Byron Clark

In his latest blog post Mark Pesce writing about how online classifieds like Craigs list in the US and Trading Post in Australia are impacting on the advertising revenue of traditional print media, he doesn't go to deeply into the implications of that but its thought provoking. FairFax Media seem to have preempted this problem in New Zealand by buying TradeMe a site that offers similarnd services to Craigs list and Trading Post. He also talks about the changing nature of the travel industry with web 2.0, switching from the old model of sending a writer overseas to write a travel book to crowdsourcing, something I can relate to having licensed a photo to Schmap.com.

Related is a blog post from Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur: How Todays Internet is Killing our Culture and Assulting our Economy now I disagree that the Internet is doing that- rather its reinvigorating culture (and counterculture) and making old economic models outdated, however, I, like Marty, agree with Keens analysis of Web Capitalism;

"Technology, it would seem, it making us less rather than more equal.
This shift is symbolic too of the massive reallocation of wealth that is taking place within the broader media economy. For all the glib pieties about the "democratization" of media, the truth about the Web 2.0 economy is that it's anything but democratic. That vast sucking sound you can hear is Google, YouTube et al gobbling up obscene amounts of wealth from the rest of the media business. The core economic truth about the Web 2.0 revolution is the causal -- albeit complex -- relationship between the rise of a user-generated-content economy and the fall of the traditional media business. "Middle-wage" jobs in the traditional (ie: human labor centric) media economy -- those of journalists, editors, recording engineers, cameramen -- are fast disappearing, to be replaced by...
By YOU! By the amateur writers on the blogosphere and the amateur videographers on YouTube. The only problem is that Google doesn't pay us for our search engine wisdom, YouTube doesn't reward us for our intellectual labor, Facebook doesn't pay us for our revelations about our taste."

Thats all true, but ignors non-profit Web 2.0 efforts like Wikipedia not to metion Creative Commons and the Free Software movement. Anyway, its food for thought.

A couple of years back when Unite members at McDonanld's were attempting to negotiate a collective agreement the company (with help from the union-busting law firm they had hired) introduced new clauses into their Individual Employment Agreements, the clauses stated that staff could not talk to customers or the media about their working conditions or wages, there was also a clause preventing them from handing out litriture to their work mates (obviously to prevent the spreading of union papers, surveys etc). People in general see New Zealand as a society that upholds the value of Free Speech, yet these days peoples employers have far greater control over their day to day lives than the government does, and for an employer to censor what you can say publiclly is perfectly legal so long as you sign the contract (and if you don't, don't expect a job)

It was with this knowledge that I smiled when I read on Stuff today about a a Bebo group set up by current and former McDonalds Invercargill workers, the site is just a place for workers to talk to each other and complain, not a union organising tool, but being able to maintain a site like this should be a right of all workers. The website is quite witty:

"All past and present people who are lucky enough to work at McDonalds Invercargill! We might not be proud of our jobs, but at least were working and not on the dole. So please stop looking down on us and treat us with a little bit of respect cause we have probably had a really long day and just want to go home to our cold, badly insulated and not warmed flats cause we cant afford to live somewhere nice cause they only pay us minimum wage. Im loving it"

The Southland Times article is titled "You want some abuse with that?" and focuses on a blog post about drive through rules such as "If there are drunk ppl in ur car,plz tell thm 2 shut th fck up! we dnt want 2 hear thier drunkn ramblings" it paints the McD's staff as rude and mean toward customers, not mentioning that just below the 'Drive Thought rules' the site states "maybe ur a customer and didnt recieve the best service ... leave a comment here with ur complaint and the staff at macas invercargill will do there best ta make sure it doesnt happen again" in fact, most of the drive though rules are actually quite reasonable (if written in colourful language) speak clearly, have your money ready, don't hold up the other customers, etc.

Its interesting to see that McDonalds is not going to try and shut the website down, the stores owner even said it was a freedom of speech issue. This is a real U-turn for McDonalds New Zealand, earlier this year they used an injunction with the Employment Relations Authority to stop a former employee blogging. I'm glad in this instance they won't be doing the same, but I would surpised if they stay defenders of free speech if the workers start talking union

I said in my last post that I may write some comentary on Mark Pesces latest article "Hyperpolitics" and Mark himself leaving a comment on that post was all the encouragement I needed, here goes.

I: Biopolitics
In this first section Pesce outlines the significance of altruism in human evolution, and discusses the perversion of Darwinism for political ends, in Pesces example bad intrupretations of Darwin used to justify European colonialism. While by no means the first person to do this, the (at times deliberate) misinterpretation of Darwins ideas is still so common that the need to re-examine them should be reiterated. While the era of colonianism has passed, phrases like "survival of the fittest" are still trotted out to justify the inequalities of modern capitalism, despite that fact the evolutionary biology shows humans to be an incredibly social animal (though at times selfishness may give an evolutionary advantage).

I start to have my disagreements after this, however, these are really just nitpicking rather than significant opposition to anything in Pesces arguement

"By the nineteenth century, in the first city to pass a million inhabitants -London- we saw the emergence of two mutually exclusive political philosophies that are the absolute embodiment of these fundamental selection pressures. On the one hand, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan announced the "War of all against all," and John Stuart Mill, with his philosophy of Libertarianism, asserted the absolute right of the selfish individual to make his own way in the world. On the other, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels distilled the essence of altruism: "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need."

Depending on how one defines the "emergence" of socialism, it could be seen as happening outside London, the quote Pesce uses comes from the Critque of the Gotha Programme which was first published in Germany, as was The Communist Manifesto, and the most significant event in 19th centuary socialist history, The Paris Commune happened in France. As I said earlier though, this is just nitpicking, dense urban cities facilitate the spread of socialist ideas, and of course Victorian London did that.

The other nitpick is the sentance "Socialism can be Kropotkin’s anarchism, or authoritarian Marxism-Leninism." I don't think that Marxism-Leninism is inheriently authoritarian, my Political Compass score puts me quite clearly on the libertarian-left, yet I consider myself a Leninist. For all the flaws of Revolutionary Russia, I think a lot of Lenins theory, particularly on questions like imperialism is usefull for understanding the world today.

In a broad sense I agree with Marks comments about Russia, China and Australia in the aftermath of the election, though I wouldn't use the word 'socialist' to describe the Labor party.

II: Hyperintelligence: Or, What I Learned From The Poll Bludger

This the "agree with 100%" part, Mark Pesces analysis of social networking as something humans have always done is a refreshing change from commentators who would dismiss it as an Internet fad, I've blogged about this idea before. The discussion of the roll of the political blogosphere in Australia is interesting and I particularly liked the comments on Wikipedia:

"The efforts of these Wikipedians (and additional contributions by millions of “fellow travelers”, who loosely affiliate themselves with the Wikipedians around a specific topic of interest) have completely redefined our understanding of knowledge formation. It is now clear, in the aftermath of the Britannica vs. Wikipedia Wars, that knowledge formation is not the exclusive province of elites: anyone, however marginalized, can make a meaningful contribution to the common font of human knowledge. Furthermore, everyone literate person can benefit from Wikipedia."

If only my lecturers would agree.

III: Nothing Like Democracy

This is the part which I as a political activist took the most from. In my 5 years or so of activity I have seen the significance of networks, in the anti-war movement, in organising support for locked out distribution workers last year, in responding to the police raids of activists homes these part two months, and in various other campaigns and organisations. As networks become more important though I've noticed the 'digigal divide' becomes a problem, even in relativly afluent New Zealand not everyone has access to the tools to participate in these networks- this may mean no computer/Internet access, no skills in that area, or a lack of time due to a longer work week. These issues of of particular significance to activists organising among the working class. Political activists should be working to improve and strengthen our networks, but also look at ways to give people the tools to participate in those networks.

Hyperpolitics

I may do some comentary on the article later, I don't agree with 100% of it, but parts of it I agree with 100% ;-) its certainly an interesting read from one of the best thinkers on society and technology, and how the two are interacting.

As readers will have noticed, this blog has been all about the mayoral campaign for the last month or so, it would be easy to think the rest of my life is on hold, yet I've still been off to work every weekend to provide people with their iPod accessaries, and I've kept on top of my studies, though realisticly expecting a drop in grades, because of this I was surprised when today I picked up my comment paper for the globalisation course I'm taking, after a double take I was sure the 'A' was in fact an 'A' but figured I'd better check with my tutor about the mark following it; "is that a plus?" I said after turning back into the office, "and its not a mistake?" as I walked out of the building I thought "I can campaign for mayor of the South Islands largest city, deal with customers complaining about New Zealands cripling iPod shortage, and get A+'s?! I must be some kind of super human" before my head got to big I remembered the history essay on post-colonial development in Africa that I will get to work on as soon as I finish this post.

In the mean time, heres my comment paper, a critique of Michel Laguerre's article 'IT as Process and Globalisation as Outcome' it draws largely on my own observations and work by Dana Boyd. I also managed to cite Mark Pesce, someone who's ideas I'm quite a fan of. Aside from the original article, all my souces are available online so I've provided links at the end.

( click here to see what an A+ comment paper looks like )

So Freeview has been launched and while some of the older generation in parliament have called this bigger than the switch to colour TV, though Freeview currently leaves a lot to be desired, the set top boxes available don't have a harddrive recording feature so viewers are still bound to the programming schedules of the TV networks, I expect more advanced set top boxes to arrive in the future, but the question still arises, will there be anything good on? Now I don't think Youtube will be the end of telivision, but along with podcasts, blogs and the wealth of other content available online TV has a lot to compete with, and this type of media is what-you-want, when-you-want-it, unlike Freeview with the current set top boxes.

Also;

Two new channels are coming in the future, one of them will show parlimentary debates; how boring right? well yes, but this is a resource that could potentially be used by political bloggers, the way we sometimes use Hansard now, only with short video clips. The only issue is copyright, which in this case will act as a barrier to political discussion and debate, so the content of this channel should be under a creative commons licence. This isn't a new idea, Copyright reform advocate Lawrence Lessig is advocating the same thing in the US

In letters to the both political parties, Stanford Law Professor and copyright-reform advocate Lawrence Lessig is calling for broad distribution of presidential debate video, according to CNET. Lessig is the founder and CEO of Creative Commons, an organization promoting the free use of content over traditional copyright standards.
Currently, the rights of debates belong to the TV networks that air them. Lessig thinks people should be able to post, share, and edit the debates freely like any video one finds on video-sharing sites like YouTube.

Hopefully in New Zealand with state run TV, this will be eaiser to achive, and the proposed 24 hour news channel could be licenced under the same licence, this, combined with the ability to save content and share it on the Internet, will make Freeview something significant.

I've been reading and thinking about an interesting article by Eric Lee who runs the online trade union resource LabourStart, he talks about Web 2.0 sites like Youtube and MySpace (as I have) but also talks about how unions should start to utilise the web, which I, despite being an activist unionst, haven't.

In other words, people seem to love websites that allow ordinary people to express themselves – to write what they think, to show off their ideas with words, pictures, movies and sound.
While most electronic media (think radio and television) are a form of one-to-many communication, where you tune in to listen or watch, the web is increasingly a form of many-to-many communication.
You'd think that the trade union movement would be falling over itself with enthusiasm over this possibility. After all, unions are not only organizations of vast numbers of people, but are mostly committed to democracy. Union websites should be leading the way with reader-generated content.
In a sense, the trade union movement as it emerged in the last 150 years has been an outstanding example of a mass conversation in which millions of ordinary people have been engaged. The great militant social unions – including the IWW – all arose out of the kinds of discussions and sharing of views that are now common on the web.

I think the union movement could utilise the web a little better, but there are some examples of how we've used it well, SuperSizeMyPay.com played an important part in the campaign of the same name, and during the Progressive Enterprises lock out the web was a great tool for organising actions and collecting donations, and of course LabourStart is a very usefull tool for unionists (just this afternoon I sent off emails condeming not one but two employers, all in a matter of seconds!) We can do more, but to be honest I don't know what exactly.

From X-bit Labs:
According to a news-story by The New York Times, three of the four major music companies - Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony and Bertelsmann’s jointly owned Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and the Warner Music Group – each quietly negotiated to take small stakes in YouTube as part of video- and music-licensing deals they struck shortly before the sale. The music companies collectively stand to receive as much as $50 million from these arrangements.

And from Red Herring:
Fake news fans can still get their fix on YouTube—for now. Shorter clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report will remain on the video-sharing site, a spokesperson for Viacom said Tuesday. The move hints that Google and Viacom are searching for a way to make money from the site’s popularity...
...YouTube struck a content-sharing deal with broadcast network NBC this summer. More recently, CBS, Showtime, and CSTV partnered with YouTube to provide short form video clips from shows including CSI, Survivor, and CBS Evening News. YouTube will share any revenue from ads placed next to CBS content uploaded by YouTube users with CBS, and CBS will have the right to remove such content from the site.

You'll never hear me praising the media corporations, but I will say that this is a smart move by them, digital distribution is the way of the future, and for once the media giants aren't standing in the way of progress. The interesting thing here of course, is that Youtube is a totally level playing field, its just as easy to share a video blog of amature movie as it is to share clips from the Daily Show, so theres a chance that amature content will become more popular that a lot of the big-media created content. Mark Pesce talks about these issues in his latest podcast Hypercasting as usual, I reccomend it.

Now theres a use for the Wifi hotspot in the Cheviot tearooms,

I don't even have a profile there but here I am writing about the site two days in a row, surely there are more important things! oh well, this is whats interesting me at the moment.

Dawn Foster of the Open Culture blog has an interesting post about the same article I wrote abuot yesterday, I suggest you go read the whole thing, but she makes one point in particular I want to comment on;

With all of the press around MySpace drawing parents, teachers, and prospective employers to view MySpace pages, young people must feel like they are under a microscope instead of hanging out with friends in a casual environment. As a teen, this might drive me to switch to another social networking site.

I think about the under the microscope bit often, I make anything I post on my LJ thats really personal 'friends only' but there are probably some things I've posted publicly that I wouldn't want certain people reading, I mostly have political rants rather than a personal blog (though I swing between the two a bit) but I don't want everyone out there knowing my political views, potential employers are the biggest worry; what employer would hire a militant trade unionist? I rely on 'security through obsecurity' hoping that no one I'm at a job interview with will find this blog, but if they were to really look, then they could.

From The News is Now Public.

Teen Web sensation MySpace became so big so fast, News Corp. spent $580 million last year to buy it. Then Google Inc. struck a $900 million deal, primarily to advertise with it. But now Jackie Birnbaum and her fellow English classmates at Falls Church High School say they're over MySpace.
"I think it's definitely going down -- a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now," said Birnbaum, a junior who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network

I think its interesting that the decline of MySpace isn't the decline of social networking, I've never used either site but I assume people are changing to Facebook because it offers a better service, online social networking is new and I think it will be a while before the best service emerges, then everyone will use that. to understand what I mean, ask yourself, when was the last time you used a search engine that wasn't Google? theres a worrying thing here, which you realise if you know the history of MySpace; the site was started because someone had the fantastic idea of getting people to post a ton of personal information on a website, now if a company knows everyones demographic, what music they listen to, what TV they watch, what podcasts they download etc, then they can have personalised advertising for each of those people. You can debate weather thats a good or bad thing, but the point is, MySpace isn't about social networking, its about marketing, and social networking is a means to an end.

Online social networking is here to stay, the reason for that is that its not just some Internet craze, humans have had social networks since we first evolved the ability to remember people in our heads, reseach shows that humans can each hold about 150 people in their heads (think 150 MySpace profiles in your brain), in contrast to our closest relitive, chipanzees, which can hold 30 other chimps in their minds. Social Networking is part of what makes us human. For more information I'll point you in the direction of a brilliant talk on the topic of social networking by Mark Pesce.

The Internet is simply a tool that people are using to improve what we've been doing for millenia. So online social networking is here to stay, but what will it look like in 5 years? 10 years? I don't know, but my prediction is that it will be something totally different. Heres what I propose for the future of online social networking, and if anyone reading this recons they can program this, go right ahead:

1. Social networking for the sake of social networking - Eventually people are going to dislike the idea of giving their information to marketing companies, so when a non-profit alternative pops up, it will become popular, to be truly successful this system will have to be Free software (free as in freedom)

2. De-centralized - No one is going to be able to host a massive social networking site without some way to pay the costs, which means advertising and/or subscriptions (if not for all members, then for some, the way LJ does) but what if the site wasn't a 'site' at all, but an enormous collection of individual profiles, hosted on users computers. Each user creates a profile, saves it on their computer, and it becomes part of the network. I reckon this could be done using P2P technology, and possibly RSS. There would still need to be some central servers, but if the software was Free, you could have a hundred small servers rather than one big one to handle the traffic, and the traffic would only be search traffic, adding someones profile to a friends list could create a direct link from your computer to theres.

Just throwing up some ideas (mostly based on that talk I linked to).