Posted 15:31 by Mark Federman permanent link
Another Reason Why Canada Will Lead the World Into the 21st Century

From Canada's Federal Court via the Globe and Mail: Court quashes music industry bid for IDs that would have allowed them to sue those who make music files available on peer-to-peer networks. Now, if history is any indicator, Canada's music industry will be forced to listen to both their customers and artists, and make the changes to their business that will effect the necessary evolutionary reversal to their 20th century plastic-coated-aluminum-disk business. The Canadian industry will then have the competitive advantage compared to any other market around the globe - one that depends less and less on geographic borders.

But of course, we all know that file-sharing actually has negligible negative effects on CD sales, right?
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Posted 14:39 by Mark Federman permanent link
Am I a Bigger Blog Nut Than You?

My new friend, Debbie Galant, whom I addicted to blogging, asked me if I was going to the upcoming BloggerCon. I explained to her (in my inimitable fashion) that I wasn't so much of a blogging afficianado that I would drive from Toronto to Boston just to attend BloggerCon (on my own nickel... for paid keynotes, I would travel half-way across the world!). Debbie wrote back asking, "Does that mean that I am more of a blog nut than you now?"

Well, maybe...

You know you're a blog nut when...

1. You go to BloggerCon dressed up like Joi Ito


2. At BloggerCon, you liveblog the blog entries that you get from the backchannel


3. You attend a panel session on which all of the panelists are simultaneously liveblogging their presentations, rather than actually giving their presentations.


4. You plot your position on a large wall chart of Clay Shirky's Power Law graph


5. You actually care about the political implications of Atom vs. RSS version 2.0 - and have taken a side.


6. You actually know who Belle de Jour is... In real life... without having been a client.


7. You think Cory Doctorow should be awarded the the Nobel Prize in Literature, not for anything he's written, but for releasing it under Creative Commons


8. You have been to more conferences on social networking (blogging), emergent technologies (blogging), political use of the Internet (blogging), educational applications of Internet technology (blogging) and the role of Heidegger in the epistimology of non-corporeal presence (blogging) than David Weinberger.


9. You drive ten hours on the hope of meeting someone with whom you've never actually corresponded directly, but you really, really know them because of the outering of their mind into publicy.


10. You wish they would get around to inventing spoken hyperlinks already.

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Posted 11:42 by Mark Federman permanent link
Meat

Meat courtesy of the always sharp and observant Ben Hammersley.
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Posted 11:36 by Mark Federman permanent link
Sibylle Moser: Media Modes of Cognition

A great seminar last evening here at the Program: Senior McLuhan Fellow Sibylle Moser describing the theory and design of her brillian empirical studies on media, modes of cognition and reception using the performance, music and lyrics of Laurie Anderson. One of our students and friends, Nui Tasakorn, captured the evening in a wonderful post here (and here.)
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Posted 11:08 by Mark Federman permanent link
Newsmap

Marshall McLuhan said that we don't so much read newspapers as we step into them, like stepping into a hot bath. It was the mosaic juxtaposition of often disparate items that appealed to McLuhan. Via newsmap

that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. ... Newsmap... provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Headlines are presented in boxes whose size corresponds to the number of newsfeeds carrying that story. Each box sits on a band coloured according to its broad topic: World, Nation, Busienss, Technology, Entertainment and Health. Visually, it tells us to what the world, or specific user-selectable countries, are being asked to pay attention.

As media concentration around the world leads to fewer and fewer individuals (and companies) setting the world's news agenda - with the news agenda increasingly setting legislative and geo-political agendas and initiatives, newsmap makes explicit the direction in which our attention is being led. and perhaps more importantly, where we are being directed not to look.
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Posted 12:15 by Mark Federman permanent link
Land of the Free? Going... going...

In a move worthy of the former East Germany's infamous Stasi, or Nicolae Ceausescu's feared-and-loathed Securitate in Romania, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled police do not need an arrest or search warrant to conduct a swift sweep of private property. The decision affects Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi - so far - but will undoubtedly be used as a precedent in other proceedings. Not that this is surprising, given the behaviour of the current Administration; it's just supremely sad. I realize that George W. Bush doesn't particularly read history - I don't know if he reads much of anything, according to reports - but someone should read the words of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, to him, and explain the significance of the history.

As I have frequently said, those who repeat history are doomed to learn it.


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Posted 11:35 by Mark Federman permanent link
Flying to the Global Village

It is so unprovincial in nature that one is almost surprised to hear that it is Toronto we're talking about. We are about to inaugurate a new terminal at Toronto Pearson International Airport - Canada's busiest airport - that will replace the moribund old Terminal 1 and the not-aging-elegantly Terminal 2. Among the features of the massive new terminal (4.2 million square feet worth of massive) is a collection of nine especially commissioned public art pieces created by both established and up-and-coming artists from around the world. The $6 to $7 million dollar program is managed by an art consultant from San Francisco, and features only one piece by a Canadian. How do I know all this? I read about it in This New York Times Article.

"The art wasn't designed to represent Toronto. It was designed to say we are part of the global aviation fabric, we are a major player on the global scene, and what you'll experience here is art in support of aviation, not art in support of a community or province or even a country." The sense of place they were hoping for from this art abandoned the traditional notion of locality in favor of cosmopolitanism ? a fitting gesture in a city where nearly half the population is foreign born.

So says Lou Turpen, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Toronto Airport Authority. All things being retrospective, we would have expected local boosterism and nationalistic fervour to have turned the art acquisition into a political (and politically correct) exercise at best, and a clich?-churning collection of traditional "airport art" in the worst case. But instead Toronto exemplifies that, of any physical space, airports represent a lack of placeness (and occasionally time) quite analogous to the electronically-induced global village conditions that we all now experience. The fusion of global cultures demonstrated in this collection of artists' work from Spain, Germany, the U.S. and Canada exemplifies that, "the artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present," as McLuhan said. The future is the creation of a new global culture that is not necessarily tied specifically to geographical location, but rather linked to creating trans-cultural shared immediate experience. This is what the GTAA has accomplished. From the Times article, we learn that the customary "Welcome to Canada" sign was removed from the arrivals gates so as not to interfere with the art. The art itself greets us with a "Welcome to the World."
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Posted 01:37 by Mark Federman permanent link
International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance

Our favourite cyborg, Steve Mann, is convening an International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance, or "Souveillance," as he calls it. IWIS 2004 will be a small intimate discussion group, limited to 25 participants who will explore topics including: Recording experiences in which you are a participant; Ethical, legal, and policy issues; Privacy and related technosocial issues; Person-to-person sharing of personal experiences; Lifelong Image Capture: data organization; Social Issues: fashion, design, acceptability and human factors; Psychogeography, location-based wearable computing; and Augmented/Mediated/Diminished Reality, among others.

The workshop will be held on April 12, 2004 at Toronto's Colony Hotel, located at 89 Chestnut Street, from 12:00 to 16:00, with a working lunch being served. To participate, email your name, the name of your organization, and what you might add to the meeting, as part of a one page extended abstract, outlining your position on, and proposed contribution to the theme of inverse surveillance. Alternatively, authors may email up to four pages, in IEEE two column camera-ready format that address the theme of inverse surveillance. Prospective participants wishing to submit a full paper may also contact the workshop facilitators prior to submission.

The workshop is a prelude to a future Symposium on Inverse Surveillance. If the program committee - that includes Joi Ito, Jim Gemmell (MyLifeBits), Douglas Schuler (CPSR) and several others involved with issues ranging from medical applications to personal privacy - is any indication, the workshop will be a comprehensive exploration.
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Posted 01:15 by Mark Federman permanent link
Politics and Morality

I'm struck by the parallel in obfuscation that I observe between Ottawa and Washington, each running respective legislative hearings. In Washington, the Senate is holding hearings into the terrorist tragedy that occurred on September 11, 2001, the so-called "9-11" hearings. Its focus is on what was, or was not, known by the Administration prior to that fateful hijacking. Ottawa parliamentarians are investigating the sponsorship scandal, in which tens of millions of dollars were allegedly given to organizations for doing nothing other than supporting the reigning Liberal Party.

In both cases, prominent members of each country's respective government are called to testify, and their testimony often strains credulity. Indeed, "insiders" have been called to refute the testimony of cabinet members. In the U.S. a bitingly satirical view can be seen in this excerpt from Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. Perhaps the most revealing part of Richard Clarke's testimony is the suggestion that he was asked by several different presidents to manipulate the media by presenting an imbalanced view of the Administration's actions. Clarke was challenged with the accusation that, "there is one standard of candor and morality for White House Special Assistants, and another standard of candor and morality for the rest of the American people." To this, Clarke replied, "I don't think it's a question of morality at all. I think it's a question of politics." This comment could equally be applied to the actions of those involved in the Canadian scandal that apparently touches former minister Alfonso Gagliano and perhaps even former Prime Minister Jean Cretien himself. In thinking about it, the following tetrad comes to mind:

Extends Political power	Reverses Into No political power when defeated in the next election
Retrieves Watergate, and the downfall of Richard Nixon	Obsolesces Morality and ethical judgement

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Posted 16:42 by Mark Federman permanent link
On Blogging, Paul Martin and Changing the World (Backbone Magazine)

I was interviewed for an article by Mara Gulens that has just appeared in Backbone Magazine entitled, "On Blogging, Paul Martin and Changing the World. (For those not current with Canadian politics, Paul Martin is our as yet unelected Prime Minister.) The problem with giving interview is not so much being misquoted - those are easy to correct or at least answer; rather it is the interviewer having to condense what might be an hour conversation into a few paragraphs. Many of the logical connections end up on the proverbial cutting room floor.

Nonetheless, one of the key ideas did make it through:

Blogging allows for distributed conversation and connected thoughts among a geographically dispersed population, from which emerges new ideas and knowledge. ... Connected individuals respond to what they see and make their views known. At times they even organize themselves into instant masses of people, sometimes with powerful effects.

These thoughts, I believe, are the lessons certain vested interests would have us ignore. The more we focus on the fiscal aspect of the Howard Dean Experience, that is the political role of multi-way instantaneous communications to raise money, the more we will tend to forget the incredible political power that was wrought through the blogosphere onto the forcibly retired Trent Lott. Those whose interests lie in the continued supremacy of broadcast politics should be very afraid.

Update: I just received my hardcopy edition of Backbone Magazine. In it, there is a sidebar that quotes from my Blogging and Publicy post of December 2003. Cool!
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Posted 11:03 by Mark Federman permanent link
Li'l Abner Rides... err... Runs Again!

Marshall McLuhan loved Al Capp's Li'l Abner comic strip that used the cartoon hillbillies from Dogpatch as social satire for Depression-era, and post-war, America. The comics are now syndicated here, with a new strip from the 1950s released daily. In Understanding Media, McLuhan observed that

Al Capp, in effect, said, "I simply involve my people in the consequences of their own stupidity and then take away their Tbrains so that they can do nothing about it." Their inability to help themselves created a sort of parody of all the other suspense comics. Al Capp pushed suspense into absurdity. But readers have long enjoyed the fact that the Dogpatch predicament of helpless ineptitude was a paradigm of the human situation, in general.

Of course, let it not be said that the "predicament of helpless ineptitude" was unique to post-war America. Then again...

The current plot line about the Sadie Hawkins Day race starts here.
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Posted 16:43 by Mark Federman permanent link
She'ayno Yode'a Lish'ol - For Those Unable to Ask

Pesach - Passover - is just around the corner and I am leading the first seder for our clan. I like to take some time to reflect, to study and to prepare for the celebration. Rather than just reading through the prepared text of the Haggadah, I take upon myself the joyous obligation to bring some additional insight and meaning to what otherwise could be a rather long and tedious proposition. I've decided to share my thoughts and insights this year on a new weblog that I call She'ayno Yode'a Lish'ol - For Those Unable to Ask. This is a reference to the allegory of the four sons that is described in the Haggadah - one wise, one wicked, one simple, and one "who is unable to ask a question."

To paraphrase the Pesach ritual, All who are hungry for insight come and partake of our ideas; all who are needy for meaning, come and explore the Pesach celebration with us.
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Posted 13:55 by Mark Federman permanent link
Tales of a Modern Tribal Woman

A beautiful piece from a global villager at La NuiT's Surfing. I can't wait to read the next installment.
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Posted 13:32 by Mark Federman permanent link
Control vs. Decentralization - What is The Future of Politics?

David Weinberger has been blogging from the Politics Online Conference in Washington D.C. this week. He was a keynote panelist, debating the issue of control vs. decentralization in political campaigns - both the imminent election in the United States (I fear that our Canadian politicians are way behind on this issue, despite Canada's usual position of leading in matters relating to media and communications) and those in the years ahead.

Weinberger, as usual, was bang on with his position:

I was up to my demographic earlobes with all the talk of "consumers," "marketing campaigns," "branding," and, most of all, "messages." I told them that they were debasing our democracy. A highpoint of the campaign so far was when Kerry uttered five words off-mike because we got to hear his real voice. ... The lesson of the Dean campaign and of the Internet is (I said) that control kills scaling, and control kills voice. And that's why we need decentralization. We're about to begin 8 months of relentless, saturation advertising of the most offensive and stupid kind. It will to wear us down to nubbins of indifference. Only by connecting with others, in our own voices, will we find any passion or enthusiasm. Finally, I said, the campaigns ought to be thrilled when we take over their "messages," change the words to ours, apply them to our lives, go off in a thousand directions with them, because that's what it means to make an idea our own. By connecting with one another and by escaping from the controlled messages of the campaigns, we can make those campaigns ours.

Weinberger's insight of taking over the messages of campaigns, changing the words to make them applicable to our own lives, is very much at the heart of another successful "political" (and I use the word broadly) movement - the open source movement.

Open Source is about much more than not paying for software. It is about the "freedom to tinker," as Ed Felton calls it, echoed by Lawrence Lessig in The Future of Ideas. In the open source world, "hackability," that is, the ability to change a pre-packaged product to suit individual needs, is a virtue. The best modern role-playing games do this, with the out-of-the-box game script serving only as an example - the real game is in the players creating their own characters, scenarios and game levels. People are now hacking into their TiVo recorders, iPod players and even their automobiles to achieve the functionality the original manufacturers either left out or didn't think of in the first place.

Why should democracy - government by the people - be any different? The ability to "hack" a political campaign, in other words, for the people to modify and thereby create the candidate that truly represents them, is the way in which we will re-engage an apathetic electorate. People become interested in politics when they can, indeed, achieve the political and policy functionality the original candidates and their handlers either leave out or don't think of. It is easy to see why few in positions of power and control would particularly want this, which is why the Howard Dean Experience remains such a threat whose effects are so routinely dismissed.

And speaking about having a voice, why don't you try hacking into the U.S. Presidential campaign debate - regardless of where you live in the world - by logging in to the Voices Without Votes 2004 initiative. Write a "Letter to America," or if you are American, respond by Writing a Letter to the World.
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Posted 17:59 by Mark Federman permanent link
Is It Forty Years Already?

It will be on May 26. Forty years ago on that date in 1964, Marshall McLuhan's classic, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man debuted to a stunned, naive and largely unprepared world. Television is tactile? The content of a medium is not its message? We will learn a living in the automation age? Sensory imbalance puts us in a state of narcosis? This was truly heady stuff, and the world ate it up, with over 100,000 copies sold - and counting - and translations into at least a dozen languages. The latest edition, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man - Critical Edition, edited by McLuhan biographer and scholar Terrence Gordon and published beautifully by Gingko Press, brings wonderful commentary on each chapter, plus other scholarly material and, for the very first time, an index.

As part of the fortieth anniversary celebrations, The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, and the McLuhan Global Research Network, in partnership with the Association of Media Ecologists North and the InSounds oral history project will be hosting a symposium on June 4 in Winnipeg, home to (one of) McLuhan's alma mater(s), University of Manitoba, as part of the annual Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities. For more information on the symposium, please contact Dr. Liss Jeffrey or Phil Rose. As well, there is an online symposium that has just been launched and invites your participation between now and the conference in Winnipeg. Share your experiences, memories, thoughts and insights on your Understanding Media.
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Posted 14:18 by Mark Federman permanent link
If Terrorists Win, Who Loses?

I've always been troubled by the simplistic rhetoric about "the terrorists winning" if we, in Western society, do (or don't do) whatever it is the authorities would have us not do (or do). Personally, I think the "terrorists win" - or to be more accurate, accomplish their goal of disrupting the fabric of our society by instilling fear and paranoia - whenever the authorities systematically dismantle the fundamental underpinnings and founding principles of society, but that's another post.

This one poses what could have been a hypothetical - and I'm sure will be picked up on Tom Burka's fabulous Opinions You Should Have - but is now a real question to ponder: If Al Qaeda endorses one particular candidate for President, does voting for that candidate mean "the terrorists win?" What if that candidate is the incumbant, George W. Bush? In this article, a statement purported to be from Al Qaeda calls a "truce" in Spain, pending their new administration's stated intention to pull its troops out of Iraq. But the statement goes on to say,

"The Spanish people... chose peace by choosing the party that was against the alliance with America." ... The statement said it supported President Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom." In comments addressed to Bush, the group said: "Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization." "Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

So if Bush wins, do the terrorists win?
From Atrios via Abstract Dynamics
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Posted 10:38 by Mark Federman permanent link
Marshall McLuhan, the Man and his Message - CBC Archives

Here are a great collection of clips of, and about, Marshall McLuhan, with some explanatory notes, from the CBC Archives. These are drawn from both radio and television interviews that span from roughly 1960 through to the early 1990s. Listening to Marshall talking about people rushing downtown from the suburbs because of the contents of filing cabinets - that he said could be made available to people in their homes via "closed circuit" (TV) - is as much a reflection of the times as it is an elucidation of McLuhan's ideas at the time he was developing them. Of course in this specific instance, he didn't quite realize that the "retribalization of man" meant that social spaces - both physical and what we now know as cyber - take on an even greater importance in maintaining one's standing or status in the tribe, giving the daily commute a renewed importance via reversal.

That's what "drives" we incessant bloggers, right?
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Posted 11:48 by Mark Federman permanent link
Remembering the Blogosphere vs. Trent Lott

The Shorenstein Centre at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University has released an exceptional case study of the downfall of Trent Lott, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader. As you might recall, Lott spoke at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, extolling the elder senator's political history and thankfully unsuccessful run for president in 1948 on a blatantly racist platform. Despite the party being attended by reporters from both print and television journalism, Lott's segregationist comments went largely unnoticed by the conventional mass-media, but were picked up in the blogosphere, amplified and eventually re-emerged into general public awareness. The ensuing storm led inevitably to Lott's ouster. "Big Media Meets the Bloggers: Coverage of Trent Lott's Comments at Strom Thurmond's Birthday Party" follows the story, from Lott's lips, through marginal coverage on ABC News, into the blogosphere via "Atrios", Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, and Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit.

The post-mortem section of the report is perhaps the most interesting. It describes a number of possible factors that led from birthday party bon (if not hateful) mots to public excoriation. In particular, the confluence of an outrageous statement made by someone apparently disliked by both right and left, a medium that kept the story alive and a cross-over "megaphone" in Glenn Reynolds that bridged both the new medium of weblog and the old of traditional journalism, created the critical mass to raise the issue from obscurity to prominence. For me, this confluence resonates well with the Howard Dean Experience - the primary impetus of the anti-war issue, a sustaining medium and a cross-over capability (in this case, from cyber to physical via MeetUp.org) gave the Howard Dean Campaign its initial gravity-defying thrust.

One of the most common criticisms of Marshall McLuhan's work is the false charge of technological determinism - the belief that technological innovation and evolution causes the changes in society that we often see only in retrospect. Rather, McLuhan refers to extension, enhancement, acceleration, intensification and particularly enablement (among the other three Laws of Media.) In other words, the enabling ground effects of the technology are necessary conditions, but not necessarily sufficient conditions for the changes we continue to experience. In Lott and Dean we have two separate examples for which the effects of the blogosphere were indeed necessary in their own contexts, but not sufficient alone. We should be watching carefully for more of these "Perfect Storms" in the blogosphere.
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Posted 16:20 by Mark Federman permanent link
Skeptics of the World Unite - You Have Nothing to Lose But...

So this unmarked email arrives in as close to a plain brown envelope as is possible in our electronic world from an "Ann R Kissed Spirit" (read it aloud) pointing us to two upcoming events, one in San Francisco, the other here in Toronto. A group of skeptics with regard to many of the official pronouncements of the Bush Administration proclaim

"Our hope is to create a safe space for new witnesses and testimony to come forward, and to deepen common understanding of the enormously complex events that preceded, occurred on and followed the attacks of September 11th 2001. Evidence suggests that September 11, 2001 was a special operation designed to terrorize Americans into silent conformity, to legitimize the crushing of dissent throughout the world, and to gain public support for imperial wars. Our hope is to disempower "the war game" once and for all, by exposing the criminal actions of those in power who committed crimes against humanity to advance that power."

A damning accusation, if true. And seeking the truth is, at least nominally, what the 911 International Inquiry to be held from March 26 to 28, 2004 at the Herbst Theatre, War Memorial and Veterans Building in San Francisco, California. A second phase will be held in Toronto, when the Skeptics Inquiry for Truth hold an International Citizens’ Inquiry Into 9/11, from May 30 to June 20, 2004.

We once thought that "seeing is believing," but those days are now long gone, as photographic and videographic manipulations allow us to fabricate what used to be incontrovertible evidence. Now, as real life increasingly emulates fiction plot twists, "believing is seeing," that is, (as Marshall McLuhan was wont to say) "if I didn't believe it I wouldn't have seen it." The maxim that we make our own reality (and therefore imbue it with the qualities of a McLuhan mediumand its messages) has never been more true. There's lots more for you to believe, or not, here.
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Posted 14:02 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Reversal of America, Part... Sorry, I've lost count...

It is supremely sad whenever we, sitting in a democracy at the beginning of the 21st century, have to contemplate the existence, let alone the active promotion, of a repressive totalitarian-like regime anywhere in our world. I understand that dealing with those who would undermine fundamental democratic freedoms and have little regard for human life in their lust for demagogic ends is a dirty business. Thankfully the Guardian has take up this challenge as the world must be aware of what is occurring. Its special report is a bone-chilling account of the shamefully inhuman conditions at the concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, being perpetrated against provably innocent people. If even half of the report is true, we need not wonder why the current U.S. Administration refuses to participate in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. We are left instead with a sense of dazed futility of the entire enterprise: The American captors have designed and run "Camp X-Ray" precisely so that no useful or truthful information will be obtainable from the detainees. This is indeed yet another dark chapter in the history of a still mighty, but regretably no-longer-great, nation.
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Posted 23:02 by Mark Federman permanent link
Anything-Goes Music Composition Wins

Every year, the Kiwanis Club of Greater Toronto sponsors a music festival to encourage musical education and performance in youth. Soloists in every instrument conceivable - including voice - ensembles and orchestras compete in classes ranging across all ages. It is a tremendous endeavour that attracts hundreds of participants from throughout the region. In addition to performance, there are several composition classes that allow young composers to enter their new works for adjudication. In a shameless display of fatherly pride, I am happy to announce that my son David won first place in the "Over 19 Years of Age" composition class for his Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (5.7 MB mp3 of an electronically-generated version of the piece.) His website, David Federman's Anything-Goes Music Composition has links to lists of his various compositions, including classical ensembles, choral pieces, film and public service announcement scores, and background music from role playing games. I have to say that among my favourites is his heavenly setting of Ave Maria.
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Posted 18:36 by Mark Federman permanent link
Social grieving, US and Spanish style

David Weinberger notes the the difference between Spanish and US "Social grieving". He observers that, "Americans dealt with the shock of 9/11 generally by going into our living rooms and turning on the TV. The Spanish have responded to 3/11 by going into the streets" To the student of media studies, of course, this makes perfect sense.

Noted by Marshall McLuhan: "I had been pointing out … our unique North American pattern of going outside for privacy and inside for community, the reverse of all other cultures in the world…" (Letter to Edmund Carpenter, January 26, 1972, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 450)

Being a nation of "rugged individualists" spread across vast distances it wasn’t until the spread of the mass media that the nation really came together from coast to coast. Throughout Europe, there was the tradition of "café society" and the market being as much a place of communication as commerce. Thus the actions of the respective publics to their respective tragedies are to go to their respective places of "public meeting."

Where are modern "town hall" meetings held in America these days? Why, on CNN, of course!
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Posted 18:38 by Mark Federman permanent link
Voices Without Votes Relaunches - New and Improved Website!

Preparing for the flood of letters, both to and from Americans, Peter Deitz's Voices Without Votes '04 website has just relaunched on a new software platform. The site now allows all visitors to group-moderate letters and comments, and invites both the world to write a letter to America, and Americans to write to the world. So whether you have a vote or not in the upcoming presidential election, you do have a voice. Make it heard here!
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Posted 13:07 by Mark Federman permanent link
Creative Commons at Work - I'm Now in Persian

Shayan Mashatian wrote to tell me,

"Dear Mark,
Your article is translated to Persian and placed on following link:
http://www.it4managers.com/default.asp?C=DC

IT4managers is a persian web site that I set up with some of my friends to
introduce resources and useful articles to Irnian IT experts/managers.
I have received very good feedback on your article."

The article to which he is referring is The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village.
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Posted 12:17 by Mark Federman permanent link
Adventures in Linux Land

In which our intrepid blogger leaves the yellow-brick road and embarks on a journey...

I've been a little light on the blogging lately, because I have been distracted by a small hobby. A couple of weeks ago, our faculty donated two old computers that were headed for the scrap heap to the McLuhan Program. One worked, the other essentially didn't. I cannibalized one for parts and ended up with a Pentium MMX (that's Pentium I) running at 200 MHz, with 96 MB of RAM, two hard disks totalling 9 GB of space, and an Ethernet card. I could have thrown an old version of MS Windows on the machine, but decided it was time for the Program to have at least one Linux machine in the place, so I embarked on a "let's see if I can do this" voyage.

This, in and of itself, is not particularly significant, except for one small detail - I have no prior exposure to Unix or Linux whatsoever. I have never been a system administrator, and have only used and tinkered with Windows desktop environments. (Okay, I'll admit I started using this stuff in the DOS days. And I used to read Jerry Pournelle.) And, to up the challenge, I decided not to simply buy a pre-rolled CD to mimic the Microsoft install experience, although as I understand it, Linux CD-installations have been made fairly straight-forward by the folks at the major commercial Linux distribution companies. So the experiment became, "Can a complete newbie install a workable desktop Linux environment from scratch?"

The answer is a qualified yes, which tells me that the Open Source industry, and the Linux project communities in general, are both exceedingly healthy and incredibly mature for their age. The qualification lies in the retrospective of the entire experience that brought to mind building old Heathkit radio sets, or, for that matter, tinkering with the early versions of Windows, say around version 3 or so.

I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow - or should I say package-by-package - description of the process. There are plenty of such descriptions that can be found via Google, which was my primary installation tool. Rather, I'll share my impressions of the process, and the inherent limitations of the Linux movement - none of which, by the way, are insurmountable for practical use of OSS for any application or environment, or for keeping the deleterious potential effects of a Microsoft monoculture in check.

Here are the basic ingredients: One computer as described above. One fully-installed and working computer connected to a network for search and research. One high-speed Internet connection. Six floppy disks. I chose the Debian GNU/Linux distribution for several reasons. First, it is truly a representation of the "Linux Community Culture," as opposed to a distribution that is guided by a coordinating company organization. This is not a political statement, but a sociological one - I wanted to see what the effect would be of a loosely-coupled, distributed (non-)organization, as opposed to a coordinated effort led by a guiding, traditional management hand. I was also told that the Debian package approach to distribution was very effective in ensuring that all dependencies were met. (For non-techie types, this means that if software package A needs to have software package B to work, and B in turn needs C, Debian automatically ensures that you don't try to install A without also installing the requisite B and C.)

The basic system is downloaded onto two of the floppies; the other four are used to contain the initial set of device drivers, also downloaded from the Debian site, or one of its mirrors. Unlike current Microsoft software with its "plug-n-play" autodetection of hardware, the Debian installation process requires you to know certain things about your physical machine. Fortunately, the donated computer was a "brand name" machine, for which old support manuals are still available online. A little bit of research, guess-work and trial-and-error got the basic system up and running within an hour. After that, the infant Debian system connects to the network, calls home, and downloads most of the rest of what it needs to run, sans graphical user interface, a.k.a. the desktop.

Part of the installation offers to install a pre-determined set of packages specifically for desktop use. Unfortunately, whoever assembled that particular set of packages neglected to roll-in the software for the X Windows System - the actual graphical support software. In hindsight, of course, that fact is well-publicized around the Internet. It was at this point - after several hours of trying to figure out why apparently installing the desktop software still meant no graphical interface, and what was the significance of "G," "K," and "X" - did I finally install XFree86 (the X Windows stuff) and a partial K Desktop Environment, otherwise known as KDE: Partial, in the sense of most of the applications libraries to actually run anything had to be installed as a separate, KDEBASE package.

The day that I spent wading through this particular swamp illustrates several of the key limitations to which I alluded earlier. One of the effects we have observed, and written about, is that in the acoustic space of the Internet, there is no time (zones or duration) and no space (geography or borders.) This means that there is no obvious way to distinguish advice, links and downloads for an ancient version of, say, XFree86, from that of the current version XFree86 V4. Similar problems occur with KDE, OpenOffice, and almost every other package. Over time and with some exploration, one learns to suss out what is current for "Woody" (the stable version), "Sarge" (the pre-release testing version that is almost stable), and "Sid" (the unstable version used to assemble all brand new versions of software.) These are what we would otherwise have called "production," "beta," and "alpha," respectively. But all of that takes time, and for those used to the Debian environment and psychology, such a sense quickly becomes the unnoticed ground, leaving newbies to their own devices and discovery.

Quite frankly, throughout the process, I felt like I was playing a computer geek's version of an "Adventure" game, in which one had to solve various puzzles, and make one's way through a maze to the ultimate goal.

It all got easier as I went along. At the end of the process, I have a Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (Woody) system, with a KDE 3.2 desktop environment, OpenOffice.org 1.1, and Mozilla Firefox 0.8 browser (although the Konqueror browser that comes as part of KDE is a very nice, Mozilla-based browser.) The system is set up for several users (this is to be an "open" workstation at the Program), one of which is configured for the KDE "MS Windows" personality. This is, perhaps, one of the most impressive aspects of the KDE environment. Without turning the entire system over to the Microsoft look-and-feel (like Lindows does), one can create a desktop environment in which someone with neither experience nor interest in Linux could work quite comfortably, with only a minimum of migration training (for example, instead of c:, use /home; note that the slashes go backwards like in web addresses; floppies and CD-ROMs need to be explicitly mounted by clicking on the icon before use; printing from OpenOffice uses two dialog boxes, not one; have a good time.)

All in all it was both easier than I thought (to pick up enough Linux over the process of a few days to build and configure the system) and harder than I thought. In the MS Windows world, there has been a lot of attention paid to integration among the applications and the environment. Fonts, when installed in the system via the desktop environment, show up in all the right applications places. That didn't happen automatically with KDE and OpenOffice, for instance. Each application has to be told individually about the CUPS printing subsystem - which itself behaved almost exactly as I was used to from Windows, an exceptional implementation. And so on.

I understand why this is - each application and subsystem is a "project" worked on by volunteers numbering from individuals to over a thousand. The whole Linux world is organic and emergent, benefiting from innovations built atop innovations, without the restrictions imposed by anti-competitive, possessive intellectual property regimes. Thus the gluing together is done by the final implementer, be it a "hobbyist" as I am, or a company like Red Hat or Mandrake or SuSE who rolls it all up on a CD or DVD for easy installation.

For the end user, especially one in a business environment, there is no doubt in my mind that a Linux desktop environment is completely viable. For an organization, the conversion and learning curve activities of moving from a Windows environment to a Linux desktop environment seems to me to be about the same as moving from a pre-XP system to an XP system. From an ongoing support perspective, it would seem as if the Linux environment would come with a lower cost - Linux desktop environments are far less prone to virus and Trojan infections, and end-users would be far less willing (and able) to install various extraneous software packages from hither and yon that would interfere with "sanctioned" software and general productivity.

So the experiment was a success. I exercised my inner geek and finally got around to learning something about Linux - both the technology and the sociology and psychology of the community from which it emerges. I am impressed with what I found, both in terms of the absolute quality and useability of the technical environment, and the preservation and encouragement of an ethos that encourages innovation and healthy 21st century competition, as opposed to the stifling 19th century style of competition that has been exhibited by too many major corporations of late. Particularly for companies - and nations - that are concerned about their policy agendas and overall strategies being controlled by a few influential, self-serving technology companies, adopting either commercial or non-commercial open source software must be considered a strategic priority.
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Posted 10:24 by Mark Federman permanent link
How News Travels on the Internet

Stephen VanDyke becomes a "source" with his clever observation of How News Travels on the Internet. His infographic clearly demonstrates McLuhan's observation that the world's electronic nervous system has changed information consumers into producers. Moreover, we note that the extreme accleration or intensification of instantaneous, multi-way communications forces the process of conventional news reportage into reversal. Rather than the "general public" receiving their news from a source of traditional mass-media, the process reverses into news sources and initial dissemination of information happening among the "greater and lesser blogospheres" and the "dark matter of the Internet" - email, instant messaging, IRC and the like - later filtering down to the mass-media.
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Posted 10:00 by Mark Federman permanent link
Taking Balance in Copyright Seriously

Canada once again takes a leadership role in the world, this time with regard to clarifying the true intent of copyright. From a letter by Professor Michael A. Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa Law School, Canada's Supreme Court seems to be Taking Balance in Copyright Seriously: "The Canadian Supreme Court issues a copyright decision that may rank as one of the strongest pro-user rights decisions from a high court in recent memory. In the unanimous decision, written by the Chief Justice, the court now appears to be considering all copyright law interpretation through the lens of balancing user rights with creators rights."

Geist goes on to note that, "when working to develop a legal definition for originality in a work, the court expresses concern that too low a threshold tip[s] the scale in favour of the author's or creator's rights, at the loss of society's interest in maintaining a robust public domain that could help foster future creative innovation." Part of the decision may cause reverberations throughout the online world, and stands in stark contrast to the cases that were brought against file-sharing networks Morpheus and Grokster, and are now being appealed. "The court concludes that the mere provision of photocopiers for the use of ... patrons did not constitute authorization to use the photocopiers to breach copyright law since taking the opposite approach shifts the balance in copyright too far in favour of the owner's rights and unnecessarily interferes with the proper use of copyrighted works for the good of society as a whole. ... a person does not authorize copyright infringement by authorizing the mere use of equipment (such as photocopiers) that could be used to infringe copyright. ... Moreover, even if there were evidence of the photocopiers having been used to infringe copyright, the [provider] lacks sufficient control over ... patrons to permit the conclusion that it sanctioned, approved or countenanced the infringement." You can find the text of the complete decision here.
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Posted 17:14 by Mark Federman permanent link
Stop asking questions and vote, dammit.

Ben Hammersley muses about why well-connected and well-informed people don't vote.

"Someone once said to me that they no longer read newspapers, because whenever they read an article about an area they were an expert in, the article was invariably 90% bollocks. Key facts would be missing, or misunderstood; known charlatans would have been interviewed and treated as holy; old or misleading conclusions would have been made. And if, this guy reasoned, that was true for the stories he knew about, it must be true for everything in the paper. Why, then, should he bother reading it? ... It’s not enough for a minister to say “Trust Me” anymore, because five minutes with Google usually finds every single lie, or spin, or misplaced understanding. To return to my non-newspaper buying friend, it’s not just that 90% of the statements about things I know about are wrong, but that I now know about 90% of everything you make statements about. The internet hive mind is fact-checking as you go. ... Why should I bother to vote, says the connected net-savvy demographic, when it’s plain to see that in every single arena the government is either making shit up..."

This gets to the heart of both the cynicism that accompanies modern politics, and the imperative for modern political candidates to use a variety of mechanisms for engagement. Despite Howard Dean's very public act of seppuku, directly connecting to a disaffected electorate is a powerful force in modern politics. It is different than conventional broadcast politics where the politician attempts a home invasion of millions of homes. Engaged politicians that use our interactive, multi-way communication technologies to truly enable citizens to participate - both online and off - and have influence beyond the ballot box once every four years, will turn what Hamnmersley calls "Emergent Transparency" into the "Emergent Democracy" of which many of us dream.
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Posted 16:42 by Mark Federman permanent link
McLuhan Fellow Among Creative Commons Moving Image Contest Winners

Congratulations to Alek Tarkowski, one of our McLuhan Fellows, who, together with Kuba Tarkowski, has taken third place in the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest. Their entry, "CCC," is a historical look at free culture through the ages. The top three winners are posted - all great and all under Creative Commons licenses (naturally) - so download, mirror and share!
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Posted 08:02 by Mark Federman permanent link
What Really Happened in Haiti?

Like many people around the world, I watched this weekend's events in Haiti with a mixture of emotions and a strange feeling of deja vu. Now former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted from power amidst the threat of violence and bloodshed, as revolutionaries were poised to lay siege to the impoverished country's capital, Port-au-Prince. Haiti has had a bloody history, emerging from the dictatorships of "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc" Duvalier, to become a constitutional democracy, albeit not an exceedingly well-functioning one. HIV/AIDS is rampant there, and people live in squalor and fear.

What struck me was how Aristide could go from emergent leader of freedom, and then democratically-elected president, to a dictatorial monster with stories reminiscent of the feared and loathed Tontons Macoute death squads. The mass-media certainly painted a picture of a man who had to go. But today's Toronto Star provides a somewhat different view. In Thomas Walkom's column, he points out that "one of the weirder elements of the Haiti story. Aristide wanted legislative elections. It was the opposition that blocked him." He asks, "Will Haiti be more democratic as a result of this coup? Given the nature of the opposition, a rag-tag band of disgruntled professionals, wealthy capitalists, unrepentant Tontons Macoute and other death squad veterans, it is hard to be optimistic."

And then Peter McKenna, an assistant professor of political science, notes, "Just like it did in the early 1990s, Canada needed to make its presence felt in Haiti and, indeed, in the wider Caribbean region once again. This crisis presented the newly minted Paul Martin government with an excellent opportunity to carve out a niche role for Canada on the world stage. By acting decisively and visibly in Haiti, Martin had the chance to rebuild Canada's long-suffering reputation, prestige and image in the world. Canadians, by acting militarily and forcefully to back Aristide, could have once again been players in the world pecking order of the post-9/11 global architecture."

So what really happened, and what should the Western democracies have really done. It is clear that the United States, and Canada, played an active role in Aristides's hasty departure. It is clear that in doing so, control over the balance of power was placed in the hands of the rebels - sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not. We who know the events only through the mass-media have no way of judging, in absolute terms, whether it is indeed a desirable thing or not. That the events are far away in Haiti makes this something of an academic question. But when the events are in our own backyards - as in upcoming federal elections in both Canada and the United States, the question is much more important, and its consequences significant.

What really happened in Ottawa? What really happened in Washington? What is really happening in your mind?
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