The advent and power of connection technologies — tools that connect people to vast amounts of information and to one another — will make the twenty-first century all about surprises. Governments will be caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, armed with virtually nothing but cell phones, take part in mini-rebellions that challenge their authority. For the media, reporting will increasingly become a collaborative enterprise between traditional news organizations and the quickly growing number of citizen journalists. And technology companies will find themselves outsmarted by their competition and surprised by consumers who have little loyalty and no patience.

Today, more than 50 percent of the world’s population has access to some combination of cell phones (five billion users) and the Internet (two billion). These people communicate within and across borders, forming virtual communities that empower citizens at the expense of governments. New intermediaries make it possible to develop and distribute content across old boundaries, lowering barriers to entry. Whereas the traditional press is called the fourth estate, this space might be called the “interconnected estate” — a place where any person with access to the Internet, regardless of living standard or nationality, is given a voice and the power to effect change.”

Read the rest at Foreign Affairs >>

… the prospect that the digital revolution is not just the latest human adventure or the next transformation the species must adapt to, but a force created by humans that is in big ways rewriting the whole human script. Yet he cannot seem to bring himself to do more than offer it a bag of peanuts.

This is not to suggest that humans have not changed (evolved, to cite the more technical term) since their origins, the new forms making their way toward Homo sapiens defined by whatever artificial designations are in fashion. Modern but Pre-Digital Man was different in untold ways from his counterpart in the Athenian agora. Millennia of history had altered his psychological structure, mentality and even his neural reflexes. What Lanier raises but then ducks is the inevitable question: If change and adaptation have been a constant all along, whence this sudden urgency about a changing “us”? Why not see the digital revolution as just the latest wave of technology, no less a boon than steam power or electricity and hardly an occasion for a top-to-bottom reconsideration of all things human?

Change may be constant, but the gradations are hugely variable, with degree at some point shading into kind. Consider that the transformations of the human to date have all been dictated by social shifts, inventions and responses to various natural givens: modifications of circumstance, in short. We have adapted over these long millennia to the organization of agriculture, the standardization of time, the growth of cities, the harnessing of electricity, the arrival of the automobile and airplane and mass-scale birth control, to name just a few developments. But the cyber-revolution is bringing about a different magnitude of change, one that marks a massive discontinuity. Indeed, the aforementioned Pre-Digital Man has more in common with his counterpart in the agora than he will with a Digital Native of the year 2050. By this I refer not to cultural or social references but to core phenomenological understandings. I mean perceptions of the most fundamental terms of reality: the natural givens, the pre-virtual presence of fellow humans, the premises of social relationships. We have seen more pressure applied to species transformation in the past century than in the previous several thousand years.

Read the rest of the article >>

By allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.

The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.

Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.

The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology—that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media—and of the Web itself?

Read the entire article at The Atlantic.

Unlike industrial goods, which wear out and become obsolete, information can become more valuable over time as more as people can find more applications for and implications of the information.

In addition, markets are supposed to ration scarce goods that people produce, but information, once produced, is not scarce at all. Once known, people can reproduce information for almost no cost whatsoever. As a result, competition would mean bankruptcy for whoever invested in the production of information.

A competitive, market-oriented information economy cannot work efficiently for another reason. Although information works best when it is shared, sharing becomes impractical in a market economy. Secrecy becomes a strategic weapon to win intellectual property rights. Even the sale of information requires secrecy. If I offer to sell you some information, you would first want to know what it is that I am offering. If I disclose enough about my information so that you realize its utility, you may already possess it without the need to make a purchase.

Allocating the monopoly rewards for those who produce information is impossible, because individuals rarely produce any information on their own. In general, the creation of information builds upon earlier work.

Given these characteristics of information, an information economy requires a government to create scarcity by granting monopolies. Such monopolies, of course, violate market principles. Even more at odds with a market economy, the maintenance of these monopolies requires means a far more intrusive and coercive government to create and enforce intellectual property rights.

The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so as to ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge.

Copycense recently raised an interesting question on Twitter, asking if, instead of trying to carefully define what qualifies as “fair use,” we might be better off trying to define what constitutes “unfair use.”

Unfortunately, people rarely think about copyright this way. Most people consider copyright to be the rule, and things like the public domain and fair use to be exceptions. With the rise of the information age, this is a problem. In an attempt to address the issue, some people over at Communia have assembled a wonderful Public Domain Manifesto to set down some general principals that establish the groundwork for reforming copyright.

Read more at the Public Domain Manifesto

Product Description: The intense and continuing popularity of the long-running television show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997-2003) has long been matched by the range and depth of the academic critical response. This volume, the first devoted to the show’s imaginative and widely varied use of music, sound and silence, helps to develop an increasingly important and inadequately covered area of research – the many roles of music in contemporary television. In addressing this significant gap, this book provides an exemplary overview of the functions of music and sound in the interpretation of a television show. This is done through analyses that focus on scoring and source music, the title theme, the music production process, the critically acclaimed musical episode (voted number 13 in Channel Four’s “One Hundred Greatest Musicals”), the symbolic and dramatic use of silence, and the popular reception of the show by its international fan base. In keeping with contemporary trends in the study of popular musics, a variety of critical approaches are taken from musicology, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, specifically employing critique, musical analysis, industry studies and hermeneutics.

Also see: Full contents list and Index.

Androids will not dream of electric sheep – because there will not be any androids. The human being is such an ungainly heap of design flaws that no one will waste the time and money needed to make an artificial one. We will, however, fashion devices bright enough to merit the description intelligent. Such devices will have desires (why else would they do anything) and will need to be able to entertain possible ways of satisfying those desires (or else they wouldn’t be very intelligent, would they?) – and isn’t this precisely the stuff that dreams are made of? What, then, will these utterly inhuman intelligences dream of? Let us hope it is something as mundane as electric sheep, for they might instead dream of ways to rid themselves of the pesky heaps of design flaws that were their designers. Intelligence thrives on wildness: It does not take well to enslavement.

– Pete Mandik, Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington U

Read more: Will Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.

… but from there, it only gets better. Gelernter makes some great observations about the information age that we’re living in, both from a technical and philosophical stand point. It’s an interesting read.

Seniors take note!

In 1850 people didn’t know how their favorite symphony sounded. Back then, it was common for musicians to work hectic schedules and perform multiple shows in a row. Instruments were frequently out of tune and good, consistent timing was fairly new. In addition, going to the symphony was a big deal: you dressed up, you hitched up the horses, you went into town.

You might only hear your favorite symphony 5 or 6 times in your life. Each time it was probably slightly in a different key, with a slightly different tempo, played with slightly different instruments, and each time you actively strained to hear and remember how it all sounded.

You would sit very attentively, absorbing each and every note and drumbeat of the symphony. It was a play, a painting, an imaginary world come to life, and you were living in it. It was magic.

Source: What to Fix

Dearest GameStop Girl,

When I walked into your store that fateful Tuesday, I expected only to find a smattering of half-decent titles tucked back there amongst the used 360 games. Instead I found you, surrounded by a beam of light, halfway between Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty 3. Your gorgeous dark hair was radiant in contrast with the rainbow of colors on the deluxe Bioshock behind you. The Game of the Year held no interest for me when I saw you look up and smile, even though both could hold me in Rapture.

You commanded the register when it was my turn to check out with the Orange Box. Yes, I was finally getting to play Portal. Lucky me, you said with the cutest smile. Lucky me, I thought, and then knew you had the Portal to my heart. I could care less if the cake is a lie, I’d still want to share it with you.

Oh GameStop Girl, how you make my heart meter skip a beat. If you were being held captive in a mountain fortress by a ruthless mutant mafia gangboss and I had to fight my way through 16 levels of fire-breathing undead ninjas with swords the size of small ponies, I would find a way, even if, after every level, a small man continued to taunt me by saying that you were in another castle. EVEN IF.

So, yes, GameStop Girl, I want to kill robotic zombie terrorists with you. You can even have the deluxe shotgun with explosive scattershot. I’ll just use this knife over here. I’ll do anything for you, just for the small, slightest chance that someday – someday – you and me could be a Wii.

Source: Craigslist via Kotaku

If you thought that you were pissed because you still don’t have a jet pack, you may not want to skip this link. The Usborne Book of the Future is a book published in 1979 predicting the sorts of technology that would be in use in “the year 2000 and beyond”. Some of the beautifully illustrated pictures detail the interiors of space stations and floating cities, while others detail expected advances in artificial technology.

The book is entertaining and fascinating. It also happens to be completely free and available online.

Source: The Pointless Museum

Are programmers and Coders the most neglected link in the Software Development Chain? Coders are like smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmers that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers. Coders follow instructions of the large program.

Some industry experts have put in that—if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming methods, coding requires only high school knowledge of the subject. Coding is deemed repetitive and monotonous.

During many events, like the one last week in India at the annual fair of the software industry’s apex body Nasscom, no one mentioned anything about Programmer or aptly the coders. The event, which brought together software professionals from around the world, used up all its 29 sessions to discuss prospects to improve the performance of software companies. Panels chose to debate extensively on subjects like managing innovation, business growth and multiple geographies. But there was nothing on programmers/coders, whom we all believed are the driving force behind the success of any software company.

It has been an eternal battle between the business cubicles and the programmers box if technology drives the business or vice versa. Well, one compliments the other.

Read the entire article at Brajeshwar’s Blog