Cultural buzz or helpless consumption?
The Conversation this week provided some commentary from Nicolas Suzor and Eleanor Angel on the Australian Government's recent instruction to Internet service providers and copyright owners to come to an agreement on policing file-sharing. At the end of the article is the crux of Australians' recent complaints about unfair and extortionate pricing of access to blockbuster television programmes: "exclusively restrict[ing] access to premium channels — such as Foxtel — are more profitable than making the same content available faster to more people at a lower price". This being so, why would anyone expect copyright owners to do anything else?
Suzor and another colleague, Paula Dootson, discuss the issue at greater length in an academic article linked to the statement above. They paraphrase the director of Game of Thrones as saying that "these series depend on 'cultural buzz' — the discussion generated and fed by viewers". What's more, "the entertainment industries have become adept at encouraging this 'cultural buzz' in order to drive up demand for their premium offerings." Fans of Game of Thrones and other series value being a part of this buzz, and feel cheated when if they can't participate because the companies behind the series delay its release into the region in which the fans live.
An alternative reading of cultural buzz is that, for all the talk of user participation and empowerment over the past 10-15 years, television viewers remain helpless consumers of the entertainment industry, unable to choose whether or not to watch a television programme, or at what time to watch it. (Of course such consumers complain that they want to watch it at the time of first release, but who chose that time?)
Over at the ABC, Mark Pesce presents himself as one such helpless consumer. Pesce complains that film studios put a lot of effort into generating interest in their films, only to cruelly ask viewers to pay for them when they're released and to castigate those who take it without paying. It isn't clear why he thinks they should behave any other way — what business would want no interest in its products, and no one to pay for them? — and perhaps pro-copyright folks can take some heart from the number of commenters who lined up to call out Pesce's rant as unconstructive, illogical and immature.
Against the "helpless consumer" interpretation, though, one could contend that participation in any cultural buzz, even one pushed by entertainment companies, is nonetheless participation. What's more, participation requires access to the material at the centre of the buzz at the same time as everyone else. In this interpretation, television viewers are instead "time-critical participants".
Against the "time-critical participant" interpretation, one could point out that hardly any of us alive today participated in any cultural buzz surrounding the release of Hamlet, 1984 or The Lord of the Rings, yet many of us nonetheless continue to enjoy, discuss, and be inspired by these things. The first release of an artwork can only ever be ephemeral, and a work's real worth evolves over a much longer period of time than the one at the focus of debates over restricted releases. In ten (or even one) year's time, will anyone care whether they saw Game of Thrones yesterday, today, tomorrow or, indeed, at all?
On technological determinism and classrooms
At the same time that I was complaining about technological determinism and law(non)making in my previous entry, The Conversation published an article from Joanne Orlando that I at first took to be a quite different form of technological determinism. Orlando disputes the importance of remembering information in the classroom (though it isn't clear to me who actually claims that it is the high point of learning), and along the way claims that electronic devices can be just as useful, if not more so, than handwriting in classrooms.
According to Orlando, a character who records photos, video and audio of a presentation "can use their digital notes to create something new that builds on the topic", while another character who makes handwritten notes finds this "not so easy". For Orlando, studies showing that handwritten notes provide better recall are beside the point: the character with the recording devices can achieve the same or better by building something out of the recordings.
Orlando doesn't say much about what ensures that the device-wielding character actually builds on the topic rather than simply leaves the recordings where they lie, and doesn't explain at all what stops the pen-wielding character from also building on the topic. I therefore took Orlando to be claiming that the mere availability of electronic recording devices led to intelligent processing and re-combination of recordings, as might be claimed by an enthusiastic proponent of mash-ups and re-mixes.
In writing a response to the article, and re-reading Orlando's article several times in the process, I realised two things. Firstly, Orlando probably didn't mean to claim that re-mixes and mash-ups are necessarily intelligent or useful, only that is possible for them to be. This point, however, is obscured by conflating the actions of memorisation and of constructing new knowledge. Coming to this understanding through the process of writing a blog entry illustrates exactly what Orlando wants to happen, but might not have happened had I simply left Orlando's article on its web site.
Orlando acknowledges that recall of a certain amount of basic information is, in fact, necessary for mastery of a topic as well as day-to-day business. Having a dictionary of French in one's pocket, for example, does not make one a fluent speaker of French, no matter how good one is at looking up words. For memorising information of this sort, writing it out it is surely better than merely making an electronic recording, as the studies cited in Orlando's article say.
Nonetheless, Orlando is correct to say that electronic recordings can be of use in constructing new knowledge — I used The Conversation's web site rather than a handwritten copy of Orlando's article in developing this very blog entry — and that memorisation of useful facts may happen along the way. My experience matches that of Cat Brown, however, whose comment points out that many students' use of electronic material is far from the ideal that Orlando imagines, being to "simply regurgitate chunks of undigested facts that google has delivered to their computers". (No doubt students can write out similarly undigested facts with a pen, though maybe they'd at least remember some of them.)
Teachers with experiences like Cat Brown's and mine may be tempted to subscribe to a form of technological determinism that is opposite to the one that I initially read into Orlando's article: electronic devices lead to unthinking reproduction of search engine results. I now suppose that Orlando meant to critique exactly this view. The real question is not whether pens or cameras and microphones result in better learning, but how do teachers get their students to use their tools intelligently?
Lawmakers on technology, and technologists on lawmaking
The Register, the ABC and The Conversation all recently reported the European Parliament's "Resolution on the Digital Single Market", which seeks to "unbundle search engines from commercial services". The resolution is presumed to target Google, and to address allegations that its search results might favour its own services over services from other providers. No one seems to expect that the resolution will have any practical effect, and a good thing too according to technology enthusiasts like David Glance at The Conversation and Marty Gauvin, interviewed for the ABC piece.
I'm not familiar with European institutions, haven't read the resolution, and can't comment on the merits of this particular resolution. The dismissals offered by Glance and Gauvin, however, seem to be underpinned by a presumption that technology makers know best and that silly uninformed lawmakers should keep out of their way.
I find it a little depressing to think that "the technology landscape fundamentally can't be shaped by politics or the law", as Glance claims. The defeatism that follows this claim doesn't explicitly acknowledge it, but the alternative seems to be to sit back and allow technology — and the companies that control it — to have its way with us. Technology companies and their cheerleaders may be comfortable with this, but are the rest of us?
Bill McKibben, in Enough (2004), points out that claims that some technology or another (he is writing about biotechnology) is "inevitable" represent attempts to sidestep debate over the merits of the claimants' technology. He notes that the Amish, for one, are famous for demonstrating that societies do have a choice to accept or reject technology. Even more mainstream societies routinely govern car technology by road rules, food technology by health regulations, and construction technology by building standards.
Enthusiasts for trendier technologies like computing and biotechnology might like to think that they are uniquely placed to understand said technologies and their effects on society, if they accept that it is possible for their favourite technologies to have a negative impact at all. But why should we believe that technologists, let alone companies with vested interests in selling technology, know any more than lawmakers about what society wants or how to achieve it?
Glance seems to accept towards the end of his article that there are, in fact, things that lawmakers can and should do address "small stuff" like privacy, intellectual property and mis-use of market power. I suppose that he means to say that the law can fiddle around the edges, but that technologies themselves appear and disappear without the input of lawmakers. Lawmakers didn't choose to invent search engines, for example. Yet lawmakers are able to decide to respond to them, and it's not clear to me why doing this should be "large stuff" beyond our ability to address if we determine a need for it.
Is privacy in need of secrecy, or of maturity?
Not long after reading Evgeny Morozov's complaints about more or less everything technological, I happened to pick up Dave Eggers' latest novel, The Circle (2013), which features a utopian-minded Internet corporation dedicated to exactly the kind of "technological solutionism" that Morozov derides. One of the most prominent features of said company is "transparency" something like that envisaged by David Brin in The Transparency Society (1998), in which everyone's activities are open to an unstoppable wave of recording devices.
Eggers has his company promote transparency as the ultimate weapon for the accountability of public figures (and, eventually, everyone else). Morozov, however, asserts that such transparency leads to public decision-making becoming bogged down in the pursuit of trivial misdemeanours. I certainly found myself wondering if Eggers' characters could ever achieve anything given the amount of time they spend on commenting on each other, and perhaps Eggers in part intended to make us wonder exactly this. Morozov even goes so far as to claim that certain amounts of duplicity and hypocrisy are necessary to public decision-making, though I can't recall him giving any specific examples.
I doubt that many people would find the world of The Circle very appealing. For one, many would likely recoil in horror at the thought of being subject to some of the revelations made public about its characters, and at the unthinking vigilantism that sometimes follows. Many would also be very disturbed by the amount of power ceded to the private company at the heart of The Circle (though one might take the point of The Circle to be that we are presently handing this sort of power to real Internet companies of our own free will).
I nonetheless found a few things to question about The Circle's and Morozov's portrayals of transparency. For a start, current public debate, at least in Australia, is hardly a model of nuanced thinking and intellectual rigour, and one wonders if a transparent society would actually have any depths of triviality left to plumb.
Eggers and Morozov both seem to neglect the possibility that trivialisers and vigilantes would themselves be watched and criticised. I don't suppose that the public and the media outlets that serve them will leave off their pursuit of triviality after being scolded by the scholars that watch them — plenty of scholars have already done plenty of scolding — but those who make decisions do nonetheless have the choice to listen to the scholars rather than the trivialisers. And debates over the behaviour of public figures in venues like The Drum and The Conversation suggest to me that there are, indeed, watchers prepared to argue both sides.
I consequently wondered: is The Circle's problem transparency per se, or the trivialisation, discrimination and point-scoring to which people apply it? After I'd been studying privacy seriously for a while, I came to suspect that the privacy debate was bogged down in debating the collection of data, a debate that can only lead to absurd extremes of either transparency (from pro-surveillers) or opacity (for anti-surveillers). If we were to be confronted by a real world Circle — and some might argue that we already are — is the solution secrecy, or a bit of maturity?
Image
Having built up a collection of electronic books and magazines to be read, and wanting to save space in my pack on a recent hiking trip, I decided to load all of the books and magazines into my phone instead of taking paper reading material on the trip. This was fairly effective for its purpose, but left me feeling slightly ashamed when I found myself sitting outside my tent with my phone (reading), looking for all the world like someone who'd rather spend time with a phone than with the natural environment I'd come to see.
Now, what I was doing with the phone was essentially the same as what I would do with a book, and I bring books with me whenever I travel. I suppose that one might also argue that reading books in hotel rooms or camp sites is wasting time that could be better spent experiencing the locale that one has come to visit, but I find reading indispensable for passing the time on aeroplanes, trains and buses, and for relaxing at the end of the day. For that matter, I also check my e-mail and answer phone calls while travelling, albeit with greatly reduced frequency to what I normally do. So why not use the phone for the same purpose?
In my mind, at least, I guess there's a great difference in the image projected by using a mobile phone as compared to a book. Sure, I might only be reading, but with a phone I could be checking in with work or providing banal second-hand experiences to my friends — and perhaps I shortly will be if I become accustomed to using to the phone. But a book can only be read, and anyone seeing me with a book knows exactly what I must be doing.
Now, why should I care what everyone thinks I'm doing anyway? Plenty of people respond with incredulity when I say I'm planning to walk or catch a bus where my audience would take a car, but I just explain to them that it's part of the adventure. Yet in doing this I guess I am trying to project an image of someone who isn't bound up with his technological devices, and enjoys spending time without them. I wouldn't like to think that I'd be doing something so crude as trying to be popular or conventional, but I am nonetheless looking after my image.
Later on one evening, I did receive a phone call from a friend. While I was a little surprised that the phone had reception at my camp site, I thought nothing of answering it until I started thinking on this blog entry. So perhaps I am just as much at the beck and call of my devices as the next person after all, at least when I'm not concentrating on resisting them.
