E-Books: No Friends of Free Expression

I've just published a short essay called "E-books -- No Friends of Free Expression" in the National Communication Association's online magazine, Communication Currents. It was commissioned in anticipation of National Freedom of Speech Week, which will be recognized from October 18th to 24th, 2010. Here's a short excerpt from the piece, in case you're interested:

It may seem odd to suggest that reading has something to do with freedom of expression. It’s one thing to read a book, after all, but a different matter to write one. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that reading is an expressive activity in its own right, resulting in notes, dog-eared pages, highlights, and other forms of communicative fallout. Even more to the point, as Georgetown Law Professor Julie E. Cohen observes, “Freedom of speech is an empty guarantee unless one has something—anything—to say…[T]he content of one’s speech is shaped by one’s response to all prior speech, both oral and written, to which one has been exposed.” Reading is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression, because it forms a basis upon which our future communications are built. Anything that impinges upon our ability to read freely is liable to short-circuit this connection.

I then go on to explore the surveillance activities that are quite common among commercially available e-readers; I also question how the erosion of private reading may affect not only what we choose to read but also what we may then choose to say.

The Comm Currents piece is actually a precis of a much longer essay of mine just out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(3) (September 2010), pp. 297 - 317, as part of a special issue on rights. The title is "The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read." Here's the abstract:

This paper focuses on the Amazon Kindle e-reader's two-way communications capabilities on the one hand and on its parent company's recent forays into data services on the other. I argue that however convenient a means Kindle may be for acquiring e-books and other types of digital content, the device nevertheless disposes reading to serve a host of inconvenient—indeed, illiberal—ends. Consequently, the technology underscores the growing importance of a new and fundamental right to counterbalance the illiberal tendencies that it embodies—a “right to read,” which would complement the existing right to free expression.

Keywords: Kindle; Amazon.com; Digital Rights; Reading; Privacy

Feel free to email me if you'd like a copy of "The Abuses of Literacy." I'd be happy to share one with you.

The title of the journal article, incidentally, pays homage to Richard Hoggart's famous book The Uses of Literacy, which is widely recognized as one of the founding texts of the field of cultural studies. It's less well known that he also published a follow-up piece many years later called "The Abuses of Literacy," which, as it turns out, he'd intended to be the title of Uses before the publisher insisted on a change.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the work. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

Social Media Hour Appearance

Just a quick note to let y'all know that I'll be a guest on Social Media Hour on Tuesday, June 1, 2010 at 1:00 pm EDT. The topic is privacy, transparency, and social networking sites. You can listen live by clicking here; the archived recording will be available here. Here's a complete description of the program from the SMH website:

SOCIAL MEDIA HOUR #59: PRIVACY, TRANSPARENCY, & ONE MORE LESBIAN

This week the show will explore the topic of privacy and transparency specifically looking at how social networks and social technologies/platforms are changing the standards of privacy … or are they? With the amount of transparency in today’s world, are people reevaluating what they share? Is that a good thing? Ted Striphas from Indiana University joins the program to discuss. Also on this week’s show, Shirin Papillon, the Founder & CEO of OneMoreLesbian – a media site that aggregates the world’s lesbian film, television and online video content in one place. What does this have to do with the other topic? Simple. An array of sites and networks have arisen catering to myriad special interest groups. You can find site and networks for just about anything … that’s not new. But think about it, you choose to visit a site and participate in a social network … that behavior is tracked – whether by Google or brands that may appear there. If you choose to post links or comment on posts, others see your participation – so suddenly your personal affinity for a particular group is now public, which means in the case of LGBT oriented content, you are now more out than you were before. We’ll talk about OML as a business and about its growth and what it means when it comes to helping further expose a wider audience to the gay community.

Should be a blast! Please listen if you can.

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UPDATE -- Here's an embed from which you can stream the entire episode:

Where the Cylons will come from

I missed most of the SyFy (née Sci Fi) series Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), though I managed to catch enough to know that I wanted to watch the new prequel, Caprica, from the beginning. I haven't been disappointed. With the pilot and two episodes now under my belt, it's safe to say that I'm hooked.

Caprica provides an origin story for the Cylons, a cyborg race created by humans who later attempt to annihilate their masters. That may sound pretty de rigueur as far as the sci-fi genre goes, but here's the twist: we learn that each Cylon's "being" -- his, her, or its unique identity or essence -- is actually the aggregation of a human individual's medical records, purchasing patterns, educational transcripts, voting records, electronic communications, and other personal information archived online. The Cylons are, in other words, the walking, talking, informational avatars of the human race.

It was with all that in mind that I happened upon the clip embedded below, which is from the February 2, 2010 episode of The Colbert Report. The title, "Cognoscor Ergo Sum," translates from the Latin as, "I am known, therefore I am." How apt. In the segment Colbert spotlights Blippy.com, IJustMadeLove.com, and other websites that allow people to reveal and record the intimate details of their daily lives. Blippy lets you broadcast what you've just purchased using your credit card, and where. IJustMadeLove allows you shout from the electronic rooftops when, where, and how you've just done the nasty. (Yes, I wish I were making that one up.)

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The Word - Cognoscor Ergo Sum

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

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There's been all sorts of talk for years now about the vulnerability of information online, and it's no surprise given the proliferation of networked databases that identity theft has emerged as one of the foremost crimes of our time. What's even more striking to me, however, is how Caprica and the Colbert clip together seem to shift the meaning of -- and even up the ante on -- identity theft.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that we humans are poised to give rise a line of super-machines intent on wiping us out. What I am suggesting, though, is that we can only begin to imagine how and for what purpose the digital data trails that we leave behind today will be used in the future. I like to think about it this way: when I started college, how could I have anticipated a rash of photos and videos surfacing close to 20 years later on Facebook? Heck -- there was barely an internet back then, let alone affordable scanners or even the idea of social networking.

Leave it to popular culture, then, to register one of the critical questions of this new decade: how does a society plan for an information future that may well be unfathomable, technologically speaking?

Whose search engine is bigger?

Fred Vogelstein over at Wired has been turning out some great material about Facebook over the last couple of weeks. His first piece, "Great Wall of Facebook," and his follow-up interview with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg are compelling in what they portend for the company's future.

The gist of the matter is this: Facebook began as a social networking site, and indeed it very much remains that. However, it's also in the process of re-imagining itself as a new type of search engine, one that prioritizes human social connections over abstract computer algorithms. And it's a move expressly designed to pit Facebook against its archrival, search engine giant Google:

Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn't just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

Two things are intriguing to me about Facebook's foray into search. First, I'm fascinated by Zuckerberg's rhetoric. He describes Google as a tool of the "surveillance society" -- as if Facebook had no interest whatsoever in paying attention to what its users are doing. He also describes Google's approach to search as "top-down," suggesting not-so-implicitly that Facebook's approach is more bottom-up. Why is it that every technology company is the authentic champion of grassroots democracy until the next new hotshot comes along? It's getting old...really, really old. Didn't Apple beat that one to death with Microsoft?

More compelling to me is Vogelstein's discussion of Facebook and Google's respective philosophies of search. Prior to reading his article and interview, it hadn't dawned on me that there could be such radically different search architectures -- much less that there would be a struggle over them. And that make these times we're currently living in all the more interesting.

There's a lovely moment near the beginning of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, in which the late philosopher shows how living creatures used to be classified prior to the advent of the modern kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species system. There was a radically different order of things, as it were, and reshuffling that order involved a tremendous redistribution of power throughout society.

Perhaps it's overblown to pitch the impending Facebook-Google showdown in such world-historical terms. All the same, the struggle over how best to bring order to knowledge and information isn't just about one company's desire to triumph over another -- it's about how, where, and among whom power will be dispersed in society.

Among the many reasons why I dislike Comcast

From yesterday's Wired Magazine Blog:

[Digital services provider] Comcast came clean with the Federal Communications Commission late Friday, detailing how it throttled and targeted peer-to-peer traffic -- maneuvers it has repeatedly denied....

By a 3-2 vote, the FCC concluded that Comcast monitored the content of its customers' internet connections and selectively blocked peer-to-peer connections in violation of network neutrality rules. The selective blocking of file sharing traffic interfered with users' rights to access the internet and to use applications of their choice, the commission said.

Beyond Comcast's aggressive anti-net neutrality shenanigans, the straw that broke the camel's back for me was the company's unilateral decision to remove Soap Net from my cable lineup. (Yes, I follow General Hospital....) One day it was there, the next, it was gone. Oh--and have I mentioned what I pay for cable and internet services in Indiana?

You can read the full story from Wired here.

Getting the Constitution through security

This is the first in what I hope will be a periodic series of guest-posts.... --t

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by DUSTIN HOWES

I am one of many millions of Americans who, like Dick Cheney, have a defibrillator/pacemaker implanted in their chest. The neat little device not only miraculously regulates your heartbeat and, if necessary, shocks you out of arrhythmia (mine has never fired, but others have told me it feels like getting kicked in the chest by a horse), it also manages to throw off the usual rhythms of airport security. Since it’s metal, the defibrillator sets off the detector, but you can’t very well remove it and put it in the gray tray. Not unless you want to all get all “priest from the Temple of Doom” on their asses.

The required alternative is to go through a pat down. Now that I’ve had perhaps a hundred of these, I could probably run the training session: 1. Check the passenger’s boarding pass. 2. Tell her or him to stand on the mat with the two footprints. 3. Tell her or him to spread their arms. 4. Ask them if they would prefer a “private screening.” 5. Inform them when you will be “touching sensitive areas” and that you will “be using the back of my hand.” And so on.

I find airport security, and particularly the post-9/11 version of airport security, extremely troubling and pointless. So I decided a few months ago to get some t-shirts made with the Fourth Amendment printed on the front and back. For a while, I didn’t feel like I was up to wearing them. What if I got stopped? (Sometimes I said to myself, “This trip is too important to wear it.”) What if people asked questions and I was tired and didn’t feel like talking? I have been traveling a lot and not enjoying it very much.

Anyway, I finally got up the nerve to wear the shirt a couple weeks ago. I found it strange that I was so nervous and self-conscious about wearing the Constitution. Yes, the shirts are not very fashionable and rather wordy. They demand a lot from the public. But more than that, I felt like I was doing something wrong – like I was getting the Constitution through security.

All in all, the trip from Baltimore to Baton Rouge and back again was pretty uneventful. Some passengers commented on the shirt – the completely drunk woman who sat next to me on one of my flights read it out loud and said: “OK! OK!” Other comments from passengers and people working the food places at the airport were mostly positive. When I went through security the first time, a TSA guy running the checkpoint, who from his accent seemed to be a first generation immigrant, tried making conversation: “Hmm … De Fourdth Ah-mednt-ment.” Out of nowhere and to my own surprise I said, “Yeah. This tells you why all of this is illegal.” He didn’t seem to care much. But as I spread my arms in the little fishbowl area among the scanners, his underling did give me an especially brisk pat down.

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Dustin Howes is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland and will join the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University in the Fall. His first book, Toward a Credible Pacifism: Violence and the Possibilities of Politics, is forthcoming with SUNY Press. He has published in International Studies Quarterly, has an article forthcoming in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and wrote the lead essay in the interdisciplinary volume, Ruminations on Violence (2008, Waveland Press).

Big (Warner) brother is watching...

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times via Sivacracy, to which I can only feebly respond, "yikes!"

The all-you-can-eat packages of voice, video and Internet services offered by phone and cable companies may be convenient, but they represent a potentially significant threat to people's privacy.

Take, for example, Time Warner Cable, which has about 2 million customers in Southern California. The company offers a voice-video-Net package called "All the Best" for $89.85 for the first 12 months.

But for anyone who has the wherewithal to read Time Warner's 3,000-word California privacy policy, you discover that not only does the company have the ability to know what you watch on TV and whom you call, but also that it can track your online activities, including sites you visit and stuff you buy....

You can read more here.