by Alan Langford | 2006-03-11 | Observations on Everything
Leah McLaren recently wrote an interesting article, titled “Logging out of the blogosphere” where she describes the reasoning behind her decision to stop reading blogs. I must admit I find myself agreeing with her in many respects. Even correcting for the volumes of garbage from spam and search engine placement games, the signal to noise ratio — the ratio of useful, accurate, or meaningful content to incoherent, unoriginal and redundant content is disturbingly low. This is a problem with ideas that get picked up en masse on the net. Universal accessibility implies average results. For this a favourite phrase comes to mind: It’s almost like half the people have below average intelligence.
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by Alan Langford | 2006-01-30 | Featured, Observations on Everything
I read a blog post today by Simon Phipps (DRM and the Death of a Culture) which was a well reasoned complaint about the constraints that DRM can place on use of content. Yet no matter how well reasoned, nor argued from which position, these arguments on DRM don’t matter. They don’t matter because DRM will never work on static content. This is so basic, so obvious that I’m not sure why anyone ever thought it would. In fact, let’s make it more general: all copy protection technologies, past, present, and future do not and will not prevent copying of non-interactive media. In fact they’re a colossal waste of time, effort, and money that only serve to inconvenience legitimate users (and as Phipps points out, kill culture).
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by Alan Langford | 2006-01-16 | Featured, Observations on Everything
DNA testing has given sperm banks an interesting challenge. The concept of an “anonymous donor” has gone out the window. Now a simple, affordable DNA test can verify parentage. Perhaps of more concern is that as more people contribute DNA to public databases, it’s becoming easier to identify previously unknown siblings, which leaves just a short step to the father.
With genetic manipulation becoming such an easy thing to do, how long will it be before sperm banks start offering “synthetic” fathers? A few genes from this donor, a few from that, and a few more from over here to finish the job. A baby born from the resulting DNA could theoretically have any number of fathers, none of them traceable to an individual.
Of course it might be a tricky business if there’s more interrelationships between genes than previously expected. Then again, given sufficient care, the outcomes of various combinations could be tracked, selected for deireable traits, and in no time the banks would be out in the market with competing “superbaby sperm”.
Now there’s an ethical mess.
by Alan Langford | 2006-01-08 | Observations on Everything
The way I see it, there are two classes of activity that people engage in: creating and consuming. These classes apply quite broadly, from creating wealth and consuming goods, to creating art and absorbing information (a form of consumption) by reading a book.
Left to their own devices, I believe most humans have a need to create. Whether it be knitting a scarf or developing a cancer fighting drug, creating is an intrinsic part of human existence.
Yet in our mass-marketed, consumer driven culture, individual creativity seems to have suffered greatly. Cultural gateways such as large publishers and mololithic music and entertainment companies arbitrate and edit our views, selecting what we see based more on economic potential than cultural value. Thousands of people are creating works that may be of value, but we rarely discover them. Individuals who might otherwise be creating their own works are watching television with their minds only partially engaged, or worse, expressing their creativity by assembling the latest and greatest over-branded, over-promoted consumer goods into a "personal statement" of cookie-cutter uniformity.
The Internet is an immensely positive disruptive force that provides hope of to reversing this destructive trend. Once musicians discover that they can both find an audience and earn a substantial living by dealing directly with fans, record companies will cease to add value. They will lose control and become "disintermediated" in short order. New intermediaries who provide value that is relevant to the Internet age will thrive (officialcommunity.net is a good example).
Large entertainment companies will be restricted to projects that require large capital investments, but even then the prevalence of easy copying will limit their potential returns, which will be reflected in smaller production budgets. The days of the quarter-billion dollar blockbuster are numbered.
Sites like lulu.com will revolutionize publishing. Blogging and photo upload sites give a stage to hundreds of thousands of people with something to say, or with images to share; They provide a platform for creativity.
Idealists refer to this as the "democratization" of culture, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Any widely distributed, truly democratic process is subject to displacement by larger commercial interests with profit as a motive. Ironically what’s required are large, strong, profit-oriented corporations who embrace "quasi-democratic access" as a paradigm, and who find a way to profit without interfering with the mechanics of that paradigm. This is why Google, Yahoo, eBay, and even Amazon have become culturally important institutions. These companies will serve as the seed for a new cultural renaissance.
by Alan Langford | 2006-01-06 | Observations on Everything
Shared Space is a term coined by Gordon Thompson, long time chief of scientific staff at what is now Nortel. I had the good fortune of getting to know Gord very early in my career in the late 1970’s. Gord’s claim to fame was that his name was on the patent for the "Stored Program Electronic Telephone Exchange", in other words the modern phone switch. For this, he should have been as famous as Alexander Graham Bell himself. At the time, he was known as the "Private Sector’s Marshall MacLuhan" But now there’s almost no mention of him on the Web, save for some blog notes from a conference where visionary Don Tapscott credits his influence. And what an influence it was.
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