The Future of Information — transcript
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I'm so delighted to welcome all of you to the celebration of UC Berkeley School of Information, our new name. Most of you know that we have both a new name and a new website. For any of you that have been through either getting a new name processed by the University of California or developing a new website, you know what a big achievement this is. And so one of the things I'm going to do today is really thank all of the people that were involved in helping to make this happen, helping us to be here today. I think that the other thing that we're celebrating here is sort of the continuing reinvention
of this school that has a long history in South Hall. And I'm just really delighted to see so many different people from so many different eras in this school's long and distinguished history. I'm going to say a few words about the process that brought us here. It began about 18 months ago, and it was a process that was very collaborative. We went out and we did focus groups with groups of alumni from the library school, alumni from Sims,
current students, past students, thought leaders, guys like this, and people from campus, just to find out what people thought of us, what they thought we should do, where we should be going. And I think we learned some very important lessons. First of all that nobody knew what our name meant, the School of Information Management and Systems, hence the shortening of the name, but also that our alumni share the vision not only about the future of information but also about
the school and where we should be going. And so I really want to thank the consulting firm Peterson, Skolnick and Dodge, Linda Peterson and Betsy Brown in particular, I don't know if they're here, who contributed greatly, as well as the design firm of Jackie Jones Design, Jackie Jones and Sabrina Lee, I don't know if they're here either. We have an audience upstairs as well, so I can't tell you who's here or not. I also want to really thank all of you that were involved in the focus groups and especially
the staff of the school who are sitting around, who have been working very hard, and the faculty of the school. The UC Berkeley School of Information is one of about 20 iSchools in the country now. I meet regularly with the deans of these iSchools to discuss both our shared visions and our shared challenges. It's a very interesting group. About half of the deans come out of computer science, the profession, the discipline of computer science. The other come out of
of library and information science. This is a pretty odd or somebody, some might say, audacious combination. All of our schools have faculty from both library and computer science and engineering, people that I think historically would not have spent a lot of time together. We also have, all of us also have on our faculties social scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, economists. I'm a political scientist, you wouldn't know it. We also have faculty from a wide range of other backgrounds. Jeff Nunberg is a linguist. We have faculty from the arts, from media, from law, policy, and so forth.
So this is in this era of multidisciplinary research, the Berkeley campus is now mobilizing around the idea of multidisciplinary research. We are at the forefront, and I think we're well aware of both of the opportunities that it creates and also the challenges of beginning to talk across these very disparate disciplines. I think we all probably understand intuitively how we got here. okay but let me just flash back a couple of decades we had libraries we had
librarians and they had challenges what some of the challenges were simply the need for people in space in the early 1980s sociologist Daniel Bell reported that in 2040 Yale University would need a permanent staff of 6,000 librarians to cope with the books and research that it was coming into the library annually I I don't think that Yale now employs 6,000 librarians. Or to take a more contemporary statistic, one
that some of you are no doubt familiar with, the Library of Congress, which, by the way, is the world's largest library, has more than 130 million items. And they're located on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. This is a very space-consuming task. each day the Library of Congress Congress staff adds some 10,000 new items to their collection
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where did my note go I'm missing a page of my notes this is crisis I had a logical I had a logical place to go from there. OK, well, let's see if we can wing it. So essentially, technology, digital technology steps into this situation when we have hundreds of miles of bookshelves and thousands of librarians needed to organize them and essentially eliminates
some of the biggest problems. The problem with storage is basically gone. We can store now 50 Library of Congress collections in one petabyte of storage, which how much space does it take up? Between here and that wall. Okay. So all of a sudden 50 libraries of Congress. We have data and information. We can put almost any kind of information now in digital form and store it in this petabyte. We can put digital text, we can put visual images, both still and moving.
We can put audio, both concert types and recordings. At the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle's organization, they now have stored a petabyte of text, is that right? And a petabyte of visuals, of web information. About a petabyte of television. Of television. Now a petabyte, for those of you that don't know what it is, and I didn't really, it's 10 to the 15th, is my memory right?
I believe it's 10 to the 15th. 10 to the 15th is how many gigabytes? A million gigabytes. Okay, so if you know what a gigabyte is for storage, data storage, that's a million gigabytes, so a petabyte is a lot of information. Storage, yes, thank you, Eve. She's just wonderful. I was doing okay.
So the bottom line is that digitization allows us to obtain information in enormous quantities, and also in many different forms. And of course we all know we can access it in a whole bunch of new ways that we couldn't access it before, or on our cell phones, on our PDAs, you know, sensor networks, video cameras, a whole new slew of technologies. My favorite estimate here, IBM estimates that today there is one exabyte of data connected to the Internet.
I can't imagine, the exabyte is 10 to the 18th. So if the petabyte was 10 to the 15th, this is, you know, enormously more. and just to give you another number for your vocabulary, by 2010 there will be one zettabyte, which is 10 to the 21st. Okay. This only brings to mind that famous quote by Herman Simon, which many of you have heard, I'm sure. It was very prescient. He said this in 1970.
What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. We all know that intuitively, don't we? We are all flooded with the information that we can store in such volume. So where does that leave us in the school of information?
What I like to say, which is really my bumper sticker, but it doesn't really answer the question, but I'll just say it, is that we're training the architects and scholars of the information era. Well, what is it that we think about? We think about at the iSchool, we think about, you don't have to think about how to store information anymore, but we do have to think about how to organize it, how to make sense of it, how to make it easily accessible and readily retrievable. And that's a set of issues that we can learn a lot from the library community still.
Information organization and retrieval is at the core of what we can do here. We also ask how can we design interfaces that are user-friendly and appropriate for different groups and contexts. How can we do that and ensure security and privacy? How can we think about policy that will ensure openness and manage the growing network complexity that we're all facing? And then of course how to ensure access to the whole community.
Ethnic minorities, linguistic minorities, people in developing world are of big interest to a lot of our students today. Obviously people with different disabilities. So that's the first level that I think we're dealing with here at the iSchool and at all of the iSchools across the country. Obviously there are vast and evolving applications for this technology and we've really, really only scratched the surface. of applications of the digital technology and the information technology.
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There are problems to be solved in industry, in healthcare, in the environment, education, in the home, transportation, you know, we know that. But the other thing that we think about a lot here in the iSchool is the set of new forms of media and personal expression, new forms of communication, the kinds of experiments with social and economic organization that have been spurred by the digital technologies and combined with this network economics, which everything expands exponentially if you have access to a network.
So we think about what does it mean that we now have free and open source software and thousands of people are contributing from all over the world without financial reward? What does it mean that there's a Wikipedia? Open free content encyclopedia with more than 4 million articles in about 200 different languages written and edited entirely by volunteers. We can argue about whether it's reliable or not. I have to say I use it a lot. We have social networking software. Over 200 social networking sites including the ones that we've heard about like Friendster
and LinkedIn but also new niche sites. You may not have heard of Dogster, which is for dog owners, and CarSpace for car lovers. These are now virtual communities around particular interests. We also think a lot about the opportunities that the internet and the digital technology has created for online participatory media creation. Interactive, no less. We have blogging, weblogs, weblog search engines now.
right 34.5 Technorati which is a search engine for just for weblogs now is tracking that is tracking about 35 million blogs there are a lot of us out there that are scratching daily I wonder where my husband goes at night he's working away on his blog so we're obviously got sort of new forms of social human expression are emerging as a result of this technology I watch my kids who are engaged in these in these online games massively multiplayer
online games where people are participating all around the world thousands of people and they can even do it from their cell phones and we also then think about what are the policy challenges how do we think about policy about intellectual property rights about our regulatory systems our copyright system for dealing with this whole new environment and then finally I want to expand even more broadly what we're doing and what we're thinking about one more step, which is, and this I'm taking the words from Peter Drucker,
who's one of the wisest business scholars, no longer living. Peter Drucker said about 20 years ago, for 50 years the information revolution has centered on data, their collection, storage, transmission, analysis, and presentation. It has centered on the T in IT. The next information revolution asks, what is the meaning of information and what is its purpose? I think this is something that we at the iSchools need to be thinking about as well.
And this is what continues to draw us, myself, and our faculty into conversations on campus, not just with the business schools and computer scientists, but also with the humanists on campus with the artists, with the historians, professors of literature, the wide range of really people on this campus who think about the social, cultural, ethical, philosophical questions associated with what information is and what it means and what it will mean for us. So that I don't take much more time from our wonderful panelists, I just want
present our new logo. I want to just point out that the I in our logo, obviously it stands for information, also stands for individual initiative, collective imagination, interpretation, innovation, all of these things that we cultivate in our community. And I'm especially proud to present our new website which I welcome you all to visit. This is the home page it's hard
to read it it doesn't convey that well but there's a lot of information in it and I welcome you to spend some time with our website. Thanks again to everybody for your support of the school, your time, your resources. This is really a celebration both of our past and of our future. If we're going to achieve the goal of becoming the best i school in the country which we of course will it's going to continue to take the support of everyone and I just want to really
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thank them so many people in this audience I couldn't thank you all individually for for your help and your participation over the past two years now it takes me great pleasure to introduce our moderator for the discussion on the future of information Jeffrey number most of you probably know his voice if you don't know his face and you know it from NPR's fresh air which he is a regular commentator on he's a professor here at the UC Berkeley School of Information and he is trained as a linguist a very accomplished
linguist I must say and he does work on semantics and pragmatics text classification and written language structure he also writes about the social and cultural implications of digital technologies. His last book, I love the titles of his book, last book, Going Nuclear, and his newest book, to be out in two months from Public Affairs Press. Take a deep breath.
Talking Right, How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax Raising, Latte Drinking, Sushi Eating, Volvo Driving, New York Times Reading, Body Piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show. And with no further ado, I will hand this over to Jeff. Thanks, Anam. See, when we get petabytes of storage, you can make your titles as long as you can. Let me also welcome everyone to this panel
on the future of information. Can people see Jeff, or should he stand up? Let me, okay, let me do this. And maybe we should, when we're talking, then we should. Okay, yeah, just think that. Let me also welcome everyone to this panel on the future of information, or as I've been thinking about it, what will we know and when will we know it?
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Thirty years ago, I think the idea of a panel on the future of information would have had people scratching their heads. But then probably so would the idea of a school of information. What else could there be? Aren't they all? But that's a sign of how rapidly the understanding of the field has been transformed in ways that Anno has just been talking about.
And it's signaled by the successive changes of name here, but the new name, the School of Information or the iSchool. It's not just a cooler name than the School of Information Management and Systems, though. It makes for much better t-shirts. But it reflects this change in conception that Ana was talking about, about what this field is about. A friend of mine who is a noted computer scientist tells a story about his early days when he
was still an undergraduate in computer science, but a gifted amateur musician in the days when computer music was just starting to emerge. and it was something that a lot of computer scientists like to play with. And they kept playing with it for a while until the technology became a little more accessible and available, and then the composers just took it over because, as he said, it's a lot easier to bring composers up to speed as computer scientists than to bring computer scientists up to speed as composers.
And there's a sense in which that's what's happened to technology, Not that the technological substrate isn't still terribly important and crucial. But as the institutions, the technology, the social practices have evolved, it's become increasingly clear that, as Anno says, it's also something that calls on insights from anthropology and sociology and law and economics and political science and business and library science and humanities and linguistics.
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We don't know exactly what it is that's slouching towards South Hall to be born. Maybe it's a new field, maybe it's a new discipline, maybe it's an approach, maybe a professional, interdisciplinary professional field. But that's a big part of the fun. And it's nice to think that we're sitting here in the oldest building on campus, in dead smack in the middle of the Berkeley campus, and that there'll be these two sounds, this kind of sucking sound as insights from all these other disciplines
are amalgamated and combined here to form whatever it is that we're doing. And also, we hope eventually a kind of splashing sound as the work we're doing flows out to influence the other corners of the campus. In any event, that's why this has been and will continue to be a very exciting place, particularly under its new rubric. And there's this sense that disciplinary boundaries are becoming porous as people discover these new commonalities.
But I think this is something really, we can talk about it in the abstract, but it's something that's really easier to show than to tell. And we're happy to have three people here today, each of whom, in his or her way, personifies one or another aspect of this new synthesis. All of them have a remarkable gift for moving between a kind of daily quotidian nuts and bolts understanding of the technology and the realities of the technology to a much
more expansive or visionary interest in the possibilities of technology, not just as technology, but in terms of the ramifications for social life, for everything from office practices to entertainment, to internet dating, I guess. And I'm happy to say that all of them have been more or less formally associated with Sims and had a lot to do with us. So let me introduce them in alphabetical order. Brad Horowitz on the left went to the media lab where he worked on computer graphics, computer vision, and virtual reality and multimedia.
He was a co-founder of Virage, which pioneered the use of streaming video and techniques of multimedia management and indexing. He's now the vice president of advanced products at Yahoo! Exclamation point. And where he also heads up the Yahoo Research Berkeley, where a lot of research and social media is being done, and where he's working particularly with Mark Davis of the iSchool
and some other people from here. Mimi Ito got her PhD in cultural anthropology at Stanford. She's now at the Annenberg School at USC, as well as being a visiting associate professor at, is it Keio University? Keio University in Japan. She's part of a new research project supported by the MacArthur Foundation called Kids Informal Learning with Digital Media, though I learned from your website you also work with seniors. at the one point. Oh, yeah, in the past, yeah.
She's also conducting ongoing research on Japanese technoculture, looking at how children in Japan and the U.S. engage with post-Pokemon media mixes. Her research on mobile phone use in Japan appears in a book she's co-edited called Personal Portable Pedestrian Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. And finally, Brewster Kale calls himself these days a digital librarian, but he's been active in a number of areas. He graduated from MIT in computer science.
Well, helped to start the supercomputer company Thinking Machines. He invented, after that was sold, he went on to invent the Waste Publishing System, which was acquired by AOL, then started Alexa Internet, which was later acquired by Amazon. And he's best known, I think, to us now as the founder of the Internet Archive, which is undertaking nothing less than building the universal library of fable archiving websites, moving images, concerts,
texts, audio, under the modest slogan of universal access to human knowledge. So the way I thought we'd proceed is that we'll have each of the panelists speak for a short while on the future of information relative to his or her field. I've asked each of them just in the course of this to answer each of two questions. One, over the coming decades, what's likely to be the most surprising or unanticipated change in social behavior,
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social life, whatever that technology will mediate? That is to say the thing that the hype has not foreseen. And second, what's likely to be the most surprising or unanticipated holdover from the present? what contrary to expectations will we be doing pretty much the same way we do it now. So we'll have each person talk for five, ten minutes, maybe a little discussion among the panel, and then throw it up to questions. So maybe we can start alphabetically with Brett. Sure. Would you like me to come up? Yeah, whatever.
Okay, cool.
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Okay, so the future of information in five minutes. One thing I've seen that has always resonated with me is kind of a hierarchy, a pyramid of information. And at the bottom is usually something like signal, kind of raw signal right out of the sensors. And then comes data. And then comes information. And then comes knowledge. And then at the top, people as a crown put something like enlightenment or nirvana or something like that. But I think, when I think about the future of information, I'm really interested in that transformation from information into knowledge.
And I've heard the word as I've listened to the first two speakers, knowledge kind of bandied about quite a bit. And I think that permeable membrane between information and knowledge is something that we are very interested in at Yahoo. And as we think about the future, I think maybe this name doesn't have legs. Maybe this is going to be the knowledge school at some point. The K school. I think this has legs for the tenure of most of the people who made the decision. So one thing that's interesting, if you think about Yahoo and the company Yahoo, we care
a lot about people. And I'll talk a little bit about the history as to why that is and how we came to be at this intersection of media and knowledge and people. If you look at that logo actually, another thing that I don't think was explicitly mentioned is it looks like a person, you know, it's suggestive of a person. We have a logo at Yahoo that's the same thing except in our logo both hands are up like this. There's kind of a celebratory feeling with it along with our exclamation point. But Yahoo has always been about people.
If you think of the way that the company was founded, we had two founders, Jerry and David, who left their dorm room at Stanford. They were actually PhD dropouts like myself. But stay in school, kids, if there's anyone. And they went into the dorm room to act as curators, really, as librarians for the rest of us. And there were thousands of websites at the time, so it kept them very busy, and they had to build a company around that. But I think even they never anticipated that one day there would be millions of websites, billions of pages, and the problem is obviously not tenable now for Jerry and David to do alone, or even with the company of 10,000 people that they had built around them.
And so in thinking of the history, we graduated into an automated phase where we sent around crawlers and spiders and robots and kind of entered the age of information retrieval where you could now type in IBM into a popular search engine like Alta Vista, for instance, and get back tens of millions of results, which was both a blessing and a curse, right? More results than you could possibly navigate, more information than you could possibly consume. And those results were good in the sense that it actually got them to you, but bad in the
sense that it was hard to make use of them. They were very easily spammed, so looking at these pages in isolation led to a lot of problems. The next major innovation was really what Google did with PageRank. If you look at PageRank, it's a way to move into the era of the navigational query so that I can now use that search box as the way I get around on the Internet. And the way that they do that is really through the power of people. They leverage webmasters, these people who can vote on what's important on the internet by building links to those sites and using this topology of the web, looking at who's
linking to whom, they can bestow importance on sites. They call it PageRank. And that's what allows you to type in IBM into the search box today and get to the IBM.com site as the number one site that comes up in the search results. You can feel lucky and get there. And that's great. That innovation is itself getting a little bit old. It's been around for six or seven years. All the popular search engines, including Yahoo and Microsoft and Google, use techniques similar to this that measure link flux. So we've been asking ourselves, what is the next major innovation that lurks?
What's next that deserves kind of be the fourth chapter of where we're going in terms of managing this information? And we believe it's something called social search. It's really reintroducing the human element. And we've asked ourselves, when you think about PageRank, Why is it that only webmasters should be allowed to vote on what's important? If I do a query and you do a query today on a popular search engine, we get exactly the same results, the results that the webmasters by proxy voted for on our behalf. And many times it's the right thing. If you're trying to get to the IBM.com site, very effective, and that works.
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But if you're trying to find a reputable plumber in Berkeley, or if you're trying to find a great restaurant in Times Square at noon that isn't crowded, these are things where you might ask other groups, other authorities of trust, different reputations in your assessment of what's important. And that's what we're trying to do at Yahoo. That's what we see as the next part of this revolution, is conferring that privilege to people, ordinary human beings, so that you don't have to be a webmaster that knows how to author a link to participate in helping Jerry and David index the web for the rest of us.
So we're democratizing the process and turning ordinary mortals, our half billion audience that visits us every month, into curators, if you will. So to kind of borrow a phrase, it's easier to turn people into curators than curators into people. And, you know, that's one thing we've got at Yahoo is scale. We do have currently over 400 million monthly visitors to Yahoo, which is just staggering.
When you think of what fraction of the world population and what fraction of the online population comes by and pays Yahoo a visit, whether it's for Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Search or sports or finance, localized in so many different languages, it's a huge opportunity. And when you think about how we're addressing that opportunity, I think another part of knowledge is really getting beyond the paradigm of web pages that are stored on the petabytes of storage that we have.
And that's valuable and we should do it and we're doing it and we're grateful that that innovation has come along. But most of the knowledge in the world still lives in people's heads. It's not yet distilled down into a web page or into a book or into a movie that we can digitize. And a lot of that is colloquial knowledge. It's things like the shortcut between this building is actually to cut through South Hall. It's warmer. Well, that's an East Coast thing. I used to cut through the buildings at MIT to go all over without leaving the comfort of the building.
And that's the kind of thing you don't find on the campus map. You don't know the shortcuts and the tunnels and those kinds of things. And they're extremely valuable, but it's hard to get to that information. That's the kind of thing we're talking about. In fact, you know, the ability of users to correct maps. How many of you have used a mapping service other than Yahoo, let's use this example, to get driving directions and wanted to, you know, throw them out the window or worse, you know, curse those? Everyone's done that, right? Because that data is sometimes stale. It doesn't take into account these kinds of things.
So the ability to have the community modify that in a Wikipedia kind of way so that that information stays current and updated is the kind of thing that we're talking about. So, gosh, there's so much I'd like to say, but I want to cover the points that we were asked to. One was around what surprising change do we expect to see over the coming generation. And one that I thought, one that came to mind for me, was really around people's decisions to trade privacy for value.
And as an example, I think some of us are old enough to remember the first time you entered a credit card in an e-commerce transaction on the web. I don't know about you, I was nervous, you know, it was a big step and I was dubious. And now we do this all the time without thinking about it. The same thing happened to me when I discovered the photo sharing site Flickr, which Yahoo eventually went on to acquire. I was nervous about putting pictures of my personal life up online and kind of in full public view. And I was unclear as to why I would do that or, moreover,
who the hell would be interested in that picture in my living room. And I kind of got over the hump. I kind of took the plunge and said, you know, something, living my life in full public view like this is okay with me. And if somebody finds value in the picture that I took of my puppy, perhaps they're considering a Rhodesian Ridgeback-Weimaraner hybrid like I have. You know, more power to them. If I can provide value back to the universe in my wake for tagging that picture and uploading it, that's great.
And if no one ever finds value, that's okay too. So I kind of got over that hump and basically decided that I was comfortable putting pictures of my personal life, my friends, myself, my pets. I don't have kids, but I think if I did, I would be putting them up, and many of my friends do. And it's a decision that I made that I consciously crossed. I think in the future people will continue to make that trade-off and it will become more and more natural and more and more commonplace to live your life online.
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And I think it's important for us as a company, a for-profit entity, to make sure that we're absolutely explicit and clear about those trade-offs. So our trust at Yahoo, the trust we've developed with users over 10 years, is something that is so highly valued. It is a corporate asset that's been cultivated and nurtured, and we have to be so careful not to overstep our bounds and make trade-offs on behalf of the user that they didn't know they were making. So we're very conservative in this regard, so we always want to be explicit.
But I'm feeling like when we do present the user with those choices, the value that we can return back and the good that they can do for the world is so compelling that they will choose to make those choices and in some cases surrender privacy for the good of others and themselves. Holdover, something that will still be around 10 years from now that may surprise people. And what came up for me was the amount of crap online, just the garbage,
the stuff that I think is of very dubious value to anyone. Just if you look at communication, a lot of it is transient in nature. It doesn't necessarily have a shelf life or a kind of forensic value that you could go back and mine. And I think that that's always going to be the case. I think that there's going to be, you know, in a world where everyone is a filmmaker and everyone is an author and everyone is a publisher, you're going to get a lot of crap. And that's not going to go away.
And it's not a bad thing. And if you look at things like MySpace and if you look at communication between, you know, teens, a lot of it is absolutely content-free. And it was in the, you know, it's like, stop, nothing, you, nothing, just chilling. You know, like they can go for hours kind of with zero content but lots of, you know, signal. And I think it presents challenges just with the amount of content, but it also presents a ton of opportunity for companies like Yahoo to create systems that help surface the good stuff
and help separate the value from the non-value without making decisions that we're going to throw content away. But allowing people to discover and navigate stuff that they may find interesting is an opportunity. It's a technical challenge and a real opportunity for companies like ours. So am I about on time with that? A little bit over probably. And I think one thing that's exciting, you know, when we think about the future at Yahoo, especially the work I do, which is around innovation and research,
we think very long term, like three months from now. And I'm half kidding because the world is changing so fast. And as a for-profit entity that is trying to keep up with that change and actually push that change and drive that change, it's an interesting challenge. We have been blessed to be working in partnership with the school formerly known as Sims, the iSchool. The artist formerly known as Prince is kind of the same thing. So I will have to slap myself every time I use Sims.
I've gotten very used to it, as I'm sure you all have. But we've been very blessed with that collaboration. We actually have an office that we opened in partnership with the school. We have Mark Davis who is on leave right now and helping lead those efforts. and we have many, many great exchanges and students and collaboration with the school. And even though the Yahoo founders were from Stanford, we thought this was the right place to set up this kind of collaboration around social media. There was no better place in the world. Even though I'm from MIT, I mean, it has very little to do with the geography
of Berkeley being somewhat close to Sunnyvale. At least, you know, it makes the commute, well, I got a Prius, let's put it that way. But it's been an absolute wonderful experience to lean on this school and hire people from this school and collaborate with this school. And we're just absolutely proud and privileged to say that we have the relationship and we're looking forward to many more fruitful years.
So thank you. Thank you.
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Okay, what do I need to do here? Clip it. Where's this? I just clipped it to the wire. Oh, got it. He threw me off. I'm sorry. Okay, well, it's a great pleasure to be here. I flew in from LA today, so I'm going to be the Hollywood rep and talk a little bit about entertainment media, so culture as well as knowledge, I suppose. And I thought that Jeff's setup was provocative to think about the future of information. And it's always kind of a fraught task because my stance has always been that the future is contested.
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And it's particularly speaking to a room like this, we are making the future. So it's certainly not there to discover. It's there as far as to make. But given that, it's still kind of fun to pontificate about how things might go. So I'll try to do that in the spirit of what Jeff has asked us to do. As Jeff mentioned, I'm working on a project in collaboration with SIMS, with Peter Lyman here and Michael Carter and many worthy students and postdocs, some of whom I see here.
And we're looking at what kids are doing with digital technology. So I want to talk in those terms in the sense that as far as the unanticipated consequences of the digital revolution or the information revolution, often what kids are doing is kind of below the radar of what grown-ups are paying attention to. And even though what I'll say is certainly not news to digital kids, maybe it's news to some of us is what I'm thinking. So my prediction is that we're kind of at the dawn
of a golden age of amateur and derivative cultural production. And I know those words have not traditionally been associated with positive cultural values and it's kind of a cut on, you know, what Bradley was talking about is all the crap out there. That's what kids are doing, yes, but there's also some other things that are going on and whether Whether you like it or not, one of the unanticipated consequences of aggregation of low cost digital
authoring tools and of network distribution is the fact that amateurs, everyday cultural production, derivative and appropriative cultures, these kids are going to have their day. And it's coming. and those kinds of previously marginalized modes of cultural production that we consider derivative, uncreative, fanboys, fangirls, media geeks, amateurs, otaku, all of these sites of what I consider general culture
that have already always been scorned by the mainstream. This is sort of a new style of culture knowledge that is becoming more and more salient. And putting aside the questions of whether we like it or not, that's my prediction of the unintended consequence. I think what's happening is that we're seeing a somewhat of a decentering from more romantic ideals of artistic and scientific genius and originality. That what we count as creativity and literacy is changing because of these new modes of cultural production.
and the registers in which we produce culture, the kind of genres and styles that are becoming sort of iconic of digital culture are changing from these more single authorial types of creative works to models of remix, appropriation, recontextualization, editorializing, snarky commentary. These are the sort of maybe the modes of voice and language that are having
their moment. Not that the other things are going to go away, but I think each historical moment and not that these weren't present in earlier historical periods, but each historical moment with the convergence of different social practices and technologies produce new kinds of cultural genres and recognizable styles. So the holdover is something that relates to this. I think that these amateur and derivative works, they're highly dependent on mainstream commercial
and highly capitalized media to work. So if you think of like The Daily Show or if you think of political remixes or if you think of what I'm studying right now which is fan fiction and art and video production all of these modes of cultural production are becoming more visible and yet they're still highly dependent on professional and commercial media so I think the thing that's not going to change is that professional and commercial media is not going to go away I think that they need to play nice with the amateurs and the derivative
remixes, file shares, P2P, all that kind of stuff. They need to find some workable solution to all the stuff that's becoming more and more present in our cultural life. And probably those media industries that do find the proper balance there are going to be the ones that are most successful. I think there are some media industries that will probably be more at risk. For example, dynamic visual media, movies, TVs, massively multiplayer games, These are forms of cultural production that require a highly disciplined staff, large production budget, sustained narratives over multiple years.
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Some of the TV shows that I've been analyzing, I think the series I'm looking at now, Naruto, is on episode 170 right now. These are not the scale of media production that can be easily supported in the amateur and viral space. Whereas things like music, which has always been a vibrant amateur practice, encyclopedias, as Anno mentioned, editorials, bloggers are kind of really taking over that space. Maybe cultural anthropology and critique, who knows.
There's certain modes of knowledge and cultural production which are likely to be colonized a little bit more by the amateurs. But I think that big media is not going to go away. And with that as a setup, I wanted to, what am I doing Thomas? Can I show, okay. So I wanted to show a video which is, or two actually, which is sort of an example of the dynamics that I'm trying to describe, which is an anime music video, which is a video that's produced,
this one was produced by a college kid, a fan of Japanese origin animation, which involves stripping up the sound and cutting up the visuals of the professional media and re-editing it to a new soundtrack. So the soundtrack he's picked is the trailer for The Matrix Reloaded, which most people agree is an excellent trailer, better than The Matrix. And then it's re-edited with footage from Naruto, which is a modern-day ninja coming-of-age story.
And I just wanted to show maybe a little bit from the trailer and then move to the parody So this is the matrix trail just in case some of you don't remember the famous trailer
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Here we go. Hi, fellas. Yes, sir. Do we proceed? Yes, sir. Only human. All of our lives, we have fought this war. Tonight, I believe we can end it.
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Okay, why don't we switch over to the parody one?
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It was working a minute ago.
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Yeah, well.
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Well, if this one doesn't work, we could try the other one, although the purpose of, yeah.
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Do you want to? Do you want to try to move on? Yeah, why don't you see if the... It's not quite as... Thank you.
Okay. Well, maybe we should move on to that. Yeah, we can run it after. Okay.
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I don't think I'm going to depend on any of this newfangled stuff. Information age. So we were scanning a book at the University of California Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond. Turns out there are a lot of books when they, well, a lot of books are stored in Richmond in this big warehouse. It's sort of where books go before they completely die, they go there.
And so we've got a room there, and we're scanning books there to make them freely publicly available. It's completely great. So anyway, so there's this stream of books, and I get this RSS feed of the books coming in. And so we've been doing this American literature and poetry. Actually, some of it's sponsored by Microsoft, some by Yahoo. And there's a poetry book from 1895. And I was just flipping through sort of, you know, love this stuff, but also technically make sure we kind of got it right. and there's a poem called The Inventor
and it was one of those poems of sort of that kind of uplifting like wow what a world it's going to be great you know because it's just the idea of having mechanical things and the steam engine stuff so there's this poem about the inventor the next poem was The Engineer it's like yay and that sort of yahoo kind of yay in a way Anyway, it is 1895, and there's all this sort of adjusting to this coming mechanical age,
this sort of oil and steel age, and trying to understand what does it mean. And there was not just a sort of overwhelming yay, though there was a lot of that. There was a lot of, uh, wait a minute, guys, what does this mean? And I think that's sort of the blessing and the curse thing that's going on. So we had oil and steel, which was the story of the 20th century. And we had, you know, pretty cool. I drove over here in a car pretty darn fast. But we also had a little downside during that 20th century.
That was really brought to you by oil and steel. So were people right to be excited and frightened of what's going on? Yeah, I'd say so. and I'm having a great time reading sort of, you know, how do people kind of view it? Because I think we're kind of right in the middle of another one of these things, where we've got, okay, we've got silicon and bits, right? We've got this sort of new fuel to go and extend another part of human power in good and bad ways.
And we have the yay, and we have the, oh my god. So we have the public access, right? All right, good. We're interested in that. And then there's this privacy thing that's been mentioned, sort of the really deep uncomfort with a lot of the things that are going on now. And I'm not sure I'm really going to feel all that comfortable in the world we're building in another 25 years. I think it's actually going to be good that there's a rollover of generations. It's kind of what it is. So I'm going to give this sort of yay, boo,
kind of approach to this. So we have this sort of the yay of this is universal access. It's our motto, right? We libraries, it's a great thing, right? Then we also have the flip side. It's the total information awareness, right? This is that program by the NSA that we're not allowed to know about. That's scarfing up, well, everything and, you know, doing things that would make, you know, it's kind of uncomfortable. So there's citizen journalism. Sounds like a great thing. And then now there's strafing all these things and have the thought police, you know, blog, go to jail.
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I'm seeing in other countries. Here it may be happening, but we can't tell you about that. So in this sort of the ageable battle of the sword versus the pen, I'd say actually right now the pen is on the upswing. The pen is really gathering some steam. The power is really shifting to the bits. So what are we sort of really kind of currently afraid of? Is these viruses and sort of information security? it's sort of the security guy's day
out there in our corporations and our government and right now but it's information that we're worried about losing as opposed to in many cases things related to pens the swords and another sort of contrast there's the global village of the McGloon thing everybody's singing the same theme songs from Gilligan's Island I bet we could sing it in unison here. We'd probably know all three verses of Gallagher's Island's theme song.
That's the global village of McLuhan. And then there's the information age, the internet thing, the globe of villages, the overlapping communities of micro-communities that are geographically dispersed. Kind of interesting. So which way are we going with this? And I'm really interested in seeing the globe of villages really take an upswing. because I actually kind of believe in that sort of power through diversity rather than having everybody chant the same damn thing.
So in general, I'm kind of an upbeat guy. I'm trying to build some of this universal access stuff. But I find what's going on in Washington now actually a really useful cold bath. This neo-McCarthyism that we're seeing deployed with an information edge can give us at a very critical time in the evolution of this technology the good and the bad of it. The iSchool is in an interesting position because they're not just sort of general cheerleaders
within sort of the computer science stuff. There's law and policy folks. The law and policy folks here have helped us, the Internet Archive, go and file briefs to try to free orphan works. These are things that are sort of this massive expansion of copyright, caught a pile of works unawares and unable to be reused. They're producing students that we can actually hire, which is really great. I was a computer science guy, but I wanted to learn what librarians knew because I knew this thing was coming.
In the mid-80s, preparing for the internet and trying to make sure the internet went right, I went to library school for a short while in Simmons. My interview process was really short, what do you want with us? Oh, no, no, no, wrong attitude, right? Simmons, you guys are, you know, in Boston, you guys have a knowledge of information things that the computer sciences are just getting to now. That was just when we could start to imagine having all books online. But now we're going to have all books, all video,
all software, all, basically we are now, you know, 25 years later at a point where we can conceive of having everything online for better and for worse. But to be a little more concrete, in terms of the things that I think are going on right now, the war that's going on right now, it's being played out. I think we're in the third battle of the Internet, or of this information age. So the first battle was the telcos versus the open Internet, what became the Internet.
ARPANET, NSFNET, than Internet. So telco, central control over communications versus you can go and run your own system with your own directory system, with your own whatever. And that happened sort of in the 1980s. And largely we won that one. There's always retreats and still continuing problems, but we won that one. 1990s was really about software and protocols and what are the applications that are going to be on top of this open thing. And I'd say the two major players were AOL versus the web.
AOL, closed garden, you know, nice and safe kind of thing. And the internet, it's kind of weird, you know, sort of, I can't quite know what's going to go on. The world wide web, world wide weight, right? There was this battle during the 90s. It was open versus closed. And again, more or less, we won that one in terms of we, you know, the open way won. I'd say we're in the third layer, right? There's first plumbing, then software, and now we're at the content layer. It's the commons. It's this concept of a public domain in an era when massive
1:00:00–1:05:00
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propertourization and going in regulation of information and making it so it's very difficult to have free and easy stuff in between us that's coming about. And I'd say the big players right now, it's Google versus the commons. So the idea of why Google? Google in their search sense actually I'd say is very supportive of the commons. They use their tool all the time. But the idea of going and scanning things and owning them, taking the public domain and putting them under control, taking things out of the public domain in a digital transition and making them proprietary single company products I find horrifying.
Listen from 1:00:37 (MP3 audio)
We have an opportunity right now to actually see a pretty interesting world, a pretty broad world, a world that we can do research on, that we can make new Wikipedias that we can go and build on and it's going to take everything this school can do to try to continue building an open world. Why open? It's not just a commie thing, right? It actually makes better business sense that you can actually go and build new and different businesses based on an open environment much more easily than it is to try to negotiate
Listen from 1:01:08 (MP3 audio)
why you should be allowed to do something in a closed environment. So those are the concrete things that I think are going on. To answer your questions of sort of what have I found to be a surprising, unanticipating thing. In the 1980s, there were these two myths of sort of human nature. One is, except for the people in this room, you have to understand, they're all really stupid. You still hear that, especially around elections. We're kind of smart, but I don't know.
Listen from 1:01:39 (MP3 audio)
They're all really dumb out there. And the other myth is nobody's going to do anything unless you pay them. Fundamentally, you know, people really just want to be a couch potato and wait for the next Madonna CD to come out. And what we found out of the internet, out of the web and the like, is there are 50 million websites out there that we archive every two months. 50 million of them. There are 400 million people using your service alone. There are a lot of people out there going building stuff for free. They're sharing the stuff and using this stuff.
Listen from 1:02:10 (MP3 audio)
And we've actually looked at the usage trails. And we found something that I thought was quite unanticipated. Is people are really particular and they're really peculiar. They really want kind of what they want. They're experts in their own little world, but they're not necessarily wanting to be experts in what it is I want them to know about. But they're very particular and they're very peculiar. They're really different from each other. And the other is that people are doing a whole lot to try to get their word out of what it is they know,
Listen from 1:02:42 (MP3 audio)
such that other people can build on it. It builds one of the great things that leads to happiness, which is satisfaction. And the internet has been a satisfaction engine. It's a place for people to share things and to be recognized by their usage logs of things. Wow, look, people from Korea are coming to my website. This is a mechanism of encouraging people to share. The biggest holdover for me, if I sort of take back to the 1970s and 1980s that I sort of formed in my consciousness,
Listen from 1:03:20 (MP3 audio)
was that we really hoped that we would make this democratizing thing. this thing that would make it possible for lots of little things to exist rather than those big corpse that we're being all complained about in the 70s of these multinational, not multinational, multinational conglomerates, right? There's all this sort of problems, the small is beautiful, if you remember all those things. And the holdover is the big are getting enormous.
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So the sorts of things that you could do back then really were able to dominate a particular country's market of something. But now we're seeing things that can scale enormously and very fast. And in this information world you can scale very, very large, very, very quickly. So the top ten websites of all websites control 20% of the clicks of people around the world. 10 organizations, and Yahoo is one of them, has 10 organizations control 20, what 20% of all of the online time, all of the web time people are on.
Listen from 1:04:31 (MP3 audio)
It's an enormous amount of control. So I'd say that the sort of the holdover is we didn't make something that we maybe enabled the long tail, but we also enabled a mass consolidation that I think as a society, government structures, people, we're gonna have to try to figure out how to deal with it. All in all, I think it's a great field to be in. I'm glad there's an iSchool so that there's actually a name for what it is we've been doing. We were always sort of caught in this sort of void of being in a
1:05:00–1:10:00
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field that didn't have a name but it's sort of caught between computer science and libraries, and the iSchool is well positioned. Thank you very much. So before we open this for general questions, let me throw a question at a few of you just to... Oh, yes, let's first run the video. I think if it, we'll try. Right.
Listen from 1:05:34 (MP3 audio)
What was the answer? The answer is it's on my machine now. Ah, use a Mac. Yeah. Well, we'll see if this works, too. And if nobody starts eyeing me, that would be good, too.
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Here we go.
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That's a nice trick. I don't have grace. Mr. Anderson. Surprised us to see him? He's found a way to dub himself. Now he's one more. A lot more.
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Come on! The machines are digging. They're boring from the surface straight down to Zion. There's only one way to save our city. Neo. What happens if I fail? Then Zion will fall.
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They need you. I need you.
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What if the prophecy is true? What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn't that what fighting for? Isn't that what dying for?
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Listen from 1:08:11 (MP3 audio)
So this actually raises a question that we just saw raises a question that actually a remark that Mimi made, but that I think resonates with the other presentations as well. Mimi said what we count, I can't read my writing, what we count as creativity and literacy is changing in terms of appropriation and recontextualization and so forth. And that's something that is also something that Brad and Brewster touched on.
Listen from 1:08:45 (MP3 audio)
When you talk about literacy and information literacy or technological literacy or so on, all of this open source presumes an increasing level of expertise, even if it's still at an amateur level. Where is that going to come from? Do you see institutions or schools or even this school as playing a role or is it just something that's going to rise out of the sidewalk? How do you see that happening? I guess Mimi, but also Brad and Bruce.
Listen from 1:09:16 (MP3 audio)
Yeah, well this is one of the questions that we're really trying to address in our project is to understand how kids like this learn to do this without any formal training. So the, and basically on their own free time. So this is done by a fan who was going to college and he learned Japanese, he learned editing, He learned all this stuff through the motivation of, I think, the kinds of things that Brewster was talking about, the satisfaction of having an audience for his work and a niche community of interest, but also, importantly, because there is this shared imagination, which has been produced by commercial industries, that is a common language that can be shared.
Listen from 1:09:59 (MP3 audio)
And that's where I think that it's not an antagonistic relationship all the time between commercial and amateur production, but they're providing the source material for this imagination and forms of literacy that are relying more and more on visual and rich media. And so kids are, I mean, what you do in school, what you learn in school is the stuff you don't learn in your everyday life, right? It's not that most learning happens in school. Most learning happens outside of school.
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Schools fill the gaps of stuff that, you know, differentiates smart people from dumb people, right? But then the kids who are doing entertainment, you know, they're learning tremendous amounts by engaging in their recreational lives, whether that's sports or whether that's fandom or whatever it is, and that there have always been sources of peer-to-peer, more bottom-up learning communities that exist outside of schools, and that's where kids are learning this stuff.
Listen from 1:11:01 (MP3 audio)
I think in terms of the digital divide, I mean, when you think about the half billion people using Yahoo, it's easy to forget about the other order of magnitude, the five billion people that are too busy trying to find some food to eat or fighting off the warlord who wants to kill them, or otherwise just underprivileged. I think there's a huge issue just with our focus in the States or Korea or kind of the hyper-developed countries relative to the rest of the world. So there are things I think we all can do as citizens and that Yahoo can do as a company
Listen from 1:11:35 (MP3 audio)
to help promote literacy, online literacy. We run services in a lot of countries which are basically not yet fully developed, but we're planting seeds there. So we're in a lot of countries where the actual user base may not justify the investment we're making, but we want to provide basic communication services like email. And in a lot of underdeveloped countries, it serves a different need. It's not just casual emails. There's a lot of business communication, and we need rice and things like that to go on with Yahoo Mail in the third world and in developing countries.
Listen from 1:12:09 (MP3 audio)
So I think there's a long way to go as a world culture. It's not just about giving people the literacy. It's about bridging that digital divide and giving them basic human needs. Maslow's hierarchy, I think, fandom comes pretty high up the pyramid, and I think there's a lot of work we need to do as a society to kind of fill out the bottom levels of the pyramid before this stuff becomes relevant. I think what's interesting, again, I said there's a lot of crap,
Listen from 1:12:40 (MP3 audio)
which sounded like a pretty disparaging comment to the, you know, billions of people. I guess it is, but one man's crap is another man's content. That's the kind of allegory there. I mean, and what we want to do is not be the thought police and kind of make editorial judgments about what is good or what is bad, but facilitate creation to turn every person into a filmmaker or a remixer, as the case may be. We just did something at Yahoo with the San Francisco International Film Festival around remix.
Listen from 1:13:12 (MP3 audio)
And this is not what we call head content. It's not from the major studios. It's independent filmmakers who said, mix it up. You know, God bless you. The more times my stuff gets seen in any context, the better for me and the better for everyone. And so you can go in there and do these kinds of remixes in a web page. It's not especially complicated. You don't have to have a film degree. It's for normal people. And people are doing amazing things like that. And what we want to do is provide the platforms and also the services that let people find what they're looking for.
Listen from 1:13:44 (MP3 audio)
Let the good stuff surface. Let the special interest stuff make its way to the people that want to see it. And I think that's the role that we play. is there something else you might want to say about the other presentations I have a question for Mimi which is around kind of you talked about the capital intense kind of studio models it's almost like a venture back thing where they make these movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and some are hits and pay for the others and some flop
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what about the continuum You know, is it a kind of binary thing where you've got the head and the tail? Or do you have, like, a new class being created where there is an economic viability to stuff? There's a little political satire thing, JibJab, and they started out kind of virally circulating. Yahoo eventually cut a deal with those guys and paid them hard cash to kind of do a special feature for us. So they kind of jumped from the tail over to the head. What about that gray area? What are your thoughts there?
Listen from 1:14:48 (MP3 audio)
Yeah, I think that's really the part that's up for grabs and interesting because we don't know how that, I really don't know how that's going to shake out. I can't say that I'm like hugely optimistic like the traditional kind of indie media, like independent production, small scale producers that aren't relying on derivative content, right? Not, you know, this is not like the Numa Numa guy or the Star Wars kid or this kind of thing, which is just like very low cost, very quick, nobody's getting paid, it's just a whole lot of fun and kids are doing it.
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But the people who are sort of like musicians who are trying to make money off selling their stuff on the net, I mean that layer, I think that's the part that may need some oomph and extra support in order to just happen. Like I see the stuff kids are doing just happening kind of virally and organically. And in fact, like even in places that are very low income, I mean, in fact, these are what I'm trying to point out is that these are mass lowbrow media.
Listen from 1:15:53 (MP3 audio)
And that's what's like even in like India. I mean, these people watch have have access fairly broadly to mass lowbrow media. And they may not be making fancy remixes, but they are producing local knowledge cultures and around it. But then it's the stuff in the middle that I think is really where we need to work, do our work. There's actually a positive indication if you take something more mature than video production, because at least we've been seeing just over the last couple years, our audio content,
Listen from 1:16:28 (MP3 audio)
we've got a lot of audio and video on the Internet Archive. And right now, audio and video downloads are about equal in terms of the amount of bytes. so it's just starting to cross over so it's still really early days in terms of video on the net audio with mp3s and Napster and stuff like that sort of broke broke in right in about what 1999 2000 is sort of when that became but if you just take websites we went and did a study the same study of sort of where are people clicking and we looked at the distribution over websites if you
Listen from 1:17:02 (MP3 audio)
ordered them the ten most popular websites get 20% of the clicks the top 100 get 40, 1,000, 60%. It's a flat line. If you look at it on a 10,000, 10,000. And what I found interesting about this, one is there's concentration of power right at the top. Pays to be one of the top 10. But it's also got at 100,000 you're still in the running. You could be the most major Brazilian stamp site
Listen from 1:17:34 (MP3 audio)
and still make it. It's not like Walmart where you're either on the shelves or not. When you have to go and do distribution of products back in currently in the physical world, it's horrible. It's really difficult to get your stuff out there where the internet makes it easier. And by being a flat line, it means there's class mobility. That popular things can move up the chain and we do see things really burst onto the scene. You take Google, they had no marketing dollars, yet they ran
Listen from 1:18:04 (MP3 audio)
right up that chart. And we saw things happen over the course of months where people would break into the top 100 with things like free phone services and the like. So actually in terms of websites, which is a little bit more mature, we do see at least that's not necessarily where money is going but at least there's, in terms of the attention economy there's some reasons to that technology can keep it relatively easy to move. We have time for a couple of questions.
Listen from 1:18:37 (MP3 audio)
Someone will bring you a mic. We're actually recording this and streaming into another room. Just kind of dealing with the issue of media and kids. Anyone care to comment on the role of video games in literacy? Maybe. Well, I don't know. Yeah.
Listen from 1:19:09 (MP3 audio)
It's mine. Uh-oh. Well, this is one of the things that, you know, is highly contested and people will take different sides. I mean, I don't know if people have read Steve Johnson's book. So there's sort of this idea that video games can promote high order cognitive thinking, which is a little bit different from the literacy contention. I think most of the talk about video games
Listen from 1:19:42 (MP3 audio)
tends not to be so much around video literacy as much as social dynamics and sort of cognitive structures. So I haven't, I mean, except possibly in the case of machinima, which is sort of on the border of games and movies, I would say that most of the learning theory in that area is not as focused on literacy as the fact that kids are learning new forms of participation with interactive environments and social environments now.
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The previous ages, nuclear age, theme age, whatever, had an impact on politics. But I think information age, because it gets at how we think, has an opportunity to impact politics and political structures unlike anything we've seen before. Now Brewster has touched on this a little bit in his talk, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on the impact of the information age on politics and how we form governments, how we tear down governments.
Listen from 1:20:50 (MP3 audio)
I've already spoken on that, right? Well, I think that it's very different depending on whether you're talking about the U.S. or other parts of the world. The U.S. has a lot of kind of dynamics around e-democracy and debates around that that are fairly parochial to the U.S. I think that in other parts of the world where there's sort of a stronger sense of urgency and social injustice that mobilize people on a viral and massive scale,
Listen from 1:21:26 (MP3 audio)
digital technologies have proven to be kind of catalytic in mobilizing people when people are really pissed off about something. I think in the U.S. we suffer from not having those same kind of, I mean, maybe hating George Bush kind of counts, but it's not quite as bad as the forms of oppression that have been organized in places like China or injustices in Korea and the Philippines and other examples we have of SMS and faxes and email being kind of central to mobilization.
Listen from 1:21:58 (MP3 audio)
So I think in those cases we've seen a pretty strong impact. In the US, I don't know. I mean, maybe somebody else is. MoveOn.org. I mean, if you look at, you know, the utopian dream, the hooray, the internet, everything's going to be, you know, beautiful. One of the holdovers is you're still going to have right wing wing nuts and left wing wing nuts. I've got to be balanced here. I'm a for-profit company. We love them all. No, let me just say that. That doesn't go away. And I think, you know, as I think about it, you know, definitely technology will have an impact, but people are people.
Listen from 1:22:34 (MP3 audio)
You know, a lot of the kind of things that we're seeing now about, you know, MySpace used for stalking. We don't see stories, you know, today, a kidnapping, and they actually used a telephone to make the call. The telephone was used to transmit. You know, like, of course, people are going to use technology for good and evil, and both sides are going to, you know, use the tool to try to mobilize people, and there'll be information warfare and, you know, all this stuff is bound to happen because people are people. We should fight the good fight and try to create the right tools that, you know, forward the cause of personal expression.
Listen from 1:23:10 (MP3 audio)
I think in the long run, things like the Internet, communication bode well. And I think that's mostly because I'm an optimist about human nature. If the information can flow freely, I think a large part of the battle is won. Not all the battle. There's a lot to do between here and there. But I actually am an optimist and think that the Internet, in the aggregate, over long periods of time, is a force of good for the world. But in between now and then, human nature will rear its head all over the tool, and it is. Yeah, I would add only that if you look at the other visionary story that's told, the emergence of netizens,
Listen from 1:23:47 (MP3 audio)
the attenuation of national boundaries, the creation of the second superpower, which is this transnational force that's mediated by the technology. So I see no sign that that has become in any important way a reality, or that national communities, political communities, have diminished in any sense through the Internet. On the contrary, it seems to strengthen national political consciousness and national political institutions. We have time maybe for one more question.
Listen from 1:24:23 (MP3 audio)
So I have a related question, which is what do you anticipate the impact of the internet and related sorts of technologies will be on minority cultures, particularly minority linguistic cultures? Are we all going to wind up speaking either English or Chinese or will small linguistic communities like Catalan or Welsh or Yiddish or even smaller ones thrive under the impact of the internet and related information technologies?
Listen from 1:24:56 (MP3 audio)
I have a comment about that. We are going strong at the Yiddish market. Just kidding about that. We saw an interesting phenomenon in Korea which is a relatively small population relative to world population, but obviously highly wired and sophisticated. And they had a problem a few years ago that they would do a query on any popular search engine, ours or the competition, and there wouldn't be a Korean document that fulfilled the need of the query. So they'd ask a question, you know, a common question, how many feet in a mile or something like that.
1:25:00–1:29:44
Listen from 1:25:30 (MP3 audio)
And there just wasn't a Korean document that had the answer to that. And so they inverted the problem. They actually created something called Knowledge Search, which basically said, if that isn't distilled into a web page that people can understand, let's reflect the question back to the community of users and ask them. And so they began to capture knowledge question and answer pairs and build up this huge knowledge base. And unfortunately, it wasn't Yahoo that thought of this. It wasn't Google that thought of this. It was a local Korean company called Naver that grew to prominence and now has the dominant
Listen from 1:26:04 (MP3 audio)
market share against both Google and Yahoo because they recognized there was this void. There weren't enough web pages in Korean and if they could take advantage of that and capture the knowledge into a proprietary system, they'd win. And today they're leading. It's interesting because a lot of the way that knowledge gets in there is somebody who's bilingual and speaks English and Korean, says how many feet in the mile, they go over to another search engine, they find the answer, they translate it into Korean and they win 300 points and they get to be the expert. There's a lot of
Listen from 1:26:34 (MP3 audio)
incentives around reputation and expertise that motivate people to do this kind of work. But I thought that was an interesting example of where the dearth of information in native Korean led to a huge shift in market share that a company took as an opportunity. We've actually taken that concept and we have something in the States now called Yahoo Answers, which again is about the liquidity of marketplace around the 500 million people that come. They represent every language on the planet.
Listen from 1:27:07 (MP3 audio)
They represent almost every sphere of knowledge on the planet. So, again, providing the tools I think is important. The final thing I would say is in systems like Flickr, which depend on tagging, we have huge audiences that spring up in places like the United Arab Emirates for some reason. It's kind of like the Orkut Brazil thing, you know, that just certain markets take off. So we have a ton of content in there that's been tagged in Arabic. And sometimes there are bridges which bridge that content.
Listen from 1:27:38 (MP3 audio)
It's tagged in a multilingual fashion, and I can look for a sunset and get one in Abu Dhabi, and I can get one here. But sometimes there are islands of information that don't span. And one of the things we're doing with our Berkeley research group is looking at whether or not that's a problem. Is it a problem that we need to solve and kind of escalate to a more conceptual level of meaning so that any user can find any content? Or do the users themselves solve this problem? And if the content is good enough and there's a rationale to kind of bring it from one language island
Listen from 1:28:09 (MP3 audio)
over to the benefit of another, they'll build that bridge themselves. So we're wrestling with these issues every day. I probably just add something because this is an area where I've done some work, I think, to pick up on Brewster's remark that when you look out at these, the interest is often down around the 100,000th site that the territory I think of is south of Wilshire in the internet. And with languages, that's as true as anything else, that where the most interesting activities going on often is on not just relatively small national languages
Listen from 1:28:42 (MP3 audio)
like Hungarian or Greek, but even regional languages and minority languages because the cost of entry is much lower, because the ease of diffusion is much greater. Until a few years ago, only Anglophones and really only Americans could have access to their own news media the second they left their national boundaries. If you were French, you might get it in a few big cities and so on and so forth. Now you can get it if you're a speaker of Tamil or Greek or any number of other languages.
Listen from 1:29:16 (MP3 audio)
So in terms of languages, it's really had an effect of leveling the playing field as no previous technology before. Perhaps we can thank our panelists and .
Untranscribed interval, 1:29:28–1:29:44: possible silence or omitted speech. No description of this interval has been verified.
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