On this episode of Spark: Digital Impermanence, Pervasive Computing, and McLuhan Today. Click below to listen to the whole show, or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:24 — 49.9MB)
You can also listen to individual stories below.
Why The Medium is Still The Message
This year marks the centenary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth – on July 21, 1911 in Edmonton. It’s a big deal, with all kinds of events planned in Canada and abroad. Here at Spark, we’re going to host our own McLuhan Fest, because whether you see McLuhan as a folk hero, an academic, a hippie prophet, or a Canadian icon, what he had to say about media more than 40 years ago shines light on today’s digital world. Eric McLuhan is a lecturer and author and for many years worked closely with his father researching media and communications theory. Published posthumously in 1988 by Eric, Laws of Media brought together McLuhan’s ideas as a tetrad of media effects, four laws of media we’ll explore over the next four weeks on Spark. To start it all off, here is Nora’s conversation with Eric McLuhan. (Runs 11:52)
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The Evolution of Humans and Technology
Thinking about the effect of media and technology on our lives and reflecting on its future impact has lead us to an unusual place – archeology. In his recent book The Artificial Ape Timothy Taylor argues a challenging new theory – that the very appearance of humans is a result of early technology. As he tells Nora, we didn’t make the tools, the tools made us. Whoa, man. (Runs 11:00)
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The Networked City
A few weeks ago on Spark, we talked about the idea of cognitive cities and the ways that urban planners are thinking about using our data trails to create better infrastructure. A leader in the field is Adam Greenfield. Adam is founder and managing director of the urban-systems design practice Urbanscale and he spoke to Nora about the future of the networked city, and its relationship with our everyday lives. (Runs 12:05)
Play audio:
- Adam Greenfield
- Urbanscale
- Full uncut version of interview with Adam Greenfield
- Spark Blog: cognitive cities item that includes Adam Greenfield
The YouTube Trapper and The Idea of Digital Impermanence
A few weeks ago, Google Video sent out a notice stating they were shutting down, and videos would have to be downloaded to your home computer, or migrated to YouTube. Earlier in the year Yahoo Video removed all user-generated uploads from its site and Cisco announced its FlipShare video sharing service would not be supported come the end of 2013. These stories seem to suggest the web isn’t as permanent as we’re often led to believe. For his perspective on online video and digital heritage, Nora spoke with archivist, technology historian, and filmmaker Jason Scott. But first, CBC Producer Philippe Morin brings us the story of the YouTube trapper, a young man who lives, hunts and traps in the wilderness outside Hay River, Northwest Territories, and he uses his own YouTube channel The Wild North, to teach his skills. (Runs 11:33)
Play audio:
- The Wild North – Andrew’s YouTube channel
- Jason Scott
- YouTube Blog: An update on Google Video – Finding an easier way to migrate Google Video content to YouTube
- Full uncut version of interview with Jason Scott
Additional Links
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Weirdly, Windows (XP) can't read the MP3. Media Player can't play it and Windows can't display any information about it (tags, bitrate, length, etc.).
The program MP3Tag is unable to read any information either. (EDIT: My mistake – it can calculate the duration, bitrate and sample frequency. But no tags.)
VLC can play it, though.
Just letting you know.
*EDIT":
Further info: LAME decoder reports a 'bitstream problem' at frame 671.
Thanks so much for the heads-up, Wilson. CBC has launched a new podcast publishing tool, and we're working through the hiccups. A replacement MP3 is up, and seems to be working.
http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/spark_20110508…
Yep, it's working for me! Thanks!
As is often the case, a useful episode. For one thing, since the program is the Canadian tech culture of a shared experience, it'll now be easy to talk about issues surrounding networked cities, the material culture aspect of the bipedal paradox, and the non-prospective character of McLuhan's work.
Listening to the Spark Plus podcast, the quality of the editing work done on these shows is especially striking. It almost sounds as if guests had been reading from a script, so seamless the integration is.
Thanks, once again, for an important resource.
I just listened to the full interviews with Siva Vaidhyanathan and Jason Scott, and each touched on on a specific theme which is government regulation of new technology and service providers.
I'm not anti-government or anti-regulation, nor do I think I am all that cynical compared to other people. I believe in the influence of public participation to have been actively involved in Copyright and related technology law for a decade, and sat in on nearly every committee hearing for Bill C-32 in the last session. I was also a witness on one of the days. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think it mattered.
But because of this involvement I also believe we need to be pragmatic and recognize that many in the public policy debate are not yet mature enough on their understanding of media to regulate in ways that will be helpful rather than harmful.
With C-32 there were deliberate changes that will make archiving photographs harder. This included obfuscating the term of copying by tieing it to the largely unknown or unknowable "photographer", ignoring that vast wealth of photographs that were automated and thus don't even have a photographer. Most photographs are taken by amateurs, a fact ignored by the government, political parties and nearly all witnesses. This change in policy was done allegedly to benefit the professional photographers who are responsible for an almost insignificant minority of photographs being taken.
There are many things being asked for in this law which will make any type of archiving harder or even impossible. What Google did with Google books may not have been ideal public policy making, but it is pragmatic public policy making given the current political climate. I don't see forward-looking motion coming out of the public sector in these areas, and left to the existing process we would continue in the existing backward motion.
On Google Books we saw the hypocrisy of groups associated with Access Copyright in Canada disagreeing with the settlement These same groups advocate for compulsory licenses all the time, and we saw that quite a bit in the context of the C-32 hearings. The claim was that they disagree with the opt-out rather than opt-in nature of the settlement, even though this lobby group advocates less than opt-out in other contexts all the time. It really was a matter of whether any residual income flowed through Access Copyright (and they took their cut) over whether it was Google that did it.
It really is hard to tell the difference between corporations, unions, or collective societies in this area of policy. You have forward-looking groups and backward-looking groups, and you can't presume that corporations are less likely to have the public interest in mind than a union, collective or government.
Is what we are getting from out current private sector Internet companies good long-term public policy? Not at all — but I think we need to realize the public sector and labour movement is so far behind the times that we must encourage them to catch up long before we suggest we table, debate and pass legislation. Doing this too early will only make things worse.
I'm glad you brought our attention to this issue: archiving and the fate of our data.
However, I think that Youtube (and to some extend, video in general) is very much the wrong choice for your principal example.
With Facebook, twitter, and so many other services I enter the content directly into the service – it only exists there and it only exists in whatever format they choose. I am dependent on their export function which, as you pointed out with Facebook, shouldn't be relied upon.
With Youtube (and video in general) I create my content separately and then 'upload' it to them. Their function is fairly clearly deliniated: they make it available to others to view. As you point out, technology is starting to make the process seamless, almost as if I record my video right into Youtube – but the video still exists independent of Youtube.
I do believe that all of these companies should be watched – none of them really want you to be able to get your data out too easily. They would really rather everything be done in their proprietary format and that you not be able to export any of it, but so far I think Youtube is not a good example of the problem.
Great episode!
Chrome can't read the MP3.