On 9 January 2010 on the occasion of the honorary doctorate to be conferred upon Prof. Lawrence Lessig by the University of Amsterdam I attended Lessig’s keynote speech as part of the symposium on Open Content and Academic Publishing, Dutch Internet law expert Arnoud Engelfriet has an excellent blog post in Dutch in response to Lessig’s lecture and includes video. These are my notes from the lecture:

Observations on culture and copyright

According to Lessig copyright has little to do with the sphere of culture but the scope of copyright has changed drastically. It now touches everyone and everything and most of us cannot spend even an hour without colliding with copyright. This is because of the architecture of digital world where very few uses are copyright free. The digital architecture triggers the application of copyright. In the physical world, the reading of a book is unregulated. We allow free use of the book. Not fair use, but free use. We can even give the book away or sell it and it’s still a form of unregulated use. In the digital world this has changed as every single  use creates a copy. The platform by which we have access to copyrighted material such as books has changed. What does this mean for the media ecology

Professionals are people who depend on exclusive rights as part of their business model. They use copyright as a way to secure their business. The paradigm here is that if you don’t secure, you get less creativity. However, not all creators have the same business model. Copyright’s paradigm ignores these important cases that apply a different business model: amateur’s produce for the love, not for the money. This is critical for culture. The new ecology does not have exclusive rights but is building upon creativity within the ecology. The business model of this ecology is different.

There is a clash between the paradigm of copyright and the paradigm of creativity.

Two bits of culture

The ecology of books is one that preserves access well through library and used book shops. But when we compare it to the preservation of film there is something different going on. Film is often a compilation and its reuse is contingent of permissions of the rights holder. Documentaries contain snippets of other sources and it took Grace Guggenheim 20 years to clear the rights of her father’s legacy to transfer them to DVD. It seemed practically impossible to renew all the contracts of the snippets. Sadly, the vast majority of these films will disappear because nitrate film will dissolve before all rights are cleared.

What is different about these two bits of culture is the regime of rights under which books and films are created.

The ecology of creativity within science

What is the business model of science and what is its ethos? Science is about the common ownership of goods and entails a business model does that not build on exclusive rights. Lessig claims that the ecology of knowledge can actually be harmed by copyright. If the business model of science depends on sharing and building upon previous knowledge then how does the paradigm model of copyright help and where does it help? For example, academic journals violate the norm of science: to provide universal access to knowledge (Enlightenment ideal). Production costs made exclusive right ok in the past but these are now gone in the case of digital production and distribution. The open access movement aims to replicate the good in the process of peer review and access and avoid the evil in restrictions on access. An example is the Public Library of Science. Law has been oblivious to the ecology of creativity.

Ecology of access

Through the eyes of copyright there are three types of books:

1. In copyright and in print (9%)
2. In the public domain (16%)
3. Presumptively under copyright, but no longer in print (75%)

The Google Books project decided to scan the books first and then ask for permission. Soon after the launch of the project Google was sued by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild for “massive copyright infringement.” The first category of books didn’t pose a problem because publishers and authors may be contacted and asked for permission. The second category doesn’t require permission. But the third category is a different case because all these books are still under copyright but no longer in print and there is very likely no one to ask permission. If you would need permission before scanning it would mean that 75% of all the books would disappear. This case eventually led to the McGraw-Hill settlement:

So, this project launched and then the lawsuit filed against it was then purportedly settled by an agreement last October (slide: 10/28/08). The agreement says that basically 20% of all of the books in that little category would be available freely to people as they want across the Google Book Search Library. Freely in the sense that Google was going to pay for that right, but at least the user could get access to it for free. And then you would have the right to purchase the full book. And that money the user would pay for would then go into a pool that would be held by some new corporation that would give it out to those orphaned authors, assuming they could be found some day in the future. What this settlement left open, importantly, was whether what Google did originally should be considered Fair Use. Google, rightly in my view, insisted that their original plan was protcted by Fair Use, and they did not give up that claim in the settlement, but of course, the Authors’ Guild disagrees with that. So, whether it’s fair use to make this scan or snippets, so that was still held open, but now the project would now open 20% of these books up, and obviously 20% is more than snippets. (Lessig talk transcription by calmansi)

What is the ecology that this settlement produces? We currently have full free access in libraries, not a mere 20% access (20% is a simplification of the actual formula of access). The settlement produces a radically different library. This is not a digital library being built but a digital bookstore! We are an obsessive permission culture and those permissions are now down to the level of the quote (Google snippets). This causes the fear that this permission architecture will now cement. Does this make sense?

What to do?

Changing law is hopeless but we can change norms and practices: Creative Commons. This may also be applied to science in Science commons:

1. Lower transaction costs of sharing, infrastructure to enable sharing. open access movement: 1000 journals
2. Open data. CC0 = a waiver, not a license, of all the rights one might possibly claim. Technical information sharing: RDFa, semantic web
3. Open materials. Scientists often deal with “stuff”. A Creative Commons infrastructure on the level of material, for example the personal genome project

We need to mark content with freedoms and make it human readable, lawyer readable and machine readable in RDF. Lessig calls for changing our norms and practices instead of trying to change the law.

More photos on Flickr licensed under an Attribution (Anne Helmond) – Noncommercial – No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

Dead Media/Live Nature

On October 31st I attended the first ASCA matinee with speaker Jussi Parikka from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His talk, titled “Dead Media/Live Nature: Media Ecologies of Animal Intensities,” focused on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media lab.

In preparation of his talk we were sent three readings:

1. Matthew Fuller (2007), “Art for Animals.“
2. Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in Charles Acland, Residual Media.¹
3. Garnet Hertz (2009), Dead Media Project

On the Future of New Media

Sterne describes how the “new” in new media consists of two types of newnewss for scholars:

In short, there are really two models of “newness” to which scholars of media change need to attend: (1) the “newness” of a medium with respect to other media, and (2) the so-called state of the art in design and function within a given medium.  Scholars, journalists and many others who write about computers have tended to collapse the second sense of newness into the first. (p. 18) [...] In a weird, recursive way, new media are “new” primarily with reference to themselves. (p. 19)

What constitutes the new is the halfwayness² and planned obsolescence of new media:

Combined with the “halfwayness” of most new media, planned obsolescence guarantees the continued recursive experience of digital media as “new”. The newness of new media is sustained by people continually disposing of the equipment they have in anticipation of something better. (p. 23)

I admit. I am one of those people. Last summer I replaced my fully functional 30 gig iPod video with an 16 gig iPod Touch because it offered me something more advanced and something better. Not so much storage wise but purely in functionality. I no longer see my iPod (Touch) as my iPod but as a small portable computer device (with tons of great and useless apps) that happens to play music. My other iPod is now obsolete, it lies in the corner of my room waiting to be used because it is still fully functional, yet I have discarded it as old and no longer useful. Yet, I do not throw it away. Sterne attributes this to the fact that equipment is expensive so we do not immediately throw it away after we have discarded our obsolete hardware. However, once we do, it becomes part of the junkyard of computers which leads to environmental problems. This is where Garnet Hertz’ Dead Media Project comes in.

Dead Media Project

In Hertz’ Dead Media Initiative he addresses the crossroads of media archeology and media ecology. The project links between themes of nature and technics and points to the material contexts of media. The Dead Media Project has three interests:

1. Repurposing media as a creative artistic project: it addresses the problems of electronic waste (gasses etc). A new temporality: cycle of consuming, human time of use value.
2. Extending media beyond individual use: Media as a community and artistic production as seen in do-it-yourself  and circuit bending practices. It aims to extend media to what is at hand.
3. Innovation through analysis of media history. It entails a shift of emphasis that looks as the usefulness of obsolescence: it offers us cheap research and design. The dynamics of media change.

Media as the death of nature

According to Parikka there are new waves of media studies: media archeology, media ecology and dead media studies. These semantics point to a crucial need to rethink media culture that takes into account the overlapping and boundaries of nature, technology and culture. Jussi Parikka addresses the animal forces within technology.

A medium is often described as a communication network, which is a broad definition. The Cross Talk project looks at new media spheres that pass through humans where the body becomes part of the media network. Its objective is to try to find processes in the natural world, for example bodies, as conduits for communications. What are natural technics that can function as carriers of signals or messages?

Relationality is the approxamity of relations. If you want to understand an media essemblage you have to look at its relations. What are the compositional dynamics that constitute media ecologies?³ Parikka is interested in the links between the themes of nature and technics and the material contexts of media. In his Spam Book he describes the Anomalies of Network Society which connects to his current research because it is a way of looking at media in ways it is not usually looked at. Nature has been seen as secondary signification, especially in the UK based strand of Cultural Studies which focusses on the politics of media. Nature is seen as merely  an affordance.

In a non-representational approach/analysis we could ask what kind of objects are circulating within media ecologies? Moving to the field of Software Studies, software may be used as the basis for the study of non-human autonomous agents. Examples of this type of research is focused on swarms (for example Galloway on Swarm Games) and object-oriented programming. These swarms are algorithmic insects and they are what produce second order effects.

The two strands of Media ecology (Neil Postman & Matthew Fuller) seem to be merging where, according to Parikka, media ecologies becomes less of a critique but more of a new strand.

The origins of the field of media ecology lie in the Toronto School and the New York School. In ‘What is Media Ecology?‘ Lance Strate⁴ describes it as

technological determinism, hard and soft, and technological evolution. It is media logic, medium theory, mediology. It is McLuhan Studies, orality–literacy studies, American cultural studies. It is grammar and rhetoric, semiotics and systems theory, the history and the philosophy of technology.

Neil Postman, seen as the father of Media ecology, defines it as follows:⁵

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. [...]

It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do.

Media ecology is the study of media as environments.

What Fuller and Parikka contribute to the Postman’s Media ecology is the increasing solidification and naturalization of the non-technological within our society. By doing so it would like to expand media studies’ agenda by borrowing from nature. Approprating and expanding our standardized uses and understandings by reconsidering what on earth have we have previously considered as media and why. Koert van Mensvoort examines this reconsideration of media and nature in the Next Nature blog. In the Next Nature publication Michiel Schwarz describes this reconfiguration of media ecology through media, technology and nature:

In the age where we have genetic engineering, artificial beaches, nature-identical food flavourings and virtual environments, what we traditionally used to view as ‘nature’ has now become an object of human design. ‘So-called nature’ has become a culturally-constructed nature in a mediated world. In this world, it is perhaps fitting that we now manipulate not only what we believed to be nature, but we happily also manipulate our images of nature. (..) What the images of multiple natures reveal to us, then, is the ‘new ecology’ in which we now find ourselves. A new ecology, where natures, technologies and media are all caught up together. (Schwarz)

1. Acland, Charles R. Residual media. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. p 16-31.[↩]
2. As described in: Pacey, Arnold. The culture of technology. MIT Press, 1983.[↩]
3. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005: p. 131[↩]
4. Lance Strate, “Understanding MEA,” In Medias Res 1 (1), Fall 1999.[↩]
5. Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum.” in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education (1970[↩]

Blogging is often seen as a new form of journalism, an online diary or a democratising medium which potentially gives every citizen a voice. However, what can we say about blogging and the blogosphere if we look at blogs from within the medium? In other words, what is blogging when we look at the software blogs are made with?

Anne Helmond graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a study on WordPress, the leading blog software. This research focuses on how blog software and search engines arose at the same time (1999) and have since established a tight relationship. What does this mean for bloggers, blogs and the blogosphere if we look beyond search engine optimization?

Anne Helmond – The blog as database from Vileo on Vimeo. (Thanks Vileo for the video!)

My slides are available in a previous post: “Slides from my presentation at the first WordCampNL.”

Yesterday I attended the first ever WordCampNL where I gave a talk about “The blog as database. Blogging and the blogosphere through the eyes of software and search engines.” I talked about how research can tell us something about current blogging culture through three concepts:

1. Freshness Fetish (an internal wish to update, the consensus within the blogosphere to blog daily and the external force of the search engines that rank their content according to freshness)
2. Software-Engine relations (the role of the search engines in indexing, shaping and constructing our blogosphere and blogging behavior)
3. Template Culture (how the software also defines the aesthetics of blogging and the rise of the ‘widgetized self’ – see a previous post on The widgetized self and the modding user in the blogosphere

The talk was also recorded for WordPress.TV and I will keep you posted when the video material is online. [Update: Video now available]

The first Dutch edition of WordPress was a great success thanks to the organizers. I also got a chance to meet my ex-colleague of the Blog Herald and long time blogging inspiration Lorelle VanFossen and successful blogger Liz Strauss.

On top of that I was actually able to help some people with some WordPress questions. Loved it!

Photo by Daphne Channa Horn (whose blog I built ;)

Madbello from about:blank posted a small video preview of WordCampNL

I will be speaking (in English) at the first WordCampNL edition in Utrecht on 31 October 2009. I will be presenting my research on Blogging for Engines filled with updates and practical implications for bloggers. Please join us if you’re interested in blogging/WordPress and I hope to see you there!

Summary:
Blogging is often seen as a new form of journalism, an online diary or a democratising medium which potentially gives every citizen a voice. However, what can we say about blogging and the blogosphere if we look at blogs from within the medium? In other words, what is blogging when we look at the software blogs are made with?

Anne Helmond graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a study on WordPress, the leading blog software. This research focuses on how blog software and search engines arose at the same time (1999) and have since established a tight relationship. What does this mean for bloggers, blogs and the blogosphere if we look beyond search engine optimization?