Accesability

If everyone was able to pick up a steam engine for $2, take it home, and do whatever they want with it, we'd have discovered locomotives a lot quicker. Openness and accessibility breed invention. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates started their careers in technology 'hacking' computers in their garages. Opening the source for a program allows people to create their own add-ons and extensions to round out the application with new and intuitive functionality.

In 1876, William Sealy Gosset was working for Guinness Brewing Company when he discovered the t-student distribution in statistics. He asked for permission to publish his findings, but was rejected because Guinness claimed it was 'proprietary knowledge'. He later published his findings anyways under the pseudonym "student", and changed the history of the field of statistics. I don't claim to know an awful lot about the field or the history, but these people do, and they seem to like him well enough:

We might hazard the guess that the generously connective Gosset was, in part the catalyst, but perhaps more generally the communicating medium, of the great statistical surge of the English 1930's.


Many companies have already jumped on the open-source bandwagon, and use the software at all levels of their organizations (although, there are still reservations). However, there is another business model that has come up in class. The best part about it is it's free. Companies have known for a while that they can sell a product by giving it away for free. However, when it comes to technology, there's another spin on the free-product model. Companies like Google and Apple open up their products and give away the tools to develop on them for free, because they want people to generate content for it, and to have people experiment with the technology. I'm curious as to whether or not there are any companies that try this with hardware, or other physical products. I'll keep an eye out for them, but I haven't found any yet. Is it because giving away a physical product doesn't bring in enough user generated results to cover the costs? What do you all think?

Open Theme

Looking back on what I"ve posted for this class, I discovered two things:
1) I don't post often enough.
2) I like playing the devils advocate. I didn't post as much as I would've liked on certain topics, especially on those discussed in class, but there is usually polarized opinions, and I enjoy arguing against both. For example, crime- it's bad right? I would argue it's not! It does a lot of good for society! What about pirating things online, that's got to be illegal- maybe, but it's still good for society! It's the forerunner of an open-information society! It's laying down the framework for an open internet.

If I had to pick a theme of my blog, or more appropriately, the focus of my thoughts over this class, I would say the theme was progression. That might seem like a kind of lame theme, so here's that theme in tweethis form (all 140 characters of it):

As technology progresses it separates itself from physical boundaries, and society will follow.

The physical world is pretty limited. Like the commonly shared apple example, if two people have two apples and trade, they still have 1 apple a piece. However, information is completely different. If two people have two ideas and trade, then each has both. Because of the limited resources, a large portion of society has been fighting over who gets which apples. The first development of written language was to keep track of who gets what in trading. Ever since Pax Romana, there has been near continuous wars over control and resources. Alexander the Great, Ghengis Khan, the crusades, and the list could go on forever. In "Ghost Map", it actually describes the clear boundaries in society, and the house where Karl Marx developed his ideas on a stateless, classless society. As communication mediums became more common, people became more educated about the state of their societies and people demanded change. People in America read newspapers and books like "The Jungle", and demanded workers rights. People in Japan and China caught wind of the technological advances and wanted to open up their countries to the rest of the world. As people world wide became informational equals, they demanded physical equality as well.

Fastforward to today, with our global economy and a worldwide network of free-flowing information. Today, ideas and media can be reduplicated nearly infinitely, limited only by the ever decreasing price of memory and other hardware. It's my humble opinion that a cultural revolution is slowly transforming our society before our eyes. Thanks to technology's convenience and open projects like Wikipedia and Creative-Commons, the digital world doesn't care where you're from or who you are- it's all content based. As long as you have access to a computer, nobody cares how much you make, who your parents are, or where you went to school. The only thing that matters is what you can put out, be it code, articles, ideas, or media. Movements like Uncollege.org, 3D-Printers, and Freeware push to create an open society, and technology is the medium through which it will be born.

So that's a short summary of how I feel about all this technology stuff! To sum it all up for those who skimmed to the bottom: Technology allows people to break out of geographical, economic, and class boundaries. This will change the structure of society, and who knows? Maybe we'll even have open source cars someday.

Smartphones and the Digital Divide

So, first off, sorry for the lack of an actual discussion on the digital divide in class Thursday. There was a nice little plan laid out, but we ran out of time. Here's what was supposed to happen:

-Before class, ask everyone with a smartphone to respond to a post.
-at the beginning of class, put everyone who responded in a circle, and share with them the link to the text poll, and the question to discuss, which was "How does connectivity affect you?".
-Then, present on the digital divide, and start the discussion.

Those with smart-phones, or the 'digital bourgeoisie', would then discuss how connectivity affects them, while the rest of the class sits in silence, and does not even get to know what the question is.

So that was the plan! I'll admit, it might have been a bit jerk-ish, but I felt it would drive home the point about the digital divide. The internet is a giant forum for sharing information, connecting with others, and discussing the problems of today. However, not everyone has access to it, so they are prevented not only from participating in the discussion, but also from learning what the discussion is. Granted, there are other non-digital media out there (such as newspaper, books, television), but since you and anyone in the world can read this seconds after I've posted it on my personal blog, which cost nothing to make, I think we can all agree that the digital experience is much different.

But so what if there are people that don't get to read the news until they get it in print or on TV? Does it actually make that big of a difference? I'd argue that it does, but that's not the argument I plan on making here. Instead, let's all remember that all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles! So does not owning a smart-phone make you the working-class proletariat? I'd hesitate to take it that far, but I would say you're on a different social class. While there are certainly other, probably more significant differences out there (wealth, education), but a difference in knowledge can have a very real social impact. 

Since the industrial revolution, there has been a difference between the factory owners and workers, the CEOs and the office workers. In our new digital age, a whole culture has evolved around technology and connectivity, creating a new 'social class' of the digitally civilized. However, unlike previous instances of the bourgeoisie/proletariat divide, this one has just as much to do with choice as with material possessions. There are plenty of people, in this class even, who have the mans to purchase a smart phone, but choose not to. We could all have used Google+ before this class, but most of us didn't. That is to say, inside of the technological elite, there is another layer of divide between those who are 'connected' and those who are not. A good example is the non-voting we've discussed in class: those who have access to the latest news in politics, getting updates on their smart-phones and checking blogs on their favorite political sites are much more likely to vote than someone who owns a lap-top, but only uses it to check email and download new casserole recipes, and even moreso compared to someone who doesn't own any computer at all. So, what do you think about the digital divide? Does it exist in your social circles? Does connectivity empower or segregate you?

If you give a business a cookie...

As someone who tries to stay connected in the crazy world of technology, I give away an awful lot of information. Facebook knows everything about me, basically, and there's at least a thousand sites out there that know my email, birthday, full name, and my first pet. Okay, that's an overstatement. Most of that information is stored in some encrypted database on their servers, but let's be honest: we hand out a lot of information, both online and off. I don't mind telling Pandora what kind of music I like, or Goodreads.com what kinds of books I like, because their service is based on taking that information and providing more of what I would probably like. Google reading my searches and emails to give me relevant ads is pushing it a little, but I can live with that. However, when companies take your information without you knowing about it, let alone consenting to it, that's pushing the line a bit. It's an everyday occurrence, though. Data-mining has become one of the mainstays of the internet industry, providing income to Google, Yahoo, and any website that's free- which, it turns out, isn't free. They just charge you your personal information instead of your money.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2058205-1,00.html

So this article covers data-mining in our society better than I could ever hope to; I highly recommend reading it through. Instead of trying to top that, I'll pose a question: how has technology changed societies perception of privacy? For most people, (those who shop online, use MVP cards at grocery stores, or use google) convenience and savings are worth more than privacy. For me, personally, that's a really scary concept. I see it as the slippery slope to a controlled consumerist state with no privacy, but that's probably just my inner conspiracy-theorist talking. But seriously, when did privacy suddenly get downgraded? In 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis went so far as to claim that the right to privacy was "the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men."

While his was a complaint against invasion of privacy by the government, businesses have become the main culprit in todays society. Here, Target tracked a young woman's purchases by assigning an ID number to her credit card, then found she was pregnant by analyzing her purchasing habits.She even got some coupons for maternity clothes in the mail. While it certainly is convenient, is it right? Should companies be allowed to extract so much information from people? While it is true that we consent in a form by using credit cards and shopping at Target, these habits are becoming such an essential part of society that it's near impossible to be an active participant of society without them. Will privacy become a thing of the past for the 'digitally civilized'? I'd hate to think so, but it seems to me that as connectivity increases, the right to privacy will become a thing of the past, and our personal information will be just another commodity to be traded on the free market. 

Forced Open Source

For those of you not up to date on the latest nerd news, there was a pretty big throw down this week between Symantec, and a hacker claiming to be Anonymous (here's one of many articles). So while Anonymous has caught my attention this semester, and I'll admit to even finding some of their hijinks amusing (dare I say I approve?), this one is a pretty cut-and-dry crime. Leaking the source code to an antivirus is somewhere on the same level as giving away free copies of your house-key.  I don't approve of crime, be it in the real world or digital, but I'd like to play the devils advocate here for a minute and argue for the other team. Perhaps there is still some good here?

I'm still intrigued by the idea of organic reactions in Ghost Map, and there's another concept linked closely - for those of you in the social sciences, I believe it's called structural functionalism. It's a theory that states all forces in society serve a purpose - including crime. While it certainly stinks for anyone who might use Symantec software, and even more so for people who *make* Symantec software, this even will lead to two things: 1) A new and improved version of Symantec, and 2) a new and improved version of many other anti-virus companies who can build off of Symantec's mistake. Again, I'm not condoning the actions of an illegal hacker group, but rather drawing attention to some perhaps overlooked concepts, which might even help in focusing our final project.

The point I'm trying to make is that all bad things aren't bad entirely. Structural-functionalism proposes that crime serves the purpose of 'sharpening' society and unifying communities, and at the same time marking those who do not function well in society as criminals. Online crime ensures that people secure their information flows, and makes examples of those who don't - a kind of social Darwinism. If no one ever had to worry about their computer being hacked, would we have developed the kind of privilege settings required for a functioning network? Perhaps hackers are part of the reason we have learned to control our information flow, and to check our sources on the internet.

Now for the application - so what? You just read a whole long article, and you want something you can talk about in class to show for it. Here's something for you - perhaps not all problems should be solved. Maybe low voter turn out is a good thing - it prevents the uninformed from electing some one who's not qualified. If an industry is disappearing, then maybe it's about time it made way for a new one. And if hackers are breaking into company networks and stealing source code, then good news! Other companies will be better off for it.

The Internet before Computers

In·ter·net

/ˈintərˌnet/  A global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.

We all think of the internet as a revolutionary construction of this past century, but if you take a step back, you'll find that it's not that new of an idea. While computers haven't been around that long, if you remove the word 'computers' from the above definition, you'll find examples throughout history of vast networks passing enormous amounts of information, and some that might even rival the social clout of Facebook.
    The very first examples of written language were in Mesopotamia, namely for trade and passing information between tribes, creating an network of commerce. Later, as conquerors expanded the scope of commerce beyond single continents, the need for more standardized communication networks became necessary. China developed bank notes during the Tang Dynasty, 7th century, to allow for trading in greater bulk without having to carry giant containers of coins or gold. The Knights Templar, apart from creating rumors and myths for movies like National Treasure, became a giant financial network for most of the wealth in Europe at its peak. A noble could turn property over to the order in Britain for a note, travel across the continent to Italy, and have that same note be recognized. So what is that? A network providing a  standardized means of communication across long distances and between different groups? Sounds familiar....
    Aside from financial networks, there were plenty of others as well. One of my favorites was that created by Joseph Fouche, intelligence director for Napoleon. It was said of his informant network "...that three men could not meet and talk indiscreetly about public affairs without the Minister of Police being informed about it the following day." Intelligence networks existed for most every army in the world. Napoleon also used a precursor to the telegram, the Semaphore. Later, the telegraph became an essential tool of the British Empire, connecting Britain to India, allowing communication all across the empire. 

     So they weren't exactly e-mail and twitter, but aside from speed, what was the main difference? They were essentially the same - a telegraph sent from England printed in the local papers had about the same effect as an online article shared on Google+, didn't it? I feel what makes our 21st century internet so revolutionary is its openness. At first, only nobles and politicians used the communication networks for national and business matters. Later, as technology advanced and made communication cheaper, more people were able to make use of the established networks, like sending telegrams or posting classifieds in newspapers. Computers didn't create the idea of global information networks, but they did change the way they worked. Only now, though, in the age of lap-tops and facebook, has communication become so cheap that something as worthless as meme pictures can be shared with the numberless masses. While increased usage has allowed for wider spread of information, it comes at the risk of a lowered standard of content. So in a way, perhaps the internet was better before computers? I don't think anyone ever had the problem of getting spam telegraphs.

The shoulders of Giants

Unfortunately, I have not been keeping up with my blog as I should have. This week, instead of posting like I needed to, I was doing homework for my computer science class. I'm taking CS 124, and in it, we learn about computers from the ground up, from wires and batteries to programming in C. I must admit I still don't quite understand it all (though I passed off the assignment, thank goodness) because let's face it - computers are tough. That's why we pay the Geeksquad or bribe our roommates to fix them for us. Nobody wants to spend the time and effort learning about their processor's addressing mode or their windows registry just so they can get back to uploading pictures or emailing friends. We rely on the tech-savvy to keep our digital world up and running. Every time you make a blog post, click a link, or even turn on your computer, you’re taking advantage of engineering feats that the best and the brightest took years, if not decades, to make. However, once an idea is hatched, than it can be shared freely, right (after paying copyright fees, of course). That’s why computers and software are so readily available in our world today. But after reading David’s posts (definitely worth reading if you haven’t yet), that thought of standing on giants shoulders was put in a new light. He mentioned how before there were professional scientists, there were hobbyists, funded by the rich or by themselves.

Another excuse I had this week for not blogging was a presentation for my Chinese class. I researched poverty and the wealth gap in China. Rural poverty in china is astounding, but what I’d like to focus on here is the urban poor, namely, the people who made the computer you’re staring at right now. Computers have leaked their way into almost every facet of society, and the vast majority of American households have more than one. Prices have remained low enough for the middle class to keep up to date with the latest in hardware, and for technology companies to experiment with releasing free software and new business models. While there is a large discussion about open-software and digital freedom, what about the base on which the software is founded? What about open-manufacturing?

Human-rights in Asia is a topic for its own blog post, and I don’t plan to tackle it here. Instead, I am hoping to spur a little more investigation into the cost of our digital world. While abstraction makes it possible for us to work excel spreadsheets without having to program, and access the world’s information without having to learn anything more than how to operate a browser, we need to dig deeper if we hope to understand and change the way the digital world works. Even if an operating system is released for free, there’s a cost involved that goes deeper than the time of those involved. Software, as powerful and intuitive as it is, is tied to hardware, and the digital world, as wonderful as it is, is tied to the real world. So remember, that new iPhone app that is going to change the world costs something, even if it’s free.