What if Baudrillard had taken up the invitation extended to him to participate in the writing of the sequels to The Matrix? I learned of this invitation in a brief New Yorker article about a book reading of his, linked above.

Cory Doctorow of the EFF uses BoingBoing to highlight to the work of the Chilling Effects Project who have apparently recently produced a report on how Internet copyright law is abused to silence legitimate uses of the Internet.

I’m glad the Chilling Effects group is out there and they do provide some good case studies but unless I miss my guess the statistics provided in Cory’s summary of the report are a little misleading. They found, for example that “Thirty percent of notices demanded takedown for claims that presented an obvious question for a court (a clear fair use argument, complaints about uncopyrightable material, and the like)”. But I assume they are working from a database of notices sent to them by people who are annoyed at receiving such notices - a somewhat biased sample. There may be lots of legitimate takedown notices which they never see. I would like to see the report itself and read more about the methods used to produce it but there aren’t any details on the site yet.

Yes I am unable to resist posting on yet another weblog - Writing and the Digital Life - a group blog this time “about the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience”. Please look at the post linked above and if you can help answer the question it poses please make some suggestions.

To save you the click what I am trying to find is if there is any literature about the social or psychological significance of being able to express the creative urge (or not being able to). Not as a means to an end (group membership, education, counter-hegemony) but as an end in itself.

Here are some thoughts/queries I had while I was writing my first (not entirely satisfactory) bit of analysis of the interviews I did for my thesis.
• I didn’t realise until I really got into it that the analysis is a bit like fractal geometry - each individual section could grow to any size as the closer you look at an issue in detail the more you can find to say.
• It is hard to draw boundaries around an individual topic when other related topics keep intruding that would be dealt with in a separate chapter. When it comes to writing up I worry I might end up repeating key points several times in different ways (though perhaps this is not a bad thing?)
• I realise that it is harder than I thought it would be to use the interview text. I can easily characterise an interviewee as having a given attitude based on my familiarity with a whole interview but when it comes to substantiating it with excerpts often I find either the particular sentences are banal and/or they are embedded in a conversational context irrelevant to my theme but without which the sentence is meaningless. To what extent will the reader be willing to take my characterisation of the overall attitudes of interviewees on trust?

I don’t know if anyone out there has thoughts on these points - I imagine these are just concerns that will fade with practice, practice practice!

Today I finally got down to work on writing up my first sketchy analysis of the interviews with personal webloggers which are at the heart of my thesis. My personal pattern with writing usually follows a fairly predictable path:

Stage 1: Avoidance
Just read one more book, brew one more cup of tea or, if necessary play a few more hours of the latest game before starting.
Stage 2: Paralysis
It’s all in my head - ish - but where do I begin?
Stage 3: Sketchy outline
A vague idea of how the piece might fit together - a few lines of text in outline form in Word.
Stage 4: Paralysis again
Hmm… This writing business is harder than I thought. Maybe I should try a little Stage 1 for a while longer. Eventually I progress to…
Stage 5: Write first draft
This I tend to do in a few long bursts of effort - at this point I become anti-social and absorbed until it is all written out.
Stage 6: Read it over
I’m not good at this - I can’t seem to spot the flaws even though they are obvious to anyone else (like most people…). So therefore…
Stage 7: Circulate to friends and unfortunate wife
A vital stage where they spot all the obvious flaws and infelicities. I really like getting feedback - even negative feedback. I think this is where my journalistic background helps - I’m used to being edited and recognise it normally improves my work.
Sage 8: Incorporate feedback.
Done!

At the moment I am at about stage 4.5 (as the chart below indicates)

177 / 3,000 (5.9%)

Update: Two days (and one bout of gastroenteritis) later

442 / 3,000 (13.0%)

Thanks to Prolurkr for using and thereby telling me about that little graphy-thing. Hopefully I will be driven to write in order to be able to show off my progress on it.

I have to have something put together by Monday. Please cheer me on! And please add yourselves to our world map so we can feel as if the whole world is watching.

Recently, major news networks CBS and News Corporation are expanding digitally. CBS?Digital announced plans for a major expansion of CBSnews.com, creating a 24-hour, multi-platform digital news network, bypassing cable television in favor of broadband, while News Corp bought Intermix for $580m. The latter owns and runs about 40 websites, but is best known for myspace.com, a blogging and networking site. The sites will be included in the newly formed Fox Interactive Media (FIM) that encompasses Fox.com, Foxsports.com, and Foxnews.com. With this acquisition it is hoped to double visitors to these site properties to 45m unique monthly visitors. Last September News Corp also acquired the online gaming company IGN and although IGN has not been profitable thus far, it mainly appeals to game-playing young males as such it is hoped to mesh well with MySpace.com and other FIM sites.

Were digital technologies such as the web previously seen as a direct threat or even competitor to various sectors ? especially media -, these (recent) examples show that the Internet presently is being incorporated into the calculus of major firms ? consolidating multiple platforms and entertainment divisions - that have recognized the potential riches to build or buy itself into an existing community such as Myspace.com.

I am a member of myspace.com and can’t say much has changed (yet), but it does give way to my PhD research that roots in?a community-based approach to knowledge management. I am particularly interested in exploring seeming changes in the relationship between the firm and the media marketplace in the digital era and the way that relationship impacts the firm?s ability to innovate, adapt, and learn.

A big “thank you” is due to Hanna (who are you? Why not add yourself to our little map and tell us about your research?) who brought Transcriva to my attention - a lovely little Mac application for transcription. It costs $19.99 but you can try it out with few limitations and it works better in some ways than the software I had been using - Transana - in a number of respects (though Transana does much more than transcription alone). She also reminded me of the existence of Express Scribe which was a commercial product and is now free. It is available in both Windows and Mac versions and claims that it, “works with speech recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to automatically convert speech to text” which is, of course, the holy grail for transcribers. I wouldn’t expect an interview to work though since you would have two different speakers and background noise to contend with. Windows users may also want to check out Dictation Buddy but it costs $33 and as far as I can tell doesn’t offer any important advantages over Express Scribe.

Or of course if you have the money you can always farm your transcription out to Katwa or another commercial transcribing company (for $50 per hour of transcribed audio). Since it takes around 4 hours (for me at least) to transcribe an hour of audio it may well be worth considering!

Update: I spoke too soon - you should still keep an eye on Transcriva (and Transana is still in Alpha for the Mac so if you are a Mac user you have to ask the programmers for a copy) but I am going back to Transana for the moment as Transcriva has some niggling irritations (eg it doesn’t handle recordings longer than 1hr well for example and doesn’t let you do any text formatting as you type to indicate emphasis).

Just for fun and to give us an idea of who visits our site and why, I have put up a Frappr! map for this blog which I encourage you to visit and add to (no registration required). Basically all this is is a really easy to use way of attaching a short note about yourself (and optional picture) to a map of the world. Use it to tell us what your research interests are, why you like (or don’t like) the site or anything at all you think we might be interested in.

(I also encourage other groupblog members to sign up to give this weblog a "human face").

PS if you want to add the URL of your home page or something else just paste the address into the "shoutout" space - don’t try creating an HTML link as it doesn’t work.

PPS There are several web applications that let you annotate and share maps - I have started making an annotated list of these services using my favourite shared bookmark application, Netvouz.

Thanks to Antonio Roversi I just came across an interesting piece about Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr which has attracted a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere (his piece is 2,500 words and the comments stretch for another 12,000 words - not counting 322 people so far who have discussed it on their own blogs). I won’t attempt to summarise it yet again but I encourage you to read it, though the author is occasionally as exaggerated in his "contrarian" rhetoric as the techno-utopians he criticises - eg:

Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die.

I think he’s right to point out the dangers but this is a little too apocalyptic. That said, his conclusion is spot on:

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral… it doesn’t care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let’s can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

I consider my own research as an extension of this - one of my more ambitious objectives is to look dispassionately at personal weblogging and to ask:

Is personal blogging really a liberatory technology (as almost all the scholars studying it seem to maintain) or is it just a potentially liberatory tool. If it is beneficial, for whom is it and how? And given the negative consequences of its use, what can we say about the net effect on society?

A few days ago I wrote arguing that the case against continued effective control of ICANN by the US government needs to be made as the "hands off" American argument seems to be almost ubiquitous online. Well, I finally found an organization making this case - IP3 - Internet and Public Policy - which has just put out "ICANN Reform: Establishing the Rule of Law". Ironically it is an academic at an American university who is making this case. Prof Hans Klein argues in the paper:

ICANN?s history shows how private governance can be captured by powerful players. At WSIS governments need to create and enforce a legally-defined framework that limits the power of all stakeholders — including governments themselves. By establishing the rule of law, the politicized processes of ICANN can be replaced by predictable, fair, and efficient decision-making.

It looks as if Hans Klein’s work and those of other allied academics is finally getting some press coverage in the run-up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Alex Halavais notes that his students seem fairly uninterested in protecting their privacy in the face of increasing threats and alludes to an argument often made by technological determinists: “Maybe privacy was just a social artifact of the mass society of the twentieth century”. The question I would ask is if societal norms move in a direction you think is dangerous shouldn’t you act even if the process is voluntary and at the end of the process society will believe itself to be just as happy? I think a lot of technologists are giving up too soon and saying that computers make spreading data around so easy that it must eventually get everywhere (’information wants to be free’).

The fact is that like any other social phenomenon, the draining away of our privacy is at least in part under our own control. If you think (as I do sometimes) that we are strolling blindly into a scary self-imposed “omni-opticon” society then you can try to organize people to become better aware of the dangers (as Alex is indeed doing) and/or you can get governments to take action (and indeed in Europe our privacy is better protected than it is in the US - at least from media and commercial prying).

P.S. By coincidence MSNBC is doing a special online series on privacy (from an American perspective) this week.