.)

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Yochai Benkler, the project lead on the Berkman Center’s analytic survey of how broadband works around the world [pdf] responds to critics and questioners.

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The Supreme Court of Arizona has ruled that the metadata included in electronic doucments is covered by the public records law. If the state has to make the document available, it also has to make the metadata available.

The court reasoned analogically:

“It would be illogical, and contrary to the policy of openness underlying the public records law, to conclude that public entities can withhold information embedded in an electronic document, such as the date of creation, while they would be required to produce the same information if it were written manually on a paper public records,” Justice Scott Bales wrote.

According to the AP article:

The Arizona decision likely will have a “persuasive effect” on other states’ courts, said Dan Barr, an attorney who filed a brief on behalf of the Society of Professional Journalists and other media organizations…

The ruling also means requested electronic records must be provided in that form rather than paper printouts, which makes them difficult and costly to search, Barr said.

Sounds like a good ruling to me…

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I’m in an airport, beginning a day of transit that seems to bend time in a Time Zonish way, so I haven’t had time to actually read this Pew Internet report, but my understanding is that it challenges the assumption that mobiles, texting, the Internet, and all the rest make us more isolated. It turns out (apparently), that Internet and cell phone users have larger and more diverse social networks than non-users. Which way the causality runs, I don’t know. But the Pew Internet stuff is invariably interesting, so I thought I’d point it out.

Now, it’s off to the airport gate so that I can circle the globe in the wrong direction, reverse the flow of time, and finally remember where I put that Superman comic in 1958.

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I’m at IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) in Milan. The Europe-wide president of IAB, Alain Heureux, is giving a talk that includes a section on the self-regulatory mechanisms IAB is proposing as it watches Brussels begin to formulate policy.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Alain goes through the following “road map”:

1. Opt out. It’d be a burden on the user to ask for opt in for IP addresses and cookies, so it’s important that there always be opt-out mechanisms. There could and should be centralized pages that explain exactly what the various types of cookies are, what they’re used for, and that give users the ability to turn them on or off.

2. Education and transparency. There should be sites [built by IAB?] that educate the public and that are completely transparent about the practices.

3. Good practices and codes of conduct.

4. Communication.

5. Research. Alain points to a survey of 32,000 customers across Europe (the MCDC), and a consumer benefits study that tries to quantify the economic value that users are getting at all those free sites we love so much.

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By the way, attendance at the Italian IAB (pronounced “yob”) continues to increase. It started 7 years ago with 300 people, and this year there are 7,000 attendees, which is up 20% over last year. Pretty impressive given the state of the economy.

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Some folks, including Nadia El-Imam, have put together an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 that is going to be presented alongside the declaration of the European ministers at the Malmö ministerial conference in about 3 weeks. They’re looking for signatures.

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The Google Operating System blog (independent of Google) has a useful post explaining why it’s a bad idea to send large attachments, even though Google now lets you attach files up to 25MB in size.

The reasons the post gives have to do with how inefficient attachments are for the system: They get expanded and require multiple uncached downloads. But, those reasons won’t carry a lot of water for people who just want to send their 25MB Powerpoint presentation to 35 people who simply have to see it. (Mea culpa. Except these days it’d be Keynote for me … which seems to make much larger files than Powerpoint.) Until we come up with an easier way to send around files — or a way that adds enough other benefits — we’re going to be wrapping our attachment anvils in brown paper and twine, sticking stamps on them, and sending them through the emails just like God and Google intended.

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I have to say I enjoyed this message from Bill, urging his fellow Mainers to vote against Question 1, which would undo the state’s gay marriage law. I’m in agreement with Bill’s opinions, but I also admired the writing and rhetoric.

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From Personal Democracy Forum:

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

This is a pragmatic decision because open source software is more likely to withstand time’s arrows (time’s arrow faces forward but it seems to fire them backwards at us), but it’s also important as a symbol: It is yet another validation of open software’s robustness and capabilities; it says that the White House is of and by the people, just as open software is; it symbolizes the Obama administration’s understanding of tech and its embrace of openness.

So, this is good techie news, but also a bit more.

(Here’s the NYT on the news. And I heard about this from my friend Britt Blaser, whose Open Resource Group citizen-to-government software runs on Drupal. (Disclosure: I volunteer as an adviser to Britt’s group.)

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Joe Trippi has an important post about to understand the upcoming election results: The electorate’s Us vs. Them has changed from Our Party vs. Their Party to The Electorate vs. Anyone in Power:

Voters are increasingly seeing themselves as “us” and both parties in Washington as “them.” They are not going to discriminate between the two parties in 2010. The results next Tuesday will likely demonstrate the voter’s frustration with those in power, regardless of party. Far from signaling a backlash against Democratic rule and hope for the Republican Party, the results on Tuesday will signal that in 2010 incumbents in both parties, of all ideological stripes should be frightened.

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A judge has ruled that email is not protected under the Fourth Amendment. This sounds wrong to me (although I am very much not a lawyer), but what I really enjoy are the many many arguments by analogy as slashdotters try to figure out what email is like, so we can see what privacy expectations to port over from the familiar world of telephones, Fedex trucks, and glass-bottom boats.

I’m not saying there’s a better way to figure this out. I just enjoy watching us flounder our way through ethical dilemmas.

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I’m finding the cultural politics of Droid’s marketing to be fascinating.

Droid is Motorola’s competitor to the iPhone, based on Google’s open source Android operating system. Of course it’s marketing itself head-to-head against the iPhone. Verizon’s “iDon’t” ad was totally in iPhone’s face: iPhone doesn’t do x, y, and z, but Droid does.

But Droid isn’t just going against iPhone’s features. It’s drawing a cultural line. Apple is for hippies, it’s saying. Droid is for power geeks.

For example, at Verizon’s “Droid Does” page, if you click on “Open Development,” the message is:

Droid doesn’t judge app makers. We don’t care about their politics, their lifestyles or their attitude. If they make a great app, we will share it. That’s how we have over 10,000 apps in Android Market™. Simple, isn’t it?

This is cross-over geek and business trash talk.

At “Hardcore,” the text is:

This is no granola crunching, flower child phone. It’s more powerful than you need and faster than you can handle. Basically, it’s everything you’ve ever wanted. And it’s ready to do your bidding. What shall you have it do first.

Weird anti-hippie, geek power lord, high-performance sports car, S&M vibe.

“Power” continues the sports car trope:

Look under the hood of this machine if you dare. There’s a fast CortextA8 processor, 16gb of memory expandable to 32gb and a WVGA 854×480 screen. Now step back. It’s revving up.

Out of my way, hippie!

And perhaps: Out of my way, girls! The Droid marketing is hitting a lot of (traditionally) male notes.

The cultural alignment will be fascinating to watch.

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BoingBoing runs a terrific photo of chimps watching a dead chimp being transported, and asks anyone to deny that the chimps are grieving.

On the one hand, I don’t doubt for a moment that animals feel emotions. (Neither did Darwin, by the way. He seems to have been quite connected to his dogs.) Nor do I doubt that the chimps are grieving. I just don’t think the photo is evidence of grief; someone who doesn’t think animals feel social emotions wouldn’t be swayed by it. It just shows that chimps can pay attention.

Of course, the more important point to me isn’t whether what chimps feel when a member of their group dies is grief or should be called something else. It isn’t even whether animals feel what we call emotions (although I’m sure they do). The point is that animals other than humans care about themselves, their world, and sometimes others. The caring can be so primitive that at one end of the spectrum it’s not worth arguing for, but pretty far down the stack I’m convinced that to deny that animals care about what happens to them — and, eventually, what happens to their significant others — is just perverse. That caring is what we feel as emotions. The fact of that caring is the fundamental reason I’m a vegetarian.

But, that’s not what I wanted to ask. The comments to the BoingBoing post are quite funny. Along the way someone points out that 98% of our DNA is the same as the chimp’s. Which always makes me want to ask: How much of our DNA do we share with animals not nearly as obviously like us? With whales? With flounders? With brine shrimp? How much difference is in that top 10% of shared DNA?

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Elizabeth Goodman of UC Berkeley is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on a project she’s just now beginning. It is, she says, “half-baked.” She’s going to compare walled gardens in the computer sense to the original referent of “walled garden” and experiences of community gardens which often are fenced off. She says she comes to this from a design background, and has been looking at “how the metaphors we use shape the possibilities we imagine for them and how people can act in them.”

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

A walled garden was originally a commons, a common ground people can use. We use the term in tech talk because it is a common and concrete metaphor. But, “its salience relies on associations with imagined wall gardens.” Can we expand the “walled gardens” metaphor to make it a more useful tool for thought? Can we do so by looking at real walled gardens?

The initial uses of the term (first in 1680 and then in 1757) was very positive. But digital wall gardens lack openness, can’t share info across networks, that limits what you can look at, etc. Examples: Kindle, the AppStore, and Facebook. When people illustrate digital WGs, they tend to show beautiful, Victorian gardens…not at all like what you experience in your Facebook stream.

Elizabeth notes that walled gardens originally were created not to keep people about to create a microclimate. Fires could be set to raise the temperature. This should help us to see WGs as places of work and production. “So, is it useful to compare how we think about digital walled garden social network sites to how urban gardeners think about members-only community gardens?”

She studied community gardeners and park volunteers in the SF area for two years, because she was interested in shared management. She points out two things about the community garden photo she’s showing: Only members get in, and they’re not collectively cultivated. Each person gets her own small plot. “It is kind of like MySpace”: You can make your own plot as hideously designed as you want and no one will bother you, although if you don’t maintain your site, you get kicked out. (She notes that someone has insisted on distinguishing gardening from landscaping, a distinction she does not much care about.)

Q: [me] Does “gardening” vs “maintaining” when applied to digital realms imply gender? Were gender implications driving its adoption?
A: Probably yes.

Q: How about farming vs. gardening?

[Discussion has become quite conversational, which is wonderful for everyone except the liveblogger.]

Q: Walled gardens keep people out. Digital WPs keep people in.

Q: People in digital WGs have no sense of shared maintenance/management.

WGs are actually less communitarian than I had thought.

Q: First time I heard something called a WG on the Net was AOL.

Q: Is using Flickr, Facebook, or MySpace a faustian bargain?

Q: Urban dwellers really like living near a community garden even if they don’t garden in it. The walls are fences so you can see what’s there.

EG: And that’s a bit like Flickr: People can see much of what you post there.

EG: Here’s a photo of an unwalled garden by a master grower who is going something like a social display of his skill/artistry. But here’s a photo of community garden where a bean plot is next to a mixed flower plot.

Q: [me, summarizing the back channel] The first use of “WG” was for AOL, where the pitch was the order and safety of AOL vs. the wildness of the Web. Now WG seems to refer to locked places. I.e., garden vs. wild becomes walled vs. unwalled.

Q: WGs demarcate space for special creative uses.

[I am doing a completely lousy job here. The conversation is too interesting, plus there's the backchannel. I give up. Sorry. You'll be able to find the webcast at the Berkman site.]

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The latest interview with a member of the FCC Broadband strategy initiative is now up at BroadbandStrategyWeek.

Elana Berkowitz is Director of Economic Opportunities for the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the FCC.

17:20 mins

0:00 What do you do?
2:30 It’s very complicated. How do you decide what should be done by the public sector, by the private?
3:53 What’s the process by which you gather this information? Have there been workshops?
4:45 Workshops specifically on economic development?
5:37 You have all of this open input, but at some point — Feb. 17 — you have to decide exactly what you’re going to recommend…

9:15 What are the chances that what you recommend will make use of existing social networking platforms that are privately held, as opposed to having the government build, or pay for the building of, a new type of platform that perhaps repeats some of the functionality privately built ones offer.
10:42 So we’re not likely to see FaceGov or TwitGov…?
11:22 Just in case, I think I’ll take those domain names :)
12:35 So, how can the social sector get involved in this?
14:25 You come to this job right after a citizen journalism project called Off the Bus. Can you explain that and the relation between these two phases of your life?

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I do like the fact that Google has a “Google Data Liberation Front.” Their mission: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.” Google announced another positive step in this direction for Google Docs. All this is good, and even if it’s over-marketing Google’s openness, it’s the right value to be marketing.

Still, I wish it were easy to download a backup of my gmail.

LATER that day: Meanwhile, Microsoft is opening up its PST mailbox format.

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Brough Turner summarizes and explains an hypothesis put forward by David Reed that much of AT&T’s bandwidth overload is self-inflicted.

As I understand it — which I admit is not very far — AT&T may have its servers misconfigured. If AT&T has set the servers’ buffers (particular servers — see Brough’s explanation) too large, then they disrupt the network’s traffic self-regulation loop. TCP increases its transmission rate until it starts losing packets. At that point, it cuts its transmission rate in half. So, if all those iPhones are transmitting packets that are being buffered instead of notifying the sending servers that they’re not being received, all those iPhones just keep increasing their transmission rates, further overloading the network.

Feel free to enumerate all the ways the following is wrong. I don’t claim to actually understand it. Here’s Brough’s summary:

It appears AT&T Wireless has configured their RNC buffers so there is no packet loss, i.e. with buffers capable of holding more than ten seconds of data. Zero packet loss may sound impressive to a telephone guy, but it causes TCP congestion collapse and thus doesn’t work for the mobile Internet!

If Reed’s hypothesis is correct, then presumably much of the congestion on AT&T’s network (but how much is much?) could be reduced by shrinking the buffers and allowing TCP to do the self-regulation it was designed to do.

:ATER: Brough’s article has been slashdotted.

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Some posts from Berkpeople this week that I thought I’d call out:

Dan Gillmor responds to a Washington Post op-ed that calls for federal subsidies to support local news gathering.

Andrew Moshirnia at the Citizen Media Law Project opens his piece on the MPAA’s attempt to make some TV content un-recordable this way:

Between sparkling vampires and slobbering zombies, the Undead have found new life at the box office these days. So it makes sense that the MPAA, inspired by the success of the long deceased, has decided to resurrect the odorous, oft-defeated idea of “selectable output control.” We can only hope and pray that the FCC will shoot this idiotic (but dangerous) idea in the head, and grant consumers a brief respite (before the inevitable sequel). For those of you who are unaware of the movie industry’s idiotic plan to castrate and consume your DVR, allow me to shine a light on the lumbering terror.

Issa Villarreal at GlobalVoices writes about the rising sentiment in Mexico that Internet access is a necessity, not a luxury, despite the government’s new Internet taxes.

Chilling Effects reports on ClearChannel’s success at killing the annual Unity Day celebration in Philadelphia because it claims it has a trademark on the term, even though the celebrations started in 1979. Stupid stupid marketing, if nothing else.

And then there’s Ethan Zuckerman, wondering what gets some people so interested in other cultures that they’ll hollow out a winter jacket in Ghana to join with other Wu Tang lovers.

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The FCC has put up a site — openinternet.gov — where anyone (after registering with a valid email address) can post an idea, or vote existing ideas up or down. I love the idea of the feds opening discussions up, although, I am not convinced that this particular implementation achieves its presumed aims. But, what the heck! Try-fail-try is the right rhythm for the Net.

The site defaults to listing the ideas reverse chronologically, which adds some serendipity, or you can choose to view them listed in order of popularity, which encourages piling on. You can also browse by category/tag.

Anyone who registers can post a comment. The comments are unthreaded, discouraging much development of ideas but also discouraging flaming. You can report a comment as being “abusive,” but otherwise cannot rate them.

At the moment, the most popular posting is from Tim Karr, who, according to his biography at SaveTheInternet.com, a site sponsored by FreePress.net, “oversees all Free Press campaigns and online outreach efforts, including SavetheInternet.com.” Tim — who I know a bit and like — is an activist. He has the most popular post at the FCC’s site presumably because FreePress.net sent out a mailing urging supporters to vote it up.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s how politics is played in this country. If an anti-NN group sponsored by, say, AT&T wanted to play the same game, it’s perfectly entitled to. It’s not hard to imagine a well-funded group swamping FreePress’s shoestring efforts and getting orders of magnitudes more people to thumbs-up an anti-NN comment.

Which is to say that an open discussion board like the one the FCC has posted can serve either of two purposes. It can be a place where people come for rational discussions across political positions, or it can serve as an informal poll of citizens’ sentiments about an issue. But combining the two means that neither works very well. It becomes simply an opportunity for gaming the system.

It seems to me that sites such as these cannot serve as a poll that has any value at all. Besides, we have lots of other ways of gauging public opinion, including scientific polling and elections. If, on the other hand, the FCC wants to sponsor a forum for useful discussion or to generate new ideas, it could modify the current implementation. For example — and these are just ideas that may turn out to be gigantic belly flops — comments could be divided into two tracks, pro and con, with most-popular listings for each. Readers could be allowed to vote up but not down. Comments could be threaded. The comments could be rated. Postings could have buttons for “agree/disagree” and “interesting,” so that the site could highlight articles that people disagree with but find interesting.

All of these techniques could be gamed because everything can be gamed. Some discussion boards do work, though. I don’t know what the magic keys are, but I’m pretty confident that a political discussion board that includes an overall popularity contest will so encourage gaming that its results will necessarily be unreliable. At the very least, the popularity contest should be confined to determining the best arguments for each side.

But I don’t want to close on a negative note, for the FCC is to be congratulated on its efforts to open its processes up not only to lobbyists and geeks who know how to walk and talk like an FCC commenter, but to the general public. And it’s doing so in the proper Webby way of taking small steps and not being afraid to fail in public. That takes guts.

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BoingBoing reports boingnantly on the miserable enthusiasm of the (unelected, heavily-lobbied) European Commission for making it illegal to provide families with an Internet connection if any member is accused of having violated copyright three times.

Take a look at your hard drive and tell me for sure that a judge reviewing the charges in a 1-2 minute traffic-court style proceeding would not find you unworthy of a European Internet connection. Three Flickr photos you passed around because they were amusing? Three newspaper articles you downloaded and attached to emails you sent to friends? Three recipes you enjoyed and shared with your family? Three attachments friends sent you that you didn’t ask for but didn’t bother deleting because you didn’t even realize they were copyrighted? Three extended quotes from medical information sites sent to an ailing relative?

And, by the way, downloading copyrighted material is not necessarily a violation of copyright. Fair use creates exemptions that are based on factors other than mere possession.

This rule has nothing to do with advancing our arts, sciences, education, government, or economy. So, if the EC passes two more stupid/insane/corrupt (your choice) laws, can we disconnect them from governance? Please?

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“In the spirit of Open Access week” (writes John Palfrey), Harvard’s Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review is today launching a new online publication. The new publication is Amicus. The idea is for law journals and other institutions to publish “as a supplement to their regular mode, shorter, open pieces formatted for the web that have serious work behind them and which link more actively to other arguments, online and offline.”

John contributes his own excellent essay, about the rhetorical spaces of the Internet: From the intro:

In this essay, I explore several of the privacy and speech problems that arise in the context of lives partially mediated by digital technologies. I conclude by arguing that we should focus not just on the civil rights and civil liberties problems, but also on the opportunities afforded by life in these new public spaces online.

Amicus joins the Berkman Center’s Publius in the open square of the Net…

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If you go to the bio page I maintain for people who are considering hiring me as a speaker — which is how I make most of my living — you’ll see a reference towards the bottom of the paragraph to my having written gags for Woody Allen’s comic strip for seven years. If you hover over the reference, a popup will add that I wrote about 40% of the gags. But, I usually ask to preview how people are planning on introducing me as a speaker, precisely so I can remove that credit. Even though the comic strip was in hundreds of newspapers and ran for seven years, few remember it, so if I get introduced as having written for Woody Allen, I then have to spend 60 seconds explaining that there was a comic strip, that I didn’t write for any of his movies, that I only met him twice, that I’m sure he wouldn’t remember me, that I’m not funny — all of which is exactly how you don’t want to begin a talk.

Now, the guy who originated the strip, drew it, managed it, signed it, and wrote a lot of the gags has written an article in The Guardian about the experience. Stuart Hample’s memoir of the strip is quite fascinating, at least to me. (Disclosure: Stu took me under his wing, treated me well, and was a nice guy. I have only good feelings for him.)

Because in some areas I am disciplined to the point of OCD, I wrote seven gags a night for those seven years, winnowed down to about 50 that I would send to Stu every week. He would tell me which ones he and Woody had accepted — about 3 a week, I recall — sometimes with comments from Woody Allen. Having Woody Allen critique gags was a rare privilege. It plus the $25 per gag kept me going.

Writing seven gags a night takes some of the romance out of the endeavor. Especially because the Woody Allen strip was looking for wry moments as much as for big gags, the challenge was coming up with situations. Woody is in an existentialist bakery. Woody decides wearing shoes is oppressive. Woody is insulted that a bear won’t chase him. Whatever. If you have the situation, it’s easy to wring a set of three panels out of it, and probably get a Sunday pay-off as well. Plus, there was always the possibility that the real Woody Allen would supply an actually funny punch line, or tell you how you could improve yours. Pretty cool.

I’ve always been ambivalent about using this credit. I mention it in my speaker’s bio and other places because it’s good for business. But it’s easily misunderstood and easily over-stated. Plus, I’ve always had the nightmare that someone will fact check my ass with Woody Allen, who would not remember me. Stu’s warm acknowledgment of my little contribution has made me feel better about this. But it remains a weird line in my resume, and one that can distort an audience’s expectations. So, I will continue to keep it out of introductions.

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While I’m fessing up, here’ a little known fact: My mother’s first cousin, with whom she was especially close, was Tiny Tim. Yes, the ukelele-playing 1960s punch line, Tiny Tim. Mom used to babysit him. There’s been a recent resurgence of interest in him. I met him once briefly at my mother’s funeral and again by standing in line at Spooky Town, where he was a Halloween performer. But I can certainly vouch that he was totally for real. Obviously somewhat crazy, but incredibly sweet, and completely serious about his music — he was in fact a serious musicologist.

So, there you have it. Two Unnoteworthy Celebrity Connections. I’m looking forward to your own contributions to this confessional genre…

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Now, as health care reform is being debated, would be an excellent time to ask your friendly local Senators to support adding Certified Public Midwifery to the list of healthcare providers who can receive Medicaid funds.

CPM’s are trained professionals. They are not nurse midwives and thus send women into the “regular” health care system when the women are at risk in any way. But, if you are pregnant, not at risk, and want a home birth, a CPM is the person to call. CPMs are hugely dedicated women who work long hours for little pay because they love healthy women and their healthy babies [1 2 3 4]. I say this as a proud parent of a CPM.

You can find your Senator’s email address here.

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There are two new-ish Radio Berkman interviews up: Me talking with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger about his book that argues that we are in danger of forgetting how to forget, and Russell Neuman on learning from the past of the media.

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The Berkman Center’s study of broadband around the world finds pretty clear correlation between successful broadband access and openness. Here’s a bit of an interview with Yochai Benkler who headed up the study for the FCC:

I think there are two pieces of news that will be most salient for people as they look at this report. The first is a response to the question: “how are we doing?”, and the answer is that we’re overall middle-of-the-pack, no better. The second responds to the question: “what policies and practices worked for countries that have done well?”, and the answer to that is: there is good evidence to support the proposition that a family of policies called “open access,” that encourage competition, played an important role.

The report is now open for public comment.

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Elliot Noss of Tucows — agreeing with the Benkler report — has posted about why the state of Canadian broadband is not nearly as healthy as a report from the incumbent providers would have us believe. He concludes: “I want, and there is no reason we cannot have, at least 100mbs full symmetrical bandwidth. It is a global competitive imperative. Telcos, Cablecos, I do not want your lousy bowl of 1.5mbps gruel. Please sir, may I have some more?”

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My Blackberry 8830 does what it needs to do. I can type on it. I can take it to Europe. With the Gmail app installed, I can read and delete emails and have them deleted from my gmail inbox. I an view web pages through a keyhole. I can recharge it off of my laptop. I can run the vaguely accurate Verizon GPS on it. I can fit a couple of downloads on it.

But I don’t love. I’m very glad to have it. But it does nothing for my hormone levels.

My eye now is roving. Verizon has announced it will be offering the Motorola Droid in November, which runs Google’s Android operating system. Unless there are some gotchas — if it has half of what we’re expecting, can we call it the Hemodrhoid? — I’m going to be explaining to my BBerry that the problem is really with me, not it, and then making the switch.

I don’t expect it the Droid to be as beautiful as the iPhone. Nor will there be as many apps. But, it will be beautiful enough, and as people write more skins for it, it may get better with age. And there are already more than enough Android apps, which is exactly how many I need.

Most of all, though, there won’t be an AppStore. The AppStore is the seductive angel of death for computing. It enables Apple to keep quality up and, more important, to keep support costs down. But a computer that can’t be programmed except by its manufacturer (or with the permission of its manufacturer) isn’t a real computer. The success of the AppStore is a gloomy, scary harbinger. From controlling the apps that can go on its mobile phone, it’s a short step for Apple to decide to control the apps that can go on its rumored slate/netbook device. And since so much of the future of computing will occur on mobiles and netbooks, this portends a serious de-generation of computing, as predicted by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

So, some of my technolust for a phone I haven’t even seen yet is due to the political hope it promises. Rally ’round the Droid, boys and girls!

Unless, of course, it sucks.

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The Berkman Center has published a draft of a review of broadband around the world. It’s posted for public review and comment now. This is the result of a huge effort by some incredibly talented and smart people, led by Yochai Benkler, and supported by the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

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In Finland, you have a legal right to be connected to the Internet, at at least 1mbps. The right begins in 2010. In 2015, your legal minimum connection speed will be 100mbps. (In the US, broadband connections generally start at 1mbps.)

According a right to connect is not the only way to ensure universal connectedness, of course. But it sure is one way.

(Here’s slashdot on the topic.)

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The Financial Times asked four concerned experts how a CEO should handle a mob outraged at his or her corporation’s behavior. All four recommend some form of conversational engagement, including the possibility of changing corporate policy if it is discovered to be wrong. The hard part, of course, is what you do if rational minds simply disagree, and if the stakes are high enough that conversation fails and confrontation remains. At least one of the four commenters acknowledges that the CEO may just have to push back, and Oxfam says it engages in dialogue even as it also runs campaigns.

(Disclosure: I am consulting to Edelman and am friends with the Edelman person who is quoted in the piece. Also, we regularly donate money to Oxfam and I hope you do, too.)

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Plenty is being written already trying to parse, understand, and come to terms with Larry Lessig’s article “Against Transparency” in the New Republic. Ethan Zuckerman does his usual outstanding job in clarifying ideas sympathetically. Transparency advocate Carl Malamud responds to Lessig. I presented my own “walkthrough” of the article. The New Republic has run Tim Wu’s response, which agrees with Lessig in important ways. The New Republic has also run four other responses, including an excellent response from Ellen Miller and Michael Klein, founders of the Sunlight Foundation, the leading advocate for transparency. (My response is included in that set of four.) Aaron Swartz prefigured Larry’s argument in a piece he posted in April: “Transparency is bunk.” Plenty to chew on.

I want to briefly expand on the article’s import.

At the end, Larry expands his own argument to cover “Internet triumphalism.” Over the past couple of years, we’ve been seeing Net triumphalism waning, at least in the circles I travel in. Triumphalism is the notion that the war has been won. It’s over. Net triumphalism thinks that the new tech is in place, cannot be removed, and will change everything. It thus includes Net techno-determinism, i.e., the idea that the mere presence of the Net has predictable, determinate, and inevitable effects. Triumphalism adds: Yay!

Net triumphalism seemed more plausible back in the days when the demographics of the participants were pretty homogeneous, masking the role culture played in the homogeneous effects the Net was having. As regimes have censored the Net in ways the Net has not routed around, as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and then Clay Shirky showed us that the Net tends towards the old patterns of unequal influence, as the mere networked presence of Howard Dean supporters failed to end GW Bush’s reign of error, naive Internet Triumphalism has become unsupportable. As Joe Trippi said, we need mouse pads and shoe leather. As Aaron Swartz says, we need narrative journalism as well as the Web. As Larry Lessig says, we need political reform as well as the Web. Indeed, as Aaron and Larry point out, the sunlight of transparency casts shadows as well.

I think “Against Transparency” misidentifies the source of the threat and undervalues the benefits of transparency-as-the-default, even as I agree with Larry’s cautions and his policy agenda. I nevertheless think it is one more marker in incremental extirpation of Internet triumphalism. Some of the pain reading his article causes old-time Net enthusiasts like me comes from that. It’s the right pain to feel, even if we disagree with the particularities of Larry’s article.

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I’ve been in a small round of email among friends, arguing over exactly what Larry Lessig means in his article in The New Republic titled “Against Transparency.” It is a challenging article for those of us who support government transparency, and Larry is obviously both influential and brilliant. So, I wanted to be sure that I was following his argument, since it is somewhat discursive.

Here’s what I think is a guide to the flow of the article, with links to the eleven Web pages across which the article is spread. (I’ve made judgment calls about where to divide topics that span a page.) The following is all my gloss and paraphrasing; let me know if you think I’ve gotten it wrong. Note that I intend this only as a guide to reading the article, not as a substitute. I’ve purposefully filed off the nuances, grace notes, and subtleties that make this a Larry Lessig article. (Note also that the italicized bits are not me interjecting; they’re the article’s own objections and qualifiers.)

Section I: Transparency is not necessarily good

[link] Sometimes, transparency that seems good is bad. (”Punch-Clock Campaign” example.)

Especially bad is “naked transparency,” which wants massive amounts of government data made available over the Internet. Naked transparency will “simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.”

Qualifier: Most transparency projects are not bad.

[link] Transparency projects that track the flow of money and influence are particularly bad.

[link] A short history of transparency. (Brandeis)

To be helpful, information has to be incorporated into “complex chains of comprehension.”

Is that what’s happening with what naked transparency reveals? The supporters of transparency haven’t asked that question.

[link] Section II: Transparency leads to untruth

Mere correlations between politicians, donors, and votes does not tell us if the politician is corrupt.

Objection: But, revealing those correlations does no harm.

[link] Yes it does! (Hillary Clinton example.) Once the correlation gets in our head, we can’t get rid of it.

Objection: More information will chase out the bad info.

[link] No it won’t! Our attention spans are shot. You can see this everywhere. (Surveillance camera example.)

[link] Section III: How to respond

Can we get the good of transparency without the bad? No. (JAMA example.)

[link] The transparency argument is following a familiar pattern. Similarly, tech has enabled a “free content movement” that has disrupted the newspaper and music industries.

Let’s not follow that pattern in how we respond. We can’t fight the Net’s lessening of control over info.

[link] We need solutions that accept the Net’s effect. (William Fisher and Neil Netanel examples.)

[link] The solution is obvious. Transparency is inevitably going to raise false suspicions. We are prey to those suspicions because we already believe that politics is corrupt. Therefore, we need to eliminate political corruption.

To eliminate political corruption, we should enact the Fair Elections Now Act.

Caveat: The name of the act is misleading. It’s not about fairness.

Without this, we are doomed.

The transparency movement should support campaign finance reform, and should constantly remind us that transparency is not “just a big simple blessing.”

[link] Likewise for the rest of the Internet triumphalism.

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Harry Lewis has a terrific post about a $300 do-it-yourself book scanner he saw at the D is for Digitize conference on the Google Book settlement. The plans are available at DIYBookScanner.org, from Daniel Reetz, the inventor.

There are lots of personal uses for home-digitized books, so — I am definitely not a lawyer — I assume it’s legal to scan in your own books. But doesn’t that just seem silly if your friend or classmate has gone to the trouble of scanning in a book that you already own? Shouldn’t there be a site where we can note which books we’ve scanned in? Then, if we can prove that we’ve bought a book, why shouldn’t we be able to scarf up a copy another legitimate book owner has scanned in, instead of wasting all the time and pixels scanning in our own copy?

Isn’t Amazon among the places that: (a) knows for sure that we’ve bought a book, (b) has the facility to let users upload material such as scans, and (c) could let users get an as-is scan from a DIY-er if there is one available for the books they just bought?

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There are reports of a new type of cloud, one that is not currently in the official International Cloud Atlas. Or, possibly, it is a formation that’s been around forever, but the scattered reports are only now coalescing thanks to the Net.

According to Amazon’s review of Richard Hamblyn’s The Invention of Clouds, we only began thinking clouds could be categorized in 1802 when Luke Howard started giving public lectures. The very idea that clouds — the paradigm of uncatchable — could be divided into groups was (apparently) fascinating and thrilling. (Lamarck had also categorized clouds, but it didn’t catch on.)

A quick googly scan makes it seem that the cloud taxonomy is pretty messy. For example, the University of Illinois’ “cloud types” page lists four broad categories, and a list of miscellaneous clouds, each of which is categorized under one of the four basic types, evoking a “Huh?” reaction from at least one of us. The cloud taxonomy page at Univ. Missouri-Columbia lists eight types. Do you categorize by what they look like, how high they are, what they do (rain or not?), which celebrity profiles they resemble …? Categorizing clouds is truly a Borgesian task.

And, dammit, wouldn’t you know? Here’s a poem by Jorge Luis Borges called: “Clouds (II)” (with the line-endings probably removed):

Placid mountains meander through the air, or tragic cordilleras cast a pall, overshadowing the day. They are what we call clouds. And their shapes are often strange and rare. Shakespeare observed one once. It seemed to be a dragon. That one cloud of an afternoon still kindles in his words and blazes down, so that we go on seeing it today. What are the clouds? An architecture of chance? Perhaps they are the necessary things from which God weaves his vast imaginings, threads of a web of infinite expanse. Maybe the cloud is emptiness returning, just like the man who watches it this morning.

(translated by Richard Barnes. B; Robert Mezey; Richard Barnes. “Clouds (II). (poem).” The American Poetry Review. World Poetry, Inc. 1996. HighBeam Research. 11 Oct. 2009 v)

More Borges poems…

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Robert Fuller has a good post at DailyKos that speculates that the Nobel committee was rewarding Obama for his “dignitarian” politics. “Dignitarian politics represents a modern synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian politics.”

Dignitarianism is Robert’s political philosophy. I don’t know the specifics of it, but I like the word it’s based on.
The term has come to connote someone who remains polite and proper, no matter what the occasion, because of a sense of self-worth and confidence. That’s part of what Obama manifests as “coolness” — not in the hep cat sense (yes, I just said “hep cat”), but in the way he refused to rise to the bait the way many of his supporters were hoping he would during the debates with McCain.

Even more important than being dignified is treating others with dignity. Being dignified can be a trick of manners or a technique for self defense, but consistently treating others with dignity is a profound statement of what you think matters in this world. That is what many around the globe are responding to when they hear Obama, especially when they remember the cacklin’ cowboy who came before him. (Pardon me. When it comes to GW Bush, I make an exception to the rule of dignity. I am no Obama.) It is also what many in our national political scene respond to negatively about Obama, confusing it with compromise, appeasement, weakness, or triangulation.

Treating people with dignity is an acknowledgment of the equality of worth aspirations. Your life and values are as serious to you as mine are to me. Dignity is thus hope’s social self. But, for peacemakers, it is also highly pragmatic. If you will not accord opponents dignity, then your only alternative is to conquer them. Sometimes that is required. But a peaceful world is built on dignity accorded to others.

That is what President Obama brings. Coming from the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, it is worth a Nobel Peace Prize if only as a legacy to be fulfilled.

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At my annual physical today I learned three things, in addition to the fact that I seem to be basically healthy:

1. My doctor told me that as someone over 50 years old (I’m 58), I should not get a swine flu inoculation. See, we’re already rationing medicine, the damn socialists! Of course. We always have. At least flu shots are being rationed by doctors, not by insurance companies. Rationing is the only reasonable response in a world of non-infinite resources.

2. The health center I go to has an extensive electronic record of my health, but it is designed around billing, not around my health. For example, I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes a few years ago. (I no longer have that diagnosis. Amazing what losing 40lbs and not eating sugar can do for you.) When my doctor tried to look up when he had made that diagnosis, he had to instead look for when he first prescribed an anti-diabetes drug. The electronioc record knows about which drugs I was prescribed, but doesn’t think of diabetes as something worth noting. Eventually my doctor found that diagnosis in a note of some sort, but if I were brought unconscious into an emergency room that got access to my electronic record, the attending George Clooneys would not easily see that I might have a problem with sugars.

3. I asked my doctor for my blood type because when I jog I carry a little health card with me, so as strangers are picking over my remains, they can see that I have no known allergies and thus they should feel free to test out new drugs on me. My doctor doesn’t have my blood type recorded and was puzzled that I’d want to know. It’s a residue of my youth when children were supposed to prominently write their blood type in lipstick on their foreheads in case they were trampled by a dinosaur. These days, apparently they just type you on the spot, before they steal your wallet and test out new drugs on your remains. Good to know!

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In the early 1980s, I was teaching philosophy at Stockton State College. At one point, I said something like, “OK, guys, let’s get started — and I mean ‘guys’ in the generic sense.” Afterwards, a couple of the young women in the class came up to me and said, “You can’t get out of being sexist by saying you don’t mean what you said.”

“‘Guys’ stands for everyone,” I said, thinking that my embedded apology had been rather enlightened of me.

“Then next time try saying ‘OK, gals, let’s get started.’”

Got it.

Justice Scalia says of a cross on public land* honoring U.S. war dead: “It’s erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead … What would you have them erect?…Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?”

He’s right that it’s intended to honor all the war dead. The problem is the assumption that you honor all war dead by putting up the religious symbols honored by some.

Scalia should talk with the young women who set me straight 25 years ago.

NOTE: I posted this at Huffington Post where the comments are, um, interesting.

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^{*The case seems to be turning on whether the land was made private simply to skirt the problem with erecting religious symbols on public land.}

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Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is giving a talk at the Berkman Center (well, actually at Pound Hall) on his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Viktor teaches at Singapore University, and was at the Kennedy School for ten years.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

He begins with a story of person studying to become a teacher who was kicked out of school because the school noticed a photo of her drinking on Facebook. She tried deleting it, but the Internet remembered it. He gives another example: A person who noted in an article that he had taken LSD in the 1960s. When trying to cross into the US, an immigration officer refused him admittance because he hadn’t offered up that information, and the officer uncovered it by googling him. What’s put on the Web is never forgotten. In another example, the information was not put up by the individual but by someone else: a bar/club in Europe records all the people, all the drinks, etc., and hasn’t ever deleted any information. Likewise, Google knows more about us than we can remember.

For millennia, forgetting was easy, and remembering was hard, says Viktor. So, we’ve come up with ways to pass on our memories. The oral tradition. Painting. Writing. “But these tools have not altered the fundamental fact that for us humans, forgetting is easy, and remembering is time-consuming and expensive.” The book and the photo also haven’t altered this fact. What is long past fades in our mind. We depreciate what is no longer relevant. But because forgetting is biological, we never had to develop explicit strategies to forget. Now we’ve moved from biologically forgetting to permanent remembering. [Hmm. I haven't. We still don't remember much. But we have more records, and thus are able to retrieve more. That seems different to me.]

This has happened because storage is cheap in the digital world. Google has server farms with a capacity of 100,000 terabytes perhaps. And we’ve gotten much better at retrieving information. And we have global access. Remembering has become the default.

There are, of course, benefits to this, Viktor says. But undoing forgetting has deep consequences, far beyond the information efficiencies. He points to power and time.

Power: If others have info about us and can keep that info accessible for a very long time, the informational power increases, and can affect how we transact and interact. It’s Bentham’s Panopticon: behavioral compliance through the permanent threat of constant surveillance.

Time: Imagine Jane is about to catch up with her old friend John, but when reviewing their history of email, discovers msgs from a time when he was nasty to her. She had forgotten that time. Now it comes back. Her current relationship with John now is ruined. [Or, she discovers msgs that remind her she once loved him. Isn't Viktor's example actually an argument for more remembering, so she can see how she got over the bad time?] “In analog times, the dangers were limited” because our biology would have brought us to forget.

Viktor talks about AJ, a non-fictional woman who has difficulty forgetting. It is a weird and unhappy condition.[This is why the conflation of human remembering and the presence of a fairly complete digital record matters. The presence of digital info and the tools for retrieving it does not turn us into AJ.]

Without forgetting, we have trouble changing. We have trouble forgiving. We may turn into an unforgiving society. “This is the real danger of shifting the default from forgetting to remembering.” Worse, suppose we stop relying on our own memories and rely instead on the digital memories. “Does that give those who control digital memory the power over history?”

What to do? Perhaps give privacy rights to individuals. But there are weaknesses: It’s not politically feasible in the US. The European have those rights, but people have not used them.

Or perhaps we could create an information ecology, a regulatory construction of what can be remembered. E.g., it might require the deletion of info after a particular time. This does not require individuals to go to court for enforcement, and it protects against an unforeseen future as when the benign Dutch social services registry was repurposed by the Nazis to identify Jews. “It may be better to store less than more.” But, after 9/11, we’re seeing requirements for increasing data retention, Viktor notes.

So, maybe we need to augment these approaches. “Digital abstinence,” for example. Don’t put everything on Facebook. But abstinence isn’t all that reasonable, he says. By the end of 2007, two out of three young Americans had put their info online.

The opposite approach is “full contextualization.” E.g., Jane can’t find the context of her bad treatment by John. Full contextualization would restore that. But will that ever be technically feasible? And if it were, would it really address the challenge of digital remembering? Do we have time to relive our past again and again?

Another approach: Hope for a cognitive adjustment. That is, over time we’ll learn to devalue older info and learn to live with an omnipresent past. “That would solve our problem. But is it likely?” How long would it take us to change how we assess information? “Cognitive psychologists are very critical of our ability to change our decision making in the short run.” [But a change in norms can happen much faster than that, and we govern what we're allowed to notice and remember through norms. Statements like "That's water under the bridge" and "Youthful indiscretions" are expressions of norms that enforce social forgetting without requiring actual brain evolution.]

Or, we could change our technology, rather than changing ourselves. E.g., a global DRM system to protect privacy. Viktor is not recommending this: “Wouldn’t this be a perfect surveillance system?” And we’d have to make sure that privacy is built deep into the infrastructure.

None of these six solutions are sufficient, although all offer something.

“I advocate a revival of forgetting…to establish a mechanism that makes forgetting easy, and makes remembering just a bit more strenuous.” Just enough to shift the incentives back to what we humans are used to. Viktor suggests an expiry date for information. Whenever we save info, we should be prompted to put in a date when we want it deleted. We should be able to change those dates.

The core of this proposal isn’t the automatic deletion, he says. Rather, the prompting for the date will remind us humans that most information is not of permanent value.

E.g., search engines could offer us an easy way to say how long we should remember searches. Or people could carry a device on their keyring to set expiration dates, perhaps tagging the expiration dates for the images of the people in digital photos.

Any expiry date system must have only two characteristics. First, it must aim at changing the default from remembering back to forgetting. Second, it must remind us of information’s temporal nature.

Expiry dates are also no silver bullet, and don’t solve digital privacy problems, Viktor says. But they could be useful when used with some of the other proposed solutions.

“Forgetting is often forgotten…Let us remember to forget.”

Q: You don’t mention the propensity of all media to fade over time. Digital memory is not perfect. Also, data is growing so quickly that it gets too expensive to digitally remember everything. The amount of data is growing faster than Moore’s Law.
A: You don’t need much space to remember a billion queries a day. A couple of hundred dollars worth of data storage. And Google’s way of saving data is relatively future-proof.

Q: [me] If we take memory to mean only the human capacity, and digital “memory” to be more like what we usually call storage, then what has actually happened to human memory in the digital age?
A: I chose the term “digital memory” carefully. If I can’t access my VCR tapes easily, they’re pretty much useless to me. Digital stuff is so easily accessible. How has digital remembering changed human remembering? I don’t know. But my argument isn’t that it’s changed human remembering, but that it has changed the external stimuli affecting our memory.

Q: One of the way a culture forgets is that it lets books go out of print, get moved out of libraries, etc. Now we have Google Books, which will make all books ever printed available (pretty much). Do you see negative effects of this project?
A: I haven’t given it enough thought because authors would like to set their books’ expiry dates very far in the future. Some preliminary research we’re doing on court decisions are showing an interesting effect on memory.
Q: The author of the book isn’t the only one concerned with the info in it. There may be people written about who would want to a say…
A: Yes, and the author’s rights aren’t always fully owned by them.

Q: Digital memory has value as cultural memory. The things we’d put expiration dates on have value even if against the interests of the people at the time, because it has social and historic meaning…
A: That’s just conjecture…
Q: No it’s not. We’re leaving traces now all the time. How we put that info to use is a different question.
A: Suppose you’re an author. Shouldn’t you be able to put bad early stories into the trash bin? Why should society have the right to take it from you and preserve it and make it public?
Q: Great point, but we still do struggle with this. Nonetheless, I would recommend we give thought to how these things might sensibly be balanced. E.g., the Iran election twitter stream. Enormous amt of fascinating info has been lost.
A: The solution is built in. For certain contexts, we may be required to mandate a very long expiry date. We do that all the time. I’m arguing for keeping that as the exception to the rule.

Q: I’m a cultural historian, trained as a Medievalist. There’s data scarcity in that field. Who decides about inclusion, preservation, etc.? Institutions have performed the filtering role. Google keeps some types of info and not others. Others are interested in your social security number, etc. So, who are the gatekeepers? There’s power to the Internet Archive’s approach of capturing everything. The stuff that the institutions of memory don’t preserve may turn out to be the most interesting for historians. (I basically buy your core argument, although I’m a believer in the cognitive adjustment.)
<
A: Brewster Kale and I (of Internet Archive) are in general agreement. The Archive sets expiry dates. [Not sure I got that right. Sorry.] My core argument is to give back the choice to the individuals.

Q: I too believe in the cognitive adjustment because I see myself and others already doing that. Sure, you find old emails reminding of something you wanted to forget, but when you accidentally delete some years’ worth, you feel an intense sense of loss.
A: When I lost all my email at the end of 1998, I was completely horrified. But then I discovered it doesn’t really matter. I started out believing the cog adjustment argument, but after I read cog science books, I changed my mind. I want to plug The Seven Sins of Memory, which shows how hard it is to readjust.

Q: Suppose two of us in a shared record have different expiry preferences…
A: I talk about that a lot in the book.

Q: There’s a big diff between what I want to preserve and what others do. The European privacy laws require data deletion. Google and others are now negotiating with the European Commission about this …
A: We need to differentiate between privacy rights and norms.

[missed a couple of questions. sorry.]

Viktor says that he recognizes that expiry dates are a crude instrument. Too binary. “I’d prefer rusting or something like that.” :)

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Ethan Zuckerman reports — and he’s the best live-blogger there is — on Don Tapscott’s stories at the BIF-5 conference.

Here’s a snippet of Ethan reporting on Don:

“If you spend 24 hours a week being a passive participant, consuming tv – as Baby Boomers did – you get a certain sort of brain.” If you spend those hours searching, researching and building connections, you get a very different brain.

Tapscott wants to refute the idea that the internet is making kids dumb. There’s no data to support this, he tells us. Instead, we’re seeing radical societal change, especially around the structure of the family. Kids and parents get along as friends, and sometimes they move back in after graduation. He wonders, “is this the first time in history that we can learn from young people and their new culture of work and learning?”

By the way, Ethan told me the topics he was planning on covering in his own 20-minute BIF story. Fabulous. I hope he blogs that as well.

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