After much fuss about the song’s title (vs. its name, vs. what it’s called, vs. what it is), the Knight settles into a reflexive song about an encounter between an “aged aged man” and a White Knight-like interlocutor who can hardly listen to him. (John Tenniel’s illustration drafts the Mad Hatter to play the aged aged man.)

Repeatedly the reflected Knight demands to know how the aged aged man lives. In response, the genial codger gamely describes various money-making schemes (capturing sleeping butterflies for mutton-pies, selling them to sailors; setting a mountain stream on fire to produce hair products; working haddocks’ eyes into waistcoat buttons; digging for buttered rolls; liming twigs for crabs; searching grassy knolls for cab wheels) — but the Knight continually zones out. That may be because the Knight is himself caught up in a series of equally absurd but less commercial schemes (hiding green whiskers with a large fan; getting fat on batter; warding off rust on the Menai bridge (me-and-I: a bridge to nowhere) by boiling it in wine).

My favorite part of all this is how disjunction and obsession jangle about each other in the White Knight’s song: how the narrating Knight, never listening, pursues one steadfast inquiry:

“Who are you, aged man?” I said,
“and how is it you live?”
And his answer trickled through my head
Like water through a sieve.

…having no reply to give
To what the old man said,
I cried, “Come, tell me how you live!”
And thumped him on the head.

…I shook him well from side to side,
Until his face was blue:
“Come, tell me how you live,” I cried,
“And what it is you do!”

Who are you is tantamount to “how do you live,” which in turn is welded to “what is it you do.” And though nothing the aged aged man does or says seems to get through to his interviewer, or vice versa, the Knight will never forget “that old man I used to know,”

Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow,
Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
Whose face was very like a crow,
With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,
Who seemed distracted with his woe,
Who rocked his body to and fro,
And muttered mumblingly and low,
As if his mouth were full of dough,
Who snorted like a buffalo—
That summer evening, long ago,
A-sitting on a gate.’

It’s an infectious sentiment: having made little progress in understanding or relating to the White Knight, Alice also tags her encounter with him and his song as unforgettable: “Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again…”

The whole episode is drenched with anxiety, self-consciousness, and nostalgia: it’s a world in which solipsistic, distracted agents wish mightily to connect — over the question of what each other *does*. At the heart of this discourse is the notion of identity as defined by work, and the further suggestion that work cannot really be communicated, triggering a retreat to surfaces.

***

Flipbook on the iPhone, atop a physical representation of all the documentation and code commits of the project. Image from http://craigmod.com/.

It’s an anxiety that anyone who works on digital projects can relate to — especially in an academic environment, where the value of this kind of work is uncertainly correlated, at best, to download or view or citation metrics. And the sentimental non-communication sketched out by Carroll is very much with us, I think. How much can we substantially know and talk about the true contours and efforts of each other’s digital projects? And given this fundamental challenge, how tempting is it to zone out, to think about our own private schemes of wine-boiling, even in the face of the most ardent demo of the next best thing?

We post code openly; we share project documentation; we create screencasts and sandboxes and guest access; we display and demo — it’s almost obsessive, if you think about it, all this effort to expose the work. And yet I share Mod’s craving for “a better understanding of what we’ve built and where we’ve been.” He resorts to a book.

***

Especially given absence of this tangible shape and worth, a standard reaction to a digital project is to ask for proof of efficacy. It’s a way of asking: whatever it is that you’ve done here, can you prove to me its worth? All very understandable, but in learning and humanistic contexts this is often a showstopper, if we’re to be honest. Imagine responding to a critical monograph, or an authoritatively edited volume, in that way. A demand for evaluation can be a way of not listening, or at sidestepping the shape and scope of the actual project.

If two thousand lines of code could be proven to produce the same effect as two million lines, would there be no difference between the projects? We can track how many times a project is downloaded or mashed or tweeted, but what does this tell us? Is aggregation of assets or users a virtue unto itself? We slide into quantification and rather crude versions of assessment, never a comfortable place for the humanities.

An absolutely ineffectual project (along whatever lines you wish to measure by) may nonetheless be very worth understanding; it may exemplify institutional relationships and workplace methodologies and asset combinations that would be fully instructive to represent. This seems especially true during these awkward days, when the basic conditions and activities of scholarship are so rapidly molting in front of our eyes.

The (mis)characterization of work is bundle-jumbled, as Carroll of course saw, with reputation, identity, and security, especially now. So many conversations about “Digital Humanities” spin into speculation about the capacity of universities to cultivate the skills and recognize the achievements of scholarship in the digital arena. And behind all this, I think, is the fundamental problem of representing the dimensions of work underpinning the projects that are or should be undertaken. Who inspires them, how do they get designed and built, who works on them, what do they contain, who uses them, who hosts them, how long are they alive, and what do they spur?

***

Lev Manovich’s recent work on visualizing large media collections is a thoughtful reaction to the general difficulty of comprehending the contents of digitized projects. Imagine, though, if such visualization were pursued beyond the surface — imagine the challenge of representing what it took to bring together what you see even in conceptually simple (if charmingly hypnotic) projects such as the 5930 front pages of The Hawaiian Star or 4535 Time Magazine covers or the 100 hours of the video game Kingdom Hearts (hello Wonderland!).

As captured pages or games whip past us or splay out for us along axes, as our eyes scan across an entire corpus for patterns trends and influences, we may also just barely make out the backstage ghosts of publishers, distributors, vendors, librarians, technologists, students, postdocs, gamers, maybe even a scholar or two.

Though Manovich’s Software Studies Initiative does a nice job of exposing digital humanities projects, tools, and the goals of cultural analytics, what it actually takes to do and sustain this kind of work remains, well, off the screen. If cultural analytics wishes to “better represent the complexity, diversity, variability, and uniqueness of cultural processes and artifacts,” we still wait for a parallel aspiration to visualize such projects themselves, a meta-visualization that would get behind the glass and convey a better sense of how they live.

We might take a cue from software developers, who have long grappled with collaborative work protocols and representations. A visualization tool like Gource, for example, conveys the build-out of a project as branches blooming off of a source tree. To see this in action, see Schuyler Duveen’s visualizations of several projects built at CCNMTL. Remember, as you’re watching these videos, that you’re just tracking code — not design documentation, not conceptual revisions, not the content and interactive elements of these projects.

So even if we were to let go of the lofty ambition of showing the institutional and cultural extents of a digital project — everything and everyone it really takes to make it “work” — just capturing the full extent of design, development, and implementation turns out to be a boggling endeavor. At any rate it’s clear that time and space are both necessary components for rendering the complexity of the kind of work we’re doing, as well as some schematic for conveying the choreography of a great amount of interdependencies.

***

Maybe such representation — and the understanding and recognition that it would engender — will be bolstered through the rise of what Henry Jenkins and his students have termed “a higher transmedia criticism”. Once we figure out how to weave strands of coherency and causation across media types, we may have developed better muscles for conveying a fuller sense of the ecosphere of a digital project.

A basic point of academic maturity in the face of the digital onslaught, I think, is to recognize the deep infrastructure (or looking-glass world?) behind what seems “merely” virtual, an infrastructure that takes us on intricate paths between modalities, institutions, and technologies. It seems to me to be no accident that early characterizations of the digital in essays like Sven Birkert’s The Gutenberg Elegies — with simplistic contrasts between print/digital like permanent/evanescent, deep/flat, sequence/signal — tended to fall away once scholars who actually worked on digital productions, such as Matt Kirshenbaum at MITH, pushed into fuller appreciations of machinery, interdependence, or “the forensic imagination,” to crib the title of Kirschenbaum’s 2008 book. Now that we’re not confusing (instant) access with (disposable) worth, what could a forensics of digital projects uncover?

Especially because I saw CHNM’s Tom Scheinfeldt talk this week about the values and tactics of THATCamp, I’m reminded that many posts on his blog have taken up the problem of Digital Humanities work. In 2008, for example, he was asking:

What happens to the increasing numbers of people employed inside university departments doing “work” not “scholarship?” In universities that have committed to digital humanities, shouldn’t the work of creating and maintaining digital collections, building software, experimenting with new user interface designs, mounting online exhibitions, providing digital resources for students and teachers, and managing the institutional teams upon which all digital humanities depend count for more than service does under traditional P&T rubrics? Personally I’m not willing to admit that this other kind of digital work is any less important for digital humanities than digital scholarship, which frankly would not be possible without it. All digital humanities is collaborative, and it’s not OK if the only people whose careers benefit from our collaborations are the “scholars” among us. We need the necessary “work” of digital humanities to count for those people whose jobs are to do it.

We can’t kid ourselves, though: this is swimming against a longstanding tide, and four years later, despite the DH hullaballoo, I’m not sure we’re anywhere closer to landing on firm ground. Though back in 2008 Scheinfeldt was heralding a “sunset for ideology, sunrise for methodology,”, anyone devoted to a digital humanities project runs into a certain recognizable chill, if not a wall: a recurring dichotomy between actual philosophers and actual workers that Jacques Rancière, for one, traces through Marx all the way back to Plato.

And this, I think, is the sharp edge of Lewis Carroll’s non-encounter: a general shirking of the work of understanding actual work. The giddily imaginative protagonists in “A-Sitting on a Gate” (or whatever it’s called) would rather conceptualize like butterflies than engage in the mechanics, methodology, or production of each other’s schemes.

***

Carroll’s poem, by the way, was a Jon Stewart-worthy parody of good old Bill Wordsworth, particularly the *also* provocatively odd (but much less humorous) poem “Resolution and Independence”. In Wordsworth’s poem, the interviewer and interviewee are, respectively, a young bi-polar version of the poet, and a severely aged man that he discovers at work on the moor, gathering leeches:

His body was bent double, feet and head
Coming together in life’s pilgrimage;
As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage
Of sickness felt by him in times long past,
A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.

Anxious about the worth of a poetic career, our narrator approaches this imposing and ancient working man, so old he’s hardly human (“as a huge stone.. / on the bald top of an eminence…” “Like a sea-beast crawled forth”), positively aching for connection, for moral understanding, for the experience of bonding within the terms of life on this earth. And so the narrator strikes up conversation about work:

“What occupation do you there pursue?
This is a lonesome place for one like you.”

And just like Carroll’s Knight, despite a genial reply from the occupation-pursuer, Wordsworth’s poet just cannot listen. Just as the old man starts to describe “Employment hazardous and wearisome,” the poet zones out:

The old Man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream…

Having dematerialized the leech-gatherer into a dream, it is not long before the poet is mulling over the same egocentric problems, the misery of poets like himself.

–Perplexed, and longing to be comforted,
My question eagerly did I renew,
“How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”

You’d think this would try anyone’s patience, but the leech-gatherer seems an indulgent sort: he smiles, repeats himself, and starts to describe the extent, methodology, and waning supply of his trade. But there’s no holding our poet back from diving right back into that crazy Wordsworthian mental space, in which the mind plays tricks on itself, self-consciously, with mirrors; no matter what the old man says and repeats, no matter what his actual activities or the conditions that drive them, our daydreaming narrator is stuck “In my mind’s eye…” flipping over “thought within myself.” He climbs out of his mind only when the leech-gatherer stops talking, just in time to milk the encounter for a quick moral:

I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.

A firm mind? We’ll have to take the narrator’s word for it, since words from the old man himself are inexorably snuffed out; his auditor ends up content with the surface act of encountering.

The only way I can make sense of this poem is as provokingly insufficient: another example of man’s inhumanity to man, leavened with presumption and sentiment — yet one more instance of high-mindedly ignoring the conditions, demands, and contours of actual work.

So: yes, yes, and yes; chalk up this still interlude to blogger’s block, pithier observation-release venues, and — most of all — the day to day work of moving the ball in the suddenly crowded game of digital humanities.

Time was, children, that an MLA panel called “Why I (Do Not) Use Digital Resources” attracted a thin crowd indeed, just a few enthusiasts, cranks, and outliers — maybe a handful of more established academics with furrowed brows worried that they might have to worry about this stuff someday (librarians already knew they would). That time has passed, and all its aching joys are now no more, and all its dizzy raptures — the mindset of late 2003 is almost beyond recall.

Where is the world of _eight_ years past? _’T was there_–
I look for it–’t is gone, a globe of glass!
Cracked, shivered, vanished, scarcely gazed on, ere
A silent change dissolves the glittering mass.

That’s from Byron’s Don Juan, by the way: change ’twere ever thus. You can read it in context here — if you do, beware annoying autoplay pop-ups, and take a moment to consider that presentations of canonical pre-copyright texts have not really changed these past eight years.

Anyway, I now hear graduate students invoke “digital humanities” constantly, insistently, desperately: finally, a future — finally, room for change. And though a year of not-blogging is tantamount to retirement in these fleeting days (when “change grows too changeable” — guess who), I’ve been manning the digital trenches and owe you an report.

For now, here’s a summary of my most consuming project, a multimedia analysis tool christened Mediathread some two years ago.

When it comes to shaking up learning and scholarship, a tool like Mediathread seems as promising and disruptive as, well, wikis did back at the dawn of antiquity, sometime back in Bush II’s first administration. But eight years hence…

“carpe diem,”_ Juan, _”carpe, carpe!”
To-morrow sees another race as gay
And transient, and devoured by the same harpy.

For some time RSA has been creating animations overlaying edited versions of taped lectures by the likes of Slavoj Zizek, David Harvey, Jeremy Rifkin, and Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s a clever way to disseminate ideas — the animations act as a lively accompaniment with their own gentle little dramas. Have a look, for example, of this treatment of Ken Robinson discussing changing educational paradigms:

Right? One can’t help but think that all those poor unengaged students could rouse out of their medicated torpor if only ideas were always so animated. It seems fitting that an RSA lecture would pay particular attention to the plight of children caught up in industrial death-in-life. After all, this is the same Society that solicited inventors in 1797 to come up with ways of sweeping chimneys that did not depend on little children. And that gives us more than enough occasion to look at a contemporaneous multimedia attempt to convey the plight of blighted children:

Look! There goes one now! Posted by cole007 on Flickr.

It’s quite easy now to push back on such millennial hyperventilating from a number of perspectives. Digital multitasking is distracting and dangerous; scanning, sampling, and mashing are destroying deep thought; the internet presents to children any number of emotional and physical risks. From my own perch in libraryworld, I’ve long been skeptical of concepts like “Net Generation Students,” which can lead to embarrassing institutional lunges into quickly expiring playpens, even as I applaud many of the service advances that get marshaled under such banners.

The most typical marketing is “revolutionary” — it were ever thus. Meanwhile the hungry sheep stay hungry. But now that we’re all sober and nostalgic for the good old virtues — close analysis, deep thought, transcendent expression — now that we’re virtuously skeptical about the effects of technology on real learning — I feel like pushing the other way a bit. I would never want to end up in a corner where intellectual worth was measured by detachment from the stunning shifts in communication of our day. That’s too often a stale corner, I think of it as full of Causabons, where ignorance or even fear is sanctified.

Hence, a couple of completely anecdotal observations, ala Prensky, though I’ll lay off on italics.

Even at this late date, some students wash into my classroom with a timorous attitude towards “computers.” Whether or not this is an affectation, a discourse of detachment from technology persists with some amount of vigor, even (or especially?) among “digital natives” at highly selective colleges. And yet the student so loath to do something new with computers in a course setting is tricked out — you can count on it — with a phone of some degree of smartness, an overactive Facebook account, a laptop, a digital music delivery system, and a cherished, variously organized, and promiscuously shared media library juggled between devices.

So perhaps we should set aside the easy binaries — digital native, displaced digital immigrant — and focus more on local competencies (whoops! italics!). The challenge, often, is to apply facility within one kind of digital environment to another — to bring what’s lively and engaging about community discourse in Facebook, say, into a new and different application, as defined by an instructor. Faced with a course blog (say), students are rarely starting from scratch, just as they’re rarely truly innovative users of the environment right out of the gate. They’re somewhere in the middle: endowed with some skills from their ‘other’ life, a life that can seem at once more playful and more serious than what’s going on in the classroom — skills that may or may not pertain to the effort at hand. We can’t assume that this pertinence will be discerned and exercised.

The question of local technical competence and portability thereof is a version of the larger question hovering over the classroom: what is the relationship of what’s learned here to the outside, impervious world? How can we know that classroom skills will really apply out in the field?

The good news for educators, I think, is that “digital natives” come into the room used to figuring out local rules and expectations: ready to be guided in that way. They’ve figured out how to get through so many various environments, and through a certain plasticity and perhaps even detachment (the world is full of strange games) they’ve succeeded. If playing to the “twitch speed” of this generation (a particularly unfortunate Prenskyism) leads education into the shallows, we might better address the adaptability necessarily cultivated by anyone who wants to think with or write to others today.

If “sustainability” is a touchstone du jour, the emphasis of any number of academic courses and programs, my quick claim, backed up by no data whatsoever, is that “adaptability” will be much more important to “digital natives.” When it comes to communication technology hurtling towards who knows where, no skill set is sustainable below a level of purely abstract values — and the effective persistence of such values (critical thought, intellectual honesty) pretty much depends on transference of skills between worlds. “One dead / One powerless to be born,” a burnt out “digital immigrant” might say of these worlds. “O children, what do ye reply?”

Aided Eye, anyone? Small shivers of horror and wonder ran down my spine when reading today about adapted eye-tracking technology, described as “a sixth sense” by researchers presenting the proof of concept in the French Alps. According to this Discovery article, tech wizards have been concocting intimate feedback loops between GPS, customized databases, and biofeedback for a steady stream of just-in-time information.

Here’s the scenario: you’re walking down the street and looking at a location, wondering what’s there. You blink a set amount of times to get information. Trackers reading your eye’s positioning connect to GPS and a database, and a pulse of information comes streaming onto your phone — no, it wants to be closer — it comes into your ear through text-to-speech conversion.

And that’s the simple scenario. Another ‘proof of concept’: memory assistance! One of the worst questions in the world — and one of the most universal — is that on-the-spot inquiry, “Have you two met?” Once upon a time, a response of frantic blinking was mere anxiety, as the target of such inquiry calibrated an answer. But in the sunshaded future, that rapid blinking will be an Aided Eye wearer’s infrared sensor-delivered request for data from whatever Facebook’s molted into, from a “lifelog” that will recall the face and tell you what you need to carry on the conversation. (encountered 4.28.2020 23:09:03. likes sunsets and walks on the beach. trust level 7.)

Word from the Alps is that such a system can be mounted onto glasses, though technicians are struggling with how to deliver data feedback. “A tiny screen embedded inside the glasses or an audio system are both options.”

So yes the parties we’ll go to in our glinting iModos — reading other sunglassed faces with our right eye, reading data streaming back with our left. Making clever and timely observations about objects in the room, best database wins. Winking direct messages over to someone who may be smiling, or may be triggering a private replay of an archived video.

We’ll all wear our sunglasses at night — and in fact while we sleep — because you never know when you might wake up in the middle of the night and need to know something.

Data never wants you to be in the dark.

So the first surprise about the recent Open Video Conference was how inclusive it felt, how it swept one up (one used to being a party of one) into a collective vision of the future. This was a healthy conference, due to a very specific rallying point — open video — and a greatly heterogeneous crowd well-nigh forced to bump up against different populations. And so the OVC overstuffed into NYU law classrooms programmers of various types of expertise and roguery, filmmakers with various types of produced work, genial lawyers, political activists, software evangelists, corporate and public media reps, educators, archivists… the “full stack,” as one friend put it, of expertise at pretty much every level of reinventing the way video acts on the web. And a concern rooted in very granular details of code seemed tangibly connected to the way we all will live.

An introduction to OVC

I can’t resist opposing this sense of inclusiveness and vitality to the MLAs I’ve attended, in which extravagant claims for the reinvention of subjectivity or sexuality or post-colonial discourse, say, clash against the most trenchant resistance to actual change. Humanists are nothing if not self-conscious, and the ironies of securing or justifying a tenured career by espousing the critical ‘trouble’ of the moment are oft felt. But MLA sessions addressing the dramatic changes in the way we are actually communicating and transmitting culture — the media revolution happening on our watch — were quirky and underattended (at least before I gave up on them circa 2004), and likely to devolve into older academics warning acolytes not to risk their careers in digital pursuits.

But back to the OVC in 2009. Others will publish some good summaries of sessions and events — I’m starting to see a few now (for example, Scott Macaulay’s blog posts on Filmmaker) — so I’ll keep here to the level of broad and subjective generalizations.

It smelled like teen spirit. Let me hasten to say, I mean that in a positive way, deriving from my experience in a public high school that gathered up a range of different classes, maturities, predilections, abilities, perspectives — drew us all up into something like genuine and still-forming enthusiasm. And so it would be easy for anyone who attended OVC to correlate speakers to various high school stereotypes: the genial hippie, the homecoming queen, the class clown, the truant, the rebel, the exchange students, the dropout, the goths, the a.v. geeks, the musicians, the art students, the nerds, the student government types…. Like high school, the conference made me feel like the future was right around the corner, momentous decisions were just ahead, and sudden and budding capacities were going to change the world. Who wouldn’t want to really feel this again, and at a conference no less?

Ray Blumenthal drawings of OVC speakers

Openness means simplification. It is touching and generous of hard core programming geeks to craft advances that inexorably shift arcane wizardry into the practical and even mundane. Thus on the immediate horizon we’re getting HTML 5 that simply incorporates a video tag, Ogg containers that free video content from restrictive plugins or presentation frames, a Wikipedia that offers easy browser-based video editing. We’re seeing entities like the Internet Archive offering to store and stream personal video without restriction, providing a range of transcoding, taking on what amounts to API service. We’re seeing advances in time-based metadata and accessibility features that make relevant pieces of video easier to find, reference, and recontextualize. We’re getting CC licensing clarifying subsequent use of content. All these efforts to simplify away impediments bolster an active, democratic engagement in heretofore complex and specialized processes, in what until now has been owned and manipulated by the very few.

A preview of new video functionality in Firefox 3.5

Openness can trigger honesty. At OVC I saw how an ethical imperative to be open goes beyond releasing code for the world to see, involves more than offering source content up for unconceptualized future use. I appreciated, through long tail examples like Earth-Touch and BoingBoingTV, that open video offers resistance to over-produced, bogus dramatization, and other commercial attempts to sweeten the pot for paying audiences. Earth-Touch’s HD yet relatively spare videos of actual animals in the field (like these suckling seals), put side by side with Disney’s over-soundtracked, hyper-narrated, dramatically manipulated presentation of (say) thrashing whales, made me feel afresh how corrosive the corn-syrup of ratings bait can be.

Americans must demand more from their broken down public media. Predictably shamed by Canadians actively funding independent video and Norwegians proactively releasing material on peer-to-peer networks, we Yankees (derives from Dutch word for “pirate”, Matt Mason observed) are reduced to handwringing about cultural treasure locked away by rights restrictions, about public broadcasting networks refusing *free* content from desperate filmmakers, by cable fee pittances funding public access tv stations that seem lost in 1982. It takes a Metavid to liberate CSPAN, for crying out loud, from hopeless VHS tape inconsequence. Perhaps PBS, NPR and the like should shift away from membership drives, with their appeals for rather nebulous support, and more to what Alyce Myatt called the “tip jar”: ways of driving direct loyalty to and remuneration for actual programs.

Nev. Senator John Ensign discusses American morality, via Metavid

We haven’t even begun to know what we can do with video. The highlight of the OVC for me was, of course, the education panel, during which CCNMTL released code for VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning). During the session, I was struck by how infrastructure, access, and distribution are still dominant topics when people are thinking about educational use of video. These are foundational concerns, but those of us wrestling with how to actually incorporate video meaningfully into curricula — how to make working with video a truly transformative learning experience — have to drive the conversation to the next level: from *access* to *effective use*. Otherwise we can get indifferent and unmotivated broadcasting, subscription services that offer a shopping cart parody of ‘participation’, substitution of awkwardly filmed stagecraft for interpersonal dynamics, false assumptions about expanding the classroom, and a devolvement of educational inquiry into the polarized insufficiencies of passive consumption or blind expression. Video DJs Eclectic Method offered an interesting example of video sampling set to audio beats, and there was no shortage of video artists offering cut-ups and remashes, but much of this active video re-manipulation seems to be paddling around so far in the relatively shallow but fun waters of entertainment and parody.

Rock & Remix from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

This stuff is dangerous. For the most part, OVC offered a benign and even symbiotic vision of the future. Yochai Benkler set the tone at the opening keynote, cheering the advancement of participatory culture, the rise of a “5th estate” of engaged citizens able to watch and produce and determine their own world like never before. To many this can help out not only our public culture, but also the wheezing dinosaurs (or Murdoch-monsters?) who are looking for better business models, more compelling content, stronger engagement with audience. Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism (pay what you wish!), spoke engagingly of “virtuous circles,” in which merchants canny enough to pirate piracy get ahead. Radiohead was invoked.

But in a surprise move, the failure of Clay Shirky to make it to the conference opened up spot for a mystery final speaker — and he turned out to be a real pirate, Peter Sunde of the controversial bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay. Patched in from Sweden, swigging some mysterious liquid, and professing indifference to incarceration, Sunde signaled no real politics and no limits. He tweaked media corporations by saying they should actually pay him to distribute their products for free, and announced that the Swedish National Theater would be presenting his recent and upcoming trial by authorities. Presumably they’ll be drawing on some lines he’s fed the press in the wake of a guilty sentence (now on appeal) — rather than pay restitution, “I would rather burn everything I owned.” Another Pirate Bay founder as been quoted as saying, “We chose to treat the trial as a theater play and as such it’s been far better than we ever could have believed.” Or, Sunde again: “This has been ‘Season One’ of The Pirate Bay series, and today’s judgment is just the cliffhanger,” he said. “But thanks Hollywood, you taught us that the good guys win in the end.”

An IOU from Peter Sunde

By ending the OVC with a reminder of the heedless hijacking that corporations use as justification for locking down content, conference organizers seemed to undercut the compelling arguments that had been made for refined licensing, better business models, better standards, and more responsive and forward-thinking media development. We ended in a rather adolescent nihilism.

At first I thought this was a mistake, but thinking about it further, I decided that this ending was a final and appropriate flourish to an effective conference. It seems open, after all, to acknowledge that there is actual menace in the air — that this medium is being contested across a legal landscape that could, in its inability to keep up with an increasingly frantic dance, freeze up and lay waste to what now seems like unbounded aspiration. None of us is in control, nobody can predict much beyond a rather ruthless shakeup of the way we communicate — along with the need for us all to somehow survive it, possibly shape it, even learn from it together.

It seems clear that this sudden engagement, this sudden caring about the political freedom of Iranians has a lot to do with the medium itself. To those immersed in new media communication channels, it’s thrilling that “cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history,” to crib from the title of Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk. We’re sensing that new media is providing timelier, more accurate, and more effective information. Hence there is a parallel confrontation, with parallel cracks in authority: authoritarian government vs. uprising crowd, traditional media vs. participatory media. Since we can, by definition, participate in the latter showdown, we become invested in the former.

Thus twitterers avidly piled onto the #CNNfail movement to drive better coverage; Gawker tweaked the New York Times’s executive editor for a premature divine blessing of Ahmadinejad; and so many Tumblrs devoted to Iran have blossomed that it’s now a throwaway line. And handy! here’s a political map of Iran from the Berkman Center derived from the Iranian blogosphere:

Shirky’s TED talk is worth watching, especially against this Iranian elections backdrop. He succinctly heralds the “many to many” communication that is transforming media, the mashup of broadcast and chatter that encourages each to inflect the other. Have a look, if you have 17 minutes:

Shriky’s pre-Iran cases in this talk are China, forced by twitterers to quickly acknowledge the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and globally shamed by the shoddy construction that caused so many deaths then, and Barack Obama, forced by a community built on MyBarackObama.com to answer for his reversal on FISA surveillance during the 2008 presidential campaign. Shirky emphasizes a shift from crafting a message (done by an elite, broadcast to the masses) to forming groups (now amateurs can participate, messages can be customized for various groups, everything becomes much more conversational).

It bears noting, though, that the confrontations that Shirky describes ended murkily, from the point of those disruptive tech-wielding crowds. As Shirky narrates of the Sichuan insurgency, “the protests kept going and – finally – the Chinese cracked down. That was enough of citizen media.” He further acknowledges that the Chinese government shut down Twitter (along with Flickr, Bing, Hotmail, Blogger, and other services) during the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. It may be, as Dan Rather has put it, “harder to turn out the lights” these days, but proving this with a quick flareup is different from keeping the lights on.

The pushback against Obama’s FISA reversal also frustrates the manyDavids-vs.-Goliath narrative, because the fact remains that, despite a flood of protest from his supporters on his website, despite their formation of the largest ‘group’ to gather on MyBarackObama.com, Obama was not swayed. A campaign spokesman last year danced around this awkwardly: “The fact that there is an open forum on BarackObama.com where supporters can say whether they agree or disagree speaks to a strength of our campaign.” The offended “netroots” may have forced some explanation, some acknowledgment of their anger, but in no way did they prevail.

So it remains to be seen whether Iran will offer the story we so clearly crave: in which the newly democratized media actually drive history, rather than just flare up in the dark, explode, and shimmer away into inconsequence. Whether or not you believe that story in these early days, you have to admire the way communication technology is stirring up personal investment in troubled places in our troubled world — as long as there is a showdown, a disaster, something to track in a feed.

I’ll leave off here with one exchange that seems, to me, to capture everything big-hearted and empty-headed that TwitterFaceFlickrTube inspires in the face of political events unfolding on the streets of Tehran:

“Stay safe” indeed….

Not surprisingly, if you visit the Internet mapping project, you’ll see that people tend to view the internet… differently. Some mappers note their age and number of hours on said internet, but flipping through the drawings I can’t quite discern trends based on these self-identifications. Well, maybe one: the 40-somethings seem quick to reach for cosmic imagery.

But this just in: an Argentinian professor has already embarked on a taxonomy of these maps! That’s right, she’s mapping the maps. So now my map of the internet looks like one giant mirror.