[Two days later: Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged this better than I. Get thee hence. Also, check Jillian York‘s comments.]

Wayner Marshall, an ethno-musicologist at MIT (and of wayneandwax) is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. He’s talking about the “unstable platforms and uneasy peers of brave new world music.” Music can tell us a great deal about politics and culture, he says. We can see the fault lines in public culture as it appears on the Web. The aesthetic qualities of works bear traces of the technology by which they’re made.

The ability to publish to a near limitless audience with production-grade tools has created a brave new world. The watermarking (“remove this stamp by paying”) of some of these works, and the maintaining of these watermarks rather than removing them, ( bears witness to a change in attitudes and culture. He points to a YouTube video titled “Marvel Inc Jerkin in Hollywood,” which uses a brand name, and includes more in the tags. It’s aimed at their peers but is posted in a public site. It’s got a visible watermark in the middle. Wayne then points to the audible watermarks in a jerking track (Fly Kidd – Buckle My Shoe) — every 15 seconds a voice interrupts it. But first we have to listen to an ad to see the video. These are the compromises we’ve made to create public music.

He talks about the New Boyz who created a video using FrootyLoops, posted it, and found other videos of people dancing to their song. Their song became so popular that the New Boyz got signed and produced an official version of their video, far slicker. (Jerkin kids foreground their embrace of technology. Plus they project skateboard culture, skinny jeans, etc. There are arguments about whether they’re violating black masculinity, Wayne says.) Once the professional version came out, YouTube started finding the videos using the soundtrack, so the video creators began began swapping out the audio for other tracks. (In a discussion we learn that Amazon lets music owners register their tracks, triggering a takedown notice or an offer to post a link to a buy link if someone uploads a video that uses the registered track.)

Wayne points to the Jamglue site where users could mix tracks. It’s now shuttered.

Now he switches to “uneasy peers.” Videos and music obviously travel much more easily than before; he shows a Panamanian video that reproduces the original New Boyz vid quite closely, with a new rap over the beat. “They’ve inserted themselves into jerk culture.” This is the music of a brave new world, he says. But it also becomes a new world music. E.g., blogs follow the global spread of music and dance: ghettobassquake. We’re seeing a reimagining of what world music is about: Not so much about West vs. the Rest, but a local dance style (jerkin) circulates throughout the world, peer to peer.

We’re seeing many problems on the platforms that we consider to be part of public culture, e.g., YouTube. Are there other ways to go about it. It’s important to teach new media literacies, but they only go so far. Maybe there are more design and architectural issues to think about.

Q: Are the dispays of cellphones in the vids a sign of new media literacy or just a sign of status or of sociality?
A: I wouldn’t disagree. I don’t want to be too optimistic about the technical savvy. They have certain literacies, but there are other issues.

Q: Maybe people use the audible watermark as a part of the music or culture. Maybe it’s part of the style.
A: Interesting thesis. I haven’t heard people bragging about their watermarks.
Q: They used to blur commercial logos…
A: That was because MTV didn’t want to give away free ads.

Q: As recently as 5 yrs ago, it was pretty much impossible to have access to these productions without access to an underground trading network. Is there no more underground or margin?
A: Those boundaries between underground and mainstream have of course been increasingly blurred. It’s not so much new as easier to do.
Q: Are there some people who are avoiding the public platforms because they want to keep it outside the public?
A: Undoubtedly, although I have not encountered much of it. More often it is being done for friends and just happens to be public.

Q: What sort of architectures ought we be to looking at?
A: The public platforms make the works vulnerable. After the Great Blogocide of ’10, many of the music blogs switched to WordPress. We could use ways to host your own music, for example.

Q: What terminology are you comfortable with?
A: “World music” too often implies non-Western vs. the West, with the West being the real music. [I missed some of this]

Q: Do you think there’s a new kind of underground forming — mainstream platforms vs. underground platforms? Non-US platforms?
A: Yes. Dailymotion in the francophone world, or SkyRock. In Latin America, fotolog is a popular way. 4Share. And more dark net places.

Q: Should the record labels be using you as a consultant?
A: I don’t know what will save the labels.

Q: What are the ethnographers responsibility to the artist if the music makes no copyright statement?
A: As a researcher, I have fair use rights. My masters thesis was about sample-based production and the litigation around it, I refused to identify which music I was talking about. Now, when I blog about a video I know I may be bringing an unwelcome audience to it. It’s an interesting question.

Q: Is the New Boyz story a success story for them and their label? If so, what’s the harm?
A: They’ve had two big hits. But some of the videos that helped elevate them are disappearing because of copyright claims. But I don’t see any chilling effect here: The vid disappears but that was last week anyway. And, of the three groups mentioned in the NYT as signed by Warner Brothers (proof of it going semi-mainstream), Wayne says he’s heard nothing from them since.

Q: You said we may be at the end of the W vs. the Rest or North vs. South paradigm. But, as ___ said, there are four outcomes when cultures map: One dominates. War. Fusion. Thanks but carry on. You’re talking about fusion, but in all the videos we’ve seen, the kids are wearing NY caps, t-shirts, etc. It’s as if they’re saying they’re as NY or LA as the rest of you. Have we hit the point where the remix impacts outside the ethnic community or specific music community? Are we seeing that cross-over?
A: Yes. And we have to look at how the local audience views the performance. Often there’s contentious conversation about the local group aping US culture. OTOH, I look at it and do not see homogenization. It’s locally accented. And the best example of this bleeding out of local communities is MIA, who’s won a Grammy and is frequently sampled; she’s one of these uneasy peers, who’ll issue a CD that nods to local genres but has the attention of the national media.

Q: Has the circle turned? At PlayingForChange, people around the world can play music today. Do the New Boyz look at what the Dominican boys do and want to work with them? Are we getting actual collaboration?
A: Yes, to some extent. That’s burgeoning. More of these videos are echoes. Wayne points to Lil B.

Q: What propagates this music style? The music? The dancing?
A: Hmm. Hard to know. The fact that it’s dance music helps.

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Here’s this week’s Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Jillian York [twitter:jillianyork]

• John Palfrey hits the radio to talk about controversial site RateBU.com:
  link

• Alum Derek Bambauer discusses the USICE’s seizure of 82 domains:
  link

• Jonathan Zittrain evaluates the latest developments for net neutrality:
  link

• The OpenNet Initiative looks at Net censorship in Syria:
  link

Special Section: This Week on WikiLeaks

• Clay Shirky envisions what a post-WikiLeaks future looks like:
  link

• Jonathan Zittrain and Molly Sauter provide an A-Z of WikiLeaks:
  link

• Dan Gillmor argues a defense of WikiLeaks:
  link

• The OpenNet Initiative analyzes Twitter’s trending topics vis-a-vis #WikiLeaks:
  link

• Radio Berkman 171: WikiLeaks and the Information Wars:
  link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Special Coverage: WikiLeaks and the World 2010”:
  link

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Jon Udell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on “Rethinking the community calendar.”

He begins by projecting the Berkman Web page for this event. He says it should be doing two things. First, it should enable humans visiting the event to get info. Second, it should make the data available to other calendars. There is an RSS feed on the page, but the machine-readable data in it does not include calendar info. The calendar info is there, but as mere text, not marked up as data. RSS feeds tend to be used to syndicate content, not data.

Jon takes blogs as an example of how syndicated feeds work. There are blog sites like WordPress or Userland that publish blogs. There are services that aggregate the feeds from the publishers; they’re registries. And there are tools that let users subscribe to feeds. The feed that you publish is your authoritative representation of yourself. (Dave Winer’s Userland fits into all three, Jon points out.)

iCalendar is the RSS of calendars, Jon says. We’ve had this standard for 10 years. Fairly recently, you can publish right out of your calendar. So, Jon envisions an analogue to the blogging ecosystem that has syndication hubs for calendar information. The publishers are sites like eventful, eventbrite, and Google Calendar. Subscribers might be community calendars, events calendars, etc. Jon is especially excited about individuals publishing events.

There are already about 50 hubs. Most are geographic, but some are topical. Jon is writing for Azure (Microsoft’s cloud server), but it’s open source. Jon points to a Stanford page that has an ical feed. Then he shows what the hub looks like. The hub is not designed primarily for end user access, although it provides an html view. The hub Stanford is using (InMenlo) happens to use Google calendar as a way to display its aggregated data feeds.

For Jon, this app is a demonstration of some what he calls the Elmcity Principles:

1. Data has structure

2. It can be transformed. E.g., into a human-readable form, or into another data format.

3. It can be syndicated.

Jon then applies this to calendar info. iCal provides a structure. It can be transformed int XML, HTML, etc. But, he points out, the transformations aren’t necessarily reversible. E.g., it can be very hard to go from the Web view back into iCal. This is hard for many people to understand, he says.

He points to Jeannette Wing‘s manifesto [pdf]: “To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability.” (‘Computational thinking’ as a phrase has marketing challenges, Jon remarks wryly.) Educators are feeling around the edges of this idea. E.g., Phil Libin said, in an interview with Jon, that the public needs to understand one-way encryption because it’s a fundamental concept.

Jon’s local high school publishes its calendar as a pdf file. Jon would like it to be in a transformable data format. More important, he’d like the high school to be teaching his children computational thinking. There are missing concepts:

• Structured data can be represented in many ways

• Some reps are best for people, other for computers

• Machine-friendly data can syndicate without loss of fidelity

• Data feeds and items have unique names (urls)

• Urls enable “small pieces loosely joined”

• Urls pass data by reference, rather than by value. Jon doesn’t think “digital natives” intuit this.

• I should be the authoritative, controlling source of my data

So, why is this hard? We haven’t evolved biological intutions about what happens online. E.g., in the real world, at some point in our development we get the concept of constant volume: Pour a glass into a larger glass and it’s the same value. There are fundamental concepts in the online world that are non-intuitive that we ought to be teaching.

Jon sees ical hubs as an example of, and a prototype of, some of these concepts, and an opportunity to help educate the public about them.

For example, Jon says, that using the syndication model, a scientist could be publishing on her site that about which she is an authoritative source, and publish it as a feed that gets syndicated into publishers and conversations. Because she can control that data, she can show the effect it has had.

Likewise, you could publish a book review and syndicate it to various e-library sources.

Likewise, we’ve acted as if the gov’t holds data that we demand, without realizing that we’re the soure of much of that data.

“Ultimately, this all goes to the broader theme of identity,” Jon says. Can we look for opportunities for ourselves to be the authoritative sources?

Q: Do you see a common pedagogy for approaching science, government, etc.?
A I think there are a handful of common principles.

Q: 100 yrs ago someone might have said citizens need to be conversant with how electricity works. But that shifted to a small number of people. Likewise for the pubsub and RSS models…
A: Yes, this is one of the breakthroughs of Facebook: It’s not hitting me over the head with “subscribe” buttons.

Q: How do the halves of your talk go together: The need for cal hubs and the need for computational thinking skills? What about our use of calendars demonstrates that need?
A: My local newspaper would love to have a comprehensive view of what’s going on in the community. Papers fail at this because the architecture of the solution is flawed: a central database with a single owner, and contributors bringing their facts to the database. …
A: But we’re using the old tools because the tools are simple. It’s easy to print out the HS calendar pdf. It’s not because of a lack of comprehension…

Q: (1) Ten yrs ago, the HS principle didn’t know what a pdf was, didn’t know how to post a blog, etc. (2) Why not scrape calendar info off of sites…
A: It’s being tried.

Q: Howard Rheingold is working on a book on digital literacy. And it can be difficult to the spidering/scraping because the sites haven’t bought into that.

Q: At the W3C we used to make the same sorts of pleas, e.g., separate content from data. People would push back that people won’t do it for themselves; we have to give them the tools. The kids today don’t know html. There hasn’t been a new literacy. Is it a marketplace issue? I.e., if you make it easy to use the tools, people will use them.

A: The end game (Jon hopes): when you’re born you’re given a cryptographic key to a cloud service, and that’s where your stuff goes. You control it and assert policy over it. Born with a personal data store.

Q: What are the limitations of ElmCity scaling? How can ical scale with all the language, infinite subjects, etc.?
A: The same way the Web scales.
Q: How tied is it to Azure?
A: The way a Google app is tied to the Google app engine.

Q: How do you keep loops from forming? I.e., someone re-syndicates…
A: Ical has an idea of a unique id for an event. The data being passed by reference is “uniquely minimal.”

Q: What determines the authoritative event?
A: The hub is a registry of feeds. It’s curated by someone who has authority to decide which feeds to include.

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This week’s Berkman Buzz,, as compiled by Jillian York:

• Dan Gillmor [twitter:dangillmor] mulls over Facebook’s latest announcement: link

• Ethan Zuckerman [twitter:ethanz] shares some thoughts on libraries in the digital age: link

• Alumna Rebecca MacKinnon [twitter:rmack] offers suggestions on U.S. Internet freedom policy: link

• Radio Berkman 168: Rethinking Music, Part I – Creativity, Commerce, and Policy: link

• VozMob (Mobile Voices), co-founded by Fellow Sasha Constanza-Chock [twitter:schock] , wins a World Summit Award: link

• Weekly Global Voices [twitter:globalvoices] : “Cuba: Fiber Optic Cable May Not Bring Greater Internet Access” link

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Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston University, is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch titled “Plenitude: Sustainability and the Web.” The tech and sustainability communities need a much closer relationship, she says as the talk begins.

She begins by telling us about the urgency of the issue of environmental sustainability. A World Wildlife Foundation study shows the decline in biodiversity. “A massive extinction is underway.” A study of eco-footprints shows that the USA’s average is about five times the world average biocapacity per person. Countries with equivalent standards of living have about half our eco-footprint. And that’s not to mention the upward path of CO2 emissions. Although there’s been some good news recently, it’s largely due to the economic downturn, she says. To avoid climate catastrophe, we need a 90% reduction by 2050.

In the 1970s, a group of MIT modelers (associated with James Forester) showed that if industrial production continued to increase, the system would collapse right about now. It was a simplistic model and it focused too much on non-renewables. Oil did not behave the way they predicted. The economists thought we could continue to grow by de-materializing, i.e., getting more out of resources [I may not have gotten that right], but the growth of use per person has more than outweighed the decline in carbon intensity. There’s been a 45% increase in materials extraction worldwide, 1980-2005, i.e., de-materialization is not happening. North American extraction has increased by more than 66% over this period. Mainly we’re burning fossil fuels and using construction materials. A stiff price on carbon would help tremendously, but is unlikely, Juliet says.

Unfortunately, the downturn is likely to increase the damage to the environment, since the imperative is to get people back to work by growing the economy. She says this is a stupid approach since we are getting people back to work doing what they did before, with all of its inequalities and emphasis on consumption. It would be helpful to improve the equity of the distribution of assets and income. We need to create wealth and well-being. And we should avoid top-down, innefficient or elitist solutions. “I call this plenitutde,” a new type of economic model.

As an economic model, plenitude is about:

• A move to closed loop/clean production and consumption systems.

• Eco-knowledge: open source transmission and ecological skill diffusion. Innovation has been based too much on using (and wasting) Nature. We should be treating nature as a scarce good. Open source is crucial for the diffusion of ecological knowledge and skills

• Reducing the hours in business-as-usual, and building time wealth for people.

• We need a “growing green sector of small scale enterprises, and new property forms”

• Invest more in social capital.

She’s going to talk about two principles of Plenitude; there are four in her book.

First, we should reduce the number of working hours. From 1870 until the 1970s in the industrialized world, we went from 3,000 hours of work per year to about 1,800. Without this, we would not have been able to absorb all the labor displaced by increased productivity. But from 1973 until now, the hours of work in the US have increased, and has created a gap between us and other industrialized countries. If we can’t keep increasing the size of our economy in dollar terms, we have to reduce the number of hours. “In Europe, people are beginning to understand this.” “Given the magnitude of the climate reductions we need, the wealthy countries of the world are probably going to have to stop growing.” As soon as we get serious about targets, Juliet says, we’ll see that. “Shorter hours of work is associated with lower ecological footprint.” We should create policies that make working fewer hours more attractive to individuals and to firms.

So, what are people going to do with their new leisure time? The second principle of Plenitude is that people should begin to do more “high tech self providing” — make and do more for themselves. (It’s a phrase from Fritjof Bergman.) This will lead to green entrepreneurship, Juliet says. E.g., permaculture (more advanced high productivity agriculture), micro-generation of energy, DIY home building (low cash, low footprint). Her Center for a New American Dream is looking at all of these.

Juliet points to Fab Labs for their lower barrier to entry. She talks about the rise of sharing — home-, tool, car-, couch-sharing. The Web has reduced the transaction costs for this type of sharing. Plus the recession has changed the calculus of time and money. Transition towns grapple with what will be happening with the climate; there are 80 in the US.

Q: How adaptable are these ideas to developing countries?
A: Many have been practiced for quite a while in developing countries.
Q: That’s not the mindset of those in developing countries.
A: It is for some development groups. Not for the World Bank. Look at some of the less mainstream, more alternative groups.

Q: To what extent does the increasing use of electronics contribute to the the eco problems?
A: That is an issue. It’s a big energy consumer. Google is thinking about its footprint and is moving to renewable energy. The mindset is generally better in that sector.

Q: Google searching can also save energy because I can avoid driving from store to store looking for something. Also, the most effective development tools are the small enablers, e.g., a sewing machine or chickens. Rather than being dependent on others, people can develop their own enterprises.
A: My model is similar to that, but it’s not money-driven. Financial constraints are not the issue in developed countries. We are constrained much more by time because we work long hours in formal jobs in order to get access to housing, health insurance, and education. Why would people want to become pose-industrial peasants? They get diversity of income streams. This is especially important because we’re coming into a time of increasing uncertainty — financial collapses and climactic uncertainties. New tech allows individuals and small firms to become highly productive because of their relationships to networks.

Q: Over the past two decades, networks have risen empowering individuals, yet capital has concentrated into fewer hands. Do you see that changing?
A: We need to develop a new economic model. Peer production can help create a new kind of economy. The increased concentration of wealth has to do with state policy. What’s happening on the Internet can be the basis of a new economic model.

Q: How do you see the politics behind this movement happening?
A: My book tries to avoid dealing with politics. We live in such a politically polarized moment. But you do need a politics to get you to this place. We lack a viable and credible economic alternative to global capitalism. We have to put it together — intellectual work. At the same time, we need people doing it and living it — real life models of alternatives. It’s happening at a very local level. In the Pacific Northwest we’re beginning to see a sustainable alternative. And there are some policy elements: A single payer health system would allow people to de-link from fulltime jobs. The recession provides us with a tremendous opportunity to explore alternatives.

Q: Are there numbers about what’s going on?
A: Not many. This movement started with people with a lot of education and social capital. That’s changing. Some of the most active areas are low-income people of color. We’re seeing less of it in the white working class. It’s beginning to become a more diverse movement.

Q: How about how the educational system could be helpful? All you hear is jobs, jobs, jobs. And how undergrad economics is taught is not on the same planet as what you’re talking about. We’re part of the problem here at Harvard.
A: How to make change in universities? Let’s just take economics. It’d be very useful if scientists actually began to take more of a role in the university in talking about what students should be taught about planets and its management, which includes economics. Humanists won’t be listened to on this. The disproportionate role of economists in running these universities…
Q: Half of the Harvard student body takes the party-line econ course.
A: Econ depts generally have one person working on environmental issues. This is a civilizational emergency, and we have depts of 70 people, 69 of whom pay no attention to this. And the one who does is probably funded by the energy industry.

Q: Do we have time to travel this path?
A: On the one hand, we can look at what’s happening and say it’s getting worse — e.g., Citizens United — and say it’s hopeless. Or we can step back and ask what we need to build. It’s going to be ugly. So we need to build a movement that will counter a corporatized, fascistic vision of green, or a scenario of non-green. We need to be constructing a much more humanistic, egalitarian world that will really be good for people, and will give people more freedom, more community, more safety, more security. That’s all we can do.

A: What’s happening in tech is not on the radar of the sustainability groups. They’re still trying to think about their web sites. The transformative power of tech has not struck them yet — transformative of knowledge transmission, how we live our lives, and the economic model. In the tech world, there are lots of people who care about sustainability. More institutional connections would help. In the tech world, people meet and things happen, and that’s part of how we’re going to get to where we need to. We need lots of innovation.

Q: Do you see the Admin’s regulations about moving MPG up as a model?
A: That’s taken decades. I’m more advocate of new techs that leapfrog over marginal change initiatives. And that’s part of how we shorten the timeline for reaching our Plenitude goal.

Q: You say mostly highly educated are involved in this movement now. How do we move ahead and expand the movement?
A: We could start out hiring people at 80% time.
Q: The Net makes knowledge more available, but how do you help people get formal education?
A: Policies could help … [Couldn’t hear parts]

Q: I’m a Ph.D. student in econ. The politics of making the shift should not only be concerned with reducing the influence of big firms, but reducing the influence of some of the big economists.
A: Economists have started taking a lot more money from financial corporations. The field has been corrupted by money. Twenty years ago, a student of mine did a report on the boards of directors that Harvard’s faculty is on. That’s never revealed when they testify, etc.

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Elliot Maxwell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Openness: How increasing accessibility and responsiveness can transform processes and systems.” H3e says he came to the question by observing the spread and importance of the Net and its effect on institutions. He sees openness as a lens for understanding processes and systems.

Openness is a continuum, Elliot says. For example, open source software benefits from openness, but because decisions are made by assigned individuals, it is not itself fully open. Things are open if they’re accessible and can be modified, repurposed, and redistributed. Openness is in part an attitude, he says. E.g., a doctor is more open if s/he is more willing to listen to the patient and to take her/his time. “Openness is not necessarily a product of IT.”

Also, openness isn’t always the right answer. E.g., an electronic health record should be open enough that doctors can see it and so it can be immediately updated as lab results come in. But, it shouldn’t necessarily be open to other people, insurance companies, or the gov’t. Also, openness can make more haystacks, hiding the needles we need to find.

Elliot began thinking about this when Napster was at its high point. Traditional IP sees control as essential to creating an environment that encourages creation. But, we also want to encourage follow-on creators. There’s not a lot of research about how much incentive first creators need. (And, of course, first creators are themselves follow on creators.) Control is expensive and imperfect. (Think DRM). Open source, on the other hand, thinks value comes by distributing and sharing. But, it can be hard to evaluate all the contributions that come in.

Elliot lists some examples of increased openness, and spends some time talking about the attenmpts to open up clinical trials. (ClinicalTrials.gov and the Journal of Failed Clinical Trials.)

Elliot is also especially interested in higher education, which has been relatively unaffected by openness, although he expects that to change. (It’s easier for Harvard and other research institutions to support open access, he says, than, say, community colleges that have different goals and constraints. ) Elliot sees a rise in open educational resources, which will affect teaching institutions. OER will be increasingly driven by customers, rather than being course materials put up on the Web by a teacher. We will know more about how OERs are being used, they will become more interoperable, and there will be incentives for participation and use.

At CMU and other places, there’s work on harvesting what happens to and around digital educational materials. We need better data on student progress, educational outcomes, and the factors that affect student success. He says we also need research on the cmparative effectiveness of digital edu materials, and best practices. Also, it’d be great to extend fab labs digitally.

Elliot sees progress in opening up research. The Human Genome Project was the seminal event that changed the basic model of research, at least in the bio sciences. Open access journals are growing. But, too many institutions still only count publication in closed journals as a scholarly achievement. We don’t yet have good models for how to reward research that is immediately published.

Intellectual property rules need to be recalibrated to recognize the importance of follow-on innovators, and to enable more use by educators. Bayh-Dole should be modified to enable more open licensing. He would also like to see some “orphan work” legislation.

We should change the default of campus events so that they’re open, unless they’re specifically closed. “We should take advantage of greater openness to improve support services.” The government should fund open access to financial aid materials. NIH-funded research should be open to the public within 12 months should be extended to all non-classified research funded by the 11 fed agencies that spende over $100M in research. And the embargo time should be reudced to 6 months. The government ought to include funds for open access publishing when making grants, Elliot says.

Then there’s openness and transparency about academic degrees. We don’t know what it means to get a degree in something. We need more compatibility, comparability and portability of degrees. The government should encourage accrediting agencies to increase their focus on learning outcomes. (Currently only 19% of accrediting bodies say anything more than that a school is accredited or not.)

Q: [ethanz] You’re conflating openness and judging inputs and outputs. Evaluating schools by outcomes is one thing, but that’s different from openness.
A: Openness has to do with the access to the information.
Q: US News and World Report makes a closed evaluation based on open info. When you go more open, you can get unintended consequences. E.g., no one has done an open search engine, because it’s too game-able. What are the unintended consequences of opening up campus events, for example? E.g., Facebook opening up more and more private data. I was hoping you’d tell us more about where openness is inappropriate.
A: Yes. I’ve been talking about openness because that’s where it’s going.
Q: I agree with your framing of first and follow on innovators and with your general direction. But, the limits are important.
Q: As a historian, your directional arrow seems too one-dimensional. Historically, open and closed have worked hand in glove. E.g., the patent system closes paths but forces innovators to reveal what they have. E.g., the closedness of some medical processes.
A: Changing the default for university events would only be for events that were public anyway. And if I sound like I’m giving a litany of open

Q: [me] Is data more open if it’s been cleaned up and put into standardized formats. It’s more reusable, but it may also mean decisions have been made about it that anticipate some uses and not others?
A: It’s situational. In the long run it’s probably likely that all the slicing and dicing would evolve to a smaller way of using this info, because people would be able to build on that info — that’s just a guess. But, when people are unlikely to agree, getting it out quickly would be more usefl. Standardization has some benefits, but if it’s rigid it’s probably wrong.

Elliot concludes about talking about new means of certification. We’re going to find new ways of certifying people in a global environment. There aren’t educational institutions everywhere, and we have a new generation of self-directed learners. That will allow many more people to be certified.

Q: [wendy] What’s the most effective lever for openness? Is it giving credit for being open?
A: We need to recognize that the closed path is not the only way to build value.

Q: Transparency, openness, and open source are each different.
A: OS is a way of building code. Transparency lets us see, but not by itself affect…
Q: At the level of international relations, we can maybe get transparency, but openness will only come from individual administrations…
A: Transparency would let us see what’s happening. But I want us to be able to act on the info we see.

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The NY Times has a terrific article about Media Cloud, a Berkman Center project (hats off to Ethan Zuckerman, Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, among others) that will let researchers track the actual movement of ideas through the mediasphere and blogosphere.

Data about concepts! What a concept!

[Tags: berkman media blogs memes research media_cloud ]

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Like a fool, until Rebecca Tabasky told me, I didn’t realize that the Berkman Center aggregates blog posts from its fellows and friends and makes them available here.

[Tags: berkman ]

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Dan Gillmor is giving a Berkman lunch on media literacy.

He whips through a history of media, from stone age to now, in about ten seconds. He cycles through a dozen sites doing interesting work, compressing twenty minutes of his normal talk to about 20 seconds. He says he’s no longer very worried about the supply of good journalism.

He says the question of “Who is a journalist?” is the wrong one to ask. Better to ask “What is journalism?” It’s an And, not an Or, situation. NGOs and individuals have been doing good reporting. The best reporting on Guantanamo has come from the ACLU, not from professional journalists. As Clay Shirky says, there’s no barrier any more between ideas and action. Try things out, let them fail, try again. Dan quickly shows some student projects at ASU, where he teaches, ProPublica, NYTimes APIs, etc. “I’m just pretty sure we’re going to get enough journalism.” But, says Dan, that doesn’t solve the quality problem.

He says he is really worried about demand. There’s too much information. Not all of it is accurate, including info in the mainstream media. “The ecosystem is in bad need of repair.” He talks about principles for “consumers” (he puts it in quotes) and suppliers.

For news consumers, he says we need skepticism and judgment. We need to have our “bullshit meter” working all the time. “It’s a mistake to think of credibility as starting at zero.” We should be thinking of it as having a negative starting point. Anonymous comments start with negative credibility. “They’d have to work really hard to get to no credibility.” Sometimes there’s something good in there, but …

Anonymous speech is crucial, Dan says. It’d be a big mistake to try to ban it. “It’s a bad idea” to refuse to stand behind your words in most cases, but it’s crucial when we need it. People should assume that a personal anonymous attack on someone is a lie. Assume it’s false.

Another principle: Do research. Ask your own questions, especially when making big decisions. E.g., Wikipedia is often the best place to start, and usually the worst place to stop. Dan says that WP is getting better and better and becoming one of the most valuable sources of info on the planet.

Another principle: Get outside your own comfort zone. E.g., Global Voices.

Another principle: Question your own beliefs. Dan used to keep a list of things he believes, and every six months he’d relentlessly attack it. E.g., these days he’s thinking Google is getting worrisome, doing things that are “anti-trust worthy” [nice pun!] He needs to revisit and ask if that trend is true.

Finally, we need to learn the techniques by which media is created and manipulates us. Sourcewatch, NewsTrust, MediaCritic (for Phoenix AZ)

The principles for journalists include all of the above, plus: Asking the readers what they know; thoroughness; accuracy; fairness (enabling right of hyperlinked reply); independence; transparency. Dan’s example of the need for transparency: The NYT won a Pulitzer for exposing the Pentagon’s coopting of military experts showing up on TV shows in the run-up to the Iraq War, but the network news did not mention that when covering the Pulitzers. Transparency means “you’ll be believed less but trusted more.”

Dan is creating a users guide, under the name mediactivecom. It’ll be a book and a site. He’s also exploring the nature of books. Perhaps the slower moving stuff will be in the book and the faster stuff will be online. He’ll write it entirely in public.

Q: Is the media organization the right unit of trust? Maybe we trust the NYT for tech reporting but not on Iraq…
A: Yes. There are reporters who I trust and others I don’t so much. And good reporters sometimes get things wrong. We’re looking for people to help us develop systems that combine population and reputation, and reputation is an incredibly complicated word…

Q: Your principles for journalists look like an updated version of the professional code of ethics for journalists. The code hasn’t been updated since 1996. Maybe that’s a framework for you…
A: One of my beefs with the NYT and WaPo is how routinely they violate their own standard. BTW, you’ll notice the word objectivity occurred nowhere in my presentation.

Q: I’m worried that money + anonymity (or fake identity) means that people can be shills. And someone who has to work all day can’t contribute as much to citizen efforts.
A: It’s going to be messy. But we’ll have more good things. Manipulation via money is not a new problem. Relentless media criticism is the best sunlight. I don’t know if it’ll be enough. As far as the inability to participate: There will be various scales. Most people can’t do media criticism all day. They have a life. People are now aware that if the see something newsworthy and they have a cellphone camera, they should record it. They don’t all know what to do next, and that’s an area for education.

Q: At our university, all students must take media literacy. Do you have advice for students.
A: I wonder if it’s too late by college. We need to do this when kids are young. But to teach critical thinking in grade schools would get you fired as a dangerous radical in half the school districts.

Q: (eszter) Even if we agreed that literacy is something we need, it’s not clear whose jurisdiction it falls under.
A: I know of one university that has a course devoted to this required of all students: U NY Stony Brook.

Q: The best media criticism today is on Comedy Central. We need the political will to do this work.
A: The Daily Show has some of the best criticism of television news, but that’s a very narrow part of journalism in terms of its content. You want to see bad news watch local tv news.

(lisa williams) What happens when local newspapers go?
A: I challenge your assumption that there will be no daily paper in the top 50 cities in the US. There’s still a business to be had in print journalism for some period of time (but not forever). The problem is most of these guys have so much debt. If the Boston Globe goes, within weeks there will be two smaller newspapers that will be better than the Metro. They won’t be comprehensive. There will be no lack of information, though it’ll be harder to find the things that trust. Messiness is not something merely to fear.

Q: (cbracy) How do some sites/papers get past zero in credibility? E.g., Talking Points Memo
A: From the beginning, TPM told you who he was, stood behind his works, had some journalistic background. Then, over time, it’s earned our trust.
Q: Rush Limbaugh uses his own name …
A: But an important criterion is that what you say is true. I have nothing against Fox existing. I just despise the slogan “Fair and balanced” because it’s a lie. We’re never going to agree on everything, so the reputation system needs to include knowing the opinion of people who broadly think about the world as I do but also what people who don’t think the way I do, because I want to make sure that I read that to. I prefer the uncomfortable world of nuance and uncertainty than one to which we simply accept the news as given.

Q: (harry lewis) Where is the right place to teach people not to beleive anonymous stuff?
A: The best single thing we could do to have better journalism is to have journalist be covered by some other journalism. It sure as hell made me better. It a smart world, getting burned would not be the way you learn. But for some period of time, people are going to have to be burned by believing something anonymous and telling their friends. It’ll take a generation…

People will miss the current newspapers because they are a unifying force. Also, what about objectivity>
A: Objectivity is a nice ideal that is hopelessly impractical. The principles I outlined add up to something better. No one should ever believe only one media source. And, no, I’m not happy about the dissolution of forces that gave us some common ground. But I see all these self-organize things happening… Before it’s over, everyone will have heard Susan Boyle sing. We have a better chance of figuring things out now that the information accretes over time to a place where there’s more clarity. And, by the way, I do not buy the echo chamber idea; I think that’s easier to do in the era of broadcasting.

Q: (darius) I’m skeptical. Aren’t lazy users aren’t lazy. They work hard all day and then want to be entertained
A: They’re not lazy in their lives, but they’re being lazy in what they believe about the news. The era of mass media has encourage an intellectual and civic laziness that’s dangerous. We all to take more responsibility for knowing what we know.

Q: You’re worried that the demand side isn’t strong enough. Even if every university had a course in media literacy, but the 2/3’s of the country that doesn’t go to university …
A: There’s lot of work going on in media literacy at all levels of education. I avoid the phrase “media literacy” because it works better than Ambien in putting people to sleep. It has to start with parents. Journalists should have been working on this for years; it would have given them a reason for existing.

[Posted without being re-read. Sorry!] [Tags: berkman journalism media dan_gillmor citizen_media ]

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From a press release:

In a case involving important First Amendment rights, the Citizen Media Law Project (“CMLP”) joined a number of media and advocacy organizations, including Gannett Co., Inc., Hearst Corporation, Illinois Press Association, Online News Association, Public Citizen, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Tribune Company, in asking an Illinois appellate court to protect the rights of anonymous speakers online by imposing procedural safeguards before requiring that their identities be disclosed.

The CMLP is a Berkman project. More here…

[Tags: berkman cmlp freedom_of_speech anonymity privacy free_speech ]

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