“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” -Paulo Freire

“This is a great discovery, education is politics!”- Paulo Freire

Q:How do you know you are succeeding as a program?

A: When you are up at 4:00am watching a project your students and faculty built spread around the globe, being discussed in languages you can’t even identify.

By now, most of my followers and readers are no doubt aware that a project built here at our Emerging Media and Communications program has been receiving a great deal of attention. Actually a great deal of attention rather understates the case. This, all more or less started on Monday when The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story written by Jeff Young about this project: EnemyGraph. (The actual story was “published” on Sunday but really did not get noticed until Monday morning.)

More on the project in a moment, but for now a brief explanation of how this story spread. By late Monday morning the story was featured on Slashdot, from where it jumped to numerous other tech blogs and ultimately to more mainstream news organizations. By Monday evening EnemyGraph was spreading internationally. And so it was partly due to insomnia, partly due to a rather full schedule that I found myself awake at 4:00am on Tuesday opening up a web browser to run searches on the story, and opening up a separate tab in Tweetdeck to peek at the Twitter conversation. It’s at this point things got a bit unwieldily, EnemyGraph was spreading to so many places around the globe that I couldn’t follow the conversation. When I first tuned in there was a slew of tweets in Russian, followed by a collection in Hindi, then Thai (for some reason it was moving Eastward). I lost count at 20 different languages. This is how I measure success as an educator. It has been covered on ABC, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, The Huffington Post, NPR . . . well look for yourself.

I am not writing this to just brag about EnemyGraph, I have a much larger motivation for writing this post. And let me be clear up front, this isn’t even my project. EnemyGraph is a project built by Dean Terry (faculty here in EMAC) and two students Bradley Griffith and Harrison Massey. My role in all of this has been really, really, really, minor; just support, talking with the team about it, sharing my thoughts. But regardless of this the last week has been one of my most enjoyable as an educator, and herein lies one of the big takeaways of EnemyGraph and ultimately the motivation for this post: EnemyGraph is an excellent example of education done right. I’ll take it a step further, EnemyGraph is one of the best examples of education in the age of the digital network I can think of.

EnemyGraph. What? You Want People to Make Enemies?

To understand my claim it’s important to contextualize EnemyGraph a bit here, and explain why I think it is a fabulous project. Again let me stress that this isn’t my work, Dean and the students are the driving force, “the artists” here, I am just playing the roll of cultural critic, analyzing and critiquing the project, albeit from an insider’s perspective. Indeed, I think some of my thoughts on this might even disagree with what the team says about EnemyGraph. (For those who want to read in Dean’s own words what he thinks the project is about, his artist statement of sorts, you can check out his own post about EnemyGraph.)

Let’s face it, there is a serious problem with Facebook, okay actually there are lots of problems with Facebook, but for understanding EnemyGraph there is one serious problem worth focusing on: Facebook has become a private corporate space which dominates our public and civic lives. The privatization of the public sphere, of our civic interactions is a serious concern to me, and other scholars. Let us set aside the issue of data mining or Facebook’s motivations, we don’t have to imagine Facebook as an intentionally nefarious actor to recognize that to many Facebook has become “the internet”, having a monopoly on communications the likes of which has never before existed, to recognize there are serious concerns here. More and more our social lives are being played out in privately owned spaces—the implications of this are still being worked out. We need, I would argue, to be concerned about this, focused on critiquing and understanding the ways in which our public sphere is being radically transformed. To be sure Facebook isn’t the only actor here, it’s just the most prominent, and for now the one which concerns me the most. Privatizing the commons of public discourse strikes me as a serioulsy dangerous civic development.

Understand this is a particularly layered problem, one I am always trying to get my students to “see.” Students today, as Siva Vaidhyanathan first put it to me, are swimming in an ocean of media, our obligation is to get them to step outside the ocean and “see” what they are swimming in. It is in this regard that I have students in my intro to the major class quit Facebook. I want them to see how Facebook is quite literally engineering social relations, and doing so in ways that students are not totally aware. And this will get us to EnemyGraph. Consider how Facebook allows you to “friend” things, companies, and corporations, to “like” things, companies, and corporations but not to dislike them. Facebook doesn’t want a dislike button because it would both undermine the pleasant (sterile) community they want to have, and because it would undermine the business model, businesses don’t want a dislike button. Or consider how Facebook has altered the very meaning of the word “friend,” where “friend” now connotes a different social relation than it did just 5 years ago. Facebook is coding, engineering, setting the rules for what types of relations we can have, with little to no input from us. Yes and the creators of this app are not idiots, the use of the word “enemy” here is intentional. Facebook abuses the word Friend, EnemyGraph just points this out.

Now as an academic I could write about this, try to get people to pay attention to this problem, as I have, and as others have. Of course there is another option which is to stage a project, a piece of art, to perform the critique. There is a long history of this, and I would argue it is one of the most important roles of art (and humanities in general), to produce objects which perform a cultural critique, and more importantly get the larger culture to engage in a conversation about the issues at hand. Indeed many of the projects I admire most adopt this tactic. One could point here to graffiti art (Banksy is one of my favorite artists), street performances (such as “Operation First Casualty”), or groups such as the Yes Men and Critical Art Ensemble, or even specific projects such as Cow Clicker. It is true that I have a particular affinity for the “stir shit up” approach, one that Dean shares, and this is not to discount other approaches, but I find this tactical one particularly effective. This is how I interpret Dean’s quote about social media needing a shot of Johnny Rotten. This isn’t simply a matter of poking a finger at Facebook, the stakes are much, much larger.

It is against this background that I find the reactions of some academics at times puzzling, and at other times downright disturbing. The idea that this was built just to foster negativity or bullying is a shallow reading, one born out of a total lack of engagement with EnemyGraph. But more importantly the idea that academics shouldn’t be working on projects which actively engage in the world around us, that produce and foster conversations about the roll of technology in our lives comes from an academic community I have no interest in being a part of. And lest you think I am being to critical of academia here, it has been interesting to note how the conversations in “non-academic” communities in my opinion have been far more nuanced and in depth, engaging both the object and what it is after.

Not to get too detailed here about EnemyGraph, but this is a project long in the making, not something whimsically produced over night to encourage bullying or trolling online (it has been at least a year in development). This is a carefully thought out, well planned critical performance, an engagement with the cultural of the privatized public space of Facebook. Part art project, part performance, part critique, part technical object, part critique of technology, part network exploit, part strategic operation, EnemyGraph is teh awesome.

I couldn’t be happier for their success, they have 20,000 users, have overwhelmed their servers, and produced so much press coverage I can’t keep track of it all. But that’s not what is the most exciting. The thing that makes me most proud here is what this project says about what type of learning environment we are building here in EMAC at UTDallas.

Conversing About EnemyGraph. The Educational Model.

I won’t go into detail here about what I think EMAC is, or the design of the major, you can read my longer reflection on that if you are interested. But I will short cut and say that the program has two components, critical and creative. That is, we want students to be critically engaged with the networked digital media environment and to be creators of media content, to repurpose social media for their own aims. I think of Howard Rheingold’s insistence that we need to teach students to be “Net Smart.” And that’s where this story gets really important to me.

As EnemyGraph took off, started to gain traction as a media event, you could see the story reflected in a general energy of our students. Other EMAC students were excited about the media coverage the project was receiving, excited about the attention EMAC was generating, but here is the important part, they were also talking about the project online across all the various networked platforms. Numerous times I would scan a news story, skip to the comments, to discover that our students were commenting on the story, explaining EnemyGraph, critiquing Facebook, even critiquing EnemyGraph. The students in our program were demonstrating a network literacy, this wasn’t just a classroom education, it was engaging the world through the digital network. Just one brief example. One of our students is from Brazil, and she was explaining to me the conversation she has been having (in Portuguese with the networked spaces in Brazil) about EnemyGraph, how it is received there, and how placing it in a different cultural context changes the dialogue. This is education at its best. And it is not just the conversation online that I see students participating in, in the hall ways, in classes, our students are engaging in a very thoughtful dialogue about this project and more importantly the problem of Facebook. I can only assume that our students are having this conversation all over, both on and off campus now.

And so this strikes me as one of the serious lessons to take away from EnemyGraph: the digital network changes the landscape of educational possibilities. This is something Bradley Griffith pointed out both in his interview with Jeff and in the comment section of The Chronicle Article.

Certainly in the past education has not been merely confined to the classroom, but the network changes the scale and pace of what is possible. The more we can encourage students to collaborate, to see the world as their audience I think the more successful we can be. Gone are the days when we must restrict students to small audiences and performing for us as instructors, now the network makes possible projects and learning environments with massively expanded audiences. Forget the classroom, the local community, or even the nation, EnemyGraph has turned into an international lesson. Sure we can keep asking our students to write papers for us interpreting some 18th century text, analyze some obscure symbolism, and give them an audience of one, or at most an audience of 20 at some conference. But give me one EnemyGraph as a learning project over 1,000 antiquated research papers any day. Or put another way who needs another boring marketing or business plan, go have the students make something.

This isn’t to say that professors ought to adopt the “stir shit up” model that Dean and I both prefer, or even that it is appropriate for every class, but certainly there is a pedagogical advantage to having students actively critique and create media objects that exist beyond the classroom. I am not interested in developing passive consumers, or students who are interested in figuring out “how to make people click ads.” I want to help students critique this world, imagine a different one, and help to produce a better one. It is in this vein that I so value and appreciate what the EnemyGraph team accomplished here. But I also teach a class where students are working on civic media projects, one group is attempting to collect coming out stories to help LGBT youth, another working to help animal adoption, and another is boldly trying to raise enough money to send a kid to college. And, these are the things that inspire me as an instructor, that make me feel good about our program, and keep me up late at night thinking, “what’s the next thing we could do?”

So many people who commented on this project claimed this was somehow irresponsible asking “how could a program support this?” or “what kind of professor does this, builds EnemyGraph?” But I have a better question to ask of educators: “Why aren’t you trying to build the next EnemyGraph?”

Let’s start by being clear on what Morris is calling for. You have to read through to the fifth paragraph to understand exactly what Morris wants:

“If university officials were to learn that a student had conducted extensive online research about the personal life and daily activities of a particular faculty member, posted angry and threatening comments on his Facebook wall about that professor, shopped online for high-powered firearms and ammunition, and saved a draft version of a suicide note on his personal network drive, would those officials want to have a conversation with that student, even though he hadn’t engaged in any significant outward behavior? Certainly.”

In other words Morris is calling not for data mining, as his title suggests, but rather for total surveillance of all student internet activity with an eye towards mining that data. What Morris is suggesting is not only that Universities monitor student email and conversations on University servers and equipment (student email addresses, Blackboard conversations), but all student internet activity. He is talking about monitoring internet search traffic, i.e. what students search for on Google, what students post on any site, i.e. Facebook Wall, blog comments, etc., what students shop for online, i.e. any purchase you make or any purchase you look at making, and even open up and look at any files you have stored (his suggestion that the University would mine a suicide note written and saved on a computer would involve opening and analyzing said file). And I assume, even though he doesn’t mention it Morris would like to monitor and then mine all IM traffic, and Skype calls. Calling this data mining hides the fact that the first step is actually surveillance, collecting the data, where the end goal is then mining what has been collected.

Technologically Morris doesn’t know what he is talking about and ethically he equates himself with some of the world’s most oppressive governments. In short this proposal reads as if it is written by a despotic leader who has spent too many hours watching poorly conceived science fiction.

In the first iteration of this post I wrote several lengthy paragraphs explaining how the surveillance Morris outlines here is not as technically trivial as he seems to make it, and it is obvious from this piece that Morris has little to no sense of how this technology works (someone please explain to him the difference between http and https cause he seems to think that all internet traffic is the same). Morris’s piece argues that technology is a “crystal ball” (his word not mine) that would allow us to predict and control the future. The technology he describes here is neither as trivial nor accurate as he suggests. But ultimately I decided to cut out all of the technical bits which demonstrated Morris’s ignorance (perhaps he has been watching too much Minority Report or Person of Interest) and instead focus on the more important issue: the ethical one. Morris is arguing that the government should monitor, without cause, all the internet traffic of some of its citizens. (Maybe I’ll write the technical stuff later.)

Let’s put it in no uncertain terms: Morris wants total surveillance of all student traffic on the internet all the time. In other words he is calling for the wiretapping of all private digital communications. Since in this particular circumstance, and in many he outlines the students attend a public school, and the police would be the ones doing the monitoring (or at least involved), what is being suggested here is that private citizens have the entirety of their online communications surveilled by the government. And this monitoring would happen regardless of the student, everyone, all students, no probable cause, no reason for suspicion, just surveil everyone 100% of the time. Total state surveillance. Perhaps Morris has a different measure of what is reasonable, but in my America the government is limited in the degree to which it can monitor its populace without a subpoena (I know, FISA, but we can save that for later).

Morris’s logic goes something like this. In rare circumstances a student will commit an act of violence, in order to prevent this we should curtail the civil liberties of all students. What’s worse though is the bizarre logic deployed to justify this type of surveillance. Morris notes that companies already engage in this kind of monitoring (Credit Card companies, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, etc.)

Let’s take these “justifications” one at a time. Effectively in the first instance Morris is arguing because a small percentage (an extremely small percentage) of individuals might commit a crime we should extensively violate the rights of all citizens. Now Morris lines the argument up by beginning his piece with a colorful fictional scenario: imagine a student “his sweating hands firmly clutched the grips of the twin Glock 22 pistols.” These sort of hypothetical, the world is really dangerous scenarios, are often used to justify curtailing liberties, after all who wouldn’t want to prevent the kid with twin Glock 22 pistols. But, in reality it doesn’t work this way. Sure we could limit all sorts of social ills through restricting citizen behavior (let’s start with curfews) but we don’t.

Or put perhaps in terms that would directly apply to Morris. We know from research that police officers are more likely to commit spousal abuse than the average individual. Thus we should in order to prevent the scenario of a cop with twin Glock pistols killing his wife institute a policy of monitoring all cops all the time. All internet activity by all cops should be monitored. We should know if they visit any sites that might indicate violent tendencies. Also we should put cameras in their homes which record how they act at home so that in case they raise their voice, engage in behavior that indicates violence, we could intervene. I am sure Morris would not be for this scenario, but it is the equivalent of what he suggests, the only difference is who is monitored and who is doing the monitoring.

His second justification is that companies do it anyway, so why shouldn’t Universities. I find it odd that we would want to look to these companies for guidance on respecting student privacy, at precisely the moment when their is a large public conversation developing around the degree to which they don’t respect privacy, and that the government should intervene to establish guidelines. Just because students willingly share information online is hardly a justification for violating their privacy, monitoring all of their internet communication. Furthermore the scale at which Morris suggests students should be monitored in no way equates with what is being shared (mostly publicly) in particular online venues. In the first case students chose to share particular pieces of information on Facebook, making them (again mostly) public for others to view, and remain empowered to not share other aspects of their online communication. Private online communication is still possible. Second in the case of corporations students (at least theoretically) willingly enter these relationships with corporate entities, trading privacy for some other benefit. With government monitoring there is no opt out, use the internet to communicate and you will be monitored. Finally the response by these corporations is in no way comparable to what happens with these private companies. A credit card company calls you to verify that you indeed did purchase a $800 dollar pink stuffed elephant, a minor inconvenience, but the government detaining you for hours of questioning because you called your professor an asshole on a Facebook wall, hardly constitutes the same level of inconvenience.

Imagine the depth of invasion this constitutes. Emails about private family matters. Monitored. Concerned about a medical condition, searching the internet. Monitored. Have a drug or alcohol problem, reaching out to a support group. Monitored. Organizing a political protest. Monitored. You name it. Monitored. This is why we have restrictions on what type of surveillance our government can conduct. We should find it a little more than disturbing that Morris’s position aligns him with the STASI, or if you prefer, more contemporary situations despotic regimes: “In order to preserve the safety of our citizens we must monitor all of their communications.”

Perhaps people are lulled into believing that this type of surveillance constitutes a minor inconvenience, because one would only be monitoring online communication. But imagine the outrage that would ensue if Morris was suggesting that police begin routinely searching all dorm rooms in order to insure that no illegal items are on campus. Ultimately I would argue that monitoring my online communication is far more invasive then searching my physical property. Heck just knowing what someone has searched for on Google in the last month can often tell you a lot more about them than looking through their apartment.

Morris’s argument is the classic, but severally flawed one, that we should give up privacy to maintain security. As Daniel Solove has argued this is a fundamentally misinformed approach. In the first case, because one rarely achieves security, and in the second because this type of ubiquitous surveillance itself constitutes a serious harm to the community. As Solove points out, privacy is not just an individual good, it is a public one as well. A community without privacy is an unhealthy one. Individuals need control over what type of information is made public (even if they don’t always exercise said right), and what types of information monitoring bodies can collect about them, not only for individual health but for public health as well. A community with no sense of privacy is a dysfunctional one. Imagine a community where all communications are monitored by the government (again this is either very directly what Morris is calling for, in the case of the public university, or by proxy in the case of the private where the institution de facto serves as the local governing body). One doesn’t have to have read Foucault to understand the degree to which severe government monitoring adversely effects the population, 1984 or Brazil will work just fine for this.

Let’s take even the best case scenario that Morris offers here, that we are going to use this technology to monitor all students, looking for ones who might have mental issues. How is this data going to be used? Are the flagged students going to be expelled? are students who the predictive algorithm decides are risks going to have mandated counseling? Will this be permanently attached to their file? Will there be a no-class list equivalent to the no-fly list? And given the issue of liability institutions are liable to err on the “conservative” side questioning any and all students that might pose the slightest risk, for fear that if they don’t they would be liable in the future? (And again, keep in mind the technology doesn’t work this way, looking for “mentally unstable” people is not nearly the simple analysis Morris implies it is.)

Even if this surveillance would work the way Morris thinks it does, it is not even the best way to accomplish what he wants. Rather than actually try and address the larger issues, or develop a more reasonable plan, Morris purposes the “magical” technological fix. Which of course is neither magic nor a fix. Compare this to a plan which would call for increased funding of mental health clinics, building a positive relationship between Residence staff and students so that those with concerns would speak to someone. Sure staffing a mental health clinic is costly, but it is more effective, and what Morris doesn’t want to tell you cheaper than the solution he purposes. As Morris himself admits, “In the aftermath of nearly every large-scale act of campus violence in the United States, investigation has revealed that early-warning signs had been present but not recognized or acted upon.” If these early warning signs exist why do we need more monitoring?

But lets be clear, Morris isn’t after safety or mental health. This is about something far more nefarious, this is about control. And to understand this argument it is important to situate this claim within the context of higher education in California where Morris works. The mental health angle here is just a ruse, a rhetorical strategy to convince people that students need to be monitored for community safety. This is something those with power have been wanting to do for a long time, wholesale monitoring of the population, and given the recent tense situations between students and the California system, situations often mediated by the police, certainly part of the story here is a feeling on the part of police that all students must be monitored and controlled all the time.

If you doubt my reading here all you have to do is turn to his paragraph on FERPA. Morris argues that yes FERPA might be a concern, you would be monitoring student’s private conversations, but “luckily” for those who want to monitor there is an exception to the rule that would allow this type of monitoring. In other words Morris treats FERPA as a technical/legal hurdle that can be circumvented not something that expresses a legitimate concern about protecting student privacy. Morris deals with the letter of the law (“look it’s easy to get around”) without addressing the reason the law is there in the first place (“protecting student privacy is a philosophically and ethically important community principle”). Notice nowhere in the essay does he recognize that this type of surveillance might constitute a privacy concern (the only mention of a limit is in taking care to make sure that students maintain a right to due process). Student privacy is treated as a hurdle to be overcome not a value to be respected.

I am an educator because I believe college can be an incredibly important step in individuals becoming productive members of their community. At philosophical times when people ask me what I do I respond, “I work with students to help them become the people they want to be.” I find it loathsome, and counterproductive to suggest the best way to help students become citizens is to monitor their behavior all the time. What types of individuals would be produced from such a community, a community under constant surveillance?

Last week I publicly (via Twitter—really what other venue is there?) mentioned that I might be leaving Dropbox. What ensued was a rather lengthy conversation between me and others as to why I would do such a thing. Soon after the conversation started, the folks at @Dropbox noticed and joined the discussion. Why would I think about leaving Dropbox, a service which I often cite as one of the most useful around for educators? One word answer: Privacy. Based on some recent reports, I now have reason to be concerned about the degree to which Dropbox can keep files secure and private. When I expressed these concerns via Twitter the folks at Dropbox responded with some helpful information, and an invitation to write their legal department with any concerns I might have (140 characters being insufficient for adequately addressing the matter. And as I said on Twitter, credit to Dropbox for listening and engaging in a conversation.)

I started to write such an email, and then changed my mind, why not publicly layout my concerns, and let other educators see what the issues are, after all I feel somewhat responsible since I have spent so much time praising Dropbox. Rather than have a private dialogue with Dropbox it would be better to make it public, yes? So here goes.

The Background:

For those that don’t use Dropbox, think of it as an automatically syncing flash drive in the cloud, an excellent way to keep files synced across multiple computers and have them available on whatever device you have in front of you at the time. (Here is the official explanation.) Because of Dropbox I never need to carry assignments, syllabi, or journal articles that I want to read with me, or on a flash drive. These are just stored in the cloud and I can access them anytime the need arises. And this is just the tip of the ridiculously useful iceberg that is Dropbox. If you want more, just look at all the times it is mentioned on Profhacker (or just Google Dropbox uses and see what I mean). Dropbox has become one of the most important services in my media/computing ecosystem. On a scale of one to ten for usefulness and ease of use Dropbox is an 11.

The Problem:

About a month ago I started to see reports that expressed concern over Dropbox security, questions about the encryption being used, and who has access to the files you store on there servers. Basically there are to two sets of concerns. The first is that by design Dropbox is insecure. You can read the whole article, which is mildly technical but amounts to a concern that it would be fairly trivial for a nefarious party to steal one file and thus gain access to all your files without you necessarily knowing. The second is that Dropbox updated their Terms of Service to reflect the fact that they have access to your files if needed. In other words if the government subpoenas Dropbox, Dropbox has the ability to turn over your files in unencrypted form to the officials. (I know what some of you are thinking: Who cares, I am not doing anything illegal? . . . but wait I promise you should.) Both of these issues boil down to the fact that the encryption of your files takes place on the Dropbox servers, not on your own computer. In other words the question is who has the keys to your file(s) and where are those keys stored.

One way to think about this concern is to imagine your files are being stored in a lock box. One way to do it would be to put the files in a lockbox keep the key and send the whole box to Dropbox. In this way Dropbox has no way to unlock the files. But rather than this method what Dropbox employs is a technique whereby you send them your files they place them in a lockbox and give you the key, but have another copy of the key that lets them look in your box anytime they want. Why would they do it the second way instead of the first? Several reasons but I think there are probably two main ones: 1. Ease of use for Dropbox customers. A system where they (the server) handle the encryption rather than one where you manage (the client) has several advantages including a “lighter” Dropbox program on your device since it doesn’t have to handle encryption and the ability to retrieve files for you, even if you forget or lose your password. 2. Dropbox doesn’t want to cross the government.

Dropbox has responded to these concerns with a lengthy FAQ, which I encourage everyone to read. But, honestly the FAQ troubles me, and makes it even more likely that I will seek an alternative cloud service as it leaves many questions unanswered.

My Concerns:

Lets start with the transparency of this issue. What Dropbox is claiming, or appears to be claiming is that this change in the TOS does not reflect a policy shift, but merely an attempt to clarify what has been the policy all along. I’ll take Dropbox at their word on this, but I still have concerns about their wording.

“That said, like all U.S. companies, we must follow U.S. law. That means that the government sometimes requests us (as it does similar companies like Apple, Google, Skype, and Twitter) to turn over user information in response to requests for which the law requires that we comply.”

What Dropbox seems to be implying here is that they are required by US Law to have what is known as a backdoor key (the ability to unlock any file) and give it over to the government when served with a subpoena. But this is not actually the case. If Dropbox has the ability to unlock the files yes they have to give that over if they receive a request. But that doesn’t mean that they have to build a system that would allow them to do this. In other words if they didn’t have the ability to unlock your files the government couldn’t ask for that key, because Dropbox wouldn’t have the ability to unlock said files, they could only give over the encrypted versions of the files to the government, rather than the actual files themselves. This is what is essentially the issue in this article, about the government wanting to be able to WireTap the Internet. My understanding though, and I have asked a few lawyers about this, and their opinion was that the current state of the law does not require companies to serve up plaintext files.

Okay, at this point I hear many of you saying that you want this feature, that you want the government to be able to access the files of “the badies,” and since you have nothing to hide from the government you are not concerned. Let’s table that for a moment, and I’ll explain in a second why this is a dangerous view, but for now, irrespective of this issue there is a more significant one, which affects every user, regardless of whether or not you feel that you have something to hide from the government: A system which by design enables a third party to decrypt your files, is by design not secure. Or, a secret between two people can only be kept if one of them is dead. A system which by design has a backdoor to enable third party access is vulnerable to a security breach. As a way of thinking about this consider the relatively recent case where a Google Employee was accessing user email and chats. Yes, Google is concerned about user privacy, but any system, no matter how good the engineers has holes unless the user is the only one with the keys. So here is the rub, by trusting Dropbox and their current system you are not just trusting Dropbox but a host of employees. Any system designed like this will have a security breach at some point. It might not be a large one, it might not affect many users, but it will happen, you are just rolling the dice, gambling that you are not going to be the one effected (a fair gamble in most cases). Its not just software that you are trusting, but people, and people are usually the weakest link in any system.

Now just as importantly for me is the type of atmosphere this private-government partnership entails. I realize many of you might not agree with this, and I don’t want to turn this into a big discussion here (a discussion I am more than willing to have in other places), but I prefer to play corporate interests against the government, keep those two forces working against each other, rather than siding against the public. One of the particularly damaging developments we have seen in the web over the last 5 years is the ability of governments to control what happens online thru extra-judicial means, collaboration with companies to curtail our privacy. For me at least it isn’t a matter of having something to hide from the government, but rather knowing that I maintain control. Control of my own data, and the data of others who have entrusted it to me seems to be an essential component of dignity.

But What Do I Care?

You don’t have to imagine that the government would want your information to see some problems here. Let’s imagine that through an engineering problem (a problem with the code), an employee problem (see Google case above), or a deliberate hacking attack, Dropbox files suddenly become available. I actually have a good deal of student work, evaluations, letters of recommendation etc. stored there at any given time. Aside from my own paranoia about data and privacy there is a good bit of data that students and others with whom I work are entrusting me to keep private. Lets imagine that your grade roster is stored on Dropbox and that gets compromised. Once that file is unlocked and passed around there would be no getting it back. Leaving aside what kind of FERPA violation this may or may not be, I can imagine many students who might be harmed by this type of info. Have you stored judicial letters (for plagiarism cases) on Dropbox? I can think of a lot of information that I wouldn’t want out there even if it wouldn’t directly harm me.

Now about 80% of the stuff I store on Dropbox has no privacy issue associated with it, things like journal articles or chapters I want to read, or syllabi & assignments, or my running schedule, or stuff that is publicly available elsewhere like my CV. But there is enough there that I am concerned and looking for other options.

I will also note here that given the recent FOIA filings by conservative groups going after professors that being paranoid about data isn’t a bad thing, removing the option from others to share my data (this is why I use my own email more than I use the University provided one).

It’s true I have become somewhat paranoid here, using a VPN when on campus to ensure that the University can’t monitor my internet use, but I don’t think you have to be too paranoid to see this as an issue.

Questions for Dropbox

Having said all of this I think there are probably several things Dropbox could make clear that would help.

1. How many employees have access to user files? Is there a dual control system (do two employees have to sign off on access, or are there are a certain number of employees who can do so on their own)? Are records kept anytime users files are accessed this way, so that the company creates a clear audit trail? Do employees (and or any contractors they deal with) have background checks?

2. Under what conditions do they give the government data? The FAQ suggests that they would fight these requests if they found them to be lacking in merit. Have they done so? Can they make transparent this process? Hard data on this?

3. What is being done to fix the architecture issues? (Here Dropbox runs into a problem as the more it says about its security the more susceptible it is to vulnerabilities, but the less it says the less trustworthy it seems. Security thru obscurity really isn’t a good idea.)

4. Does Dropbox think it is their legal responsiblity, ethical responsiblity, or both to share information with the US government? Would they do so without a warrant? The policy says “request” what constituents a request?

The Other Options

1. As the Dropbox FAQ suggests the first option is to encrypt your file before it syncs with Dropbox. If you encrypt your files before syncing them with Dropbox, using something like TrueCrypt, nobody else will be able to access them. The disadvantage to this is it makes it such that your files are not accessible on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. In other words a not so useful option.

2. Use Dropbox only to store public, or pseudo-public information. Again 80% of what I store on Dropbox I am not concerned about so maybe I just only store that type of stuff on Dropbox.

3. Go back to using a flash drive. (Uhh, no thanks.) This also doesn’t let me use it across other platforms (iPad, phone, etc.)

4. Create a partition on my phone that would store these files. They would always be with me, and I could run something like Samba File sharing and Root Explorer. This would make it more than trivial though to access the files. Really I like cloud features.

5. Switch to a different service. Both SpiderOak and Wuala seem to offer services similar to Dropbox which encrypt the files on the user side. Both of these have applications for all the devices I use (iPad, Linux Computer, Android Phone).

6. Set up my own Dropbox type service on my home computer. Sure this can be done, or I can just run a VNC back to my computer and fetch the files I want, but this is less than optimal. There is also an open source Dropbox being developed, called Sparkleshare.

7. Pogoplug. Pogoplug works by creating your own cloudserver at home.

There is one meta-issue here. As the leader in this type of service, many other applications rely on, and provide support for syncing with Dropbox, for example iAnnotate or GoodReader—usability that would be sacrificed by switching services. And as the easiest and most frequently used, Dropbox is the easy one for me to recommend to faculty members who are less than computer savvy.

Right now I am investigating SpiderOak, Wuala, and PogoPlug. I will let you all know what I discover. My preferred option though would be for Dropbox to address the current issues, cause you know I really do like their service.



At any rate for those who are interested on Monday at noon east coast time, I will be participating in a webinar on teaching Writing as Information Arts (sort of a way of thinking about teaching digital literacy).

Choisir entre supprimer le français et supprimer la philosophie… Quel beau choix ! Enlever plutôt le foie ou le poumon ? Plutôt l’estomac ou le coeur ?

Plutôt les yeux ou les oreilles ?

Il faudrait inventer un enseignement strictement monolingue d’une part – car tout peut être traduit en anglais, n’est-ce pas ? – et strictement dépourvu de toute interrogation (par exemple sur ce qu’implique la “traduction” en général et en particulier de telle langue à telle autre). Une seule langue débarrassée des parasites de la réflexion serait une belle matière universitaire, lisse, harmonieuse, aisée à soumettre aux contrôles d’acquisition.

Il faut donhc proposer de supprimer l’un et l’autre, le français et la philosophie. Et tout ce qui pourrait s’en approcher, comme le latin ou la psychanalyse, l’italien, l’espagnol ou la théorie littéraire, le russe ou l’histoire. Peut-être serait-il judicieux d’introduire à la place, et de manière obligatoire, quelques langages informatiques (comme java) et aussi le chinois commercial et le hindi technologique, du moins avant que ces langues soient complètement transcrites en anglais. A moins que n’arrive l’inverse.

De toutes façons, enseignons ce qui s’affiche sur nos panneaux publicitaires et sur les moniteurs des places boursières.

Rien d’autre !

Courage, camarades, un monde nouveau va naître !

Jean-Luc Nancy, professeur émérite d’une vieille Université française (pas pour longtemps).

What’s that you say? You can’t read it because it’s in French? Well luckily for you, despite the best efforts of the Albany adminstration there are French Studies Faculty left. So, you can read it in translation:

To choose between eliminating French or Philosophy . . . what a fabulous choice! Should one rather take out the liver or the lung? The stomach or the heart? The eyes or ears?

We need to invent teaching that is, on the one hand, strictly monolingual – for isn’t it true that everything can be translated into English? – and strictly lacking in all forms of questioning (for example concerning what is implied by “translation” in general and from one language to another in particular). A single language unencumbered by the static [parasites] of reflection would be a great subject for university study, smooth, harmonious, easily submitting to the controls of acquisition.

We should propose eliminating both of them, French and Philosophy. And everything existing in proximity to them, like Latin or psychoanalysis, Italian, Spanish or literary theory, Russian or History. Perhaps it would be wise to introduce in their place, as requirements, certain computer languages (like Java), as well as commerical Chinese and technological Hindi, at least until such languages are able to be completely transcribed into English. Unless the inverse were to happen first.

In any case, let’s teach what is displayed on our advertising billboards and on the stock exchange monitors. That and nothing else!

Courage, comrades, a new world is about to be born!

Jean-Luc Nancy, Emeritus Professor of an old French (not for long) university.

Translation by Professor of French and English David Wills (fair disclosure David was my dissertation director).

So here is what I am trying this semester for my EMAC 4325, Privacy, Surveillance, and Control on the Internet . . .

The focus of the class is on semester long research projects where each group has a public website/blog covering one aspect of the class. So for the whole semester groups have to work together to produce their project. The project is designed to require a range of skills, design, writing, coding, image manipulation, video and audio editing etc.

I came up with two basic rules for this project:

1. Everybody in the group gets the same project grade (which is 50% of the final grade).
2. If you are unhappy with a member of your group, i.e. feel that they are not sufficiently contributing, you can fire them from your team.

I put together these two rules from different projects I saw others do, although neither project put them together. On the first day of class I explained these rules and then handed them out the long detailed sheet which contained all the information on the project. Part of the project, indeed the first thing they had to do was come with community rules which described how the group was going to function, what initial responsibilites would be, and finally what the means by which they could dismiss a member of the group would be. In other words they had to write a group constitution of sorts complete with reasons and methods by which they would dismiss someone. (I did explain that in every case a meeting with me would be necessary, but I did this mainly as a way to make sure the group rules were followed, if a group decides to remove someone then I plan to support them.)

If someone is removed from a group then they become a group of one, responsible for their own project (which frankly is quite a bit of work).

Do I think this will solve all of the group assignment problems? No. But I think this probably represents more realistically how groups function outside of academia, they succeed or fail as a group, it doesn’t really matter if you work really hard, harder than anyone else around, you still need the group (ask Lebron James about this). By focusing on the group I won’t get caught trying to figure out team dynamics and what went wrong, assigning blame (like restaurant wars on Top Chef), instead everyone succeeds, or everyone fails. Simple . . . hopefully.

The next thing I did was get them divided into groups.

This was actually the most difficult part of the class, so far. I wanted students to be able to have a say in what group they joined, so that they were working on a topic that interested them, but I also wanted to avoid people just pairing up with people whom they have worked before and are friends. I also wanted to make sure that each group got a diversity of talent. I contemplated having them pick teams (schoolyard style) but thought that would end up being a bit ridiculous and isolating to the people who were not picked. Instead I had each student write on a one side of a notecard their name, on the other side they wrote the three topics that interested them the most, and then the three skills they would bring to the project, creating anonymous mini-resumes. I then selected one person for each group, and subsequently that person got to pick from the notecards one person for their team. On the whole this worked out, everyone got in a group that interested them, and the talent in every group is pretty diverse, and groups were picked based on talent not prior relationships or popularity.

Overall, three weeks into the semester, I am happy with how the groups are progressing. I have started to give them weekly feedback, always directed at the group rather than individuals. You can see the complete details of the project at the class website, along with links to all the ongoing projects.

I’ll write about this again at the end of the semester . . .

In general I think it can be a productive activity to encourage students to take a step back from relying on social media. I say this not because I think social media is a bad, or even harmful technology, but rather because I think that changing behavior can lead students to certain realizations about whatever it is they are studying. Showing students is usually a better pedagogical method then telling them. I won’t go into all the reasons in detail here, if you want you can check out the longer article I wrote for Flowtv.org on the student saturated media environment, but in short I would say that what seems strange and unfamiliar to us, is normal to most of our students. That is there is nothing particularly strange or unusual to them about Facebook, texting, Twitter, YouTube etc. As an educator one particularly effective tactic, I think, is to take the familiar and make it look strange. Or as Siva Vaidhyanathan explained on Twitter recently, students are like fish swimming in an ocean of media, my job is to get them to notice the water.

So it might seem like I would support Eric Darr, the provost of Harrisburg, and his plan to cut off social media for a week. Except I don’t. Actually I think it is a bad idea (maybe with good intentions, but a bad idea nonetheless). Let me explain.

In short I think this sort of experiment needs to be done carefully at a local level not globally with a broad brush. As Eric Stoller characterized the decision, having the Provost decide the matter for the whole University seems a bit “heavy handed” (Note: the “heavy handed” quote which is attributed to me in the Chronicle article originates with Eric, although I agree with it.) In this instance it becomes an abstracted authority telling his subordinates, what is and is not healthy, or at the least creating an experiment where the participants have no say in the matter. Whether or not it is Eric’s intent the message easily becomes “students cannot live without social media, they should try it for a week.” And again whether or not this is the Provost’s intent, it ends up coming off like a “kid’s these days” situation. Try substituting another “batch” of technology to see how problematic this becomes. For a substantial portion of the faculty, dissertations were written on a typewriter maybe we should ban all computers for a week and make graduate students work on typewriters, or we used to communicate in handwritten letters, for a week all communication must be handwritten, or people used to walk everywhere before there were cars, maybe we should have students practice a car free week.

This is not to suggest that anyone of the above couldn’t be a productive project, but I think they would only be productive given the right context. If you were studying urban planning it might be useful to have students not use cars for a week, or if you were studying linguistics and machine technology maybe only letter writing would be appropriate, but without a context I think the experiment is bound to fail, probably creating more frustration and anger than anything else.

In essence Harrisburg (or Eric, it’s difficult to tell) has grouped together a wide range of technologies and banned them all, without really recognizing their difference, and recognizing the differences between these technologies is one of the crucial things we should be teaching. On the first level who decides what is “social media” and what is not, is foursquare blocked? what about last.fm? World of Warcraft? or discussion boards? or heck even blogs with comments? I am not sure that I could decide what is and what is not social media and I am supposed to be an expert in it, how is a school going to decide? Second on the practical level it is near impossible to block all social media sites. Even if you could create a working definition of social media it would be impossible to create an exhaustive list of sites, there are simply too many to count.

Furthermore, how does one even go about enforcing this? A University wide ban is not likely to stop students from using social media, rather what it is likely to do is teach students how to set-up proxies and route around the IP blocking the University is planning on doing (not that this wouldn’t in and of itself be a good thing for students to learn. I wonder how many Tor downloads will happen that week?) Or students will likely just go off campus to access the net, making the ban an inconvenience but not an experience in giving up social media. What is more is that it is likely to disproportionately effect students over faculty and disproportionately  effect some students more than others. Faculty members who go home at night, or students who live off campus will be less affected. And what is worse is there is likely to be a class divide here as students who can afford to work at places like coffee shops will access the net there, or students who can afford Smart Phones will just rely on those devices for social networking.

There is one other concern here worth noting, one that I tried to raise in The Chronicle article but which unfortunately came across probably too soft. I think we should start by recognizing that social media isn’t an online form of communication, rather social media is how students communicate. In other words Eric isn’t asking students to give up communicating online, he is asking them to give up a large portion of the way in which they communicate. Imagine if the experiment was to have no one on campus talk to each other? There are actually fairly serious concerns here that shouldn’t be treaded over lightly. For many students their social media networks of friends are crucial to their daily lives, whether as the primary means by which they stay in touch with people or at the most significant level as a medium by which they connect with their support groups. Asking students to give up social media is not just a technical ask, it is a social and psychological one as well, one which I think those who don’t use it as a primary means of communicating probably underestimate.

But it is all to easy to critique without offering a solution. So, here is my solution, how I go about asking students to go on a social media fast.

1. I do it within a specific class context, making it an assignment. Since I teach social media, media is both the object and means of study, any ask I make is within the context of the class. In the same way asking students to give up cars for an urban planning class would make sense, asking students to give up a particular social media site within the context of class makes sense. This also presents the opportunity to discuss and process the experience.
2. Create buy in. Just telling students to live without social media seems to authoritarian, explaining to them, again within the context of the class is a far more effective way to handle the situation. If students are bought in to the assignment then they are more likely to do it. An assignment like this cannot possibly be monitored, so you need students to want to willfully do it. Do all my students follow through? No, but a majority do. (Incidentally the person who commented on The Chronicle that I would leave it up to a class vote, sort of missed this point. You can demand a lot of things from students, the one thing you can’t demand is that they learn. Their mindset going into any assignment will greatly determine what they get out of it.)
3. Make the assignment after, or during studying the object. This again creates context. After discussing Facebook and the way students use it, asking them to give it up for a week will make more sense.
4. Pick specific social media, not all social media. When I assign students to give up Facebook for a week they are still free to use email, discussion boards, even Twitter. By being specific you get students to pay attention to the specifics of each site rather than treating them all as equal, which they are clearly not. I might have students give up search engines for a day next semester.
5. Have a specific timeline and a reason for the duration. Make it a challenge.
6. Recognize that students will be differently affected by this assignment, especially if you are asking them to give up their support networks.
7. Join them. I never ask students to give up something that I am not also willing to give up.
8. Have them write about it, during and after. I want them to process the experience, they learn more this way and learn more from each other this way.

P.S. You should also read Eric Stoller’s take on this from a student life perspective.

Earlier this year Marc Andreesen was interviewed by TechCrunch on the future of publishing,in particular journalism. Andreesen’s response was, provocatively, “Burn the Boats.” What he was referring to was the moment Cortez, fleeing from Cuba, and landing in Mexico, ordered his troops to “burn the boats,” preventing any possibility of return. The lesson: don’t defend lost ground, at times there is no going back, and making decisions to insure that one does not consider a return is a good move. Andreesen’s point was that old print based media forms are dead, and it does no good to try and re-envision them for the 21st century, rather journalism institutions need to boldly move to future web based models, giving up on their print based biases.

In a similar regard I would like to suggest that academics “Burn Their Boats” or in this case, more specifically “Burn the Books,” making a definitive move to embrace new modes of scholarships enabled by web based communication, rather than attempting to port old models into the new register. Rather than providing the book with a digital facelift for 21st century scholarly communications, academics should move past book based biases which structure scholarly communications and instead imagine and execute born digital scholarly forms, which leverage the evolving digital media landscape.

Let me be clear, I like books, in fact it was my love of books, or more specifically my investment in what books can accomplish that led me to graduate school. My PhD is in English after all. Indeed I collect book, and although I don’t do it much anymore I have at times spent time tracking down and acquiring first editions for some of my favorite works. I am not in fact suggesting that we actually engage in book burning, nothing of the sort, although if I did actually burn some of my books I think it would make moving easier. Instead I am suggesting that we burn our love affair with books, and that out of reverence to the book, we stop treating it as the only or indeed primary means of scholarly communication. Not only are there better ways, but if academia wants to remain (or more skeptically, become) relevant we ought to recognize that the book is no longer the main mode of knowledge transmission.

Faced with the transformation to the digital, the newspaper industry chose to protect a business model, instead of preserving their social function. My fear is that academics are making the same mistake. Now granted this analogy is not perfect, there are contours and shapes, and nuance and details that matters here. They are not a direct equivalence, but I think the underlying logic is the same. It concerns me that academics and intellectuals, with some exceptions, seem to be repeating this mistake, following the digital facelift model, asking how they can continue to do what they do now, but do it in the digital space, rather than asking how what they do has been fundamentally changed in the age of the digital networked archive. Administrators have a tendency to preserve the business function (how can we offer our classes online vs. how does the online reshape the very idea of a class), and academics end up defending the political and ideological function (the importance of books and peer review).

It is probably worth distinguishing here between the materiality of the book, and the ideologies and biases we associate with the book. That is at the most basic level a book is a dead tree processed and bound together in leaves of paper and stained with ink. But, many of the things that we have come to associate with the book are not in fact coterminous with its material structure but rather biases developed over the Gutenberg Parenthesis. I won’t fully develop this idea here but this is what I often call librocentricism, or a book biased way of thinking, where the book stands in for certain prejudices and ideas about knowledge. As a way of thinking about this notice how the word book often stands in for, or comes to mean, the entirety of the matter, as in The Book of Nature, to “throw the book at someone,” or The Book of Love. Again there is a lot more to this idea, and I would no doubt need more than a blog post to develop this, but I think it is easy to recognize, even if the full complexity of the argument would take time, that “book” comes to be an epistemological framework for knowledge, not just a material one.

One quick example of how this works, before I move to some ideas for restructuring scholarship: syllabi. A syllabus is often structured like a book, a beginning, a middle and an end, indeed even with chapters (sections), where the traversal (completion of the weeks or reading of all the pages), promises to deliver the knowledge product.

The idea that knowledge is a product, which can be delivered in an analog vehicle is precisely what I want to call into question. What the network shows us, is that many of our views of information were/are based on librocentric biases. If you printed out all the information on the net, roughly 500 billion GB it would stack from here to Pluto 10 times. While the book treats information as something scarce, the net shows us precisely the opposite, information is anything but scarce. Books tell us that one learns by acquiring information, something which is purchased and traded as a commodity, consumed and mastered, but the net shows us that knowledge is actually about navigating, creating, participating (to be sure some people still trade in knowledge, buying and selling secrets, but this is of a substantially different order than the work we as academics do, especially humanities based academics).

Knowledge is no longer print based, nor governed by the substrate of paper, indeed while in many ways we might continue to harbor librocentric biases, as we move away from structuring knowledge to end up on paper, these framing structures will prove less and less necessary, indeed may actually impede on our ability to participate in knowledge conversations.

I am not saying that we should whole sale give up on books, actually perform a book burning freeing ourselves from all of the pages we have in our respective offices, but rather something slightly different, we should start conceiving of our scholarship as if if will not end up in books, indeed it still might, but begin by asking ourselves what would scholarship look like if were not designed to end up in books.

Here are some ideas, or suggestions for this change over:

• Stop Publishing in Closed Systems: If I can only convince you of one thing, I hope it will be this. If you publish in a journal which charges for access, you are not published, you are private-ed. To publish means to make public, if something is locked down behind a firewall where someone needs a subscription to view it, it is not part of the “common knowledge” base and thus might as well not exist. Academic journals are treating knowledge as if it is a scarce commodity, it is not, don’t let them treat it as such. If someone wants to publish something you wrote, ask them if you can keep the copyright, license under creative commons, and if they say no, don’t give it to them, and find someone who will. Look for journals which publish only online and only for free.
• Self Publish: Publishing and editing are hacks based on the scarcity of paper, no need to carry it over to the new medium. Once publishing was the most efficient way to reach the largest audience, no longer is that the case, so lets get over our publishing fetish. Publishing online allows you to engage a wider audience, both faster and more efficiently than any print based journal. We think of an academics role as presenting polished finished work and ideas, but this need not be the case. We should switch to presenting our ideas in process, showing our work, not just the final product.
• End the .pdf madness: A .pdf document is not a web based document, it is a print based document distributed on the web. One of the principle advantages of the web is the way it connects, operates as a network of connections within an ecosystem of knowledge, one can search, copy, paste, edit, link with ease, none of which is true of a .pdf. The .pdf is just a way of maintaining print based aesthetics and structures on the web. In the same way you wouldn’t think of publishing a book without the appropriate footnotes, don’t publish to the web without the appropriate live links.
• Get Over Peer Review: Peer Review is another hack based on the scarcity of paper. Given the cost of producing knowledge and the fact that academic journals or academic presses could only afford to produce so many pages with each journal, peers are established to vet, and signal that a particular piece is credible and more worthy than the others. This is the filter than publish model. But the net actually works in reverse, publish then filter, involving a wider range of people in the discursive production. Some of the most productive feedback I receive on my work comes not from peers who have a rather narrow sense of what counts and what doesn’t but from a wider range of people, with a diverse perspective. Why do academics argue for small panel anonymous peer review? One thing we know is diversity of perspective enriches discourse. 
• Aspire to Be a Curator: I think we have to give up being authorities, controlling our discourse, seeing ourselves as experts who poses bodies of knowledge over which we have mastery. Instead I think we have to start thinking of what we do as participating in a conversation, and ongoing process of knowledge formation. What if we thought of academics as curators, or janitors, people who keep things up to date, clean, host, point, aggregate knowledge rather than just those who are responsible for producing new stuff. Do we really need another book arguing that throughout the history of literary scholarship the important field of ‘x’ has long been ignored. No. But, we could actually use some really good online resources and aggregators for particular knowledge areas.
• Think Beyond the Book: Think of the book as one form, not the form. Indeed think of things that move beyond the book. What if you are writing didn’t have to be stable, didn’t have to have a final version, what if you could constantly update, change alter, make available your work. There will be no final copy, just the most recent version. While the constantly in beta mode might concern those who aim for perfection, it can also be liberating when you realize that nothing is fixed, taking advantage of the fluid. What happens when we give up on, or at least refuse to be limited by librocentricism? What if a piece didn’t have to be 20 pages for a journal article or 250 for a book, there are economic constraints that place limits on the size of academic writing, how much better can we be when we get rid of these. Or what would an academic argument as an iPhone app look like?

Let me be clear, I am not saying that the book is dead, in one regard it is already dead, in another it continues to haunt us and will never die. And we should be glad for this haunting there are many features of the book from which we benefit. What I am saying though is the centrality of the book is gone, and academia would do well to recognize this, to move into new directions, new grounds, where many already are. We should not continue to constrain our thinking by this librocentricism which no longer structures or limits the way that knowledge is produced, archived, or disseminated.

(P.S. Below is a photo I took at my visit to The Chronicle last week. Apparently these are all the books they received from academic publishers in the last week (that’s right just one week), which nobody wanted. In other words at an academic institution like The Chronicle, not one reader could be found for any of these books. They were giving them away for free. Seriously, we should stop this madness. Won’t somebody please think of the trees?)

(Below is the full video where I elaborate on the points/ideas above.)

Burn the Boats/Books, part 1 from DWRL on Vimeo.

Burn the Boats/Books, part 2 from DWRL on Vimeo.

What Dan made me wonder/realize is that by using iPads for educational purposes schools, both higher ed and secondary/primary ed, would be opening themselves up to censorship by Apple. In other words as I tweeted this morning:

Consider, that Apple’s track record here is not all that great. The way currently the App Store is administered, applications have to receive approval from Apple to be listed. Now supposedly this was initially done for quality assurance purposes (to make sure apps won’t crash your device) and in limited cases to insure that apps don’t duplicate existing core apps (listening to music, email) or interfere with AT&Ts money interest. But as the app store developed Apple extended their approval process into the role of censorship. From Apple’s Program License Agreement:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

So, Apple might block anything that in their reasonable judgement they think is “obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.” This as far as I am concerned is a dangerous situation, Apple as moral censor. Now certainly it is within their legal rights to do so, but the question is whether or not it is a good idea for us to enter this contract (and by us I mean both users and developers).

Most famously this restriction affected developers of “pornographic content” with Wobble being one of the more hyped, removed, reinstated apps. This also means that the range of iPhone sex apps must have stick figures rather than more illustrative pictures. So, say for instance you are teaching a course on human sexuality, or a sex education course, is Apple going to restrict what you can and can’t do with the iPad content wise?

Okay you might be thinking this is a liminal case, teaching sex in schools is always a touchy subject and Apple will be necessarily treading on shaky ground here. I think most people probably feel no threat from Apple as long as they limit their censorship to “pornographic content,” but as their policy indicates it extends further than that. There is political content that Apple not only would be willing to censor, but has already censored. (Worried yet?) The at this point most famous case of political censorship by Apple is of Mark Fiore, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons. His app was censored by Apple. Now upon him winning the Pulitzer his app has subsequently been made available, but a situation where someone has to win a major award to overcome Apple’s censorship doesn’t exactly strike me as conducive to intellectual discourse.

Now consider the possible futures. Will Apple censor political apps that one might want to use in your classroom? What happens when Apple goes international with the iPad in education movement? Will the German laws restricting what can and can’t be said about Nazism limit what content Apple makes available? What about in China? Currently this is not an issue because the devices we use are independent from the content (or at least with respect to most computers), the company doesn’t get a say in how I use their device.

This initially might not seem like a big concern, for as many people pointed out on Twitter today, Apple is not going to censor documents that one accesses on the iPad, Apple only restricts what applications you can run on their devices. So presumably one could buy an ebook reader app for the iPad and run any Textbook that is published in ePub through the reader, Apple will have no say in the matter.

But as Dan’s Tweet points out this is a concern. For in the first place many books are published as apps so they will not get a work around. Especially with regard to textbooks which are likely to be published as apps requiring updates every year, following the software leasing model, rather than purchase a song model (textbook industries will love this as it yields greater revenue). Or as many of the educational materials people use will be “rich textbooks” not just ebooks, but packaged content with videos, quizzes, and “interactive content” so just publishing to .epub or .pdf won’t constitute a work around. Imagine the scenario where you want to include this M.I.A. video in your course content about police state violence, and racial profiling. (YouTube already removed this video, so it is not to far fetched too imagine Apple would deem it too violent.)

But take this even a step further, beyond “bookish” content, there is a range of material that I would want to make available to my class which Apple might chose to ban (and I am not even talking about the illegal stuff here). Consider, I have (and probably will continue to) teach Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Clearly this is content someone might find “obscene” or “defamatory” how do I know what Apple’s judgement on this is going to be? Is this really a decision I want to turn over to Apple? Indeed by allowing a locked down device into the classroom, especially if one makes it the center piece of a technology in the classroom movement this is precisely what will happen. Apple will have control over what type of content students can place on these devices.

I realize, as many pointed out on Twitter, that this is a decision many school boards already make, censoring course material, believe me I live in Texas, I get it. But there is something substantially different about a community deciding what is and is not appropriate for its students, and a corporation making these decisions. And, for higher ed, where we are not subject to the same school board politics, this would certainly be accepting a larger set of restrictions than we are used to. Again having one corporation serve as a media hub for both software, hardware, and now content, strikes me as a future we ought to resist.

(I need a “Just Say No to iPad in Education” banner.)