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Alamo A La Mode

March 14th, 2011 at 05:03

I always liked twitter as a social network, mostly because unlike facebook or myspace, it seemed ad-free, and never seemed to want to eat all of your data like an over stimulated census taker. Being ad free – and apparently sans business model –  it also felt a little bit like a public service. Twitter was a system designed to facilitate random communications and free international messaging without asking anything from you at all. Twitter was a pirate radio station and international newspaper rolled into one, and it was free to contribute, and free to consume. The hubris with which Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wasshown in “the social network”, stands as an ironic juxtaposition next to the relatively obscurity of twitter’s staff. Here where faceless venture capitalists subsidising a system which brought down governments for free.

On Friday however, Twitter decided to change. People using the twitter API have been told to not write any new twitter clients. Twitter was an odd system, in that so few twitter users actually use www.twitter.comto access the system. Most use another client (such as tweetdeck) to access the system. Twitter now believes that users are confused by this, and believes that to ensure “consistent user experience for all”, that no new clients should be developed. Inevitably, what this means is that more people will have to use the main website, and once on the main website, advertising or other services and income streams are easily enabled. The argument over where twitter could be a public service then disappears, but also, twitter in truncating it’s API and in a sudden jolt is lurching towards becoming that most loathsome of Internet data stores – a silo.

These silos, often the University repository or some such institutional system, are railed against for their fixed nature, difficulty of use and lack of services for building around. So in truncating / neutering it’s API, is Twitter silo-ing itself? Should the same vitriol with which silo is used now be aimed at twitter? Is there an SI Unit of silo – perhaps a contained data to services for extracting it ratio? An idea for the name of this Unit? Perhaps the Dewey? Don’t get dewey-eyed over the changes in one site though, ponder instead a new question – how much of the Internet is public? Not public in a secure way, how much of the Internet is owned, or ran, by public bodies? How much of the internet’s content is publicly-owned?

Twitter is “commercialising”, it isn’t lifting up a drawbridge, merely giving itself border controls whereas before it was happy with user freedoms. The notion, albeit one I didn’t make tremendous efforts to analyse, of twitter as a public service therefore seems impossible now. Twitter is now an ITV. Adverts for all can’t be far off, and a previously public, almost anarchic space on the internet is lost to the desire for profit and associated business models.

As no real alternative exists to twitter, it seems unlikely that this change will affect it’s user base. So we can accept the privatisation with next to little change, all we will likely see are the occasional advert for our troubles, and at best with twitter, these will almost certainly be easy enough to ignore. So what then for the rest of the internet – what else for the areas we may describe as public – I’d be tempted to label these as “the common land”, but the danger then becomes that the inference is that we are talking about Creative Commons and it’s ilk. The government of Australia has just made an open data site, as has Southampton University. MIT’s OCW provision has adverts in it’s RSS feed, but adverts for MIT itself. These resources, like twitter, obviously cost money to run, and logically need models to assess their value to the organisation.

Or do they?

Website hosting is ridiculously cheap. Domain names are not expensive. Think of the other public spaces. We don’t have turnstiles to count admissions at art galleries, or gauges to test how often a see-saw is see-sawed, or a roundabout roundabouts? Perhaps all dogs walked in parks could have pedometers attached? Does any one ask the swing for it’s business model, or lambast a government purchased painting for it’s lack of admiration? Ah but websites, websites can give us statistics. So hoist by their own statistical petard they must be! Step back from these autogallows and ask – how many hits is worthwhile? What is a ball park figure? 100,000? 1,000,000? Anyone?

We risk knowing the statistics for something, the price of everything, and the value of nothing. A dangerous triptych of data, economics and soul. A worrying Cerebus guarding the gates of potential. A business model for these open resources is to create barriers to them – it is to take away a level of their openness by hobbling their freedom with perceived price tags based on little to no evidence. We have given with one hand and then taken away with the other. We have made a public space, and then before even an opening ceremony retreated into bean counting.

Obsessing over perceived values generates bureacracy that starts to hinder both the implicit and explicit values of any public space or materials. If we argue again for evidence of OER reuse, how many examples do we need to justify the price, how many downloads, how many remixes, how do we track? Hows about we just make OER instead? Is it better to waste minds upon the bureaucracy of implementations and the desire to justify them, or to drive forward by creating materials and resources that will increase the potential for these resources? The cynical will say that you cannot measure potential (no electronics jokes), but that is better than a resource so mutated by measuring devices it becomes worthless.  A resource so surrounded by statistical barriers that it’s effectively be-mazed into obscurity.

OER has only recently been planted as a seed, it has the potential to grow and exceed as a true public space on the internet. Instead of allowing and believing in the public space, the tree is already a-bonsai-ed into a reduced and contorted shape. And why? Against an economic argument from? Ourselves mostly? We stand on the walls of the Alamo, to fight who? Ourselves mostly. Where we could be the plucky underdog, instead we are retreating, seeking damage limitation to something which is not damaged. If we cannot build a public, open space with OER and education, then what can we with?