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Archives for October 2009

Rushes Sequences - Arianna Huffington interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 12:26 UK time, Tuesday, 27 October 2009

is the co-founder of the influential news blog . Aleks Krotoski and the Digital Revolution programme one team met with Arianna to discuss the rise of blogs and citizen journalism, and the effects the web is having on politics and political activism. She also discusses the development of hierarchies and 'trusted editors' for online content.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



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Transcript:
(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Aleks I'd like to take a step now towards politics. ÌýYou mentioned the election erm obviously the Huffington Post was erm a very important news source during that period. ÌýErm, of course, the very first question in the Obama presidency was directed to a Huffington Post reporter, which must have been quite an exciting moment, erm not only for social media in general, and new media in general, but, but for you. ÌýHow did it feel when you when the first question was asked of the Huffington Post reporter?

Arianna Erm, when erm it wasn't the first question of the press conference, but it was erm a question asked of Sam Stein, our White House correspondent, during the presidents first press conference. ÌýAnd I felt that it was really an acknowledgement by the President and the administration of the maturing of new media, I don't think it was just about the Huffington Post. ÌýI think it was really erm an acknowledgement of the role that new media had played in the election of Barack Obama, I mean I, I would argue, that were it not for the Internet Barack Obama would not be President, it wasn't just because of the new media, it was about the way that he used the Internet, erm to fund raise, to organise, erm to really break through, just the traditional ways of doing politics. ÌýSo, in that sense he wanted to demonstrate that he was also going to govern differently, and that's been harder than erm than he and we thought. ÌýAnd erm there are still many attempts being made you know to have a, erm a White House website that erm is much more transparent, erm to continue using the millions of people that have come together during the campaign, to organise for legislation, its still not at all what it can be, but there are different ways to govern, that are being tried right now.

Aleks Which steps would you take, personally, if you were in charge of the new media strategy, at the White House, to erm to erm to gather that potential group together, those millions of people that supported him on-line?

Arianna Well here's what is so interesting about that. ÌýErm you can't really galvanise people without a clear message. ÌýIts not just a faction of technology it's the combination of message and technology. ÌýAnd because the Presidents message, around lets say the health care debate has been ambiguous as he himself considered, it's been much harder to organise around it. ÌýBecause if you don't have a particular plan, but multiple plans, then its hard to say to people go and knock on doors, go have erm, erm parties and bring people together to campaign for the election of Barack Obama, yes, that's obvious, erm the passage of work. ÌýErm a plan with a public option, a plan without a public option, a plan with co-ops, a plan with erm insurance reform, you know, so that has demonstrated the, the sort of weakness or organising around an ambiguous message. ÌýAt the same time, erm you see the conflict between transparency, which is an essential part of new media, and an administrations desire erm to keep decisions made behind locked doors, and not really be as transparent as the administration had arguably would be during the campaign.

Aleks Well it's interesting that you say that, because one of the themes of this particular programme is the emergence of hierarchy by a new media. ÌýAnd I'm wondering how you feel, whether, whether you feel that, that new media, that the Internet, that this very open platform still the hierarchy emerges. ÌýYou know you have gatekeepers who may galvanise me, you know galvanise a public through messages, or erm they may be needed to, to gather people together. ÌýWhat do you think about the hierarchy's that have emerged on the web?

Arianna Well that's a great question, I mean we see what's happening with Wikipedia, Wikipedia is now going to have a sort of layer of editors. ÌýErm I believe in editors, I believe erm that erm the, the hybrid future that I'm envisioning is going to include millions of voices, but is not going to eliminate editors. ÌýIn fact editors will be more important than ever in terms of erm, erm sifting through these voices. ÌýNow the editors are not all going to be erm professional editors, they can be editors whom the community has erm designated as editors, who have earned the trust of the community. ÌýBut what is so different now, is that for the first time, erm what is being debated is not being dictated by hierarchy erm at the top of a newspaper or erm a television erm, erm operation, but is really being much more organic in terms of what is on people's minds and what they care about, and what they're passionate about.

Aleks Some might argue though that the Huffington Post itself has emerged as one of the new gatekeepers, through the aggregation, through the investigative journalism that your beginning to fund, how would you respond to that?

Arianna Well I would say that we are putting an enormous amount of effort and resources into citizen journalism. ÌýOur new project of Izaniers for examples is erm is, is every day are putting erm questions and raising issues with our community, which is now about 23 million people, and which is very active and very engaged. ÌýAnd erm and we get tremendous information coming from that. ÌýErm at the same time we see in with erm new erm tool that we introduced, called Social News that in conjunction with Facebook. ÌýErm that we are creating a kind of digital water cooler, where people can see at a glance what they're friends are reading, what they're friends are commenting on, and they're friends can see what they are reading, although there is also a stealth function so that if you are reading something you don't want your friends to see, you can actually click the stealth function and then you can read in peace and without anybody knowing. ÌýBut that is another new way to interact around news, because people don't want just to consume news, they want to engage with news, they want to sort of talk back, and erm and give they're own opinion around what they are reading.

Aleks Erm one of the criticisms of information on the web, and how people gather on the web is that they, they gather in order to erm confirm they're own opinions, that there's almost a cyber balkanisation as it were, and I'm wondering how you feel about that, do you envisage that people will simply seek out that information, they come to the Huffington Post for a particular type of information. ÌýErm they go to the Drudge Report for another type of information. ÌýWhat effects do you see that having in the future on how we consume, and in fact the social effects on our attitudes and opinions?

Arianna Well at the Huffington Post one of our big editorial goals, is to get beyond the right left way of looking at the work. ÌýWe welcome different opinions, we challenge the way that term journalists refer to what's happening in terms of right versus left, and we argue consistently that the big issues of our time cannot be seen through the right left prism. ÌýLet me give you some examples. ÌýAfghanistan, erm you can no longer say either in England, or in the States, that those who oppose our erm military engagement in Afghanistan are on the left. ÌýGeorge Will, one of our most conservative commentators has recently come out and said that American troops should leave Afghanistan. ÌýSo those who continue to look at this issue through that prism are really stuck in a paradigm that's obsolete. ÌýErm health care, why are you supposed to be on the left if you want some form of, of universal health care. ÌýThere are many, many businesses that recognise that without some form of universal health care they're own health care costs are increasing to the point where they're going bankrupt. ÌýErm Wall Street, there are many editorials in the Wall Street Journal that argue against what has happened with erm the bail out of erm firms like Goldman Sacks and City Group that are now making multi million dollar profits, while still receiving tax payer guarantees. ÌýAnd those who believe in free markets know that's not free market capitalism. ÌýErm that's basically a form of Oligopoly, where the government picks winners and losers and where you socialise erm losses and privatised gains. ÌýSo you know what I'm saying, there's a hugely fascinating erm re-examination of erm the biggest issues of our time and how we approach them, and to keep looking at them through right versus left or this is a right wing side or is it a left wing side, is to really miss the ferment that's going on at the moment.

Aleks And additionally erm some people may say that the new media's challenging this notion of nations even, you know the idea that whether we're looking right versus left or whether we're simply saying that this is the U.S. perspective or the U.K. perspective. ÌýDo you see new media, do you see the Huffington Post as dealing with a, dealing with an international audience, dealing with an audience that's engaged at a different level than say people who are in the United Sates?

Arianna Well of course that's in the nature of the technology, that erm we can reach people anywhere, and its actually really wonderful when our bloggers erm will often write to me and say, I can't believe that you know my high school teacher who now lives in Australia has read my blog and I reconnected. ÌýAnd that's of course, one of the most exciting things about the web, the fact that you don't know who you are communicating with and how far they are. ÌýErm, they, they are brought right next to you, erm because of, of the way we can now communicate.

Aleks Those aspects though that you mentioned before of the social media, the transparency, the accountability, the immediacy, some may even argue that those are erm those are very American points of view, that it's a, that it's a western idealism, that's in fact being pressed out across the web for you mentioned Iran for example and how they've locked down the web, or China, that's a big stories about how they've locked down the web. ÌýDo you see a problem with this notion of the American imperialism and these, these ideals being spread out or do you think that you know how do you feel about them?

Arianna I think that everyone will benefit from them, the spread of transparency, immediacy and accountability through the web, I think these are forces definitely for good. ÌýAnd erm that's why so many totalitarian regimes are resisting them. ÌýAnd erm and doing everything they can, and sometimes its pretty complicated to block the, the free flow of information on the Internet.

Rushes Sequences - Stewart Brand interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 10:24 UK time, Tuesday, 27 October 2009

is a writer and president of . HeÌýwas the creator of the , an early virtual community, which he discusses here with Aleks Krotoski and the Digital Revolution programme one team.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



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Transcript:
(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Stewart Ìý ÌýThe WELL was just a big bulletin board. For some reason the bulletin board, which kind of preceded the internet in terms of places where people hung out online, had been forgotten, as near as I can tell. When I was paying attention ...... and they're starting to be what was then called conference systems. Like [Eyes] and then we had [ConQuServe] and [The Source] and The WELL was just a very local um kind of jumped up bulletin board that um was cheaper than most and more accessible than most. We invited hackers in and they came in because they got serious access to a serious [unex] machine that they could play around in. They helped us improve the code and all this sort of thing. I gave free accounts to journalists and writers, so the level of discourse online was pretty good from the start. And so was a body of people who turned out to have a lot to say to each other. Um there were a couple of things that we required that made it, I think, work. Not only that it was cheap er everybody knew who everybody was, they used handles but there was no anonymity online. There was the understanding that you owned your own words which means you're responsible for what you say, you're not going to sue us, The WELL, because we don't have any money anyway but, you know, don't mess with it. And users could create topics with-, and conferences the same with a little bit of conversation with management, start their own conferences, and indeed if they ran a conference that encouraged a fair amount of traffic, then they got free access to The WELL. So part of it was kind of a gift economy online um but it became a community faster and more profoundly than I would've expected, frankly. Um it still lives to this day, not only in memory, but as a place where a number of people hang out.

Aleks Can you explain a little bit about the mechanics? So, how did people access it, what visually did it look like? Can you sort of break it down to an audience who may never have heard, or may not even believe that online community exists?

Stewart Well remember, we're talking about 1983, 1984, so personal computers were just barely happening er telecommunications was happening through modems. You go into a hotel room and, you know, you get out your screwdriver and you start messing around with the apparatus that's there to try and get yourself online so you can do email. And to everybody-, it's kind of like your early years of cars, everybody had to know how to fix the car, everybody had to know how to mess with this stuff to make it, you know, even semi-functioning. That attitude came not only because they were doing it with their personal apparatus, they then brought that attitude to a joint aggregate community apparatus at The WELL, so everybody was helping kind of build this little online town. And it was slow, the code we were using, called [Peeklespan] was fairly dreadful but actually functional, and it had some weird capabilities that became somewhat pathological. It became possible for a person to decide to, as we said then, scribble, let us erase anything, everything that they'd ever said in the years that they'd been on The WELL would just go back and be removed. They got really, really angry and one guy actually committed suicide, and before he committed suicide with his real body he did it online by removing all of this existence online. So there was that kind of peculiar social behaviour that emerged in the course of all this. Um so it's a social event, it's a technological event, it was um early, it was pre-internet in many respects, and for the people who got into it, it was the sort of thing people [worry about] in the ...... so addicted to Second Life or whatever it is now. People were spending hours online, which was great for us because we got eight dollars for every hour they spent online. And we weren't coining money but we were staying in business, and that's really all The WELL has every done, it never coined serious money for anybody. It was a place where the Grateful Dead er crowds of Dead Heads went from concert to concert and recorded, you know, freely and wanted to swap tapes and swap gossip and all this stuff. They've been doing that Helter Skelter by email, and The WELL gave them a place where they could conjoin all of those conversations in one place. And basically people discovered that asynchronous communication, that is you log on and you see the things, the comments that had been made on your comment over the last couple of hours and make your comment and this is kind of slow-motion discussion, which for some reason brought out a um I don't know if honesty's the right term, but an intimacy that was surprising to me. I'd first encountered it, some of the early bulletin boards were sex boards, one was called Date-A-Base, you know, database, and it put in your sexual proclivities and then they would be matched up with, you know, a matching set of proclivities from the other side. Which was great, so gays were finding gays and bis were finding bis and on and on. But what I noticed there is that the public conferences and, you know, this is a bulletin board, we're not in somebody's basement, but in public conferences it was a like a co-educational locker room where, instead of just the women telling the women what really happened and the guys telling the guys what really happened, they were telling each other in one joint conversation what really happened last night on their peculiar date. And what they were doing now differently and of, er there was a openness, that somehow-, and you always hear about the distance online allows insult and flames and all those kind of things, it does, it's a problem, but it also involves-, invites some kind of openness that um turned out to be transformative. Um so we got a lot of people fell in love, they got married, they had children and their children are online and this became a world that was deeply connected to the real world. The WELL was a regional system, it was based in the Bay area, so er one of the reasons I wanted to encourage that is so that the real people behind every comment not only that there was no anonymity, but if you're really angry at somebody or really falling in love with somebody you could go find them in ...... or whatever, and deal with them personally. And that was encouraged. So the local and the online were blended in, I think, a way that turned out to be helpful. And you see that, you know, since then with meetups and what not, that the online world wants to not just reference the physical world, but encourage the physical world I think.

Rushes sequences - general views - Aleks Krotoski (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 17:19 UK time, Monday, 26 October 2009

This is a selection of general view shots (GVs) of presenter Aleks Krotoski, filmed on location by the programme one team.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



Rushes Sequences - Peter Thiel interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 13:54 UK time, Monday, 26 October 2009

is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and co-founder of . Aleks Krotoski and the Digital Revolution programme one team met with Peter to discuss the development of the web from its early libertarian beginnings, to its current effects upon nations, communications and the future of nation states.

'Technology will decide the question of the number of countries that exist in the world in 2050 more than anything else.'

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



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Transcript:
(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Aleks do you feel that that libertarian ideal still lives on in silicone valley today?

Peter ÌýÌý Ìý Ìý ÌýÌýWell you know, I think, I think it would be a mistake to ascribe too much ideology to, to what people er, the, to the way people were thinking about it. ÌýUm, I, I do think that a lot of the people involved in the internet would, would subscribe to some version of this story I'm telling you about er, empowering people, giving them more freedom. ÌýThey wouldn't necessarily er, and, and changing you know, the existing power structures of the, of the state. Um, you know, I think a lot of people um, the, and there certainly are other political cuts of this so I think you know, I think another equally important dimension of the internet is that er, that you know, the future of the 21st century's going to involve some version of globalisation and we have to get globalisation to work. ÌýAnd, and you know, that means we have to somehow er, figure out ways to break down certain barriers that exist between, between people.

Aleks Like financial barriers for example?

Peter ÌýÌý Ìý Ìý ÌýFinancial barriers, social barriers er, thing, thins of, things of that sort. And I think that's, that' probably and equally er, important er, dimension of it. ÌýUm, so I think, I think there are sort of a, but, but I, I do think the um, um, I think there has been an element of this that's been um, well there's, there's been, there's been a debate not just since the history of the internet but really since the history of the computer age is how would computers develop? ÌýWould they, would they empower individuals or would they empower the state? ÌýAnd so go back to the 1950's and 1960's and the sort of the er, the classic science fiction narratives where you'd have like a super computer that's running a planet, there's a, maybe there's a Star Trek episode from the original Star Trek where you have the er, um, the planet er, Beta where you have these DOS ............... that are controlled by a single computer that's er, sort of incarnates the er, um, the thoughts of somebody who lived 8,000 years ago and still sort of runs the planet. Um, and those sort of, this vi, vision of computer revolution as leading towards centralisation of, of power. ÌýUm, but then I think starting in the late 70's in to the 80's this very alternative vision of computer revolution evolved which was er, I think started with the personal computers that computers would be a vehicle not for empowering the state but for empowering individuals and giving them more information and more knowledge about what happened. And in some ways the internet revolution of the late 90's and 2000's I think was sort of a culmination of the sort of er, revolution in information technology where, where um, information just became too much for the state to handle and you had to decentralise power. ÌýAnd this is in some ways you know, there's, there's a version of this which was the story of you know, the fall of Eastern Europe and of communism where basically er, where basically things like um, the spread of fax machines enabled people to find out what's happening and to circumvent the um, the official truths er, that had promulgated by er, institutions like ............ in the Soviet Union. And at that point it gradually unravelled and people learned what was really going on. ÌýAnd I think um, I think in some ways the internet was just a culmination of that, of that process. ÌýThat being said I think you know, I think the jury is still out and the question of where it will be in 20 or 30 years um, one should not be overly dogmatic. ÌýI think er, it er, it may empower individuals, it may, it's possible that we go back to a 1960's version where it somehow um, ends up empowering the state. And er, but I think the question will be decided by technology and not by, not by politics.

Aleks What do you mean the, the question will be decided by technology because as we're seeing there's a real interesting um.

Chat.

Aleks There's a really interesting struggle at the minute, when you talk about you know, the nation and the state and, and the individual; when you're talking about technology it seems like you have incidents like er, for example in Iran where you had, you had the, the nation, the nation state trying to put the barriers around information getting out for example during the recent riots. But at the same time you have individuals who are hacking around those firewalls, those, those barriers.
Ìý
Peter ÌýÌý Ìý Ìý ÌýYes.

Aleks So where do you see, if you say that it's difficult to see in 20 years time where it's going to be, where, where do you see it happening in 20 years time? ÌýWhat do you see happening? ÌýWhere, what will the outcomes be?

Peter ÌýÌý Ìý Ìý ÌýWell I, I think that um, I think the outcome will be one or the other. ÌýSo er, it will be that we either have, it's likely we either have a far more powerful state that uses technology to control things which is in some sense a culmination of what's happening in China to some extent. ÌýOr we have a state; we have a place where the technology sort of circumvents existing power structures which I think has been happening in Western Europe and the United States. And er, and I think it's, but I think the, the Iran case was certainly one where um, it didn't cut, has not so far cut very well for the you know, the individual empowerment narrative where I guess people were um, issuing Tweets on Twitter but er, it turned out that er, bang, bang beat tweet, tweet. ÌýAnd er, and so that was, that was an example of where um, where this didn't' quite work. ÌýSo I don't, I don't think you know, I don't think the individual story is clearly going to end. I think it's an open question and that's why, that's why I think there's nothing automatic about history, there's nothing predestined about it going one way or the other. ÌýUm, and I think it will be a very close call and depends very critically on the kinds of technologies that are developed, how they get rolled out and how they er, how they transform things. Um, and er, and I think that we'll not know for sure except you know, with hindsight 20 or 30 years from now.

Aleks Have we seen precedents for this, in technologies that have come before whether it you know, I don't know, you mentioned the fax machine. ÌýHave we seen other precedents with a new technological innovation where the nation state has been challenged in this way?

Peter ÌýÌý Ìý ÌýÌýWell there have been um, there have been enormous precedents. ÌýUm, I mean you know, certainly there are military examples and the gunpowder revolution around the year of 1500. ÌýEr, basically resulted in the obliteration of all sorts of small countries because central governments were able to expand their power and project violence over much greater, greater areas. ÌýUm, and I think er, in some ways you could say er, that culminated in the nuclear age in the late 20th century and in super power states. ÌýAnd so I think um, and then I think there have been other technologies that er, that empowered er, individuals er, more locally. ÌýAnd I think that's been, that's been the story of the computer age really since er, the 1970's. ÌýCompletely contrary to what the expectations of the science fiction writers of the 50's and 60's were. And it's a, it's a very interesting how the science fiction thought it was going to go in a very different direction to what, to what er, ultimately happened.

Aleks It seems that what you're suggesting when it comes to er, the, the nation states success in the end in this battle goes against your ideal when you developed Pay Pal does it not? ÌýWith you know, the notion that the individual ..............

Peter Well I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't think the nation state is destined to succeed. ÌýUm, so far it's looking like it's going the other way. ÌýI just don't think, I don't, I don't think we should have a view of history where history is automatic and it just necessarily unfolds in a certain way. ÌýUm, and I think, I think it's a, it's a, it's an open question which way you know. ÌýIt may, it, it's, it is possible that the science fiction writers of the 50's and 60's still turn out to be right. ÌýAnd you know, but so far it looks like it's gone the other way.

Aleks Well taking a look at.

PeterÌý And one, one, one, one way of, one way of measuring the er, the question about the er, power of the nation state and the ability of the nation state to project force er, involves just looking at a map of the world and counting the number of countries in the world. ÌýIn er, 1945 when the United Nations got started I believe there were about 45 or so countries in the world. ÌýSo they were large countries with large empires. ÌýAnd er, the history, er, especially the last 20 or 30 years has involved the collapse of this em, these empires and the creation of more and more countries so we're at something like 192 countries today .And so one, and they're sort of smaller, generally somewhat weaker, people have more freedoms in them. ÌýUm, there are problems with them too but er, that's generally been the direction it's gone. ÌýAnd simply fast forward to the year 2050 er, one of the questions is um, compared to today will there be more countries, fewer countries or just the same number? ÌýAnd I think it would be very strange if the number of countries in the year 2050 would be exactly 192. I think its likely to me more or less. ÌýAnd what I'm willing to predict is that if it's more you will have, you will have a world with um, greater individual freedom, there may be greater security problems, may be, may be other problems associated with it. ÌýIf you have fewer you'll end up with a world of more government power and less individual freedom.

Aleks And you believe that this will be technologically instigated?

PeterÌý And technology will decide the question of the number of countries that exist in the world in 2050 more than anything else.

Rushes Sequences - Tim Berners-Lee interview - Ghana (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 13:31 UK time, Monday, 26 October 2009

is best known as the inventor of the . He travelled to Ghana with the Digital Revolution programme one team and presenter Aleks Krotoski to see the online advances being made in Ghana, and the ways in which the Ghanaian people are utilising the connections the web provides. During this visit, Tim discussed his past and the adventures in tech at that led him to create the web.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



-------------------------------------------------

Transcript:
(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Tim So its 1976 I'm coming to the end of my career at Oxford learning physics - I really don't know anybody who's done physics at a PhD level so I don't have a role model to go and do physics itself but meanwhile I'd been playing with computers a little bit. ÌýI'd made myself a computer terminal o' during the 3 years and I just started making er a a computer because the microprocessor chip just became available - 6800 - I bought one of the early 6800s put it onto a board - soldered it myself. ÌýSo that's really exciting. ÌýThe neat thing about my generation I think that nobody else really was luckily enough to get in on was the fact that when I was this big then I would go er wind er magnet - well wind electromagnets make relays out of them and nails in the primary school playground. ÌýAnd then later on when really I was approaching the limits of what you could make with electromagnets and relays and er and bells and things - transistors became available really cheaply when you went down the Tottenham Court Road to er to the sort of the junk electronic shops - you could buy transistors which some of which worked some of which didn't and then we'd test them and then make transistor circuits. ÌýSo then as I was in secondary school my friends and I made trans' transistor sockets and we made them more and more complicated er including some that would sort of flip flop that would store bits of information and so on so we're getting to the point where we're we're starting to make more complicated logic circuits and just as that was happening you could get these little logic circuits - these chips which would have several gates or flip flops to mem' to memorise information in in a chip. ÌýSo that just as we'd figured out how to make a gate out of transistors then you could buy the gates and then we started making more and more complicated logic circuits and I made - using those chips I made the computer terminal ca' which would display characters on the screen. ÌýAnd we're getting to the point now I really pretty much would know how to make a computer out of lolly chips but it would involve a huge - putting together a huge very very er complicated logic board but even though I knew how to do it then suddenly all that comes in a chip two inches long. ÌýSo every time we'd gone - it was although we'd gone through er sort of kindergarten and each stage of learning how to make more and more complicated things they'd suddenly get delivered on a plate - you know now you know how to make one here's one we've already made sort of in the oven - had it done before er now you can go onto the next level. ÌýSo then there I was coming out of university with my own home made computer with a pretty good understanding of how you build a microprocessor system and programming it from scratch. ÌýAnd there weren't many people like that so I went into the electronics industry where people were taking racks of equipment and replacing it with a single card which had a microprocessor which was doing everything that this rack of equipment did. ÌýAnd so I would know how to design the card to pretend to be the rack of equipment and how to .................. programme microprocessor it to do the same thing as that did. ÌýAnd that was a lot of fun er you know I had er a few microprocessors at work and a microprocessor at home and so it was erm it was a new world er full of er you know full of excitement and fu' and exciting because it was manageable and you could buy these things to make a home computer system yourself. ÌýAnd now you can do what previously had been done by main trains in in labs or in computer centres - you could actually do it yourself. ÌýSo it was a very exciting time and I'm glad I didn't miss it.

Aleks How did that inform what you were doing at CERN?

Tim Well so that was 1976 the next - over the next four years ........................ and became a consultant in erm hardware and software. ÌýAn' er 1980 I just went over as a consultant because they needed people to programme a system quickly because they were late and so they they they hired 20 people over six months and I just went over as sort of just er sort of like sort of hiring cowboys for the you know for the season and we just rewrite programme er and left trying to figure out how everything worked. ÌýAnd tha' so that was getting .............................. little bit of providing a programme called enquire ............ everything in order to figure out how all the various bits of certain cases go cos I was parachuted in with everybo' with these other programmers. ÌýEr we all had to work out which what was connected to what and I had that programme for writing ............ ÌýErm then I suppose I just - so then I realised that CERN was a really interesting environment so then several years later I decided to go there because I wanted to go to a different country - wanted to go to somewhere which was pretty er which was fun - there were people er just - where the coffee table discussions with crazy ideas you know were er were just great - er sitting there outside not to mention looking at the Monte Blanc er on a good day and er and chatting with bright people all the different nationalities about ways of designing different machines that had not been built before - that was that was pretty er enticing proposition.

Aleks Well indeed not just not just the machines that didn't exist before but systems that didn't exist before. ÌýCan you talk about why you invented the web?

Tim I invented the web just because I needed it really because it was so frustrating that it didn't exist. ÌýThere are er - there I was - I was at CERN exciting environment - people coming from different countries - people coming from different universities working for different people and because they didn't all work for the same company they weren't all told to buy the same software and buy the same computer so they came with different sorts of computer different sorts of software so their documentation was all in different systems. ÌýSo when I wanted to do my job I'd have to build a programme that would make this talk to that and I'd have to go and find out how this worked and find out how that worked and then how the infrastructure worked - this would all be on different computers. ÌýSo it'd be a question of going to one person and interviewing them more or less er just like you're interviewing me - how does it work why did you make it - what other things does it depend on - what else should I know - are there any questions I haven't asked er which I really should have asked. ÌýAnd then writing all that down and then going to somebody else and the place to do it in fact was the coffee area where people would come by and erm you could grab people out of the flow and say oh yes if you're using this then you'll have to learn how to use this too so you need to to to talk to Jean Pierre - Jean Pierre you know so that environment was all very well but when you joined it you spend a lot of time getting up to speed and when you left you had an obligation to leave er sort of instructions on how to use the thing you'd made. ÌýA lot of the people I was working with I'd get help from people who were may be students - they'd come for the summer or something - you don't want them spending 3 months getting up to speed and then go. ÌýSo the idea of the web as being a place where we could just have all this stuff available in such a way as I could make a link when somebody says oh if you use this you're going to need - I'd use that too - ok that is a random abstract association - that's somebody bringing up from their brain oh yeah those two these two things are connected. ÌýSo really valuable - I always felt to be able to keep that - put that into the computer even though this system runs on one sort of computer - this system runs on a completely different sort of computer - there's different types of system. ÌýSo at CERN before the web they would be systems you'd have to connect to completely separately - you wouldn't be able to really bring up the information from one thing at the same time as the other - you'd have to bring up information from one and write it on the back of an envelope and then go to the other system and may be type it back in. ÌýSo that was pre web but there was lots and lots of information on discs but there was - the information was there - there were all these documentation systems and if you realised that it would just take a little programme running on each to turn them into the web - to make it so that even though the documents stayed on that documentation system they actually also appeared on the web and even though they say there was self help system they also appeared in the web and then you could link them together. ÌýThat was clearly going to be such a ............ er it was er worth putting a bit of time in.

Rushes Sequences - Einar Kvaran - Wikipedian interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 12:49 UK time, Monday, 26 October 2009

Einar Kvaran is a dedicated Wikipedian who contributes articles to Wikipedia (mainly) on the subject of American sculptural art. Aleks Krotoski and the Digital Revolution team met and interviewed Einar to discuss his views of Wikipedia, democracy in an online collaborative environment, and the emergence of hierarchies in online communities.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



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Transcript:
(Please note that this transcript is the 'raw data' text we receive from a transcription company. It is a tool commonly used in production to facilitate editing and review the content. We publish it for users in that same spirit, rather than it standing as a 'perfect' representation of the content.)

Intvr Wikipedia initially was, a giant free for all you know as you said anybody could go in they could you know vandalise things, and it's evolved into a, an interesting system that has a very structured hierarchy that's erm, that's been implemented by Wikipedia itself. Can you talk us through that hierarchy?

Elner A little bit, I have intentionally avoided the hierarchy because I am in heart an anarchist. ÌýAnd I don't work well on power structures. ÌýBut the way it works it there are editors, everybody's an editor and then there are folks called administrations and they're elected through anybody who wants to vote in these elections can vote in an administrator and they have certain powers, of editing and blocking erm, people that are considered disruptive. ÌýSo I deal with that level occasionally if I have a problem of if I need to know something initially it was technical. How do I post a picture on Wikipedia? And you know they were I download some instructions and they would make no sense to me it was like it was, translated from computer geek or something like that. ÌýNo very well translated. So then I would just go out there and I'd randomly pick an administrator and I would email that person and say can you help me with this and they would say, you know give me some simplified version. So those the administrators above the administrators are another level that have as far as I know powers of dealing with the situations where administrators don't agree. ÌýErm, err if you and I were having an editing war, and we reached the point where administrators were required it's possible that I could find an administrator who would back my position you could find one who'd back yours. So then it gets kicked up a layer, and then the final erm, buck stops here in Wikipedia is the err in, encapsulated in the phrase Wikipedia is not a democracy. So up until this point it has been a democracy anybody can edit anybody can change other peoples edits. Anybody can be an administrator. Boom and then if, if, reaches that top level no the people that own it it's they're, they're thing and they can get in and settle the dispute. I have never been involved in a dispute that has gone beyond the administrator level. Ìý

Intvr How does the buck stops here mentality err defeat the purpose of Wikipedia. Do you feel that it does? Or is it just an evolution that has to happen and in, in such an enormous erm, objective as Wikipedia has to document the truth, to document all of knowledge. Ìý

Elner Tough question. I would say that I'm not going to have a problem, with it until I have a problem with it. OK, so far the system has worked, for me. And if I get into some situation and I can't imagine what it would be, but if I suddenly find myself Ìýin a situation where it gets passed up to the hierarchy and they make a decision that I don't agree with and if they make a decision I agree with I'm going to go greatest system in the world, nothing could be better. If, if they go the other way then I have to either decide oh dam, well or you know get an attitude about it. there are people who are a Wikipedia who are intentionally disruptive, erm, sometimes in very nasty ways and I, I don't know if this is because they have a problem with the Wikipedia bureaucracy or if they just have a problem. I suspect it's that.

Intvr Another question that's sort of dealing with the Ìýthe final media issue question is what do you think the objective of Wikipedia is, is it to, is it to identify the objective truth or is it to err generate a truth that is, crowd source of something completely different?

Elner I used to think that the point of Wikipedia was to create a, a valuable commodity for someone and that at some point someone was going to say well sorry folks but we are going to now start putting advertising and we are going to start, using it as a income generating thing and know all of you million editors thanks a lot I'll see you later. I don't think that anymore. Erm, I think that they're being up front that they want to keep it, open as it is and free. Free is very important and if we're not free then I would feel that I had been taken advantage of by which I don't feel that way at all. I don't as far objective truth the total truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth I think it's just too create the best articles they can on every possible topic. As far as I know the Beatles have an article every album the Beatles produced has an article and every song the Beatles recorded has a separate article. This is just from a music stuff that I'm interested. You get into computer games of which I know nothing about every game has an article the k. each character has an article I mean it, it's huge I think it's more. I think of it as in documentary terms that it's not an absolute truth it's trying to just put as much information in one space as I possible.

Intvr Some critics say mob rule is driving Wikipedia, do you think that this mob rule err is effective?

Elner I don't think that mob rule is real. I don't think that's what happening erm I think it is. I mean I don't see mob action very much. I don't go to controversial erm, sights that much. Occasionally I stumble across them sometimes I get involved mostly I go oh no erm, but no I don't think it's a mob rule at all. It's, it's a complex process for sure. And how it's going to sort out remains to be seen and that's part of the fun. ÌýI mean I'm 60 years old I wish I could live to be 200 to see how some of these things are going to resolve themselves. I'm not going to be. I don't see mob mentality I see you know a form of democracy that you have in any democracy where if you want to get the votes then you got to go out there and you got to do this and, and that and make whatever promises to get the votes and maybe there is some of that happening I don't consider that to be a mob. To be a mob is a threatening thing. I'm not threatened by what I see on Wikipedia.

Intvr How do you feel when people edit your articles?



Elner Don't touch, don't do that there, there's big disclaimers everywhere that, that say these are not your articles, OK. Don't edit unless you're prepared to have it ruthlessly hacked apart by mindless whatever, chimpanzees or something along these lines. Erm, I watched the edits to my. I do think of them as my articles. Casper Bouble the is my article and if somebody goes there and makes an edit I want to know what the edit is and why they've done it and if they've got through and corrected all my spelling that's a good thing. If they've turned all my American spelling into British spelling that's a bad thing. It's something that Wikipedia has had to deal with because huge wars have happened about err the spelling of particular words and it has come down to the, the rule is first person there gets to spell it the way they want to. Ìýerm, another problem that comes up is, it touches on this mob rule thing in interesting ways is people get up and complain that it's too American. That the article on Fasces which is a err a symbol of lion order from the roman's it's a bundle of sticks with an axe and it err, in my version of the story it goes back to Roman law of the strength through unity but also corporal punishment versus capital punishment. I Ìýmean the axe is there for a reason. So err America uses that Fasces a lot as a symbol you see it all over the place if you know how to look forÌýit. so the Fasces article is, maybe half American content so then some people from I'm sure not Britain let's say France show up and complain well no there's Fasces all over France to this article is too American centred I...

Chatting.

Rushes Sequences - Stephen Fry interview - London (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 11:03 UK time, Tuesday, 20 October 2009

is a writer, comedian, actor and technology enthusiast - and a man very much online. Aleks Krotoski and the Digital Revolution team met and interviewed Stephen to discuss the web, the changes it has brought to the world, its benefits and its possible dangers.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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So, Stephen seems greatly optimistic of the web's power to connect people, and of its standing as yet another great invention in human history that both enables, overthrows and terrifies in equal measure. Would you agree with his belief that the reward / risk ratio of the web mirrors that of the car, or the mobile? And (to extrapolate slightly) that perhaps our concerns for privacy are, as Bill Thompson would agree, based on outdated ideas - as Fry says that Trollope's were, with respect to the post box's liberation of women.

Let us know in the comments below.

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Transcript:

There are now people in their mid to getting onto err advanced teens erm, who have never know obvious err a world without the web. ÌýThat maybe 20, 20 year, 20 year olds who have never known anything about that. Have they developed strange thumbs? ÌýDo they have peculiar ways of talking and listening, do their eyes glaze over when they have to concentrate for more than 30 second, no I don't believe any of that. I'm not particularly negative or pessimistic, about the, the social qualities, the linguistic qualities the concentration qualities of generation web as they're called. ÌýErm, I honestly believe that if you go back into 1920's and take an ordinary semi educated 15 year old and place him next an ordinary se, semi educated 15 year old how he would find the one knows more, understands more is more socially confident he's more aware of the rest of the world it's more able, and more adept to research erm. may not be able to say the 9 times table as fluently or repeat amos, amass, amat, amonst, aramtis amant. They may not be able to do that is that such a great Ìýloss to an old fashioned person like me. I'd love to think people can do both, but let, let's get real about this. Connection is what humans crave, it's what we are all about and something that separates us from animals it's even pre, it, it comes before the fact that we, we have language, because the language is an example of a, if you like Ìýa mural technology that we have, we have created to answer this need for connection. We are the social animal par excellence. Or, or by devil err if you like. Err if not necessarily excellence. Erm we are, constantly in need of, of connecting with people for, friendship, love, sex, knowledge, growth, enmity, territoriality all the, all the imperatives that drive us as human beings. Erm we've created villages and towns to help us do that and roads and now we've created something else that allows us to do it, us to do it even more.Ìý

Where people make their fundamental error and criticise all this I think it's a danger and it's reducing our capacity to act as proper human beings is they think it's all this. Either sit in front of a screen of some kind tapping away all your life, going lol and, and, and being childish and not writing in proper English sentences or, you sit in an old fashioned study with books and you read properly and you engage property and you go for walks. Well I do both! And most people do both, it is not one or the other. ÌýNow you may say I've have the advantage of a classical education I've grown up in the tradition which I've understood books and I've understood history and I've been interested in these things, and I like Latin and Greek and I you know and I like the smell of a proper book and so on. that's true but I make quite a lot of on line friends I, I don't even know gender seem of them are err they're people I chat with I, d you know I've the personal direct messaging in forums and err, and Twitter and so on. some of whom I think are very young, and you can sort of tell they are, and who astonish me in case with their knowledge, knowledge of, literature. In fact I was having a conversation just the other day with one, who was talking to me about Evelyn War and I think she's 12 and she seems to have ever book that ........... and have a very intelligent view of this great novelist. ÌýAnd at I almost wanted to say but how would someone who is 12 like you ever have read these books and I think what am I saying of course, of course they might have done and spend a lot of their time on, on a forum as well. It's not the two are not mutually exclusive. Ìý

Alex As social animals which you conjecture we are erm, we now err historically are interactions our relationships are, tribal capacities would have been walled, they would have been within the, the physical proximity and now there's there the opportunity to out reach via face book via Bebo via whatever social networking means that are available. How do you think this is going to affect the younger generation of growing up if they're able to have relationships that are purely on line based upon erm, communities practice, or ideals.

Stephen The human social history is being filled with inventions and developments and techniques, that have threatened the way we arranged ourselves. A very good example that seems so peculiar is that Anthony Trollope the English novelist best know for writing books on politics and the church, was also a civil servant of err, some importance and he invented the post box the pillar box, and he was distraught that his invention might undermine the Victorian family. Now at first this seems quite a why would it do that well until the time the pillar box arrived, Ìýthe post box the little red thing we put a letter in a woman had never been able to write a letter and get it delivered without giving it either to a post man or to her father to be sent. ÌýA middle class woman had no ability to connect with the man except through the graces of her, Ìýparents particularly her father and Trollope who was a... although he was, a fine novelist and a and an innovative thinker, was a very traditionalist and he hated the idea that there were women commutating with men without their father knowing about it cause they could just slip a letter into a post-box. And similarly if you go back a little further to the time of Jane Austin, people found the idea of the novel simply horrific, people could not bear the idea of children sitting around and reading. They should be if they were going to read it would be sermons and history, certainly not novels and they should be going about the place, sitting up straight and err at dinner parties and err, and you know walking and being healthy and then of course along came radio and people couldn't bear the idea of people sitting around the radio and then television and then games and then computers and then and all these things seemed to those who were not brought up in them somehow to diminish because we're all so proud of our youth. We think our youth and our childhood are somehow if not perfect it was even if was imperfect it made us suffer how dare these children now not suffer the way I did. They should be having the kind I did made to read, made to do this, they should not have this freedom this access, or if they do, while I can approve of it, I ought to suggest that it's dangerous that it's going to while I can approve it, I ought to suggest that it's dangerous it's going to go wrong.Ìý

Well yeah I mean some genies when they're let out of the bottle can you know can cause problems and they certainly can't ever go back in the bottle. When cars first arose people were horrified at the deaths on the road, horrified they couldn't believe it, I mean there were, there were hundreds of people being, being squelched every day. It was grotesque and any you know if you just braked in a car at 30 miles a hour you'd kill yourself on the steering wheel you'd break your neck. People were dying all the time. Did they say oh that's it then? ÌýWe can't have cars sorry. In the same way as if someone says actually mobile phones do give out microwaves and they will give you brain cancer are we going to say oh well that's, that's the end of that technology the? ÌýNot on your Nelly there's a risk reward ratio here and for us the reward is so great, that whatever the risk is we try and contain it and understand it at best but what we don't do is say the risk is too great.

The great question is whether or not the web is being a force for democratisation and whether it is made us all equal erm, there are those who will say the moment it became monetised as, this terrible word the way at the moment it became really commercialised, erm, the moment the large corporations that controlled the pipeline started to buy each other up, and started to get this huge erm, err mergers, that some how err the pioneering spirit Ìýwent out of it in the freedom died. ÌýPeople would say erm, I'm not quite a cynical or quite as pessimistic as that I do genuine ally believe there is a, a dispensation in, in politics in the west that the focus the, the wait of authority has shifted that it used to be, the ballot box was the way people expressed themselves.Ìý

Now there is no focused way people express themselves on the internet, but I think that is the next challenge for democracy is to use Ìýthe fact that this surely is the way that we can harness .............. the will of the people it, it seems to me that I'd a real threat to the established estates as they used to be called, the they're one of the four estates in .............. spiritual or the temporal the, the comments and the forth estate as it was always known. Err, the press the press has been deeply upset and worried of course by the, the how err particularly Google and aggregators of, of content that they have spent a lot of money assembling, have been able to distribute it freely in such that people now regard it as almost their right to have free news err if the, even if they're outside Britain it's not through the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and the, and their licence fee. So there's that side of it where the press feel somehow and they're authority is Ìýunder threat and through things like twitter err, and, and face book individuals and celebrities and politicians are finding Ìýother mouthpieces other ways of connecting the new ............ cause it used to be that if you were, if you were a politician or a celebrity wanted to set the record straight or you wanted to sell a book or something you had to count out to the newspaper. ÌýNow you don't you simply ignore them, I mean if you, you know if you're a big American star you've got over a million followers. And there's no newspapers there provide you with the kind of coverage you can provide yourself and you can control it. err newspapers hate that, ............ speak to the contempt for the, for the stupidity and vanity of stars anyway. What we all share, and yeah about myself and that included naturally. Erm, erm, but being in it just takes away their power. So that's, that's the press's way. ÌýAnd that's why they're always trying to keep that is very uneasy relationship. On the one hand they mock it, so Twitter which is a good example when that arrived, the press said oh no, not ridiculous factious people telling you what they had for breakfast oh I did this, look at this Twitter stream by the moronic celebrity how boring is that? Two weeks later join our twitter stream at Daily whatever. You know and such is desperate, desperate to jump on it, absolutely and politicians the,, there are dozens of politicians who ............. dam why did I speak I had to go to Twitter just two months ago I said is was ............ and now it means I can't have my own Twitter stream and everyone else has an I'm ohh I'm loosing out. And how, how do I back kettle here you know because through no fault of their own I don't quite see how it was going to develop. ÌýThis is the, I'm getting ......... because of what's happened with the internet and so that's the press. Then government, government is, is at much trickier one it's a much huger issue.

Rushes Sequences - Clay Shirky interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 10:14 UK time, Tuesday, 20 October 2009

teaches, consults and writes on the social and economic effects of the internet.ÌýThe Digital Revolution Programme Two team met and interviewed Clay to discuss the phenomenal changes that have occurred to the world since the advent of the web. He discusses the difficulties of attaching terms such as 'democratisation' to the web, and the reduction of 'strong tie' relationships, as 'weak ties' increase.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



This is an interesting partner piece to some of the issues of knowledge elites and knowledge democracy, as discussed with Jimmy Wales. But it's also a fascinating examination of the changing nature of relationships; strong and weak ties, and the direct effects each might have on the other. Susan Greenfield asked a similar question in her Web at 20 speech - when we say we have 400 friends, what does that mean?

Are you a highly connected person with numerous followers and friends online? Do you feel you have your strong ties in a healthy balance with your weaker ones? Would your friends and family in agree with your answer?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Transcript:

Clay ÌýÌý ÌýThe web's democratic in one way and distinctly un democratic in another way. ÌýAnd I think a lot of the confusion about the political ramifications have to do with that one word having so many meanings. ÌýSo its democratic in that it quite literally delivers power to the people it, it essentially opens up participation in the publics mind. ÌýSo erm I erm I have been teaching at, at ITP, at the Interactive Telecommunications Programme for about 10 years, and the average age of my students has stayed pretty much the same erm my average age erm has risen at the alarming rate of about 1 year, 1 year per year. ÌýAnd so I'm now, I'm in a position of teaching my own youth as ancient history, right I have to get my students to understand what the media landscape used to be like. And I tell them all kinds of stories about what it was like, and they nod politely and I think they believe me when I tell them these things, but I can tell they don't feel it. ÌýAnd the thing they really don't feel is when I say that in the 20th Century, if you had something to say in public you couldn't, period, right, if you were a civilian, if you were a citizen but not a media professional, you could not broadcast a message, no matter how hard you tried. ÌýIn fact, people who went out of they're way to try to get messages out in public through amateur channels, like holding up signs on the street, or you know by the road side, were widely regarded as being kind of off they're rockers. ÌýAnd that changed, that change is enormous, that anyone who wants to participate has at least the means to participate is a huge change. Ìý

So in that sense of the world, democratic, the web has been this huge increase in part, the participatory logic of the media. If by democracy though you don't just mean engagement and participation and, and availability to be part of the public spirit, but you mean the contending of political ideas, in such a way that an outcome is reached and it balances the rights of the minority with the rights of the majority, the web is not democratic at all. ÌýBecause, the kind of democratic structures you need, things like, everybody gets to vote but each person only gets one vote, we can't even tell who anybody is. ÌýSo we have no way of saying, we can be sure we're being fair in counting votes right. ÌýErm we don't have official forms in which things are debated, and after some contentious period of bring the ideas to bare a decision is reached, and that decision is legitimated by the will of the people. ÌýAnd so what you get in the web is all of the contending special interests that you expect in a democracy, but you don't get many of the mechanisms for defending the overall process our outcome from the special interests. ÌýSo the big, the big question around the Obama erm administration was will he govern like he, you know like he campaigned, will the, the Obama administration show the same zeal for public input and participation that the Obama campaign did. ÌýSo the day after the election they announce Change.Gov, right and they, they invite people in to tell the Obama administration what issues they should care about. ÌýAnd number 1 issue, right it rises to the top of the charts, the thing that really in the middle of 2 wars and the biggest financial meltdown in, in 70 years, the thing the Obama administration should most focus on, is medical marijuana, right the ability of people to smoke marijuana in they're own homes for medical reasons .............. Ìý And you think if, there's a not a poll you could have commissioned that answer. ÌýThe reasons that that was at the top of the list wasn't that that's what a majority of citizens wanted, rather it was because the people who wanted that thing, were the most organised and they were able to get they're message out to people who care about you know our absurd war on drugs, in order to push this, this issue to the top. ÌýSo, there's real signal there, right there's a group of people who care passionately about this issue, but its not the same as a vote, right, and that's, I think, the enormous tension we face right now, in the American context this this is a kind of a Madisonian moment, we, you know we wrote our constitution down, so we had a fairly different attitude towards, towards political discourse, I mean maybe you all will do it in the next couple of years. ÌýBut Madison was, was the great framer of the constitution, and he was the person who most worked out the idea that you can never get rid of special interest, you can never get rid of factualisation, in a way, democracy is for creating a playing field and a set of rules for factions to contend with too. Ìý

So the web is really good at factualisation and special interests and empowering people that have incredibly loud arguments all hours of the day and night. ÌýBut it's not at all good at figure out, out of the massive signal that, that our unit generates what any unit should do. ÌýAnd that's because that secondly isn't a technological problem, so the technologies enabled this, this incredible conversation, but the kinds of the kinds of tools that allow you to look at that conversation and say, this part we're going to take as advice for the Government, and that part we're going to regard as the conversation that lead to the advice, but we're not going to act, you know to decided between deliberation and decision. ÌýYou can't have a technological solution like that. ÌýAnd we don't yet have the political overlay that says this newly broadened and crazily fractious public sphere is also going to become politically critical in ways that you know we accord to voting or jury duty or any of the other kinds of, of you know formal government mechanisms were used.

Intvr ÌýÌýÌýClay do you think the new generation growing up now actually thinks differently to sort of pre-internet generations?
Ìý
Clay Ìý Ìý I do think they think differently and the real question I think is, how much of that is normal human plasticity, right we all are really good at responding to opportunities. ÌýAnd this young generation has different opportunities than, than my generation. Erm and how much of it is actually that they're brains are being wired differently because of exposure to the media and environment they're being exposed to. ÌýErm, the first category is, it's relatively easy to see examples of that. ÌýAnd you know in the States right now because we're very good at moral panics, you know people my age, mid 40's and up, are ringing they're hands over what kids are doing, kids are doing on Facebook, as if we would not have done those things had Facebook existed when we were young. ÌýAnd so we want to project this idea, well you know I wasn't putting drunk pictures of myself up on Facebook, its like yeah well no one gave us the chance. ÌýBut I remember us, I think we would done that in a heartbeat if Facebook had been around. ÌýAnd so, rather than you know sitting around complaining about how young people have it better than us, which makes us look like old fogies, we decide instead that this is a threat to civilisation, and must be you know well, must be addressed at once in the highest halls of power. ÌýErm, that kind of, you know hypocrisy and lack of self-examination is always a last truth of you know of people my age and older. ÌýErm, the second question though is much more interesting, erm which is, when you grow up, expecting to be able to find information, at a moments notice, what does it do to your ability to internalise information.Ìý

And you know the brain is very, very plastic, very malleable, but at a certain point it does get wired up, and it gets wired up in a particular way. ÌýAnd so I look at my son who's 8, erm and he asked me, my wife, when Michael Jackson passed away, my wife muttered something at the breakfast table about him being a criminal. ÌýAnd erm my son later asked me right is that, was that true, and I said well no, erm the dilemma of explaining the difference between accusation and proof and so forth were, were going along, along in this conversation and I say essentially no one, no one does, right there, there were these questions, nothing was every proved. ÌýAnd he looked at me and he said not even Wikipedia. ÌýAnd I realised he'd never asked a question before, because he tends to be in the domain effects, what's the fastest train dad, I've no idea but Wikipedia do, what's the tallest building, I don't know look it up on Wikipedia. ÌýAnd suddenly he comes up to a question that's entirely interpretive, and, and he clearly his worldview is a little bit shaken because he, you know there had never been a question he couldn't, couldn't answer before. And so you wonder how much of his relationship to the factual is being shaped by the idea that you, you don't need to guess or estimate or remember if you can get your hands on a keyboard, you can find out right then. ÌýSo that's, that's you know that's what I'm saying the, the much more momentous question for society I think is this. ÌýErm, we've long known, from sociological work on the way we live our lives, that we have there's inverse correlation between the number of friends we have and the death of that friendship. ÌýSo somebody who lives in a city can have hundreds of people they call friends, somebody who lives in a small town can have dozens of people they call friends. But for both of those people there's fewer than half a dozen people you'd give a kidney too. ÌýSo you have strong ties, which are this tight core, and you've got weak ties, which can be small or large depending on where you live. ÌýWell, the web is like everybody lives in London right, the web is like everybody has access to this enormous pool of people, inexhaustibly large and diverse pool of people, and as a result, you know on Facebook, on Twitter on My Space, on Bebo, etc, etc, people have the experience of having thousands of friends. ÌýWell no one really has thousands of friends, its, its, its either the word thousands or the word friends has to be struck out for that, for that sentence to make any sense. Ìý

So its, its evident to everybody that the web has been this incredible amplifier of weak ties, right we have many, many more connections, people we knew, you know from high school or from college that we haven't seen in years but somehow we're linked to in this way. ÌýWhat we don't know is what that's doing to ............ and there has been early research to suggest in, in a way kind of alarmingly, that there really is a trade off, you can't just amplify the number of weak ties without decreasing either the number or the depth of strong ties you might ................ ÌýAnd if that's true, that's a big change, because it's nice to have people where you can say oh hey I'm coming out to San Jose want to get together for coffee or whatever. ÌýErm, but its really nice to have somebody who'd loan you a kidney if you needed one. ÌýAnd if we're amping up the former at the expense of the latter that's a really big change in erm in the way human society works or can work. ÌýErm, more generally, we're doing what we always do when we get enormously increased freedom. ÌýWhich is a bunch of stuff that we used to get for free, because just the environment was constrained, we're now starting to have to in place, right we're starting to have to plan for it. ÌýSo if we're in a world where our social wiring just isn't used to a world where you can have thousands of weak ties at the expense of the people you most care about, erm we're starting to have to have, as an act of discipline, erm doing the kinds of things that just weren't even possibilities before. Ìý

When my wife and I were courting, right we only used e-mail to say I'll meet you at such and such a place at such and such a time. ÌýI'd had relationships, sometimes long relationships which you know the, the e-mail back and forth the kind of carefully constructed e-mail back and forth was the big part of the relationship. ÌýAnd, I think it ultimately damaged the face to face stuff, and so when I met the, you know woman I later married who, you know who became, became the mother of my children, I early on, I thought, oh I don't want to screw this one up, and we only used e-mail to co-ordinate, because I thought if too much of this relationship goes in to the network we may never be able to get it back out again. ÌýAnd that was a place where it just took a certain amount of, of discipline and decision making, there never used to be an easy way to do that, you can occasionally get epistolary in a relationship some of them, erm you know deeply literary far separated people, but ju, you know somebody you were dating who lived across town, the idea that most of your communication would be written never really an issue. ÌýErm, for most of us, and now it is, and I think we're going to have to learn as habits, a lot of things that we used to get just as a side effect of life being inconvenient in ways it no longer is.

Rushes Sequences - Jimmy Wales interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 08:46 UK time, Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for founding Wikipedia.org, as well as other wiki-related organizations, including the charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, and the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

Aleks Krotoski previously blogged about her concerns with Wikipedia's inherent power structures and 'knowledge elites' on the Digital Revolution blog, and Jimmy Wales, in turn, replied with his own blogÌýasking what was so wrong with knowledge being elitist anyway?ÌýSo it was with some excitement that Aleks and the Digital Revolution programme one team met with Jimmy to pick up the discussion and consider Wikipedia's importance, influence and responsibilities in the new information age.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



I particularly like the idea of the 'cross-cultural pollination' of the information, as evidenced in Jimmy's anecdote of the invention of the aeroplane having a different history depending on which language version you read - English or French. Does this mean that the old adage, that history is written by the winners, is being brought into question?Ìý Multiple and available interpretations of any event produce an open debate, and perhaps more nuanced facts or truths across the versions - and if not, then at least a greater awareness that differing versions exist.

'There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don't envy the future historian's job.' Ìý

Of course Orwell, visionary author of 1984, had no way of predicting the web or Wikipedia. Online the truth is not filtered and edited by one , rather a gaggle of squabbling siblings. I wonder whether he would approve?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Transcript:

Jimmy Ìý Ìý ÌýYou know one of the, one of the most important principles er, for an encyclopaedia is neutrality er, this is the idea that er, Wikipedia itself shouldn't take a stand on any controversial issue. Um, our job is not to be a place for political commentary or persuasion um, but basically just to lay out the, the, the landscape for people.
So if there's a controversial issue, we try to report neutrally on what er, you know relevant and important authorities about it have said. So you know er, pick as an example um, er, a hot button issue like abortion. Wikipedia of course is not going to take a stand on abortion, but it's going to report um, you know that, that the catholic church position is this, and the pope has said that, and critics have responded this way and so on, er, you know the idea is so if you're new to the topic and you want to know what everybody's fussing about, you can come and get that landscape. Of course neutrality's not always easy um, we are human beings and it's a, you know it's, it's serious effort, er, but that's one of the core principles. Er, some of the other principles that are really important are things like reliable sourcing. Now that's something the community has gotten more and more um, interested in over the years, as the project matures, um, people have become less tolerant of just some random information that somebody writes down that they happen to know. Er, and really more looking for what's your source for that um, you know er, is it, do you, do you have a, a scientific journal or a well known newspaper and so on. And in fact we've gotten very sophisticated er, in the community with all of our policies around what counts as a reliable source of contact.

IntervÌý yea can you talk me through that actually because one of the, one of the guiding principles or rather what I've understood to be one of your inspirations for starting Wikipedia is to create an environment that almost breaks down this ivory tower notion that this idea that there is a hierarchy that anybody can contribute knowledge, yet what you're talking about here with this notion of reliable sources, the scientific journal, the peer reviewed, can you talk me through that juxtaposition that sort of, that, that ........ there?

Jimmy I mean it's interesting because um, Wikipedia in many ways does break down a lot of hierarchical assumptions that people have, but that was never the goal, it's not something I particularly care about one way or the other. What I care about is quality. Er, it turns out that it's easier to get quality when you have more people participating and when you judge er, the quality of someone's work on its own merits, rather than er, paying too much attention to their credentials. At the same time we really love when experts come er, we really try to have an environment that's very welcoming of people who know what they're talking about. Um, it's funny because we have this er, reputation for being very er, anti elitist but we're really not anti elitist, we're actually quite snobby within the community er, based on er, you know if you know what you're talking about, and you can back it up, that's honourable and that's really important to us. So our, our concepts about quality er, end up being very um, old fashioned in a certain way um, you know we er, don't regard ourselves as some kind of open free speech forum, where every opinion is as valid as every other opinion. Um, we really want good work, good quality work um, and when we think about what counts as a reliable source, um, it depends very much on the context um, you know if you're, if you're looking at some er, if you want to know what Yasah Arafat said er, you know in 2001 um, the New York Times is a very good source. Um, and er, that's perfectly valid. If you are er, writing some very detailed entry about some concept in physics um, you really want a physics journal. Er, you want some pure review material to back it up, not er, an article in Time Magazine you know um, if you want to write about a TV show then maybe a TV Guide is a good source er, you know, and again if you, you know if you want to write about um, you know er, the, something very scientific or there's something very detailed in history, then you wouldn't use TV Guide as a source. So it depends on the context and the communities er, been very, very thoughtful at really working through er, trying to figure out when is something of a reliable source, for what, and so on and so forth.

IntervÌý It seems that this is something that's evolved over the years?

Jimmy Oh yea I mean in the early days um, we didn't have a lot of policy just because it wasn't necessary. Er, you know when you start and someone is typing er, for the first time you know Africa is a continent and hitting save, and that's our first entry on Africa, you know. It's very simple um, you don't really need a lot of er, detailed er, policy to get started, but then the policy evolves over time, people er, begin to run into controversies er, and then they start to think about how do we resolve this controversy, how can we write Wikipedia so that it's neutral. Um, and one of the best ways is to say well lets, lets reach out to the sources, right let's just report on what the valid sources say. Um, so that's been, yea it's been something that's grown up over a long period of time.

IntervÌý It seems interesting to me that um the, the variation of the number of Wikipedia pages in the different languages, I mean in many ways by creating Wikipedia pages or allowing people to create Wikipedia pages in different languages, you're almost creating those silos that were, you know the web is trying to break down, is that not, how do you make sure that there's cross pollination between those ideas?

Jimmy Right well I mean one of the things that we er, do er, sometimes people ask um, you know do you have a Canadian version of Wikipedia. This is silly right, we have English and er, there are many different varieties of English of course, but they're all together in English Wikipedia. Um, then we have the German and French and so on and so forth, and so now we have over two hundred different languages er, we now have like a hundred and seventy five languages that have a thousand articles which is small you know, but that's still a, a legitimate project that's getting started. ÌýAnd yea we do encourage people er, to make note of what's going on in other languages, but the only people that can do that are people who are bilingual er, who can read in multi languages, and there are people who do that. Now one of the reasons English is the largest er, language is that English is by far the largest language on the internet. And it's the largest second language all around the world. So we see a lot of things like people writing in their, in their native tongue and then they'll also put it into English. So sometimes people will say um, you know and, and there's almost nothing you can do to offend a German Wikipedian more than saying well how many articles have you translated into you know er, you know, so German Wikipedia, so it's a translation of the English. No, no, no it's not, they, they wrote it independently, er, translations are a small part of what people do um, and some people do, they take their time to go and like compare two versions and look for er, interesting er, contradictions er, you know one of the classics um, is um, you know for, well who invented the airplane.

Interv ÌýÌý Ìý Ìý ÌýWell I suppose in the western sense it would be the Wright Brothers.

Jimmy The Wright Brothers right, we were all taught, all English speakers are taught this when you're er, you know in second grade, the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, it's a simple and uncontroversial a fact as that you know the moon goes around the earth. Um, in France similarly they are taught, just as uncontroversially that some guy from Brazil who was in France, you know, he invented the plane, and, and in fact the, the true story is actually er, there's some validity to both accounts. And um, you know it's very complicated, you know this is, it's like many inventions, it was part of a spirit of the times and there were a lot of different people doing a lot of different things, um, and who you assign priority to depends on how you define the first flight and so on and so forth. And so it turns out that you know at some point, somebody from French Wikipedia noticed, they said wow what English Wikipedia and French Wikipedia are completely different on this point. And then in the English Wikipedia, people sort of went back and looked at it and er, studied the history more and now the English Wikipedia has a much more nuanced story er, in the history of aviation. ÌýYou know it sort of explains, there are many competing claims and er, here is the different achievements that different people did. And then you get a much richer um, idea, so I think that kind of cross cultural pollination er, is er, really important and really er, valid to help us all move beyond er, second grade.

Interv ÌýÌý Ìý Ìý ÌýÌýWell the danger though is that because there are so many um, English language accounts um, that these are the people who are actually contributing the knowledge that the people who own the knowledge, they're the sort of elites as it were on Wikipedia, because they have this knowledge. And if people first come to the English page, then they're only getting that information from that point of view, without realising that perhaps they themselves could contribute to it.

Jimmy Yea but I mean a lot of people do contribute and particularly for English Wikipedia as I said er, because English is the largest second language around the world, it tends to be very multi cultural. I once was in Lithuania meeting with a, I had a meeting with a head of parliament there, and he's a lovely guy who um, is really into encyclopaedias, he was on the board of a encyclopaedia project there, and when I went in, he had printed out er, some, an entry on a famous battle that happened some hundred years ago between Lithuania and Poland er, and he said um, er, he could read er, English, Lithuanian, Polish and German, he had printed off four. And he said er, that the German version was just quite small, there wasn't much to be said about it, the Lithuanian version was from the Lithuanian perspective, and the Polish version was from the Polish perspective, but then he said the English version was really fabulous and it looked to him like the, the Lithuanians and Poles had come together there to fight about it, and sort of reach some compromise. And then we later went and looked and that's exactly what had happened. Um, and then people, you know from there um, went back er, into the Lithuanian version, the Polish version, and those began to mature over time.
So these kinds of things you know er, English is an interesting language; it's kind of a melting pot language um. But we're really very focused on people writing in their mother tongue. Um, in India for example um, there's been a situation in India for a long time, where um, obviously English is a very important language for the elites in India um, there's you know over twenty different languages in India um, and the, in order to communicate with each other, they could use Hindi, Many people are English as the elites tend to do. And um, what's happening though is that a lot of the people there who er, are on the internet, they're using English a lot but they really have a great passion for their mother tongue, and so now they're beginning you know working in er, you know Canada, Bengali, all of the different languages of India. And those are growing very quickly, so that's something we're very um, excited about.

Rushes Sequences - Andrew Keen interview - USA (Video)

Post categories: ,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý

Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 14:20 UK time, Friday, 16 October 2009

Andrew Keen is an author, commentator and speaker. Previously a pioneering internet entrepreneur, he is reknowned for his challenging critiques of Web 2.0, social media and modern internet culture.

The Digital Revolution programme one team met and interviewed Andrew to discuss the Internet's libertarian beginnings and its expanding role in world cultures and economies.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.



So, do you agree with Andrew's analysis of the 'digital revolution'? That the counter culture has become the dominant, accepted culture; that there is no revolution, rather young men getting very rich on the work of many others chasing a delusion of democracy andÌýegalitarianism?

Let us know in the comments below.

-------------------------------------------------

Transcript:

Andrew You know all technology is routed in ideology. ÌýTake, one of the big misunderstandings of the internet is that it suddenly came along, this miracle, this religious miracle that was granted to us because we were such good human beings, or, you know maybe we behaved ourselves one day so we got it as a Christmas present. ÌýIts absolute nonsense. ÌýThe Internet has a cultural and a very concrete cultural ideological context. ÌýIt represents the fusion of the old military industrial complex of southern California, and the hippy ethic of northern California. ÌýBoth were, in a sense opposed to authority. ÌýAnd in a book erm written by Fred Turner, a Stamford University Professor, an excellent book, erm entitled From Counter Culture to Cyber Space, he explains that very strange union, although on reflection it's not that strange. ÌýBecause both erm the military industrial complex, which invented the internet or at least financed the internet in the late 50's, and the counter culture of the late 60's, in san Francisco were libertarian or hostile to authority, hostile to the state, hostile to traditions. ÌýSo on reflection I'm not sure how unnatural the union was, but these people were tied together by the libertarianism, by they're hostility to traditional forms of authority.

Intvr how did they're libertarianism come together, can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Andrew Well I think there was a you see it in the Internet is there's this hostility, the Internet itself reflects a hostility towards authority. ÌýSo the Internet is an edge technology, it has no centre, its no coincidence then that it reflects the ideology of the people who invented it, and the people who drove it. ÌýErm I mean technology is simply a reflection of human will. ÌýTechnology isn't accidental, technology just doesn't come about in a vacuum.

Intvr You talk, you said that both the military industrial complex and sort of I guess hippy counter culture, northern California, San Francisco were libertarian, how does the military ..........................?

Andrew Well I think the military industrial complex was obsessed with the cold war, obsessed with hostility towards erm Eastern Europe and towards state socialism. ÌýIts no coincidence that Reagan came out of that, its no coincidence that the hippies themselves were really libertarian, were embracing the free market, its no coincidence that most of the major intellectual figures of the contemporary internet are also free market idealists, or radicals, people like Chris Anderson. So there is an ideological symmetry to what's happening, I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy, I'm not suggesting that a, you know a couple of people from Rand and Lockheed and some long haired fatsos from San Francisco got together in the early 60's and said how are we going to, how are we going to impose our way on the world. ÌýThings in historical terms don't work that simply. ÌýBut I think its very important for people to understand that the Internet, with its absence of a centre, with its obsession with the edge, is not coincidental, it reflects values. ÌýAnd technology can never be detached from values. ÌýTechnology reflects human beings, human beings don't reflect technology.

Intvr But what do you mean about its obsession with the edge?

Andrew Well the idea that there is no centre, I mean when you listen to people like Berners-Lee and all the rest of the crowd, they idealise this notion for the first time in human history, we've created something without a centre, it can't be controlled. ÌýWell the reason we created it is because these people were opposed to the notion of hierarchy and authority. ÌýSo it wasn't an accident. ÌýThey created they're ideological wet dream.

Intvr but you've also said that hierarchy and oligarchy and so on.

Interruption - Andrew laughs

Intvr So how does this fit then, that if they're obsessed with the edge, a kind of web evangelised through they're obsessed with the edge and having they're .................... and they're anti-hierarchical, but you've also talked about the web being marked by hierarchy and oligarchy, how does that fit?

Andrew Well that's a really good question, and it can be summarised again in the nature of the companies, there's reality and there's ideology. ÌýSo when you listen to the, the young mean who run Google, they will spout the ideology about the absence of an edge, they will talk about doing no evil, they will, they will attempt to reform the world in they're image. ÌýThe reality though is they're monopolising the print business, they're putting newspapers out of business, the reality is they hire 747 jets, erm they buy the airports next to they're office and they fly around Africa. ÌýSo the reality, of economics and the ideology erm seem in contradiction, but when you understand, I think, the full history of the Internet it actually makes sense. ÌýNow, again, I'm not saying necessarily that they are hypocrites, I'm simply saying that there are these parallel worlds of the Internet and the way people think. ÌýI'm not suggesting that they're consciously hypocrites or consciously opportunists, but what you have with the internet is a world on the one hand where a lot of young mean, and they tend to be young men, erm, spout off a lot of nonsense in my view, about democratisation, and egalitarianism and the opening up of everything. On the other hand these young men are become infinitely rich and powerful.


Andrew I think what's really interesting erm in terms of the way in which the counter culture has become the culture, and particularly the Madison Avenue erm media culture. ÌýErm the work of cultural critics like Thomas Frank have shown, that the counter culture has become the thing in itself, the thing of value. ÌýAdverts, erm leverage the idea of rebellion of resistance to authority, as a way of selling products. ÌýSo the counter culture has become the heart of capitalism. ÌýAnd erm so its no coincidence that the new Barons of capitalism, the young men in Google and, and Yahoo and My Space and Twitter and Facebook, are also deeply counter cultural.

Intvr So that way is the web rather than being as some people said a levelling equalising force actually just the next stage of capitalism.

Andrew The web as the next stage of capitalism, your beginning to sound like me now, erm, absolutely yeah. ÌýI mean the web is the digital version of capitalism, and social media is the next stage in postindustrial capitalism.

Intvr And why is it the next stage?

Andrew Well it's the, the digital version, it's the way in which industrial production and industrial society is being replaced by the digital, by globalisation, by the virtualisation of production, by all the other features and values and way's of organising that the web is. ÌýSo I think that that's what's most interesting about the Internet, as the next stage in capitalism, as a very pure stage. ÌýErm, erm a reflection of a very pure market capitalism, free market capitalism, hostility towards authority, hostility towards the state, hostility towards external laws and organisations.

Intvr so what would you say to all those people those kind of people sitting there in front of they're laptops, they're computers with these kind of dreams of that somehow they're taking part in this great equalising experiment that everyone's being connected around the world, it's a great new web family that's being created. ÌýWhat would you say to that?

Andrew Well what I say to the people who are sitting in front of they're computers, believing in revolution. ÌýI think I would say the same thing as those people in the 16th and 17th and 18th century who went to church, and who believed in universal redemption, or realisation in heaven. ÌýI believe that they're, that they are subjects or victims of a, of, of false consciousness, that they're wrong. ÌýThat they're believing in something that doesn't really exist, and they're dupes or they're exploited. ÌýParticularly those of them who stupidly give away they're labour for free, so that young men in Silicon Valley can become infinitely rich.

Rushes Sequences - John Perry Barlow interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 14:17 UK time, Friday, 16 October 2009

is a writer, former member of and founding member of the - an organisation dedicated to the defence of freedom of speech.

The Digital Revolution programme one team and presenter Aleks Krotoski met and interviewed John to discuss the history of the internet and the web as part of the 'great levelling' - of free information access and communication across the world.

These rushes sequences are part ofÌýour promise to release contentÌýfrom most of our interviews and some general footage, all underÌýa permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

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What do you think? Does John's sanguine view that 'in a completely open information environment the truth will out' ring true in the information age? Or does the open and immediate communication of the web offer even more danger and damage in terms of Mark Twain's adage 'A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes'?

Your thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated.

------------------------------

Transcript:

John Er, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is, is an organisation that exists and has existed since 1990 to try to assure to humanity the right to know. ÌýI mean which is a, a right that hasn't been previously promulgated because it was a, it was an impossibility. ÌýBut our dream is that anybody anywhere may have access to anything that human beings do with their minds one day. ÌýBecause that you know, that capacity is being given us by the internet and that can change everything er, in a lot of interesting ways.
ÌýBut we want to make certain that, that anybody who's got something to say can say it and anybody who wants to listen can hear. ÌýAnd anybody who doesn't want to listen can ting them out and which is an essential part of your freedom of expression is the right not to, not to listen. Um, and we believe that that can, that can be conveyed by making certain that the architecture of the internet er, is designed in such a fashion so as to be both ubiquitous and, and open.

Intv What are the threats?

John Well the powers that have been of course. ÌýI mean there are a lot of er, you know, outside of, outside of er, raw weaponised force the principle way in which power exerts itself is by creating reality distortion fields around the control of information. ÌýYou know, you don't have to control people much if you can tell, if, if you can control what they believe. ÌýAnd you can control what they believe if you control what they have access to. ÌýIf you can control what they can know the rest of it is a very simple matter.

John The threats to, to the right to know are, are er, are the usual powers that have been who would rather that you didn't know certain things because that's how they control people. ÌýEr, you know, I mean er, that's why for example when the, when Martin Luther er, came along it wasn't just that he nailed some thesis to the door, it was that he came along about the same time as Gutenberg who could give everybody a bible. And suddenly the bible was not something that was, was strictly interpreted by the church you know, ex cathedra, the bible was something that anybody could read and figure out for himself. You know, that, and that changed fundamentally changed the power of the church. ÌýAnd changed the power of all, all social organisation in Europe. ÌýEr, and we just think you know, the human mind has its limitations but we just think that, that humans are more likely to achieve their ultimate purpose whatever that may be if they have the capacity to completely explore the possibility space of what can be known. Er, you know, and I have a, a mystical belief in this and, and, and, and EFF does as well. We want people to have, I mean I'm pro choice, but you can't make a choice unless you have some... I mean all good choices are informed. ÌýNow I, I would grant, I mean I can imagine there are people listening to me say that and, and say well yeah what about all these, what about the new reality distortion fields that, that spin themselves up in the rumour mill of the internet where you get you know, like people who, who are going around claiming that Obama's a Muslim or that he's, he wasn't born in America or you know, any, any number of silly things that get spread around. And, and you know that happens. ÌýBut I, I ultimately think that in a completely open information environment the truth will out.

Intv But at the same time the, the distortion fields are... in order to cope with all that information we seek those things that confirm. ÌýI mean the internet is criticised for its confirmation bias...

John Well sure no, no, no but look I mean what do you think mass media are about? ÌýMass media exist to confirm the, the pre existing beliefs of the masses. ÌýYou're, you're working in one. ÌýI mean how easy is it for you to get a programme, programme on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ that says true things to people that they don't already believe? ÌýYou know, I think you'd have a hard time.

Intv So is the objective to lay it out there and let people find out...

John I just you know, I want it, I want, I want there to be an open smorgasbord and you know, that anybody can, anybody can roam at and, and, and EFF has been, I think remarkably successful in, in maintaining this. ÌýThe, the Electronic Frontier Foundation as an organisation and as a er, you know, as a, a kind of mission that a lot of people just decided to adhere to whether they were members or not, has I think, has been you know, if I died today I would still feel like I did something useful.

Intv At its core it feels as if the, the ownership of ideas is part of what you're fighting for?

John Well see that's, that's, you know, and this is the real, see you can't own free speech. ÌýAnd you know, I, I saw this very early and you know, this was a, actually not an EFF issue, it was something that I identified er, I, I wrote a piece for Wired Magazine in, in '93 which they called The Economy of Ideas. ÌýAnd I recognised that the only reason that copyright had worked was because it was hard to make a book. ÌýAnd that suddenly anything that a human being could do with his or her mind would be infinitely reproducible at zero cost and infinitely distributable. And given that there is a fundamental quality in human nature that likes to share information. ÌýI mean if you think something is, is cool or interesting what's the first thing you want to do with it? ÌýTell everybody you like. ÌýYou know, and if, and if it's not just simply saying I read this great book you should go out and buy it but you can just sort of zap the book right in to the other persons mind practically, you're gong to do that. And you're not going to have much regard for, for copyright. Ìý Er, and so the powers that had been suddenly saw copyright as being a splendid way to control this scary new liberty. ÌýEr, that exerting powerful controls on owned word would be the, would be the real method of clamping down on this, this thing. ÌýYou know, so that, I, I knew was going to be where the push really finally came to shove. ÌýEr, and they, they had a pretty good, good run there at least legally and legislatively. ÌýYou know, they, they managed to win every place where there was an established power. But where they didn't win was where it really counted which is that you know, they were trying to set up technical obstacles to the free flow of information er, usually involving cryptography or something like that and you got a bunch of you know, 55 year old greed heads that are up against you know, 17 year old electronic Hezbollah that they have seriously pissed off by their previous depredations on that community.

What has the Web ever done for us?

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Maggie Philbin | 09:40 UK time, Wednesday, 14 October 2009

( has worked on a wide range of science, medical and technology programmes, but has deep affection forÌý Tomorrow's World, where she demonstrated the firstÌý commercial fax machine, the first digital camera, the first car navigation system , even the first supermarket bar code reader. The web featured on the show in 1994 but, she says, few appreciated then just what that technology would mean.Ìý She has a keen interest inÌý social media and you'll find her on Twitter as . The following post is published with kind permission and represents Maggie's views; this does not necessarily reflect the views of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ or the Digital Revolution production.)

I never imagined the power of the web. In the nineties I surfed the web for hours simply because I could, bought books and music and felt proud of my seventy year old Dad booking flights and ferry tickets and emailing the pen friend he'd had since before the war.

For me, the web had its greatest moment when it saved my Dad's life. When he blacked out and drove his car into a ditch, my sister and I, alarmed by the hospital's decision to send him home without treatment, went straight on the web. So, we 'knew ' he had a heart condition, that blackouts would recur, fatal if ignored, but that there was a good prognosis with a pacemaker. We made sure he was never left alone and Mum knew to call an ambulance instantly. Three days later that ambulance was called, he had emergency surgery, got his pacemaker and is still going strong. And yes, I know the web has also spawned hypochondria and that medics find our amateur diagnostics infuriating. But hey, it saved my Dad.

We all have our own stories of how access to the right information at the right time made a real difference.

The power of the web now lies in its conversations. Twitter allows you to tell me about your life in Iran, the plane landing on the river outside your office or your row with the gas board. We talk - others eavesdrop. The successful petition for an apology to was amplified across social networks. "Chat" on Twitter about the neglected WW2 veterans and buildings of has also led to curiosity about their work and a significant increase in visitor numbers. It may even have played a part in their successful application for . You'll have more examples.

I can talk to government minsters, to scientists I admire and to witty strangers. My interest is technology and I know my peripheral knowledge has improved. The same would apply if I were a beekeeper, a footballer or a cardiac surgeon. If we choose we can be more aware.

That also applies to modern business practice.

If you're an airline whose baggage handlers damaged a guitar and most significantly were slow to offer compensation, then I can enjoy. It had 2,000 views when I first saw it. I've just checked and it now has 5,709,097.

Many of my virtual connections have become real life ones, professionally and socially. I've found collaborators for work projects and people who share my passion for food and film.
My generation grew up in an era where most conversations were one-to-one and private. Some conversations are now one -to -many and even one to one conversations are public. My daughter is 21 and she's grown up communicating as a group. Only time will tell how this will really affect her way of thinking.

So what's the most significant thing the web has done for you?
Ìý

Stephen Fry on your attempts to re-name the Digital Revolution series

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 09:00 UK time, Monday, 12 October 2009

Wordsmith, wit and irrepressible technophile, Stephen Fry, launched the quest to name the TV series that Digital Revolution (working title) will eventually become in 2010, with a request to his Twitter followers to help us crowdsource or namestorm a title for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two programmes, using the .

Joined by our presenter, , also took the time to consider a few of the titles we had already come up with in previous naming sessions, and muse upon the suggestions that streamed in from the in response to his call to action that morning.

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As Stephen's impassioned appeal makes clear, our series still languishes without a name. A working title, Digital Revolution - yes - but, mere overalls, fine for this stage of the production, where the paint's flying, but when the programme launches in 2010, we'd like a name to suit the series better - a tux of a title, if you will.

We have been flooded with ideas so far. You can see all of the titles suggested by searching for the hash tag ; you can also see the names that were longlisted as contenders via our . Of these, our favourites (though not necessarily final shortlisters) are:






How the web was spun - already ours, but favoured by Fry and Aleks, so still in play
How the world was shrunk

The World Mind





We also had a curious affection for '1% useful' - an adaptation of .

Series Producer, Russell Barnes, has some guidance regards directions and themes of thinking of further names:

  • Universal / galaxy / planetary - our graphics for the series are more and more visualising the web as a galaxy of planets and stars, so a name such as 'The brain the size of a planet' or 2010: A Web Odyssey has some legs for us.
  • Historical paradigm shifts, such as Age of Dreams or Civilisation +
  • Epic / biblical ideas, such as How the web was Spun, or Let There Be Links

So that's the story so far. An enormous response, for which we're incredibly grateful, and some really nice points of connection for us, ideas worth pursuing. But we don't think we're there yet. So please, please keep the suggestions coming - either to with the hash tag or as replies to this blog.

To reiterate the terms of the Digital Revolution namestorm: this is not a competition, nor is it a vote. We are looking for suggestions from which the production team will choose a longlist (deadline 15 November 2009). The series producer and executive producer will take a shortlist of six names to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two, and they will choose at least three of these from the longlist of your names. The final decision will be made by the ´óÏó´«Ã½.

Rushes Sequences - Dr David Runciman interview - London (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 15:22 UK time, Friday, 9 October 2009

is a University Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Trinity Hall College, Cambridge. We interviewed him for his insights into how the web plays into world politics - the critical theme for programme 2. He talks about the extraordinary access to information that the web brings, co-existing with a system in which elites continue to rule the roost.

Watch the video or read the transcript below. Do you agree with David Runciman's view that the recent news from Iran was 'a kind of emblematic internet revolution not just because it fizzled out ... but what you had ... wasn't political it was social... one got the feeling that the real politics was happening elsewhere'? Let us know what you think about this and Dr. Runciman's other thoughts.

Click here if you want to embed or download this rushes sequence.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

These rushes sequences are part of our promise to release content from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under a permissive licence for you to embed or download and re-edit.

This is one of several general 'talking head' interviews that were filmed on September 15th. The interviewer was Series Producer Russell Barnes.

Transcript:

David Runciman:ÌýÌýÌý I think the web threatens the nations state with irrelevance, it threatens to give people a resource to communicate with each other to inform each other, to entertain each other that can bypass nation states c, cross an, national boundaries and level this is the perceived fear leave national politicians floundering always trying to keep up. It's that kind of threat it's not a rival to state power but it does threaten to bypass state power.

Intvr:ÌýÌý ÌýÌý It does create communities of identity with a separate identity, it's an allegiance if you like to the an, to the state is that in a sense what, the web is doing the web is kind of not .......... there aren't countries on the web what there are are different communities that have a live of their own outside the nation state?

David Runciman:ÌýÌý ÌýI think there are, I think there are multiple communities out there but the difference between those communities and national communities is that they are, their, sorry going to use a pretentious word there, evanescent they, they're short lived their superficial nothing that the web has produced can rival the kind of depth of identity that nation states have produced over time. The other feature of web communities is that they're simply are so many of them, there is so much choice, nation states don't provide their citizens with a choice, nation states are compulsory organisations you have to belong to at least one and only one. Web communities you can move in you can move out you can belong to all sorts of different ones at different times. If you tire of them you're gone and that kind of community doesn't have any of the hold that nation states have over their citizens and that means so far there's no evidence they can rival that hold.

Intvr:ÌýÌý ÌýHow do you think you nation states are responding to the threat of irrelevance proposed by you know.

David Runciman:ÌýÌý ÌýWell I think where politics makes nation states very anxious I think the main reason that states are anxious is because we politics is primarily negative.Ìý It's this whole world out there of complaint of anxiety, criticism reaches states much faster and it produces this kind of fire fighting response. What states tend to do in the face of the web, is try and put out the fires, the scandals the criticisms the complaints. I don't think that states have found in the web anything that makes them fear that they're power is being threatened by an equal. So what states tend to do I think is see the web as this giant irritation and it's something that they have to deal with and they're always looking for the resources to deal with it. but what they're not doing I think is seeing the web as something that they have to compete with on it's own terms.

Intvr:ÌýÌý ÌýChina is an interesting example in China you've got the irritation factor, censorship, use of the web for that but there's also the sense they are engaging the web an interesting line because they're engaging nationalists are, being encouraged I, know this but it seems likely that national scripts are 50% down on the blog. Tell us a bit what you think the Chinese are doing playing the game of the web.

David Runciman:ÌýÌý ÌýYeah I think the Chinese have noticed that the web is this, potential threat and it's also this potential resource and so far the threat hasn't really been realised and therefore what you have in the web is something that can fight fire with fire.Ìý I think what the Chinese government have noticed is that the kinds of uprising of complaint of anxiety also these little loyalties that are being created can be channelled just as easily by national politicians as against national politicians.Ìý The National politicians have the huge added advantage that they have already centralised the power. Web complaints against nation states have to cross that barrier they have to somehow pool their resources, pool all of this complaint together nation states have already got the centralised institutions. So if they can harness some of this energy some of the dynamism they maybe have the advantage.

Intvr:ÌýÌý ÌýJust going over this Iran do you think that was it us getting excited?

David Runciman:ÌýÌý ÌýWell it's early days but that looked to meÌý like a kind of emblematic internet revolution not just because it fizzled out and it looks like for now that it has fizzled out but what you had on the one hand was this kind of social networking dynamic explosion of anger and popular discontent, but it was a socially networked phenomenon it wasn't political it was social.Ìý It did get channelled through gossip sites it got channelled through face book it got channelled though slogans and then one got the feeling that the real politics was happening elsewhere. Iranian politics is still and incredibly elite business a small group of clerics who've known each other and been fighting each other for 20 or 30 years, were carrying on playing out the real game of politics far away from any of this and the connection was never made that's the one thing that's missing with this kind of internet politics. The connection between this incredibly dynamic but essentially social form of politics which is individuals communicating with, with the other individuals sharing their feelings their emotions. And elite politics which if anything is narrower more closed off and harder to access than it ever was. And that gap is still there. nothing about the web has closed it, so far.

Intvr:ÌýÌý ÌýTell me more about the web has created it's a western democracy has the web created an information overload of changing news the elites running the counties are more immune to pressure?

David Runciman:ÌýÌý ÌýWell there's much more information out thereÌý are many more distractions. The web is a huge diversion from all sorts of central political activities and the evidence I think of the last 20 years is that while the web has democratised all sorts of aspects of our lives, it's democratic celebrities as a easier and quicker to become a celebrity people have much more access to sites to express their opinion anyone can have a blog. Politics in the west, has become less democratic, the elite have become narrower. It's husband and wife teams it's Bill and Hillary it's the Milliband brothers you find that people who were at university together 20 years ago are now sharing power in Washington or in London. So there's a narrowing of political elites at the same time as there's this huge democratisation of all sorts of other aspects of our lives.Ìý Is the web responsible for this, no but is the web, the kind of distraction, creator of endless diversions huge amounts of different stories fast turnover of news that makes it easier for the politicians just to carry on with that private games yes.

IntvrÌýÌý ÌýExample Gordon Brown as being about to resign or cut out three or four times in the last year? Is that a specific example, where people are clinging onto power.

David Runciman: Well I think the best example actually is Berlusconi. Silvia Berlusconi is the kind of politician that the web should have swept away. He's an old style media magnate, his business is based on newspapers and TV these are the, the old media and he's still there and he's still there despite a constant rumble of scandal. How can he still be there I think two reasons, first because the scandals flare up and then they die away there are too many of them, there are too many sources where you can see the pictures of the girls at his villa there's no focus for it, and then the other reason is that elite politics has carried on regardless. It matters who you know there are these contacts that determine who remains in power that are impervious to this kind of pressure and Berlusconi is the master of that. So you have a politician who seems to have been finished for the last 10 years an old man awash with scandal clinging onto power in the age of the web.

Rushes Sequences - Howard Rheingold interview - USA (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 12:15 UK time, Friday, 9 October 2009

is a writer, teacher and commentator on modern communications technologies, such as the web, and originator of the term ''.

This is a sequence from Digital Revolution presenter Aleks Krotoski's interview with Howard as part of programme one's filming in the USA.

Please do comment here, with your thoughts on what Howard says. This interview will be edited into our programme; all insights will be helpful.

Click here if you want to embed or download this rushes sequence.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

These rushes sequences are part of our promise to release content from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under a permissive licence for you to embed or download and re-edit.

Transcript:


Aleks:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý What is a virtual community Howard?

Howard:ÌýÌýÌý Well when I came up with the term it was 1987, and the emphasis was really on community rather than the virtual part, because people were asking me whether anyone besides some, some kind of maybe anti-social electrical engineer would be interested in using computers to communicate with people.Ìý And I was very excited, because what I had discovered on bulletin board systems and ultimately the well we're real people who became part of my life,
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý in fact babysat for my daughter, I was at they're weddings I went to they're funerals, I sat by they're deathbeds.Ìý Anything that you do in a real community was happening with this group of people, and I wanted to get the word out that even though we met through computers, we're real people and our relationships are real.

Aleks:ÌýÌýÌý That was a very important part of the well, this notion, this idea that erm it was a localised environment, a localised community, how important was that face-to-face contact for the development of this community?

Howard:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý I think fortunately for the development of that community it was originally quite local, because you had to make a local phone call through an ancient technology known as a modem.Ìý There was not an internet then, so people in the San Francisco Bay area, within lets say an hours drive of the office where the computer was, eventually began getting together, and that was I think very im, important in the development of the sense of community among those people but also on line.Ìý And eventually of course it included many people from
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý many parts of the world who weren't in the San Francisco Bay area, but that sense of, of knowing people, and having some kind of significant relationship that could translate to the physical world, I don't like to say real world, because its real, on-line for a lot of people.Ìý But that really translated over the years to people who weren't part of that original group, or in the San Francisco Bay area.

Aleks:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý There are critics of on-line communities of even you know relationships via Facebook and all these, these types of contemporary on-line relationships.Ìý And can you describe why an on-line community can be conceived of as a community?

Howard:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Well first of all I think its always important to think critically about our technologies and our enthusiasms.Ìý And there are some serious questions to ask about on-line relationships.Ìý But, there have been many instances in which there are, are people, for different reasons, they're sick, or they're, they're in a scary part of town where they don't want to leave they're apartment at night.Ìý Or maybe they're older and they don't get around that much.Ìý Or like myself, and many others, I work at home, where am I going to get my relationships and I go, go to a bar or a coffee house or, or do I log on
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý line, so not everybody has that kind of old village, small town, everybody knows your name, physical community.Ìý And in fact the more I've looked into it the more I've seen, you need to think critically about those kinds of communities as well.Ìý We have cities full of people who left those kinds of communities because they didn't think the way everybody else did in those communities.Ìý So I think its great
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý to have a place where your grandparents knew they're grandparents, and everybody knows your name and we need to preserve those communities.Ìý But lets not idealise that as the only form of community.Ìý I think we're at the point in history now where more people are living in cities than are not living in cities and you can have communities in London and New York, these places that a lot of people characterise as being big
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý soulless, heartless places where nobody knows each other, it sounds like the Internet doesn't it.Ìý But you find a block, you find a pub, you find a place where people have real connection with each other.Ìý So I don't think we should be so quick to judge what's a real community and what's not, we need to look at the reality and the authenticity of the relationships.

Aleks:ÌýÌýÌý This notion you know you say London, New York, you've got these trans-national communities, these on-line environments where people gather.Ìý Can you talk about this idea of belonging, you know it seems to be a very important element people identify or even have an allegiance with something that isn't physically set, its not based in the physical world?

Howard:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Well you know people look at me and I dress a little unusually and they think oh you must be from California.Ìý Of course people in California think oh you must be from, from Mars, so you know your next-door neighbour is not necessarily the person that you are going to make a connection with.Ìý In fact the person you make a connection with might be on the other side of the world, and while that's not true of everybody, certainly for me, and I bet its true for you, there are very few places in the world where I can go and not
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý get at least one and maybe 15 people to show up for lunch, or, or dinner, and they're, the conversation starts immediately because we know that we share some things in common.Ìý So does it matter that your Slovenian, and I'm American, what matters is that we have this shared interest.Ìý In fact when I first started travelling about this was erm during a brief period when I worked for Wired Magazine, I had a little wired hat on.Ìý It didn't matter whether they spoke English or not, there
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý were people who identified more with me than with they're neighbours, with they're parents, with they're peers, erm even though we may not have even spoken the same language, they knew UNIX, they knew Photo Shop, they knew communicating on line.Ìý We had a shared culture, and that culture has really emerged from our use of digital technologies, and our use of those technologies not only to connect with other people but to create.Ìý So, creativity, learning, connection what's so
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý wrong with that, is that, is that less real than the fact that my grandparents came from the same village that your grandparents did, or that we worship at the same church or our skin is the same colour.Ìý So again I would not be so quick to judge.

Aleks:ÌýÌýÌý You bring up some very interesting questions about the notion of identity, and about the notion of, as we were saying allegiance.Ìý What implications do virtual communities and this idea of belonging to a trans-national community have for the traditional nation states?

Howard:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Well I think its important to recognise that at the same infrastructure of this wiring up of the world, of the digitalisation of everything, down to the bar codes that, that track the way physical goods move.Ìý It's the same infrastructure that supports this virtual community business, but it's also the same infrastructure that has created globalisation, economic globalisation.Ìý The fact that there are people in, in India who answer the phone when you make a support phone call.Ìý The fact that an automobile is manufactured in 17
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý different countries.Ìý The fact that China can control the mobile phone industry if it wants to because there's certain erm rare elements that, that are exported from there.Ìý This interconnection erm on an economic level and the fact of course that we've got nuclear weapons and we've got a world in which conflict is no longer easily localised.Ìý I think these things are all connected, it a cliché to say that we're in this global village.
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Its not a global village but we're in a highly interconnected globe.Ìý And I think if we're going to be interconnected financially to the point where when banks fail in one country they fail in another country, or whether there's a conflict in the Middle East that's going to result in mayhem elsewhere in the world.Ìý That ordinary citizens being able to communicate with each other is important.
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý And I'm not saying that world peace is going to break out, but I, I think that it's an important part of what we're learning.Ìý We're learning how to live together on the planet and if we don't learn that, then we're not going to.

Aleks:ÌýÌýÌý Are they challenging the traditional notion of a national sovereignty, an identity that is fixed on the United States of America, I'm American or Great Britain, I am British.Ìý Do you think that virtual communities will have an impact on those traditional concepts of belonging to, to nations?

Howard:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Well I think its pretty clear that a lot of people can make they're money on the other side of a border.Ìý In fact in the U.S. there are many people who emigrate here from south of the border and send money home, and then there are many, many places in Central America and South America in which the chief source of income are people working in the U.S., sending they're, they're money back, so that we're, we're very, I'm sorry.Ìý What was the question again?

Aleks:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Well the question was do you feel that the virtual community, do you feel that the virtual community will challenge the notion of belonging to a particular nation?

Howard:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý So economically, clearly there's a lot of trans-border business, and, and culturally people are communicating across borders.Ìý Why do we need nation states, as far as I can tell, I'd rather have a nation state controlling erm weapons of mass destruction than erm a smaller unit.Ìý And you de, do need something equivalent to a state to do things
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý like Public Health, if you've got this global flue epidemic then you need some kind of erm trans-community authority to enable that to happen.Ìý But those two things aside, why do we need nations.Ìý Now
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý I'm in erm the U.S., and when people make generalisations about America, I say well do you mean rural Maine, or do you mean downtown Dallas, do you mean Arkansas, Northern California, Southern California.Ìý If I was to say Europe you would have to say do you mean Oslo, or do you mean Milan, so we have these categories that made sense in the 19th Century and now we're living in the 21st Century and there are a great many things, I think, that we can do either very locally, like
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý food, or tans-nationally, as we're doing with culture and, and education.

Aleks:ÌýÌýÌý How did people develop a sense of community on-line?

Howard:ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý You know you asked about nation states, and the nation state and the on-line community have something in common, which is that they're imaginary.Ìý And that we have an image that there is some abstraction or some entity that we belong to and others belong to.Ìý Of course I didn't invent this, there's a book called imagine communities, before the Internet he was talking about nations.Ìý And you know newspapers have a great deal to do with that, everybody would get up and see the same headlines in the morning and you would travel around, with people
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý who are very different from you, but you were of that nation because you all read the same headlines that day.ÌýÌý Of course newspapers are going away and where are we going to get that sense.Ìý So many of the things that have caused us to have a sense of coherence about nationality, I think are disappearing.Ìý And of course nationality and ethnicity used to be, in many places, very similar, in the U.K., in the U.S., we have people from a lot of different parts
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý of the world.Ìý But other places that, that like the Scandinavian countries that used to have pretty much the same ethnicity are now, because of, because they don't have enough young people and labour force they're importing people from other ethnic groups, they are beginning to have the, the kind of multiplicity and, and richness and conflict that, that we have in these kind of heterogeneous nations.Ìý So a na, a nation state that's very
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý heterogeneous and is trying to maintain democracy is really seething with conflict, and sometimes it's a very bad thing, but maybe if your talking about democracy that's a good thing.Ìý If you all believe the same way, you're all from the same group, its I think easy to demonise the other.Ìý I don't think that there are easy answers to these questions, I think that we have a lot of pressures on the nation state and there's some very good reasons why the nation state ought to change, or many of the things that we do ought to be done at a different level.Ìý But I also think there are some really important questions about what happens when the controls, over the
ÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý the threats to democracy, or who has the nuclear weapons in the U.S., or France or Pakistan, that, that erm evolve to the, to requiring a strong central nation state.Ìý And of course, if you can have nuclear power, and Stewart Brand among others makes the argument that if we're going to get through the next 50 years we can worry about the next 500,000 years later, we need to build nuclear plants, I think you do need a strong central government of some kind if your going to have that kind of danger in people's communities.

Inspiration wanted: help us name the series #bbcnamestorm

Post categories:

Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 09:50 UK time, Tuesday, 6 October 2009

Can you come up with a better title for the series than 'Digital Revolution'?

certainly hopes so, as Ìýto join the #bbcnamestormÌýthis morning:

stephenfry_tweet.jpg
You may have noticed that our website refers to the production as 'Digital Revolution (working title)'. This is because we have yet to decide upon a name for the series that will go out on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two in early 2010.

In the continuing spirit of the open production, we thought we should give our users the opportunity to offer their own opinions as to the name of the series - and join us in a massive, open brainstorm or 'namestorm'Ìýfor the series. This is a documentary that seeks to chart the course of the 20 years of the and the remarkable changes it has brought to our lives:Ìý

So, what would you call the series?

What's wrong with the name Digital Revolution? Well, we don't feel that it sums up the power and excitement of the web. It sounds too much like something that might have begun in the 1940s; too much like a make of electronic stopwatch.

The production team has already come up with some ideas for potential titles, a list of which I've provided below to give you an idea of the ground we have travelled.

Please give us your suggestions for the series title as comments below (or via Twitter to using the hash tag #bbcnamestorm) and we'll add them to our list for consideration. We'll regularly update you on the current front runners and favourites to help keep the process moving.

Names that have come close:

.Revolution
The revolution Machine
Only Connect: the Web Revolution
Civilisation Rebooted
Hope, Hype and Hyperlinks
The Revolution Logs On
World Without Walls
A World Connected
The Electric Enlightenment
How the Web Changed the World

Names that haven't:

How the Web was Spun
Clickstream
Generation Web
The Battle for the Web
Wild Wild Web
Spinning the Web
The WWW. Revolution
World Wide Revolution
i-world
Viral
Viral World
The Connected Society
Age of Viral
Exponential
The Day the World went Viral
The Web that spins the World
i-life
Life in the Download
Cyber Reality
Web Heads
All Webbed Up and Nowhere to go
World Wide Web-olution
The New Web Order
Tangled: a new history of the Web
The Revolution will be HyperlinkedÌý
Connections and Chaos
The Crowd Connected
The Power of Connection
World in Overdrive
The World is Out There
Connection, crowds and control. Ìý
Raging WebÌý
The Pandora MachineÌý
High WiredÌý
Magic at your Fingertips
Opening the Machine
Keys to the World
Wizards of the Web
Caught in the Web
Paradise RebootedÌý
You, me and the Machine
Beyond the click

You can see where we've been from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again. Sparking any ideas?Ìý

Let the namestorm begin.

PLEASE NOTE: this is not a competition, nor is it a vote. We are looking for suggestions from which the production team will choose a longlist (deadline 15 November 2009). The series producer and executive producer will take a shortlist of six names to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two, and they will choose at least three of these from the longlist of your names. The final decision will be made by the ´óÏó´«Ã½.

Many thanks for your suggestions.

Rushes Sequences - Tim Berners-Lee interview - London (Video)

Post categories: ,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý

Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 18:50 UK time, Monday, 5 October 2009

invented the web, 20 years ago. Since then he's been at the forefront of efforts to create web standards, that mean we have one web worldwide. He's also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, which strives for more widespread use of the web globally.

There are two rushes sequences here. The first mainly covers questions about how people think when using the web, and the 'spirit of the web'. The second mainly covers questions about the impact of the web on nation states, and web censorship. The full transcripts of both videos are at the end of this blog post.

This is one of several general 'talking head' interviews that were filmed on September 15th. The interviewer was Series Producer Russell Barnes.

These rushes sequences are part of our promise to release content from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under a permissive licence for you to embed or download and re-edit.

And please do comment here with your thoughts on what Sir Tim says. These interviews will be edited into our programme; all insights will be helpful.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.


In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.


Transcript of Clip 1

Intv: Do you think that generations growing up, the new generation growing up with the web, think differently from other generations?

Tim Berners-Lee: Well it's clear that even people who have, like me, who started off without the web and now use it, work differently. When we want to think of something we tend to often just reach for the keyboard, because we have assumed that we can find stuff. Now people say, I don't know, but the people that-, they've measured that people are not remembering so much. I don't know, but I know that the way I work very often assumes that I can go for my computer helper, for my web, as a helper,
the web is an extension of my brain er when I'm roaming. So my little interface to the web is too expensive to use, I feel as though suddenly I've got one hand tied behind my back, because the usual sort of instinctive reaction to whip it out, I have to hold back and try
to actually think things out.

Intv: Do you think social networking is irrevocably changing our relationships, one with another? That that is almost a logical progression from what the web is about, in a way? That it's about connecting and this is actually going to change human relationships?

Tim Berners-Lee: I think the web's about a lot of things. The web is about, you know, it's connecting humanity, alright, the web is humanity connected. That includes a lot of things, and friends is one of them. I think the social networking systems we have at the moment are, in a way, in their infancy. Typically they allow you to
deal with the concept of a friend, and a photograph, and whether a friend is in a photo, and where I'm going, but in fact my life is much more complex than just having a set of friends. I have all kinds of groups er I want to share different things with er different people. I want to go through different sorts of social protocols that you might
do on the web, like figuring out where to meet, I will do with business colleagues. And figuring out whether er what sort of film would be good for me to watch, I will do with my friends perhaps. There are all kinds of different things that I do in different cases. I think that we'll end up with much more complicated things, don't know whether we'd still call them social networking, but our interactions, as we interact through the web, I think will include more and more things called social machines. Things where
er just like booking a meeting room er or organising a trip, or building a photograph album er or, for that matter, reviewing a scientific paper and deciding which one should be published. Things where people are doing the work, but the machinery of the web is allowing them to work, is actually doing the administration of linking together into a bigger machine.

Intv: As we look at things like climate change and sort of big challenges, do you think the web is, in its ability to share knowledge and find answers through sharing knowledge, is going to be one of the great ways in which we can combat, you know, these big problems facing humanity?

Tim Berners-Lee: I don't think it's going to be sufficient, but I think it's going to be essential. I think for these huge problems that we have in medical fields, trying to understand the brain, understand Alzheimer's, understand cancer er the huge problem of understanding the planet. Here we have this planet, we know it's in trouble, we know it's sick. We really have got so much information about it we have to put together, we have to understand it, we have to then model it, understand how it will change, what things we do will do to it in a long term. So,
yes, that's a huge amount of information, it's a huge amount of data. It's also a huge amount of stuff in people's heads that they may not have put down. Ideas that they might have about how things interact. I think we're going to need the power of networking all that data together into a web of data, certainly, in order to be able
to solve those problems.

Intv: Talk to me a bit about the semantic web then, what is the ability, in essence, what is the semantic web, or the link data web, and what is its potential?

Tim Berners-Lee: Simply that the web of link data is the web which has got on it all the things on your computer which are data rather than documents. So a document is something, you write a letter to your friend, but your calendar is data. So, different thing about data, when you look at the calendar data you don't read the data itself, you look at a day view or you look at a week view, or month view, you can take all the calendars of your friends and smoosh them together so that you've got them on the same day. You can ask the
calendar to work things out, like when will all your friends be available to go and have lunch. You can put onto the calendar information which is-, other information which is public. All kinds of things er when groups are playing near you, football. When you're doing that, you are taking
data together and you're manipulating it, and you're looking at it from different views. That's the sort of thing you can do with
data. Now, most of the data which is out there on the web isn't there so you can do things with it. I can't pull it into calendar, I can't pull it into a spreadsheet. I can't look at it on a timeline. If I'm a geneticist I can't look at it using the tools that geneticists use to look at genetic material, because it's been published in a paper. It's there as a pdf file, so I can print it, but I can't do things with it, I
can't analyse it. So I think it's a big frustration to scientists, but it's a big frustration also to business people who want to plan their days. In fact it turns out that when you look at all the different sorts of data there's a huge amount of it, and what's really valuable is the way it connects together. So it's not just that I want to look at a particular meeting, it's that I want to look at the person who's organising it and I want to look at-, I want to go to the information about the
organisation that they're running, and I want to find out what's its market cap, where is it, where is it invested? Or in which countries is it invested, which sorts of government do they have? Let's look at that government, when was it elected, who runs it? Where did he come from, where did he go to school, what sort of a school is it?
Now, just as you're surfing the web, you can surf through all the data, but the difference with data is that when you've found an interesting pattern, like oh, I found that somebody-, I found that all the members of the board went to the same school. The web of data it'll show me all the companies I'm dealing with, where all the members of the board went to the same school. It's a query to a database,
just looking at all the data out there, if it were available I'd be able to ask all kinds of questions which nobody had asked before, and getting answers back in a very much more powerful way. So, the link data web is in a way more powerful than the web when it comes to being analysed and re-used.

Intv: What's the spirit of the web?

Tim Berners-Lee: The spirit of the web. The spirit of the web, the beginning, was of people working as it were under the bed [clothes] with the light on. People working after the other people had gone home, and installing a web server and setting an email saying 'Oh, by the way, at the end of the work day I installed this web server, I put some photographs on it, hope you like it.' Or 'I put up all our documentation in the web form, just in case you're interested
in it.' Er most of these people did it because they thought it was a good idea at the time, and of course we do lots of things because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and a lot of them turn out to be a terrible idea a bit later. So it's worth celebrating the ones where actually it was a good idea, I think. So the spirit is partly if-,
if everybody did this, this will be really cool, and there's some people who will, when there's something like that, that if everybody did it, it will be really cool, they'll do it. So those people are the people who kick off these network-based things. But things which are networks, which are where everything's connected, like the telephones. As Bob [Macroff] pointed out that, when you sell the first
telephone it's difficult because you can't phone anybody with it. The value of one piece depends on how much else there is there. So people looked at the web and thought, 'Oo, if there was a lot of global hypertext out there it'll be really neat, so I will put some out there anyway.' And right now with data it's the same thing, people are saying, 'Well, there's not a huge
amount of data out there, but the bit that's out there is really neat, and if there was lots out there it will be great, so I'm going to put my bit out there.'

Intv: Do you think the web says something very positive about human nature?

Tim Berners-Lee: The human nature that I came across from the work from the early web developers, it was very open, very giving, people very much working together, encouraging each other. Very much full of excitement, getting a kick out of making things work, and very much out of making things work together. I think the collaborative spirit of it was a driver for most of the people, even though they worked by themselves sometimes, because the nearest sort of web enthusiast may have been hundreds of miles away er they were connected up over the network. And I think the fact that they were
connected up through email lists initially and of course the early websites um I think probably was a very important part of it.

Intv: Do you feel that the web is really a reflection of who we are?

Tim Berners-Lee: From the technical point of view the web is supposed to be a blank sheet of paper. The web itself is not supposed to predispose anybody to use it for one particular subject or for one particular type of material. It's not suppose to really-, it doesn't predispose even to do good stuff. You can put up a bad website, or page, or terrible, or brilliant web page. It's just like the white piece of paper. So when we look out there and we see what a lot of
wonderful stuff there is and what a lot of junk there is, yes, we have ourselves to blame, this is humanity, this is how humanity is. There's lots of wonderful stuff andÌý a lot of junk happening, some of the junk aspiring to be wonderful stuff. Um often the question of what's wonderful and what's junk is clearly
defined by science. Sometimes, often, what's wonderful and what's not is extremely subjective when it comes to music and art. So, when you look out there we've got only ourselves to blame for what's out there. If you look out there and you think that there's an area of the web where really it could be a lot better, well, go and make it better. Go and make a better website. Go and write a better essay. Go and make some better sets of links to more
useful material. It's always put the challenge out there. So when somebody complains about it I point out two things; you don't have to read the junk, you can restrict yourself to reading the things that you like, and you can always contribute. So I think it's really important, the technology of the
web, and the way the web is run by society allows people to go out and contribute, and to go fix it and make it better.

Transcript of Clip 2

Intv: How would you [characterise] the effect of the web on nation states? You know, western democracies on one hand, but then authoritarian regimes like China and perhaps Iran on another?

TimWell the web naturally, as a technology, tends to lead to openness. It makes openness easy and closedness more difficult. So one of the nice things has been where we've seen that countries that tend to be rather closed and where information flow was not very good, have used the internet in fact, to open up. It's unfortunate when we find a
country where there has been a very strong clampdown. My feeling is that there is, maybe independent of the internet, an inexorable movement
towards openness. That as people learn more about other countries, as people learn more about the world, then they demand more. They connect more and they push back against the borders. And once you've allowed
openness it's very difficult to push it back. So I hope that there will be a general move towards openness and each country bit by bit will become open and-, when it comes to information, and therefore become
a better base for an informed electorate and an informed democracy.

Intv: When you were developing the web, did you think about, I suppose, this idea-, it is fundamentally a globalising force, a trans-national force. It allows communities, or people, to connect across borders. Countries aren't on the web, individuals are, and individual websites and communities are built from those websites. Is that something that you were intrigued by when you were thinking about the web and developing it?

TimCertainly the fact that the web breaks down those geographical boundaries is really interesting, and it's not clear that the effect of that has at all, really, come to er come to full fruition. We've seen, yes, people will chat to people in other countries er they find it difficult to do that across
time zones maybe, but you get-, certainly there are strong
communities which are international. But still, a lot of things are still geographical. Now imagine that you are part of a town, you're in a
school, you're in a town, you're er in a region and you're in a country and you're in a continent. Now imagine though that everybody picked those randomly, they would be in one continent, they would deal with affairs of a different continent, and a country which was not in that continent, and they would deal with another region which was not in either of those, and a town which was not in any of those and then they would go to a school which was not in any of the above. Can you
imagine then they'd have a very different view of the world er and we don't have anything like that amount of sort of twistedness about the way we connect. So we've got the ability to connect to people in the world, just as, you know, a town has got the ability to twin with another town. But it takes a lot of energy. Maybe it takes um the brain learning
how to do it, I don't know. Maybe it's something which people are really not that much suited for. They find it exciting to have a certain amount of contact outside the local area, but also, they're comfortable with people that they meet locally and, in fact, to a certain extent, they find life easier when all their circles of interest are nicely nested one
inside each other, with home in the middle.

Intv: Do you think censorship is ever justified? Web censorship.

TimDo I think web censor-, I think that there are always illegal-, there are things which are illegal, like child pornography, incitement to violence, there are things which our society has decided should be made illegal, and those are illegal whether they happen on the web or not. So when those-, when that sort of thing happens, then I think it's reasonable for authorities to take
force, to use force to stop people doing things, to block information which is really er which has crossed that boundary, which has crossed the boundary into the criminal. Society continually reviews, using the existing systems er reviews that boundary between what is just horrible but stuff that we tolerate er for free speech, and stuff where we draw the line and we say no. Free speech or no free speech, that is too horrible to allow, or it's too
dangerous to allow. We continually have to adjust that boundary.ÌýÌýÌý

Intv: Are you worried that sometimes the web sometimes allows cranks to speak under [pranks] in a sense in which it can balkanise communities as well as bring people together? Is that something that has bothered you as you've watched the web develop?

Tim Berneres-Lee: Well there are these two concerns, and they're really opposite, and they're both [strongly] strongly expressed. So one of them is the balkanisation problem. Isn't it true that people who belong to a particular cult can set up their email so that they can only get email from other people in the cult, and when they go to a website the website only links to other websites which believe the strange things that these people behave? And don't you then get people who end up sitting just by their computers,
communicating in such a way that when they meet-, they come out of the cellar and meet somebody in the street, the only thing in common with them is-, they have nothing in common, the only way they can communicate with them is to shoot
them? No, that is one vision of a horrible cultural pothole. Then the other frightening vision is, isn't it true that once everybody can communicate with everything, then everybody will end up just going to the same website? Won't everybody just go to this great, big McDonald's culture, which will hand us out the music we'll all watch and the art we'll all appreciate, and the language which we'll all start speaking, which will lose a huge number of long words and it'll become very simple? Won't we all-, when all the teams of the world end up speaking the same language over
the internet and end up growing up to be adults who have actually no culture at all? So that is the extreme of the mono-culture, the fright that we'll all just be one bland very, very broad culture and then the contrast, of course, with the worry that we're going to be a bunch of very narrow ones. Now, I think, in fact, the wonderful thing is that people naturally avoid those very much. If you find yourself in
too bland a culture you go and spend some time with a smaller group. If you spend too much time in a small group, oo, you get out and do something and, you know, and read a newspaper about the world. So, and in fact of course we're involved in all kinds of things at a national level, the city level, in groups and schools and so on. So in fact, all these different scales, or different size of community which we're involved in, I think people naturally need to be involved in
different scales. They need to spend some time by themselves, sometime worrying about the planet, but also of everything in between, because people have that natural tendency to get involved in lots of different communities. So, they tie individual communities together. You've heard of act locally, think globally? Well, there's also act globally, think locally. There's act nationally, think globally. There's
all these combinations, and because people are doing that, they're acting in one domain but they're thinking about another size of community while they're doing it, because of this overlap, I think people naturally steer us away from each of these horrible extremes, toward a big tangled up, very complex but wonderful mess of entangled humanity.


Rushes Sequences - Charles Leadbeater interview - London (Video)

Post categories: ,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý,Ìý

Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 18:39 UK time, Monday, 5 October 2009

is a British author and former government advisor, who has written widely on the impact of the social web.

This is one of several general 'talking head' interviews that were filmed on September 15th. The interviewer was Series Producer Russell Barnes.

Click here if you want to embed or download this rushes sequence.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

These rushes sequences are part of our promise to release content from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under a permissive licence for you to embed or download and re-edit.

And please do comment here with your thoughts on what Charles says. This interview will be edited into our programme; all insights will be helpful.

Transcript:

CharlesÌýÌýÌý 02.09.22ÌýÌýÌý I think right from the beginning there are kind of two competing views about the web, ah, playing out, which still play out now.Ìý One is that the web is this home for collaboration, for sharing, for allowing information to be free, for
ÌýÌýÌý 02.09.35ÌýÌýÌý people being able to create things together in open platforms and sharing ideas and that's imbedded in the kind of geek/hippy culture of the Homebrew Computer Club, right at the start of all this in the 1970's.Ìý And then there's another, which is the kind of Bill Gates/Microsoft corporate view, which is wait a minute, how do you pay the mortgage?Ìý You know, you're sharing all this stuff for free, but who's putting the groceries on the table?Ìý Someone needs to pay for this stuff.Ìý And
ÌýÌýÌý 02.10.03ÌýÌýÌý that is still not really a question we've worked out, because even now, the newest creations of the web, the most glittering, Twitter, no one knows how it's going to make money - it's fantastic to do, but how do you actually make money out of it?Ìý And so this is this huge dilemma, that we've got this way of creating stuff, collaborative and open, which isn't really viable economically in
ÌýÌýÌý 02.10.25ÌýÌýÌý some ways and we're still trying to work out how we might make our livings out of it.Ìý And that's the way that we now live, in this world where we're caught between these two forces.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý 02.11.07ÌýÌýÌý We saw and I mean you talked about a lot of collaboration but also it's quite a cut throat kind of world out there of, of you know you live for a few years and then your over, is that a useful way to think about the web, rather than the socialist model that erm Kevin Keller's been talking about?

CharlesÌýÌýÌý 02.11.33ÌýÌýÌý Erm, hold on, erm I think the best way to think about the web is that it's a huge unfolding social experiment, in which we are both part of the experiment and conducting it.Ìý And so what's fascinating is that as these tools spread and become more available to more people, new stuff keeps on emerging and old stuff then gets outmoded.Ìý So you see erm, old browsers, old search engines, old social network sites kind of rising and then falling.Ìý So it's like an echo system in a way that it's a kind of constantly evolving thing, and that is what is so important about it.Ìý Because actually, if it
ÌýÌýÌý 02.12.17ÌýÌýÌý owned, was owned by Google, if it was all owned by Microsoft you wouldn't get that kind of explosion of creativity.Ìý The cost is you also get this huge volatility as things come and go, erm and change.Ìý But
ÌýÌýÌý 02.12.30ÌýÌýÌý the underlying logic of it all, is finding new ways to exploit this ability to combine creatively and collaboration.Ìý Those, that's the underlying logic of all this.Ìý Finding new and more creative ways to collaborate.Ìý And the trick, that everyone is trying to pull off is how do you make money out of that so you can create a kind of viable organisation that people can earn they're livings from or invest in.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Do you think, I mean its been suggested to us by some people that there has been a levelling, and then hierarchy's necessarily emerge and we talked a bit about that with Wikipedia, but is there a sense in which that the web then where we see that thing going on also re-emergence of bigger boulders within the you know on the level playing field, is that, is the web in some way a mirror society a reflection of simply of human nature, is it that some people are always going to be more weak than others, the web so the web is simply reflecting that back at us?

CharlesÌýÌýÌý 02.13.29ÌýÌýÌý Well I think the web is a reflection of society, its, its the web is pornography, gossip, flirting, erm power plays, people making money.Ìý I mean the web isn't a sort of utopian collective.Ìý Its life reflected on the web.Ìý But the nature of the web, because it allows this ability to create in a very distributed way and for people to connect and collaborate, it makes things possible in ways that they weren't before.Ìý Its now possible to collaborate more effectively than ever before without having a traditional organisation.Ìý It's created a new menu of options for us to get things done together in new ways, that is significantly different.Ìý So in that sense its not
ÌýÌýÌý 02.14.09ÌýÌýÌý simply reflecting how society is, its opening up options for us to behave and be in different ways, and that's what's really significant about it.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý And lastly the blogosphere, I think the figures are you know actually this is one of these examples of a huge rush of almost like levelling ......... and then perhaps a kind of slight contraction and now you know the aggregation sites like Huffington Post and, and others, erm Tree Hugger, now they're kind of hubs of power, is that, would you think, was that a useful, another way again an example of how power was almost pulverised, in a way publishing power is pulverised but then gradually congeals again around
ÌýÌýÌý 02.14.53ÌýÌýÌý these hubs like Huffington?

CharlesÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Yes, I, I think that what you get, I think on the web is this constant process of kind of new things emerging from new sources and then new structure emerging out of it, and so you do find these aggregators like the Huffington post and others which are pulling all these kind of little pebbles together, you tube and what have you.Ìý But the point is, that I suppose is that as long as there still is this explosion, and as long as there's the opportunity then to create new ways
ÌýÌýÌý 02.15.23ÌýÌýÌý of bringing things together and I think there will be new search engines, I don't think Google is the end of that story at all, I think they'll be new news aggregators, I think Huffington Post may come and go in 5 years.Ìý Then you get new possibilities.Ìý The danger is that
ÌýÌýÌý 02.15.37ÌýÌýÌý you'll just get new big boulders.Ìý I mean this metaphor that people use about the web being a cloud, like cloud computing, imagine a world in which there was only one kind of cloud, and it was called Google and it was just floating over you and that was your only option.Ìý You could only have one cloud in your sky and it was Google, that would be an awful world.Ìý Actually, thankfully we have scores of kinds of clouds and that's what you want on the web.Ìý You want a sky full of different kinds of clouds being created by different people.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý I'd just like to re-cap, it would be nice to encapsulate it.Ìý Can the, should the web be seen as a great levelling?

CharlesÌýÌýÌý 02.16.17ÌýÌýÌý The Web I think is a great levelling, because the means of production to have your voice heard, to find an audience, to join in, have been hugely costly in the past, you've needed recording studios, or television studios or printing presses.Ìý Now someone with an iPhone can post a video, make a pod cast, connect to someone else, anyone with the means of communication erm through a computer can have access,
ÌýÌýÌý 02.16.42ÌýÌýÌý potentially to a vast audience.Ìý In that sense, it has completely blown apart and levelled access to communications and collaboration.Ìý You can have your say and find your audience, find collaborators in ways that were never possible before.

Rushes Sequences - Nigel Shadbolt interview - London (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 18:35 UK time, Monday, 5 October 2009

Nigel Shadbolt is a Professor of Computer Science at Southampton University. In 2006 he co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative, to promote multidisciplinary research into the Web.

This is one of several general 'talking head' interviews that were filmed on September 15th. The interviewer was Series Producer Russell Barnes.

Click here if you want to embed or download this rushes sequence.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

This rushes sequence is part of our promise to release content from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under a permissive licence for you to embed or download and re-edit.

And please do comment here with your thoughts on what Nigel says. This interview will be edited into our programme; all insights will be helpful.

Transcript:

IntvrÌýÌýÌý 03.12.18ÌýÌýÌý So Nigel lets just start and talk about some of the issues of Programme 4, do you think that the social networking revolution erm has irrevocable changed our relationships, how we, how young people relate to each other?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý 03.12.32ÌýÌýÌý I think it's provided a means to stay connected at much closer quarters for much erm longer periods of time.Ìý So classically the statement is that the kids bring the playground back with them in the evening.Ìý So, in a sense, they're local friendship groups are more persistent, they last longer, and that brings benefits and diss benefits I think.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý What would you identify as the benefits and, and drawbacks?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý 03.13.01ÌýÌýÌý Well its clear that within friendship groups erm with teenagers and people at school there's a huge appetite for staying connected, to stay available through and beyond the school day.Ìý Erm, but of also, some of the problems of the playground come back I suspect, into the home, into the kind of sanctuary they used to have.Ìý So there's a sense in which they're space is sort of invaded, erm of course they're all willing participants and accomplices in this, but it gives them perhaps not as much opportunity for down time, where they're not erm
ÌýÌýÌý 03.13.34ÌýÌýÌý sort of under those sorts of stresses.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý do you think erm what role do you think the web can have in education going forward, in terms of it's a sit forward technology, it encourages playfulness, I'm interested in those kind of themes.Ìý Do you think it's going to make more intelligent students in the future?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý 03.13.55ÌýÌýÌý I think we already see, my experience of this is we already see students who have a very acute sense of the requirement to be critical about the material they're seeing, just because the web is full of a huge amount of material, some of questionable provenance and origin.Ìý They have to take those lessons on board very early, so in a strange way, although there is more out there, its requiring them to be more self critical about how they should use those sources.Ìý And I think that's a hugely important skill in
ÌýÌýÌý 03.14.27ÌýÌýÌý thinking that we've always been trying to convey to students.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý How do you feel when you see new students coming through, do you identify them as being you know more curious, more intelligent, smarter, more critical?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Well I'm a Professor of Computer science, so I see people who naturally want to get in and develop the systems, take them to the limits.Ìý Erm, and they're whole interest in doing this and ability to do it is hugely accelerated by the presence of the web, because they can form communities, they can exploit open source software movements, they can be much more creative individually than they erm would be, than collectively than they would be on they're own.Ìý The
ÌýÌýÌý 03.15.07ÌýÌýÌý challenge is a little bit though that its, erm its quite easy for them to reach for other solutions, so we have to guard against that I think a lot in the way we teach and develop they're own research scales.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý So do you think the web, a huge opportunity, but also possibilities for distraction?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý 03.15.23ÌýÌýÌý Yeah distraction and difficult to be entirely original, that there's somebody out there who has produced a piece of code or a piece of research that can look quite similar or quite close to the work and the idea you've had, and its actually interesting then to say how distinctive is my own contribution, should I bother making it.Ìý But it doesn't seem to have stopped people though I should say voicing they're opinions, voicing they're code and putting it out there.

Direction

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Do you think, just getting into you know we shoot programme 4, what are the benefits of the way we think.Ìý What I'm teasing out, I know your very interested in collaborative intelligence, and your very interested and talk to me about, can you tell us a bit about in what ways you think .......... In what ways you think the web is enhancing intelligence?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý 03.16.28ÌýÌýÌý The webs enhancing intelligence in lots of ways.Ìý And in ways we didn't anticipate.Ìý Erm, I started out looking at artificial intelligence so we thought we would put all the smartness into the programmes.Ìý There's a new kind of AI, we call it augmented intelligence and that's the product of lots of people collaboratively solving problems together, contributing material.Ìý And that's producing really extraordinary new products.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý Can you give me some examples, we've talked about map and galaxies and?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý 03.16.58ÌýÌýÌý Yeah so erm, so when you look at the kind of products of this augmented intelligence, the obvious and well known one is Wikepedia, you know collective efforts to build a massive encyclopaedia that's current that's policed that's of high quality.Ìý But you can take all sorts of tasks that humans are naturally good at, an interesting one is work where people have been trained up to use what they're extremely good at which is they're visual sense is to tell one object from another.Ìý So they've been used on mass to classify different types of astronomical phenomena.Ìý One type of galaxy versus another.Ìý We're very quick to learn these things with a
ÌýÌýÌý 03.17.34ÌýÌýÌý training set and then we can unleash a massive amount of capability and people connected together to solve a huge amount of data processing this way.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý That's sociology has identified the web is or its claimed that the web is somehow akin to the invention of the telescope its unleashing a golden age?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý 03.17.54ÌýÌýÌý The web gives us a new kind of instrumentation I think, it is a new golden age in the sense that obviously your joining people together, so on the end of all of these web connections are on the order of you know, hundreds of millions of neurons, whirring away with a life history that can be shared and pooled.Ìý That integration of human intelligence has never been seen before on this scale, and what's happening with the web is one of its characteristics is that those communities, within the web, co-release, aggregate, come together to form particular interest groups.Ìý So it seems to self organise in very interesting ways into co-ordinated groups of communities.

IntvrÌýÌýÌý 03.18.39ÌýÌýÌý In what way do you think the semantic ............. Will help to share or does share help to share and improve knowledge?

Nigel ShadboltÌýÌýÌý ÌýÌýÌý So 20 years ago erm Tim Bernesley gave us a connected web of documents, before we had it it was hard to imagine what a world would be like with documents across the planet, material across the planet connected.Ìý The semantic web is really going to emerge as a web of link data or information.Ìý So the information inside documents, inside data bases and spreadsheets imagine if that was connected up seamlessly.Ìý And we're seeing huge opportunities there where information sets that were sitting there in isolation can now be cross correlated, integrated,
ÌýÌýÌý 03.19.20ÌýÌýÌý overlaid to produce a most amazing range of rich information, erm mash ups.Ìý New insights, new erm discoveries all the time there.




Rushes Sequence - general views - San Francisco (Video)

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Dan Biddle Dan Biddle | 18:27 UK time, Monday, 5 October 2009

These are the first general views of San Francisco - there'll be more to come soon. They include a couple of shots of presenter Aleks Krotoski using her computer.

Click here if you want to embed or download this rushes sequence.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit ´óÏó´«Ã½ Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.


These rushes sequences are part of our promise to release content from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under a permissive licence for you to embed or download and re-edit.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Digital Revolution rushes for you to download and edit

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Dan Gluckman - Product Lead | 16:51 UK time, Monday, 5 October 2009

Since the very first blog post about Digital Revolution, we've been promising to release some rushes sequences before the programme is broadcastÌý - rushes that you can download, edit and republish under a permissive licence. And now we're ready to post the first of these.

What can you do with these rushes? Whatever you want, subject to the terms of the license. Let us what you're up to, as we'll be featuring the best uses of the rushes very week.

Once we have more rushes up, we'll also be setting some specific challenges - watch this space, or sign up to our for updates.

Releasing rushes like this is an experiment, and there are some limitations. We're not releasing all our rushes, for two reasons. Firstly, we have a compliance procedure at the ´óÏó´«Ã½ which means that all online video has to be viewed by a senior manager - there's simply too much footage to do this properly. We do estimate that we will be releasing around 5 hours of interview material, featuring 20-30 interviewees, and up to an hour of other content.

Secondly, it's the nature of an interview that some parts don't really work, and would always hit the cutting room floor very early. Our series producer, Russell Barnes, has selected the key parts of each interview to post first. If there's a strong demand for more rushes from particular interviewees, then we'll certainly try to do that.

The rushes are released under an international permissive licence, inspired by but not identical to the Creative Commons Licence. It covers some elements not covered by that licence - for example, you're not allowed to use the footage to suggest the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s endorsement or on websites aimed at young children.

We're releasing the rushes sequences in the .mov format - exporting .movs gives us highest quality for a reasonably sized file, with the least compression . Please do feed back to us if you think there is a strong case for also providing a different format.

This is an experiment, so we welcome your feedback - please do let us know what you think by commenting here or by contacting us direct.

Reboot your memories for Digital Revolution

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Russell Barnes | 18:35 UK time, Thursday, 1 October 2009

In programme one of Digital Revolution, we want to illustrate the explosion of on the web of the early to mid 2000s.Ìý How best to do this?Ìý
Ìý
Well, rather than just replay the usual clips of and a , we thought we'd ask the users themselves - you, the Digital Revolution community - to help us make this section of the film.
Ìý
We want to create a fast-cut of - we envisage at this stage - about 45 seconds of your highlights of your material that you've posted in the past on blogs, Youtube and picture sites.
Ìý
What we need from you is the (the address) of a page, picture or video that you've posted on the web before and you're happy for us to transmit on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two in prime time.Ìý The material needs to be your copyright and, in the case of visual media, come with permission of any on-screen performers or participants.
Ìý
We can only offer you perhaps a glimpse of your own material in the final cut of the programme, but it will be part of a sequence that can capture something of the excitement, the humour, the civic journalism and, above all, the exuberant creativity of millions of voices expressing themselves on the web.

So, if you've got some early video, pictures or animation or an old blog from the early days of web 2.0 you'd like to share with us, please submit them via our submission form.

Please note - theÌý deadline for submissions was October 15th 2009. We are not accepting any further submissions. Many thanks to those who submitted their old sites.

Video blog: week four - Ghana online: web consumers today, producers tomorrow?

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Aleks Krotoski | 09:13 UK time, Thursday, 1 October 2009

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