Posts about zeit

Give up on the net?

August 8, 2013 by Jeff Jarvis
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Die Zeit asked a handful of people to answer their question, in essence: Have big companies and the NSA ruined the internet? Or to quote the email to me: “Have all the hopes concerning the internet been destroyed?” Here’s my answer in English; the German translation is here.

The battle for control — and the soul — of the internet has only just begun.

I doubt the net’s creators realized how subversive it was to connect anyone to anyone, bypassing the institutions that mediated those connections: from media to government, universities to retailers. These institutions are now circling wagons to protect their prerogatives: copyright for media, secrecy for government.

But as much as they want to take charge of it, the internet is less about institutions than individuals. Now anyone who’s connected can speak to, find, join, and act with a public. Anyone can find information, learn, sell, and create.

Yes, large new institutions are born to serve these needs and opportunities: Google to connect us with information, Facebook with each other, Twitter with everyone. They and we are negotiating norms and ethics regarding privacy, transparency, and control, a process that’s progressing.

Then enter government. It may portray itself as the protector of privacy but it is instead the greatest threat to privacy, for it can gather information and use it against us as no one else can. It abuses the net.

The problem Edward Snowden uncovered in the NSA is not technology. The issue is transparency. The NSA demonstrates that secrecy corrupts and absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely.

We must engage in the discussion Snowden finally sparked about the principles of a free and open society, which we must protect in the face of the new opportunities technology presents to, in the words of NSA chief Keith Alexander, “collect it all.”

Those principles, which I proposed in my book Public Parts, include:
* An ethic of privacy, compelling governments and companies not to steal our data without our knowledge.
* The ideal that government must be open by default and secret by necessity; today, it is the opposite.
* The right to connect, speak, assemble and act online as off.
* The understanding that if any bit on the net is stopped, detoured, or spied upon by any institution then no bit — or the net itself — can be presumed to be free.
* And agreement that the net must remain open and distributed, controlled or corrupted by no government.

A letter to 2040

February 22, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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Zeit Online is having some of us write letters to a child just born, to be read in the year 2040. After reviewing David Weinberger’s Too Big to Know, they asked me to write about wisdom. I wrote about media. It being a letter to a German child, I of course wrote about Gutenberg, too. Here’s the German translation. Here’s the English text:

I’ll bet that 2040 will prove to be a pivotal year in the future of knowledge. But you’ll have to collect on that bet for me.

It so happens that 2040 is the year when—according to projections of the downward trajectory of the American news industry—it is believed that the last newspaper could come off the last press.

Yes, the last press. Already, what we call printers do more than press ink on paper. They use jets to precisely place matter on matter, producing not just text but also manufactured parts, chocolate, even concrete buildings and perhaps soon human organs.

2040 also comes about 50 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web. That is an important milestone. Elizabeth Eisenstein, the leading scholar on Gutenberg, said it took 50 years for the book to leave behind its scribal roots–it was first considered just “automated writing”–and take on its form. As I write this, the products of the press—books, magazines, newspapers—have not broken out of their past to take full advantage of their digital fate. I hope they soon will. Could you be wondering now, “What’s a book?”

By the time you read this, I hope that knowledge will have broken free of its imprisonment in media to explode in new forms. An author and friend of mine named David Weinberger wrote a book called Too Big to Know in 2012 in which he argued that our very understanding of wisdom will transform.

Before Gutenberg, people revered and sought to preserve the knowledge of the ancients of Greece and Rome. After the invention of the press—during what a group of Danish academics call the Gutenberg Parenthesis—we came to honor the work of authors and experts, the people who had access to the press and the authority in conferred. Then, after the passing of the age of the press and the advent of the internet we began to value the knowledge of the network.

“The smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room,” Weinberger wrote. “The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it.”

So I hope you live in the age of networked knowledge, when information and the analysis and understanding of it can flow freely among many people and their machines, building worth as it spreads and gains speed. I hope you live in an age that values these new connections over the old notion of nations and institutions and their artificial boundaries. I hope you will define wisdom as the fruit of connections.

2040 is roughly the 600th anniversary of Gutenberg’s invention. By then his magnificent technological disruption may live on mostly as a memory and an exhibit in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. I hope you will visit it there to see where the idea of manufacturing knowledge began and how far it has come.