Reviews

Review: Delete – The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

/ Christopher Parsons

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009) is a powerful effort to rethink basic principles of computing that threaten humanity’s epistemological nature. In essence, he tries get impress upon us the importance of adding ‘forgetfulness’ to digital data collection process. The book is masterfully presented. It draws what are arguably correct theoretical conclusions (we need to get a lot better at deleting data to avoid significant normative, political, and social harms) while drawing absolutely devastatingly incorrect technological solutions (key: legislating ‘forgetting’ into all data formats and OSes). In what follows, I sketch the aim of the book, some highlights, and why the proposed technological solutions are dead wrong.

The book is concerned with digital systems defaulting to store data ad infinitum (barring ‘loss’ of data on account of shifting proprietary standards). The ‘demise of forgetting’ in the digital era is accompanied by significant consequences: positively, externalizing memory to digital systems preserves information for future generations and facilitates ease of recalls through search. Negatively, digital externalizations dramatically shift balances of power and obviate temporal distances. These latter points will become the focus of the text, with Mayer-Schonberger arguing that defaulting computer systems to either delete or degrade data over time can rebalance the challenges facing temporal obviations that presently accompany digitization processes. Continue reading →

Some Blogroll Love

/ Christopher Parsons

Closeconnections

I tend to (almost exclusively) access key websites related to my research and personal interests through RSS feeds. As a result of using Google Reader to collate new content, I rarely actually see the blogrolls and suggested links that are provided by those key websites that I grab content from on a daily basis. Given that I’m sure many people read this site almost exclusively through RSS, I wanted to prepare a short piece that highlights just some of the key blogs and websites that I turn to on a regular basis in the hopes that readers might find some cool and interesting new sources of information they’d otherwise never come across. As a hat tip, this post is largely inspired by Rebecca Bollwitt‘s “The Missing Link” that considers (as of 2008) the changing characters of link lists and blogrolls.

AR.m-ato.me

Aya Walraven is a digital media and internet enthusiast who primarily works in video, web, and emerging technologies. A self-appointed internet-culture historian and archivist, she studies and documents mobile technologies and online behavior, particularly in Japanese youth and anonymous communities.

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Google Dashboard – Does It Need Another Name?

/ Christopher Parsons / 6 Comments

TheWrongGoogleDashI like to pretend that I’m somewhat web savvy, and that I can generally guess where links on large websites will take me. This apparently isn’t the case with Blogger – I have a Blogger account to occasionally comment on blogs in the Google blogsphere, but despise the service enough that I don’t use the service. I do, however, have an interest in Google’s newly released Dashboard that is intended to show users what Google knows about them, and how their privacy settings are configured.

Given that I don’t use Blogger much, I was amazed and pleased to see that there was a link to the Dashboard in the upper-right hand corner of a Blogger page that I was reading when I logged in. Was this really the moment where Google made it easy for end-users to identify their privacy settings?

Alas, no. If I were a regular Blogger user I probably would have known better. What I was sent to when I clicked ‘Dashboard’ was my user dashboard for the blogger service itself. This seems to be a branding issue; I had (foolishly!) assumed that various Google environments that serve very different purposes would be labeled differently. In naming multiple things ‘dashboard’ it obfuscates access to a genuinely helpful service that Google is now providing. (I’ll note that a search for ‘Google Dashboard’ also calls up the App Status Dashboard, and that Google Apps also has a ‘Dashboard’ tab!)

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Review: The Long Tail (Revised and Updated)

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

thelongtailI’m in the middle of a massive reading streak for my comprehensive exams, but I’m trying to sneak in some personal reading at the same time. The first book in that ‘extra’ reading is Anderson’s “The Long Tail”, which focuses on the effect that shifting to digital systems has for economic scarcities, producers, aggregators, and consumers.

The key insight that Anderson brings to the table is this: with the birth of digital retail and communication systems, customers can find niche goods that appeal to their personal interests and tastes, rather than exclusively focusing on goods that retailers expect will be hits. This means that customers can follow the ‘long tail’, or the line of niche goods that are individually less and less likely to sell in a mass retail environment.

There are several ‘drivers’ of the long tail:

  1. There are far more niche goods than ‘hits’ (massively popular works), and more and more niche goods are being produced with the falling costs of production and distribution in various fields.
  2. Filters are more and more effective, which means that consumers can find niches they are interested in.
  3. There are so many niche items that, collectively, they can comprise a market rivaling hits.
  4. Without distribution bottlenecks, the ‘true’ elongated tail of the present Western economic reality is made apparent.

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Review: Canadian Copyright – A Citizen’s Guide

/ Christopher Parsons

200902012349.jpgFull disclosure, up front: I’m reviewing Canadian Copyright – A Citizen’s Guide (published through Between the Lines) as part of the Mini Book Expo. Now, on to the review…

Canadians are inundated with news about copyright on a regular basis. Where copyright was once a little spoken of technical subfield of law, it has blossomed into a vibrant and relevant facet of Canadian cultural discourse. Unfortunately, such discourse is often clouded by the ‘facts’ of copyright that accompany vast swathes of American media that is projected into Canada; discussions of fair use, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the definitions of copyright infringement are regularly grounded in American legal statutes. This book offers itself as an accessible panacea that promises to reorient popular discussions of copyright in Canada.

The text is neatly divided into four parts; Ideas, Law, Practice, and Policy. I’ll address each in turn, noting what I appreciated, and what I found lacking (where appropriate). Given that I spend a little bit of time reading and thinking about copyright, I’ll scatter some comments through the review.

Part I – Ideas

This section of the book is meant to give some background to copyright today. It begins by broadly distinguishing between natural rights-based and utilitarian arguments for the value of intellectual property broadly, and copyright specifically. At the same time, the authors recognize copyright as a means to make non-exclusive property (i.e. ideas) exclusive property; copyright functions to cordon off particular ‘things’ from the public. With this theory behind them, they delve into the history of Canadian copyright by examining the traditions of Britain, the United States (US), and France – copyright law in Canada is found at the crossing of these various legal traditions. While the historical basis of copyright often find themselves into texts on the subject, even elementary theory is often hidden from view – the authors should be congratulated for even taking a stab at the theory behind copyright. Given that the book is meant for a general audience, it’s hard to fault them for not digging into the theory too deeply.

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Summary: CRTC PN 2008-19; Requests for Public Disclosure Filings

/ Christopher Parsons / 4 Comments

I’ve just completed a summary document that pulls together the requests for disclosure from the various advocacy groups currently involved in the CRTC’s PN 2008-19 (ISP Internet Management Techniques). A few things that I found of interest:

  1. TELUS is being used as a lever against the other ISPs; the common metric is “TELUS released all this information in public, so what justification can the rest of the ISPs have for filing in confidence?”
  2. Public Interest Advocacy Center (PAIC) really focused on Bell and Rogers, and noted repeatedly that Bell has filed items in confidence in this public notice that it had been forced to file in public previously. Also, where Bell could claim confidentiality last time (Canadian Association of Internet Providers [CAIP] v Bell), this isn’t the case now because all the major ISPs will be forced to show their hands at the same time.
  3. Without historical and projected growth, it is impossible for public groups to argue whether or not current managing practices are appropriate. This data needs to be released so that they can fully response to the CRTC’s public notice.
  4. The Campaign for Democratic Media (CDM) is willing to have all of the ISPs’ traffic aggregated, so long as it is disclosed publicly what the trends are.
  5. CDM notes that without information on the top 5% and 10% of users, that it is impossible to ascertain what their actual impact on total bandwidth has been.
  6. CAIP, PAIC, and the Canadian Film and Television Production Association (CFTPA) all argue that it is important for clear, technical, explanations of congestion be provided – without this, it is challenging to effectively interrogate what is, or isn’t, happening on ISPs’ networks.
  7. PIAC stands that, if Bell didn’t have a congestion metric in place prior to January 2007 then they should be obligated to disclose information in public on the basis that their definitions of congestion need to be examined more closely than others (unstated, but this is in part because they are such a major player in Canada).
  8. CFTPA holds that Bell’s networking diagram is good, because it offers specifics into their network. In light of Bell’s submission, other parties should submit similarly detailed diagrams, with devices clearly labeled, so that members of the public can meaningfully comment on whether the network components use by ISPs are adequate or not.
  9. CAIP, CDM, PAIC, and CFTPA all maintain that knowing what products are being used to manage Internet traffic is critical – without this information it is challenging to actually comment on how throttling is occurring. CDM raises the privacy issue with DPI.