Week 6.1 - I wouldn’t say it was “convergence” but impatience.

I wouldn’t say it was “convergence” but impatience. There was a demand for everything to be accessible. Everywhere because our generation wanted it that way, “I can’t be bothered to walk to my commodore 64 to send an email, hey IT companies? Do you reckon you could make my commodore more portable?”

Cue Osborne 1

“eh. Too big”

Cue IBM 5100

And so on and so forth. It still hasn’t stopped. My point is that once humans get bored of how cool the new “thing” is they’ll ask for more, with something a little different. Apple knows this, with their planned obsolescence strategy, where they create a product that has things deliberately left out of it (like flash, grrr) so consumers will be the upgrade (this also pumps out products faster because Apple don’t have to wait to test everything.

I don’t think it’s “how we’ve grown up”, it’s what we’re used to; Were used to things being requested and then brought within a couple of seconds. Smartphone’s have caused this impatience to manifest, a panel from a comic by the oatmeal displays this well.



So does more accessible media through convergence help or hinder our society?

I feel Henry Jenkins said it best when he compared how we choose to use media today to how George Orwell thought our world would be like in Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949). Jenkins mentions that Orwell though that Big Brother would be watching us all the time, but society is watching Him, and using our technology for justice, not just pleasure.

Stolen or Borrowed, just tell me man

It’s never been okay to use someones work and get credit for it. It is by essence stealing their creativity.

You have a great idea, you create it, it gets big and you win big.

Not always the case though. How about it’s not your great idea, but you know how to make it better. Or the idea is yours and you create it but you get somebody else to get it off the ground. Either way your share gets smaller the ore people get involved. And that’s the money argument

The Levine & Boldrin article presents the progress argument, that without patents there is increased productivity and creativity.

Some people don’t believe it’s ok to use or borrow anther's work and use it in you own while citing the source, but I do.

I agree with Levine’s statement that without borrowing, technology would not blossom as it has. Sure, some people get left behind; you hardly hear about the inspirers or the first person there (you don’t hear about the first Nepalese person to climb Mount Everest, just saying) we only care about who did it better.

I heard that pretty much everything you see on an iPhone is patented, from the ringtones to the rounded edges, even (Ted’s favourite) the “swipe to unlock” function. The new Samsung (?) smartphone is having trouble even getting off the ground because of Apple’s patents on their own smartphone.

A perfect example of how copyright and patent can stem progress.

There was discussion in class with the question “why would you buy anything if you could get it for free?”. Most of us brought up music, as most of us have all downloaded music. There was the argument that the music industry is in turmoil because no-one is buying album’s anymore, they’re just downloading them.

I agree, the music industry as it was is in turmoil. I don’t agree that the future of a music industry is impossible.

Think about it. Artists get effed over by their record companies all the time, it’s a rare occurrence when they make it big off their first record sales. It’s touring that makes the mullah.

So, my argument is that if everyone downloads the album for free, they like it, and then they pay to go to concerts to see them. More revenue is raised through touring than record sales, for the artist that it. So, in theory, his new music revolution could turn out better for the artists, but not so good for record companies. But who likes them anyway!

And what about Disney? If he hadn’t ‘stolen’ mickey mouse we wouldn’t have the timeless classics we have today (even if his methods weren’t so honorable...)

Boldrin, M., and Levine, D.K. (2007). Introduction. In Against Intellectual Monopoly (pp. 1-15). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press [URL: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/anew01.pdf]

Lessig, L. (2004). Creators. In Free Culture: How Big Media uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Strangle Creativity (pp. 21-30). New York: Penguin [URL: http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-4.html]

Contemporary Capitalism

“We have to come to terms with the challenges and opportunities of contingent employment, precarious labour, and a structural sense of real or perceived job insecurity”(Dueze p2)

This week we discussed work seeping more into time that wasn’t necessarily work time before. In the last 10 years there has been a shift from business being rigid and confined to the office cubicle to “working from home” and sending proposals via your iPhone, while you sit sipping your latte at a café downtown.

The Dueze reading discusses that this shift from the conventional work environment will lead to a shift in other things. He outlines family: “The family has become […] a ‘shell’ or […][a] ‘zombie’ institution: people and policymakers alike still refer to the family as the primary unit in today’s society, even though in its traditional connotation of the nuclear family – two married parents and children at home – it has all but died.”

I can see a shift in other things. This constantly connected shift has been made possible by the boom of smart phones, wifi and the human fear of being obsolete. I carry my phone around “in case of emergencies”, and this is mostly the case. But it’s more of a security thing, like a blanket for a child. Also, I get reprimanded by my friends for not answering my phone a copious amount so it’s more a fear of being shouted at, and not being connected.

I think it’s a fear of being obsolete, and that if you’re offline, someone else can take over.

I had an analog experience when I moved house and had trouble getting internet for most of the uni semester. I was spending a lot of time on the computers at the BLD 17 labs at uni. I didn’t want to spend the whole day there though, so I found myself prioritising more (creating more lists, which I already do a lot!) and doing work, rather than trawling facebook. It was also the fact that I was using uni computers that I felt obliged to do work or I might get kicked off!

My job is very much online, I’m a media intern at an infrastructure research facility. I write articles for the newsletter and website as well as update facebook, twitter, youtube and the website itself, and most of my correspondence with my boss is via email. I was never a huge fan of email, but as I’ve moved into the working world I found email was easier. You didn’t waist phone credit and you could convey more content than in a text message. WIN WIN!

M Gregg talks of “coping mechanisms” for workers “to keep up with their workload regardless of formal paid hours and the impact of this “anticipatory labour” on home life.” (P1). Ted raised this question also in the tutorial…What are the skills needed to cope in this current concrete jungle (or as it becoming…ASCII jungle)? I say you need offline time. I think if you get too immersed either you’ll go a bit coocoo, or you’ll cope just fine, tough it out, and become a cyborg. I’m not sure I like either option though.

I think if you can have some time to differentiate between work and play time, the better of you’ll be.

p.s. my word processor doesn’t recognise the word “analog”, which I find ironic.

p.p.s too long...again... i apologise for my blog vomit

New Soft-world

I read John Perry Barlow’s “declaration of independence”, and I feel sorry for him. The poor guy, all he wants is utopia, is that too much to ask?

To be fair, at least he realises that utopia is practically impossible in the real world; this makes me think of our “where’s the line?” argument from last week.

Barlow’s “I have a dream”-esque manner of writing is nice, but also naïve. Nice, because he realises there is no hierarchy or distinction among race. Naïve because as he expressed in the previous paragraph, there is no discrimination among who “connects” so “your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us” is a nice thought but yeah, naive. With everyone having a slice, someone’s definitely going to try to monetise they’re particular brand of pizza (please bare with me and my analogies).

It’s interesting how the story of the internet has parallels even today, and I think I’ve come up with an equation of sorts:

Something cool comes along

Something cool is distributed to nerds worldwide. Those nerds with friends spread it to slightly more social people, Something cool becomes popular

Now, one of two things will happen:

a) Something cool is bought by a liberal company and distributed for free, or free-ish (known as open source or freeware).

b) Or, something cool is bought be not so liberal company and distributed not so free (known as expensive).

Kevin Kelly writes about “an emerging new economic order” or the “new economy”, and embraces this idea of option (b).

Kelly and Barlow do agree on something: the internet is not physical, almost metaphysical, and it consists of “transactions, relationships, and thought itself” as Barlow (1996) says and as Kelly expands, “the new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global [and] It favors intangible things—ideas, information, and relationships.”(1999).

May I just mention the cute little similarities with these two?

Barlow: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.”

Kelly “the principles governing the world of the soft—the world of intangibles, of media, of software, and of services—will soon command the world of the hard—the world of reality, of atoms, of objects, of steel and oil, and the hard work done by the sweat of brows. Iron and lumber will obey the laws of software”

Although they agree on the internet’s concept, Kelly and Barlow have different ways to use it. Kelly likes the grandeur in an economy consisting entirely on the internet, without space or time; and in this he sees no discrimination as Barlow described, you don’t need a suit or slicked hair to buys shares from your computer at home.

Barlow, I think, is one of those people who wants to keep everything in his control and clings to his rose coloured view that the internet-Triffid cannot be controlled. Barlow’s sentiments border on childish stubbornness, he should be careful because, as Kelly writes, “those who play by the new rules will prosper, while those who ignore them will not.”

eesh, this was a long one. Sorry about that!

A moral grey-area

One thing I have learned over the last couple of weeks is that the internet was never what anyone intended it to be.

It was envisaged that the internet, or “ARPANET” at the time, would ensure survival after a nuclear attack in the Cold War (how many technological advances have there been for fear of the Russians I ask you?), and it did that.

However it soon developed into “news and personal messages” (Sterling 1993 p2), and of course this is abused to gossip and schmooze” (Although the first big mailing list was “SF LOVERS" (for those enduring science fiction fans).

The theory of the internet also had a sort of closed network, in that only the military and academic institutions could use it.

But then it gets distributed and the boundaries no longer apply like they used to, so like now the internet in most places has no boundaries, but let’s not forget China (sneaky buggers).

A question posed in the sterling reading was “Why do people want to be "on the Internet?". The answer, he thinks, is freedom “a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy”, and an anarchy that is (usually) not punished or subdued. It’s all in the infrastructure, any node can speak to any other node as long as they speak the same language (TCP/IP Protocol), it’s technical, not social or political (1993, p3).

I liked Sterling’s analogy that the internet is like the English language, whereby it is what you make it (1993, p3).

With everyone with a different notion of what the internet as and what it can and should be used for, there is the question I raised earlier of boundaries. What’s right and what’s wrong, or what is appropriate, is not constitutional.

My personal opinion about this whole WoW funeral ambush thing is that, yeah, these douche-bags go and kill everyone paying respects to someone who actually dies (kind weird). That’s not what I’m concerned about. In WoW you pay real money for things, like weapons and stuff, and these people were AMBUSHED and lost their weapons and stuff, so they lost actual money...

Money exists in the real world, if you lose it, you have a right to be pissed. Just saying

Refs:
Sterling, B. (1993) 'A Short History of the Internet', The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [URL: http://sodacity.net/system/files/Bruce_Sterling_A_Short_History_of_the_Internet.pdf]