Well that's just great

When I first created this site, I added a forum for discussion. I didn't put in any censorship parameters because at the time, it was really just limited to me, my friends, and their friends. Then I forgot about it. Apparently, it turned into a giant repository for porn links. I have removed it, since that is not at all what I'd like to be associated with. I'm also planning to change over to blog software with which I can better monitor comments so this doesn't happen again (I found out because this blog was comment-spammed this morning). So if you see a few changes in the next few weeks, that's why.

In light of all this, I'd like to ask your opinion. Is censorship always bad? I don't like the idea of censoring people from communicating, but I realize that I am limiting people to "relevant topics" by ridding my site of spamvertising content. So is it bad?

Thanks!

Not your average internet education

With Wikibooks and its peers came free, open-source education by and for the people. And now, with iTunes, comes the webcasted lecture. Prestigious universities like UC Berkeley and MIT (and previously Stanford, Oxford, and Yale with AllLearn) are offering webcasts--audio and sometimes video--of many of their courses, from physics to philosophy to art.

The way traditional "distance learning" courses for credit work is by combining readings and audio/video lectures with online communication through a chatroom or forum. Assignments are sent to the professor and assessed. Most of the courses available through Berkeley Webcasts and similar sites don't offer any meaningful interaction with the professor or other students, but some, like this environmental history course, provide all the salient details. The only difference from traditional DL courses is that you don't get your assignments graded.

It's not a free degree, but it IS free education as long as you have a computer, some kind of audio player, and speakers or headphones. This still excludes the poorest of the poor except through access via a library or other public internet location, but it's a pretty significant improvement in the quality of education you can get for free.

I'm doing PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence right now. I'll tell you how it goes. In the meantime, educate yourselves.

YouTube and the Iraq War

A post in honor of Bush's plan to win in Iraq:


A veteran speaks out against the war, and the Navy takes a different approach.


No editorializing for today.

Soap Operas and Online Art Galleries

I'm on "vacation" for the next week, but I thought I'd share three tidbits from my readings over the last few days.

First, a shout-out to "All My Children." Yes, the soap opera. They've just written soap's first transgender character into the season, and ABC has announced that over the course of his tenure, Zarf will go from Mr. to Ms.

Secondly, the NY Times reports on the Saatchi Gallery online--an online gallery in the Chelsea sense of the term, where new artists can bring their work to the public and sell it.

Last but not least... RIP Joseph Barbera. You will be missed.

Bloggers responsible for their commenters?

From MeFi:

|AMP|#8220;Senator John McCain (R. - AZ) has introduced legislation [PDF] that would hold blogs responsible for all activity in their comments sections and user profiles. Provisions of the proposed bill include: (1) commercial websites and personal blogs "would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000," (2) bloggers with comment sections may face "even stiffer penalties" than ISPs, and (3) any social-networking site must take "effective measures" to remove any Web page that's "associated" with a sex offender. "Because 'social-networking site' isn't defined, it could encompass far more than just MySpace.com, Friendster and similar sites." The list could include any site that allows comments, author [sic] and personal profiles. Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that this proposal may be based more "on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts." "McCain's [sic] legislation could deal a serious blow to the blogosphere. Lacking resources to police their sites, many individual blogs may have to shut down open discussion."*

Rut roh. Fining bloggers up to $300,000 for the comments they inspire? Write your congressmen and congresswomen, people!


We've seen a lot of legislative proposals in the last ten years seeking to regulate the internet. I don't have a problem with requiring bloggers (or anyone else) to remove copyrighted or illegal material from their blogs, or even from their comments. I do have a problem with making bloggers responsible for content that does not originate from them. The "easy" way to solve this problem, from the blogger's perspective, would be to screen all comments, but big blogs (like Wil Wheaton's, or community blogs like MeFi or Slashdot), that's pretty much a full-time job in and of itself. Perhaps more importantly, one of the great things about unscreened comments is that users know they aren't being censored, and neither is anyone else. Furthermore, isn't $300,000 a bit excessive for a personal blog? Yikes.


Then there's the social networking/sex offender issue. Many social networking sites tout business networking as their primary functions, and even the infamous MySpace has age restrictions. The ex-sex offender issue is particularly biting: sex offenders have served their debt to society, yet they ostensibly have a high rate of recidivism (although recent studies suggest that rates of recidivism are falling). My home state of California recently passed a bill requiring high-risk sex-offenders to wear a tracking device for their entire lives after release from prison. As Lanier pointed out when we were discussing the bill during the election, a state-sponsored optional program could actually benefit former offenders, because their whereabouts would be established at all times (so if they were falsely accused, they could potentially demonstrate their innocence) and because the positioning devices may serve as a deterrent. A mandatory program, on the other hand, has the effect of punishing people who have already been punished according to their crime by violating their right to privacy.


Beyond that, it's easy enough for someone to falsify personal information and obtain an account that would not immediately identify them as a sex offender if indeed they are. Holding social networking sites responsible for viewing literally every page on their sites and knowing the identities of all sex offenders well enough to determine if a page is "associated" with them, regardless of purported identity, is absurd.


Perhaps you disagree? Comments, as always, are welcome.

Antiseptic technology

I'm reading Emergence by Steven Johnson right now, and it's set me thinking about how we sanitize the future. At the start of the book, Johnson talks about Jane Jacobs' theories of urban development and how neighborhoods form. But as the book progresses, he only briefly touches on demographics and associated issues of class and race. At first, I didn't think it was a problem. In fact, I barely noticed it. But as Johnson moves into what eventually starts to look like technophilia and the idealization of emergent software, some of his examples give me pause.

One of the central tenets at the heart of emergent behavior is the idea that acting locally produces global results. If enough people walking along the sidewalks of the Lower East Side interact, the sum of their interactions is a self-regulating system. What's missing from this analysis, aside from one chapter analyzing the history of how the "lower classes" have fit into theorists' understandings of emergence, is a set of social "mirror neurons"--as Johnson starts to discuss emerging emergent technologies (hee), Emergence loses a lot of its socioeconomic value and Johnson's argument gets sanitized. Johnson talks about every TV coming with TiVo (or something similar) and connecting to something like the internet to create TV "neighborhoods" based on individual and global user preferences. In the midst of this argument, he refutes the idea that TV and the internet contribute to user isolation based on the fact that the technology aids communal emergent behavior.

So what's the problem?

If you don't have money, you won't have a TiVo. The communities that could potentially form won't account for the impoverished, and entertainment will continue to alternately misrepresent, ignore, insult, and exclude the poor. While media may be tailored to certain "communities" through TiVo, the same groups who have traditionally been excluded by the top-down system of the networks will still be excluded by the bottom-up system because they won't have access to the technology required to form their own communities, and thus the impoverished (and possibly other groups, this is just the obvious one) lose what little grip they had on media solidarity.

I'm still enjoying Emergence, don't get me wrong. But I'm concerned about the blanket sanitization that today's zeitgeist chasers exhibit. Just talking about technology's potential to shape thought isn't enough. Neither new technology nor bottom-up self-organization is inherently ethical. It may be useful, but many of the social problems that were around before bottom-up technology will still exist during and after it. Focusing on the technology without moral discourse draws attention away from those problems.

Even my beloved Star Trek, which early on incorporated race, rarely explores issues of class and never concerns itself with sexual orientation. Looks to me like technology glosses over social problems rather than fixing them. Hmm.

EDIT: Here's something entertaining and mildly relevant! The blog software I use, greymatter, has quotes on just about every page you work with. In the "preview" page, this quote came up:

"The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create."—Leonard Sweet