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...