hyalineskies

“In every proposal I write to a client where I’m not doing corporate identity work, I give them the option to where I will, free of charge and as a benefit to the community, package and licence the work I do for them under a Creative Commons licence. Once I’m done with their work, I’ll personally distribute the work on my site of give the packages to them for distribution if they ever wish to open-source the project. It’s an absurd premise from a designer, to say ‘Hey, you pay me to make this for you, and then I’ll release it for free to everyone else.’ It was a risk I took to see if my clients had any interest in the surrounding community.”

In a socially-driven atmosphere on the brink of being devoured by powerful investors and American capitalism, I offered my clients an option to have their work released freely, under a community-supporting licence such as the Creative Commons Licences or the GNU GPL, as a free-of-charge option. The results were surprising. Will proprietary licences and commercialism destroy Web 2.0’s democracy?

“The class broke into a cacophony of affirmation. My teacher, surprised, asked how many people in the class use or have used the hyperactivity drug. Nearly a third of the class raised their hands. I stared, appalled.”

I knew illicit use of the amphetamine Adderall was fairly well-known at the University of Michigan, but I had no idea that a substantial amount of people regularly used it. How long will this social acceptance and pharmacological ignorance of “speed” continue before someone dies?

“Sadly, regardless of traditionalism, the common reader and user is honestly entirely apathetic to this editorial control. Jeff Jarvis had it right when he stated ‘give people control of the media, [and] they will use it.’ In our socially-networked world, this apathy is painfully evident that as we watch the increasing popularity of social news services such as Digg and Newsvine. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rupert Murdoch, the head of media conglomerate News Corporation, stated the shift in control bluntly: ‘[Those in the online generation] want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.’”

As traditional journalists feel the backlash of print media’s decreasing popularity, citing a loss of reputability and editorial control, they’re not realising the shift in authority: editorial control still exists; it’s just moved to those who shape new media.

“How is Flock expected to survive? Unless your vision of integration matches that of Flock’s, I don’t see how it can (aside from buzz and a few niche users.) My vision was different. On the day I reinstalled Firefox, I installed the official del.icio.us plugin, Performancing for Firefox, a few of my favourite search engines, ChatZilla, and DownThemAll. I had my dream browser, the same, familiar browser I had been using since its days as Phoenix. Although I wanted to ride that wave of early adoption again, I had realised that I was going to end up surfing on the sand. ”

I spent two months with the hyped “social browser” Flock, only to feel as if all of it was beginning to seem a little too dot-com.