Debating the networked society: technical roots of social change

Debating thenetworkedsociety: technicalroots of socialchangeMathias Klang @klang67

Overriding them: Freedom andcontrolTechnology challenges copyright, integrity, democracy, rights, culture, autonomy, thought…

Neither prophetsnor luddites

Technolibertarians& technopaternalists

hollerith

Birth ofcomputing 1940s

Generation zero

memexVannevar Bush; As We May Think; Atlantic Monthly; July 1945

Generation 1 & 2

Generation 3 (1964-72)

It was the first, and being first, was best, but now we lay it down to ever rest. Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears. For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years of faithful service, duty done, I weep. Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep. "Requiem of the ARPANET” Vinton CerfArpanet: connections withredundancy (1969-1990)

Bulletin board system (late 1970s)

Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnus Not Unix),GNU Project, posted by and give it away free toRichard Stallman on everyone who can use it.September 27, 1983.

On the one handinformation wants to beexpensive, because its sovaluable… On the otherhand, information wants tobe free, because the cost ofgetting it out is gettinglower and lower all thetime. Stewart Brand (1984)

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tensionSteward Brand (1985) will not go away

The Well: Whole Earth LectronicLink (1985) stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant

Freedom 0: The freedomto run the program for any purpose. Freedom 1: To study & change the programFreedom 2: To redistribute copies Freedom 3: Improve & publically release the program Stallman’s Free software definition (1986)

I believe that all generally useful information shouldbe free. By free I am not referring to price, butrather to the freedom to copy the information andto adapt it to ones own uses... When information isgenerally useful, redistributing it makes humanitywealthier no matter who is distributing and nomatter who is receiving.Stallman (1990)

1994, the first spam is sent over usenetFrom jesus to green cards

World wide web (an open standard)Hypertext in the wild - Tim Berners-Lee (1990/91)

The Net interprets censorship asdamage and routes around it.John Gilmore (December 1993 quoted in TIME Magazine)

Julian Dibbell (1993) A Rape in CyberspaceIs database society?

Mosaic web browser (1993)

Killer apps 1995: Browser wars

Dot-com bubble(1995-2000)

Governments of the IndustrialWorld, you weary giants of fleshand steel, I come from Cyberspace,the new home of Mind. On behalfof the future, I ask you of the pastto leave us alone. You are notwelcome among us. You have nosovereignty where we gather. John Perry Barlow (1996) A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

The rise and fall of edemocracy (1995-2000)

Code and other laws of cyberspaceLawrence Lessig (1999)

Information wants to be free – the radicalapproach

Napster 1999 (sued 2000)

From Usergeneratedcontent toSocial Media touserentertainment

Wikipedia all the worldsinformation 2001

BittorrentBram Cohen (2001)

The pirate bay (2003)

Imagine a world in which every singleperson on the planet is given free access tothe sum of all human knowledge. Thatswhat were doing.Jimmy Wales (2004)

Facebook (2004)

What do the people who control whatwe can do, think?

Neo-optimists vs neo-pessimists

Social media…At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. Its a fusion of sociology and technology, transformingmonologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. (Wikipedia, May 2009)

"Out of this anarchy…what was governingthe infinite monkeysnow inputting away onthe Internet was thelaw of digitalDarwinism, the survivalof the loudest and mostopinionated.”Andrew Keen: Cult of the amateur(2007)

Device driven development

meaning

Up to 3500 booksShop and download books in less than 60 seconds

Is there meaning in this madness?

Blogger 1999Google 1999 End of communications monopoly

Normalizing the abnormal

The facebook/twitter revolution

Tweets dont topple governments, peopledoE. Morozov: The Net Delusion: The dark side of internet freedom (2011)

Morosov is critical to the “technology bringsdemocracy” approach and is concerned that we are“amusing ourselves to death” (Postman 1985)

Social media creates silos & do not allowusers to port data from one site to another.

Power is Profitability

Coming debates

iTunes, Facebook, Amazon, Google…. Walled gardens

Personalization, endof personhood & the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

Autonomy &Regulation by proxy

IBM  Windows  Browser wars  Google  iPhoneBeing the user interface

The final interface: We have your money –now we want your mind

THANKS!

Mathias Klang klang@ituniv.se or @klang67 www.digital-rights.netImage & licensing info in the notes section of slides. Images at www.flickr.com (or specifically stated). This ppt licensed: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA Download presentation www.slideshare.net/klang

Debating the networked society: technical roots of social change

by Mathias Klang on Mar 07, 2012

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