A Personal Deviation

by Harrison on 26. Nov, 2010 in the man

We’ve been talking about open source software and Creative Commons quite a bit, which has brought me into a good deal of introspection regarding just how much these two movements have shaped the way I view the world. In fact, just when I became a teenager (2003), Firefox hit the world by storm. I had been an avid Netscape user before that (I’ve almost always hated Internet Explorer), but AOL had purchased the browser, and the resulting sharp decline in quality left me with nowhere to turn.

Now, for any of this to make any sense, you have to understand that to me as a geek, at least a young one, my browser was my tool. My weapon. My window into the world that was building around me that I wanted to help shape. It wasn’t just important that it ran. It had to run well, work for my purposes, and, if it could, it had to stand for something.

And then, not too much later, Wired’s front page article was about this magical browser, and it spoke to me in huge ways. The guy that spearheaded it was 20, and he’d been working on it before that.

20! He really wasn’t that much older than me, and yet here he was on the cover of Wired, leading the charge on one of the most renowned open-source projects of all time. And the thing was that people really cared about this stuff. It wasn’t just about making something better.  It was about making something through volunteer effort that would be free for anyone to use and change.  It had meaning.

It wasn’t long after that (probably about a year) when I found out about Creative Commons.  The same principles, but it applied to art.  The full ramifications of what they were proposing didn’t hit me then (I wasn’t terribly culturally aware), but the ideas were exciting enough to capture my interest and make me more open to the cultural (and related legal) world around me.

I now realize that ideas and projects like these are going to be shaping our culture for years to come, even if they appear to be on the decline.  Firefox took the world by storm in its day, but, more recently, closed projects like Facebook are captivating people to an even greater degree, and Diaspora hasn’t received much press since its Kickstarter fundraising event earlier this year.  And I’m sure most people don’t even know what Creative Commons is.

Still, their existence and large minority is important.  They keep the world in check.  There’s a large enough group advocating these projects that companies can’t just ignore them.  Practices and methods have to be continually improved to keep up.

And me?  I’m still enjoying the ride.  This was and probably will always be my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Culture shapes the minds of the public, and the last thing that needs to happen is absolute control over it.

The world is scary, but we have art and tools of our own to express ourselves to both shape and escape it.  Never forget that.

Until next time,
Harrison

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Art Review: Like a Donut

by Harrison on 19. Nov, 2010 in media studies


“We have no sense of dignity.  We worked in journalism.”

–Phill Johnson

It’s easy to talk yourself into a circle.  It’s rare that you ever want to.

Like a Donut, however, aims to do precisely that, though not in the precise manner you may be thinking of.  The piece is a series of interconnected videos created by Luke and Phill (last names redacted) that encourages exploration through a network that loosely connects the ideas within.

While the pieces themselves are often brief humor vignettes focused around a topic or two, the connections between them add an additional layer of interest to the ideas within.  Much in the way that people can find themselves browsing Wikipedia or TV Tropes for hours on end, Like a Donut relies on whimsy and loose relations to draw you in.  As topics come up in the pair’s banter, links to other videos and outside sources appear around them, pulling you deeper into the web (or circle of nonsense, as they would have you see).  The design (which almost exclusively uses circles and round objects) pulls this theme together,

There’s a few problems, but nothing that truly breaks the experience.  The “random” link, which could add some exploratory potential, does not seem to be working, and the small scale means you often find yourself getting linked back to videos you’ve already seen (although this also completes the experience in a certain sense, adding closure to the circles).

The trailhead also only links to two videos, so the project’s ability to drop you anywhere and still enjoy it is somewhat dampened, but there’s enough links from the first video to avoid this being a problem.

With its exploratory potential and ability to connect unrelated discussions into an overarching theme, Like a Donut is definitely worth consuming.  And not because it’s covered in glaze and makes for a delicious breakfast.

(Full disclosure: Co-creator Luke and I have worked together and talked about projects outside of this speace and my review here may hold some bias.  However, I am also the best student critic in Texas as of this March.  Take this for what you will.)

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Two Creative Commons books you should be aware of and why

by Harrison on 12. Nov, 2010 in the man

When I think of publishing under Creative Commons, there’s two books that immediately jump to mind. The first, most obvious choice is Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. The other, which you may not have heard of, is Machine of Death, a stellar short story anthology edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki, two of whom are fairly prominent webcomic artists.

Free Culture is the quintessential Creative Commons book because it goes into great depth regarding Lessig’s problems with copyright law as it stands and outlines what he recommends as methods of resistance. Through this, it’s quite easy to see Lessig’s reasoning when he help found the Creative Commons organization, as many of the principles he outlines in the book are present in the CC licenses and philosophy.

My other recommendation, Machine of Death (by-nc-nd, with some works by-nc-sa), demonstrates that writers don’t have to copyright their works and maintain total control over them to keep them successful. By promoting it through internet channels, they got enough people to buy it on Amazon on one particular day to put it at the top of Amazon’s best seller list above Keith Richards, a new John Grisham release,  and Glenn Beck’s new book for that day (Glenn was not too happy). They have since signed a deal that will distribute copies to bookstores en masse.

They were able to achieve this success while still offering the book as a free PDF and offering free audiobook recordings in a series of podcasts.

This is awesome. Instead of fearing free release due to loss of profits, they actually used free release as a promotion mechanism, allowing it to spread farther through distribution and word of mouth farther than it would have if they had merely self-published it and hoped people bought it.

The idea that a book can be free and yet still profitable is still lost on a great deal of publishers. With this as an exception (along with more to follow, hopefully), perhaps the industry as a whole will begin to embrace ideas such as Creative Commons rather than reject them.

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WTH, DMN?

by Harrison on 06. Nov, 2010 in media studies

This past Sunday, the Dallas Morning News republished Keith O’Brien’s Boston Globe opinion piece that commented on a study on a decline in empathy in college students.  The University of Michigan’s findings demonstrate that over the past two decades, college students’ emotional empathy has been on the decline, giving them less tendency to identify with others’ problems and generally care less or understand why they may be hurting.

O’Brien’s article is actually an extremely good assessment of the social problems facing our generation.  High divorce rates, 24-hour news, and technology and social changes at large are listed as possible causes, and O’Brien also admits the study’s shortcomings, as well as potential counters to his own argument.

The Dallas Morning News’ presentation of the article, however, was less than dazzling.  Above the article, taking up an entire half a page, was this picture:

Dallas Morning News Article Image
(source: Dallas Morning News, 10/31/2010)

The illustration provided with the article barely represents its actual content, if at all.  In fact Facebook is only ever directly mentioned in the article once, and even then it’s in a quote.  The illustration merely seeks to capitalize on the widespread vilification of social media instead of informing readers.

The thing is, behaviors like this are precisely what cause the widespread vilification of technological tools.  Media is often more concerned with selling papers and drawing eyes than it is in actually disseminating information.  If we’re to have any sort of civil discourse regarding new communication forms, we need to learn to filter sensationalist text and imagery such as that which the DMN ascribed to the article.

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A Dose of Halloween Cyberscare

by Harrison on 30. Oct, 2010 in security

Last week, one Firefox extension successfully caused Facebook users, Twitter users, and a whole lot of other people to panic.  The tool, Firesheep, allows you to view unencrypted authentication cookies that travel across a network and log in as the users they’re meant for.  It’s been hailed as a massive security hole in unencrypted login systems (like those for Facebook and Twitter), and people are scared.

But what does it really mean?  The tool only works on unsecured wireless networks, which have a whole host of security issues anyway that people have known about for years; Firesheep just makes it easier to exploit them.  Instead, the extension’s release and publicity were just more events that proved the public at large really doesn’t know (or perhaps even care) about security until it jumps out at them in a big way.

Mass media has been demonstrating this for years.  Remember when the Conficker worm was supposed to bring down everybody’s computer, ruining the tech network as we know it?  Remember when it didn’t?

Or Y2K.  It wasn’t a security issue, but it was still a widespread problem with computer code that laughably created far more panic than it should have.  Sure, the bug could have caused some problems if it hadn’t been fixed, but it wasn’t anything close to the massive apocalypse that the public and the media was predicting.

With Firesheep, just like scares that have happened in the past, education is far more important than panic.  I’m glad Firesheep exists to make people more aware of security issues, but I hope they won’t entirely blame the unencrypted services.  If you’re transmitting login data unencrypted on your favorite coffee shop’s open wi-fi network, you’re basically asking to get hacked, Firesheep or not.

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On App Stores and Repos

by Harrison on 25. Oct, 2010 in the man

33+takes and a number of upload attempts later, here is a video.

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Scrambled eggs in one basket

by Harrison on 16. Oct, 2010 in personal information

From last Friday to this Wednesday, I was asked to participate in an experiment: don’t use Facebook.

I wasn’t particularly fazed by this. For reference, here are my last three (intentional) Facebook posts, from oldest to latest:

July 28: “Let’s Play Words With Friends on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad! My Username is ‘IAmAboutUs’”

September 3: “Testing something, bear with me.” Link included from a development site I was working on.

October 7: “Starting tomorrow, I will not be using Facebook for a week. Most of you will not notice a difference, but I figured I ought to keep you posted nevertheless.”

Granted, this does not include comments (which I make with more frequency), but it should give you some sort of idea of my Facebook participation.

So, when the experiment was announced and many protested against the idea of leaving Facebook, I was briefly befuddled. Why would anyone be so upset about not using this service? It’s not like it’s really good for anything other than API docs and promotion…at least in my world.

The difference is simple: Facebook is not my single, one-stop personal organization and sharing tool. I’m using Flickr and my hard drive for photos, the calendar on my phone for events, Pidgin to socialize, and Twitter to broadcast random thoughts. Hence, I did not have much to lose by giving up Facebook; my life is elsewhere.

However, one who does use Facebook’s tools for all these things could find themselves very lost without it. Even if you do use their new data-exporting feature, it’s still very difficult to remove yourself from system.  The feature has not been activated for my account yet, but it seems like the HTML format you get the data in would be difficult to simply pack up and put into another system.

It leaves an interesting question: what happens when one of these systems goes down? Services that get canceled usually give their customers some sort of escape plan, but we haven’t had anything as large as Facebook or even MySpace completely fail and disappear from the internet.

My personal solution is to distribute my data between multiple services as well as keep data on as many things I personally own as possible (I use my own harrisonmassey.com domain for email), but that’s not a practical solution for everyone. What’s your online burning building escape strategy?

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Dear Diary…

by Harrison on 09. Oct, 2010 in media studies

…I read for forty minutes straight today without music and without getting up or looking away to do anything else.

I didn’t see this as an accomplishment.

Granted, I’m quite fortunate to not have the sorts of forced distractions that many people have in this day and age.  My boss stresses the importance of completing my schoolwork first, my roommates are usually gone in the morning and aren’t terribly noisy, and I’ve learned to ignore my phone at times, either intentionally by tuning the alerts out or unintentionally by leaving it in the other room when I go to read.

I believe the key is the medium.  A book (or e-reader) offers few functions apart from reading; therefore the potential for distraction is low.  However, other more generative devices (I use “devices” loosely here) have more ability, and therefore more potential for distraction.  I can claim that my second monitor is for looking up documentation while coding all I want, but its true purpose is to keep my Tweetdeck window running alongside whatever more important thing I happen to be doing.

While “continuous partial attention” may be partially the result of a more connected lifestyle, we also have to consider the fact that our machines are now capable of handling more tasks at once than we are.  When we try to keep up, we understandably get distracted.

This isn’t really a bad thing, it’s just an effect of evolving technology.  Still, I hope people don’t forget the simple joy of doing nothing but reading a book.  It’s easy to forget how pleasant that is if you haven’t done it in a while.

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Not Ubiquitous

by Harrison on 01. Oct, 2010 in media studies

Look over this chart, and pay particular attention to the charts about U.S. and worldwide cell phone use.

Now look at this Wired article on the flood response in Pakistan. For our purposes, however, I’m more interested in this quote from photojournalist Asim Rafiqui than I am in the flood response:

We forget that understanding the value of data (the use of that data to make it into information) is a privilege of an educated society. A person must understand the meaning of the information, and trust that it can be transformed into action. In Pakistan we have two issues; not only can’t an illiterate society know what data can be transformed into worthwhile information, but it has no awareness or even trust, that at the other end of the information cycle are institutions and organizations that will react, respond and deliver. A people in peril are sending data not to create pretty data maps, but to ask for a helicopter to come and save their families.

What do these two things have in common?  One simple message: most people aren’t participating in, or even interested in emerging media topics.  Those of you who are in my ATEC 2322 class may recognize this topic; we touched on it when talking about Lanier and Levy‘s views.

Going forward in our studies, it is important that we do not forget this.  We talk about media subjects as if they are ubiquitous truths like the people Rafiqui mentions in his quote, but we sometimes fail to realize that not everybody has access or even the ability to obtain access.

However, taking this rememberance and thinking too far is also problematic.  If we claim that those “out of the loop” are completely unaffected by anything going on in the emerging media space, we run the risk of causing unintended consequences for others through our thoughts and actions.  Networks are not limited to the online tools that help establish them; they are also highly personal.  People can pull information (or misinformation) from the computer and spread it to their non-technically oriented colleagues, friends, and family.  Emerging media propagation affects even those who are not directly observing it.

We can’t forget that this is partially an anthropoligical study and partially a technical study.  Leaning too far in either direction is problematic.  Anyone have any good examples for either point?

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Why does nobody care about jQuery?

by Harrison on 24. Sep, 2010 in coding

My contribution to Wikipedia was less an addition to the knowledge base of Wikipedia and more participation in the process and an attempt to collaborate with fellow users.

To date, that contribution has failed to a certain degree.

On Wednesday, I contributed this post to the talk page on the Wikipedia article on jQuery, a very popular Javascript library. A new project by the organization that maintains jQuery called “jQuery Mobile” is in development, and I wanted to know everyone’s thoughts on whether it had sufficient notoriety for its own page, or if it should be its own section on the jQuery page. So far, I haven’t received a response.

Maybe it’s because I shouldn’t have discussed it first. Maybe I should have just tried adding the section and let the editing community take it from there. My own uncertainty was my downfall here, and I should have just made the edit.

There’s another possibility, though: not many people are actually looking at the page. And it’s a rather likely possibility.

Wikipedia contains plenty of information about history, facts, and trivia, but it doesn’t contain what most people wanting to learn about jQuery are looking for: technical details, documentation, and tutorials. Therefore, if someone wants to learn how to use jQuery or what a particular jQuery function does, they are far more likely to look at the jQuery API reference than they are the jQuery Wikipedia page.

So, my next step? Overcome my fear of failure or angering the Wikipedia gods editors and just add the section.

And maybe add detail and references to the jQuery UI page while I’m at it.

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