communication on a whole minute

I have uploaded my thesis for my Master of Communication degree, A Community-Based Model for the Production of Ideas. I argue that treating ideas as the products of communities, rather than the exclusive property of individuals, resolves a number of significant flaws with copyright. More importantly, community-based production promotes communities and aids the self-development of individuals. Since community and self-development are desirable in and of themselves, they provide both a motivation for community development and a moral argument in favor of it.

I am part of a research team studying the access of Canadians to government web sites. We are interested in the prerequisites for people to communicate with government over the Internet, whether in order to retrieve information, make use of services, or participate democratically. Our final report to policy makers will make recommendations about how they might improve access to and the quality of government online in Canada. . . .

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. . . . “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity. I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed whin you bought this conapt.”
—Philip K. Dick, Ubik

A recent Canadian government commission concluded that we need telecommunications deregulation in order to maximize the role of the market. This is supposed to increase competition for consumers and result in increased innovation in Canada. There are some real problems with these claims. The coverage in the Globe & Mail has been particularly uncritical.

I have added Audience Labor: The Asymmetric Production of Culture to the research area of the site. I argue that much of the value in cultural works is produced by the audience, who both promote and construct new meanings from works. This is a challenge to strong copyright, which by inhibiting audience activity may actually limit the value of works (both the cultural value to the audience and the monetary value realized by culture industries). ...

Is talent scarce or abundant? Jon Udell suggests that this is fundamental to the argument over DRM: if talent is scarce, then it needs to be protected. I believe that talent is more abundant than it appears. …

I attended a discussion entitled When is there too much copyright? at the Vancouver Public Library tonight. The room was quite full – there were probably about 80 people in attendance. The copyfighters were by far the majority: I only recall one person arguing for strong copyright from the floor; much of the discussion was criticism aimed at the lone proponent on the three-person panel. …

Tim Bray has proposed a micropayment system to combat spam. A central authority – he suggests the post office – would issue “stamps” for perhaps $0.01. Then, each email message, blog post, etc. would have to prove that it had been paid for by a stamp. This low cost, he suggests, would have little effect on most people, but would be fatal to spammers. I am an admirer of Tim’s blog, but I think he’s dead wrong: this is one of the worst ideas I’ve seen in some time¹. There are two main problems, revolving around cost & access, and centralization & innovation. …

The threat of digital copying is not that it produces perfect duplicates, but that it produces heterogeneous diversity. It is not a sequel to the press, but a divergence from it. …

I just completed a study, titled “ A Balkanized Blogosphere? ”. With same-sex marriage as a topic, I examined the degree to which blog posts connected to others with different points of view. Along with the study, I have posted my full data set and the scripts I used to analyze it. ...

I recently wrote about mobile phones, centralization, and city planning on an exam. I think I gave a rather poor answer: I had too many ideas. I am hesitant of claims that we are entering a new era rather than an old, and suspicious that the role of the mobile is one of decentralization. . . .

Here are some of the more interesting quotes and notes I jotted down during the presentations at Northern Voice. The quotes are really paraphrases (I would make an awful secretary); I apologize for any errors or omissions. . . .

Cindy and I attended the Northern Voice blogging conference today. We thoroughly enjoyed it: the setting was good, the weather was beautiful, and the whole thing was a comfortable size. Many of the speakers were excellent. I intend to write several up, but I’ll start with Stephen Downes’ presentation on Community Blogging. He had much to say, so this is a long post. . . .

I found this in Norman Davies’s book Europe: A History. It strikes me as particularly relevant to the election campaign underway in the United States: . . .

Recently I have been talking about how to improve email. This got me thinking, and I remembered an essay I wrote about email in my final year of higschool. This may be of interest for its historical value – both because of what it says about how widespread online communication was, and because it contains online political comment from back in the day. One thing that jumped out at me is that although technology has advanced, the cost of a computer has remained the same in unadjusted dollars: $500 would buy you a machine with a modem. . . .

I ran across an intriguing version of the Sherlock Holmes story The Speckled Band on kottke. The author has threaded the text of the story through comments in other people’s Flickr web logs. There is something very intriguing about this, but I can’t put my finger on it. I think it has something to do with public versus private spaces. . . .

I am reading Harold Innis’s Empire & Communications. Innis was suspicious of writing; he felt that in many ways an oral tradition is superior to a written one. This is illustrated best when he quotes Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates comments on writing and explains how the god Amon criticized Thoth’s invention of writing: . . .

When I saw this link to Star Wars dance videos on Boing Boing I suddenly realized: this is how the computer-generated movies of the future will be made. They will not emerge from the vaults of Hollywood studios, there painstakingly built by programming in angles and dimensions and movements. No, they will arise from kids using games to make films they never could before. . . .

Most films don’t draw me in. Usually it’s the characters and the script which are lacking; a good story is often wasted because I just don’t care about the people. But the films I do love, like Casablanca and Chungking Express, have one other element: a sense of time and place. . . .