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Remix: The Copyright Wars

December 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Lawrence Lessig is a lecturer in law at Harvard University and a leading authority on copyright and intellectual property rights in the digital age. He helped to found the Creative Commons movement, and he’s a former member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. His works are a passionate defence of the rights of the individual to the creativity of the past, and a crusade against those forces which try to limit the free exchange of information. Remix: The Copyright Wars is his manifesto on the topic.

This is the latest in a long line of books he has written in support of such causes – explaining in non-legal language the way in which human rights have been eroded by the vested interests of big business. Whilst upholding the right of all content originators to make a living from what they create, he believes that the current copyright laws restrict the free exchange of information. He also argues that all creativity builds on the creativity of the past, and it is modern technology which has democratised and speeded up the process.

In the past, you could own the ‘source code’ to Shakespeare’s works, but only printing press owners could make copies. Now, as soon as something becomes digitised, any kid in his back bedroom can copy at will. This has given rise to a panic over copyright, which he explores in some depth.

First of all he examines the ‘war against piracy’ in the American courts by a close inspection of the terms in which it is commonly pursued:

In my view, the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution to an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to achieve without war the ends that the war sought.

You would almost think he was talking about the Americans in Afghanistan – but no, this is the ‘copyright wars’.

He cites many examples where companies have paid out legal fees ten times greater than the lost revenue they were seeking to recoup.

He agrees with Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow that the Nay-sayers and prophets of doom on all this are wrong. The future is not likely to be an either/or choice between prohibition and control versus unbridled anarchy. It’s much more likely to be a creative symbiosis of past and future technologies.

He then addresses the central theme of the book – how much is it possible to quote from someone else’s work in a new work for private or public consumption? The rules and general practice are quite different, depending on the medium. With printed text it is a perfectly normal, accepted practice to quote from someone else’s work. In fact academic writing specifically requires a knowledge and accurate quotation of previous works in the same subject.

But use the same approach with audio recordings and you’ll end up with a solicitor’s ‘cease and desist’ letter from Sony or Decca. And his argument is that this restriction is a brake on both creativity and freedom of information.

On mixed media he also makes the very good point that the sort of well-edited video clips with over-dubbed sound tracks shown in TV political satire (and now on blogs) are more effective than long-winded essays taking 10,000 words to make the same point.

Most people today don’t even have time to read long articles. They get their information in much shorter chunks. As he puts it, very pithily – “text is today’s Latin”. It’s an extreme view, but you can see his point.

A propos of which, he also practices what he preaches. He developed a style of presentation which uses rapid display of short, memorable phrases or pictures. Here’s an example which takes a while to load, but is well worth the wait. It’s quite old now, but it demonstrates a technique of presentation which will not date: sound and text being used together for maximum effect.

One thing about his writing I found quite inspiring is that for every bold proposition he makes, he looks at the possible objections to it. (In fact a whole section of his web site is devoted to criticisms of his work.)

He makes a profound distinction between what he calls read-only (RO) and read-write (RW) culture. Both are important, but they have the difference that RO encourages passive reception, whereas RW encourages a written, that is a creative response. This leads him to argue for the enhanced value of all ‘writing’ – by which he means not only text, but the manipulation of other media, such as the audio and video files which are the stock-in-trade of the mashup artists.

His point is that these collage-type works are definitely not examples of parasitic imitation, and that in almost all cases they reveal a skilled appreciation of the medium.

The second part of the book is an investigation of eCommerce – conducted at a level just as radical and profound. He looks Google, Amazon, and Netflix as examples of businesses that have become successful by defying the normal laws of commerce. They allow other companies to share their information, and in Amazon’s case they even allow competitors onto their site. By doing this they make more money, and they control more of the field.

For the sake of those people who didn’t catch it first time round, he explains Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Principle. He then looks at the ‘sharing economies’ to which the Internet has given birth – the Open Source projects and the Wikipedias which exist on the voluntary efforts of volunteers.

Next he passes on to what he calls the ‘hybrid economies’ – companies such as Slashdot and Last.fm who offer a community but make money by advertising revenues. The subtle distinctions between these different models have to be handled carefully – otherwise sensibilities (and revenue streams) might be affected.

He looks at the ethical and practical conflicts between Old and New economies – those based on greed and naked competition, and those based in the ‘hybrid’ sector of sharing and cooperation. Eventually this takes us back to the issue of copyright, where he has some radical proposals for reform.

The first is that basically all genuinely amateur use of copyrighted material should be exempt from prosecution. It is pointless issuing legal writs against some kid sampling and posting on YouTube. The second is a suggestion that copyright is returned to its original status – a fourteen year term which is renewable if the owner so wishes.

Next comes a suggestion called ‘clear title’ – which means that the item being copyrighted needs to be clearly defined. Then comes the de-criminalisation of P2P file sharing, and the end of prosecuting sampling and mashups. As he suggests, supported by people in the pop music business, there is no evidence to prove that a sample or mashup detracts from sales of the original. All of these seem perfectly reasonable – though I suspect vested corporate interests would think otherwise.

This is a passionate and thought-provoking book on the ethics of copyright and creativity in an age of rapid technological change. It is radical, free-thinking, and a challenge to anyone participating in the digital world right now. Lawrence Lessig is a voice to take note of. But you’ll have to move fast. He seems to be in a permanent state of rapid development, and by the time you’ve read this, his latest book, he’ll have moved on elsewhere. If you go to his official site at lessig.org you’ll see what I mean.

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Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp.327, ISBN: 0143116134

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Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

academic writing: electronic versus print publishing

It had to happen: an email discussion so interesting, it has been published between paper covers. Don’t be put off by the long title: Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads is the account of a debate which embraces a number of important contemporary issues, from digital publishing to intellectual democracy and the politics of knowledge.

The discussion was one which exploded in the summer of 1994 on the discussion list VPIEJ-L [Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Electronic Journals]. Steven Harnad [then at Princeton] posted a brief article concerning the future of scholarly journals. His argument is that scholars working in what he calls the ‘esoteric’ fields of specialisms (particularly the sciences) do not need to publish on paper; they merely wish to be read by their peers. And since they don’t expect to be paid for what they make public, why shouldn’t they put their work straight onto the Net in preprint form. They can invite comment, make Whatever revisions they feel warranted, then archive the finished article in digital form. By following this procedure, peer review is maintained, but the system works more rapidly and less expensively. Most importantly, they can avoid the dinosaur procedures and high costs of traditional print journals. As he puts it himself (in characteristically succinct form):

What scholars…need is electronic journals that provide (1) rapid, expert peer-review, (2) rapid copy-editing, proofing and publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and retrievable electronic archive.

Many other advantages to this proposal were outlined during the debate which followed. Put everything On-Line, and access is free at the desktop twenty-four hours a day. Scholars in fields such as mathematics are already editing their own work for publication (using TeX) – so why should this work be done again less expertly by editors? Fellow scientists and librarians were quick to see the good sense of these proposals.

Objections followed too, of course. His critics come up with compromise and half-way-house solutions, mainly resting on the ‘tradition’ and ‘authority’ of the refereed and printed journal. But Harnad sticks to his proposal that for esoteric publications where authors simply want their work to be read, and do not expect any payment, there is no reason why their work should pass through the laborious, slow, and very expensive process of print publication.

Having established the ‘Subversive Proposal’, he defends his essentially clear view and simple suggestions against all comers. His are opinions which threaten those who currently control the means of production, distribution, and exchange of intellectual property. He takes on criticisms, subjects his own views to inspection, and sets a tone of ‘collegiate debate’ which is commendable.

The editors have retained on-page some of the typographic flavour of email discussion. There’s a lot of repetition of quotes from earlier messages – as well as some revealing date-stamping, which shows major contributions being answered by others within two hours. Quotations have mercifully been attributed, but for the sort of audience this book is aimed at, this degree of ‘full explanation’ may not really have been necessary. However, this is a very small quibble.

Midway through the debate there is major intervention by Naylor from Southampton University (UK) [where Harnad transferred a few weeks later]. Even though he wishes to support the subversive proposal, he points to the problems it would raise for paper publishers. It is then fascinating to see how Harnad subjects this contribution to rigorous clear-thinking and shows it to be held back by what he calls a “papyrocentric” view of publication. In the course of pursuing this argument he throws up a number of important distinctions to be made about the different forms ‘publication’ may take, and the implications these have for scholarship, economics, and intellectual culture in general.

The other main contributor is Paul Ginsparg, who maintains an archive of scholarly materials at Los Alamos which receives more than 20,000 hits per day. That is, more than twenty thousand physicists from all over the world download articles in electronic form – a medium which as he points out, has advantages possessed by no other:

there are many things that the new medium supports … including the overall fluid nature (on-line annotations, continuously graded refereeing, automated hyperlinks to distributed resources including non-text-based applications) that simply have no analogue in print.

He also mentions – en passant – the advantages of directly digitised text over scanned page images (a ratio of 1 to 500 in disk space required). These exchanges explore in concrete detail the possibilities of electronic publication which have been discussed in theory by people such as Ted Nelson, Jay Bolter, and George Landow. Here we have the financial and practical minutiae of editing, printing, and distributing knowledge in electronic form – with the World Wide Web looming larger and larger as each page is turned.

Discussion of costs becomes very detailed on the varying practices in different disciplines – yet none of the contributors seem to take into account the hidden subsidies of people doing editorial work in time which is paid for or made available by their universities. Bernard Naylor gets near to this point when he queries “the propriety of academic institutions using public money … in order to drive a viable industry … to the wall”. However, his observation is made to cast doubt on the wisdom of scholars exchanging information freely instead of passing it through the hands of all those poor publishers.

There are one or two other academic blind-spots. It would be easy for a reader to get the impression from some contributions that scholars do not profit from their work. This might be true superficially – they will not get rich by selling the words they write. But of course as a result of publishing they are able to secure promotion. The progression from lecturer, to senior lecturer, and on to Professor involves a not-inconsiderable salary increase – and let’s not forget that the writing of these articles and books is often done [largely] in time which is payed for at taxpayers’ or funding agencies’ expense. Which other occupations have paid sabbatical terms and periods of study-leave up to a year long? However, this is another strength of Harnad’s argument. He suggests that electronic publication releases authors from what he calls a Faustian pact with commercial publishers.

On a peripheral note, it is interesting that these experienced and fairly high-level scholars from fields as diverse as mathematics, psychology, and particle physics, all manage to communicate with each other in a manner which is clear, direct, and sometimes quite elegant. None of them resort to the silly show-off jargon of the academically modish and the fashion victims of ‘Cultural Theory’. They don’t even push forward their own subject specialisms, but concentrate on the issue in question – electronic communication between peers.

The more books one reads on electronic publication, Hypertext, and digital technology, the more one realises how convenient, comfortable portable, and aesthetically pleasing the printed book remains – produced by what Nicholas Negroponte describes as “squeezing ink onto dead trees”. But this does not invalidate Harnad’s proposal: if a text is urgent, hot, and written for a minority – we’ll read it on-screen, add comments, and send it back within the hour, rather than wait for the Dinosaur Publishing methods (and timescale) of ‘getting it onto paper’. The editors make the point that there is no sharp ‘answer’ or ‘conclusion’ to these issues. [In fact this debate is still currently raging in the Hypertext-Journal discussion group].

This is a book for specialists, but it encompasses issues which are part of the profound effect of the forces of digitisation and the Internet. The vested interests of commercial publishers and academic institutions may take some time to shift, but their fault lines are remorselessly exposed here. Harnad’s vision and his debate with contemporaries gives us a view of a world which is breaking apart, in the very process of being overtaken by the forces of New Technology.

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Ann Okerson and James O’Donnell (eds) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, An Internet Discussion about Scientific and Scholarly Journals and Their Future, Washington DC: Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing Association of Research Libraries, June 1995, pp.242, ISBN 0918006260

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Screen

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on graphic design, new media, and visual culture

Jessica Helfand is a critic of digital media and design matters. This collection of essays Screen first appeared in Eye, The New Republic, and Print Magazine. They deal with issues of visual design, digital culture, film, and media in general – including television, radio, and the Web. They are commendably short pieces, and it has to be said that they are elegantly written. Her formula is to take a single observation as a starting point, then spin it around with lots of cultural references to make gnomic statements about the state of culture in society.

The problem is that they are basically personal opinions, and she very rarely examines concrete examples in any detail. This approach leads her into the marshy swamps of false generalisation. On our sense of space in a digital age, she claims:

The computer is our connection to the world. It is an information source, an entertainment device, a communications portal, a production tool … But we are also its prisoners: trapped in a medium in which visual expression must filter through a protocol of uncompromising programming scripts

Yes, it’s true that using computers requires mastery of complex techniques – but we are not its prisoners, because our sense of space is formed by many sources beyond the computer screen.

It’s obvious that she is well informed on digital technology. She discusses issues of web design, navigation buttons, splash screens, and the cultural significance of ‘rollovers’. Yet she confuses navigation with content, and even thinks that email has a homogenising effect:

In the land of email we all ‘sound’ alike: everyone writes in system fonts … Software protocols require that we title our mail, a leftover model from the days of interoffice correspondence, which makes even the most casual letter sound like a corporate memo.

That is simply not true. Anybody who receives more than a couple of dozen emails a day knows that most people generate their own ‘voice’ using this medium. And the titles of some of the messages I receive would certainly never make the ‘corporate memo’ file.

The fact is that there’s lot of techno-scepticism here. Underneath the glossy media guru carapace, she is actually digitally uncertain. Yet she’s not averse to patting herself on the back; she drops lots of Post-Modernist names, and at its most acute, her writing comes dangerously close to something from Pseud’s Corner. Encountering a consumer quiz on chicken nuggets, she reports

while I would like to report that my thoughts … drifted to Martin Heidegger or Giles Deleuze, to existentialism or metaphysics or even postmodernism, alas, they did not.

Fortunately, the collection is rescued by two excellent essays on the designer Paul Rand, where her analyses are much more meaningful because they are focused on concrete examples. The first is an analysis of his work as a commercial designer, and the second an interesting account of his methods as a teacher at Yale.

These two essays are first rate pieces of work. It’s a shame that the rest of the collection doesn’t match up. But having said that, the book comes larded with praise by other designers, and copies at my local bookshop have been flying off the shelves – so you will need to judge for yourself.

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Jessica Helfand, Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001, pp.175, ISBN: 1568983107

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Semiotics: the basics

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Semiotics is ‘the study of signs’ – but what constitutes a ‘sign’? Basically, it can be anything. Its significance will be determined by the context in which it appears and the way in which it is interpreted. The colour red can suggest passion, danger, or heat, depending on where it occurs and who perceives it. Daniel Chandler’s introduction to the subject explains the history and the various strands of the subject in everyday language, using up-to-date examples.

Basically, his account covers the development of these ideas from the nineteenth-century Swiss linguist Saussure, to post-modern cultural theorists of the present day. Semiotics is a subject which can hardly escape the dominance of language as the most developed system of signs. This is because language has what he calls ‘double articulation’. What this means is that small units (words) can be signs, but they can be combined indefinitely with each other to form other, bigger, or more complex signs. However, the theory leads effortlessly into considerations of linguistics, philosophy, and critical theory, as well as cultural media such as television, photography, literature, cinema, and even academic writing. This is in addition to the more obvious day-to-day sign systems of facial expressions, food, clothing, and social gestures.

His guidance through this multi-discipline maze is thoughtful and clear, and even though you have to be prepared to dip your toes into the waters of critical theory, he has a reassuring manner which makes it a pleasant intellectual experience.

I enjoyed his chapters on metaphor, irony, and codes – though a few more examples of how the theory could be applied would be useful. It would also be interesting to consider why something deprecated in one code (switching point of view in film, for instance) is permitted in another, such as narrative fiction.

However, he summarises his exposition with a useful chapter outlining the strengths and limitations of semiotics as an analytic tool. I was slightly surprised he didn’t include more comment on the Internet as a cultural medium, because this book has its origins as a well-established web site where he has been posting help for his students in the last few years.

Semiotic theory claims that it can reveal the codes and conventions shaping what we might otherwise think of as ‘natural’, which makes it a powerful tool for analysing all forms of culture and human communication. This an excellent basic introduction to the subject, with a good glossary, an index, and a list of further reading.

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Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics, London: Routledge, 2nd edition 2007, pp. 328, ISBN: 0415363756

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Smartphones for Internet Access

April 11, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Today’s Internet users are relying on their smartphones or tablets for quick and easy Internet access, rather than laptops and desktops. And no wonder. It’s simply more convenient and portable. However, those with tight finances haven’t always been able to enjoy the benefits of 4G connectivity. But this will all change with the announcement of T-Mobile’s reinvigorated challenger strategy. This offers more affordable options to cash-strapped customers. When subscribers to T-Mobile compare cell phone plans with those of other service providers, T-Mobile comes out on top as one of the most affordable cell phone carriers with reliable service.

With mobile devices increasingly imitating each other’s features, it’s the quality and cost of the service that will determine user choice. T-Mobile’s challenger strategy, outlined by CEO and President Philipp Humm recently, focuses on making 4G services affordable and establishing growth for the business by investing $4 billion on network modernization and 4G evolution.

"We want to be known for delivering the best value in wireless because of the advanced technology we deliver at an affordable price," Humm said. "Over the next two years, we’re prioritizing and investing in initiatives designed to get T-Mobile back to growth in the years ahead—beginning with the transformation of our network."

Over 90 percent of T-Mobile device sales in the fourth quarter were from 3G and 4G smartphones, and data usage as well as smartphone adoption continue to accelerate. This has prompted the telecommunications giant to improve its data services to keep loyal customers happy as well as attract new subscribers.

"Today we operate America’s Largest 4G Network delivering a fast and reliable 4G data experience with Evolved High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+)" T-Mobile Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray said. "Launching Long Term Evolution (LTE) next year lets us take advantage of technology infrastructure advancements and benefit from a more mature LTE device ecosystem, while continuing to meet the growing demand for data with a powerful 4G experience."

T-Mobile plans to deliver better performance and coverage to its customers by improving its 4G network infrastructure with "new antenna integrated radios on many of its cell towers." The company may even be the first carrier in North America to accomplish this feat.

These technological developments should give users access to much higher rates of data transfer, and a smoother user experience. For instance, they can produce significant improvements to battery life, and quicker wake-from-idle time. This will be similar to an always-on connection. That’s the sort of service mobile device users increasingly expect in a fully-connected environment.

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Strangers on a Train

May 25, 2010 by Roy Johnson

psychology, mystery, and murder

Strangers on a Train was Patricia Highsmith’s first novel. Published in 1950, it was quickly made into a film the following year by Alfred Hitchcock. The film become a classic, and it is this version which has become better known. Unless you are only twelve years old or have been living on Mars for the last few decades, you’ll already know the basic plot outline. Two men meet on a train. Guy has an estranged wife standing in the way of his romance with a wealthy socialite, whilst Bruno has a rich father whom he hates because he refuses to give him an allowance.

Bruno suggests to Guy that they ‘exchange murders’ – removing their respective obstacles to happiness. He argues that nobody will be able to assign motive, because the assailants are unknown to the victims, and nobody will have any reason to think that the two plotters knew each other, because they have never met before. At first the two men appear to be polar opposites. Bruno is a spoiled emotional child, a psychopath, a drunk, and a failure. Guy on the other hand is a cultivated professional, a successful architect with a promising future. But as the novel progresses they slowly become more like each other. Both of them have mother fixations, and both possess a gun. Guy reads Plato and Bruno carries poetry around in his wallet. In fact the whole plot is driven by a series of parallel events, repetitions, and echoes which link the two men.

Bruno is infatuated with Guy, and murders his troublesome estranged wife in an effort to please him. Despite being oppressed by Bruno’s attentions, Guy eventually murders Bruno’s father in an effort to put the ‘pact’ between them at an end. But in fact this draws them even closer to each other.

Those who have seen the film will have to put Hitchcock’s plot (written by Raymond Chandler and Ben Hecht) out of their minds. The original novel (quite apart from the twin murders) has more subtlety and depth, and is also a much darker piece of work. It’s also a curious blending of literary genres. Superficially, it is a crime thriller, but it has rich seams of psychological analysis running through it, as well as meditations on existential philosophy (which was popular at the time the novel was written).

Farley Granger and Robert Walker

Bruno takes a Nietzchean view of the world, seeing himself as some supra-moral being who can float above the pettiness of everyday human beings. Guy on the other hand is racked with guilt and despair, and despite the fact that they appear to go undetected in their plans, Guy in the end feels driven to make a Raskolnikov-like confession of the diabolical plot into which he has allowed himself to be drawn.

The outcome is disastrous for both of them, but the novel offers no comforting moral reassurance. The world it creates is one of ethical ambiguity and free-floating malevolence.

Highsmith is an interesting literary stylist. She has an attractive habit of what might be called narrative ellipsis – leaving out parts of the story for the reader to supply. She is obviously attracted to violence, sexual ambiguity, and the perverse in life. She deliberately courts the grotesque and shocking, and of course she was originally from the American South, famous for its Gothic.

Her characters drink and smoke to excess (as she did) and they are drawn into forming destructive and humiliating relationships (as she was) of a kind we normally associate with Dostoyevski (who was one of her favourite writers). See Hitchcock’s film version of Strangers on a Train by all means: it’s one of his class acts, with lots of witty touches. But for the real thing, do yourself a favour and read Patricia Highsmith’s original novel. It’s a disturbing, often uncomfortable experience – but not one you will easily forget.

Alfred Hitchcock film 1951

Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, London: Penguin, 1999, pp.256, ISBN 0140037969

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The End of Print

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated guide to popular US avant-garde typographist

David Carson designs jarring and visually chaotic magazine spreads, posters, and print ads which have consistently challenged the boundaries of legibility and typography. His modest San Diego, California, studio has become the epicentre of a new graphic anti-aesthetic that has stirred ongoing debate among fellow designers such as Neville Brody, who observed that his work prophesies ‘the end of print’. This comment inspired the title of Carson’s new book, the first comprehensive collection of his decade-long output of graphic imagery.

In past lives, Carson was a top-ranked competitive surfer and a high school sociology teacher. However, during a two-week workshop on graphic arts he discovered his calling. He landed his first major design assignment as art director of Transworld Skateboarding in 1983, and he later moved on to Surf magazine. In 1990, Carson headed the much-praised Beach Culture.

This is where his irreverent but often ingenious layouts consistently pitted editorial substance against graphic style. Carson’s creative vision came out on top – in its six-issue stint, Beach Culture won over 150 design awards. As the art director of Ray Gun, his unconventional look has been shamelessly emulated by a slew of similar start-up magazines.

Recently, Carson has shifted from spokesman for Left-Coast subculture to the corporate arena, taking on larger projects that include print ads for Nike and a television commercial for Citibank, as well as collaborations with musician David Byrne and photographer Albert Watson.

The End of Print was designed by Carson, and ironically, this proves to be the most disappointing aspect of the book. For those designers and readers who want to learn more about Carson’s graphic work and philosophy must do so on his terms. The text of the book is presented in the confusing and often incoherent typography typical of a Ray Gun layout. Those not willing to read the garbled introduction and inarticulate essays may surrender in frustration. However the book manages to stand on its own as a purely visual document, a fascinating chronicle of David Carson’s creative mind.

Like the collage artist Kurt Schwitters, who collected his materials from curbside rubbish, Carson finds much of his inspiration in the visual garbage of modern-day living. Handlettered signs, torn and layered poster kiosks and the eroded storefronts encountered in city streets serve as backdrops which Carson equates into the digital realm. Many of these found objects and photographs are reproduced in the book and they offer insight into Carson’s design approach.

One page reproduces a Carson ad selling a Beach Culture T-shirt sight unseen, with the premise that “if you like the look of the magazine, you probably would like the shirt.” Likewise, if you like the design of David Carson, you probably will like this book.

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Lewis Blackwell and David Carson, The End of Print: The Graphic Design Of David Carson, Chronicle Books, 1995, pp.160, ISBN: 0811830241

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The Long Tail

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how endless choice is creating unlimited demand

Chris Anderson is the editor of WIRED magazine. This book started as an article there, took off, and was expanded via seminars, speeches, and further research. It has now become one of the most influential essays on the new sCommerce. Anderson’s notion is relatively simple, but its implications profound. He argues that because the digitisation of commerce allows more people into the trading arena, and because minority goods can be made available alongside best-sellers, the consumer therefore has a much wider choice and cheaper prices. This gives rise to a new phenomena – niche markets – also known in marketing-speak as the ‘long tail’. This is the part of the commercial results graph where returns begin to flatten out and slope towards zero.

But – and this is a very big BUT – in the new digital world they don’t slope off completely. And if you add up all the income from these many tail end transactions, it can be more than the total sales from the Short Head part of the graph.

Once you have grasped these basic issues, the lessons are clear. The profit is to be made in shifting bits, not atoms, plus lower overheads means more profit, because you can sell more. Much of this is possible because the price of electronic storage has now dropped almost to zero, and digital distribution has removed transport costs – as well as making delivery immediate. A physical bricks-and-mortar store has limited shelf space to stock goods, but Peer-2-Peer file-sharers make the downloaders’ options almost limitless.

The only way to reach all the way down the Tail—from the biggest hits down to all the garage bands of past and present—is to abandon atoms entirely and base all transactions , from beginning to end, in the world of bits.

Much of the new digital economy is amazingly counter-intuitive. Amazon for instance has allowed its own competitors to sell their goods on its site. The net result – more profit for Amazon, and the rise of the small second-hand book trader – the very businesses people thought would be put out of work by online trading.

Other positive elements in the new digital economy are the rise of reader reviews and recommendations; the back catalogue becomes valuable again; and new niche markets become available for more buyers.

Anderson looks at the technological history which has made the long tail possible, using a typical Amazon purchase as a model: postal delivery service, standard ISBN numbers, credit cards, relational databases, and barcodes. Of course Amazon’s genius in its latest phase is it gets other people to hold all the stock and fulfil the orders.

He’s a great believer in reputations and taste being formed by social media – the YouTube and MySpace worlds in which personal recommendations and fan reviews help forge best-sellers more than any amount of advertising hype.

There are lots of interesting nuggets thrown out as he makes his way through the socio-economic implication of all this. Such as for instance the fact that Google searches counteract the tyranny of the New over the well-established. That’s because they rank pages by the number of incoming links, which favours those which have had the time to acquire them.

Even though he goes into some economic theory, the study remains accessible and readable throughout – largely because he uses everyday examples with which most readers will be able to identify: the purchase of music CDs, DVDs of films, and supermarket food purchases.

This is a really inspiring book, and a must for anyone remotely connected with the online world. Even if some of his estimations and predictions might be overstated, it offers a glimpse into processes taking place that will change the way we think about business and technology. Time and time again, I thought “Yes! I’ve already started doing that!” – ordering more books from Amazon’s marketplace traders, buying out-of-print titles at knockdown prices, exploring new music, and looking out for recommendations on the new social media. I would rank this book alongside Nicolas Negroponte’s 1996 study Being Digital as a seminal influence for the decade in which it is published.

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Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, London: Random House, 2006, pp.238, ISBN: 184413850X

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The Whole Internet

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

updated version of first complete Internet guide

The Whole Internet was one of the earliest-ever computer books to become a best-seller. That was in 1992, when the first major wave of Net users needed information, and there as very little of it about. Ed Krol produced a manual which was well informed, comprehensive, and examined the technology in detail. However, it wasn’t very easy to read, and you needed to grapple with an arcane command-line interface which assumed you had grown up with Unix as a second language.

This new version is an update and complete re-write. It is based on the big changes which have come over the Net and the way it is used in the last eight years. Number one development of course is the Web, which moves up from a subsidiary chapter in the original to occupy the centre of this edition. Former features such as Gopher, Archie, and Veronica on the other hand are relegated to a footnote section called ‘Archaic Search Technologies’.

But this difference also makes the manual easier to read and understand. The emphasis has been changed from how the Net works, to how it can be used. There is far less impenetrable code cluttering the pages. Instead we get clean screen shots and nice photographs of what the Net looks like on screen, not at the DOS prompt. Ed Krol has been been very fortunate in choosing his co-author, and their co-operation has produced a far more readable book.

They cover all the basics which someone new to the Net would need to know. How to send email and follow the conventions of netiquette.; what to do with attachments; how to behave on mailing lists; understanding newsgroups; and how to deal with security, privacy, and Spam. They explain how to choose from a variety of Web browsers (including even one for the Palm Pilot). I was struck by how much more accessible all this technology has become in the short time since I struggled through the first edition.

This radical shift in user-centred design is also reflected by the inclusion of completely new chapters on Net commerce, banking, gaming, and personal finance. After a chapter on how to create your own Webages, there is an introduction to what are called ‘esoteric and emerging technologies’ – conferencing, streaming audio and video, and electronic books. This is a very successful attempt to cover the full range of the Net and its activities in a non-snobbish manner. They end with practical information – maximising the effectiveness of your Internet connection, searching techniques, and they offer a thick index of recommended resources.

The original Whole Internet may have been a more striking phenomenon because of its originality at the time, but this new edition has the potential to reach even more readers, largely because it explains the Net and shows how it can be used in a way which is much more attractive and accessible. It has gone straight onto my bibliography of essential Net reading, and I will certainly be recommending it to all my students.

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Kiersten Connor-Sax and Ed Krol, The Whole Internet: The Next Generation, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 1999, pp.542, ISBN 1565924282

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Txtg: The Gr8 Db8

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

text messaging analysed, described, and defended

Ever since Text messaging first began there have been moans and complaints that it was lowering standards of literacy, corrupting our youth, and bringing about the collapse of Western civilization. Even the normally rational John Sutherland, writing in the Guardian, complained about texting:

Linguistically, it’s all pigs ear … it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates.

David Crystal has answers for every one of these common objections. Texting isn’t even that new: writing in abbreviated forms has been around for a long time. Other languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) do not use vowels as part of their writing system. In actual fact, the amount of abbreviating and acronyms such as ROFL is quite small. And most convincing of all to me, users in other languages all follow more or less the same ‘rules’ for abbreviation.

What’s more, the use of pictograms and logographs have been around for a long time; the rebus or word puzzle is an ancient tradition in UK and other cultures; and reducing terms to their initial letters is deeply enshrined in our culture – as in pm, NATO, eg, asap, OK, and GHQ.

The same is true for omitting letters, or ‘clipping’ as it’s known technically. Mr and Mrs are cases in point. Any form of word shortening makes complete sense in an SMS system, and nobody has any problem failing to recognise Tues(day), approx(imately), biog(raphy), mob(ile), gov(ernment), poss(ible), and uni(versity.

Crystal has a good chapter on the amazing literary aspirations of the SMS poets and writers – people who compose haikus, short stories, and even serial novels using this extraordinarily restricted form.

In terms of users, women are more adept and enthusiastic than men, and another interesting feature he reveals is that text messaging was late to take off in the USA – for two reasons. One was that phone calls were cheaper there, and the other is that many people need to drive to get about, unlike European countries and Japan, where the country is smaller and more people use public transport.

The content of text messages varies from personal greetings and co-ordinating social activity to political electioneering, advertising, and even schemes to quit smoking. Crystal lists plenty of examples which I imagine will be good stimulus material for the A level students doing language projects who will find this book particularly useful.

At a more advanced level, he also looks at how other languages handle text messaging. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that all of them do more or less the same thing, though some even mix English abbreviations with their own language – which is called ‘code-mixing’. This is an example from German:

mbsseg = mail back so schnell es geht (‘as fast as you can’)

He ends by allaying the fears of all those who think text messaging lowers any kind of standards of literacy, or communication. In fact the reverse is true. And to prove that he’s done his homework he ends with a huge glossary of terms and multiple lists of text message abbreviations in eleven different languages. U cnt gt btr thn tht!

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David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.256, ISBN: 0199571333

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