Philosophy, et cetera

Lifehacker has a Thanksgiving list of the 50 free apps they're most thankful for, which is worth checking out.  I especially recommend:

* LastPass - for internet security, and incredible convenience -- everyone should have this.
* Dropbox - easy-to-use cloud storage and backup: don't lose all your work when your computer explodes.
* Adblock Plus
* F.lux - warms screen colour at night, both looks better and reduces insomnia
* Mint - to easily keep track of your finances

I just got a new laptop, and figured I should collate some useful links while my memory is still fresh. Feel free to add your own suggestions...

I like having students submit their work electronically, rather than dealing with reams of paper. But I don't so much like dealing with weird file formats (e.g. Microsoft's docx, or Apple's extensionless documents), or the bother of downloading and uploading attachments one at a time. Fortunately, I recently came across the perfect technical solution (thanks to Andrew Cullison and Cédric Eyssette): use Google Docs with python scripts to automate the electronic transactions. In this post I'll explain the process step-by-step. It takes a little bit of set-up, but saves a heap of tedium down the line.

If you're currently using Windows, you might want to give the open source, flexible, faster and more secure Ubuntu Linux a try (esp. their Netbook edition, specially customized for smaller screens). You don't need to wipe over your Windows installation or anything. Instead, you can simply set up a "dual boot" system where you have the option to boot into either Windows or Ubuntu on startup.

Given my sporadic posting of late, perhaps it's a good time to remind any less-geeky readers of the wonders of RSS feeds.

In short: Rather than having to manually visit each blog or website you follow to check for updates, an RSS reader (like Google Reader) keeps track of the website updates for you, and collects any new articles for you to read in one convenient location.

Interesting stuff in the NYT:

Some imagine a situation in which the bulk of introductory course materials are online, as videos or interactive environments; students engage with the material when convenient and show up only for smaller seminars. “In an on-demand environment, they’re thinking, ‘Do we really need to show up face to face at 8 a.m. with 500 other students to take Psychology 101?’ ” Mr. Schonfeld says. [...]

Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?

After a year of use, I must say that my Kindle [reviewed here] has turned out to be even more useful than I'd expected. I used to read a lot on my (backlit, eye-straining) laptop screen, but I've now found ways to shift pretty much all my heavy reading on to the Kindle. Here are some of the most useful (non-obvious) tricks and tips I've found for extracting online content:

Any computer scientists in the audience? I often find myself pondering what kinds of communications/IT tools (e.g. email, blogs, forums, wikis) are best suited for various purposes. I'm sure computer scientists and software engineers must have an official name for this field of inquiry, but for now I'll just call it 'information architecture'. Anyway, I'm especially struck by how organizations typically over-rely on email communications, even when it should be clear that it isn't the right tool for the job.

For example, a work team (or academic department) will typically use mass emailing as their primary (or even sole) form of digital communication. But email is very poorly suited as a medium for large-group discussion. I see two major reasons for this: (1) the discussion is scattered across myriad individual emails, making it more difficult to refer back to past installments, and easier to lose replies. (2) Not everyone in the group will be interested in every such discussion, and so may not appreciate having their inbox cluttered by the constant stream of babble. A discussion board or 'forum' solves both these problems. So I think any such team (or department, etc.) that's likely to benefit from such discussions should ensure that they have a dedicated forum for this purpose.

A second example that jumps out at me is notification. Don't get me wrong: email is great for issuing one-off, instant notifications that may be of interest to others in one's team (department). But for serial or regular use, greater customization is called for. It's just plain rude for (say) the Italian Studies department to spam me every week about their upcoming public lectures. Rather than forcing such notification on students in other departments against our will, they should simply offer an RSS feed (or similar) which we may choose to subscribe to or not.* Similar lessons apply to trans-institutional announcements, e.g. conference announcements, "calls for papers", etc. It's completely backwards to rely on ad hoc email forwarding (all those "please distribute" emails sent to department secretaries) for this sort of thing. Better communications infrastructure should be put in place. For example, the 'PhilosophyCFP blog', if sufficiently well-implemented (I haven't looked closely), could render all those annoying CFP emails redundant.

* (Indeed, an optimally organized university would centralize such offerings, letting us pick and choose which departmental -- or even sub-field -- public notification lists we want to opt in or out of.)

These lessons may even apply to regular intra-departmental announcements: though I don't mind these as much, it wouldn't hurt to set things up so that recipients can pick and choose which regular departmental notifications they wish to receive. (But in this case, at least, the benefits might be modest enough as to not be worth the bother of setting up a better communications infrastructure.)

Of course, email overuse is a small crime in the grand scheme of things -- i.e. compared to the inexcusable overuse of snail mail. But don't get me started on the absurdity of requiring (e.g.) job applicants to transmit their information on dead trees...

P.S. Is there a standard administrative support position with this job description, i.e. an 'informational architect' to investigate ways the organization could streamline its communications? There should be.

The wonderful PhilPapers website is now open to all. As David Chalmers introduces it:

The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and books in philosophy. Around this database, the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums, for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more.

The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to the site and try it yourself (we've compiled a basic introduction to some of the features). Even a casual browser can browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on. However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many more sophisticated features. If you do this, you'll have a profile page from which you can set up personal research tools such as bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email). Your profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name matching), which you can edit where appropriate. With a user account, you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums...

This is the future of philosophy on the internet. Check it out.

Wonderful news: I've discovered an easy way to convert scanned PDF files (e.g. from JSTOR) so that they're readable on my Kindle. I simply email the PDF to my gmail account, and (thanks to Google's new OCR capabilities) from there I can "open as HTML" and save the result as a plain text file. As an added bonus, this process preserves page number information (normally lost in Amazon's conversions).

Before transferring to the Kindle, it might be worth tidying up the text file to make it more readable. This is especially easy using the command line in Linux -- I use the 'fmt' command to remove excess whitespace and line-breaks, and 'tr -d' to delete any annoying characters (in my case, asterisks) that one's browser saw fit to scatter throughout the saved text file. This is all taken care of by the single line:
cat oldfile.txt | tr -d \* | fmt -u -w 999 > newfile.txt

Perfect!

Update: a few further notes...
(1) Acrobat Reader is sometimes able to "save as text" even scanned-image PDFs. (I guess these must be "image+text" marked-up PDFs, rather than raw scanned images. But they look the same to the naked eye.)

(2) The method listed for JSTOR articles won't work for two-column scans (e.g. of books). Linux script 'unpnup' enables one to convert such files to single-column PDFs however. PaperCrop is a more powerful solution that works easily in Windows.

(3) Sometimes a book scan is of such bad quality that OCR just can't interpret it. In this case, one can use PDFread to cut up the images into kindle-sized bites, and assemble the images directly into a .prc or .mobi (Kindle-readable) file. This way one can read the scanned images themselves on one's Kindle, without them being shrunk to an illegible size. I've found that this works extremely well.

Don't miss the 75th Philosophers' Carnival, which includes our recent discussion of Moral Experts and a fun discussion over at Hallq's place concerning 'What Richard Chappell is Wrong About'!

Sympoze ('Digg for philosophers') looks promising. If it came to average a couple dozen users active (voting) per day, it could prove to be a very valuable filter for online philosophical content. Depending on certain technical fixes -- in particular, improved bookmarklet and blog-button functionality -- I'd give it better than even odds of success. What do you reckon?

P.S. I should finally be able to make a start on the PhilReview draft-sharing project soon (depending on a couple of factors outside my control). In the meantime, feel free to contribute any further design suggestions using the wiki.

I must thank Andrew Cullison for introducing me to Ubuntu ("Linux for Human Beings") last month. To pass along the favour, I'd introduce it as follows:

Ubuntu : Windows  ::  Firefox : Internet Explorer

It's free (and open), easy to install and customize, very fast, extremely secure -- what more could you want? The OS comes with all the essential free software -- Firefox, Open Office, etc. -- and you can easily download more from the 'Add/remove' item in the main menu. You can even download 'Wine', a Windows emulator, in case you have programs that only run on the inferior Microsoft product.

One minor annoyance is that because it only comes with support for open formats, there's a bit of extra setup required if you want to be able to play mp3 files, commercial DVDs, etc. But the instructions are easy enough to follow, and it only takes a minute. Another minor difficulty is that certain proprietary packages (e.g. Skype) are not initially accessible through Ubuntu's package managers at all, but again it is easy enough to add outside applications when desired (as I was relieved to recently discover). My next task is to learn how to use the terminal.

Any other downsides? There aren't many commercial games made for Linux, so hard-core gamers probably won't be converting any time soon. But there's plenty there for casual use -- including free clones of Civilization, SimCity, etc. I guess the main negative factor is just the bother of switching. It doesn't take much work though, and the advantages are pretty significant.

One big plus for me was that my old OS (Windows Vista Home Edition) didn't have networking capabilities. Once I switched to Ubuntu, I could log on to the Princeton network and create my university webpage from my laptop. Very convenient.

But again, in the long run it's probably the extra speed and security that are the main advantages of Ubuntu. (And perhaps the feel-good factor if you like to support the Open Source movement!) No more viruses, system crashes, and other staples of computing on MS Windows.

To get Ubuntu, simply follow these installation instructions. (Note that you can try out Ubuntu from the installation CD, to make sure you like it, prior to installing.) Pass it on.

I finally gave into temptation and bought myself a Kindle e-book reader, which I'm so far very impressed with.

I immediately went to manybooks.net and downloaded a couple dozen literary classics (Candide, Metamorphosis, Ulysses, etc.), all free. I also transferred a couple dozen philosophy PDFs that I've been meaning to read.

Unfortunately, one of these was a scanned-image pdf (JSTOR style), which didn't transfer at all well. The Kindle shrinks images to fit, so I could barely make out the words. So much for JSTOR. [Update: fixed!] But I was relieved to find that the others (including ordinary text-based PDFs) convert and display perfectly reasonably well. I think the only other downside to bear in mind here is that you lose page numbering. Kindle includes a replacement measure called "location", but that won't be much help if you're trying to sync with other people who are reading non-Kindle versions of the text. Oh, and logical symbols get mangled -- '$' in place of the existential quantifier, etc.

Other than that, I have no serious complaints. I find the Kindle very pleasant and comfortable to read from -- the main selling point is, after all, its ink-based display technology -- there's no glare, so it feels like reading a book, unlike backlit computer screens. (Minor aesthetic complaint: the background is a newspaperish gray rather than pure white.) It's small, light, and easy to hold. Some people complain that it's too easy to accidentally bump the 'next page' button, but I haven't found this a problem myself, so long as I put it to sleep when carrying rather than reading it.

I like the navigation a lot. It's actually quicker and easier than turning a page in a regular book. Granted, you can't flick through multiple pages nearly so well, but there is a 'search' feature which more than compensates for this. Other options allow you to 'highlight' text, 'add notes', or 'bookmark' pages for future reference. And you don't need to worry about losing your place, since whenever you open a document, it picks up from wherever you previously left off. (I should note that the tiny keyboard is made for thumbing, not typing, so you won't be writing treatises in the margins. But it's handy enough for jotting down quick thoughts as you read.)

Aside from comfortably reading e-books and online papers, the other great feature of the Kindle is free mobile internet. The display is a bit awkward, and - combined with the clunky little keyboard - you certainly wouldn't want to use it as your primary form of internet access. But it's nice to have access to email on the go, and my feed reader (bloglines) works tolerably well on it, too. (I'm sure the iPhone is much better in these respects, but I'm deterred by the price tag.)

[Update: it turns out I hardly ever use the Kindle's internet access -- it's just too slow and clunky. But note that you can use free services like Kindlefeeder.com (from your home computer) to convert rss/atom feeds to kindle format, and even automatically deliver the converted feeds to your kindle. See 'Read Anything on Kindle' for more detail.]

Other features are fun but superficial. There's an mp3 player, but the sound quality isn't great. There's a (black-and-white) picture viewer, and it's nice to be able to carry around photos of loved ones, but the resolution is far from photo-quality. I hear you can even play Minesweeper, but I fortunately haven't gotten that bored of reading yet!

Is it worth $399? It is for me, though it may not be for everybody. There's a lot of free digital content out there that I can now take full advantage of. In particular, my main reason for buying the Kindle was to read online philosophy papers, which it's great for. But now that I've got it, I find that I'm also appreciating the opportunity to read all those old literary classics that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten around to. I don't expect to buy much paid content from the Kindle store, since I don't tend to buy much of anything, but you might want to compare prices if you're into that kind of thing. (I gather the Kindle versions tend to be slightly cheaper than hardcopies, and they're conveniently "delivered" wirelessly to your device in minutes.) At present, selection seems to be limited mostly to new bestsellers and old public domain works. So be warned: anything in between may not be available.

Full disclosure: Amazon will give me a 10% referral fee if you buy it via this link!

Watch the video, or read the transcript. First, the depressing:

Wikipedia... represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought...

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Then, the hopeful:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

See also my review of Clay Shirky's book.

Googleblog notes that today is Document Freedom Day. This reminds me that I should stop locking up my work and other information in Microsoft's .doc format, and instead use the standardized open document formats (.odt), which are universal rather than vendor-specific.

Imagine if we all wrote in invisible ink that could only be read by wearing special Microsoft-designed glasses. That would seem unwise, at least if there were better alternatives available (i.e. 'open inks' that anyone's glasses could read). What if not everyone has the special glasses? (Do you really want to make being a Microsoft customer a precondition for communicating with you?) Further: how can we be sure that these special glasses will continue to be made in future? We would be needlessly exposing ourselves to the risk of being unable to read our own words a few decades down the line.

Do yourself and your non-Microsoft-using friends a favour, and download an open document application today. (I personally recommend Open Office, a free and high-powered alternative to Microsoft's entire office suite.)

A common theme in analyses of the Internet is the transformation from a 'filter then publish' to a 'publish, then filter' world. The high costs of publishing previously forced the former model on us: anyone who wanted to see their work in print first had to win over the gatekeepers (editors of newspapers, journals, etc.). But now anyone and his dog can publish for free over the Internet. So the contemporary challenge is post-publication filtering, i.e. how to find the gems in the torrent of information out there.

One option is to turn to the old gatekeepers for guidance. Anyone can self-publish, but not everyone can publish in the pages of the NY Times or Nous. So we can keep ourselves in a world of informational scarcity if we limit our attention to particular locations which impose pre-publication filtering.

That's fine as far as it goes, but it is an extremely conservative response to the new information ecology. It makes us no worse off than before, at least. But it's worth raising the question: might we have an opportunity now to improve the way we do things? I've already mentioned open-access, which is of course a no-brainer. But that is just a minor tweak, still firmly within the old 'filter then publish' paradigm. To be clear: I think there is an important place for this, at least for the foreseeable future. But I wonder whether we could supplement this with some form of more widely distributed post-publication peer review.

I imagine, for example, the Philosophy Papers Online database could be expanded to allow registered philosophers to rate and/or review the papers found therein. (If measures are needed to 'guard the guardians', these reviews themselves could be subject to peer review -- Slashdot style -- and weighted accordingly. Other online communities have already solved the technical question of how to create a software infrastructure that supports peer production. All we have to do is implement it.)

This would make PhOnline a vastly more valuable resource, since users could browse the most highly rated papers, using these peer ratings as a guide to the most important new scholarship. (At present, users may search by author, title, or date, but there is no way to gauge quality.) This would only work if other philosophers put in the effort to review their colleagues' work. But we already do this for journals, so I don't see why we wouldn't also do this for each other. Depending on how it's set up (i.e. not anonymous review), there could be additional incentives to perform this service, as quality reviewers would benefit from reputational gains within the profession. It could even be technologically enforced, e.g. by requiring that users offer a few reviews before they are allowed to submit another paper of their own to the database.

(In that case, perhaps it would be best to start this project from scratch, rather than trying to build upon an already existing database of papers.)

John Holbo offers a variation on this sentiment (but restricted, I take it, to work that has already passed through the old channels of official credentialing -- I would want to expand this to "unpublished" drafts):

If overproduction is inevitable, which I grant, the primary question is not how to fund it but how to ameliorate the damage it does us. (Having gone overboard by describing excess scholarship as 'effluent' I should probably add: producing things no one wants to read is perfectly harmless so long as these undesired things do not collectively block the road.) The question is how to overproduce with intellectual dignity?

The answer, I think, is that a supplement is needed to a pre-publication peer review process that inevitably hyper-produces hypertrophic 'conformist excellence within the heuristic contraints ...' The supplement should be a hyper-efficient post-publication peer review process that tells you what you might actually want to read.

A simple normative principle. Every scholarly book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed and reviewed - should have it's own lively blog comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a modest measure of sustained, considerate, intelligent chat from a few dozen souls who specialize in that area shouldn't have been published as a book - i.e. after several years labor and an average production cost of $25,000. Turning the point around: any book worth that time and expense, that fails to be widely read, discussed and reviewed - that is not given it's own blog comment box - has been dramatically failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born. [...]

Why is this really quite low normative standard of healthy discussion not presently met? The technological barriers are non-existent, the financial barriers negligible. It's cultural dysfunction. Sheer institutional sclerosis.

The Real Circulation Problem - of which low book sales are a symptom - concerns ideas, not paper. The academic humanities have simply never grown hyper-efficient networks for post-publication peer review that are remotely adequate to the excessive volume of peer-reviewed scholarship generated, especially in just the last few decades. This is the real scholarly argument for moving aggressively online, although it is bolstered by many economic arguments. As I have written before, the beast has poor circulation. The only way to get the blood of ideas moving is to rub its sorry limbs vigorously with ... conversations. Intelligent, bloggy bookchat by scholars, to label this crucial ingredient as the essentially unpretentious thing it is. That isn't scholarship; but - in a world with too much scholarship - it may be an indispensable complement to scholarship.

Cf. Tyler Cowen, for a more radical long-term projection:

I don't envision the free access system as the status quo but free. Papers would be ranked directly in terms of status and popularity rather than ranked through the journals they are published in. Ultimately there wouldn't be journals and this would make a big difference as journals are the current carrier of selective incentives and status rewards...

I'm not sure about this -- what about blind review? We'll presumably want to retain this somehow, if not by journals than via some similar formal means of competition. (Though others have suggested that googling spells the doom of blind review, in which case it's hard to imagine why journals would survive in the long term.) In any case, journals certainly aren't going anywhere in the short term. So I'm really proposing a supplementary system (not a replacement) that I think we'd all benefit from right away.

Update: I've shifted discussion of my specific proposal to a new post.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations explores the power of new communications technology and social media to transform society. As a blogger, it's a topic I find very appealing.

Shirky begins with a premise about human nature: we're social animals and like to form groups. Recent changes have radically reduced the costs of doing so, broadening access to "capabilities [e.g. publishing] previously reserved for professionals" (p.17) and thus empowering people to organize themselves, with occasionally spectacular results. Shirky writes (p.22):

The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.

The fuller explanation involves Coasean economics. (1) Note that transaction costs would skyrocket if everyone worked freelance, constantly negotiating in the marketplace. That's why we have firms ("organizations"): it can be more efficient to have managers simply order their employees about. (2) However, managerial overhead brings its own costs. This implies what Shirky calls a Coasean floor, beneath which lie potentially valuable activities that cannot be profitably realized by either market or institutional means. However (p.47):

Now that it is possible to achieve large-scale co-ordination at low cost, a third category has emerged: serious, complex work, taken on without institutional direction. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure, because they lay under the Coasean floor.

The cost of all kinds of group activity--sharing, cooperation, and collective action--have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath the floor are now coming to light. We didn't notice how many things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.

It's a nice enough analysis, but the real value of this book lies in its illustrative examples. Shirky discusses everything from Flickr, blogs, and open source software, to flash mobs, political protesters, Wiccan meetups, and Catholic lay groups self-organizing for the first time ever to reform the Church.

There are also little insights scattered throughout the book. Consider, for example, the common disdain felt towards the "drivel" posted on Livejournal and the like (pp.85-6):

We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us... if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, as opposed to reading their post, it would be clear that you were the weird one...

Most user-generated content isn't "content" at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a relative is "family-generated content." Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life--gossip, little updates, thinking out loud--but now it's done in the same medium as professionally produced material.

I also liked his point about the impossibility of full-blown interactivity with the famous, no matter what technology we might come up with. To be famous is to receive more incoming attention than one could realistically hope to reciprocate (by any means). So even bloggers, when they hit the big time, are forced to become mere broadcasters rather than responsive participants in an open conversation. (A good reason not to desire fame, I should think!)

The book also contains some interesting thoughts on political and social change, especially the importance of "lower[ing] the hurdles to doing something in the first place, so that people who cared a little could participate a little, while being effective in aggregate." (pp.181-2):

Having a handful of highly motivated people and a mass of barely motivated ones used to be a recipe for frustration. The people who were on fire wondered why the general population didn't care more, and the general population wondered why those obsessed people didn't just shut up. Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves.

One thing Shirky emphasizes throughout is the way that so-called "cyberspace" is growing increasingly intertwined with meatspace. He discusses using his mobile phone, and a service called 'dodgeball', to learn that a friend of a friend was currently in the same NYC bar. Conversation ensued: "I'm Clay. If Dennis were here, he'd introduce us." (p.219) Pretty amazing, really, and something we can expect to become increasingly common.

Finally, a couple of cute philosophy quotes:

The groups now adopting social tools form the experimental wing of political philosophy, a place where hard questions of group governance are being worked out. [p.? lost it.]

Wikis take on one of the most basic questions of political philosophy: Who will guard the guardians? Their answer is, everyone. [p.272]

Note that if you're looking for a rigorous academic work on social media and the promise of peer-production, you can't go past Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks (available for free, here). But Here Comes Everybody offers an accessible introduction to the broad issues raised by social media, so I would especially recommend it to non-specialists who are curious to learn what all the fuss is about.

Tim Wu:

[I]t is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines: no one (well, nearly no one) would watch Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs” as a substitute for “Star Wars”; a book review is no substitute for reading “The Naked and the Dead.” They are complements to the original work, not substitutes, and that makes all the difference.

This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web. Fan guides like the Harry Potter Lexicon or Lostpedia are not substitutes for reading the book or watching the show, and that should be the end of the legal questions surrounding them. The same goes for reasonable tribute videos like this great Guyz Nite tribute to “Die Hard.” On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.

We must never forget that copyright is about authorship; and secondary authors, while never as famous as the original authors, deserve some respect. Fixing fair use is one way to give them that.

[Part Six in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]

We've seen that the Internet, as a more open and accessible public media space, creates new opportunities and advances important democratic values. It makes the broader culture more transparent and responsive, it empowers citizens to express themselves creatively, and it enhances autonomy by broadening the range of possibilities open for us to choose between. The end result – if this opportunity is recognized – is a more ‘conversational’ public sphere, whereby citizens can deliberate together in an ongoing dialogue, at least to a greater extent than was possible under the mass-mediated industrial model that dominated the twentieth century.

These benefits are not inevitable, however. Private control over its physical infrastructure could threaten the democratic potential of the Internet, for example:

Clearly, when in 2005 Telus, Canada’s second largest telecommunications company, blocked access to the Web site of the Telecommunications Workers Union for all of its own clients and those of internet service providers that relied on its backbone network, it was not seeking to improve service for those customers’ benefit, but to control a conversation in which it had an intense interest. (p.398)

Possible solutions to this might involve public provision of broadband and/or open wireless network infrastructure, as several U.S. municipalities are currently investigating (pp.406-7). Public provision of this essential infrastructure would also help overcome the ‘digital divide’ that excludes non-connected residents from the full benefits of networked citizenship.

Other threats include excessive IP laws (e.g. copyright extensions) that diminish the public domain and crowd out peer-production in favour of incumbent commercial industries. Further, hardware "fixes" -- i.e. the crippling of information devices, so as to preclude the very possibility of copyright infringement -- inevitably overreach, equally obstructing "fair use" and other perfectly legitimate actions.

Past posts in this series have highlighted the Internet's incredible potential, based on the distinctive ease with which people can use it to produce and share information. If we don't want to see its value squandered, we need to be wary of lobbyists and legislators who would undermine these distinctive qualities of the Internet (thus precluding its distinctive benefits). So, this is an important political issue for citizens to be aware of. In light of the democratic potential of the Internet, it would be an awful shame for our laws to convert it into just another commercial medium.

[Part Five in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]

"The easy possibility of communicating effectively into the public sphere allows individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners to potential speakers and participants in a conversation. The way we listen to what we hear changes because of this; as does, perhaps most fundamentally, the way we observe and process daily events in our lives. We no longer need to take these as merely private observations, but as potential subjects for public communication." (p.213)

This leads to “a fundamental change in how individuals can interact with their democracy and experience their role as citizens” (p.272):

Ideal citizens need not be seen purely as trying to inform themselves about what others have found, so that they can vote intelligently. They need not be limited to reading the opinions of opinion makers and judging them in private conversations. They are no longer constrained to occupy the role of mere readers, viewers, and listeners. They can be, instead, participants in a conversation. Practices that begin to take advantage of these new capabilities shift the locus of content creation from the few professional journalists trolling society for issues and observations, to the people who make up that society. They begin to free the public agenda setting from dependence on the judgments of managers, whose job it is to assure that the maximum number of readers, viewers, and listeners are sold in the market for eyeballs. The agenda thus can be rooted in the life and experience of individual participants in society—in their observations, experiences, and obsessions. The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the public sphere. They no longer need be consumers and passive spectators. They can become creators and primary subjects. It is in this sense that the Internet democratizes.

This ‘conversational’ approach represents a deliberative-democratic transformation of the public sphere itself (p. 180):

The Internet allows individuals to abandon the idea of the public sphere as primarily constructed of finished statements uttered by a small set of actors socially understood to be “the media” (whether state owned or commercial) and separated from society, and to move toward a set of social practices that see individuals as participating in a debate. Statements in the public sphere can now be seen as invitations for a conversation, not as finished goods. Individuals can work their way through their lives, collecting observations and forming opinions that they understand to be practically capable of becoming moves in a broader public conversation, rather than merely the grist for private musings.