Yay!

Really, free books for you

Speaking of ethics and intellectual property rights...

Turns out that thanks to the Internet, the new Harry Potter book has already been pirated. See, J.K. Rowling has for years forbid the creation of an eBook for her massively popular series, which is, I suppose, her right as the creator of the series and all that.

But it only took a few hours after the midnight release of Harry Potter 6 for copies to have been scanned with OCR readers and shared on IRC channels (man, that takes me back).

What impresses me most about this project isn't that it was done at all--if there's a way to get something for free, the Internet will eventually provide it--but the worldwide coordination of the folks who managed this project. It took 11 hours for all 672 pages of this book to be scanned, and now, nearly a week later, it's widely available in any format you'd like.

When I got on the bus the Monday after the book was released, at least half a dozen people were reading it, including myself. Thankfully, I finished it that afternoon so I didn't have to cart it around for another day. But man, now I wished I'd just grabbed a word file and put it in my PDA; even if it was a lot shorter than the last one, I still didn't relish carting that book around and trying to read it in the tiny space afforded me by the large man who sat next to me on the bus.

Administrative note

With reliable Internet access finally restored, I'm slowly typing in entries I've written the last few weeks. I started with the shorter ones, but here's a preview of what's to come if you're interested in coming back tomorrow evening and reading up. (Note: the awesomely substantial posts are the ones I've put off posting until later tonight/tomorrow, so it's really in your best interest to come back and look for the new ones.)

Among the highlights:

July 8: Day one of digital divide, in which our heroine explains why she doesn't think the argument is all it's cracked up to be. Really.
July 11: Day two of digital divide, in which our heroine softens the blow and explains why she's not crazy.

July 14: You call yourself an influential? Our heroine explains that the concept of an "influential" is nothing new, and points you toward some studies done back in the 1920s, when they were called "opinion-makers."
July 15: Our trusty blogger explains why she thought this week's class speaker (and the people whose ideas she was discussing) was slightly off when explaining how an influential works and how ideas are spread from the engaged folk to the rest of the population. You'll especially want to see this one.

A final note on Chinese bloggers

A few weeks back I got into a sort of blogging-in-China phase. And today, conveniently enough, as I'm in the process of typing in entries, I came across this piece from The Washington Post, which argues that it's not just Microsoft (the object of my earlier derision) but also Yahoo and Cisco and others who have sold their technological souls to do business with the Chinese government.

Anne Applebaum, the author of the Post piece, (who, ironically enough, uses a Yahoo address as her contact line) brings up the issue of whether the sorts of deals these companies are making are even legal:

If this isn't illegal, maybe it should be. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the United States passed a law prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection" equipment to the Chinese. But in 1989, the definition of police equipment ran to truncheons, handcuffs and riot gear. Has it been updated? We may soon find out: A few days ago, Rep. Dan Burton of the House Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to the Commerce Department asking exactly that. In any case, it's time to have this debate again. There could be other solutions -- such as flooding the Chinese Internet with filter-breaking technology.

As with many stories, I'm continually amazed this has hit bigger (for the record, I first learned about it from an AP story back in May). The blogosphere especially has been silent on the issue, aside from a few dozen people linking to the Wired story back in June, which itself was a few weeks behind the curve.

I've said it in a lot of posts before this, and I'll say it again: This is really scary stuff, and the chapters we read for class this week didn't even begin to scratch the surface. (The chapters, by the way, were published six weeks before the introduction of MSN's My Spaces to the Chinese blogosphere.)

Free books for you

Lately, I've been wondering what philosophical difference divides a good-old library, where one can go to enjoy free books, from downloading music off P2Ps. Why is it that the book industry doesn't rise up to complain about all those people stealing the intellectual property of authors like the thousands of recording artists and lawyers who swear they'll go broke if we don't pay $16.99 for yet another version of Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill." (I admit to not doing too much digging beyond Wikipedia into the history of libraries, but that entry leads me to believe the library boat had already sailed by the time book publishers came along.) It's safe to say that I generally tend to err toward the side of free use for all.

It is with this mentality that I approached Lessig's "The Future of Ideas," and I'd intended to write a little rant on its applications in regard to musical file sharing, essentially claiming, for perhaps the 5,000th time since I first encountered Napster that night in my freshman year dorm room, that music should be free, or at least freer than it is.

Ahh, but then I went home last week to visit my cats and my family. My mom works in a photo lab in one of those big box stores, and constantly regales me with stories about the completely random enforcement of copyright rules in her store. Big box store has a corporate-wide policy that each photo lab tends to enforce on its own, though my mom has done a bit of research and generally concluded that the laws on which big box store claims to be basing its policy don't exist. Basically, if you go into big box store to have your photos developed (or to have copies made of other photos) and they look "too good," the store employees are empowered to deny you your photos on the basis that you've probably stolen them from a professional and don't have permission to be making copies of them. This makes sense if you're trying to make copies of a professional portrait or something, but too often my mom's co-workers have randomly (and trust me, it is completely random) denied newlyweds access to the only copies of their wedding pictures because they looked "too good," even though the groom's second cousin took them with a disposable Kodak. (My mom, for the record, eventually helped get the photos back into the couple's hands.)

Through her protests of the big box policy, my mom's shared with me strange tidbits of American copyright law, much in the fashion of Lawrence Lessig.



Both examples, though, can apply to a simple statement Lessig makes: "Sometimes, a society gets stuck." We're stuck right now as we try to figure out what's fair to music-lovers and artists alike, just as my mom's big box employers are stuck because they tried to make a blanket policy that can easily be understood by big box employees and the lowest common denominator among their shoppers.

A real digital divide

As a bunch of you know, I've had spotty Internet access lately. While it's given my lots of time to do off-line things like read actual books (I highly recommend "The Historian," by the way), it has forced me to live my off-work hours away from blogland. Sure, I could read blogs from work, and even write out my posts (literally write out--with a pen and paper!) and plan all the things I would say when I had reliable access again, but no way in hell was I going to actually log into blogger and post from the office. People in my field have been fired for that, repeatedly. And so I was forced to sit on the sidelines for days, weeks even, unable to participate. Oh how I pined... (note: heavy, heavy sarcasm).

So I've had lots of time to think about what it means to be online and connected. Now that I've been able to post all these entries that have been sitting in a notebook, you should know my feelings on the digital divide and how it often serves as a punching bag of sorts for all that ails our society. I admit I wasn't completely in the dark--I had lots of time at work to browse the Internet, after all, and it's not like I wasn't checking my e-mail 800 times a day like always. But still, without the nightly Internet fix, dripping into my body hour after hour like so much heroin, I did things like clean my apartment, laundry, go for walks and read books. Maybe if we just unplugged everyone for a few weeks a year, the world would be a much more calm place.

Bonus perk: Not paying much attention to Karl Rove for many days. God it felt good.

How Carol Darr was just a tiny bit off (just a bit!)

Someone in class, and more than a few others on their blogs, questioned the effectiveness of the "influentials" if, as they are described by Carol Darr and some other ipdi-related folks, they all live here in Washington, D.C., or are concentrated in other metro areas and state capitals. Yeah, we're a transient society in this area, but we can't be moving around that much that our opinions can be expected to account for the dissemination of what I yesterday called the second part of the two-step flow of information.

It was a valid point, questioning how influentials are supposed to influence people when they're all hanging out in the same places themselves. Darr had a reasonable answer--that while we all belong to the DC community, we also have other communities of varying sizes among which we are the go-to folks for political information. The answer got about 60 percent of the puzzle right.


Back in the day, when they were first trying to figure out the role of these opinion leaders and followers, media researchers had one qualifying trait for the opinion leaders: They watched more media than the rest. They didn't necessarily live in major metro areas, and they weren't even necessarily that much more interested in politics than the rest of the population. They just happened to be the members of their sewing group, baseball team, bridge night who had the most insights to share about politics. The other members of the group would automatically turn to these folks with questions about politics, and eventually what these people thought filtered down to the rest of the population.

And that's the part I think Darr got a little bit wrong: It's not that opinion leaders are made and then set forth to filter through the rest of the population. It's that every single group, every single community, no matter how small, has home-grown opinion leaders. They may be leaders on which makeup to buy, on which cars to buy, on how to dress or on how to vote, but every group to which you belong has that one person to whom the rest of the group turns when it comes to making a decision.

One of the studies I read earlier this year, Elihu Katz's 1956 "Two-step flow of communication: an up-to-date report on an hypothesis," made an especially interesting point: that even in the same group of people, leaders and followers may switch roles when it comes to different subjects. Katz's piece, in which he addresses the four major Columbia studies to have been published so far, is actually really interesting and chock-full of details on the relationship between opinion leaders and their followers. It's arguably a more interesting a read than "The Influentials," but don't let Ed Keller hear me saying that...

Everything new is old again

Back when we first started this project, I hoped to do a series of posts about why I didn't think the Internet was capable of persuading voters. At the time, I was three weeks removed from one of my program's core courses, Media Theory and Effects, which that semester was taught by a man who was most decidedly among the limited-effects academics, those who don't like to blame the media for everything that goes wrong in human society. I tried, and apparently failed miserably, to condense five months of class into blog entries explaining the background that would eventually lead to my all-encompassing argument that the Internet, like most other forms of media, was not capable on its own of persuading voters. I let the project drop when I couldn't figure out how best to write it clearly, and when I realized the amount of energy it would take wasn't worth the four or five visitors I was averaging a week.

And why do I bring this up? Because the next post, had I not given up the topic, would have been on mitigating factors, those pesky little things that keep TV campaign ads or stump speeches from convincing us to back candidates. One of the most important mitigating factors of all, when it comes to the effects of media on voter behavior, turns out to be "influentials," or, as they used to call them back in the 1940s, opinion leaders. Which just happens to have been part of this week's class discussion.

So now I'm going to (briefly!) try this again. Today, a short background of opinion-leader research, and tomorrow the specifics of why this week's class speaker got the details a little bit off.

In short, digestible bits, here's how opinion leaders came to be studied:

In the late 1940s, a bunch of guys from Columbia wrote "The People's Choice" and a few other pieces in which they attempt to examine the role of the media in elections. Remember, this is coming right around World War II, which saw remarkably effective use of propaganda on the American population, and people were starting to be a little bit freaked about what all that new media watching was doing to their kids.

The Columbia folks basically went at the study questioning most people's fears of media as a hypodermic needle, which sent messages essentially into the brains of a comatose audience. Yeah, I'd be scared, too.

What they found instead, though, was a two-step flow of information, from the message creators to the opinion leaders, and then finally to the mass audience. Sound familiar?

A caveat: There were a lot of problems with the original study, which took place during the 1940 campaign cycle, and dozens of researchers since then have argued its merits, including the original authors who a few years later developed a second study. I'm not even saying whether I agree with the study, I'm just bringing all this up because we read/talked about it for class this week and I like taking an opposite point of view.