Aram Sinnreich

Moscow Panel: "Culture: Create or Copy" [video]

Last month, I returned to Moscow to speak at Google's Big Tent Event. My panel, which was entitled "Culture: Create or Copy," was focused on the question of whether configurable cultural practices like memes, mashups and remixes are legitimate and socially valuable, and therefore whether communications and cultural policy should provide a degree of support for them. Obviously, I was there to bang the "yes" drum. This was not an idle "academic" topic; the panel's moderator was Ekatrina Chukovskaya, Deputy Minister of Culture for the Russian Federation.

Here's the video of the panel:

New article: "Welcome to Alphaville, Avoid the Ghetto"

Truthdig.com just published my new article, "Welcome to Alphaville, Avoid the Ghetto." It's about what happens when smartphones turn our entire life into a giant search engine, and then selectively hide the results without telling us.

...The world we see through our smartphones is a curated world, and its horizons are constricting, rather than expanding. Though they’re often billed as modern-day Diogenes’ lamps, outshining the light of day with the light of truth (or “augmenting reality,” in contemporary geekspeek), they would be better understood as corporate-sponsored guidebooks to our own lives, keeping us on the prescribed path and off the road less traveled....

For more, read the article on Truthdig.

"Beyond the Internet" event at Rutgers tomorrow

Tomorrow, I'll be hosting an event at Rutgers called "Beyond the Internet." It continues the themes I've been working on with the MondoNet project, surrounding the potential of new and emerging platforms (e.g. ad hoc, wireless mesh networks) to provide a more robust platform for free speech and the exercise of cyberliberties.

The cornerstone of the event will be a panel featuring some of the technologists and thinkers at the forefront of these issues, including:

• Laura E. DeNardis, American University / Yale Information Society Project
• Michael Potter, Geeks Without Frontiers
• Jonathan Baldwin, Parsons
• Josh King, New America Foundation/OTI
• Isaac Wilder, founder, Free Network Foundation

The event is free and open to the public, hope you can make it!

Time and location:
Wed, November 16
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Rutgers University, College Ave Campus
Alexander Library
4th Floor Lecture Hall
Map: http://bit.ly/t5fDnq 
Event website: technologies.rutgers.edu

Introducing MondoNet: The censor-proof, unsurveillable network [video]

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at TEDxUSC, in which I laid out the basic argument for MondoNet, a new project I'm working on with a few of my grad students at Rutgers. My basic point is that, despite the many amazing cultural, economic and political uses to which it's been put, the Internet has a fundamental flaw preventing it from being an effective tool for democratic political action and cultural innovation.

The flaw lies in its centralized architecture and hierarchical governance; no matter how much people resist against institutional power through innovative cultural forms, and no matter how much we lobby against oppressive and exploitative uses of the technology (e.g. the current battles over net neutrality), the network provides its operators with an excess of power that will necessary be exploited.

We propose to remedy this situation with an architectural intervention: namely, using ad-hoc, mesh networking technology to create a global network that is fundamentally resistant to censorship, surveillance and exploitation, because no single individual or institution can control the information flow on any significant scale.

Clearly, there is a lot to discuss here; we plan to publish a full-length academic article in The Information Society in July, and a pre-publication copy can be read at MondoNet.org. But we're still working on developing funding and fleshing out the engineering, so I welcome your feedback, criticisms and offers of help! 

Here's the video:

Whither Facebook? Whither Society?

I spent a very interesting 45 minutes on the radio today with MPR Midmorning host Kerri Miller and Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray, talking about Facebook, privacy, society, and our changing ethics and expectations about what it means to "participate" in an always-on culture. I love being on Kerri's show, because she gives her guests lots of opportunities to ramble, argue, and otherwise break away from the standard talking points.

Here's an archived stream:

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

France crushes online innovation and dissent with a silicon fist

Well, it appears that Free France has finally given in to the forces of totalitarianism.

Today, the country passed the dreaded "HADOPI" bill, which many American news outlets are calling a "three strikes" law. Here's how it works: if you're accused of copyright infringement by a rights holder, you receive an email with your IP address in it. If you are still suspected of infringement, you receive a certified letter telling you you're in big trouble. If you make the mistake of being suspected of infringement a third time, you'll lose your Internet connection for up to a year.

And there's no right to judicial appeal.

Clearly, there are a thousand problems with this: IP addresses can be spoofed or piggybacked, allegations don't prove guilt, many online uses of copyrighted content fall into exempt categories such as fair use, new business models are built on the innovative (re)use of copyrighted material, political dissent is built on the innovative (re)use of copyrighted material, ... oh, and whatever happened to privacy?

Kicking someone off the Internet is not the same as telling the kids "no TV for a week." We are shifting an ever greater number of essential social functions online, from access to government bureacracy to vital business and personal communications to consumer research to banking to emergency and disaster warnings. The net disenfranchisement (so to speak) amounts to something more like losing your voting rights or your passport.

Fortunately, we don't have any laws like this currently on the docket in the U.S; unfortunately, the "market" is preempting the need for such anger-provoking action on the part of our elected representatives. Already, two of the four major ISPs have agreed to "voluntarily" adopt a 3-strikes rule against their own customers. They brokered the deal with the RIAA back in December 2008 -- a bitter pill dipped in the carob candy shell of a pledge by the RIAA to stop suing file sharers. Too bad they have already broken that part of the bargain.

At least Jacques Attali, France's greatest philosopher of music, technology and culture, has come out against HADOPI:

Jacques Attali tacle Hadopi
by iPolTV

Previously:

• French Parliament nixes awful IP law
• e-Speech: My Truthdig article about free expression in the digital age

French Parliament nixes awful IP law

Good news on the global civil liberties front: the French Parliament just voted to strike down the awful Création et Internet bill, which would have used a "three strikes" law to block copyright infringers from using the Internet.

In case you might wonder what's wrong with that, remember that the Internet is now, in many countries including France, fundamental to free expression, participation in the economic system, adequate political representation, interaction with government and commercial organizations, and so forth. In other words, it's become a sine qua non of citizenship.

In this light, using something as nearly universal in adoption as P2P and other so-called "violations" of recently-expanded IP laws and treaties as a tool of de facto disenfranchisement would have negative social consequences of enormous proportions.

So three cheers for the French! Let's hope our own Congress can make equally good decisions for the well-being of citizen and state alike.

Incidentally, I'll be speaking about this stuff tomorrow at the NYU Piracy Symposium. For some reason, the event has no web site, but here's the details:

PIRATE PROPERTY
Frirday, April 10
10am-5pm
SCA Gallery Space
Dept of Social and Cultural Analysis
41 E 11th St, 7th Fl
(Keynote by Siva Vaidhyanathan)

The teen social networks gospel (according to danah)

My friend danah boyd, who recently received her doctorate from Berkeley's Information School, just made her dissertation available online. I haven't read it yet, but I've spent a lot of time reading her past work, and sharing panels with her at conferences, so I'm confident it's a doozy. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that this will very likely emerge as the definitive academic work on social networks from the Web 2.0 era. I can't think of anyone else (except maybe her mentor, Mimi Ito) who's done so much solid ethnographic work on teens and online community.

I have a feeling I'll be assigning sections of this in many classes to come...

Here's the details:

"Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics"

http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties - persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability - and three dynamics - invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private - are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens' engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

E-Speech: My Truthdig article about free expression in the digital age

A few days ago, I published an article in Truthdig about what we call "e-speech" -- freedom of expression in digital media. The article attempts to pull several issues (e.g. net neutrality, electronic privacy, walled gardens, asymmetrical access) together under one umbrella, and to propose market- and technology-based solutions to these challenges. It's been getting some positive feedback, so I think we did something right -- although some people have taken issue with the new coinage. The idea was to come up with something less clunky than "free expression in digital media" that didn't sound too techy or too legalese, and would be appealing and simple enough to garner support outside of the circles of the digerati. I think the phrase works, but I guess the proof will be in the pudding.

Bonus trivia: my co-author, Masha Zager, is also my mom.

Link