What is The Message?

Posted 10:05 by Mark Federman permanent link

Amos Satterlee suggests an interesting line of reasoning concerning the intersection of digID (Digital ID - the unique identifier of our digiSelf that will be used in commercial, and other types of, transactions), Digital Rights Management and the Total Information Awareness initiative in the United States (and, one must presume, elsewhere to some non-trivial degree). Noting that the digID will be conspicuous by its absence for any of our digiSelves, he opines, "You will be unable to access significant content without a digID, and the class of digID you have will determine what level of access, both in terms of content and throughput, available to you. And once D[igital] A[ccess] M[anagement] has been established, the "public" network will be marginalized. ... no person of any credibility will waste their time mucking through the pr0n and spam on the public net. This will also simplify surveillance. TIA will only have to look at the private net..."

As a civilization, we have spent centuries refining our notion of the individual, starting with the ancient technology of private reading and private thoughts. What we keep in our heads defines us uniquely as individuals. It is at the root of liberty, personal freedom and our vaunted democratic ideals. The Reversal (and perhaps Obsolescence) aspects of digID are where we should be focused in the digID and DRM discussions. As Scatterlee puts it, "a more meaningful discussion is what will be the long-term effects on the notion of individual identity in a world where information is so promiscuous." Couldn't have said it better myself!
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Posted 00:55 by Mark Federman permanent link

The digiSelf goes for a test drive! Bloomberg.com reports this interesting advertising twist in which companies develop advertisements that play like video games. In the lead example, a future Jeep Rubicon buyer takes the vehicle on a computer-simulated, 4-wheel test drive up a steep rock ledge. He bought right after playing the online game. As television advertising must make its appeal through a medium that essentially turns us into zombies (and not actively engaged as in Marshall McLuhan's day), a different strategy must be used to attract and appeal to the very active and mobile digiSelf. Now I wonder where I can buy that interplanetary time travelling shuttle I was playing with...
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Posted 09:49 by Mark Federman permanent link

Two stories caught my attention today, and it is their coincidence in time that is particularly striking. The Globe and Mail reports that Canada's federal ombudsman, George Radwanski, has tabled a report identifying "massive government databases that use these biometric identifiers to catalogue people's travel habits at home and abroad, their Internet usage, their e-mail and cell phone conversations and even videotapes them as they converse on a street corner. ... this Orwellian society could be the natural evolution of the Liberal government's "unprecedented assault" on privacy rights." The report identifies how the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency personal travel database can, under pending legislation, be used by a variety of agencies and police forces for purposes other than the nominal protection against terrorism.

Then, the Toronto Star has a story that reports on the theft of a hard drive from service provider ISM of Regina has resulted in the loss of personal information on 180,000 life and pension plan clients of Co-operators Life Insurance Company. The sensitive information contains everything an identity thief would need to kidnap the digiSelves of all these people: Names, addresses, birthdates, social insurance numbers, banking information - the works!

The first story describes the depth of surveillance to which digiCanadians are potentially subject. The second clearly identifies the risk of digiKidnapping, even from an ostensibly secure data centre. The juxtaposition of the two stories is frightening in its dystopian potential, and raises the following questions: What liability to the individuals do governments and corporations have for the appropriate care and control of our digiSelves? In fact, who owns our digiSelf in the first place?

I'll bet dollars to donuts that we won't like the answers.
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Posted 02:00 by Mark Federman permanent link

Adina Levin's BookBlog touched off a firestorm when she made an entry discussing Socially Augmented Reality, a.k.a. cyborgism. The ensuing discussion proved rather entertaining, and prompted a further entry noting, "that the real cyborg experience is a community, which is different from the media and commercial stereotype."

One of the comments mentioned the all-too-human failing of language and vocabulary. I can never resist a good straight-line. My response:

The "mention of "vocabulary" is particularly useful. Language - our first technology, by the way - not only takes our thoughts from "inner" to "outer" (or "utter," as McLuhan and James Joyce were wont to say). Language also takes thoughts from outside and brings them in, to influence our thinking. In doing so, the specific language we use, and the way in which we use it, results in our forming conceptions or models of reality. The problem with this, of course, is that "believing is seeing" (and not really the other way around.) We only see that which we believe to fit our individual models of reality. Perception is regularly overridden by conception; our ability to see the effects of change is impaired by our preconceived theory of change.

(This thinking brought to you by my course in Applied McLuhanistics)"
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Posted 01:06 by Mark Federman permanent link

The Economist has a great "survey" - a set of articles on a specific theme - called The Internet Society. The various articles deal with societal issues that arise from the Internet including digital surveillance, digital democracy, the haves vs. the have-nots, and others. Among them, Through a glass darkly makes the case that, "The biggest decisions about the internet's future will be political and social, not technological." The article circles around the Laws of Media aspects of Reversal and Obsolescence, without specifically naming them, of course. It concludes by noting, "The truth is that we all live in the internet society now, whether or not we spend any time online. [An observation I, too, have made based on the nature of Acoustic Space] The future will bring exciting, disorienting change as electronic communication reaches ever deeper into everyone's life. The prizes will be great. A more productive and safer society is possible. But things could also go nastily wrong."

Almost there, but not quite. Governments and businesses would do well to use the lens of the Laws of Media, and other McLuhan thinking tools, to examine proposed policies and initiatives. Understanding all of the effects beforehand allows us, as a society, to choose our causes wisely.
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Posted 00:12 by Mark Federman permanent link

We held a little experiment in creativity and human dynamics at the Program on Monday, all in support of the upcoming Toronto International McLuhan Festival of the Future. One of the planned evenings at the Festival will be part party, and part futuristic voyage of self-discovery. Guests at the party will, through a variety of games and other fun activities, try to discovery whether they are Designarazzi, Artistocrats, Imagicians, Mediaficionados, Mentallurgists, run-of-the-mill McLuhanatics or one of two dozen other neologistic "TIMFF-Types." Our experiment saw 16 people play with creating new types of party games that explored both fun interactions, and the depth of new awareness created by unpacking and repacking new words. This is a classic McLuhan activity, one McLuhan himself learned from the likes of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and one of his mentors at Cambridge, I.A. Richards.

Our favourite cyborg, Steve Mann, was with us at last evening's festivities and offers a variation on one of our games, "Pret a Portemanteau".
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Posted 09:14 by Mark Federman permanent link

The New York Times (free registration required) has an article (here, if you don't want to register)about how newspaper editors attempt to identify automated letters to the editors, organized by lobbyists, as opposed to those from "real people."

" Organized letter-writing campaigns have been around for decades. But the Internet has sped up both their scope and pace. At any time, editors are being bombarded by at least two or three campaigns covering any range of topics, among them immigration, school prayer and politics in general. The large campaigns are easier to spot because many identical letters appear at once. It is the isolated letter that editors have to keep an eye out for."

However, lobbyists are becomeing more sophisticated in their endeavours. For example, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin has a "mix and match" letter generating applet on their website at which letter-writers can select various paragraphs and arrange them in a customized order.

Editors bemoan form letters, calling them unethical. However, what is the difference in effect between people selecting from among several pre-written paragraphs online, and selecting from among several pre-written paragraphs that they parrot from "opinion-makers" who appear on television?

The difference might be that our digiSelves are more aware than our couch-potato incarnation. And newspaper editors may well be demonstrating their fear of new awareness online.
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Posted 16:13 by Anonymous permanent link

Just a quick note, to underline a cliché we split into a new meaning recently at the Coach House. Derrick de Kerckhove was noticing that the Third World War has been announced every year since the beginning of the cold war,
has become a cliché. As a cliché it is something that everybody relate to, as something more than possible, or something to wait for, as if globalization might ask for global scale wars to solve its problems.

By the way the expression turned very easily into the "Third-World War," the war of the wealthy standard against starving and politically simple countries,
starting from Afghanistan, that was one of the last countries on earth for quality of life, to Iraq, where western money feeds and will feed a small elite between uneducated people living in tribal economy and laws. The next might be North Korea, where no other country was allowed to engage in business until last year, social poorness, self segregation of a country where people are still wondering what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ethiopia would probably be next, a no mans land where war lords are able to do any kind of business. Last but not least Agolpe is ready to start in Venezuela where rich people lives into bridges segregated condos, millions of starving lives at the border of cities waiting for food or using guns to take it.

So the solution for all of this seems to be in a cliché created almost 50 years ago. If the cliché had shaped the world or if the world was scientifically driven to this point by laws similar to natural ones is hard to say, but for sure few people seems to be surprised to witness a Third-World War.

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Posted 11:33 by Mark Federman permanent link

I overheard my middle-school-attending daughter respond to one of her friends, "Oh, that's so ghetto." Ghetto? She explained that, in her school, ghetto is synonymous with bad, shoddy, cheap. But, in our local area, that usage only applies to her school. At the school to which some of her friends go, ghetto has exactly the opposite meaning: good, cool, valued. The racial demographics of the two schools are approximately the same, so racism doesn't seem to be at play here. Rather, it appears as if the language ground, as usual, is being used to define tribes. In this case, two adjacent school areas are linguistically worlds apart, self-defined by the students.

The same phenomenon is exemplified on a considerably larger scale with hip-hop and urban slang. The language of the streets, most often first adopted by non-white youth, helps the urban youth "tribe" to self-identify and coalesce. Later, it is adopted by white youth seeking to leave their own (usually middle-class) clan, and finally, urban language is completely co-opted by the dominant clan itself.

McLuhan (and Innis before him) noted that the rise of vernacular languages in the wake of mass literacy helped define nations, forging them from local tribes. It created national identity. Now, as we fast-forward several hundreds of years, mass orality enabled by instantaneous, multi-way communications imposes a common language - or, at the very least, enables a common language to infiltrate among nations.

What happens, now that English is the de facto universal language of the world - English as the New Latin, perhaps?

This is sooooo ghetto...

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Posted 00:22 by Mark Federman permanent link

In Take Today - The Executive as Dropout, McLuhan wrote about how, under conditions of speed-up caused by electricity applied to communications (i.e. computers and networks) hardware reversed into software. He also wrote about the "service environment" for all hardware creating the reversal conditions that led to hardware becoming software. The examples he pointed to were things like hard-wired circuits being replaced by software programming or firmware and hard currencies based on hardware like gold being replaced by software – money as information stored in computers.

Now, we know that in using the Laws of Media, there are sometimes chains of tetrads, in which one quadrant of a tetrad for a given medium becomes the subject medium of the next tetrad. He uses Newton’s Laws of Motion as a great example of such a chain. For each Law of Motion, the Reversal becomes the next Law.

Our work in McLuhan Management Studies indicates that the same sort of "chain reaction" links product evolution: hardware reverses into software; software reverses into services; services reverse into experiences; experiences reverse into the-next-big-thing. Right now, for instance, we are very much in the midst of the "experience economy," although what most people notice is the "service economy." The cool thing is that each Reversal aspect defines the service environment of the previous medium. Taking it another way, the-next-big thing is the environment that enables experiences, in much the same way that experiences enable services, services enable software and software enables hardware.

Offerings went from products, to services to experiences. And the value of each category, not to mention the economy as a whole, increases at each step. Let’s add globalization into the mix: Global businesses were first enabled in the manufacturing sector by cheap labour costs in emerging countries. Manufacturing jobs were exported to developing countries from the more affluent nations. Meanwhile, North American and European economies shifted towards higher-valued services, based on well-educated knowledge workers. The February 3, 2003 issue of Business Week reports on the next stage of globalization, enabled by digital technologies and high-speed data networks. The evolution of products to services continues, as knowledge workers’ jobs follow manufacturing jobs to developing countries that have sufficiently developed their educational systems. The article concludes with " The truth is, the rise of the global knowledge industry is so recent that most economists haven't begun to fathom the implications. For developing nations, the big beneficiaries will be those offering the speediest and cheapest telecom links, investor-friendly policies, and ample college grads. In the West, it's far less clear who will be the big winners and losers."

The answer to the last challenge is clear: The big winners will be those who figure out how to offer experiences to the consuming public, as the engine of economic growth evolves via Reversal.

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Posted 23:54 by Mark Federman permanent link

Regular readers may recall that I referred to the Internet as an instance of what McLuhan (and other Toronto Schoolers) called "acoustic space." In an article I'm preparing, I take this idea and do this with it:

We can also make an additional observation from this interesting metaphor. McLuhan points out that a characteristic of “visual space” is that we can shut it out, in much the same way we can shut off our vision by closing our eyes. We have eyelids, but we have no “earlids.” We cannot shut out acoustic space, or the space of relationships and connections that are all around us. This suggests that we cannot shut out the effects of the Internet on our culture and society, even if we choose not to use the Internet directly. The fact is that society as a whole is affected [possible examples – inclusion/exclusion, popular culture connections, speed of access to information, expectations of speed and access imposed by the “connected” on the “unconnected”] and we, in our physical reality, are equally affected by the changes that have their impetus in cyberspace.

Well, over at openDemocracy I came across a fascinating discussion on the Human Experience of Globalization, among other things. In this article, there is a tragic example of Reversal that has occurred with the intensification caused by fibre replacing copper.

"In The Anthropology of Globalization, edited by J. Inda and R. Rosaldo (Blackwell, 2001), a particularly good example is James Ferguson’s bitter portrait of today’s Zambian ‘copperbelt’. Here, de-industrialisation has brought about ‘the un-making, rather than the making, of a working class’. The technological advances made by the information explosion have lessened demand for copper wiring, and hence for the main Zambian export. Fibre optics and satellite communication have altered the nature of the ‘wired world’, disastrously for Zambians. The mining and industrial development which was supposed to make them part of the wider world is suffering severe contraction, and the usual remedies of privatisation, lay-offs and ‘back to the land’ schemes.

Most Zambians never made a phone call in their lives, Ferguson points out; but some of them did live in hope of doing so, via the copper wiring they were helping to export to everywhere else. Now they are getting used to the idea they never will. Here, the ‘New World Order’ means more and more ‘poor Africans’ (unless of course these new ‘barbarians’ can scrape together enough to emigrate)."
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Posted 23:21 by Mark Federman permanent link

Being Canadian is no protection against the type of surveillance that is - soon to be was - contemplated by American Total Information Awareness. This article in the Toronto Star should make us wary of how far the Royal Bank of Canada is willing to go to "know its customers" - far more than most of its customers probably want to be known.

When combined with the reporting provisions of Bill S23 (that requires Canadian airlines flying to the U.S. to report passenger information to U.S. authorities) the emerging picture gives one cause for concern. According to an interview on this morning's The Current on CBC Radio One, Liberal MP Dennis Mills expressed his serious reservations about how "the legislation was passed, saying it was rammed through without proper scrutiny at the committee level." Mills repeated several times during the interview the American threat that all air traffic from Canada would be cut off if Parliament did not pass the legislation by the U.S.-specified deadline.

Canada may be our home, and for some, our native land. But glorious and free?
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Posted 22:52 by Mark Federman permanent link

In his book, From Cliché to Archetype, McLuhan observes, "Social anger and sensitivity sharpen the awareness of the funny man so that his “jokes” are stabs or probes into the cultural matrix that plagues him." There is much that is plaguing the American cultural matrix lately, including the recent "Eldred decision" in the U.S. Supreme Court. There is much thoughtful discussion and many relevant links at Lawrence Lessig's blog. One of the more amusing references is to a wonderful probe by Jesse Walker, in which he interviews Mickey Mouse.
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Posted 00:46 by Mark Federman permanent link

Good news from south of the border. The U.S. Senate is taking steps to rein in the Total Information Awareness project. As readers probably know, "The Total Information Awareness project, headed by Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter, intends to ferret out potential terrorists by creating and then searching a vast database of electronic information on Americans -- from credit-card transactions to medical files." The article from Mercury News notes, "Pentagon officials would be prohibited from spending any more money on the counterterrorism initiative until they submitted a detailed explanation of the technology and its potential uses, [Democratic Senator Dianne ] Feinstein said. The Pentagon or any other agency also would be prohibited from using the system on Americans, limiting its potential use to overseas military actions or foreign intelligence operations."

George Orwell - you can stop your spinning now...
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Posted 23:44 by Mark Federman permanent link

Welcome back Kevin Mitnick, and thanks for creating an anti-environment of awareness in your own unique way.
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Posted 17:30 by Mark Federman permanent link

During the weekend's CUTC conference, I had opportunity to interact with about 100 of the more-than-400 student delegates. During our conversation, I asked them if they recognized the name, "Marshall McLuhan." Only about 1 in 25 did. I then asked them if they recognized the expressions, "The Medium is the Message" or the "Global Village." Almost everyone did. The memes have entered the common consciousness, while McLuhan himself is now a part of the hidden ground of our society and culture.
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Posted 13:22 by Mark Federman permanent link

Just finished an interesting discussion with Franke James, one of the co-founders of a new game, Office-Politics. It's "the messaging game where you say one thing and do another. It's fun, free, and occasionally vicious." The game - that began on the web and is about to jump to print, voice-web, and television - replicates the real-life world of, well, office politics, in which many of us toil. Players are presented with "Daily Dilemmas" on which they vote (for example: You just stumbled on the boss's deep, dark secret. Do you tell everyone, or put the skeletons back in the closet?), and can attend "meetings" (via live chat) during which they can support the boss and virtual co-workers, or back-stab.

Now why would you want to put your digiSelf through the same Dilbertesque world as your physiSelf? What Office-Politics does is change the unobserved ground environment of real office politics into an explicit figure. In doing so, it makes us aware of the unseen, but sorely felt, effects and dynamics of the world of the cubicle dweller. By changing hidden ground to perceived figure, we gain a measure of immunity against the most potent, and sometimes damaging, ground effects by gaining new insight and awareness. Yes Office-Politics is a fun distraction from work. It may also be a sanity saver.
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Posted 11:33 by Mark Federman permanent link

I just attended a session given by Bob McDonald, host of CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks. His theme was environmental - raising awareness among the delegates of the fragility of our natural environment, and making a big pitch for an increased use of renewable resources, and in particular, hydrogen and fuel cells. Apparently Iceland has an initiative to become the world's first hydrogen-based economy within the next 5 years.

It is an idealistic and hopeful view that McDonald espouses, but one that I heard over 25 years ago. The main problem as I see it has to do not with the technology, but with the political and business will that will accompany it. What businesses need to understand is that Reversal is evolution.

More later...
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Posted 09:54 by Mark Federman permanent link

I'm at the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference today. CUTC (a cutesy name if I ever heard on) is entirely organized by undergrads from the University of Waterloo, and this year has attracted over 400 students, mostly from the universities around southern Ontario, Canada. I've been asked to lead a small "think tank" session during which students will consider possible approaches to the semantics problem I posed earlier.
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Posted 21:58 by Mark Federman permanent link

John le Carré, the British novelist, writes about the reversal of the United States's founding principles in an insightful piece at openDemocracy. He writes, "This is High Noon for American democracy. The rights and freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. A new McCarthyism is abroad. ... The American over-reaction is beyond everything Osama could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. But this war was planned long before Osama struck, and it is Osama who made it possible. Without him, the Bush junta would have been mired in Enron, electoral scandal and taxation sleeze. Thanks to Osama, Americans are instead being daily misled by their leaders and by their compliant corporate media."

A longer version of le Carré's article was published in many newspapers around the world.

As I mentioned earlier, a United States of America, whose power for Extension is unchecked by an equivalent world power, must go into Reversal according to the Laws of Media. If the European Union could get its collective economic act together, it has the potential to provide that world balance. But me, I'm betting on China.
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Posted 19:39 by Mark Federman permanent link

When I think of the future of the open source business model, I'm not necessarily restricting myself to think about business models for companies developing open source software. I'm playing with the idea of "open sourcing" all sorts of I.P. from all types of companies.

In the online world, the contribution made by the open source movement resulted in the phenomenal growth of the requisite infrastructure that enable millions of people to do all sorts of cool things. It also enabled a significant reduction in business expense (through standardized and compatible infrastructure that provides all the business-to-business transactions we see) and created new types of businesses that disseminate information, provide diverse markets... you know this story, and probably better than I.

So if the non-IT-based businesses more to a more open model by sharing their respective intellectual property, is it reasonable to expect that the economic infrastructure of our society will enjoy an analogous explosive growth? By rights, this should be the sustainable solution to stagnation and recession.

(This thinking brought to you by the Laws of Media, and our friends, Retrieval and Reversal.)
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Posted 18:46 by Mark Federman permanent link

David Weinberger is becoming downright sentimental in his examination of the morality of the web. He writes: “… the links that connect us on the Web are small acts of selflessness, deferring to what we share — the topic of discussion, perhaps — rather than to the primacy of our own place in the world. … the Web is based on an admission of shared caring, and thus has a tendency towards moral goodness just as our own moral natures do.” His central argument is that the architecture of the web is based on the type of selflessness from which springs morality.

The Internet architecture, and much of its infrastructure, was not built on selflessness so much as on enlightened self interest and the ethos of both hackers and academics. Both of these communities have — or at least traditionally had — a culture of cooperation, sharing information for the greater good, and building on the work of others for the benefit of everyone. In doing so, the hacker and the academic enhanced their own reputation within their respective tribal pecking order. Reputation and credibility are valuable currency within those tribes, although, not the exclusive currency. The effect – what we in the McLuhanistics business call the message – of this enlightened self-interest was the availability and continuing growth of the marvel we call the ‘net. It had little to do with morality per se, although the appearance of moral behaviour is a happy by-product of what is considered legal and valuable tender among the academic and hacker tribes. “Cast your code upon the waters, for after many days you will find it.” Even King Solomon’s original "Ecclesiastical" (Eccl 11:1) admonition is based in enlightened self interest.

What is perhaps even more interesting is to predict the effect of the recent drive to build business models primarily on the basis of the exclusivity of intellectual property, as opposed to the more “open” approach. Had the mentality of Lexmark (see below) or even The Chamberlain Group - makers of remotely controlled garage doors who are using DMCA to sue Skylink, a universal garage door remote manufacturer - dominated over the past decade, we most certainly would not have had the Internet as we know it; in all likelihood, you wouldn’t be reading these words. The growth of the PC industry would not have survived DMCA-style challenges. Ironically, even Microsoft would not have attained its success had it be subject to the types of restrictions it, and many other companies, now seek.

Business success built on exclusivity and vigorous prosecution of Intellectual Property similarity has extended beyond the limit of its potential from the industrial/mechanical age. We are now at the point of reversal, at which exclusivity will result in failure, and business success will be founded in the same ethos that has nurtured the Internet’s success. The reversal quadrant of the tetrad is the quadrant of evolution and metamorphosis — in other words, that ol’ fashioned notion of progress.

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Posted 12:45 by Mark Federman permanent link

I was powerless for a short while, as the AC adapter on my trusty old Toshiba T480CDT gave up the ghost. Besides the expected observation of how my thinking and creative processes are intimately tied to my workstation in the McLuhanesque "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us" fashion, I learned something about the reversal of supply chain management.

I called around to several major chains of office supplies/equipment and consumer electronics to see if they had a potential replacement: a universal AC adapter, made by a well known accessories manufacturer. Across 3 chains, and a total of a dozen stores, computer said they had the device in inventory, but a check of the shelves revealed not a one. At last, one "sales associate" gave me an explanation. He told me that the receiver must have accepted the shipment from the supplier into the computerized inventory system without actually checking the delivery. Thus, all the stores' individual inventories were updated, indicating however many units in-stock, despite the obviously empty shelves.

I finally found one store that physically had the device. When I went to purchase it, the salesman told me that he in fact had a replacement Toshiba-brand adapter at about half the cost of the third-party universal adapter. "Great," I said. "Let's do it!" "One problem," replied the salesman, holding the Toshiba adapter in his hand. "Computer says we're out of stock..."
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Posted 10:07 by Mark Federman permanent link

Reversal of Digital Rights Management and the co-opting of Digital Millennium Copyright Act is becoming worrisome. What was intended to protect the rights of creative people (ha!) is being used as an anti-competitive measure. Witness the Lexmart vs. Static Control Components case. When legislation is created primarily to serve business interests, the public is served, in much the same way as a turkey at Christmas!

What becomes truly disconcerting is the McLuhan idea of "The user is the content." The user is indeed the content, but not quite the way Marshall used that phrase. It's actually closer to his expression of "transferring our consciousness to the computer". Our digiSelves live online and in databases, and this raises all of the interesting issues of digID, ownership of a given digiSelf, copyright of a given digiSelf or group of digiSelves (and hence, ownership and copyright on *us*), and surveillance like never before. All of these incarnations are real in any sense of that word except physical - physically, I don't exist to a bank or the government apart from what is in my financial records, tax records, passport database, etc. To the bank, government and others, my digiSelf is more real than I am!

So what happens when DRM and DMCA are used against the collective us - me and my digiShadow.

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Posted 02:30 by Mark Federman permanent link

Here are some things Marshall had to say on morals and value judgements:

"On the telephone, or on the air, man is in every sense discarnate, existing as an abstract image, a figure without a body. The Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland is a kind of parallel to our state. When discarnate, man has no identity, and is not subject to natural law. In fact he has no basis for morals of any sort. As electric information moved at the speed of light, man is a nobody. When deprived of his identity, man becomes violent in diverse ways. Violence is the quest for identity. (Letter to Clare Boothe Luce, 5 April, 1979, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 543)

"The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study. People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming?" McLuhan in Stearn, McLuhan Hot & Cool, p. 285- 286

"Value judgments create smog in our culture and distract attention from processes." (Marshall McLuhan, in correspondence with Jonathan Miller, April 22, 1970, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 405)
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Posted 02:24 by Mark Federman permanent link

David Weinberger is lecturing at MIT. In this week's seminar he plans to talk about morality, ethics and ethos on the web. He's ahead of me. In my Applied McLuhanistics course we won't get to ethics until the end of term.

David notes, "Now look at the Web's architecture. Links come first. Every time I put in a link to a site, I am sending people away from my site, a little act of selflessness and generosity. The Web is characterized by generosity throughout. The Web is a shared world created out of shared interests. It is fundamentally connected, sympathetic and moral."

I can understand his notion that architecturally, the web reflects our better nature by encouraging people to leave, I think there may be other media effects at play. I mean, just consider that architectural notion. What type of "good host" immediately does the "Apu at Quickie Mart" thing: "Thank you. Come again!" If you remember back to the early days of the web, link pages were more about reciprocity - "I'll link to you if you link to me."

If we consider the fundamental Media nature of the Internet (that is, its ground, or hidden, effects) the Internet is an ever-present presence: All places are "here;" all time is "now." This reflects McLuhan's expression of acoustic, as opposed to visual, space: "A resonant sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose boundaries are nowhere." (Take Today, p. 76) Extend that thinking a bit, and we can make the observation that the 'net encourages the ephemeral - if all time is the present, there is no past and there is no future. There are therefore no consequences and thus, no basis for morality within that medium. Morality only kicks in when we cross the interface back to the physical world.

Some of Sherry Turkle's thinking may be useful here. Prof. Turkle speaks of "windows," each of which projects some aspect of ourselves, or a given instance of our digital persona. We can be active in many windows simultaneously, and can have disparate personae, some of which may be moral and ethical, and some of which may not. (She notes that "real life" is but one more window of existence in this metaphor.)

Morality on the 'net has no meaning. It is the projection of our "real life" morality that introduces "real life" value judgements.
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Posted 09:12 by Mark Federman permanent link

Are you a Patriot? Then register here! Because, as the page says, "non-traitors have nothing to hide."
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Posted 13:58 by Mark Federman permanent link

There is much thinking around the Program lately about this notion of publicy (publi - see?), that is, the Reversal of privacy as we fulfill McLuhan's prediction of the tribal effects of instantaneous, allatonce communications. Another story in today's Globe and Mail describes what could only be called "performance art psychology" at the Fez club in the East Village of New York City (where else?) People bare their souls, live onstage, in a true reality show called Psychotherapy Live! More and more people are willing to indulge in making public that which was formerly private (and mostly taboo). So why are we even surprised, let alone upset, when our multiple digital identity avatars go off and do the same thing?

And what is the difference between this and the likes of, for instance, the Jerry Springer Show? You can freely admit to watching the one with the $12 cover charge.

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Posted 13:35 by Mark Federman permanent link

The Globe and Mail has an interesting article that indicates, among other things, the Obsolescence of Hip Hop. Watch for a new evolution of language among the youthful urban tribe as hip hop has been co-opted by middle-class society and corporate interests. The article contains a great obsolescence metaphor from Grant McCracken, a professor in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He notes: "Hip-hop is everywhere at the moment ... and this is the moment, traditionally, when trends die. In a sense, it's like it's going nova: like the stars that explode before they die."

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Posted 12:33 by Mark Federman permanent link

Our ground is that of an integral being - body and identity are one. In much the same way as the phonetic alphabet violently ripped meaning from sound (and encoded the sound in a set of semantically meaningless symbols), one of the messages, or effects, of the Internet is that it violently rips our identity from our person, and encodes it in a set of semantically meaningless bits, and non-corporal avatars and other such representations. Nonetheless, we are still living in our bodies, even when our identity is out-to-cyberlunch.

Of late, our identities and individuality are threatened, and it's not entirely the fault of our friends at Total Information Awareness, south of the border. It is the intrinsic nature of the Internet to pose such a threat, as individuality, and hence privacy and private thought, disappears in the acoustic space that is the 'Net. (see below) For once, perhaps we can't lay all of the blame on the feds.

McLuhan reminds us that, "When discarnate, man has no identity, and is not subject to natural law. In fact he has no basis for morals of any sort. As electric information moved at the speed of light, man is a nobody. When deprived of his identity, man becomes violent in diverse ways. Violence is the quest for identity."
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Posted 12:16 by Mark Federman permanent link

We began the "Applied McLuhanistics" course last evening. If the nature of the discussion at the first class is any indication, this will be a lively and most interesting term! We left the seminar with the following probe: The invention of the phonetic alphabet changed us from a primarily oral culture to a primarily literate culture (starting in ancient Greek times, and accelerated by Gutenberg). The effect of this transition was, among other things, to create private, silent reading (via books), hence private ideas and therefore personal identity and individuality. Now that the acceleration of instantenous, multi-way communications has put us back into "acoustic space" (centre is everywhere/anywhere, boundaries are nowhere), we are regaining our oral culture. (This is one aspect that led Marshall McLuhan to note that we are "retribalizing" in the sense that we move back to acoustic space, from which the Global Village metaphor emerged.) What effect might the nature of Internet as acoustic space have on personal identity, individuality, privacy and so on? Do we still have privacy, or is there a new medium of "publicy" that emerges?
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Posted 01:33 by Mark Federman permanent link

A real "medium is the message" problem, in that we must consider the issues quite independent of the information. The meaning is truly a function of respective, and hidden, grounds.

All language is metaphoric in its ability to transform, in McLuhan’s words, “inner to utter,” and vice versa. When we speak, and often, but not always, when we write, we are able to negotiate meaning. By this, I am referring to the subtle conversational nuances that allow us to bridge the differences between the metaphors I use the ones you use, so that we arrive at a common understanding, more or less. However, in an automated system, and to a lesser extent, in an asynchronous conversation (e.g. email), there is no clear mechanism that permits such negotiation. Think of two databases that use the same nominal terminology, but, in fact, have slightly different definitions or meanings for what otherwise would be the same terms. Now suppose those two databases are linked or even combined, as companies might merge or hyperlink one to the other. We are now confronted with the problem of a system that does not permit negotiation, although negotiated meaning is required.

There are clearly manual approaches to physically merging two sets of close-but-not-exact database elements. However, companies are hyperlinking to each other at an accelerating rate and sharing increasingly abstract and complex quanta of information. This problem of negotiating meaning in a non-negotiable framework is looming large, and, for all we know, may already be affecting the nature of inter-company hyperlinked conversations. Is this an issue for linguists? Semioticians? Computer scientists? All of the above? Or am I just smokin’ dope here?
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Posted 22:35 by Mark Federman permanent link

David Weinberger of Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization fame writes one of my favourite blogs, JOHO the Blog. Today, David points us to a fascinating piece of "back of the envelope" research done by Valdis Krebs. Mr. Krebs analyzed the "buddy books," or books purchased together, from a major, online bookseller. By following the connections and mapping connected books, he found that two distinct clusters are formed, reflecting books that tend towards the political right and political left. Only one book, Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, was commonly read by those on both the left and the right.

While not a rigorous research study, there is the indication that our observation that "Believing is Seeing" is indeed correct. Most people tend to conceive an idea - some model of the world - and not only continually seek affirmation of that view, but will only allow themselves to see that which corresonds to the pre-fab reality. Little wonder that there is such extreme polarization when Points of View are involved: We literally cannot see what is beyond our own vanishing point. It's too bad that's where most of the ground exists.

Points of View are useful only when you choose to put yourself out of the frame of experience.
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Posted 01:19 by Mark Federman permanent link

David Gelernter's response begins with an interesting observation that ties closely to one I've made many times. He writes, " The best thing that happened to U.S. science in the last half-century was the Cold War and its consequences—one of them being the Space Race."

In fact, it was the perceived strength of the Soviet Union that kept the U.S. in a balanced growth. The elimination of that balancing influence allowed the U.S. to EXTEND itself tremendously, and possibly "beyond the limit of its potential," in the parlance of the Laws of Media. Has it happened? If we can detect evidence of REVERSAL, then clearly such an extension has clearly occurred. Has anyone noticed any REVERSALs in, say, Freedoms of Speech, Association, the Press...?
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Posted 01:10 by Mark Federman permanent link

One of my favourites among the Edge answers comes from mathematician and computer scientist Marvin Minsky. Here's a hint to Prof. Minsky's view: "Conclusion: what we really need is a 'Homeland Arithmetic' reorganization."
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Posted 01:03 by Mark Federman permanent link

Edge.org has posted their 6th annual World Question. This is the type of Big Question that keeps the intelligensia noodling, promoting more interesting discussion than mere answers. In other words, Edge annually provides a greate probe. This year's question, and responses from (so far) 85 people is posed in the pseudo-voice of U.S. President George W Bush: "What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?" — GWB. Everyone from Nobel Laureates to Actor and Activist Alan Alda get into the act.
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Posted 17:46 by Mark Federman permanent link

I came across an interesting article at openDemocracy. Intriguingly entitled Is the Internet Viagra for democracy?, it talks about increasing voter engagement in the democratic process (and not, as one might think, e-voting.)

One particularly interesting aspect noted by author Jan Steyaert reads, "That two million Dutch citizens used the website www.stemwijzer.nl in the run up to the May 2002 elections is impressive. It’s very attractive to be able to run through a series of statements, indicate whether you agree or not and receive ‘voting advice’ at the end of it. It deepens my understanding of why I feel sympathy for one party, gives me something to think about when that party has different views on specific issues (change party? update my views? just disagree?). But are these two million people now doing online what they otherwise did over a beer with their friends and by reading newspapers or watching television? How many are actively triggered by this Internet application to become participants in, rather than objects of, democracy?"

How about an analogous site with a voter game for the upcoming Toronto municipal election? By allowing voters to match up their views on issues with those of the candidates, and reporting on which candidates seem to be attracting the most like-minded voters, perhaps candidates for what promises to be the first real mayoralty race in a while will feel the effects, and get The Message, of the Internet.
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Posted 19:22 by Mark Federman permanent link

McLuhan tells us that the acceleration due to instantaneous communications will cause our fragmented, linear and literate Western society to become more oral in nature. But what happens when an intrinsically oral society, like those of the orient, for instance, is accelerated by the same oral-inducing electric influences? In many ways, the East is far ahead of the West, despite the latter's phonetic alphabet. Consider the recent election in South Korea, in which a relative unknown was vaulted to the presidency, due in large part to the effects of the Internet and SMS on cell phones. What happened was...

As of 3 p.m. on voting day, the turnout stood at 54.3 percent, compared with 62.3 percent at the same time during the presidential election in 1997. Because a low turnout was considered likely fatal for Roh - the young often skip voting - many Internet users posted online messages to Internet chatting rooms, online communities and instant messaging services imploring their colleagues to get to the voting booth. The messages spread by the tens of thousands, playing a key role in Roh’s victory.

A report released by a local broadcaster showed Roh won 62.1 percent of the support of those under 30, while Lee won 58.8 percent of the vote of those in their 50s and older. The free-for-all Internet campaign also helped Roh when he lost the support of Chung Mong-joon just a day before the poll.

And what's happening in the home? Apparently, even Korean Housewives Want Their Broadband, with market penetration far ahead of either Canada or the United States.

What may the future bring? If we believe some of the rhetoric, that it will be "cyber superiority" which determines the future winners and losers, the United States's propensity for stifling proliferation of 'Net usage and technologies (hello Messrs. Ashcroft and Rumsfeld, and the DCMA!) may already have set an unfortunate and inevitable course.

The U.S. satisfies the "ubiquitous" criteria. Now all we have to do is find an aesthetic element to that once great nation, and there will be no question that America has guaranteed its own OBSOLESCENCE. (McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science) Sic transit gloria mundi.
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