From Library Babel Fish, June 25, 2015
I’m a sucker for optimism. That’s one of the reasons I liked David Weinberger’s recent essay in The Atlantic in which he first describes how the internet has been “paved over” by data-sucking giant corporate interests and then explores how we can still have an internet that reflects and embodies its original ideals – a place where people can share ideas, build their own stuff, and participate in open culture. You can use the paved-over internet or you can “feel the loam between your toes.” A lot of people who didn’t know where to start got online only when a paved road was presented to them along with a click-through agreement to surrender their content and privacy. But there are parts of the internet that aren’t commercialized, that do allow people to tend their own gardens still.
The giants have the benefit of network effects – Google and Facebook are so big their very size exerts a kind of gravitational pull, and where pull isn’t enough they can simply buy their potential competitors to absorb or kill them. But our confidence in them has been shaken by the reverberations of the Snowden revelations. People who have felt helpless about their identities being exploited whenever they use a popular service are now feeling angry as well. That irritation can be fanned into fury as terms of service change with little warning and the platforms that have become our surrogate memories and social gathering places become high-handed about what we can see and whether we can have the stuff we contribute.
Of course, this metaphor of paving and gardening reminds me of libraries and how (with the collusion of the scholars we serve) we have entrusted our scholarly record to giant corporations which lobby for stricter rules about sharing and are busy buying up the smaller fry and are now even trying to invade our institutional repositories. In 2013, more than half of scholarly papers published were the intellectual property of five corporations. In the social sciences, that number is a whopping 70 percent. These companies make tidy profit margins – between 30 and 40 percent, largely riding on the demands made on libraries to provide All the Things and the desperation of academics to exchange their research findings for reputational crumbs.
We have choices, but they are not simple ones. Nobody forces you to be on Facebook. I’m not, but I have the luxury of connecting with my family by alternate means and enough money and a smidgen of tech skills to run my own website – and no great need to attract attention to it because I have a job. Still, I miss seeing a lot of family news and family members have to go through extra steps to share news and pictures with a grumpy Facebook refusenik. Nobody forces you to publish with journals owned by the big five, unless you’re seeking grants or a steady job and can’t afford to go against the grain. Again, I have a job and nothing much to prove – so it’s up to me to make it possible for tho