Web 2.0 » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

Dec 102012

Ariel has an interesting article over at the Guardian which not only describes current behaviours in mainstream and social media but serves as an excellent repository of such behaviours – in this case, in relation to the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas. Whilst during the riots last year in Britain, social networks and social media served to put the authorities on the back foot, lessons since then have clearly been learned. When Ariel headlines the article in question as “The first social media war between Israel and Gaza”, he could just as easily describe it as one of the first social media wars, full stop. This, for example:

From the start, the Isreaeli Defence Force (IDF) and Hamas shared clips on YouTube, and posted messages and images on Facebook and Twitter (also here), which initiated heated debates on the platforms. Many reporters followed these and actively participated in the discussions, which made social media an important element of both reporting and criticism of the conflict.

This should hardly surprise us. That manipulation of social-media news and its transmission takes place must be self-evident to anyone with any experience of how stories in such contexts surge. Recent cases of sex-abuse allegations have generated claims and counter-claims which can hardly depend only on the dynamics of sheeply flocks. But in the argument that Ariel develops, we get a further strand of behaviours that add a far more complex interest to the mix. For he also describes and defines the following processes:

[...] Unlike any other war in the past, the Israeli-Gaza conflict has been characterised by the mass virtual participation of ordinary people via social media. [...]

And this has led to the more mainstream media feeling obliged to take onboard, and within their own frames, websites and even offline print, such popular – and, maybe, populist – content. In a post-blogging Facebook generation, where the very fact you’re an amateur communicator adds weight, veracity and conviction to what you tell, it must be the case that, in order to be able to properly convince, latterday industrial media has had to acquire a journalistic equivalent of what film-makers learned to call cinéma vérité. A kind of post-modern approach to communication, perhaps. A veneer of “realistic” edginess to their product where once smooth and house-ridden styles were sub-editorially imposed as unquestioned – and unquestionable – good practice.

Some further thoughts, then, on where this might all be leading us:

We need to look beyond the tools and their physical manifestations – it’s always easy to notice the technology and think that content must inevitably follow suit. What’s clearly missing in all kinds of media at the moment is the instinct to reflect and think behind the headlines before putting virtual pen to paper – the impulse to leave, for a few days as a draft, a piece of work usefully unpublished. Blogging is as guilty of this as any newspaper columnist out there. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.
I would also ask us to keep in mind that whilst the free press belongs to limited liability industry, free speech should belong to unlimited liability people. And the rights and responsibilities, as well as the punishments for transgression and so forth, should be quite different in each case. If we believe that international corporations are better guarantors of our free press than the laws of representative democracy, then the real problem doesn’t lie in statutory underpinning or not – it lies in a democracy which isn’t representative enough. No amount of any social media under the evermore fierce gaze of Western governments is going to fix a system as broken as that.
A people’s press, then, perhaps? A kind of Fifth or Sixth Estate? We need statutory protection for free speech here in the UK at the very least if we are to propose such a model.
The ideal? Maybe an osmotic world of information exchange where industry and people interface to their mutual benefit. But not under the current weight of English and Welsh libel laws.

A couple of final thoughts. First, in relation to these words from Ariel (the bold is mine):

Just as cyber-war and cyber-terrorism have become prevalent, social media warfare is here to stay. It seems that the fight for public opinion will keep growing in importance, and play a more central role in future conflicts. The fact that opposing parties can communicate directly with the public will increase the pressure on journalists to stay relevant.

To these words I would be inclined to add that the above-mentioned three battles will shortly form part of a new Holy Trinity of communication. Just as industrial media was kept in the shadow and practice of the security services throughout the whole Cold War and its aftermath, leading to the corruption that recent phone-hacking scandals have uncovered here in Britain, so now social media will be in the eye of and form a target for such institutions. It could hardly be any other way. If amateur communicators are making more of the news their peers are wanting to read than the news outlets themselves, no veneer, however thick, will fool any member of the post-Leveson generation. There is no way back. And the security services probably know this well before the newspaper industry is able and prepared to take it on the chin.

Second, these are all matters which have interested a lot of us recently – both readers and writers, both amateurs and professionals. Such a post-Leveson moment as this will surely serve to define at least the next fifty years of communication in Britain – and people really don’t realise what’s happening.

We’re sleepwalking into the future of so many unfreedoms.

Social media warfare being just one more sorry battleground they’ll fashion in order to restrict our ability not only, not primarily, to freely exchange our thoughts but also – far more importantly – to be able to evaluate their narratives.

Because if the future is going to work as I think Ariel believes, the ability to sift and determine where truth really lies will become far greater and relevant than it currently might be.

A world of multiple and simultaneous intertextualities?

Almost fit for a new generation of Johann Haris … and I mean that in as complimentary a fashion as you care to allow me.

If Google’s search is now a publisher, what does that make Twitter (the corp)?

a con, Facebook, Google, Internet, laws, libel law, Twitter, web, Web 2.0, websites No Responses »

Nov 262012

Today, the Guardian publishes a fascinating story – a story that may have the most far-reaching of implications for democracy, free speech, online behaviours and the wider publishing industry. Essentially it describes how an Australian jury has come to the conclusion that Google’s search engine is actually a full-blown publisher – not simply an automated disseminator of access to interesting, timely and relevant content.

Now if Google’s search, a “simple” aggregator of content, can be accused and sentenced as a publisher – or, presumably, re-publisher of sorts – by a legal system I assume is pretty similar to our own (for it’s hardly going to be more restrictive in matters of freedom of expression I would, at the very least, have thought), just think what kind of intellectual precedent the case could set for our more thoughtful judges over here in England.

Just think, in fact, what they might say about Sally Bercow and that tweet which referred “innocently” to a trending topic generated by Twitter’s very own corporate mathematics.

Just think what they might now have to consider in relation to Twitter’s responsibility for that topic and trend in the first place.

As I just tweeted on Twitter itself:

So algorithms and the companies which create them *can* be held responsible for the content they enable. Twitter (the corp) – watch out!

Meanwhile, a few days ago I was already arguing the following:

What I’m really saying with all of this is that Twitter’s Terms of Service attempt to argue that its software simply distributes and does not publish. It takes no responsibility for the bringing together of such content – and it consequently allows form to come under one legislation and content, thus defined, to belong entirely to the user. (Though we know that even this is not true: a user cannot normally access more than a limited number of tweets back in time, whilst companies pay Twitter good money to access on a massive scale such ancient thoughts and occurrences.)

My argument, however, would run as follows: deliberately dumbing down individual ideas into 140-character gobbets and then bringing them together automatically to create interesting streams of thought involves not just the process of distribution but also the process of transformation. We are not just talking about giving someone else the tool to publish off their own bat: microblogging (ie Twitter) is essentially different from its much more discursive and single-authored precursor – which is to say, the blogging you see in front of you right now. Microblogging, essentially, is collaborative writing which involves many many others – and in order for it to work someone, or something, needs to sort and filter the information.

That is to say, give it shape. Edit and give sense and sensibility to what would otherwise be a morass of idiocies.

So who are the authors who write in a microblogging site like Twitter? Obviously the individuals who post. But also, surely, if we’re being realistic, the software which joins as a seamless whole the activities of so many busy worker bees; which is programmed and designed from ground up to prioritise speed of transmission over reflection; and which aims above all to indicate the latest over the lasting.

Which is why we finally come to the question I pose at the top of this post: why is a company like Twitter’s social-media software not also legally responsible for what it – basically – creates? Or at the very least enables?

But if this Australian case now proceeds to open the floodgates for “simple” search engines to be taken to court on any and every matter libellous matter arising (the truth being, of course, that they’re not all that simple – levering as they do billions of dollars of advertising revenues), just imagine how this might all impact – as the implications bed down – on the usage and abusage of social-media networks such as the above-mentioned Twitter and the inevitable Facebook.

That it spreads the burden of responsibility for statements made in a bespoke software constitution is to my mind only reasonable. That it may mean we lose all the virtues of Web 2.0, as well as online communication more generally, should however serve to stop us in our tracks – and make us seriously wonder if this is now going to be all for the best.

Do we really want the law to become even more wound up in our daily discourse? Is this really the right way for the interactive web? Do we really not know of any other way of exercising order which does not remove more and more our ability to communicate freely, spontaneously and democratically with other citizens?

As the Guardian concludes in its excellently measured piece:

If the Australian decision is followed by courts elsewhere search engines and platform providers will have to be a lot quicker in dealing with requests to take down material when they are contacted by a potential claimant and they will have to be more responsive to requests to sever links to defamatory content if their “not our responsibility, contact the webmaster” response opens them up to liability.

For those of us who put material online it might mean a more hostile legal landscape. The lesson will be that not only do you have to watch what you say online, search engines will have to do so as well.

And so is it that I fear a massive return to the deep web and its darknesses, if something is not done very quickly. Just as I also wonder whether the battles are already well on their way to being quite unpredictably – quite hazardously – lost.

I do still choose to believe that there must, surely, be another way to guarantee a future world of intelligent sharing.

It’s just that I’ve become evermore totally ignorant of the proper means to engineer and implement such a goal.

Creativity crisis? What creativity crisis?

books, creation, creativity, Facebook, Facebook generation, film, in a hole, music industry, online constitutions, social media, social networks, Twitter, web, Web 2.0, websites No Responses »

Apr 252012

My thoughts on this matter continue to emerge. Bring yourself up to date, if you wish, by reading this and its associated posts.

Just a couple more ideas to throw into the mix.

The social web’s major achievement seems to have been to convince people to work for global corporations for free. Not only for free but also in exchange for handing over personal data such as names, locations, dates of birth and so forth. We spend hours every day inputting what starts out as our data in a process whereby it essentially becomes their data – much of which in a discrete sense is of very little value. But bundled together, as sparse data often has been over history, it takes on a whole new life and existence.

So where has that selfsame history brought us? Whilst the 20th century was characterised by the multiple players of the industry of film taking over from the single authorship of the previous century’s novels, the 21st century will be characterised by a virtual sweat-shop of voluntary and addicted labour inputting its individually irrelevant datasets in order that algorithms and clever software manage to tease creative content out of the mix.

The creativity crisis both Chris and Rick speak so eloquently of is, in fact, no crisis at all – for there is plenty of employment to go around; the only slight problem from a living-your-life point of view being that it’s manifestly unpaid.

If we feel that the creative arts are inadequately funded, it’s because we’re looking in all the old places to create them. The new and brightest locations for creativity exist in the online constitutions which convert the product of evermore humble data-inputters across the globe into interesting and engaging Web 2.0 content. And funding isn’t necessary because the dumbing-down of process which characterises such corporate bodies everywhere has now also been applied to the end-users of such tools. Which does beg the question: who, in fact, could justify paying anything to anyone for simply liking or commenting on an article? In essence, we’ve been sold the donkey that what we do is ephemeral and worthless by itself – when in reality, using such dumbed-down processes which gather together and combine disparate data in new and unusual ways, it is really rather valuable, permanent and complex.

Are the machines on the point of taking over then? I would argue, with billion-dollar stock market flotations and user populations in the hundreds of millions, the modern social web has already turned us into industrialised cogs – freeloading as it does quite brutally on the back of our own falling standards of living as we work for zilch.

This software I talk of serves to take the basest of another’s data and turn it into a financial gold which is then stripped of all authorship and right to proper remuneration.

A virtual alchemy finally exists, then, in the 21st century. And its objects and goals – and victims too – just happen to be ourselves.

Oh, and one final thought to be going away with: if you believe in remunerating content providers properly but at the same time are thinking of using collated datasets of social content to run your businesses, think for a moment where all the latter information comes from – who produces it, under what conditions and how.

You may discover that the phrase “two-faced” comes to mind as you fight to impose your copyright laws on end-users of film, video, music and journalism – end-users who in a separate context you’re effectively employing unwaged in order that you might market better such legally protected products.

Yes. Web 2.0 is a classic example of getting something for nothing. Which doesn’t stop the most fervent supporters of copyright, even as we speak, resorting hypocritically to its charms.

How, sooner or later, they will have to pay us to tweet, like and post

Facebook, on a high, social media, social networks, software, sorted, Twitter, web, Web 2.0, websites No Responses »

Apr 242012

One of those nights. You just can’t stop chasing the trains of thoughts.

I suggested earlier on that for particularly local copyright reasons, users of social media in countries like Spain and France might one day be able to argue they had a moral right to be paid for their labours. I then suggested that – without such payments – we were, effectively, in a state of 19th century sweat-shop capitalism.

My attention was then drawn to this brilliantly argued piece from David which paralleled my own – but did so with far more evidence and far less rhetoric.

Finally, via David again, the following project came to my attention: “User Labor – A framework for sustaining user labor across the web”; a fascinating idea from a couple of years ago now, whose overview runs thus:

With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor, which is currently a monetized asset for the service provider but not for the user herself. We believe that universal, transparent, and self-controlled user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable social web.

So what do we have at the moment?

copyright issues in some jurisdictions – which may lead us to argue the social web could theoretically be obliged to remunerate users;
an economically unsustainable, as well as manifestly immoral, state of affairs whereby more and more work is done for large social web companies without remuneration – thus converting the predicted knowledge society of intelligent labour into a rip-off society of addicted users;
a formal proposal to structure the metrics of measuring user value – and so allow us to define exactly how much value is added by our Web 2.0 activities;

Then to the above three factors, we can add a fourth: as the law encroaches evermore closely on social media and networks – in particular, at least in the UK, Twitter – and as such encroachment expands the number of responsibilities such previously garden-fence discourses now display, there must come a time when such expanded responsibilities will include their corresponding rights. We can’t, after all, have responsibilities without rights. Now can we?

And rights generally obtain a return of some sort or another.

You want to make me legally responsible for my tweets? You want me to sanction their permanent profit-generating nature where before you claimed they were ephemeral? Then duly reward me for their production.

With a tool and approach such as “User Labor”, you can’t even say it wouldn’t be possible to measure our worth.

In times of a massing unpaid employment, we now have the legal, economic and moral imperatives – as well as the technical tools – to carry out a massive shift in how our social web operates. So what’s stopping us? Perhaps a simple public recognition of where all those knowledge society jobs they promised us have gone and disappeared to.

For they haven’t really disappeared at all: they’re called tweeting and liking and posting and commenting – and, whilst they all earn huge amounts of money for some people on the planet, we as very ordinary users have been conned into doing them for nothing!

Whilst, in the meantime, unemployment of the traditional kind just carries on soaring.

Can you really see no connection with the fact that almost one billion people punch data into Facebook on a regular basis for absolutely no compensation whatsoever?

Really not?

The return of sweat-shop capitalism

19th century, a con, capitalism, Facebook, freemium, in a hole, online constitutions, online world, open source, open standards, social media, social networks, Twitter, web, Web 2.0 No Responses »

Apr 242012

I once wrote these words in my unfortunate, naive and relative youth (a couple of years ago I mean), in a piece titled “Is Web 2.0 an example of 21st century socialism?”:

Lessig doesn’t think so. More here.

But I do. It’s a semantic question, obviously. For me, socialism means employing the collective to defend the individual. Historically, there are many socialisms where this has simply not been the case. Thus, we disagree.

But a 21st century socialism we choose to remake, in the image of a century we all covet and proclaim ours, can break out from its historical straitjacket – can achieve something entirely different.

Web 2.0, crowdsourcing, consumer-producers … all these concepts sit nicely with the idea of supportive communities which are able to organise themselves. Using open source tools to redefine and remove costs from the equations that large corporations would otherwise burden us with is 21st century socialism at its best.

Let’s have more of it.

And yet today I find myself posting on whether Twitter and Facebook should pay their users for the content they generate. Clearly something has gone wrong.

We’ve ended up making the most basic of all mistakes: we simply don’t have control over our means of production. What’s missing from my previous position, what turns my dream into a mirage of a delusion, is the fact that instead of open source tools freely and unconditionally available for everyone to use, we’ve decanted for a branded equivalent which behind it has only the naked instincts of profit and loss.

Decanted is the right word too. It’s kind of like what’s happened to the growth in bottled water consumption: running water used to be so enough.

Only now it isn’t quite.

Now we need a logo, an image, a network of messages to justify and sustain our continued participation.

Whilst back at Web 2.0, we continue to slave away at our keyboards and mobile phones – punching in data furiously, with the only reward and compensation for our efforts being the approbation of our peers.

It’s not even as if we’re doing it for free – it’s actually far worse than that.

In the process involved we are obliged to give up so much of our personal information in order that we may access these tools, that effectively we end up paying our lords and masters for the right to enter the aforementioned data on their behalf.

As users of Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter and Facebook we are nothing but foolish data-inputters who actually court our virtual bosses for the honour of broadening their portfolio of assets.

Web 2.0 isn’t 21st century socialism at all. Web 2.0, as we have allowed it to grow, is 19th century sweat-shop capitalism of the very worst sort. And what’s so very fascinating about its dynamics is that we’re prepared to cede to its attractions so cheaply.

Quite an achievement, this apparently voluntary enslavement of the working-classes – how to beat Marx and all his assumptions, in fact, in one easy step.

A certain kind of infirmity – even, perhaps, an encroaching technological addiction of the proletariat – which is fashionably and ingeniously destroying our ability to put boundaries on its reach.

Social networks.

Don’t you just love ‘em?

How we’d do anything for our friends. Even work for absolutely nothing for the grandest web-based corporations – which then, on the back of our toil, receive billions of dollars of hardly earned cash.

Now there’s an unfashionable explanation for our current levels of unemployment: a massively clever transfer of socially networked riches from the most humble in our nation states to the most powerful on our globalised planet – and all via the labour of the former at the hands of the latter and their freemium strategies.

Could be a PhD in there somewhere, you know.

Definitely a PhD’s worth of ideas.

Alternatively, a truism only we at the coalface are still unaware of.

Should Twitter and Facebook start paying their users for content?

Blogger, blogging, copyright, copyright madness, Facebook, in a hole, social media, social networks, Twitter, web, Web 2.0 No Responses »

Apr 242012

Paul Evans has been making a consistent case – which I don’t always agree with (though here and here from a couple of years ago I think I do) – for a proper, that is to say, rather less free-culture based, funding of the creative arts.

I asked my Twitter stream the other day if anyone had reliable stats on trends relating to user-generated content versus traditionally generated content over, say, the past century. I got no reply but the thought was prompted by this other tweet, which if true is quite astonishing:

95% of the worlds information was created 2 years ago according to Michael batty. #casaconf

In the meantime, I read this morning that Facebook is looking to achieve its one billionth user in the very near future. On the back of all this Web 2.0 energy, both Facebook and Twitter itself have clearly positioned their business models to deceive us into generating the content with which they hope to permanently profit in the future.

Now here we come to a couple of issues out there which even Anglo-Saxon clevernesses such as these cannot avoid. In some countries such as Spain, and I believe France as well, there are certain “moral” rights which people as authors cannot sign away if they wanted to. Whatever a contract says, whatever a set of terms and conditions outlines and insists, an individual is simply unable to deny their own right to authorship and its rewards.

So maybe Anglo-Saxon Twitter and Facebook have all the bases covered in the Anglo-Saxon world. But what about in those countries where it would appear for legal and “cultural” reasons they are moving to regionalise content generation and its reception? If there is now a French or Spanish Twitter, Facebook or Blogger environment defined precisely and locally by their respective software constitutions in order to comply with local sensitivities, doesn’t this also open the door for equally local legislations to be applied not only in the case of cultural mores but also in the context of copyright?

A legal conundrum which surely drives us down the path of requiring these behemoths of Web 2.0 content generation to begin to recognise and even pay minimally for authorship on a piecemeal and quantitative basis.

A minimum wage for Twitter and Facebook users perhaps?