Digital Revolution Blog

Rushes Sequences - Steve Wozniac interview - USA (Video)

2009-12-02T18:30:23Z

Steve Wozniak is a computer engineer who co-founded Apple Computer Inc. and built the Apple 1 computer. He was a member of the pioneering Homebrew Computer Club influential in the formative years of Silicon Valley. Steve met with the Digital Revolution team to discuss the formative years of the web, the Homebrew Computer Club and Bill Gates' letter against early software piracy.

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Transcript:

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Steve The Home Brew Computer Club because of it's sharing attitude was

very much the opposite of business as usual it was very much counter culture it was very

much like open source you give away something you write it down. Other people can look at it

improve on it come back to you get some you know little err amendments made erm, but you know companies did form in the Home Brew Computer Company right club. I mean the people that attending the Home Brew Computer Club ...........to sell products to make money and then eventually Steve ......... came by and we actually started a little company but not really an official company with big money and hoards of directors and that sort of stuff. When we did that later on with the Apple 2 computer the day, the day that I left Hewlett Packard to go to Apple and start Apple I never went back to the Home Brew Computer Club because now I was in a different world.

Intvr The famous early letter from Bill Gates wasn't there about the, the software and ........... tell me a bit about that?

Steve Sure our computer club got very interested in these up coming computers and then it became aware that there was a basic language a computer language that would run on these small low cost computers that you can build yourself and then you have to spend a lot of money to buy enough memory to run a programming language and to buy a teletype to type your stuff on yet you have to spend several times the cost of a car but then you could run Bill Gates and Paul Allen had written a basic came on a big paper tape reel and it, you read it in on a teletype machine it would get into the memory of the computer and then it could run programmes. You could type in a game out of a book of games written in the basic language, type in the game and play it on the computer. This was a whole, goal that probably every one of the 500 of us in the Home Brew Computer club was to get to the point that we could play games on our own computer. And Bill Gates became a little bit famous and well known for this software going around. well we had a con, one copy of the tape that our club library had bought, to purpose and one member of the club, the Dan ........ took that tape and borrowed it for two weeks and when he came back he brought back like four copies, he just copied the, he copied the paper tape at his company AMI and he brought them back and he said the new rule is anytime you take something from the club library you have to return at least that many copies. That's kind of funny and we got a letter from Bill Gates all upset you know copyright you know you're copying software and you shouldn't. you know and I agree, I agree with that.

Intvr Tell me more about the letter because whatever you think about it it marks the sort of change it's a different attitude isn't it to some of that kind of just sharing and sharing?

Steve Say again.

Intvr Tell me a little bit more about the letter and err.

Steve Sure, sure the letter from Bill Gates to our Home Brew computer Club got some notoriety and fame over the years you know and because it was basically you know hey you have to pay for what you use and you know to, to this day we still have you know we, you look at all the reports of how many kids just copy all their music for free. I don't know I, I don't really agree with that I was brought up with a very strong ethics you are who you say you are, you tell the truth, the truth is the number one ideal in my life, and so I don't like you encouraging children to learn any time you get something for free it's OK. I do not agree with that I have never copied a piece of software taken a piece of software illegally, music no I won't touch that you know. Why don't you, you know you can, you can afford something and you can stick within your means that's what I believe in. And I have a lot of friends that are musicians they are creators of the world they're like writers and how did, imagine a writer, writing a book, how are they going to get paid if everyone copies it for free. Look at the royalties on that. So many of my musician friends their musician friends the royalties have just dropped, and dropped and dropped people are still getting their music more than ever before but they're not paying.

Intvr Some of the just in the difference of opinion or the different attitude then you can see about this idea of software or piracy or things that should be free or whether they should be paid for do you think in a way that's the first example of an argument that's still going on today?

Steve Sure yeah well when Bill Gates wrote his letter to the Home Brew Computer Club upset that we were copying freely copied his basic that he'd spent all his time and energy working on you know he was pointing out that erm, a problem which is the digital age on earth the ability to copy things for no cost. You know I mean there were times in I remember time in erm, like I was brought up to communist Russia you weren't allowed to have copy machines, you know and then all of sudden we started trying to ban copy of anything over here and it's just a problem how do you solve it in the long term it's almost like huge forces of nature that you cannot turn back. Huge hurricanes are forced eventually it's going to be so easy to copy things that their value their cost where people will pay it's got to go down, it just has to eventually err you know the laws of trying to hold it out I'd noticed that every court case to this day tends to side with copyright holders and you cannot have for free.

Intvr You talked about music and file sharing do you think that's something that's ever going to be resolved or is that just going to be keep playing out the same way?

Steve Now that it's so easy to like buy a little card and put 500 movies on you know one little card that you can plug into a camera if you want it's very difficult when. One time in my office a gentleman came in you know on this whole copyright issue a gentleman came in and I was talking about my gosh you could almost get to the point you could put a movie on a card and he said oh somebody will have a card and you'll have 500 movies on. and I thought that changes life as we know it. it changes the rules if I have a card that's bits ones and zeros and I give you those ones and zeros the digital age, says a song is not longer music a song is a collection of a billion numbers. I give you those billion numbers you've got it. it's so easy. Our computer technology lets us copy everything instantly no it's very scary it means a new world, a new world's ahead and it may take decades it may even take centuries before we actually get to the final ending point. Because you know people are used to the old ways and you always want to keep a little bit of the old and the old is everything was too complicated for individual person to make all the copies in the world of. You sell them a replica on vinyl and they've got that one record and all these days of one record I mean they could loan it to a friend and get it back, but it's pretty much you know one record and now all of a sudden you give out a song and it, it could be 10,000 or a hundred thousand a million copies you know just distributed that instantly you know the, the cost of, the cost of production used to regulate this industry. Some industry's that are based on information meaning everything like music, books, erm, newspapers and, and movies. All these industries are having severe problems today. Already and it's just been you know what's been you know what err decade and a half.

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Intvr When did you first come across the internet?

Steve I heard about the internet from friends at first, I wasn't one of the earliest people in it I had friends in companies like Hewlett Packard friends that were tied into the University community and I would watch them get on line with this thing called I, I got Arpanet before it was the internet. Now they had the internet they could talk to their friends at different universities and share scientific information I knew something was going on but I didn't know. I didn't relate it to how valuable it could mean to normal humans. And then a friend of mine told me he'd gone on the internet with a friend a certain here and seen some amazing things he said that was going to take over thing cause now for the first time we had a programme called mosaic that put pictures with your text on the internet. The original internet brought us the web from Tim Bergs Lee brought us the web but it was only words. It was only words it was merging the pictures and all of a sudden made it half way to what personal computers were. Or a part of the way there. and erm, had this and anyway I was scared I didn't know a thing about it I had a friend err a friend of a friend Come in and and teach me here's how you set up the internet in your house or your company. First you have to rent some copper lines from a company called Bell something and then you have to do this and then you have to get these kind of machines and servers and I was scared I didn't know what any of this stuff was but I did it. I took the risk, I went and I got friends and I got equipment and I made purchases and I set things up I didn't even use a Macintosh computer I was familiar with I had to get a Sun computer and I got something hooked up and I had to make phone calls and say are you supplying the part or are we, something's not working and I had it fixed and working and then for 10 years I became a network administrator keeping all these routers the route the signals out to this part of the network and give you internet addresses and all this crazy geeky stuff. Erm, it was a tough time but I got on the internet so early I got a three letter dot com. I got wars my name dot com. But you know what everybody wants their name dot com and I like to do things different and I'm sort of a non profit guy so I always use ............ non profit.

Intvr Did you have experience of early on line communities or know of or hear of the well and so on?

Steve When the internet came it turns out there were some, some things that proceeded the internet. There were erm, the source was the first big huge organisation it was a computer that tens of thousands of people could dial into with accounts and link messages for others to read and then came AOL. AOL for the first few years was Mackintosh only because it was graphics in a display like we're used to on our computers today instead of just texting and answering you know putting out a list of my options on type 3 for this, and 3 for that so I talked plasters around this time and I would teach all the students every year I would give them AOL and watch how you're going to chat rooms and find people that are strangers and the amount of communication just explodes in your body the number of strangers that you can meet and actually talk to and you don't have to be afraid of a personal interaction. Erm it was just amazing you could download all these neat software you know stuff and you know have AOL account download all the software you needed and you could research different news, you could get into groups of different types of education that were places for parents, places for kids what on an incredible world was opening. Now here came the internet and it was sort of like a sub centre of them but at first the internet was occupied by the ............. in the universities and they were putting out different kinds of information than what you do in normal fun like you know it wasn't kids it wasn't young education it was erm, and so at first the internet was a little bit more boring by you know and tame by, by regards. They didn't have sound they didn't have movies they didn't have all the things flash and all that we, we're used to today so it was a very early start but I thought this is so important this internet it's a cunning thing, we still have to dial into the internet on 50K modems, even slower modems I think when the internet first came we didn't have 50k modems yet we didn't have DSL we didn't have broadband we didn't have Cable modems we didn't have satellite anything so it was very, very slow and I got all my classes of young kids, 10 years olds on up on erm, I always you know taught them you know here's how you set up and use the internet have email addresses and do that sort of thing because it was easy ..........it was the most important thing in the world. I went home one night I just set up the internet for the first day ever in my house and I said this internet is something you're going to be able to buy things on. you know things that you're not used to going to stores and we typed in, my wife and I typed in coffee and we found a place in .......... that you could order coffee I mean we were just probably sending them a little note that they would then do all the paperwork and do it manually it wasn't really done through the internet. But I was really need to see you could actually buy something on the internet that was going to change the world of commerce for ever and this was in the early days the late 90's when all the investment, investors and all the venture capitalists figured the internet is going take over the world and anything internet related is going to be so valuable they invested and invested and they over invested more rapidly than the technology could really come about in robust fashion so that we had the dot com crash and here we are today and I think every body would look at the internet and say it's a good thing. It's a good thing everything I do on the internet I did before a different way that was more work, was slower or worse or didn't get a ......... it's changed our life quite a bit.

Rushes Sequences - Dave Weinberger interview - USA (Video)

2009-12-02T15:17:01Z

Dave Weinberger is a technologist and technology commentator. He met with Aleks Krotoski and the programme four team to discuss the new mental journeys enabled by the hyperlink, the web's world of information freedom and the difficulties of filtering that information in the potential chaos of that freedom.

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Transcript:

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Naming the series - the quest for a title continues...

2009-12-02T13:45:59Z

First off - a big thank you for all your title suggestions for the series. The response has been fantastic.

This said, unfortunately we don't yet have a definitive answer on our title - we remain, as Stephen Fry, bemoaned 'title-less'.

We've been inundated with suggestions (many of which you can find on the previous blog posts on the #bbcnamestorm) and here the team have been toiling with terms, scouring thesauruses (thesauri?), mixing metaphors and collecting clichés. But the Executive Producer and Commissioning Editor of the series still don't feel any suggestions either from both the production team and the web quite grab them enough.

Here are the shortlists we compiled of your ideas and ours. None of these are firm 'no's; the intention remains to take a shortlist of six names to BBC Two, and they will choose at least three of these from the longlist of your suggested names. But the suggestions so far have generated pithy comments from the powers that be - provided in parentheses beside them.

We're hoping this might help stir up one last burst of inspiration for a series title. If not, the six names will be taken forward from our existing lists.

Shortlist of suggestions from the web:

The World Mind (nice but a bit too narrow - suggests content of our fourth programme)

The Age of Dreams (is it, really though?)

The End of Distance ('Death of Distance' is snappier but Frances Cairncross got there first)

The Links That Bind Us (aren't 'links' a bit of a techie turn-off?)

Let there Be Links (ditto with added biblical feel)

Shift: the new digital paradigm (quite Gladwell-esque but what does 'shift' mean/say?)

Click: And the World Shrank (a bit narrow)

Onrush (like the made-up word but it could be a documentary on cocaine)

2010: A Web Odyssey (means we can't broadcast it in 2011)

A brain the size of a planet (nice Hitchhikers' allusion but all a bit programme four)

all together now (are we?)

Civilisation + (like the computer game?)

Around the world in 80 nanoseconds (very nice but doesn't quite roll off the tongue for the next-day-at-the-watercooler chat)

How the world was shrunk (all very honey I shrank the web)

Unbound: the World Connected (not bad, just a bit bondage)

1% useful (the series producer was tickled by this one but felt on balance that it slightly undermined the series mission)

Production Team suggestions:

Digital Revolution (yes, we've grown to like it but nobody up top does)

Only Connect (EM Forster would be proud - we're still turnign this one over)

.Revolution (the dot is putting oldies off)

How the Web was Spun (Stephen Fry liked the double pun but it sounds too historical)

The Electric Enlightenment (but the web is so much more than electricity- sounds like we'll be featuing Faraday)

Civilization Rebooted (that game again...)

Clickstream (geek speak)

Generation Web (programme four subtitle?)

Unleashed: How the Web Transformed the World (walkies!)

Reach: How the Web Changed the World ('Reach' could be a deoderant or toothpaste, not unique to web)

We still feel the word' revolution' is important - as that's the concept the series interrogates again and again. Continual revolution, constant revolution, irrversible revolution...

If you have any further ideas - find yourself inspired with a title for our series in the next few days - please do tell us! Either here on the blog, or via Twitter to @BBCDigRev. Your input and interest are hugely appreciated.

Rushes Sequences - Doug Rushkoff interview - USA (Video)

2009-12-02T13:03:26Z

Doug Rushkoff is an author, teacher, columnist and media theorist. He met with the programme three ream to discuss the realities of 'free' content and services on the web.

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Doug Look at the devolution of-, the way we represent ourselves online has devolved from the quirky, personalised HTML webpage, homepage of the '90s, to the somewhat modular but still strange presence of a MySpace page, to the completely formatted and market-friendly presence of a Facebook page. You know, what we've done is moved from personal, human, open-ended self-expression to completely market and computer-friendly regimented and conformist expression. And that's because we've turned the net from a venue for self-expression, to a way to render ourselves up onto the market. You know, as a result the internet does not foster humanity, you know, the internet is about human beings conforming to the needs of technology as understood by the market, rather than human beings getting technology to extend and express what it means to be a human being. And that's why the net has moved from being part of a human potential movement to part of the, really, anti-human movement.

Intv A lot of content on the web is free, and that's largely advertising-supported. Do you think that Google helps to create the 'free web'?

Doug Um, Google on the internet serves almost the same function as the World Bank in the globe. In other words, Google talks about everything being free, open source and all shared, Google wants every system to be open. But what Google really want is every system to be open to Google so that Google can serve ads through every piece of technology. You know, the same way that the World Bank says, 'Oh, we want to give money to all these developing nations as long as they open their markets to first world activity. That means, we're going to give them money so that they allow a factory to be opened on their land, you know, we're going to give them money so they have the privilege of paying us back with interest.' And that's um that's not just openness, that's openness to a certain thing. So, I must applaud the Google Android and this great system and it's going to be on phones and all that, but they want to be open for a reason, you know, they understand that because they do basically have a monopoly right now um information and the way it's spread and the way it's categorised, the way we understand it, that the more open systems they can have, the fewer boundaries that anyone is allowed to erect to anything, then the fewer boundaries there are to Google. You know, the-, there's a myth online that what we're doing is free. All that's happened is the place that revenue and value is extracted from us has been shifted. So yes, I might download a movie for free from the internet, but who's made that movie? Someone who's bought a Macintosh and a Sony camera, made their movie and edited it on Final Cut that they paid for, and uploaded it with their, you know, Time Warner AT&T broadband and stuck it on YouTube, which is a Google-owned server. You know, they've paid nine corporations for the privilege of making and uploading a movie that they would've simply paid for before, to download and watch the movie. You know what I mean? I'm still paying Time Warner for movies, I'm just paying them now to make movies instead of to watch them.

Intv So 'free' is a myth?

Doug 'Free' is absolutely a myth. The only thing that-, the only thing that's changed is that there are new ways to extract value from people who are working. Nothing is-, nothing is free, nothing is free. You know, you are paying for your free Guardian, you're just paying for it by buying the computer and buying the online time, and upgrading your system, and getting the new computer and then buying the computer for your kid, you know, and then paying for the power. You are still paying, you're just paying different companies. Sometimes you're paying the same company. Sony owns music and computers, so they're selling you one thing to rob from the other side of their company, you know, but you're still paying. The only thing that's different, is things-, the only thing that's changed is that which was in scarcity, and that which was in abundance. So, the technology through which to watch the news was in such abundance by the 1980s that there were no American television manufacturers left by the late '80s, because everybody had a TV, they all lasted a long time, it didn't matter. Now, everybody's getting a new computer every year or two, or a new device, and a new iPhone and a new this, there's a tremendous market for that stuff, but the content is basically free because there's so many people in companies out there trying to make content, trying to write their articles.

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Doug there's a real danger among er technology and media theorists today, in that they accept the sort of libertarian understanding of the market as a given, in reality, that they just assume that that's the way things work. They haven't looked at the history of money. They don't understand that making markets for scarce things is the result of having a kind of money that is released in a scarce way. This is a better way of saying it; for all these people's understanding of open source and programmes, they refuse to acknowledge that the money we use is also a programme, that it is a closed source programme. It's as if you woke up one day and all the computers had Microsoft Windows on it, you wouldn't know that there's any other operating system. Well the money we use is also an operating system that was invented during the Renaissance, and it was invented for a top down scarcity model of media and culture and technology and everything. Now we've got a decentralised technological system with computers all over the place and people creating value all over the place, but we're still using a 13th century money system. So you end up with these contradictions that guys like Chris Anderson call 'free', that means all the stuff is free! No, it doesn't mean it's free, it means we need to now develop an economic platform capable of dealing with the distributed decentralised value-creation economy. And that's not that-, I don't think that's too complex for a documentary. I mean I think that's an im-, you know what I mean? I think that's-

Chat

Doug Things are free and things are devalued now. I can't get paid to write because there's so much writing out there. But this is a temporary stage, this is not a function of technology, but a function of economics. You know, the crash that we're going through now, this upset in central banking, is largely a result of the ability of people all throughout the periphery to create value without capital. That's a really strange thing. In the old days, if you wanted to create value you needed to go to the bank, borrow money, set up your factory and do this thing. Now you can create value without going to the bank, without getting that central capital upfront. That's what's created the confusion, that's what's upset the banks. There's no longer a market for their product, which is cash, so what do you do? Well, there's big wobble until that's figured out, and that's why we have this problem of the free. And this is not forever. In other words, journalism sucks now, music sucks now, media sucks now, because everyone can kind of make this stuff. The only reason everyone can make this stuff is because there's way too many outlets. You know, every time Britney Spears pops a zit there's 400 news vans outside her house to cover it, you know, and probably two or three news vans could easily cover her popping a zit enough for everybody. You know, the fact that there's all of this surplus um that does need to end, and some people will lose their jobs over it, and hopefully it will be the people who don't do it well who lose their jobs over it and the people who do do it well can stay.

Rushes Sequences - Sherry Turkle interview - USA (Video)

2009-11-28T14:55:01Z

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauxe Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She met with Aleks Krotoski to discuss the issues of privacy, communication and identity in the web-connected world.

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Rushes Sequences - Danah Boyd interview - USA (Video)

2009-11-28T14:49:10Z

Danah Boyd is a social media researcher at Microsoft Research. She met with Aleks Krotoski to discuss the changes in young people's behaviour when online, their attitudes to privacy and the importance that might be placed upon building their identities online.

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Alex      Danah, are the kids behaving differently on line?

Danah      You know, it's not so much that they're behaving differently as much as that we have a sense of visibility that we've never seen before. So we're used to having, you know, we'll see a certain group of kids in certain places right. The mall we can see kids hanging out with their friends that way. But as adults we don't typically have a, a really good sense of all the kids and a good sense of where they are and what they're doing when they're with their friends. What's going on on-line is it, in many ways it's youth space. So they're there, they're goofing around as through it, they're there just with their friends. And so what ends up happening is you can get a sense of what's going on really in, in broad sweeps. And it isn't just the kids like the kids in your community but the kids who are in different communities all around the world with all sorts of different ideas of what is normative behaviour. Right, and that what, what is ......... or what is common really differs and so we see these behaviours on line and we're like oh my gosh it's radically different today than it ever was before. That's not really. Its.

Alex    Well yeah I, I was going to ask that actually. How different is it from like when I was a kid I'd come to the mall and I'd do stuff at the mall or I'd go to the movie theatre or whatever. How different is this?

Danah   Think about what happens when you were doing that with your friends right? You were there, you were joking around, you were gossiping, you were flirting you were kind of consuming culture and consuming merchandise. But it was part of this all, all encompassing social experience. The same thing is actually happening fully on line right. So all of those everyday practices, the gossip, the flirting, the joking around that's taking place on line. And it's taking place on line with the same kinds of friends that it took place in the mall right. You met up with all the kids at school but you also saw the kids at the neighbouring school and you're like hey who are you what's that about? That same thing is, is where we're seeing it play out. So young people who are engaged on line they're primarily engaged with the people they already know; their friends, their friends from school, their friends from after school activities, their friends from around the community.

Alex      And of course it's that visibility though that's freaking people out.

Danah Oh yeah.

Alex    Because there's this longevity associated with that. You know, you put something up on I don't know, you put something on Facebook like a social networking site or you put something on My Space or any of these spaces and it's there, it's there for life. So are there ways that the kids are starting to protect themselves? How do they, how do they stop what they're putting up there?

Danah   Well they're not going to stop what they put up there because the, the trick with on line material is everything is persistent by its nature right. That's one of the powers of the internet. And we think of, it, it really is a useful ............ right because if something is persistent that means you can get access to it at a different time. That's the opportunity of ......... synchronicity. But it's also how this material is available 10, 15, 20 years later. And right now we're in that moment of, of transition, that point of absolute confusion. Um, the uncertainty of you know, what does it mean that you have everything up there? Down the road it just becomes the way things are you know, and it's interesting to see the individuals for whom that's already part of their story. And that's' the power of the early adopters right. So you, you know, I think about it, I've been blogging since you know, 1997, that's a really long time at this point. And sure, you can go back and you can read all sorts of things about me as a teenager working out all sorts of issues. Hopefully you won't um, but more importantly it's, it's about constantly moving forward. And so if someone wants to engage with that level of stalking and see my teenagedom they can. But you have to read it in the light of the whole shift. And so I think for the teenagers today they're going to be living out their teenage lives in this very persistent, very searchable manner but 10, 15 years from now it's going to be part of a longer trajectory and the people are going to be looking at the things they're doing as 20 something's. And sure, we look back and go oh that was stupid what I did when I was you know, 14 and it was, it always was. Um, but when you have this cultural element where everybody's got this track record it's not going to be as shocking as it is right now for the people who are you know, learning that and figuring it out.

Alex That's interesting you say that cos I've heard a theory that you know, some, that people won't trust people in the future. Say they run for political office, if they don't have that exposure, if they haven't thrown themselves all up on line because they won't have that track record people will say well why not, what were you trying to hide? And do you think that that's, that that is an aspect of naivety? Do you think I'm naïve because I'm part of this, this culture that I think well our privacy is, our concepts have shifted so much?

Danah    The concepts are shifting but we all, always have to take in to account privilege. Who has privilege in this system and who doesn't? I, I have the great privilege to be able to say this is who I am you will deal with me like it or not. When I'm in a very particular position you know, professionally, socially etc. Now a lot of people ......... that's not true. And the classic example that everybody can reach out er, can make sense of is the teacher right. The teacher we think of is a perfectly reasonable character in our lives but the teacher is supposed to have a big boundary between what they do in the classroom and what they do elsewhere right. And for example sex is not supposed to enter the classroom and yet teachers have a right to have a sex life. They you know, they're old enough to be allowed to drink and it not be an issue. Um, and so what happens when their students get to see access of their personal lives in another context, how does that use, how is that used to shift the power roles in the classroom? And for many teachers it's a point of deep struggle and frustration right. What does it mean to be in an on line dating site and your students track down your profile that was never meant for them where no name was ever explained? But it was meant to try to live a life outside of the classroom. And what happens when it gets interpreted by you know, those, those teenagers parents of like what are you doing, why do my kids have to see you dating? You know, and that becomes a really interesting boundary problem. And so for all of the ways in which yes we're going to expect people to be online for certain roles right. If you're building um, credibility in public um, in the future, that will include public on I, on line. Just like if you're running for you know, to be a politician, you should have a track record of TV of you know, newspaper articles of all of this material, that's your track record, that's your story. Um, but not everybody wants to be in public at that level and what are the different boundary issues for those who being in public is actually very costly?

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Danah Yeah we're seeing, we're seeing patterns and a lot of it has to do with their particular social positions right. So the popular kids are using the technologies to try to maintain and reinforce popularity in very particular ways. And that's when we see social status becoming really critical. So it's no longer the Nikes that are the particular status. With markers it's the way of actually maintaining certain kind of friendships and getting certain kinds of you know, responses from certain celebrities, all of that play goes on. Um, we also see marginalised kids who, who are desperately seeking some sort of support um, and who are often at loss um, you know, out in more traditional senses of schools or what not. Finding a community on line and this is one of the more powerful narratives of the internet right. Your, your queer kids who can actually find people like them who can support them. They're much more willing to be public in a traditional sense because they're desperate for somebody who might be like them. For the, the popular kid it's much more about being public to the school; people who will give them credit, that will give them status. And so we see these different groups contending with it differently. We also see the power of certain public figures you know, in negotiating with teenagers. So if you think about which teenagers are using Twitter in the, in the earliest of stages a lot of it comes down to who's talking to celebrities? And you know, this wasn't that different from when I was growing up you know, and the idea of writing to the New Kids on the Block right, the, you know, the Boy Band of the day you know, in a hopes that you would get a letter um, you know, in response right which was inevitably a form letter. Um, was the possibility of, of reaching out and getting, getting a response you know, feeling as though that person really existed and they really recognised your existence. This, the Twitter is a modern day incarnation of that for a lot of the celebrity teenager relationships right. Can I get validation from you know, Miley Cyrus who's now left Twitter or even Demi Levado or any number of these particular celebs? Um, the idea that you know, may be I can actually get to meet Shakil O'Neil in person cos he'll announce where he is. I mean all of that possibility. So you see that as another component. So there's always these publics, these publics keep coming back. But the same practices are there.

Alex      The, one thing that keeps coming up is this idea of the exchange of private information you know. How is, how are kids exchanging or using private information as currency in a different way than perhaps adults are using private information as currency?

Danah   Well again what, what constitutes private information? Right. From an adults perspective it's identifying information is their absolute fear right. The idea that it's your name, your address, your phone number, anything that will identify you. And this has to do with the idea of physical risk. But for young people it's about the you know, alright fine you can call me by my name why is that a big deal? It's more about the things that make you vulnerable. And so when we think about privacy and private information it's really a question of vulnerability. And so from adult perspective we're really concerned about physical vulnerabilities. Um, and increasingly about psychological vulnerabilities. And for a lot of young people it's about social vulnerabilities. So you know, how do I make certain that I don't get teased, harassed, bullied um, because of the things that I make available out there? How do I make certain that what I put out there makes me seem cool and not, and not lame? How do I balance that? So the social vulnerability is the privacy fight for young people. The physical and psychological is the fight for parents. And so we see these two constantly at odds. Because part of putting things out in public is to achieve status you need to actually make yourself a, vulnerable at a certain level. And how do you actually do that in a way that balances the risk and the benefits?

Rushes Sequences - Gina Bianchini interview - USA (Video)

2009-11-28T14:30:57Z

Gina Bianchini is CEO and co-founder of Ning. She met with the programme four team to discuss online social networks and the changing nature of relationships and human interactions in the connected world of the web.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

Gina      So, regardless of whether you think, you know, social technology and the internet is good or bad, it is. This is what, you know, the genie is out of the bottle, and I think that's an amazing thing. The social web can do more good in the world than it can do bad, and it's the choice of people and the people who are using it as to what they want to do with it. It is the most empowering generational shift that has ever happened, and I think that that is what makes it so compelling and so inspiring, and so much fun. When you look at the fact that you can be sitting in your pyjamas on your couch and help-, help drive, you know, world peace, that is actually happening today, that's possible in a way that it was never possible before, and I think that that's something that is incredibly important. So, you know, does it mean that people have shorter attention spans? Yes, but is that a bad thing? Maybe, depending on what your point of view is, but in terms of what it can actually enable socially, economically and politically, I think that we should embrace and welcome social technology, not fear it.

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Intv    So basically we're saying, can we judge the social networking revolution as good or bad?

Gina    So when I look at whether social technology and the social web is a good thing or a bad thing that's horrible for society or wonderful for society, I think the reality is that it's here. It's not going away. And so, it's up to people who use it to decide whether it is going to represent the best of human nature, or the worst of human nature. And realistically, it's probably going to be a little bit of both, but what is possible today with social technologies is profound. Namely, you can be sitting at your house, in your pyjamas, and you can actually impact the lives of someone sitting in a country hundreds of thousands of miles away, that is wrought with political strife. You can say, 'I'm here, I'm listening to you.' One of our-, one of our Ning networks is er is the Congo Wall, which was created by Eve Ensler who had just gotten back from the Congo with her V-Day organisation, where women are being brutalised as a-, as a means of fighting war. And the fact of the matter is, they feel alone. And with social technology women from all over the world can come to this-, this Ning network and leave a message for the women of the Congo, 'You're not alone.' And those messages, over 2,000 women and men around the world actually contributed one of the-, contributed a message, they printed them out and took them to the hospital in the Congo where women were recovering. No one is alone anymore, and I actually think that's a really powerful thing. You can sit at your house and make change. And we're talking about social change, and political change, and economic change, in a way that was never possible before, and I think that that's something that we should embrace and that we should look at what are the ways that we're going to make it the best of what people can be, as opposed to the worst of what people can be.

Intv What have we just seen, particularly in light of, say, the last presidential campaign now, Barack Obama being in office, this sort of transformation of social networking, sort of, coming out of the playtime and actually influencing institutions [and convincing people]?

Gina    So fundamentally, again, social technologies are reflective of human nature, whether it's, you know, connecting you to the people that you know, or connecting you to people around the things that you care about. And when you look at it in that context, everything that people are doing in terms of learning how to connect with other people online, is towards a common goal. So whether that common goal is sharing news articles for fun, or, you know, entertaining themselves by listening to amazing music in the context of a artist fan site, or an artist website, or a MySpace page or a Facebook fan page. All of those skills can actually be used for anything, so we have-, we have a Ning network, the Pickens Plan, which is er here in the United States T. Boone Pickens, who was a-, has been a big oil entrepreneur over the years, is passionate about wind energy. Over 200,000 organisers across 91% of the congressional districts in the United States have come together in a social activism network and changed the course of wind energy policy in the United States. The same exact foundation, the same exact technology is being used for people to express themselves around their tricked-out cars and DUB pages, which is a social network name for people who love to trick out their cars. So as people are actually learning how to use social technologies, they are using them in all sorts of ways, so of course, social technology is going to have a massive impact in terms of how people organise politically, what they do economically, and how they express themselves as being unique individuals in a social way. So I actually think and really look at it as, the skills people are learning across all of these facets of the world um it's not a surprise that they're using them for political activism. And I think that the part about it that is just amazing is the fact that it is global. Ning, when we launched, in 2007 we launched Ning Networks, we had registered users in over a hundred countries, day one. The internet is global, the world is global, and I think that when you look at, you know, the fact that media is global today in a way that it never was before, it is going to have a fundamental impact on the way the world works, and I think that's a good thing.

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Gina    I almost wonder if on some level the problems that we have to tackle as a human race, you know, have presented themselves at the exact same time that the technology to actually address them in a compelling, global way, has also appeared. So, if you look at it, you know, that the kinds of things that we have to solve, as global citizens, we actually have the tools to be able to solve them, in part because of the-, what makes people so special, which is the fact that we're innovators and we are people who can change the world. So, we now have tools, I mean, 25 years ago we didn't have a way to impact the world in one single instant. Today we do, and it's through the internet.

Intv   Going back to web natives, the people that have only grown up knowing online, is this generation going to be alright? Are the kids going to be doing okay?

Gina    Kids are alright, the kids are alright. No, I absolutely believe that the possibilities and the opportunities for people to live a rich, passionate life that allows them to express themselves in all the ways that they want to, regardless of where they live geographically, I don't think it gets any better than that.

Rushes Sequences - Master Shortie interview - London (Video)

2009-11-27T15:47:34Z

Master Shortie is a Mobo nominated British rapper. He's 20 - the same age as the web - and has fully embraced the digital revolution. He constantly promotes his music online, connects with his fans on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, and releases his music virally as well as through mainstream outlets.

Here he talks to Aleks Krotoski about social networking and music piracy, explaining why it's wrong to crack down on fans for downloading music and suggesting other ways for musicians to make money in the digital age, such as touring and merchandise.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

Master That um, how I've started out, I did quite a lot of shows like that, I did one at the Roundhouse in Camberwell, just issued an invitation off facebook to a lot of friends that were into my stuff, and then on MySpace as well, and then just kind of spreads out. And then the first one you know, there's X amount of people there, they go off and tell their friends, and it's just you know, it's slow and it's long, but or I could have just gone, loads of money marketing, posters everywhere, I'm performing here at this time, you know I've got that amount of people to go straight away, but it's um, it's more real I suppose if you do it yourself because you know that they're coming to see you cos they want to see you, not because it's been forced in their face.

Aleks    Well there's something else like you, you mentioned before that you use the web to work with producers, you use the web to work with music makers, and do you think that's, that's a part of the personal aspect of the web, I mean are they, are they fans or are they people who are seeking to produce music on record labels

Master On both man like I'm loving that the internet is full of you know the fact that it's music lovers in general and just because you work in music it doesn't mean you stop love, loving music. I'm also a music lover and I'm a fan and I go on as a fan online, as well as an artist and with me doing that, I've helped people to do the same thing with other artists, so it's like a big community online with up and coming R...... rappers, singers, musicians, producers and you know if you, you can literally just bond with a lot of these people online. i.e. with the kind of style of music that they're doing. And then you know with my producer um, labyrinth, I met him um, via a friend, but we really made a connection online and kept in contact online, and from then on you know it's history. We made an amazing album, really created a sound together.

Aleks     there's some people who would, who would like criticise this whole idea that they would say that they'd want you know, go down the traditional route, that this is just a flash in the pan type of thing, that this is you know that, that fans are gonna get tired of this, it's just something that's new, that's not resilient. How do you respond to those kinds of criticisms when it comes to what you're doing, which is essentially marketing and promotion and all that kind of stuff?

Master I don't know maybe they are, it's, to be honest I can't, I can't say anything to those people because um, they're living in the past realistically because um, the, the internet adds, pays a big part in not just music but in more aspects of the media. And that's obvious to see and if you see the statistics prove that you know singles sales you know they dominated by, by iTunes, and not you know physical releases. People have gone to top ten without actually having CD's out, so I, I would love to see them come up with a, a um, a kind of a thing to say to them about, facts are facts, and they just need to you know, move with us.

Aleks    It was amazing actually we were holding your CD before and I couldn't figure out, I'd forgotten how to open a CD case, like that, that nearly freaked me out, this idea of like a jewel case, that somebody...

Master But at the same time I compromised, it's nice to have a CD, it's nice to have it physical in your hand you know of a sleeve and lyrics. Cos in my album I make sure to put the lyrics in there, so again um, if you do go out of your way to spend the extra money in the CD, and the actual time and effort um, I want to make an effort back. So put all the lyrics in there and some wicked pictures, and also with the CD you get bonus tracks which you may not be able to get online, and loads of stuff like that, and also I went down and signed a lot of CDs at a lot of the record stores. And um, I think that there should be a way of you know making something more physical, more you know tangible for a person to be able to hold. But um, until then I think people just don't have the time and life is moving so quickly that, that actually to come out of a busy schedule to go to a record store, spend money on a CD, go, then have to find a CD player to um, play it on, it is, it does work out a bit longer, whereas iTunes is for online, it's download, listen straightaway, whereas HMV, bus home, bedroom, electricity on, put it in, press play, then you listening. And then so you randomly want to listen to it again, you can't it, it's hard man, but I do like CDs because it's, it's nice to have that physical product, at the same time I understand that it is a bit time consuming.

Aleks        Well it's also a different craft like in terms of how you produce it, but that's a whole different conversation.

Master yea definitely

Aleks   Um, the CDs, like you're talking about signing it and you know you're talking about adding a little bit of presence, you're talking about adding that little bit of rarity, that people wouldn't get if they download on MP3s.

Master yea definitely

Aleks      so what other ways because there's so much plenty that's available I mean not only is it well, I'll go into that in a second, there's so much plenty when it comes to online content, when it comes to downloading movies or ......... whatever, that people aren't really making as much money are they really?

Master no definitely not

Aleks So like is a CD, like actually having a physical thing, still where are we going to move back to that as a way of like getting cash flowing through the music industry?

Master I hope, I hope, I hope there is a way to you know go back into having something physical, people also want to buy alongside downloads, I don't think downloading should be abolished or that people should be punished for downloading music because I think that um, it's played a big part within the media, within music and I think um, a lot of the positive things that have um, come out of music in the last you know, ten, twenty years, would never have come about. And you wouldn't be able to watch award ceremonies on TV, wouldn't be able to find out information relating to ...... every five minutes, you wouldn't be able to really um, you know what I mean buy gigs at hotels for every single show of an artist that you like and stuff like that, so um, but I do think that there should be some kind of way of making it physical, maybe not a CD because like I said, like I said that's time consuming, that's only ...... or something, like um, like you may get a free USB key like I, I'm trying to come up with an idea now where with the CD like you, you get like a EPK pack with it or um, if you download my album like we you get sent an email with an EPK pack and in that EPK or that kind of media um, package, you get free music you get um, a token which gives you free refusal, first refusals of gig tickets when they come out and the best seats. And you get um, like a free poster, but you can only get it if you buy a download, and little stuff like that, which kind of um, I suppose, persuades people to um, want to buy the actual CD.

Aleks Well that's I mean that's...

Master Or the actual down, paid download

Aleks Exactly and that's, that's something that's, that's a real challenge, that the music industry is totally fallen over on because they, they're being overwhelmed with piracy, essentially. You're talking about downloads, are you talking about legal downloads, are you talking about illegal downloads?

Master It's hard because at the same, and also if you give away something free with your um, with your CD for example, or you do a little extra to give back to your fans, you're not liable for chart positioning because you're giving away something free. So it's like then what you don't chart and you don't really get the respect from media, radio to help promote you, and then it's like, it's like you're fighting a losing battle.
But if you, it's, if you're sure of the way that you want to go and you keep going, you can actually really...

Aleks    Do you think we should crack down on piracy though?

Master Um, no I think, I think um, er, to be honest I think if some, if you're gonna buy the CD right now in, in terms of people that are buying music, if you're buying music, I think they're going to buy the music if they're going to download it, they're going to download it. It's like, it's not gonna persuade the people that want to benefit free or not, because I doubt they'd do it online ........ and it wasn't there, they'd go oh man now I've really got to get on a bus and go and get the CD because I really want that music now, it's like they'll just wait for it to come online right, cos that's, it's not their fault. It's the part of the generation that they've been brought up, you know they've been brought up where it's the norm to just go on lying and quickly download music, so it is not online they'll just wait rather than go get music, so cracking down isn't really going to help. Just, it's just going to um, damage relationships between artists and their fans.

Aleks    Well you're losing money though aren't you?

Master Yea but then you can make money in other areas by them having your music quick and easy and it's accessible means that they er, also it's easy for them to buy um, merchandise and ........ kits and stuff like that.

Aleks Well music is all about reinventing yourself anyway

Master exactly

Aleks to stay fresh and all that, so this is, this is basically the internet has offered an opportunity for people to reinvent themselves don't they?

Master Yea definitely yea, you can see, you can stay um, relevant as well with um, with being online and stuff like that. And if you're not necessarily putting out music, you can still put out music. And by that I mean you don't need to put music out in the charts and play on the radio, you can just put out a little you know little fun tracks for your fans, and that's automatically building the momentum and you know building fans.

Aleks Well with all that content that's out there, I mean everybody and their uncle it used to be a lot harder, I mean the bar used to be set a heck of a lot higher because you'd have to get that record contract, if you, you couldn't, there wasn't this as much of an underground vibe, so how do you make yourself heard in this absolute din of everybody and their dog, who's putting out a track on MySpace of facebook or whatever?

Master First of all I believe it has a lot to do with luck um, you know cos um, yea luck plays a big part, and also being different and relating to people for example there's X amount of people that relate to me personally, worry about dress, what I'm talking about, and are into the same kind of music, music as me, and then kind of that's, that makes it a lot easier as well. But if um, loads of people are doing the same kind of music, it becomes saturated and then that's when it's hard. But um, I believe I'm unique enough and I, I'm myself and I'm different to everybody, for it to you know stand out amongst the rest.

Aleks How often do you talk with your fans, cos you're talking a lot about you know, how, I mean, how often do you tweet, cos you're on twitter as well.

Master Everyday like I'm, I'll twitter in a second, before I came here, twittered for, I'm always twittering and always you know, trying to reply to some of them, obviously sometimes I can't cos sometimes they're just like hello, and it's just like, if I say hello back, and they say you know but um, you know asking important questions and stuff like that and concerns that they may have ..........I'll always, I always reply back to them cos it makes it that more personal you know and they remember you know what I mean um, it's like when musicians, it's like when back in the day when people used to take pictures of somebody, somebody who was nice and ........ that time, they can always remember that moment, and I believe they'll be a fan for longer and really support them, so that's what I'm trying to do.

Aleks How you are promoting yourself, you're marketing yourself?

Master yes

Aleks How has the internet made that possible in a way that you wouldn't have done before?

Master I think that is, that is what the internet is what made it possible. Um, um, I remember um, I'm able to reach loads of people at one specific time quickly, at the drop of a hat. whereas if not I'd have to do you know, promoting, word of mouth, phone calls and stuff like that, whereas I could just put out a message and send it to about you know four hundred to four thousand people in like, like that. So that's good, it's a lot easier, and also um, in terms of like videos and the visual stuff as well, like I can put online videos, I can put online not just music.

Aleks    And what about collaborating not just with producers, but maybe with other artists, do, have you, have you been stretched by the web in terms of being creative?

Master Yea definitely well um, that's, that's originally that's how I was getting into studios, it was hooking up with people that had a studio that was available and that would normally be collaborating with artists that actually ..... MySpace. Now that my profile is a bit, you know is a bit um, a bit larger um, I can also talk to other artists that are also in the same limelight as me and collaborate with them.

Aleks So if it's okay for people to download your stuff for free, you're losing money?

Master Um, yea correct but at the same time um, I can gain money in other areas, i.e. merchandising, touring, it means that people that would never have been able to hear my music because they didn't have the money or the know, know abouts of where to buy my album, can still hear my music, and still get involved in my projects.

Aleks    now that's you individual entrepreneur, you know self made man, but those people, like record companies, who are losing the grip on this thing because of piracy you know, they're out there and they're suing people. They're trying to you know, they're trying to take down people like me or other people who would download music for free. What do you think about that heavy handed approach?

Master No I think it's definitely wrong, I think um, this is you know um, taking it a little, a little bit too far, cos at the end of the day the people that, if you're gonna download music, I think that you're gonna download music. If you're gonna pay for it, you're gonna pay for it. Um, for example if you go out to, you're online and you search a track that you like or any kind of illegal um, website, um, and it's not there, people aren't going to go running to the shops that very moment and really, really try and get their ten pounds together, so they can go and buy the album. They're pretty much just gonna wait um, for the track to go, to become available online, and still get it for free, and if you're gonna buy it, you're gonna buy it. But um, again I, it's, another thing is that it could, it's, could, maybe not even down to the people that download for free because, the generation that are listening to music now, part of the whole internet um, generation, and therefore they don't know any better, like it's just their norm, they don't, they haven't you know grown up, their mums and dads haven't brought them into HMV to go round and by CDs so, it, it's the norm, like everybody in their school class, everyone that they, they're with on a day to day basis will download music and they just think that's the way. But I'm finding that because it means that my music gets to more people and that will in the long run, they will hopefully end up buying my product but in you know, much more of a vast amount. And you know punishing people for doing it, for you know liking your music and you've damaged the relationship between the artist and your fans.

Rushes Sequences - Nicholas Carr interview - USA (Video)

2009-11-26T17:32:21Z

(Nicholas Carr is author of several acclaimed books on technology, writes for numerous publications (including the article Is Google making us Stupid?) and blogs. The programme four team met with Nick to expand upon the concerns he voiced in his post on this very blog: the loss of the contemplative mind to the new 'skittering' mental processes encouraged by the web's way of thinking.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

Nick I think the price we pay for having easy access to so much information usually quick access to so much information is is we sacrifice some of the depth of our of our engagement with that information. So the kind of jumping hopping from bit to bit to bit clicking on links takes the place of what used to be a more er contemplative I I think approach to thinking about one thing. Er whether its one piece of information or the argument or the narrative of a book erm it becomes much harder I think when you're bombarded by information and other stimuli as you are all the time on the web to sit down and really focus on one particular thing. Erm an' so we g' we gain kind of a breadth of engagement with information but the cost is I think a certain superficiality in our relationship to that information.

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Nick Yeah erm I - you know throughout my life I've - books have played an important role in them and I've always found it easy to immerse myself in a book and get engaged in an argument or a narrative but a few years ago as my use of the web kind of picked up I found it much much harder to sit down and engage with a book. After a page or two my mind would start wandering - I'd er kind of loose the focus - have to go back a coup' - er go back a page to to to reconnect with the argument and at first you know I thought ok may be this is just general you know age or something that that's causing this. But what I noticed is that the sensation I had when I tried to read or really concentrate on anything was that my brain my mind wanted to behave the way it behaves when I'm at my computer or online. It wanted to check email it wanted to click on links and jump from page to page er so it really - I began to make the connection that you know in in in really in a unmistakable way my use of the net was changing the way I think er in changing my ability to do things like concentrate or or or contemplate one particular er piece of information or or read through 100 pages of a book. An' I I began talking to the other people an' many of them - not all of them but many of them had a very very similar - were suffering from a similar type of affliction. They they felt that they were - had increasingly scatterbrained an' an' they wanted to be online and they wanted to get information very very quickly and they didn't want to sit still an' an' concentrate on anything.

Intv You mentioned that if you were to design the perfect vehicle for brain distraction it would be the internet - it would be the web - can you illuminate that - tell me that and why that might be?

Nick The human brain like any animal brain is attuned to distraction. In a sense it wants to be distracted - it wants to see what's going on in its surroundings so you know its not - it doesn't miss some source of food or isn't attacked by you know a tiger or something. Erm and if you look at the way the internet bombards us with stimuli not only hyperlinks and different pages of information but alerts you know from face book updates to twitter alerts to er you know incoming email and even our phones going off all the time - it creates in in a sense an environment of information that plays to our desire to or our need to be distracted. And so it becomes very difficult to keep a focus on anything when you know five different things are happening at once on your screen or or you know between your screen and your smart phone and so forth an' and its just its just all sorts of environmental stimuli that come through you know this this information medium an' keep us pretty much permanently distracted when we're online.

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Intv What's the argument - what is this link between possibly you and some of the other people think that - deep reading and deep thinking - what's the link between those two things and what is a good quality of deep reading and deep thinking?

Nick What reading did for us in particular book reading is it slowed us down - it it took us away from our natural distractedness and forced us to focus on one thing - on a book on a line of argument on a line of text literally often from hundreds of pages in in hours on end and that's a very different er type of thinking that w' than we're kind of naturally used to. So so the book promoted a kind of in depth engagement with ideas - a kind of very deep thinking concentrated thinking contemplative introspective thinking which er in many ways is kind of a unique aspect of that particular medium - the the print on page medium that we that we'd never saw before at least not broadly until the book became popular 500 600 years ago.

Intv Tell me why people think it's a good thing to think and to think big - why is that a good useful tool for humans to engage?

Nick I think I think the great value of thinking deeply an' reading deeply an' concentrating in general is that we begin to develop a unique personality a unique intellect that's ours and ours alone and that requires I think deep thought an' an' in the ability to make our own associations and our own connections about things we understand deeply inside our own minds rather than relying on you know the the the associations and connections that might be out in the world and that we might access through hyperlinks for instance. So er I I I really think that the the human self and the human personality becomes much richer when we can slow down and when we can think deeply an' and engage with information in more than just kind of a cursory manner.

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Intv What are the worries is the first generation have may be grown up online have only used the web - what are our big worries as they enter the workplace - do we think we're going to see these traits?

Nick Well I'm I'm a little nervous about drawing a sharp distinction between what we call you know generation web or digital natives in older people adults because what - I think that's too too - that that lets adults off the hook an' they can say oh you know as they always say oh this younger generation they're you know going to hell or whatever. An' an' really the effects of the internet I think are the same on adults as on younger kids an' an' younger adults an' if you look at the statistics its people in the twen' later 20s 30s 40s 50s who are online much more er of the time than say teenagers. Erm so so I would hate to to have the focus on generation web you know make it seem as though though older people aren't affected by the internet because I think they are. And I think what we see in young people - the the distractedness the inability to you know read more than 2 pages at a time is probably coming to to characterise older people in in every generation as well. Having said that you know I think obviously the - the brain is is - the human brain is malleable throughout the course of anybody's life but it's particularly mal' malleable of course when you're young. So if if a person is brought up looking at screens an' an' an' using the web and being bombarded by information then then the question is will the brain circuits circuitry necessary to do things like deep reading deep thinking - will those circuits ever even come into being - will they be wired for that kind of thinking or will they be wired completely for internet type of thinking for for er taking in lots of information very very quickly. Erm an' I think that's the big fear is that w' we'll end up er with with a generation of people who are very good at using the net and very good at finding information and and processing information very quickly but don't really have any capacity for contemplativeness or for concentration er for deep engagement with information.

Intv Is there this big distinction or should we be making a big distinction about information and knowledge what the web provides is information for what we're using is our ability to know what to process that information in a knowledgeable way.

Nick Well people always get into semantic discussions about what's information what's knowledge what's wisdom and I think those are important discussions but I think what the what the web does - what the net does goes much deeper than that. It's not just the form of the information we're taking in it's our ability to make sense of that information to process that information. So it's it's - I think it's at a very deep level in our brain that an' the more we use the web the more we train ourselves to skip very very quickly among many pieces of information er an' we lose the ability to stop an' concentrate and so you could say that the the the outcome of that will be - will have you know access an' an ability to process huge amounts of little snippets of information but we'll we'll kind of begin to sacrifice the ability to er create the associations ourselves among those bits of information that I think lead to er true knowledge an' an' ultimately wisdom

Rushes Sequences - general views - aerial shots of San Francisco (Video)

2009-11-26T17:21:05Z

GVs (general views) of San Francisco from the air, taken by the Programme Three team filming on location.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

Rushes Sequences - Lee Tien interview - USA (Video)

2009-11-26T14:26:45Z

Lee Tien is Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation specialising in Free Speech law. He met with the programme three team to discuss the costs of 'free' services on the web, and the potential dangers of the increasing amounts of personal information we share online and with mobile devices.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

Intrv How might we give up personal information.

Lee One way in which you'll give up personal information is obviously erm, by clicking on one thing or another that reveals the sorts of things you are interested in, but er, how would they get from that to actually figuring out, for instance, who you are. Erm well its well know in the.............. that er, things like your birth day, your gender, erm and your postal code or zip code, er, will allow people to figure out who you actually are, what your true name is. Now how might a website get that information from you, er, well lets say you want to sign up for a horoscope, then you are going to give them your birthday, and probably tell them whether or not you are a man or a women. Then maybe you want to find out what your local weather is erm, probably the easiest way to do that is to put in your postal code or zip code, and bingo they have got 3 pieces of information that are going to make it really easy for them to figure out exactly out who you are.

Intrv And how do they actually do that, they can use that to cross reference.

Lee Well that's right I mean there's an enormous amount of, of public record data that's available about people, erm, and certainly in the United States for instance, erm, there are lots and lots of records. Some of these are voting er, ......, erm other kinds of public records that will contain peoples true name and address and gender, so what they can do is they can figure out erm, by cross linking those records with the information they have and say oh, well you know, this is the only person in this postal code erm, who is of that age erm and of that gender, and that way they will be able to figure out who you are.

Intrv Is personal information more valuable than cash.

Lee Its hard to say just how valuable personal information er, on the web is. I think that most companies would rather have cash to start with but the information is coming to them almost for free. Erm, that is the er, your quick stream data just comes to the website, comes to advertisers er, without your, without your actually having to do anything other than just going er, going and clicking on things. So it's a very, very cheap and unobtrusive erm, form of ............. I mean probably the best thing about it is that its so unobtrusive, you don't know er, you're giving it up and so its seems entirely free to you. And then the consequences of it, maybe you get certain kinds of ads, maybe you get er, telephone solicitations. But you have no way of knowing that that's because, you know you clicked on 17 things on these 5 websites, and so whatever it is that you are paying for you don't really make a connection to the er information you are giving up. And I think you know, frankly people see cash, individuals see cash differently because its something that comes straight out of their pocket, erm, the information they give up, they don't see it leaving and they don't know what anyone's doing with it.

Intrv How do we pay when we visit a free website.

Lee Well when you visit a supposedly free website, its sort of like a sophisticated version of watching free TV, erm, you know, there is content that's being presented to you, erm, somebody's paying for it, how do they get paid back. Well in the, you know, the old TV world, at least in the United States where its, you know, based on ads, erm, what's really happening is the content is a product that's sold to advertisers, and what are advertisers buying, advertisers are buying audience, and so they pay to be able to put their advertisement in front of you. And the same thing is happening on the web, advertisers pay websites in order to put ads in front of them. The main sort of extra dimension on the web is that they're also paying for the information that they get from when you visit websites, to help them decide which ads they want to target, they want to put ads. And you know, TV is a non and interactive media, right, they don't know you are watching, erm, with the web its, the information stream goes both ways. When you pick, click on something they know you spend a certain amount of time on it. They may know you spent more time on an article about erm, er, contraceptives than about er, er, breast cancer, and all this kind of information about what it is that you're interested in gets used by advertisers to figure out how they are going to target erm, then it goes a step further right, I mean because they're building up, essentially profiles, they are building up dossiers and files about the people who visit various websites. Erm, and they will be able to glean that, you know, you are a person who likes to travel, you are a person who er, likes to cook and so on and so forth. And being able to target you as a person for those kinds of ads is again something that advertisers are worth paying, are will to pay for. Because advertising in the ordinary world is an extremely inefficient media that you are sending an ad to lots and lots of people and what percentage of those people are actually likely to or willing to you know, buy your goods or services. The amount of information that's available about people's preferences on the web enables them to be much more precise in how they advertise and therefore how they, how they sell.

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Lee The rise of, of mobile applications and location based services is, is going to be a huge privacy nightmare. Erm, because very simply you know, your place is a sensitive thing, you know, there are many, many places that seem innocuous erm, but there are many others that actually again like what you read, er, say things about you, you know, the er, if you go to an alcoholics anonymous meeting, erm, if you visit an oncologist for, who specialises in, in cancer, erm you know, if you visit a bar, you know, these are all places where you are simply being there says something about you that might be viewed er, as stigmatising or at the very least, something that you don't want others to know about, and in a way I think that, that this sort of goes under peoples radar, they don't think about erm, the, how meaningful er, location can be, you know, then you add in that you know, its not just location er, parse but its location combined with time erm, you know, staying at a hotel you know, overnight is one thing, going to that hotel er, regularly er, during the lunch hour er, is yet another thing, and the ability to gather data about location over time you know, creates the possibility of seeing erm, these patterns in your behaviour, er, and making some very strong inferences about what you do and what kind of a person you are. And then of course you know maybe an additional wrinkle is not just about you right, its also about the people that you are with, because if my mobile phone is being tracked and another persons mobile phone is being tracked, when you connect those dots on a, on a more grand 24-7 basis, you'll see when you know, these dots are together and er, where they're not. There's a great example from a, a several years ago, researches in Cambridge I believe were doing a study of what were calling ambient Blue Tooth activity. They want to know back in the day before Blue Tooth devices were really common, you know, well just how may Blue Tooth devices are there. And so all the folks worked in the lab, erm, had their Blue Tooth devices on in promiscuous mode. Well when they were analysing the data they were able to see that two of these devices were always sinking together erm, Friday evenings and Saturday evenings, erm, and they could see from the data that you know, that one of these was a man in the office, and the other was a women, and so they were easily able to infer that these two were a couple outside the office, even though no one knew, or would have guessed from their in office behaviour. Erm, you know the potential for location tracking to reveal not just information about yourself but about the relationships you have with other people, is, is er, unparallel and that's one reason why we are so concerned about location privacy.

Rushes Sequences - Terry Winograd interview - USA (Video)

2009-11-26T13:47:24Z

Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, USA. He specialises in human-computer interaction. He met with the programme three team to discuss the way in which search engines work, determine page rank and deliver results to our queries online.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

Alexi Terry what was the idea behind the research, this notion of page rank?

Terry They started doing the research in an era when people had just begun to do search engines on the web. The web started off, erm, really the idea, there was a bunch of interesting stuff and you browsed, you surfed. You went from page to page saw what was there and that was fun. Erm, and then people realised that there was enough interesting and serious stuff, they might want to actually go somewhere, where they could find something they wanted. So a number of people at different places erm, created what were called search engines. Erm and the basic idea was that you create an index that let you find where things are in the web. So if you have here, and this is sort of a sketch of what it might be, web pages, each of these boxes is a page, a, b, c, and d. Each one has certain words in it, television, computer, circuit, whatever it is. And each one can have links, where the links point to another page. So, this page on computers and net's may point to this one for televisions and computers and so on. Now, what they realised, this is before Google, with the people doing the original 'spiders' they were called on the web. What the spiders could do, is they could give them the address, give the computer the address of this page. The computer could make a list of all the words that were on that page and also, find this page, cause there was a link. Then it would go to this page, make a list of all the words on that page and then it could follow the links there. And computers had gotten fast enough and powerful enough and the web was small enough, that you could actually build a complete index. So you'd end up with something, think of the index in the back of a book, so the word computer appears in pages a, b, and d, the word television appears on this page and so on. So I went to AltaVista let's say, which was one of these early search engines and I typed in computer, it would look in the index it had made and it would give me a search, a list of results that said, a, b, d, and so on. And this made it possible to go find something on the web, instead of just browsing around and seeing where you got to.

Alexi But the problem of course is that, if somebody said computer a thousand times, because that was the key word that was being searched, it would push the result up and it wouldn't necessarily be the most

Terry Exactly, so they have to decide, if there are three results, it's not problem, but if there's a hundred results or a thousand results, which ones do you show? And how do you know that a, is more interesting than d, or be is more interesting than d? So the question of what was interesting, what was irrelevant, wasn't addressed by having just a regular index like this. So, the problem really, here's where Google, the founders of Google came in, Serge and Larry decided, that they could do a better job of, finding the interestingness, the relevance, what makes a page something you want to see, other than just that it happens to have the words that you search for.

Alexi And how did they go about identifying interestingness, because that's a very subjective idea, isn't it?

Terry So interestingness is of course subjective, and there is no, what plays things like Yahoo did, is, had human beings go through and say, here's an interesting page, here's an interesting page. That was the, the people, Yahoo was the most famous now, but there were a lot of people in that era, who would go through and check out pages. And again that worked when the web was very small.

Alexi Exactly that would not scale

Terry And as the web gets bigger you can't have higher people to go out and look at all the pages. So the question is, how do you get people who you don't hire, to in some sense give you judgements on which pages are interesting. And they had a very interesting sort of metaphor for this, which is, imagine a crowd of people all surfing the internet. So you take millions of people, start them out all over the internet, and they get to a page and they'll follow a link and from there maybe they'll follow another link. Now if you could actually get millions of people and all the paths they take, you would see that traffic would end up concentrating on certain places. A lot of people would end up here on this page and only a few people went on this page. Then when you've got around to giving your search results, you would give the ones that got a lot of this virtual traffic. Now this is not actual people going, cause you don't have millions of people, you don't have data on that. But you can imagine, where would they go.

Alexi So in, so if we kind of take this outside of the web, this would be like places in a City, that have a lot of people driving through it, for example, it's a particular junction, it's an important building or something like that. That's what these websites, that's what the search algorithm identified?

Terry That's what would decided what's the most relevant, what's the most interesting. So, there's no, there is no simple way to actually get that data. Because the people who know where other people went on the web are only the service providers and they don't give that information. But what they realised is, if they used links, they could get an approximation of how interesting pages were. So they built a second index, which, not only kept track of what words were on each page, but were, it was linked from, so, you might here say that page b, has a link coming in from a, and a link coming in from x.

So they actually had information that gave them the full link structure of the web, where does every link go from and to. Then they could take this and they applied a mathematical algorithm, it's called the page rank algorithm. Which was intended to basically simulate in some sense, the result of what would happen if you had an infinite number of monkeys. If you put thousands, millions of millions of people on the web and let them just start browsing. And the result that they can get out of running this algorithm, which of course didn't require millions and billions of things going on, erm, was a good approximation that page b, lets say is the one that would get the most traffic of a, b, and d. So then when you search for computer, it brings b to the top of your listing.

Alexi So if a page had a lot of people going to it or referencing it, then that would increase its interestingness, it would increase its reputation?

Terry It's a little bit like in academics, were you have citations. So I write an academic paper and I say, see so and so's paper from such and such year. That indicates that, that's an interesting paper. And it's sort of the same thing here, if you have lots of links pointing to you, that indicates that a lot of people have decided you're interesting enough to put in a link pointing to you. So that's really the basis of the algorithm.

Turning the tables: Digital Revolution interviewed by the interviewees

2009-11-20T14:29:43Z

Digital Revolution has spent the last few months interviewing some of the most influential, inspirational and engaged individuals on the web today, asking how the web is changing world economies, nation states, human behaviour, and levelling the media.

Only natural, then, in this connected company, that the production teams wouldn't be able to cling to the 'old-media' film maker's luxury of the camera pointing only at the documentary subject; and certainly folly to imagine that the interviewer would retain a monopoly of the questions.

Here are a few examples of these moments where the film crew and Aleks have become the subjects of their subjects' own films and, of course, put them on the web for the world to view.

1 - Tim Berners-Lee 'Ghana Aleks Krotoski: turning the tables'

The inventor of the web travelled to Ghana with the programme one team, during which he gave an interview to the team (you can find a rushes sequence of that interview here). But not before he'd had some fun of his own and put Aleks on the spot to explain her thoughts on the web and its effects on the world.

2009-09 Ghana Aleks Krotoski: Turning the tables from Tim Berners-Lee on Vimeo.

2 - The BBC visit my place for the 'Digital Revolution' documentary

The programme four team find themselves discussing camera lenses and in the light of the camera's eye as they prepare to interview Mashable's Ben Parr.

3 - BBC's Aleks Krotoski (@aleksk) is a 'Woman of Mystery'

At the same shoot, presenter Aleks Krotoski is caught tweeting in the kitchen by her prospective interviewee, Ben Parr and faces her own moment in Ben's spotlight.

Is this a glimpse of the future of open source documentary - an infinite feedback loop of camera on camera study and interplay? The new age of the 'prosumer' and 'interviewerees'?

The big web test - UCL - 14 November 2009

2009-11-20T09:25:07Z

(Professor David Nicholas is the Director of the CIBER research group at University College London, a group which specialises in evaluating behaviour in the digital environment using deep log analysis techniques. The group has evaluated behaviour in the news, health, charity and scholarly fields and, perhaps, is most widely know through its work in evaluating the behaviour of the Google Generation. The following post is published with kind permission and represents David's views; this does not necessarily reflect the views of the BBC or the Digital Revolution production.)

Image: the groups taking part in the experiments 14 November 2009, outside UCL, London. Click to view full size image.

Saturday 14th November saw a unique experiment take place at UCL. The CIBER research group at UCL, experts at evaluating human behaviour in cyberspace, together with the BBC Digital Revolution team ran a scientific experiment with the general public, which we believe has never ever been undertaken before. The experiment sought to characterise and evaluate information seeking behaviour by tracking what our volunteers did online and relating it to demographic background (age and gender), memory and multi-tasking ability. Nearly 100 people of various ages and backgrounds took part in the experiment, which required them to undertake a number of cognitive tests and Web searches. The test was filmed and will appear in the final programme of Digital Revolution in 2010.

The experiment will be rolled out to the nation in the New Year via the BBC's LabUK. The findings of the experiments will help us understand the meaning of the millions of digital 'footprints' which people leave behind them every time they use the Web and which have been captured by CIBER researchers using a technique called deep log analysis. We have a detailed understanding of the footprints, they tell us for instance that we skitter or bounce along the surface of the Web very rarely penetrating very far or dwelling very long, but we do not know why and this is what the BBC experiment will tell us.

Image: the groups taking part in the experiments 14 November 2009, outside UCL, London. Click to view full size image.

Rushes Sequences - Chris Anderson interview - USA (Video)

2009-11-19T17:47:04Z

Chris Anderson is Editor of Wired Magazine and author of several books exploring the economies of the web. He joined Aleks Krotoski and the programme three team to discuss the nature of the web's free content, and the bargains we make, explicit or otherwise, while enjoying the web's apparently gratis services.

Click here if you want to embed, or download a non-branded version of this rushes sequence.

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Transcript:

Chris One could definitely argue that Google is an advertising company, it's you know, lots of people do search. We can argue that Google search is significantly better or worse than, than Microsoft's or anybody else's. Um, but its hold over advertising is unmatched and it's not, it's not just its model that the sort of pay per click, the matching of content and advertising that's so relevant. But the fact that it has a critical mass of growth. Um, what you, if you have a critical mass of search terms, in other words, people using Google as a search engine and, and you know the largest pool of ads against which to run. To run against these search terms, you're able to match them better. And um, and if you can match them better, advertisers are inclined to use you more and it becomes a sort of self reinforcing, positive feedback route. Um, what Google does, it has is not such a monopoly on search. its switching costs of search are pretty, you know one click away. What it has beginnings of a monopoly over internet advertising?

Alex Are people aware of what they're trading when they contribute to the Google machine?

Chris I think people are on, whether explicitly or implicitly, pretty aware of what the trade off is, and um, I don't think that, that's explicit, I don't think that's necessarily just for Google. I think you know as we go online, um, the deal is relatively straightforward. So when you go on Amazon and you click, and as you click through from product to product, you start to see the recommendations appear, either based on your past history or more typically your sessions. You know as you start looking for cameras, you start to see people who click who, who looked at this also looked at that, people who bought this, er, people who clicked at this, bought that. Um, you know in this, the course of your clicking, the service becomes more useful to you. They ex, the implicit, and for many people the explicit trade off is that in exchange for watching over your shoulder, as you shop, we will help you shop better. And no one seems to have any problem with this because, because you know this is, they trust Amazon, and this is the you know, if you go into a store and er, the store assistant says can I help you. And if the store assistant is good, and you're feeling like you need help, er, you know you'll go through this little communication, here's what I'm looking for, what do you think of that, what do you think of that, and a little bit more of this, the advice will get better and better and better and eventually you will get what you want. Amazon does this exact same thing, so there's nothing new about this trade off. In the same way that you don't, that um, you know that in the stores as, as the assistant helps you shop, you are choosing to give up information about your preferences for the sake of a better experience, you do so as well in Amazon. if you don't want to give up personal information you just don't have to log in to Amazon, you can do it anonymously. Um, Google um, works the same way um, er, you type in your search term, Caribbean holiday. And Google will give you a useful set of results and they will also give you some ads um, on the site. and as your term gets more and more specific, you know maybe a date range, a price range and things like that, um, the ads will get more and more specific and more and more relevant. Um, you know presumably at certain points not only are the search terms what you're looking for, but the ads are what you're looking for as well. And so you now have two sets of results to choose from. Now you can, if the one on the right side, the ads, is actually even better than the one in the middle column, you will choose that one, and you will click there, it's your choice. And so you know Google knows what you're interested in right now, do they know who you are and do they have a profile of you. Not in any real sense um, but they are watching as you, as you click and but they, but because we trust Google to, to watch for the right reason, which is to give us better results, we're okay with this.

Alex This implicit or this explicit trade, suggests to me

DIRECTION

Alex This implicit and explicit relationship, this trade off that we have with Google, with Amazon, suggests that actually the web isn't free, is that, would you say that would, would you say that the web is free?

Chris So there's two ways to look at this, um, there's the pure monetary definition of free, and then there's the sort of the broader definition of free, of an exchange of value. Um, the web is for you know, for, you know if you choose to make it so, the web is very much free from the monetary perspective you know, once you've paid for access, once you've paid your way in the door, your internet service provider whatever, um, you can pretty much get what you want at no additional cost. Um, that's from a strictly monetary perspective in terms of you know, just taking out your wallet and paying cash. Um, but I think that the, looking through, looking at the world through the lens of pure monetary value is not the right way to do it anymore. I think we now realise that there are other forms of value that we, we sometimes actually value even more. there's time, there's attention um, there's, there's reputation um, when I, you know a, I can get music two ways. I can go to bit torrent sort of like I know that all music is out there for free um, I can go to bit torrent and I can hunt around and find it and download it, and it will be free. Or I can go to iTunes and pay ninety nine cents. Um, which so er, because I'm older, I have more money than time, so I'll go to iTunes, it's faster, it's convenient. I'm paying for a convenience fee. I'm not really paying for music, I'm paying for convenience.

Um, my kids are younger, they have more time than money, they'll, actually they don't, but just project that they might go to bit torrent and download and download for free. So um, the time, money calculus is two dimensions of value. um, we know that time is money right, this is not an original idea but it's quite explicitly manifest on the internet today. Um, you know most of human activity is done without an exchange of, of money. You for the record are not paying me for this interview; you know I for the record am not paying you for this publicity. Um, you know when my, I have my children do not pay me to drop them off at school, my you know, I do, I, my wife doesn't pay me for washing the dishes um, you know most human activity is done er, to cement social bonds of, of various sorts. Now these social bonds turn out to be more important to us than money. If um, you know if my, if, if um, my wife paid me for doing the dishes, it would actually devalue our relationship, it would undermine the social ties that hold us together. If the only thing holding us together is payment for services rendered then we don't have a marriage. We have a contractual relationship um, so the difference, you know this has always been true from the time immemorial, the difference about the internet is this is now being done on a global level. so you know when I tweet for free, I am exchanging information um, for the sake of reputational credits, people will follow my tweets, I'll get more followers, I may be able to then use that celebrity of some sort, to achieve my own ends, whatever, whatever they may, may be. So I give away content to acquire repetition or attention credits, which I then store until I want to spend them.