I'M ON IT

Piracy and Shirky’s Three Modes of Sharing

“A CD collection was like keeping the box that your Amazon stuff came in and taking it out all the time. You pulled out a piece of plastic and shot lasers at it.”

Clay Shirky (author of “Here Comes Everybody”) made his SXSW enterance by telling that he’d recently had to explain Napster to his too-young-to-remember students at NYU. He then went on to talk about the three modes of sharing. They go as follows.

You can share:

1) goods. (If I give you money then I don’t have it any more, and I may have a feeling that I’ve been taken.)

2) services. (If I do this and invest my time, I will feel good.)

3) information (The easiest of the three to do.)

In other words: imagine an old lady in the street asking:

1) for money

2) to walk her across the street

3) directions to a place

In the words of Shirky: “Before Napster, if someone came to my house and asked if they could have my Vanilla Ice CD I would have said “Noooo!” Then I would no longer have been able to enjoy my beloved Ice Ice Baby.” [Sharing type 1]

Before CDs we had cassette tapes, and making someone a mixtape meant that you shared a service. [Sharing type 2]

And finally: ”All Napster did was take the world of music and make it possible to share it as information.” [Sharing type 3]

Music is information - and information is easy to share.

“Not sharing information. There’s a word for that: spiteful. And ACTA (The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is trying to encourage spitefulness.”

This all comes down to Shirky’s famous statement that abundance is a bigger problem for society than scarcity. When things are abundant, their price goes away - and this changes the way the world works.

Public by Default, Private by Effort

Today at work I went through my notes from Danah Boyd’s danah boyd’s excellent “Privacy Is Not Dead” SXSW keynote. Her points were really useful for me in but they also touch on some very timely/relevant subjects for all of us:

- We communicate within three kinds of networks: Articulated, Behavioral and Personal. Google collapsed our behavioral networks with Buzz and assumed that they were our personal networks -> “Just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean that people want it publicized. Binary logic isn’t good enough when it comes to privacy.”

- Even in the real world if we tell our friends something we have to trust them to keep it to themselves. The problem is that we don’t know how to navigate privacy with people online.

- It’s all about context. Imagine sitting in public at your local café. There are people there, but they are people you might expect. If your mother suddenly appears from 3000 miles away, or if your whole high school cheerleading team shows up, you would have a heart attack. We are still learning about what we can trust about online architecture and about people.

- On Facebook in particular: “People aren’t very good at managing when the system they are using suddenly changes. This shift is very challenging to deal with.”

- “Just because you see something doesn’t mean you know what’s going on and just because people see you doesn’t mean that they interpret you correctly.”

- “Privacy is not about hiding. It’s about control. It’s about creating a space to open up.”

A teenage Bob Dylan on Facebook?

Jaron Lanier is worried about kids on Facebook. Some points:

“Adults have “a life” and social networks that exist before they get on Facebook. Teenagers, on the other hand, need to create themselves online from the beginning. This image demands constant attention and it needs to be kept consistent. The problem is that to become an adult you have to do some strategic forgetting.

Imagine a young Bob Dylan coming to the West Village with a Facebook profile. People would say: “Oh look, it’s a Zimmerman from Minnesota… Look at his embarrassing bar mitzvah pictures.” Bob Dylan could never have started a new life in the connected digital world, and this is what worries me.”

Yay quotes from the blah @ev keynote

I’m sure you’ve read all about @anywhere, which was launched during the SXSW keynote by Evan Williams. And as expected, real insight from @ev’s talk didn’t come from the launch video. It came from the quotes:

“People think of Twitter as a social network, but we think of it as an information network. It’s like asking: “What is the internet?” It’s an information network.”

On openness <-> transparency:

“A window is transparent, but you can open a door. You can look through a window and see what people are doing on the other side, but a door is something you can open and start messing around with what’s happening.

Openness is a survival mechanism, although it has to be controlled a lot. It can be used against us. We are constantly sending cease-and-desist letters to makers of “the ultimate twitter marketing spam shotgun tool”. All ecosystems are like that. They need management and they need shepherding.

If you’re closed, there’s always more value in working around you. But if you’re open, there’s not that much reason in going around.”

On product development:

“Everything is infinitely expandable if you zoom in closer.”

On the digital divide, crisis areas and censorship:

“The internet is a tidal wave that eventually nobody will be able to hold up. There are walls in the internet, but you can SMS through them. SMS is incremental to us in places like India, where SMS is ubiquitous. And in Haiti, Chile and Iran, the simplest mobile phone that can send and receive SMS could transmit a tiny bit of information that makes an enormous difference.”