The day the Net went black: SOPA or Soap Opera?

Anyone who relies on Wikipedia to maintain their position as most knowledgeable spark in their milieu might have struggled yesterday (particularly if they hadn’t Googled how to ‘View Source’ beforehand). If you missed it, several of the world’s largest Internet sites ‘took action’ yesterday in protest against the proposed SOPA and PIPA Acts currently being discussed in the different chambers of the US parliamentary system. This would be an awfully long blog posting if I stopped to explain them; thankfully the BBC News pages provide an overview and the (now-restored) Wikipedia can also tell you more.

Essentially, the arguments are around intellectual property rights and digital piracy: as we embrace Web 2.0 and user-content (and, by extension, social media, crowd-sourcing and many other topics you may already feel you’ve read your fill of), it’s technically far too easy for people to upload copies of films, music and so on that has someone else’s copyright legally attached to it. (Unless you’ve never watched anything on YouTube or burned a copy of a friend’s CD to iTunes, it’s a fair bet you’ve broken copyright law.) Because it’s easy, it happens; because the end result is free, other people watch, listen to or re-download it. Various high profile websites’ issue isn’t so much with the problem as with the proposed solution: if someone uploads a copy of a Hollywood movie to Wikipedia or YouTube, SOPA would – if enacted – mean that Wikipedia/YouTube has broken the law and could be taken down in total, Google could be forced to remove links to them, and so on … That’s why you either had to do your own thinking or find it in a book yesterday.

 

Steaming into the future: early adopters of tradition

A few days ago, I was one of a group of 15 or so that were treated to a guided tour of the factory of an internationally renowned UK company that produces(amongst other things) amplifiers for musicians. The group largely compromised people working in IT-based roles, including web design and 3d modelling. Although the company we were visiting undoubtedly scores high on the ‘cool place to visit and get shown around’ scale, it was interesting to watch the group’s reactions on the ‘I was expecting digital everything’ scale – especially as a guitar player. (And even as a guitar player who has loyally used a different brand of amplifier for decades, but never mind …)

Apart from premium range products that are entirely hand-wired (and there are a surprising number of wires – and transistors and diodes and capacitors and so on – in an amplifier), production processes have adapted to the time-saving, productivity enhancing approaches that technological advances have brought about. There’s an undeniable logic: given a pattern to work to (just as a human operator would be), a machine can make considerably more solder joints per minute. Another machine – albeit a large, complicated and expensive one – can assemble a large, complicated circuit board much more quickly too. The time side of the triangle gets drastically shortened, the quality side is unaffected, and decisions to automate can be made on the basis of cost equations (how soon would the investment cover its costs, what are on-going costs of maintenance and upgrades, etc.)

 

Book Review: The Net Delusion – How Not to Liberate the World by Evgeny Morozov

Not, on the face of things, a book about organisational change, HR or learning, I hear you murmur. True, I’d murmur back, but a book you might gain a lot from reading nonetheless. While Morozov’s primary focus in The Net Delusion may be on the socio-political impact of the Internet, and on repeatedly, provocatively and effectively countering the prevailing view of it as a force for democratisation, openness, dissemination (and quite possibly a cure for a real gallimaufry of our ills), in the context of this blog and the professional focus of its audience the book has a useful role to play as both eye-opener and reality check. Webs may not be inherently wicked, but they’re not simple either: the clue, as they say, is in the name.

 

Events, dear boy, Events: Learning Technologies 2011 & Learning and Skills 2011

In November last year, I wrote about my contrasting reactions to the CIPD Annual Conference in Manchester and the HR Unconference in London. One conclusion that it was hard not to draw was to question quite what the CIPD Annual Conference was attempting to achieve, and whose benefit it was attempting to achieve it for. As I remarked at the time, footfall and attendance both seemed to the reasonably eagle-eyed attendee to be surprisingly low: it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that those paying handsomely for exhibition space might be questioning the wisdom of their investment.

While it was evident even before I arrived that the Learning Technologies 2011 & Learning and Skills 2011 event, held at London’s Olympia on 26-7 January 2011, was not going to be a small, informal, grassroots/bottom up even in the style of the Unconference, I’ll admit that I was interested to see just how busy the event would be. As it turned out, and as some of the photos illustrating this post demonstrate, it turned out to be very busy indeed.

 

The Social Network, or “not because you’re a nerd” …

I emailed my real friends, but they were busy or washing their hair, so my partner and I queued behind a thousand teens blackberrying intently while they waited to buy tickets for Vampires Suck and Paranormal Activity 2. Despite having gone to the cinema with people, everyone around us was talking to someone who wasn’t there. Eventually, and appropriately, we waded through the fast food wrappers to see The Social Network, the story of Facebook. Or more accurately, mostly the story of the lawsuits that later erupted around those at Harvard during the time that ‘thefacebook.com’ first debuted and the rather messy years that followed.

Much has been made in comments on the film of the irony of a social network whose driving force is a man portrayed as so lacking in the social graces that lubricate and enable friendship. As much as been made of the film’s suggestion that Facebook was a response to getting dumped in a bar by an erstwhile girlfriend. (She gets the film’s best line in the process), with Mark Zuckerberg, the central figure, denying it while other websites dig a little deeper into what may or may not be the truth behind what actually happened. So this posting is a reaction to watching a film that may or may not be exactly what happened in Harvard and in California in 2004 – 6: that the film itself suggests that truth is a highly interpretable abstract concept is a comment worth slipping in at this point.

 

The bigger picture shouldn’t need to be a jigsaw puzzle

One contemporary syndrome is well-known: we live – and particularly work – in a swirl of emails, text messages, bullet lists, strap lines, soundbites, instant updates, each constantly interrupting each other for our attention and each giving us what – at least in their individual context – are the key points. And bonus marks are awarded for those who prune their message down to just the one key point. The modern way to conjugate the verb ‘to communicate’ might almost be:

• I communicate critical messages
• you distribute messages quickly and widely
• he or she knows that important things are happening
• we have some jigsaw puzzle pieces, but possibly not all of them
• they are wondering if anyone has the lid of the box so they can figure it all out.

Collectively, we have not so much lost the plot (although that might be rather too polite) as replaced it with a few sub-headings and a selection of sketches from (and again I might be being too polite) a storyboard. Never mind eh, there’s obviously lots happening and it’s all terrifically exciting …

 

Book Review: Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”

A book about Wikipedia, Google, “Web 2.0” and Virtual Reality in a leadership and organisational development blog? Well, yes. Jaron Lanier’s book will be a demanding read for anyone who thinks Silicon Valley is a euphemism for part of a celebrity, or who glazes over at the first mention of ‘cloud computing’. But it will also be a challenging read – with powerful reasons – for not just the many millions who Google answers from Wikipedia and collect ‘friends’ on FaceBook, but for the many industries who derive their livelihood from human creativity (embracing not just the arts, but skills such as journalism) or from the value of proprietary information. And it’s an important read for anyone who uses systems and databases to arrive at judgements or evaluations. It’s not the best written or argued book in human history, but – importantly – Lanier has been an important player in the ‘digital revolution’ since its early days. Often sharply critical of the way our relationship with technology is evolving, this is not the rant of a Luddite: this is a rant of an IEEE Lifetime Achievement Award winner and one of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s 300 greatest inventors.

 

Book review: Richard Donkin’s “The Future of Work”

Don’t judge a book by its cover is a well-worn cliché, but in this case the caveat should really be ‘don’t judge a book by it’s title’. This is a valuable read – that it will be hard to keep this review to reasonable length indicates just how much thinking or comment it provoked (which seems to be a large part of the author’s intention) – but it’s not really about the future: it’s far more about the present and what the author – well qualified by experience, judging by bios and blurbs – finds both good and bad in it. That it considers work in the context of both human life and human society is also to be applauded, even if (like many other aspects of the book) this is both a strength and a weakness.