Oh, the blessing and curse that is the "keep new" feature in Bloglines. It means that I’ve cluttered up that place with all sorts of good stuff, some of it a year old now. It’s all links that I meant to do something with or save for some wonderful future purpose, but never deployed. The end of the year compels me to clean some of it out, so I’m moving it over here where it can go safely into the archives of oblivion for future reference. (Am I the only one who still likes storing links in the same place I keep everything else instead of keeping them in deli.cio.us?)

New Media
Andrew Lih on How Wikipedia Ranks
danah boyd on making net neutrality relevant and writing community into being on social network sites
The blogging special issue of Reconstruction
Media from Johndan’s old blog: the Eames’ Information Machine and the original iPod launch video
Via Infocult: timeline of the Wikipedia/Britannica controversy, a history of FaceBook, the Foucault-Chomsky debates on YouTube, and frightening instructional AT&T videos.
Information Aesthetics spotlights email thread visualizations, blogosphere linkology, and treemaps
Clay Shirky argues that news of Wikipedia’s death is greatly exaggerated
Anne Galloway’s working bib on The Internet of Things

Fodder for Teaching Presentation Skills
Guy Kawasaki on the art of panels
Dean Dad’s interesting threads on grading group presentations and ">handling difficult classmates

Academic Whatnot
50 ways to take notes

Book History
From Old Books: images from, um, old books
Jill points out material aspects of the original publication of “Death of the Author”

Professionalization
Via Prolurker: The Academic Departments: Home Base for Doctoral Students and the Center of the Graduate Mission of the Institution and Thinking Beyond the Dissertation
AKMA on productively structuring argument in academic writing
Sherry on study breaks (I’d send this to new grad students if I were putting together a comprehensive advice file.)

Pop Culture
scribblingwoman rounds up Brokeback spoofs
The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time, with linked video for each. (High ratio of Warner Brothers, of course.)

Just Beautiful
Aunt B: Breathe In, Breathe Out.

Posted at 11:06 AM | Permalink

Summer indolence has settled upon me. I’m still managing to get some work and teaching done every day, but not as much as I'd like. Not much going on. Not much to report.

One thing I did do, though, was finally get around to discovering Ethiopian food, thus proving that Derek has been right all this time about its fabulosity. Now I gotta learn to make my own sega wot and kik wot.

Posted at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Over on Between Lawyers, they’re discussing the language (and opacity) of the CC contracts in comparison to open source licenses. Interesting stuff.

And: does anyone know of a case where a CC license has been interpreted yet? I haven’t heard of one.

Also: Federal Circuit to Decide Patentability of Crustless Sandwich.

Posted at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Mister Boyfriend blogged about the advent of microphotography a couple of days ago, and I was struck by an H.G. Wells quote he included. Wells is commenting on the possibilities of building a commons through microfiche, but it also sounds like the utopian dreams we have for the internet (and a bit of it‛s reality).

It . . . . was the beginning of a world brain . . . . a sort of cerebrum for humanity . . . . which will constitute a memory and also a perception of current reality for the entire human race. . . . . In these days of destruction, violence, and general insecurity, it is comforting to think that the brain of man-kind, the race brain, can exist in numerous identical replicas throughout the world. . . .

Also: The American Anthropometric Society and Walt Whitman's Brain

Posted at 9:15 AM | Permalink

My fellow Ethics seminarian Greg Schneider wrote a smart response to one of my questions about ethics and the commons that ties together the Bollier and Mill essays. It does a nice job of incorporating the notion of intellectual pleasure with the ethical problem of obligation to the commons. He doesn't blog, so I asked him if he'd like to post it up here - both because it should be shared and because I selfishly want to file it with the rest of my notes on this topic. So without further ado, here is Greg:

Apply the basic precepts of happiness in Mill's Utilitarianism to the academic commons

To get at how a theory that posits happiness as "pleasure and the absence of pain" can help us understand the information commons we must first explore Mill's definition a bit further. After all, the information commons doesn't seem all that pleasurable at first glance (well, it's pleasurable if you think of it THAT way, but come on, focus, we've got theory to discuss!).

Mill's Definition of Utilitarianism: "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure" (448 in my edition).

But Mill goes out of his way in the second chapter of this short book to debunk the cliche arguments against his theory. Here we begin to see a subtle development of his notion of happiness. Indeed, one of Mill's oft quoted phrases states that "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" (449). For Mill, happiness is not hedonism (as it could be argued it was for Bentham), and he takes pains to show this. There are differences in kinds of pleasure, Mill argues, and we can say that human pleasures are of an entirely different sort than the baser beasts. "Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification" (448). While this statement seems to include the love/hate power of addiction, and it also shows that humans have access to a higher quality of pleasure. Mill doesn't just want to count pleasure points (like some kind of fad diet), he wants to factor in the quality of this pleasure as well.

These qualitatively greater pleasures of the mind are the ones which provide the link to the information commons. The information commons refers to the creative space where intellectual property (music, art, film, advertising, poetry, novels, etc.), in effect digital everything, is created and disseminated. As digital technologies, which free information from physical recalcitrances that made mass dissemination more difficult, come into conflict with traditional market forces, the legal system has been harnessed to control and limit the development and dissemination of these works. Through the extension of copyright law and attendant legal arguments over fair use, Bollier worries that this space is being usurped by corporations and corporate power politics. All this, he argues, shuts down creativity by limiting creative fair use of artistic works for the sake of the corporate bottom line.

Continue reading "Guest Blogger: Greg on Utilitarianism, Happiness and the Commons" »

Posted at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the cool things about the 75-minute presentation/discussion assignment in Ethics is that you get to write the web discussion questions for the week. Then the assigned respondant(s) write a 750-word essay answering one of them. (My Aristotle on the Place of Emotion in Argument and Levinas and the Commons posts were written under these assignment parameters.)

I ended up shortening my original reading list in order to get the pagecount right. We read Bollier's Why We Must Talk About the Information Commons, "The Gift Community" from Hyde's The Gift, and What Utilitarianism Is by John Stuart Mill. Here are the questions I offered to the class:

1. Apply the categorical imperative (using the Humanity formulation) to the problem of responsibility to the academic commons.
2. Apply the basic precepts of happiness in Mill's Utilitarianism to the academic commons.
3. Compare Levinas' conception of responsibility with that put forth by Mill.
4. It can be argued that Levinas would say using another's ideas for one's own purposes is not sufficiently honoring the Other's alterity*. Extend this argument to its logical conclusion.
5. Anarchism has been closely related to 'copyfight' movements (i.e., groups who agitate against current intellectual property legislation.) It has been applied both metaphorically (through the notions of piracy and sharing) and literally (through moral arguments against owning intellectual property). Hyde and other gift theorists also often align themselves with it. Does alignment with anarchism constitute an effective rhetorical strategy for copyfighters? Why or why not?
6. Buber suggests that our ethical responsibility lies in the true, open exchange between two individuals. Is this idea applicable to exchanges within a commons? Is it applicable to gift theory in general?

*This one is drawn from my Ethics professor's response to my short essay on Levinas and the Commons.

Posted at 8:59 AM | Permalink

Following is the proposal I wrote for my final project in Ethics class. We were asked to limit our source list to five - otherwise, mine would be much longer. I had originally hoped that this paper might do something useful, but it looks to me like it's turned into a purely academic exercise. Constructive commentary and advice are welcome.

Title
Anarchy and Utility: Toward an Ethics of the Information Commons

Rationale
Contemporary proponents of the information commons have always inhabited a border space in the intellectual property landscape, a space that is home to both scholars and street preachers. While all "free culture" rhetoric is oppositional to the current intellectual property policy structure to some degree, the last five years have seen significant parts of this opposition adopt the more extreme stance of techno-anarchism. Recent works by John Logie and Siva Vaidyhanathan have critiqued, respectively, the anarchist rhetoric of Napster's defense and the real-world role of techno-anarchism. While both offer critiques of these anarchistic stances and suggest that this alignment creates an oppositional and ultimately damaging rhetoric, neither have suggested an alternative ethical system that might frame our discussions of the future of the copyfight movement.

Continue reading "Ethics Final Project Prospectus" »

Posted at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)