Internet Culture and Technology – Page 22

RFCs: How the Internet Got Its Rules

Stephen D. Crocker has written an Op-Ed on How the Internet Got Its Rules (April 6, 2009) about the Request for Comments or R.F.C.’s of the Internet. He looks back on writing the first R.F.C. 40 years ago as a student assigned to write up notes from a meeting. He chose the to call it a R.F.C. because:

What was supposed to be a simple chore turned out to be a nerve-racking project. Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath of some prestigious professor at some phantom East Coast establishment. I was actually losing sleep over the whole thing, and when I finally tackled my first memo, which dealt with basic communication between two computers, it was in the wee hours of the morning.

Calling them R.F.C.’s set the tone for the consensual culture.

The early R.F.C.â€™s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called â€œrough consensus and running code.â€ Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.

Another feature was layering for independence that allowed people to build new technologies on older ones without asking permission.

Thanks to Dan Cohen on Twitter for this.

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Thanks to Peter O I came across Clay Shirky’s excellent analysis of what’s going on with newspapers and the web, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable . Some of the salient points:

Change has been so rapid that it has changed who is pragmatic and who is a fabulist. Newspapers are in denial about the realities of online content so those who describe what is happening (the pragmatists) are treated as fabulists.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades havenâ€™t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry.

The economics of publishing have changed. It used to be that there was a tremendous upfront cost to set up a newspaper or broadcasting facility. Now the infrastructure of distribution is paid for by all so publishing is cheap.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves â€” the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public â€” has stopped being a problem.

It is easy to describe life before or after an epochal shift. It is hard to describe the chaos of experiments during the shift. Shirky looks to The Printing Press as an Agent of Change as an example of the hard type of history.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was childâ€™s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisensteinâ€™s book asks is â€œHow did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?â€

Advertisers don’t want to pay for the costs of a full-featured newspaper (with international bureaus and investigative reporting.) They will move their money to where it connects with their (usually local) audience.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. Theyâ€™d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

Newspaper reporting provides a public service that will be missed, but knowing we will miss it doesn’t save it. We just don’t know how to fill the gap that will be left when daily papers dissappear in cities.

â€œYouâ€™re gonna miss us when weâ€™re gone!â€ has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I donâ€™t know. Nobody knows. Weâ€™re collectively living through 1500, when itâ€™s easier to see whatâ€™s broken than what will replace it.

Actually I think there are ideas floating around as to what might fill the gap:

Blogs may take up some of the slack with various advocacy groups and NGOs providing investigative reporting in the areas that concern them. I think it is wrong to assume that amateurs will necessarily do a worse job than professional reporters. In fact, as most know, professionals are too busy to usually go into depth and whenever they write about something you know they get it wrong in all sorts of ways. A blog like Buckets of Grewal probably does a more indepth job of examining the Grewal controversy than any newspaper story. The difference is rather that the professionals are committed to breadth and they write better.
Publicly funded broadcasters like the BBC and the CBC will provide tax funded news reporting with foreign bureaus and so on. They don’t have to have make a profit and can invest in things perceived as useful for society.
There will always be some big and international newspapers like the New York Times or Reuters because there will always be a demand for that sort of news. The internet reduces diversity – every city doesn’t need a newspaper with a foreign bureau. All we need is a couple of news services with foreign bureaus.
Some companies have already figured out how to package news as analysis and get other businesses to pay for it. This will accelerate as newspapers fail. Companies like Oxford Analytica will meet the demand of multinational businesses who need access to strategic information. The sooner the newspapers fail the sooner we will see these companies come out of the woodwork and start selling their products to us.

To conclude with another quote from the Shirky essay, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

Google Notebook Stopped

According to the Official Google Notebook Blog they are stopping development on the Google Notebook. I rather liked Google Notebook for gathering notes, to do lists, and so on. Google Docs doesn’t have the same ease of use. Oh well, time to find something else.

MIT: Open Access Mandate

From Twitter I found a link to Peter Suber, Open Access News where there is a story of MIT’s unanimous faculty vote to adopt an Open Access mandate that gives the University the right to archive and make available their articles. Like the Harvard mandate, faculty can opt out if they have a good reason.

Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.

Hall: Digitize This Book!

Digitize This Book! by Gary Hall is an interesting book at the intersection of cultural studies and humanities computing. The book seems to be addressed mostly to the cultural studies crowd arguing that “do cultural studies writers, thinkers, and practitioners not also need to experiment with ways of being ‘militant’ in a positive, innovative, creative, and constructive fashion in their own situations, institutions, and places of work?” (p. 206) The book is a sustained defense of the Cultural Studies e-Archive (CSeARCH) and other computing projects that Hall has initiated. He is trying to make space in cultural studies for projects we would recognize as humanities computing projects. To do this he argues against “transcendental politics” which assume a commitment to a particular political analysis in order to open room for actions, like starting an open archive, that cannot be demonstrated a-priori to be in support of capitalism or not. He ends the book with,

A fixed, pure and incorruptible institution could only be a violent, transcendental, totalizing, and totalitarian fantasy. One could even argue, after Derrida, that it is precisely the structurally open and undecidable nature of the situation – the fact that an institution or archive can be used to facilitate the forces of capitalism and globalization – that gives it ethical and political force. (p. 214)

Now I tend to shudder when I read phrases like “the forces of capitalism”, partly because I don’t understand the tradition of thought that takes such things as givens, but I don’t, as many colleagues do, believe we should therefore shun cultural studies or other forms of post-modern thought. Hall is interested in something important and that is the ethics and politics of digital work. To avoid discussing the ethics and politics of what we do in the university or as developers of digital works is to ascribe to a naive and unexamined ethic. Many avoid politics because the discourse has been politicized by second rate cultural studies folk who think shaming others for not being militant is a form of engagement. Hall is trying to open room for a form of politics beyond politics (or hyperpolitics) where we can act without knowing for sure what the consequences of our actions will be. That is the heart of ethics for me, acting (or not, which in turn is a form of acting) in the face of insufficient knowledge or ability. We always do things without being sure, ethics is knowing that and trying to deal thoughtfully with the ignorance.

Part of what I am saying here, then, is that certain forms, practices, and performances of new media – including many of those associated with open-access publishing and archiving – make us aware that we can no longer assume that we unproblematically know what the “political” is, or what sorts of interventions count as political. (p. 196)

Hall in his actions (like CSeARCH and the Open Humanities Press) and in his writing is trying to reach out to those in open access circles and in computing circles. We who are too buried in the techne should reach back.

You can find earlier versions of sections on CSeARCH like The Cultural Studies E-Archive Project (Original Pirate Copy), but, ironically, I can’t, find a copy of Digitize This Book!. No one has bothered to digitize it, no doubt due to the copyright notice as the beginning (p. iv) that states,

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. (p. iv)

Is there a contradiction between the injunction of the title (“Digitize This Book!”) and the copyright notice? What is the status of a title when it comes to rights? Should I digitize the book?

To be fair to Hall, the chapters of his previous book, Culture In Bits are available on CSeARCH and I assume he will make Digitize This Book! also available after a suitable interval. Perhaps someone knows him and can update me or point me to a digitized version already open.

Note: since writing this someone passed on a note to Gary Hall who kindly pointed me to online copies of other chapters. See my more recent blog entry with the links.

Hall makes an interesting move at the beginning of the book to position open access as a middle way for the university between the commercialization of the university and the (impossible elitist) return to whatever it is we think we were doing in the humanities in the good old days. I find it interesting that Hall believes “cultural studies has for some time now arguably been the means by which the university thinks about itself …” (p. 13). I’ve seen no evidence of this – cultural studies to me seems to want to position itself as outside the university critiquing it in the Socratic gadfly tradition rather than taking a role acknowledged by the university. It would probably come as a surprise to most university administrators that cultural studies is doing this for them and somehow represents the university’s institutionalized reflection. And therein lies the promise of Hall’s book – that there is type of creative activity we can all engage in, through which we can imagine the university by modeling it. We don’t need approval to set up open works. We can use the technology to become a way for the university to think about itself.

Vice President Al Gore

Icon of Computer Peter O sent me a link to the original 1994 web page for Vice President Al Gore kept by NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration (of the USA.) What is amusing is that this copy of Gore’s page looks really dated and positions him as a pioneer of the Internet:

Vice President Gore, having first coined the term “information superhighway” 17 years ago, is the recognized public leader in the development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).

Not quite the same as saying he invented it. To see the page Gore’s page linked from go to the White House page. Many of the links work, though not Clinton’s page.

Project Bamboo

I attended Workshop 3 of Project Bamboo in Tucson Arizona this week. I think I’m beginning to understand it, though understanding what Bamboo is was one of the favorite subjects of conversation of the meeting (so I’m conscious that . There is a deliberate ambiguity to the project since they are trying to listen to the community in order to become what we want rather than what we suspect. Some of my takeaway thoughts:

It is being structured as a consortium. Thus the long term sustainability model is that universities (and possibly associations and individuals) will contribute resources into the consortium and get back services for their faculty. This seems the right way to get to a level of broad support.
One thing Bamboo will do is develop shared services that participating universities can use to deliver research support.
One of the challenges is figuring out how to listen to the community. The stories are the mechanism being used for this. Scholars are contributing stories of what they do and what they want to do. In some cases the stories are being contributed by people who talk to faculty.
Recipes (like those we developed for TAPoR) will be a key way to connect stories to the shared services. A recipe is a way of abstracting from a lot of stories something that can be used to identify the tools and content needed by researchers to do useful work.
Bamboo probably won’t build tools, but they will build and run services with which others can build tools. Bamboo may be the project that runs SEASR as a service for the rest of us, for example. We can then build tools with SEASR for our research projects.
Bamboo is talking about running the shared services in a cloud. I’m not sure what that means yet.

Cornell Web Lab: Large scale web research

The Cornell Web Lab is an interesting example of a high performance computing project in the humanities and social sciences. As they say,

The Web Laboratory is a joint project of Cornell University and the Internet Archive to provide data and computing tools for research about the Web and the information on the Web.

In a paper on the project, A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive, William Arms and colleagues point out that the data challenge of the social sciences (and humanities) is that the data is poorly structured and there is a lot of it. The Internet Archive is a case in point; as of 2006 they had 5 to 6 petabytes of data of web pages. While it is amazing that we have such archives in computer (and human) readable form, it is hard to do anything with that much. The Web Lab approach is to provide HPC basic services for extracting subsets of the whole that can then be used by other tools.