Reflection and Refraction #6: Immitation, Copy That?

you'll be going out with radio
going out with disco
going out like bacchanal
i'll be going out with telephone
going out alone to the radar zone
it's all just inadvertent imitation
and i don't mean mine
it's all across this nation
if it's just inadvertent simulation
a pattern in all mankind
what's got the whole world faking?

Pearl Jam 1996 from the album No Code, Song 'Mankind'

What is missing from the lengthy discussions regarding intellectual property (IP) and copyright law including the amazing Creative Commons is a more fundamental examination of what we are as humans and what we do best as such, in connection with the exchanges, processes, and digital 'value' transfers that are under legal and philosophical review. Lawrence Lessig takes it all the way, and he more or less created an alternative structure to the existing copyright and IP system. And Henry Jenkins believes that US colleges and universities might benefit by going back to their historical antecedents, prior to WWII and the Cold War, to create a 'commons' for higher education research, instruction, and more. Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow is more direct and suggests strongly that IP and copyright laws are a capitalist tool to be questioned, his USC 2006/2007 Annenberg course stands as a testimony to this trajectory.

Yet, there is something much more essential to the 'copyright' and IP domain. We all know about and grew up with 'copy cats' in school, and we all might have witnessed another aghast with horror at a sibling, neighbor, friend, or schoolmate whom they viewed derisively for their 'copying' of our clothing, consumer objects, music, movie tastes, manner of speech, cosmetics, and even 'our' word(s) - we ourselves may have been aghast for 'copying', or someone else at us for the blatant mimicry!

From experience, as a young kid growing up in Phoenix, coming to California meant seeing the kids from 'Dogtown' do crazy sh@t on their skateboards that we could only barely watch. But like a wildfire, the moves and spins made their way to Phoenix, and like the BMX bike culture nuances, the 'language' of the sport spread. And of course, anyone associated with the process felt that they were the true 'originators.'

So it was with some encouragement that I watched the recent Meet the Press (Sunday, Feb 24, 2008) when US presidential historian Doris Goodwin Kearns suggested that presidential elections are very unique, and that the candidates feed off of each other in a very unique way, ergo, plagiarism and such is not the issue. Kerns seemed on the one hand to be stoking her own mythologies that give reason for her 'presence,' and on the other hitting on what seems to be a common strain in nature and in the way that we as humans seem to behave. So maybe the US presidential elections of ideas, concepts, positions, representations, and other often multimedia depictions of the candidates and their 'representations' are not so unique. Maybe that's what we need to fundamentally nurture: our ability to mimic.

While I am not aware of an outright statement by Henry Jenkins that learning is essentially mimicry. Perhaps it goes without saying that how (well) we learn in schools and in higher education is really about emulating the knowledge held by experts. Whether we incorporate this knowledge, or it is assumed on average by prospective employers, the value of education is in the students' ability to apply what that they have been trained to mimic. And this is true too for less monetary pursuits upon graduation.

Equally matter of fact, from a biological perspective we are all about 'reproduction' and the replication of our genetic selves. DNA code replicates. That is what it does. It replicates. Duplicates. Copies.

Finally, we come to the philosophical underpinnings of our beliefs as a democratic republic. We believe in a nation for and of the people. This means that we are less concerned with large institutions per se, and rather in favor of the individual and the liberties of all. So why do we not have the courage to take the leap into that which we are by nature? What interesting exchanges of ideas, knowledge, fashion, language, economy, food, thoughts, representations, music, and more might we see and be in if we simply shift our focus toward the 'nature' of exchange and human 'core competencies'?

Reflection #5: The Auction

here's the progress we have found (when the rain)
A way to talk around the problem (when the children reign)
Building towered foresight (keep your conscience in the dark)
isn't anything at all (melt the statues in the park)
Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky

Don't fall on me

Well I could keep it above
But then it wouldn't be sky anymore
So if I send it to you you've got to promise to keep it whole

Buy the sky and sell the sky and lift your arms up to the sky
And ask the sky and ask the sky

rem 1986 from 'Life's Rich Pageant'

Related to REM -- they will be apparently living by their words and releasing their latest video as open.

As the 700-MHz band gets auctioned off by the FCC in the weeks ahead, these UHF channels 52-69 represent 'white space' that's being left behind by the broadcasters in order for them to make the transition to digital transmissions of their programming. The 700-MHz band has been described as 'beach front' property on the electromagnetic spectrum that carries all types of wireless communications - from television, to radio, to emergency communications, to telephone, to cell, to cable television transponder uploads and downloads, to military communications, and more. While the definition of 3G and 4G wireless services has yet to be fully defined, it is clear that there is much activity afoot in providing ubiquitous wireless broadband including WiMAX, LTE, and Qualcomm's proprietary UMB 4G standard.

For one, Qualcomm has agreed to start supporting a chipset that includes EVDO, LTE, and UMB -- allowing for many more devices to work on numerous types of cell or broadband wireless networks, including Google's Android 'open standard' that is intended to help catapult Google into the broadband mobile market. Google has even pledged to wager up to $4.7 billion in the current 700 MHz FCC auction. Meanwhile, Microsoft also has a mobile strategy that oddly enough puts Microsoft and Google in agreement that the spectrum space should be opened up, similar to Lessig's call for a device neutral, open wireless network -- where use is not determined by licensing, rather, by the efficiency of the device. This may lead to an advantage by Google as it cleans up on the disarray that is today the Microsoft hostile buyout attempt of Yahoo! -- where Microsoft's business model is to sell software licenses, and Yahoo!'s is to sell advertising based on the use of free software.

Can these two models co-exist and complement each other in a broadband wireless distribution model that is open and determined on the basis of device competitiveness?

Very likely the answer is yes. Clearly there are contradictions in place, beginning with the idea that the television broadcasters are moving on to 'better' spectrum space, and leaving behind 'prime real estate' for broadband wireless -- two-way broadband wireless. So what does this mean for the new space that these companies will be using, and by the way, receiving because these companies 'provide for the public interest and expediency.' This means that they are fulfilling a public good that warrants 'free' use of the spectrum space. So what kind of stellar services will these companies provide that surpass the open broadband networks that appear to be emerging? We shall see ...

And how can Microsoft and Yahoo!'s sales and advertising models complement each other? Perhaps if Yahoo! provided a Web front end complete with an e-commerce and advertising and portal and email solution, while Microsoft provided the identity management and the intellectual property or internal knowledge and data services. This same basic symmetry could exist on the broadband networks, where some are used for open, community-based communications and others, at the flip of a switch and authentication, could be for secure, private communications.
And isn't this precisely how we lead our lives -- one that is open, communal, and public; and another that is private, secure, and personal?

Google definitely has the upper hand in its current dominance in online advertising. However, it may be that the rapid changes coming will require a Microsoft identity management and security system that Google cannot provide -- but perhaps they can. Either way, it is likely that both public and private; open and proprietary systems and distribution networks will coexist for the long term.

Meanwhile, today, the issue of digital rights (DRM) and the easy sharing and moving of content across devices is being enabled by DoubleTwist which exposed the Apple DRM (rendering it harmless and impotent).

For a great tutorial on the DMCA and how to avoid copyright infringement, click here.

Immersive Techno Terror! Threat Level: DEFCON 3!

The Washington Post published a story on Feb 6, 2008 that discussed the US intelligence community's concerns around Second Life and similar 3D immersive environment's potential to serve as 'seedbeds for transnational threats,' including China's version of SL - HiPiHi.

Says the article,

["The virtual world is the next great frontier and in some respects is still very much a Wild West environment," a recent paper by the government's new Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said.

"Unfortunately, what started out as a benign environment where people would congregate to share information or explore fantasy worlds is now offering the opportunity for religious/political extremists to recruit, rehearse, transfer money, and ultimately engage in information warfare or worse with impunity."

The government's growing concern seems likely to make virtual worlds the next battlefield in the struggle over the proper limits on the government's quest to improve security through data collection and analysis and the surveillance of commercial computer systems.]

TechDirt respectfully disagrees with the position of the United States security authorities.

Reflection #4: Viral Word-of-Mouth Marketing and Memes

While there is much to be said about the importance of word-of-mouth and viral marketing when selling a product or service, the current state of this form of marketing remains extremely vague, albeit, the observation that new technologies are accelerating the spread of word-of-mouth and 'viral' concepts or communiques is correct.

Many authors have been quick to recognize the importance of this form of marketing, including Emanuel Rosen whose book The Anatomy of Buzz (2000) provides a kind of introduction to the concept of 'buzz' marketing that is steeped in concepts of viral marketing and word-of-mouth information flows. Broken into three parts, the book covers the essentials of what 'buzz' is and how it relates to networks, certain fashion leaders, and so on; how to be successful in different 'networks' especially through 'contagious' products or accelerating 'natural contagion'; and finally, in a typical marketingesque fashion, the book ends with a section on how to 'stimulate buzz.'

Similarly, in Naked Conversations (2005), the authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel offer a kind of near marketing pitch for the destiny of blogs as a kind of end-all, be-all tool that is required for survival by any right thinking or 'sane' business today. Write the authors:

"Slowly, over time, that something impacts other things and before you know it the world a different place. Blogging is one of those “somethings.” It is vital and strategic to the future of business. Some who ignore this fact will face the same fate as the village blacksmith of the last century."

It is this kind of hyperbole and self-adoration of those who are blogging and using this technology that has the non-users and traditional media users and believers more or less wondering if anything has changed. That is, it's unlikely that an attempt to 'market' a new paradigm for 'marketing' whilst using the same hyperbole that has resulted in the more 'grass roots' dimensions of viral or word-of-mouth communications channels - 'marketing' channels if you like - will turn out successfully. More likely, the marketing professionals reading this kind of exaggerated account of blog culture and its significance for the institution will assume that the marketing puff effect is under way.

The real problem currently with the concepts around 'viral' and similar types of marketing is the near religious over- and undertones that this 'community' has struck; one that rings of a kind of corporate culture infiltrating the very purity that is word-of-mouth marketing - one that rose out of a basic peer-to-peer community of users that couldn't find the truth within the product provider's channels and support systems. This kind of 'webagoguery' appears self serving and a shallow attempt to gain contracts for book orders, company workshops, and speaking engagements - but not as a sincere effort to nurture real and meaningful feedback loops, new strategies for connecting with customers, and accelerating and strengthening such efforts. This near-religious fervor comes out in the 'Customer Evangelist Manifesto' and the 'code of conduct' for word-of-mouth marketing according to the WOMMA organization and its six items that constitute 'WOMMA 101.'

The real give away that this discussion of 'viral marketing' is something of a capitalist, money making scheme seems most obvious in the '95 Theses' from the Cluetrain blogsite. Here, you can read a list of everything and (virtually) anything that could possibly have an affect on your business - and that you should take these 'anythings' into account when communicating with your customers - and above all else - BE HONEST! Well, these 'theses' are all well and good; but aren't they a bit self serving and self righteous? I mean really, is someone going to read these and then turn around, and head into a meeting pontificating the importance of all of these 'theses'? Who is supposed to be reading these and deciding how to change? Or was this written for the writers and their circle or network?

'Ten Predictions for the Future' (2005) from the 'Connected Marketing' blog offers something of a more solid set of predictions, and suggests strongly that change will accelerate, and we will become more dynamic. I believe that the prediction around mobile technology "Prediction 9. Cell phones will develop rapidly as an important medium for spreading connected marketing promotions, such as mobile invitations, SMS barcode discounts, etc." is both simplistic, and true. It is simplistic because it ignores the dynamic nature of this medium, and how it relates to the flow of people and things and how these are essential to the context of messages on this medium. But the prediction is true, in that we will see growth. This is likely visible today with the rapid rise of Twitter.

This week we saw the emergence of a kind of 'live' YouTube; but not from Google - rather from Yahoo! and it is now active: Live.Yahoo.com In light of the phenomenal growth around YouTube and the seeming voracious appetite for immediacy in communication - it will be interesting to see whether this service morphs into a viral marketing tool, or just a blip in streaming and web history. I think that I'd be interested if there was a solid mobile piece, for true device interoperability and access --

Viral marketing and the concepts around 'wom' marketing are also not original, and go back to at least the concept of 'memes' as presented by Richard Dawkins (1976) in his book The Selfish Gene in which he describes the mimicry that is associated with how people form their ideas and opinions. Such mimicry is an innate part of humans, according to Dawkins, and later media author Doug Rushkoff picked up on this theme in his books Media Virus, Cyberia, and Coercion (1994, 2000) and presented a convincing case that the 'mediascape' was changing profoundly, and that it was no longer possible to create the kinds of illusions and monolithic (dis)information campaigns associated with broadcast television, radio, and other highly controlled, top-down media structures. Indeed, Rushkoff predicted the dissolution of these media and the rise of informal networks.

It would be interesting if the WOM marketing and 'viral' marketing communities and proponents could and would consider the self evidence of their observations, and to consider the real implications of such immediate and more efficient information dissemination and feedback loops -- beyond, 'tell the truth and be honest and listen and ... blah, blah, blah.'

MPAA Exaggerates Claim of Illegal Downloads

CNET NEWS:

Research led by John Heidemann of USC's Information Sciences Institute was featured. Heidemann and colleagues found that between 3 percent and 13 percent of those connecting to USC's computer network were using peer-sharing technology that could be used for downloading pirated films and music. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has claimed that college students downloading movies on campus were responsible for 44 percent - or $572 million - of the industry's domestic losses to piracy. The MPAA's claims "did not hold in our analysis," Heidemann said.

The MPAA recently acknowledged that the figure was overstated, and now says that students account for 15 percent of domestic losses, the story reported.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9858416-7.html?tag=nefd.top

Yasoft! or Microhoo? And the Jenkins Milieu: Reflection #3

"We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
Abraham Lincoln, Dec 1, 1862

There seems to be a continuum or at least a strange 'back channel' debate brewing around Web n-point-0 and its future -- there's a kind of twitter that has all a-jitter. I speak here of the recent statement by Google around the hostile takeover announced by Microsoft over search engine and 'web portal' competitor Yahoo!. The continuum that I reference here, is one that goes to the heart of the Jenkins discussions and his references to Pierre Levy's conceptions of 'community versus commodity.' In the following sense, quoted from the Jenkins article,

"Levy distinguishes between four potential sources of power - nomadic mobility, control over territory, ownership over commodities, and mastery over knowledge - and suggests a complex set of interactions and negotiations between them. The emergent knowledge cultures never fully escape the influence of the commodity culture, any more than commodity culture can totally function outside the constraints of territoriality."

So, on the one hand, Levy is clearly not 'enthralled' with the new communication constellation, for example, broadband networks and recognizes the inter- or arguably co-dependencies of the two systems coexisting. On the other hand, Levy seems to succumb to the utopianism that is uniquely American and that seems to temper the cold economic realities of online communities, and that Jenkins too seems to not fully accept, or perhaps, that he does accept but sees as something fundamentally unacceptable, and therefore should be manipulated accordingly.

I say this, because there does seem to be a great deal of subtext associated with the many discussion points raised by Mr. Jenkins, and also, the way that he has spoken on the subject of higher education and Web 2.0 (or 'n-point-0') - including this past week when I had the good fortune of hearing him at the ELI 2008 conference in San Antonio, TX, and in 2007 at the Annenberg Center on the YouTube University. And you all can have the opportunity to see Jenkins and others of his milieu, Feb 8-10, 2008, this upcoming week here at USC.

The main subtext that I refer to comes out in the lofty missive put out be Google that all but suggests that Google is above criticism and circumspection given the claimed way that Google will ride on its horse - way up high, on its very, very high horse. As with the immediate cynical reaction of many a critic to their corporate mission statement that "You can make money without doing evil," to the way that Google glossed over their dependence upon advertising revenues, many including TechCrunch are questioning Google's rather holier-than-thou attitude. I definitely wonder if Google, like Yahoo! before it, is self enthralled and cannot pull itself away from its own image - on a mirror that duplicates and morphs by the microsecond, and flickers in nearly every American home daily.

And it is precisely this self adoration that has many like me concluding that the 'media' as we know it is nothing more than a mirror reflection of all that we are to ourselves, while at the same time, a complete deception therefore of that which we 'really are.' This deception goes back much, much farther than the Web or multimedia.

In the 2oth Century alone it would seem that Adolf Hitler was quite the multimedia mashup artist, taking film, radio, and banners ( an important 'in real life' or IRL - in Rheingold speak - an important IRL harbinger) that mimic online icons and online banner ads in the form of swastika flags, pins, and banners across 1930s and 40s Germany; and it would seem that while at first rap music was considered something of a rip off of 'original' music; today is considered a precursor to the new millennium's 'mash up' culture phenomenon.

This self adoration seems to come up again and again in my short lifetime. Whether the so-called 'me generation' or the 'Pepsi Generation' that epitomizes the 1960s 'hippy' or 'SDS' or 'Baby Boomer' or whatever you prefer - this generation got seriously self absorbed and mesmerized by television and film, to the point that they too have succumbed to the seductions of watching oneself in the mirror. Whether the 'World's Greatest Rock 'n Roll Band' or the legendary 'Beatles' to the end all, be all event of 'Woodstock,' the 1960s generation is convinced that they are the most important generation that has ever walked the earth. This is what also gives Tom Brokaw the right to proclaim who is, after all, The Greatest Generation.

And now, beginning with the, in retrospect, rather pathetic early attempts by 'Generation X' to create an electronic neural network akin to Marshall McLuhan's Global Village, to the more pragmatist wing of the 1960s generation in the form of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog that brought us Howard Rheingold's beloved 'WELL,' to the Millennials or those in the generation featured in the recent PBS 'Growing up Online'; they all seem strangely and naively self enthralled to the point of obscene. Indeed, there is nothing necessarily obscene about the way that this new American generation interacts and the messages that they send amongst themselves. Rather, it is the predictable conclusion that they reach that is more difficult to swallow -- they seem to be completely self absorbed with themselves in a way that is uniquely American, or perhaps Western, or perhaps 'modern.'

What is more, this type of self absorption seems to be supported by those like Danah Boyd who comments in the PBS Frontline 'Growing Up Online' in a way that suggests that the real issue is one that is framed and encouraged by the traditional, television media (the one that has Boomers and X'ers self enthralled) - that it is a matter of 'yes or no.' That is, in a predictable American tradition, it is either 'good or evil,' as with the War on Terror, Star Wars, Christianity, and a host of other American dominant cultural narratives.

But it is precisely this sterilized version of what 'Growing up Online' means that this blog will implicitly and explicitly challenge; for we know that the world that we live in is not as simple as 'yes or no.' We know that pop culture, Christianity, free markets, advertising, and academia are alone and together much more than 'good or evil.' We also know that this world is at once a very, very harsh place and a very, very gracious and lavish place. Where we land is not necessarily up to us -- and while Jenkins and his milieu suggest strongly that we need to participate in the new media, excuse me if I hold my tongue while the chips are still falling.

All of this is to say that McLuhan's definition of 'media' is much broader than the discussion today that picked up primarily on his electronic network predictions. But the images, for example of 9/11 and NYC, are just as much a distinctly non-American viewpoint of capitalism as they are an attack on innocent American women, men, and children. That is, we have come out of a 'cold war' that clearly involved some very stark and awful images of what the ultimate 'medium' of a nuclear bomb or worse, set of nuclear bombs (nuclear 'media') would mean to the recipients of the not-so-subtle message.

So, yes, the 'medium' remains the message. But the question now, beyond the theoretical extremes of the distinctly binary trajectories of those like Jenkins and Boyd, is much closer to Manual Castells' question around the emerging (and arguably 'real') "Networked Society"; where he asks [paraphrased] -- 'What does it mean to really accept others? Can you really accept that the way others see the world is as legitimate as your way of seeing the world?'

I'm not sure I have the answer -- but I'll have a different point of view [guaranteed!] -- riding home on a crowded bus filled to the brim with differences and different people - after a day's work than right now, sipping a glass of wine on a Sunday evening!