The FDA and NOAA say that Gulf seafood is fine. President Obama ate a fish taco yesterday made with Gulf fish.So does that mean Gulf seafood is safe to eat?I had hoped – for the sake of the Gulf fishermen and the entire Gulf economy – that the answer w…
Posts Tagged ‘Bill Thompson’
Oiling the digital society
August 5th, 2009 |
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Squabbling about competition between companies is far less important than the effect they’re having on all of us, says Bill Thompson.
"The announcement that Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt is standing down from the Apple board hardly came as a surprise.
Google’s Android is already powering smartphones that offer an open alternative to Apple’s iPhone, while the recent announcement of plans for Chrome OS – an operating system that will directly challenge Mac OS – makes Google a direct competitor to Apple in its core market. Apple’s recent decision to keep Google Voice out of the iPhone App Store must surely have increased tension on the board, and may have been the last straw. The move not only annoyed customers, who wanted to take advantage of the single phone number and voice-over-IP calls it offers, but has also invited the attention of the US Federal Communications Commission. It has asked Apple, Google and network provider AT&T to provide it with details of their decision making process. The ongoing Federal Trade Commission investigation into his position and that of the other joint Apple/Google director, Arthur Levinson, may also have been preying on Schmidt’s mind, although it seems the investigation will continue even after his departure. "We are bootstrapping a new world, one in which information technology and computational systems are as deeply embedded in our society as the scientific method or religious belief seem to be" Bill Thompson Schmidt’s status on the Apple board may have gone from "it’s complicated" to "single", but reports that this marks the beginning of all-out war between Google and Apple seem to exaggerate the real importance of the separation, and also to misstate the current state of affairs in the IT industry. From the inside the competition between Google and Apple, and between either of them and Microsoft, is bitter and intense, as is the rivalry between SAP and Oracle, two large companies that dominate the corporate computing space but rarely get a mention in more consumer-oriented technology coverage. But the US-based computing industry is one of the bastions of free-market capitalism and we should expect companies to undermine each other, attack each other, use dirty tricks to try to obtain monopolies and ally together in anti-competitive cartels which keep prices up, reduce choice and limit consumer freedom. It’s all part of the great game. Yet even though individual companies are trying to gain market share and the vast riches that will come from having a dominant position in particular sectors of the technology market, they share an ideological commitment to the increased penetration of computer technology in society, to building a world that is completely dependent on the systems, services, tools and hardware they are capable of providing. That shared ideology is far more significant than the specifics of particular alliances or clashes over certain parts of the market. Google’s Chrome OS, for example, is really just a minor adjustment of pieces on the chess board of the modern computing industry, neither a declaration of intent against Microsoft nor an attempt to annex GNU/Linux into Google’s worldview. It may perhaps change the way the industry evolves, because the widespread availability of a lightweight network-oriented operating system might give strength to those inside Microsoft working on the company’s cloud computing strategy, but that does not affect the larger project of embedding information technology in all aspects of our lives. The same can be said of the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo!, whereby Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power Yahoo! search while Yahoo!’s sales team sell Microsoft online advertising. Sad though it is is to see Yahoo! drop out of the search space it does not affect the growing importance of search in our online lives. That will continue to grow whether Google or Bing or some small upstart like Cambridge-based True Knowledge dominates the market in 10 years’ time. The current state of the IT industry is similar to that of the oil industry in the latter part of the 19th century, when the availability of oil-based products was starting to transform the wider economy in a way that increased the need for and then created a complete dependence on those same products. We are bootstrapping a new world, one in which information technology and computational systems are as deeply embedded in our society as the scientific method or religious belief seem to be, and the precise names of the gods we worship is less important than our presence in the church of technology. So we should keep developments in the IT industry in context. Schmidt’s departure from Apple is mildly interesting, but matters little compared to the impact that the landfall of the Seacom fibre-optic cable in Kenya will have on the world once access speeds increase, prices fall and reliability increases to the point where connectivity can be assumed there. Apple, Google and Microsoft are pieces on the chess board, but the board remains no matter how they are moved or which of them is captured, and we should not allow their manoeuverings to distract us from appreciating the game as a whole.
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Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Uncensored web
July 30th, 2009 |
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Digital Planet
Dave Lee
BBC World Service
It has been 40 days since Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman, was killed during an anti-government protest in Tehran.
Within hours, graphic scenes showing her final seconds of life dominated newspapers and bulletins over the world.
Yet this moment wasn’t recorded by a professional journalist working for a big news organisation. Instead, a regular bystander captured the powerful footage and uploaded it online.
The clip of Agha-Soltan’s death is just one of hundreds of pieces of citizen journalism to come from Iran in the past few months.
With journalists forced to stay in their hotel rooms, or even leave the country, these amateur recordings quickly became the only means of getting uncensored news out of Tehran.
No entry
With no correspondents allowed on the ground, the BBC, like almost all major news organisations, is forced to rely on the honesty of citizen journalists to provide details from the protests.
Inevitably, with valuable information comes deceptive mis-information and programme makers have to make difficult decisions about how to harness social networks.
"We look at what’s going on on Twitter, and then we follow it up in order to verify"
Azi Khatiri
Download the podcast"On Twitter you see people tweeting on various protests that have happened," Dr Azi Khatiri, an interactive producer for the BBC’s Persian TV service, said.
"But, as a news organisation we have to make sure what we report is accurate and correct.
"We look at what’s going on on Twitter, and then we follow it up in order to verify," she told the organisation’s Digital Planet programme.
"We have various contacts inside of Iran that we call up so they can tell us that, for example, a protest has actually happened."
Flood of information
Since the disputed election results, BBC Persian has been inundated with content sent in by viewers.
Far from being a hindrance, Khatiri says the great flood of information helped the team decipher content and identify reliable information.
"We literally get hundreds on days that massive protests happen inside Iran," said Dr Khatiri .
"When somebody tells us that something has happened, and then we get 10 or 20 pieces of film coming in from mobile phone footage, it shows the same thing: it actually did happen."
However, Bill Thompson, a technology journalist, said the move to citizen journalism didn’t necessarily spell the end of the professional.
"Anybody can now have access to these sources," he said.
"But of course there’s no validation or verification of the stuff coming out. The role of the journalist is not just to be the person who gets the information, but the person who puts it in context and makes sense of it."
"When it comes to complex political situations, where people’s lives are at risk, the mainstream news organisations come into their own because they have done this before. We know how to check something, we know how to get the balance right," he added.
He said that he was also concerned that citizen journalism was only representing the young, web-savvy community of Iran, and that the older generation, with perhaps different views, are being drowned out.
However Dr Khatiri is adamant this isn’t the case.
"A lot of the older generation have also been out in the street.
"This is not just the one-sided, young and youthful and funky sort of a protest. You would think, ‘OK, do people in the provinces really give a damn Is it really their cause as well’ I say that yes, it is."
Digital Planet is broadcast on BBC World Service on Tuesday at 1232 GMT and repeated at 1632 GMT, 2032 GMT and on Wednesday at 0032 GMT.
You can listen onlineor download the podcast.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Follow in the footsteps of geeks
July 28th, 2009 |
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Forget visits to stately homes, what about our geek heritage, asks Bill Thompson
About ten years ago I went on a family holiday to Cornwall, and one day I dragged my unwilling kids to a delightful but otherwise undistinguished beach so I could point out to them the spot where the world’s first undersea telegraph cable came ashore in 1870.
They were about as impressed by Porthcurno beach as they had been on our trip to the fabled Saxon burial site of Sutton Hoo, which my son memorably recalls as ‘mounds in a field’, but I felt a moment of geek joy that has stayed with me since.
That first cable linked Britain to India, and helped create a communications revolution that transformed the world.
The telegraph, as Tom Standage makes clear in his excellent book, was ‘The Victorian Internet’, and undersea cables were vital to its development. The cable at Porthcurno was the precursor of the Seacom cable that has just gone live in Kenya, and is a direct antecedent of the complex web of fibre-optic cables that make today’s internet possible.
The museum was closed on the day I made it to the beach, and no amount of persuasion would convince my kids that the drive was worth making a second time. But if I’d had The Geek Atlas with me I would have been able to plan my trip properly and managed to make it into tunnels, dug during the Second World War, and explored the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.
GPS tracker
"It’s our geek heritage, and the more we make people aware of it the more likely it is to be preserved in some way"
Bill Thompson
Geek guide to tech treasures
John Graham-Cumming’s book The Geek Atlas is a travel guide for those interested in the history of science, mathematics and technology, and lists 128 sites around the world, including Porthcurno and nearby Polhdu from which Marconi made the first transatlantic radio transmission. And if I have to explain why there are 128 entries you shouldn’t be reading the book.
Locations range from the Jacquard Museum in Roubaix, France, where you can see the punched-card weaving technology that inspired Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine and led to modern computers, to the Stadtfriedhof in Gottingen, Germany.
Max Planck, Friedrich Wohler and David Hilbert are among the many notable scientists and mathematicians buried there, while Carl Gauss can apparently be found just across town in the Albanifiedhof.
It’s primarily a guidebook, with details of the historic importance of each site accompanied by visitor details and, of course, the precise latitude and longitude of each place listed so you can plug in into your GPS tracker and make sure you’re on exactly the right spot. If you don’t have a GPS tracker you’re probably outside the target market.
Summer break
But each entry also has background information on the science, maths or technology itself, with entries covering complex numbers (Broom Bridge, Dublin), penicillin (Alexander Fleming Laboratory, at St Mary’s Hospital, London) and the infinite loop (Apple HQ, Cupertino, CA), so it’s worth picking up even if you’re stuck inside during a typical British summer deluge.
Geeks cover the world, and the atlas offers places to visit in Australia, Ecuador, Japan and the Ukraine, but forty-five of them are in the UK and therefore more accessible than the magnetic north pole or the White Sands missile testing range in New Mexico, USA.
So if you’re planning a summer break in the UK this year, whether because of the financial situation, your desire to reduce your C02 output or just because it’s a lovely country, you should pack The Geek Atlas along with your National Trust handbook and good hotel guide.
Modern world
First stop, of course, has to be 51° 59′ 47.44" N, 0° 44′ 33.94" W – better known as Bletchley Park, home of the British code breaking efforts during the Second World War and now also the location of the fabulous National Museum of Computing, but you might also find time to visit Manchester for the Science Walk and the Eagle pub in Cambridge.
The site of the old Mathematical Laboratory where the EDSAC computer was built doesn’t get an entry, perhaps because it’s now a modern lecture theatre with a plaque on the wall, but I’m prepared to forgive that omission and head off to discover places I hadn’t even heard of, and find out more about the places where science, mathematics and technology happened or is still happening.
It’s our geek heritage, and the more we make people aware of it the more likely it is to be preserved in some way.
After all, the work that Hooke and Boyle and Newton did during the Enlightenment has had at least as much impact on the modern world as that of the artists, architects, authors and musicians who make it into the big national museums.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Dan Cantor: Why Working Families Back Thompson
July 23rd, 2009 |
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The Working Families Party has a ticket one can be proud of, starting with Bill Thompson.
Learning to live without the net
July 22nd, 2009 |
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Bill Thompson feels the pain of the digitally dispossessed.
I have just endured a week of limited connectivity and it has given me a salutary lesson in what life is like for the digitally dispossessed here in the UK and around the world.
I have been driven to searching for open wireless access points so that I can download my e-mail, sometimes wandering the beach looking for elusive 3G signals just to get my Facebook status updated.
It was my own fault, of course. I spent a few days on the Norfolk coast with my son and some of his friends in a wifi-less cottage in an area that had poor 3G coverage, though I was probably less frustrated with lack of connectivity than he was, as he wanted to keep in touch with his mates back home while I was mostly on holiday.
Then I spent the weekend at the lovely Latitude Festival in deepest Suffolk, there to represent Writers’ Centre Norwich as we had supported some of the poets in the Poetry Tent.
No wireless there, at least none that I could get connected to – there did seem to be a private network for the tech crew to use – and the phone networks were clearly swamped as text messages were taking two or three hours to be delivered while my 3G dongle repeatedly failed to connect.
Photos of the beach sat on my hard drive because I didn’t have the bandwidth to upload them to Flickr, while my ambitious plans to deluge the world with AudioBoos from Latitude came to naught after the first one took twenty minutes to upload over the slowest phone connection I have experienced for at least five years.
In between the Norfolk beach and the muddy fields of Latitude I had my third experience of life offline when I came into London to chair a conference organised by Arts Council England for arts organisations that want to explore the potential of new technologies to reach audiences or just work more effectively.
Network crash
"The real benefits of the online revolution will only come when net access is seamless, pervasive and guaranteed."
Bill Thompson
The conference took place in the Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadler’s Wells, a wonderful space that works really well for conferences because the acoustics and lighting are designed for performance. Most conference centres are so soulless and dispiriting it takes all your energy to stand up at the lectern, so it was a pleasant contrast to be in an inspiring space.
We had wifi access inside the theatre as the conference included tutorials on social networks and online engagement, and the audience were encouraged to contribute questions online so they could be displayed on the screen behind the speakers.
Unfortunately the wifi stopped working about half-way through the first session of the day, and those of us with smartphones and laptop dongles were forced to resort to slower 3G connections.
It appeared that we had overwhelmed the capacity of the wireless network that the venue had set up for us. I talked to the IT support engineer and he asked me how many of us were trying to connect, and I told him I estimated that thirty to forty people were using laptops and probably the same number had wifi-enabled smartphones.
Wider lesson
After he had recovered from the shock he explained that the wifi router they had installed could only support twenty simultaneous connections and had crashed when we all tried to log on.
He was very efficient once he realised the problem and sorted out a second network and higher-capacity kit by lunchtime, but it was interesting that twenty network connections were originally seen as adequate to support one hundred and fifty people at a conference about technology.
I go to many technology events now where the ratio of online devices to people is greater than one, as many of us have a laptop and a phone or two, and conference organisers are going to have to adapt pretty fast to this new reality or they will quickly lose custom.
But I think there’s a wider lesson here.
Finding myself intermittently online this week was a mild inconvenience for me, and I managed to get connected when I needed to so that urgent business could be dealt with.
However slow, unreliable connections are a fact of life for millions of people in the UK, and most of the world’s internet-using population, and experiencing it again myself made me realise that the real benefits of the online revolution will only come when net access is seamless, pervasive and guaranteed.
Slow down
The rhythm of my life now depends on easy and fast online access in the way that the driving beat of drummer Suren de Saram supports the frenetic guitar sound of Bombay Bicycle Club – one of the best acts at Latitude, by the way.
I have grown accustomed to being able to respond quickly and easily to people, to having much of the world’s information at my fingertips, to being able to share my thoughts and observations with my online friends and those who have chosen to listen as I think out loud.
Without it I slow down. Things get lost or forgotten, ideas go nowhere and trains of thought are shuffled into the sidings and are neglected. An unreliable network is worse than no network at all, and forces me to limit my imagination to those things that don’t rely on being online all the time.
Although the recent Digital Britain report was criticised for proposing that we should aim to offer universal access to a relatively slow 2Mbps (megabits per second) network connection by 2012, on reflection I think that a reliable and pervasive two megabits might be enough to kick-start the next stage of the network revolution, because it will allow everyone to begin to embed online access into their lives.
Once we do that, then the demand for faster access will grow, but it will also be possible for commercial operators to see the benefits on offering next generation access, creating a virtuous circle that will benefit us all.
Being offline has been a learning experience, but it’s nice to be home to my twenty megabits. I just hope that there’s some connectivity at the Port Eliot festival, where I’ll be next weekend!
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
I needed music ‘cos I had none
July 14th, 2009 |
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Young people don’t want to break the law, says Bill Thompson
"The latest report on young people’s online music-finding habits from consumer research company The Leading Question has attracted a fair amount of coverage for its headline finding that UK teenagers use of file sharing services has dropped by a third.
The Speakerbox survey polled 1000 young people, so it’s a reasonable survey – although of course there’s a margin of error in any survey and a significant likelihood that the interpretation of the results will be driven by the predispositions of those reading them, demonstrating yet again what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn calls "theory-dependent observation". Music industry pollsters will inevitably look for a silver lining in the cloud of consumer behaviour, and a focus on the growth of legal services is to be expected. But even with that caveat in mind, there has clearly been a shift in behaviour as more young people find licensed ways to listen to the music they want, watching YouTube videos, streaming songs through MySpace and Spotify, and generally using legal avenues to find and enjoy the music of new bands like Florence and the Machine. Rigorous statistics Not having access to the full Speakerbox report, as I’m writing this while on holiday in Norfolk, I carried out my own unrepresentative survey of three 16-year-old boys who happened to be sitting on a nearby sofa playing Soulcalibur IV. I can exclusively reveal that 67% of teenagers use Spotify but that a whopping 100% still download material illegally if that’s the only way they can get it, and that ripping the soundtrack from YouTube videos to put onto your phone or MP3 player is growing in popularity, with 67% of 16-year-olds having taken up the practice in the last six months. "I turned to the file sharing networks because the music I wanted to listen to was either completely unavailable or so locked up with restrictive terms as to be effectively inaccessible" Bill Thompson These findings fit rather well with more statistically reliable surveys in that they show a continuing desire for music among young people, despite the obvious interests and attractions of gaming and other activities. They also show that teenagers are aware of and able to take advantage of legal services when they are available. This should not surprise us, since the only reason that we all started to use file sharing and other unlicensed ways of getting music was because the services that the record companies provided were unwieldy, expensive, limited and intrusive. They were riddled with absurd and inconvenient copy protection measures like the software that Sony-BMG put on music CDs in 2005, which secretly installed itself on users’ computers and could not be uninstalled automatically. In common with millions of others, I turned to the file sharing networks because the music I wanted to listen to was either completely unavailable or so locked up with restrictive terms as to be effectively inaccessible. And I indulged heavily in other behaviour the record industry body BPI wishes to remain illegal by buying CDs and ripping them onto my computer so I could load them onto my iPod. Of course I’ve also spent thousands of pounds on vinyl, CDs and downloads over the years, and will probably continue to do so as my love of music is undiminished with age. I really enjoyed hearing Vampire Weekend at the recent Blur concert at Hyde Park, and can’t wait to see The Editors play at the Latitude Festival next week. Role of tape The network revolution poses the most significant challenge the record industry has faced since the phonograph was invented, and it has been shown wanting in almost every respect. Last month Geoff Taylor, chief executive of BPI, wrote a column for the BBC News website in which he admitted that the industry had made a mistake ten years ago when they sued the Napster file-sharing service out of existence, but that was just one error among many. I remember speaking at a record industry conference in 1994 and telling the assembled executives that the day of the CD was over and that they should prepare for digital distribution. They didn’t take me seriously, perhaps believing that there was no way the internet of the time could ever be used to deliver music.
Five years later Napster showed them how it could be done and they shut it down. Two years after that, in 2001, Apple opened the iTunes Music Store and showed them how to do it legally and profitably, but they still failed to see the real potential and insisted on copy controls and other restrictions.
And only now, 15 years after the web began to transform the world, are the senior executives for the big record labels acting as if they really appreciate just how deep the change in consumer behaviour, brought about by the affordances of these new technologies, is going to be.
Unfortunately it might be too late. Behind the shift to licensed music services there is another change that should give the music industry pause: young people seem happy to stream their music, relying on access to the network to ensure they can get the songs they want, when they want it. While my generation was stuck on owning music on vinyl or CD, today’s young listeners seem not even to feel the pressure to have a local copy of the file.
It took the record companies fifteen years to realise that their business wasn’t shifting physical units of singles or albums to retailers. They won’t have nearly that long to adapt to the new world in which the money comes not from selling files but from simply making music available for anyone to listen to, anywhere and on any device.
I certainly don’t rate their chances of getting it right in time.
"
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Giving life a shape
July 3rd, 2009 |
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Novel ways of thinking about the digital world are needed, says Bill Thompson, and perhaps the arts can help.
One of the more interesting shifts in the technology world over the last quarter century has been the way that cultural organisations have gone from being the late adopters, inheriting office-oriented computer systems from business and making do with them, to being those leading the digital revolution in many areas.
When I worked with the Community Computing Network in the late 80s it was hard work persuading charities and voluntary organisations that having a computer to handle their member databases and print letters was worthwhile.
But now that there really is a computer on every desk and word processing, spreadsheets and databases are standard, arts organisations seem to be far more willing to engage and experiment with the latest tools, especially online.
"We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp"
Bill Thompson
Many are making expert use of social media, moving from MySpace and Bebo to Facebook to follow the audiences, but also finding out how Twitter and other services can be used to help them engage and interact with people who may be interested in their art.
Stage craft
The much-loved Pilot Theatre brought in virtual worlds expert Caron Lyon to built them a stage set in Second Life. The team at Hoi Polloi used video diaries, Facebook and Twitter to establish an online following that has supported them as they tour from their Cambridge base as far afield as Australia, offering new audiences a chance to discover their work in all its strangeness while also ensuring that fans – including me – know what they are up to while they are away.
When it comes crossover organisations like Hide&Seek, who recently ran a social gaming festival in London, it is impossible to separate the art from the technology, and their work offers a real inspiration to those who wonder what the arts will look like in a digitised world.
This cross-fertilisation is important in several ways. It obviously makes sense for those committed to experiment and exploration in the arts to embrace new technologies as a way of exploring the creative potential of a new domain of human activity, just as painters explored the radical new technology of oils for for many decades, or sculptors turned from marble and limestone to work with welded iron or novel materials like frozen blood.
But there is something else going on, something deeper and potentially more important, because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.
They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.
The point was made clear to me at Shift Happens, a conference on the ways arts organisations are using new technologies that took place this week at York Theatre Royal.
Over a day and a half the audience, mostly made up of practitioners, was treated to a fascinating selection of arts-based technology, or technology-based arts, from the interactive animations of the always-engaging Sancho Plan through calls to ensure that tech-based arts are environmentally sustainable from Envirodigital and a demonstration of how to subtitle your online video from Internet Subtitling.
It quickly became clear that the network revolution is already happening in the arts even if its success on the political stage is sometimes sadly limited, as we saw this week in Iran.
One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.
Texting times
I wonder, however, if we can take some old stories and use them to explore the new world. Take The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare’s last play and one of his finest. Set on a remote island where Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, lives with his daughter Miranda and a strange creature called Caliban, the Tempest explores issues of redemption and forgiveness and the use and abuse of power.
Prospero rules his island thanks the the spells in the books he has studied in his exile, commanding the spirit Ariel to torment and manipulate his former enemies, who have been shipwrecked on the island by a tempest created at Prospero’s command.
A modern reading this tale would see Ariel as a representative of the digital realm, created from bits but able to have a real effect on the physical world. We discover during the play that Ariel was locked into a forked tree until released by Prospero, a good analogy for the effort needed to liberate the power of the digital revolution, represented by Prospero’s books of spells.
We can take this further. The witch’s child Caliban believes himself the true inheritor of the island as his mother was banished there before Prospero arrived and fails to realise that Prospero’s books have given him power over the unseen world that far outstrip Caliban’s physical prowess, just as the rulers of analogue distribution fear the world we have conjured from our code.
And when Caliban, wandering the island with shipwrecked sailors Trinculo and Stephano, hears an invisible Ariel playing on a pipe he tells them:
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Today the thousand twangling instruments that Ariel and his sprites conjure up are replaced by millions of tweets, status updates, but they still fill the world with sweet sounds, and offer us a vision of a digital world that can be as rich and full of delight as we choose to make it. It’s reassuring to see that some of our best artists are working hard to make that happen.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
What role for TV in wired world?
June 24th, 2009 |
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Will we need public service broadcasting in the wired world Bill Thompson has his doubts.
"Much of the debate that followed last week’s publication of the Digital Britain report has focused on the proposal to take some of the income from the TV licence and make it available to fund universal broadband access, with a suggestion that once this has been accomplished £130m a year could be used to support local news services and perhaps even children’s programming provided by people other than the BBC.
Within the BBC there is a strong feeling that this would be a very bad idea because the corporation’s resilience comes in part from having a guaranteed source of funding that does not rely on politically-motivated decisions of the government of the day. The fear is that once the licence fee is shared there will be nothing to stop it being carved up to meet short-term policy objectives. Others share this view. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee is vehemently opposed to what she calls ‘deliberately breaching the unique status of the BBC’ and asks if the destruction of the BBC is ‘really going to be this Labour government’s legacy’ The final decision on the TV license is yet to be made, but the argument about funding the BBC is only one aspect of a much larger debate about public service broadcasting in the UK and how we pay for television content that is designed to meet specific social and cultural objectives, such as news, education and children’s programming. ITV, Channel 4 and Five all have obligations to provide public service content, and it is hard to see how these commercial broadcasters can meet them as television advertising revenue falls and competition from digital channels and online sources continues to increase. The scale of the problem is enormous, and was highlighted in a recent report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) commissioned by the entertainment union BECTU and the National Union of Journalists, both of whom have many members working in broadcasting. Genuine crisis ‘Mind the Funding Gap’ looks at the impact of the switch to digital broadcasting on the main UK channels and estimates that it will leave the commercial public service broadcasters with a funding gap of between £145 and £235 million, although the calculations are based on many assumptions about how much the analogue television spectrum is worth compared to the lower value of a digitally-broadcast channel and are rather more indicative than accurate. Even if the numbers are uncertain, there is clearly a massive loss of subsidy that, along with the current reduction in advertising income, has created a genuine crisis in public service broadcasting. What, then, should be done about it Earlier this week I attended a meeting organised by the FEU, the Federation of Entertainment Unions, to discuss ‘New Forms of Funding for Public Service Broadcasting’, and heard from John Smith of the Musicians’ Union, Luke Crawley from the media and entertainment union BECTU and the London Business School’s Professor Paddy Barwise. The debate covered a range of topics but focused on a proposal in ‘Mind the Funding Gap’ to pay for public service programmes by imposing a one per cent on the turnover of pay television and mobile phone companies, raising around £280m a year. The argument is a simple one. If a levy on telephone use, as proposed in the Digital Britain report, can be used to pay for next generation broadband, taxing old services to pay for new, why not have a levy on pay television services and mobile phone companies to ensure that providers of public service broadcasting have the same level of public funding in a digital world as they do in the analogue one This is such a broken idea that it is difficult to know where to begin to unwind it. Old-style content "The age of television is ending, just as the age of printed textbooks and user manuals is ending, as the age of the hand loom and the wheelwright and the scribe ended before them" Bill Thompson Instead of investing in innovation and taking advantage of the capabilities that high speed networks offer, finding ways to deliver entertainment and news and education to people wherever they are, with interactivity and options for engagement built in, the old style content providers want to tax network services so they can continue to provide old style content. They want to keep us all in a world where vast numbers of people spend most of their precious leisure time watching a flat-screen television on which the limits of interactivity are set by an electronic programming guide and, if you’re very lucky, a red button that lets you vote on your most-disliked Big Brother housemate. Of course the unions want to protect the jobs of their members, and they cannot be criticised for this, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. Many fine writers, including my partner, are suffering because book publishing is going through enormous turmoil, but there is no subsidy on offer to them. In broadcasting actors are out of work while directors and production crews see budgets cut and funding dry up, and journalists are living with uncertainty. This is happening because the age of television is ending, just as the age of printed textbooks and user manuals is ending, as the age of the hand loom and the wheelwright and the scribe ended before them. It is a hard change to live through, and those who are only skilled to work in the world of television will inevitably fear it, just as print-only journalists fear the online future. But this is not a reason to distort the growth of online services in order to give television a few more years. It is an argument for reskilling, for offering funding to innovative services, for building on the ideas of projects like Martin Bright’s ‘New Deal of the Mind’ that are trying to find ways to support and sustain those whose career prospects have been affected by the growth of the internet. When I was young there was a great children’s TV show called ‘Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead’, which encouraged viewers to be active and not simply passive viewers of packaged content. I think it’s time that those involved in television production were asked: Why Don’t You Stop Banging on About Public Service Broadcasting and Go and Make Something Less Boring Instead Perhaps the most dangerous assumption is that an always-on digital world will be so similar to the old analogue one that the passive consumption of scheduled television programming will be the only way most people will want to spend their time and so vast amounts of public money must be spent to ensure that it continues to be available.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Engaging with the net
June 16th, 2009 |
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The Digital Britain report offers a lot to work with, says Bill Thompson.
"We live in a largely digitised country, so in one sense the Digital Britain report is an exercise in ensuring that the legal and regulatory system catches up with the lived reality for most of the UK population rather than a visionary document describing a far-distant future.
As such it is a serious attempt to ensure that government makes the best possible use of the network in serving us all, and that businesses offering access to the internet or providing services and content over the network are regulated, rewarded and cajoled as necessary to ensure that the UK does not fall even further behind the rest of the industrialised world.
Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.
I criticised the interim report when it was published in January because it had been written behind closed doors and offered few opportunities for consultation and engagement for those outside the charmed circle of invited experts.
But it is clear that Stephen Carter and his team have listened to and taken notice of the extensive debate around their initial proposals. The result, though far from perfect, offers a good basis for work on the detail of implementation and legislation, and there are clear signs that those who want to engage will be able to do so.
There are suggestions on how to liberalise and improve access to wireless infrastructure, with potentially transformative proposals to shake up spectrum allocation to build a next generation mobile network offering 50Mpbs in cities and 5Mpbs in rural areas.
There is a confirmed commitment to delivering a universal 2Mbps (megabits per second) fixed-line broadband service to the whole country by 2012, and a six pound a year levy on existing copper telephone lines to pay for the ‘final third’ next generation coverage if the market cannot deliver. Two megabits per second is too slow for me, but universal service offers so many opportunities for engagement that it’s definitely worth having.
And there may even be ‘cultural tax relief’ for games developers and distributors, on the lines of the model that has made Canada such an attractive place for UK developers to move to.
The report comes on a day when the importance of the internet and the services it supports has been drawn to the attention of the whole world.
"Unfortunately the proposals to limit file-sharing are less well considered and seem to be hopelessly optimistic, or perhaps to betray a naivety about how the internet works. "
Bill Thompson
The protests over the election results in Iran have depended on Facebook, YouTube and of course Twitter to get their message to the world, put pressure on their own government and organise their activities.
Just last week the French Constitutional Council of France halted the government’s plans to give a new authority the ability to cut the network access of internet users accused of copyright violations because "the internet is a component of the freedom of expression".
In the UK the Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote in the The Times today that "a fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water."
Locking content
The view of the network as a utility and as a tool for expression is a very different one from that put forward by the dominant players in the so-called ‘content industry’.
Record companies, film studios, newspapers and the TV broadcasters have all lobbied hard for the UK government to shape its internet policy around their interests.
They want copyright laws to be strengthened so they can lock up any and all content. They want anyone who dares to challenge their business to be kicked offline, fined and locked up. They want a world in which they control what can happen.
Fortunately that pressure seems largely to have been resisted, and the real thrust of the proposals is about getting everyone online and ensuring that the network is there to be used in ways that support creative expression, new forms of industry and new models of engagement.
Funding news
The Digital Britain of the report is one in which all have access, not one where we try to preserve old industrial models.
When it comes to newspapers the report notes that ‘Digital Britain is at the beginning of a new and possibly disruptive wave of local news, generated by communities for communities using free online media’. It recognises that ‘government and business will need collaboratively to devise new ways of funding the news’ without simply promising subsidies to the existing players who have failed to adapt to the network reality and have sought protection and subsidy.
The debate about the future of public service broadcasting includes many progressive ideas, and both the decision to make Channel 4 more than just a broadcaster but turn it into ‘the open new media authority providing the seed-corn for creative innovation in the multi-media world’, and the message to the BBC that the license fee does not belong to it are all good ones.
Unfortunately the proposals to limit file-sharing are less well considered and seem to be hopelessly optimistic, or perhaps to betray a naivety about how the internet works.
Ofcom is to be asked to oversee efforts by UK ISPs to reduce what they term ‘illegal file-sharing’ by 70%, initially through notifying those accused of downloading material or revealing their names and addresses to rights holders so that they can be prosecuted.
If this doesn’t work then Ofcom may then be granted power to oblige ISPs to limit bandwidth or block specific protocols, presumably in the hope that doing this will deter or stop downloads. But this proposal ignores the fact that work is already going on to develop new file sharing technologies that are encrypted or disguise addresses more effectively. Ofcom might well hit its 70% target just because everyone moves away from BitTorrent without actually reducing the number of files shared over the net.
However the fact that the BPI boss Geoff Taylor found it necessary to accuse the government of ‘digital dithering’ for refusing to allow rights holders to have internet users cut off – the same proposals that have just been thrown out in France – is a good sign indeed.
In the end public service broadcasting and the protection of the content industries matter far less than the promotion of universal access and the creation of tools and services that encourage everyone online to demonstrate their own creative potential.
Networked world
A digital Britain is not one in which we are all sitting glued to our screens watching the same sort of television programming that we could have had on a cathode-ray set in the 1970′s, downloading blockbuster movies or listening to more dull music made by rich popstars whose only real interest is their property portfolio.
It is one in which universal access allows us all to be fully-fledged citizens of a networked world that offers opportunities for creative expression and communication instead of the passive consumption of packaged content. There’s a glimpse of that world through the Digital Britain report, and it is one that those of us who already live a networked life need to clarify, share and work to build.
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Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The digital age of rights
May 26th, 2009 |
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The digitally deprived have rights too, says regular columnist Bill Thompson
"President Sarkozy of France recently managed to get his Création et Internet law passed by the National Assembly, and if all goes well in the Senate then French internet users will soon find their activities being supervised by HADOPI, the grandly named ‘Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet.’
The rights it is concerned with are not those of ordinary net users but of copyright owners, and especially the large entertainment companies that have lobbied so hard and so successfully for the power to force internet service providers to terminate the accounts of those accused of downloading unlicensed copies of music, films and software.
Once HADOPI is up and running rights holders will be able to go to it with evidence of illegal downloading, and it will issue banning orders to ISPs without any need for tiresome court proceedings.
The agency is deeply controversial, and may in fact be illegal under European law as proposed changes to EU telecommunications regulations seem likely to require the involvement of the courts in any disconnection.
But even if it is legal, it is still a bad idea and must be one of the most foolish, regressive and potentially damaging moves by a government that claims to want to capitalise on the internet’s potential to transform society.
"It’s not that computers matter more than water, food, shelter and healthcare, but that the network and PCs can be used to ensure that those other things are available"Bill Thompson
The new law treats the internet as if it was simply a conduit for delivering the sort of mindless entertainment provided by most films, TV programmes and popular music and proposes to cut people off because their actions might damage the business model of one tiny sector of the economy.
But the net is far more than television with added e-mail. As digital rights campaigner Cory Doctorow put it in an impassioned article on this issue in The Guardian last year:
"The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It’s only vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day)."
Cory is not alone in believing that net access is too important to be regulated solely in the interests of the entertainment industry.
Earlier this month Vivian Reding, the European Commissioner responsible for Information Society and Media, spoke of "a right to Internet access" and pointed out that the EU’s new telecommunications rules "recognise explicitly that Internet access is a fundamental right such as the freedom of expression and the freedom to access information".
BILL’S LINKS HADOPI on Wikipedia Cory Doctorow on net access Cnet: Is net access a human rightBut if the argument against extra-judicial disconnection is so strong then surely a policy that lets network service providers keep millions of people from having a usable, fast and reliable connection to the internet must also be morally indefensible
If it is unacceptable to cut people off from the network because their actions are commercially damaging to the record companies, why is it acceptable to offer them poor or no access to broadband and mobile internet just because providing the service is commercially unattractive to ISPs or network operators
BROADBAND WORLD MAP: BBC reporters talk broadband
And if we are to be encouraged to think of access to the internet as a fundamental human right, a prerequisite of having freedom of expression, should we not be prosecuting ISPs over the ‘notspots’ in their mobile or wi-fi coverage, the communities with no access to ADSL because of the telephone network was repaired with aluminium instead of copper, or the areas bypassed by the cable providers
As a long-time contributor to Digital Planet, the BBC World Service programme about the impact of digital technology on people’s lives, I’ve seen the growing awareness within the developing world that computers and connectivity matter and can be useful. It’s not that computers matter more than water, food, shelter and healthcare, but that the network and PCs can be used to ensure that those other things are available.
Satellite imagery sent to a local computer can help villages find fresh water, mobile phones can tell farmers the prices at market so they know when to harvest.
The same arguments apply in the UK, but those of use who have easy, affordable and fast connectivity tend not to think of the plight of those who can’t get online, just as we so often fail to notice the homeless people in our towns or let our eyes glide over deprived housing estates as we sit on the train.
Of course once the kids on the local council estate start using their new-found power to create mash-ups of their favourite bands or add soundtracks to the videos they upload onto the web we’re sure to hear calls for their net access to be restricted in some way.
But at least they’ll be able to organise a Facebook campaign for themselves, and get some attention from the rest of us. At the moment the offline masses lack a voice as well as an internet connection.
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Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.