Some preliminary observations – I was glad to see that they allow for the ability to go “offline.” (Can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to avoid my friends!) I tested it out as well (I was intrigued) and out of the 10 or so lines of text I sent, about half didn’t go through (apparently there’s still some bugs to be worked out!). One thing I would comment that I don’t like, is that I can’t pick and choose who I have on my chat list. Why does Facebook automatically assume that since I’m Facebook friends with someone, I also want to talk to them?? Seems odd to me….

The idea of chat is nothing new, but I feel slightly annoyed by Facebook adding this feature. I already have Skype, msn Messenger, AIM, and gchat, not to mention my cell phone, my land line, my four e-mail accounts. I think people can reach me if they want to. (but what if I don’t want them to??)

Also interesting to note, seems Facebook has learned from the past. Right in the blog post announcing the chat feature is a paragraph on privacy. Facebook seems to understand that this issue is important to its users, and bringing in new features without consideration of privacy will create a bad-for-business backlash. (Who can forget the “newsfeed” debacle)

The web has definitely made a difference in how we communicate, and how much we communicate. But like we said in class, what about the quality of how we communicate?

I was talking to some of my friends (the live ones, not the Facebook ones) today about this new feature. A comment from one of them – “Facebook is about to implode because of its overwhelming usefulness”

Is this making the Web less different but making more of a Web difference? Better technology allows us to emulate real life much more than ever before, and at the same time it allows us to do things we’ve never been able to do before, such as “chat” with someone who is half a world away.

After the initial surprise passed the first question that came to my mind was: Why did I expect to be taken to the Britannica page? Am I a digital-natives impostor? I struggled with this guilty feeling for awhile before I began writing this post. Maybe, I thought, I still (somewhere in the back of my mind) think that a “real” encyclopedia is something published by someone other than me, or you, or anyone I know for that matter. Maybe I thought wikipedia lacked “real” credibility. But this wouldn’t do, I didn’t want to think that I was a traitor to my digital-native brothers and sisters. I had think of another rationalization for my thoughts.

The only thing I could come up with is this: It might be that wikipedia entries are so unique that people tend to refer to them as just that: wikipedia entries, not encyclopedia entries. Maybe Wikipedia has gained that coveted market position that only companies (product lines) like, Xerox, Kleenex, Q-tip, and most recently Google have attained. That is, the only (or most frequent) way that society refers to the good your company provides is by referring to it as a “your company name,” or even turning your company name into a verb. It is a “Kleenex” and you can “google” something. It is not a stick with cotton on the by Q-tip and it is not a search powered by Google (for the most part). Now it is a “wiki-entry,” not an encyclopedia entry on wikipedia.

Has wikipedia attained this level of marketing, or am I merely rationalizing my treason?

DW: is the broader question here less one of gender but one of whether we want or expect the web to be a way to get around or past stereotypes that have plagued us offline? Web utopians would like another chance at it because we screwed it up in the real world. People like me don’t like to hear that the same old crap is emerging online. But you would expect if there were real differences between the web and the offline world, you’d think they’d emerge here. I hope that this issue will be a persistent topic, not just a 5 or 10 minute discussion in class.
A: While restrictions based on filtering or gender archetypes aren’t positive, maybe it doesn’t have to be bad thing that there are different webs, in the sense that people just do different things with the web as individuals.

DW: Moving on to copyright: you are HLS students who have taken copyright classes with some of the best legal thinkers in the world. I was a humanities major. I hope to talk about copyright as a social/cultural issue. I’m somewhat qualified to talk about this as I have some first-hand experience with copyright as an author. What should I think about copyright? What do I get out of it? Why should I publish things?
A: Because you want to make money (copyright gives you a number of rights, including the ability to sell copies of your work – or rather, someone else sells your stuff, they insist on a copyright, and they pay you).
A: It gives you something to sell. It makes something yours.
DW: these are two different things. A year ago I self-published a children’s book on Lulu, it’s published under a Creative Commons license, you can go to my blog Joho, you can download it for free, or buy it on Lulu, who gives me a much better royalty than from a traditional publisher. So I don’t need copyright to make money.
A: It gives you exclusivity. If the market were larger for your novel, were it not for copyright, people would just pass around free unauthorized copies.
A: Copyright supports the entire publishing industry, which is what gets your book to the bookstore.
DW: from my personal experience, that’s a lot closer to the phenomenology of the experience. The entire economic system is based around copyrighted stuff that really is secondary to me as an author. I just want them to put the book out there, and to do that I have to give them the copyright.
A: Authorship – for a lot of authors, they want people to recognize that’s my idea, that’s my thing. The reason anyone creates anything, they want it to be their thing, recognition of the artistic accomplishment. Prestige.
A: It also builds the brand around your name, your reputation. J.K. Rowling can charge a lot more for her third book than her first because people know who she is.
DW: suppose someone else copies my book, imagine that there’s no economic impact, but you’d still think it’s unfair. Fairness is the ostensible topic of today’s class, we’ll see if we get to it.

DW: Moving on to Lessig’s Code 2.0. If you have a piece of property, and you want to protect it, what do you do?
A: Pass a law. Build a fence.
DW: And for intellectual property what is a fence?
A: DRM. Websites that don’t let you copy the text, PDFs that disable functions.
DW: What are defaults?
A: Normal settings, usually you can change them.
DW: Facebook’s Beacon was all about defaults.
A: Facebook had a relationship with certain third-party websites, and when you bought something on those websites, a popup would show up on the bottom right corner of the screen.
DW: this was an egregious example of customer manipulation. The popup said, we will show this information on your Facebook profile, and you pick yes, tell my friends, or no. If you didn’t press the button, it defaulted to yes. That program is on by default in your Facebook account, and unless you went to your Facebook profile and changed it, it will pop up.

DW: Why did Lessig think that Reeves was ultimately wrong?
A: Lessig thinks both fences and laws should be used, in whatever mix is most efficient.
A: Because the web is always developing, and there are so many reasons why you do things, it’s difficult to figure out when you’re doing something illegal. Doing it by law cuts out too many instances that you might want to happen.
DW: As an owner, my intentions might be completely different than what gets enacted in copyright, and that specificity can’t be enacted in law, it can only be done by my particular fence. In order to enable the range of actions, then the default should be open, there shouldn’t be a law that bars certain actions, that’s what Reeves was arguing. But there are also some reasons why we might want open defaults. But first there are reasons why we might not want open defaults.
A: If you have owners who are not very savvy who don’t understand what the defaults are and don’t know how to prohibit actions, they may end up making horrible mistakes.
A: There’s a public good benefit that underlies the copyright scheme which is that people are adding to a pool that others can draw from, and that has to be taken into account when you consider the costs. Private people won’t be taking into account the public good.

DW: Public goods like Wikipedia are so cool because you know you can go there and add to it or take from it and not run afoul of copyright laws. Why are open systems so great?
A: Transformative and derivative uses which build on previous works.
A: Mashups and mixes.
A: The flip side of the public good problem is that it’s so much cheaper to copy than to create. It might actually deter creating if people can’t get protection for their works, not just for economic reasons but for credit/attribution. It could be a disincentive to people to lose control of their works.
A: There’s a problem here in that there’s an assumption that the internet world can operate on a completely different set of rules than the real world, which is untenable. You’ll want to avail yourself of multiple channels, and if the defaults are open in one place where they are closed in the real world, do you lose your rights other places? It’s difficult if you have these two huge worlds with different rules. It’s disruptive to the institutions that have been built up around a certain default.
A: Maybe it’s not a terrible thing if it’s disruptive to the world as we know it.
A: There is a difference between the costs of copying and the costs of creation. While new technologies have lowered the costs of copying, they have also lowered the costs of creation. We’ve seen this in the music industry. Maybe it’s okay to dismantle the recording industry because it was based on a scarcity that no longer exists. For text, it’s essentially free to “publish” on the web. For film/movies the costs have gone down somewhat but they’re still pretty high, maybe that’s one area where distributing movies for free online really hurts the traditional industry.

DW: with an open system, we can get more innovation. Remember the end-to-end argument; we get an option value that is incalculable. In a purely open environment (not that I’m necessarily recommending it) we create a world where all content is available to everyone, which we never had before. Like it or not, that’s what we have now. Keeping that in mind, what do we lose in the default of openness?
A: Anything new. We wouldn’t have new music if people weren’t going to get paid (assuming that in a world of pure openness you don’t get paid).
A: I disagree, I think with music specifically that people will still be able to make tons of money because they can sell out shows, and now music beyond the radio top 10 is available and can become popular. I think the best music comes from people who aren’t making tons of money. There’s a hatred for sell-outs, musicians become worse when they hook up with the Britney Spears phenomenon and start sounding the same as everyone else. It’s the best thing for music right now.
Response: My statement was based on the assumption that you can’t make money. Assuming you can sell out concerts knocks my argument out.
A: But a lot of artists, especially smaller artists, are likely to spend as much money to go on tour as they will make on tour, and they’re really just going on tour to get more exposure.
DW: would we create on the web the same bi-polarism that we get in the world that we’re coming from?
A: This gets to the economics argument again, which is important. If you look at really expensive works, there is a definite argument that whatever the economics are of an open world on the internet, you lose the incentives to make the hundred-million dollar blockbusters due to the inability to aggregate wealth with a different incentive structure.
DW: what do we lose with an open default?
A: Maybe alternative methods could come forward, people could sponsor artists. Instead of studios interested in making money with movies, we can have “bill gates” sponsoring movies that are worth being sponsored? Art can become more like art again.
A: Isn’t this just a value judgment? To say that independent artists are somehow better?
A: If you think that money conveys information, the fact that some artists make more money than others suggests that some artists bring more value than other artists.
A: In an open culture people have no protection from having their small, easily reproducible works being ripped off.
DW: Someone who is producing that sort of thing is more likely to suffer from openness, as opposed to someone who makes a work that is harder to reproduce.
A: What about having a quality filter? Studios and movie industry creates this function, without them you would have to yourself sift the good from the crap.
DW: as an institutional author, I know there is an industry that has no interest in purveying crap, and that is a function. This is similar to the argument made by Andrew Keen in Cult of the Amateur. There is of course at least one counter-argument, which is, have you looked at mainstream media recently?

A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web. 

Very interesting, and alarming. But it’s important to keep the scope in mind: This report is looking at the Internet as a library. Good scope but not the only one.