a conceptual paper
Paul S Prueitt, PhD
The Digital Media vision contemplates a revolution in the way in which humans communicate. This revolution will take place in a specific context that is well established by history.
Digital media has become part of the mainstream. In spite of the wonderful creativity of media professionals, the current media reality maintains an artificial division between producer and consumer. We suggest that the reason for this division has both a cultural element and an economic element. The technology for producing digital video, for example, has been expensive and required the involvement of third parties. The production has, out of technical necessity been a separate process from the consumption. This necessity is about to change.
Living systems sustain the relationship between self and environment through interaction. If the interaction between self and environment is mediated by entertainment and by interests such as education and church, then this mediation must maintain high standards and accept responsibilities. In many cases, these standards are meet and the responsibilities accepted. However, by moving the production and the consumption closer together we find a number of positive consequences.
The natural process of communication involves iterative, continual and profound cyclic perceptual and behavioral activities. These cycles depend on the perception of consequences from action taken. Particularly when the marketing of produced digital content has significant advertising, this disconnect between perception and action may lead to imbalances in psychological and social grounding.
The quality of content is degraded both due to the nature of current advertising practices and the separation of intention and consequence that the technology and the advertising systems produce.
This imbalance has deep historical roots. Some have argued that a higher authority, such as a church or a King, should always control human-to-human communication. A counter argument lies at the heart of the American founding papers. Our American Constitution disallows authority that is not grounded in the informed intentions of the people. The key is the principle of consent. Up to now, the American people and people in many countries have consented to advertising as part of a healthy and vibrant economy.
The paper “The Coming Revolution in Information Science” [1] details a technological foundation for balancing the production and consumption of information. It is suggested, in this paper, that the quality of human communication has suffered due to the separation of the production of media from the consumption of media. A specific technology path is proposed that facilitates a solution to this problem.
The “.vir” standards create the infrastructure to register service information that reinforce transparency and truthfulness. This service information is then available using a Google like search infrastructure. The test market for the “.vir” standard is part of the New Mexico art market.
A service oriented Internet architecture is designed to allow the individual pull of product literatures using user defined ontological modeling. The proposed ontological modeling is based on a well-established and non-proprietary Topic Map standard. Topic Maps have been shown to be easy to use and useful.
The individual pull of product literatures is enhanced in value through standards for the use of generative digital objects that cannot be copied without a record being made of the copy. The generative digital object is an innovation similar to the fractal image compression technology, but has a precision that factuals do not have. The generative digital object also has an internal record of the object’s use.
Digital object instrumentation allows the owner/creator of any digital object complete control over the use of that property. The control over all digital objects in the “.vir” subnet of the Internet is instrumented via a derivative of the work on super distribution of economic value by Dr Brad Cox. [2]
The second key to the “.vir” standards is in a generative technology that I have designed based on the work of others, but also by adding new elements. The generative technology is based, loosely, on models of how the gene expression results in specific living forms. Of course the gene is not a computational mechanism, and the borrowed principles are unique to computing machines. These principles have been seen in more than a few deep innovations in data management. In the “.vir” standard, content property is not stored in the object but is generated by a small-encoded mechanism. The “tree” is not stored in the acorn, but is generated by a process.
What is the bottom line? Generative digital objects provide several valuable features. If the mechanism is copied without permission, the object and the copy dissolve. If the output is copied this output copy is automatically identified as stolen property.
This generative enhancement is further enhanced by the introduction of wireless transfer of any digital property, including high definition television content. In this wireless environment personal management of digital content is more highly enabled. The management decisions over when to watch and what to watch do move from producer to the individual. Individual control is increased.
The “.vir” does not impose any constraints on current advertising or Internet activities. However, the “.vir” standard forbids push advertising, and spam, within the “.vir” infrastructure, so that an alternative pull information repository may become established as a means to acquire information on how to buy what, and where to buy from. We realize that not everyone will wish to use the “.vir” subnet to acquire information about products, but the alternative will be available.
We celebrate the creativity of the advertising community, and feel that this creativity will be enhanced by the increased empowerment of the individual to self regulate, if she or he so chooses, the content of advertising that he or she is exposed to.
A social movement seems to be arising based on individual-to-individual production/consumption circuits as an alternative to the model where consumers are programmed by producers to buy what producers decide to sale.
Technology gave us a problem and technology may be used to return balance. Internet technologies have provided a many-to-many and an individual-to-individual medium for human communication. Television and radio produces a hierarchical communication infrastructure, whereas the Internet has produced a competing flat communication infrastructure. This flatness provides that ground from which self-organizing communities are arising.
Community sustainability movements are but one manifestation of communities that arise from the flatness of the Internet. As individual-to-individual and many-to-many networks develop we see the increasing use of pull information system to organize these communities.
[2] The work on super distribution is best represented by Brad Cox in his book
Superdistribution, available from Amazon or from:
http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/pub/94WiredSuperdistribution/index.html