Standards?

Some thoughts prompted by NG264's piece on standards in the blogosphere.

Doesn't this whole idea assume a homogeneity in the purposes & uses of blogs that doesn't, indeed maybe shouldn't, exist? Sure, it would be neat if everyone who wrote a software review (for instance) followed a certain format that would allow the reviews to be collated/indexed/rendered searchable. But where does that leave individuality, creativity, our right to be different? The joyful messiness of an organic form of self-expression?

If I feel moved to write about a particular piece of software, I just want to say what I have to say (which may be trivial, technical, practical, frivolous....) without shoe-horning my comments into some predetermined standard.

I may be misreading the SmartMobs entry, which is less coherent than I would expect from a student assignment:

"Datamining" ourselves "democratizies"[democratizes?] tools that were previously cost [costly? cost-effective? something else?] and prohibitive [huh? what did they prohibit?] for most people. They can also make it easier for many more people to contribute more effectively to a general "knowldge [knowledge?] commons". The idea of creating databases about different aspects of our [our what??] has actually been around for a while.

I'm automatically suspicious of the quality of argument, when the quality of expression is so low.

Software reviews may also be an unfortunate example. The main purpose of standards often seems to be to facilitate interoperability, in the interests of promoting manufacturing efficiency & profits, with user benefits an almost accidental side-effect. So standards applied to blogged software reviews would speed the process of sorting sheep from goats, help consumers choose between competing products.

Fine, but is it why we blog?

Blogging for journalism students

Technology commentator Bill Thompson's contributions to the BBC World Service "Go Digital" programme are published weekly in The BillBlog.

His December 3 piece, Two-way conversations, explains the thinking behind asking his journalism students to produce blogs as part of their coursework. There are lessons here for all educators, not just those involved in journalism courses.

He draws a parallel with the paradigm shift in e-commerce:

A few years ago readers of the Cluetrain Manifesto were exhorted to see the market as a conversation where customers engaged with sellers. This was presented as a break with the one-way advertising and marketing model that used to hold sway, made possible by the internet.
The blogosphere is doing the same sort of thing for journalism, whether in print or broadcast. Its no longer enough to write or say something and consign any responses to the letters page or occasional 'have your say' programme.

I'm not convinced the shift in e-commerce is as extensive as Thompson implies (though peer-to-peer e-commerce on the eBay model maybe comes close) but I like the example set by his course.

Blogs & Wikis

A useful starting point for this topic is Blogs & Wikis: Ushering in an Era of Change.

Alongside interviews with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales & the co-founders of Bytes for All, it includes links to definitions & basic resources.

This is part of the Development Gateway's special report: Information Society: The Next Steps, which covers a range of issues around the recent WSIS Tunis Summit.

Thanks to Nigel's H806 blog for the pointer to this multi-topic portal.

Google Print revisited

I'd vaguely registered the American publishing industry's legal challenge to Google Print, but not looked properly at what Google's proposals involved. Scanning the contents of books held in public libraries, in order to make them available online - right? Wrong. Well, not exactly wrong, but seriously incomplete.

An article by Prof. Tim Wu, Leggo My Ego: Google Print and the other culture war spells out & challenges that assumption:

There's a key difference between Google "Print" and the regular Google "Web." On the Web search, if you find something, you can then just click through to the Web page. But using Google Print is different - you only get the results. To get the "full" result, you actually have to buy the book. This is a common misunderstanding about Google Print - it is a way to search books, not a way to get books for free. It is not, in short, Napster for books.

Wu argues convincingly that this is part of a web-driven shift from "a culture of control" to "a culture of exposure". He draws a useful analogy with map-making: if cartographers had to seek the permission of every individual property owner to include their land on maps, what chance would there be of having complete, affordable maps?

Just as maps do not compete with or replace property, neither do book searches replace books. Both are just tools for finding what is otherwise hard to find.

He concludes by pointing out that it's in authors' interests to make their books easy to find, if books are to continue competing successfully with the web as a publishing medium.

Given Google Print's potential value to online learners, I'm happy to have had my eyes opened by this defence of what it really involves.

Three warnings

Rheingold's coverage of the major risks associated with developments in communciation technologies (in a spirit of "know thine enemy") identifies three main schools of criticism:

1. commodification of the public sphere

Here he draws on Habermas & Baudrillard to argue that the "public sphere" as the place where democracy happens ("People can govern themselves only if they communicate widely, freely, and in groups - publicly") is especially vulnerable to being changed for the worse by advances in ICT. Not just by direct censorship, but by "the corrupting influence of ersatz public opinion". The PR industry & the packaging of policies & politicians as commodities are both facilitated by new technology. ("What used to be a channel for authentic communication has become a channel for the updating of commercial desire").

2. the Panoptic school

Using the analogy of Bentham's proposed prison architecture, where all cells could be viewed from a central point, this is the "Big Brother" argument - that the digital traces we leave, as we interact online, lays us open to malicious surveillance by commercial, criminal or controlling forces of various sorts. This is where we need to exercise a healthy amount of cynicism. 'I do nothing wrong, therefore I have nothing to fear' only stands up as long as I'm not in conflict with my government.

3. the hyper-realist school

A logical outgrowth of postmodernism & therefore difficult to refute (because ICT utopians are hardly in a position to deny the power of symbolism) this criticism raises the possibility that cyberspace is a place of illusion, replacing reality with a "slicked-up electronic simulation" that deludes us into believing we still have authentic relationships with each other & with those who exercise the real power. Rheingold cites Debord's 1968 Society of the Spectacle allegation of a "worldwide hegemony of power in which the rich and powerful [have] learned to rule with minimal force by turning everything into a media event".

Now, whilst I'm quite prepared to accept that I'm being disempowered, spied on & generally conned (& that online communities in education may all be part of the same Evil Plot) I have to ask myself: does it matter? I'm with Rheingold in thinking that it's only "when we forget about the illusion that the trouble begins". If it's war, the Internet provides weapons for both sides.

These are only notes - not how a blog should work, but if I stop to seek out appropriate links, it will be even further into tomorrow than it is now....

Synchronicity?

Just been reading about Richard Branson's latest move, the Virgin/NTL "merger":

A deal between Virgin Mobile and US-listed NTL would radically shake up Britain's media landscape, as operators move to offer their customers a full range of TV, entertainment and telecom services.

Then I opened up Rheingold's Virtual Community where I'd left off, & immediately read his 1993 comments about Prodigy in its pre-Internet incarnation, as:

a preview of what could happen if a small number of large companies manages to dominate a global telecommunications industry that is now a competitive market of small and medium-size businesses that manage to survive and thrive along with the giants (...) The prospect of the technical capabilities of a near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth Net in the hands of a small number of commercial interests has dire political implications.

I'll pursue that another time (the chapter is stuffed full of high level sociological ideas, from Habermas to hyper-reality) but I went off for tea pondering the coincidence. I usually steer clear of the business news (some sacrifices have to be made in the face of impending information-overload-induced insanity!). Maybe I should be taking more notice.

Paradigms

... or paradiggems as they're affectionately known in this family!

On last year's Homer course, I met their ancestor, paradeigmata. A paradeigma was a mythological tale, a sort of fable that provided a key to understanding some particular dilemma by showing an example of how it had been handled in the mythical past. I wasn't quite sure how that related to the Kuhnian paradigm shifts I'd previously encountered on T171, but didn't stop to investigate.

Today I've been reading Rheingold again & came across his argument that the rise of online communities involves a paradigm shift of sorts: from the broadcast paradigm (one to many communication) to the network paradigm (many to many). What makes this particularly applicable to education is that the first fits a didactic, teacher-centred pedagogy & the second fits a constructivist, learner-centred pedagogy. I don't think I'd fully, consciously, made the connection between the two sets of concepts before.

Yet I should have done, as I saw the network analogy in Bob Taylor's horizontal management. (See Bluefluff's posts here & here.)

Rheingold's chapter is here.

I don't think Rheingold's usage of the term exactly matches either the traditional 'exemplar' sense, or the Kuhnian 'mindset' sense, but I quite like his middle way.