12 See http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2004_0616a.html.
13 See http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/kerry/kerrfin.html.
14 See http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/summary.asp?id=N00009638.
15 Kate Raynes-Goldie and Luke Walker, “Our Space: Online Civic Engagement Tools for Youth,” in W. Lance Bennett, ed., Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008), pp. 161–188.
16 See Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O’Reilly Media, 2004), and Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006) for two variants of this story.
17 Michael Cornfield, Presidential Campaign Advertising on the Internet, Pew Internet and American Life Project.
18 Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler, among others, have made the case for this trend from consumers to creators of digital media.
19 See Terry Fisher, “Semiotic Democracy,” http://www.lawharvard.edu/faculty/tfisher/music/Semiotic.html.
section three
the fate of culture
< Todd Gitlin >
nomadicity
Excerpted from Media Unlimited (pp. 53–60).
TODD GITLIN is the author of fourteen books, including (with Liel Leibovitz) The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (2010). Other titles include The Intellectuals and the Flag (2006), Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (2002), and The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987). He has published in general periodicals (The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, The New Republic , The Nation, Wilson Quarterly, Harper’s) and scholarly journals. He is now a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in communications at Columbia University. His website is http://toddgitlin.net.
INCREASINGLY, YOU COULD CARRY your private current anywhere. The home entertainment center was, after all, a luxury for which you had to confine yourself. Images and manufactured sounds came home, but you had to be home to greet them. So why not render your private amusements portable? Why not, like Pascal’s well-served if pitiable monarch, have it all wherever and whenever you like?
Self-sufficiency, that most tempting and expansive of modern motifs, feels like a sort of liberation—until it becomes banal and we have need of the next liberation. People gravitate toward portability and miniaturization—each a kind of freedom—in everyday life. The mountaineer’s backpack evolved into the hippie traveler’s aluminum-framed pack, which in turn evolved into the contemporary frameless version, which in turn gave rise to the utilitarian but waistline-disturbing fanny pack, the bulky monster sticking out horizontally, and the trim designer variety that is, in effect, a purse that leaves the hands free. Portable nourishment is another sign of the nomadic thrust toward self-sufficiency: the Hershey bar (1894), the ice-cream cone (1904), Life Savers (1913), trail mix (1970s), the portable water bottle (1990s). The tendency has been toward performing as many functions as possible in the course of one’s movements—“multitasking”—so that as we move, new accessories become mandatory. The indented tray inside the glove compartment and the cup holder next to the front seat have become standard equipment.
Not only must material provisions be available on demand; so must sustenance for the senses, not least the ears. After the portable battery-powered radio, the car radio, and the transistorized radio, the logic of individualism pointed toward that exemplary little machine for musical transport, Sony’s Walkman. The theme is well enunciated in a London billboard of 2001 that does not even bother to indicate any particular product: “Give today a soundtrack.”
The Walkman story shows how the convenience of a single powerful man could generate a marketing triumph. Before a transoceanic flight in 1979, Sony chairman Masaru Ibuka asked company engineers to create a stereo music player so he could hear classical favorites of his choice. Airlines already provided passengers with earphones and canned musical loops, but Ibuka did not want anyone overriding his personal taste, so Sony engineers connected headphones to an advanced tape recorder for him. Ibuka was delighted with the results, and his partner Akio Morita realized that this jury-rigged contraption might have sales potential among teenagers, who were already accustomed to carrying portable radios. The Walkman was born. What had begun as a toy for Ibuka was promptly sold to consumers less accustomed to indulging their personal whims. Supply proceeded to trigger demand. By the end of 1998, without much advertising, Sony had sold almost 250 million Walkmen worldwide, not to mention the Discmen and all the specialized spinoff players for joggers, swimmers, and skiers.
Throughout the twentieth century, supply and demand looped together in an unceasing Möbius strip, technology always increasing the radius of contact: the pay phone, car radio, battery-powered radio, transistor radio, remote-accessible answering machine, fax machine, car phone, laptop computer, Walkman, airplane and train phone, portable CD player, beeper, mobile phone, Palm Pilot, Internet access, PCD, GPD, and so on ad acronym. Once “interactivity” by machine became feasible, the hallmark of so many communication inventions was nomadicity, which, according to the Internet pioneer who coined the term, “means that wherever and whenever we move around, the underlying system always knows who we are, where we are, and what services we need.” Actually, not we so much as I, for more and more often the contemporary nomad travels alone, detribalized—or rather, in the company of that curious modern tribe each of whose members seeks to travel alone while being technologically connected to others. Equipped for accessibility, he may encroach upon the right of others to control their own private space: the battery-powered boom box blaring music or narrating a ball game (even the one taking place before one’s eyes in the stadium itself); the cell phone trilling during the play or the concert; the caller shouting into his phone on the train, in the restaurant, at the park, or on the street.
Charles Baudelaire once lamented: “They left one right out of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen: the right to leave.” Now, for hours each day, the right to leave is secure, though doubtless not in the way Baudelaire had in mind. In fact, the right to leave has merged with the right to be somewhere else. For a growing proportion of the population, and for a growing number of hours per day, you can, after a fashion, break the limits of space, choosing from your private menu of activities, amusements, and contacts. You are not exactly alone, because you are with others, their music, their games, their voices. Commuting or washing the floors, you are a movable node, never wholly abandoned. Even in extremis—but who could have imagined such extremity?—your voice can reach out to a loved one from the inferno of the World Trade Center about to collapse or the cabin of a hijacked plane. The horrific emergencies of September 11, 2001, put to extraordinary ends what have become the ordinary means to overcome distance.
How shall we understand the appeal of these ordinary means? Consider the humdrum experience of waiting for a bus, which Jean-Paul Sartre took as a metaphor for modern alienation. Sartre called this ordinary condition serialization, by which he meant losing one’s individuality and being reduced to a function—waiting. The immobilized man on line cannot pursue his own ends because he has lost control of his time in favor of the bus company’s schedule, the pileup of fellow travelers, the traffic that has delayed the bus. He is the creature of a routine that demands self-suppression. Now imagine this man in line equipped with a personal stereo. His ears project him, at least partially, elsewhere—or rather, elsewhere enters him, corporeal, immediate, intimate. He stands in the line but leaves it behind for a chosen communion. He blocks out unwanted contact. Now he is, paradoxically, an individual because he has company—music, familiar music at that. He feels little spurts of emotion. Music rubs up against him, gets inside him. He nods along with the beat. Against the pressures of w
ork and environment—even against his own unpleasant obsessions—he has a compensation: he has enveloped himself in a sort of mobile bubble. He has—to quote from Walkmanned Londoners interviewed in one study—“shut everything out” and “squashed thoughts.” The music, turned up loud enough to drown out ambient noise, “takes over his senses.” “It’s like living in a movie.” Availing himself of “a life-support machine,” he has taken charge of his mood.
Now imagine this man still in line or trapped in some other serialized reality—in an elevator, on the train, or stuck in a traffic jam—equip him with escape implements in the form of today’s proliferating mobile equipment: the cellular phone, the Game Boy, the personal communication system with text messaging and Internet access, feeding him sports scores and stock quotes, eventually cartoons, jokes, slot machines, card games, and pornographic images, asking him at all hours: “Where would you like to go?” Take charge of your mood! Possessing an “arsenal of mobile technology,” he comes to feel that he has the right to them. He is, to some degree, shielded from urban fear.
Some admirers of our present-day electronic efflorescence are carried away with promises of the technological sublime. One recent enthusiast heralds techgnosis. But nomadic access raised to the level of gods and angels rings sublimely ridiculous. Usually, the very point of dot-communion is banality. Through the most mundane act of e-mailing about the weather or instant-messaging a “buddy” about nothing at all except that you’re stuck in a boring lecture, or that you exist and affirm the other’s existence (“Whassup?” “Not much”), or phoning your loved one from the air to report that your plane is late or from the street to report that you are just now emerging from the subway, you have, in a sense, spun off a filament of yourself to conduct your business, secure your network, greet your friend, discharge your duty, arrange your pleasure. Intellectuals may scoff, but it is this relatively trivial mercy that most people in a consumerist culture seek much of the time.
But the freedom to be even incidentally connected is not uncomplicated. It goes with being incidentally accessible, which amounts to being on call and interruptible everywhere by your boss, your nurse, your patient, your anxious parent, your client, your stockbroker, your babysitter, as well as your friend whose voice, even electronically, you welcome even if you have just seen each other face-to-face. Friendship makes intrusion welcome—perhaps that is part of its definition—and nomadicity, no question, is a boon to certain kinds of friendship. In a suburb where nothing seems to happen, something can happen—again and again. You can send along jokes, photos, shopping recommendations, references smart and dumb. It was probably America Online’s “buddy lists” for instant messaging that made that huge Internet portal so popular.
Wireless handheld devices with Internet access carry the instantaneous buddy principle out into public space. Having been launched in Japan with considerable success, they are galloping through the United States and Europe. Sony’s mobile Internet device, no doubt to be called Webman, is set to go into American circulation shortly. “We believe that the mobile terminal will be a very . . . strategic product for Sony,” the company’s president, Kunitake Ando, told the Asian Wall Street Journal. “Just like we created a Walkman culture, we’ll have a sort of mobile culture,” he said, adding that sooner or later Sony was planning to pipe online music and even movies through a new generation of mobile phones. Such prognostications may be hype, but Sony’s have a way of turning out accurate.
At this writing, though, the principle of instantaneous access is most firmly at work with nomad-friendly mobile phones. In the year 2000, 53 percent of Americans owned mobile phones, up from 24 percent in 1995. So did 63 percent of British adults, about as many as in Japan though not so many as in Italy, Sweden, and Finland. Their diffusion rate is tremendous, comparable to television’s, exceeding that of telephones, radios, and VCRs, and more visible in public, of course, than any of those.
The mobile phone radically transforms the soundscape. Like the servant’s bell, its chime or ditty is a summons, but also a claim that you have the right to conduct your business willy-nilly wherever you are, whether you’re a day trader in New York or a Hong Kong youngster chatting away in a subway car (that city has wired its tunnels). Private practices open out into public spaces. So if the Webbed-up, wired, or wireless nomad rarely gets to relish full-bodied freedom, there is still the pleasure of knowing one is wanted right now.
The new technonomadicity comes with this paradox: the fully equipped nomad, seeking freedom of access at will, becomes freely accessible to other people’s wills. The sender also receives. The potential for being intruded upon spurs technological fixes; with caller ID, for example, you can block calls from old boyfriends, or screen calls to see who wants contact, or defer contact by dumping a call into voice mail. As in a military arms race, the dialectic of offense and defense ratchets up. There is a second paradox: those who hope to control their moods when they go out in public find themselves invaded by alien noises. In theaters, concerts, conferences, parks, and churches, the trill of the cell phone is not an angelic visitation. The commons explodes with private signals. Again, the defense also improves. Theaters announce, before the curtain goes up, that ringers should be turned off—with uneven success. Devices to block mobile phones are already being marketed to restaurants and theater owners.
So communication comes at a price—not just the monetary price, which falls year after year; not just the invasion of solitude; no, the third inevitable price of nomadicity is surveillance. This is not just the risk of being overheard in a public place. After all, the mobile phoner who wishes to preserve privacy in the face of proximity can still do so, for the new devices amplify the lowered human voice with wondrous fidelity. But cellular conversations are peculiarly capable of being intercepted, not only by public agencies but by interested private parties, whether by accident or deliberately.
Still, the new nomad, intent on living out a dream of personal power, seems willing to pay the price. The omnicommunicative utopia appeals to a centuries-old passion to control one’s circumstances without renouncing social bonds. This is the version of freedom that drives the civilization that American (but not only American) enterprise and power carry to the ends of the earth. It is an omnivorous freedom, freedom to behold, to seek distraction, to seek distraction from distraction (in T. S. Eliot’s words), to enjoy one’s rootlessness, to relish the evanescent. But as the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen once wrote, “Where do all these highways go now that we are free?”
what is web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software
By Tim O’Reilly. Originally published in 2005 at www.oreilly.com.
TIM O’REILLY is the CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. In addition to Foo Camps (“Friends of O’Reilly” Camps, which gave rise to the “un-conference” movement), O’Reilly Media hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. O’Reilly’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar, “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends. O’Reilly is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.
THE BURSTING OF the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the Web. Many people concluded that the Web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.
The concept of “Web 2.0” began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, Web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed,” the Web was more important than ever,
with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the Web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0” might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.
In the year and a half since, the term “Web 2.0” has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.
This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.
In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:
The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as “Web 1.0” and another as “Web 2.0”? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted start–ups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly Web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of Web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.
1 > the web as platform
Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.
The Digital Divide Page 21
