Clay Shirky’s masterful talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC last September — “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure” — makes crucial points and makes them beautifully. [Clay explains in greater detail in this two part CJR interview: 1 2]

So I’ve been writing about information overload in the context of our traditional strategy for knowing. Clay traces information overload to the 15th century, but others have taken it back earlier than that, and there’s even a quotation from Seneca (4 BCE) that can be pressed into service: “What is the point of having countless books and libraries whose titles the owner could scarcely read through in his whole lifetime? That mass of books burdens the student without instructing…” I’m sure Clay would agree that if we take “information overload” as meaning the sense that there’s too much for any one individual to know, we can push the date back even further.

The little research I’ve done on the origins of the phrase “information overload” supports Clay’s closing point: Info overload isn’t a problem so much as the water we fishes swim in. When the term was popularized by Alvin Toffler in 1970’s Future Shock, Toffler talked about it as a psychological syndrome that could lead to madness (on a par with sensory overload, which is where the term came from). By the time we hit the late 1980s and early 1990s, people aren’t writing about info overload as a psychological syndrome, but as a cultural fact that we have to deal with. The question became not how we can avoid over-stimulating our informational organs but how we can manage to find the right information in the torrent. So, I think Clay is absolutely spot on.

I do want to push on one of the edges of Clay’s idea, though. Knowledge traditionally has responded to the fact that what-is-to-be-known outstrips our puny brains with the strategy of reducing the size of what has to be known. We divide the world into manageable topics, or we skim the surface. We build canons of what needs to be known. We keep the circle of knowledge quite small, at least relative to all the pretenders to knowledge. All of this of course reflects the limitations of the paper medium we traditionally used for the preservation and communication of knowledge.

The hypothesis of “Too Big to Know” is that in the face of the new technology and the exponentially exponential amount of information if makes available to us, knowledge is adopting a new strategy. Rather than merely filtering — “merely” because we will of course continue to filter — we are also including as much as possible. The new sort of filtering that we do is not always and not merely reductive.

A traditional filter in its strongest sense removes materials: It filters out the penny dreadful novels so that they don’t make it onto the shelves of your local library, or it filters out the crazy letters written in crayon so they don’t make it into your local newspaper. Filtering now does not remove materials. Everything is still a few clicks away. The new filtering reduces the number of clicks for some pages, while leaving everything else the same number of clicks away. Granted, that is an overly-optimistic way of putting it: Being the millionth result listed by a Google search makes it many millions of times harder to find that page than the ones that make it onto Google’s front page. Nevertheless, it’s still much much easier to access that millionth-listed page than it is to access a book that didn’t make it through the publishing system’s editorial filters.

But there’s another crucial sense in which the new filtering technology is not purely reductive. Filters now are often simultaneously additive. For example, blogs act as filters, recommending other pages. But blogs don’t merely sift through the Web and present you with what they find, the way someone curating a collection of books puts the books on a shelf. Blogs contextualize the places they point to, sometimes at great length. That contextualization is a type of filter that adds a great deal of rich information. Further, in many instances, we can see why the filter was applied the way it was. For blogs and other human-written pieces, this is often explained in the contextualization. At Wikipedia, it takes place in the “About” pages where people explain why they have removed some information and added others. And the point of the Top 100 lists and Top Ten Lists that are so popular these days is to generate reams and reams of online controversy.

Thus, many of our new filters reflect the basic change in our knowledge strategy. We are moving from managing the perpetual overload Clay talks about by reducing the amount we have to deal with, to reducing it in ways that simultaneously add to the overload. Merely filtering is not enough, and filtering is no longer a merely reductive activity. The filters themselves are information that are then discussed, shared, and argued about. When we swim through information overload, we’re not swimming in little buckets that result from filters; we are swimming in a sea made bigger by the loquacious filters that are guiding us.

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Here is a letter Lewis Hyde sent to Judge Denny Chin who is considering the proposed Google Books settlement. I’ve also appended a supporting letter written by Eric Saltzman. The issue is that the newly-proposed trustee overseeing the handling of “orphaned works” (i.e., works that are still in copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be found) still does not have the power to adequately represent the interests of the rights holders, especially when it comes to allowing companies that are not Google to license the works. Granting Google a monopoly on these works seems like too much of a reward for Google’s scanning of them (which I’ve costs about $30/book), and does not seem to serve the interests of the rights holder or — more important, from my point of view — the overall social good of increasing access to these works. (Note: I am not a lawyer.)

So, here are the letters, minus some addresses, etc.:

 

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27 January 2010 

Dear Judge Chin:   

I write to amend the letter of objection that I wrote last August in regard to The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc. (Case No. 1:05-cv-08136-DC).  My August letter is on file with your office as Document 480.   

I shall here limit my remarks to provisions of the amended settlement that are changed from the original settlement, specifically to the role of the newly proposed trustee for orphan works.   

I object to the fact that, despite the amended settlement’s creation of an Unclaimed Works Fiduciary (UWF), the monopoly powers that Google and the Books Rights Registry will acquire, should the Court approve the orphan works elements of the settlement, still stand.  The settling parties have limited the role of the UWF such that he may discharge some duties of the registry in some circumstances, but little else.  He cannot act fully on behalf of the rightsholders of unclaimed books; he cannot, for example, license their work to third parties.   

To put this another way, it is still the case that an approved settlement will in essence grant the settling parties unique compulsory licenses for the exploitation of orphan works.  But why make such licenses unique?  If the Court and the settling parties believe that they can authorize compulsory licenses of any sort, why not go the extra step and grant such licenses broadly so that competing providers can enter this market?   

To address the problem of monopoly in the market for digital books the UWF should be empowered to act as a true trustee.  As such, he should make every effort to locate lost owners, communicate to them their rights under the approved settlement, and pay them their due.  Absent their instructions to the contrary, he should deliver the works of lost owners to the public through the efficiencies of a fully competitive market.   

As Chief Justice Rehnquist has written in regard to the larger purposes of our copyright laws:  “We have often recognized the monopoly privileges that Congress has authorized … are limited in nature and must ultimately serve the public good…” (Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc., 510 U.S. 517 (1994)).  In regard to both content owners and the public, then, the fiduciary needs to operate in an open economy of knowledge and, for that, he will need the freedom to license work to other actors.   

(Note:  I have asked my attorney, Eric Saltzman, to separately address the question of the UWF’s authority to license orphaned works to others; please see the attached addendum to this letter.)   

Yours sincerely, 

Lewis Hyde

Richard L. Thomas Professor of English

Kenyon College 

Addendum 

Eric F. Salzman

Re: The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc. (Case No. 1:05-cv-08136-DC). 

Dear Judge Chin: 

My client, Lewis Hyde, tells the Court in his letter of January 27th that the new proposed settlement cannot be fair to the owners of the copyrights in the orphan works and to the public unless it allows the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary to make licenses to other providers to allow competition with the monopoly plan that Google and the Plaintiffs now propose to the Court.   

I would like to offer the Court additional support for Professor Hyde’s objection and suggestion.   

If the named plaintiffs or others who “opt in” to the settlement wish to sign on to it with their own copyrights (and if it survives any antitrust process), then that shall be their prerogative.  However, the combination in this class action lawsuit of inadequate representation and significant actual conflicts among the so-called class should make the Court skeptical of granting a monopolistic license of the absent members’ copyrights.   

If the Court does decide to approve a settlement of the case, it should not approve one where Plaintiff’s counsel have consented to deliver the licenses for the orphan works to just one licensee. 

It would be a complete fiction to say that Plaintiffs’ attorneys have adequately represented the orphan works authors and their successors in interest in this case.  The original settlement proposal clearly demonstrated counsel’s willingness and ability to compromise or, at least, to ignore the orphan works owners’ interests in favor of the named plaintiffs who engaged them and whose assent they needed to cut the deal.  

The problem of plaintiff counsel shaping a settlement attractive to the clients before them at the expense of absent class members is a well-discussed problem in class action jurisprudence.  This Court may take notice of an incentive in that direction, the more than fifty million dollars of fees that Google has agreed to pay to Plaintiffs’ counsel if the settlement goes through.   

Allow me to point out two methods whereby the proposed settlements seriously shortchanged the orphan works owners to enrich other class members at their expense.  

The proposed settlement provides that “Google will make a Cash Payment of at least $60 per Principal Work, $15 per Entire Insert and $5 per Partial Insert for which at least one Rightsholder has registered a valid claim by the opt-out deadline” (Emphasis supplied). According to the settlement, total payments will amount to $45 million.  

By definition, no orphan work Rightsholders could meet this registration condition.  Thus was the settlement engineered so that the rightsholders of orphan works and their successors-in-interest would not and could not get any share of the up-front payments total.  

Evidently, in dividing up the scores of millions of dollars that defendant Google was ultimately willing to pay up-front (i.e., unrelated to yet unproven forthcoming revenues) to settle the lawsuit, counsel felt no obligation to share any of it with the orphan works owners, even if the rightsholder should later appear and wish to register and claim that payment.  This very large slice of the pie would go only to the known rightsholders, their de facto clients. 

This economic discrimination against the orphan works rightsholders went beyond just up-front payments. It also took unclaimed (after five years) revenues from exploitation of the orphan works and assigned them to the known rightsholders of other books, thus promising still further enrichment of the client sub-class with actual control over the settlement.   

That particular feature drew such unpleasant attention to the bias in representation in favor of the known rightsholders (and disfavoring the orphan works rightsholders) that it was written out of the settlement proposal now before the Court.  Nevertheless, the Plaintiffs’ counsel who now urge the court to approve this revised settlement agreement are the same counsel who, in the first settlement go-around, assured the Court then (as they do now) that they had adequately represented the entire class, including the orphan works rightsholders. 

Commonality and adequacy of representation are two touchstones for class certification.  “The adequacy inquiry under Rule 23 (a) (4) serves to uncover conflicts of interest between named parties and the class they seek to represent.” Amchem Prods. v. Windsor, 521 U.S. 591 at 625 (1997).  

In Amchem, the Supreme Court upheld the Third Circuit Court’s decertification of the class because it found that “…the settling parties achieved a global compromise with no structural assurance of fair and adequate representation for the diverse groups and individuals affected. The Third Circuit found no assurance here that the named parties operated under a proper understanding of their representational responsibilities. That assessment is on the mark.” Id at 595. 

As demonstrated above, much less than promising the “structural assurance of fair and adequate representation for the diverse groups and individuals affected”, the settlements that were and are proposed to this Court suggest that advantaging the named class members at the expense of the unrepresented orphan works rightsholders was a goal successfully achieved during the settlement negotiation. 

Accordingly, if the Court will entertain a settlement, it should itself take on the burden of making sure that the orphan works rightsholders interests are well protected.  At this point, the best way to do so is to free the orphan works from the monopoly straitjacket that the proposed settlement forces on them.   

Let the parties live with the deal they made for the parties who were, in fact, adequately and aggressively represented. For the inadequately represented sub-class, the orphan works rightsholders, the Court should empower the UWF (or similar fiduciary) to license their works into the open market. With this authority going forward, the UWF will, as well, be able to adjust licensing of digital rights in these works to the market conditions in an area that is still very new and sure to develop in ways that are, today, impossible to predict.   

Professor Hyde’s objection addresses the two enormous flaws in the proposed settlement:  1. the actual conflicts within the class together with the failure of adequate representation of the orphan works rightsholders, and 2.  the anti-competitive effect of the full copyright term license it would grant to Google only.  The first undermines both the process by which the settlement was achieved and, correspondingly, the public confidence in the courts.  The second hurts both the orphan works rightsholders and the strong public interest in access to the knowledge and creativity these books offer.   

Short of a initiating a new attempt at settlement — with new counsel for the orphan works rightsholders — the changes Professor Hyde proposes would achieve a result that would be fair for all the parties and for the public.   

Very truly yours, 

Eric F. Saltzman, Attorney 

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The iPad definitely ups the Kindle’s ante. Unfortunately, it ups the Kindle ante by making an e-book more like a television set.

Will it do well? I dunno. Probably. But is it the future of reading? Nope. It’s the high-def, full-color, animated version of the past of reading.

The future of reading is social. The future of reading blurs reading and writing. The future of reading is the networking of readers, writers, content, comments, and metadata, all in one continuous-on mash.

 

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Tim Bray writes:

Compared to my laptop, the iPad lacks a keyboard, software development tools, writers’ tools, photographers’ tools, a Web server, a camera, a useful row of connectors for different sorts of wires, and the ability to run whatever software I choose. Compared to my Android phone, it lacks a phone, a camera, pocketability, and the ability to run whatever software I choose. Compared to the iPad, my phone lacks book-reading capability, performance, and screen real-estate. Compared to the iPad, my computer lacks a touch interface and suffers from excessive weight and bulk.

It’s probably a pretty sweet tool for consuming media, even given the unfortunate 4:3 aspect ratio. And consuming media is obviously a big deal for a whole lot of people.

For creative people, this device is nothing.

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Want to see one way to use the Web to teach? Berkman’s Jonathan Zittrain and Stanford Law’s Elizabeth Stark are teaching a course called Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw. It looks like they have students creating wiki pages for the various topics being discussed. The one on “The Future of Wikipedia” is a terrific resource for exploring the issues Wikipedia is facing.

Among the many things I like about this approach: It implicitly makes the process of learning — which we have traditionally taken as an inward process — a social, outbound process. By learning this way. we are not only enriching ourselves, but enriching our world.

My only criticism: I wish the pages had prominent pointers to a main page that explains that the pages are part of a course.

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The Guardian has gone meta-meta and produced a single portal for exploring the data the world’s governments are dumping into the public sphere. (Thans, Doc!)

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From Chris Csikszentmihaly, Director of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media:

CALL TO NEWS ORGANIZATIONS

In the response to the earthquake in Haiti, many organizations worked to create sites where people could find one another, or least information about their loved ones. This excellent idea has been undermined by its success: within 24 hours it became clear that there were too many places where people were putting information, and each site is a silo. The site Haitianquake.com began scraping – mechanically aggregating – the most popular such sites, like http://koneksyon.com and American Red Cross Family Links. As people within the IT community recognized the danger of too many unconnected sites, and Google became interested in helping, they turned their work over to Google which is now running an embeddable application at: http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/

We recognize that many newspapers have put precious resources into developing a people-finder system. We nonetheless urge them to make their data available to the Google project, and standardize on the Google widget. Doing so will greatly increase the number of successful reunions. Data from the google site is currently available as dumps in the standard PFIF format on this page , and an API is being developed, and licensed through Creative Commons. I am not affiliated with Google – indeed, this is a volunteer initiative by some of their engineers – but this is one case where their reach and capacity can help the most people.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the reasoning behind this request. Any questions about the widget or its functionality or features are best directed to Google.

Christopher P. Csikszentmihalyi.
Director, MIT Center for Future Civic Media

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I’m scheduled to do color commentary tomorrow when NPR’s “On Point” interviews Jaron Lanier for an hour, 11am-12 EST. Jaron will be talking about his book You Are Not a Gadget. I think my main role is to argue that the “hive mind” is not all bad.

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Marginal Revolution has a terrific post about giving advice.

I find myself conflicted about the topic. Although I am an occasional consultant and adviser, I don’t think of myself as giving advice. Sometimes I know stuff (or think that I do) or have opinions that I’ll offer if asked (or, in a blog post, unasked): “I had bad luck with this vendor,” or “Don’t over-specify it at launch, so it can be more emergent,” or “I use Kayak. It’s faster and it doesn’t clutter itself up trying to sell me stuff.” I suppose those all count as advice, but they don’t feel like very interesting cases of advice: The first is a datum with an implied conclusion, the second is a bromide, and the third is a personal preference with a justification statement. I think of “giving advice” as something loftier, larger, and more coherent.

And that larger sense of advice seems to me not to be a self-contained activity, but a process and a social interaction. Giving advice generally (?) means helping someone try on futures. “What would it be like if …?” Maybe at the end of that there’s a recommendation, but that recommendation is the least interesting part of the advice, because it only says, “And here’s what I think.” That’s why I’ve never been able to come up with a “Seven Steps to Miscellaneousness or Cluetrainhood” that would have helped my books.

Anyway, I liked Marginal Revolution’s post, and especially liked the recognition that giving advice is a social activity, not merely a transfer of purported knowledge.

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Jeff Goldenson at Harvard Law Library’s Digital Lab (Disclosure: I’ve just started consulting there) has been thinking about the benefits and pitfalls of embedding metadata into JPG images. That happens already, and some of it can be quite useful, although some can be a little creepy.

He and I were talking and began to wonder if there’d be utility in embedding Creative Commons license info into JPGs. So, let’s say you post a snapshot and you want to make it available under a Creative Commons license that allows people to reuse it so long as they attribute it to you and agree to let others reuse it under the same license. That information — including your preferred attribution and a link to the page you want it linked to — would be hidden within the JPG file.

Why bother? Because it would mean that the license info travels with the image. Otherwise, the chain of licenses and attributions can too easily be lost as B republishes a snap posted by A, and C republishes B, etc. The game of License Gossip just about ensures the chain of license info will not be unbroken.

At least as important, if this metadata were inserted in a standardized form, applications could begin using it, making the CC license both more useful and more visible, thus encouraging more people to use it. For example, someone could write a Firefox extension that would insert under any CC’ed image a line such as: “Share this image. Just be sure to include this attribution: (cc) [name] [license],” etc.

For this idea to have any effect, someone (Creative Commons?) would have to promulgate the standardized format for the embedded info, someone would have to write a metadata editor/inserter, and apps would have to add features take advantage of it. It’d help, for example, if Flickr were to let us set a preference for embedding the metadata into any photo we post there under a CC license.

Down sides? Well, the idea is unlikely to take off. And I suppose there’s a chance that the Big Content industry would start to insert their copyright info using the same mechanism, and thus would have something like a “broadcast flag” with which they could try to beat up browser makers and others who make create apps that display images: “Whenever your app displays images with copyright metadata, we insist you turn off the Copy entry on the context menu.” (IANAL, but I believe such a demand would have no legal basis, but since when does that have anything to do with it?)

Care to punch holes in this idea? Point to people who have already done it?

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From a Nov. 17 review by James Bamford, in the NY Review of Books, of The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid:

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (10²⁴ Bytes) by 2015.”

The citation for the MITRE report: The MITRE Corporation, “Data Analysis Challenges” (December 2008), p. 13.

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I’ve put Chapter 1 aside for two whole days after several weeks of compulsive daily writing and unwriting (usually in the other order). In the meantime I read Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia. I had skimmed it a couple of years ago, but this time I went through it more slowly because his caveats about group deliberation are important.

Infotopia follows up on his 2001 Republic.com, which famously worries about the formation of online “echo chambers” on the Net that causes people to become more extreme and less open in their views. Infotopia asks whether and how groups of people can learn and make good decisions. While Sunstein professes to be optimistic, the book reads pretty much like a catalog of how groups make themselves stupider. Worse, the book is evidence-based. There are a lot of studies that support him.

So, it’s directly relevant to the book I’m writing. I will undoubtedly draw upon it for both its warnings and its advice. The advice in fact seems to be to recognize what groups are good at and what they’re not, and to make sure diversity is encouraged and rewarded. (I am oversimplifying, of course.) No argument from me on those points!

I found the book useful for a couple of other reasons, too.

First, overall the book warns that deliberation is not always the best way to get to truth. Sunstein knows that he’s here arguing against deeply held Enlightenment beliefs and against some of the notions that founded this country.

Second, underneath that is a notion of knowledge that I think is being challenged; it’s the task of my book to try to figure out what that challenge actually is and what it does to our idea/ideal of knowledge. I hereby freely admit that I don’t have a good sense of what I’m driving at. But, I think the difference is between thinking (a) there is a realm of fixed and true knowledge (even if deliberation is not always the best tool for uncovering it); and (b) knowledge is always in contention and is never settled.

Now, let me add the qualifiers to that last point, because they are so broad that they may well obviate the point entirely. There is clearly a realm of facts about which one can be simply right or wrong. If that’s all we me mean by knowledge, then (a) is correct. But, if so, then knowledge isn’t nearly as elevated as we’ve thought it is. It’s just facts. As we go up a level from facts (and facts about facts may still be facts, so this is a confusing way of putting it), issues are more contentious and more important. I don’t know if we want to call that contentious realm “knowledge” in any sense, nor do I care very much. The picture of the world is different no matter what you call it: Either (a) the contention is an inferior, preparatory state that has value because knowledge emerges it, or (b) the contention is the normal, natural and inevitable condition of us humans, out of which some facty knowledge occasionally precipitates and becomes commoditized.

Or, in the terms that I have using when I think about this for myself, knowledge squeezes differences out, while networked knowledge works by including differences.

By the way, Sunstein also concludes that group deliberation works best if it includes differences. But his idea of working best is that it drives out differences and settles the issue. I am suggesting that knowledge includes differences. I’m just not sure that I’m right, that it’s an interesting point, or that it actually means anything at all.

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I had the whole book plotted out carefully, but the first chapter changed things. So, I’m trying to figure out what goes in the next chapter. I think I have a rough idea now. I think I have to explain what it means to say that knowledge is becoming a property of networks, which means showing how traditional knowledge arises from the printed medium. Then I think I have to talk about what this does to experts and expertise. Which actually is fairly close to my original outline. Well what do you know!

I’m working on figuring out how to open the chapter. I have an idea but I have to review some notes first…

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Is there any holiday that is less grounded in anything than New Year’s Eve? It celebrates what? The completion of an orbit around the Sun? But every day does that, so we’re really just celebrating having picked an arbitrary day to celebrate. Yay for us. We made it around the Sun again. Good job, Earth!

What a sorry excuse for getting drunk.

So, in the spirit of the season, I offer the following content-free meta-resolutions:

I will make good resolutions this year.

I will follow through on those resolutions.

If I do not follow through on them, I resolve to make better resolutions next year.

There, am I done?

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Jos Schuurmans usefully coins “Amplification is the new circulation.” And then he usefully worries about how to handle the fact that with each amplification, the link to the source becomes more tenuous.

The problem is that the amplification metaphor only captures part of the phenomenon. Yes, a post from a low-traffic site that gets re-broadcast by a big honking site has had its signal amplified. But the amplification happens by being passed through more hands, with each transfer potentially introducing noise, as in the archetypical game of “telephone” or “gossip.” On the other hand, because this is not mere signal-passing, each transfer can also introduce more meaning; the signal/noise framing doesn’t actually work very well here.

Retweeting is a good example and a possibly better metaphor: Noise gets introduced as people drop words and paraphrase the original, and as the context loses meaning because the original tweeter is now a dozen links away. But, as people pare down the original tweet, the signal may get stronger, and as they add their own take and introduce it into their own context, the original tweet can gain meaning.

But, Jos is particularly worried about the loss of source. As the original idea gets handed around, the link to its source may well break or be dropped. “TMZ says Brittany Murphy dead http://bit.ly/6biEQg” becomes “TMZ says Brittany Murphy is dead” becomes “Brittany Murphy dead!!!!!!!!!” and then maybe even “Brittany dead!!!,” and “Britney Spears is dead!!!” Sources almost inevitably will be dropped as messages are passed because we are passing the message for what it says, not because of the metadata about its authenticity.

So, what do we do? I have a three part plan.

Part one: Continue to innovate. For example, there’s probably already some service that is following the tracks of retweets, so that if you want to see where a RT began, you can. Of course, any such service will be imperfect. But the all of the Internet’s strengths come from its imperfection.

Part Two: Try to be responsible. When it matters, include the source. This will also be a highly imperfect solution.

Part Three: Cheer up. Yes, it sucks that amplification results in source loss. But, it’s way better than it was before the Internet when all sorts of bullcrap was passed around without any practical way of checking it out. The Net amplifies bullcrap but also makes it incredibly easy to check it out, whether it’s a computer virus warning passed along by your sweet elderly aunt or a rumor about the spread of a real virus. Also, see Part Two: Try to be responsible. Check out rumors before committing to them. When amplifying, reintroduce lost sources.

As Jos says, amplification is the new circulation. And the new circulation tends towards source loss. It also increases both noise and meaning. And it occurs in a system with astounding tools — e.g., your favorite search engine — for the reinsertion of source.

Is it better or worse? Yes, definitely.

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This is just too cool:

Even if it doesn’t work well — I’ll try it out later — the concept is great, and the video is a great work of product marketing: clear, exciting, and ratcheting up the vision click by click.

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In this five minute interview, done at Supernova, Alec Ross — who reports to Hillary Clinton as Senior Innovation Adviser — talks about how the Internet cadre is doing in the State Department.

[Disclosure: I may have the opportunity to work with the State Dept. (as a volunteer) on the internal use of Web 2.0 tools, pending my getting a security clearance. I believe Alec was instrumental in this. So, thank you Alec. And, of course, that inevitably taints my interview. FWIW, I was a fan of Alec's well before I knew him.]

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I have not had a chance to listen to this — it’s Thanksgiving here in the US — but StarLarvae has found, digitized, and posted a talk by Marshall McLuhan at Johns Hopkins from the 1970s. Could be fascinating…

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If you search Google Images for “Michelle Obama” (no quotes), the first image you’ll see is a poorly photoshopped picture of her as an ape.

You’ll also see a Google Ad on that page that links to Google’s explanation of why such a blatantly racist photo is the top-ranked one at Google Images. It says, after assuring us that Google does not endorse such images: “Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.”

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, Google is taking a principled stand by not inserting its own political/cultural views into its engine. It’s also avoiding an endless squabble if it were to start hand-manipulating the results.

On the other hand:

1. Google’s algorithms are undoubtedly tuned by looking at the relevancy of the results. If they come up with a new wrinkle, they check it against the results it returns. So, the algorithms are already guided by Google’s own sense of what are good, useful and relevant results. If they tested a tweak of their ranking algorithm and it turned out always to put all the porn and pro-Nazi literature on top, Google would judge that algorithm as faulty. So, Google is already in the business of building algorithms that match its idea of what’s useful and relevant. When those algorithms occasionally turn up racist crap like that photo of Michelle, why not improve the algorithm’s results by intervening manually?

2. Google as a business and as a cultural force aims to give us useful results. That’s more important to the value of Google Search than the purity of its algorithmic approach. A photo of Michelle as an ape cannot reasonably be construed as the most useful result of a search for photos of her. So, fix it. (And, yes, I’d say the same if searches for “George W. Bush” ranked as first a photo of him as a chimp or as Hitler.)

Although the bulk of this post argues against Google’s position, let me say again that I am torn by this issue, and admire Google’s consistency and transparency about it.

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Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Wait for it. Blobs disgorging.

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New media generally don’t replace old media, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out. After TV we still have radio. After telephones we had telegrams for a good long while. So what about books? After we have networked digital books, we’ll still have and produce physical books. But will physical books be as ubiquitous and culturally important as radio? Or will they be as cherished but infrequently attended as live theater?

In my interview with Cory Doctorow, I wondered, in the midst of an overly-elaborate three-part question, whether ebooks will provide enough of what we value about physical books (pbooks) that pbooks will lose the historic significance Cory had pointed to.

We won’t know the answer until we invent the future. But, I’m going to hypothesize, predict, or stipulate (pick one) that at some point we will have ebooks (which may be distinct hardware or be software running in something other device we carry around), with paper-quality displays that are full-color and multimedia, that are fully on the Net, with software that lets us interact with the book and with other readers, that are a part of the standard outfitting of citizens, and within a physical environment that provides ubiquitous Net connectivity.

Those are a lot of assumptions, of course, and each and every one of them could be disrupted by some 17 year old at work in her parents’ basement. Nevertheless, if the future is something like that, then what of pbooks’ value will be left unreplaced by ebooks?

Readability. I’m assuming paper-quality displays, which may turn out to be unattainable without having to wheel around batteries the size of suitcases. But, even without that, the ability of ebooks to display text in various fonts and sizes should remove this advantage from pbooks.

Convenience. I am assuming that ebooks will be more convenient than pbooks: as good in sunlight as pbooks, at least as easy to hold and use, easier to use for those with certain disabilities, long enough battery life, possibly self-lit, etc. The biggest open question, I believe, is whether it will be as easy to annotate ebooks…

Annotatability. The current crop of ebooks make highlighting passages and making notes so difficult that you have to take a break from reading to do either of those things. But, that’s one big reason why the current crop of ebooks are pathetic. With a touchscreen and a usable keyboard (or handwriting recognition software), ebooks of the future should be as easy to annotate as a pbook is. And those annotations will then become more useful, since they will be searchable and sharable.

Affordability. The marginal cost of producing ebook content is tiny, which doesn’t mean prices will drop as dramatically as we might like. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine a world in which ebook content costs more than pbooks.

Social flags. You probably carefully choose which book you’re going to bring with you on a job interview, and which books get moved to the shelves in your living room. We use the books we own as tribal flags, as Cory points out. Ebooks can serve the same role when introduced into social networks, including social networks explicitly built around books, such as LibraryThing.com. They obviously don’t work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you’re going to have to get physical copies.

Aesthetic objects. Many of us love the feel and smell of books. While ebooks might be able to simulate that in some way — maybe their page displays could yellow over time — it’d still just be a simulation. While ebooks will undoubtedly develop their own aesthetics, so that we’ll call people over to see how beautiful this or that new ebook is, they can’t replace the particular aesthetics of pbooks. So, those who love pbooks will continue to cherish them.

Sentimental objects. For my bar mitzvah, some friend of my parents gave me a leatherbound copy of A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” and other poems. It was a beautiful aesthetic object, but I also understood that it had a personal meaning to the giver. I doubt that that particular copy did — I don’t think it came from his own collection — but the physicality of the book was itself a marker for the personal meaning it had for the giver. As Cory says, the books your father read — the very copies that were in his hands — probably have special meaning to you. It’s hard to see how ebooks could have the same sentimental value, except perhaps if you are reading the highlights and notes left by your father, and even then, it’s not the same.

Historic objects. Likewise, knowing that you’re looking at the very copy that was read by Thomas Jefferson gives a book an historic value that ebook content just can’t have. It’s hard to see how an author could autograph an ebook in any meaningful way.

Historical objects. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have pointed out, as has Anthony Grafton, books as physical objects collect metadata that can be useful to historians, e.g., the smell of vinegar that indicates the book came from a town visited by cholera. Ebooks, however, accumulate and generate far more metadata. So, we will lose some types of metadata but gain much more…maybe more than our current norms of privacy are comfortable with.

Specialized objects. It will take somewhere between an improbably long time and forever for all collections of pbooks to be digitized. Thus, books in special collections are likely to be required well after we can take the presence of ebooks for granted.

Possessions. We are headed towards a model that grants us licenses to read books, but not outright ownership. (This is Cory’s main topic in the interview.) If we lose ownership of ebooks, then they won’t have the sentimental value, they will lose some of their economic value to readers (because we won’t be able to resell them or buy them cheaper used), and we won’t be as invested in them culturally. Whether ebooks will be ownable, and whether that will be the default of the exception, is unresolved.

Single-mindedness. Books are the exemplar in our culture of thinking. We write our best thoughts in books. We engage with the best thoughts of others by reading books. Books encourage and enable long-form thinking. Ebooks, because they are (ex hypothesis) on the Net, are distracting. They string together associated chunks and tempt us with links beyond themselves. It is easy to imagine ebooks providing the singleminded pbook experience: “Press here to remove all links.” But, of course, you could always unpress the button. Besides, since your ebook is on the Net (ex hypothesis), all that’s stopping you from jumping out of the book and into your email or Facebook is self-discipline. So, while ebooks can provide the singledminded experience of pbooks, some of us may prefer the paper version to keep the distraction of the Net at bay.

Religious objects. Some books have special meaning within some religions. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that an ebook is going to replace the Torah scrolls in synagogues. In fact, orthodox Jews can’t use electronic devices on the Sabbath, so they are certainly going to continue to buy pbooks. But, this is the very definition of a specialty market.

So, what does all this mean for the future of books? It depends.

First, are there other values of pbooks that I left off the list?

Second, I haven’t listed any unique advantages of ebooks. For example, ebooks will allow social reading: Engaging with others who are reading the book or with the traces left by those who have already it. That’s pretty important. Also, ebooks are likely to radically reduce the cost of reading, especially of some categories of overpriced pbooks (e.g., textbooks). Also, ebooks will make it much easier to understand the content of books through embedded dictionaries, search capabilities, and links to explanatory discussions. Also, as more of the corpus gets digitized, ebooks will make it far easier for scholars to pursue the footnotes (except they’ll be embedded links, not footnotes). Also, ebooks will incorporate multimedia. Also, reading ebooks will build a searchable personal corpus that is far more useful to us than bookcases filled with out conquered pbooks. Also, we’ll always have our entire library with us, ready to be read or reread, which is good news for readers.

I leave it to you to decide how this mix of values is likely to play out. What will be the social role and meaning of pbooks as we go forward into the ebook era? In twenty years — giving ourselves plenty of time to develop usable ebook readers, to digitize most of what we need, and to built an always-available network — will pbooks be used mainly by collectors, and scholars working with unique texts? Will they be sentimental objects? The poor person’s medium? Will physical books be the equivalent of AM radio, of the road company of “Cats,” of quaint objects in book museums — and/or the continuing pinnacle and embodiment of learning?v

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In this edition of Radio Berkman, Cory Doctorow argues in favor of copyright … the part of copyright that protects the rights of readers to own (and not just license) books.

It being Cory, the discussion covers topics such as the way in which books are like dogs and his sentimental attachment to his digital collection.

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Ethan Zuckerman ponders what good is knowing if it doesn’t lead to effective action…and he isn’t asking this rhetorically. You want to read this because Ethan himself is an extreme knower, an extreme care-er, and a full time agent of change. I found that this post caused me to have an internal dialogue in which I kept interrupting myself. The world is just so hard to change, even when the need is so obvious and urgent, and yet we can’t let ourselves believe that knowing and caring can make no difference at all. What’s at issue here (at least in my internal dialogue) is that the model of knowing, caring, and acting isn’t explaining our experience. Or our hope.

Then there’s Evgeny Morozov’s review of Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution in the Boston Review. Evgeny likes Andrew’s book although he thinks it doesn’t explain enough about why Wikipedians wikipede. The comment thread is also well worth reading.

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It makes me very nervous to disagree with Umberto Eco because he is so fathomlessly smart. But I think in this case I do. Sort of.

There’s a fabulous interview with Eco in Spiegel (in English) about why he loves lists. He is characteristically pithy, provocative and wise. A crucial paragraph, from the beginning:

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

I read the first sentence and was provoked, as Eco intends. Lists are the origin of culture? Please say more! But Eco doesn’t really explain, in this interview, why lists — as opposed to other forms of collections and orderings — are so important. The urge to make order, yes, but not lists themselves.

A list is one particular way of creating order. Lists are sequential and one-dimensional: Wines listed by year, or by place, or by ranking, or by the chronology of when you first encountered them. (Lists can be hierarchical, but they’re only lists if they can be resolved back down to the one-dimensional.) Lists thus are one elemental way of ordering the world. And they have a peculiar fascination, which Eco expresses beautifully. But I think it’s wrong to say that they’re the origin of culture. I think it’d be more accurate and useful to say that culture originates with collecting: Pulling things around us because of their appeal (a word I’m purposefully leaving vague).

I’m sure I’m making too much of Eco essentially drumming of interest in his exhibit at the Louvre, but the issue matters a little bit. I think (based on little to nothing) that lists emerged as a stripping down of multi-dimensional collections. Culture first happened (I imagine) when we pulled together pieces of the world that spoke to us in ways we could not articulate. We assembled them as spaces through which we could wander, or piles through which we could collectively sort (“Oooh, I particularly like that green shiny stone!”). Lists are an abstraction, and culture began (I suppose) with an unarticulated sense that some things go together — and perhaps our first conversations were about why.

Eco goes on to say many wonderful things about why we have liked lists, including proposing that listing properties of an object can liberate us from looking for the definitional essence of things. (For more on this, read his important book, Kant and the Platypus.) In fact, Eco suggests that a mother defines a tiger to her child “Probably by using a list of characteristics: The tiger is big, a cat, yellow, striped and strong.”

I have a bunch of issues with that.

First, that type of definition really just makes explicit what’s implicit in the traditional approach to definitions as essence. In the traditional Aristotelian approach, the essence is the creature’s spot in the hierarchy of beings. So, a tiger is a species of cat, and thus would be specified by its difference from other cats but also by all of the properties of the classes above it (mammal, vertebrate, animal, etc.). The essential definition and the list definition both consist of a list of properties, but the essential definition nests them so that they don’t all have to be spelled out, and so we can see which differences “count.” Eco says, “The essential definition is primitive compared with the list,” but it seems to me that a beautifully nested, hierarchical system of essential definitions is in fact more advanced — it requires abstraction and systems thinking — than a mere list.

But, I don’t want to miss Eco’s essential (so to speak) point here, which is that defining something with a list breaks us out of the notion that there is a single, knowable essence. Absolutely. There’s no eternal essence, “just” a set of properties that are relevant depending upon our circumstances. With that I wholeheartedly agree.

My second problem with this is that — as George Lakoff says in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, explicating and expanding the work of Eleanor Rosch — the mother (heck, maybe even the father) probably actually teaches the child what a tiger is by pointing at one, or at a picture of one. We learn through prototypes, not through essential definitions, and not by making lists. List-making is an abstraction and a secondary activity.

Third, the listing the parent does seem to me to not have the properties that make lists captivating to Eco. The parent isn’t trying to give a complete listing that brings a sense of mastery over the infinite and over death. She’s just pointing out some of the salient features. If it is a list, it’s not a list of the sort that Eco has charmed us about.

Fourth, while lists of properties are a useful corrective to thinking that things are exhausted by a definition of their essence, lists strip out so much that they don’t seem like much more adequate than essential definitions. A tiger isn’t a list.

This is just a fun interview in Spiegel, so I may be taking it too seriously. So, even if lists occur within culture — including the lists in literature he points to — rather than being the origin of culture, the interview does indeed help us to see why our fascination with lists is a fascination with something bigger than lists.

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Google has announced a revised settlement [redlined pdf faq pdf] that it hopes will address the concerns raised by the Department of Justice and many other groups.

Here’s a summary of the summary Google provides [pdf], although IANAL and I encourage you to read the summary, which is written in non-legal language and is only 2 pages long:

1. The agreement now has been narrowed to books registered for copyright in the US, or published in the UK, Australia or Canada.

2. There have been changes to the terms of how “orphaned works” (books under copyright whose rightsholders can’t be found) are handled. The revenue generated by selling orphaned works no longer will get divvied up among the authors, publishers and Google, none of whom actually have any right to that money. Instead it will go to fund active searching for the rightsholders. (At the press call covered by Danny Sullivan [see below], the Authors Guild rep said that with money, about 90% of missing rightsholders can be found.) After holding those revenues in escrow (maybe I’m using the wrong legal term) for ten years (up from five in the first settlement), the Book Rights Registry established by the settlement can ask the court to disburse the funds to “nonprofits benefiting rightsholders and the reading public”; I believe in the original, the Registry decided who got the money. So, in ten years there may be a windfall for public libraries, literacy programs, and maybe even competing digital libraries. (The Registry may also (determined by what?) give the money to states under abandoned property laws. (No, I don’t understand that either.))

The new settlement creates a new entity: A “Court-approved fiduciary” who represents the rightsholders who can’t be found. (James Grimmelmann [below] speculates interestingly on what that might mean.)

3. The settlement now explicitly states that any book retailer can sell online access to the out-of-print books Google has scanned, including orphaned works. The revenue split will be the same (63% to the rightsholder, “the majority of” 37% to the retailer).

4. The settlement clarifies that the Registry can decide to let public libraries have more than a pitiful single terminal for public access to the scanned books. The new agreement also explicitly acknowledges that rightsholders can maintain their Creative Commons licenses for books in the collection, so you could buy digital access and be given the right to re-use much or all of the book. Rightsholders also get more control over how much Google can display of their books without requiring a license.

5. The initial version said Google would establish “market prices” for out of print book, which seemed vague because what counts as the market for out-of-print books? The new agreement clarifies the algorithm, aiming to price them as if in a competitive market. And, quite importantly, the new agreement removes the egregious “most favored nation” clause that prevented more competitive deals to be made with other potential book digitizers.

From my non-legal point of view, this addresses many of the issues. But not all of them.

I’m particularly happy about the elements that increase competition and access. It’s big that Amazon and others will be able to sell access to the out-of-print books Google has scanned, and sell access on the same terms as Google. As I understand it, there won’t be price competition, because prices will be set by the Registry. Further, I’m not sure if retailers will be allowed to cut their margins and compete on price: If the Registry prices an out-of-print book at $10, which means that $6.30 goes to the escrow account, will Amazon be allowed to sell it to customers for, say $8, reducing its profit margin? If so, then how long before some public-spirited entity decides to sell these books to the public at their cost, eschewing entirely the $3.70 (or the majority of that split, which is what they’re entitled to)? I don’t know.

I also like the inclusion of Creative Commons licensing. That’s a big deal since it will let authors both sell their books and loosen up the rights of reuse.

As far as getting rid of the most favored nation clause: Once the Dept. of Justice spoke up, it’s hard to imagine it could have survived more than a single meeting at Google HQ.

Reactions from the critics has not been all that positive.

James Grimmelmann is studying it carefully, but quickly put up a substantial and detailed evaluation of the revisions. He is deep into the details.

The Open Book Alliance (basically an everyone-but-Google consortium) is not even a little amused, because the new agreement doesn’t do enough to keep Google from establishing a de facto monopoly over digital books. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not satisfied because no reader privacy protections were added. Says the ACLU: “No Settlement should be approved that allows reading records to be disclosed without a properly-issued warrant from law enforcement and court orders from third parties. ”

Danny Sullivan live-blogged the press call where Google and the other parties to the settlement discussed the changes. It includes a response to Open Book Alliance’s charges.

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Giles Turnbull at the Morning News reports on his research interrogating (gently) children from different families about what they call various Lego pieces. Quite interesting in its own taxonomic way, and a topic that’s amusing even just to contemplate.

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Derek Barry blogs Jay Rosen’s keynote at the Media140 in Sydney. Jay gave his ten commandments (in the form of tweets) for press in the age of the Internet.

(Jay apparently noted my post on transparency and objectivity, which Derek looked at and thought was “ironically anonymous.” I never considered that this blog looks anonymous, since I flog my books, have a disclosure button at the top, and list my twitter handle, but I can see how it would seem that way. I think I’m too shy/neurotic to fix it, though.)

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I’ve been honored with one of Ethan Zuckerman’s incredible liveblog postings. I gave a 45 min talk at the Berkman Center yesterday. I spoke quickly, waved my hands a lot, and spewed. [Rough draft here.] Even so, Ethan was able to commit an amazing act of streaming journalism, with very few places where I would even quibble with his summary and analysis.

He posted it immediately after I spoke, which I can attest to because if you read it you would never think that it was an unedited draft. It’s too thoughtful and well-written for that. This is Ethan writing on the fly, not merely typing or transcribing. Amazing.

independent of all that, I am very fortunate to be able to call Ethan a close friend.

[Later that day: Here's the video of the webcast.]

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Dewyane Hendricks, one of the foremost implementers of wireless networks anywhere, and a guy so far over the leading edge that the leading edge asks him for directions, talks about the rise of the “darknet” (dark net?) in a 5-minute interview at Broadband Strategy Week, my set of video interviews about, well, broadband strategy. On the Darknet you can get just about any content you want, especially in the gated communities where sharers trust one another. Dewayne thinks that we’re not paying enough attention to this when we think about policy, especially since the Darknet is getting more accessible all the time.

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Here’s the Onion on the Dewey Decimal Classification system meeting its nemesis, Jim Belushi. (Thanks to Jay Hurvitz for the pointer.)

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Jose Antonio Vargas is an under-30 who recently left his plum job at the Washington Post as a technology reporter/writer to become the editor of HuffingtonPost tech section. [Disclosure: I know Jose and may contribute to his HuffPo section on technology.]

He’s posted a terrific article that calls to task the Newseum’s ten part TV series on The Future of News that seems to include no one under 40 years old. Now, as a 58-year-old, I’m certainly sensitive to the formal fallaciousness of an argument that says 40+ folks can’t understand the future that will be built by 20+ folks. Nevertheless, Jose is right to raise the red flag about a project that seems not to be listening to the young. (That “seems” is important; the show hasn’t aired yet. It may be full of The Kids, even as it promotes itself using older, more established news critics.)

As the over 30 year old Clay Shirky says, we are in the middle of — or start of — a real revolution in news. And not just in the business models. Traditional news has fit into rectangles: Pages, time slots. News now moves like ragged ripples through unstable water. We really don’t know what will become of it and of the institutions that assume (rightly or wrongly) a public homogeneously informed. The future of non-rectangular news is being linked together right now. And even if that future were being created solely by middle-aged women and men, its success, effect, and meaning rests almost entirely on the young.

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