It is remarkable… how often thinking for oneself will lead us to conclusions written about before we were born.
From a post by Vera Bass, ‘Teaching requires learning’, 6th November 2006.
Many people have probably also said this, but that’s the point, pretty much.
First, an apology for anyone who’s had problems with the RSS/Atom feeds over the last month or so. I think they’re fixed now (certainly Bloglines has started picking them up again) but please let me know if you don’t read this. Oops, that won’t work… anyway:
Many of the tens of thousands of products displayed last week on the Vegas expo floor, as attractive and innovative as they are, are designed to restrict our use… Even children are bothered by the increasing restrictions. One electronics show attendee told me his 12-year-old recently asked him, “Why do I have to buy my favorite game five times?” Because the company that made the game wants to profit from each device the user plays it on: Wii, Xbox, PlayStation, Game Boy or phone.
At this year’s show, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary Shapiro, spoke up for “digital freedom,” arguing that tech companies shouldn’t need Hollywood’s permission when they design a new product.
I’m not sure it is now, either.
…Architects hit a snag when they realized too much visibility could create problems.
“We’ve got lots of windows looking in, but the drawback is that inmates can look from one unit to another through the windows at the central core area of the ward,” Gulliksen says. “That’s a big deal. You don’t want inmates to see other inmates across the hall with gang affiliations and things like that.”
To minimize unwanted visibility, the design team applied a reflective film to all the windows facing the wards. Deputies can see out, but inmates cannot see in. Much like the 18th-century Panopticon, the El Paso County jail design keeps inmates from seeing who is watching them.
Image from Correctional News website
As Jason Devitt says, stopping users installing non-Apple (or Apple-approved) software means that the cost of sending messages goes from (potentially) zero, to $5,000 per megabyte:
Steve typed “Sounds great. See you there.” 28 characters, 28 bytes. Call it 30. What does it cost to transmit 30 bytes?
* iChat on my Macbook: zero.
* iChat running on an iPhone using WiFi: zero.
* iChat running on an iPhone using Cingular’s GPRS/EDGE data network: 6 hundredths of a penny.
* Steve’s ‘cool new text messaging app’ on an iPhone: 15c.A nickel and a dime.
15c for 30 bytes = $0.15 X 1,000,000 / 30 = $5,000 per megabyte.
“Yes, but it isn’t really $5,000,” you say. It is if you are Cingular, and you handle a few billion messages like this each quarter.
… [I] assumed that I would be able to install iChat myself. Or better still Adium, which supports AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Jabber. But I will not be able to do that because … it will not be possible to install applications on the iPhone without the approval of Cingular and Apple… But as a consumer, I have a choice. And for now the ability to install any application that I want leaves phones powered by Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux, RIM, and Palm OS with some major advantages over the iPhone.
Aside from the price discrimination (and business model) issue (see also Control & Networks), one thing that strikes me about a phone with a flat touch screen is simply how much less haptic feedback the user gets.
I know people who can text competently without looking at the screen, or indeed the phone at all. They rely on the feel of the buttons, the pattern of raised and lowered areas and the sensation as the button is pressed, to know whether or not the character has actually been entered, and which character it was (based on how many times the button is pressed). I would imagine they would be rather slow with the iPhone.
Karel Donk has some intriguing thoughts on ‘maximising the upside’ of life, by reducing dependence on other people, status and possessions, so that there is less to lose:
So one of the important things in life is to be as independent as possible and rely on very few things. After all, when it comes down to it, the only thing you can really and always depend on in life is yourself. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t want a lot of things in life. Want and have as much as you like, but require as little as possible. This is the simple rule you can use to guide you in making decisions about what you want to depend on in life.
Interestingly, he also hits on the ‘architectures of control’ issue, briefly:
Today’s world, and indeed for a very very long time now, is structured in such a way where people are directed, if not forced, to become dependent. Dependent on the system, or dependent on others. When you do enough research, you will find that this is all by design. I won’t go into details in this post, but certainly will in the future. For now it’s enough to note that this is by design. The reason why things are set up in this way is of course to be able to control people and limit their freedoms. When people depend on you, you can manipulate them into behaving the way you want. Because they depend on you, they have little choice but to go along with anything you say because they fear losing what they get from you. By definition if someone depends on someone else, or something else, that person has something to lose.
I’m looking forward to reading Karel’s future thoughts on this. Creating dependence, or at least creating a need/desire/requirement to consume more, is a fair characterisation of many architectures of control we’ve looked at on this site, from printer cartridge sneakiness to outright chemical addiction; whether a simple razor-blade model (you need to buy more of this, because it’s the only thing that fits) or something more sinister, Karel is right: the common thread is dependence.
To a large extent, I think this is why education is so important. If we understand the systems around us, technical, political and cultural, we are able to make (better) decisions for ourselves. If, however, we ‘leave it up to others who understand all that stuff’, we become dependent on them.
Fullfeeds.com is “a petition against intentionally disabled feeds”:
Isn’t RSS about convenience? Wouldn’t you prefer to see entire texts in your feeds, rather than just summaries? Support the cause, sign the petition below.
While I’ve signed the petition, I’m not sure to what extent partial feeds are really deliberately used to drive subscribers to view the full post in its original context (and hence see the advertising), which would imply similar reasoning to splitting up articles to increase page views and forcing users to click through multiple ad pages to reach the file they want to download.
Certainly some bloggers will be using partial feeds for this reason, but equally, a lot of people who offer their feeds in a truncated format are perhaps doing so because their posts are longer/more involved and may seem ‘intimidating’ if displayed in full in a feed reader, especially if seen in a river of much shorter news items from other blogs - just as newspapers and magazines tend to have longer feature articles towards the middle and the second half, and shorter stories near the start.
There may also be plenty of bloggers who have simply not thought about the effect offering only partial feeds has. I know that I’m much less likely to read a post which is truncated when I come across it in Bloglines, simply because I can’t immediately see how long the post is, and hence how many minutes I’ll need to allocate in order to read and understand it fully (that makes it sound like I otherwise plan my time well, which is not true!).
So, although partial feeds can be an ‘architecture of control’ if used deliberately for forcing full views, I can’t believe that too many bloggers who actually use feed readers themselves would do it for that reason, because they must realise how annoying it can be.
Kevin Gamble and Stuart Brown have some interesting thoughts on this.
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