Musings & Meanderings

if i could have counted
the hugs and kisses would they
be more or less

Non profit American news co-operative Associated Press is a monopolistic news re-distribution conglomerate in the United States. Their content is created for them by contributing media (newspapers, radio, and television) in the US. Last year, threatened by the freedom of the internet, AP began charging for any right to use or reprint its content electronically.

On Sep 6, 12:22 PM EDT, Wired published an AP article on Net Neutrality titled Feds OK fee for Priority Web Traffic, which I can’t link to without paying. I can link to the Agonist Forum’s Ten Things That Finally Killed Net Neutrality, or to Peter Kaplan’s Justice Dept wary of “net neutrality” proposals on Yahoo News via Reuters.

There has been plenty of conversation online about Net Neutrality, but precious little in the mainstream media. Much of the online conversation focuses on Republicans and big bad capitalists in general as the perpetrators of the death of net neutrality. Little of it talks about what Net Neutrality is in plain English, or what it means to all of us. It is freedom of speech and freedom of access, which includes freedom to make a living. It affects every single one of us.

It’s worth an hour or two of everyone’s time to learn about this.
Start with Tim Berners-Lee, and sign up at Save The Internet.

Save The Internet is a very unfortunate name. This isn’t like Save the Whales, and it’s a lot more than an appeal to conscience. I’d name it Claim Our Freedom.

The opposition to Net Neutrality has been led mostly by delivery system giants such as AT&T with opposition coming from companies dependent on a customer base that is free to leave, including eBay and Google (although Google has been getting progressively quieter on the subject lately). When you do read mainstream press on the subject, pay some attention to the way the issue is presented (including what is left out). This will usually tells you everything you need to know about the presenter’s agenda.

The average non-tech person has never heard of Net Neutrality, or if they have they don’t understand it at all. When it is explained in terms of their telephone company wanting the right to both ‘capture’ a fee from the consumer and control access to what we currently create for one another for free, then everyone gets it. Take it one step further and explain that your access to others is going to be controlled by big media and telephony, which translates into censorship, and more people might start to value what we have here and protest against losing it.

Who is communicating this effectively outside of the core online tech communities? There is over 80% computer saturation in North America and there are over a billion people online worldwide, so why don’t most of them know anything about this? This is a serious issue that threatens free speech and personal freedom. Is Net Neutrality dead and is it just because we didn’t take the time to tell everyone about it?

Shame on the US press.

I can only conclude that mainstream media is all for censorship. We’ve been listening to their crying over lost readership growing in volume as it is directly impacted by more and more individual voices online.

Many professional journalists are horrified by what is called citizen media with its lack of professional standards. Despite many strong voices advocating the joining of traditional press to online citizen publishing, however, I don’t see anyone actually doing it.

AT&T and Google are corporations, not people. They have a clear legal obligation to their shareholders to make as much money as possible. Period.

The onus for communicating the threat here falls squarely on the shoulders of a free press. Anyone who knowingly ducks is either a coward or a political hack, but cannot rightfully claim the designation of free. Free press means us, just as it did in earlier times of our countries (US and Canada). You and me. We’re the free press today, not the Times or the Post or CNN or Fox.

Why isn’t everyone saying this plainly while we still have the freedom to do so?

A proposed Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web was posted this morning by Joseph Smarr on Open Social Web.

Joseph’s preamble states that it isn’t carved in stone (the phrase is chiseled in granite), but is intended to spur conversation and debate.

Do I have anything to contribute? On first reading, I’d say that the form and language tiptoe around rights which have already been abrogated by default, but at this moment I still have smoke coming out of my ears. This ‘document’ floored me.

Users, I presume, means all the constituents using the internet and web services? Or is this just for white American entrepreneurial tech insiders?

Why has this document been authored by four men? Four of the 10 men authoring the blog on which it’s posted?

You couldn’t find any women interested enough to participate? Any women prominent enough to consider inviting? Any women interested in the subject of their rights? Are there any powerful American female tech insiders? I’m a Canadian woman and I’m looking for them. I am also a ‘user’.

Women happen to be half of your constituents. Just like men, we aren’t all American. We aren’t all techies. We care about our rights.

—–
later…
Phil Wolff on Skype Journal says,
BORUS is a shallow attempt to codify broader, deeper rights in cyberspace. It’s like petitioning for the right to print an afternoon edition of the local newspaper on paper instead of fighting for Freedom of Speech with heart, guns, money and blood.”

It is rare for me to sit still for a video presentation.

Anil Dash compelled me not just with Dan Pink’s drawing power, but with a connection to me personally when he told me that his tastes also ran to faster speeds, but that this presentation was nevertheless worth the time.

Anil further told me why he took the time… “far more impressively, [Dan Pink] created his own presentation in the format, and it’s a smart and thoughtful look at the emotional expressiveness of signage in public spaces.”

My first takeaway was on the title, ‘Emotionally Intelligent Signage’. I think that this describes the method or process used by the sign writers very effectively, especially for the signs that address a common anxiety. The signs which give me a reason, though, such as the ‘keep off the grass’ sign or the ‘hand dryer’ sign, go a lot further to invite response and involvement from the reader.

When I’m reading those signs, I’m being asked to think, consider, and participate, to make a conscious decision by getting involved rather than just reacting. It’s similar to my POW acronym on great blogging. The power of why …why I should care.

Communicators have been using emotional triggers for as long as we’ve had emotions, but asking me to make a conscious decision to care is a lot braver than haranguing me about why I should or trying to trigger it reflexively. It tells me two things: that you have a good reason to be asking and that you respect me enough to ask for my involvement.

Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein’s Pecha Kucha form is a delightful example of marrying discipline to creative energy, and considering it led me to my second takeaway.

I often go on about integrating different points of view and expanding horizons to embrace various perspectives. Here’s an illustration.

Reverse these…

‘All form and no substance.’
‘Form follows substance.’
‘If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing well.’

…and then put the results beside the originals, like an equation that expands their meaning. This is how I see Pecha Kucha.

What are your takeaways?

The value of free is in access to knowledge.

Knowledge is gained by learning. Learning is something we actively choose to do and is distinct from education. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have a great teacher or two along the way, and this can be a family member or mentor as often as a teacher in a scholastic setting.

The most important components of the freedom we enjoy in the modern western world are free access to information, the freedom to share it, and the freedom to use it. Freedom of information isn’t a property right. Property right is a right to one’s own tangible or intangible human product or creation, not to information.

Should all information be free to everyone? Of course not. Freedom includes a right to privacy, and we should (imo) value our personal information more highly than we generally do. The collection, and also analysis, of highly specialized information by experts is performed as a paid service for whatever their market will bear, and is a human work product. Artistic and creative works are the same kind of product. Each of us also has the right to give our time and our work product to others, including to the society as a whole, where ownership vests in the public trust. If an artist creates a work for the public trust, then no individual has the right to charge for and thereby deny access to it. Anyone, however, is free to study it, learn from it, take inspiration from it, and, together with all the other information they have collected and used as a basis for their knowledge, create something new which they are then free to either donate to the public trust or to own. We, individuals and businesses alike, usually benefit most by doing both.

On the important issue of net neutrality, which most people have never even heard of, we would do well to promote a better understanding of rights.

Free press advocates and free enterprise advocates often have a way of settling on opposite ends of a political spectrum. In my experience, this is usually a construct based on agendas and motivations which most commonly serve to limit freedom. The agendas are usually about control of information (censorship), and the motivations about power or money (or both). Free is a powerful word.

Even if we could take in all the free information available, we would not necessarily become knowledgeable. The value of free information resides not in the information itself, but in what we do with it.

Value is created in the propositions we develop and make to ourselves and to one another, human to human. Every one of us initiating interaction with others is making propositions all the time, often without even seeing them as such. Every time we respond (or don’t) to one another, we are choosing from a wider spectrum of responses than we usually realize. Rarely do we stop and take time to consider that full spectrum, but if we did, we’d be amazed at how many opportunities to create, innovate, and build things are at our disposal all the time.

Free in computers and on the internet can be viewed in as many ways as there are individual perspectives: as a valuable gift or a shared treasure, as a windfall, as getting lucky or getting away with something, as a marketing tool, as stupidity, as a lure, as a trap.

All this free noise sometimes distracts us from what makes freedom valuable. It isn’t the raw information that has value in itself. It’s what we learn from it and what we do with it, the conclusions we draw, the theories we develop and prove, and the propositions we develop and make, that enable us to create value for ourselves and others.