DIY video goes to war. ABC News quotes Ana Marie Cox on “the YouTube War:”

From the frontlines of the war in Iraq to the political battleground of the 2006 midterm elections, the surge of online video has changed the dynamic. In both campaigns, a piece of tape can be quickly uploaded, and seen by tens of thousands of viewers in a matter of hours.

The war in Iraq “is the YouTube war,” said Ana Marie Cox, Washington editor of Time.com. “It’s a war where communication is instantaneous.”

Soldiers in Iraq aren’t just shooting weapons, they are shooting videos. Whether mounted on vehicles or carried to gather intelligence, cameras are rolling, and tape or digital images can easily be edited and uploaded from laptop computers.

On several Web sites, including YouTube, IFilm, Liveleak.com and Military.com, GreenMarines.com, videos shot (and sometimes edited) by soldiers or their friends and family back home are being downloaded over and over. Both the soldiers and the people who monitor the Web sites say that the videos offer a raw, first-hand view of the war.

‘Here’s What’s Going On’

“It’s not a perspective you usually get when you’re watching the nightly news,” said Marine Cpl. Scott Lyon, who spent seven months in Iraq stationed in Ramadi. He and many members of his platoon carried cameras when they went out on missions.

Much of what was shot shows the routine of daily life. But some of it is much more graphic, like an improvised explosive device detonating on a routine patrol. “It doesn’t capture exactly what it feels like to go through that, but it’s pretty close,” said Lyon, who is now back home in Iowa.

“War is horrendous, and I think that it is important for us to see that,” said Jeff Jarvis, of BuzzMachine.com and an associate professor at City University of New York’s graduate journalism school. “The danger is that we’re going to become addicted to scenes of horror, and I don’t think we can bear that, but we also can’t hide from it.”

Some might question whether soldiers should be shooting and uploading video, but Torie Clarke, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and one of the architects of Pentagon policy embedding reporters on the frontlines, believes it is a positive development. And she says soldiers are just doing what thousands of other people in the country are: using the Internet as a tool of expression.

With this post, David Bollier beat me to the honor of introducing this important new book to the blogosphere. He’s one of the authors, so he deserves the honor. My copy of this important new work just arrived. If you are interested enough in the overarching economic and political changes that both enable and are enabled by DIY media to have read Benkler and Jenkins, you need to read this book. I was reminded of the importance of commons discourse to DIY media when I read this in Bollier’s chapter:

As the Internet and various digital technologies have become pervasive in American life, enabling robust new forms of social communication and collaboration, the cornucopia of t he commons has become a widespread phenomenon. We are migrating from a print culture of scarce supplies of fixed, canonical works to a digital culture of constantly evolving works that can be reproduced and distributed easily at virtually no cost. Our mass-media system of centralized production and one-to-many distribution is being eclipsed by a multimedia network of decentralized production and many-to-many distribution.

Here is a brief excerpt from Bollier’s blog post, introducing the book.

Two leading scholars on the commons, Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, have just published a great anthology of essays, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (MIT Press). The book brings together some varied perspectives on knowledge as a “shared social-ecological system.” I highly recommend it.

The idea that knowledge is incubated and maintained through social communities is hardly revolutionary, of course. But the rise of the Internet has suddenly made it more imperative to understand the structure and norms of “knowledge communities,” which can vary widely. This book helps sort through this variety with chapters on open access scholarly publishing (Peter Suber), research libraries (Wendy Pradt Lougee), science as a commons (James Boyle), open source software (Charles Schweik), preserving the knowledge commons (Donald J. Waters) and civic engagement and knowledge commons (Peter Levine), among others. I am pleased to be among this illustrious company with a chapter on “The Growth of the Commons Paradigm.”

Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related.

“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: “DRM stops the change process” that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws.

“Fair use,” fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and “DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal.”

In addition to the social damage caused by cutting the legal system out of the process of determining the limits of licenses for cultural products, Urban pointed out that DRM leads to disasters like the Sony rootkit fiasco, in which hundreds of thousands of Sony CDs were distributed with DRM protections that installed malware on the computers of people who simply wanted to listen to music — compounded later by the exploitation of the malware by hackers.

Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.

Firefighters battle the wildfire in Moorpark, CA on Dec. 3. (You Witness News/Bradley Laurent)

This week, Yahoo News and Reuters announced a strategic alliance to display and distribute DIY videos and images of news events. You Witness News invites DIY contributors to upload newsworthy pictures and videos to the Yahoo website http://news.yahoo.com/you-witness or email them to pics@reuters.com, where they will be reviewed by Yahoo and Reuters editors. Selected images will be placed on Reuters and Yahoo News pages.

Starting next year, Reuters also plans to distribute “the very highest quality pictures” to its print, broadcast and online media subcribers. Reuters and Yahoo expect to pay contributors when their images are distributed commercially, but details of the compensation plan have not yet been made public.

This photo by Ross Mayfield was taken at a different event, but it portrays danah, Mimi, and Justin evocatively:

At the November 14 DIY Media seminar, danah boyd (who presented in tandem with Justin Hall), spoke about “Creating Culture Through Collective Identity Performance.” boyd is a Graduate Student Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication, a PhD Candidate in School of Information at University of California-Berkeley, and a Social Media Researcher at Yahoo!

boyd pointed out that the personal profiles in social networking services provide “moments of representation of identity and digital body.” What makes SNSs unique, boyd asserted, are features around friends and networks of friendship that articulate and make visible aspects of interpersonal relationships and social networks that have always existed, but not so visibly. The SNS feature enabling participants to create, display, and edit lists of friends online (e.g., “Top 8″ in MySpace, friends lists in Facebook, Friendster, et. al.) presents young people with an opportunity to present their networks of social connections visibly to the world. “In MySpace,” boyd noted, “”top 8″ is like a high school drama — who you tell the world your best friend is will get you in horrible trouble offline or online. Who do I put in the top left slot”? MySpace management realized that this feature attracted attention, so they sold as a premium what had been a misfeature in their original design, charging to have more than 8 friends.

Comments on Friendster evolved beyond Friendster-like testimonials. “It became a way of speaking to and about someone and about yourself in the process. Making sure everyone else knows that they are in your list of friends solicits reciprocity. ”

This identity-play and social experimentation is a form of DIY media, boyd pointed out, because in social network services, social rituals and norms are signalled by online representations like graphical backgrounds and friend lists, displays of cultural consumption (playlists and fashions) and cultural production (photos, photostreams, and videos).

As has been the case with previous media that young people appropriated for their own uses (SMS, notably), groups of people in the early days of MySpace figured out that they could put html on their MySpace pages; other people used the ability to view html source code for a page to initiate a copy and paste culture. The people who were pimping out their profiles cared that they could modify pages, not about code.

“When you join, you see your friends’ profiles — those profiles teach you the norms of representation,” boyd explained. The norms of a group became networked, creating a visible context that informs the group about acceptable ways to behave and express themselves. “You get socialized into a culture by learning how to behave in different social situations” so viewing the social source code by inspecting your friends’ profiles is an analog to the creation of pages by copying and pasting html source.

“Networked publics have four important characteristics that non-mediated social networks — the face-to-face kind — don’t have: persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Until the Web, only celebrities had to deal with persistence and invisible audiences, ” and nobody dealt with replicability and searchability the way digital networks have made possible.

As an example of the way different media can change the ability to represent oneself, sometimes causing conflicts, boyd used the case of civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, who gave speeches to different publics in the 1960s, and addressed white politicians differently than he did black congregations. “But in 1968, he had to take his speeches to television and radio. He had to make a decision about how to represent himself. Youth are faced with a similar situation. Networked publics make youth norms visible.”

danah was called by a college admissions officer who knew she had been studying SNSs. The admissions officer was puzzled by the gang references on the MySpace page of a scholastically outstanding applicant. danah explained that this young man had to face his peers everyday in school. Contexts and how you behave in them can be vitally important.

MySpace banned YouTube, but the community reacted so fiercely that Tom — everybody’s friend — apologized for banning it. People put their YouTube videos up on MySpace. This mixing of sites is consistent with the social norms of digitally-literate youth: “copypaste culture makes many old boundaries irrelevant.”

boyd’s article on “Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites” has been published by First Monday.

DIY media today is a hybrid of the social group formation capabilities of the Internet, which were manifested two decades ago as virtual communities, the production capabilities of affordable digital audiovideo tools, and the broadband distribution capabilities of the Web. That cyber-prehistory context is the subject of this video of Fred Turner’s talk at Harvard’s Berkman center on his new book, From Cyberculture to Counterculture: Stewart brand, The Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism

In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers represented a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.Fred Turner explores this extraordinary and ironic transformation by tracing the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs who made the connections between San Francisco “flower power” and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.

Dubbed “digital natives” or the “thumb generation,” young people today are quick to adopt new technologies and to adapt them as they like. Exactly what they’re doing and why is research gold for anyone interested in the future.

Take the way kids create languages to facilitate text messaging. (In case you’re older than 26 here’s a shorthand decoder). Yesterday, at a presentation to launch his new book, Mobile Communication and Society, co-authored by Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey, Manuel Castells detailed how mobile phone use in countries around the world is signaling the end of corporate and governmental control over communication. Read the book’s introduction here.

How might corporations respond in the future? Maybe the same way they are in the present. A New York Times article on parents befuddled by “text-message teenspeak” reports that Cingular Wireless, the largest carrier in the US, is holding a series of “texting bees” to teach parents how to send text messages— including not only the ins and outs of text slang but also the context in which texting is the best approach, more appropriate than email or face-to-face conversation. Cristy Swink, the executive director for text messaging at Cingular told the Times “It’s about, ‘Do you realize this is how your kids communicate with their friends?’”

If its consumption habits and information savvy are any guide, the thumb generation will likely recast relations between corporations and individuals, creating a whole new variety of tensions. We can only hope Cingular will offer classes on that, and if they do, that they get someone like Castells to teach them!