Keep your eyes on my nipples ... living on the fringes of conversation.

I am taking tips from grandpa ... whom the New Year finds more frail, more mad, and more outrageous than ever ...

When I arrived at the dementia centre today he was deep in sleep - his top teeth detached and filling the gap in his open mouth like some medieval portcullis dropped to repel access by invading flies.  When he awakened he complained that he had been lost underground for three days with no liquids and was dying of thirst, but when I rise to get him a drink he abuses me loudly - claiming that my efforts are self-serving - designed solely to make it look like I am “Mother Theresa made flesh”.

He wants to stand up but needs help to get out of his chair, and once up struggles to persuade his feet to shuffle in sequence from the dining chair to a sofa, and he hates this new vulnerability – he reacts by cursing and berating me for being mobile – for being able to offer help.  A nurse aide rescued him by suggesting he holds her hands and keeps his eyes on her nipples – lust must be one of the last memories lost in dementia - he fixed his gaze salaciously and shuffled slowly after the nipples to a nearby sofa.

Once settled on the sofa, he complains through loose dentures that “when you are at sea the structure of the cabins means it is hard to communicate meaning” - “the echoes mean you are always on the fringes of conversation” – I am sympathetic having often felt on the fringes of conversations myself – and after inventing an elaborate fabulist explanation of the rice flour grinding facilities of the flat bottom barges on the Kaipara Harbour he is exhausted and withdraws by shutting his eyes and pretending to be asleep. 

And yet despite feigning fringe deafness he monitors the communications in his environment closely - somehow managing to negotiate a share of the nurse aide’s fresh oysters – and all without opening his eyes.    

I am cramping his flirtation with the nurse aide - he wants me to stay and he wants me to go ... “how far away can you go?”  he whispers hoarsely, “and still be in my presence?”.

Grandpa is making me think about the many ways in which we understand the communication of ideas ...

And I have been enjoying thinking about this in the context of the internet through another vacation read - Lawrence Lessig’s  The Future of Ideas  – The fate of the commons in a connected world . 

Lessig introduces Communication Systems through Yochai Benkler’s Three Layers definition (page 11)

Physical Layer: the computer, or wires, that link computers on the Internet.
Code Layer: a “logical” or “code” layer – the code that makes the hardware run – includes protocols and software
Content: a content layer – the actual stuff that gets said or transmitted across these wires.

Explaining that each of Benkler’s layers can be seen as a resource that can be controlled or free (note commons arguments – rivalrous and non rivalrous resources), for example:

Speaker’s Corner – Content: free, Code: free, Physical :free
Madison Square Garden – Content: free, Code: free, Physical: controlled
Telephone system – Content: free, Code: controlled, Physical : controlled.
Cable TV – Content: controlled, Code: controlled, Physical: controlled

Reading Lessig makes me wish I’d had this thinking when I was trying to explain why the walled classrooms of LMS left me cold.  But more significantly I realise that the communication analogy works with Grandpa - the physical wiring of grandpa’s brain and even the code layer and linguistic protocols are becoming increasingly controlled by his dementia – and given the progressive nature of the cognitive breakdown – it is inevitable that in time the content will also be under the ownership control of the dementia – cable TV approaches.

I’d always quite liked the new ways of looking at collaboration and authorship to communicate new ideas provided by Lev Manovich’s take on new media in the early 2000’s 

New media culture brings with it a number of new models of authorship which all involve different forms of collaboration. Of course, collaborative authorship is not unique to new media: think of medieval cathedrals, traditional painting studios which consisted from a master and assistants, music orchestras, or contemporary film productions which, like medieval cathedrals involve thousands of people collaborating over a substantial period of time. In fact, romantic model of a solitary single author occupies a very small place in the history of human culture. New media, however, offers some new variations on the previous forms of collaborative authorship.

(1) Collaboration of different individuals and/or groups.
(2) Interactivity as collaboration between the author and the user.
(3) Authorship as selection from a menu.
(4) Collaboration between a company and the users.
(5) Collaboration between the author and the software.
(6) Remixing
(7) Sampling: New Collage?
(8) Open Source Model

But this breakdown failed to address the very real issues of copyright online that challenge our teachers and students, which is why I have enjoyed the following collaborative content classification of online videos from Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video

Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the American University School of Communication law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, have a study  suggesting that “many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration”.

They identify “nine kinds of uses of copyrighted material, ranging from incidental (a video maker’s family sings “Happy Birthday”) to parody (a Christian takeoff on the song “Baby Got Back”) to pastiche and collage (finger-dancing to “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”) that “creatively use copyrighted materials in ways that are eligible for fair use consideration under copyright law.”

1.    Parody and satire:  Copyrighted material used in spoofing of popular mass media, celebrities or politicians (Baby got Book) 
2.    Negative or critical commentary:  Copyrighted material used to communicate a negative message (Metallica Sucks)
3.    Positive commentary:  Copyrighted material used to communicate a positive message (Steve Irwin Fan Tribute)
4.    Quoting to trigger discussion: Copyrighted material used to highlight an issue and prompt public awareness, discourse (Abstinence PSA on Feministing.com)
5.    Illustration or example:  Copyrighted material used  to support a new idea with pictures and sound (Evolution of Dance)
6.    Incidental use:  Copyrighted material captured as part of capturing something else (Prisoners Dance to Thriller)
7.    Personal reportage/diaries:  Copyrighted material incorporated into the chronicling of a personal experience (Me on stage with U2 … AGAIN!!!)
8.    Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials:  Copyrighted material that might have a short life on mainstream media due to controversy (Stephen Colbert’s Speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner)
9.    Pastiche or collage:   Several copyrighted materials incorporated together into a new creation, or in other cases, an imitation of sorts of copyrighted work (Apple Commercial)

Is no wonder that I continue to find myself on the fringes of conversations online and offline ...   there are so many things to think about in this – and I am uncertain how best to connect them for our cluster teachers so that they escape the echoes in the cabin ..

Comments

[Stephen Downes]

I'm not comfortable with Lessig's tripartate distinction because it cross-categorizes. The code is often embodied in the hardware, is a part of the hardware, and hence control of the hardware means control of the code. That's why it is significant that Intel is building 'trusted computing' into computer chips and that telephone companies are pushing the handset as a media device.

In my own work I distinguish between enforcement at the network, access, and document level, and between levels of enforcement: expression, authentication, and encryption. http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/distributed-digital-rights-management-8325

That said, your uncertainties have nothing to do with the reason you are on the fringes of the conversation.

Though Lessig has a lot of good things to say, his ideas are no more useful than, say, Peter Suber or Stevan Harnad, both long-time advocates for open content.

What Lessig has, that they don't, is a significant public relations machine. You can see this at work in various other MIT initiatives - OCW, OLPC, etc., that have taken ideas that have had some currency and transformed them into MIT ideas.

Your level of sophistication, your grasp of the issues and nuance, your understanding of what to do - these are no less than the Lessigs or the Negropontes of the world. This despite a very thorough system (think 'TED Talks') of propaganda designed to make you feel inadequate about your own cognitive capacities.

This is true not only for you but also for the vast majority of the people I read online and in print. People are not cognitively inferior, they are just made to feel that way.

It's a lot like the beauty industry - it's like intellectual beauty. Think about how women especially are taught that they are not beautiful, that they need to depend on certain products or services in order to seem attractive.

The moment you begin to think you are inferior, you are. There's no need for that, and you shouldn't do it.

[Artichoke]

Thanks for sharing your DRM categorisation Stephen,

The http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/distributed-digital-rights-management-8325>DRM Design Decision Matrix (slide 5) clearly addresses the oversimplification in the Lessig/Benkler three layer model

And I do agree that “textual communities” with their differing literacies, acronyms, authoritative texts and designated spokespersons conspire to privatise expertise – to keep a sense of expert authority – and like you I reject that – in the blogosphere and in the day job -

Alan Bennett’s “Writing Home” has a diary entry for the 1 February 1981 that always makes me smile ...

1 February. “What is it”, said Ariel C., today, “that I’ve no need to do now that I’m an old lady? Oh, I remember: tell the truth.”

I cannot yet count myself as old as Ariel C and must rely upon telling the truth - the truth in this instance is that I know nothing about DRM – I am still at the early stage where my understanding comes from anything I chance upon – hence the fact I am only just now reading Lessig’s book (and have yet to stumble over people like Peter Suber or Stevan Harnad) I have only a very shallow understanding of the implications for DRM – be they political, economic, legal or educational and no coordinated sense of it at all - that focus up view that Lucychili refers to - the big picture stuff - your slideshare helps move me along ..thanks for that ... and I am putting "intellectual beauty" alongside "intellectual courage" as notions worth tilting at

[leighblackall]

Nice post Arti. Especially the metaphors brought on by your grandad, who by the sounds of it is no more demented that I am.. in fact, he sounds free!

Does this perverse idea of freedom I've expressed have something in common with Steven's profound connection between academia and beauty myths? It seems to me that the out spoken, radical, and contrarian in ideas (people like Steven) are in some way seen as demented by those that see themselves as beautiful. By being 'demented' Steven is in fact free.

If that doesn't wash, I still like what Steven says about the beauty myth within the ugliness of academia.

Down here at Otago, the big ol stone buildings are putting on a conference about socially networked communications and media. It reaks of the stuffy academic and essentially anti social snobbery that ferments in those stone buildings, but I'm compelled to be involved. How can I let an event about the thing that I am most interested in, go on in my own neighbourhood and not be there to ... attend! More, I think I should be in the program.

But I'm not about to forgo my own demented freedom and submit something that panders to their stuffy, snobby criteria. Or am I...?

Can we think about tossing this conference around in our blogs a bit? Pull it apart a little, think about it and us and whether we will use it as a time to come together in Otago again and talk dementia a bit more over a turkish meal and some good drink?

[Dorothy Green]

I find it very funny at first when I read the tittle of this blog. But later on I feel how you felt towards your grandfather, and how he suffered.