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Al Jazeera on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative
Al Jazeera reports on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a proposed reinforcement of free speech rights based on the best available legislation in the whole world:
Posted in Video, media | No Comments »
A Flickr commons of shareable p2p graphics
Via Neal Gorenflo of Shareable Magazine:
“I’ve started a Flickr group call Sharing Illustrated to create a pool of Creative Commons images, photos, and videos that anyone can use to talk about sharing, peer-to-peer production, alternative economy, and the commons. The idea is to empower communicators of all stripes with high quality images about sharing.
You’re invited to join the group and share your images. It’s really easy.
First, join the group here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/1365597@N21/admin/
Once you’ve joined, then for any image you’d like to share, click on the “Send to Group” tab just above the image to the left. It’s self-explanatory from there.
The group is brand new with no images. I’m reaching out for your help to get the ball rolling. Once the group is seeded with images, I will promote the group through Shareable to gain momentum. And we’ll
continually promote.
There are a number of benefits to contributing: advancing your work by creating the pool for others, gaining access to the pool yourself, and increased traffic to your site from link backs.
I hope you’ll give this a try! And feel free to pass this request on to colleagues, forums, and lists that might be interested.
Thank you,
More Information:
See also the P2P Foundation Graphics section, with 105 graphics and images so far.
Posted in P2P Commons, media | No Comments »
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced a very handy checklist to ask yourself how much reading rights you are giving away when accepting DRM restrictions on the new generation of eBooks.
Here’s the intro:
“After several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will help make this digital book revolution possible may not always respect the rights and expectations that readers, authors, booksellers and librarians have built up, and defended, over generations of experience with physical books.
As new digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our rights and expectations.”
Posted in Open Content, P2P Rights, media | 2 Comments »
Adrian Chan on the new paradigms of streamtime sociality
Interesting meditation on the new peer socialities, in which Adrian Chan recognizes two major shifts.
This is followed by a related meditation from Rob Horning (Generation Bubble blog), who wonders whether the new corporate-funded social networks are not designed to create ‘capital-friendly’ identity formation.
Adrian Chan on the first shift
“The way I see it … social media are currently undergoing a radical if not inevitable transformation. We have come off the page, out of the network, and with that struck forth from territorial identity for nomadic travels and connections. We identify less now by where we are from and more by who we connect to. We maintain this identity less by identity through place and more by identity through sociality.
I’m speaking not just metaphorically, but directly to this realtime culture in which we now spend so much of our time, and to which we commit so much of our attention.
The siloed world of mass media, with its disconnected channels, its fixed real estates, and branded identities, is receding from relevance and by virtue of acceding ground to global nomadism, losing its claim to authority. A new mode of production is in place — one based not on manufactured goods, not on information, but on communication. And social media are its mode of production.
Social media may now be approaching the point of coming off the page entirely, reaching a condensation point (system threshold) at which stage communication may connect to and permit interaction by means of mediated talk anywhere through and on any screen or device.
Our relation to activity in the online social world is shifting from space to time. Attention should always have been measured in terms of time. We do not occupy space in the online world — we relate, in time and for stretches of time, to content and people.
Time is now multiply threaded, it is more often discontinuous than continuous, knitted and connected together out of intersections and connections that weave a social fabric more closely resembling the smooth and non-hierarchical architecture of felt, than the old, striated and linear designs of pre-patterned weave.
Time discontinuous is constituted on interruptions and distractions, our own individual focus of attention being the only synthesizing continuity possible. Separate times and timelines for each of us, in a world that is incapable of mediating truly shared time. A social world of adjacency and contiguity but lacking the higher and moving power of togetherness. We are next to, but not with, each other. And are our increasingly our own movers.
As we use media to stretch our relationships with people and interests across time and space, a bifurcation emerges between our own inner experience of now — attention, focused — and the online world’s capture and persistence of now-for-anytime. We are here now, online, but leave behind a wake of meaning that once digitized is durable without decay. The temporality of online is of connectedness, not continuity, for findability and visibility are the constraints on the “value” of the flotsam and jetsam that drifts in the flow of a realtime streaming world.
The activity streams in which we now live flows unceasingly, a river of news and information, rippling and eddying when currents are sustained for their currency. Trendlines on the surface of flow. The old world of territory, with its stocks of knowledge, its piles of treasure, was a world of allotment. The new world of flow, with its moving trends, its exchange dynamics, is a world of apportionment. The old media capital value of stocks and piles now washing downstream in a flow that values currency.
Currency flows, values dynamically representing present and changing interest and value, an attention economy made productive by means — you guessed it — of communication, threaten to displace old media capital investments. Social capital, valued not for its number, its pile size, but for its currency when put in play, and deeply contingent not on audience size but on its distribution by audience engagement and participation, is the currency of currency — the realtime flow.
A flow that we view not standing on its shores, but while drifting within it. For our perspective and lens on the flow is ours and ours alone — threaded as it were on our own, unique, and personal line of time. We live in our own streamtimes, even as we seek to connect.
This is a world not of information value, but of communication value. An open state of talk in which every statement and reference supplies connectedness to the timeless world of online. A world not of information but of meaning, not of static content but dynamic and relational action. Not of know-ledge but of know-who and know-how. Social, not archival.”
Adrian Chan on the Second Shift
“We are perched now at the threshold of another shift of paradigm. A world of interconnected streams, of intersections in flow and of dramatic escalations in amplitudes, of constructively-interfering ripples and waves, as well as chaos, turbulence, and noise. Meaning in the social cannot thrive on communication alone. It is only with social action and activity, that is, by means of relational connectedness, that it is cemented and validated socially.
This paradigm, of action streams perhaps, requires coupling, reciprocity, mutuality, for the proper binding that glues social connections. Talk not just spoken but heard and listened to. Talk not echoed but replied to. Talk that is not just the murmur of a babbling brook, the language of being, but the doing of becoming: communication that is action.
Streams, intersecting and cross-referential, permitting not just identities but socialities. A social media age in which communication is action, in which messages perform, and in which information is relation.
This is how I see it today. Social networking is rapidly becoming communication. Our profiles serve as resources, distributed identities but serving evergreen interests and referenced when the relevance adds value. The universe of social networks is itself becoming connected and in its connectedness, it matters less to the user where identity resources are kept and more how they are protected, secured, and made visible. And as networks become communication, communication becomes increasingly networked.
The next steps then, if possible in a world of un-coupled messaging, would be to enable interaction by messaging. To lift social activities out of their containers and architectures and embed them where possible in streams of social activity. And to architect, around communication, the meta data and state required for a truly inter-subective web.”
Rob Horning on capital-friendly identity formation:
“There are clear parallels between the transformational space of ads and the interactive spheres opened up by commercial social networks — in which brands intermingle with people on equal terms and data about the sort of connections we make are carefully aggregated. Much of our behavior online consists of this “linking work” — a form of immaterial labor which strengthens the consumerist code of meanings for goods while presenting that work as the strengthening of ties between friends and family. We are recognized as subjects by virtue of performing this sort of work.
It may be that the internet is expanding the kinds of domains that can signal identity, driving the domain hierarchy to ever further reaches of minute refinement. Berger and Heath claim that the product choices that are typically used for identity signaling are “publicly visible and made from a large choice set and take time or effort to make.” Web 2.0 services seemed to make more product choices visible and thus potentially identity-signaling. Social networks also help give shape to the groups that we seek to belong to through consumer goods — the networks produce and disseminate meanings for goods that need not be engineered in advance but that add value to the products. Social networks give us a field to display our identity in and a compendium from which to learn possible meanings that can be displayed. These are becoming more and more refined all the time, so that everything has an identity component, and everything must be “shared” in order for the consumer to realize what identity value is there to be realized in a good.
At this point, identity itself becomes a highly wrought, labor-intensive product. It begins to play as a status good, helping others signal belonging and uniqueness through association with us, with our reified identity, and so on. It has become an object among objects in the field of advertising, of which social networks are merely an extension. This is what Web 2.0 is ultimately all about — making everything part of the code of identity and stripping away the autonomy of any of our choices. Instead, they all mean something that we may or may not intend, we may or may not want to have to worry about. ?
That ties in to what is most disturbing about consumerism: how it appropriates consumption rituals and commercializes them, building in the priorities of capital directly into the social world and its material culture. It promises a paradoxical escape from being labeled by what we consume, by suggesting we can consume in isolation from society. But at the same time, that isolation makes us vulnerable, more prone to turn to advertisements in lieu of communities for a quick infusion of the social meanings none of us can exist without, regardless of what ideology tells us. The social hierarchies reproduced by consumerism are also engineered to suit capital, naturalizing the sorts of ritual consumption that suit its perpetuation: rather than potlatches and festivals, we orient our consumption through such ideas as invidious comparison, competitive conspicuous consumption and self-presentation as branding. Rather than use consumption to stabilize identity and render it secure, we end up using consumerism to chase the impossible dream of unfettered individuality, of identity that is entirely free of contingencies, of finding the goods that represent us and no one else for only those rare soul mates who can interpret them. We search and search for these people, destined never to find them, no matter how many fleeting glimpses of them we catch in the mirror.”
Posted in P2P Culture, P2P Epistemology, P2P Subjectivity, media | No Comments »
Iceland could become a internet and press freedom haven
A communication by Smári McCarthy of the Icelandic Digital Freedoms Society on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative:
This really important project, endorsed by the P2P Foundation, was also reported on BBC News:
“In recent months a group of local and international people has been working on an initiative here in Iceland to propose reforms in media- and freedom of expression law, with the goal of creating the best environment for publication in the world. The method has been to adopt the strongest protective laws that exist in the world, such as the Swedish press freedom law, the Belgian source- and communications protection law, the New York Libel Terrorism Protection law, and so on, and bundle them into a broad proposal.
As the freedom of expression is constantly eroded, with recent
examples of a source secrecy ban in Ethiopia, a draconian data retention policy being enacted in Belarus, and even in supposed liberal
democracies, laws such as the FRA law in Sweden, censorship lists in
various countries including Australia, Sweden and Norway, and more than 300 secret gag orders in the United Kingdom, the need for a place where the right to know is guarded and the right to share knowledge is upheld becomes ever greater.
We have set up a website for this initiative, which is, while we
finish the final cleanups and such, closed, but it will be open soon.
Until then I invite you to preview it. I hope that you will share the
URL and credentials with trusted friends and contacts.
Our goal is to get public endorsements from a number of international
organizations who believe this is generally a step in the right
direction. We have already received a few endorsements, including from Wikileaks and Eva Joly. If your organization is willing to endorse the proposal, I request that you let me know via e-mail. If you have a
comment of some sort, please let me know.”
Posted in Link recommendations, P2P Public Policy, P2P Rights, media | No Comments »
The emergence of algorithmic authority
Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority. … Algorithmic authority handles the “Garbage In, Garbage Out” problem by accepting the garbage as an input, rather than trying to clean the data first; it provides the output to the end user without any human supervisor checking it at the penultimate step; and these processes are eroding the previous institutional monopoly on the kind of authority we are used to in a number of public spheres, including the sphere of news.
Excerpts from a thoughtpiece by Clay Shirky:
“Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.
First, it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published. This is how Google’s PageRank algorithm works, it’s how Twitscoop’s zeitgeist measurement works, it’s how Wikipedia’s post hoc peer review works. At this point, its just an information tool.
Second, it produces good results, and as a consequence people come to trust it. At this point, it’s become a valuable information tool, but not yet anything more.
The third characteristic is when people become aware not just of their own trust but of the trust of others: “I use Wikipedia all the time, and other members of my group do as well.” Once everyone in the group has this realization, checking Wikipedia is tantamount to answering the kinds of questions Wikipedia purports to answer, for that group. This is the transition to algorithmic authority.
As the philosopher John Searle describes social facts, they rely on the formulation X counts as Y in C — in this case, Wikipedia comes to count as an acceptable source of answers for a particular group.
There’s a spectrum of authority from “Good enough to settle a bar bet” to “Evidence to include in a dissertation defense”, and most uses of algorithmic authority right now cluster around the inebriated end of that spectrum, but the important thing is that it is a spectrum, that algorithmic authority is on it, and that current forces seem set to push it further up the spectrum to an increasing number and variety of groups that regard these kinds of sources as authoritative.
There are people horrified by this prospect, but the criticism that Wikipedia, say, is not an “authoritative source” is an attempt to end the debate by hiding the fact that authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact. Authority is as a authority does.
It’s also worth noting that algorithmic authority isn’t tied to digital data or even late-model information tools. The design of Wikileaks and Citizendium and Apache all use human vetting by actors prized for their expertise as a key part of the process. What seems important is that the decision to trust Google search, say, can’t be explained as a simple extension of previous models. (Whereas the old Yahoo directory model was, specifically, an institutional model, and one that failed at scale.)
As more people come to realize that not only do they look to unsupervised processes for answers to certain questions, but that their friends do as well, those groups will come to treat those resources as authoritative. Which means that, for those groups, they will be authoritative, since there’s no root authority to construct from. (I lied before. It’s not turtles all the way down; its a network of inter-referential turtles.)
Now there are boundary problems with this definition, of course; we trust spreadsheet tools to handle large data sets we can’t inspect by eye, and we trust scientific results in part because of the scientific method. Also, although Wikipedia doesn’t ask you to trust particular contributors, it is not algorithmic in the same way PageRank is. As a result, the name may be better replaced by something else.
But the core of the idea is this: algorithmic authority handles the “Garbage In, Garbage Out” problem by accepting the garbage as an input, rather than trying to clean the data first; it provides the output to the end user without any human supervisor checking it at the penultimate step; and these processes are eroding the previous institutional monopoly on the kind of authority we are used to in a number of public spheres, including the sphere of news.”
It is useful to place Clay’s analysis in the context of a typology provided by Henry Jenkins, which shows that algorithmic authority is just one of three methods to create authority through collective intelligence.
Henry Jenkins:
“We can argue that there are a range of different models of collective intelligence shaping the digital realm at the present time. We might distinguish broadly between three different models:
1) An aggregative model which assumes that we can collect data based on the autonomous and anonymous decisions of “the crowd” and use it to gain insights into their collective behavior. This is the model which shapes Digg and to some degree, YouTube.
2) a curatorial model where grassroots intermediaries seek to represent their various constituencies and bring together information that they think is valuable. This is the model which shapes the blogosphere.
3) a deliberative model where many different voices come together, define problems, vet information, and find solutions which would be impossible for any individual to achieve. This is the model shaping Wikipedia or even more powerfully alternate universe games. Of the three, the deliberative model offers the most democratic potentials, especially when it is tempered by ethical and political commitments to diversity. This is the model which Pierre Levy describes in his book, Collective Intelligence. Levy’s account stresses the affirmative value placed on diversity in such a culture. The more diverse the community, the broader range of possible information and insights can inform the deliberative process.”
Posted in Collective Intelligence, P2P Governance, P2P Hierarchy Theory, media | No Comments »
Cory Doctorow on Shareable Publishing
Via Shareable magazine:
“In this PublishingPoint interview, Cory describes a new shareable book project he’s launching in which he serves as author, publisher, distributor and bookseller–and involves dozens of collaborators. “He also shares his thoughts about the ways in which traditional roles in publishing are becoming blurred,” says PublishingPoint. “And he touches on strategies that have made the popular on-line community Boing-Boing (where he serves as co-editor) so successful, including how he and his co-editors started Boing-Boing at almost no cost.” It’s a fascinating overview of state-of-the-art cultural production in the age of sharing.”
Video:
Posted in Gift Economies, Open Content, Open Models, P2P Business Models, P2P Culture, Video, media | No Comments »
Will Barnes and Noble kill the Kindle?
(via Glyn Moody)
In fact, this loaning function could be the viral feature that makes the device spread. Who would buy a walled-garden machine like the Kindle when the Nook has the same titles, cheaper, and you can borrow? The Nook is already starting to look like the real internet to the Kindle’s AOL.
Wired announces the coming launch of a new eBooks reader by Barnes & Noble, which will not have a DRM feature:
“The machine runs Google’s Android OS, will have wireless capability from an unspecified carrier and comes in at the same $260 as the now rather old-fashioned-looking Kindle.
It “features the line “Lend eBooks to friends”, and this has the potential to destroy the Kindle model. One of the biggest problems with e-books is that you can’t lend or re-sell them. If B&N is selling e-books cheaper than the paper versions, then the resale issue is moot. And lending, even if your friends need a Nook, too, takes away the other big advantage of paper.”
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“The Cosmonaut”, a new Open Movie project
The Cosmonaut in 5 steps from Riot Cinema on Vimeo.
The Cosmonaut is a feature film project by Riot Cinema Collective from Madrid, Spain, that uses Internet to find funding and distribution, in a collaborative way and under free Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike licences. The Cosmonaut is a movie about memories, and as its website says: “Even those memories which never existed”:
What if you got back home… and there was nobody there?
In 1973, the first Russian cosmonaut on the Moon is unable to make his way back and is declared missing in Space. However, through ghostly radio messages, he claims to have come back to Earth and found it empty, not a living soul. His unreal presence and voice will little by little destroy the world of his loved ones.
You can read more on the movie website where you can find the script, a dossier about the movie and other informations about locations and costumes. The project is really well documented, you can even find the timeline of the project and the list of all the people working on the movie. And the movie has even the support of Richard Stallman!
And aside of the movie itself, what is realy interesting for us is the business model they developed:
- Crowdfunding. From 2 euros, anyone can become a producer in this film. In exchange, this person will receive presents and other benefits.
- Capitalization.The people and companies involved in the team are also investors. They contribute, the equivalent to their salaries or resources and, in exchange, they receive in exchange a proportional percentage based on the total budget.
- Advertising and sponsorship. We are looking for companies which want to join their name and brand to our project as sponsors; with a careful presence through the different stages of the film. Always from a non-invasive, non-annoying approach.
- Investors.Instead of getting gifts and special offers, you can invest in a percentage of the film. From €1000 and with a joint venture agreement, they can receive part of the benefits the project may produce. (Ask how at hello@elcosmonauta.es).
This is the source code that will be open and freely available online:
- The film in HD.
- All the footage.
- Music and original audiomix.
- Graphics and designs used in the website and dossier.
- Original texts and derived ones.
- Works from artists who have transferred them for their use: poems inspired on the film, alternative soundtracks, sounds, graphics…
We will promote derived creation through several contests to look for the official poster, alternative editing, the perfect soundtrack… Something you create may even end up in the film.
It is important to follow this project in order to see if the business model works and if we can try to adopt it in other projects. We should also note that, at the moment, the movie itself will be created in a closed team, and it will be shared only once it’s completed. It’s a common trait of Open Movies so far: examples are Rip! Remix Manifesto, A Swarm of Angels and the Open Movies produced with the open source 3D software Blender: Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny (and the current one Project Durian).
I think that we can push such Open projects forward, with a real open and collaborative design process, but right now the tools, processes and systems we need are not completely ready yet. Such projects as The Cosmonaut are important because they are building and sharing with us such tools, processes and systems.
Posted in Crowdfunding, Open Content, Video, media | No Comments »
The mutualization of news: the Guardian’s Trafigura case
Editor Alan Rusbridger starts this interesting article by summarizing the recent censorship incident in the UK, and how Guardian readers helped the newspaper circumvent it:
“Recently, I was confronted with a legal obstacle that—possibly for the first time since we were founded in 1821—prevented The Guardian from reporting something that had happened in Parliament. We wrote a bafflingly cryptic front-page piece and I left the office feeling pretty fed up. But before sitting down to eat, I borrowed the restaurant’s computer to Tweet the fact of our gagging order. By the time I got home that evening Twitter had gone into meltdown. Several diligent tweeters had discovered the banned information and had published it. By morning, the news of the injunction and the corporation behind it—a hitherto obscure London-based trading company called Trafigura—was familiar to millions of Twitterers throughout Europe. “Trafigura,” which had gone to law in search of anonymity—had become the most searched for term in the Twittersphere. By lunchtime their lawyers had thrown in the towel.”
Alan then uses the concept of mutualization of news, and wonders in the rest of the article,whether a similar mutualization of newspaper funding would be possible.
Alan Rusbridger:
“It was the latest example of what I think of as the mutualization of a newspaper. Our readers have become part of what we do. They write commentaries for our Comment is Free site—they have helped with investigations into tax avoidance and police brutality. They form communities around individual reporters and issues, lending a hand with research and ideas, bringing us up short when we get things wrong. They have collaborated on big projects needing resources beyond our scope. We have done things that would have been impossible without them. In return we give them a more diverse form of journalism and the visibility that comes from a platform that reaches some 30 million unique users a month—two thirds of them outside the U.K.”
More about the funding issue here.
Posted in Crowdsourcing, P2P Business Models, media | No Comments »
