j's scratchpad

With a title like that, I can only think what Jonathan Zittrain wrote in his book must be grim because otherwise, we wouldn’t want to stop it.

One of the first things Zittrain said after taking the mic is that he used to title things poorly. I think that was in reference to something else, not what I just typed here. He joked about offering people a boat sinking and a love story at the same time. “Be mildly unsettled. Be very, very mildly unsettled.”

He’s presenting some dystopias, like North Korea and its radios that tune to only three stations. Some folks float radios into North Korea on balloons hoping to liberate the airwaves.

He introduced us to a bit of history of the census by explaining how some fellow came up with the idea of using punch cards to record information about the US population, then using machines to tabulate the results. That was quite revolutionary. The company became IBM. Jonathan illustrated this portion of his talk with pictures of punch cards and punch card readers.

His next really cool image is of Steve Jobs using an Apple model that looks like the first computer my family had. He naturally progressed into telling us about a mug shot of Bill Gates and his smile indicating his plans to own us all some day. To illustrate how technology is progressing, Zittrain shared an environmentally friendly paper shredder with us. Not only does the hamster wheel power the shredder, but the shredded paper can immediately be recycled for use in the cage.

After a series of images about CompuServ (Hello, JD!), the next fabulous photo was of some men illustrating networking by having cans and strings between them. What’s particularly amusing about the photo is that some connections go ear-to-ear or mouth-to-mouth instead of being the more useful mouth-to-ear connection. We laughed thinking about whether that means the photographed men don’t know about networks.

Of course, true to Zittrain, he talked a lot about generativity. One of the next big laughs came from a Chinese menu with Wikipedia on it: stir-fried wikipedia, wikipedia with eggs, etc. Zittrain was even able to work couch surfing into his talk. The site coordinates people willing to crash on people’s couches with people willing to host people on their couches. Blogging. And how blogging has changed from people who only write about cats to people who write about cats and Babbledog. {Sorry. I couldn’t miss a marketing opportunity there.} (Jonathan’s favorite blog? Cats who look like Hitler.)

The somewhat unsettled part of the talk comes into play when he talks about how changes threaten generativity.

Someone accidentally turned the lights off in the room and Jonathan jested, “That’s it. If we don’t solve these problems: lights out!”

Some newer technologies recall menus from older technologies, like the Brother Wordprocessor. Why alter things that work well?

Some technologies, like Tivos are sterile because you can only do specific tasks with them.

Some technologies are tethered. His anecdote is about a toaster that suddenly has a third slot and a message saying it downloaded an update. Imagine the slot disappearing one day because there was a bug and they rolled the technology back. Then think about your toaster making orange juice and toast next week. Hhhmmm.

One problem with updatable devices is that other companies can sue them to get them to change how their devices operate, which happened to a Tivo competitor.

Are we getting to a point where programmers will need licenses?

Another interesting situation came with the game Scrabulous, which is a Facebook plugin based on the word game Scrabble. The Scrabble rights owners asked the programmers to remove Scrabulous because of infringement and they said, “Good luck. We’re in India where the laws are different.” The rights owners then approached Facebook and Facebook wasn’t sure what to do.

The Web browser has really changed technology because we’re getting to the point where people can do so much via browsers, they don’t need a lot of software on their computers anymore.

We can’t wish these changes away. Jonathan wants us all to start using generative tools and do what we can to preserve their use. People who are rulemakers have interesting roles when it comes to enforcing their rules. Think about Wikipedia and its communities.

The picture on the cover of Zittrain’s book is terrific. It shows railroad tracks going off a cliff.

I will attempt to take notes during his talk in case anyone out there isn’t here, but wants to know what’s happening.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Copyright Law, Internet, Professional Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.