Ruckus pre-history:
“Richard,” a poster in a discussion thread prompted by the Register.com's story "There is Magic Behind Penn State's Napster Deal" sketching the connection between the RIAA and Penn State, sums it up perfectly:
"One thing the pundits at Penn State hasn't considered: As an I.T. professional, I will in future consider Penn State alumni to be underqualified for any job under me, because they have not been exposed to open standards technology as part of their education, but rather subjected to a carefully-controlled "lab experiment" using closed-standard proprietary technology. Ergo, they will not be prepared to handle any emergent issues that don't fit into their proprietary mold that their "education" at Penn State has trained them to expect. And I use the word "trained" in the same sense as I would if the student were a horse, or a guide dog for the blind. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/12/there_is_magic_behind_penn/)
Indeed, the "proprietary mold" makes foreclosures on information technology research, and confines education to the sort of training Quintilian deemed inadequate to rhetorical development almost two millenia ago. Furthermore, it boxes out the skill sets my pedagogy was designed to solicit and enjoin in the invention, arrangement, and display of persuasive writing. Furthermore, the failure of the PSU-Napster agreement rests in a more fundamental and bureaucratic misapprehension of Napster, which is really just brand name for a business model made possible by a more fundamental movement. This movement works according to principles of resonance, and the Napster form of this movement created much resonance in a manner if distributed and collective activity known to entymologists and dubbed stigmergy Pierre Grasse, in the 1950s. The stigmergy principle, subsequently developed by researchers studying the self-organization of diverse biological systems, depends on activities other then mere consumption. As Camazine et al. explain in Self-Organization in Biological Systems,
Information acquired directly from other individuals is only one source of information used by organisms in self-organizing systems. In situations where many individuals contribute to a collective effort, such as a colony of termites building a nest, stimuli provided by the emerging structure itself can be a rich source of information for the individual. (p. 23)
In “The Cornicopia of the Commons: How to Get Volunteer Labor,” Dan Bricklen explains how, when it comes to filesharing, the normal, routinized behaviors of users add value to the the database. “Napster,” Bricklen explains, “is a manually created database created by volunteers.” Created and mainted by volunteers. How?
"Somebody needs to actually buy (or borrow) a copy of a CD, convert it to MP3, and store it in their shared music directory. Or, somebody needs to create an MP3 of their own performance that they want to share. In both cases, creating the copy in the shared music directory can be a natural by-product of their normal working with the songs, for example as part of downloading them to a portable music player or burning a personal-mix CD. Whenever they are connected to the Internet and to the Napster server those songs are then available to the world. Of course, that person may not be connected to the Napster server all the time, so the song is not fully available to all who want it (a problem with P2P). However, whenever someone downloads a song using Napster and leaves the copy in their shared music directory, that person is increasing the number of Napster users who have that song and raises the chances you will find someone with it logged in to Napster when you want your copy, so, again, the value of the database increases through normal use. What we see here is that increasing the value of the database by adding more information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own benefit" (http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm)
Once connected, users, resonating at the same frequency (uploading and downloading copies of information coded with like information), end up tuning into larger patterns of connectivity. Even without the art, science, and legal savvy required to share files effectively, which become commonplace in everyday writing processes, seemingly "selfish" acts resonate with the protocols of sharing that builds a commons. Giving, it seems, is the best hack we have for ordering chaotic, information-rich ecologies of communication. These conclusions say as much about a shift in and (democratization?) of musical practice, a distributivity that necessitates further research and experimentation into music's applications and potentials in electronic media and digital literacy.
next: Brand Loyalty and Losing all Your Playlists
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