Evaluation

The digital environments that have grown in recent years, somewhat exponentially as well, have allowed much innovation in the way people communicates and forms ideas and institutions. This growth has hit both negative and positive feedback alike, but overall the trend is towards a better experience of the digital world for everyone across the globe. Whether it takes the Internet to become dull, like Charles Leadbeater suggests, to become more effective overall is yet to be seen.

As any system grows, and contains a human-made working environment, noise is introduced. This needs to not be seen as a bad thing, as many of the things you could immediately regard as rubbish may become part of something great in the future. This is the way the Internet works the best, where information is linked and cross referenced constantly, so one no longer needs to apply the traditional methods of research or creation of ideas. Everyones voice is available to you instantly, and on the most part for free. The human part would be lost if the Internet was cleansed of things people considered inappropriate.

Rupert Murdoch wants to turn the trend of free on its head, and revert to something more similar to the traditional industries of the past in terms of payment models. It’s fair to say that people should make money from their work towards quality journalism and the like, but a changing world should mean you innovate rather than lock down. Google have proven there is money in the Internet, it just requires you to look at the situation in a different way. These two figures in the news industry are head to head at the moment because they disagree which model is right for the Internet, but in the end it will be up to the consumer and their choice of where and how they want to get the news.

Changing a trend which has greatly accelerated this past decade will be very hard to do. Everyone receives their information in small chunks, one at a time. be that by RSS feeds, or Twitter, up-to-date and crowd sourced news and information is redly available to you. Even the White House has a twitter feed, so they can keep up with the trend setting populace. Even if Twitter is just a fad, there will be the next thing and the next thing to follow that.

These social networking sites to come of some good, even if most of the infrastructure available is used to play time wasting games, or constantly give up to minute updates of your day to day lives. Art can be created in this forum, allowing projects to span countries and communities, no longer forcing groups to be contained around art centres like Paris or London. People can be helped by the online communities they are part of because locally people don’t have the knowledge, or more likely they people asking for help find it easier to ask anonymously.

Even if Rupert Murdoch says that ‘the Internet will soon be over’, (http://www.theequitykicker.com/2009/05/08/the-current-days-of-the-internet-will-soon-be-over-rupert-murdoch/) it most certainly will prevail in this form, there are too many people who benefit from the open-ness of the Internet, too many people willing to make a large effort in order for this not to happen.

"The BBC has today said it has “no intention” of charging for online news, in a declaration that is unlikely to please James Murdoch and his father Rupert as they prepare to start charging for News Corporation content on the internet."

Five views about the Internet

Here are five views about the internet by Charles Leadbeater and my thoughts.

1. Just a Tool

I understand how this idea about the internet makes sense to a lot of people. The part about it being the same as we have always done before is true, why would humans create something that we couldn’t relate to? Everything is always a step up, something better and that is important. Ebay being an overblown fleamarket is better and it is exciting! It is natural for us to get overly excited by something new, which is why I agree with the next point:

2. Big, but Becoming Dull

The excitement will wane, and then you’ll know the internet has either gone, or (more likely) it is under the surface of everyday life. When this happens I think the effect will be subtle, people will be using the Internet without realising it. This already happens to an extent, but the people who are using the internet everyday stand out now because it isn’t yet common for everyone to have smart phones or similar devices that are always online.

3. big but BAD

There are three reasons why some people see the internet as bad:

1. killing experts & professionals - mass amateurism
2. dependency on web - eroding independent thought - dumbing down
3. eroding privacy & identity

Everything that occurs will have opposition of some kind, and these views can also be countered by opposing arguments. I think the main point here is that although jobs and other things may be lost in the change, new opportunities will be opened up for the new generation of people leaving university in the coming years. For instance, the job of photo journalist may no longer be a good career choice with all the amateur photographers on phones taking a lot of of the work, but the job of managing this content didn’t exist before the Internet.

4. big and getting bigger FAST

The Internet is growing faster and faster as a useful tool. There are choices open to a lot of people that didn’t exist before. If you want a free blog there isn;t one good option, there are several. Even with Google seemingly controlling the market space for most tools, there are viable and good alternatives everywhere you look. This freedom of choice and the ability to connect to people actually do good things?

As an example I can refer to the reddit community that I am a part of has pulled together and helped people out of awkward situations before, sometimes even with actual donations. The problems occur when you realise that you can never be 100% sure who someone is on the Internet. The larger the Internet becomes I think the easier it is to exploit people and get away with it by becoming lost in the masses of similarly occurring cases.

5. big, good - could become bad

The people who view the current self-organistion of the Internet as only a phase would say that it requires a traditional control method in the future as it gets bigger and bigger. Having this structure, either by paid for access or a governmental control scheme will bring more problems that it is trying to solve. In many ways this can already be seen from examples like China’s Internet filtering system. Even though those measures are in place there will always be ways to circumvent the barriers put in place and chaos to resume.

I believe the Internet should stay a neutral playing field, and be freely available to everyone to allow them to have a voice. A large part of the power of the Internet is that it is neutral, and introducing a paid for access to certain services would exclude a lot of people.

The Internet can already be seen as polluted, and it is not hard, especially with search engines getting better and better at sorting data, to find what you are looking for within this pollution so I do not believe more control is needed in the ways that are suggested.

Owing a knife gives you the option to do many things, but it they are not crippled by being made blunt or non-sharp just to stop people from killing other people with them. The people committing the offences should be prosecuted, not everyone with a blanket control measure.

It is interesting that we talk about THE internet, one internet. It wasn’t always like that, for example Compuserve and AOL started as walled off parts of the world wide web.

digital environments create the possibility for …

Looking at these two TED talks by Clay Shirky:

http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

We saw how digital environments create the possibility to avoid the tarditional structure of institutions. Now as the cost of including every submitter of information is essentially the same, all content can be included. Institutions would say that if they can get 80% of the content by employing only 1% of the people they will take just the 80% in order to pay the least money. In the new system, including everyone costs nothing. This is good because it means that if your information was in that 20% a traditional organisation wouldn’t include, then you still find your information.

This new way of working with people allows more and more innovative ways of solving problems to surface. The ease in which this can happen no longer means that the western world is the only innovator. In the second video you see that events happening in Africa with SMS and monitoring the polls, move on to America for their election, not the other way around.

Digital Noise

From this session I see digital noise interpreted in several ways. Claude Shannon looked at the increasing complexity of the telephone system and solved a lot of the issues that came with this by essentially introducing the digital system we now use today.

Noise affects a signal in-between the source and the recover, affecting the purity of the original signal. In a sense noise is the enemy of transporting information and Shannon, as an engineer really wanted to increase the efficiency of the telephone system, so reducing noise came as a by product of this.

This is considering more obvious digital noise, but there is also noise from more abstract sources. Data is kept intact from place to place by checking the data at regular intervals to see that it is the same, but people create noise too. So online you’ll receive ‘noise’ from the millions of users of a website for example. This noise is the human part of the Internet, and to try and remove it would make the Internet an instantly sterile place. Wading though the noise may be annoying, but at times it can be considered fun. If anything it means you’ll find things you never expected

Rupert Murdoch

Here is a link to a guardian article talking about Rupert Murdoch’s proposed pay-walls:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/10/newpaper-internet-paywall-murdoch-live

In a hope to make money from online journalism, these proposed pay-walls would mean that after a certain amount of free articles read the user would be confronted with no other option but to pay for more content or leave the site.

This compromise has already happened with Google News, which until now allowed you to read all the news you liked from all sources without even leaving Google’s site. This of course frustrated Murdoch because that didn’t even allow him advertising revenue from his own online ventures. So now, you seen only 5 or so articles from a source, and then you must pay.

To be honest, I think this won’t affect either parties much at all. If anyone else is like me when I browse for news sources online, I usually end up viewing several different websites in one day, and rarely 5 or more from the same website. Things may be different for some people though, like if you prefer the style of one publication. If that is the case then I am sure they already have a subscription to that source.

This doesn’t take into account BBC News online either, which currently will always be a source of free online news. Most people assume information is free on the Internet, so I think something a lot more thought out than a pay-wall will be needed to convince the masses to pay for online news at this point.

If Murdoch’s views become a reality, then I think the biggest casualty will be the unique-ness of the Internet as a source of information. It would look more like the standard media industry looks now, just online, with the people with money deciding what goes.

Unity Pandas and Pubs

This week Keir Williams, Chris Poolman and Jonnet Middleton, each presented some of their work to us as a group. Keir and Chris work as a pair, and showed us projects they have both worked on over the years.

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