me and the amoral menace

In the Guardian of London, Henry Porter says that “Google is just an amoral menace.” His evidence?

Google presents a far greater threat [than Scribd] to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

So let me get this straight: if Google/YouTube chooses to take down music videos rather than pay the fees their makers request, this constitutes a boot on the windpipe of the musicians? Moreover, for the musicians there is “nowhere else to go”: YouTube is the only site on the whole internet where music videos may be posted and viewed. (Who knew?) And this situation is so intolerable that “it may be time for the planet's dominant economic powers to focus on the destructive, anti-civic forces of the internet.”

An interesting argument. And presumably Porter would extend this model to other forms of content. For instance, I have recently been asserting my legal claim to the books I wrote that have been scanned by Google Books, according to the (tentative) terms of the Google Book Settlement. If the settlement holds, Google is going to pay me sixty dollars for the right to scan each of my books. (There are some interesting complications regarding terms of distribution that I will write about another time.)

Now, according to Henry Porter, I should have the right to determine my own price for the scanning of my work, and Google should not have the right to refuse to meet my terms. If I demand a thousand bucks per book, then Google needs to fork over, or its boot is on my windpipe and I have every justification for asking the world’s dominant economic powers to intervene to force Google to pay me what I want.

I am so buying this argument.

natural signs

In an earlier post I linked to this excerpt from Albert Borgmann’s extraordinary book Holding On To Reality, and I want to invoke Borgmann again now. One of the key concerns of that book is to separate and classify the kinds of . . . well, reading is what I would say — the kinds of reading we do. But Borgmann would probably say that he wants to understand the various kinds of signs we confront and the various ways we interpret them. Borgmann is especially concerned with our diminishing ability to read what he calls natural signs:

Information about reality exhibits its pristine form in a natural setting. An expanse of smooth gravel is a sign that you are close to a river. Cottonwoods tell you where the river bank is. An assembly of twigs in a tree points to osprey. The presence of osprey shows that there are trout in the river. In the original economy of signs, one thing refers to another in a settled order of reference and presence. A gravel bar seen from a distance refers you to the river. It is a sign. When you have reached and begun to walk on the smooth and colored stones, the gravel has become present in its own right. It is a thing. And so with the trees, the nest, the raptor, and the fish.

Borgmann teaches at the University of Montana and it’s clear from his books that he spends a lot of time outdoors; in one sense you could say that his major works are attempts to forge a meaningful connection between the experience of doing philosophy and the experience of walking through the Montana landscapes.

I have been thinking a lot about this emphasis in Borgmann’s work lately, and it affected the way I read this story about changes in the new version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary:

It is difficult to read the list of words excluded from the new Oxford Junior Dictionary without a sharp sense of regret. Here are some of the words that have been culled: catkin, brook, minnow, acorn, buttercup, heron, almond, marzipan, ash, beetroot, bray, bridle, porpoise, gooseberry, raven, carnation, blackberry, tulip, catkin, porridge and conker.

But you are likely to be overwhelmed by a greater sadness when you see the words that have elbowed them out. They include celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro, square number, block graph, attachment, database and analogue.

Unlike Henry Porter, I am not “overwhelmed by sadness” when I note the new words that are included; but I am dismayed to see the ones cast off, because those castoffs are largely words that describe the natural world — words that enable an understanding of “natural signs,” words that embody “information about reality.” As Porter rightly says, “what we are witnessing is a gradual triumph of abstract words over objects that can be seen and experienced.”

Porter has other complaints about the changes as well — the new dictionary’s “war on Anglo-Saxon simplicity,” its exclusion of religious and historical references — but this is the one that strikes me, at the moment, as especially significant. As our world becomes more complex, our children’s dictionaries (and adult ones too, for that matter) may just have to get bigger. But if hard choices have to be made, I’d rather start them off learning about brooks, acorns, and ravens; there will be plenty of time for databases and celebrities later.