Scott Fisher

Scott - you neglected to mention that Joi is a 43+ level Horde mage in World of Warcraft.

Very nicely done :)

OMG.

Definitely can't take credit for the excellent Joi mash-up image and embarassed to say it's true author is currently unkown to us. But all indicators appear to lead back to Fred's House - Gene, is this your masterpiece?

Interesting. I'd love to hear more about this Hecklebot. From a first impression, it seems very contrary to the positive and constructive possibilities of a backchannel. Is there any accountability for a person's statements?

I'd love to hear Mr. Ito’s thoughts on the possibilities of filtration and discipline within backchannels. The following are some ideas out of a stream of consciousness, as well as a bit of a defense of my criticism of our division’s use/abuse of this tool:

I'd like to see a system that allows the community to restrict those who do not have constructive things to talk about and rewards those who do. I see this taking the form of a real-time collective rating system. The instant messages of individuals with higher personal “constructive / well put” ratings would appear in larger, bolder text. In addition, a secondary “whiteboard” screen that allows interesting points and questions to filter in as they are voted on according to levels of "interesting, smart, funny, etc” in larger, color coded bold text (following the model of Slashdot comments) would reward and reinforce those who use the system constructively and filter out those who do not. To use elementary school methods: For the ones who are good, you get a sticker. For those who suck or are bad, you get your “name on the board” or in this case, “off the screen”. Those making stupid jokes, or who never look up from their connection to the Borg collective to address the human in front of them should be temporarily banned from the chat. And it shouldn't be a continual chat, but should have scheduled intermissions at the middle and end for everyone one to jack-off the system and to be reminded of one of the best forms of communication: face-to-face.

Joi is actually an Alliance Mage. ;)

I (respectfully) disagree with Brad’s Backchannel suggestions; building community and “restricting” seems contradictory. A community is made up of people with different sensibilities and terms like “constructive”, “interesting”, “stupid” are highly subjective. Unless, of course, you are creating the “Backchannel Survivor Game.” In addition, rating every comment would increase distraction and encourage people to become more consumed with their computers.

That said, I’m really looking forward to the presentation/discussion tonight…

Mystery Solved - the Joi mashup image author is Gene Becker.

I think these proposals could definitely be more of a distraction and could potentially lead to people trying hard to be pithy or witty and subsequently listen even less to the speaker. But I think some experimentation with fast and slick UI design could yield some fruitful filtration tools.

Chat rooms have a unique power to them, and are ripe for abuse. For one, people become much more impulsive with their statements. I think the speed with which the chat is progressing has a lot to do with this; you desperately want to make your point and continue your line of argument in a rapid and discernable fashion within the quickly shifting window and collective chat memory. The result often being statements that are defended in a long thread of argument that ultimately leads to a realization that the original statement just wasn’t very well thought out.

The same power that e-mail has for misunderstandings, tangents, and flaming is delightfully present in chat rooms as well, though to a lesser degree.

There is also a need in people, to different degrees, to be seen and heard. They actively seek acknowledgement and agreement from the community, which can lead to people becoming LOUDER in their statements, inflammatory statements that try to start an argument or gain attention, and then the always wonderful bad one liner jokes, sarcasm, and links to some picture or website that the person thinks has just the most hilarious connection to the discussion.

Any restrictions would definitely sacrifice a degree of freedom of expression, which is definitely one of the wonderful aspects of a chat room. But I don't agree that any restrictions should be discounted to preserve this freedom. I think this fear of restriction is a natural reaction, but I think the power of chatroom abuse is something that needs restrictions and organization to really shine. The “beast needs to be trained” to really operate well in my view; and finding the right degree of restriction and filtration I think is the trick. I think it would come down to a lot of testing to find out where the line is that the system becomes fascist or just a hindrance to free expression.

I think the idea of "building community" is a vague defense, and one that I think the backchannel could be argued doesn't do in its current form. In ways it probably projects an impression of insularity and impersonal tech fetishism to outsiders that come to present, and contributes to divisions between our community and the presenters.

To jump on our video stream, you'll need Windows Media 9 or newer.

Go to File -> Open URL, and type in:

http://128.125.236.31:3000

I really enjoyed the Joi Ito perspective of how to develop technologies through open resources for the development of the emergent internet society. Moreover I liked how through adapting to the people necessities and daily habits possible to create a lot of new business is based in more democratic and collaborative systems. It was a great lesson of how to adapt software & business based in internet to the global human being likes, necessities and new behaviors. The creation of continuous decisions, flow and changes are one of the most attractive elements in the interactive systems. I think that community is based in participation and commitment and there are as many types of communities as different types of people and values. It is just another interactive free choice with its real, positive or negative, consequence. Play it smart.

I found Mr. Ito's talk to be quite fun and inspiring! I am especially enamored with his discussion of the fascinating world of fan-sub anime.

In the 80s, anime fans had to go through seedy backchannels (no pun intended) involving boot-legged poorly subbed VHS copies of anime that would never be relesaed in the US without crazy censorship or completely re-written stories (I'm looking at your Robotech).

With the internet, fans have been able to create their own channels of distributing anime and with software able to do so in a high quality manner. However, these people aren't pirates-just fans. And the companies have notices, bringing the respective anime's over and releasing them for the public. For a show like Naruto, this is wonderful. In fact, its a huge hit on Cartoon Network.

Like Mr. Ito said, the fans are respectful and begin to remove their fan-subbed content after the anime gets licensed in the US. They are the cheerleaders and their voices are heard! How about that for community action! I think its a rather amazing phenenemon and I'm interested on the studies being done on the subject.

I had been honestly hoping for a little bit more. The problem of digital rights and the debate over a file-sharing enabled world has been so front and center for such a long period of time that I had expected there to be more to the night's discussion than a simple re-hash of the usual themes and arguements. I started out participating in the backchannel but when I found myself making the same usual corrections I always have to make viz. misconceptions about the music industry and who takes what money where from the sale of a CD, I quickly lost interest.

Long story short, I think the system is broken and the solutions implemented or discussed so far are ugly and ultimately dangerous to the business of creativity. Co-owning a firm whose business is ideas, creativity, and ultimately media, I often find that though the pricetag often sounds ludicrously high, a lot of people aren't getting paid enough in this business to do what they do, and I found Mr. Ito's suggestions that music in particular was overvalued and didn't necessarily deserve to make the ridiculous money that it did, to be precisely the kind of attitude that's ultimately going to ensure that the business becomes one run by the fatcats because that attitude is only going to result in the industry being deserted by artists. I don't know. I just felt like I should have expected something more illuminating from any one part of the evening.

The internet has at the same time the potential to be an incredible boon to developing ideas, and a horribly stiffling channel in which everybody is afraid to sell their ideas. There's a great group of people trying to figure out how best to protect IP, while still utilizing the freedom the internet allows, but there's a much larger group of people who just like getting stuff for free. The music industry is a great example of this. Due to the general resentment at the cost of music, it's easy to overlook the fact that most of the downloaded music online is stolen property.

I really love the idea of how the internet is allow communities to build great works of art, technology, and knowledge databases. It inspire me to see the awesome degree of collaboration that occurs over the internet. I believe that the the idea of shared assets and the free flow of information is what will drive this collaboration in the future.

There was something I wanted to mention during the talk that I forgot about. There was a website awhile back that had a copy of the Star Wars Episode III trailer with which they had subtitled in leet speak. While the trailer was normally allowed for download in its unaltered state, Lucasfilm sent them a cease and desist letter to have them remove the trailer. Not to be undone, they subsequently translated the letter into leetspeak.

http://nuar.lunarpages.com/video/SW_mirrors.htm

I bring this up because, if I remember correctly, there was some talk about people doing basically the same thing. Taking a movie file, subtitling it in whatever language, and then redistributing it. In this case, it isn't something that is even possibly cutting into their profits. There's no untapped market being exploited by someone other than the original IP holder, this isn't the whole movie being posted for download with the subtitles added... all it is is a trailer that is commonly available anyway.

So if Lucasfilms has a legal right to stop them from doing this (going on the assumption that they aren't just blowing hot air and the website caved), how about those who actually are making money on a movie that they just haven't started to sell in the area in which the subtitled version is being distributed?

Just curious.

Oh, btw, if you are interested in seeing the trailer, not every site has removed it.
http://www.askmen.com/video/2005_apr/apr09_star_wars.html

I really enjoyed the talk Joi gave, and I think Brad's comments about the backchannel might work better when applied to the front page of the IMD blog. Perhaps people can vote certain story off the front page, similar to the way stories appear on the front page of digg.com.

The future of the Internet and copyright has always intrigued me. I found Joi's lecture engaging. The thing about all these new distribution techniques and desktop publishing is what does it mean to the established artist when any Joe Smoe can make music or video and get it distrubuted on the web,, and even make money off of it? Is art just going to become a hobby rather than the vast entertainment empire is today? No more George Lucas-es or Spielbergs but, instead a collective band up hobbyists entertaining the masses? …sounds like communism to me.

Well much of these talks were similar to what Lessig has been saying for a while (http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sgillies/2005/10/lessig_stuff.html)
I'm glad to see this type of exploration into the copyright world and hope that this will begin to effect the cinema school.
I was especially intrigued by the Creative Commons concept.
But as Matt makes a point of... where do we draw the line in respect to copyright and capital? Artists still need to make money. Maybe we should just be communists.

unfortunately i missed the joi ito lecture as julian and i were at the locative media workshop at nabi in seoul, however i'm an admirer of joi's for his commitment to p2p. the p2p exchange culture we see in anime fan-sub, for example, presents a new kind of vibrant culture of exchange, which i believe is symptomatic of a healthy democratic society. i also find it fascinating however, that someone with these politics sits on the board of icann, which i had thought was american institution with a mandate for global domination by controlling the the internet domain name system (dns) registry. recently there has been controversy around icann with europe calling for them to reliquish contol over dns to the un. china has seriously proposed creating their own dns registry thereby effectivily suceding from the global intent. in the face of all of this, icann has stood firm. recently however, i heard an altenative view to this apparent imperalism from none other than p2p activist larry lessig. says lessig: "I’ve been a critic of ICANN for a long time, especially in its early stages. But I think what it’s trying to do now is pretty close to what it ought to be doing, which is just trying to serve technical functions in the narrowest possible way. They’ve resisted a lot of policy work that they could have been doing." larry thinks that the existence of google has also made the dns system somwhat irrelevant, in any case, as today, he argues, one doesn't type in a web address but googles it. i'm not sure if i buy this take on icann, but whatevr the case it is fascinating to see how someone like joi manages his contradictions to be successful entrepreneur, activist, policy wonk, and visionary all at once.

Has anyone started running orcs in WoW on Satuday nights.

I took interest into Jesse's comments because I do not know much about the legality of the music business. It is hard for me to side with any of the arguments that were discussed due to my lack of understanding. Sadly, I won't buy into something just because another person says to. That being said, for those of us who aspire to join the gaming industry, it would be beneficial to get off our butts and learn more about the music industry. More and more modern games are using music artists that are contractually binded to the major music labels. If we intend to be leaders in the gaming industry, it is important that we do not ignore the people and laws of the music business.