conflux
The Economist
Mayhem in May"For all their entertainment value, the anti-globalists’ demonstrations cannot be dismissed as a recurring juvenile joke. How to reduce poverty in the third world—and whether globalisation is a help or a hindrance—is one of the most pressing moral, political and economic issues of our times. Undeniably, anti-globalism demonstrations have moved these questions higher up the public agenda. Whether they are pushing governments towards more enlightened answers is quite another matter."
redux [04.16.01]
"Garson set out to write a book about the global economy, a daunting subject that instills equal amounts of terror and confusion in most ordinary souls. Interest rates and currency exchange speculation do not usually make for riveting, or comprehensible, reading. But the remarkable thing about "Money Makes the World Go Around" is that her investigation of the movement of capital around the world ends up as easy to swallow as that cool Singha beer on a hot day at the beach.
The result is subversive, a sugar-coated exposé of the way the world works that is halfway digested before you realize how radical it truly is. And by then it's too late. You're stuck: Now you know why peasants in Thailand pay the price for bad loans made by Citibank and Chase Manhattan, or why the unrestricted flow of billions of dollars around the globe in a ceaseless search for higher and higher rates of return ends up benefiting very few people."
redux [04.10.01]
"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.
Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."
Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."
redux [03.08.01]
"Globalization. Clearly something is happening to humankind. "Everybody's in everybody else's business," is how the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom I visited on the first day of my journey, puts it. The question, a lot of people's question at the moment, is what this great and growing overlap in humankind's business means. What does globalization portend, to narrow the subject just a little bit, for those sets of idiosyncrasies, habits, prejudices, and accumulated wisdom we call human cultures?"
redux [08.07.00]
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."
redux [04.23.00]
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.
Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).
It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."
redux [02.18.01]
"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."
According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."
redux [02.14.00]
""Knowledge and information are the common property of humanity as a whole: they cannot be transformed into merchandise" – this was one of the many slogans of the WSF, and one which, like the rest, was little examined for its practicality and its financial sustainability.
But it expressed an ideal: that corporations should not be allowed to monopolise the creation or ownership of the data on which public life depend. It was, for the first time, a drawing of the battle lines of the information age."
redux [03.24.00]
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.
A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.
Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.
This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.
How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."
10:25 PM 0 comments
The New York Times
Does an Anti-Piracy Plan Quash the First Amendment?[requires 'free' registration]
"There's a long-accepted notion in the publishing world that between the right of an author to control the uses of his book and the right of a reader to engage in free speech is the safety valve known as "fair use." "
"But there's a related question that has never been settled by the courts: Does fair use, which has its roots in the First Amendment, entitle the scholar, reporter or others to gain access to the copyrighted work in the first place -- -- especially when the material is guarded by a technological device designed to prevent digital piracy?"
"In a move that shows just how wary of free speech the recording industry has become, a Princeton computer science professor announced Thursday that he would not be presenting a paper that revealed how he and his colleagues cracked SDMI -- the recording industry's chosen method of cryptographically protecting digital music. Edward Felten, who was scheduled to present his findings before the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop in Pennsylvania, explained that threats of legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America had persuaded him to stay silent.
Free-speech advocates should be cheering his decision."
9:28 PM 0 comments
The Economist
Out in the open"Open-source is extremely good at optimising existing programs, says Ray Ozzie, chief executive of Groove Networks and creator of the popular Lotus Notes. But he cannot imagine his firm’s software, which allows small groups of people to collaborate online, being developed in a decentralised way. He and four colleagues operated “like one brain” for three years to solve all the engineering problems, he says.
Still, nobody can predict what kind of “mob software” may turn up. Richard Gabriel, a distinguished engineer at Sun, describes this as “a kind of semi-chaotic, self-organising behaviour in which numerous small acts of repair can lead to quickly built, complex and massive creations”. Open-source is certainly a mass phenomenon, with tens of thousands of volunteer programmers across the world already taking part, and more joining in all the time, particularly in countries such as China and India."
redux [04.01.01]
"Metiu and Kogut see the open source movement as a tremendous driver of innovation. "The open development model opens up the ability to contribute to innovation," they say. "It recognizes that the distribution of natural intelligence does not correspond to the monopolization of innovation by the richest firms or richest countries. It is this gap between the distribution of ability and the distribution of opportunity that the web will force companies to recognize and to realign their development strategies." In other words, engineers in China, Israel or India who are unable or unwilling to move to Silicon Valley or the Research Triangle need not be locked out of innovative product development: They can play a vital role in the creation of new products and services."redux [04.20.00]
"It is a bracingly cool wind that rushes through the streets of Helsinki in mid-March. And not only does it chill you to the bone, it blows through your mind too.
Imagine a society where the computer hacker isn't a figure of fear or derision, but something of a national hero (Linus Torvalds). Imagine a country where the leading thinkers and policy-makers are comfortable with the idea of "open source" - not just as software, but as a model for education, social services, even democracy itself. As a technoculture, Finland is much more than the might of Nokia and its latest stockmarket valuations. The higher values of the net - participation, sharing of resources, love of knowledge - seem deeply hard-wired into this culture."
[requires 'free' registration]
"WHEN technology stocks took their sharp tumble last week, many companies appeared to lose one of their most important assets -- the ability to lure talented employees with options. To attract and hold the best, you have to offer the chance to strike it rich.
Or do you? What are we to think when the best of the best -- the elite programmers that industry wisdom deems 100 times more productive than the typical competent coder -- donate their precious time to develop software anyone can use without charge? That is the puzzle the open-source movement, most famous for the Linux operating system, presents to economists."
"While its development looks like a marketplace, open-source software itself is a classic public good. You can use it without contributing to its maintenance and without paying a cent to all those programmers who created and improved it.
Hence the economic puzzle. As Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School and Jean Tirole of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ask in a recent paper: "Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?"redux [01.08.01]
"Why Finland? In the 21st century, there's hardly a nation in the world that doesn't want to be a role model for the information society. What made Finland so special? Was it an accident of history, the luck of the draw, or some more complex intersection of cultural evolution and the activist will of an entire people? More to the point, was it possible that the deep structure of Finnish civilization encourages an open-source way of life?"
"This paper describes the evolution of the Linux operating system, and studies dynamics of socio-technical change using Linux as a case example. Theoretical models of community-based practice and learning are combined with actor-network theory, and the characteristics of the open source development model are described using the introduced theoretical concepts. The paper analyses the growth and development of Linux and its development community, and shows how the development community evolves into an ecology of community-centered practices."
"A marketplace of ideas is not inherently in conflict with a community of ideas. Then again, those tensions and conflicts that do exist can and will lead to further innovations.
What all of these books do well is capture the grand themes and the subtle nuances that explain why it makes more sense to have an untraditional community drive innovation than to have a traditional marketplace do so. The point of these books is that communities of people can come up with codes of conduct — rules of engagement — about how ideas can and should be shared.
The software that really matters is not what is programmed in computer code but rather the shared assumptions and ideals that let people exchange ideas. That ultimately is what will shape the global ecology of innovation."
10:11 PM 0 comments
The New York Times Magazine
Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age[requires 'free' registration]
"Information everywhere, at light speed, immersing us -- is this what we want? We seem unsure. We are the species that defines itself in terms of information: homo sapiens sapiens. We are knowledge connoisseurs. We are being promised some approximation of All Previous Text (and music and pictures) in our pockets. Then again, we didn't evolve in a world with so much data and buzz. Our sense organs tuned into one slow channel at a time. Now we tune in and out. The dream of perfect ceaseless information flow can slip so easily into a nightmare of perfect perpetual distraction.
Our technologies don't just empower us: they also harass us, and they change us -- for better and for worse."
[requires 'free' registration]
"Questions such as: What does it mean to be online all the time? How will that change the way we live? What are the benefits and the drawbacks to being constantly connected?"
""It's easy to say we would just have more of the same: more speed, more multitasking, more frequent messages," Mr. Powell says. "But maybe we will see something more qualitative than quantitative - watch kids doing homework with four or five instant-chat windows open. Is this just more, or is it something very different from, say, sitting quietly with a book? Whatever that difference is, that's what is coming.""
redux [08.10.00]
"This paper began from the premise that every new medium changes our definitions of, approaches to and views of knowledge. It claimed that networked computers (as enabled by the Internet), cannot be understood as simply yet another medium in a long evolution that began with speech and evolved via cuneiform, parchment, manuscripts to printed books and more recently to radio, film, and video. Computers offer a new method of translating information from one medium to another, wherein lies the deeper meaning of the overworked term multimedia. Hence computers will never create paperless offices, they will eventually create offices where any form of communication can be transformed into any other form. "
"A half century ago pioneers such as Havelock, Innis and McLuhan recognized that new media inevitably affect our concepts of what constitutes knowledge. The mass media epitomized this with McLuhan’s pithy phrase: "The medium is the message." Reduced and taken in isolation, it is easy to see, in retrospect, that this obscured almost as much as it revealed. The new media are changing the way we know. They are doing so in fundamental ways and they are inspiring, creating, producing, distorting and even obscuring many messages. New machines make many new things possible. Only humans can ensure that what began as data streams and quests for information highways become paths towards knowledge and wisdom."
"Our dialog with technology is a dialog with ourselves. Technology can indeed have a powerful effect upon the subsequent development of culture, but it is the kind of effect that powerful meanings have. This must be distinguished from any mechanical sort of cause and effect.
I draw on the work of Owen Barfield to indicate how the development of both printing press and perspective art, as companion movements toward abstraction, fit into the broad evolution of western consciousness. My conclusion is that, once we take this evolution into account -- and reckon especially with our own place in it -- we cannot say, in quite the way it is often said, that technology "causes" a radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life."
"Ong pulls together two decades of work by himself and others on the differences between primary oral cultures, those that do not have a system of writing, and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures to look at how the shift from an oral-based stage of cons ciousness to one dominated by writing and print changes the way we humans think. His approach to the subject is both synchronic in that he looks at cultures that coexist at a certain point in time, and diachronic in that he discusses the change in the Wes t from being oral-based to chirographic which began with the appearance of script some 6,000 years ago. In addition to pinpointing fundamental differences in the thought processes of the two types of culture, he comments on the current emergence in Western society of what he calls a second orality. This second orality, dominated by electronic modes of communication (e.g., television and telephones), incorporates elements from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode which has been subordinant for some time."
8:47 PM 0 comments
BusinessWeek
A Penny-Ante Business Worth Billions" In 1998, tech visionary extraordinaire Nicholas Negroponte, then head of MIT's Media Lab, predicted that "you're going to see, within the next year, an extraordinary movement on the Web of systems for micropayments." The technology, he said, will move up to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars annually through the Web.
Negroponte was right. There was a big movement toward micropayments. But it was an almost unmitigated disaster. E-payments companies are failing this year almost as fast as they were launched after Negroponte made his forecast."
redux [12.20.00]
"Micropayment proponents have long suggested that micropayments will work because it would be great if they did. A functioning micropayment system would solve several thorny financial problems all at once. Unfortunately, the barriers to micropayments are not problems of technology and interface, but user approval. The advantage of micropayment systems to people receiving micropayments is clear, but the value to users whose money and time is involved isn't.
Because of transactional inefficiencies, user resistance, and the increasing flexibility of the existing financial framework, micropayments will never become a general class of network application. Anyone setting out to build systems that reward resource providers will have to create payment systems that provides users the kind of financial experience they demand - simple, predictable and easily valued. Only solutions that play by these rules will succeed."redux [01.05.01]
"PayPal's use of plain old dollars and its ability to send money to anyone with an e-mail address set it apart from the earlier payment systems. To that point people had to get together and agree on what system they would use for payment, then both had to be registered for anything much to happen. PayPal took more of the Western Union approach -- that if you were told that some money was waiting for you down at the Western Union office, you'd find a way to hike down there and get it. For PayPal recipients, hiking down means registering as users. It's free. It's actually better than free since full registration scores you a five-dollar bonus, as well as another five-dollar bonus to whomever refers you or is the first to pay you using the system. And that's how PayPal actually began operations last October -- with 24 employees sending small gifts of money to their friends."
"The Web is going through its own Great Depression as big sites continue to go belly-up. Meanwhile, revenue from banner ads drops because many of the banners are linked to...other dot-coms.These ominous signs do not foretell the death of the Web. But sooner or later the free lunch has to end. Information wants to be free, but information providers want to be paid."
"The Web is not one of those magical plants that can grow in midair. It needs cash to live."
"hi, this is bryan, the guy who runs big panda. i've started to ask for dimes on my home page."
"this is not a scheme to make crazy internet money. nobody's going to make a bazillion pennies. this is about readers and writers gaining control of the web.
this already exists in the real world: you can pay a dollar or two for a fanzine. on the internet, it can be much cheaper. it can even be a penny.
"how do you pay a penny on the internet? paypal is a popular way for sending tiny bits of money through email. ebay people use it a lot. there are other systems, but paypal is the most popular. i set up my paypal to accept dimes. i could have asked for pennies.
so i hope you now understand why i'm asking for dimes. i don't expect to make any serious money, but i do hope to educate people about the value of paying just a penny for the web sites you love."
"hi, this is bryan, the panda guy. i'm writing in astonishment at the response to my call for dimes. i've already received more dimes than i ever expected. maybe i was right. maybe people would rather pay a penny than see another ad for CASINO MONKEY CREDIT CARD INTERNET PERSONALS.
frankly, i'm not sure how to respond."
"Back when I did direct marketing, we were well-aware that people were irrational about pricing. The only way to really find out the right price for a product -- especially an information-based product, for which prices can be so arbitrarily set -- was to test a few, by sending different offers to random samplings, and see which resulted in more profit. Actually, it would be unusual if more than one (or any) of the prices produced any profit at all. And the results were all over the map. A higher price could sometimes bring in not just more money, but more orders, because of the increased perceived value. Then again, a price 20% lower could increase sales by 100%. You could guess but never know, and you were often surprised.”
8:18 PM 0 comments
Kyoto Journal
Digital Dream or Digital Dystopia?"How are we Asians, in this new global realm of the phosphor and the pixel, going to deal with the reality that 95 percent of the Asian populace has never used a computer and 98 percent has never been on the Internet? A populace for whom 1) family and wealth, or class and caste, define almost all relationships; 2) magic and myths born in the fears of the Stone Age are the roots of almost all the laws; 3) legend, not fact, is the wellspring of the public imagination; and 4) the future is something most people go to an astrologer for.
What have we to offer to 2 billion people who can't read? How will we reconcile the Asia around us with the fact that we represent a medium that is an imported sociology founded on the assumption that efficient commerce is the pinnacle of human achievement? How do we propose to guide the abyssal undercurrent of Asian tradition into a media-shaped future without losing what to most people is a precious mythical identity? How will the underclasses of Asia respond to a medium that does not reinforce the courtyard culture of old Asia but appears all too ready to cast it aside for something defined almost entirely in terms of a marketplace culture? And how, with an unclear new identity facing them, can Asians avoid the two calamities that have historically gone into defining who they are: reactionary nostalgia and the bloodshed of change?"
redux [05.14.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
""The use of the Internet here has started more as a social thing that in the end is going to have enormous implications," said Jiro Kokuryo, a professor at Keio University's business school, who specializes in e-commerce and information systems. "It is changing people's point of view and empowering them to challenge traditional ways of doing things."
Groups that have traditionally had little influence here are finding their voices and taking action on the Internet. Farmers like the Kimuras escape the huge, bureaucratic distribution system that has been sucking up their profits. Working mothers are banding together to form business ventures. Small companies are using the Internet to expand business and decrease reliance on a primary corporate customer. These are all revolutionary developments by Japanese standards, and not limited to marginal players."
redux [03.31.01]
"Why Japan?' I've been asked for the past 20 years or so. Meaning: why has Japan been the setting for so much of my fiction? When I started writing about Japan, I'd answer by suggesting that Japan was about to become a very central, very important place in terms of the global economy. And it did. (Or rather, it already had, but most people hadn't noticed yet.) A little later, asked the same question, I'd say that it was Japan's turn to be the centre of the world, the place to which all roads lead; Japan was where the money was and the deal was done. Today, with the glory years of the bubble long gone, I'm still asked the same question, in exactly the same quizzical tone: 'Why Japan?'
Because Japan is the global imagination's default setting for the future."
12:40 AM 0 comments
The Standard
There Must Be a Better Way ..." "There's this sinking feeling that buried in the communications is a time bomb," says Jeff Wishnie, product management director at Snapfish, a San Francisco photo-services firm. Wishnie recently returned from a two-day business trip to find more than 300 e-mail messages waiting. The feeling, Wishnie says, was like "slamming right into a brick wall."
Gelernter, among others, is hoping to knock down that wall. "Our goals are tremendously ambitious," he says. "There is no doubt the desktop is dead.""
" Computing will be transformed. It's not just that our problems are big, they are big and obvious. It's not just that the solutions are simple, they are simple and right under our noses. It's not just that hardware is more advanced than software; the last big operating-systems breakthrough was the Macintosh, sixteen years ago, and today's hottest item is Linux, which is a version of Unix, which was new in 1976. Users react to the hard truth that commerical software applications tend to be badly-designed, badly-made, incomprehensible and obsolete by blaming themselves ("Computers for Morons," "Operating Systems for Livestock"), and meanwhile, money surges through our communal imagination like beer from burst barrels. Billions. Naturally the atmosphere is a little strange; change is coming, soon."
10:59 PM 0 comments
The Economist
The human touch"DESPITE the best efforts of programmers, there are still many things that computers just cannot do. Examples include distinguishing between suspicious and legitimate behaviour on a corporate network, or sorting junk e-mail from genuinely important messages, or providing detailed answers to particular questions. For these tasks, which require judgment, expertise and experience that cannot be easily captured in software, some firms have adopted the unusual tactic of using people as part of their network infrastructure. Such “cyborg” companies use computers as levers for the mind, to make the most of precious human expertise."
redux [03.19.01]
"The Web is big. A billion pages big, according to a recent study by Inktomi and the NEC Research Institute. It's the ultimate testing ground for information retrieval technologies."
"If your search engine can automatically bring order to this overwhelming global mess of stuff, just think what it can do for a single web site or intranet. No more agonizing over the design of topical hierarchies. No more worrying about how you'll afford your growing staff of information architects. Just sit back and let the software work its magic.
"Perhaps the biggest problem with these automated approaches to classification is the fact that they're completely content-centric. They focus solely on organizing the stuff inside the folders, ignoring the broader information ecology.
"The key to success in designing information architecture solutions for really large web sites and intranets is to intelligently combine manual AND automated approaches."
redux [06.29.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Five ears ago, search engines seemed like the Web's salvation. Today, they need some saviors of their own."
"It is not just the vastness of the Web that is causing problems. Consider the way people search: Typical users enter single keywords, cross their fingers and hit the search buttons. And when they are faced with lists of 1,000 results, they usually click on the first few options instead of refining their searches by adding keywords or trying new terms.
The confluence of technological limitations and simple searching methods means that only two kinds of online searchers are well served: those looking for very popular terms and those who are using uncommon words to hunt for specific things. But the majority of searchers, whose requests fall somewhere between, are finding searching as frustrating as ever.
To cope, many search engines have concluded that simply indexing more pages is not the answer. Instead, they have decided to rely on the one resource that was once considered a cop-out: human judgment. Search engines have become more like cyborgs, part human, part machine."redux [06.15.00]
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.
This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."
To partially answer the questions raised in the title of this paper -- "Who is going to mine digital library resources? And how?" -- today’s end-users are not capable of mining today’s digital libraries, let alone the more comprehensive digital libraries of the foreseeable future."
"Today’s attention to database creation and better search engines fails to address a critical consumer need. Better digital libraries and more powerful search engines will not get quality materials into the hands of the end-user. Developers of digital libraries must work with content experts to develop an array of information products that help users identify and understand the available resources."
9:40 PM 0 comments
Fast Company
Jazzed About Work
"That was a big moment in my life, because I was communicating mind-to-mind with this guy, and the technology was acting like power steering: It was augmenting our interpersonal, human communication in a way that I could not have imagined. Soon after I left college and moved east, I realized that the rest of the computing world just didn't get it. But I was lucky, because I had seen the endgame. And the endgame was the user experience on PLATO. In a sense, I've spent the rest of my life trying to reinvent it."
"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day.
Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."
"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."
redux [03.19.01]
"Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability."
"In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.
Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 gajillion Zlotys to own the customer now look like a giant shell game, because the users don't want to get headline news. They want to talk to one another, and they will switch carriers until they are allowed to. Email is the thin end of the interoperability wedge, and this will be true of interactive TV as well."
redux [02.18.01]
"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."
The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.
For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."
redux [01.15.01]
"Nicole Thompson's third-graders can tell you all about the penguins and killer whales that populate Antarctica. They know about the months of darkness that grip Iceland each year and the fine tea that grows in Darjeeling, India. The Greenbriar Academy children have learned those facts - and countless more about countries large and small - thanks to a simple e-mail message from Thompson that has raced around the globe and brought more than 20,000 responses in six weeks.
It's crazy, just crazy," Thompson said. "At most, I thought we'd get about 2,000 replies.""redux [02.04.00]
"Email will become the killerer app. It continued to work when all else failed. Communication - not consumer storefronts - is the core value provided by the net and email is the star. The best things on the net make things easier and faster. Seems simple, but many of the failed business propositions of the past year seemed to go in the opposite direction."
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."
"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."
redux [10.18.00]
"I think all this hooey is simply public self-expression. And it's a good thing. If it makes you happy to call it a blog, go for it. You could call it a desk for all I care. Just keep doing it. I believe, now more that ever, that all this self-expression is going to change the world.
Haven't you noticed? It already has. How many people do you know who you've never met? Or, how many people have you met online? How much has being online changed your perceptions and ideas? Where do you go when you need to connect with other people? How much of your time is spent conversing with people who aren't in the same room with you? Where do you get your music? Your fun? Your ideas? Your ... faith?
Now think about life before you got online. See the difference?
Put simply, expressing yourself online is a gift to the web, because it lets strangers see the world through your eyes, if only for a moment. And if we all did that a little more, I think the world would be a more tolerant place."
9:12 PM 0 comments
Salon
Follow The Money"Garson set out to write a book about the global economy, a daunting subject that instills equal amounts of terror and confusion in most ordinary souls. Interest rates and currency exchange speculation do not usually make for riveting, or comprehensible, reading. But the remarkable thing about "Money Makes the World Go Around" is that her investigation of the movement of capital around the world ends up as easy to swallow as that cool Singha beer on a hot day at the beach.
The result is subversive, a sugar-coated exposé of the way the world works that is halfway digested before you realize how radical it truly is. And by then it's too late. You're stuck: Now you know why peasants in Thailand pay the price for bad loans made by Citibank and Chase Manhattan, or why the unrestricted flow of billions of dollars around the globe in a ceaseless search for higher and higher rates of return ends up benefiting very few people."
redux [04.10.01]
"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.
Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."
Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."
redux [03.08.01]
"Globalization. Clearly something is happening to humankind. "Everybody's in everybody else's business," is how the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom I visited on the first day of my journey, puts it. The question, a lot of people's question at the moment, is what this great and growing overlap in humankind's business means. What does globalization portend, to narrow the subject just a little bit, for those sets of idiosyncrasies, habits, prejudices, and accumulated wisdom we call human cultures?"
redux [08.07.00]
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."
redux [04.23.00]
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.
Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).
It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."
redux [02.18.01]
"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."
According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."
redux [02.14.00]
""Knowledge and information are the common property of humanity as a whole: they cannot be transformed into merchandise" – this was one of the many slogans of the WSF, and one which, like the rest, was little examined for its practicality and its financial sustainability.
But it expressed an ideal: that corporations should not be allowed to monopolise the creation or ownership of the data on which public life depend. It was, for the first time, a drawing of the battle lines of the information age."
redux [03.24.00]
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.
A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.
Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.
This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.
How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."
8:44 PM 0 comments
The Street
Can You Kiss 3G Goodbye -- and Still Make a Buck?"Permit me to throw a stick of dynamite in the room: Third generation, or 3G , wireless is dead before it was even born. And after billions wasted on 3G, it's going to be replaced by free wireless local area networks, or LANs.
A technology that the cell-phone industry is spending untold billions on, 3G promises to deliver high-speed data precisely where you don't need it -- on your phone. On the other hand, homes, offices, coffee shops, airports and hotels are building out cheap and grass-roots wireless local area networks that deliver even higher-speed access where you do need it -- your personal digital assistant and your laptop."
redux [12.10.00]
"With its meticulously preserved rows of army barracks and offices, San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood gives off the illusion that it's still the 1800s, when it was a bustling spit-and-shine military base.
The wireless Internet antennas sprouting everywhere suggest something else: Today's civilian community is home to a very unregimented attempt to build a homemade wireless Web that seeks to rival the expensive plans of telecommunication conglomerates and other corporations."
""I use it in bed, at the cafe, in the car, on the grassy fields," says Brewster Kahle, a 40-year-old high-tech entrepreneur who lives and works in the area. "I'm living a wireless existence."
"Matt Westervelt and three of his friends had tinkering on their minds when they started building their own high-speed wireless network in June. Climbing on the roofs of their Seattle homes, building antennas and trying to make them work with Ethernet protocols sounded like fun. Plus, if the whole shebang actually worked, they figured they'd be able to access their home computer files from the local cafe, play Net-based games while sitting on each other's couches and stream video onto their personal data assistants -- all at speeds of up to 11 megabits per second, far faster than what cellphone operators or other wireless providers offered."
"Call it "the free-network movement" -- a bubbled-up-from-the-underground effort to spread high-bandwidth wireless connectivity everywhere."
"Julian Priest is walking east down Clink Street away from his office. He's holding his laptop in both hands and surfing the Web as he goes through an enviable five-megabits-per-second link to his desktop computer. A BBC correspondent appears in a small box on the screen, delivering a report on the U.S. elections, just like you would see on television. "It's pretty cool," Mr. Priest says with a laugh."
"The 31-year-old technical director of a Web agency is one of a growing number of tech-adept individuals who are taking inexpensive wireless-networking technology designed for inside homes and offices and putting it to work outdoors. What they've found is that they can get Internet access as far as a kilometer away from their transmitters -- and at more than twice the speed that the much-touted next-generation cellular systems will offer."
9:36 AM 0 comments
Feed
The Three Stooges Play Zunil"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.
Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."
Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."
redux [08.07.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Overlooked in last month's Group of 8 discussions about the challenge of a growing "digital divide" between the information rich and the data deprived was the work of Bernard Krisher, a 69-year-old former journalist who is trying to bring the Internet to one of the poorest regions in Asia."
"Though the effort is on a small scale, Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who is also engaged in the effort to aid Cambodian villages, said the project demonstrated that the global impact of the Internet could ultimately serve to reverse the disparity between urban wealth and rural poverty.
"The Net will reverse urbanization," said Mr. Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. "The past 150 years of development have been one of urbanization. To be rural has meant to be poor. The Net could bring some of the same opportunities to the rural world and maybe even turn being rural into being rich.""redux [04.23.00]
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.
Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "
"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.
"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."
redux [07.09.00]
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.
Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.
It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""
""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."
Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.
"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""
redux [05.14.00]
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.
Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."
9:23 PM 0 comments
Wired News
Is U.S. History Becoming History?"The workings of government in the first decades of the information era have been poorly recorded, archiving experts say. Years of valuable public records may have already been lost, creating a gap in the country's historical record."
""We know less about information in the information age," said Patrice McDermott, a records management analyst with government watchdog agency OMB Watch. "It's not just government, corporations have to deal with this too."
Records management experts say the problem started around 1985, when U.S. government agencies began using e-mail and word-processing programs as they changed the way they conducted business. But they did it without a system for preserving electronic files."
redux [07.08.00]
"The Internet provides a unique glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, much like newspapers of old, but little is being done to preserve Web pages for future historians. One non-profit company is trying to change that.
"We have a shadow of the world that we're able to capture and make available to the future," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.
"Why save the entire Internet, when some would argue that most of it is junk?
Referring to newspapers of the past, Kahle said, "If we had been selective, we probably would have kept all the articles and thrown away those ads, but it's the ads that the historians really like. That's what of what life was like."redux [12.17.00]
"Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world."
"The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to permanently preserve a record of public material.
Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages.
The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars to ensure that they have free and permanent access to public materials. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization."
"It is important to realise that the Internet is not just the Web. Many people are unaware that the Internet in fact provides a rich array of services beyond those beginning with WWW. I'm a geographer so I like to think of these as different information spaces, with differing virtual 'geographies'. A good way to get a information spaces of the Internet, their shape, size, landmarks and interconnections, is to map them. One of my favourite conceptual maps of net spaces was drawn back in 1994 by John December."
"The map was drawn at the end of 1994 and the nature of the Internet has changed markedly since then, with certain information spaces dying off as they fall out of favour with users, particularly WAIS and Gopher. Undoubtedly, the biggest change has been the inexorable and exponential growth of Web space which would now be a huge blue blob on the map, squeezing and submerging many other information spaces. For many end-users the Web, seen through the browser interface, is the only information space, although e-mail is still the most widely used. But even here, the Web is coming to dominate with the growing popularity of Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail.
Other important information spaces within the global Internet have evolved and grown to prominence since December drew his map. Notable examples include, instant messaging (e.g. ICQ), chat environments (e.g. IRC), multi-user game spaces (e.g. Quake) and streaming media (e.g. RealNetworks, MP3s). Also, large intranets have proliferated, creating important private information spaces, which are largely unseen from the outside and are therefore difficult to quantify and map. While at the scale of the networks of the Matrix, John December commented to me, via e-mail, that since 1994 there has been "the swallowing up of all alternate networks into the Internet…everyone thinks of only the Internet as the online world.""
"There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future. Digital documents are vulnerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which that software runs, becomes obsolete and is lost. Preserving digital documents may require substantial new investments, since the scope of this problem extends beyond the traditional library domain, affecting such things as government records, environmental and scientific baseline data, documentation of toxic waste disposal, medical records, corporate data, and electronic-commerce transactions."
"New ways of storing information in a way that can be understood thousands of years from now have been discussed at a conference in the United States.
Scientists, librarians, technologists, anthropologists and others, with the backing of the Long Now Foundation, are considering the best way to ensure that the culture and heritage of the 21st Century are not forgotten.
The foundation has developed a small metal disk which can store hundreds of thousands of words.
Called the Rosetta disk, experts hope it will provide our descendants with details of how we live today."
"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."
"At the Internet Archive, a nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco, a small group of engineers backed by a philanthropist are trying to create a new