10.24.09: Internet Antichrist

I started thinking a few days ago about how the digitization and networking of so much of what we hold dear has changed things. I see that in my lifetime I will witness the end of books, or most of them, physical copies of recorded music and probably physical newspapers too. Stuff that’s been around for a thousand years will be gone in my lifetime! Film based photography is pretty much a remnant, an art form, an artisanal craft used by fine artists and high-end fashion photographers. And writing letters to one another? On paper? And dropping them in the mailbox? When was the last time I wrote and mailed a physical letter? All those academic books filled with Auden’s or Jane Austen’s letters — it’s hard to imagine a collection of someone’s text messages, tweets and e-mails. I suspect that television as we know it will be gone soon as well. All right, film and recorded music have only been around a hundred or so years, but books! All of which led me back to wondering — how did this get started?

The Internet, the World Wide Web, as much of a boon as it has been, has left an awful lot of wreckage in its wake, beyond just the elimination of those formats we thought of as eternal and the industries that produced and delivered them. Interconnectivity has facilitated the loss of privacy of many of the world’s citizens. We’ve been liberated and captured at the same time. I sense that the loss of privacy — which to me seems inevitable — is part and parcel of the whole project. You can’t have efficient search algorithms, cloud computing and digitized everything and anything and expect to retain the anonymity of the past.

Security races to keep up, but I wonder if the dream of unlimited access and personal and corporate data security aren’t simply incompatible. Maybe we just can’t have them both. Maybe we need to throw up our hands and give in. Stop resisting and surrender. Live totally and completely in public. The world would truly be the village that McLuhan predicted — a small town where everyone does know your business. Maybe that would keep us honest, and push the realization that as custodians of the planet we really are all in this together.

This “creative destruction” began in the ’60s, as did many things that we now both love and regret, and it was initially a spinoff of a project funded by US military agencies. The military (along with the space agency) gave us Velcro and (I believe) cheap integrated circuits (i.e. gizmolandia), as well as the blowback that helped nurture the current mess in the Middle East, South America and Afghanistan. The Internet’s connection to the military, as much as I would love it to be a big secret conspiracy, seems a lot more benign than that. Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle. After all…in some versions of the story, he cannot enter your house unbidden — you have to invite him in, like a vampire.

One man foresaw a global network before any such thing was close to being possible. J. C. R. Licklider (sounds like a character in a Coen bros movie!) envisioned, in a 1960 paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis, "A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines…[which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions." [Source]

In other words, he saw it all coming.

[Source]

Is this man the antichrist? Or merely a prophet?

In a weird coincidence, Licklider began his career studying psychoacoustics (more on that later), and wrote a paper called “Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception” in 1951 that forms the basis of contemporary concepts of how we perceive pitch, even though it sounds like it might be about two-story apartments with uneven floors. That the man who predicted a worldwide information exchange network was initially interested in how we perceive music is slightly uncanny.

More about Licklider from Wikipedia:

“His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. He has been called ‘computing's Johnny Appleseed’ for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age.”

Now, it’s been pointed out that he didn’t actually invent any of this stuff — he merely “planted the seed.” But often it seems that putting out the idea that something might be possible encourages others to actually make it possible. In a way, to imagine is to create.

In the ’50s, Licklider “worked on a Cold War project known as Semi Automatic Ground Environment (better known by its [weirdly appropriate] acronym ‘SAGE’) which was designed to create a computer-aided air defense system. The SAGE system included computers that collected and presented data to a human operator, who then chose the appropriate response. In 1957 he…conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing,” [Source] which is when multiple parties can share the use of a single large computer. And in 1958, he became president of the Acoustical Society of America.

“He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPANET [acknowledged to be the predecessor to the Internet]. His 1968 paper on The Computer as a Communication Device predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.” [Source]

“Without regard to location”— the phrase resonates for me. It implies disincorporation — an out-of-body experience. In this case, it’s data that has no fixed place, no physical manifestation. But I sense it’s happening to us, too.

I had thought that the Internet began with the linking of some military computers in the Pentagon (ARPANET) in 1969, and that this network was an experimental project to create a system which was specifically designed so that its data could survive a nuclear attack. It turns out my hunch was wrong, although the military were indeed involved in funding the research. ARPANET (which Licklider was involved with) did give birth to internet protocols — how computers “talk” to one another — sometime later in the 1970s, but it was not, it seems, all about securing secret data from the electromagnetic pulses associated with nuclear weapons.

Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or ARPANET) program, insists that its purpose was not military, but scientific. Though we might take whatever the Pentagon says with a big grain of salt, he could be telling the truth. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Taylor to build the Network, states that ARPANET was never intended to link people or act as a communications and information facility. So, the evolution into the Internet was completely unintentional, though Licklider foresaw it. ARPANET was primarily about finding a more efficient way of time-sharing.

Those were the days when computers looked like this:

They were extremely expensive, and there weren’t a lot of them, so many people, like my friend C’s brother, made a good living managing access to them. Time-sharing was a big issue. If however, access could be accomplished remotely, through a network, then the efficiency of the time-sharing would be increased. Time-sharing via these networks was focused on making it possible for research organizations (and the military) to use the processing power of other institutions’ computers when they had laborious calculations to do, or when someone else's facility might do the job better.

Because this research (used to develop ARPANET) was government-funded, its use was restricted to the military and university research facilities — C’s brother couldn’t use it to create or enhance the commercial enterprise he had established to manage computer access, for example.

“During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.” [Source]

We can see by the involvement of these companies that the line between non-commercial use and commercial and public access was already getting fuzzy.

“Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP.

“In 1984 the NSF…supported departments without such sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. [For those who don’t remember or are too young, one used to access the Internet and send e-mail by modems that would “dial-up” using regular phone lines…a web page in this era would take many minutes to load; these were NOT the good old days in that sense.] This grew into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and was intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF.

“In 1992, Congress allowed commercial activity on NSFNet with the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, permitting NSFNet to interconnect with commercial networks. University users were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their networks. Eventually, it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research […and soon the rest of us].

“By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project came to a close.” [Source]

The mother, seed or egg that gave birth to the Internet was gone, and the floodgates had opened.

By the mid-’90s, access became easy enough that the commercialization of the Internet proceeded rapidly. I wondered to myself if the military kept a parallel World Wide Web, inaccessible to civilians, since they were so involved in the early stages of its development. They do, or did — it was called MILNET.

[Source]

A quarter of the earth’s people now use the Internet and the World Wide Web. We don’t know how many use MILNET. Finland and France are about to make Internet access a right, like a legal right to a trial, free speech or health services (well, these rights exist in some countries). The Finns want everyone in their entire country to have broadband (5mb) in a few years. (FYI, 5mb allows streaming video like most of us can see now, 10mb would allow HD streaming video and 100mb, which the Finnish government proposes offering by 2015, would, well, increase not only ease of access to information, but interactivity on a level and with repercussions we can hardly imagine.)

In the Meantime

While these networks were evolving, there were simultaneously a number of innovations and technological breakthroughs that allowed for the digitization of all sorts of media — the stuff that would soon be flying around those same networks.

The technology that allowed sound information (and soon all other information) to be digitized was largely developed by the phone companies. Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T, wanted to find more efficient and reliable ways of transmitting phone conversations. Phone lines up until that time were all analog, and with that technology the only way to squeeze more calls through a line was by rolling off the high and low frequencies, and turning the resulting lo-fi sound into waves that could run in parallel without interfering with one another — like terrestrial radio transmissions. TV and radio communications had the same problems.

Bell Labs was huge, and they had branches in many states, most of which are closed now. They invented the transistor and the semiconductors that made the integrated circuits in our tiny devices possible, they developed the laser — the list goes on and on. Their scientists won a lot of Nobel prizes.

When Bell Labs figured out how to digitize sound — to, in effect, sample a sound wave and slice it into tiny bits in a way that was not prohibitively expensive and that still left the human voice recognizable — they applied it to long distance calls, switchers and all manner of phone technology, allowing more calls to be made simultaneously, especially considering the limitations imposed by underwater cables. Much of the research regarding what makes a sound understandable (like a voice, in AT&T’s case) involves applying lessons from the science of psychoacoustics — how the brain perceives sound in all its aspects. We’re back to Licklider!

Out of this combination of psychoacoustic and technical research emerged digital equipment that was used in, among other places, recording studios — where I saw this technology. In the ’70s, the Harmonizers and digital delays that appeared little by little were in effect primitive samplers — the samples were usually less than a second long. These were quickly followed by machines that could hold longer samples of greater resolution, and manipulate those “sounds” more freely (clumps of data more than sounds, technically). All sorts of weirdness resulted. Bell Labs was involved in manufacturing a sound processor called a vocoder that would preserve certain aspects of talking (or singing), like speech formants — the shape of the sound apart from its pitch. Using this machine one could transmit these aspects of the voice separate from the rest of the vocalization in ways that rendered them unintelligible. One use for this was a sort of cryptology for the voice — a garbling that could be “decoded” at the other end. These machines were also adapted for music production. Here is Kraftwerk’s vocoder, made especially for them:

[Source]

I once used a vocoder borrowed from Bernie Krause when Eno and I did the Bush of Ghosts record. It was beautifully made, but rather complicated and very expensive.

A Harmonizer cost thousands of dollars, a digital reverb set a studio back maybe 10K, and a full-fledged sampling device like a Fairlight or later the Synclavier cost much, much more. But soon the price of memory and processing dropped, and the technology became more affordable. Inexpensive Akai samplers became the backbone of music like hip hop and DJ mixes, and sampled or digitally derived drum sounds took the place of live drummers in many recordings. And we were off to the races, for better or worse. With the digitization of sound, digital recording and eventually the CD became possible — and not too long after that, the capacity and speed of home computers was sufficient to record, archive, and process music.

Some years ago I visited Bell Labs and was shown the famous anechoic (perfect, sound absorbent) chamber. This was where John Cage claimed that he could hear both his heart pounding and the high-pitched whine of his nervous system. His insight was that true silence doesn’t exist — even if we can block out everything else, we can’t stop hearing ourselves.

Here is one such chamber:

[Source]

They also showed me a processor that could squeeze what seemed to the ear to be CD-quality sound into a miniscule bandwidth. I’m not sure, but I believe encoding music as MP3s had at that date already been invented in Germany, so this compressing/encoding was not a big surprise — but like most people, I worried that something in the quality of the music might have been sacrificed in this rezzing down process. I was right, but MP3s have improved quite a bit since then, and now I listen to most of the music I own in that format. I believe what Bell Labs was working on is used for satellite radio — getting more hi-fi sound into smaller transmissions.

In 1988 I went with designer Tibor Kalman to visit a printing studio on Long Island. It had a machine that could digitize and then subtly manipulate images (we wanted to “improve” the image on a Talking Heads record cover). This machine was, like those early computers, incredibly expensive and rare — we had to go to it (it couldn’t be brought to the design studio), and we had to book time in advance. Sytex I think it was called. This was exciting, but its cost and rarity meant we didn’t think much about incorporating its talents into more projects at that time.

After a while, though, the price of scanning dropped, and manipulating scanned images using something called Photoshop became common. Who would buy a film camera these days? Who buys film for their old camera? There are some holdouts, and I have no doubt that there is a richness or at least some special qualities that have been lost, but, well, for most of us, the trade-off seems fair — and inevitable. Needless to say, as these images became digitized they could enter the river of networked data.

Photojournalism went digital a number of years ago. In the beginning, the photographers, realizing that their images would be reproduced in newspapers no larger than 8x10 (if that), didn’t need to shoot at the highest available resolution on their new digital cameras, allowing them to squeeze more images onto their data chips — and giving them fewer problems with storage and developing in the field. To compare these low-res images to video, it’d be like if movies past a certain date were all captured at the quality of YouTube files. While researching archival news footage at some point, I discovered that when it migrated to videotape from 16mm film, the quality went way down.

The confluence of digitized media and the capability of digital information to be shared, transmitted and stored anywhere in the world — this volatile, disembodied mixture that Licklider predicted and whose seed he planted — has, duh, had a huge effect on countless institutions. Many that deal with physical objects — newsstands, record stores, bookstores — will all go away, along with their support structures: trucks, warehouses and all the people that worked in those places. For many of us this is not all bad. The record stores like Sam Goody or Coconuts were never great experiences.

Maybe the first institution to disappear almost completely as a result of this process was the letter. Conventional mail still exists — I get bills, junk mail and announcements — but communication related to my work and between my friends and me is almost all by e-mail or text, as has been for a while.

Television, not a big part of my life for quite a number of years anyway, is bound to migrate online and become something very different.

It’s not so surprising to witness the end of many of the delivery systems for recorded music — vinyl, cassettes and CDs. Somehow those changed from one form to another so rapidly over the decades that to see them all go away isn’t that much of a shock. I don’t really miss them all that much, to be honest. But to imagine that I might live to see the end of print — books, newspapers and many magazines — is mind-boggling. Publishers and news organizations might argue that they are not like the music business, but the patterns are too similar to ignore, except by those who don’t want to see them. Print and books have remained more or less unchanged since Gutenberg, but all that seems about to become history.

I’m not advocating trying to stop this — it all seems inevitable, and the access to information and convenience will be unprecedented — although without newspapers as a Fourth Estate, a check and balance, democracy as we were taught it, will not be, um, the same. We can’t rely on bloggers to police the entire government. Danielle comments, however, that the death of physical newspapers isn’t the same as the death of journalism — if the NY Times can find a way to make money as with digital distribution, it will continue to provide a similar function in society. Whether that will be possible is still an open question — but digitization doesn’t necessarily equal death, at least not yet.

The End of Privacy

Now that the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled data, content and information to be shuttled anywhere in the world — even around China, sometimes — it seems inevitable that the flow goes both ways, or actually in many ways. The ability to access the Internet is incredibly useful to us and we can’t imagine life without it, so we don’t seem too bothered that as a result of this interconnectedness, the National Security Administration, for one, has access to our web lives and loves — and we don’t seem all that nervous that cloud computing will eliminate any real sense of privacy (despite assurances), or about the massive amounts of information Google and other commercial enterprises have about us.

Danielle points out that many people are in fact very nervous about this — that privacy & the Internet is a huge topic of concern. Google data mining, the ownership and confidentiality of social networking data, security of financial data, etc. — these are all topics that are regularly reported on in the press and about which people have very strong feelings. However, the sense I get on the street is that most ordinary folks are happy (so far) to give up some personal security for all the convenience they’re getting.

Google’s batteries of server farms allow us to search, so, naturally the NSA can also search, dredge and process. I typed in someone’s name yesterday and found that for a small fee, I could see how much they paid for their house, who their neighbors are and what their credit rating is! I was flabbergasted. That’s me, a private citizen, who can know stuff I’d sort of rather not know, not some corporation or governmental agency.

Here’s an NSA data mining facility in Yakima, Washington. (A massive one is being built in Utah.)

[Source]

So far I’m not aware of malicious use of all that information, not on a large scale anyway — though identity thieves and guys sucking up US credit card numbers by the truckload in Ukraine are a start.

I recently read an article regarding the security of so-called “scrubbed” data. Netflix or some other company wanted to employ a third party to analyze some of their customers’ patterns of purchase — but as a precaution they removed (scrubbed) the customers’ names off the data. So theoretically, the people being analyzed were now abstract entities. However, out of curiosity they hired another company, to see if any of those unidentified customers could possibly be re-identified. It turned out they could. Not due to a fault of the scrubbing, or some security or software malfunction, but because other data and patterns of customer and citizen behavior were available online, and correlating these with the patterns of the anonymous customers led to conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, the re-identification of many.

To me this means that, yes, information already flows both, or rather all, ways. Privacy and security, as much as we might strive for them, are phantoms that we chase but can never truly catch. As much as we love getting information, data, media and connections, so we ourselves become available as data. Social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter seem to use these conflicting urges — the urge to reveal oneself to the world, in all one’s intimate details, and yet simultaneously maintain some kind of privacy. Good luck with that.

The end of privacy in parts of the world is near. It will be traumatic for some, and a comfort for others — for to relinquish one’s privacy is to become a part of the hive and the herd, and there is a certain reassurance there. How our corporate culture and its twin, the government, make use of this process and this massive change in society leads one to imagine something closer to a paranoid Phillip K. Dick scenario than a return to the nurturing tribe (or the Global Village) that it will be for some. I suspect it will be both — liberating and restrictive. Conflicting and opposite tendencies, operating simultaneously.

So, there it is. The free flow of information, and the ability to digitize all media as it enters the river, has a lot more repercussions than the end of books, newspapers and CDs — it portends a massive social and political shift. Licklider may have seen this coming as well, but he didn’t let on about it.

08.25.09: The Kindle Experience

I got an Amazon Kindle DX (the large-size one) before leaving on this last 6-week European tour leg. I thought that I could afford to be a guinea pig (it’s almost $500!) and try this way of reading. I loaded up a bunch of books ($10 for most, many just out) and some New Yorker magazines before I left, and as a result saved some space in my luggage, which usually gets filled with books I brought or purchased on the road. My luggage, as you can imagine, still got pretty full — mainly CDs and DVDs I was given — but a pile of books and magazines would have put it over the top. You can therefore “carry” more books than you might read, and if one is boring you can easily just dip into another.

Here’s my report.

The screen contrast approximates reading a newspaper — the background is off-white, rather than the ivory or white of most books. So it’s not super contrasty, but for me it’s OK — I didn’t feel eye strain. The device is heavier than a small paperback, but lighter than a hardback, so that part was no problem — and it’s MUCH thinner than any physical book, so it slips in a bag easily. The B&W screen isn’t so good with photos, though they’re often no worse than a B&W newspaper image. But, since most of what I was reading wasn’t photo- or chart-heavy, that was OK too. Reading The New Yorker, for example, was pretty great — no ads, you can skip around to various sections of the magazine, and the new issues download via a cellular network automatically.

There are a few websites that offer thousands of public domain books — Jane Austen, Dickens, Melville, Joyce and lots of wacky, forgotten, orphaned volumes as well. I got one by PT Barnum. So, if you wanted, you could have hundreds of books in this thing and not pay for any of them.

One of Amazon’s selling points is instant gratification. You want a book (at least in the US — there’s no coverage in Europe or elsewhere) and you can have it in about a minute — if there’s a Kindle version — and… you can shop only at Amazon (or through certain other Kindle content providers).

Here’s where the rub is. This machine only reads Kindle files and PDFs. And nothing else out there reads Kindle files. It can read other types of files — Word DOCs, MOBI, TXT etc. — but you have to go through Amazon via email, where they’re converted for a small charge, then sent directly to your Kindle. And, you can’t share a book with your friends, even if they too have a Kindle. No doubt, as with MP3 and iTunes, book publishers would only agree to this system if people couldn’t share their purchases. As we know, Apple has relented on this, and has taken DRM off many of their music files. But which ones? How do you know? Years from now, having gone through a few computers, your music collection is unplayable except for the files without DRM. Well, same with these books — if you migrate to a different tablet (the forthcoming Apple one we hear so much about, for example), you are fucked. All the unread books in your Kindle library are stuck on what will eventually become antiquated technology.

There are other e-book formats out there (EPub is being touted as a cross-platform format, but still, ugh, with DRM). I saw a guy at a bar reading a Kindle book on his iPhone, as the files are available for those and for the iPod Touch through an Amazon app, but it looked kinda tiny, and the backlit screen will drain a battery in a couple of hours of constant use. The slightly strange electronic ink system in the Kindle (and in the Sony Reader) has no backlight — so, like a book, you can’t read it in bed at night without a nightlight. This was an understandable tradeoff, as the battery life is unbelievable. With the wi-fi switched off (you only need it running to retrieve orders or magazine subscriptions), the thing stays charged for weeks.

Do I miss the “physical experience”? I will certainly miss being able to read books from my personal library, but if the title I want to read is all text it doesn’t make much difference to me. The smell will be a bit of nostalgia, as will fading and water damage. The Kindle only uses about two fonts at present, so some may miss type layout and design. But I suspect additional fonts will be added soon. On the e-book file I can still highlight sections to refer to later, and there’s a built-in dictionary! I forgot that! You put the cursor next to a word, and a little definition appears at the bottom of the page! Students will love that. I do.

[Source: left / right]

I hear that the Apple tablet will use a format that is more cross-platform, but will that mean I can share a book with my friend? It’s surely a way we make friends sometimes: “I just finished this GREAT book, do you want to read it? I’ll pass you my copy.” As with music, sharing things is a way of getting to know one another and a form of reciprocal debt — if I “lend” you my book, you sort of owe me… a book, or something. We’re linked now, which is how we use these things that represent our inner selves — as social connectors. Take that ability away, the ability to exchange stuff that represents us, and I’ll bet some of the “value” of these kinds of e-books goes too… the social interconnectedness value, not the dollar value.

The Apple tablet looks to have illumination, which will drain battery life really quickly in book-reading time (many, many hours on a train, plane, bus, back porch, bed) — but sometimes the color, photo quality and ability to read in low light that Apple promises (and the touch screen!) might win out. We’ll see. I do think, based on my limited experience, that if some of these bugs and proprietary issues can be worked out in any of these reader things, then yes, the future of reading (and of selling books) will be very different, whether it’s this device or another one.

The bookselling and publishing worlds will be shaken with repercussions. Imagine the hundreds of pounds of textbooks a lot of college students are expected to lug around every year — and pay hundreds of dollars for as well. And the resulting medical bills. If those textbooks can be sold as weightless $10 downloads the students and their parents will cheer, and the chiropractors will cry. A LOT of publishers count textbook sales as their bread and butter, because the poor students HAVE to buy them — which is why they are so damn overpriced. If the income from those textbooks shrinks by 90%, they’ll be hurtin’.

Likewise, if, as Amazon hopes, all books will be priced around $10, then publishers who regularly charge $25 for a new hardback (cheaper than a textbook) will also be crying. Or going out of business unless they jump on the wagon.

The upside for publishers is that with digital files there is a much lower distribution cost. There is still the expense of setting up and maintaining the e-commerce situation — which is not nothing, but it is mainly front-loaded. The ever-recurring printing costs, trucks, warehouses or even, ulp, percentages to bookstores go away. (“Hello, Tower Records, meet Barnes and Noble.”) So the printing and distribution costs will be significantly less — though there are still the costs and skills involved in marketing. As things move in that direction, it seems obvious that writers will begin to realize that the percentages and royalties they normally give up for those services — well, why should they pay them? Kinda like the music biz.

Another parallel to the music biz is that writers will be able to self-publish and distribute. Who knows what they’ll live on, but there won’t be any printing costs or distribution percentages to subtract from book sales. Just like the musicians (like me) who sell downloads from their own websites, writers will sometimes bypass publishers. Would Tom Clancy or Steven King need their publishers to print and distribute their latest? Hardly. Their fans, like Radiohead’s or those of NIN, will just buy directly from the author’s website. Amazon has already launched a test platform called Digital Text, which enables anyone to upload their work, suggest a retail price, and pocket 35% of sales.

Lastly, and scariest for publishers I guess, is that inevitably someone will hack the Kindle (or other formats) — and the books will become shareable… and copiable and infinitely reproducible, just like MP3s. People laughed at the record companies, with their reputations as money squanderers and for their waste and extravagance — but music hasn’t suffered, and writing and magazines might not either, especially if both writers and publishers can learn from the record companies and not pretend that publishing is any different.

04.19.09: Senigallia — You Get What You Pay For

Some Internet providers in the US are considering a tiered pricing system — charging more to customers who use a lot of bandwidth. There has been a hue and cry from the public regarding this proposal. By now, everyone is used to paying a flat fee, and then assuming that they can use as much bandwidth as they can get away with for that fee. The providers have even abandoned the tiered proposal trials in some cities — they are that unpopular.

We’ve all become accustomed to overlooking how much bandwidth we use — without thinking about it, we go from low bandwidth usage, like emailing, browsing websites and surfing, to fairly high bandwidth usage, like video Skyping, uploading audio and photo files, or streaming a movie from Netflix or iTunes. Internet users presume that high bandwidth usage, like Skyping or video and audio streaming, is their right.

This struck home today, when someone offered our group a password to a wi-fi network he had established, but didn’t offer it to those who habitually Skype. Initially, this seemed mean, but I had noticed that as more folks hop on a network, especially Skypers, the speed of the whole network goes down — especially for the rest of us. Even simple emailing becomes sluggish or intermittent. Bandwidth hogs take 80% or more of the bandwidth, and everyone else is left with slow or sometimes non-existent connections. Here then is the hidden cost of “free” services like Skype — they’re only “free” when the resource (the information highway) is limitless and infinite — which in this case, it is not. The same thing happens in hotels — the more people log on to the hotel server, the slower the whole thing goes. Sometimes it slows to a crawl, and after you’ve paid 5 Euros for an hour’s use, that can be pretty frustrating. The information highway can have traffic jams, just like any other. We tend to think of bandwidth as a God-given right, but it’s too finite, and its limits become apparent as the highway gets more crowded.

So, should access be tiered? If the tiers are partitioned in chunks, should only those with more money have access to higher bandwidth connections? This would eventually lead to an information and Internet hierarchy — streaming movies, music and TV will only be available to those who can afford it — and the rest will have to watch in low-res or be content to miss that kind of web experience, forced to settle for basic emailing and web browsing. The whole Internet mixed media experience — Flash sites, video clips, audio clips, slideshows etc. — would become less available. As it is now, I don’t think twice about watching a video clip, or listening to some streaming audio if I’m curious — but I might hesitate if I knew that a meter was running.

I could envision the idea of a meter that monitors bandwidth usage and charges accordingly. It might be a fair system — leaving the choice up to the user in each instance, rather than segregating users into discrete tiers. The proposed tiered plans sound less flexible. They seem to want to establish completely separate pipelines — gated Internet communities, in a way.

Likewise, I just read that for centuries, fishing was relatively unregulated. There were limits on excessive catch, but the fishing grounds were more or less a free-for-all. Chesapeake Bay and other fishing grounds were public property. Anyone with a boat — a commercial fisherman, or a kid in a rowboat — was allowed to pull up oysters or crabs. It would have been all well and good when supplies seemed unlimited and plentiful, but they’re not anymore — in some places, there are no oysters or crabs left at all. Most, of course, were not taken by kids in rowboats.

One proposed solution has been to privatize the oyster beds — allotting each fishery a designated area — with the assumption being that if fishermen realize that their stock is limited, they will self-manage and regulate their own consumption and fishing. Little Johnny on his rowboat will be pretty much out of luck, as the “public” fishing zones will have been fished out, and the private areas will be off limits.

As our oceans and waterways become fished out and depleted, it’s fairly easy to justify some sort of fee, management or enforced regulation system — but shouldn’t that apply to anyone who uses limited natural resources? For years, mining companies have been digging out underground resources while paying a minimal cost for access — and they often leave environmental disasters in their wake. Weren’t those resources in some sense “public”? Ditto for oil and natural gas companies — shouldn’t they pay their host nations a hefty fee for access to finite resources that are, in a way, the patrimony of humanity?

Someone once asked me, rhetorically, if an overweight person should pay the same amount for a plane ticket as someone of “normal” weight. It’s a rude and uncomfortable question, but not totally unreasonable when you consider that someone twice my weight requires twice as much jet fuel to get them airborne. Their carbon footprint is higher as a result. In effect, I’m subsidizing their excess — at least if all seats except first class are priced equally. Similarly, should kids and babies fly for less? Should tall men and women pay more? What about those whose above-average weight isn’t a result of overeating or poor diet? That seems unfair. Who’s to say why someone is overweight? And if you’re tall, it’s not your fault — you were born that way, so why should you be penalized?

The tiered or metered way of charging for resources — how would that work? Can bandwidth even be considered a resource? Is it like the electromagnetic spectrum — a government-managed “public” resource, with various frequencies allocated to broadcast TV, mobile phones and police transmissions? We accept that not just anyone with a transmitter can usurp part of the broadcast frequency, start a radio station or blast their TV network to everyone in town — chaos would result. We accept that even though the airwaves might be “public,” they do need to be regulated. But cable and fiber optics aren’t God-given — someone paid to lay them down.

For some strange reason, we presume that our health is a crapshoot. Most public health plans don’t tax people according to a tiered plan dependent on their propensity for getting diseases — though some folks, due to lifestyle, addiction or bad parenting will require more frequent and expensive treatment than others who live healthier lives. The folks who pay higher taxes, and those who are less prone to illness, are paying for those who are reckless with their health, or (it is presumed) just plain unlucky. Every industrialized country submits to this, apart from the US, where insurance companies fulfill this function — and they aren’t quite as altruistic, though they still maintain the crapshoot model, at least in the public’s eye.

Anyway, the built-in unfairness of this system — that some per chance pay more than their share — is justified by the idea that a health disaster could randomly happen to any of us. We know this isn’t quite true — besides the lifestyle and social context factors that affect our likelihood of getting ill, there are genetic factors that are becoming easier and easier to assess. It seems inevitable that as genetic profiling becomes common, many will balk at paying for those who have a much greater propensity for getting serious diseases. Insurance companies will probably begin to adjust to that information before public health plans do — the companies themselves are taking on the risk, so if they can better their odds by charging so and so more because addiction, MS or Alzheimer’s runs in their family, they will. To many people this will seem unfair, since they might be as healthy as anyone else when the insurance company determines their rate — so, they will argue, why should they pay more? Auto insurance companies already do this with drivers — those who live in high-risk areas or have had accidents pay more. We don’t mind paying — via taxes or insurance — for the other fellow if we believe our risk is more or less the same as his, but we might be reluctant to pay medical bills for a junkie.

In the long run, and from a wider perspective, health care does more than just insure against sudden medical costs — that is, public health care, not insurance plans. Public health care ensures that everyone lives without the fear that the bottom of their world will suddenly drop out. In the US, people with medical emergencies suddenly can’t pay their mortgages, college tuition or for their kids. They often end up on skid row, or at least in bad shape, because their financial situation is precarious (since there is no safety net) and a medical emergency knocks the whole thing down. In those countries where these worries are not as pressing, the people’s lives are different — they're less desperate, less on the edge, and therefore everyone, even those who are paying more than their share, benefits. It’s hard to quantify that benefit, I would imagine — but anyone with eyes and ears can sense it.

So, back to the Internet. Is there a parallel with health care, insurance, fishing? Should I pay more, or receive less for what I pay, because my neighbor wants to stream movies, or video Skype to his or her pals night and day? Not sure. Maybe the question is how much we are willing to give up in order to share, and be equal… and what are our rights, if any, as far as resources go?

12.18.08: No More News

The Tribune Company owns the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs, a bunch of TV stations and some other regional newspapers. They’re just barely holding on since being acquired in a takeover a year and a half ago by Sam Zell, a real estate billionaire. After the buyout, the Tribune’s editor left, as did a lot of its journalists and columnists. They reportedly weren’t happy with some of the changes that Zell had instituted. The paper had also acquired a relatively large debt. My guess is that after Zell bought the paper, his purchase price saddled the paper with debt; or rather, the paper’s employees — since its board members, like Zell, managed to avoid any personal debt.

I saw similar things happen in the music business in the early 80’s, as record companies merged and were taken over by other companies (Warner Bros. was absorbed by Time and then later, AOL). The result was that the companies suddenly ended up in debt, and, in order to show a profit every quarter, had to forget about their standards and musical instincts. Long-term thinking became a thing of the past. They had to cut back here and there, which often meant cutting out middle-level employees. Bosses weren’t likely to thin their own ranks, and from their perspective, losing middle-level employees who had accrued decent salaries would help shore up the bottom line — temporarily, at least. New middle-level people could be hired at lower pay, or lower-level employees could be bumped up.

The thing is, it was the middle-level people who actually knew and essentially ran the businesses.

“‘From an informed public standpoint, it’s alarming,’ said Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from the Houston area, who has seen The Houston Chronicle’s team in Washington drop to three people, from nine, in two years. ‘They’re letting go those with the most institutional knowledge, which helps reporters hold elected officials accountable.’” [Link to NY Times article]

The Houston Chronicle is not alone. Almost every newspaper in the US, except the Times and the Wall Street Journal, has drastically cut, or in many cases entirely eliminated, their Washington contingent.

“‘We used to cover the Pentagon, combing through defense contracts, and we’re covering some of that out of Dallas now, but basically we don’t do it anymore,’ said Carl Leubsdorf, chief of The Dallas Morning News bureau, which had 11 people four years ago, and now has four. ‘We had someone at the Justice Department, but no longer. We can’t free someone up for a long time to do a major project.’” [Link]

As one of the Baltimore Sun reporters, who appeared in the HBO show The Wire, mentioned, you just can’t cover with 4 people what you used to with 11 — or 30. Despite management trying to squeeze more blood out of that stone, it’s just not possible. Less gets reported.

Likewise, these newspapers have dumped most of their foreign bureaus, food critics, and film critics, and are loathe to assign reporters to stories that will take months to research and write. In doing so, they are eviscerating that which makes newspapers different from online reviews, blogs and websites. When papers end up like USA Today, there will be no reason to read them.

“The much greater loss, the journalists say, is the decline of Washington reporting on local matters — the foibles of a hometown congressman or a public works project in the paper’s backyard. One after another, they cited the example of the San Diego paper’s Washington bureau for exposing the corruption of Representative Randall Cunningham, who is known as Duke.

In accepting a Pulitzer Prize for that work in 2006, ‘we were bold enough to hope that it would be the first of many, but it turned out to be the high point,’ said George E. Condon Jr., the last bureau chief. ‘No matter how much great journalism is done by national organizations, they’re simply not geared to monitor closely a member of Congress from, say, San Diego, who’s not a national leader.’” [Link]

Second to the NY Times, the Tribune Company owns some of the country’s most widely circulated newspapers. Though I tend to think of the LA Times as more a community paper than a national one — a paper that covers mainly the intrigues and dramas of their local industry (movies, music and TV mixed in with coverage of local politics and crime) — there’s nothing wrong with in-depth reporting of one’s own city. TV sure ain’t gonna do it.

Do we really need in-depth reporting, investigative journalism and foreign news desks? Can we manage without them? I am as guilty as most in that I often (though not always) read the morning papers online, for free. I jump between different publications, as their angles, points of view and interests are varied. Yeah, sometimes it’s the wacky human-interest story that grabs my attention — the sort of thing fit for web reporting — but just as often, it’s a story that is thoroughly researched and gives background and context on the topic.

How does a democracy work without (in-depth) news? It doesn’t. While most of the population will not care about access to high-quality news, there are always some who read to find out what’s really going on, and why. Dictatorships, totalitarian regimes and underdeveloped countries don’t have the luxury of investigative journalism, and the news-as-entertainment in highly capitalist regimes isn’t really informative either — it’s bread and circuses. An informed citizenry, said Jefferson, is necessary for a democracy to function. He also said:

“Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”

and

“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” [Link]

TJ may have presumed we’d get our information from other sources, or maybe, like many politicians, he simply distrusted the press. It wouldn’t be surprising if he did — imagine if the press reported heavily on his taste for Brown Sugar. Politicians are held in check by the press, for better or worse; that too is one of the ways in which the press allows a democracy to function. Without the threat of public exposure, well… you can imagine.

Anyway, it will be strange if the USA becomes a large industrialized country with only one or two newspapers — the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal — practicing in-depth coverage; the latter, now owned by Murdoch, may find itself eviscerated, assuming its fate follows those of his other newspaper purchases around the world. There is no way the Times can afford all the foreign desks, local reporters and journalists that a country of this size requires.

What will happen when most of the country has nothing but entertainment, gossip and sports as sources of information? It’s a country ripe for takeover, if you ask me. A place where public opinion can be easily manipulated, as long as the consumers keep buying. Blogs and Internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story — sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day. They don’t have African or Southeast Asian bureaus either. Besides, most Internet news sites like Google News are aggregates of traditional print and wire service news gatherers. Without sources they’d be pretty much nothing. Local sites like Gothamist and national ones like The Smoking Gun are cool and up-to-the-minute, but they don’t assign staff to conduct long-term investigations into the how and why of a scandal or news item. They break stuff, it’s true, but mostly they rely on others to feed them information.

I have plenty of beefs with the arts and culture coverage of many newspapers; I can easily spot the biases and lack of research. I’m of that world, so I have my own personal biases as well — which sometimes match those of the critics, and sometimes don’t. I myself have gone in and out of favor a few times, so I regard their reviews and reporting with what I feel is healthy skepticism. News, though, is another story. I imagine that cops, thugs, hedge fund dudes, politicians and bureaucrats all have their own beefs with the press, but from my point of view, I’d much prefer some seriously researched coverage in those areas — with a little bias — to nothing of any depth.

I’ve been trying to imagine what this country would be like without a serious news source. Like Cuba with only Granma, the organ of the party — that and bootleg satellite TV broadcasts of American Idol. Or Russia, pre-Gorbachev, when the choice was between Pravda and some samizdat mimeographed publications. Iran under the Ayatollah or the Shah. The Philippines under martial law — when all press critical of the Marcos regime was silenced.

We tend to get all holier-than-thou when we look at countries without free press. We think their lives must somehow be more pathetic or sad. Needless to say, this attitude makes us feel better. But people go on. They know, or at least suspect, that they are being denied something, but they maintain hope and optimism. They don’t go around moping. They get on with their lives, and sometimes, at least now and then, feel like maybe the censorship doesn’t matter all that much. There are still reasons to be cheerful. We might like to think of life in an oppressive regime as sheer misery, but from what I can tell, it’s rarely viewed that way. Life goes on and people make do with what they have, and they fall in love and get drunk and sing and dance. It takes a lot — a whole lot — to bring them to the flash point, like what just happened in Greece. Mostly, people adapt to the way things are — and to feel miserable about it is fruitless. And that’s what we will do when there are only two serious newspapers left in the USA.

11.04.2008: Election Day ; Paint on Canvas

Election Day

I'm scared to look.

Paint on Canvas

In an article in the weekend Financial Times, Jackie Wullschlager writes about a show of Renaissance portraits at the National Gallery in London. She makes a series of broad statements about the contemporary implications inherent in the changes portraiture went through at that time. Jackie says, for example, “the more human individuality is threatened — by biogenetics, global capitalism, the identikit personae of YouTube — the more intensely we turn to painted portraits.”

I remember hearing something similar in a YouTube video, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” by anthropologist Michael Wesch and his class at Kansas State University. That piece is exactly what it says it is, and, of course, it itself is also a YouTube phenomenon that looks at other YouTube phenomena and back at itself. Anyway, one of the points he and his class make is that as certain values get eroded by phenomena or technology they simultaneously become more valued. They mentioned authenticity as being a value that is highly prized among YouTube denizens, as it is relatively easy to fake a posting. And therefore, the whole YouTube world prizes stuff that isn’t slick, or God forbid fake, but is “real.” When anything can be virtual, then “real” becomes precious.

So, I can see what Jackie is getting at — that the humanistic values implied by the new (at the time) Renaissance portrait styles might have contemporary relevance. Jackie also says that previous to the Renaissance, full frontal portraiture (not full frontal nude body images) were reserved for pictures of Jesus. So, by implication, to paint real people in that way was to say that the individual is no less than the God(s). That we each have a spark, a dollop, of Godness in us, and it’s always a little different. Maybe this was the beginning of the rise of the cult of individuality, of the idea that each of us is completely unique. Each a nation unto itself. Now science is telling us that maybe we’re not as unique as we would like to think. We’ll see where that leads.

Of course, portraiture was originally reserved for the rich and powerful — royalty, popes, bishops and powerful merchants. But eventually, the less wealthy merchant classes soon adopted it. Jackie quotes an Italian satirist, Pietro Aretino (1554), who laments that “even tailors and vintners are given life by painters.” God forbid. So, the rich and powerful did what they always do; they changed the rules of the game to maintain their distinction. They could afford to, so they had their new portraits done giant size. Or what was then giant size. It goes without saying that only they had the wall space for such large-scale works.

When is a painting not a painting? When it is a hot line to God. In another article in that paper, Robin Blake reviews a show of Byzantine works that includes a number of icons. These paintings were, he says, not revered for their painterly qualities and certainly not for their humanistic values. They were closer to sacred relics according to Blake. Like the bloody nails, bones, and wood fragments elaborately displayed in many churches today. “Any pious person who tried hard enough, it was thought, could establish a hotline to the divine through the painting.” Not only were these paintings powerful agents in this way, but also their power could be multiplied and transferred. (Walter Benjamin, take note). A copy, maybe every copy, maybe even bad copies, of the original icon was believed to somehow partake of the power of the original. This is digital technology from 1000 years ago! Where the copy and the original are identical — at least identical where it matters. I remember going into some Orthodox churches in Greece while there on tour and seeing women kissing the images on the icons. Not tongue kissing, mind you, but there was definitely passion of another sort involved. I wondered to myself how many contemporary artists might wish their work could elicit such a powerful reaction. Needless to say, one doesn’t judge these “artworks” in the same way one judges other portraits, just as a splinter allegedly from the cross is no mere chunk of kindling. Art criticism in this case becomes useless, and aesthetics too — it all becomes irrelevant.

02.12.2008: Addendum to recent Wired Article (Part II)

Model Number 7: Fan Supported Label/Distribution

Just read the second of a number of articles on Maria Schneider, the jazz composer, and the release of her new album. She’s up for a Grammy, which probably prompted these articles, as her lovely new CD — which isn’t actually a CD — is only available as a download through ArtistShare, her current “record label”. The album, Sky Blue, is a suite composed for a seventeen-piece jazz orchestra, so it must have cost something to record and mix.

ArtistShare offers yet another alternative to the traditional record label deal — another possibility to add to the ever-growing list of other possibilities. Again, it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, but it certainly seems to be working for her. ArtistShare asks the fans of an artist to contribute to the making of a future record. (Obviously, this means the artist must have some fans to begin with, so emerging artists might give this one a pass.) A donation of $9.99 gets you a download of the album when it’s done, along with some texts, notes and images and a few other extras.

But then the deal ramps up in steps. A deeper investment gets you concert tickets and other perks and the highest you can go is 18k, which wouldn’t fund a mega pop record or a project in the cash only business of hip hop, but in this case it gets you a credit as a producer. You can attend the recording sessions, obtain tickets to live shows, and can even attend the Grammy’s with Maria and her producer or label guy.

I imagine that in Maria’s case, she spends a lot of time composing (with either a computer or with pencil and paper). And then the actual recording process might be fairly straightforward — some band rehearsals in any large room before renting a large studio to record the stuff more or less live over the course of a few days. Mixing and post-production could be done in a smaller, cheaper studio. So, though I doubt that 18k for example would cover it all — she works with a large ensemble — the sum would at least take a big bite out of the recording costs.

For the most part, distribution is through digital downloads, so those costs are kept under control (though I think the larger investors get signed hard copies as well as their downloads).

How did she do? Well, pretty good I’d say, though she didn’t win a Grammy this time (she got one in 2004). She got 200k from fan/participants for her record, of which 15% went to the “label”. The rest, 170k, went directly to the artist. (I suspect the recording costs come out of that as well, which must have been at least 20-30k). AND, she didn’t have to give up any of her publishing, which traditional labels often manage to get a big piece of.

Anyway, add this one to the list of possible distribution models.

(See the original article published in Wired Magazine here)

02.03.2008: Aspen, Colorado; Blocked

C and I are here to take a Final Cut Pro tutorial at a place called Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Years ago Mike and Doug Starn told me they took Photoshop classes up here and recommended it for intensive learning. The ranch includes ceramics studios, a large woodshop, a metalsmithing studio, darkrooms, and a full print shop that functions quasi-independently of the ranch center.

Normally, established artists come here to get help realizing a project, or to consult with the younger aspiring artists also taking the tutorials. While we didn’t have specific projects in mind, we were excited by the possibilities offered with these new affordable video and editing tools. With Final Cut one can edit professional quality, high-res video on a laptop if need be. No extra hardware, other than an external hard drive, is needed. And with the new high-definition cameras that have just come out in the last year or so, the image quality available for a relatively low cost has taken a quantum leap.

It reminds me of when Logic and other comparable softwares made audio recording, editing, and mixing available at a more reasonable cost than with Pro Tools, which required that you use their expensive hardware. Pro Tools eventually responded to the competition’s populist approach with more reasonably priced hardware setups, but the cat was out of the bag. It was possible to record audio at home, on a laptop even, at the same quality as in a professional studio.

As others have pointed out, the required gear — mics, headphones, A to D converters, amps, speakers, etc. — is far from free. And though the costs are significantly less than they once were, much of the gear still remains out of reach for many young artists. The investment need be made only once though, whereas the cost of using a professional recording studio must be shouldered every time an artist goes in. I continue to pay for a recording studio from time to time, mostly for the skills and the fresh, creative ears of the mixer, recorder or producer.

On the way to Aspen, in Newark Airport, I used the restroom, and there was a man in the neighboring toilet talking on his cell phone. Of course, everyone could hear what he was saying — not that it made much sense, as we all just heard one side.

Blocked

There’s free Wi-Fi at the Denver airport, which is a nice, sensible touch. But to my surprise, one of my habitual surfing sites has been blocked. I’m not totally shocked that alleged nudity might be blocked (if there is nudity on the Boing Boing site it’s pretty rare and likely to be arty or ironic), but I’m perplexed by the implication that all blogs and wiki sites are suspect!

Back in NYC however, Danielle explains that not all blogs and wikis are blocked, just those filtered by Secure Computing’s web censorware product called SmartFilter. According to Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin,

“[…]SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity — even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands — as a ‘nudity’ site, which means that customers who block ‘nudity’ can't get through." (see blog post here)

Turns out, Secure Computing and other similar companies have sold their products to government-controlled monopoly Internet providers in places like Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan to name a few, effectively blocking access to filtered sites — like Boing Boing — for entire countries. Xeni wrote an op-ed in the NY Times on the issue, which you can find here.

We transfer to the small plane to Aspen. It arrives over Aspen about twenty-five minutes after takeoff, but there is low visibility, so we can’t land. The plane circles for an hour over the clouds and then we have to fly back to Denver. The airline people tell us the next available flight is twenty-four hours later, so we all scramble to look for ground transportation. A wild man with a van is outside soliciting passengers; as the busses aren’t leaving for hours, a group of us pile in and we leave as soon as the van is full.

As we ascend into the mountains the snow begins falling and the roads are increasingly covered in snow. After an hour or so it’s dark, and the road is a white path amidst a white landscape. The Vail Pass is pretty outrageous, with falling and blowing snow and pretty low visibility. Every time we hit a bump the interior light in the van blinks on and off. The kid next to me is getting restless — after about 3.5 hours, he routinely asks how much further and how much longer. It’s annoying, but he’s only articulating what the rest of us feel.

12.06.2007: Embedded

On the occasion of the opening of the new, big New York Times building on 40th St and 8th Ave, I posted a journal/blog entry recently that raised some questions about print media. The post got passed around, and after a few days I received an invitation Ariel Kaminer at the Times to visit their new home. With a little trepidation and a lot of excitement, I went yesterday afternoon and got a little tour. I wondered if  embedded journalists might feel much like I did— welcomed in, but unsure how much is kosher to tell and report.

Of course they are asking themselves many of the same questions I asked in my post: for example, “how will print journalism survive financially as more and more readers migrate on line?” Part of my little tour consisted of talking to folks who are confronting that issue every day, but I also encountered journalists involved in traditional newsgathering, as well as the digerati who are pondering the online and electronic future of news media.

Needless to say, the big question remains open; we didn’t decide it yesterday, but a lot of issues and ideas were raised. The Research & Development department (!), located way up on the 28th floor with incredible views, is where possible future (and present) technologies for delivering news and other services are pondered. Or you can look out the window and see New Jersey and the rolling hills that stretch further west. On a long countertop lay a broad selection of tablets, cell phones, PDAs and other devices that might become a way that people receive their news in the future.

While reading substantial articles on a Blackberry or Palm, or even an iPhone seems unlikely on those small screens, checking stocks, sports, movie times, reviews, menus, and headlines, etc., may be a more probable scenario. The tablets and readers arrayed on the counter were more intriguing to me. One or two had color screens and were touch sensitive, allowing readers to highlight parts of articles (as I do in the print version), as well as to save and send them. These devices were about half the width of this 15” laptop I’m writing on, and some were about half as thick, approximating the size of a thin trade paperback.  A few had hidden keyboards (the Fujitsu Tablet PC 1610 has a keyboard that swivels out), while others did not. These devices go online, of course, but they don’t necessarily run all the software, or perform all the functions that a laptop does, though it seems obvious to me that fairly soon they will all be able to do so.

This begs the question of whether people actually want these halfway devices, devices that do some things, some of them very well, but stop there. Will people, for example, carry a slim tablet as a way of reading the morning paper and accessing other online information and leave it at that? Will they continue to own and even carry multiple devices? A (smart) phone, a computer at the office, maybe a laptop in the briefcase and another computer at home? And a tablet reader on top of all that? (Well, in many cases the tablets will replace the laptops.)

I can see both sides. When I go out to see something or to have dinner with friends, I never take my laptop. And unless the tablets evolve to use the recently emerging folding screens (enabling a small and compact device to open up and have a larger screen), I doubt I would bother to carry one around as I would a newspaper, a magazine or a book to keep me company when I’m by myself. So, even though one can do email and documents on a smart phone now, and there are various collapsible extension keyboards for them, I don’t see people reading or writing long letters or docs on tiny devices until the advent of the foldout screens.

The R&D folks mentioned the potential advent of portable devices with tiny projectors that would effectively turn any bit of nearby white surface into a screen about the size of a laptop.  Hmmm…Maybe folks would adapt to writing and interacting with little projected versions of their laptop screens? The smart phone would then serve as a link to the web, as well as a storage and processing device, its user interacting not with the apparatus itself, but with thin air, a projected virtual version of a desktop and keyboard. And then before too long, the computer interface will become a hologram or a projection that doesn’t need a wall, vanishing when you’re done work (or play) and switch it off.

There was also talk of people getting articles pushed to their phones, all of which is possible, but the question of how one reads longer pieces remains. For now, portable readers seem perfect for information updates and such. In fact a couple of these R&D guys just won first prize at a Yahoo hack contest for developing — in twenty-four hours — some hardware with corresponding software linking phones and computers easily. It is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that someone could hack a piece of software and its attendant hardware so quickly, albeit some of the stuff looked like it was held together with hot glue. Pretty impressive.

The tour continued in a dark room the size of a kid’s bedroom with a large plasma screen on one wall and various devices — game controllers, iPods, DVD players, etc. — plugged into it. I sat on the couch. A few of the guys came in and proceeded to demonstrate the interactive “game” called Rockband. (The newspaper does review games and electronics, but I suspect these guys were not the game reviewers.) They pulled out a microphone, a virtual guitar (I don’t think it had strings on it), and some virtual drums, and proceeded to jam — full on — to a Weezer tune! The “game” allows you to select avatars — in this case a weirdly muscular drummer, a singer with a kind of white mullet, and a woman on guitar with pink hair — and you sing and “play” your instruments to the prerecorded karaoke version of the song. Lyrics and tab like graphics scroll by to help you follow along. The audience in the game world cheers. Then you get rated on your performance. These guys did really well. Really well.

On another floor I had a talk with a VP of business affairs (not the business section), who of course thinks a lot about from where to derive ad income as readers migrate online. Already the present readership is far stronger online than in print, but income from online ads is not a great, not by a long shot. Ariel says that the ad income online may be much smaller than that on paper, but it’s growing much, much faster.

At present, it is mostly the ads in the Style section, and the glossy Sunday and T magazines that pay for a disproportionate amount of the newspaper’s running costs. Without the income from Gucci and Rolex, there probably wouldn’t be a Baghdad bureau. (That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the idea.) And to some extent those seductive and provocative luxury ads work best in print — they certainly don’t have the same impact when translated to a tiny online banner.

It was pointed out however, that no matter how seductive a print ad is, it still relies almost exclusively on the reader remembering it in some vague way. First it has to meet your eyes, and then it has to be remembered in some conscious or unconscious way. While small in size, online ads have the advantage of being able to take the curious reader right to the “store” — the “store” being either the vendor’s web page or some “place” where one can buy the item with a few clicks online. Any sales person can tell you that once you’ve got the customer into your establishment only a fool will let them get out empty handed.

I sense that there is an unspoken philosophy at the Times that guides and informs everything. It’s an old idea (Jefferson, DeToqueville) that a democracy — which I would suggest we barely have now — can only run with at least semi-informed citizens. Without information a citizen can’t make intelligent choices or vote in any kind of rational way. They’re easy to dupe, fool and deceive. Gut instincts will only get you so far. (One could say that faith-based politics would deny that being informed is necessary, with faith being the only requirement.) Anyway, this philosophy places the media, and in particular the news media, in a sort of integral role — not in the government of course, but in the mechanism that makes a country work.

As a serious newspaper, or news service, or whatever it will be called, the Times would then have a duty to write about situations around the world, around the US, and in NYC and Washington. And to do fairly in-depth reporting, including investigative pieces, they must maintain bureaus in a number of far-flung spots around the globe. Needless to say, this is hugely expensive and some of those articles may not be the most popular. The press is both a product to consume and an indispensable service — a tricky balancing act to pull off.

The Times folks seemed to have internalized an extension of this idea — that, for example, it’s OK if the ads for luxury goods or gadgets fund the newsgathering and reporting because it serves a greater public service. Or, to put it another way, it’s OK if the important newsgathering part doesn’t make a profit.

Many forms of media have held those same values, though a good number have been forced to drop them in recent years. In the record biz, the successive waves of corporate takeovers put increased emphasis on the bottom line and on quarterly profits (to keep the stock values up). Labels like Warner Bros used to fund recordings by Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Frank Zappa and later Talking Heads (to name but a few), with the profits made from Black Sabbath and subsequently from Madonna. The labels accepted that the less profitable, but maybe weightier and more prestigious stuff was important to keep around.

But when the suits moved in after a series of mergers, the idea that many artists’ recordings weren’t profitable in and of themselves was no longer acceptable. Like many other media forms — TV news, magazines and movies — the unprofitable stuff was inevitably axed, and the material bringing in the bucks, well, “Let’s have more of that,” the suits would say. The Ochs-Sulzberger family directs a large percentage of the board of Times, giving them effective control.

There was a similar situation at the Wall Street Journal with the Bancroft family. But, their family’s control was more fragmented and the News Corp (i.e. Rupert Murdoch) managed to take over. The Times family holds the view that “quality” journalism makes all the rest of the business worth more. It’s not uncommon that the unprofitable parts of a company lend it weight, prestige, and ultimately its worth. So, maintaining those expensive foreign bureaus is viewed as important.

It was mentioned that some folks in the building feel that the addition of  glossy supplements like the T sections, is selling out. But one could also argue that as long as the serious journalism remains intact, then why not let the ads in those sections pay for it. (Well, we’ll see what happens as readers go on line.)

Lastly, I was invited to a conference room on one of the lower level news floors to sit in on the “page one” meeting. The meeting was like something out of Front Page, one of those old-fashioned newspaper movies. It’s a long-standing tradition in which representatives of each section pitch a story that might be suitable for the front page. More than twenty people sit around a giant table, each with a printed summary of his or her proposed story. A projection screen at one end of the table allows accompanying photos to be thrown up and discussed as well.  The meeting was a bit frenetic, with no seeming established order of presentation. There’s no Big Board, as in Dr. Strangelove, but there is a big white wall with room enough for one.

None of the pieces even had proposed headlines at this point. Sometimes the head editor(s) would suggest that a given story be tightened up, which might involve adding a paragraph to make a point or connection, or to provide further clearer explanation.

Yesterday there was no obvious or massive breaking story,  so some larger, ongoing stories (the credit debacle, for example) continued to evolve and develop in important and significant ways — although there was really nothing spectacular to hang these developments on. At one point the metro desk suggested a story about non-operating elevators at the Bronx Family court. I thought it was a good piece, as the families and children were often denied assistance or legal help because of the damn elevators — “For the want of a nail, the battle was lost” sort of thing. But OK, in the context of everything else that day, maybe it seemed that more “weight” was desired.

Haggling over the front page might seem anachronistic; soon readers might be customizing their own front pages or an algorithm might do it for them. I would argue that, as in a lot of fields (like music), a filter is more valuable than sheer information. In fact, a filter is information, in the strict sense. And a front page — whether material or virtual — is a filter that tells us what news the paper has decided we should be aware of at a glance. Granted. a nice picture (they’re getting increasingly arty these days) will draw in browsers at a newsstand as much as a headline. But for most of us, this aggregator that is that daily conference meeting is still a pretty good system.

I saw more departments after the “page one” meeting, like the guys who make interactive graphics, for example. Their online pieces are increasingly like little movies and might, I think, draw even more eyes away from the print edition. Hmmm.

On the way out I saw the nice art piece that Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen did in the 8th Ave lobby. Though it usually displays random text excerpts trolled from the online archives, at that moment it was displaying the shapes of nations and states that might be in the news. I recognized the shapes of Afghanistan and Minnesota.

Ariel adds:

“There used to be only one way to engage with the NY Times — and that was to buy the whole thing, sit down, and read it in its entirety. (If you bought it, but left parts unread you felt “guilty” — which is a big reason some people didn't buy it in the first place.)

Me, I still read it like that. Every morning, cover to cover. But now, there are many additional ways to engage the stuff we publish. You can Google a fact, land on a Times article, dip in, dip out, move on. Or you can visit the site to get movie tickets and showtimes (actually we just yesterday launched our new movie site: www.nytimes.com/movies) and click your way to the day's reviews — or the day's news about Kabul. Or you can debate with other readers about what off-Broadway plays to see during the stagehands' strike (and click thru to the reviews).  Or when a rainstorm shuts down the subway system, and the MTA website crashes, you can go to the "City Room" blog, which was fielding real-time reports about what was running and what wasn't, reported via cell phone text by wet people on subway platforms. Or you can waltz through the archives, a vast and free library of history's first draft.

Or, you can log on every morning and read every story, cover to cover (or whatever the electronic equivalent of that is).

The numbers suggest people are finding lots and lots of different ways and reasons to use the Times — as a resource for news and more broadly speaking, information — and that's what I (not ordinarily a cheerleader) find cheering. Because obviously it no longer makes any sense to expect people to read the thing just out of some sense of civic obligation."

4.1.07: Your Government Working for You

[A special bulletin brought to you by DB and Danielle Spencer]

[Link to savenetradio.org]

The Copyright Royalty Board is proposing a large increase in the performance royalty rates for “non-interactive streaming services”. This means web radio, cable radio and satellite radio will pay more to SoundExchange in royalties. Presumably those royalties eventually dribble down to the artists getting “played”, but it’s never that simple. It’s a little complex and difficult to understand but let me see if I can describe what is in the offing. (My own streaming web radio would be affected, and since I derive no income from it, that, among other things, makes this an issue of personal interest.)

Web radio is different than broadcast radio in that the hosting costs increase precisely as the listenership increases. With streaming web radio, information on the exact number of listeners accessing the stream at any given moment or period is available, and easy to obtain, unlike broadcast radio which is just out there and no one knows how many people are listening (so how do they determine ad rates?) The more listeners you have the more you pay in hard costs — some server’s gotta host the stream. Of course stations like mine and the network of NPR stations that have no commercial revenue eventually run into a financial wall once that audience figure reaches a certain amount.

With royalties it gets more complicated. While traditional terrestrial radio does pay songwriter/publishing royalties for the musical work itself, in the U.S. they don’t pay performance royalties for the sound recording under the rationale that airplay promotes the songs, which benefits the copyright holders. (This determination was mostly due to the radio industry lobbying congress not to collect these royalties.) Web radio, however, along with satellite and cable services, does pay performance royalties — these are the rates that are being raised now. (If this discrepancy sounds illogical, it’s because it is.) Now, broadcasters are eligible for statutory licenses for these new performance royalties. These statutory licenses set royalty rates so that each station doesn’t have to license each song individually. Until now, if a webcaster’s profit was below a certain amount, they have been eligible to pay a set yearly fee, and if they met certain criteria they have been able to pay royalties as a percentage of their profits, not as a per-song fee. Registered 501(c)(3) non-profits have been eligible for reduced rates regardless of their stream traffic.

With the proposed changes the royalties can no longer be based on a percentage of revenue, but on a fee for each listening hour — how many folks are listening and for how long — and there will be a minimum fee per radio “channel”. Also, above a certain aggregate listening hour amount, non-profits have to pay the same per-listening hour rates as commercial broadcasters. So now there will be no distinction between a large-scale non-profit station (like KCRW or WXPN) and Z100. The threshold for non-profits is proposed to be 159,140 listening hours per month. Where did this bizarre number come from?

For perspective, on my web radio I get an average of about 40,000 listener hours per month. At present I pay small mechanical royalty fees that go to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC (presumably these dribble down to the artists whose songs I stream); performance royalties that get dispersed via a company called SoundExchange, and a fee to Live 365 for hosting and doing all the paperwork. I pay about $2,000 a month, based on the above listening hours. That’s rent for an apartment for many people (at least in some cities.) I can afford it, I enjoy doing it, and people seem to like it, so it’s OK for me that I’m out of pocket. I do however realize that I am in a special position — not just anyone can afford to start a streaming web radio service if it has this many listeners. If this ruling goes through it’s likely that my costs would go up about 20%, which is not crippling, yet. But one can see where this road leads — the door will have been wedged open. It’s estimated that the per-play rates will put many webcasters out of business, all but the largest and most commercially successful.

For NPR stations it is a different story as they have wider listenership than I and would pay the same royalty rates as commercial broadcasters. KCRW estimates  roughly that as this ruling is retroactive they would owe $130,000 in additional fees for 2006 and $237,000 for 2007. WXPN in Philly estimates $1,000,000. In some worlds this is not a big deal but as one can imagine many of these stations barely eek by as it is, so this could very likely shut down the webcasting side of many of them. That would be a shame, as these stations are the only source of, well, good music, alternative sounds and innovative and informative programming in the U.S. It would be a loss for, well, democracy, as democracy depends on availability of many points of view untainted by commercial concerns and pressures. A truly informed populace, in other words. It points to another victory for the oligarchs — the big 5 record companies and the media companies that own them. Count one more for the big guys. The reasoning that it’s for the benefit of the artists rings a little hollow as most artists heard this argument re: cracking down on file sharing, and most never see money from their record companies anyway — so the line about “we’re doing it for you” is pretty suspect.

Who is this agency that is proposing making this change? They are not an elected body — the Copyright Royalty Board is made up of a few people appointed by the Library of Congress Copyright Office. They used to be a group of arbitrators but since 2004 they are a group of judges. (I wonder if Gonzales, Cheney etc. have any pals in there?)

The new rates are supposed to have been based on the model of the so-called willing buyer and willing seller in the marketplace — this according to the wording of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1996. But where does this “market value” come from? Does it mean that if I play more popular music on my streaming radio I should pay more? I’m confused. (I think I’m supposed to be confused.) Who is determining this value? In this case the CRB seems to be looking towards agreements made between the major record labels and the largest commercial webcasters, but this is hardly a free market model. It also seems to ignore the fact that the “value” of a song would change depending on the context — if I’m listening to a web radio stream I can’t control what I hear, which is different from purchasing the track.

The new rates are being appealed — to join a petition (against the rate changes) or learn more about this, go to savenetradio.org.

—DB/DS

+++

Some further notes, for those who are really interested:

Commercial broadcast mediums in the U.S. mostly derive their income from advertisers. Nielsen systems — boxes attached to a random sampling of viewers’ TV sets — are supposed to determine what shows are being watched, and the more popular shows can therefore demand more money from the advertisers as they are “delivering” a larger audience to view their ads and presumably buy their products. I suspect it’s a more complicated algorithm than that, as some shows will have a wealthier viewership than others, and presumably one could market more expensive items to this crowd than to Super Bowl fans even though their numbers might be smaller. You might charge more to deliver potential buyers of jewelry and designer clothes than drinkers of Bud Lite. And with cable it might be possible to determine more accurately who is watching what.

From an audience perspective we are used to receiving radio and TV more or less for free. We see it as a God-given right, and our perception is that the stuff is simply “in the air” and there for the taking. Of course the fact that we “pay” by being forced to listen or watch lots of ads is somewhat ignored. Subscription services that reduce ads like Tivo, cable, and commercial-free satellite radio are increasingly popular, but I would argue that ads are not consciously viewed by the public as a cost. To some extent  free programming is simply an elaborate means of getting us to sit still and tune in to the ads. With cable we pay a blanket fee, which helps fund the channels — and we still feel we can and should have complete access to the cornucopia of programs, some with ads and some without. NPR and PBS stations are funded by viewers like you, as we are often reminded, and by miniscule government grants. They don’t solicit ads. Though they pay a fee for their license and pay royalties for playing music, these amounts are not too high. And being non-profits they get a tax break. (I do not.) Broadcast radio has been traditionally viewed as a kind of free promotion of the artists and record labels’ products, and therefore the idea that the stations should be paying performance royalties was waived. The same “promotional” logic was applied to MTV in the past; the videos, for a certain period, were provided free and seen as publicity vehicles for CDs. After a while the big record companies extracted fees from MTV — which they didn’t share with the artists — and now there are hardly any videos shown at all. (Since, in the past, TV had no “product” to sell, this “promotional” reasoning was not possible in that medium. For example, Seinfeld or American Idol are not broadcast without ads under an assumption that folks will rush out an buy a video or DVD…it’s also true that, unlike music, TV shows are not quite as endlessly repeatable.) With web radio that logic seems to be partially being left behind.

—DB

The “promotional” rationale for not collecting performance royalties from terrestrial radio is more of a reflection of the radio industry’s powerful lobby in the 1940s than an ideological decision. The RIAA calls it “an historical accident”, and the U.S. copyright office has acknowledged the asymmetry of collecting publishing royalties but not mechanical royalties. We are one of the few industrialized countries that doesn’t collect these royalties. The EU nations do collect performance royalties for terrestrial radio, but because we don’t collect them here, they don’t distribute those revenues to U.S. artists.

There are of course many examples of broadcast mediums that are essentially promotional as far as the copyright holder is concerned and don’t earn direct royalty revenues. However, the songwriter/publisher royalty income from terrestrial radio is more than token. As for web radio, the “promotional” logic was never applied, dating back to the initial decision to charge performance royalties in 1995 with the DPRA (Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act). The performance royalty rates have always been significant for webcasters (12% of profit for commercial broadcasters above a modest profit threshold) even before these proposed rate increases, despite the fact that the revenues don’t amount to much for the artists.

—DS

+++

4.17.07

Here are some links/articles on the web radio issue that was decided yesterday:

The Death of Web Radio? [Business Week Online]
Net Radio Operators Lose Appeal Over Fees [c|net news.com]

Interesting that SoundExchange initiated the whole thing…and that they are a non-profit created by the big record labels. Hmmm. One could say conflict of interest but cleverly held at arm's length by the creation of this mouthpiece?

9.7.06: The Empire Fights Back

A new music download site has made deals with two of the largest music catalogues in the world — potentially, then, they could become a challenge to iTunes. But the model is way different.

From The Guardian UK:

The deal follows SpiralFrog's agreement with Universal Music Group announced last week and means the site can offer users free legal downloads from artists such as James Blunt, Kelly Clarkson and this week's Mercury Prize winners, Arctic Monkeys.

While iTunes charges for music — 79p a track in Britain — on SpiralFrog users will have to watch a short advert before they can download a song free.

As far as artists are concerned, it is understood they will get royalties based on how many times songs are downloaded, with the money coming from SpiralFrog's advertising revenue.

All well and good if you want stuff these major labels have signed and approved of — to me it implies that if you’re not an artist with one of these majors then you might have trouble getting your track available on these sites in the first place, and even then, if your stuff isn’t hot, the advertiser who is paying you will eventually balk at funding fringe stuff that doesn’t draw (the right) consumers to their products. The advertiser holds the purse strings, and will naturally pull the other strings too, despite what they may claim, so this model puts the control of what music is available back in the hands of the majors and their corporate cronies.

Not that iTunes is fair and balanced, either. I don’t know the details, but I have heard that they are like record stores of yore — doling out position (visibility) to a very very limited number of artists. No surprise there — there is limited space. I’ve also heard that true indie artists get inferior treatment — lower royalty rates (or higher entry costs), less attention, and sometimes they are refused entry outright. Who’s manning the velvet rope here? What happened to that Long Tail where everything is available?

Now, a lot of this inequity might be due simply to pragmatic realities — there are only a finite number of tracks that can be processed and added at once — large, but finite.

Soon enough a site will open that is like a Google search for music downloads — downloads that are not copy-protected but you still pay for. eMusic tracks have no copy protection, for example, but their catalogue is limited. Eventually a meta search will turn up the tracks you want, wherever they live, on whomever’s site. Consumers don’t care who they buy them from if the interface is easy and intuitive. Soon enough iTunes consumers will find they have reached the 5th authorized player on their tracks and the frustration will set in when they can’t listen to the music they paid for. They’ll start to look elsewhere.

No mention whether or not SpiralFrog’s tracks have similar copy protection or similar malicious malware attached; maybe they won’t. But I can bet that the big advertisers won’t leap to sponsor the last 3 CDs I bought — Anja Garbarek, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Thelonious Monk. Niche advertisers might sponsor these kinds of records — they could sponsor them on their own sites via their own servers. Putamayo CDs are in effect sponsored by the health food stores and eco-boutiques that give them display space. A Mormon-owned Home Depot like chain, like the one featured in Big Love, might sponsor the choir’s CDs, and bars and coffee shops might sponsor the Monk CDs. The abovementioned search engine interface would find the tunes wherever they lived and the money would flow accordingly. They don’t have to be given free, as in the SpiralFrog model, but there are some obvious synergistic and mutually beneficial models that would naturally evolve to make this kind of sponsorship lucrative. For some.

Still, it still puts access in the hands of advertisers — a third party, so to speak. You’re not getting your groceries from the farm, you’re getting the ones that the store decides to stock. The mutually beneficial aspects of having a third party will rub off most when there are large numbers. Beco at The Red Hot Organization pointed out to me that a Lenny Kravitts tune was sponsored by a vodka company — you could get it free from their site and nowhere else. They took out ads, billboards, etc. Apparently it worked, and his visibility and CD shot up as a result. But what big vodka company would do that for some of the stuff I buy? A niche brand that might be a perfect match but they probably couldn’t afford that kind of marketing for fringe stuff. Often, though, the fringe stuff wouldn’t be right for that mass audience anyway — so no harm done. That stuff is better marketed via MySpace, websites and word of mouth. Or via specialized stores. But the point is, in this model it will never get the chance at a wider audience. The playing field had at least the illusion of becoming level — but maybe not for long.