Three hours from now, this blog will blackout for 12 hours to protest against the SOPA/PIPA bills. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills are aimed to preventing the online piracy of commercially-produced movies and music. However, the bills empower authorities to shut down any site suspected of any kind of piracy without due process. I can't have that. We can't have that.
The internet is a wonderful place. We use it for a variety of activities, and we learn a lot from it everyday. We have xkcd, p*rn and Wikipedia. We have hundreds of thousands of blogs that give us candid and brazen opinions on all sorts of things. What makes the internet truly beautiful is that it's open and it's free. It belongs to nobody but serves everybody.
If the bills are passed, we will lose all those things. People like me will lose their purpose in life: the creation of knowledge. The internet will become a dank place filled with manufactured opinions and lecture-style advertisements. Fiction will die, creativity will become leashed, and most importantly, information-sharing will become regulated. You'd think I'm exaggerating, but can you prove to me that things will be fine?
They won't.
I am against the piracy of commercial products, too, but I need something more focused. I don't want this spray-and-pray attitude. The Senators and the Congressmen must come up with something better instead of trying to tame lions by flaming kittens. Find out more about these bills. Show your disagreement with them - spread the word, join the blackout, call your Senators, or do all three. But remember: the United States pioneers innovation on the web and in information communication. That means these two acts in 1 country will hit all 256 other countries.
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Thursday, 30 June 2011
The poor-smart and the rich-foolish
The World Wide Web (3W) is going somewhere.
The amount of history it has backing it up is nowhere close to what it was for any other field that was decidedly going somewhere. Apart from the industrial and technological advancements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, all that we did we'd been trying to perfect for a long time. The 3W, on the other hand, has been around for just about 2 decades and it has already instituted a smart-foolish gap beside its rich-poor counterpart.
In the future, there is definitely going to come a time when the rich will become poor if they're not smart enough to capitalize on accessibility of the web and the poor will become rich if they're smart enough to capitalize on the quickness of the web.
When information exchange is this quick, some measure of trust and an assurance of quality will accomplish the same amount of work in a second as a brick-and-mortar establishment does in two days. It's just that the handshake is called a "click" these days.
The amount of history it has backing it up is nowhere close to what it was for any other field that was decidedly going somewhere. Apart from the industrial and technological advancements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, all that we did we'd been trying to perfect for a long time. The 3W, on the other hand, has been around for just about 2 decades and it has already instituted a smart-foolish gap beside its rich-poor counterpart.
In the future, there is definitely going to come a time when the rich will become poor if they're not smart enough to capitalize on accessibility of the web and the poor will become rich if they're smart enough to capitalize on the quickness of the web.
When information exchange is this quick, some measure of trust and an assurance of quality will accomplish the same amount of work in a second as a brick-and-mortar establishment does in two days. It's just that the handshake is called a "click" these days.
The poor-smart and the rich-foolish
The World Wide Web (3W) is going somewhere.
The amount of history it has backing it up is nowhere close to what it was for any other field that was decidedly going somewhere. Apart from the industrial and technological advancements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, all that we did we'd been trying to perfect for a long time. The 3W, on the other hand, has been around for just about 2 decades and it has already instituted a smart-foolish gap beside its rich-poor counterpart.
In the future, there is definitely going to come a time when the rich will become poor if they're not smart enough to capitalize on accessibility of the web and the poor will become rich if they're smart enough to capitalize on the quickness of the web.
When information exchange is this quick, some measure of trust and an assurance of quality will accomplish the same amount of work in a second as a brick-and-mortar establishment does in two days. It's just that the handshake is called a "click" these days.
The amount of history it has backing it up is nowhere close to what it was for any other field that was decidedly going somewhere. Apart from the industrial and technological advancements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, all that we did we'd been trying to perfect for a long time. The 3W, on the other hand, has been around for just about 2 decades and it has already instituted a smart-foolish gap beside its rich-poor counterpart.
In the future, there is definitely going to come a time when the rich will become poor if they're not smart enough to capitalize on accessibility of the web and the poor will become rich if they're smart enough to capitalize on the quickness of the web.
When information exchange is this quick, some measure of trust and an assurance of quality will accomplish the same amount of work in a second as a brick-and-mortar establishment does in two days. It's just that the handshake is called a "click" these days.
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Sometimes, To Be Ethical Is To Be A Fool.
If free information distribution is considered to be an ethical practice today, at what point does information retention become unethical?
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Google Labs"]
[/caption]
A very good example to illustrate this dilemma would be the products of Google, more specifically the services offered under their Labs feature. The first step in increasing worldwide public access to information was the Google Books project. The unevenness of opportunities presented by lack of space or time was nullified by the access to a range of books written in many languages and of many genres (especially of the classics corpora). On that primary level, any competence that involved information as a principal player saw the latter’s transformation into a tradable commodity. It began to be subjected to the same abuse that money faced: hoarding, thriftiness and deficiency. Therefore, he who hoarded, he who was thrifty and he who caused deficiency was inculpated for unethical practices.
Now, with too much information swimming around the cybersphere, data visualization has been resurrected with greater responsibility and, as a matter of an axiom, greater power. In between the two eras, that of data acquisition and perception, there was a period dominated quietly by a backstage hero called data mining: with more information on more things coming out every second, the proverbial gap between the winner and the loser began to narrow down because the two factions were only separated by the knowledge of what information was worthy and what was not. However, when we bit off more than we could chew, it was soon not a matter of what but of how. When we began to find out more than we ought to have known about the past, the future becomes less of a certainty and more of a possibility.
In line with that thought, Google brought in its Ngram Viewer (NV). A simple extension of the Google Books venture, NV brought together simple data mining, graphical data visualization and hundreds of thousands of books written in the last 200 years in 7 languages to leave the user with a new kind of data, ripe for interpretation. Visit the viewer here and see for yourself how the usage of the words “gay” and “homosexual” has varied in frequency over the years, and how it can be understood to show our perception of the words themselves: the more often they were used, the more they featured in discussion, the more they impacted us.
In this secondary level of information distribution – with the world as such tending to greater access limited by vaguer boundaries – could there be such a thing as information hoarding? Definitely. Compare this scenario you’re in to a ladder: you’re on the bottom rung, raw data is on the top-most rung. Before the raw data can reach you, the number of other filters it goes through on the way is increasing. Even though the greater challenge has been to engender new perspectives, there is also the challenge of leaving some information to be interpreted. On the primary level, the access to the information is increased. On the secondary level, it is classified more logically. On the third level, when it reaches you, you retain a responsibility still to decide:
Therefore, the ethics of this day and age have not been blurred by the repeated refinements but have only been rendered into a finer and finer line, bent this way and that by corporate greed, capitalist agendas and an overriding anarchism performed as an act of rebellion in most cases. The withholding of information does not spell misdemeanour but, more often than not, caution. This is the very nature of capitalism: to address greed by fostering the need to compete in its players. To be completely ethical in such a day and age is to be a fool.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Google Labs"]
[/caption]A very good example to illustrate this dilemma would be the products of Google, more specifically the services offered under their Labs feature. The first step in increasing worldwide public access to information was the Google Books project. The unevenness of opportunities presented by lack of space or time was nullified by the access to a range of books written in many languages and of many genres (especially of the classics corpora). On that primary level, any competence that involved information as a principal player saw the latter’s transformation into a tradable commodity. It began to be subjected to the same abuse that money faced: hoarding, thriftiness and deficiency. Therefore, he who hoarded, he who was thrifty and he who caused deficiency was inculpated for unethical practices.
Now, with too much information swimming around the cybersphere, data visualization has been resurrected with greater responsibility and, as a matter of an axiom, greater power. In between the two eras, that of data acquisition and perception, there was a period dominated quietly by a backstage hero called data mining: with more information on more things coming out every second, the proverbial gap between the winner and the loser began to narrow down because the two factions were only separated by the knowledge of what information was worthy and what was not. However, when we bit off more than we could chew, it was soon not a matter of what but of how. When we began to find out more than we ought to have known about the past, the future becomes less of a certainty and more of a possibility.
In line with that thought, Google brought in its Ngram Viewer (NV). A simple extension of the Google Books venture, NV brought together simple data mining, graphical data visualization and hundreds of thousands of books written in the last 200 years in 7 languages to leave the user with a new kind of data, ripe for interpretation. Visit the viewer here and see for yourself how the usage of the words “gay” and “homosexual” has varied in frequency over the years, and how it can be understood to show our perception of the words themselves: the more often they were used, the more they featured in discussion, the more they impacted us.
In this secondary level of information distribution – with the world as such tending to greater access limited by vaguer boundaries – could there be such a thing as information hoarding? Definitely. Compare this scenario you’re in to a ladder: you’re on the bottom rung, raw data is on the top-most rung. Before the raw data can reach you, the number of other filters it goes through on the way is increasing. Even though the greater challenge has been to engender new perspectives, there is also the challenge of leaving some information to be interpreted. On the primary level, the access to the information is increased. On the secondary level, it is classified more logically. On the third level, when it reaches you, you retain a responsibility still to decide:
- How you use it
- Why you use it, and
- Whom do you use it with
Therefore, the ethics of this day and age have not been blurred by the repeated refinements but have only been rendered into a finer and finer line, bent this way and that by corporate greed, capitalist agendas and an overriding anarchism performed as an act of rebellion in most cases. The withholding of information does not spell misdemeanour but, more often than not, caution. This is the very nature of capitalism: to address greed by fostering the need to compete in its players. To be completely ethical in such a day and age is to be a fool.
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