Technobafflement

I've just been watching Hackers, the one and only cult movie for inspiring young technogeeks to hack bank mainframes in the mid 1990s (yeah, I said mainframe). Watching this movie just tickles me these days, although I thought it was SO COOL when I was in grade five.
It's a far cry from what we're capable of 14 years later. Have a look at Microsoft's Surface computer. It's just like using your computer, only it's touchscreen. And a coffee table. And a painting easel. And I thought Eee Pcs were cool.

I'm still scared of downloading torrents, my gran won't click on links or open email attachments. She's terrified of untraceable Internet companies charging her for opening email files. I'm scared of iinet charging me for episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

How are we supposed to keep up with the technology that's thrown at us? Every day I find out about some new gadget and think I'm on top of things - no wait, that's been out for three years already. I've been trying to find somewhere I can go to read the biz on what's happening out there. The best sites I can find are Wired, TechRepublic and Technology Review.

There sheer amount of information on the Internet makes me dizzy. I'm wondering if I can split my brain so one half can spend all its time looking at blogs and reading the news and the other half can do uni assignments and work. If anyone knows about a gadget that can do this already...

Photography and the Ethics of Privacy

Talking about legal and ethical considerations has got me thinking about one of my pet issues - when does photography stop being an ethics-free activity and start impinging on people's privacy?

The Australian Journalists Association (AJA) code of ethics covers privacy pretty extensively - suggesting that journalists respect people's private grief, only use accurate material, and use fair and honest means to obtain pictures. The National Press Photographers Asssociation echoes the same ethics and the Society of Professional Journalists advises journalists should avoid "pandering to lurid curiosity".

The Encyclopedia Brittanica Online defines privacy as a right not to be emotionally disturbed or be subjected to tensions from baring intimate life and affairs to public view. Obviously the papparazzi and sensational photojournalists ignore the codes of ethics and overstep people's right to privacy all the time: taking photos of celebrities in their homes, nipple slips, ladies without their makeup on doing shopping etc. etc. They also love to take embarssing photos and videos of politicians doing gross things in session:

Mmmm...yummy...
There's always the argument that by being a public figure, you've given up the right to any personal privacy. But c'mon, does that mean it's ok for journalists to take pictures of women exiting cars without their underwear on?
(I won't show you the original photos, as they lack the artistically placed stars)

Celebrities and politicians are also a different kettle of fish than your average daily Joe. It's hard to justify taking pics like this of regular ladies hoo-has - then you'd be a perv. Taking photos in times of war is another ethically contentious issue. Is it ok to take a picture of a woman tearing off her clothes in grief over a son who's been caught in the crossfire? Children with their legs blown off, or vultures creeping up on helpless, supine babies?

There's been a few shakeups over the past few years about police and authority figures taking cameras from citizens and deleting photos. There was the Nick Holmes incident where police deleted films off his Blackberry. There were also a number of cases in 2008 where Surf Lifesavers seized cameras and handed them over to police for investigation. Do police and other authorities have the legal power to do this? No, they don't. Arguably, Surf Lifesavers are just using their good taste and morals to get rid of child pornography and unsavoury photos of topless women, but the police obviously have darker incentives. It's also perfectly legal (barring naked children) for people to take a photo anywhere they like in public. Kenneth Kobre says you are even allowed to take photos of people who are on private property, as long as they can be seen by the naked eye from wherever youare standing on public property.

Privacy laws are a double-edged sword at the moment: current Australian law dictates there are no laws against journalists overstepping boundaries into a subject's right to privacy; coincidentally, there are no laws to protect journalists against court suites filed against actions regarding invasion of privacy. But change is coming - in 2007 privacy law reviews from the Australian Press Council suggested a "public interest" defence for journalists. Bingo. It'd be pretty hard to justify photos of pantyless ladies as being in the public interest. Now to see how effective such a defence would be...it turned out to be so useful in defamation law...

Photograph privacy is a complicated issue. I guess journalists (professional and citizen!) should stick by their codes of professional and moral ethics and ask themselves the same question Machiavelli did: does the end result really justify the means?

Niche Markets and The Long Tail

We've always had niche markets, shops that sell one thing only (buttons, fake hair, red shoes), services for a particular hobby (smurf colleting), esoteric books for strange people. It seems only rational with the rapid growth of the Internet, that such a widely flung net of bits and bytes would capture and cultivate the interests of a billion individuals. With so many people using the Web for everything except brushing their teeth (I'm sure there's an app for that), companies started making websites and products to target smaller demographics. And with all the niche websites and products, rose opportunities for consumers to explore deeper and deeper into the unfathomable vortext of the Web. Readers of books and magazines, newspapers and manga, we avid consumers of the printed word started exploring too.

My theory - heavily influenced by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail articles, books and blog, is that the digital age may be the death of the blockbuster book culture we've been experiencing for the past 50 years. The blockbuster complex (first coined by Thomas Whiteside in 1981), beloved of booksellers and big publishers who push those hugely popular books by the Dan Browns, Tom Clancys and Stephenie Meyers, may be flirting a war with the infinite choice provided by the Internet.

Such diveristy in choice didn't just surface with the Internet. The blockbuster complex's rise in the book market was due in part to commercial booksellers and book retailers like Borders, and Barnes and Noble. These international book superstores can easily stock 100,000 titles in store - much more than your average back-alley bookshop.

The digital age initiated the publishing industry to the e-book and online retail: 160 publishers currently have Internet publishing businesses that produce, publish, distribute and sell e-books. As of 2001, Cope and Ziguras (two RMIT professors) counted over 10,000 publications for sale by download via Internet publishers. Just imagine how many there are now. There are books for sale in store, online, e-books, Print on Demand books, e-bay books, book-swapping forums, books coming out the wahzoo. Naturally, consumers had more choice, developed a taste for their raison d'etre and now want more.

Chris Anderson's theory is that the blockbuster model which supports the ‘head’ of the market, where consumers rapidly buy millions of copies of the same book, is being balanced with the ‘Long Tail’ of consumers that purchase a large of number of ‘non-hit’ items over a longer period of time. Online retail giants like Amazon - unrestricted by the physical space of a bookstore - can market billions of different titles at once. Amazon has a total inventory of 3.7 million book titles and compared to a typical Borders or Barnes and Noble of 100,000 titles, makes it easy to find those books that can't be found anywhere else. Here is a dinosaur chart from Edgwater Technology Weblog to demonstrate the Long Tail:
The niche-spawning effects of digital technology is just a new development of what book publishing used to be before the blockbuster complex; companies relying on steady long-term sales of mid-list titles with the opportunity to explore publishing new authors who in turn also became mid-listers. The wheel of history is repeating, just in a new way. Maybe the ‘death of the book’ (the death of books as physical objects) as online retailers and e-books become more popular, will be a re-birth of largely ignored book genres. As consumers explore further down the Long Tail, perhaps we will see an upsurge in sales of "quality" literature (and by "quality", I mean anything that is well-written and edited).

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once said his goal was: "to make every book available – the good, the bad, and the ugly." The Web has enabled us to see the light at the end of the blockbuster tunnel - the good among the bad and the ugly. I love ye olde bookstore, but for science fiction and fantasy readers like me, the online book market has opened up new vistas. I am going see if I can order Patrick Rothfuss' new novel - which comes out in Australian bookstores in December - off Amazon. Don't damn me for not supporting Australian publishers. I need it. I'm a niche market.

If you're interested in the Long Tail theory you can read Chris Anderson's Blog on Wired.

Web 3.0?

What's Web 3.0? Wait, what's Web 2.0?

While I was watching my new and beautiful Season 2 of Star Trek - TNG (if you don't know what TNG stands for, or who acts in it, you're missing out), I caught myself thinking about what Web 2.0 is and what it means to us non-technical types. And these weren't two completely unconnected events. I was thinking what number .0 we should ascribe to Data the android - Web 200,000.0?

Like any good researcher I decided to Google Web 2.0 and came across the TechRepublic. As the name suggests these guys are a republic of techies who seem to know what they're talking about. But even techxperts were having trouble defining Web 2.0. Ramon Padilla most aptly described it as:
(a) just a buzz word that means nothing at all
(b) a term that means whatever the user thinks it means
(c) the Web as it exists today
(d) the technology of the future

I'm going to agree with Mr Padilla and say that (c) is the most logical choice. The words Web 2.0 as I understand them just describe all the things I can now do on the Internet: Google; buy books off Fishpond; stalk Facebook; giggle at Chocolate Rain on Youtube; chortle at the newest Lolcats pictoreel.

Of course, Web 2.0 incorporates all those other new things like social connectivity, the advancement of online services and the next evolutionary step towards an artificial all knowing (and seeing) thing.

And Web 3.0? My technologically superior boyfriend flippantly refers to Web 3.0 as the 'semantic web'. And after half an hour of discussion of semantics, I will refer to Web 3.0 as 'the web that will understand and interpret and adapt to all my stupid questions like "How do you actually open a can of whoopass?"

The other Idea I gained from our discussion is that Web 3.0 will focus on big businesses whipping out their marketing guns, profiling us using social networking communities and killing them with their superior advertising-targeting skills.

And after thinking about Webs .0 and how Silicon Valley and the Universities are working towards making the Internet think back at me, even Star Trek is starting to seem a little dated. The wondrous centralisation of technology in the Federation database and Data's incredible mega-processing speed don't seem three or four hundred years in the future, really. I bet there's already a Google robot hiding in a gondola out back.