Digital thoughts

It seems no month goes by without some remarkable news coming from the land of ones and zeroes. Even more remarkable is the amount of coolness people turn out when they're not afraid of the future. This time it's about a most traditional medium - Broadway musicals - embracing a very new one: microblogging. The story (or should I say meta-story?) as covered by the New York Times is simple. Some smart people ran a show simultaneously in the theater and as a Twitter adaptation. The result: half a million followers, many of whom were interested enough to go see the live performance, but also to engage with the cast and crew in conversation.

This is just the latest in a long stream of success stories from the relatively young medium of microblogging. It was used to report on the Iranian election protests in June, and to organize the Moldovan election protests in April. It told the world in real time about the Hudson River plane crash in January and arguably helped Mr. Obama win the U.S. presidential elections last year. More recently, we've been shown How an Indie Musician can make $19,000 in 10 hours using Twitter. And still, each new microblogging success story seems to amaze the world. Why is that?

The answer, I think, is perfectly summarized in this tweet quoted by a recent article in Wired Magazine:

@danyork said 'the popularity of microblogging shows us that we were missing a medium,'

Much has been written about what is obviously a major cultural phenomenon. It seems appropriate that the best explanation would fit in 140 characters. Like cellphones and the Internet itself, microblogging filled a void we didn't know existed. Sure, some people use the new medium to send spam, or to tell the whole world what they had for breakfast, while others never post anything, but just follow others. But a surprising number of talented, imaginative enthusiasts use it to do stuff with information that the rest of us didn't think possible, and I can't help but wonder: what's next?

The answer is likely to surprise me.

P.S. Is it a coincidence that Twitter was just hit with a patent lawsuit? As the saying goes, "...then they fight you...". And we all know how that ends.

Microblogging, the missing medium by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Well, everybody's off to rest for the holidays. Everebody, that is, except the idiots. Since they rest all year anyway, they take advantage of everyone else's downtime to get their moments of fame. There's not much else happening, anyway.

Let's start with the American venture capitalists, who are so confused they are buying high, selling low. Not that Techdirt is telling us any news; Paul Graham was on it around the beginning of December.

We move to the world of Internet Nanny wannabes, where Aussie government's own report trashes 'Net filtering. But let's not rejoice too fast. On this side of the planet, Culture secretary Andy Burnham wants cinema-style age ratings for websites. Never mind the whole movie rating concept being controversial in the first place, let's apply it to something fundamentally different? Now, that's confusion! Oh wait, no, it's pure small-mindedness. Never mind.

Surprisingly (not!) after all that, the first prize still goes to the US of A, where a judge rules Fox has copyright claim to Watchmen. Say again? Warner's just spent the ridiculous amounts of money required to make a blockbuster, only to find out they don't own the rights? Priceless. Too bad about all the work and talent that went into it. Maybe next time the little guys who did all the work will consider making their own movie over the Internet.

Too bad I have to hand the special mention to a man I admire. Needless to say, he's NOT an idiot. Really, dunno what got into this guy. Two days before Christmas, Lawrence Lessig launched a plea to Reboot the FCC, arguing it's an obsolete institution that could use some change. Sounds reasonable?

President Obama should get Congress to shut down the FCC and similar vestigial regulators, which put stability and special interests above the public good. In their place, Congress should create something we could call the Innovation Environment Protection Agency (iEPA), charged with a simple founding mission: "minimal intervention to maximize innovation." The iEPA's core purpose would be to protect innovation from its two historical enemies—excessive government favors, and excessive private monopoly power.

So what he wants is to replace a government agency with... another government agency, which would somehow behave unlike any other government agency in existence. Suuure. Let's just pretend Mr. Lessig has started the party a little early (which would make him a little "confused"), otherwise I'd have to label him naive, and that would be sad.

Verdict: messed-up week. See you next year.

Digital Week #5: Confused for Christmas by Felix Pleşoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The week that just ended has seen the continuation of two trends I signalled in the previous issue, specfically regarding "piracy" and the end of consumerism, but I won't revisit those now. There are new and interesting happenings in cyberspace, so let's go forward instead, shall we?

The yesterday-it-was-sci-fi department returns in force. Last time I checked, computers couldn't read images directly from the brain, nor use artificial intelligence to drive robotic limbs. Well, now they can. What's next? A robotic wife, apparently. Welcome to the future. And no, I won't make that joke.

In the ha-ha-only-serious department, here's a little game for you: can you tell what the following fragment is about?

Others were troubled by the labeling of tens of millions of Americans as criminals, overflowing prisons, and the consequent broadening of disrespect for the law. Americans were disquieted by dangerous expansions of federal police powers, encroachments on individual liberties, increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the (...) laws, and the billions in forgone tax revenues.

If you guessed the intellectual property wars, the joke's on you. It's about the American Prohibition, from this article proposing to end the war on drugs. On a similar note, here's a blog post arguing that brain-enhancing drugs should be legal. At last, some people are starting to remember that "drug" also means "legitimate medication". Homonyms... Isn't it funny how language shapes thinking?

Still in the same department, isn't it "funny" how authorities keep concerning themselves with - and overreacting to - ever more innocuos manifestations of the digital culture? Could it be they are feeling increasingly irrelevant? While in Australia Bart Simpson, Lisa cartoon is ruled kid porn, and Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover only to repent a few days later over public outrage (read here and here), no less than 20% of teens say they've put nude pics of themselves online. I'll let you simmer over that for a few days.

This concludes the 3rd issue of Digital Week, but I'm not finished. Be right back with some extended commentary, as well as a couple of topics that didn't fit above.

Digital Week #3 by Felix Pleşoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Starting today, I'm going to try something new: since I spend a lot of time online, reading news, I might just as well collect those that draw my attention and share them with you. Most weeks are busy on this front, and the past one was no exception, so without further ado, let's see what this mad, mad world has in store for us.

In the captain-obvious-returns department, a title from the International Herald Tribune: Study finds teenagers' Internet socializing isn't such a bad thing. No kidding, Sherlock! We've been trying to tell you this for years now. Instead of spending $50 million, you could have listened. Oh well.

In related news, it seems that gaming in Sweden [is] bigger than football and hockey. In other words, they can no longer ignore gamers, not even laugh at them, as for fighting... suffice to say that the Annual Video Game Report Card Is Positive, For Once, and even Atari Cancels Anti-Piracy Witch-Hunt. In other world, ladies and gentlemen, we've won. Hourray!

From the yesterday-it-was-sci-fi department, we learn of a nanotech clothing fabric [that] 'never gets wet'. Sounds like something out of Ringworld, doesn't it? Not to be let down, the geekish Guardian.co.uk reports on the eco machine that can magic water out of thin air. Coupled with the recent advancements in solar and wind power, this promises a not-so-remote future where many people no longer depend on centrally-controlled grids. I'll let you imagine the implications. Oh and, hopefully computer networks are next. Speaking of which: Wired Magazine tells us that graphene memory makes Flash looks huge and ungainly. I immediately thought of Charles Stross' older article Shaping the Future. I feel cybernetic today.

Last but not least, the Creative Commons blog just announced a new book titled The Public Domain. It appears to be similar to Lessig's The Future of Ideas, with the added benefit of seven years' additional data. I've been hoping something like this would pop up. Verdict: good week!

Digital Week #1 by Felix Pleşoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.