David Weinberger

Am I the only person not to finish Here Comes Everybody?

10/31/2008 by simoncollister 4 Comments

This may be somewhat controversial, but I can’t bring myself to finish Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.

It may be this year’s bestseller, but I am struggling to find anything new or ground-breaking between the covers. Admittedly, there are a couple of anecdotes or examples I find interesting enough to dog-ear the page, but the number of dog-eared pages is low.

As I’ve read the book some ideas I can’t help but feel I’ve read before. The chapter ‘Sharing Anchors Community’ has some dog-earring but both David Weinberger and Yochai Benkler have covered off the Internet’s challenges to institutional ecology from a more social and economic perspective.

Likewise, in the chapter Publish, then Filter, Shirky explores the idea that with massively decreased production and storage costs (specifically, the cost of publishing content via blogs) the Internet changes the media model whereby barriers to creating content disappear giving everybody (from the book’s title?) a chance to compete with hitherto professional creators/publishers etc.

I admit I’m simplifying here, but the idea the Internet is re-shaping human knowledge and the ways in which we interpret the world around us based on the growing digital (dis)order is explored in much more depth in Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. See my review for a bit more about this.

Writing about the book in response to Felix Stalder‘s review in Mute magazine, I suggested that HCE is a business book, rather than a study in digital sociology or emerging digital economics.

A colleague suggested that idea to me independently when he remarked that “like all business books, it could have pruned to about five pages.”

I have to agree. There’s a lot of homely anecdotes which frankly I just find are filler. And that’s why I’ve given up two-thirds of the way through.

What do others think? Am I being too unforgiving?

Technorati tags: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, business books

Quote du jour

10/03/2008 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Pure poetry:

“…companies so lobotomized that they can’t speak in a recognizably human voice build sites that smell like death.”

[Context]

[Via Doc Searls]

That McCain technology policy

08/27/2008 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Further to my previous post, I appreciate this is more Weinberger (not in itself a bad thing) but it *is* relevant to the post below about copyright.

Weinberger flags Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s technology policy which, in Weinberger’s words, shows that:

He’s flat against Net neutrality.
He wants to see copyright extended and enforced more vigorously.
He thinks the current infrastructure only needs a couple of tweaks.

So there you have it. Not only are large corporations trying to protect IP through greater enforcement and tighter controls on the Internet, but politicians are now looking to curry with corporations. That’s when we really need to start worrying!

Opening salvo on the battle for commons-based digital rights

08/27/2008 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

As mentioned earlier this week I was catching up with some hard-copy reading during my holiday, including Eben Moglen’s Anarchism Triumphant.

Moglen’s essay explains why it is that “software” resists traditional forms of copyright both legally and technically and instead embraces new legal paradigms, such as commons-based agreements.

I put software in inverted commas as Moglen extends this concept beyond the explicit programmes which our computers run; instead he suggests that “software” includes the creative ideas and content which produced, shared and adapted by individuals.

Thus, Moglen contends, traditional organisations with an interest in protecting their IP are becoming ever more aggressive and – some would say – desperate to make sure the Brave New World of commons-based digital rights never happens; or more accurately, happens in the way they dictate.

Fascinating stuff. Either way this is a preamble to flag a revelatory post by David Weinberger who blogs about an important federal judge ruling that will hopefully set a legal precedent preventing companies (Viacom in this case) from sending copyright infringement notices automatically in any instance where they pick up key words, e.g. “jon stewart” or "daily show".

Not only does this flouting the ol’ “innocent until proven guilty” line, it is also tantamount to a deliberate policy of heavy-handed copyright protection-as-future-deterrent.

As Weinberger points out, while sending infringement notes from an automatically generated list takes seconds, “the response is analog, and thus hard, time-consuming, and risky”.

I think it’s fair to say these issues affect all of us – as individuals or professionals, whose clients may just be on the receiving end of an infringement action at some point.

Either way, they are definitely not going to go away. I only hope we have a judiciary far-sighted enough in the UK to make and uphold such rulings here.

Technorati tags: Digital Rights, Copyright, Copyleft, David Weinberger, Viacom

Internet and Ideology Part 3 – Society

03/11/2008 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Following on the political and economic changes of modernity, the emergence of social mobility was also a new development based partly on individual’s new found power of self-determination.

Modernity represented:

“a move away from traditional society marked by an unchanging hierarchy … modernity involved a search for new identities to replace the traditional and religiously sanctioned ones of the previous epoch. Moreover it was made clear that these new identities were the creation of human action and agency, rather than god given and unalterable.”

What this means is: people living in the modern period became individuals for the first time. The ideology of modernity helped people define their own personality and shape their own lives through their actions.

However this social emancipation was still only available within the confines of the relatively structured society at the time. Likewise it was also limited by cultural norms and shared values.

There was a long way to go until people had real personal liberty but then the process of enlightenment was just that: a process. Things didn’t change overnight but from modernity onwards individuals shaped by own actions.

Contrast this with the Internet Age – a period of relatively early post-modernity. People have (mostly) had self-determination and the concept of being limited in terms of what we want to do – socially at least – is something alien to us – or at least a lot of us.

Looking forward and extending the idea of a post-modern ideology offering individuals something more than just the opportunity to shape their own lives, the internet offers us the possibility to not only define but invent, create, design, shape, live, change, co-create a range of identities and lives.

One rather basic example of this the ability of someone to take on an alter-ego in Second Life. But the same notion applies when we think about the different personalities we all probably have. My persona on ebay is probably different from this blog; likewise my blog is probably different from my Twitter profile which in turn is probably different from my Facebook profile.

This is Modernity’s idea of a self-determined individual exploded arcoss a range of platforms and positions not bounded by geography – or indeed physical space of any kind. David Weinberger has a great illustration of what this means practically and philosophically in Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

But bear in mind that this is just me with a predominantly Modern conept of myself as a single entity simply being expanded across the internet retrospectively.

Think of what this all means to the generation below me (and the rest) who have grown up in an internet age. The type of people who cannot remember a time BG – Before Google.

Technorati tags: ideology, post-modernism, modernity, John Schwarzmantel, society