Brown - Open up Internet, but thoughtfully

Open up the Internet, but thoughtfully
Leading guru on S’pore’s ‘responsible’ approach, and why the public will get more engaged, creative:
Friday • September 19, 2008, TODAY
Alicia Wong

THERE are those, particularly in the United States, who think the Internet should be completely open, "like the wild west of olden days".
But just look at what the American situation has bred, according to a renowned new media guru and scholar, who calls such thinking "a bit adolescent".

"Many blogs quickly gel into micro-ecosystems that feed in on themselves, and start to amplify extreme bias if not outright hatred. The value of the US is in being a melting pot — we need to preserve that at all costs," said Dr John Seely Brown, one of the leading contemporary thinkers on the influence of technology on modern life, in a recent interview with Today.

In Singapore, which is in the midst of reviewing its engagement with new media, the challenge is rather different.
"The question is always how quickly to evolve the medium to a more open medium," said the former chief scientist at Xerox Corporation, now a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.

While Dr Brown declined to go into depth, he said his conversations with "some high-level people here" left him impressed.
The Singapore Government, he said, has shown a "deep understanding" of the pros and cons of liberalising new media, "a sense of saying, let’s open this up, but open it up responsibly".

Dr Brown, who believes governments need to be aware of the impact of technology before making decisions on how to regulate it, said: "I’m actually more supportive of a thoughtful understanding of the socialising of the technology ... (meaning) how do we feel comfortable about it, understand how to be around it, and so on."
This is important because any decision is hard to reverse. "There are several things I have personally done to help shape our media that I wish I could now retract," said the Industry Hall of Famer, who declined to elaborate on which technological innovations he meant.

Open up for the creativity it fosters, not the money

Describing Singapore as being moderately relaxed about bloggers, he identified a "spectrum of radicality" among those here, with many blogs that are openly critical.

But while governments around the world today puzzle out how to regulate new media, or how far to relax regulations, "my only complaint is, certain countries figure it out for the business, rather than what makes a better world".

The opening up of the Internet, he believes, should be paced for society’s benefit — not commercial purposes. In the US, he said, extending the copyright law to last for 100 years or more was done solely to protect the interests of several big media companies, and not to encourage creativity.

There needs to be a shift from holding on to knowledge, to creating knowledge, he said. "We have to rethink what is ‘fair use’ (of material), in a way that will stimulate creativity, often in terms of remix and mashup." Open-source software, for example, is a form of "mashup", where people take the knowledge around them and remix it to create something else.

So, what would make "a better world"?

Lifelong learning, says the founder of the Institute for Research on Learning — a non-profit institute for addressing the problems of lifelong learning.
Dr Brown is "particularly impressed" by Singapore’s push toward a productive inquiry method of eduction — in other words, "teach less, learn more".
A student is tasked to explore for solutions, instead of simply being told the answer by the teacher. And digitial media is fantastic for supporting this productive inquiry method, he said.
Compare the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia, for example. If one knows how to read Wikipedia by examining the history of each entry, the edits that have been made, how often something is challenged or what is agreed on, "it may turn out to be more trustworthy than Britannica because of that," said Dr Brown.
As Singapore experiments with "teach less, learn more", it will spark Singaporeans to be more creative, he says.
And with the better digital tools to think with, create with and understand with,Dr Brown believes that "we’re going to have a more engaged public that is constantly willing to be engaged in new ideas, new learning, and to be more entrepreneurial."