Tuesday 6 December 2011

Is the Internet Changing Our Memory? (295 words)


In July 2011, BBC News and others reported a journal in the journal Science that the internet changes the way that we think.

Psychology tests demonstrated that when we know that information we're about to be presented with will be available to access later, such as on the internet, we store it in our memories differently to when we know we might need to refer to it without accessing it again.

In the former case, we store less of the actual information in our brains, instead devoting storage space to remembering the location of the information and how to access it. This “transactive memory” has been described as an external memory store.

Despite the headline, it seems that this is nothing new, just an extension of what we as a social species have probably always done – specialise. We trust that some people are experts in certain things that we are not and have no interest in becoming, and allow them to do our remembering for us; remembering only who the expert is and how to find them.

For example, knowing which mushrooms are safe to eat is not something that I have need for much knowledge of, living in an industrialised city so it's not something that I need to remember. I do remember though where I put the book about mushrooms and that I can find from this book all I need to know when I'm in a forest.

This is not qualitatively different really to remembering the search terms I used to find a website with the same information on. So all the internet has done in this respect is enable us to have easier access to more experts, so we're probably just utilising this transactive memory more than we used to.

BBC News (2011). BBC News - Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14145045. [Accessed 05 December 2011].

Wikipedia, Wikis and Web 2.0 (549 words)

One of my personal favourite places on the internet is Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that bills itself as the “Encyclopaedia that anyone can edit”. It is also the perfect exemplar of Web 2.0.(Lüers, 2007, p.54)

The World Wide Web, later dubbed Web 1.0, was created in 1990 by Tim Berners Lee while he was working at CERN in Switzerland (O'Regan, 2008. p.186). Initially envisaged as in information distribution system it was not interactive – people published pages and other people read them in the same publication model as a traditional paper-published document would be.

As the internet and with it the word wide web expanded through the 1990s it began to move away from this author and viewer model although there are still a great many pages and sites that are still this way. Retrospectively, models of limited interactions where users and producers communicate outside of emails, have been called Web 1.5. It began with business transactions (Lytras, Damiani and Ordóñez de Pablos, 2008. p2) and then expanded through forums and blogs.

Then, when social media arrived and two-way communication became the key Web 2.0 was born (Chatfield, 2008. p.23). Although social media were among the earliest and remain among the most prominent examples of  Web 2.0, I'm going to focus now on another key website: Wikipedia.

The basic technology behind Wikipedia is the wiki – indeed so crucial is the software to the project that its very name is a portmanteau of it and “encyclopaedia” (Lüers, 2007. p.54). Wikis were invented by Ward Cunningham (Wenger, E., White, N. and Smith, J.D., 2010. p.19), and are websites that let users add, edit and modify their contents (Governor, J., Nickull, D. and Hinchcliffe, D., 2009. p.51). The name is derived from the Hawaiian “wiki wiki”, meaning “quickly, fast”. (Dictionary.com, 2011), chosen for the first ever wiki software “WikiWikiWiki”, referring to the speed with which content could be updated and published. (Governor, J., Nickull, D. and Hinchcliffe, D., 2009. p.51).

As Lüers says, "Wikipedia is an example for the basic functions of Web 2.0: without the user, Wikipedia would be a worthless website, but with their input, Wikiepdia has become one of the global top sites" (2007, p.54)

Wikipedia combines the wiki technology with the goal of producing an encyclopaedia. In contrast to the top-down approach employed by traditional reference works, Wikipedia is built from the ground up by editors (Governor, J., Nickull, D. and Hinchcliffe, D., 2009. p.51) – a defining aspect of Web 2.0. This user-driven content has proved to be somewhat of a culture shock for many used to the expert-driven works they're more used to (ibid), and is one of the reasons its reliability is poorly understood: there is no one single standard of how reliable Wikipedia is – it is only as reliable as the sources it cites. This means that far from trusting the single authoritative source to tell you the truth, be that a newspaper, book, the television or whatever, as was traditionally the case, Web 2.0 turns us from consumers into producers and simultaneously requires us to be our own editors.

As well us giving us great knowledge and great power, Web 2.0 has brought us the need to think and evaluate for ourselves, rather than blindly accept what we're told is true.

References:
Chatfield, Brian T. (2008) The MySpace.com handbook : the complete guide for members and parents. Ocala, Florida: Atlantic Publishing Group

Governor, J., Nickull, D. and Hinchcliffe, D. (2009), Web 2.0 Architectures. California: O'Reilly

Lüers, E. (2007) Web 2.0 and Audience Research. Norderstedt, Germany: GRIN Verlag.
Lytras, M.D., Damiani, E., Ordóñez de Pablos. P. (Eds.) (2008) Web 2.0: The Business Model. New York: Springer

O'Regan,G. (2008). A Brief History of Computing. 1st Edition. London: Springer.

Wenger, E., White, N. and Smith, J.D. (2010) Digital Habitats; Stewarding Technology for Communities. Portland, Oregon: CP Square

Copyright and copyleft (614 words)


Copyright is a very complicated subject, one that lawyers can devote entire careers to understanding. Also, as copyright laws vary from country to country, but the internet has a global scope, it's unsurprising that most people don't understand it.

Possibly the most frequently encountered aspect of copyright is in relation to file sharing of works like films and music. In a July 2003 study, the Pew Internet and American Life Project stated that “29 percent of Internet users [in America] have downloaded music files to their computer so they can play them anytime they want, and that of those that do, 67 percent say they do so whether the files are copyrighted or not.” (Gordon, 2005. p.6). According to the International Federation of the Photongraphic Industry (IFPI), in 2007 the ratio of unlicensed tracks downloaded to legal tracks sold was about 20 to 1 (Kennedy. 2008. p.1).

Add to this the widespread presumption that anything on the internet is free (10 public domain misconceptions), and it's clear to see why copyright owners are concerned about copyright on the internet.

Not everything is copyrighted though, there is a movement against the all rights reserved nature of copyright, known as “copyleft”, that has recently “exploded on the internet” (Ronchi, 2009. p.287) having originated within the computer development community's open source movement, retaliating against the tight restrictions of Unix and spawning the open-source Linux.

While copyright is about controlling access to works, usually to enable money to be made from them, copyleft is about granting access to your works and encouraging others to use them and build upon them, while retaining some of the rights you have as a copyright holder – most commonly attribution (the right to be credited as the author, etc.).

Today, the most widely known copyleft licenses, also known as are the GNU's “General Public License” (GPL) and its companion “GNU Free Documentation License” (GFDL) (CreativeCommns.org) and the suite developed and maintained by the Creative Commons Foundation, for example the “attribution share-alike” license, which goes by the monika “cc-by-sa”.

Proponents of the copyleft movement also use terms like “Free content”, using “Free” to mean “free as in free speech”, also known as “libre” after the French and Spanish word with the same Latin etymology from which English derives “liberty”. This is contrasted with “gratis” or “free as in beer”. (Anderson, 2009. p.16). Works can be gratis but not libre, i.e. they don't cost you anything, but you aren't free to use them – the vast majority of websites are like this. Works can also be libre but not gratis – i.e. you have to pay for the work, but once you do you have the liberty to reuse it.

Almost certainly the biggest and most well known application of a copyleft license is Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, the largest project of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is the use of the copyleft license that allows it to be edited by anyone, and to be reused by anyone (as long as you give attribution) – it's mission is to produce and disseminate free content. (Wikimedia Foundation, 2011)

Finally, some things on the internet are free (gratis and libre). These are works that are in the public domain – there are no restrictions on its use. The biggest class of public domain works are those over which the copyright has expired. When this happens depends on lots of factors, but in most cases works become public domain a certain number of years (most commonly 70) after the creator's death. This means that in 2012 works by authors such as Virginia Woolf and founder of the Scouting movement, Robert Baden-Powell will enter the public domain (PublicDomainDay.org, 2011).

References:
Anderson, C. (2009). Free:The Future of a Radical Price. Croydon: Random House

Gordon, M.S., (2005). Downloading Copyrighted Stuff from the Internet: Stealing or Fair Use? (Issues in Focus Today). [unknown location]: Enslow Publishers.

Kennedy, J. (2008). Digital Music Report 2008 – Summary. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/DMR2008-summary.pdf. [Accessed 03 December 11].

Ronchi, A.M. (2009). eCulture: Cultural Content in the Digital Age. Berlin: Springer

10 public domain misconceptions. 2011. 10 public domain misconceptions. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/10-misconceptions-about-the-public-domain.html#two. [Accessed 03 December 2011]

Creative Commos.org (2011). Copyright symbol. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.creativecommns.org/component/content/article/3-copyright-articles/23. [Accessed 03 December 2011].

PublicDomainDay.org (2011). To celebrate the role of the public domain in our societies | Public Domain Day - 1 January 2012. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.publicdomainday.org/. [Accessed 03 December 2011].

Wikimedia Foundation (2011). Our projects - Wikimedia Foundation. [ONLINE] Available at: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects. [Accessed 03 December 2011].