The awkward silence

After a couple of years of furiously chirruping away to anyone who would listen to my views about anything and everything and failing to blog, I am back. Not particularly sure that anyone's very pleased to see me, but here I am anyway, and I intend to talk without much authority or expertise about how I see my friends (ab)using technology. I guess this sudden impulse is a result of a decent-sized ego, listening to people like the lovely Stefana Broadbent and Brian Eno (I know! BRIAN ENO!!!) talk at my school, and wondering if anyone will listen to what I have to say, given that the people who say least about Generation Z are Generation Z. So here goes. Sincerely, Will

FOR OUR TRUST IS NO LONGER IN THEE

After my woefully inadequate last post, it seems only right that I address the issue of trust. We were discussing with Mr Rokison why we trust certain things and why we don't trust other sources. Seems an interesting topic, so that's what I'm going to talk about today. I suppose that there are a few of sources that I would trust pretty much unquestioningly: my immediate family (apart from cunning little sisters and suchlike), doctors, the Bible. The last one is too personal to really be widely applicable and the second is probably the weakest of the three, so that leaves my parents. Why do I trust my parents? Why do I trust anyone?




I think trust is either inbuilt or developed. We have an inbuilt trust in parents because they brought us into the world and we entrust our lives to them, so it seems a bit illogical not to trust them. We develop trust in them when we are very young because they are the people satisfying our needs with food and water. Similarly we trust doctors with our lives when we are seriously ill because they have our lives in their hands, and we trust them to stop us from dying because that's what they're paid to do. Again, pretty logical.




However, when we start talking about who we trust where media and the internet are concerned, things get a little more complicated. Seeing as the general public are increasingly becoming the journalists of the 21st century world, we no longer know who we can trust. I have always trusted The Times newspaper, simply because for me they have always been symbols of integrity - I have grown up with The Times, and I have come to take its word as quite trustworthy. However, now I can see that perhaps it's not so simple to trust this blindly. We encountered a bit about reliability in the Wikipedia entries, so inevitably some of the stuff will overlap. Here goes - why I trust what I trust.

1. The writer. If the writer is a credible, reputable person who has already written good articles, then of course I will be more inclined to believe what he or she has to say. I suppose this, combined with social conformity and expectation, is why I trust The Times more than some of the things on the web. We have so much to learn about the web because it is so new, but The Times is an old, well-respected institution.
   


2. Reputation and previous content. Most people would take what something like The Mail or The Sun have to say with a pinch of salt because the tabloids are generally regarded as fear-mongering papers that perhaps don't always tell us the most truthful stories. Hence if I find a blog that has a good reputation, like the Huffington Post or something like that, I am more likely to buy into what it has to say. That's why lots of people don't trust Wikipedia, even though it has proved itself reliable more often than not - it has a bad reputation.


3. Medium. This is a slightly odd one, but thinking over this I found that I was more likely to trust papers than television, and more likely to trust television than the internet. Why? The only reason I can think of is that with a paper, there is something tangible there, something you can read and hold. It somehow seems more real. The TV news also sort of comes into this category because you can see what's happening and you are generally being told (on terrestrial channels particularly) the news by a well-respected institution. We seem as a society to have developed a sort of intrinsic trust in our favourite news anchors and writers, which links into the thing about who writes it.

The problem is that we no longer know who we can trust simply because we are the journalists. If you wrote an article online tomorrow, I wouldn't know who you were, I wouldn't know your reputation and I probably wouldn't like the fact that it was a web article and not in print. However, the criteria I mentioned above simply don't stand up any more. Things like Roo Reynolds' blog, which did an article on the G20 protests, is able to tell us so much more simply because he was there (scroll about half way down to find the article). He came, he saw, he blogged. Because technology is allowing us to do this, we have to think of other critical methods, but often the ideas overlap with the traditional things I mentioned earlier. Reputation - that's why I trust Roo Reynolds. Situation - was the person an eyewitness? Did he/she talk to the people concerned? Officiality - does it come from a news site or a blog? Actually, even the last one may not be the best criterion, simply because blogs and tweets sometimes get the news up faster and more accurately.

In short, we have to re-evaluate the reliability of the internet as a news provider and a source in general because of the way it works. Anyone can post from just about anywhere - does that mean that traditional forms of the media are on the way out? There is already talk of newspapers starting to fail as many turn to the internet to catch up with the daily occurrings, and events like the G20 protests were best covered by the people without the fancy microphones and smart suits - us. I find newspapers have a sort of charm in their seemingly old-fashioned, quaint practices, but the internet will, I think, inevitably overtake it, simply because we are seeing the emergence of a world where convenience is everything. Take what you see on the net with the same critical thought you would apply to a tabloid article or indeed any newspaper article, and more often than not you'll find that the facts come to you. Now if you'll excuse me, BBC SPORT beckons.

COPYWRONG

And so we must move on, onwards, upwards, sideways, anywhere but here, for this is copyright country. British copywright reminds me of Othello: a noble concept, but ultimately flawed and quashed by competitors. But enough of this pretentious drivel. I intend to talk a little but about what copyright is, why it is, how it is and what it shouldn't be. Are we all sitting comfortably? Sorry. No more silliness, I promise.

Copyright refers to an individual's rights over created property, like writing a song, a book or a play, or taking a photograph, or making a film. If you do any of these things, it stands to reason that you should have control over the use of this property. Copyright essentially stops people from saying that stuff you make is theirs, and by taking somebody's work without permission and using it, you break copywright and the law. It's a pretty logical idea, but on the web, things like copyright can get blurred - where does your property end and others' begin? Things like mash-ups, remixes and file sharing have all helped to confuse the lot of us by messing about with how copyright works.

To start with, let's take remixing and mash-ups. These are different things; remixing involves taking a motif or theme from a song and building a song around it, often involving new material. However, a mash-up doesn't use any new material, but instead you don't use any new material. See the difference? One of these is a remix and one is a mash-up.






Now the copyright issue here is that of derivative work. Under the copyright law in the UK, derivative work requires permission from the party whose property it is. It's a problem because mash-ups breach copyright, but sometimes remixes are considered far enough from the original to be considered "derivative work" and so it's technically possible to make a remix from a copyrighted song that doesn't actually breach copyright.

However, this isn't what I really want to talk about. What I think is the most interesting part of copyright in the UK is how it works and the illogicalities within. There are some sensible things - movie piracy is bad, so are file sharing sites like Limewire - but also some totally daft ones. For instance, if you have any old TV programmes recorded on VHS, you are likely to be breaking the law, because if you have kept the VHS for more than 30 days, that's considered breaking copyright law. There are other things,like how you're not allowed to put iTunes music on more than 5 devices (this is called DRM). Anyway, the point is that while we often are grateful to copyright, there's a great deal of unnecessary clutter in the law. What should we do about it? Well, the government hasn't been terribly good about enforcing the law and punishing people for flaunting it. We should be concentrating more on things like LimeWire. It seems silly to my mind to worry about whether someone's kept an episode of Antiques Roadshow from 1995 as opposed to cracking LimeWire, which lets people share music files and the like, which utterly breaks the law and robs musicians of royalties. We need to address this imbalance now, because more than half of all downloaded music is downloaded illegally, which will, if it continues, simply stop artists from making music. (I should stress at this point that bands do not make their money from albums, but from gigs, and it is the albums that get people to come to gigs, so really it all works out the same.) Read this article about how Radiohead completely changed music marketing. These just go to show how quaint the copyright laws and conventional pricing laws seem as a result of the blistering pace of advancing technology.

So what am I getting at? I suppose the answer is that copyright seems a little, well, silly in the state it's at at the moment. Most people would willingly break copyright even if they don't know the full extent of the law. We should feel obliged not to break copyright, but we don't. The government need to try and adapt copyright laws to be able to deal with the slipperiness of the digital age. How they do that I have no idea, but watching this already forlorn cabinet face up to this could be fun. Let's watch and laugh, children. Sorry. I know I promised not to be flippant, but it was just too easy...

THE BLOUSE OF COMMONS

Photo of woman wearing blouse from Flickr Commons.

As the heinous pun above suggests, this May week we are going to be looking at Flickr Commons. We've come across Flickr before: searchable photo albums, tagging photos, phenomenally successful Web 2.0 business, yadda yadda yadda. But wait! it gets better: Flickr Commons. It sounds a bit like it might be something to do with governments: it is, after a fashion. Essentially what it is is that Flickr has joined up with several civic institutions to let the people of earth (and possibly other places too, but let's not go into that) see the photos that were previously kept hidden in archives and civic files and comment on them, tag, post, add, emulsify, whatever. The first, and hitherto one of the most important, institutions to take up this offer was the American Library of Congress. There are a number of weird and wonderful things about this. First, this means that government institutions are signing up to the revolution of information. Gone are the scared faces of ancient librarians peeping from behind their office chairs at the big bad computer screens: now the big institutions are sharing what they can offer and contributing to the knowledge of the online community.

The bigger issue is how they are able to do this. Copyright is what governs who can put photos and other material where, when they can do it, and what gives them the authority to do it. The laws governing copyright are convoluted, outdated and in Britain's case absolutely ridiculous. If every person who had kept a video cassette of a TV program for more than thirty days was chased up, it would be bedlam. We think the judicial system here is bad now, but if we stuck resolutely to the letter of the law, we would a) lack a great deal of common sense and b) be getting the wrong end of the stick. Copyright is there to protect creative forces - artists, musicians, writers etcetera. Many of the old photos in the Library of Congress lack identification, date lines or something telling us who took the photo. So the Library of Congress has decided to post many photos with the disclaimer "no known copyright restrictions". The brilliance of this is that they aren't breaking the law by categorically stating the rights of viewers to use and reference the photo, but they provide us with this seemingly innocuous statement. But there's more. We are invited by Flickr Commons to look at the copyright laws governing use of material in general before we use the photos. Not only this, but it's a two-way thing: we are also encouraged to give back by tagging the images or perhaps putting comments up that can shed some light on the historical context of the photos. This is, in my opinion, a masterstroke. The public get to use the photos, but they are doing what we should have been encouraging them to do from the start: they are considering the law of their own accord, and they are even helping to contribute to help us develop a better cultural picture. Now the Smithsonian Institution and the Imperial War Museum have also signed up. So now you see how the cultural research facilities of the world are at last sticking their necks out and saying, "Look, here are some rather special photos. Use them, but don't mess us about. Read up about what you have to do, use them, perhaps credit us, but be sensible." It remains to be seen whether in this frenzy of joy we will spill the figurative red wine of foolishness over this precious opportunity. See below for the videos.

Welcome!

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.

Flickr Commons statement (for link see above)

POST PECHA (KUCHA)

Well that was interesting. As an exercise the Pecha Kucha was very unusual: we don't usually get examined on the structure of a presentation over the content, so that was interesting. I think that as a system of presentation, Pecha Kucha has both good and bad points. It's great for making you condense information and keeping the attention of the audience, but it is quite offputting to be quite so regulated strict about the time keeping. I would have preferred to have a "time gate" in which we had to change slides, which admittedly would have made it less demanding, but I think that the standard of presentation might have been higher.

As for my own personal performance, I thought I did quite well. I agree with Mr Rokison that I perhaps chose a difficult topic to talk about - it isn't easy to explain away a song about the pain of putting a child up for adoption through financial need without a) playing the song and b) talking for longer than 20 seconds. However, I didn't think I did that badly at all: my timings were fine, I conveyed an argument and I knew my stuff (at least, I thought I did). I thought some others were better, though: Lazarus' talk on Alan Bennett, with clarity, passion and knowledge, stands out, and so does Fabian's talk on man-eating snakes, which was rather macabre, but impressive nonetheless. If I were to do another one, I would try to do some things differently. I would try to talk about something that wasn't so hard to talk about. I would also try and be a bit more relaxed, and finally I would try and have a bit more fun with it - I felt like I was doing a piece of work, not a talk about an album I love. Anyhoo, there's nowt can be done now. Have a look and tell me what you think.

BLUE, HERE IS A SONG FOR YOU...

So. I have been instructed to create a "Zen presentation" or Pecha Kucha for ICT, using Wikipedia as one of my main starting points, about anything at all, most likely something that means something to me. But wait - before you start thinking that my ICT teacher is a bored, lazy oaf, he has actually been quite clever by making us do a Pecha Kucha in particular. This means that we have at most 10 slides, each of which advances after exactly 20 seconds. This means that we can a) accurately predict how long each presentation will take and b) stop the presentations from turning into bloated, soporific banality-fests like most of the marketing presentations in existence. It also challenges us, i.e. the pupil, not to ramble and it makes us squeeze as much information as we can so people don't get bored. No fancy animations, no dodgy graphs, just pictures and a few words. A good example of people doing this can be found here at Ignite Where 2.0.

I decided to write about the Joni Mitchell album "Blue", which is widely recognised as a work of brilliance. It is an example of an artist baring her soul and laying it all out there. But I digress. The research is what I am here to write about. I started by going to the Joni Mitchell Wikipedia page, which was not great. I know Joni Mitchell's life story quite well, and it was distressing to see a warning at the top saying that the page had no reliable sources or citations.

However, when I got to the bottom of the page there were plenty of sources. It turned out that the warning had been there since September last year, and since then people had obviously done something about it. I checked the references and sources, and the ones I checked were good. I found the Joni Mitchell Discussion List particularly useful. I then went on to the main page for the album "Blue". This was less reliable - it had less sources, and they were all rather poor. The only really reliable bits were the parts about the various awards and accolades the album won. The other really helpful bit was a link to an interview by Cameron Crowe, which was great for trying to understand the mindset Mitchell wanted for the album. I know that this isn't really ICT, but it is relevant and it is what my presentation will be about.

Finding out the true meanings of the individual songs was a bit harder. Some of the songs from the album had individual pages on Wikipedia, some were not. The ones that were had few sources, if any - most were stubs. Again, the JMDL was helpful, particularly for the song "Little Green". Two things during this project struck me: the first was how easy it was to back up information on Wikipedia with hard, impartial fact. I could be sure of the information I garnered from the "Little Green" Wikipedia page because it appeared on an official, Joni Mitchell approved fan website. The second is perhaps more interesting (to me at least). "Blue" is a desperately sad album, dealing with all kinds of emotional trauma. I am in awe of the courage and boldness that Joni Mitchell displays by publishing this album. That's just a short aside from me. Back to the tale of the research.

In conclusion, I found that using Wikipedia as a primary research resource was not as bad as I had anticipated. All the things I found were verifiable, there were no utterly outlandish or ridiculous statements and the information I garnered has proven useful in writing my Pecha Kucha. So I hope you enjoy my Pecha Kucha, which I will put in my next post. Until then, enjoy these people showing you how presentations should (and should not) be done, and don't try and ignore Wikipedia as a valid source of information. Just make like a blowtorch and use with caution and discretion.

WIKIPEDIATRICIAN

I am painfully aware that the title is woefully poor. I'm tired. Sorry.
Aaaaanyway, this is intended to be a brush up on whatever else needs saying about Wikipedia, so try and listen for the short time I will distract you.

• Sandboxes are important, more important than I stressed in the large post. They are where you learn to use Wikipedia. They show you how to interlink, reference and provide images for articles and then show you the result while not actually publishing what you write. If you're planning to use Wikipedia, using the sandbox(es) is essential as it allows room for error but still shows you how to use Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia is always going to be a work in progress by its very nature: there will be no Wikipedia Mk. II or anything, but on the plus side, updates can clearly be made quicker than between editions of a regular encyclopedia. For example, when the 7/7 bombings happened, the Wikipedia page was updated hundreds of times in the hour after the page was started, while newspapers only got one chance to get it right. Wikipedia is quicker and easier to edit than other information sites and therefore more accurate on the whole and in the long run.
• Wikipedia is a community and a tool at the same time, but 80% of the content comes from 20% of the users (see here for that funny rule that governs this). Everyone knows a bit about something: if you see an error that you can correct with reference, do so. It only enhances the experience for everybody and there's nothing to stop you. Try and think of ways that you can help Wikipedia and then it'll be even better for you and for others.
• Wikipedia is massive beyond scale. If you looked at every single page in English alone for only a minute each consecutively, you'd have to be looking at a screen straight for about 4 years. That's how big it is. It came from nothing and was edited by us, not by pros. When you think about it, it's weird how so many people have united to form such a behemoth of a website but hardly anyone knows anyone else doing the same thing. We isolate ourselves in order to unify our knowledge. How peculiar.

Well that's it as far as what time and effort constrains me to tell you about Wikipedia. But do try and contribute, even if it's only to a very silly or trivial page. It'll do no end of good. In short, Wikipedia is by us and for us, and we need to keep it that way for it to work. Adios.

See below for pictures, videos etc.