Tag Archives: internet

The CRTC’s broadcast nationalism won’t matter in a networked world

Woke up today was confronted by yet another headline demonstrating why the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) must go.

For those who’ve never heard of the CRTC, it is the government agency that regulates Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications activities, the best-known of which is probably the Canadian content rules.

At the core of the proposal is a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet. The CRTC wishes to treat it like a broadcast medium – one where there are distinct roles of creators and consumers. Happily for us, this is not what the internet is. Instead it is what Clay Shirky describes as a communications medium – one where we are all talking to one another and where the distinction between creator and consumer has broken down.

So with that lens in mind, I encourage you to read the article. Below is my analysis:

Amid fears that Canada’s culture is being drowned in a sea of online video from around the world, federal regulators are looking at setting up a $100-million fund to support homegrown programming on the Internet… under a scenario proposed yesterday, Internet service providers could be asked to surrender 3 per cent of their subscriber revenue – roughly $100-million – to a fund that would help produce Canadian programs for the Web.

Is Canadian content being drowned out in a sea of online videos? I suppose. But so is everybody’s. It is the nature of the medium. What % of content on the internet is American, Indian, Chinese? Does it matter? Not really. Because people don’t surf the internet like they surf the radio or television – most often the seek out content. But the CRTC is used to a certain % of content being Canadian on the radio and television because it controlled how much content ended up on those mediums. This is their frame and why they can’t understand the internet.

Ironically, even though we don’t know what % of online content is Canadian what the CRTC cannot grasp is that since the advent of the internet ordinary Canadian both produced more content and – I’ll wager – consumed more Canadian content than ever before. Think of all the blogs, videos, podcasts made by ordinary Canadians that are sharing Canadian stories over the web. Think of this blog. Ensuring Canadian stories get shared is core to the CRTC’s mandate. And yet, for all their discussion about Canadian content the CRTC does not include content created by all those Canadians who’ve previously could never tell their stories.

Why? Because none of us have title of “producer” or “writer” or “actor” in the CRTC’s eyes. We (Canadians) don’t count as culture.

More ironically, the one thing you often can’t find online (and/or has been slow to get online) is the very media the CRTC does count as culture and that it seeks to protect – the Canadian TV and radio shows broadcast on CTV, CBC and Global. These artifacts of the broadcast era have fought or denied the existence if the internet, who have been the slowest to make their content available to us, now want us to foot the bill for creating their content.

What I can be certain of is that the $100 million raised by the CRTC will not go towards Canadians telling their story on the web. My blog, your blog, your podcast, or your video of the play you wrote, none of these will never see the CRTC’s money. Instead a public servant somewhere in Ottawa will determine what is “Canadian” not so we can promote Canadians stories, but so that we can prop the old and dying business model of broadcast media – the expensive production facilities, the hierarchies of managers and staffers that are necessary to produce older media like television.

Nor is this is not about protecting artists – writers, actors, singers – they all thrived before the advent of television, and they will thrive after its demise in ways we cannot imagine. Again, this is not about them. It is about an industry trying to prop up a dying broadcast medium and a government agency trying to assert control over what can be defined as Canadian.

Both are problematic and have no place in a networked world. As a closing counter factual, imagine a tax on your phone designed to raised funds to ensure a certain % of all phone calls in the world were being conducted by Canadians. A fund designed to pay people to make “Canadian” phone calls. That is what this is. At the very time when we need the internet to be free and as cheap as possible so those with the fewest resources can make use of it to tell their stories, organize protests, create a new business or just find a job, we are going to try to make it more expensive.

In short. Are Canadians lost in a sea of content? Yes. And they are thriving in it. More Canadian stories are being told than ever before. Moreover, I never watched Canadian content on television, but today I read numerous Canadian blogs, and listen to the occasional podcast. I never consumed so much Canadian media in my life. Moreover, never has Canadian content been so widely viewed. Readers of even this small blog come from around the world.

What we don’t need is a tax that makes it more expensive for ordinary Canadians to tell their stories. We don’t need a levy that props up a dying business model. We don’t need a government agency that defines what is “Canadian culture.” Arguing against this proposal is not the most important battle of our time, but it is worth fighting against. Today Canadian culture is a free culture, increasingly defined and created by Canadians. That’s the promise of the internet, why would we fight that?

The internet is messy, fun and imperfect, just like us

Last October 23rd David Weinberger gave the 2008 Bertha Bassam Lecture at the University of Toronto. I happened to be in Toronto but only found out about the lecture on the 24th. Fortunately Taylor pointed out that the lecture is online.

I’ve never met David Weinberger (his blog is here) but I hope to one day. I maintain his book – Small Pieces Loosely Joined – remains one of, if not the best book written about the internet and society. Everything is Miscellaneous is a fantastic read as well.

The Bertha Bassam lecture is classic Weinberger: smart, accessible, argumentative and fun. But what I love most about Weinberger is how he constantly reminds us that the internet is us… and that, as a result, it is profoundly human: messy, fun, argumentative, and above all imperfect. Indeed, the point is so beautifully made in this lecture I felt a little emotional listening to it.

Contrast that to the experience of listening to someone like Andrew Keen, a Weinberger critic who this lecture again throws into stark relief. After reflecting on Weinberger, Keen dislikes the internet and web 2.0 mostly because I think he dislikes people. It may sound harsh but if you ever hear him speak – or even read his writing – it is smart, argumentative and interesting, but it oozes with an anger and condescension that is definitely contemptuous and sometimes even borders on hatred. If the debate is reduced to whether or not we should, however imperfectly, try to connect to and learn from one another or whether we should just hold others in contempt, I think Weinberger is going to win every time. At least, I know where I stand.

Indeed, this blog is a triumph of Weinberger’s internet humanism. It is a small effort to write, to share, and to celebrate the complexity and opportunity of the world with those I know and those I don’t, but who share a similar sense of possibility. Will millions read this blog. No. But I enjoy the connections, old and new, I make with the much more modest number of people who do.

I hope you’ll watch this lecture or, if you haven’t the time, download the audio to your ipod and listen to it during your commute home. (lacking the slides won’t have a big impact)

Old modes of production die with the depression…

A few weeks ago I blogged about how I thought land line phones and cable TV would be among the first items to go as people cut budgets. In contrast Cell phones and internet would be among the last (can you imagine trying to find a job without an internet connection?)

Well I forgot to mention that newspapers would be the other obvious target… why spend to get a newspaper when you can get the content online for less or for free?

So I was probably rash in saying that traditional telephone companies (are there any left?) and cable companies would be among the first to feel the pinch. It is going to be newspaper companies. The end is going to come fast and furious. It won’t be pretty.

For my American friends there is already talk about how much trouble the New York Times is in. Indeed, as one industry observer points out, the NYT may not survive past MAY – although by drawing down on its credit and selling assets (like the Boston Red Sox’s) it can survive until 2010.

Here in Canada the situation is bleaker. CanWest, which owns the National Post as well as newspapers in most of the country’s major markets (such as the Vancouver Sun, here in my home town), has reported Q1 losses and its stock continues to free fall. Having lost 92% of its value in the last year it may no longer be able to meet its debt servicing requirements. It turns out that buying more newspapers is not the solution for newspaper companies. A bigger broken business model doesn’t, at some point, transform into a working business model.

The old modes of production are in trouble. Today it’s print, but TV/video better not assume the same pressures won’t be confronting them in the near future.

The Next Economy – Why the wrong Stimulus today could fail us tomorrow

After reading The Great Crash it is hard to not feel that we are the cusp of another economic depression – the parallels between today and 1929 or almost eeire. Much like the last crash, a whole slew of business models, technologies and ways of thinking are simply going to become obsolete (or at least, not-profitable).

For example, I was talking to an American friend whose partner had been laid off by a bank and they were talking about what expenses they were going to try to eliminate. High on the list? Their land line and cable television. Low on the list? Cell phones and their high speed internet. This may finally be the beginning of the end for the old copper wire – this will accelerate a trend begun about a decade ago in which households have no fixed phone line. Indeed, Reuters is reporting that:

In the first half of 2008, 17.5 percent of households were wireless only, up from 13.6 percent a full year earlier…

…Service providers such as Verizon Communications, AT&T Inc, Qwest Communications International and others have seen a steep increase in customers cutting the cord on their home phones.

Qwest said recently that the trend was exacerbated by the weak economy as some customers were disconnecting home phones to save money.

It makes sense. Why keep a land line when you can just use your cell, or even Skype for free when you are at home?

What this means is that connectivity has never been more important to people – not just for social, but also for professional reasons. Can anyone imagine a professional, creative classer or service sector employee, under the age of 35 looking, for a job without an internet connection? Impossible. The simple fact is that a robust telecommunications network – specifically, access to the internet – is today what an electrical, phone or road network was in the 1930’s. That means, if you want to help invest for the economy of tomorrow, help bring the costs of accessing the internet today – and make sure everyone can get access.

At the moment, one reason why costs are high is because providers have agreed to build their networks out, even to “unprofitable” parts of the country. If the government provided – or helped to provide – such access internet access could be rendered cheaper and service could be improved.

My biggest fear is that here in Canada and the in United States the call for a “new” New Deal with result in a stimulus package that looks a lot like the new deal of the 1930’s – with big infrastructure projects receiving the bulk of the money. The fact is, unlike in the 1930’s new roads aren’t going to generate the same returns over the next 50 years like they did back then – there will be marginal returns at best and negative returns at worst. What we need to identify the infrastructure that is going to guide the next economy, not the last one.

And be afraid, because one thing is almost certain, the next economy almost certainly doesn’t include an auto sector of even remotely the same size or structure. (Think how much ZIP car reduces the need for cars.)

history's new beginning

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Fascinating conversation tonight. Was talking to a professor of International Relations from Los Angelos and she was talking about how her new students simply share fewer and fewer “reference” points with her.

Obviously history has no “starting” point, but there are seminal moments that demark the start of a new era. Moments people use as way finders for determining when they begin to care about events and tagging everything before as either “old” and “did not sufficiently shape my world.”

My undergrad degree is in history and my Master’s had a strong emphasis on the subject so don’t hear me saying history is bunk. It matters profoundly. But people often resort to a shorthand starting point to explain and give context to their world. I suspect that for those of my generation – those born in the 70’s, this date was 1945. Yes, events preceding this date are important, but World War 2 and its aftermath re-organized and shaped the world I grew up in. The international system, the Cold-War, the baby boom, the consumer society, many of these things spring from or arose after, this date. All the more striking is that these institutions and the culture that shaped them emphasized centralization and oversight. The World Bank, the UN, television, everything had strong hierarchical frame to it. It is as if the ethos was: we are going to bring order to the chaos that is our planet and culture. And who could blame them? After two world wars and the arrival of nuclear weapons, I’d probably want emphasize control too.

The interesting piece is, I think we’ve crossed a threshold. I don’t think teenagers today see 1945 as the starting point of their history. They live in a world of emergence and networks that probably feels completely divorced from the culture, institutions and technologies of 1945. I’m not sure when young people see “their” world’s history beginning, but I’m willing to bet that it is some other date, maybe earlier, but more likely later. They may not have yet seized upon a date or the triggering event as it may not, as yet, have passed into history. Maybe it will be the year the internet pierced popular culture? Or the day netscape was released? Or perhap 9/11. I doubt it will be any of these. But regardless of the date, I suspect that those born in the 80’s onwards are going to have a vastly different view of history than those born in the 60’s and before – and they are going to re-interpurt the 19th and 20th century in fundamentally different way – possibly in a manner that emphasizes interconnectedness and emergence.

For now however, expressing that new sense of history is going to be difficult. Young people remain trapped in a world where the dominant historians, experts and academics – and consequently the underlying narrative – is that of 1945. Personally, I can’t wait for the narrative to shift.

The Open Web is a social movement

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Social movements are collective actions in which the populace is alerted, educated, and mobilized, over years and decades, to challenge the powerholders and the whole society to redress social problems or grievances and restore critical social values.
– Bill Moyes in the Movement Action Plan

The mission of the Mozilla Foundation is to create and promote the Internet as an open platform that supports the principles set out in the Mozilla Manifesto.
– Mozilla Foundation’s Statement of Direction

The open web is a social value. It’s not a fact, it’s not necessity, and it’s not a requirement. It’s a value – one that a growing community of people believe in and are willing to fight for. Indeed an emergent community in support of this value, initially composed of coders and technophiles, has steadily grown in size and scope. Today, there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who believe in the open web. They want the internet to be an open platform, indeed, they know the internet must be an open platform.

This means the message and goals of organizations like the Mozilla foundation and others that promote an open web, have broad appeal and resonate with a increasingly diverse community.

This is exciting.

It will also create new challenges.

Those involved in promoting an open web need to know that they are part of a social movement. Yes, it is language and terminology that make some of us uncomfortable. But it is the reality of our situation.

Embracing the notion that the open web is a social movement does not mean that we must start lobbying politicians or chaining ourselves to Microsoft servers (although some people may already be doing these things). I will be the first to admit that this social movement is very unlike those of the past. We do not need to employ the industrial and hierarchical model of influence and power that underlies the Bill Moyes document that, in part, inspired this post. It is for another era, or at least, for other movements.

This social movement is different in that, so far, it has been able to derive its power from a narrow set of people – mostly coders – who by volunteering their labour, have given the movement neither political power, nor economic power, but hard consumer power. This power has enabled projects like Mozilla to out-create, out-innovate, and out-perform the largest, best financed, and most successful software and IT companies in the world. As such, it does not need to rely on persuading government to create structural changes the way past social movements have. It has simply been able to force change though its market position.

This success however, does not mean it has nothing to learn from the past. Indeed, understanding and embracing the fact that the open web is a social movement would not only give the open web project structure – an organizing principle – upon which further success can be built but it would also allow it to reflect and leverage on the lessons of past movements.

Possibly the most important of these past lessons is that social movements may emerge organically but often do not succeed until at least some primitive form of organization or basic structure takes form around which resources, supporters, and eventually the general public, can coalesce.

This structure does not need to be hierarchical, but it does need to at least anchor or provide a platform around which the movement can build identity and direction. I sense a number of people look to Mozilla to be that rallying point. Indeed, last year when Chris Messina ranted online about Mozilla – which some in the Mozilla Corporation incorrectly felt was an unhelpful critique of the corporation – he was asking this very question. (I know Chris’ comments weren’t very popular with many people and that a major motivating factor for his rant was an effort to bring attention to his new consulting firm, but I’m still going to address his comments at face value) I don’t think Messina was being critical of the corporation per se, a large part of what he was asking was why Mozilla wasn’t serving as a rallying point for people (like him) who cared about the Open Web and Open Source.

The Berkman Center at Harvard, the CIS at Stanford, the Mozilla Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Shuttleworth Foundation, along with a handful of other organizations are already part of the movement’s ecosystem. Perhaps one of them could credibly take on a leadership/organizing/convening role for such a social movement. Perhaps not. At the moment, it seems unclear if anyone is.

Again, this social movement can and probably should be more decentralized than any past movement. But could we push ourselves harder? Are we creating enough hooks for new participants to latch on to? Are we creating an ecosystem where non-coders, but passionate open web believers, can find a niche? What are the big harry audacious goals that a larger community can get behind, and support? Are we willing to talk about ourselves as a social movement? What are the opportunities and dangers in doing that? I’m not sure. But it would be great if someone were thinking about who, or whom, might be asking these questions.

Please know this post is a draft and treat as such. Please tear it to shreds or build on it in the comments or in an email to me.

My “top 10″ 2007 blogging moments: #1

Government Networks – Easy or Hard?

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At the IPAC conference last week I did a panel on creating government networks. Prior to my contribution fellow panelist Dana Richardson, an ADM with the Government of Ontario, presented on her experience with creating inter-government networks. Her examples were interesting and insightful. More interesting still was her conclusion: creating networks is difficult.

What makes this answer interesting is not it is correct (I’m not sure it is) but how it is a window into the problematic manner by which governments engage in network based activities.

While I have not studied Richardson’s examples I nonetheless have a hypothesis: these networks were difficult to create because they were between institutions. Consequently those being networked together weren’t be connected because they saw value in the network but because someone in their organization (likely their boss) felt it was important for them to be connected. In short, network participation was contrived and mandated.

This runs counter to what usually makes for an effective networks. Facebook, MySpace, the internet, fax machines, etc… these networks became successful not because someone ordered people to participate in them but because various individuals saw value in joining them and gauged their level of participation and activity accordingly. As more people joined, the more people found there was someone within the network with whom they wanted to connect – so they joined too.

This is because, often, a critical ingredient to successful networks is freedom of association. Motivated individuals are the best judges of what is interesting, useful and important to them. Consequently, when freedom of association exists, people will gravitate towards, and even form, epistemic communities with others that share or can give them, the knowledge and experience they value

I concede that you could be ordered to join a network, discover its utility, and then use it ever more. But in this day and age, when creating networks is getting easier and easier, people who want to self organize increasingly can and do. This means the obvious networks are already emerging/have already emerged. This brings us back to the problem. The reason mandated networks don’t work is because their participants either don’t know how to work together or don’t see the value in doing so. For governments (and really, any large organization), I suspect both are at play. Indeed, there is probably a significant gap between the number of people who are genuinely interested in their field of work (and so who join and participate in communities related to their work), and the number of people on payroll working for the organization in that field.

This isn’t to say mandated networks can’t be created or aren’t important. However, described this way Richardson’s statement becomes correct: they are hard to create. Consequently, you’d better be sure it is important enough to justify creating.

More interestingly however, you might find that you can essential create these networks without mandating them… just give your people the tools to find each other rather than forcing them together. You won’t get anywhere close to 100% participation, but those who see value in talking and working together will connect.

And if nobody does… maybe it is because they don’t see the value in it. If that is the case – all the networking in the world isn’t going to help. In all likelihood, you are probably asking the wrong question. Instead of: “how do we create a network for these people” try asking “why don’t they see the value in networking with one another.” Answer that, and I suspect you’ll change the equation.

review of small pieces loosely joined

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I’m not sure where to begin with Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

Maybe with my regrets. My biggest regret is that it took me so long pick it up and read it. And I had no excuse, Beltzner had been trying to get me to read it for months. I now understand why.

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture took me into new territory by introducing me to the dangers and important issues confronting our emerging online world. In contrast, Small Pieces Loosely Joined did the opposite, it was a homecoming, a book that explained to me things I intuitively knew or felt, but in a manner that expanded my understanding and appreciation. It’s as though the author, David Weinberger, took me on a tour of my own home, a place I knew intimately, and explained to me its history, the reason and method of its construction, its impact on my life and its significance to my community. Suddenly, the meaning of a thing I use and live in everyday was expanded in ways that were consistent with what I already knew, but didn’t. Wienberger accomplishes all this, but in talking about the internet.

Weinberger achieves this by outlining how our sense of time, space, knowledge and matter is shaped by the online experience. Initially, the book could be mistaken as a more sophisticated Wikinomics, but as each concept builds on the other, the book becomes an increasingly philosophical and thoughtful treatise. Indeed, unlike Wikinomics, which anyone can scream through like a normal business book, Small Pieces took longer to read than anticipated because I wanted (and needed) to slow down and play with its ideas.

Indeed, you can see how so many ideas connect with this book. From The Naked Corporation (Weinberger’s discusses how our desire for authenticity drives form on the internet), to The Wisdom of Crowds to The Long Tail, this book is essential reading to those interesting in understanding of our emerging new world, one overlaid with an internet. Even I was caught in the vortex. For example, I recently wrote a post on the emerging trust economy (all while pitching in my two cents on Keen). I knew the ideas weren’t completely novel, but there was Weinberger, filling in the holes of my thoughts, outlining why we keep going back to the internet even though it is filled with so much disinformation (unlike FOX, CNN, or CBS or any corporate brochures that preceded the internet). Weinberger recognizes that:

…we don’t process information the way philosophers or computer programmers expect us to. We don’t use a systematic set of steps for evaluating what should be believed. Instead, we do on the web we do in the real world: we listen to the context, allow ourselves to be guided by details that we think embody the whole, and decide how much of what this person says were going to believe.

It’s not perfect. But then, neither are we.

But even without all that perfection, we still managed to create this amazing thing called the internet. This is singularly significant accomplishment and one Weinberger believes we must celebrate. And he’s right. At almost no time in history have we built something that is, and can become still more, broad and representative. And it is important that we remember the values that made it possible. A culture of freedom.

…consider how we would’ve gone about building the Web had we deliberately set out to do so. Generating the billions of pages on the web, all interlinked, would have required a mobilization on the order of world war. Because complexity requires management, we would have planned it, budgeted it, managed it,… and we would have failed miserably… We’d have editors pouring through those pages, authenticating them, vetting them for scandalous and pornographic material, classifying them, and obtaining signoff and permissions to avoid the inevitable lawsuits. Yet we — all of us — have built the global web without a single person with a business card that says “manager, WWW.”

Our biggest joint undertaking as a species is working out splendidly, but not only because we forgot to apply the theory that has guided us ever since determines were built. Whether we’ve thought about it explicitly or not, we all tacitly recognize — it’s part of the Web’s common sense — that what’s on the Web was put there without permission. We know that we can go where we want on the web without permission. The sense of freedom on the web is palpable. The web is profoundly permission free and management free, and we all know it.

More recently, Weinberger has emerged as a champion of the internet, probably most famously for taking on Andrew Keen in a now famous debate whose transcript can be read on the WSJ. His book explains the knowledge and understanding that allows Weinberger to be optimistic in the face of people like Keen. Indeed this book serves as a map to what has become Weinberger’s larger thesis – that the internet is not just a human project, but a humanizing project.

The Web is a social place. It is built page by page by people alone in groups of that other people can read those pages. It is an expression of points of view is diversion as human beings. In almost every case, what’s written is either explicitly or implicitly a view of how the world looks; the Web is a multimillion-part refraction of the world. Most of all, at the center of the web is human passion. We build each page because we care about something, whether we are telling other shoppers that a Maytag wasn’t as reliable as the ads promise, giving tips on how to build a faster racer for a soap box derby, arguing that the 1969 moon landing was a hoax, or even ripping off strangers.

What we see when we look into the internet is ourselves.

Increasingly, understanding humanity will require understanding the internet, and Weinberger’s book is a good departure point for that education.

eaves.ca

if writing is a muscle, this is my gym