Intellectual Property in the hive mind, music industry and how it all relates to education

This is an attempt to draw together a number of ideas I've been having about a number of subjects which may seem unrelated, but which I think actually have something in common. (Its also the second stab at writing it as ironically, given that much of it relates to the Internet as an extended joint memory, I managed to write the whole thing and then lose it when I tried to post it having forgotten to save as I went along. On this 2nd writing, I'm not sure I've linked the concepts as well or articulated the issues for education as well either - but tough. Its close enough and I'm fed up with trying to articulate it now for a while at least ;)

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The Internet is a wonderful tool for bringing people together. Social networking tools such as Facebook dominate many of the most visited sites on the web and almost every site includes a comments section. The number of ways we can interact with other people online grow and increase in complexity continually too. The Internet also remembers everything. This is both a good thing and a problem with much debate and effort currently looking for how to give it a way to forget the bad things (bad in this context can mean a lot of different things). Access to the Internet is also becoming both ubiquitous and universal. Putting these together is oft referred to as a manifestation of a Hive Mind. A kind of collective consciousness in which ideas spread as memes, where you can get answers to things you don't know yourself just by asking as someone somewhere is bound to know what you need. But it goes beyond a collective consciousness, it is also a collective memory. With a simple YouTube search, I can "remember" exactly what it was like (at least the visual/audio aspects) to witness the assassination of an american president who died before I was even born. I can "remember" what it is like to journey to the moon, including the entire dialogue of the Apollo 11 crew all the way there and back, including those parts not transmitted to earth. With music, with services such Spotify, I can "remember" a tune with perfect clarity on demand, wherever I am and at whatever time I choose. Let's take that last point first and imagine back what life would have been like before recorded music, before sheet music, before any technology had been invented to help share the essential transient nature of music. I focus here on music, but the principle applies to books, video, news etc just as well. At the time before any mechanism to record music, the only way to experience music "on demand" would be to remember it. Our memory is not perfect but it is quite effective. In that way, as soon as a piece of music is performed and experience by someone else, it is "owned" in some way by the listener since they can recall it later. The music gains a virtual existence in the mind which can not be controlled, or regulated by the originator. However, the wetware of our brain gives far from perfect recall; how many songs can you remember exactly, note perfect with all the words? A few maybe, but probably not many. So, as soon as technology came along which could augment that recollection process, it became highly valued. Sheet music (for those who can read it) could assist the accurate recollection of a piece of music - it can even be used to transmit that music to someone who has never heard the original performed. In that sense, it augments the individuals memory, but also their ability to sense things at a distance - both in time and space. Because of the value such technology brings, it was quickly highly rewarded and so became protected by law (which tends to be concerned with ensuring financial reward goes/stays where it is perceived it should be by those with power). This allowed the originator to gain reward not only from the initial performance, but from the transmission of the idea/music/etc through a medium other than direct experience. It also enabled/(required) 3rd parties to add value to this transmission process and they also gained reward from that process. Publishers of sheet music, shops who sold it and resellers all were able to gain a share of financial reward by adding value as the technology needed their help for it to work. This situation essentially continued as music became recorded and the fidelity of the transmission process improved. As each new technology came along which improved the fidelity of transmission, the value we attributed to the experience it granted us increased to, and as a result, it allowed greater accumulation of reward for those who could control the media, while those originating the memes could also (sometimes) gain greater reward too - but not necessarily. The media industries are just that - industries concerned with providing ad controlling a medium through which ideas are conveyed, making money from providing that medium. This is the old world, the world before the hive mind. ISPs (amongst others) provide the medium for the Internet, but completely disassociated from the content/ideas/memes being conveyed. Web sites such as FaceBook provide repositories for the memories/knowledge/ideas/memes, but as the things they hold are virtual, the ideas/concepts/memes can ebb and flow from one shore to another, endlessly duplicated and mutated in the process such that no one site can really be seen to "own" the content. Many services such as bittorrent even delegate responsibility for the storage down to the collective level. There are no barriers to bits and bytes moving wherever they are needed. Some "old media" are attempting to coral the content they seek to control behind pay walls, but that is a form of censorship, and as the saying goes, the Internet sees censorship as damage and just routes around it. In the case of paywalls, people who do have access act as vectors for the bits and bytes to leak out. They don't have to intentionally do so, but by sharing the thoughts and ideas they have around that "protected" content, it leaks. Essentially then, the Internet now provides a shared consciousness infrastructure such that what is in my mind can flow through it freely to your mind as you read this without the need for any moderation or "added value" beyond the infrastructure itself. Old media industries which fail to recognise this are quickly seeing the revenue streams on which they relied evaporating, and will continue to do so unless they reinvent themselves as "content creation industries" rather than media industries. The media to transmit ideas is no longer scarce or valued, it is becoming ubiquitous and universal, and taken for granted. Currently, the "music industry" (read: music media industry) continues to bemoan the "losses" they feel they are suffering due to piracy. In fact, what has happened is that everyone can now transmit music with incredible fidelity and the "added value" they used to rely on being valued and hence gratefully rewarded for is now essentially unnecessary. The barriers between an artist creating music and being able to share it with the world is now essentially nil. As an example, I've been creating lots of tunes recently and I've been able to put them online (through Soundcloud) and share them with the world for free. Now, one might feel the music I've created is awful - that's fine, I'm not that keen on it myself ;) and I certainly wouldn't pay for it or expect anyone else to pay for it either - I might think music being created by recognised artists is also awful too. The point though is artists can now share their works easily without the need for a media industry to mediate the exchange. Now, producing (quality) music can be expensive still. Studio time, engineers, equipment hire, travel expenses and 1,001 other things all cost money, and artists who produce expensive music will need a way to recoup those costs if their efforts are to be sustainable - but they can no longer rely on rewards accumulated through the transmission of their work to do this as that process is no longer valued. The film industry (currently) can still rely on accumulating revenue from the transmission process as people still value attending the cinema as a "value added experience", but the revenue from content for consumption in the home is certainly under threat as the speed of the Internet connections and infrastructure make the delivery of "content on demand" by using old technology of physically shipping media around the world much less valued (or by fewer people at least so far). Old media companies that fail to recognise this fundamental shift in the balance of where people attribute value will increasingly struggle. It is only by shifting their business models to be content creation industries seeking renumeration through adding value in other ways that they can continue. Now, how does all this relate to education? Historically, (bad) education has been about cramming young minds full of facts with the hope that wisdom will spontaneously emerge. Good education has always been about empowering people with a set of tools through which to see the world. In a world of the hive mind and "perfect recall", even of events which happened to other people in other places and at other times, the bad way of seeing education becomes even more obviously pointless. Clearly, there is still a need to provide some framework of basic "knowledge" with which to evaluate the collective knowledge of the hive mind, but the days of measuring someone's worth by their ability to recall facts has surely past. As Martin Bean said in his speech at ALT-C 2009, education needs to be about fostering the knowledge-able, not the knowledgable. Yet, much assessment in education is still based on the arbitrary recollection of facts/ideas from the limited local wetware available to us as individuals. In most exams, we cut people off from the hive mind and collective consciousness and then expect to assess their performance, when that environment is entirely alien, and akin to cutting off half of their brain. In a very real sense, our individuality has been partially subsumed within the hive mind, but we are also greatly augmented by it, which is why most of us willing engage with this technology. Most in education would now be incredulous if a teacher/professor insisted that students didn't use the Internet at all. Even in class, it is now common for students to be able to "check" things online, or to seek further clarification of points they may have missed, and many workplaces also now encourage, even expect, people to utilise the Internet to augment their knowledge when necessary. ...and yet, we still often assess students by artificially isolating them from the collective, despite this being unrealistic of the real world. Higher education in the UK is facing drastic changes to funding, in much the same way that the media industries are. Where HEIs have historically been the medium through which individuals can access materials (lectures/books etc) and then gain accreditation, much content is now available "for free" on the Internet (iTunesU etc) and the private sector is almost certainly going to provide flexible ways for students to gain accreditation of their skills/knowledge-ability. The business model on which UK HEI is based will need drastic and rapid re-invention if they are going to survive as the private sector is certainly going to seize any niches it can, which may otherwise leave existing HEIs as untenable. Content creation will be done by the best in the world and available for free. Assessment will be based on demonstrating real world benefit - which will mean demonstrating being knowledge-able, and so unlikely to be accurately assessed using exams or other artificial means of isolating students from the hive mind/collective consciousness. Revenue will be gained by demonstrating some other added value. That could be the study environment itself (libraries open 24/7), access to content behind pay walls (since the leaks are imperfect), access to experts directly (to provide a much greater augmentation of the individuals abilities by a more direct connection in the hive mind...perhaps with a commitment to provide this after graduation?)...who knows. Market forces will certainly influence where added services are valued, but sitting in a darkened room listening to an expert talk quite possibly won't be highly valued when the same content is available on demand provided by the worlds best presenters. So, any industry based on the value of the media for transmission of ideas/content/knowledge has been undermined by the Internet fostering a collective consciousness and memory. Any industry which fails to recognise that and resists it is doomed to fail. That goes for education as well as the traditional media industries. While that means difficult changing times for those industries, it is for the greater good of society as a whole. - Posted using BlogPress from mobile device