disorganization, or decentralization?

John Urry claims, in "Is Britain the First Post-Industrial Society," that Bell's thesis of post-industrialism hasn't quite proven true. He cites Liverpool and notes that the high rate of unemployment in this previously industrious city indicates that it is "deindustrialized," not beyond industry as "post-industrial" would suggest. He goes on to claim that Britain is more disorganized than before, and becoming moreso all the time.

But I disagree. It seems that the phenomenon he's describing here is a different form of organization, not simply a lack of it. Perhaps society is becoming decentralized, as people can bring more public consumer goods into their homes (VCRs, for instance) and they can increasingly telecommute (although this was less of a possibility in 1995, when the article was written). But what, then, do we make of AOL/Time Warner, and ClearChannel, and Unilever? These companies may be physically decentralized (spread out across different cities and countries), but they're certainly not disorganized, and their presence is a force of consumer product consolidation. Perhaps this could be related to Greg's post, where he mentions the idea of code interconnecting everything, and making everything dependent on it. Our society seems more decentralized, but behind the scenes, power is consolidating.

marx, schmarx

I'm tired of reading about socialism. Does this mean I'm ready to leave grad school? Hopefully.

Anyway, in the excerpt from "The Post-Industrial Society," Daniel Bell describes the shifting work population in this society. I've heard this stuff before, and this is pretty dated. But since he's one of the first to describe this stuff, I suppose interesting from a historical perspective, as he's hypothesizing somewhat, and has far less information than we do now about trends coming into the 21st century.

I think the best part I read here was a critique of the monolithic "system" in socialist theory.

There is no 'system' which 'reproduces' the existing division of labor in the next generation, but many different trends deriving from the diverse sources of occupational trends in the United States.

Take that, you imaginary proletariat class!

cameras have been installed for your safety...

OK, this isn't on the topic of the readings, exactly, but I did mention that these ideas were clanking around in my head...

I always find it amusing to read that big brother/doublespeak (yeah, I'm mixing metaphors, but they match, dammit!) when I walk into a store. I don't shoplift, but I can't really imagine how those cameras can be for my safety. Or when I'm in a dressing room? Do I feel safer because female monitoring personnel are monitoring me? Not really. Though occasionally, it would be nice to get a second opinion on a pair of jeans.

Anyway, I found a fascinating post on BoingBoing about the EULA for Amazon's Unbox, their rival for the Netflix crowd. In the post, the author points out some of the most egregious right-thefts in the agreement, such as how Amazon reserves the right to monitor your machine, have their software running in the background (with a presumed loss of performance) in order to perform those important monitoring task, the right to change the agreement, force you to install updates (or lose the movie content your bought), etc. Some of this stuff is unbelievable.

So...given all that, why would anyone pay to get content legally though this process when they can download it for free, without those constraints, from a bittorrent site? These agreements seem to be getting more and more ridiculous as file-sharing becomes more and more ubiquitous. It's as if it's a last-ditch, dying effort to preserve what little customer base is left for the purchasing of music and movies. But haven't they been to business school? The way to keep customers is not to strip them of their rights. I'm waiting for the entertainment industry to provide me with something worthwhile, for them to change their paradigm and sell me something I can't find easily elsewhere. I still pay for movies at the theater, for instance, or live concerts. I rent movies, too, although I've found it aggravating and have had to download them when I'm halfway through them and they skip. These agreements and this business model seem only to punish those trying to do right by these companies. It can't possibly be sustainable.

the intersection of code and law

The chapter I found most interesting in Lessig's Code is the one on intellectual property. I'm currently taking a class in the law school on intellectual property and I'm afraid I can't go anywhere right now without thinking about the way that I'm implicated in advertisements, contracts, trademarks and copyrights. Lessig's legal expertise is particularly useful when he describes the conflict between IP rights and contracts law in EULA agreements. What we get through fair use and other rights are (at least partially) contracted away when we agree to the Terms of Service. But just how defensible are these agreements in court? Certainly, there are some things they cannot legally embed in those terms and bind us to them, even if we're negligent and don't read them. Imagine yourself signing your first-born child away to Microsoft, for instance. A dark future, indeed! But it probably wouldn't hold up in court.
My boyfriend and I were talking about intellectual property rights, based on the Lessig readings and what I'm learning about trademark law, and we came up with some interesting thoughts and anecdotes, both real and imagined:

• What if you were to program a game that ran on the internet and used, as art assets, certain images from the New York Times archives online? These images are all copyrighted, of course, but if you didn't actually embed the images in the game--if you just linked to them--then what recourse does the NYTimes have?
  
• In 2004 GEICO sued Google because Google was selling its trademark to advertisers as a search term. In other words, if you typed "Geico" in Google, you'd get some related stuff in your results that certain companies had paid to put there. The courts found that Google didn't have the right to sell another company's trademark in that way.
  
• When students are forced to turn their papers in to a service such as turnitin.com, what rights do they have to their IP? Student IP in general is poorly protected, perhaps because the demand for it is low, but what if turnitin.com decided to sell some papers out the back end to those dodgy $10 term paper websites? What rights does a student have to his work produced for a class? Or what rights does he have to protest the publication of his material? For instance, writing on our blogs is a significant portion of our grade for this class, such that it would be difficult to do well in it if we were to refuse to publish our thoughts online. Now, supposing Greg were an evil tyrant professor and didn't allow us an alternative assignment (if we had good reason, like say, we were in the federal witness protection program or something). Would we be able to sue the University, or him, for forcing us to publish and punishing us if we didn't? What rights do we sign away when we matriculate at the University? Or what rights get contracted away when we sign up for a class?
  

Just some brief thoughts for now, but these ideas are a-buzzin' in me noggin!

big brother, evolving

In Lawrence Lessig's book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, he describes the possibilities of government regulation of the internet. Occasionally it's difficult to cast myself back to 1999 to think about where he's coming from, as it seems like a long time ago on internet time. But where his cute, pop-sci rhetoric doesn't clog his message too much, he's got some interesting things to say.

I've read his stuff before on the issues of plagiarism. Fascinating stuff, and not unrelated to talk about "cyberspace" (sorry--I just can't use that word without the distance of scare quotes). The ease of cut-and-paste, the possibilities for self-publishing of text, graphics, music and video have developed into a kind of "remix culture" that stretches far beyond the court cases involving hip-hop's sampling culture. In this book, he notes that he's a constitutional law expert. And he's also quite tech-savvy, as he sails through (necessarily simplified) discussions of TCP/IP and Linux and all sorts of things that generally turn lawyers a delicate shade of green. At first, I thought the guy had a lot of interests. But I'm realizing now that these interests are all connected. Issues of freedom and privacy and the shared space of government and individuals all figure in his publications.

I've been thinking about his unobtrusive, spying worm example in the very beginning of the book. Later, he mentions this concept again: "Cost for the government is liberty for us. The higher the cost of a regulation, the less likely it will be pursued as a regulation. Liberty depends on the regulation remaining expensive" (56). It's a scary thought, and he means it to be so. But I wonder about the cost of sorting information--with so much collected, certainly it's not free to winnow through it. Will it ever be completely cheap for the government to spy on individuals? One cost is public backlash, as we've seen in our current government's wiretapping program. It may be possible for Bush to escape direct punishment for the illegality of the program, but, as Lessig suggests, the norms of society are regulating him. Of course, if word didn't get out about it, it would have been possible for the administration to carry on without backlash. But in a society as open as ours, and with the current climate of whistle-blowing, it seems possible that many of these illicit (or non-transparent) plans will out. Perhaps I'm just an optimist.

One issue I'm having with the book, however, is that it portrays government as a kind of monolithic entity. This breaks somewhat when he cites New York v. United States (which found it unconstitutional for the US gov to indirectly force the states to pass legislation--it must do so directly and take the responsibility for it). But otherwise, he writes of the government like many of the freshman papers I see: "The media chooses to influence us through..." The government, in particular the US government, is no more of a monolith than "the media"--and given the consolidation of media outlets in corporations such as ClearChannel, it's less so. The government regulates our society with a mixture of motivations: safety and well-being of its constituency, desire for reelection, passion for certain causes, moral upstandingness or turpitude. It seems impossible to assign it the sweeping desires for information-collection that Lessig warns of. I think his warnings are apt, and important to heed. And certainly, open soruce code is a factor keeping the government honest. But at least in America, our government is made up of people like ourselves.

pynchon and revolutionary luddism

Since I can't access the other two excerpts from books to read for tomorrow, I spent some time following a few links about cautionary attitudes toward technology. I happened upon an essay by Thomas Pynchon from 1984 (appropriate date, eh?) that asks, "Is it ok to be a Luddite?" Pynchon, for those who don't know, is a recluse, scientist and novelist who is infamous for the impenetrable allusions littered in his text. Think Da Vinci Code only 100 IQ points higher, without all the answers and linear plot.

Anyway, he notes the revolutionary origins of the word Luddite, and how resisting the seemingly inexorable march of progress is not a new phenomenon. People have always had an uneasy relationship with the machines that make their lives easier because these machines also make some lives obsolete. Smashing the machines didn't work then and Pynchon laughs off the idea now (well, in 1984), too. It seems like resistance to the information revolution or computer age or whatever-you-want-to-call-it comes mostly in the form of uninformed legislation and ivory tower academics. What would violent resistance to the "Information Society" look like?

Winner's losers

First off, I have to admit that I read an unauthorized version of Langdon Winner's 1995 "Who will be in cyberspace," which I found here. My book is on campus, and I'm 4 miles away, in my pajamas, and my life isn't "virtual" enough yet to give me access to the authorized text without changing out of my pajamas. It ain't gonna happen.

Anyway, Winner provides a reality-checking foil to Dyson, Masuda, and the others. He hits several of the points we had discussed in class, namely that cyberspace is no guarantee of democracy or utopia, and that our progress towards the vanishing point of individuals, physicality, industry, and knowledge as we know it is neither and inexorable nor a god-given teleology:

We can pretend to follow "where the technology is taking us", to social outcomes "determined by market forces", but the fact is that deliberate choices about the relationship between people and new technology are made by someone, somehow, every day.

People shape this world that we see around us; it doee not evolve on its own. Ironically, however, Winner seems to think that there will be some point of no return, that Frankenstein's monster will one day overtake the ambitious doctor:

How people will recreate selfhood when everyone is expendable, could become a more serious issue than even the decline of real wages.

Can everyone really become expendable? I find his argument more persuasive when he claims that power is concentrated in certain segments of the population. The people who are making these important decisions that Winner thinks should be more thoroughly considered are the ones who will likely never be expendable. But by virtue of his position as a professional cultural theorist and relative Luddite, Winner ensures he will live up to his name in this new society.

information economics

I'm afraid I have little to say about Leadbeater's piece, "Living on Thin Air." It's tuff I've heard before--yes, things have become destabilized, and yes some people are ending up better than others. My partner lives that same kind of freelance computer whiz existence, while I've chosen to go the (relatively) secure university professor route. We figure we can hedge our bets that way. This would be much different if we had national health care, incidentally, which I presume Leadbeater (as a resident of London) does have. But what good does it do to call for a new economic system without a great deal of specifics, as Leadbeater does here? He is dissatisfied with the market/capitalist system, the community system (is this communism? It's hard to tell) doesn't work for him, and the "Third Way" (which, I'll admit, I never really understood) also won't cut it. We should have as our goal the speading of knowledge--presumably to that it is a commodity, so that everyone can enjoy it, and we have fewer of those economic giants hoarding all the good stuff in the economy. But without solutions, I'm afraid he had little to add to what I've already read about directions for the "new economy."

the internet is a vehicle for self-discipline?

I was impressed at Masuda's prescience in the excerpt we read from his 1990 book Managing in the Information Society. I think he got a few things amazingly right (seriously, what were you thinking about the "information society" in 1990? It certainly wasn't on my mind!), but I'm not certain if his trick is akin to the astrologer's horoscope--"You are stressed about something, and perhaps unsure of your current relationship. You will take a trip soon"--who wouldn't that apply to? At any rate, here's some of the stuff I think he got right, and where I think he got it right:

• 6. The shared utilization of the "synergetic economy" (p. 17) reminds me a lot of the open-source movement.
• 8. The creation of the "voluntary community" brings to mind interest-based forums, chat rooms, and all the things that bring together those super- specific groups (i.e. lizard-loving-albinos-who-play-Chutes-and-Ladders)
• 12. Perhaps this is just my optimism, but I do see a little bit more "participatory democracy" in the blogosphere, Howard Dean's campaign and moveon.org .
• 14. So dead-on it's scary--the adjustment problems of rapid technology adoption, problems of privacy, global terrorism, etc.
  
• 15. "computerization will make it possible for each person to create knowledge and to go on to self-fulfillment" sounds a lot like wikipedia to me. Or at least the first part does; I'm ashamed/proud (depending on my audience) to admit that I've not experienced the "self-fulfillment" of wikipedia authorship.
  

Some stuff though just sounds quixotic and socialist to me, and not exactly how the whole "information society" thing is shaking out 16 years after this publication. Masuda says the information society will be "horizontally functional, maintaining social order by autonomous and complementary functions of a voluntary civil society" (p. 17, italics in original). Participation I see, but hierarchy still exists on the internet, as far as I can tell. Don't some sites get way more traffic than others? Aren't some deemed far more superior than others? Aren't people employed in knowledge work at the higher echelons of the pay scale, if not yet of society (although Bill Gates has made great strides for geeks everywhere)? And in particular, I think Masuda's way off when he suggests that the spirit of globalism (which I do think is in play on the internet) equates to "a symbiosis in which man and nature can live together in harmony consisting ethically of strict self-discipline and social contribution" (p. 20, italics in original). The internet is a vehicle for "strict self-discipline?" Hasn't he heard what the internet is really for?

just what is this "information society", anyway?

In a conversation, we say "technology" and think we know what we're talking about. For instance, I often tell people that I'm interested in technology and its effects on writing, or that I'm interested in teaching with technology. But this often goes unprobed. Does this mean that I am interested in computers? Are computers just those processor/keyboard/screen combinations produced by Dell and Gateway and Apple? Or what about ipods and projectors and, better yet, pencils? In short, I really have no idea what I'm talking about when I say "technology." But no one calls me on it.

In the introduction to his The Information Society Reader (2005), Frank Webster notes that it's "especially surprising [] that so many professional commentators evoke an Information Society without being at all clear about what they mean by the term" (10). Commentators like Webster himself, in fact. While I've only read the intro, I notice that he's very cavalier about the term "Information Society" without being very clear about what he means. There's controversy about it, sure, but what is it?

Wikipedia is no help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_society . I thought I could trust such a darling of "the Information Society" to explain the term to me, but the entry is full of ramblings and points mostly to outside authorities--some of which are also cited in Webster's book.

Since there's so obvious a void here, I feel I need to fill it. I'm not crazy about the term "Information Society" because it implies that it's a monolithic thing, that we're all post-modern (also undefined but used by Webster) and living in the same age. While the potential speed of communication may make feel like a "global village" at times, there's plenty of people living in the modern (as opposed to "postmodern") age--my parents for instance--and many others living in spaces far less connected than that. I think it's interesting to theorize what the world looks like from the perspective of a connected (in social and digital wired/wireless terms) academic, but I think it's important to acknowledge that this is still just one band in our, ahem, broadband (and not so broadband) world. From that perspective, I see the "Information Age" ( a term I like better, for some reason) as having a unique problem: our concern should no longer be the acquisition of knowledge, but the sorting of it.

response to 676 readings

As if I didn't have enough blogs hosted here already... After some thought, I decided to split off my reactions to 676 readings to keep the rest of my blogs unsullied with my student role in this class. I'll move the posts here.