5 Things

First blog post, such an awkward little postcard to the world. The disconnect of writing to myself and simultaneously to the firmament of connected lights that is the Internet. On one hand, it's an intimate, private space - just me, my keyboard, and I - on another, it's a potentially public space, a postmodern cross between singing in the shower and delivering a speech from the Pope's gallery. So in an effort to bring some order to my thoughts and launch this thing, I’m falling back on a simple “5 Things...” post. Five Things I’m thinking about in digital culture are...

1. The future of professional content. The information age, as it was coined in the 90s, suggested the fallacy that to make money, one had to broker and sell information. The opposite has come true, and a generation has grown up with the expectation that media is free. Content creators, professional ones at least, have found themselves unable to profit from the traditional means of selling media. Whether you’re a music company, a newspaper, a film producer, a novelist or a textbook publisher, making a buck out of selling information has become a whole lot harder if not impossible, and entire industries have found themselves kicking through the rubble of their collapsed business models in a stupefied daze.

2. Net Neutrality. When we log on to the Internet we can access almost any information we want at the fastest available speed. With few exceptions, we can use any service we want any time we want. The Internet service provider may not speed up the connection for one class of user as opposed to another; there is no discrimination based on the sender or the receiver. Framing the debate as one in which illegal file-sharers are hogging up too much bandwidth and slowing things down for everyone else, ISPs are asking for the right to privilege certain web activities over others with more bandwidth and faster speeds. The fear is that this will open the door to legislating the net, imposing limits and allowing providers to sell access in packages as they do with their other businesses, such as cable or telephone services. As a consequence, we would have a fast lane and a slow lane on the Internet which would interfere with the explosion of innovation and artistic freedom and expression that the web affords us.

3. The death of the Web. A common misperception is that the Internet and the Web are the same thing. The World Wide Web is the part of the Internet we are most familiar with, the pages upon which Wikipedia, blogs like this, university research sites, and the New York Times magically appear in our browsers. Email, streaming, downloads, Skype, chat and a host of other services and functions about which most users are unaware are also part of the Internet. The Web is a wild and wooly place with its uninvited porn, spyware, phishing scams, obscene comment strings and viruses. More and more of us are migrating to our mobile devices like the iPad and taking advantage of the services and platforms we enjoy through convenient apps. These apps effectively keep us off our browsers, and the fear is that we’ll regret this move. The ease and safety of apps will push us further from the freeform innovation and inventiveness of the more open and unpredictable Web.

4. The Internet is bad for our brains. Another concern of the moment is whether the constant distractions and multitasking of being online is in fact changing the way we think. Are we losing our ability to understand longer texts and complex arguments as we ignorantly drown in a happy sea of tweets, status updates and indignant blog posts? The argument claims we are instant superficial specialists, skimming knowledge and making quick, uninformed decisions without the ability to ruminate and develop larger ideas. This idea is the basis of Nicolas Carr’s The Shallows. The other side of this argument, most famously put forward in Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, is the idea that time spent online creating even the most mundane things, such as tweeting a status update or commenting on a YouTube video, is superior to passively consuming television and therefore ultimately better for us in the long run.

5. Copyright vs. Copyfight. Copyright laws are vastly outdated for the current media landscape. Originally created to balance creativity and preserve the importance of the public domain, they speak to another era when reproducing media was impossibly expensive for the average citizen. Now that copying is free, faultless, easy and social -- it could be argued that copying files is in fact the main function of computers -- average citizens find themselves the targets of lawsuits, and media producers find themselves in the position of suing their fans and customers.

So. Five things that are on my radar.