Musings & Meanderings

…please count me out. I’m a stubborn believer in the wisdom of people being necessary to harness, and benefit from, the power of machines. An increase in combined and collaborative knowledge? Great. Crowds in the cloud with the wizard standing behind a curtain? Not so much. As long as people don’t really want to know how any of it works, though, the wizards will remain.

Twine is the ‘Facebook killer’ hopeful, an invite only beta social network
launched by Nova Spivack’s Radar Networks.
Nick Carr likes it better than Freebase.

This social network proposes to make sense of all your personal information. The aim is to deliver benefits to you in the form of better tools for organizing your personal data and sharing it with others. Could it be that one of the ultimate goals is to create targeted advertising effective enough to make it impossible to distinguish from personal recommendation?

Read the Terms of Use page on Twine before you sign up. Rights to all information you contribute to Twine are granted in perpetuity, which is pretty standard. You retain, of course, all responsibility for inaccuracy and illegality, and so on. I read everything I could find on the site. One of the many things I did not find was any mention of delineation between personal and non-personal information, or any mention of user rights at all.

Most any publishing of information on the web can be deemed, under what will eventually be understood as common law use, to constitute the granting of redistribution licenses of some type. All of us who venture out here have personal responsibility for what we do and say in public. There are very few of us both knowledgeable and fortunate enough to remain totally anonymous on the internet forever. Anyone whose true goal is total anonymity avoids public places.

Personal privacy is not about having something to hide. It is an essential component of freedom, autonomy, and simple human dignity, as well as an important element in personal and family safety and security.

My wish for the day is to see the buzzword ‘transparency’ replaced with a more traditional and meaningful word, namely ‘responsibility’.
A perpetual wish is for linking ‘benefits’ to ‘respect’.

There is so much that we users could accomplish and benefit from, together, on a semantic web. Yesterday I read Tara Hunt’s post on The Brown Act of 1953, and was struck, as always, by the casualness with which many embrace these online tools, and also by the unspoken characterization of older, more cautious generations as an obstacle to progress. Much of that caution has a sound basis.

When I first started blogging in 2006, there was much public discussion about trust, especially following the ground breaking sale of MySpace. Trust is essential to human communication and interaction. Trusting a corporate entity is different from trusting a person. I, for one, am much more likely to trust you with my data if you recognize and respect my ownership of it.

Millions trust Facebook enough to submit their birthdate, a fact connected to their driver’s license, social insurance number, etc., online. Hundreds of millions have an account of some sort with Google, which has relatively comprehensive privacy policies and offers snail mail access to communication in case of problems. Millions of you may also join in making Twine one of the next hot destinations. As Danah Boyd says, “read those contracts!”.

Just over a week ago, I received a letter from my GP that he is shutting down his practice. Add me to the list of millions of Canadians without basic medical care. I actually haven’t had that for a long time here, but that’s in the lap of cynical and burnt out doctors, which is another post altogether.

No, you can’t simply find another GP here. Their practices are all closed. Patients are told to contact the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. The College maintains a list that is always out of date by at least 6 months. Patients get the list, which has hundreds of physicians names on it, only to be told by every office they call that the practice has been closed for many months now. The College, by the way, advocates for their peers …the physicians and surgeons. No one advocates for the patients. Supposedly one can write to the Minister of Health.

As recently as 10 years ago, if you went to specialists, any one of them could direct you to a good GP. Today they all shake their heads and say, “Not any more”.

After receiving and trying to digest that news, I next faced this blog going into meltdown. It was shut down for several days, due supposedly to a server migration that made the mess worse. Some hosts should not be offering Linux on Apache combined with open source packages that they don’t know a great deal about.

The upshot is that I have a new host and re-installed yesterday. Some data, such as categories, didn’t survive the import, so it will take a few days to get through the archives.

If you get pinged from one of my old posts …again… please say that you forgive me!

Now I’ve also lost my voice, although I can whisper. The best thing I can say about this is thank goodness it went after I made my new hosting arrangements, and now I have a ‘voice’ again for musing and meandering on things that matter much to me.

WordPress …je t’adore. It is better the second time around.

BlueHost makes a big difference too. Installing and setting up the second time around has been so much easier I feel like I’ve moved to another planet. I even got everything validating within hours yesterday. I’m sure there’ll be new twists and quirks to deal with, especially as I add plugins, but the past month has also proven to be a great learning experience.

If you’re a returning reader, thank you for your faith.
If you’re in Toronto, do you happen to know a GP with good hearing?

In a NYT article titled Questions You Should Never Ask A Writer, Doris Lessing writes of political correctness, legacies of communism, and the “demand that stories must be “about” something”.

This one phrase speaks volumes to me, of people who shun fiction entirely, of others who spend an academic career studying but one or a few works of literature, of people’s fear of human imagination, of how many millions of times someone asked what Seinfeld was about, feeling so wickedly delighted to know that the clever answer was ‘nothing’. Meanwhile, emotions, passions, spirituality, the wondrous mystery of life itself, overflow beyond hope of classification and micro-management, gloriously incomprehensible through logical deduction.

Why, indeed, must everything be ‘about something’? What is this almost compulsive need many people have to identify and explain everything in so minimalist a manner that it can be safely enclosed and, then, put away?

This compulsion applies to much more than just literature. Any artist’s life’s work should be describable in one term or phrase. Any new business idea should be reduced to an ‘elevator pitch’. Many community projects are most likely to gain backing when the answer to what goal is to be achieved can be stated in one sentence. Politicians actually get elected based on a statement of intention to ‘fix’ something with little or no explanation as to how they will do so. This list goes on and on.

Every one of these ‘abouts’, these simplified and symbolic reasons people seem to crave, only has meaning within the full context of a human story, a multi-faceted and dynamic panorama of intertwined moments and lives, about many things simultaneously.

We can be without being about something.
We cannot be about something without being.

I may be a foreigner, with limited knowledge of the details of American politics, but I recognize propaganda when I see it.

Lawrence Lessig has been one of my reads since I joined the blogosphere because of his work in the copyright arena, and I consider his contributions to freedom in online publishing valuable. I approached his introduction of a new and different area of study and specialty with interest.

The hour I spent yesterday listening to the Corruption Lecture - Alpha Version was an emotionally turbulent one. I listened only once, and do not have a transcript; the following references to the content represent my personal impressions.

The presentation opens with, and is wrapped in, an (unpaid, I assume) advertisement for Al Gore’s book. This is followed by a paean to the cause of global warming which does not state openly, but leaves the listener/viewer to draw, the conclusion that refutation of global warming is a symptom of corruption. Throughout, images of prominent Democrats glow like angels while those of Republicans are offered in a demonic light. Visages of America’s founding fathers which are shown are as stern, forbidding, and authoritarian looking as any I’ve ever seen. No criticism is cast on these venerable personages directly; there is only one non-laudatory but essential statement (which hooks to the conclusion) proposing that those gentlemen would never have envisioned the world we live in today, with its specific challenges. The conclusion is that “re-making our constitution” is the work which Professor Lessig (and whoever else is included in his plural ‘we’) considers important and will be undertaking over the next 10 years.

All of this political dogma is wrapped around an introduction to the topic of corruption. This topic is initially presented from a view of personal and societal responsibility, in a very powerful way, a way which should lead naturally to a focus on morality. Instead, the flow is jarringly interrupted by the substitution of the word money for morality. We are treated to images of the long suffering proletariat, in the form of elementary school teachers and firemen, alternating with oppressor images, which include the sugar and pharmaceutical industries as well as Cliff Richards and Disney aka Mickey Mouse. There is a pointed statement to the effect that this study of corruption will be only about money. After this statement the focus shifts to defining political corruption in terms of indirect influence. Eventually it skips across a small menu of specific issues, such as the limited influence of politics on the Supreme Court, and campaign finance reform.

At the end, I am left with a feeling of betrayal and my abiding concern about schools and education.

I am hardly surprised by Lawrence Lessig’s political beliefs, nor is this the first shameless propaganda I’ve heard from any faction of the political spectrum. If I was interested in reading political views, however, I would be at RedState or DailyKos.

Were I an American, I’d have a difficult personal challenge in voting. Both political parties have held power through my lifetime, and both have increased government spending, as well as inappropriate involvement in the private affairs of individuals. I believe that a non-partisan study of corruption and political influence could have value, and also that both of these factors are directly tied to morality and personal responsibility, and therein to freedom.

The issue that disturbs me deeply is that this piece is presented as an embarkation point for scholastic study by a prominent academic. It isn’t a new issue either, and is intrinsically related to censorship, the banning of books, and the re-writing of history. My support of free speech, freedom of public information, and open access is fervent and based on classically conservative views, which include social responsibility and respect for the public trust. We are accustomed to the concept of betrayal by politicians, yet often oblivious to the same concept in regard to teachers.

What we don’t know can hurt us.

Dan writes on being a student again, a change which has granted him access to academic libraries, saying,

As an independent researcher, I simply could not keep on top of my subject properly.

We complain about the quality of education without thinking twice about the lack of resources available to anyone with a spark of interest or an iota of motivation. Any of us who choose to pursue an interest can easily summon the sense of attraction and challenge that emanates from a newly discovered and available body of knowledge. Most of us have looked for information in vain on many occasions.

Almost everyone I know who has any sort of specialized knowledge outside of technology and computers has commented to me on doors closing on the availability of learning resources over the internet for a number of years now. This continuing construction of barriers to learning is destructive to our society. It is rationalized on an economic basis, yet it shares characteristics with the economics of free enterprise. Lower taxes and the result will be economic growth. Open libraries and the result will be a higher level of public education and a greater demand for learning materials.

The more we limit access to literature of every sort the less knowledge we all have.

Some percentage of bloggers are also academicians. Those who are typically have access to far more online resources than the rest of us, but usually do not consciously recognize their participation in creating what is effectively a class distinction. The class divides are expanding. Schools increasingly ban access to online publications of the less educated while restricting access to tools of self education. Elite online publishers shun the masses, yet there are many weblogs written by informed and well-educated citizens who take greater care with facts than some professional journalists, with access to expensive resources, do.

My own subscriptions over the years, represented a huge outlay of dollars. Where those subscriptions were used to inform business activities they represented an investment. This thinking is sound as far as economics are concerned, but our lives and our society are about more than just economics. We don’t expect a direct financial return from teaching our children to read, nor from much of the reading and learning we do ourselves. My personal interests are wide ranging and cross disciplinary, so I have constant cause to compare the enormous gap in quality and depth of information available to the public on different topics. On this issue, I envy Dan his official student status. There is much online information that I would be willing to pay for access to which is not available at all, for love or money, to non-members, be they professionals or laypersons. Being limited physically, I don’t have regular access to various libraries, so am perhaps more aware than most of just how empty the electronic public library is.

The expectation that the internet could and would make more substantive information available to all of us has not been fulfilled. Whatever your views on the wisdom of crowds versus the madness of mobs, each is composed of a collection of individuals. Those individuals are either informed and educated, or not, and often those levels are determined by accessibility to learning resources. Formal education isn’t free, but access to educational materials and other publicly published information shouldn’t be limited only to those who can afford an expensive education. People who have a higher level of education read more. They read more for the rest of their lives, not just while they are in school. Not everyone who wants a higher education gets one. Sometimes life interferes.

If you’ve read this far, and are new to Open Access, try reading these
11 (mis)Leading Open Access Myths.
Peter Suber offers a page titled
What You Can Do To Promote the Open Access Movement.

Open Access does not make education, or books, free. Teachers and authors both require stuff such as food and heat in winter just like the rest of us do. The internet, though, offers us a different world with its own unique characteristics. In a bookstore or a public library, we can browse hundreds of publications on a topic we’re interested in. A majority of the billion people with internet connections, though, never even see the wealth of potential information and learning tools that already exist electronically. Much of it languishes, rarely read and ‘gathering dust’ in walled gardens while people of all ages, eager to learn something, wade through ad-laden Google search results.

One oft cited frustration by institutions which offer some open access is that we use the information without linking to the source or crediting the author. Perhaps some of us use information irresponsibly, and perhaps there are enough of us who have the opposite intention to make a difference. If you care, teach someone else about this.