Earlier this year, Facebook raised the ire of users and privacy rights groups when the social networking company announced updates to its privacy policy, which some interpreted as a declaration of ownership over the media and information uploaded by Facebook users. While the Facebook debacle may be old news, the larger issue of ownership over personal media and information has yet to be addressed in a meaningful way. Thus, the question remains: when we participate as “users” in a cybernated society, whether as Facebook fanatics or AT&T customers, are we (or should we be) allowing these organizations to claim ownership over the information and media we store in their systems? Do all our base belong to them?

As Dr. Debra Hansen points out, Marshall McLuhan provides a “useful starting point for the study of information and society” that is particularly salient to the comparison between the print revolution and the current “electronic” revolution. In his seminal work, “Understanding Media,” McLuhan characterizes the print revolution as part of the “mechanical age,” as opposed to the “electric age” that we live in today, and describes the printed word as a “mechanical medium” that “burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly”. In McLuhan’s eyes, the “supreme quality” of print is “that it is a pictoral statement that can be repeated precisely and indefinitely,” and that “the principle of movable type introduced the means of mechanizing any handicraft by the process of segmenting and fragmenting an integral action”.

In contrast, McLuhan sees the current electric age as one of automation as opposed to mechanization, an era in which “letters…are not printed by type but rather painted by light,” and in which “centuries of specialist stress in pedagogy and in the [linear] arrangement of data now end with the instantaneous retrieval of information made possible by electricity”. Automation, or cybernation, according to McLuhan, is a “scientific revolution” that “affects not just production, but every phase of consumption and marketing; for the consumer becomes producer in the automation circuit, quite as much as the reader of the mosaic telegraph press makes his own news, or just is his own news”.

Hot and Cold

Although McLuhan wrote Understanding Media in 1964, his analysis anticipated the arrival of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Web 2.0 in near-prophetic fashion. The reference to cybernation is particularly astute as it relates to the feedback and control mechanisms we see in the blogosphere, a phenomenon that has transformed the journal-as-medium from a monologue into a dialogue (or “polylogue”). The highly participatory nature of Web 2.0 makes it what McLuhan would call a “cool” medium, as opposed to the “hot” medium of print, which “allows of less participation than a cool medium, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and book for less than dialogue”.

In my mind, one of the key distinctions between the print revolution and our current electronic revolution is that, while the printed word made it possible for anyone to become a reader, the electronic word is making it possible for anyone to become an author. Gutenberg literacy is about consuming information; Berners-Lee literacy is about contributing information.

Your Information, Our Data

More than ever, we are being invited to “participate” in this social Web. Community engagement is rapidly becoming a dominant mode of consumer marketing, and many of the most popular products and services on the Web today, from Google to MySpace and Facebook, are driven by the contributions of users who place ideas and information “in the cloud” where it can be leveraged for targeted advertising and market research. For example, Facebook has been planning to “exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150 million members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases”.

This brings us to what I think is another crucial distinction between the print revolution and the current electronic (more specifically, cybernetic) revolution: The central issue associated with the invention of the printing press is that of intellectual freedom; in contrast, the central issue associated with the invention of the World Wide Web is that of intellectual property.

In 1439, when Gutenberg first assembled his mechanical printing press, the concept of intellectual property, and by extension copyright, did not exist. While it is true that medieval trade guilds closely guarded information such as trade secrets and trade routes, Western European society had no legal basis for recognizing creative ownership over of ideas of the mind until the so-called “Statute of Anne” in 1709. Furthermore, the term “intellectual property” may not have appeared until as late as 1845.

To be certain, these concepts were products of the mechanical age, but they were (in part) responses to printing monopolies, and I believe they can be considered as the springboards of an issue that is central to this modern electronic era of “cloud computing” in which “participation” amounts to placing your intellectual property on someone else’s (Google, Facebook, etc.) physical property.

Policy Shifts and Warning Bells

While there is well-established legislation and jurisprudence around corporate and artistic ownership of intellectual property (music, movies, etc.), there is far less clarity around the issue of user-contributed content. While the information we upload to Facebook or Google Docs may “belong” to us, the raw data is stored on their physical property–their servers, their storage equipment, their network lines. Privacy policies and terms of use dictate what is permissible, but many companies can–and do–change those terms. If you don’t like it, you can delete your account, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to stop utilizing your information behind closed doors, or that they are going to delete the data from their systems. In fact, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement, is a noted skeptic of using online services to store your information, warning that “cloud computing is a trap” and has “advised users to stay local and stick with their own computers.”

Take the example of AT&T, which in 2006 was accused of allowing agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor telephone and Internet communications of customers–without warrants. While not admitting to this activity, AT&T did update their privacy policy to state that “AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it ‘to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.’ ”

This issue also extend to libraries in terms of the information that librarians are placing online. During his recent keynote speech at Califa’s 2009 Digitization Symposium, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle expressed concern about the  Online Computer Library Center’s announcement about a draft update to its Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of OCLC-Derived Records. According to Brewster, the proposed policy change amounted to a claim of ownership over the user-contributed card catalog records in its database, as well as an attempt to prevent anyone from using the records for any purpose that might conflict with the interests of the OCLC.

Now it should be noted that Kahle and Stallman are advocates of an openness, and both are radical opponents of closed information systems. However, as evidenced by the recent $125 million settlement in the Authors Guild vs. Google court case, authors do have legal recourse. However, I think it is important that librarians continue to raise awareness about these issues as more and more of the world’s information becomes digitized and available on the Internet. Furthermore, it is worth considering that we as citizens of a digital, online society will need to become “literate” in how to manage our personal information and information assets in this interconnected environment to protect ourselves from abuse without closing ourselves off from the opportunities and advantages that life in the cloud has to offer.

Bibliography

Authors Guild. (2008, October 28). $125 Million Settlement in Authors Guild v. Google. Retrieved February 12, 2009, from The Authors Guild: http://www.authorsguild.org/

Feather, J. (1980). The Book Trade in Politics: The Making of the Copyright Act of 1710. Publishing History , 39.

Hansen, D. History of Information.

Johnson, B. (2008, September 29). Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman. The Guardian Newspaper .

Lazarus, D. (2006, June 21). AT&T rewrites rules: Your data isn’t yours. San Francisco Chronicle .

McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Online Computer Library Center. (n.d.). Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of OCLC-Derived Records. Retrieved February 12, 2009, from Online Computer Library Center: http://www.oclc.org/support/documentation/worldcat/records/guidelines/default.htm

Various. (n.d.). Intellectual property. Retrieved February 12, 2009, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History

Neate, R., & Mason, R. (2009, February 2). Networking site cashes in on friends. Retrieved February 10, 2009, from The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/4413483/Networking-site-cashes-in-on-friends.html