Remix

Participation

"In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity." - Aldous Huxley, 1927

Yet can the word "passivity" be used to accurately describe modern web culture?

(Via http://thru-you.com/)

"...we will routinely prefer a shareable amateur source to a professional source that requires us to keep the content a secret on pain of lawsuit. (Wikipedia's historical advantage over Britannica in one sentence.)" -- Clay Shirky

Originality is overrated

One of the certain effects of the electronic age is that it will forever change the values that we attach to art. In fact, the vocabulary of aesthetic criteria that has been developed since the Renaissance is mostly concerned with terms that are proving to have little validity for the examination of electronic culture. I refer to such terms as "imitation," "invention," and, above all, "originality," which in recent times have implicitly conveyed varying degrees of approval or censure, in accordance with the peculiarly distorted sense of historical progression that our age has accepted, but which are no longer capable of conveying the precise analytical concepts they once represented.

Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. ...It will not, it seems to me, be very much longer before a more self-assertive streak is detected in the listeners participation, before, to give but one example, "do-it-yourself" tape editing is the prerogative of every reasonably conscientious consumer of recorded music (the Hausmusik activity of the future, perhaps!). And I would be most surprised if the consumer involvement were to terminate at that level. In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process.

-- From "Strauss and the Electronic Future," 1964

Robert Green in 1592 attacked a "provocative" new rival, a "mere player who considers himself to be the only shake-scene in the country," and who thinks that he can "bombast out blank verse" in the manner of university-trained playwrights.

Quoting from Green's critique of Shakespeare, Thomas Pettitt refers to him as "merely an upstart crow beautified with our feathers." Pettitt was making the point that just as his students have something in common with Shakespeare, he has something in common with Green, which is that they are both speaking from within what he calls the "Gutenberg Parenthesis."

Making it

• There must be 50, er... 67 Ways to tell a Web 2.0 story...

Knowing you can use it

Open licensing

• Creative Commons
  • on Flickr
  • via Google Advanced Search (usage rights)

Being able to do stuff with it

Open and remixable formats

• WikiEducator
• The difference between a proprietary streaming audio file and a podcast.
• Can engender spontaneous connections and enhancements on the network.

"The 'cost' of sharing has collapsed... If I come across something I share it via Google shared items, Twitter, my blog, etc. If I want to share I stick it up on Slideshare, my blog, YouTube. There is a small cost in terms of effort to me to do the sharing, and zero cost in anyone wanting to know what I share. Sharing is just an RSS feed away. - Martin Weller

Development: Publish from anywhere, reproduce it anywhere (we can dream, right?)

We have embraced a model of Radical Reuse.

The essential component is RSS syndication.

By the way, do you have an RSS reader?

• LEAP Embed Code via JSON: Original Page, Reproduced

• MediaWiki Embed Code: Original, syndicated here.

• Wiki Ink WordPress Plugin: So wiki maintained pages here can be represented here. D'Arcy Norman has done a screencast demo.

• Portal - North of the Rio Grande, Survey of Spanish-American Literature to the 1820s - each contributing blog is on the student's choice of platform.

• Presentation: Ink, Example

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE SYNDICATED

Open data

• data.gov - "to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government"

• City of Vancouver embraces open data, standards and source - "Reimer had argued that supporting the motion would allow the city to improve transparency, cut costs and enable people to use the data to create new useful products, including commercial ones. She had also noted that taxpayers paid for the data to be collected in the first place."

• • See UBC's Vancouver Cycling Map

Mash-ups for the masses

Portals like Netvibes, Pageflakes (Michael Wesch's portal).

Or, Yahoo Pipes:

Recommended: Tony Hirst's OUseful.Info

A Wave Coming In

• What might email look like if it were invented today?

• • Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
  • Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
  • What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

• What Intrigues Me About Google Wave - "it makes no hard distinction between content and functionality. Text, images, video, and functional gadgets are all mashed up on the page. Second, permissions are wide open. At least in the current iteration of Wave, there are no fancy graduated access controls. If you are a member of the Wave, then you have full editing privileges. Rather than setting hard controls, Wave provides contextual clues and tools for users to negotiate control through the establishment of social norms."

• Google Wave and teaching & learning - "it is built around the idea of real time document collaboration as the fundamental organising concept. More than that, it allows the participants to determine who is involved with any particular learning activity; it's not limited to those that have been signed up for a whole course, or even to those who where involved in earlier stages of the collaboration."

• An open architecture. Already, educational widgets are being built.

"When copies are super abundant, they become worthless."

"When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable." -- Kevin Kelly, Better than Free

"Embracing the social means embracing the abundant - and emphasizing instead the way an organization might actually help people on the periphery generate value for themselves." -- Douglas Rushkoff, Real social

Does the content need to be password-protected? Can a Creative Commons license be applied?

When choosing a content management system for a campus project, can RSS support (for full-content feeds) be a consideration?

Non-crufty URLs, XHTML

Can we discuss what data/content can be exposed and what cannot, rather than a default nothing?