David Parry's Profile

The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. It's not about the cost of the equipment in the racks at the data center; it's about what that equipment can do.

As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we're surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper.

Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom.

The second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs.

Even though they may never become entirely free, as the price drops there is great advantage to be had in treating them as if they were free. Not too cheap to meter, as Atomic Energy Commission chief Lewis Strauss said in a different context, but too cheap to matter. Indeed, the history of technological innovation has been marked by people spotting such price and performance trends and getting ahead of them

The psychology of "free" is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

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heavy pressure from the recording and entertainment industry

If a movie is available in the U.S., why shouldn't a computer user in China get to see it too — even if the movie won't be released in his own country for months?

Netanel made just that proposal in a 2003 article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, arguing that a 4% levee on computers, MP3 players and all other devices used to enjoy digital media would adequately compensate the authors and the companies alike. "And look at all the effort it would save,

sites that feature user–generated content—Facebook, YouTube, Blogger—are especially unpopular with authoritarian regimes

Such mobilization may indeed have been important in the final effort. But it is misleading to imply, as some recent studies by Berkman staff have, that the Orange Revolution was the work of as a “smart mob”—

Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life, and no real elections have been won there either; otherwise, Ron Paul would be president.

The answer depends, to a large extent, on whether the Internet fosters an eagerness to act on newly acquired information.

The premise that providing access to information and fostering the norm of transparency could speed up democratization underpins their work.

than the fact that people can have lots of information and very little power to act on it.

The Internet makes it easier for us to find and join groups that we already agree with, which might, in turn, make our views even more extreme.

According to Sunstein, avoiding this problem in the pre–Internet age was easier, as the front page of the major national newspaper provided the shared collective experience as well as a healthy dose of serendipity, exposing us to views and news that we may never encounter otherwise.

Cyber–utopians’ biggest conceptual mistake is treating cyberspace as some kind of anarchist zone, which the authorities dare not enter except to shut things down. Media reports encourage this view of authoritarian governments as technophobic Internet censors.

But why would authorities not pursue a two–pronged strategy, both restricting access to the most undesirable Web sites and using the Web to manipulate public opinion? This is precisely how authoritarian governments have dealt with more significant media threats in the past.

they are also heavily polluted by government operators, making them indistinguishable from the old, tightly controlled analogue public spheres.

However, outside of the prosperous and democratic countries of North America and Western Europe, digital natives are as likely to be digital captives as digital renegades, a subject that none of the recent studies address in depth

“Iranian bloggers: major challenge to democratic change” and “Saudi Arabia: bloggers hate women’s rights.”

The problem with building public spheres from above, online or offline, is much like that of building Frankenstein’s monsters: we may not like the end product

Central in Habermas’ thinking is the notion that the quality of society depends on our capacity to communicate, to debate and discuss: Reason is crucial to communication, sich auseinandersetzen.

Published well before the digital revolution, the work addresses the implications of modern communications technologies only in a cursory and fragmentary fashion. Habermas’ work on the public sphere is frequently attacked by post–modernists who question the emancipatory potentials of its model of consensus through rational debate.

conceptual rather than physical.

Important focal points are the significance of the public sphere for democracy. Growth of information inequality threatens basic human rights; the power of state and corporation to engage in electronic surveillance in civil society threatens both the rights of groups to speak and organise and the privacy rights of individuals. New forms of citizenship and public life are simultaneously enabled by new technology and restricted by market power and surveillance. One might, for example, draw from Foucault’s concept of the panoptic society to argue that the spread of information technology is likely to lead to a loss of autonomy in many realms of political, economic, cultural and social life (Friedland, 1996).

Do the new media like the Internet, then, merely offer a shallow substitute for "authentic" discourse, or do they contribute a new quality to the public sphere?

Communication media are necessary but not sufficient for self–governance and healthy societies:

we simply ‘feel involved’

What these "skeptics" fear is primarily the classical argument in mass media research of commodification, the way electronic communications media already have pre–empted public discussions by turning media content into commodities.

The public sphere is not just a "marketplace of ideas" or an "information exchange depot," but also a major vehicle for generating and distributing culture.

The panopticon, Foucault argued, is not a value–neutral technology. It is a technology that allows a small number of people to control a large number of others that comes in many guises:

"the Internet is dominated by white, well off, English speaking, educated males, most of whom are USA citizens,"

Public opinion can only be formed if a public that engages in rational discussion exists.

As far as information is concerned, communications and corporations’ overriding concern with the market means that their product is dedicated to the goal of generating maximum advertising revenue and supporting capitalist enterprise. As a result their content is chiefly lowest common denominator diversion" [8

How do they affect journalism? It has often been stated that the traditional functions of journalism will erode even further as media technology advances.

New communications technologies are being used in ways that extend democratic communication practices. As networks become structurally decentralised, ever wider publics gain access to them in ways that lead to an increase in the rate and density of public exchange. New citizens’ movements and practices have emerged, whose community–based technology projects democratic potential has been rarely explored.

The technological infrastructure of communication networks is influencing the social structure of society; its development is closely related to the development of social structures in a process of interchange and mutual dependence [13].

Are there new kinds of power relations occurring between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster approaches this question by making a detour from the issue of technology and raising again the question of a public sphere: If there is a public sphere on the Internet, who populates it and how? What kinds of beings exchange information in this public sphere? What kind of community can there be in this space? What kind of disembodied politics are inscribed so evanescently in cyberspace? What constitutes communities in cyberspace and cyberdemocracy?

increasingly takes place across national boundaries.

At the same time, he points at the danger of its fragmentation: Media globalisation does not automatically entail the creation of a singular global public sphere, but rather a process of gradual blurring and differentiation of the public sphere

transnational and specialist news media increasingly serve a well–educated elite

The alliance of the public sphere with a particular place or territory diminishes:

Kellner uses the term "technocapitalism" to describe the synthesis of capital and technology to point out both the increasingly important role of technology and the continued primacy of capitalist structures.

technologies are creating a new public sphere, a new realm of cyberdemocracy

The population problem cannot
be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of
winning the game of tick-tack-toe.

We want the maximum good per person; but what is good? To one
person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for
thousands. To one it is estuaries to nourish ducks for hunters to
shoot; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with
another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are
incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared

Has any cultural group solved this practical problem at the
present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves
that none has: there is no prosperous population in the world
today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.
Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum point will
soon reach it, after which its growth rate becomes and remains
zero

But he contributed to a
dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with
positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency
to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be
the best decisions for an entire society.

Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day
when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality.

Each man is
locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd
without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the
destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best
interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the
commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

The individual benefits as an individual from
his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of
which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural
tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of
generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be
constantly refreshed.

The National Parks present another instance of the working out
of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all,
without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent --
there is only one Yosemite Valley -- whereas population seems to
grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks
are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the
parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone

Using the commons as a cesspool does not
harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there
is no public; the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.

One does not know whether
a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is
harming others until one knows the total system in which his act
appears.

n a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the
religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable
and cohesive group) that adopts over breeding as a policy to
secure its own aggrandizement? [13] To couple
the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone
born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into
a tragic course of action.

f we ask a man who is exploiting a
commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are
we saying to him? What does he hear?

1. (intended
communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly
condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; 2.
(the unintended communication) "If you do behave as
we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be
shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the
commons."

When we use the word
responsibility in the absence of substantial sanctions are we not
trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into acting against
his own interest? Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a
substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something for
nothing.

Rather than rely on propaganda we follow
Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek
the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming
a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of would-be
robbers we neither deny nor regret.

A Madison Avenue
man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of
the word coercion.

We must admit that our legal
system of private property plus inheritance is unjust -- but we
put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that
anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the
commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable
to total ruin.

Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's
population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all,
is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density.
As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be
abandoned in one aspect after another

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now
recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in
breeding.

The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune

In the future, according to Kelly, the Web will grant us not only the vision of gods but also their power

Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment.

The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively

When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is "good" an old-fashioned concept that doesn't apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity.

ts superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation.

The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices.

Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral

YOU! have forgotten how to listen, how to read, how to watch

digital narcissism

without that essential epistemological anchor of truth

accountable expert is replaced by murkiness of the anonymous amateur

no audience

This time, of course, you might be right... especially since you and I seem to agree that the Web isn't yet another medium. Something important and different is going on

But, the Web is also the continuing struggle to deal with that problem

That's why we don't open up the Web at random

The Web is abundance, while the old media are premised -- in their model of knowledge as well as in their economics -- on scarcity…

Or is your epistemology in fact rooted in the scarcity that has silently shaped the traditional media?

It's a mirror rather than a medium

This is fascinating to a philosopher of knowledge like yourself, but for mere mortals who rely on their media to "understand the world", new digital abundance will lead to intellectual poverty

ordinary people

Traditional media has done a good job in discovering, polishing and distributing that talent.

So, traditional distribution makes it look like talent is a you-got- it-or-you-don't proposition -- you're an artist or you're a monkey. That doesn't reflect the scarcity of talent so much as the scarcity of distribution, a result of the high cost of delivering the first copy of a mass produced item

Knowledge is generally not a game for one. It is and always has been a collaborative process...

In fact, since businesses learned long ago that knowledge is social, do you seriously maintain that the work of business

The problem, however, with Web 2.0 is that most of the conversation seems to be taking place anonymously, conducted -- in a manner of speaking -- by people who are more interested in vulgar insult than respectful intellectual intercourse.

The issue of talent is the heart of the matter. How do we traditionally constitute/nurture/sell talent and how is Web 2.0 altering this?

But the problem is that gatekeepers -- the agents, editors, recording engineers -- these are the very engineers of talent…

These professional intermediaries are the arbiters of good taste and critical judgment

It panders to the market. If you want to see the "democratization" of talent you fear, just look at a Top 40 chart…

That's why your polemical use of the term "monkey" is not only intentionally obnoxious but essentially false and misleading.

Sites like Boing Boing are flushing away valuable culture.

Andrew, the mud you throw obscures the issues you raise

searching out the last bits of competitive advantage, business insight, and radical innovation.

“Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

most of these changes wouldn’t be jarring; instead, they’d be incremental, almost overdetermined,