Here is some required reading to get a clearer picture.
Why SOPA and PIPA must Die – Andy Baio
SOPA and PIPA – Khan Academy (That’s the video that’s embedded above.)
Tagged with Web …
Should Internet Access be a Human Right?
Internet Access Is Not a Human Right – NYTimes.com
Chief internet evangelist at Google Vinton G Cerf on why making access to the internet a human right, is kind of a bonkers idea when you think about it.
… [T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.
Hacksploitation
A couple of days ago I sat down to watch Hackers on Netflix. I missed that movie when it came out in 95 and was curious on why it’s considered a cult movie. I can see the appeal and the reason why it’s considered a cult movie. It’s campy, rebellious, and Angelina Jollie wears leather. But it’s cult for all the bad reasons that a movie is considered cult. It’s not an underappreciated movie that was too ahead of its time. Let’s just say this one is cult because only a cult would be crazy enough to champion it.
When I finished watching it I was terribly disappointed. But more than disappointed, I had complex feelings about it. I felt sad and angry. I got all worked up and drove my wife crazy talking about computers in movies. The question that kept coming up is, “Has there been any movie about computers, or computer culture, that’s been fair?”. Note that I’m not asking if there’s been any that have been good or bad. But just fair. This question drove me to do some research. Meaning doing some Google searches and reading Wikipedia entries.
Hacksploitation
When Roger Ebert reviewed Hackers back in 95, he cited Andy Ihnatko’s impression of the film:
“Hackers wasn’t even in theaters before attacks on it started online. It represents a new genre, “hacksploitation,” Mac expert Andy Ihnatko grumbled on CompuServe, adding that like a lot of other computer movies it achieves the neat trick of projecting images from computer screens onto the faces of their users, so that you can see graphics and data crawling up their chins and breaking over their noses.”
This Hacksploitation term encapsulates it perfectly and it starts to answer part of my question. Think for a moment of movies that deal with computers. With the exception of You’ve Got Mail, which was a giant AOL advertisement, computer users are either hackers, or are either hackers. That’s not a typo. They’re dangerous people and can destroy civilization as we know it.
The list of movies about the computer world are either thrillers or science fiction. That’s actually a good definition of a Hacksploitation movie: Blurs the line between a thriller and sci-fi film. Another and even better definition could be: A movie that gives homage to the computer culture but sadly getting everything totally wrong about how computers work.
In the 80′s we had WarGames and Tron. If you were into computers, these movies were the best thing ever. A hacker almost starting World War III? That’s totally boss. Tron was like a PBS special on computer programming that used special effects to give give visual analogies.
But in the 90′s it’s when it really started getting weird and exploity. We had Lawnmower Man, Jonny Mnemonic, Hackers, The Net, and The Matrix. Three of those came out in 95. The Net, were Sandra Bullock plays the most unbelievable hacker in the world, looking more like she should be hosting The View, almost felt out of the Hacksploitation category until the floppy made the screen flash different images and made rapid swoosh sounds.
(The made for TV film, Pirates of Silicon Valley, could be included, but it’s more of a documentary. I wouldn’t classify it as Hacksploitation. That’s just a great and underappreciated film about the industry.)
The problem with these movies is not that they were bad or good. It’s just how wrong it got the computer stuff. The flashing code blown up in 3D so you could understand how they hacked. The totally bananas user interfaces. The stereotypes, which were really off the mark stereotypes. (Raver look?!) They had an agenda and the agenda was that computers and computer people are trouble.
It’s perfectly understandable. In those two decades, (80′s and 90′s) if you told someone that you were a computer programmer or just worked with computers, people couldn’t help to picture someone from Revenge of the Nerds. Even in the mid to late 90′s, computers and the internet was still this fringe activity. It wasn’t completely understood that computers were simply tools to make things.
So we get to the new millennium. The internet finally explodes. Blogging, social networking, and all that stuff starts happening. Computers are understood more as devices to create and consume media, than to code and hack. You would think Hollywood would know better. But they come out with Swordfish and Antitrust. Don’t get me wrong, Swordfish was badass, but it’s still a Hacksploitation film. In the oughts the films got more sophisticated: Firewall and Live Free or Die Hard are two that come to mind. It remains to be seen how would they hold up, but compared to films like The Net, they’re not as embarrassing.
There is a glint of hope though. In Fincher’s The Social Network we are finally given a straight up, raw computer nerd. Fake Mark Zuckerberg. This film had to address computers and web culture. That was a big part of the story. But it does so fairly in a non-dramatic way. Non-dramatic to a fault even. With The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were getting another hacker, a goth-punk-new-raver something that happens to know a lot about computers. I haven’t seen the Fincher film, but I saw the Swedish version, and the most computer-y thing I remember the lead character doing is transferring jpgs on a Mac.
Circling back to the conflicting feelings, the “good thing” is that a movie like Hackers would never be made again. People no longer think that computers are creepy, or hard to understand. But that’s also the “bad thing”. I’m not so sure if kids would be as inspired to get into computers by watching fake Zuckerberg creating a social network, than how probably Broderick’s character in WarGames hacking into military computers inspired thousands.
The irony of it all is that the only people who could truly love these films, or equally hate them, are the same people they’re exploiting. The geeks, the nerds, and the jackals. Hacksploitation is dead. Long live hacksploitation.
The Internet in 1995 on MTV
Tagged Internet, MTV, News, WebThe Emotional Web
This is a very geeky talk about something that’s not so geeky: feelings. In this TED talk, Jonathan Harris shows how he has tracked and graphed how people are feeling on the web.
(Via Sokanu)
20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web
20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web
An interactive Google book about how it all works. Extremely cool.
(Via Dan Patterson)
How Facebook’s News Feed Works
Facebook News Feed Settings: Random or Not, Biggest Secrets Revealed
The Daily Beast took Facebook through some experiments. Turns out, Facebook pretty much sucks for new people.
The Daily Beast’s one-month experiment into Facebook’s news feed yielded the following discoveries:
* A bias against newcomers
* “Most Recent” doesn’t tell the whole story.
* Links are favored over status updates, and photos and videos trump links.
* “Stalking” your friends won’t get you noticed.
* Raise your visibility by getting people to comment.
* It’s hard to get the attention of “popular kids.”
(Via Kottke)
Cognitive Surplus – Review
Cognitive Surplus is written by the author Clay Shirky. He is also a teacher at New York University, where he teaches “New Media” at the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His previous book is called Here Comes Everybody where he tackled the subject of the power of the web for groups to organize. Shirky has also written for publications like The New York Times and Wired.
My first exposure to Clay Shirky was a talk he gave about the so called problem of information overload. In the talk he explained that the problem is not really information overload. We have had an over abundance of information for centuries. The problem, he said, is a filtering issue. He explains that since the cost of publishing on the web is zero, there’s no loss if you don’t filter for quality. In traditional publishing the costs are high thus the need to filter for quality before taking that risk. In this book he writes about this subject when he gets to the history of the printing press.
My first impulse to read this book was because I wanted to hear the good news first. What I mean by that is that it was either Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows or this one. For the last couple of months, there’s been this debate going on on how the web is doing x to us. Mostly negative. How it’s robbing our attention, our ability to concentrate, etc. Now that I read Cognitive Surplus, I wouldn’t say the it has an opposing view to The Shallows. Carr’s is about psychology and the web and Shirky’s is about sociology and the web. But one is definitely viewing the glass half empty, and the other is viewing the the glass half full. While Clay Shirky is definitely a techno optimist, don’t confuse him with a social media 2.0 guru enthusiast.
If I could sum up the book with one idea it would be this: “The stupidest possible creative act, is still a creative act.” This quote comes from the first chapter of the book we’re he discusses LOLCATS. Here Shirky is acknowledging that sure, there’s a lot of crap on the web, but it’s better than having nothing. And it’s not just about a content creator making something for an audience, but about creating something to share with a community. For that purpose, the quality is secondary.
The key idea in the book though is free time and television. Television is so embedded in our culture that we don’t realize how much time we actually spend on it. Shirky started looking at this because of the frequently asked question, “Were do people find the time.” The time has always been there since industrialization and the 40 hour work week. It’s that for the last 50 plus years or so, we have spent that free time passively staring at a light emitting box. The so called boob tube. Shirky’s conclusion is that the people who have opted to watch less television have made Wikipedia possible, as well as LOLCATS.
Through out the book Shirky also answers why we’re doing this for free and what motivates people to do it. The short answer: because we can. The opportunity is there. People just don’t want to be a passive consumer anymore. They also want to create and more importantly, to share with people. Now we can. He also writes about the impact and the potential that social media can have with civic service.
This is a big deal. It’s an interesting time to be in. We still watch a lot of television, but while we’re watching it, we look up info on IMDB from our smart phones. We listen to music, but look for what people are saying and we rate them. We are no longer just an audience, we are the people formerly known as the audience.
The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains
Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains | Magazine
The Wired article is an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains Here’s an excerpt from the excerpt:
What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.
The web is not making us smarter. It is not making us stupid. But it is most definitely making us think differently.
(Via Rough Type)
Web 3.0 aka The Semantic Web
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
I’ve been hearing about the concept of the semantic web for a while, but I don’t think I have ever understood the whole gist of it. The basic idea is to find better ways to “manage information in way that matters to individuals”. The 14 minute video is a good introduction to the idea, but a lot of it seems like one those surreal Bing commercials. You know, like when the daughter mentions jeans and the mother says “Moms who wear jeans to match their teen’s jeans”. I hope it’s not like that.
(Via MF)
