Web 3.0 Must Make Information More Free, the Individual More Autonomous

We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.

We must, as end-users, content creators, innovators and even pioneers in media and technology, consider that for very serious and transcendent reasons, this cannot be permitted to become true. Web 3.0 must be liberating, and it must expand, not shrink the freedom of information that stems from the First Amendment to the US Constitution, free and open society in general, a free press specifically, and the Internet’s empowerment of the individual.

If we are to be a global society, or a “globalized” society, if we are to have a planetary consciousness, or benefit from the “village” dynamic inherent in global trade and telecommunications, then we must ensure that individual freedoms are not limited by global media powers or by governments who think there is something expedient about limiting media freedoms. When freedom of information is restricted, human beings suffer, in real terms, and economic vitality is slowed and economic resilience damaged.

Technology is the great economic immune system for industrial and post-industrial societies. It breeds competition, innovation, the expansion of learning and individual potential, opportunity and social mobility, and it spurs the exploration of new directions in thought and production. Information technology is helping to create a global fabric of human ideas, individuals and broader societies, interwoven in a complex web of shared and competing interests and shared and competing freedoms.

The mass convergence of new media, established media, commercial activity, personal communications, event planning and vital services (such as medical, financial, travel and utility), poses an obvious threat to the freedom of individuals to remain unmonitored or unexposed to new risks and new controls. But information serves us best when it is free, when it is untainted by powerful interests, when it moves where it needs to move, finding its level like water.

People move toward information and information moves toward people, in ways that cannot be calculated from a media conglomerate’s boardroom, and which, for better or for worse, do not parallel anyone’s particular bottom-line. Yet major telecoms are planning to stratify web-speeds for paying media giants, and advertisers are looking to recruit bloggers to create specialized information which actually functions like a covert advertisement.

Segmenting the web further by charging for the permission to let end-users access your servers via the highest bandwidth is a direct assault on media freedoms and access to information. It is also an attempt to ensure that most web traffic ensures at least 3 separate payments to the telecom for a single event. This attack on Net Neutrality —tied to the basic freedom of the press— runs contrary to the real promise of Web 3.0 and media hyper-convergence.

Deceptive or manipulative advertising formats are not inherently an attack on web freedoms, but they do pose a threat to the equality of access individuals may have to quality information as such. This means consumers may actually opt to create or to frequent services that shy away from those practices, which may in many cases be closed services or “gated communities” that provide their audience with a self-image of privilege, though their main function would be to limit the flow of information.

Electronic Paper Makes Reading a More Diverse & Flexible Experience

Researchers at MIT have been working for years now on a wide range of variations on the changeable visual text formats that might replace many of the backlit screens we now use to read and interact with electronic documents. ‘Electronic paper’ refers to a number of these technologies, able to reproduce encrypted files in visual text form, as if they were computer monitors, some touted as having “the look and feel” of real paper.

The benefits of this advance are various:

1. paper is an ancient technology whose ease of use is difficult to match, one of the pillars of civilization;
2. electronic paper may help eliminate the strain on forest environments that comes from increasing consumption of paper worldwide;
3. the texture of paper makes viewing a document less challenging to the eyes;
4. adding touch-response makes it possible to read “on-screen” with the feeling of flipping pages, visually and physically;
5. advances in storage capacity mean being able to store huge amounts of readable text and images in a very small space

The potential for streamlined storage and portability of large amounts of reading material is one of the most important functions of the e-paper phenomenon. The ability to not only store thousands of books, or hundreds of magazines with full-color imagery, or to view video or even browse the world wide web, from a paper-thin device, makes exploiting the resources of the information age a far more comfortable experience for the everyday commuter, or news reader.

At MIT’s Electronic Paper project, the fundamental challenge regarding e-paper is stated as follows:

Books with printed pages are unique in that they embody the simultaneous, high-resolution display of hundreds of pages of information. The representation of information on a large number of physical pages, which may be physically turned and written on, constitutes a highly preferred means of information interaction.

A key element in the quest for a less massive, but more flexible format for text reading, i.e. electronic paper, follows: “An obvious disadvantage of the printed page, however, is its immutability once typeset.” This is a major issue when relating to informaton that is not necessarily transcendent or in itself immutable, and commercial applications, as well as everyday news and information uses for paper, make it attractive to create an alternative that is precisely mutable, or rather, programmable, modifiable, able to be updated when the information itself has changed.

MIT’s Technology Review explains the hardware that makes e-paper work, in devices like Amazon.com’s ‘Kindle’ reader:

At the front of the screen is a layer of transparent electrodes. Below it are millions of microcapsules containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles, and below them is a layer of nearly a million more electrodes. A negative charge on one of these bottom electrodes pushes black particles to the top, and a positive charge does the same with the white ones. Each microcapsule acts as a pixel that can thus be made to appear black, white, or gray.

The gist is to achieve ease of use, visual stability, paper-like quality, and high-resolution text imaging, in a device that allows for interactive navigability and mass storage. Amazon.com has added a wireless download functionality that is designed to promote spontaneous purchase and on-the-spot access to e-paper-ready e-books sold through its store.

In October 2005, Sentido.tv reported that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, “told a London audience that the static format of paper would be replaced by paper-thin digital wireless devices which would be constantly downloading huge amounts of information from the internet. He predicted we would all be connected all the time, within 10 years.” Electronic paper provides some brave new frontiers for niche media to grow their markets exponentially, with new editorial methods and distribution mechanisms never before possible.

If e-paper and wireless internet meet in the coming process of hyper-convergence of media, we will find that text is at once ‘liberated’ and ‘filtered’, and we will need to implement mechanisms that ensure consumers have as much access, on a permanent and private basis, to information as with the standard purchase of a book, which sits comfortably in one’s home, in one’s private space.

This issue of privacy is vital to the entire question of electronic information, because of the fact that a press that is free to produce and distribute according to its own editorial choices tends to produce far more reliable information and helps protect the rights of individuals. A lack of privacy in the media sphere, by contrast, would have a chilling effect on what sorts of content some major media outlets would be willing to provide.

The standard for e-paper should also be maximum possible user-enabled modification (a standard that is the rule in paper publishing: readers can write, cross out, highlight, rewrite and reproduce section by section, by hand, and at will, what is meaningful to them, by their own standards, and without paying a licensing fee). The problem of technical specifications as minimum requirements for accessing information continues to be a nuisance in computing and web-browsing, but would be far more severe if there is a massive migration of text publishing from printed pages to e-paper.

Customization is essential to the long-term success of e-paper as a new, beneficial medium for authors, publishers, web-content providers, bloggers and readers alike. E-paper essentially constitutes an event horizon after which information may be fundamentally changed and questions of accessibility, credibility and longevity (conservation of format and re-accessibility), become central to the question of informational freedoms.

• MIT: “Electronic Paper project”
• E Ink Corporation: “Lower Power, Electronic Paper Displays” [commercial site]
• MIT Technology Review: “Amazon Kindle: The online giant hopes it’s created the ipod of digital books”
• eMedia Wire: “Self Published Book Achieves Top 1 Percent Sales Rank at Amazon.com’s Kindle Book Store”
  
• Washington Square News: “New shiny Amazon Kindle doesn’t replace my old book” [opinion]
• Sentido.tv: “GATES ANNOUNCES PLANS TO REPLACE PAPER WITH SILICON”

Hyper-convergence: the Coming State of Media Arts & Services

HOW TV, INTERNET, TELECOMMUNICATIONS, RFID & COMMERCIAL SERVICES WILL CONVERGE TO CREATE NEW SOCIAL SPHERE, SECURITY RISKS

For some time, we have heard speculation that the user-centered logic of the Internet medium will persuade old-guard media powers to embrace the model, and we will see a convergence of online, print, radio and televisual media, in one integrated system. Media integration will likely go far beyond that, so security has to be the watchword as technology invades personal space and our attempts at a ‘pursuit of happiness’.

At present, the movement favoring net neutrality —or equal access to online content— may be the segment of media markets and public consciousness most aware of the issue and its implications for the nature and quality of information and information access. Net neutrality is the premise that connection providers should not be permitted to take any actions that influence users’ access to online information or content providers’ access to the public.

Cable companies and ISPs are seeking the power to charge for a stratified web-traffic format, where those who pay a special fee will be granted higher degrees of bandwidth not available to any other content providers or customers, even though they already charge for connection and connection speed at both ends of the service. This is what convergence should not be, if it is to benefit consumers and favor the free press.

Hyper-convergence is a term that seeks to explain the integration of a broad array of services and personal information management tools into the multimedia web. It refers to the blurring of the barriers between online activity and real-world effects, which will present major security concerns.

New technologies can make hyper-convergence into a landmark moment for consumers and can increase access for many to events, information and resources that might otherwise be more difficult to access. But they can also increase in dramatic ways the risk to which we subject sensitive personal data.

RFID —Radio Frequency IDentification— is one of the most controversial and well-debated new technologies whose implementation could both expand the scope of hyper-convergence in powerful ways and also subject the individual to unnecessary and ill-advised long-term risk of identity-theft or fraud.

RFID-enabled smart chips can help integrate products, services, personal information and personal space, into a fluid information environment, but plans to implement global networks of “broadcasting” or “active” RFID chips means that one may all-too-quickly let slip sensitive personal information, without technological standards catching up to the severe exigencies of this new security risk.

Biometric data is another, related problem area. Touted as a security enhancement measure, the implementation of even narrowly-construed, isolated biometric readings, poses a major, lifelong personal security risk for the individual.

Unlike a Social Security number, a signature, an account number or a credit card, an iris pattern, a fingerprint, one’s genome, blood-type and facial structure —all of which various biometric security scanning systems propose to read or sample for ID purposes—, cannot be changed. And if they could be, it would present a major security risk for the system attempting to enhance its security by such means, because of the presumption that the use of such information is inherently safer.

Permitting one’s private biological data to propagate across an online network, or into state-run databanks, or databanks run by multinational firms, is to surrender a part of one’s identity, for all time, to the idiosyncracies and shortcomings of the system, at which one must take into serious consideration the supposed value of a potential commercial or procedural convenience.

But services and media are combining, and that makes sense. The logic of synthesis shows that connecting ideas, fields of study, geographical locations, cultural oddities, people and access to information, increases understanding and breeds a more fluid social reality. TV, Internet, mail, messaging, voice communication and purchasing processes, will increasingly combine to blur the line between virtual and lived-in physical space.

The challenge will be building systems that allow the individual to maintain all existing freedoms and natural barriers against fraud and identity theft, while facilitating access to that ever broader range of media and services.