After the Revolutions
---------------------

Where we’ve been
Revolutions that happen in 10 year increments, so we’re about due for one
- microcomputers (1976)
- Internet (1986)
- First Amendment revolution (1997)
- a coming of age culturally
- librarians were ahead of the curve on this and fought in ACLU v. Reno
- what will be next?
- will it be positive or negative (backlash)?
- most revolutions experience a backlash

First wave of computer/internet panic centered on crime
law enforcement geared up for a problem that never happened, so they started looking around for new issues

Second wave of computer/internet panic
- encryption (wiretapping)
- notion that computers and networks need to be limited, policed, or controlled
- explosive growth of Internet usage 1990-95 compounds the panic; television wasn’t adopted as quickly
Third wave of panic = objectionable content
- sexual content, porn
- “dangerous information”
Reno v. ACLU (1997)
- Supreme Court holds (9-0) that the First Amendment applies to the internet
The real threat is that computers are efficient copying machines and the internet networks them together
- if you have a model that rewards creativity based on the idea that copying is difficult and hard, then the natural response of industries based on that assumption is that we have to somehow seize control and put the genie back in the bottle
- sea change – instead of outlawing behaviors, outlawing (or otherwise limiting) technologies

Have laws for “attempted” copyright infringement, not just the infringement itself

Redesigning technologies
- broadcast falg and digital watermarking
- closing the analog hole
- trusted computing
- focusing on hardware interfaces
- wiretappability and data retention
- discrimination as to uses of the network

Troubled by open technologies because it means people will use them in new ways all the time and this is difficult to predict what they’ll do

Pipes and policies – telcos and cablecos don’t like open pipes because they can’t “extract rents” for these new uses
Common carriage has been a tradition but is not a requirement for many carriers. Even when it applies, common carriage is about content, not applications
- is this the revolution for 2007?

What consequences to a counterrevolution?
- creativity has flourished due to flexibility in copyright law
- computer/network design and applications have flourished due to flexibility in technology
- what happens when we reduce flexibility in law and technology?

Long-term Consequences
- copyright law could become irrelevant if digital rights management and other technologies lock things down so much that your legal options don’t matter (because they are governed by the code)
- Free speech practice may change with design at the pipe level (consider Google in China)
- Privacy expectations may change with design changes (centralization of services)
- Tiered speeds and services plus special deals for some info services (always pitched as “helping the consumer”)

Challenge is to recognize forces in play
- Law enforcement
- Industry
- Carriers

Can’t let these external forces have their way because we might be shutting off the pipe of individual innovation (not Microsoft or Apple, but what we can do personally with these technologies politically and economically)

Sharing of information has already been immensely productive for us – do we want to do away with that world?

What now?
- our job is to make conscious choices about what kind of future we want for computers and for us, their users
- a controlled, “safe” future (safe for telcos and cablecos, safe for content owners, safe according to law enforcement)
- a dynamic, open (but less safe and predictable) future

For libraries and librarians
- we now have a generation of kids who reflexively look something up
- increasing focus on assistance in “ordering” and finding information online; kids reflexively looking online, but the information isn’t ordered; help them to search the resources they have
- decreasing focus on archiving
- they are important, but because they’re not as easily searchable on the open web, these budgets might be cut in the future
- open internet means increasing opportunities for developing new services ourselves
- closed internet essentially locks down our 2007 understanding of information services
- long-term mission of libraries and librarians requires commitment to open yet privacy-conscious internet
- openness to open architectures is critical to the future foundation of libraries

Respondent panel: Jorge Schement, John Berry, Adam Eisgrau

Jorge:
------
Mike is asking about framing
offers:
when immutable facts evolve
- the First Amendment is in an era of transition, contraction
- living in the era of transition; the boundary of property and commons is in flux
- democracy in transition (blogosphere, etc.); sum of statements by anonymous individuals

Frame 2
- brought uninvited friends in addition to invited ones
- what do Americans want and what do they really mean?
- pornography was one such uninvited friend but it drove

Frame 3
is this the revolution and am I dressed appropriately?
- every American enjoys their right to live at *the pivotal moment* in American history
- love to reinvent our institutions
Moral for librarians and our basic principles and metaphors
- use these to tell stories and shift the discourse

John:
----
international forces that are at play here
2 phase summit in 2003 and 2005 on information
the 2003 summit flew under the radar in the US and didn’t really appear in the press here

in 2005, though, the summit hit the press here because of internet governance (became about human rights)
smaller nations challenged the US and the west for their role in internet governance and policy
the US State Department, which led the delegation to both summits, had the attitude that we built it, we own it, get used to it
naturally there was pushback
they created an internet governance org that met for the first time last year and will meet again late this year
they are now discussing:
- openness
- free flow of information
- security
- diversity (local content and multilingualism)
- content
- policy
- cost

China brings a lot to the table
will become the biggest internet user in the world, displacing us
about a month ago, they announced another round of trying to control access

Adam:
-----
had the advantage of not knowing anything about this ahead of time
was an advocate in the messaging wars
how does the community do this? What are the arguments? What are the words? How do we take the debate back in the face of powerful economic forces?
doesn’t have the answer, but has some thoughts

is a recovering deconstructionist
think civil rights and the concept of justice (which Siva referred to last night)

typically there is a leader and a group coalesces around this person
outrage as an opposite of fear can emerge
many forces at play

Dan: if the internet is closed off and becomes a corporate entity, our children and grandchildren would be stuck in the services of 2007
- thinks the picture is better than that and worse than that because the internet is affected by global forces
- the US might be frozen in time, but the US would fall behind until we realize this is happening

Janice: telcos think people have an infinite amount of money to pay for online services
doesn’t know how far people are willing to pay more money

Mike: RIAA is in meltdown because their strategies didn’t work. By contrast, the studios have segmented their markets to a very fine degree and they take every opportunity to extract revenue from every possible point. They like the idea of multiple revenue streams and they hate that the internet may erase some of those silos. So the comment about money applies more to video than audio because they know they’ve already lost

Jorge: have been tracking consumer spending on entertainment for years, and over 100 years, it’s pretty flat, maybe a 2% increase, of spending on information and its goods and services. That ceiling isn’t fixed, but it’s been stable for a long time

Bob: How do you counter the arguments from the carriers that they need control and maintain the pipes (traffic)?
Mike: wrote a paper for OITP in which he argues that maybe they need to manage it at the application level. If we tackle them on that ground, they win by framing the argument. Need to argue it on the principle of a level playing field. In other words, don’t make that special deal with Google, Microsoft, etc., where we can argue about preventing monopolies, which is a winning argument in the legal arena. In the long run, though, their arguments are spurious. They’re always going to be managing and expanding their networks, but he doesn’t want to take their scarce resource terms, which favors them.

Nancy: wants to make sure we remember to keep in mind how can we be a force and a framework. We are a big force to contend with and we need to make sure we’re shaping the debate.

Mike: agrees. We have to be proactive and not just talk about all of the standard arguments (distance education, fair use, etc.), it helps us to think about general concepts such as openness. Need to always be showing up saying we want more people to be able to do more things and push for that to be able to happen. Talk in that broader term.

Duane: concerned about the mission of the new library. Concerned Mike didn’t refer to mass digitization efforts
Mike: mentioned it in regards to archives. It’s good this is being done, but at the same time, archives are a good backup source. There are pieces you can’t turn into digital information.
Duane: faculty don’t care if there is a preservation of history, just want access to what they need right now, which affects funding

Mike: you have to start the religion of archiving now, if it hasn’t been already
Duane: we’re approaching it as an insurance policy, but that’s not a sexy sell

Alice: was unclear that archiving meant digitization in Mike’s presentation
Mike: should have been clearer. Often we can find stuff but we’re not sure if it’s relevant, don’t know if it’s digitized or not. We have to be very proactive in how we plan, pitch, and sell the archiving function.

Howard: thinks we are using the term archiving somewhat interchangeably with preservation, which is a problem for some of us, but you’re not from our field. Getting back to Duane’s point, one of the most important things we can do is to inject into the discourse all of the bad stories, all of the things that we have lost. Need to have the library making this case to the faculty on every campus. Is also disturbed that in the policy arena, we tend to be reactive rather than active. Even when we get active, it’s in a reactive way.

Feels like we’re always in some kind of disaster situation and we’re always trying to dig ourselves out of the tunnel. Can we get out of this reactive mode and into one where we really set the agenda and be more aggressive at stating what things should look like policy-wise?

Adam: yes, we can, should, and must. But we can’t do it alone and not without a bazooka. It takes resources, commitment, and ability. We need to get on the bike we’re walking with that we thought we didn’t have time to get on. If we want to build alliances that broadly shape a large agenda, we need to make the door-to-door sale with other groups, why we should work together

Jorge: Adam is talking to the power of stories and metaphor. Liberals have tended to focus on the policy world as a structure of laws that need to be changed, and that’s a fundamentally reactive starting point, whereas conservatives approach it as storytelling. That’s what we haven’t done very well. Need to reinterpret the environment we want to live in.

John: we got a lot of libraries, museums, and archives working together, although it was reactive. It takes a lot of resources to play in that arena globally. IFLA has tried, but their budget is stretched so that they can’t be at the table all the times they want to be.

David L.: in terms of archives and preservation, the massive scale of storage. We’re in the era where we can spend 20cents per gigabyte so we can store everything. Unintended consequences of that. In regard to ordering information, the focus of ordering information, means bringing voice to it to prioritize it. Who do we work with to create that voice? Is curious, as we look at policies, access to these discussions (likes “net equity” rather than “net neutrality”), what about the idea that filtering in schools can become the credibility legislation that prioritizes views of information? This is very concerning, that we can worry about how much they’ll charge us, etc., but more worried about the fact that once I get my bandwidth, however I get it, that there will be policy that says you will expect “this” and what you can do with it. Prioritizing one context over another. The response to “there’s bad stuff on the internet” don’t just get filtered out, but the viewpoints do as well.

Mike: when I said ordering, I meant that as opposed to prioritizing. What I do when I order information is make it easier to access, not assigning value or prioritizing. Agrees that we want to resist the prioritization. The search engines now are quite democratic in a ridiculous, low-level way, but they’re pretty random. They’re not necessarily useful because the decisions are made by machines. Just mean “structuring” the way libraries have always done it. Must resist privileging and making value judgments.

David L.: that view of ordering is naïve. Alphabetical is one thing, but other methods are still affected and can be value-driven.

Joe: to go back to Howard’s question about taking initiative, we have so many stories. It’s almost a problem. If we got to set an agenda, would our priority be intellectual property, privacy, equity, or what? Trying to wrangle our crowd to pick the story we would want to fight for…it would be fun, but it would be a real challenge. It’s not a bad idea, thinks it is the right idea, but how would we figure out what to fight for in a proactive (rather than reactive) way?

Jorge: tell different stories in particular arenas? When conservatives began deriding the term “liberal” for no particular reason, they reframed the debate. Librarians deal with some specific things – democracy, freedom, etc. – but in the long term these things make sense to people and that is where the storytelling can have its greatest effect. If this conference were held around storytelling, it would be very different.

Adam: “freedom is not for sale” would be a powerful story

Technorati Tags: ftl2007, ftl07, technology, libraries