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January 2004: Social Exclusion, Language and ITKey terms definedCommunities ¦ Compression ¦ Convergence ¦ Digitisation CommunitiesPoliticians and policy makers are currently very keen on supporting communities with funding, policy initiatives and so on. We are told that the mentally ill need "care in the community". But what does this word mean? When do disparate people and families become a community? The concept becomes clearer when one looks at the etymology of the word. The root is communis, Latin for "common" or "shared". When one observes the obvious (but often unappreciated) link to the word communication, it can be seen that community, like communication, is based on ideas of sharing. In his excellent book Deep Citizenship, Paul B. Clarke observes that members of a community are joined by what they share. Not just geographical proximity, although this can be one link; some communities are geographically dispersed. Communities also share other things such as symbols, memories or histories. They can face collective threats, or undertake collective action. Whether the modish term "virtual community" has any substance is a complex question: and one we hope to cover in a future issue of Tangentium. One should also note that the idea of community can be used to exclude as well as include. Sometimes people are told they are members of a community whether they feel like being or not (the "gay community", for instance). Some declare themselves to speak on behalf of a community without necessarily having a formal mandate to do so. When investigating particular communities, one should always ask how the term "community" itself is being appealed to. CompressionCompression is frequently encountered in computing in a technical sense. A notable example is image compression. File formats such as the bitmap (*.bmp) record colour information about each individual pixel. This enables images to be reproduced with great accuracy but for certain applications - particularly if that information has to be transmitted across the WWW - this is inefficient. If, say, there are 30 pixels in a row all of the same colour, why repeat the information 30 times? Better to just store two numbers: one for the colour, and one for the number of times it is repeated. This dramatically reduces the required number of bytes. Though file compression algorithms are more complex than this, this is basically how compressed image file formats such as *.gif and *.jpg work. The basic concept is also used in other file formats such as *.zip. However, as with the "Reader's Digest"-style compression of a book, information that has been removed is not always replaceable. Compression invariably reduces quality and depth. There is also only so much information that can be removed. Text message addicts would probably recognise I lv U as a term of endearment but remove any one of the remaining four letters and the message becomes ambiguous at best, meaningless at worst. Problems of reconstruction may therefore arise. This links in to the problems mentioned by Kevin Carey in this month's feature essay: how does one know what has been taken out of a summary, if one does not have access to the source text? What was redundancy to the summariser may have been important information to another reader. Any map, model or simulation is a compression of reality. Ordnance Survey maps can be things of beauty, and enable one to gain an excellent appreciation of the shape of a landscape, but can say very little about (for example) the architectural quality of buildings. Academics have to try and compress a course of study into a few examination questions; students' answers to these are themselves compressed into grades. Later, these same students have to try and compress themselves into curricula vitae for their putative employers. Always, the full picture will be lost. What we choose to keep and what we choose to obscure via compression is a value judgment; the computing (or other) techniques by which we actually perform the compression will, like all other techniques, will reflect the value judgments which underpin them, for all that we might like to think they are value-free. ConvergenceThe coming together of different technologies, principally communications media. As late as the 1970s, communications technologies remained separate. There were radio shows, TV shows, films, rock concerts, plays and so on, and the techniques used to stage each, and the values involved in appreciating each, were distinct. If one wanted to move from one medium to another one needed different equipment, and also a different approach to one's work (think about how film versions of plays are usually "opened out" from one set). At around this time, however, provoked by technical developments such as digitisation, the boundaries between some of these technologies began to dissolve. At a trivial level, it meant that performances or other events began to turn up in different media from the original: films or rock concerts broadcast on TV, for example. More significantly, this provoked the creation of a media industry which deployed "cross-media" strategies to promote its products. Publicising the release of a new film, for example, takes place across virtually all media simultaneously - trailers in cinemas remain, but are now accompanied by web sites, publicity in magazines and newspapers, mobile phone alerts, billboard advertising, etcetera. Sometimes it is hard to say in which medium a particular message exists at all. Music is as likely to be delivered via the Web as via record shops: digital radio can be received by televisions. All this is an example of the "slipperiness" of digitised information, due to its innate construction as information translatable into any medium, and like other such consequences, potentially impacts on our ideas of intellectual property. DigitisationIn a technical sense this commonly means "the reduction of information to binary digits". The digits 0 and 1 are all that computers really understand (representing as they do the absence or presence of current in a circuit). Simply due to the speed of modern computers, however, 0 and 1 can between them cope with a great many forms of information, starting with numbers and ascending through text, still images, sounds, moving images and indeed just about anything else. It is because these media are reduced to a common form that there has been such a convergence of communications technologies in recent years. Digital music, television and so on can easily cross the boundaries which separated media from one another when all were in analogue form (media such as vinyl, videotape and "old" radio and TV). However, "digitisation" has also become a byword for "development into an information society". Here it should come attached with all the health warnings implicit with that idea: society may be using digital information more and more, but some things will never be reducible to 0 and 1: food, for a start. The trick is to see which aspects of society may be "digitisable", and what the consequences might be if we try and digitise those things which are better left untouched. Hypertext"Hypertext" is a term like "poetry" - difficult to define exactly, but people tend to recognise it when they see it. Or at least, they recognise a limited form of it. Despite the term's frequent use, particularly when talking about the WWW, it may be that we have not yet seen genuine hypertext - nor ever will. Invention of the term is usually credited to Ted Nelson, and he built on ideas developed by Vannevar Bush in his prescient essay, As We May Think. Bush pointed out that the human mind classified information not in hierarchical fashion, but by association: forming links between ideas (thus the concept of "trains of thought"). Building these links was a whole new layer of authorship. "Ordinary" text, designed to be read from start to finish in a linear fashion, did not reflect this. Hypertext, on the other hand, was not designed to be read in a linear fashion. Rather, one could insert associations for readers to follow, as I have done twice towards the beginning of the paragraph. The reader can "leap out" of the linear progression through the text and follow the reference. This form of association is now commonplace in the WWW and indeed other electronic texts such as Word documents. Why, though, do we suggest this remains a limited application of hypertext? Firstly because the creation of associations between documents depends on the author rather than the reader. There is no guarantee that the author's intention will correspond with his/her readers'. Second, there is no reciprocity in the WWW: a link is usually only one-way. Meyrowitz (see his essay in James Nyce and Philip Khan (eds.), From Memex to Hypertext, 1992, Boston, Academic Press) calls reciprocal linking like this warm links. He also suggests the next and ultimate stage of hypertext, the hot link, where changes in a source text would "reverberate" through cyberspace, updating all documents associated with that text. Think of how changing a value in the cell of a spreadsheet causes changes to all other values which are linked to it. A hot link would reflect this, but for text (and ideas) rather than numbers. Whether any of this is compatible with intellectual property and copyright remains to be seen. Nor should hypertext be seen as an excuse to abandon narrative in writing, whether the narrative of a story or of an academic argument. Too many bad pieces of writing have attempted to approximate hypertext in unsatisfactory media: the results are at best fragmented, at worst incoherent. Many of these difficulties come about because of the factors mentioned at the start of this defintion: that hypertext is very difficult to define accurately, however deeply one reads the increasing amount of thought devoted to it and its consequences. Intellectual PropertyParticipationOften, "participation" is used to mean "inclusion in a system" - e.g. [widening] "participation" in education. True participation in education would, however, mean the ability to participate in the creation of the teaching policy and learning environment of one's institution and of national education policy as a whole. This is the real essence of participation - as a political act. Participation in political life was one of the pillars of Athenian democracy. In the famous Funeral Oration, Pericles declared (although the text was probably written after the fact, by Thucydides) that an Athenian who did not participate in democratic life "was not minding his own business... [but] had no business [in Athens] at all". Despite certain exclusions (notably women), Athens was a true democracy in that there was no conceivable division between people and state. It was not a matter of citizens selecting those who governed them: they were the government. Active participation in political life was therefore the mark of a good citizen. However, later democratic theorists seemed more concerned with limiting the ability of the citzenry, or "mob", to participate in government. Liberal democrats such as James Madison sought institutional checks and balances on participation. Partly this was to limit the power of rulers, true: but there was a noticeable undercurrent of fear when considering the mass of the populace. "Rational" theorists such as Schumpeter went so far as to suggest that the ability of the masses to actively participate in politics be severely constrained; others at least observed that "apathy" was a good thing as it contributed to stability. Only in the late 1960s did participation regain credibility in theoretical debates. Defining what one means by participation remains tricky, however. Voting is clearly a form of political participation, but very limited. Membership of campaigning organisations (Greenpeace, say) might also be considered political action, but is one not just paying others to do one's politics? At the other end of the scale there are those who would consider direct action (protest marches, occupation of development sites, etc.) as pure political participation: but others who would see these actions as entirely undemocratic, distant as they are from the "proper channels" of politics. As with many of these definitions, there is not always common ground to be found between different interpretations of the term. It does at least seem clear that removing the ability of certain groups (racial or sexual minorities, for instance) to participate, even in a limited way, in the construction of their own lives and the political decisions which surround them, is a firm indicator of oppression. Whether groups such as this, or "ordinary" citizens, have the desire to take advantage of their ability to participate in politics is a more difficult question. | |