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Blog Home
May 02, 2008
One's a crowd
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Note: this is the fourth in a series of blogs looking at the history and future of Web 2.0
In our last instalment we contrasted the “hard path” of user-created media – which requires would-be creators to be highly talented, skilful, committed, or all three – with the “easy path” of services which make it possible for more people to create media. In this column we’ll be looking at a method which aspires to make everyone a creator: crowdsourcing.
As with other aspects of Web 2.0 we’ve examined, the origins of crowdsourcing go back to the beginnings of computer culture – and betray a split within that culture. In this case the split, which began in the early 1980s when personal computing began to become a commercial industry, is between those who viewed computer code as a proprietary possession and those who believed that it should be accessible to all. As the industry became more and more profitable, the former camp was in the ascendant – both Microsoft and Apple maintained corporate control of their operating systems – but the other side never entirely went away. Instead it evolved into the Open Source movement (named after its assertion that source code, the programs that made up an operating system, should be open to all) and spawned a series of alternative operating systems, culminating in 1991 with Linux.
What made Linux different from either the Mac or Microsoft operating systems was that it was collaborative – while its development had begun with one person, Linus Torvalds, it was completed by any number of programmers who debugged, refined and improved it. Because of this Linux was more easily customizable to various applications than other operating systems, and many believe that it is debugged and updated more quickly. More relevant to Web 2.0, though, is the way that Linux became almost a totem for many people in computer culture: proof that great things could be done by a community instead of a corporation.
The early 1990s were, of course, the beginning of the Internet era as well, and it was there that the Open Source movement found its spiritual home. The two-way nature of the Internet – more like a telephone than a television, as Scott McCloud has pointed out – made it a natural forum for collaboration right from the beginning. Nearly all Web services that survive from that period involve some degree of user creation, such as the customer reviews on Amazon. As a larger number of people began to go online some sites began to use open source principles in unexpected ways – sites like TripAdvisor, for instance, which compiles customer reports about hotels and other travel amenities. In 2006 Wired writer Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing (by analogy to outsourcing) to refer to a business model in which the content is created, either for small payments or for nothing, by a large number of users not formally affiliated with the company.
Today new experiments are pushing crowdsourcing in ways unforeseen even two years ago. For one thing, many of the new crowdsourcing sites are non-commercial. Front Porch Forum is a site that aims to use the Web as a “virtual front porch” – in fact it’s a bit more like a community newspaper or bulletin board, with messages such as “Looking to borrow a car seat” and “Yes to new sidewalks.” The makers of Front Porch Forum provide nothing but the forum itself; all of the content is provided by the residents of the town or neighbourhood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Front Porch Forum originated in Vermont, not the most urban state in the union; how it will work in urban neighbourhoods, when it expands beyond its pilot city of Burlington, remains to be seen. If nothing else, though, Front Porch Forum provides a model for a non-commercial crowdsourcing, as well as a means of using the Internet – so famously able to connect us with people from around the world – to put us in touch with our neighbours as well. Whether this will lead to actually talking to our neighbours face-to-face is another matter. (Given the incredible boom in online worlds aimed at children, can the virtual play-date be far off?)
A site that takes crowdsourcing in a different direction is Patients Like Me, a site that allows sufferers of a variety of diseases (at the time of writing ALS, HIV, Multiple Sclerosis, mood disorders and Parkinson’s Disease) to connect with one another. Like Front Porch Forum, Patients Like Me has its antecedents in the world of bulleting boards and discussion groups; what makes it different, beyond the scale on which it operates, is the focus not just on sharing experiences but on compiling data on treatment options. By allowing patients to compare the effects of various treatments, it also allows them to advocate on their behalf – to ask to be given treatments that seem to be more effective based on the data they’ve seen on the site. To make this work, members are required to submit not just subjective accounts but specific information on drugs, dosage, strength and duration of effects, which the site then compiles into a common database. So much data is involved, in fact, that two significant concerns have arisen. One is the loss of privacy about medical information – a crucial matter in the United States, where disclosing medical information can lead to a denial of insurance coverage; the other issue is that users will begin to use Patients Like Me as a substitute for professional medical advice rather than as a supplement. The site tries to address both concerns in their “small print” pages: their Privacy Policy says that “PatientsLikeMe will never rent, sell or share information that personally identifies you for marketing purposes,” but admits a line later that “We do, however, provide Personally Identifiable Information and non-Personally-Identifiable Information to approved vendors for PatientsLikeMe email communications and other PatientsLikeMe internal programs.” The User Agreement, meanwhile, is careful to note (in capital letters) that the site does not provide medical advice. Nevertheless, it’s clear that many users are relying on the site for exactly that: The New York Times reported that more than a hundred ALS sufferers on the site had begun to use Lithium, a drug not normally prescribed for that condition, on the basis of an unpublished Italian study whose early results were being published on the site.
Perhaps the ultimate example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia, the user-created encyclopedia. Wikipedia is, in fact, more open-source than either Patients Like Me or Linux – more akin to Front Porch Forum, in fact, in that the site provides only the architecture, none of the content. All of that is left to the users, who create, alter, edit and occasionally delete entries. Its accuracy is a matter of debate: a study reported in the magazine Nature stated that it compared favourably to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that study – which has been accused of being flawed by the Britannica’s publisher – looked only at science-related articles, which tend to be less subjective. In more controversial topics, such as the presidential nomination race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, “editing wars” erupt as each side tries to promote its own position, or at least keep the text neutral.
Interestingly, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has stated that he dislikes the term “crowdsourcing,” contrasting the businesses that were originally described by the word with his non-profit venture. Wikipedia describes itself not as “the crowdsourced encyclopedia,” or even “the open-source encyclopedia,” but “the free encyclopedia.” Though Wikipedia is free to use, it is also free of corporate oversight or control; while not all users are equal, all do have a voice. For Wales, and for most open-source loyalists, that freedom is worth whatever loss of accuracy it may cost. In our next instalment we’ll look at whether user-created content can succeed in an area where accuracy and trust are the most valuable currency: the news.
For Classroom Discussion
Apr 23, 2008
With a little help from my friends
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Note: this is the third in a series of columns looking at the history and future of Web 2.0.
It all started with a spreadsheet.
In the last instalment of this series we looked at some of examples of user-created media such as mashups, fan movies and machinima. One thing all three forms have in common is that in each case the Internet is not a means of creating content but of delivering it. One of the unique features of computers, though, is their flexibility as a tool: they can be programmed to make doing almost anything easier – and that includes making media.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. As we noted in the first instalment, one of the reasons why the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic is so deeply ingrained in the computer world is because it has its roots in hobbyist culture. The original Apple was actually a DIY kit – users received a complete circuit board but had to add their own case, keyboard, monitor and power supply. Even that, though, was a step away from the DIY nature of other personal computers of the day, which required users to assemble the circuit board.
By the time the Apple II was introduced little evidence of its hobbyist origins remained: the case, keyboard, monitor and circuit board all came from the same company in the same package. What really made the computer a success, though, was the software that was available for it – a program called Visicalc, the very first spreadsheet. For the first time a computer could actually make the average person’s life easier, helping people with home and business budgets and even their taxes. From that point on the computer world would be divided into two camps. One believed that computers should make things easier, while the other believed that anything worth doing with computers – and computers themselves – should be hard.
Much of what was covered in the last column can be seen as typical of the “hard path.” Painstakingly matching beats and pulling samples to blend two albums together into a seamless whole, duplicating the sets and costumes of a forty-year-old TV series to shoot new episodes, using software intended for first-person shooter games to tell stories – all of these take enormous amounts of effort and commitment. The “soft path,” though, is equally well-represented in Web 2.0, providing a variety of tools which allow users to become creators without having to go to the extremes found in the last column.
One way in which the Web is making it easier to become a “media author” is by bringing creators together. A good example is Pathetic Geek Stories, a website that lets people submit embarrassing stories to be illustrated by cartoonist Maria Schneider. For whatever reason, Schneider never has any shortage of submissions – there are over a hundred stories archived on the site – and the ones she chooses to draw range from the simply silly, like this one, to the genuinely heartbreaking. Schneider’s work, in its focus on the smallest of life’s details, is reminiscent of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. Pekar is generally thought to be the overall author of his work even though it is drawn by a variety of artists; Schneider, on the other hand, draws from stories sent to her by many different contributors. This brings up a question that will come back repeatedly in looking at these collaborations: who is the actual author? Schneider’s submission guidelines make it clear that she owns the copyright to the finished product, but authorship is a somewhat trickier question than copyright.
The question becomes even more complicated with more user-oriented sites like Bitstrips, a free online tool for making cartoons. Bitstrips allows the user to choose how much artistic control she wants to have: users may draw on a catalogue of established characters or create their own (a process which itself has several levels of complexity available.) The results tend to look fairly similar – there’s a definite “house style” that results from the character creator, so that most wind up looking like this – but for those that want it there’s enough flexibility to create much more distinctive-looking cartoons like this one. So far the content on Bitstrips is better enjoyed as an experiment than as art, but what’s more interesting about it is the sense of it being a community: users are encouraged to share their characters, to be used in other comics on the site. As well, each strip is accompanied by a space for reader comments, which makes the experience more like reading a blog than a traditional cartoon. Bitstrips has addressed the copyright question in a King Solomon-like fashion, dividing the rights equally between the user and the site, but the question of authorship can’t be resolved so neatly. Who, for instance, is the author of a strip created by one user featuring characters created by another and using a technique discovered by a third? (Bitstrips is just out of its beta testing period, and many of the bugs discovered by early users have been incorporated as features.) Or is the whole idea of authorship irrelevant in Bitstrips’ collaborative culture?
A more corporate attempt to develop a similar resource is Electronic Arts’ The Sims Carnival, which extends its popular Sims franchise into user-created content. The Sims Carnival, currently in a closed beta-test stage, provides tools that allow users to create their own games. Like Bitstrips, The Sims Carnival offers its users several levels of engagement: at the simplest, a program called “The Wizard” functions as a general-purpose “modding” tool, allowing users to customize one of several genres of games. Much more involved is “The Game Creator,” which allows for a tremendous range of creativity – games created so far include Bird vs. Cat, an action game whose graphics look (intentionally) like something you might find on the door of the family fridge; Wash the Dog, which features the grooming of a photorealistic mutt; the irreducible Stick Man Hammer Throw; and of course any number of more typical action games.
The wide variety and individuality of these games raises a still more complex question of authorship: unlike Pathetic Geek Stories, all of whose entries are scripted and drawn by Schneider, or Bitstrips, in which most of the cartoons are made with templates provided by the site, many of the games found on The Sims Carnival have content which is entirely original to the users. Electronic Arts has stated clearly that the games created are not property of the users (though users are allowed to link to them from other sites). The Sims Carnival seems to be aspiring to create the kind of collaborative culture found on Bitstrips – every user has the right to modify or borrow elements from any other user’s games. A major difference is that Carnival is eventually intended to be a money-making venture, both for Electronic Arts and the content-generating users (exactly how this will work has not yet been revealed). Whether the collaborative culture of 2.0 can survive a collision with the profit principle remains to be seen. The problem of authorship is inherent in nearly all user-created content – who is the author of The Grey Album? – but the “soft path” throws it into sharp relief. Is the author of a game created using The Sims Carnival the user who designed the gameplay and the graphics, or the company that built the tools with which the game was made? We wouldn’t say that The Sun Also Rises was co-authored by the company that built Hemingway’s typewriter: on the other hand, Hemingway could just as easily have written his book in longhand or, had such things existed in his day, on a word processor. Although the typewriter facilitated the novel, it wasn’t necessary to produce it. But the games featured on The Sims Carnival, and the cartoons on Bitstrip, would not be possible without the tools provided by those sites.
Perhaps more important than the authorship issue is the fact that nobody on any of these sites seems much concerned. The same is true with user-created content in general: it’s not so much that users are willing to give up their authorship rights, as we’ll see in a later column, so much as that they’ve abandoned the idea of authorship altogether. Instead of intellectual property, the model is a commons – where Sims Carnival users modify each others’ games, Bitstrips users share their characters, and the makers of Star Trek: Phase II lend their re-created sets to the makers of other Star Trek re-enactors. After two hundred years of exalting the individual artist, we may be moving back to a focus on the community. In our next instalment we’ll be looking at a Web 2.0 phenomenon that is all about community, crowdsourcing.
For Classroom Discussion
Apr 14, 2008
DIY Media: Mashups, fan movies, and machinima
Posted by: Matthew Johnson
Note: this is the second in a series of columns looking at the history and future of Web 2.0.
In the last instalment of this series we examined the origins of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic and some of the issues around the definition of “user-created content.” Turning from the theoretical to the practical, we’ll now take a look at just what is actually out there, and begin to examine some of the ethical and legal implications.
Mashups. Perhaps the most well-known type of user-created media is the mashup, a mixture of two (or more) pre-existing works to create something new. The most famous of these is The Grey Album, a mashup of vocal tracks from Jay-Z’s Black Album with samples from the Beatles album The Beatles (better known as “The White Album” due to its all-white jacket). The Black Album tracks had actually been released by Jay-Z with the intention of making it easier to remix them, pointing to hip-hop culture as another forebear of the modern DIY movement. It’s long been standard practice for hip-hop artists to encourage remixes by releasing their vocal tracks, as Jay-Z did, in the hopes of building word-of-mouth and encouraging fan involvement. Unlike most remixers, though, the producer Danger Mouse (a pseudonym for London DJ and producer Brian Burton) did not lay his own beats onto the vocal tracks but rather used samples from The Beatles.
The Grey Album episode included many elements that were typical of the mashup as a whole, so it’s worth exploring this in detail. To begin with was the legal issue: EMI, which owns the copyright to the Beatles tracks used, served Burton with a cease-and-desist order when he began distributing copies of the album. Although Burton complied, by that point several people who had received copies had uploaded them onto the Internet. When many of these download sources also received cease-and-desist orders from EMI one of them, a site called Downhill Battle, organized an event called “Grey Tuesday” to protest. On February 24, 2004, more than a hundred Web sites offered the album for download for a twenty-four hour period. This signalled a new activism within the online community, advocating for the right to use samples without obtaining permission from the rights holders. We’ll be looking at this issue in greater detail in a later instalment, but for now it’s worth noting that the owners of both the recordings and the songs themselves are corporations – EMI and Sony. It would be interesting to know what the reactions might have been if the Beatles themselves had still owned the rights to either one.
Another issue illustrated by The Grey Album (and a legal concern, as we’ll see in a later column) is the attitude that mashups are not original works of art, but rather the musical equivalent of Mad Libs or Paint-by-Numbers. It’s true that The Grey Album inspired many mashups that were, well, less inspired – but the trick in many works of art is to make it look easy. In fact The Grey Album received notice for more than just novelty. The New Yorker profiled Burton, looking in detail at the effort that had gone into the album’s creation, and it was named the best album of 2004 by Entertainment Weekly. Despite the crudeness implied by the term “mashup”, the album’s creation took considerable finesse: “It would have been easy just to slap the vocals over music of the same tempo,” Burton told the New Yorker. “But I wanted to match the feel of the tracks, too.” In an interview with MTV Burton said that the album took him two weeks of non-stop work: “The first thing the producer did was listen to The Black Album a cappella and measure the amount of beats per minute for each track, a common technique for club DJs who seamlessly mix music together. Next, he scoured all 30 songs on The White Album, listening for every strike of a drum or cymbal when other instruments or voices were not in the mix. Most were single sounds, which he would later put together to make beats.”
Although most mashups are still done with songs, the idea has spread to other media as well. Mashup videos – mostly short clips -- range from the satirical to the simply silly: from If Dick Cheney Was Scarface, which puts dialogue from that movie into the Vice President’s mouth, to Clint Eastwood’s The Office, which imagines the sitcom as made by the director of such violent movies as Unforgiven. While few of these have the inspired quality of The Grey Album, the mashup has become an established genre – and, for better or worse, the form most widely associated with online user-created media.
Fan movies. Taking things one step further are fan movies. These are original movies (some feature-length) that use characters and settings from pre-existing properties such as Star Trek and Star Wars. Although the writing of “fan fiction” is not new – it dates back at least as far as the early 1970s, when Star Trek fans began writing original stories following the cancellation of that series – it is only recently that fans have begun making video content. In part this is due to the availability of digital video cameras and editing software, but another cause is certainly the ability to make the films widely available through the Internet. Making even a short film, after all, is a complicated project, and if your only expected audience is your friends and family you’re unlikely to see it through. A fan film made today, though, might easily be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, and as a result some truly ambitious works have been created.
Fan movies fall into two broad types. The first is straight-forward fan fiction, “untold” stories that might easily fit within the canon of the particular property. An example of this is Star Trek: Phase II, which aspires to create a “fourth season” of the original series. Phase II, like most fan films of this type, treats the original material with something approaching reverence: it has, for instance, filmed scripts written by original series writers David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana. At the same time, these fan films often reflect the fans’ own interpretations and desired changes to the material; Gerrold’s episode, for example, is an adaptation of one he wrote for the Next Generation spinoff series and which was never filmed due to its dealing with homosexuality and AIDS.
The second type of fan film is humorous and satirical. This is often done by blending the original material with a more mundane element: Troops, the first of these films to get much attention, portrays Star Wars’ Stormtroopers in the style of the reality show Cops. Another, Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager, imagines the life of Darth Vader’s less ambitious brother. Though funny, these films are rarely satirical in the way that mashups often are: while less faithful than the fan fiction movies, these too show a tremendous affection for the original material.
Machinima is perhaps the least-known type of user-created media; it’s also the one most intimately tied to the online medium. That’s because machinima is actually made using existing computer programs – either animating characters in virtual worlds such as Second Life or using computer games to create narratives. (In some cases this is done through co-operative play – every user in a multi-user game agrees to act out their part in the story – and in some cases it is done through the “modding” functions of games like Doom, described in the last column.) Many machinima have a relationship to these games similar to that between fan movies and their inspirations; the machinima Red Vs. Blue mocks Halo in much the same way as Troops does Star Wars. Others use the game merely as a jumping-off point, such as the Busby Berkeley-style musical numbers staged within the multiplayer game Star Wars Galaxies (there has, inevitably, also been Star Trek machinima, most notably the feature-length Borg War.) Whereas fan films are essentially movies delivered through the Internet, machinima can best be compared to puppetry – or perhaps to the theatre. The machinima ethic of telling a story with already-available tools calls to mind the director Peter Brooks’ famous statement that “I can take any empty space and call it a stage.” In machinima, the game is the stage.
These three forms are really just the beginning of the user-created media available on the Internet; we haven’t addressed webcomics, one of the earliest kinds of online user-created media, or newer ideas such as Muxtape (a Web site that lets users submit and download mp3 “mixtapes”) and wikinovels. Nor have we touched on the user-created content that lets people “answer back” to the messages they receive from commercial media, such as the anti-violence game Soul Control.
It can be easy to dismiss user-created media; all too often it is juvenile, poorly made or obsessively focused on “fannish” material. Much of it is no different from what, in earlier generations, was filmed on Super 8 cameras or just acted out in living rooms However, as noted in the previous installment, the key difference is the use of Internet as a method of delivery. That is what allowed The Grey Album to be on many music critics’ top ten lists, allowed the fan movie Fanboys to be released by a major studio, allowed an episode of Star Trek: Phase II to be nominated for a Nebula (one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction) and allowed an Emmy-winning episode of South Park to be made using the online game World of Warcraft. In our next installment, we’ll look at a number of services which appeared to make user-created media more accessible to the less technically adept.
For Classroom Discussion
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