A few videos to spark (or reinforce) your interest. First, (via Biella) a two-part series from an event by the Meme Factory, from March 24th of this year, in which they give a ~45 minute overview of internet memes. (Warning: much of the content may be NSFW – remember the Internet is Serious Business).

Part One:

Part Two:

Second, a Berkman Luncheon Series presentation by Tim Hwang (ROFLCon founder) titled “The LOLCat-hedral and the Bizarre: A Memescape Manifesto.”

Although I wasn’t able to make this Berkman luncheon, I did see Tim give a similar talk at SXSW interactive this year, which unfortunately isn’t yet one of the ones they’ve posted audio or video from. During the question and answer period of that talk, an audience member commented on the new circulation of old memes (e.g. 25 things about me no one knows) on Facebook, and noted that some people with less context for the word “Meme” were interpreting it as “me-me” (as in, these things are all about me).

In the meanwhile, here’s Chris presenting at a Berkman Luncheon Series event on June 17th, 2008:

The Berkman description:

A discussion of the recently published book, Two Bits, which will focus on the meaning and cultural significance of Free Software, its history and the manner in which it has been “modulated” into domains both close to and far from software and networks. Topics for discussion include anthropological approaches to studying distributed phenomena, the historical analysis of Free Software and the use of Free Software practices in education, science, music and culture generally.

Unfortunately I was out of town – in Chicago for Web Content 2008 – and unable to attend in person. Nice to see Benjamin Mako Hill, danah boyd, and Ethan Zuckerman (and, I’m sure, others who I don’t recognize by sight but would know by name and reputation) in the question and answer segment. That’s the kind of crowd you’ll really only get at a Berkman event.

Here are my rough notes from the talk, which are really more an outline of the topics discussed than what Chris has to say about them – for that you’ll have to watch.

Overview of the book:
I. Ethnographic and Theoretical Introduction: Hackers, Geeks, and Recursive Publics
II. Analytic History of Free Software – Five Practices which make Free Software
III. Modulations of those practices into other domains

Part One:
The important thing is the subtitle – the cultural significance of free software.
What would it mean to do an anthropology of free software?

Ability to participate in building the internet – recursive publics: the thing that draws them together is the thing they are building in common.

Part Two:
Breaking Free software into 5 practices / domains.

1. fermenting a movement
2. sharing source code
3. defining an open infrastructure
4. writing copyleft licenses
5. coordinating collaboration

Part Three: Modulations, carrying “free software” into non-software domains

College Textbooks – Connexions (collaborative textbook creation using creative commons licenses). (At Rice University)

Biology: BiOS, Registry of Standard Biological Parts, patent Lens, open source nanotechnology

Bio Nano: ATCC (Global Bioresource Center)

Difficulty of patents, not just copyright, in some of these other domains.

—

It’s interesting to me how much Chris focuses on the moment in 1998 when “Free Software” and “Open Source” underwent a decisive split, and how the distinction between the two plays out in the “Modulations” section. What difference does it make if the modulations are actually versions of “open source” in other domains rather than “free software” in other domains?

Of course, the book isn’t subtitled “The Cultural Significance of Open Source,” so one assumes the focus is more on the free software version – which focuses more specifically on copyleft, and ensuring (some might say requiring) freedom for downstream users – but when my copy finally arrives I’ll post some further discussion about what impact those differences might have. Would the more traditionally business friendly “open source” approach have made modulation into other domains easier, but perhaps less impactful?

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?

There’s Jonathan Zittrain‘s new book, The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. (In addition to buying a print copy, you can download the pdf version under creative commons license). Presenting on that book, there’s video of Zittrain at Princeton on March 26th, at ISOC-NY on April 11th, and at the Berkman Center the following week. You can also read and comment on the book.

Finally, via Biella Coleman I found this fascinating video from an event April 16th (between the above two videos), from a meeting of the NY Chapter of the Internet Society, talking about “The Futures of the Internet.” The discussion was sponsored by the NYU Information Law Institute, Free Culture @ NYU, and ISOC-NY. (Shirky’s presentation is on the same cognitive surplus theme from his web 2.0 expo keynote I recently blogged about).

The Panelists:

• Clay Shirky, Author: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Adjunct Professor, NYU ITP
• Tim Wu, Author: Who Controls The Internet?, Professor, Columbia Law School
• Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome
• Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia and Wikia
• Jonathan Zittrain, Author: The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It, Professor, Oxford University; Visiting Professor, NYU Law,

It’s a lengthy video (1 hour 30 minutes), so I recommend downloading a version and getting comfortable to watch it. But if you’re interested in generativity, free culture, online communities, geek culture, mass collaboration, and the larger questions of the internet-as-public-sphere, it’s well worth it.

Once you’ve watched it, go read Biella’s blog post which raises the question she also asked in the video about the depth of political consciousness in “geek culture” generally and free software communities like Debian in particular, as well as the comment thread following it.

I can’t help but relate the discussion also to ROFLCon, and what I perceived as an unfortunate lack of critical and political framing to the discussion there (with some notable exceptions). Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of LOLCats and potentially subversive power of humor. But what kind of culture do we hope we’re collectively creating on the ‘net?

One attraction of the internet can be how unlike the offline world it is – but as the line between online communities and “real world” communities blurs (as more and more offline groups and communities become digitally enabled, and more and more online communities develop offline manifestations) do we risk losing the generative freedom the internet has made possible in the last decade?

As we move in the direction of cloud-based and hosted computing platforms like Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, or even the Facebook API and Open Social, do we put at risk the basic freedoms the FSF is organized to fight in support of?

There’s a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln that the best way to predict the future is to create it – so what are we collectively doing to create the future of the internet that preserves its progressive and liberational aspects?

(Photo by kevingc on flickr, creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license).

See my rambling notes below:

He basically argued (riffing on many themes from Everything is Miscellaneous) that the internet has changed the nature of fame – that in the pre-internet, mass communications era, fame was incredibly scarce, and drew it’s power from scarcity – very few people could make someone famous, and the number of ways to become famous was very small.

This created a certain kind of fame we call celebrity, along with a bunch of notions of what that means.

But thanks to the internet, we are no longer are interested in the inhuman, they’re-not-like-us-they’re-so-different famous – we’re looking for real, homespun, authentic, not separate, one of us kind of famous.

Examples:

Mahir I kiss you. 1999. *we* made him famous. Not orchestrated by any media conglomerate. (Some people may be condescending here, some not).

Dancing hamsters.

Star wars light sabre kid. (Here there’s definitely condescension, not us at our finest – we’re laughing at him).

These are all things we made famous.

We’ve invented a way to scale conversation – loosing a lot, gaining some. Conversation will fill every vacuum.

Everyone now is famous to 15 people.

We know how fame works in a time of scarcity but not in a time of abundance – now that everyone can recommend media, not just famous people, what does famous look like?

There are more people who are sortof famous – we’re lengthening out the elbow in the power-curve graph of fame – not exactly a long tail, but a thicker elbow and a somewhat thicker tail. More complex, more continuum, more stops along the way between famous and unknown. [My addition - what Kathy Sierra might call a high resolution experience of fame].

The obama bollywood remix.

The “a thousand true fans” concept – basically fame on line softens the power curve in the direction of a continuum.

We’re maing people famous in lots of new ways – one to a few, one to a lot, anonymous fame, pseudonymous fame, mimicing, mocking, mimocking? evanescent, persistant, stupid brilliant mean knowing polished confused confusing

Fame on the internet is human. It’s messy and complicated, just like us.

This is a benefit not only for the steady stream of students (undergrad and graduate) and recent graduates all those colleges and universities pump into the workforce regularly, but also because of the broader institutions they support.

My two favorite examples this year are the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. (As an alumnus of neither Harvard nor MIT, I can recommend both impartially).

Somewhat less well-known in tech circles than the Media Lab, the Comparative Media Studies program practices “applied humanism”:

The . . . program is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. Both our graduate and undergraduate programs encourage the bridging of theory and practice, as much through course work as through participation in faculty and independent research projects.

Among the projects that the MIT CMS program currently sponsors / hosts:

• The Convergence Culture Consortium
• Learning Games to Go
• Metamedia
• Project New Media Literacies
• Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
• MIT Center for Future Civic Media

In addition, check out their Faculty, Theses, Publications, and subscribe to their Events Calendar and News Feed, which often includes podcasts of various events.

This week (Nov. 16th and 17th, 2007), the Convergence Culture Consortium will be hosting the Futures of Entertainment II conference, which (true to their mission):

brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations, and mobile platform development.

Check out the full conference schedule for more detail on speakers and subjects. I will be attending and hopefully blogging about much of the conference – though those posts may not appear until the following week due to some vacation time which will take me offline.

Just up the Charles in Harvard Square, the Berkman center focuses on “Internet & Society” in the broad context of the Harvard Law School.

To get a sense of the breadth and depth of the center, just look at:

• The projects linked from their home page, including the Center for Citizen Media, the Citizen Media Law project, the Digital Natives project, and the Internet and Democracy Project, among others)
• Their faculty and fellows, including Yochai Benkler, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, danah boyd, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jimmy Wales, and David Weinberger, and that’s just grabbing the names that immediately jump out to me, not to suggest all the others aren’t equally prominent or doing equally fascinating and worthwhile work.

Also be sure to check out (and subscribe to) MediaBerkman, which podcasts / vodcasts many Berkman sponsored events for those not able to make it to Cambridge in person.