Not So Invisible Children

On March 4, 2012, Jason Russell, co-founder of Invisible Children, was virtually unknown.  Within days his video Kony 2012 had over 50 million views and he, literally overnight, became a household name.  On March 16 he was taken into custody by police after complaints that he was naked through the streets, screaming, and making crude gestures in what appeared to be some kind of nervous breakdown.

With the recent popularity growth of the internet and social media, we often here concerns about how this trend effects our privacy.  What we don't hear about as often is the dangers that come with its incredible power of exposure.  Here is a case of someone who appeared to have good intentions, whether or not they were misguided, who became extremely famous almost instantaneously through social media and appears to have been unable to cope with the exposure and resulting backlash.

On March 5, 2012, a 30 minute video was released by a non-profit organization named Invisible Children Inc. The video was entitled Kony 2012, and its goal was to bring awareness to the atrocities of the LRA in Uganda, and its leader Joseph Kony.  The video currently has over 85 million views on Youtube, and Invisible children has over 3 million facebook "likes", and over 400,000 twitte followers.  It was also a top 5 trending topic on twitter for over a week after its release.  One of the results of the videos incredible popularity was a senate resolution being made condemning Kony and promising further support for Uganda.
Several high profile journalists such as Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper had recently done stories on Kony through traditional news outlets, and yet the public remained largely unaware of the issue.  Somehow this video resonated with people, and spread through social media such as facebook and twitter like wildfire.

Perhaps even more interesting than the meteoric rise of Jason Russell's and the video's popularity, was the almost absurdly vehement backlash that followed.  Many felt the video's message was far too simplistic, and focused more on a 5 year old american boy than the suffering of the people of Uganda, but the criticisms went far beyond that, some going as far as to denounce Invisible Children as a fraudulent charity with nefarious intentions.  After his public episode, Russel's wife stated to the press that he was having difficulty dealing with the negative feedback from the video, and that this was atleast partly responsible for his public breakdown.  A second video, which begins with the cries of suffering Ugandans and then quickly tranforms into an expensive looking musical featuring Russel and his friends, only fueled the criticism, and the video was quickly removed from their website.

Their have been many examples of people's lives being effected negatively by viral videos, such as the infamous "Star Wars Kid",  but none of those videos seemed this benign, or spread so far and so quickly, with such immediate obvious effects.  We all need to consider the implications of this new media's incredible power to shine a spotlight on people suddenly, whether or not they want it or are ready for it.

Crowdsourcing Copyright Reform

Seeing as how both crowdsourcing and copyright have been discussed recently in lecture, I thought this new   Future of Copyright Contest was a particularly relevent topic, since it deals with the intersection of these two issues. This contest is attempting to crowdsource not only ideas for copyright reform, but the prize money as well.  Contestants are asked to create a short work about the future of copyright (20,000 characters for text or 15 minutes of audio/video), and the entries with the best ideas, as determined by an independent jury.  The jury already contains several respected professionals in the field including Michael Geist and Piotr Czerski.  The prize money that will go to the winner of the competition will come entirely from donations, so those that don't want to submit their ideas on the subject can contribute financially instead.

How appropriate would it be, perhaps even poetic, if ideas that help shape copyright reform for the information age were to come from a crowdsource contest funded by the internet community itself.  I believe that it is initiatives like this that will protect the freedom of the internet for its users.  Copyright is an extremely complicated issue, and the public can't really be too hard on the governments and media coalitions who feel threatened by the current state of the internet and want to impose stifling restrictions upon it, unless they can concieve of reforms themselves that are fair, enforcable, and don't impose on people's freedoms.  I feel that if idea's like this are successful, it will be evidence of a maturing internet community taking responsibility for itself.

Raspberry Pi, the $25 computer

My girlfriend finishes her Master of Information degree this spring and has begun looking for work as a librarian. She was surprised to see how many employers were looking for applicants with programming skills as well as the master's degree. This seems to be becoming increasingly common in all fields as we advance further into the digital age.

Surprisingly, research has showed that students applying for computer science in the last decade have less programming skills than they did in the 90's. One possible reason is that in the late 80's and early 90's computers were relatively simpler, and with the internet only in its infancy, fear of operating systems becoming corrupted or compromised was much lower. This lead to parents being more likely to allow or even encourage their children to experiment with programming on a family computer. These days, home computers have become a vital part of most peoples lives, and the last thing most people want is their child experimenting with things they don't necessarily understand on them. So as a result the skills which are becoming more universally in demand are actually becoming more scarce.

In 2006, Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory began working on a potential solution to this problem. They have since then created a credit card sized computer, capable of running modern software (the basic software package was developed in Toronto at Seneca College), which is being sold for the amazingly low price of $25 US. Not only is the computer extremely affordable, but it was also designed to be extremely energy efficient.

The Raspberry Pi just went on-sale last Wednesday and immediately sold out, with the website being completely unable to handle the amount of traffic from interested parties. Part of the reason this product can be sold so cheaply is that it is not being sold for profit, but for the benefit of society in general.

Not only can the Raspberry Pi provide a truly personal computer which children can experiment with programming on, but it could provide many other solutions and possibilities as well. Their is already a strong interest from third-world or emerging countries where the average citizen can not afford a regular PC or the power demands of such devices. This also presents an incredible opportunity to schools, since they could supply each student with their own computer for less money than they would spend on most textbooks. The affordability and extremely low energy demands of this device will cause people to consider using computers to solve all kinds of problems where it simply was not practical for.

The information revolution has provided society with an incredible open and democratic platform. We as a society have a responsibility to ensure that people in lower income brackets aren't excluded from its benefits, and the Raspberry Pi may go a long way towards making sure that virtually anyone can afford their own computer.