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Category: digital

Fair Use And Remixing Post-Literate Thought

Published June 24, 2009 by cgerrish

marshall_crop

There will be no laughter. No enjoyment of any kind. As Laurie Anderson once said, “sit bolt upright in your straight-backed chair, and button that top button,” the words, images and videos assembled on this page are for the purpose of either commentary, criticism or education. Please keep this in mind as you “read.”

Good evening. Welcome to Difficult Music Hour.
The spot on your dial for that relentless and
impenetrable sound of difficult music [music, music, music]
So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair,
button that top button
and get set for some difficult music:
Ooola.

Laurie Anderson
Difficult Listening Hour

Sequences of letters, especially in the form of typography, have the wonderful quality of hiding their origins. We dip our hand into the cloth bag, pull out some scrabble tiles and fashion words which we string together into original sentences. The audience’s attention is misdirected, and we magically produce language out of thin air. Images and sounds, on the other hand, betray their origins— collaged or remixed, we recognize the original context. It’s a snippet of this song, a clip from that movie, or a fragment of a rather famous photograph.

Even text has taken on the attributes of recorded media. Printed sequences of words become an image of text. An image that can be matched to other images to determine whether a particular flow of words actually manifested ex nihilo or was, in fact, a photocopy of previously recorded material. Mike Masnick asks whether King Lear could be written under current legal conditions— its sources are legendary. As the digital swallows all other media, we can see, with eventualities like Google Wave, text will be recorded as it is typed— with instant universal playback at our finger tips.

I remember you typing that letter to me. I watched as the characters filled in one by one— moving across my screen. You mispelled the word “ambidextrous” and the spell checker caught it in real time. The rhythm of the typing was hypnotic. I play it back often, just to watch the letters dance.

If images, video and sound were to be embedded in the substance of a stream of thought, could the thinker be sued for copyright infringement? And could that stream really be called thought? If there is such a thing as post-literate thought, and it has a beat you can dance to— what would distinguish it from music? But the more important question is: is it really necessary to keep music/video/images out of thought? It’s a  question first seriously addressed in the conflicts of Byzantium between the iconoclasts and the iconodules.

Kurt Weibers, in his Marshall McLuhan Remix, takes some of these issues head on. The project is presented in three parts and is well worth your time. Although please keep in mind that these videos are for your edification only, any enjoyment, finger snapping or inappropriate context switching could put Mr. Weibers in legal trouble. So, button your top button, and press to play…

An interesting coda to Mr. Weibers’s production is the revelation of his correspondence with YouTube over the use of samples from a song recorded by the Talking Heads, called “Take Me To The River.” The epilogue [3/3] of the work was blocked by YouTube, and Mr. Weibers disputed the action based on the definitions of  fair use in the copyright act. YouTube responded quickly and unblocked the video.

These questions are not simple ones. While it’s true that the remix is the medium of our time, the issues permeating the economics of the transition are very serious. When the value of music was thought to be price one could charge to see a performance, signing a recording contract that paid a small fixed fee for the session seemed to make sense. We have yet to discover the economics of the remix, but discover them we must.

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Ink, Trust and the Electronic Vote

Published June 23, 2009 by cgerrish

Dumbold

It probably passed unnoticed by most, but an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times contained this phrase:

Electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record of every vote cast cannot be trusted.

The Times stated its support for Representative Rush Holt’s Bill which would ban paperless electronic voting in all federal elections. Of course, it’s the combination of ink and paper that supplies the level of documentation for which the congressman is looking. It is asserted that a physical manifestation of the vote is required to establish trust. A mark upon a ballot that can be plainly seen by anyone in the broad daylight of a town square.

While the documentation of voter suppression can be digitally captured and distributed via the real-time news network, the act of voting itself, apparently, cannot be trusted to the digital. The low cost of change damages the digital’s credibility here. It seems too easy to hack the vote.  And yet, we trust our finances to purely digital systems— and our medical records will soon move from ink and paper to databases.

What would electronic voting have to be in order for it to enjoy the level of trust accorded to voting through the medium of ink and paper?  And what change would that level of trust signal?

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The Crowd Settles and Focuses on the Performance

Published June 10, 2009 by cgerrish

An opera house holds around 4 or 5 thousand people. When the performance is ready to begin there are a number cues to the audience. The lighting changes, the conductor enters, the ushers take their places, the crowd organizes itself, shows appreciation to the performers through applause– there’s a shout of ‘bravo!’ and then it focuses its attention. You’ll hear a shush here and there to establish order, and the performance begins.

At the live simulcast of Tosca at the ballpark there were around 27,000 people from all walks of life in attendance. The cues to settle and get ready for the performance are much more subtle than in the opera house. Ballparks can accommodate highly focused attention, say the ninth ining of a no-hitter. But these venues also work well with multiple threads of activity none of which are focused on the game. As the third act begins, there are some notices in text on the high-definition Jumbotron screen and a small change in lighting.

Watch the video above and take note of how a crowd of 27,000 people can take a cue, settle down and focus their attention on the musical melodrama unfolding before them. This moment is the beginning of the third act. Scarpia is dead and Tosca has gone to save Mario from the firing squad.

As we think about the civility of the real-time social web; about how crowds self-organize for this task or that one. We can look at how civility and cooperation is established in other venues. A crowd of anonymous people understand their role and take their part in the drama. Tosca stabs the evil Scarpia, shouting “this is Tosca’s kiss!” The crowd cheers wildly as justice is portrayed. The emotions of the crowd ride the roller coaster of the bigger-than-life melodrama. No one takes Scarpia’s evil behavior as an excuse misbehave. They understand the roles of the players and the shape of the drama.

We can plainly see that a crowd can organize and police itself in real time as it takes part in the ceremony of live performance. Is it the physicality of the audience that makes the difference? Could it be possible to transfer that social contract to the live web? Or do we believe so little in the substance of our digital bodies that we think of ourselves as ghosts– neither living nor dead, immune to the judgement of our tribe.

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Digital Identity, Like Putting on your Sunday Best

Published June 4, 2009 by cgerrish

dressed_up

When we talk about internet identity, it seems as though we’re only speaking of consenting adults. We discuss women and men of free will accepting or rejecting products from the open market place of identity. The user of identity products is a consumer, shopping for the best deal on identity– as though it were a suit of clothes. (We can make inferences about the politico-economic environment of such a free agent, but let’s bookmark that for later discussion).

Those of us who are digital immigrants view the Network as something selected, a destination we chose. And as the Network is optional, so too is the digital suit of clothes we call internet identity. For the digital native, the Network merely is. It’s a quality of the environment into which a person is born. It’s a bell that cannot be unrung.

Can internet identity restrict its sphere to the population of adult consumers? Is identity really only a matter of commerce? Sitting across the table from Doc Searls at the recent IIW, we were discussing the future of digital identity. The extent of the lifecycle of digital identity has its origins in the discussions of the adults who’ve freely taken on the responsibility of shepherding the direction of the discussions on identity. Doc quotes Lakoff on the embodied mind, our metaphors– our frameworks for thinking are hard-coded into original equipment manufacturer’s hardware.

…we produce moral metaphors that equate light and up with good and dark and down with bad because we are diurnal animals that walk upright.

When we use the word “we,” we also make assumptions about who we are and who we aren’t. Let’s take a moment and enlarge the set of all those with a digital identity. Each day, some number of people are born and some number of people die. When a baby is born, it is given a name. That name is entered into a database on the Network. At what point does digital identity bind to a new person? Is it at the moment of conception? The quickening? At birth? Or is digital identity more like a contract or an oath with suitability requirements.

I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion

Children begin life as a part of their mother, and then they live within the identity of the family. During the teenage years they go through the painful process of separating and establishing a unique identity. They visit the thrift stores of our culture and try on various suits of clothes in various combinations. An adult identity is fashioned from the iterative process of finding the pieces that seem to work.

Phil Windley told me that he’d reserved gmail addresses for his children. I wonder if a digital native, when thinking of names for a new baby will consider what’s available in the dominant digital identity name spaces. One can imagine the middle name gaining a new prominence in this kind of economy.

At what point do we teach our children about the Network and the digital identity they already have on it? A librarian friend told me that, in addition to teaching children how to find a book in the stacks of the library, she teaches them how to search for things online. Is learning about the Network still an elective course of study for the digital native?

At the other end of the spectrum, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil— what is to become of our digital identity? When our affairs are put in order, will that include signing out of the Network? Shall our last will and testaments specify the dispensation of our blogs, waves and twitter streams? Shall they be withdrawn from the Network (to the extent that anything can be withdrawn) and cremated? Or shall they be embalmed and left as a standing monument to one’s sojourn? Will the digital identities of the next Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean be reincarnated into corporate entities that will continuously animate them as long as they are profitable? Will each person’s 15 minutes of fame be cataloged, indexed and searchable for the rest of eternity? A kind of eternal recurrence of the same?

Martin Heidegger writes about human beings (dasein) as a thrown project. We are thrown into the world and land with a particular trajectory. None of us select the world into which we emerge.

Heidegger proclaimed that we are ‘thrown’ into the world and that our Being-in-the-world is a ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit]. To Heidegger this concept is a primordial banality which had long been overlooked by metaphysical conjecture. Humans beings are thrown with neither prior knowledge nor individual option into a world that was there before and will remain there after they are gone.

The digital natives born into this time will pull on digital identity like a well-worn leather jacket. They’ll put on their Sunday best when trying to make a good impression. They’ll wear a t-shirt with a company logo while out for a Saturday jog. They’ll wear an orange vest, picking up trash on the side of the road, doing public service. They’ll carry a handbag whose primary design is the maker’s logo to impress their friends. They’ll resent wearing the uniform of the fast food worker for their first job out of high school. They’ll be proud to wear the uniform of the military of their country. They’ll create fashion out of the thrift shops of the streets of the inner city and watch it reflected on the runways in Paris and Milan. They’ll settle on a comfortable daily uniform and declare that style is too much trouble. They’ll declare that they won’t wear fur because it troubles their conscience. After buying their first custom tailored suit of clothes, they’ll look in the mirror to take in the full effect, and then smile and nod. They will judge and be judged by the clothes they wear.

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