Digital Community: The Age of Technology and the Social Network

Digital Community:

The Age of Technology and the Social Network

By Brad King
November 2004

Part I: Generation Connect

It's a cool (relatively speaking) summer night here in Austin, Texas, where I'm writing this introduction. I'm sitting outside on my back porch under the dying light of my Tikki torches. I can do this because the ancient IBM Thinkpad 600E I'm using can latch on to the 802.11g wireless Internet connection covering--and reaching out of--my home. It's helpful to have my PalmOne Treo 600 smart phone sitting on my lawn chair's plastic green arm, ready to alert me whenever someone from work sends me an email, a friend text messages me, or my dad wants to call. For good measure, my Treo lets me gather material from my work computer, where I've stored some data for this introduction.

It's an enjoyable scene, writing as the sun goes down. Eventually, though, my Thinkpad battery will run down, and I'll be forced back indoors. However, I have a My Yahoo account, where I can upload my latest writing, giving me access to this piece no matter what computer I'm using. That's good, because I'm going to retire to my writing study in just a bit, and fire up my HP Windows Media Center.[1] I feel badly about using this supercharged desktop just to write, because it's my home's entertainment hub. My Time Warner cable connection and my Road Runner high-speed cable modem runs through it. It comes complete with DVD and CD capabilities--both playback and burning.[2] Heck, it's even got a remote control, giving me armchair access to every bit of entertainment I own.

Tonight, I'm likely going to load the first season of "Star Gate SG-1," resizing the window so I can write while Col. Jack O'Neill and his troops explore the galaxy. I like working at my PC because my favorite blogs are stored on my browser and I can easily click between my writing, O'Neill, and the world of news. But, most likely, I'll be moving to the cushy recliner, plugging the Thinkpad into the outlet so I can write, and using the Treo to check out news feeds from dozens of blogs and news wires and emailing the most interesting ones to my Hotmail account while I'm Instant Messaging my friends.[3]

I love the fact that I can move seamlessly throughout my world without ever really losing my connection to the Internet. In metropolitan areas across the United States, almost any place where people congregate will likely have to have wireless Internet access. It's quickly becoming a necessary selling point for coffee shops, retail stores, and restaurants.[4]

According to the latest usage figures from the Pew Internet & American Life project, 77 percent of the people between the ages of 13 and 29 use the Internet on a regular basis. What's more, people between the ages of 13 and 24 spend more time per week online (16.7 hours) than they do watching television (13.6 hours), listening to the radio (12.0 hours), or talking on the phone (7.7 hours).

Each day brings new innovations, new technologies, and new phenomena that stand ready to change the way we live now. The frustration people feel towards technology is maddening, just trying to keep up with all the latest gadgetry.[5] With all of that information floating around, it's no wonder that people have built up an inherent distrust of technology. It's the great unknown: a strange world of geeks and hackers who continue to roll out even more technology that renders what was unveiled yesterday obsolete. The distrust that blue-collar workers, middle managers, moms and pops, and even high powered executives feel grows each day as a group of social misfits releases something that threatens to make their skills obsolete. It’s apparent in their faces when I go back home to Appalachia.

Much of the animosity turned into glee around 2001 when the stock market took a header. Surely, these naysayers thought, the crash was the end of this technological revolution. Back to business as usual. It was a subtle glee, in the deep recesses of their minds: networked technology had become not something that would make our lives easier, but instead an omnipresent "thing" that seemed beyond comprehension.

It wasn't until 2003--after I moved from the Bay Area back to Austin--that I realized their glee wasn't over the abject failure of the dotcom revolution, it was a collective sigh of relief that for just a brief moment, the speeding innovations would slow enough for everyone to catch up. The reality is that many people haven't had the time to understand the impact of what this networked, digital world means. The fact is that our culture is evolving from a world where news and information came from a few well-known sources into a world where everyone can speak with everyone. For many people, that's just downright scary. When they look at teenagers running around with Internet-connected smart phones that can take pictures, record audio, and shoot short films, it's easy to understand their concerns. When they find the comfort of a human voice on the other end of a phone replaced by the automated call system, it's easy to understand their concerns.

When we become more interested in our gadgets than in how we can use those gadgets to interact with our world--well, it can be too much. It can't be very comforting for those who now look at the quantum leap our society is making from an analog world, in which people were mainly connected by standing in front of each other, into a digital world, in which time and proximity are no longer relevant to many social relationships.

Even Generation X (i.e., those born between 1961 and 1981), the first group to come of age in a world that can scarcely remember when it wasn't possible to connect with each other at will, sometimes appears lost when it comes to harnessing the power of networked, digital culture.

But the new generation--dubbed Generation Y--has adapted to digital life, often without realizing the implications of the tools they have at their disposal. They have never known a time when it wasn't possible to log on to a computer, search for information, send email, instant message friends, or just troll message boards. And while they aren't always aware of how the world has changed because of these networks that span from desktop to laptop to smart phone, it's obvious from watching how they interact with these technologies that the digital revolution is changing the way we live our lives.

I teach a college course called Writing for Online Publication at Southwestern University, and the first six weeks of the course touch on the history of networked culture and its effects on how we share information. I've now grown accustomed to blank stares as we walk through the Internet's early days, when hackers gamely unscrewed gigantic computers so they could figure out how they worked, then spent countless hours writing software code that would enable these computers to reach out to others just like them, scattered around the world, and finally devised hardware that was small enough--and simple enough--for the average person to have one of these machines in their home.[6]

Even for these young adults who have grown up in a world that has been networked since their birth, they've missed the subtleties of the networked age. They've missed the fact that the original mission of these odd hackers wasn't to create a mystifying techno-world ruled by the cyber-elite. It was just the opposite. These young men desperately wanted to build computers that would work for each of us, allowing us to connect with other people, and remove some of the drudgery of everyday life. None of these early hackers had any real notion of what would happen when--and if--regular people got their hands on these computers, but they were confident that these digital networks would change the ways we lived our lives.

While they may have missed the subtle genius of the early hackers who built the Internet, these college students rarely miss the inherent power of digital networks. There is always a light-bulb moment, when the class inherently understands that the digital networks on which they play are far more than just places to get music. They have come to expect to get their news and information from places other than the nightly news. They have come to expect to share information with their friends across peer-to-peer networks. They have come to expect to make friends that they will likely never meet in person.

Our world is in the midst of a transformation into digital life, where answers are never more than a Google search away and nearly everyone in the world is a simple click away. This always-on, always-everywhere connectivity has the power to change how we receive information, how we interact with our neighbors (and changes the definition of neighbor), and how we involve ourselves in the politics of our world.

 

Part II: Blogs

Today, people have greater access to information than they've ever had before. No longer are we confined to simply reading news from our local newspaper, listening to local radio, or even watching national news broadcasts. Blogs--those funky websites where regular Janes and Joes post information using free software applications--have done more to wrest control of information away from big media organizations, shifting to a more democratic landscape in which anyone with a computer and Internet connection can create news stories readily available to anyone else with a computer and an Internet connection.

These simple websites have become a virtual meeting ground for millions of people who want to go beyond headlines. Some of the best blogs have even managed to revive--and sometimes spur on--stories that the major media outlets have let die. Just hours after "60 Minutes II" used controversial documents in a news story that claimed President George W. Bush had shirked his National Guard duties during the Vietnam War, the blogsphere came alive with people who claimed the documents had to be forgeries because of the fonts used. Soon, television networks and newspapers were looking into those claims, eventually forcing CBS to admit that the documents may have indeed been forgeries.[7]

But more often than not, blogs have become a place where individuals--or collectives--post interesting news stories from the day, creating a digital water cooler where the news is read, discussed, and analyzed. Many have become can't-miss reads for people with specific interests. Slashdot is the place to go for anyone interested in technology. Others, like Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things, manage to give people a fairly decent overview of oddities of the digital world. Smart Mobs, meanwhile, somehow keeps up with all things mobile. The list of popular blogs is infinite, at least in the aspect that anyone can start a blog--or multiple blogs--and write to their heart’s content.

The most important aspect of blogs, though, isn't their ability to give anyone a voice. These websites have started to move beyond a simple repository of information, turning instead into the central hub for activism. When the United States Senate started work on the INDUCE Act, a piece of legislation that would have effectively made it illegal for some consumer electronics devices like the VCR from being manufactured without the approval of the Hollywood entertainment industry, a small group of people launched a blog, Downhill Battle, with the idea that they could gather people from around the United States to protest this action. Within days, the group signed up 5,000 citizens who agreed to make three phone calls on a designated day to congressmen affiliated with the bill. It was an ambitious undertaking, and one that would have been nearly impossible to coordinate without networked, digital technology. Yet, on September 14, 2004, congressional phone lines lit up throughout the day, and activists were apprised of which Senators had changed their votes (and thus should no longer be called).

It was an impressive display of how the blogsphere could be harnessed for more than just information exchange. While many in the news media initially dismissed blogs as a simple fad (including my former boss at Wired News, who insisted on multiple occasions that blogs were no more than glorified home pages), they have in fact usurped the primary role of newspapers in our society.[8] They can quickly inform, create communities, and inspire action.

This transition from traditional media to digitally networked media will only increase as more people come online, particularly as they come online at higher speeds. Fifty-one percent of the online U.S. population (63 million) now connects to the Internet using broadband, compared with forty-nine percent (61.3 million) who still use dial-up modems.[9] The numbers are much higher among younger users:

Age	Percent Using Broadband
18-20	59
2-11	58
24-34	55
12-17	53
21-24	53
35-49	51
50-54	49
55-64	46
65-99	34

This signals the beginning of a radical change, not only in how we receive our news and information, but in what we expect to be able to do once it becomes available. With high-speed connections, wireless networks, and personalized media devices that keep everyone linked into the Internet, there will soon be a proliferation of rich media spilling out across networks.

From a practical standpoint, this means that anyone can become a media organization--or, more likely, any small group can become a media organization--delivering video, audio, and written commentary that becomes instantly accessible to everyone. The only barrier to developing a following is creativity.

Generation Y and its successors are driving this news and media revolution. These are the groups that are forcing the adoption of broadband technologies because they have never known a time when they couldn't connect with one another. They are always looking for new ways to reach out, and when they do reach out, they want an answer quickly. For many, this youth-driven media environment is terrifying because when everyone has a voice--that means everyone has a voice. The 18-year-old voice becomes just as important as the 50-year-old voice. For those who have taken the time to climb the social and work ladders, watching a new generation cast aside well-worn traditions is frightening. It's daunting to believe that modern youth will not only help drive the adoption of these new technologies, but also have a strong say in how these networks develop.

"Not surprisingly, the younger set of adults, kids and teens, who grew up with PC technology, have the highest penetration of broadband access," Nielson/NetRatings Senior Director Marc Ryan said in the press release announcing the new broadband numbers. "The norm of waiting for a page to load has gone by the wayside through increased broadband access. With high-speed access in the majority, we're likely to see the richer, more interactive content become the standard."[10]

 

Part III: Social Networking

Blogging, though an important step forward in the distribution of media in a digital age, doesn't exist in a vacuum. The power of blogging means nothing unless it is distributed across vast networks of people who are linked together through a web of friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends. These social networks, as they are called, have started spreading throughout the networked, digital world, allowing people to create personalized home pages within a given network, and link themselves with other, like-minded individuals.[11] These social networks allow people to seek out friends, dates, business partners, and chat buddies. It's like going to a bar, joining a social club, and hitting business cocktail parties all without leaving your home.

It's a digital Six Degrees of Separation, and along with the proliferation of mobile technology and high-speed networks, it's about to change the way--well, you know the refrain by now.

The first digital social network--inasmuch as it was both digital and social--emerged out of the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, where a group of utterly brilliant, if slightly eccentric, computer hackers worked on software and hardware that would eventually become what we know today as the Internet.[12] These programmers spent hundreds, likely thousands, of hours working on software solutions that would allow them to hunt each other down in "outer space." These code monkeys would leave their programming sitting in a drawer by the computer lab, allowing anyone to come in, tinker, and upgrade the program called Spacewar! Later, as computer technology got better, they would code together--watching each other through remote connections, hacking into each other's folders to modify code, and leaving messages for friends and foes alike.[13]

Modern networks work in much the same way, and they shouldn't been written off as a fad only the weird join. The biggest social networks boast several million users, and for the technologically inclined, they provide a powerful way to seek out and connect with those whom they would otherwise never reach. Friendster has accumulated five million users who have tolerated slow Web page load times, lost emails, and a general user interface that can drive someone to drink.[14]

Friendster operates like this: users provide a password and username to sign up, and then they upload photos and input a series of personal information. It's that simple. In and of itself, it sounds pretty boring. Once users have an account, though, they can search for friends already on the network. With a simple click, they can invite those people to become part of their, well, social network. Once the invitation has been accepted, that person's picture appears on the user's home page--and the user then has access to their invitees' social networks. (Those connections are "first degree connections," while the initial connection is a "direct connection.”) There is also a user search function, which allows people to surf through the entire Friendster network (or do directed searches for people who live in the same area or have the same interests).

Maybe the most powerful function--or, at least, the function that has the most potential--is the bulletin board communication network, which allows people to post a note to everyone in their social network. With this, people can easily reach hundreds of people--who can, in turn, forward that information to hundreds more. Within minutes, well-placed messages can travel at the speed of the Internet.[15]

However, social networking isn't tied entirely to these social networking services. The best blogs, for instance, contain links to other like-minded sites. Friendster--while merely one of a handful of services--and blogs are the current final piece of the puzzle when it comes to the potential of delivering personalized media to the masses. See also: Ryze, Tickle, Orkut, and LinkedIn.

 

Part IV: Mobile Networking

Blogs and social networks, though, no longer need to be tied only to the personal computer. People can now roam wherever they want, with the knowledge that their entire lives are packed safely away in their pockets, residing on small, powerful, multipurpose handhelds. The hybrid devices--many of which are already hitting the market--store personal calendars, phones, cameras that record still and moving pictures, music players, and television receivers. Along with that, these devices--dubbed smart phones--are not only connected to the Internet through dial-up speed services, but also come with WiFi-enabled chips that let individuals connect with each other directly over short distances.

It's an all-powerful, mobile remote control for life--and it's quickly becoming a staple for young adults who with each passing day are participating in the digital cultural landscape in ways that couldn't even be imagined just five years ago. Just over 85 percent of teens will soon own some form of mobile phone, and along with making phone calls, they will use that technology to check email, instant message friends, and participate in social networks.[16]

Smart phones equipped with cameras have already become the norm around the world, with over 84 million camera-ready cellphones shipped in 2003.[17] Japan's NEC Corporation led the way with 13.1 million smart phones, followed by Finland's Nokia, South Korea's Samsung, Japan's Panasonic, and Sony Ericsson, which is joint venture between Japan's Sony Corporation and Sweden's Ericsson

Cell phones and other smart handhelds are already changing the way that people, particularly those under 30, interact with their world.[18] The Palm Treo 600, for instance, runs a simple application called Vagablog, which lets users write up posts using the thumb QWERTY keypad, and then post to a variety of blogs. Sites like Buzznet enable users of the 84 million camera-ready phones shipped in 2003 to snap a picture and instantly publish it on the Web.

Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs, first pointed out the seminal shift in communication such instant networks created. It's akin to the first pictures coming back from Vietnam on television, as a nation of Americans received, in their living rooms, a first-hand view of the horrors of war. These roving mobile media hounds can provide contextual pictures and stories about events happening anywhere. These smart mobs can, and often do, beat traditional media outlets in terms of immediacy.[19]

The smart phones don't depend solely on user-created media. Berkeley's MobiTV streams television programming to cell phones in the United States, and Eurosport does the same with Premiership soccer and Sweden's "Big Brother."[20] It's exactly these types of data-happy services that prompted the Yankee Group research firm to estimate that 11-to-24-year-olds would generate roughly $21 billion in revenue for wireless companies this year, reason enough to believe that mobile culture will continue to greatly expand in the coming years.[21]

And, it's the expansion of these commercial enterprises that will allow the digital, mobile, networked world to grow as well. As more people connect with their wireless handhelds, and as more people get used to using their phone as more than just a device to call others, there will be a juggernaut of media activity wholly connected to the blog and social network experiments now virally spreading across the Internet.

Within the next few years, there will be roving citizen-reporters who will share photographs, blog entries, and videos from the front lines of news all over the planet. It won't be pretty, and it will likely be rife with errors and misstatements; however, it will be by the people and for the people--an argument that should give everyone hope that the mediasphere is rapidly changing.

These roving social, mobile networks already have some in the government frightened. The United States military has banned camera phones from combat areas for fear that unauthorized photos would start showing up on digital networks.

Where the governments and big media are nervous, activists have become energized because the least politically active--and most politically sought after--are re-engaging in politics thanks to these new devices. It turns out that people under the age of 25 are quite open to the idea of mobilizing political action and communicating their desires around text messaging. The Ad Council, Upoc Networks, and the Federal Voting Assistance Program launched a Register and Vote 2004 campaign that relies on an opt-in registration program in order to remind young voters about election dates.[22] And the annual Rock the Vote has signed up 150,000 mobile voters who receive regular updates on candidates and elections.

Soon, these mobile networks will be tied together by a loose confederation of bloggers, who are themselves tied together by a loose confederation of social networks. This will be the ultimate check-and-balance system and it will be in the hands of the people. It will be a giant, self-correcting system that will, at times, appear unwieldy, as millions spill their thoughts and opinions across these digitally linked networks. Yet, fifty years of Internet history show that the outcomes are better--if not a little more difficult to predict--when networks are opened up to people, discussions are encouraged, and decisions are made collectively.

 

Part V: The Beginning

The beauty of technology is that, when done correctly, it allows everyone to participate. It's the ultimate republic builder.[23] It truly gives everyone who wants to participate the opportunity to start on an equal ground. It's this belief--that everyone can play, and that everyone matters--that continually drives millions of average citizens to log on to their networks and blog, or sign on to social networks to make friends, or use their mobile handheld to find out where to vote.

We are living smack dab in the middle of a revolution of unheard of proportions, with individuals now able to connect with each other despite geography and time constraints. Even as media corporations speed to harness the Internet's grand potential and horde power, regular folks are working just as hard to make sure the power is equally distributed.

But this isn't some feel-good rant about how people can sit back and change the world. It's quite the opposite, actually. This study undertaken by CDD is simply a primer, an account of the tools that are now in the hands of the layperson, and a few thoughts on how these tools can be used. As always, the power of technology still lies squarely in the hands of those who use it. Fortunately for us, millions of people have already started exploring these new realms, figuring out stunning new ways to connect with each other and participate in the forces--political, social, and educational--that help steer our lives.

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Notes

[1] This is a distant cousin to the first computer, the Apple, which was designed by then-HP employee Steve Wozniak. The irony is that my machine runs on Microsoft's XP operating system, the very company that nearly put Apple out of business. Back to text

[2] With the right downloaded software applications, it lets me record television programs with my built-in digital video recorder, strip off the embedded rights management, burn a disk, and watch the recorded show in my living room. This, of course, is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and I would never actively encourage anyone to Google software applications that stripped DRM from the Windows Media Center. Doing so would constitute a violation of the DMCA, as well. It's especially illegal to download that software, run it, play the recorded media in that software application, and record it sans DRM. Then you've broken the same law like--I don't know--six, seven times. I would never encourage that. Back to text

[3] wiredbeat2000 for MSN and Yahoo Messengers; wiredbeat99 for AIM. Back to text

[4] I may be biased because I lived in the Bay Area from 1998-2002, and then returned to Austin. Both of these cities are extremely wired, whereas my home in northern Appalachia boasts almost no wireless hubs. Back to text

[5] I am the new media director at VTV: Varsity Television, an independent cable network; a blog writer for Variety; a college teacher; and founding member of two media publishing companies in Austin--and I still can't keep up. Back to text

[6] For a brief history of the origins of networked culture, see Stephen Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1984), and Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Back to text

[7] See, for example, "The Sixty-First Minute," Power Line, Sept. 9, 2004, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/007760.php. Back to text

[8] Ironically, it was Wired News that helped spur the Downhill Battle action after it ran a story on the group. Back to text

[9] Nielson/Netratings, "U.S. Broadband Connections Reach Critical Mass, Crossing 50 Percent Mark for Web Surfers, According to Nielson/NetRatings," Aug. 18, 2004, http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_040818.pdf. Back to text

[10] Nielson/Netratings, "U.S. Broadband Connections Reach Critical Mass." Back to text

[11] For a discussion of social networks, see Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, and Eytan Adar, "A Social Network Caught in the Web," Fist Monday, June 2, 2003, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_6/adamic/. Back to text

[12] My writing partner gets upset when I write things like "the first." Rightfully so, because there were likely others out there who predate this group. However, it's generally accepted that the M.I.T. hackers created the first socializing, digitally networked society. I'm okay with that because I've got bigger problems. I've footnoted this passage, giving credit to my writing partner and myself, since we did this research--which was based on the work of another writer. I was self-referential squared, with a tinge of hearsay. This is why people don't trust journalists. Back to text

[13] Brad King and John Borland, "Machine Games," in King and Borland, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic (Emeryville, CA: McGraw-Hill, 2003): 23-40. Back to text

[14] Chris Tucker, "Joined at the Chip," Southwest Airlines Spirit, June 2004: 48-52. Back to text

[15] Of course, the largest use of this type of mobile, social network will likely be trying to find a date. Already, services allow people to receive notification about potential matches who are in the area. Pictures can be sent to each phone, and if both parties express interest in meeting, an actual connection can be made. Back to text

[16] Chris Schiano, et al, "Teen Use of Messaging Media." CHI '02: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2002: 594-95. Back to text

[17] David Pringle, "Nokia Clicks With Camera Phones," Wall Street Journal, Mar. 29, 2004. Back to text

[18] Myself excluded. At 32, my digital media habits are more closely mirrored, from what I hear, by Asian teenagers. Back to text

[19] While they are more immediate, online reports are not always as accurate as the traditional media. Blogs are, in a real sense, the new first draft of history--which is what newspapers claimed to be for much of that medium's existence. Newspapers are now taking on more of a magazine role, explaining the ramifications of yesterday's news. Magazines, ironically, have remained largely unaffected in terms of the role they play, because these publications continue to take the longer view of subjects. Back to text

[20] Associated Press, "New-Wave Cell Phones Arriving in Europe," CNN.com, Mar. 1, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/02/26/multimedia.mobile.phone.ap/. Back to text

[21] Yuki Noguchi, "Cell Carriers Tap Teen Market," The Register-Guard (Eugene, Ore.), Apr. 29, 2004, http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/04/29/a1.nat.teenphones.0429.html. Back to text

[22] Katherine Goodloe, "Youth Voter Drives Going Cellular," Dallas News.com, June 25, 2004. Back to text

[23] For those keeping score, we live in a republic and not a democracy. We elect people to represent our will, which means we are a democratic republic. Media works much the same way. We allow people to represent our will. Back to text

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BIO: Brad King was named the Web Editor for the MIT Technology Review in October 2004. There he oversees the site's daily news operations, edits stories, and develops multimedia packages. Along with his editing duties, he writes a blog for Variety, a Los Angeles entertainment trade publication, where he discusses the convergence of the music, music, and video game industries.

In late 2004, he launched Demon Press, an independent, on-demand book publishing company with a focus on telling stories about the emerging technology culture.

Brad has been a journalist since 1994, and in 2000, he received his Masters in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley where he was won the Wired Magazine Excellence in Journalism Award. He covered the convergence of technology, entertainment, and culture for Wired News until October 2002, when he returned to Austin to finish his first book, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture From Geek to Chic (McGraw-Hill 2003). Throughout 2004, he was the director of new media at VTV:Varsity Television, a media network aimed at 13-19 year olds, where he developed strategies to deliver television programming created by teenagers to PC, television, and mobile screens.

His work has appeared in over 20 publications, and he's a regular guest on radio and television programs where he discusses trends in digital culture. Back to top

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Links

Blog Software: Publishing on the Web has never been this easy, whether you're looking simply to host a diary or hope to start a mini-publishing empire.

• Blogger: The simple software partnered with Google, allowing people to post text, photos, and audio files directly from a browser toolbar.
• LiveJournal: This open source software is a powerful software tool that comes with a world of software developers always adding new features.
• MovableType: Lots of features, and an upgraded version of TypePad.
  • TypePad: This software is great for businesses looking a simple feature set.
• Serendipity: An open source PHP client still under development.
• Pivot: A Dutch software tool that allows people to log and handle basic content management.
• WordPress: A simple content management tool for the blogger looking to create a big-than-average site.

Blog Networks: The best blogs are more than just rants. They have style and substance. Check out who's reading whom with these blog trackers that will keep your hand on the pulse of the blogsphere.

• DayPop: A list of the top 40 news storiesblog or otherwise being read at any given moment, and a dedicated search of blogs.
• Technorati: A tracking system for those who want to find who is linking to their blog.
• Feedster: A search engine dedicated to weblogs and major media outlets.

Social Networks: Cyberspace is a big place, and it can get lonely. Join a social network, though, and keep up with old friends and make new acquaintances.

• Friendster: A popular social network, primarily used by the under thirty crowd looking to make friends and influence people.
• Orkut: Google's foray into the social networking scheme, still a little buggy but growing fast.
• MyPlace: A social network that combines friend searches with personal blogs.
• LinkedIn: A business network where old colleagues can keep together as they move from job to job.
• Ryze: A business and social network smashed together, with minimal graphics.
• Tickle: A social network for the high school and college crowd looking for personality tests and hook-ups.
• Tribe: A social network that dispenses with the national networks, and connects people in cities across the United States.

Mobile Networks: The digital world isn't tied solely to the PC anymore. More people are toting around powerful handhelds capable of reaching out to friends no matter where they are. Now, take your blog and social network along for the ride.

• Buzznet: A photoblog site broken down into a variety of communities.
• Smart Mobs: Howard Rheingold's blog that follows mobile networks around the global.
• Dodgeball: A local, mobile network that allows people to connect with other by locating friends who are nearby.
• Playtxt: A mobile short message service that let's on-the-go singles connect with others in the United Kingdom.
• Multiply: Combines Friendster and Blogger functionalities with the power of handhelds, giving users the ability to blog, post photos, and connect with friends wherever they are.

Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books

Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books

(If the Catholic church can survive the printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent of bookwarez.)

by Cory Doctorow
November 2004

 

Introduction

My name is Cory Doctorow. I'm a science fiction writer and activist, and it's been 16 months since Tor Books--the largest science fiction publisher in the world--published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a hardcover book. It's done remarkably well: been short-listed for the Nebula Awards, been named one of 2003's best books by Entertainment Weekly, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel of 2003. and generally sold like hell. All of that makes me pleased as punch, as does the pocket miracle of having an actual, no-foolin' novel that I wrote with my own hands on the shelves of bookstores around the world, but the victory wouldn't be half so sweet without the satisfaction I've derived from giving away my book for free.

On January 9, 2003, I released Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on the net as a free download in a variety of open file-formats, under terms governed by a license from the Creative Commons project. This is a license that allowed anyone to make a noncommercial copy of the book and send it on to anyone else. Thirteen months and hundreds of thousands of downloads later, I re-licensed the book to allow for the creation of noncommercial derivative works. Today, there's a "distributed audiobook" project underway, in which strangers are reading chapters of the book aloud and uploading the results to the net, to be reassembled into a cohesive audiobook by clever jukebox software. There are also fan translations into Russian and German underway, and more stuff every day.

There's been a lot of hype about ebooks. First there was hype about how great ebooks would be. Then there was hype about how lame ebooks were. Hype is hype: reality never lives up to it--that's why we call it hype. Me, I just spent a year and a half on the front lines of the ebook fight. I released most of a short story collection and my second novel under similar terms. I've got some first hand observations to share with you.

Eight Observations

For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. In February 2004, I gave a talk called "Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books." A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at the event called the talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true.

No, if I had to come up with another title for the talk, I'd have called it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." That's because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.

 

1. Ebooks aren't marketing.

OK, so ebooks are marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book--and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But ebooks shouldn't be just about marketing: ebooks are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions.

 

2. Ebooks complement paper books.

Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build concordances of characters, places and events.

 

3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book.

Hackers speak of "0wning" a computer: taking control of it and making it buck and shake to your will. Some poor sap may "own" the computer, but the hacker who controls it "0wns" it in a much more atavistic sense.

I take the view that the book is a "practice"--a collection of social and economic and artistic activities--and not an "object." Viewing the book as a "practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good question.

I write all of my books in a text-editor (BBEdit, from Barebones Software--as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF. I can turn them into an HTML file. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced-review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a dollar.

Try converting a paper book to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text.

 

4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers.

The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground. Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback's original science fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're quaint and historical, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're rounding errors as compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and, of course, no one would play the lotto if there were no winners).

The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled.

Even better: they level the playing field between writers and trolls. When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work--for, if a personal recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best way to not sell a book. Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":

I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in disgust--this book is for people who think Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.

Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage:

Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first page

You see that? Hell, this guy is working for me!

His writing is stiff, amateurish, and uninspired, and it sucks the life out of his (somewhat) interesting ideas.

Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.

You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all the things that people are saying about your book is that it can play right into your insecurities--"all these people will have it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read the negative interweb reviews!" But the flipside of that is the ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is." And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).

 

5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature.

The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text.

The more you constrain an ebook's distinctive value propositions--that is, the more you restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook--the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks fail on those axes.

Ebooks don't beat paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.

 

6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).

Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this out:

To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.

In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this quote isn't from this century or the last. It's from the preface to Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, published in 1887.

Yeah, our attention spans are different today, but they aren't necessarily shorter. Comics author Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the storyline for Transmetropolitan in their minds for five years while the story trickled out in monthly funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately 20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.

 

7. We need all the ebooks.

The vast majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.

For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared desire for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to complete that collection with different texts that are as distinctive and individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look like we're doing the same thing when we read, or listen to music, or hang out in a chatroom, that's because we're not looking closely enough. The shared-ness of our experience is only present at a coarse level of measurement: once you get into really granular observation, there are as many differences in our "shared" experience as there are similarities.

More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference between a single book, a shelf full of books and a library of books. Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can hope to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together, Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today.

 

8. Ebooks are like paper books.

To round out this section, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a good several times before they buy--seven contacts is tossed around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review, and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to buy.

There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you). Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for every copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the sales are healthy.

We also like to think of physical books as being inherently countable in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since computers are damned good at counting things!). This is important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.

But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never exactly--if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations, chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and that's why.

And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen. Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.

The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off.

Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.

And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books. However an author earns her living from her words, printed or encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the hardest and most important task any writer faces.

 

Why Ebooks Matter

I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the works. I've won a major award in my genre, science fiction, and I'm nominated for another one, the 2003 Nebula Award for best novelette.

I own a lot of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in storage on both coasts of the North American continent. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade: the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today. Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science fiction is inherently ephemeral.

Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Books on computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin.

Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person.

Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this paper is to lay out both categories of ideas.

This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who cares if net.dweebs are trading them on Usenet?

A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books, released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook.

The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors introduced by the OCR.

(A lot of my colleagues worry that these books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to "improve" the work. Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.)

Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Well, not yet. I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over ebook piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper circles. Writers were joining the discussion on alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves. My editor, a blogger, hacker and guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup, saying, in part:

Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes. Partly it's greed; partly it's annoyance over retail prices; partly it's the desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy). Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it's morally tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it doesn't work. In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that "home taping is killing music." It's hard for ordinary folks to avoid noticing that music didn't die. But the record industry's credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced.

Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs, to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's bought three more since--I really like Patrick!).

Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so many infringing files, and that its failure to do so made it a contributory infringer, and so liable for the incredibly stiff penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright laws like the No Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.

Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who thought the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the duty of actively policing and censoring the websites and newsfeeds their customers had access to, including a requirement that ISPs needed to determine, all on their own, what was an unlawful copyright infringement--something more usually left up to judges in the light of extensive amicus briefings from esteemed copyright scholars.

This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my boots. Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression, not censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the First Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the rest of the world.

Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook stuff. On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the other hand, there were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks every day.

 

Two Certainties About Ebooks

This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:

1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day.

2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day.

These two certainties begged a lot of questions. These questions were usually expressed in the form of a predictable list of ebook failings.

 

Ebook Failings

• Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper.

• People want to own physical books because of their visceral appeal (often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how good books smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how evocative an old curry stain in the margin can be).

• You can't take your ebook into the tub.

• You can't read an ebook without power and a computer.

• File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time.

None of these seemed like very good explanations for the "failure" of ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace paper, then how come everyone I know spends more time reading off a screen every year, up to and including my sainted grandmother (geeks have a really crappy tendency to argue that certain technologies aren't ready for primetime because their grandmothers won't use them--well, my grandmother sends me email all the time. She types 70 words per minute, and loves to show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at her Florida retirement condo)?

The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It seemed to me that electronic books are different from paper books, and have different virtues and failings. Let's think a little about what the book has gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because the history of the book is the history of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately, the colonizing of the Americas and the American Revolution.

Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed on rare leather by monks. The only people who could read them were priests, who got a regular eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the margins. The priests read the books aloud, in Latin (to a predominantly non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in pricey incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.

Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin Luther turned that press into a revolution. He printed Bibles in languages that non-priests could read, and distributed them to normal people who got to read the word of God all on their own. The rest, as they say, is history.

 

Martin Luther Versus the Monks

Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the printing press:

• Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the illuminated Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the typographical expressiveness that a really talented monk could bring to bear when writing out the word of God.

• Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case for Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority of the man at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed impressiveness, and most of all, it needed rarity.

• The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no incense, no altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew that reading was so friggin' hard on the eyes?

• Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any apocryphal text he wanted--and who knew how accurate that translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead for centuries.

In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points raised above with equal certainty.

 

Why Luther Bibles Kicked Ass

What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways that Luther Bibles kicked ass:

• They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them without having to subject themselves to the authority and approval of the Church.

• They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests explained what God really meant.

• They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.

Note that all of these virtues are orthogonal to the virtues of a monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the Gutenberg press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a success.

By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious little to do with the reasons to love paper books.

 

Why Ebooks Kick Ass

• They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a midlist title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand by women in reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have social life as rich as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get to see each other face to face; the only kind of book they can pass from hand to hand is an ebook. What's more, the single factor most correlated with a purchase is a recommendation from a friend--getting a book recommended by a pal is more likely to sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the preceding volume in a series!

• They are easy to slice and dice. It's a truism of the Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are bog-standard top-40 tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe it. We all want to hear popular music. That's why it's popular.

But the interesting thing is the other ten percent. Bill Gates told the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing "a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing] the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that counts, because that's where the quality perception is."

Why did Napster captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40 tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile when we heard it. Those songs are different for all of us, but they share the trait of making the difference between a compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio programming.

It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of electronic text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw it on a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text for a quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig. In other words, most people who download the book do so for the predictable reason, and in a predictable format--say, to sample a chapter in the HTML format before deciding whether to buy the book--but the thing that differentiates a boring e-text experience from an exciting one is the minority use--printing out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach rather than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.

 

What Computers and the Internet Demand of Us

Toolmakers and software designers are increasingly aware of the notion of "affordances" in design. A hammer's affordance is to bash nails. You can bash a nail into the wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a cast-iron skillet. However, there's something about a hammer that cries out for nail bashing, it has affordances that tilt its holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

The affordance of a computer--the thing it's designed to do--is to slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the Internet is to move bits at very high speed around the world at little-to-no cost. It follows from this that the center of the ebook experience is going to involve slicing and dicing text and sending it around.

Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement. That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly over copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever (theoretically, copyright expires, but in actual practice, copyright gets extended every time the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to enter the public domain, because Disney swings a very big stick on the Hill).

 

How Broken Copyright Screws Everyone

This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:

• Authors freak out.

Authors have been schooled by their peers that strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from getting savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much true: it's strong copyright that often defends authors from their publishers' worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that strong copyright protects you from your readers.

• Readers get indignant over being called crooks.

Seriously. You're a small businessperson. Readers are your customers. Calling them crooks is bad for business.

• Publishers freak out.

Publishers freak out, because they're in the business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and hanging onto it for dear life because, dammit, you never know. This is why science fiction magazines try to trick writers into signing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides and action figures based on their work--it's also why literary agents are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books they represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes to long to shake off, who wouldn't want a piece of it?

• Liability goes through the roof.

Copyright infringement, especially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of $150,000 per infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their representatives have all kinds of special powers, like the ability to force an ISP to turn over your personal information before showing evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge.

This means that anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong side of copyright law is going to be terribly risk-averse: publishers non-negotiably force their authors to indemnify them from infringement claims and go one better, forcing writers to prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even in the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts because an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a work carries such a terrible price.

• Posterity vanishes.

In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of science fiction's ancestral founders--Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells--are still known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky--if their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain.

This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.

 

Democratic-ness as a Fitness Factor

From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its "democratic-ness"--the ease with which it can reproduced.

(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that preceded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had one hundred percent control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had zero percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible--next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts.)

Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded off its artifact-ness--the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople--for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better--as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a copy of her own.

Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet.

The thing is, when all you've got is monks, every book takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the books that are better suited to movable type migrate into that new form. What's left behind are those items that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that need to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.

Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there's a photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monastery and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of creators with their audiences.

 

Rebalancing Copyright

For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate.

Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was generated in response to the last generation of technology. The temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real property) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current copyright only considers the last generation of tech.

So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the end of the world? Duh. If the Catholic church can survive the printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent of bookwarez.

 

The Arts on the Internet: Art, Advocacy, News, Information

The Arts on the Internet: Art, Advocacy, News, Information

 

by Judy Malloy
November 2004

CONTENTS

• Introduction

   

• Part I
• Art and Telecommunications - Early Arts Presence Online
• The Arts Take to the Web

   

• Part II
• The Importance of Original Arts News Online
• Original Arts News Online
• Print Arts Magazines - Online Editions
• Print Newspapers Online
• News Blogs
• listservs
• Some Specific Needs

   

• Part III
• Portals
• Artists' Websites
• Organizational Websites

   

• Conclusions
• Notes

   

• Resources - Selected Links to the Arts Online

Introduction

Ten years after the World Wide Web made the Internet widely accessible, there is a rich and diverse collection of arts websites on the Internet. There is an amazing variety of arts websites produced by arts organizations and individual artists. But as the Web continues to grow--in February 2004, CNN observed that by some estimates, there are now 10 billion Web pages on the Internet--access to these sites has become more difficult. [1]

Print newspapers have permeated the Web environment, resulting in an increase of Internet-based coverage of the higher profile arts. But although the nonprofit arts sector--including emerging and experimental artists and alternative art spaces--has created a strong home page presence, coverage of and access to these pages is increasingly difficult to locate as the Web environment becomes more commercialized. And social, political, and economic art news and advocacy are dwindling.

The Internet still offers what Judge Stewart Dalzell referred to as "the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country -- and indeed the world--has yet seen." [2] Nurturing the survival of this open Internet environment is essential. However in the shadow of consolidation, (Time Warner's merger with AOL for instance, despite some concessions) this thriving and open landscape is threatened by the potential for the loss of Open Access ; by the duplication of the established broadcast and print media online; and by the potential for search engine commercialization and monopoly.

Furthermore, the dot-com bust and the fact that the media no longer extensively covers the promise and development of the Internet are likely contributors to diminished interest in funding new online ventures.

Indeed, Norman Solomon observes in "What Happened To The 'Information Superhighway'?" that "The news media's recalibration of public expectations for the Internet has occurred in tandem with the steady commercialization of cyberspace. More and more, big money is weaving the Web, and the most heavily trafficked websites reflect that reality. Almost all of the Web's largest-volume sites are now owned by huge conglomerates. Even search-engine results are increasingly skewed, with priority placements greased by behind-the-scenes fees." [3]

For the arts in this evolving Internet environment, there are three primary areas of emphasis:

 

1. The encouragement of arts news and advocacy, including creating and funding original Internet-based news.

   In the contemporary Internet environment, encouragement of arts news and advocacy content that speaks both to the art community and arts audiences is an important goal. As this paper documents, there are a few good sources of arts news, information, and interactive forums, but the initial optimism and excitement about an online platform--one that would host arts news that was more inclusive and more accessible than what is available in print, that would provide a place to show and discuss artwork, and that would allow dialogue among artists all over the world-- has only been partially fulfilled. Much Internet-based arts news is print journalism ported to the Internet or news specific to the organization or artist who produced it. There are a substantial number of online sources of reviews, but much of this coverage is also print coverage ported online, and it favors museum and gallery exhibitions, established symphony orchestras, Broadway productions, and well-known dance companies.

   Print-originated news online and the blogs like Artjournal.com that reprocess it bring arts coverage to a wider audience. However, this duplication of the established media online has created the illusion of substantial arts coverage on the Internet. And--at the same time as there has been a demonstrable demise of the kind of serious arts news and advocacy that Arts Wire Current/NYFA Current once offered--this illusion may have lessened the perception of the need for original Internet content that covers the nonprofit arts.

    

2. The encouragement of more individual artists' websites, in tandem with technology help and funding for artists and arts organizations who are creating content on the web.

   The need for encouraging arts content on the Internet is pointed to in "Content and the Digital Divide: What Do People Want?" by Kevin Taglang of the Benton Foundation. "People also want more spaces on the Internet that allow for cultural exploration and development, reflecting unique cultural characteristics and attributes," he observes. "Spaces that allow for interaction on art, music, food and sports would allow people to share information about their heritage and cultural practices." [4]

   Artist and arts organization sites--from Dance Theater Workshop's program notes on contemporary dance; to the Greg Kucera Gallery's extensive artists documentation of individual artists; to musician/composer Pamela Z's site that presents her work with photographs, text, and sound clips--provide a rich source of Internet content that enables their work to reach more people, benefitting not only artists and arts organizations but also audiences.

   In recent years of online reporting on the arts, the author of this report has observed that most arts organizations have Internet presence. But there are still many artists who do not have their own websites. Additionally, many of the organizations that have websites could benefit from help in determining how effectively their sites present content. The initial promise of Internet presence spawned nonprofit technology transfer for the arts--Arts Wire and Open Studio, for instance--but such subsidized technology transfer is now difficult to find.

    

3. Sustaining access to the websites of artists and arts organizations, including fostering a continued open Internet environment, combatting the Digital Divide, and encouraging and funding portal sites that supplement search engine results.

   Although the 2002 Digital Divide Report reported that Internet use is increasing for people regardless of income, or education, the Digital Divide Network pointed out that "the report shows a significant gap in technology access and use based on race and ethnicity. While Internet use among Whites and Asian American/Pacific Islanders hovers around 68%, use rates for Blacks (30%) and Hispanics (32%) trail far behind." [5] Additionally, people with disabilities are less likely to use computers or the Internet than those without disabilities. [6] (In a separate paper, the Digital Divide Network also observed that data on Native American uses of the Internet was excluded from the report. [7])

   Because they represent and reach diverse communities, the arts online are an important tool in widening Internet participation. Nurturing the arts online should be a part of wider programs to combat the Digital Divide.

   A contingent area of access concern is search engine access to nonprofit culture--likely to be affected both by the sheer number of websites and by commercialization.

   In a Cultural Policy & the Arts National Data Archive (CPANDA) study that examines the role of portal sites, (defined in this CPANDA report as large search engine/content gateways such as Yahoo and Excite) Eszter Hargittai notes that "as portal companies become completely dependent on outside advertisers and retailers for revenues, they will favor content that caters to the mainstream over very specialized material to guarantee the widest possible popularity with Web users." [8]

   In addition to commercialization and consolidation, the trend for broadband to become the major access method for the Internet -- potentially creating a situation where the Internet becomes more like cable with access controlled by a few corporations--threatens the thriving and open Internet landscape. Nurturing the survival of an open Internet environment is essential.

   "And today, the democracy that was once the Internet is beginning to look more and more like an oligarchy. The recent attacks on the traditional ownership/diversity safeguards, moreover, waged in the courts and at the FCC, represent an effort on the part of a handful of entertainment conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, General Electric/NBC, Disney/ABC, Viacom/CBS