Building knowledge in the digital age; the transition continues — science this time.

I have made the point on this blog that the digitization of information and the internet have made the old ways of doing business with information (be it entertainment, news, science, or art) obsolete and that efforts to force the new media into legal forms that evolved with the ways businesses had organized the old technologies are doomed to failure or to killing the innovation those laws are supposed to promote.

But the struggles inherent in the transition from old and established ways of doing business are ongoing and will continue to be. Today’s example comes from the world of science. As the New York Times reports, “For centuries, [scientific] research [was]cdone in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large.  . . . Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only ‘if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.’”

But Dr. Nielsen and others argue that science can happen much more quickly and accurately using the new technologies, and reality is catching up to their ideals (even as established institutional players such as universities and grant-makers still depend on the “traditional published paper” as their exclusive criterion of judgment):

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.

And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”

The film, music, and publishing industries have always cried, “Wolf!”

I’ve written before about how the film industry decried and fought the VCR. In 1982, Jack Valenti, in sworn testimony before Congress, stated that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” Of course, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the VCR and the film industry not only prospered; it makes more money from home video sales than from from the theatrical box office.

Mike Masnick at techdirt does a far more thorough job, setting forth the long, continual, and continually misbegotten history of existing industries decrying the doom foretold by emerging technologies. He starts with John Philip Sousa, the conductor.

In 1906, he went to Congress to complain about the infernal technology industry and how it was going to ruin music:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

It’s a long and hilarious history. Did you know that in the 1980s home taping was “killing” the music industry? That using your DVR is theft? That Thomas Edison argued that film projectors would kill the film industry?

The whole thing is worth reading and worth remembering next time you read a screed by Bono or Scott Turow.

Is the NY Times new paywall a platypus?

Will the new New York Times paywall survive longer than its last one? The Times sent me an e-mail explaining the plan, but Felix Salmon explains it more succinctly and clearly:

[T]he website is free, so long as you read fewer than 20 items per month, and so are the apps, so long as you confine yourself to the “Top News” section. You can also read articles for free by going in through a side door. Following links from Twitter or Facebook or Reuters.com should never be a problem, unless and until you try to navigate away from the item that was linked to.

Beyond that, $15 per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. But if you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you’ll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately, and pay an eye-popping $35 every four weeks. That’s $455 a year.

I can’t say I disagree with Salmon’s take: “The message being sent here is weird: that access to the website is worth nothing. Mathematically, if A+B=$15, A+C=$20, and A+B+C=$35, then A=$0.” And I suspect Mike Masnick’s is correct in his belief this plan was spawned by a committee that either lacked or utterly ignored any member who suggested the idea was stupid:

It feels like something that was completely developed by committee group-think. It’s one of those things where they’re sitting around and someone timidly suggests a dumb idea (“I know, for $5 more we take away their smartphone access”) and, because they have to come up with something, someone else says “sure” and then they think there’s validation of a good idea. But there’s no one brave enough in the room to say: “Guys, the newspaper is digital. Charging different amounts based on the hardware is like charging people different prices for listening to the same music on headphones vs. speakers.” But no one did that. And because they had a committee, who kept making bad suggestions like this, and 14-months to keep upping the stupid, they spent over $40 million on it.

The result for me will be that I’ll read the New York Times less than I do now. Whether the newspaper will in fact be hurt by losing page views by readers like me or will make more money than it does now with its content online for free remains to be seen, but something tells me this isn’t the best solution to the world we live in now, one in which newspapers no longer control the means of producing and distributing journalism.

Stay tuned. We’ll see what the New York Times is doing online in a year or two.

Does online writing produce better writers? IMHO, it can, but hasn’t yet to any great degree.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Josh Keller asks: does the explosion of online writing via social networking sites mean that we’re developing a better generation of writers?

The long and the short of it is that no one knows. Students are writing a lot more, and to audiences about whom they care. On the other hand, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs do not exactly seem to promote the kind of disciplined analysis that most good writing constitutes:

Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.

The debate seems to boil down to whether more writing produces better writing. One researcher states, “People write more now than ever. In order to interact on the Web, you have to write.” But writing, on the one hand, for Facebook and, on the other,  to produce an analytic essay or a legal brief, is writing for entirely different purposes. Sometimes I wonder if the differences are like driving to a Friday night party and driving in the Indy 500 — skill at one does not necessarily translate into skill in the other. As one writing professor quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education article points out,

[H]e spends more of his time correcting, not integrating, the writing habits that students pick up outside of class. The students in his English courses often turn in papers that are “stylistically impoverished,” and the Internet is partly to blame, he says. Writing for one’s peers online, he says, encourages the kind of quick, unfocused thought that results in a scarcity of coherent sentences and a limited vocabulary.

My own views on the effects of online writing on professional writing are mixed — it hasn’t been the benefit idealists hope for, but it’s an outstanding tool that, properly used, could be a tremendous benefit to producing a new generation of excellent writers.

On the one hand, I have encountered again and again in the past couple of years student efforts at professional writing that are so stylistically inappropriate as to make me cringe. I recently read, for example, an analysis of the jury system that read entirely like a People Magazine article, full of superficial quips and an endless series of references to examples obvious to everyone – the principal point of reference was the O.J. Simpson trial (which, incidentally, I consider an example of atrocious lawyering on the part of the prosecutors, not a failure of the jury system).

On the other hand, the internet is here, and we better get used to it, even if we are training lawyers or political analysts. Students write  a lot on social networking sites. As the article points out, “Students in [one] study ‘almost always’ had more enthusiasm for the writing they were doing outside of class than for their academic work . . . .” Moreover, online writing is “self-directed,” is “often used to connect with peers” and usually is aimed at a “broader audience” than is professional writing. One of the most interesting points to me as a legal writer is that online writing is “also often associated with accomplishing an immediate, concrete goal, such as organizing a group of people or accomplishing a political end . . . .”

These are all characteristics that quite plainly can be used to produce better professional writers even if they have not yet been used effectively to this end. I have struggled to exploit student enthusiasm for online writing. Two years ago, I created a class wiki directed at creating a brief writing check list. I did not consider the effort terribly successful. One year ago, however, I created (as the Chronicle of Higher Education noticed) a class blog to explore issues regarding copyright and fair use in connection with a legal brief the students were assigned to write. While the blog became almost entirely the product of my own work rather than that of my students, it was a huge success in producing better work product. The students were engaged in and argued about the blog, and that engagement and passion produced work that was far more thoughtful and disciplined than anything I could have imagined without the blog.

So does Web 2.0 produce better writers? If you think it does so merely because it makes people write more, no. But it is a tool that, properly employed, sure can help.

The Great Emancipator, 200-year-old mashup artist

Reflecting on Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, I’ve made the startling discovery that he was not only an inventor but that he espoused ideas that constitute one of this blog’s principal themes — that innovation and progress require the technical capacity and the legal freedom to exploit existing knowledge.

I hadn’t learned in school or in the many books I’ve read about him since that Lincoln  is the only President to have applied for and received a patent. It was for a device to lift boats over shoals. In fact, throughout his life Lincoln was fascinated by mechanical devices. William H. Herndon, his law partner, wrote that Lincoln “evinced a decided bent toward machinery or mechanical appliances, a trait he doubtless inherited from his father who was himself something of a mechanic and therefore skilled in the use of tools.”

On February 11, 1859 (on the eve of his 50th birthday and precisely 150 years prior to the moment at which  I am writing this post), Lincoln delivered a lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions” in Jacksonville, Illinois. Published as the “Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” Lincoln described the U.S. as the embodiment of a youthful vitality that caused some to think it “conceited and arrogant” but also made it “the inventor and owner of the present, and sole hope of the future.”

Lincoln attributed this extraordinary national role to America’s capacity for innovation:

The great difference between Young America and Old Fogy, is the result of Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements.

But Lincoln didn’t consider America’s talent for innovation to be the product of some unprecedented national genius. Instead, its inventiveness resulted from the recognition that innovation requires using and building on earlier innovation. Thus, speaking of the invention of the steam engine, Lincoln made clear that his comparison of “Young America” to “Old Fogies” was ironic:

[W]as this first inventor of the application of steam, wiser or more ingenious than those who had gone before him? Not at all. Had he not learned much of them, he never would have succeeded—probably, never would have thought of making the attempt. To be fruitful in invention, it is indispensable to have a habit of observation and reflection; and this habit, our steam friend acquired, no doubt, from those who, to him, were old fogies.

Furthermore, while humans instinctively exchange knowledge, the progression from speech to writing to printing was indispensable to “facilitating all other inventions and discoveries”:

When man was possessed of speech alone, the chances of invention, discovery, and improvement, were very limited; but by the introduction of each of these, they were greatly multiplied. When writing was invented, any important observation, likely to lead to a discovery, had at least a chance of being written down, and consequently, a better chance of never being forgotten; and of being seen, and reflected upon, by a much greater number of persons; and thereby the chances of a valuable hint being caught, proportionally augmented. By this means the observation of a single individual might lead to an important invention, years, and even centuries after he was dead. In one word, by means of writing, the seeds of invention were more permanently preserved, and more widely sown. And yet, for the three thousand years during which printing remained undiscovered after writing was in use, it was only a small portion of the people who could write, or read writing; and consequently the field of invention, though much extended, still continued very limited. At length printing came. It gave ten thousand copies of any written matter, quite as cheaply as ten were given before; and consequently a thousand minds were brought into the field where there was but one before. This was a great gain; and history shows a great change corresponding to it, in point of time. I will venture to consider it, the true termination of that period called ”the dark ages.” Discoveries, inventions, and improvements followed rapidly, and have been increasing their rapidity ever since.

It is easy to imagine, then, that Lincoln would revel in the capacity of today’s technology to copy and disseminate information world-wide in mere moments. Without the technological capacity to pass knowledge across time and space, “[i]t is very probable—almost certain—that the great mass of men . . . were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were incapable of improvement. They not only looked upon the educated few as superior beings; but they supposed themselves to be naturally incapable.”

But it was knowledge, not intelligence, they lacked.  Lincoln knew innovation is not the product of individual genius towering above the mass of humanity.  It is a collaborative enterprise that grows from one person’s creative use of someone else’s invention, which itself appropriated another’s discovery that was inspired by something written across the world in an earlier century.  To think it could be otherwise is to enslave humanity not on a plantation but in ignorance:

To emancipate the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform. It is difficult for us, now and here, to conceive how strong this slavery of the mind was; and how long it did, of necessity, take, to break its shackles, and to get a habit of freedom of thought, established.

It is even more difficult for us, for whom the printing press seems the equivalent of cuneiform.  But if we are to overcome the challenges we face, we must embrace the full potential of the technology that makes it so easy to improvise on the creations of others.  It is improvisation and reworking and remixing that leads to innovation and progress.

Who knew that Remix Culture is merely an appropriation of Abraham Lincoln’s thinking, that the Great Emancipator believed that for humans to be truly free  knowledge must be free too?