Rc 12.global culture
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Chapter 12 of a university course in media history by Prof. Bill Kovarik, based on the book Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2015).
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Rc 12.global culture
- 1. Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age Slides based on the Bloomsbury book by Bill Kovarik Revolutions in Communication Chapter 12 – Global Culture
- 2. Web site & textbook Textbook: 1st edition – 2011 2nd edition – 2016 http://www.revolutionsincommunication.com
- 3. This lecture on Global Culture Charts impacts of the digital revolution ◦ Public collaborations ◦ Business disruptions ◦ International challenges Explores some of the ways that new media publishers are contributing to global culture Asks questions about social responsibility and how to harmonize international communications law
- 5. Era of global culture arrives Two decades into the 21st century, the digital media revolution is destroying the barriers of time and space, creating major shifts in media structures and sparking dramatic social change. For the first time in human history, computer networks allow billions of people to communicate across national boundaries, instantly, at no cost, in any media format— from text to video — with the help of instant translation technologies.
- 6. Global culture is not a new idea “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.” — Charles
- 7. What will we do with it? With the future at our feet, with a vast new power of worldwide networking, how will we envision the future? Will we use the media to lift and protect and diversify the human spirit? What will global culture become in a decade, or a century? It’s a question of social construction, not simply one of technological momentum. The ability to shape the way information technology is used, to serve the public interest, will be the twenty-first century’s
- 8. • Michael Hart (March 8, 1947 – September 6, 2011) • Began typing public domain books into computers in 1971. • Started with US Declaration of Independence at U. of Illinois • By 1990s the project took off • By 2015, the project had 50,000 items in the collection Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/
- 9. Richard Stallman open source • Web server – Apache • Internet routing – TCP/IP • Database – MySQL • Browser – Firefox – Mozilla
- 10. Collaboration took a big step with Diderot’s 1751 encyclopedia
- 11. Printed encyclopedias 1800s – 2000s
- 13. Collaborative info systems ‘Wiki’ is a Hawaiian word for fast, but a wiki is like an open web site that is easy to edit New wiki-map sites, political wikis, health wikis, cookbooks, game wikis and many more are cropping up. New kinds of collaborative sites let musicians in different locations record separate tracks to a song that can then be put together in one place.
- 14. • Jimmy Wales started “Nupedia” in 2000 using traditional encyclopedia publishing techniques • After dot-com bubble, decides on an open source approach with Wikipedia Now over 4.7 million articles in English, and 34 million in 288 other languages We are the Media
- 15. Wikileaks blows the lid off Editor Julian Assange • Begun in 2006 • 250,000 diplomatic cables leaked 2011 • Set off riots, ‘Arab Spring’ • Assange censored & persecuted by US & EU governments
- 16. Wiki collaborations - SourceWatch
- 17. Created in 2004 by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg. Early competitor MySpace was ahead but tried to create a more closed – off environment for user content. As of 2015, Facebook has about 1.4 billion users and is the second most visited web site in the world, after Google. MySpace is out of business.
- 18. Twitter Twitter was originally a way for programmers to catch up with each other in the mad hacking environment of Silicon Valley. Twitter took off in 2007, and by 2015, 340 million ‘tweets’ were being sent per year. A culture of generosity can also be a culture of shaming. Social media elevates, amplifies and preserves controversy in the digital amber Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder
- 19. Founded in 2005 by Hugh McGuire If you are vision impaired, or if you’ve always wanted to catch up on the classics while getting some exercise, you can thank Hugh McGuire for founding a volunteer-run, free reading service for public domain books and articles. It’s available through podcasts or a variety of downloads.
- 20. Founded by Brewster Kahle, an American computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, internet activist, advocate of universal access to all knowledge, and digital librarian.
- 22. Internet for developing nationsEmpowering women in computer engineering, especially in developing nations, is the mission of Nancy Hafkin, former coordinator of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s Information Society Initiative. Gender is an enormous barrier, she says. “The rate of women connected to the Internet in Italy is as low as it is in Kurdistan, I’ve found that Internet use doesn’t correspond with the development of a country,” Hafkin told Wired Nancy Hafkin (Photo: Internet Hall of Fame).
- 23. Other collaborative businesses Hospitality: AirBnB, CouchSurfing, Feastley, LeftoverSwap Auto: Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, ReadyRides, Hitch, Getaround, Sidecar Retail: Neighborgoods, SnapGoods, Poshmark, Tradesy, ThreadUP Media: Amazon, Wix, Spitify, SoundCloud, Earbits
- 24. Business models for news Partisan media / corporate sponsorship Pay walls / Charges for apps / not working ◦ Serious problems w/ apps at NY Times, Post Hyper-local advertising ◦ Possibilities for discounting, coupons (Groupons) Non-profit (Foundations, sponsorships) Public funding (Campaigns) ◦ Public broadcasting model competes with other charities Cooperative (Member capitalization) ◦ Depends on benefits to members ◦ Extend services into business areas
- 25. Taz.de co-op Berlin daily newspaper & consumer co-op
- 26. Taz.de co-op Berlin daily newspaper & consumer co-op
- 27. Jonathan Zittrain & Lawrence Lessig The internet needs protection from “tethered” / non- generative technologies and overzealous copyright law enforcement, say these two law professors.
- 28. Not ‘generative’ technology What Lessig and Zittrain object to is the locked in nature of the new web devices like iPhones and iPads
- 29. “Takes the guesswork out of bar-hopping” But can users contribute listings and info?
- 31. Tech of freedom Ithiel de Sola Pool, whose 1983 book Technologies of Freedom predicted a “convergence” of electronic and print technologies in a digital sphere: In the coming era, the industries of print and the industries of telecommunications will no longer be kept apart by a fundamental difference in their technologies. The economic and regulatory problems of the electronic media will thus become the problems of the print media too. No longer can electronic communications be viewed as a special circumscribed case of a monopolistic and regulated communications medium which poses no danger to liberty because there still remains a large realm of unlimited freedom of expression in the print media. The issues that concern telecommunications and now becoming issues for all communications as they all become forms of electronic processing and transmission. (Pool, 1983).
- 32. Lech Walesa Looking back on that time, former Polish president Lech Walesa noted: “Rapid development of satellite television and cell phones . . . helped end communism by bringing in information from the outside. It was possible to get news from independent sources; stations like the BBC (British Broadcasting System) and VOA (Voice of America) were beyond government control. During ‘50s and ‘60s, the communist government put people accused of listening to these stations in prison . . . It’s hard to believe that things like that actually happened from today’s perspective.”
- 33. Collision courses In September of 2005, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, printed editorial cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an unfavorable light In July, 2012, violent protests with over 50 deaths took place in Egypt and other Muslim nations in response to a fictional narrative video entitled The Innocence of Muslims, which associated the prophet Mohammed with wrongdoing On January 7, 2015, two members of Al Qaida killed 15 journalists and police officers in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, a satirical weekly magazine known for crude humor. Continued terrorist attacks in Europe show the ongoing collision course between elements of the world’s cultures
- 34. A New World … “We are rapidly entering into a new world of hyperconnectivity, said Carl Bildtis, foreign minister of Sweden, in a July 5, 2012 New York Times op-ed. “We cannot accept that the Internet’s content should be limited or manipulated depending on the flavor-of- the-month of political leaders. Only by securing access to the open and global Internet will true development take place. The governments of the Human Rights Council now for the first time have confirmed that freedom of expression applies fully to the Internet. A global coalition for a global and open Internet has been formed… The challenge now is to put these words into action to make sure that people all over the world can use and utilize the power of connectivity without having to fear for their safety. This work is far from over.”
- 35. International cooperation World Summit on the Information Society 2003 and 2005 in Geneva and Tunis, just showed disagreements in world policy. Internet Governance Forum 2014 for discussion on domain names, security, copyright, and development issues Very little agreement, but the longstanding principle is to keep the
- 36. Conclusion . Since the advent of printing, each media revolution’s internal tendencies that channeled its educational potential and by social constructions that shaped the impacts of the new medium. The global digital revolution is a quantum leap forward into this process, and it is quite possible that humankind was not entirely prepared. But it hardly matters now. The walls are down, and this university is wide open to both the lowest and the highest aspirations of humanity.
- 37. Conclusion With the future at our feet, what will we do? With a vast new power of worldwide networking, how will we envision the future? Will we use the media to lift and protect and diversify the human spirit? What will global culture become in a decade, or a century? It’s a question of social construction, not simply one of technological momentum. The ability to shape the way technology is used, to serve the public interest, is the twenty-first century’s truest badge of freedom.
- 38. Review: People Ithiel de Sola Pool, Julian Assange, Jimmy Wales, Jonathan Zittrain, Clay Shirkey, Ward Cunningham, Edward Snowden, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Brian Chesky, Lawrence Lessig, Jeff Bezos, Ray Kurzweil, Sean MacBride,
Notas do Editor
- In the last chapter, we focused on networks and why they made long-tail marketing possible. A good bit of what makes new media exciting is the ability to collaborate on various projects. This includes, but is hardly limited to, social media.
- Although it is worth noting that while Darwin saw sympathies extending to all men of all nations and races, Samuel Morse saw the telegraph creating a “national neighborhood” and Marshall McLuhan saw satellites creating a “global village,” a sort of miniature version of the global culture we are now experiencing.
- One of the earliest visions for digital collaboration and public service was that of Michael Hart, whose Project Gutenberg started in 1971 and has now placed more than 50,000 books and other printed works on the web. Like the first generation of printers in Germany, Italy and France in the 1450s – 1500, the first goal was to preserve and share the most important books from previous ages.
- Computer hackers of the 1970s and 80s were noted both for their idealism and their anti-authoritarian culture. One important idea was that digital media had unique characteristics, and trying to make it follow old media rules would just hold it back. “Information wants to be free” was the motto; working together on information software was their obsession. “The copyright system grew up with printing—a technology for mass-production copying. Copyright fit in well with this technology because it restricted only the mass producers of copies. It did not take freedom away from readers of books. An ordinary reader, who did not own a printing press, could copy books only with pen and ink, and few readers were sued for that. Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That’s the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright.” (Stallman, 1994). “ The free software movement is one of the most successful social movements to emerge in the past 25 years, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing . . . and teaching . . . about the danger of a society losing control over its computing” (Brown, 2010). Not surprisingly, the Free Software Foundation is frequently at odds with the Business Software Alliance, which represents Microsoft, IBM, Dell and other electronics firms in large-scale networking standards issues.
- Project Gutenberg was one of the world’s first digital collaborations, but it’s important to remember that the idea of collaborations traces well back into the world of printed books. The world’s first big collaborative project was the original encyclopedia, organized and edited by French philosopher Denis Diderot in 1751. It was produced with the idea of reorganizing human knowledge, and it helped set the stage for the European Enlightenment. “The Encyclopedia was virtually a protest against the old organization, no less than against the old doctrine,” said historian John Morley more than a century ago. “Broadly stated, the great central moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions.”
- The French Encyclopédie was soon followed by the English-language Encyclopedia Britannica and the German-language Conversations-Lexikon. The Britannica was published between 1768 and 1771, and went through 15 printed editions until the final 2010 printed edition. The Conversations-Lexikon was published in Leipzig between 1796–1808, and was renamed Der Große Brockhaus in 1928 and Brockhaus Enzyklopädie from 1966. Both the Brockhaus and the Britannica stopped printing and went online around 2009.
- Another kind of encyclopedia was Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. The idea was to provide “access to tools” and help the reader “find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."
- By the 1990s, computer systems and networks had reached a technical stage that allowed collaboration among many participants, but the final piece of software was missing. Software designer Ward Cunningham from Portland, Oregon came up with the first wiki in 1995 as way for lots of people to contribute to a software repository. He picked the word “wiki” as the Hawaiian language word for “fast,” and the idea was that a wiki could be a quick and simple way for many people to make changes on web pages (Leuf, 2001). Wiki software is unusual in that it provides a single-step process for creating branched, indexed information structures.
- Wiki software set the stage for all kinds of collaborations. Especially important was Wikipedia. Over the long term, Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation hope to create a free encyclopedia that can be accessed by every person on earth in every language. “It means a lot more than just building a cool website,” Wales said. “We’re really interested in all the issues of the digital divide poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions.” “We Are the Media,” Wales said. This of course contrasts rather directly with Marshall McLuhan’s deterministic aphorism, “The Medium is the Message,” and gives a sense of the extent to which social construction is the key approach in creating popular global media.
- Another use of collaborative sofware was Wikileaks, which was hotly controversial and vehemently opposed by both democratic and repressive governments. “This is the first time we have seen an attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency,” said global press freedom group Reporters Sans Frontiers. “We are shocked to find countries such as France and the United States suddenly bringing their policies on freedom of expression into line with those of China” The WikiLeaks revelations were overshadowed in 2013 by disclosures from a US intelligence analyst, Edward Snowden.
- More collaborations include SourceWatch and CoalSwarm.
- Another kind of collaboration, where users generate content, is Facebook. Before the era of Web applications, a “face book” was a reverse yearbook with the photos, names, majors and hometowns of incoming university freshmen. The idea was to help them get accustomed to their new university homes and introduce them to the campus and to each other. Facebook was founded by a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg whose first foray into social media was a “hot or not” ranking system for photos of female Harvard students.
- Twitter is another sphere of collaboration which elevates, amplifies and sometimes overwhelms.
- Yet another example of collaboration made possible by digital platforms, Librivox is a free reader service for public domain books. Nearly all of the effort is managed through volunteers, and while the quality of reading can be spotty, the overall effort is a significant contribution.
- A good bit of Project Gutenberg and Librivox has landed in the massive Internet Archive, which includes many millions of items. Brewster Kahle has been critical of Google's book digitization, especially of Google's exclusivity in restricting other search engines digital access to the books they archive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle
- What happens when the internet does NOT allow collaborations and new kinds of applications and services? According to law professors Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig, digital technologies came into the market while they were still incomplete, leaving open the potential for further improvements. That was the only way they could compete with the big computer and media companies. The Unix/GNU operating system and Apache server software are examples of collaborative open system approaches. The more these applications spread, the more they improved, until a virtuous circle pushed them from the creative margins into the mainstream. “This is the story of the PC against information appliances, and it is the story of the Internet against the proprietary networks,” Zittrain said. It’s a legacy that Zittrain and others hope can be kept alive, a social construction of technology that is quite different from the static and deterministic corporate model.
- Can technology really improve the bar crawl? Thoreau would be so proud. So this is where the Renaissance has led us.
- . In some cases, musicians who are happy to encourage fans have come in conflict with their record labels. For example, in 2006, a rock band named OK Go uploaded “Here It Goes Again,” a song with a humorous video. The video became popular (or “went viral” as people said at the time), bringing in 10,000 hits per day. This happened because fans put the video’s <embed> code on their own web pages so that the video would play on their websites. The group’s record label, Capitol/EMI, realized they were losing advertising money from the ads that are automatically placed by YouTube. So EMI pulled the plug on the embed tags. Fan hits quickly dropped from 10,000 to 1,000 per day, and EMI’s revenue from YouTube dropped from about $80 a day to only $8 per day. “This isn’t how the Internet works,” said Damian Kulash of OK Go. “Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face” (Kulash, February 20, 2010). While respecting EMI’s need to recover its investment in musicians through its studio system, Kulash also felt that the group’s use of the new media was in the record company’s long-term best interest. Eventually, the record label restored the embed code on the group’s YouTube video, but the issue shows how difficult it can be for traditional media to anticipate the problems posed by new digital media. “It’s been like a corporate version of the Three Stooges: absurd flailing, spectacular myopia and willful ignorance of reality,” Kulash added. “Now that the big record companies have made themselves obsolete, bands such as mine can make a better living without their help than we can with it.” (Kulash, August 29, 2010).