Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 5 Piracy

PIRACY I

The recording industry estimates loss at about $4.6 billion every year to businesses that do nothing but steal others people’s copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it without permission of copyright owner. 

 

"The MPAA estimates that it loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy" (63).

Lessig iterates: Piracy is wrong – legally and morally. Three arguments in favor of piracy:

1. "...in any case, it does no harm to the industry. The Chinese who get access to American CDs at 50 cents a copy are not people who would have bought those American CDs at $15 a copy. So no one really has any less money than they otherwise would have had" (64). But there are still people who can afford to pay for those DVDs they pirated who should have paid the copyright owner.

2. "Extremists in this debate love to say, 'You wouldn’t go into Barnes & Noble and take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it be any different with on-line music?' The difference is, of course, that when you take a book from Barnes & Noble, it has one less book to sell. By contrast, when you take an MP3 from a computer network, there is not one less CD that can be sold" (64). -- weak argument for the morality of piracy, still.

3. It actually helps the copyright owner: "When the Chinese 'steal' Windows, that makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of the software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy" (65). The addiction strategy does work as a marketing tool. But we should still let companies decide when they want to give their stuff away for free. 

Lessig concedes: Not all "piracy" is wrong.

Distinction between piracy and p2p sharing: "For (1) like the original Hollywood, p2p sharing escapes an overly controlling industry; and (2) like the original recording industry, it simply exploits a new way to distribute content; but (3) unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that is shared on p2p services" (66).

PIRACY II

"The key to the “piracy” that the law aims to quash is a use that “rob[s] the author of [his] profit.” This means we must determine whether and how much p2p sharing harms before we know how strongly the law should seek to either prevent it or find an alternative to assure the author of his profit" (66-67).

Napster didn't do anything new – they just put together things that independents had already developed (67).

Four kinds of file sharers:
1. Users who download instead of purchase

2. Those who want to listen to music before they purchase it

3. Those looking for content that is either not on the market or too expensive. Net damage is zero if the content isn't being sold anymore

4. Users downloading content that is not copyrighted or the owner is giving it away

Only the 4th is legal, and the 1st is the most harmful. "Type 2 sharing is illegal but plainly beneficial. Type 3 sharing is illegal, yet good for society (since more exposure to music is good) and harmless to the artist (since the work is not otherwise available). So how sharing matters on balance is a hard question to answer—and certainly much more difficult than the current rhetoric around the issue

suggests" (69).

Still, it is difficult to determine just how harmful p2p sharing is. Often times, those seeing loss in profits blamed technology for the problem, to be solved by banning or regulating it (69).

So the question we must also pose is "how harmful type A sharing is, and how beneficial the other types of sharing are." If type 2 outweighs type 1, then sharing is clearly beneficial (70).

"But let’s assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is because of Internet sharing. Here’s the rub: In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent...
If I steal a CD, then there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely clear that the same is not true of downloads. If every download were a lost sale—if every use of Kazaa “rob[bed] the author of [his] profit”—then the industry would have suffered a 100 percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop" (71).

"If efforts to solve the problem of type 1 sharing destroy the opportunity for type 4 sharing, then we lose something important in order to protect type 1 content." Society does not just lose money from p2p sharing -- it is also enriched (73).

But the war is still against all file sharing. When Napster said it could reduce all copyright infringement down to 99.4%, the district court told them that wasn't good enough. "If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement... zero tolerance means zero p2p" (74).

Our culture has not always been like that. The law usually strives for balance. The two main goals of copyright legislation during the compromise affecting records and player pianos were 1) "to [assure] that new innovators would have the freedom to develop new ways to deliver content" and 2) "[assure] that copyright holders would be paid for the content that was distributed." They were worried that if copyright holders (CRH) could charge however much they wanted for their content, then one medium's CRH would stifle a different medium, OR that letting a medium use copyrighted material for free would "unfairly subsidize cable." So Congress compromised to "assure compensation without giving the past (broadcasters) control over the future (cable)"(75).

Of the Supreme Court case for the movie industry vs VCR recording, the court wrote "Sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for copyrighted materials. Congress has the constitutional authority and the institutional ability to accommodate fully the varied permutations of competing interests that are inevitably implicated by such new technology" (77).

"In none of these cases did either the courts or Congress eliminate all free riding. In none of these cases did the courts or Congress insist that the law should assure that the copyright holder get all the value that his copyright created" (77). New technology always creates this fight with the old medium, and everyone is concerned about protecting their property.

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 4 Pirates

FILM

"Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early twentieth century in part to escape controls that patents granted the inventor of filmmaking, Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through a monopoly “trust,” the Motion Pictures Patents Company, and were based on Thomas Edison’s creative property—patents. Edison formed the MPPC to exercise the rights this creative property gave him, and the MPPC was serious about the control it demanded" (53-54).

By the time Edison's law enforcers got there,  the patents had expired. Patents then granted the

patent holder a truly “limited” monopoly (just seventeen years) (54).

RECORDED MUSIC 

"But the law governing recordings gives recording artists less. And thus, in effect, the law subsidizes the recording industry through a kind of piracy—by giving recording artists a weaker right than it otherwise gives creative authors. The Beatles have less control over their creative work than Grisham does. And the beneficiaries of this less control are the recording industry and the public. The recording industry gets something of value for less than it otherwise would pay; the public gets access to a much wider range of musical creativity. Indeed, Congress was quite explicit about its reasons for granting this right. Its fear was the monopoly power of rights holders, and that that power would stifle follow-on creativity" (57).

RADIO

"But it doesn’t. Under the law governing radio performances, the radio station does not have to pay the recording artist. The radio station need only pay the composer. The radio station thus gets a bit of something for nothing. It gets to perform the recording artist’s work for free, even if it must pay the composer something for the privilege of playing the song" (59).

You compose a song and have someone famous record it. Every time a radio station plays it, you are compensated but the singing artist is not. Thus, the radio pirates the value of the work from the artist every time they play it on the air (59).

CABLE TV

1948: "When cable entrepreneurs first started wiring communities with cable television in 1948, most refused to pay broadcasters for the content that they echoed to their customers. Even when the cable companies started selling access to television broadcasts, they refused to pay for what they sold. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters’ content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did— Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away" (59-60).

The copyright owners said: "All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now take our property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop piracy and I don’t think there is any lesser word to describe it. I think there are harsher words which would fit it" (60).

"Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing" (61). OHMYGOD they didn't fix it for 30 years!! (61)

****

"Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Every generation—until now" (61).

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 3 Catalogs

Jesse Jordan and the RPI system
RPI = Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit against him for copyright infringement because he tinkered with the code for RPI's site's search engine, making it easier to access content, which he did not create or post. For this "willful infringement," they demanded he pay a fine of $15,000,000 (48-50). Two other students faced similar lawsuits from RIAA.

"If you added up the claims, these four lawsuits were asking courts in the United States to award the plaintiffs close to $100  billion—six times the total profit of the film industry in 2001... [the RIAA] demanded $12,000 to dismiss the case" or in other words, Jesse's entire savings (51).


"The recording industry insists this is a matter of law and morality. Let’s put the law aside for a moment and think about the morality. Where is the morality in a lawsuit like this? What is the virtue in scapegoatism? The RIAA is an extraordinarily powerful lobby. The president of the RIAA is reported to make more than $1 million a year. Artists, on the other hand, are not well paid. The average recording artist makes $45,900. There are plenty of ways for the RIAA to affect and direct policy. So where is the morality in taking money from a student for running a search engine?" (52).

Now Jesse is an activist. He's trying to set the record straight, and point out the absurdity in the RIAA's actions.

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 2 Mere Copyists

CH 2: “Mere Copyists”

In photography, photogs are allowed to capture anything in the public space (Copyright:public domain)

"For just as there is a grammar for the written word, so, too, is there one for media. And just as kids learn how to write by writing lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by constructing lots of (at least at first) terrible media... One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting upon what one has created." (36.) Media Literacy

Elizabeth Daley: 'From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.'

"'Read-only.' Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century" (37). 

"Education, Daley explained, is about giving students a way of “constructing meaning.” To say that that means just writing is like saying teaching writing

is only about teaching kids how to spell" (39).

"[Blogs] are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have. That’s a strong statement. Yet it says as much about our democracy as it does about blogs. This is the part of America that is most difficult for those of us who love America to accept: Our democracy has atrophied" (41). (juries)..."But for most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for “democratic deliberation” to occur" (42).

Blogs vs. Mainstream media: "This different cycle is possible because the same commercial pressures don’t exist with blogs as with other ventures. Television and newspapers are commercial entities.They must work to keep attention. If they lose readers, they lose revenue. Like sharks, they must move on.
But bloggers don’t have a similar constraint. They can obsess, they can focus, they can get serious. If a particular blogger writes a particularly interesting story, more and more people link to that story. And as
the number of links to a particular story increases, it rises in the ranks of stories. People read what is popular; what is popular has been selected by a very democratic process of peer-generated rankings" (43). "Blog space gives amateurs a way to enter the debate—“amateur” not in the sense of inexperienced, but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning not paid by anyone to give their reports" (44).


"But it affects democracy in another way as well. As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues.... it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy" (45).


"...tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you’re doing in your garage" (46). We used to tinker with our cars, small electronics, alone in our rooms. Now, when we tinker with things like open source code (free software or open-source software (FS/OSS)) we are letting others all over the Net see our work... creating a "community platform."

Notes: Lawrence Lessig "Free Culture" Intro - Ch. 1

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity"

"To Eric Eldred—whose work first drew me to this cause, and for whom it continues still."

Introduction
Free Culture is about the troubles the Internet causes even after the modem is turned off. It is an argument about how the battles that now rage regarding life on-line have fundamentally affected “people who aren’t online.”

We come from a tradition of “free culture”—not “free” as in “free beer” (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement), but “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections.”

The opposite of a free culture is a permission culture "...creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past"

"Does that sound unconservative? Not to me. The concentration of power—political, corporate, media, cultural—should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy."

"technological meme pool"

"Corporations threatened by the potential of the Internet to change the way both commercial and noncommercial culture are made and shared have united to induce lawmakers to use the law to protect them... They are succeeding in their plan to remake the Internet before the Internet remakes them (9)."

It seems there is a new "war" now between "piracy" and "property," (10) provoked by the Internet (17).

"There has never been a time in our history when more of our “culture” was as “owned” as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now... Or is the radical shift away from our tradition of free culture yet another example of a political system captured by a few powerful special interests?" (12)... "...we are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law—and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been" (13).

Part 1: “PIRACY”
Person-to-person sharing (p2p) has an efficiency which does not respect the traditional lines of copyright laws. "A generation of Americans, the warriors warn, is being raised to believe that “property” should be “free.” Forget tattoos, never mind body piercing—our kids are becoming thieves!" (18).

WRONG: "Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy" (18)

"Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value.

The source of this confusion is a distinction that the law no longer takes care to draw—the distinction between republishing someone’s work on the one hand and building upon or transforming that work on the other. Copyright law at its birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both" (19).

"Rise of the Creative Class" Richard Florida

CH 1: Creators
Disney

Japanese publishing of manga, or graphic novels..."Doujinshi are also comics, but they are a kind of copycat comic. A rich ethic governs the creation of doujinshi. It is not doujinshi if it is just a copy; the artist must make a contribution to the art he copies, by transforming it either subtly or significantly" (25-26). "This market exists in parallel to the mainstream commercial manga market. In some ways, it obviously competes with that market, but there is no sustained effort by those who control the commercial manga market to shut the doujinshi market down. It flourishes, despite the competition and despite the law" (26).

Even though Japanese copyright law technically bans these copycat comics, one Japanese man admitted that there simply aren't enough lawyers to defend these cases (27). "Would Japan be better off with more lawyers? Would mangabe richer if doujinshi artists were regularly prosecuted? Would the

Japanese gain something important if they could end this practice of uncompensated sharing? Does piracy here hurt the victims of the piracy, or does it help them? Would lawyers fighting this piracy help

their clients or hurt them?" (27-28).

"Scientists build upon the work of other scientists without asking or paying for the privilege. (“Excuse me, Professor Einstein, but may I have permission to use your theory of relativity to show that you were wrong about quantum physics?”)" (29).

2.26 Notes

Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture"
The Causbys: chickens died when military planes flew over their yard. What is "your property"? Does the air space above it count? 

Steamboat Bill and Steamboat Willie: copyright lasted 14 years, then 28, and then the life of the creator. Disney has so far maintained ownership of Mickey Mouse, but lobbying Congress. But... SBW owed "ideational debt" to SBB, and many of Disney's stories came from folk tales, legend, oral history. #scumbagDisney

doujinshi: Fan fiction in the form of comics. Using the same characters. It's Japanese, where there are much different rules for intellectual property.

Copyright Criminals

Who gets the credit, and the money? Money and art

"We're all turning into DJs"

Anthony Berman - entertainment lawyer/douchebag

people who used to be miffed by sampling found out how much money they could make on copyright

Cheap and easy -- say the older generation of people, opposed to sampling. It's absurd to say samplers are "instrumentalists"

Modern music producer/sampler/DJ:instrumentalist as photographer:painter

"all these other artists that I'm sampling... they're in my band!"

Sage Francis: modern music producer

"Funk is the DNA of hip-hop"

Digital sampling came in the 1980s - the equipment was cheaper, more people knew how to make it.

"Sample police" -- lawyers and bullshit

The Bomb Squad -- four musical masterminds, bringing in sounds

"reality record" -- what you hear back on the streets is what you hear on the record... and then you hear that on the streets!

"Nobody took hip-hop seriously until it started making a lot of money." The copyright holders realized they could profit by charging artists for sampling their tracks

De La Soul got in a lot of trouble for sampling -- and sued

Biz Markie and Gilbert O'Sullivan: made a parody of "Alone Again," G.O'S fules a huge law suit. AS IF MUSIC CAN BE ERASED PAHAH. The judge called it "Biblically incorrect."

They weren't trying to steal or take what wasn't "theirs" -- they were creating, vibing. It was an unwritten code of the hip-hop world. You can't copyright a sound.

Sampling clearance emerged as an industry. Put pressure on artists to be honest about samples from the beginning. 

Now that creating includes asking for permission... the definition of musical creativity has changed. "It is cheaper to cover an entire song than to sample 3 seconds of it." If you change the words or recontextualize it, you're screwed. 

Paying over $100,000 to sample one song! "Now you're telling me that my style is too expensive?"

No rapper ever thanked Clyde Subblefield "the original funky drummer" for his drum beats. No credit, no mention, no compensation. (besides Melissa Etheridge)

There aren't many original that make more money than the pieces they sample from. 

CULTURE IS ABOUT COLLAGE -- FORGING THE BITS INTO SOMETHING STRONGER. 

Danger Mouse' "The Gray Album" from 2004: mashup between The Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album. One of the most successful albums of 2004, if it had been for sale. Nobody made a dime. 

The people who make the technology do it so we can make music and create and move on. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just get on with it. The law may be too involved in, and an underground is growing because the "outlaws" cannot afford the lawsuits.

Subblefield says the credit is more important than the money. 

"That's how society moves forward. It evolves from taking old things, and changing them."

Soundtrack?

That was quick – White House acts on Swart's demand for free information

"White House Grants Aaron Swartz's Wish: Taxpayer-Funded Research Will Be Free"

Gerry Smith writes in his article for the Huffington Post that the Obama administration just granted Aaron Swart's wish by directing federal agencies on Friday to make the results of federally-funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote on Feb. 22, "in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research."

The memorandum was addressed to "the heads of executive departments and agencies" which "with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures" (Dr. John Holdren).

"In a 2008 manifesto, Swartz said sharing information was a 'moral imperative' and advocated for 'civil disobedience' against copyright laws pushed by corporations 'blinded by greed' that led to the 'privatization of knowledge.'"  Smith writes of Swartz. #PDFtribute

Some people marvel that this was not done earlier. As the reddit thread on the Huffington article put it, "Whenever you hear Republicans say they want to privatize a piece of the government, what they are really saying, is that they want tax payers to fund a private monopoly." - "I don't think this type of thing is limited to Republicans, unfortunately." - "Greed doesn't have a single party. It's all-inclusive." - "And it's global."

I don't think I agree that the whole issue itself started out of greed. In a time when information simply could not be shared as easily, or as cheaply, publishing and sharing (printing journals or books) would have been an expensive process. I wonder if, when government-funded research only resided in libraries, they allowed the public to access them for free.

Now the problem of sharing inexpensively has been resolved with the Internet, but the old laws about sharing information took longer to adapt to technology's affordances. More important than the laws themselves are the people of power who uphold them, and have built empires upon the old way. They are the ones resisting change and progress; their fortunes depend on an antiquated system.

This is not to undermine the challenge publishers will face when required to restructure their system. Making articles freely accessible will likely take a big chunk out of their profits, and someone is going to take the financial hit for that.

In Defense of Literature - Reddit gold

"The universe is huge. Time is impossibly vast. Trillions of creatures crawl and swim and fly through our planet. Billions of people live, billions came before us, and billions will come after. We cannot count, cannot even properly imagine, the number of perspectives and variety of experiences offered by existence.
We sip all of this richness through the very narrowest of straws: one lifetime, one consciousness, one perspective, one set of experiences. Of all the universe has, has had, and will have to offer, we can know only the tiniest fraction. We are alone and minuscule and our lives are over in a blink.
All of this strikes me as terribly sad, and if I believed Someone were in charge, I could muster an argument that our awareness of vastness makes our tininess unfair.
But here's the thing. Literature lets us experience life through a second consciousness. For a time we share the perspective and experience of the author and his imagination. Our experience of the universe is broadened, multiplied.
Without literature, we are all limited to our own lives. With it, we can know something of what it is to be other people, to walk in their shoes, to see the world their way.
Literature needs no further defense than this, I would say. It is our species's most advanced and successful technology for cheating dismal fate out of the abstract aloneness it would otherwise impose on us." -OnlyFoolin

White House directs open access for government research -Reuters

Excerpt:
"We wanted to strike the balance between the extraordinary public benefit of increasing public access to the results of federally-funded scientific research and the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides are not lost," he said.

Federal agencies are permitted a 12-month embargo time before offering access and can petition for a longer lag.

"We are working on the cutting edge of the science. I want to read a new paper NOW, not in 1 year," Vittorio Saggiomo, a chemist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, wrote in an online chat about the announcement.

Full article

2.21 Notes --- SEMESTER HALFWAY POINT

Read Lessig, Free Culture 7-47

Write a blog entry responding to Lessig in some way. If you choose the stock option, your blog entry can either link to some sort of multi-modal digital text (art, video, audio, multimedia) that remixes or pirates prior work in an interesting way (if you want to show off some of your DTC design chops, this is your chance), or else link to some text that you would argue is too derivative of the work of others in a way that merits discussion. (For the second option, choose something that's open to debate rather than something that's simple, obvious plagiarism: in other words, Shakespeare ripping off Chaucer is more interesting to talk about than Kaavya Viswanathan, Blair Hornstine, or Jayson Blair.) Use quotations from the Lessig reading to help you talk about why you think it's interesting, cool, or problematic.


"The act of reflection, metacognition -- promotes knowledge transfer. If you want knowledge to stick to continue working with those concepts, you must think about thinking." ~Edwards

"The machine is us/ing us" The video is dated now (6 years) 

Server farms? Crawlers/spiders? archive sites... archive.org, they start in 1996 current form of the internet began, Web 2.0

Part 2 of the semester will go over OWNING INFORMATION
So stoked for this.
Edwards is the chair of a caucus on intellectual property? Go to office hours!!

*cryptomnesia

By 9 pm tonight: mid semester reflecting:

Write, either on paper or on your computer, a reflection on your progress so far in the course; you'll email this to me NLT 9 pm tonight, and I'll use it to help me assess your midterm projects. Your reflection should answer the following questions:

• Assume that your midterm project is an instance of some of the best work you've done. Describe to me what you think are its best features.
• Assume that your midterm project requires some revision. Describe to me what I could have done or taught to help you improve the quality of your project.
• Predict what grade you think I will assign to the project, and why.
• Agree or disagree with the grade you think I will assign to the project, and give reasons based on the wording of the assignment and the course concepts described in the syllabus.
• Look over the syllabus and identify the readings and concepts you are most interested in investigating, and why.

Delagrange "When Revision is Redesign"

She goes through her process to revise and publish Wunderkammer.

"This webtext for Inventio describes my response to Kairos' invitation for "re-envisioning," which I took as a provocation, a challenge to literally re-see and reimagine the visual and conceptual design of my argument"

argue by example for publishing scholarship about new media in new media. Are butterflies arranged by species? by size? by color? by geographical habitat? by medicinal property? Each arrangement is part of a different worldview, as is the presence or absence of butterflies in the first place.

My goal (with Wunderkammer), then, was to enact my argument—that the (visual) canon of arrangement, as represented in the Wunderkammer and further demonstrated in the assemblages of Joseph Cornell, is a heuristic for invention and discovery—by combining the visual effect of theWunderkammer as a physical space with the embodied experiences of designing (for me) and exploring (for the viewer).

"My revision/redesign started with the premise that the design experience must contain elements of building a Wunderkammer, and the viewer experience must contain elements of exploring one" ---- This reminds me of my process for the midterm. Lay out all my quotes, pick the best, assign images and colors, and then write the prose to string them all together.

trope: A figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression

Limitations of using Adobe Flash: need the program, the know-how, the time to learn it, the Internet speed, the memory space, the compatible device and browser to view

best multimedia digital scholarship: Anne Wysocki's (2002) "Bookling Monument," Adrian Miles et al.'s (2003) "Violence of Text,"or Anna Munster's (2001) Wundernet

Importance of motion: "Cognitive research supports the assertion that the brain is less computational than combinatorial, working through homology and affinity in a search for similarities (Stafford, 2001, pp. 47-48, 139-142). It makes sense, then, that new knowledge can be generated by the discovery of meaning in unexpected juxtapositions, and that those juxtapositions will be stimulated by wandering and wondering through a richly furnished imaginative space."

Horse running/arrow and flower bloom and die/circle: "I designed the animation to explore time as a metaphor, and to visualize the conceptual difference between time as an arrow, forever streaming out behind us, and time as a circle, repeating cycles of birth, death, and renewal. But by explaining, I undercut my argument that visual arrangement, juxtaposition, classification, and even serendipity are in themselves generative, epistemologically rich and powerful. And by explaining, I also inhibit the opportunity for new, different, and equally productive interpretations of the images to emerge."
THIS -- let them come up with their own interpretation. do not tell people how to think.

"(Larry Leifer) argued that a key to innovative thinking and problem-solving is maintaining ambiguity for as long as possible. Designers must preserve ambiguity so as not to exclude avenues of thought or experiment that might later prove productive. Learners too must preserve ambiguity, as premature certainty shuts down the process of inquiry and exploration that often leads to more sophisticated, more interesting, more generative knowledge."

"Compositionists too have long believed that the act of writing is a mode of learning; it is the putting down of words on a surface that generates thought."

"First, I wanted to publish on the technological bleeding edge so that the article would be readable by browsers for the longest possible time."

"Techné is a making, and involves knowledge in the hand and knowledge in the head. Knowledge in the hand comes from practice and experience, knowledge in the head from reflection on causes and effects."

Midterm – DTC 356 Spring 2013

I thought it best to create a new blog for this project, as it is broken into a few parts. They are all in order, and flow from one to the next.

Delagrange "Wunderkammer" notes (messy)

Read Susan H. Delagrange, "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement." Give yourself time to work your way through it: it's a complicated text, and the midterm will ask you to do something similar to the ideas Delagrange discusses. Take notes, and make sure to write down and look up any unfamiliar terms. (What isKairos? Episteme?)

Excerpts (no analysis)(Sorry they're messy)

Productive arts, or techné (Aristotle included medicine, architecture, and rhetoric as examples), occupy a middle ground between theory and practice, one that incorporates both abstract and applied knowledge. Rhetoric as techné has four implications: first, it is heuristic, a process of making, and thinking, and re-making, through which meaning and knowledge are made; second, it is situated, specific to the embodied and material conditions of a particular time and place; third, it is mobile and strategic, adaptable to changing circumstances and new challenges; and fourth, it is ethical, founded in specific beliefs and values (which may or may not be those of the community at large).


dInteractive digital media open up new opportunities to “perform” our pedagogy as a productive, rhetorically rich art, and to compose texts and make meaning that are not possible in traditional print.   

We can engage with these artifacts and the social technologies in which they are embedded through the practice of what we might call "critical wonder": a process through which digital media designers can thoughtfully and imaginatively arrange evidence and articulate links in a critical practice of embodied discovery.

Visual Analogy" expands the concept of arrangement as heuristic (involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods), because analogy is a trope that lends itself particularly well to the discovery of unexpected affinities in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects (and ideas). 

In "Wunderkammer," I argue that these 16th-century cabinets of wonder are models of visual provocation in which objects were manipulated and arranged in order to discover new meanings in their relationships. "Visual Analogy" expands the concept of arrangement as heuristic, because analogy is a trope that lends itself particularly well to the discovery of unexpected affinities in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects (and ideas). "Joseph Cornell" explores the mobile assem-blages of 20th-century artist and bricoleur Joseph Cornell, whose refined use of repetition and small variation predicts the epistemic possibilities of 21st-century interactive digital media.

Wunderkammer:
"Until the end of the 18th century, wonder was defined as "a form of learning—an inter-mediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing" (Lugli, 1986, p. 123)" Collections of objects, random, big and small -- art, to inspire wonder ..... "In fact, scale is one of the characteristics by which wonder is measured. Gigantic objects like skeletons of wooly mammoths and miniature accom-plishments like portraits of Napoleon painted on grains of rice are equally evocative of wonder... While associative interpretations of natural and man-made wonders led to significant intellectual projects like Linnaeus’s classification system, the scientific apparati housed in Wunder-kammern served not only as fascinations in themselves, but also as the means to examine and explore other objects... Magnifiers, spectacles, telescopes, and microscopes made previously imperceptible detail visible to the naked eye." Visual synecdoche (a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole of something, or vice-versa... like saying the Internet but meaning the World Wide Web) ... "Like the scientifica in Wunderkammern, digital media are "practical inventions" that we may use to multiply, magnify, mirror and otherwise manipulate images and collections of images..... accidental reflection or refraction:" we might see ourselves in the reflection of parts of a Wunderkammern, which changes our perception of the piece/pieces.... "many people find Freud’s references to dreams and slips of the tongue to be fruitful objects-to-think-with about how the mind works, despite the fact that Freud himself considered them relatively unimportant. The Wunderkammer is an object-to-think-with that constructs an uncanny bridge between the mental and physical"... Interactive digital media-as-Wunderkammmer provide new objects-to-think-with about our slippery, provisional, fragmentary understanding of the world, a framework for exploration and discovery of how its seemingly disparate and disconnected pieces can be joined and made sensible, and thereby help us learn how to act. while we may be attuned to thinking of association and analogy in verbal terms, they are also deeply and fundamentally visual.


Visual Analogies:
The making of knowledge through arrange-ment and visual analogy in a Wunderkammer
is a process of analogical manipulation that is deeply rhetorical. Each arrangement of objects creates new taxonomies (defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups). It focuses on affinity rather than on difference, it is more likely to produce rhetorical effects that are collaborative and communal. if two things are similar in some ways, then it is likely that they will be similar in others, an insight that is critical to the formation of community. The role of visual juxtaposition and manipulation is to provide an opportunity for the discovery of affinities, but chance, of course, favors the prepared; we must be looking in order to see. Antistasis (From the Greek, "opposition". "In the stories we tell ourselves, we tell ourselves." Catachresis: juxtaposing things together that are not alike, then with the "aha!" moment that reveals their similarities.  associative habits of mind that can be equally well employed in the construction and manipulation of digital media designed as technologies of wonder and discovery. Computers, software, and the social technologies in which they are embedded are contemporary devices of wonder. One of the enduring critiques of the use of images in academic discourse is that images are inherently manipulative. It seems to be the particularity of bodies of evidence that raises fears about affective and emotional argument. -- anything not logocentric seems "cunning and inappropriate" -- 


Joseph Cornell: 
(1903-1972), the American assembly and collage artist. relying on the serendipitous discovery of artifacts he associated with his particular obsessions for maps, romantic opera, owls, the Medicis, and more. While his themes may have seemed eccentric, the creative juxtaposition of objects within each box “signals a careful rhetor who researches his subject, composes with specific communicative intentions, and endows his text with a discernable coherence” ...(in his pieces,) provide multiple perspectives while never revealing all, insisting that the viewer both accept the ambiguity and continue striving to construct meaning in the gaps. Like many artists, he worked in series, producing variations on the themes of soap bubble toys, Medici Slot Machines, and celestial navigation, a model for us of the visual tropes of repetition and small variation, and the reason we should seek mobility in multimediated spaces. “Cornell’s interpretation of found objects was distinctive because it also encompassed information—fact upon fact upon fact—that he accumulated about people, events, places, and phenomena” (Hartigan). Pieces were meant to be picked up and handled... This shifts the obligation to learn by doing to the viewer, whose responsibility it becomes to make sense of each object and text. 

Midterm Review

 Susan H. Delagrange, "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement."

Epistemology: study of knowledge, theory of
Techné: middle ground between theory and practice. Making to know, productive arts. Rhetoric is a techné.
Rhetorical Canon: there are 5... invention, memory, style, delivery and arrangement. A was her focus in this piece -- organization (e.g. the 5 paragraph essay as a canon of arrangement). The web juxtaposes things in a way to make you think more about them
Wunderkammer: wonder-cabinet. Collections of man-made, found objects. Joseph Cornell made his own, they usually have a theme. Visual canon or arrangement. Wonder is a type of learning: "an inter-mediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing

Praxis: practice/doing, as opposed to theory, but with theory in mind (e.g. effective web design... you learn through trial and error, observation what works and doesn't – so when you go to make your own, you keep these things in mind)


MIDTERM PROMPT: Delagrange argues that "[p]roductive arts, or techné. . . occupy a middle ground between theory and practice, one that incorporates both abstract and applied knowledge," and notes that rhetoric can be considered as techné.

Argument is rhetoric. Produce a multi-modal argument about the evolving ways we produce, distribute, use, and/or reproduce information. It should reflect the four implications Delagrange assigns to what Delagrange calls "rhetoric as techné."

4 implications: 
1. heuristics (process of making, remaking, iterative process)
2. situated specific to the embodied and material conditions of a perticular time and place
3. mobile and strategic, adaptable to changing circumstances
4. ethical, founded in specific beliefs and values which may or may not be that of the community


***Ask Nathan to narrate? :)

Alex Galloway "Protocol" notes

Alex Galloway, "Protocol," (chapter 13 of "Rethinking Marxism" 2001)

How does control exist after decentralization?

the move from the modern disciplinary societies to societies of imperial control.

The reason for my essay is this curious “descending into the hidden abode of production.” The hidden abode of production means many things in the age of Empire.
It means descending into the real conditions of Third World chip-making factories
populated by the “destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited—and yet living!” working poor (156), just as it means descending into the boardrooms of dotcom start-ups


At the core of networked computing technologies is the concept of protocol. A
computer protocol is a set of rules that govern networked relations. The protocols
that govern the Internet, for example, are contained in what are called Request For
Comments (or RFC) documents. They are the written definitions of the protocols and
policies of the Internet. The RFCs are managed by the Networking Division of the
University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI). They are
freely available to anyone wishing to build hardware or software that meets their
specifications. The ISI is itself under the directive of the Internet Engineering Task
Force, an international, technocratic community of network scientists, and the Internet
Society, an altruistic but equally technocratic organization that wishes “[t]o assure
the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people
throughout the world” (Internet Society)
Protocol: like rules of driving on a highway. Protocols are highly
formal—that is, they encapsulate information inside a technically defined wrapper
while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of the information.


"It is common for contemporary critics to describe the Internet as an unpredictable
mass of data, rhizomatic and lacking central organization. This position goes roughly
like this: since new communication technologies are based on the elimination of
centralized command and hierarchical control, it follows that we are witnessing a
general disappearance of control as such. This could not be further from the truth.
Empire does much to dispel this myth in the social and political arenas. Whereas
Empire is how political control exists under decentralization, protocol is how technological control exists under decentralization."


The address “www.rhizome.org” is parsed in reverse, starting with the “org.” Thus,
in theory, the root server receives a request from the user and directs the user to another machine that has authority over the “org” domain, which in turn directs the user
to another machine that has authority over the “rhizome” subsection, which in turn
returns the IP address for the specific machine known as “www.” This process of deriving an IP address from a domain name is called resolution.


A common protocol leads to network articulation, while incompatible protocols leads to network disarticulation. For example, two computers running the DNS addressing protocol will be able to communicate effectively with each other about network addresses. Sharing the DNS protocol allows them to be networked. However, the same computers will not be able to communicate with a foreign device running, for example, the NIS addressing protocol or the WINS protocol. Without a shared protocol, there is no network.


For example, a decentralized network is precisely what gives the Internet Protocol its effectivity as a dominant protocol. Or to take another example, the flimsy, cross-platform nature of HTML is precisely what gives it its power as a protocological standard. Like Empire, if protocol dared to centralize, or dared to hierarchize, or dared to essentialize, it would fail.


We turn now to Michel Foucault to derive one final quality of protocol: the special existence of protocol in the “privileged” physical media of bodies...?


But the effects of distributed networks and protocological control on the marxist liberatory project are massive indeed. As Deleuze remarked to Negri several years before Empire: "It’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called “sabotage” . . . You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism . . . The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control. (1990, 175)

Liliana Bounegru's explanation: "In understanding networks in terms of their protocols, by
drawing on Paul Baran, Galloway demonstrates that, unlike common conceptions, the
distributed network, the network diagram specific to the Internet, does not remove
forms of organization or control, is not anarchic, chaotic, or entirely rhizomatic, but it
creates novel structures of organization and control. Protocol coincides with this new
apparatus of control in the core argument and subtitle of Galloway’s book: “protocol
is how technological control exists after decentralization.”

2.12 Notes

DNS: domain name server. Which IP addresses correspond to domain names. Altering that information would make the Internet unfunctional.
TCP/IP helps the domains interact with each other and share information. Opposite of the telephone system, which had a centralized hub

"Empire has no Rome" (Galloway) means – no central power


Alex Galloway "Protocol" and Jonathan Lethem, "The Ecstasy of Influence":


1. One idea that was already highly familiar to you from other contexts, with a description of what it means or what its implications are, and what those contexts are.

"Protocol is to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies. Protocol is more democratic than the panopticon, but it is still structured around command and control" (Galloway 87).

Driving at night on an empty street, one would still stop at lights and signs for fear of being watched -- but not so much this paranoia, but that the paranoia has imbedded itself into one's subconscious to the point where the watcher has succeeded. Drivers are aware of the transparency and fear repercussions, so their obedience has become subconscious. They become internalized dispositions -- get people to act in ways in accordance with conventions. Govern our actions in real life (protocol does)

switch 

2. One idea that was new and interesting to you, with a description of what it means, and why it was interesting.

Lethem says on page 61, "That  is to say, most artists are converted  to art by art  itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying  oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses.  Inspiration  could  be called  inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.  Invention,  it  must  be humbly admitted, does not  consist  in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any  artist  knows  these  truths,  no matter  how  deeply  he  or  she  submerges that knowing."

One could compare this to a quote attributed to Einstein, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." -- Albert Einstein. 

Copyright is suppressing creativity, not fostering it. And those who claim to "own" intellectual property are those guilty of "source hypocrisy" (65) because they in turn got their ideas from others.

3. One idea that you didn't understand or that seemed fundamentally mistaken, confused, or misguided, with an analysis of the specific part of it that seemed most problematic or difficult and why.

"By design, the Internet Protocol cannot be centralized. The RFC documents declare this in black

and white" (Galloway 85).

RFC documents say TCP IP stack cannot live on any one machine... moment of irony? People wrote the "centralized" power proposals -- they put themselves in a point of power by writing it, that it comes from a central place.

Information is Random, Complex and Interesting

Prompt: Read Gleick 324-354 on randomness and information. Note the distinction between interesting and uninteresting numbers. As we start thinking about the mid-term, I'll be looking for interesting essays from you. What might that mean?

Chapter 12 of Gleick's "The Information" titled "The Sense of Randomness" adds to the definition of Information. The main character of the chapter, Gregory Chaitin, is a New Yorker mathematician. His  studies furthered theory about algorithms. While Gleick explained that messages being random, complex and interesting translate to containing more information, I kept thinking about Berry's Paradox (179). It helped me understand the purpose of an algorithm. If a complex idea can be stated in fewer terms (or fewer bits) than an algorithm helps us compute a message.

"But Shannon also considered redundancy within a message: the pattern, the regularity, the order that makes a message comprehensible. The more regularity in a message, the more predictable it is. The more predictable, the more redundant. The more redundant a message is, the less information it contains," Gleick writes on page 329. So it seems that the easier it is to create an algorithm for message, the less information it contains. Those messages which require more complicated algorithms to illustrate become more "interesting." And in this chapter, "interesting" has become another measurer of information.

Later in the chapter, Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov calls this randomness complexity: "the size, in bits, of the shortest algorithm needed to generate it. This is also the amount of information" (337).

The more random a message is, the more interesting it is, and the more information it contains. And "random" and "interesting" are not subjective terms in this discussion: "Ignorance is subjective. It is a quality of the observer. Presumably randomness – if it exists at all – should be a quality of the thing itself" (326). 


On page 331 when pi π is explained to be a random number but not in the subjective sense, we learn that math and science can help us pull meaning out of seemingly random numbers. Gleick states that if a number can be computed or defined, it reflects on its randomness. And since algorithms produce patterns, looking at the size of an algorithm reveals computability. Since an algorithm is measurable, w gauge the size of a message in bits (332). Pi is a random number (its numerals do not repeat in patterns) but since we can compute it, it loses the 'random' tag. Same with the number 1729, or the Hardy-Ramanujan number (339).

It's been difficult reading these sections because I can't put my finger yet on how this translates to information in general. Are we talking about decoding foreign, animal or alien languages? Or just quantifying/commodifying Information? 

John von Neumann said, "Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin" (327). Since now we do have algorithmic ways of producing sets of random numbers (as Gleick states earlier on that page), perhaps what Neumann was getting at was Information. New Information cannot be produced arithmetically – it requires "outside the box algorithm" thinking.

Ultimately, when Professor Edwards collects our midterms, he will be looking for "interesting essays." If he is using the objective term as Gleick and Chaitin do in the chapter, then he will grade with the expectation that we have come up with sentences and thoughts that are not just arithmetically concocted from our readings and discussions (our class "algorithms"). The less formulaic our essays are – with quotes pieced together and commentary inserted that has already been mulled over in class – the more interesting they will be. We must work outside our given algorithm ("given" meaning what has been bestowed upon us – we have to seek out and bring in new things).

However, Gleick later brings up the fact that algorithmic information theory is basically the way scientists operate. "When humans or computers learn from experience, they are using induction: recognizing regularities amid irregular streams of information. From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm" (345).

"...perfect understanding is meant to remain elusive. If one could find the bottom it would be a bore." This applies to human questions, Gleick says, like art, biology and intelligence (353). 

Charles H. Bennett pulls it all together. He stated that "it has been appreciated that information per se is not a good measure of message value" (353). Information is valuable when it is "neither too cryptic nor too shallow, but somewhere in between" (354). Valuable Information is computable but requires us to keep thinking to expand and contextualize the message.

2.5 Notes

Turing Machine
Alan Turing (1912-1954)

Implications... the universal machine.
"A Turing machine is a hypothetical device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a com." -Wiki/TuringMachine

Turing found that any mathematical computation could be done on a mechanical device, using the binary system. It changed the way people thought about computation. "Computers" used to be women who did computations. Some call it "the moment the digital age began." He invented the concept of computers – he started something genuinely new.  His ideas are the fundamental truths that have remained true throughout all automated computing. (From video: "The Universal Machine")

The machine was hypothetical, to him, but has since been created in first a digital form, and later an analog form.

Smart phone processor chip, plus the memory (tape of the Turing Machine).

Turing Test
"The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of an actual human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test." -Wiki/TuringTest

Midterm...
Make conceptual connections between readings. Joyce, Gleik


Intellectual Property/Capital

Early MUDD 
Chat room to interact with people via text. Avatars, they were getting hijacked – girl's avatar got raped :/ ("A Rape in Cyberspace")
Leave your facebook logged in? Get hacked.

Bendito Machine III

Black and red 2D movie. Evolution of the TV, computer, knocking people about. People pitch the old devices off a cliff. New ones fall on, squash, and kill people. Kind of view that technology is not neutral, it's controlling

Edwards: "Some philosophers identify three attitudes toward technology: 

Technological determinism, which presumes that technology is an autonomous force that determines social structures and cultural values. 

#Moore's Law, no human 

Technological instrumentalism, which presumes that technology constitutes a set of tools under conscious human control.

Technological substantivism, which presumes that technology is not neutral but carries with it certain values."

"Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different media have different political biases" – the Tweet or the Reddit headline, versus a journalistic article. One is more sensational, just the who/what/when/where, but the reporter may write about the why and go more into depth. We think we're informed because we instantly "know" what happened, when really it takes more time to get to the real meat of a story or occurrence. 

"Ah, so the velocity of information changes the quality" -Edwards