Archive for May, 2007

Last week, the Susan Crawford blog featured a slow, close reading of the question/phrase “What is Broadband Good For.”  We only got through “broadband” – that's the geologic pace of this blog.

Twice in the last week I've been presented with a lunch menu at a fancy midtown club that has the following entry as one of the choices for red wines by the glass.  I am not making this up (as Dave Barry would say):

Chateau Routas, Internet, 2004.

So, if the internet can bring forth a great glass of wine, surely it's good for other things as well.

Good

Communications policy suffers from a certain perspective-blindness.  Our tangles with line-drawing between “information services” and “telecommunications services” are embarrassing, because for anyone other than a communications lawyer these distinctions make no sense.  From a user’s perspective, cable modem access to the internet is transport. Just like a DSL connection to the internet is transport.  Users don’t care about the materials that are involved in transporting their communications. 

“Good” suffers from this same potential perspective-blindness.  Good for whom?  Who decides what’s good?  Good compared to what alternative state of the world?  The use of “good” is as weighted in its policy implications as “broadband,” and carries with it a large number of questions. Even without a clear goal, the regulatory actions we take affect outcomes and create controversies about which economic and social benefits should be preferred or can be attained.  We are stumbling forward, tinkering blindly with the greatest value-creation system we have ever seen.

Our national internet access policy suffers from a lack of a principled theory of “the good.”  Other countries are doing better at this.  In many Northern European countries, and in Asia, they’ve decided what’s “good” about internet access.  They understand that choices made by government to stimulate the production of new ideas can have an significant effect on economic growth, and they have explicitly linked communications infrastructure and internet access to economic policy:  better infrastructure leads to more new ideas, new ideas lead to a more flexible labor market, more flexible labor market and the ability of new businesses to operate at scale lead to economic growth.  Other countries are making these explicit, national, public choices to support national internet infrastructure in a variety of ways. 

We need a theory of “the good.”  Mine is that “more, faster, open internet access is better for everyone.”  Whether spectrum should be “licensed” at all is a fiercely-contested question.  We can’t predict what business sectors will flourish and which will die as a result of this policy, and that’s as it should be.  No one is guaranteed a return on their investment in this life.  We need a national social policy for internet access that takes the country as a whole and tries to do better for all of us, rather than for the few companies that currently control internet access.

[Disclosure:  I'm connected to David Weinberger through a web of mutual interests and conference-attendance.  I read his blog.  David is a member of the OneWebDay board.]

This is a book that was written to be blogged about.  (Other blog entries are here.)  I'm confident its author, David Weinberger, often thought to himself “So why am I writing a book if the world I’m writing about exists online?”  So let me rush to assure him that I am glad he wrote this book.  We still need books, which give us sustained single voices talking to us and can be conveniently carried around so as to be read on quiet trains or in quiet rooms.  It may be an old-fashioned medium, a book, but this one is written humbly and with no great claims to authoritative “last word” status.  And it’s good.

This lovely book was written to be taken apart – in a good way.  It asks us to reflect on how the great worlds of knowledge and authority have been changed beyond recognition by the advent of the internet.

In my view, which is only one of the thousands of views about this book (and that’s the way it should be), I think this book was written to bridge gaps between the people that are baffled by the web and the people that aren’t.  The people that aren’t may find instant anachronisms – mentioning X new business when X is already merged into Y, how slow! and why on earth didn’t he write about Z? – but the people that are baffled (even a little baffled) will need to sit back in their collective chairs and consider.  

Weinberger has written (or, at least, I think he has written – he may differ) about the distinction between information and knowledge, and between knowledge and authority.  And he’s letting us know that online groups of various kinds, consciously and unconsciously, without necessarily having any direction, are rewriting these distinctions and restating how they work.  Finally, he’s telling us that this is a great and joyous development.

Many wiser minds than mine have written about these distinctions.  Now, these distinctions fall apart at their margins, like the differences between atoms and bits.  You could say that a map is “information” and the best route between Boston and New York is “knowledge” – but as Weinberger makes clear, the map itself represents a judgment about what’s important to its particular audience.  But leaving that alone, we could say that we know the difference between information and knowledge.  We could bluntly say that information is unprocessed – a train schedule, a laundry list.  Some mind or machine processes that information in some way, by pointing to it or using it somehow, and metainformation (compressed, useful, expressive, having quality) emerges.  Metainformation, in turn, can be processed by human minds in ways that causes knowledge to emerge.  No sharp lines here, just sharpening and turning and pattern-revealing.  At some point, who knows when, knowledge can emerge as authoritative, relied on by others, agreed-to.  (My cousin Benjamin Reeve has written about “metainformational depth” and the quality that attaches to metainformation.)

What’s amazing about the online world, what makes Weinberger need to write this book, is that it enables everyone to participate in these emergent processes.  We could look at the amount of information available online and just shudder.  (My mother does this when she’s thinking about arranging for a stay in a hotel across the country.  Hi, Mom!)  Or we could say bravely that the ability to tag and disaggregate and reaggregate splinters of digital information in ways that we find sympathetic is an extraordinarily powerful skill that we are just beginning to learn.  It’s not so much that everything is miscellaneous but that nothing need be.  Shards of information are forever being gathered online, creating individual “knowledge” that is revelatory.  Weinberger finds music in the spaces between the notes, in the intersections and gaps and collections that make up online group-created knowledge.

In The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster that I keep pointing to across the years, the main character takes a journey across the physical world to visit her son.  They have been joined only by electronic communications for a long time.  She is unaccustomed to movement, and trembles when she climbs aboard the almost-empty airship – people have stopped traveling.  She thinks that only the machine, a very centrally-run machine, can give her new ideas, and she has begun to worship it.  When the airship is above the Greek islands she draws the shade closed, afraid of the sun, and says to herself, “No ideas here.”

Weinberger turns this vision inside out.  The internet is not the machine that Forster was afraid of.  Instead, because anyone can publish and link and annotate, and no one is in charge, the internet can reveal the wealth of ideas and interactions that we could only approximate in the past by musing about ancient Greece.  It isn’t visible, this emergent miscellany-knowledge, you can’t see the boundaries of the islands, but it’s amazing nonetheless.  We needn’t worship the machine, because there isn’t really “a machine” – just a sea of all-of-us in which meaning is constantly emerging.  Here’s a lovely moment towards the end of Weinberger’s new book:

So thanks to David Weinberger for writing this book. Small Pieces Loosely Joined (also written by Weinberger) was a very important book for me because it made me think about the web as a cultural construct rather than a curiousity.  I’m glad he wrote this one, and I treasure its expression of emergent discovery.

We still have some key words left in “what is broadband good for” — both the “good” and the “for” are ahead of us.  But it's time for a break.

I've been taking breaks offline on weekends recently, and I recommend it.   I find it's really hard to make any sustained progress in writing or reading if I'm wondering who's sending me the next email.  (Not that my email traffic is that great – there's a lot of listmail and a lot of news.)  In fact, I can't write these days unless I intentionally isolate myself from online access. 

What's up with that?  I keep writing about how great it is, how productivity-enhancing and empowering and all-around helpful the internet is, but I can't write anything longer than a few paragraphs when I'm online.  I bet many people who check by this blog have the same problem. 

There are some architectural fixes for this.  There's a physical switch on the machine that prevents it from picking up wifi signals.  There's a chair in my office, a big, comfortable chair, that isn't anywhere near either a wireless signal or an ethernet connection.  There are libraries and benches that don't have access.  I need these architectural limitations.  It's a challenge to settle my mind down and concentrate.

And increasingly I need a day or two off each week to take a breath and reflect, both offline and online.  I'm a mix of the very old-fashioned and the very-electronically driven.  I spend hours working on playing an instrument whose sounds can be synthesized perfectly by Ray Kurzweil's machines.  So tomorrow and Sunday I'll take a break, and I'll be back here on Monday.

Before we continue the What is Broadband Good For serialization, a big cheer for Rick Whitt!  And thanks to Gordon Cook and his list for pointing to the article.  Another big cheer for David Weinberger and his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, reviewed here beautifully by Cory Doctorow.  Small Pieces Loosely Joined is one of my favorite books of all time, and Everything is Miscellaneous will join that short list.

Broadband

We have reached the middle word, the heart of the matter.  I remember seeing Yehudi Menuhin run a master class about the Bach Chaconne once, with a white linen Indian overshirt over his tuxedo pants.  He played the piece for the students, and suddenly stopped to bow deeply.  He said that he bowed at that point because it was the exact middle of this great piece, and he wanted to show respect.

“Broadband” is both central to this essay and a loaded word.  It is used to draw a distinction between slow and fast speeds, and it implies speed – but this word does much more work than that.  To talk about “broadband” means that you either (1) understand “the internet” to be, essentially, the connections we use to access it or (2) that you’re not thinking about “the internet” at all but rather about some speeded, managed “service” that happens to use the Internet Protocol.

What is the internet?  Again, this is a mindset question.  To the engineers, the internet is a logical architecture, an agreement to chunk data into packets and send them on their individually-routed ways to their individually-numbered destinations.  To netheads, the internet is both the logical architecture (the standards) and the relationships that that architecture makes possible; these relationships, pulled together by interest and accident and characterized by shifting boundaries and unpredictable dynamics, are what is so attractive about the internet.. To the telecommunications companies, the internet is the collection of three physical transport links (last mile, middle mile, backbone) and nothing more.  To equate “the internet” with “broadband” is to give all prominence to the importance of last-mile speed, and to fall into the traditional telecommunications way of seeing the world.  This equation of “internet” with “broadband” subtly ends all discussion and focuses us only on the incentives the telecommunications companies say they need to build out these last miles.

It may be, however, that this use of the word “broadband” isn’t about “the internet” at all, but instead about a very special purpose use of IP:  the managed last mile.  (Bob Frankston often talks about this.) IP was of course designed to handle “video” in the same way that it manages “voice” and “data,” as undifferentiated packets with no guarantees.  The idea was that the ends of the network would take care of the guaranteeing.  This works rather well.  It leaves a lot of room for reinvention and new opportunities to be new. 

The managed last mile, by contrast, is potentially indistinguishable from a cable system with a cellphone overlay, optimized on billing and bundling.  I realize that Verizon and AT&T have different plans for our “broadband” future, but this use of “broadband” is what may be meant by AT&T’s “Your World Delivered” and Verizon’s “Our People.  Our Network” slogans.  It’s our network, we manage it, and we’re going to deliver content to you.  You’ll be passive, you won’t need to upload, we’ll take care of all of this for you and you’ll be happy. 

If I can convey only one idea in this short study of this short phrase, it is this:  the use of “broadband” as the portmanteau term for online communications has significant connotations.   The train left the station carrying this word long ago; the OECD studies “broadband” penetration, not “highspeed internet access” penetration, the President calls for “broadband” by 2007, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation identifies “many signs that the U.S. broadband market is showing healthy growth” – including the new “mobile wireless broadband” platforms.  If there is anything that isn’t highspeed internet access, it’s mobile wireless as it is now in this country. 

Even though the word “broadband” is in wide use, we should try to be candid about what it means, and careful to make sure that its differences from “the internet” are understood.  At the least, we should understand how the intentional use of “broadband” affects central communications policy debates.

We're moving on from yesterday's “What” to today's “Is.”  But we will also have to think about Obama/MySpace, and there's a tie-in ahead.

What is broadband good for?

Is

After a few earnest paragraphs [see yesterday's very serious "What" discussion], it is always a good idea to take a break.  “That depends on the meaning of ‘is,’” we can all say at this point.  This is also a good tie-in to the Casanova theme with which I shamelessly tried to grab your attention at the beginning. 

There is something serious to say about “is,” though.  To think that what we are doing online now is somehow predictive of what we will be doing is another example of the human wish to categorize and clump.  It implies that we can measure and assess online activity in some helpful way now that should drive telecommunications policy for the future. 

With just ten years of experience with a user-friendly graphics-rendering browser behind us, and just ten years of the commercial internet under our belts, it seems naive to think that we have any idea what will happen next.  Many online eruptions are entirely unanticipated.  Who knew that classified ads would be destroyed, that we would all stop using phone books, that online presence-detection would become a nuanced, informational thing, that tens of millions of people would start publishing details about their lives online, and that IBM would be trying to make a business model out of Second Life?  Maybe all of you did.  If so, congratulations.  It’s safe to say, though, that a few other people didn’t.

=====and speaking of online eruptions, many thanks to Micah Sifry for carefully reporting on the Obama/MySpace volunteer story.  What a story!  Here's more from Micah.

Who would have thought that campaigns would feel the need to take over MySpace sub-areas?  I agree with Micah that the Obama campaign fumbled this one.  Anthony worked on this fan site for 2.5 years and the work got to be overwhelming.  He was asked to name his price and he did.  But the campaign decided that control was the better way to go. 

“Is” is changing daily, and our candidates aren't quite as dynamic as they should be – in all senses of that word.  I hope they get there.

What is Broadband Good For, someone asked me. 

In “Casanova in Bolzano,” a novel by Sandor Marai, an aging but powerful nobleman comes to pay a call on Casanova.  The nobleman has intercepted a letter written by his young and beautiful wife to the famous womanizer, and has come to convey a warning to Casanova.  But before he delivers the warning, he does a close reading of the letter for Casanova’s benefit.  The nobleman says:

The letter is very brief.  There are four words.  “I must see you.”  The nobleman takes his time with his interpretation.  “Next comes ‘must.’  Not ‘I would like to,’ not ‘I desire to,’ not ‘I want to.’  Immediately, in the second word of the text, she declares something with the unalterable force of holy writ.”

This slow exegesis is compelling and sinister, and while it is going on you imagine Casanova’s clever mind trying to map out a way to avoid the painful plans of the nobleman. 

I realize that communications policy is not always viewed as a dramatic subject.  But when I was asked to write a brief response to the question “What is broadband good for” it seemed to me that to take the words as simply a banal phrase would not do them justice.  Each word has a weight and import of its own.  The intentional choice of each of these words is, in fact, significant.  And it is much more fun to approach the task this way.  So, each day this week I will take on a separate word.  Let's start with

What

There is an implication hidden in “what.”  It implies a kind of “service”-oriented thinking.  “What” is something you can point to, draw lines around, and understand as a single or aggregated coherent thing/activity in the world.  When people want to hear about the activities their aging relative has undertaken during the past day, they say “what did you do today.”  They expect that the output will be a list of events, each with a distinct starting point and ending point.  Each item on this list will have a boundary and will fall within a category that already exists in the listening (even if slightly bored) mind of the other.  There will be errands (to, from, the shop visited, the item bought), conversations (who with, the plan made, the information exchanged), entertainments (music heard, videos seen), and, if the aging relative is employed, a series of work-related events (meetings, who attended, more conversations, outputs).

This “service” mindset for what people do or will do online has a long and distinguished pedigree.  This is the mindset that sees each communications modality as a categorizable, separate entry on a list.  New forms of these modalities occasionally arise, but they can easily be related back to the old form.  The use of “what” is a prompt for output-categories like “IPTV” and “VoIP” and “email”: a new form of broadcast television, a new form of telephony, a new form of terrestrial mail.  Each item on this list of “whats” has a clear boundary (“Verizon plans to roll out FiOS TV services in January”) and a start date.  Before January, there was no FiOS TV from Verizon, after January there will be.  The entire “IP-enabled services” rulemaking initiated by the Commission in 2004 has this “what” orientation.  The FCC stated that there that it was dealing with “services and applications relying on the Internet Protocol family,” and trying to decide how those “services and applications” should be regulated.

“What” “services and applications” will people use online?  To ask the question in this way assumes that we will be able to perceive boundaries around categories of online activity, that what we do will be recognizable to us and others as a new form of what we used to do, and that we will be able to talk calmly and intelligently about the substitutability of these services for regulatory purposes.  It assumes that the internet is a content-delivery supply chain – much like a railroad – that is a souped-up version of earlier communications modalities.

This focus on the application-layer, service-oriented view – celebrating the advent of Wikipedia, YouTube, eBay, Second Life, blogging software, and other new substitutes for the delivery-chain applications of the pre-internet era – provides an impoverished (or at least incomplete) perspective on communications. The landscape of the internet can usefully be perceived differently:  Human online communications are best captured intellectually as a complex adaptive system that can generate economic growth. New forms of persistent social interaction (often crossing application boundaries) are quickly evolving in direct reaction to collective human attention, and these communications are creating opportunities for the development of new ideas and new ways of making a living.  This has never happened before at the same rate, with the same directness, or with similarly persistent results. 

The use of “what” is meaningful.  It is intended to elicit a list of activities, a letter (now, an email) home from camp reciting events and activities.  To resist the use of “what” is quite a challenge – humans look for patterns and lists in everything they do. 

But the only answer to “what” in this context is “everything.”  Communications online will not necessarily fall into easily-categorizable chunks, even though they may seem to now.  We will hear that something like ten social-network sites account for about 40% of internet traffic. That tells us only that humans are social, not that these sites are “services” that replicate earlier “services” or will remain a definable category.  We are dealing with a transformative system, not a supply chain.  Communications policy should be about optimizing communications.

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The latest is that WSJ representatives can't/won't talk about the Vonage ad.  [from GigaOM]

The FCC report on television violence came out last week. In the words of Commr. Adelstein: “Are we saying 'Law and Order' should be banned during hours when children are watching? It's anyone's guess after reading this.”  Good reason story here, Christian Science Monitor story here.

As the stories note, it's an “oddly anachronistic” report, hand-wringing about the effects of TV violence on children in an era in which parents (for whatever reason) don't choose to use the many filtering/managing tools that are available to them.  You might conclude that (1) television's importance is diminishing because there are so many other sources of entertainment available, and (2) parents don't really think that there's a link betwen violent entertainment and violent behavior.  Or don't care. 

The Commission is calling for Congress to “implement a time-channeling solution that would more effectively protect children from violent programming and/or mandate other forms of consumer choice that would better support parents’ efforts to safeguard their children from exposure to violent programming.”  But “time-channeling solutions” are content-based regulations that are heavy-handed and thus most likely unconstitutional.  Treating broadcast differently than other forms of media no longer makes sense.  Is broadcast content “uniquely pervasive”? ”uniquely accessible to children”? It's certainly not scarce these days.  Pacifica has been an embarrassment from the beginning, and it's not clear that we'll be any less blundering when it comes to violence. 

What's violence, anyway?  I wince at almost everything.  If someone with my sensibilities is put in charge of this operation, we'll be stuck with nothing but Charlotte's Web all day long.  That can't be appropriate. 

Come to think of it, Charlotte's Web is actually pretty painful.  You have to worry about Wilbur being slaughtered the whole way through.  Forget it, it's off the list

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