dan mcquillan's List: introduction to social media IS51020A - lecture 3 - open source & participatory culture

• We need to look at the whole society and think, "Are we actually thinking about what we're doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?"

• this was the evolution of our process for creating the standards, it started off fairly ad hoc, much more in the start of the Internet engineering task force. People get together, they know each other -- and all with a passion for the same thing -- get together and produce some technology and roll it out and then sort of create a new market.

   

  Then we found with one particular standard that came through the consortium, that one of the people in the working group turned around and said, "Oh, right -- you're all going to be paying me royalties, by the way, when we're finished." And there was shock and horror. This was during the dot -com boom, so this was when things were moving very fast, people were talking about 2.6 Internet years being a year -- or was it an Internet year being 2.6 months? -- things going very fast. And the whole process stopped for 18 months. It cost us I think $150,000 to find a lawyer who would investigate it and write an opinion. And the opinion was that actually these people would not be paying anybody royalties, that a patent did not apply in that case.
• So my function was that everybody would be able to edit in this space, or different people would have access rights to different spaces. But I really wanted it to be a collaborative authoring tool

• But I've always felt frustrated that most people don't ... didn't have write access. And wikis and blogs are two areas where suddenly two sort of genres of online information suddenly allow people to edit, and they're very widely picked up, and people are very excited about them.

   

  And I think that really for me reinforces the idea that people need to be creative. They want to be able to record what they think. They want to be able to, if they see something wrong go and fix it.

• You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?

   

    Berners-Lee: Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SVG, and so on. It's using HTTP, so it's building stuff using the Web standards, plus JavaScript, of course. So Web 2.0, for some people, it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.

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• In 2003, a little–known DJ by the name of Danger Mouse created a "mash–up" album that remixed the music of the Beatles’ White Album and hiphop star Jay–Z’s Black Album to produce a new record called The Grey Album. The swift and draconian legal reaction to the online dissemination of this technically illegal but culturally fascinating artifact gave rise to a "day of digital civil disobedience," organized by music activism group Downhill Battle. Grey Tuesday, as the day of action was known, marks a potentially new site for a blend of online political and cultural activism in the highly charged realm of intellectual property expansionism.
• This move prompted a burgeoning music activist group, Downhill Battle (www.downhillbattle.org), to jump into the fray with a call for a day of protest on 24 February 2004, dubbed Grey Tuesday. On this day of digital civil disobedience, participating Web sites and blogs offered Danger Mouse’s mash–up for download in defiance of EMI’s legal threats.
• the mash–up–like blend of cultural activity and political activism that Grey Tuesday encapsulates.
• Jonah Peretti’s now infamous e–mail exchange with Nike over customizing a pair of shoes with the word "sweatshop" was certainly an example of successful online activism,
• copyright absolutism
• Napster so captured the imagination of computer users that its demise at the hands of the music industry’s lawsuits not only created a "digital Hezbollah," in the entertaining hyperbole of John Perry Barlow (2000), but also spawned a wave of new peer–to–peer systems, many of which were themselves forms of activism on the parts of programmers against the corporate oligopoly of the major labels.
• Vaidhyanathan describes two rhetorical strategies that might shift the copyright debate away from the "property–talk trap" that has thus far framed it in favor of the content industries. The first is to borrow a page from the environment movement of 40 years ago and to start to engage in "commons talk" that over time could build a level of public concern about how information is used, transferred and owned in society (see also Boyle, 1997). The second strategy involves a targeting of the uses and users of copyrighted material, which almost by definition includes everyone in society. Based on the simple premise of the "right to read," such an activism seeks to bring to people’s attention the fact their old uses of copyrighted material, for example making a mix CD, are now either under threat or perhaps already illegal. The Grey Album itself is an excellent example of such a new and intriguing use of musical material, and the Grey Tuesday event consolidated its political relevance.
• As DB co–founder Rebecca Laurie states: "If music reviewers have to break the law to hear new, innovative music, then something has gone wrong with the law."

• DB also offered an explicit endorsement of file–sharing:

    

  "As a case study, the Grey Album proves that filesharing networks are a necessary and legitimate means of defense (for sample–based musicians, music reviewers, and everyone else who likes music) against a music industry that consistently attacks the public interest."
• legend has it that the first true "mash–up" as it is understood today was a 1994 track by the Evolution Control Committee that combined a Public Enemy rap over a Herb Albert instrumental (Manriki, 2003). Some time around 2000, this new underground style found a home at a small club in London’s West End, where the Cartel Communique began a mash–up (or "bootleg" as it was called then) night called "King of the Boots". The name was changed to "Bastard," adopted from the term "bastard–pop," another early term for mash–ups.
• There are other factors that must be acknowledged in this history. One of the most obvious is technology. The explosion in mash–ups occurred in large part because cheap computers and easy–to–use software, such as Acid and Pro–Tools, have proliferated far beyond the sound–proofed walls of the professional recording studio. As well as simplified production, the Internet — and P2P in particular — was also necessary for the distribution and dissemination of mash–up tracks around the scene and around the world. Of course, quality and talent still play a large role: the Grey Album worked because it is good, not simply because it was a clever idea. It is also relevant that remixing and sampling are the currency of today’s popular culture. Cultural appropriation takes place on our televisions and cinema screens, in the advertising that surrounds us and in the music that is piped to us on radio — which is why the illegality of a project like the Grey Album strikes so many people as counter–intuitive.
• Though remixing and mash–ups may seem inherently apolitical on the surface, there are certainly grounds for a political analysis of the phenomenon. The mash–up is by no means the first music to exist at the margins of the law, and in fact part of its roots lie in forms of political resistance: Negativland’s mixing of familiar songs, advertising jingles, news reports and radio DJ banter were created as statements about how consumerism, news and pop culture were becoming indistinguishable, and were always designed to draw attention to the restrictiveness of copyright laws (Negativland, 1995; in Sakolsky and Wei–Han Ho).
• Semiotic democracy speaks to the power of active audiences in their own processes of meaning creation. The Grey Tuesday story suggests that more than "meaning" is being created here; indeed, it epitomizes a new form of political engagement. At the individual level is Danger Mouse himself and the creative artifact that he generated by recombining elements of our cultural environment and heritage. At a collective level, the participants in the Grey Tuesday protest became the distributors — and even the marketers — of the Grey Album artifact itself. This is where cultural studies and political economy find a new area of common ground: audiences are not merely active in the sense of creating meanings; they are active in the evolution of the technological and economic structures of the music circulation system itself. And, either consciously or unwittingly, every person who has downloaded The Grey Album has been party to the fostering of an emergent form of political participation.
• he formation of Downhill Battle Labs (software development geared to increasing ease–of–use of open source software such as BitTorrent; see group’s Web site for details).
• "We never imagined that Downhill Battle would become such a long–term project for us. When [DB co–founder] Holmes [Wilson] and I started the site in August 2003, we saw it as a chance to make a timely push–back against a totally one–sided debate about the future of the music industry. Now we’ve been sucked into an even bigger fight for the future of our culture and the role that the Internet can play in reshaping it."
• In September 2004, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that any and all samples used by music producers must be paid for, including snippets of sounds or chords made unidentifiable by heavy distortion. The case, Bridgeport Music v. Westbound Records [14], revolved around a 1.5 second sample from the George Clinton and Funkadelic song "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" that had been used in the NWA song "100 Miles and Runnin’" featured in a 1998 Master P movie produced by No Limit Films.

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• "Only recently the DCMS told us that they have no evidence of the effects of copyright infringement, or of the effectiveness of different ways of dealing with it. Yet the aim is '50 or 60' websites. Which ones? Why is website blocking the best way of tackling them? What evidence is there that this is the case?" he said.

• There is something messy about the relationship between users and corporations. What causes this mess I will explain in the first part of the article, which points towards an ontology of Web 2.0.
• The ground covered here is often described as Web 2.0, social media, participatory media, citizen journalism, user generated content, user driven innovation, and social software. The list is long. Sometimes there are important differences betweens these terms but not in this article. These terms have in common a certain positive sound to them, when uttered within a democratic discourse influenced by the Enlightenment. Another list of words could be added, which has a somewhat negative sound to it: exploitation, losers, free labor, and enclosure. These two sets of words are not dichotomous; they are part of what happens online and elsewhere these years, and for the sake of history, always have happened. Along with words such as joy, creativity, significance and pleasure, they are best described as a diagram that maps the design, production and use of the Internet. But how can a technology, or an ensemble of technologies, have such different characteristics? Produce such different effects? One way of explaining this would be to consider the basic principles behind the technologies in question.
• One of the most interesting, inspiring and productive aspects of Web 2.0, and at the same time one of the problematic ones when considered critically, is the relational character of these technologies. Relational thinking entails viewing the world as relations instead of objects and subjects. Usually we would ascribe significance or value to objects and subjects as if it came from within. It is evident, when looking at how Web 2.0 creates significance for its users, that it is the relations between the different elements that create significance and value. Why is this important? Because it explains why a specific type of software and practices related to it can be participatory, exploitative and create pleasure for its users at the same time. Let me offer an example. When someone takes a picture with her or his camera phone and uploads it to Flickr.com, a lot of different relations are created and hereby also significance and value.
• Another reason is more closely related to this article. It is important to acknowledge the unstable character of Web 2.0 technologies compared to other technologies; the way content is both moving and moved across platforms, creating different forms of value. We should also acknowledge history; always be alert when seeing patterns of exploitation taking on new forms. This new form is not disguised as participation, in most instances we are witnessing genuine participation (within certain constraints though, questioning how democratic these technologies really are). It is not a question of capitalism luring users into spending time on their sites, as a more classical hegemonic orientated 1970s Marxism would frame it. It is much more complicated, which has to do with both the technologies in question but also how society and the means of production have changed during the last century.

• The most important aspect of the new production mode for the Autonomia theorists was the variable and more uncontrollable form of human or subjective capital. When the workers are freed from spending all their time at the assembly line, new forms of subjectivity and knowledge arises – the general intellect – creating what they dubbed ‘mass intellectuality’, a “repository of knowledges indivisible from living subjects and from their linguistic co–operation” [5]. With the advent of the Internet these forces have become even more widespread, and therefore hold new means of subversion when:

    

  “The actual time spent in labor and exertion has become a marginal productive factor. Science, information, linguistic communication, and knowledge in general – rather than labor time – are now the central pillars on which production and wealth rest.”
• Although there are zones of autonomy and piracy online, it is important to acknowledge that the Internet, always and already, operates within the confinement of capitalism (Terranova, 2004).
• The ease of copying and relocating content online as well as its network structure are both what enable distributing music and other digitalized culture products for free, hereby undermining the chain of value for entertainment and software corporations. However, it is also what makes it easy for capitalism to copy and reuse content produced by users into the sphere of a corporate site (reterritorialization).
• The case of Google buying Deja News’ archive of Usenet is a subtle example of participation turning into exploitation. Usenet started in 1981 and functions as a distributed system of loosely connected servers so there is no general server that hosts postings, thus differing from a BBS or a list hosted by a company. In 1995 Deja News started archiving old and new posts to Usenet and made an interface with search options. Deja was purchased by Google in 2001 and Google have incorporated Usenet into its own groups.
• Although Google does not own the postings, they own the interface which is just as valuable. The strategy Google used when buying Deja is equivalent to the method of enclosure used within Web 2.0, to which we will return. This strategy can be characterized as a reterritorialization of free labor into a capitalistic structure of profit–making.
• Another common strategy within Web 2.0 that was also widespread within “1.0” is downright exploitation, which became evident with the case from AOL. In 1999 seven of the 13,000 volunteers of AOL, working to keep AOL’s community vibrant and living, started questioning whether they should get paid for their work. Two of the seven filed a complaint against AOL in a federal court in New York (Margonelli, 1999). The U.S. Department of Labor investigated the case but came to no conclusions and closed their investigation in 2001.
• AOL is a typical example of how the architecture of participation was in “Web 1.0”. The basic design principle was to create Internet portals mixed with search engines and discussion lists. Posts and articles posted to discussions lists hosted by a company such as Yahoo or AOL are owned by the company providing the servers and the interface. This manner of claiming ownership over content produced by users is a very explicit form of exploitation that we do not see as often within Web 2.0, although there are exceptions, such as Facebook (Scholz, 2007).
• In the third quarter of 2006, one billion dollars went into Google’s AdSense program, out of which 780 million was shared with those implementing AdSense on their blog. The majority of this shared revenue goes to a minority of large sites, and the majority of bloggers earns close to nothing, especially compared to all the hours that go into running a blog (Arnoldy, 2007). From Google’s perspective AdSense is a goldmine because they can share little and still promote their tagline of “don’t be evil”, while at the same time maintaining an impressive system of surveillance gathering information that can be used in their huge range of other products.
• The users of Flickr that I interviewed [9] all say they would not dream of moving to another site, unless they could take their network with them as well as all their pictures with comments, tags and notes.
• The collective aspects of creating significance is often done through comments and occasionally through adding tags and notes to other people’s pictures. All these different features and the practices surrounding them are a primary factor in the creation of significance and affective bonds on Flickr. Without this, it simply would not be as fun, as my informants tell me. But at the same time, this is also what makes migration to another site impossible.
• Flickr is very active in promoting themselves by opening up their API so people will code small applications that improve the design and usability of Flickr, while at the same time helping Flickr in promoting it as the cool site to be at. There are limitations though as to how open the API is; the openness stops short of enabling migration. It could be an option to migrate if you could take the entirety of the context data with you.
• The communities that emerge, the integration of social networking in everyday life, and the personal biography you create through your content, comments etc. create an impressively strong tie to a particular site. The demography of the people I interviewed places them on the left side of the political spectrum; they are at times directly anti–corporate/capitalist in the pictures they upload and their comments. Nonetheless, most of them do not see a problem in having such close ties with a particular company. This can only be explained with reference to the immense joy and pleasure they get out of sharing photos online. The huge amount of work that goes into each personal site is paid back in an affective currency: the joy and significance these sites bring to their users.
• But it does not matter whether you can claim ownership or not, because of the way ownership and content is defined in End User License Agreement’s (EULA). The legal language of EULAs is based on a subject–object ontology instead of a relational way of thinking. Content is defined as the content people upload as if the significance of that content is inherent within it, but, as I have shown, it is not. What you buy, when acquiring a social networking site, is not content but context data produced by users and communities. In this way the architecture of participation turns into an architecture of exploitation and enclosure, transforming users into commodities that can be sold on the market.
• Commodification of users and their content have proved itself as the answer to the problems that capitalism supposedly faced when online communication sparked off.
• Relations are the key here. We need to acknowledge that relations of subjectivity, everyday life, technology, media and publics also are related to dimensions of capitalism. This relation reconfigures patterns of use into practices which caries a resemblance of work relations, transforming users into losers.
• What is seriously needed is a theory of labor that is able to map both exploitation and free labor, along with considering the value using these sites creates for their users. Yochai Benkler’s (2006) utopian project of a commons based peer production and the development of a non–market and non–proprietary mode of production is a way forward. I still think, as I have argued in this article, that we need to keep an eye on capitalism’s ability to piggyback. An additional strategy would be more openness. It seems almost ironic that one has to argue for this within Web 2.0 where data flows easily between different sites. Unfortunately, as I have shown, not all kinds of data flow, which is problematic when value is dependent on relations.

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