Actually, it’s not dead.  It’s alive and kicking.  Mike talks about it here.  We do not like to be offended.  We do not like to be different.  Ken talks about being different here.  Yeah, but no.

I suppose we should be grown ups, as Ken suggests.  I suppose we should protect the children, as Mike suggests ironically.  But why is being offended so negative?  It’s a part of life!  And why is being youthful so negative?

Edupunk has been described as being anti-authoritarian, as DIY education (pejoratively) and people have taken offence and told us all to grow up.  We need maturity to be teachers, to be in authority.  But what people see as immaturity, particularly in education, I see as  a joy in learning.  It’s the excitement of the new and the unknown that gets us, gets our blood boiling and spurs us on to greater achievements.

So too our offendedosity (and that is a real word).  It allows us to see other perspectives.  That’s important.  Very very important.

If we protect ourselves from offence, from being different and from new words, I think we well end up poorer, less enriched, no different, zombies in a huge melted pot of sameness.  I like edupunk (now that is a real word, it’s in Wikipedia (and that’s another new word (and how many levels of parenthetical asides can I achieve?)))!

I’d like to see a reverse of this trend to attempt to get sameness.  There used to be a song.  Actually, there used to be many songs.  But the song I’m thinking of was a call to difference, a call to be ourselves.  That song?  Australia, don’t become America![1]  I fear we are headed in that direction, the direction of easy offence, of sameness.  Reactions to this trend, our anti-trend, need to be heard more.  We need more edupunks and more offence, if only to keep people thinking.

And look on the bright side.  At least I didn’t call anyone a Nazi!

1. But I can never remember who sang it [↩]

I’ve been writing a paper about literacy online, and I keep getting really really cross at attempts to censor the internet.  There’s all this talk about ‘protecting the children’ and blocking unsavory images, or anything that offends someone’s sensibilities. But I really don’t think that censoring these things will do anything to protect children.  I mean, yeah, there’s this sexualised image of a child and it’s offensive.  But it’s not offensive because it exists.  It’s offensive because some complete and utter pratt has abused that child.

And what do parents do when they find these things?  They panic, and try to protect their child from that image.  But it’s not the image they need to protect their child from.  It’s the photographer and their gaze.  It’s the gaze of the sexual adult.  I’m no expert in this, but I sense that we get uncomfortable precisely because children shouldn’t be sexualised. Our initial reaction is to hide the image, pretend it does not exist.  And yet, it does.  And so does the child in the image.  The child who could be our own.

I’ve been reading up on road safety because I think the analogy between road safety and internet safety is a powerful one.  Most of us (my generation, the parents) grew up with cars and trucks and motorcycles.  We learnt the ebb and flow of them.  We learnt physics[1] from them.  But most of us don’t really understand the internet.  We don’t know how to protect our children from the ‘information superhighway’.  But superhighway is not really a good analogy because we don’t let our children on highways, but we do allow them on the backroads.  We feel safer when we know that there are controls on traffic.  But, again, we don’t let them out without clear instructions on what’s safe and what’s not.  That’s our job as parents.

Why then do we allow them unsupervised on the so-called information highway.  Our highways are not going anywhere.  Well, they go somewhere, but they also stays where they’re put.  We know where that highway is, and we train our children with how to deal with that:

• Stay away from moving cars
• Look both ways
• Cross at the crossing
• Walk, don’t run

All these simple rules begin a process which prepares our children for navigating the roads of our neighbourhood.  But we don’t ever ask the Gubmit to ban cars from the roads.  We don’t demand that other people give up things to protect our children[2].  We accept our role in educating our own.  I know I did this.  I’m not giving up my car so your child won’t be hit by it[3].

So, tell me why I need to give up access to information to protect YOUR children?

1. or at least, momentum, movement, speed [↩]
2. except perhaps speed where speed is unnecesssary, and stupidity, yeah please give that up on the roads [↩]
3. I will, however, drive slowly where children are known to behave in less than responsible ways. [↩]

I’ve been reading up (again) on Project Xanadu again for MWT[1].  This forms part of the history of hypertext.  But I always feel a dis-ease at some of the concepts embodied in that ‘proposal’.  According to the page at Wikipedia, one of the 17 Rules of Xanadu[2] is that each individual is uniquely identified.  Each document is uniquely (and securely) identified[3].  Each use (transclusion) includes a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed[4]. So that idea I just copied from Wikipedia?  Transcluded.  It would require a royalty payment and an automatic link backwards and forwards and indelibly.

So what would happen if I dumped this blog? Erased this post?  Maybe I couldn’t because of the transclusion.  But that’s not really my point.

The thing I really like about Wikipedia is directly (and inversely) related to what I am uncomfortable with about Xanadu, about the idea of putting a price on our culture.  Wikipedia allows us free and unfettered access to culturally relelvant ideas.  Yes, there are issues about what is included or excluded from Wikipedia, but generally, if you want an overview of a topic, Wikipedia has it.  And it’s free.

This is also the problem I have with the Recording (music) and Movie industries.  They seem to want to create our culture[5], but they also want us to pay and pay and pay. When we hear a piece of music that speaks to us, that we share with our friends, that helps bind us as a group, that music becomes part of our culture, our identity.  That’s why musicians make music[6], they want to connect with us and allow us to connect to each other.  I really get annoyed at the notion that we have to pay for each and every version of a song that speaks to us, that we appropriate for our own purpose, our own identity.

Transclusion, Xanadu, comes with this same level of cost for our culture.  We will never own ideas.  We may never learn new things because each idea is already transcluded (or completely excluded) from our grasp.  I read recently about a newfangled piece of equipment that would allow the identification of people thinking ‘terroristic’ thoughts[7] as they passed through an airport.  How far will this technology go before they can identify that we are thinking a song and are thus liable for royalties?  When does a song, an idea, become our own?

Our culture seems to be up for ransom.  Every single use, every idea, every development is already owned[8].  We all stand to lose if we cannot appropriate ideas for our own use.  We lose if we cannot find information on Wikipedia and simply link to it.  I don’t have to know everything about Project Xanadu, I don’t need to link and transclude the ideas, because I can remix them, I can shift them, I can change them.  That’s what makes the web as we know it so interesting!

1. Mobile Workforce Technologies [↩]
2. Number 3 to be exact [↩]
3. Rule 10 [↩]
4. Rule 9 [↩]
5. or at least some versions of it [↩]
6. or so I’m led to believe [↩]
7. If I do a search for “identifying terrorist thought patterns” will I be flagged as a potential Person of Interest? Or will I find over 200000 hits?  And how could I include this idea without the 200000 hits of the people already talking about it? And which is the original? [↩]
8. or should that be pwned!!! [↩]

I often wonder about the way people use their computers.  It’s almost like they are arcane instruments that magically make information available with very little input from us.

A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.[1]

Now, I see this kind of ‘interruption’ happening all over the place where I work.  It’s how (B)Lotus is set up - automatically check mail every 10 minutes and when there is new mail, play a sound, flash a popup and get the pipes and drums going because this message cannot wait!  It’s part of the standard operating environment (SOE) mentality that I hate.  It means that I can’t make the computer do what I want it to.  It makes me a slave to the computer, rather than it being an instrument[2] that I use.

Admittedly, I do often see some users who manage to get in and change settings to suit themselves, but many many people seem to think it’s too important to change the settings or they just aren’t aware that they can[3]. I find the kind of statement shown above to be bereft of any thought.  I mean, would you sit in a house and complain about the wind/cold but not shut the window?

I don’t think we can blame our computers or Google or anything else for our failure to think about what it is we are doing. I really think, as far as our capacity with computers go, we are still learning to crawl, before we really learn to walk.  Sure, there are many of us who have learnt to run, some of us even come up with new ways of running.  I am quite happy walking with an occasional jog here and there, but I will not refuse to poke and prod and change settings to see what happens.  Yes, I break things, and yes, the tech guys get irritated at me, but I would not, could not use an SOE!  It’s like blaming Google for my inability to find what I want!  There is not a ‘mere button’ between me and information.  There are my eyes, my hands, my mind and my heart.  Each of these contributes to my understanding of the world.

Those of us who engage with technology with our minds and our hearts in gear, those of us who enter the new domain of knowledge, whether from our ivory towers or our mobile domains, we will be the intepreters, the way finders for those who follow.  Which one are you?

1. Is Google Making Us Stupid? [↩]
2. I still struggle with whether to call it a tool, an instrument, my slave, that thing wot i use, but whatever it is, it is NOT the master [↩]
3. I can give specific directions to anybody about how to turn this feature off in (B)Lotus and when I suggest it, the majority of people amazed that it can be done.  I haven’t used (B)Lotus for two years, actually it’s 22 months since I got the Mac. [↩]

Funniest thing I’ve read all day.  In amongst dealing with lots of (exactly the same) news reports about the Beijing Ticketing Scam for my paper on Online Reading (almost finished), I came across this little gem from Adrianne Pecotic, executive director of Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT):

but movie makers can’t compete with theft[1].

Firstly, that’s what shopkeepers do every day.  We could quite easily take what we want from shops, but, hey, they make it easier for us to buy rather than to steal.  It doesn’t take a day of faffing around (downloading), getting the right trolley and only the right trolley (piece of software or having the right piece of hardware, instead of the hardware you have), fighting to get to the checkout (fiddling and twiddling with different settings to get it to work) only to find you can’t eat (watch) what you’ve purchased.

For instance, a friend of mine recently downloaded a copy her favourite show.  She did this from an online shop. She paid for it.  After nearly a whole day of trying to get it to work, authorising, unauthorising, copying to different machines, trying desperately to watch her show, she gave up. She could have simply found a torrent, set it going, then come back in a few hours and hit play.  But she did the right thing and missed out.  So much for competing with theft, you’re not.  You are actively ensuring the continuation of easy to use sources of information and the reduction in the usefulness of your product.

Secondly, I thought they were competing with ‘free’[2].  There are ample examples of music makers competing with ‘free’.  There are ample examples of other sectors competing with free.  Heck, I have a garden and yet I still buy vegetables.

Thirdly, these ‘cultural industries’ are not competing with free or with theft.  They are competing for my dollars.  Make it worth my while to see your movies, buy your music.  But don’t treat me like a thief.  Get those gawdawful ‘public service announcements’ about piracy’ OFF my legitimately purchased DVDs.  Make it easy for me to watch them.  Compete for my attention and my dollars.

But fercryinoutloud, don’t tell me you have to compete with theft.  You’ll lose.  It’s simple.  Just make it easy, mkay?

And that’s AFACT~

1. ISPs join the copyright fight - web - Technology - theage.com.au [↩]
2. I’m not enough of an economist to fully appreciate this argument, but I get it [↩]