I was reading my usual science blogs, and came across Weekend Diversion: And now, they're coming for me. Yeah, me. Because I write for you. at Starts With a Bang. Apparently Congress is creating new classes of felons that would have no idea they were doing anything even technically wrong.
In brief, U.S. Senate Bill 978 (that just cleared committee) makes it a Federal Offense (felony) if you happen to embed someone's video on your post that someday someone may claim infringed on a copyright. If I, for example, embed a video of some stranger's birthday party on this blog, that pans briefly across a television set that happened to be playing a commercial for shoes, that has background music by the Beatles, and in five years Michael Jackson's heirs decide that this infringed on their copyright on the music of McCartney and yank the video, I could technically be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison. Even if the creator of the video, the owners of the network, and the shoe company and its marketing agent all had approved my use.
Ethan Siegel has more details about this silliness and suggestions on his post.
Creation is daunting. Partly because the drive to create is always rooted in admiration for others' creations. What writer hasn't struggled against inadvertently ghost-writing their favorite author? What aspiring auteur, poet, or painter doesn't begin with work that is heartrendingly derivative of others' better attempts? Or worse-- what creative person hasn't struggled to make something 'great', something 'great' as the art they adore, only to find they can't quite compete? And who doesn't infer from these failings that maybe they weren't cut out to be a creative type after all?
Ira Glass, creator and longtime host of This American Life, says there's a very simple reason for the head-bashing frustrations of early creative production. Simply put: if you are interested in creating something, it's probably because you have immaculate taste. Taste that outpaces your own ability. At least, at first. Glass says:
“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I found this snippet in a video interview with Glass (below) a year or two ago, and I find it incredibly inspiring. Glass' view of creativity suggests that even if you lack innate, immediate creative ability, you are not a lost cause-- and that, in fact, a little creative self-loathing may be a sign of good aesthetic instincts. It also suggests there is a solution to the problem of making unsatisfying dreck: just keep making more. And more. And more.
This wisdom is especially powerful in context. As a radio producer, Glass was a very late bloomer. He worked in public radio for twenty years before conceiving of This American Life; he readily admits (in another portion of his interview, and on his program) that the first seven years of his radio work was deeply underwhelming and often poorly-paced. He'll readily admit that his early stories were bad, and that even he knew they were bad, and that this tormented him. Only through tireless efforts and the cultivation of exceptional taste was he able to develop and bloom. And he bloomed big: This American Life is one of the most widely-heard public radio programs ever, with 1.7 million weekly listeners, and has topped the Itunes podcast chart continuously for years. If Ira had given up after a few years of shoddy radio stories, we'd all have missed out on TAL's hundreds of hours of thoughtful, poignant, high-quality public radio.
I found this interview snippet a little over a year ago, and Glass' words of experience have galvanized me ever since. Whenever I write something that strikes me as uninspiring or derivative dreck, I reassure myself it's a matter of taste, and time. And more time.
A few weeks ago, we talked about Dutch mobile phone carriers planning to charge for the use of different kinds of application, such as Skype, WhatsApp, and so on. They would check people's data traffic using deep packet inspection, and charge accordingly. This led to a massive outrage here in this glorified swamp - and this outrage has had its effect.
Our parliament stood up to defend the concept of net neutrality, and as such, motioned the government to have it added to our telecommunications act. Not only will this prohibit carriers from forcing customers to pay additional fees for specific types of data, it also prohibits them from blocking certain types of traffic - something the Dutch branch of Vodafone is already doing by blocking VoIP services. This applies to regular internet service providers as well.
A Netherlands arts group, Studio Smack, put together this video which provides a stark look at all the logos and advertising one is exposed to going throughout a normal daily routine.
It used to be that people were subject to the whims of old media, human gate-keepers who decided that type of information we should see. The Internet was supposed to change all of that, but we are now seeing startling examples that Facebook, Google, and Yahoo News among many other companies, are using algorithms to please us by giving us what they deem to be “relevant.”
Author Eli Pariser, executive director of Moveon.org, asked several friends to search the same term (“Egypt”) in Google, and they received dramatically different results. It turns out that there is no longer any standard version of Google. The new version uses dozens of bits of information about you to give you what it thinks you want. Facebook also employs such relevance algorithms to weed out information, and even “friends” that it has decided that you don’t want. In the case of Pariser, whose politics are progressive, Facebook edited out information from his conservative “friends.”
What would be the advantage to giving us what we want? Certainly, some of us want to live in a world where everyone appears to think the same. But such filtering would also have a commercial purpose—giving only “relevant” hits might facilitate Internet sales.
In this excellent ten-minute TED talk, Pariser tells that the Internet is increasingly geared to giving us what we want to see rather than what we need to see. In this talk, Pariser has challenged the new Internet gatekeepers to make this ubiquitous filtering of information transparent and to give user control over it. We will all be better off, he warns, when we get information that makes us uncomfortable, and information that is important, as well as information that challenges us, rather than simply giving us what they think we want.
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