YouTube’s Online Symphony Orchestra

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I’m really excited about YouTube’s new project: an online symphony orchestra! Composer Tan Dun has written an Internet Symphony meant to be played by all the usual orchestra instruments – and any other instruments that participants want to play. It will be collaboratively performed online. You can upload sheet music, watch masterclasses on your instrument from London Symphony Orchestra players, get some video help from Tan Dun as conductor, and then upload audition videos. Chosen performers will play in the flesh at Carnegie Hall.

It is almost (but not quite) enough to make me want to bring my violin out of hibernation.

Tales of the Village Fool

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Here in Quebec, a new Christmas film just came out. Called Babine, it is based on the stories told by a very famous storyteller (yes, this is a culture where traditional storytellers can become big stars). The stories are a mix of archetypal myths, local legends, and melodrama and are set in a real village, but in a imaginary time. The main character is the village fool, who is wrongly accused of burning down the village church. Other characters include the woman who has been pregnant for twenty years, the farmer who raises flies, the Old Priest and the New Priest (the villain).

What I find so interesting about the film and the stories (some of which I have heard) is that they are so clearly ways of imagining an ideal (time-out-of-time) local world. Quebec has worked very explicity towards greater openness, and twoards promoting immigration. As in many places, this has created tensions around who is a Quebecer and what Quebec culture means. But as much as Babine explicitly imagines a settled, French-Catholic interpretation of what is Quebec by focusing on the village and church as opposed to the hunting camp or river (and certainly not to the Algonquin village), it also does some less insidious cultural work. This kind of story, where grand myths play out in a real local place, helps people re-imagine belonging to somewhere in particular. In a post-modern reality of balancing multiple identities, it provides a simple pre-modern idea of belonging to where you are. Furthermore, it suggests that great human dramas and inspirations come from those places, and belong to them even as they develop universal themes.

Of course many people don’t want to go and live in villages. And people who live in villages are also connected to other people in many places, telling stories and making myths and negotiating complexity. Quebec and Canada are more diverse and urbanized than ever, with all the complexity and promise that that implies. But as the trope of the network society loses its luster amid financial collapse and postmodern ennui, films and stories like Babine are imagining the local as the place to belong. We should attend to the promise – and pitfalls – of this cultural turn.

Montreal Book-blog: from John Ralston Saul to Net Neutrality

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I’m holed up in icy Montreal waiting for a visa from the UK home office. To keep myself occupied, I thought of blogging every day about what (and why) I’m reading. So here’s the first installment. If the weather keeps up like this, there could be many more – at least until I get to go home!

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I devoured two John Ralston Saul books this week: The Collapse of Globalism, and A Fair Country: Telling truths about Canada. These could be read sequentially: after outlining how globalism fails, Ralston Saul presents a solution in his address to Canada’s elites. Basically, the premise (oh so prescient) is this: the system of globalism attempted to reduce society to economic terms, and in doing so, applied market logics so broadly that they ceased to be useful. The principle of governance, so essential to democracy, was replaced with the principle of management. Ralston Saul traces these principles, and the broader ideology of globalism, through phenomena such as trade agreements, changes in intellectual property laws, and the privatizing of the public sector. He concludes by describing a potential of a return to nation-states, but notes that we should still be wary of “negative nationalism.”

The Collapse of Globalism brings together so many of the observable consequences of globalism that it would be tempting to say that it anticipates the current correction financial systems (which is also a crisis in governance and regulation) and the ensuing failure of trust in these systems and regulations. But it doesn’t, really. Instead it outlines in broad terms some of the things that I’ve observed in more focused situations: frustration with the “it’s out of our hands” market ideology of globalism can provoke an identification with a more contained identity. This could be national, local, or cultural. In its negative form, such small-scale identifications confound our relationships with the other (Ralston Saul talks a lot about the other) and intensify conflict. Positive nationalism, on the other hand, reflects “a renewed and growing desire to build our societies at all levels with our own hands – that is, to find ways to be involved”.

This is just one resonance in this book with what I’ve observed happening in grassroots (and not-so-grassroots) groups. In response to a failing system, we can be remarkably ingenious in developing something better – if we build on our strengths. This is exactly what Ralston Saul addresses in his next book, where he argues that Canada has been neglecting its third founding pillar – the First Nations. The result of this has been the development of a colonial mindset and the divestment of many of the country’s resources through increased foreign ownership. He entreats Canada’s elite (that would be you) to break out of complacency, and restore the sense of this country as a place where negotiation is valued over quick solutions, and where the founding principles of Peace, Welfare, and Good Government return.

You’d like to know how? Well, one good way would be to lobby the CRTC to stop Internet throttling. In a clear example of short-sighted management/market ideologies, Bell Canada has appealed for the right to continue to throttle P2P applications on its network, even as it begins to prioritize its own audio and video content. SaveOurNet.Ca has more information.

Canada already has the most consolidated media companies in the world. What’s more, its status as an internet leader is in sharp decline. Why? Because the telecom companies don’t want to invest in delivering the “last mile” of connectivity to homes and businesses. Their construction ends at the neighbourhood loop level. All the more reason for muncipalities/communities/neighbourhoods to invest in local networks.

Whew! I got all the way from globalism and Ralston Saul back to local broadband. I must say, it’s been fun.

Slow Food meets Community Broadband

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Michael Pollan’s open letter to the next American president suggests that the North American industrial food production system should return to regionalism, year-round planting, and small farms.

Pollan has created a framework for local farming and food distribution that advocates for “small is beautiful” local agriculture (including a proposed White House Victory Garden) that avoids simply assuming that local food or small scale distribution is inherently better. There is no use, he argues, for calling for local distribution of more diverse crops if grain elevators will only accept corn and soy. A return to localism should happen because it is economically and socially viable, and would help the US disconnect food production from a dependence on foreign oil.

Many people I know from CWN and media reform advocacy would make a similar argument about the necessity for a return to localism in communications ownership. There are some parallels between the two areas: local media can nourish geographically close areas by presenting local stories, distributing local information, and creating opportunities for people living close to each other to learn about one another. Local evening newscasts on a broadcast television channel provided skilled employment as well as local information: but as media ownership consolidated, many local newscasts have been eliminated. Local radio funding has been cut too, as North American stations invest in satellite radio

So should we have a local internet? In the 1990s the answer to this question would have been yes, and the strategy the creation of community networks, which were the first ways for people without university affiliations to get online. These FreeNets, including the National Capital FreeNet in Ottawa, loaded up the front ends of their systems with local information, but what they did best was get people to go online . . .where . . . they met a lot of people who didn’t live in their local areas.

Then researchers started talking about the internet as a global utopia – Manuel Castells famously claimed that we were leaving behind a “space of places” and moving into a “space of flows.” Research in “virtual communities” blossomed. It seemed that a local internet was mostly a portal to a global world, and that communities and social networks would become dis-integrated from the local. The emotional argument might go this way: as we eat delicious berries out of season, trucked across the country, we watch YouTube videos instead of the local news.

But the internet is a local infrastructure: the local loop controls the speed of access to broadband. Someone must invest in this, and here is where community networking (reinvented as community wireless networking) comes in: WiFi is cheap, and local people can thus own the last mile, whether through their governments or through other non-profit or community organizations. The question is, should they? Unlike food, digital communications don’t absorb energy as they travel between places, and people maintain relationships with people from all over the world, as well as getting access to media from all over the world.

But people still live in places, and their lives are influenced by local policies, cultures, and contexts – not to mention media habits. My thesis case studies suggest that people most often use local WiFi networks to get their e-mail and to check the weather or the local news. It is impossible to return to a media world in which each small town has no idea of the big world issues. Finance, culture, and information flow too smoothly for this, and the disadvantages of being disconnected from this flow are still too great. Still, I believe that it is very likely that the next ten years will see us travel less, get our food from closer to where we live, and spend more time in local areas. If anything, this supports local investment in both communication infrastructure and in local media.

Local ownership and control of communications infrastructure can ensure that towns, cities, or neighbourhoods are not left out of the continuing global exchange of information. However, using community networks just to get people online is not the whole story – it is like investing in grain elevators for only one type of crop. If a more local world is coming (and it is, based on previous economic downturns), governments and organizations also need to invest in community media that will inspire local talent, provide employment, and help culture, creativity and innovation to strengthen.

Loose Ends – and Milestones

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I just moved 2.34 cubic metres of stuff, mostly books, into the London house from an enormous freight truck. The stuff had been riding on the ocean for a couple of weeks, and its arrival makes me feel so much less divided, wrapping up two years of trans-Altantic commuting. Home is where your stuff is, I guess. I don’t know how much I’ll unpack though – in a few weeks I start at the OII and after viewing every property on the market, I finally found a flat I’ll share during the week with new colleague/old friend Bernie Hogan. At least the commute is getting shorter . . .

But before the Montreal phase of my life wraps up, there’s one more loose end (or is it a milestone?):

Doctoral Thesis Defence

Name: Alison Powell

Title: Co-productions of Technology, Culture and Policy in North American’s Community Wireless Networking Movement

Date: Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Time: 2:00 pm

Room: H – 760 (SGW)

Examining Committee:

TBA, Chair
Dr. L. Shade (Communication Studies), Supervisor
Dr. B. Simon (Sociology & Anthropology)
Dr. K. Sawchuk (Communication Studies)
Dr. P-L. Harvey (Communication, UQAM)
External Examiner:

Dr. Martin Hand
Department of Sociology
Queen’s University

All are welcome to attend

End of an Era

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I’m about to pack up my desk. For four years (almost to the day) this apartment has been the place I’ve returned to, to entertain, relax – and work. Even when I’ve been away for long periods, the same view out my office window has been waiting for me when I return. It seems somehow fitting that the first thing I unpacked when I moved here was my desk, and now it will be the last thing to be dismantled.

Of course I’m a “mobile worker.” After all, my academic work grew out of an interest in working in places other than homes and offices. I’ve hauled my laptop downtown, to the library, across the ocean, and into the living room. I’ve tried to find community in cafés, bars, and libraries, as well as in the long hallways of university departments. But this place seems to invite writing and thinking, even now that the files are on servers and the books are in boxes.

I’ll be unpacking the boxes in another home office with another view (these days, of the blooming lilies I planted in a fit of procrastination in January). But also, for the first time in a long time, I’ll also be working in an office. As a visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, I’ll have to leave my cozy home office three days a week and go sit in a room with other people. It’s an exciting proposition, after the isolation of writing.

Even more exciting (and terrifying) is the whole matter of moving to a new country permanently rather than temporarily. No more Montreal pied à terre. No more splitting time between a city I love and one that terrifies me. Time, perhaps, for a new kind of love affair, and a new kind of life.

For now, for the last little while that I can, I’ll be sitting here in my sunny home office, writing and thinking, looking outside at a wonderfully familiar view.

Thesis: Bite Size Version

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I can’t believe I am copyediting the last version of my PhD thesis! So many people have worked and played, participated, contributed, critiqued and otherwise walked along with me. Here’s the ‘official abstract’ – more coming soon once the blog interface is fixed.

Co-productions of Technology, Culture and Policy in North America�s Community Wireless Networking Movement

Alison Powell, July 3, 2008

This thesis investigates the visions and realities of community WiFi�s social and political impact from a communications studies perspective, examining how communication technology and social forms are co-produced and providing a communication studies perspective on the transformation of social visions of technology into technological, social, and policy realities. By following the development of local WiFi projects and the emergence of broader policy-oriented mobilizations, it assesses the real outcomes of socially and politically progressive visions about information and communication technologies (ICTs). The visions of advocates and developers suggest that community WiFi projects can inspire greater local democratic engagement, while the realities suggest a more subtle bridging of influence from community WiFi actors into policy development spheres. The thesis describes local WiFi networks in Montreal and Fredericton, NB, and the North American Community Wireless Networking (CWN) movement as it has unfolded between 2004 and 2007, arguing that its democratic visions of technology and their institutional realities have been integral to the politicization of computing technology over the last four decades. Throughout the thesis, WiFi radio technology, a means of networking computers and connecting them to the internet by using unlicensed radio spectrum, acts as an example of how a technology’s material form is co-produced along with its symbolic social and political significance.

Canada’s Net Neutrality Fight Begins

Michael Geist (via Steven) recently revealed that Bell Canada has been secretly throttling the wholesale bandwidth it sells to small ISPs. These small companies are supposed to be Bell’s competitors, but with their service limited, they are essentially playing by Bell’s rules. A map of reported slowdowns is being updated.

Now Bell is admitting that it limits all encrypted or P2P traffic in the afternoon and evening. Not only illegal P2P content will be slowed down, but legitimate access to secure sites and even CBC’s Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, or VPN remote access to an office after hours “will simply not work as fast” according to a spokesperson.

Meanwhile, US internet service provider Comcast has been legally obliged to stop throttling their customers. It’s Canada’s hour to step up and fight for the right to fair competition in our telecom industry, and fair access to the means of communication.

The NDP’s Charlie Angus has issued a statement calling on Industry Minister Jim Prentice to establish clear rules to limit interference by big companies like Bell. I’ll be writing to my MP about this – or you can file a complaint with the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services if your ISP is being throttled.

The terror of almost done

I am not writing here because: I am almost done a full thesis draft.

There is a terror in almost being done with a big piece of writing: because when we bring it into the world, it stands or falls on its own value. In my mind, my writing is perfect, complete, lucid. In fact, it is lumpen, awkward, sometimes unrefined.

The Open-source Boyfriend says, “you have to communicate it, and to communicate it you have to write it down. You can’t have someone halfway across the world read what you write and comment on it until it’s written.”

I know he’s right (write?). Release early, release often, they say. But I’m scared that the awful truth is that upon release, I have nothing to say!

Sticking points in the global flow

I went to the bank today, to cash a cheque. The cheque was written in US dollars which meant that I could not cash it directly: instead, two separate forms had to be filled and sent to the central bank office, where the cheque would be negotiated or sold for US currency. The whole matter would take one to two weeks, and likely involve several levels of bureaucracy for an amount that would buy me one decent pair of shoes. I experienced the same issue when trying to transfer money from Canada to the UK: for personal banking between two countries, paperwork and tax laws multiply to confusion. The thing is, I have three chequing accounts, in three countries. In the past year I have earned money in four different currencies. By all rights I should be one of the “network elites” moving fluidly around in the global space of flows (that’s Manuel Castells – 1996 and 2001). After all, international finance companies are transferring billions of dollars across the world every second in a network of operations constructed from transportation, information, and communication technologies.

But as I (and presumably others in this situation) find, the network flows are not always so easy to navigate at the personal level. Oh yes, we are mobile – but we can be suddenly made immobile by bad weather, human error, mechanical breakdown, passport control, banking imbroglio. I wonder if other frequent travellers find, as I have, that multiplying one’s identity is easier than carrying a continuous self through the flow? So my addresses multiply to minimize transfers overseas, and each jurisdiction is likely unaware of my identity in the other. In many ways, this makes me painfully aware of where I live at any moment (for example, I’m quite incensed about the bad planning for cyclists in West London) and also ferociously interested in what’s going on elsewhere (I read much more Canadian news when living abroad).

Mimi Scheller thinks that mobility and democracy don’t recombine in a network or flow. She argues that things like mobile people and communication devices make up more of a gel, where some movements between public and private are smooth, and others are held in place and space. Public life doesn’t suddenly appear in “official” public space: instead it emerges around and through and alongside people’s movements through all kinds of spaces and in all kinds of places.

I think Scheller’s right about the gel – for individual people, the flows of mobility and capital don’t move smoothly. We keep getting caught in the sticky parts of the gel, where we are reminded of where we are and challenged to make the actions we take as citizens relevant. Castells’ main criticism of the network society is that it isolates the influence of actions in local places. But if what connects us is not a rigid network but a slippery gel, maybe we can determine a way to connect local actions to global events. For those of us with different lives in different places, maybe this means thinking about the connections, not the barriers, between these spaces and places.