Why #DeleteFacebook

Not because Mark Zuckerberg is a self-entitled white-privileged frat boy who based Facebook on an app he developed called Facemash to rate students “hotness”.

Not because of Facebook’s Predatory Business Model that leverages users and their friends personal information to maximize profits.

Not because Facebook wants to replace the open Internet with a proprietary for profit service.

And not because Mark Zuckerberg is a Trump enabler who either supports, sympathizes with, or fears the American President's power.

BUT because no corporation should have the kind of control over the amount of personal (and in many cases corporate and government) information and data that Facebook seeks to have for the sole purpose of maximizing profits, and no person should willingly give them that.

On Being a “Boomer”

Generations

When I was growing up in the 1950s and onward there was not all this talk about generations that seems to have become a fascination of the last twenty years. Although I became aware of the baby boom and even the term baby boomers (now apparently just boomers), I instinctively assumed the baby boomers were the people that had the babies. It was only recently that I realized that it referred to the children and I was one of them.

Indeed the original ideas for this blog had nothing to do with boomers but was simply to recount how lucky I was to be born at this time and live through all these changes, particularly the technological ones. But since labelling us folks born during this time as boomers seems to be the in thing I thought I might as well go with the flow, thus the title of this post.

This meant at least some cursory research into generations which Wikipedia explains this way. But the first thing I learned is that these generations are simply time periods people talk about in their own ways. There are no officially defined generational periods, no consensus on what the names of these periods are and not even a consensus on how long a generation is, even within individual generational schemes. So it's a good thing I am not talking about generations but just my time on this planet.

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s

The 1950s and 1960s, at least in northern Ontario, was a great time to grow up. It was a time when all elementary school kids could walk or bike to school because we had eight room neighbourhood schools. Yes, we didn't have proper gymnasiums or any sort of shop rooms, or even libraries, but we managed without that until high school. There were no computer rooms because there were no computers, It was a time when on weekends we could wander away wherever to play in the rocks and bush by the railroad tracks and creek and the slag dump. We could bike all over town and once I even biked all the way to our camp (cottage for you non-northerners).

Progressing into the high school period, school spirit was a big thing. Anyone from Sudbury remember the school lunch bag contests ? Music was the other big thing. School dances always featured live bands. When the bands took their breaks and records where put on everybody stopped dancing. The groups were often other high school kids. Anyone remember The Sound Expressway. Local Battle of the Bands contests were a regular affair usually emceed by one of the local DJs who were more than minor celebrities in their time. Radio was our main source of music, and calling in requests and dedications were what you did while doing your homework and listening to your favourite DJ on the radio. Remember G. Michael Cranston.

Unions and the Middle Class

One of the most important facts about this time was the role of the labour movement and the fact that the 1950s was a time when we still built things in North America. Unions enlarged the middle class from being just the professional and merchant class to include working people enabling me to have a middle class upbringing and life as the son of a hard rock miner.

Public Health Care

It was in 1947 that Medicare, as our public health care system is known, was first introduced in Saskatchewan, and it was adopted by the federal government and all provinces during the 1950s and 1960s.

Social Change

The period from 1950 until present day was a pretty good time to be a heterosexual white male Canadian of European descent. If you did not fit that category (or even if you did) it was a period of great opportunity to fight for social progress. This included the 1960s and 1970s, decades defined by battles for social change, particularly on university campuses. Laurentian University at the time was known as the Berkeley of the North, It included the civil rights movement, women's liberation movement, LGBTQ rights movement, and the adoption of multiculturalism in Canada.

From the 1950s to current day we saw a huge change in the role of women in the workforce and economy (and the role of men in the home and family) and we saw the LGBTQ community advance from being whispered about in the shadows to fully accepted members of society.

This is not to say that discrimination, bigotry, racism, misogynism, etc no longer exists but we have matured as a society to where inclusion and diversity are accepted Canadian values. We have come a long way.

The Peace Movement and The War Against The War

No discussion of the time of the baby boom generation would be complete without mentioning the struggle against the Vietnam War, the War Against The War waged during the 1960s, inspired by a long history of the Peace movement, and more particularly the late 1950s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Canada played it's part as "Vietnam War resisters were welcomed as heroes in Canada" (Montreal Gazette).

It was perhaps the generation's most defining moment.

Technology

Indeed I could talk much more about social change during this period but these advances were not the original motivation for this post. Rather it was to talk about how we were so fortunate to live through this period of technological advances. Other periods of history have seen technological advances such as the printing press, industrialization, still and moving picture photography, the telegraph and radio, but never so much so fast as this era from television to the Internet, where we have in many cases surpassed science fiction.

Television

I was three years old in Sudbury when television was first available to the city. Although it was a few or several years before TV ownership became widespread enough that we had one I was old enough to remember first getting television. I guess one could call it our generation's “screen time” although we were not nearly as enamoured with it as people seem to be with “screens” these days. It was something that amused us when we were finished our homework and it was too dark to go out and play or early weekend mornings before we went to meet our friends.

But that was just the beginning. Those of us born in the 1950s would see television go through many evolutionary stages from the development of cable television with cable only channels to streaming services over the Internet. Cable and satellite television came to be dominant over broadcast TV and may soon be supplanted by Internet streaming. We may even see the complete end of traditional broadcast television in my lifetime.

And of course. the the quality of the picture has improved with the quality of the screens used to watch it. First with the introduction of colour and then flat screens replacing CRT tubes along with higher resolution images for much better picture quality.

As to content, that has evolved in two directions, while production values have improved and the amount of high quality content has increased, the multi-channel universe has created space for an increasing amount of crap (can you say reality TV) on our screens.

Computers and Personal Computers

While the history of computers can be traced back to Charles Babbage in the 1800s, the first commercial computer UNIVAC was put into service in 1951. The early commercial computers were first designed and produced to perform specific tasks for specific customers. General purpose computers came later. The programming language COBOL was develop in 1953 and Fortran in 1954. The IBM System/360 was first produced in 1964. These mainframe computers revolutionized business and industry. The revolutionizing of our personal lives would come later.

We got our first personal computer in 1981, an Osborne 1, the world's first portable computer. It was a powerful computer with a 4.0 mHz processer and 64K RAM and two 92K 5.25 inch disk drives. $2,500 Canadian with another $800 for an Epson 9 pin dot matrix printer. A huge 10 Mb hard drive was available for $10,000. But this was a powerful machine for it's time. It was usable out of the box with bundled software, including WordStar and SuperCalc, plus MBASIC and CBASIC, and the CP/M operating system, a suite of software worth the price of the computer by themselves. We also managed to acquire a cope of dBASE II.

Previous personal computers were aimed at computer hobbyists and nerds who wanted to learn about computers and programming. The Osborne 1 was one of a new group of computers designed as productivity tools. This was only the start of the personal computer revolution which soon saw ordinary people with computers more powerful than the ones that put a man on the moon sitting on their desks.

Indeed, Wordstar made writing so much easier and SuperCalc allowed for financial wizardry on the Osborne 1. But Dbase II was the most interesting and fun with it's own programming language. My first big Dbase II project was creating an Index to The Portable Companion, the magazine for users of Osborne portable computers. My most ambitious project was creating a prototype key word indexing system for Hansard, the House of Commons Debates, and a computerized voting record database, at least 10 years before the House of Commons developed their own much more powerful Publication Search system.

Our next personal computer was an IBM XT clone, that ran MS-DOS, and following that new machines about every three years till we purchased our current machine on April 12 2013, with Windows 7, now running Windows 10.

Indeed it was quite a surprise when I checked back to see when I purchased this current machine. This is a clear sign that personal computing has matured and the average user does not need any more computing power. Of course gaming is a different matter. Putting a man on the moon did not require fancy 4k video imaging and fast graphics. It just required number crunching. Which is why it required much less computing power than making a game about it. That is also why today it is home computers that need more power and capability than business machines – number crunching requires much less power than high definition video.

But yet we may be soon coming full circle to the pre-home computing days when computing involved dumb terminals connected to main frames. The tech industry seems to want to go that way with all your applications and even personal data storage in the amorphous “cloud“ (a network server somewhere), somewhere in the great unknown.

Computer Networks from BBSs to the Internet

But home computers were not just for nerds sitting at home looking at a screen and writing programs. The first home computers soon led to computing networks that were the forerunner of the internet, computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) that allowed users to to share their knowledge via discussion forums and also share software via download capability. I used at least one BBS to share my index of The Portable Companion. Surprisingly, they still exist .

However they were replaced to a certain degree by larger proprietary online service providers like CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. These systems provided information services, online forums, messaging services, downloadable files and programs, etc.. They were the forerunner to the Internet but they were proprietary corporate systems. They were very much like Facebook except it was very clear how you paid for access, with a monetary subscription fee. They died off, essentially by transforming themselves into Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as users embraced the open Internet, preferring that to getting all their online information from one commercial source (until Facebook).

Then came the The Internet but it was not accessible to the general public until Free-nets provided that access.

The word mark Free-Net was a registered trademark of the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN), founded in 1989 by Tom Grundner at Case Western Reserve University. NPTN was a non-profit organization dedicated to establishing and developing, free, public access, digital information and communication services for the general public.[4] It closed operations in 1996, filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.[5] However, prior use of the term created some conflicts.[6] NPTN distributed the software package FreePort, developed at Case Western Reserve, that was used and licensed by many of the free-net sites.

Any person with a personal computer, or through access from public terminal in libraries, could register for accounts on a free-net, and was assigned an email address. Other services often included Usenet newsgroups, chat rooms, IRC, telnet, and archives of community information, delivered either with text-based Gopher software or later the World-Wide Web. (Source: Free-net - Wikipedia )

In Ottawa it was the National Capital FreeNet (NCF) that provided the public with not only access to the Internet of the time but also access to e-mail, which started a communications revolution of it's own. The free-nets also provided a way for community organizations to reach the public, not only in their home communities but internationally as the free-nets were all inter-connected via the Internet. At this time the Internet was completely non-corporate and there was a huge debate, the conclusion of which was clearly predictable though not so obvious at the time, about whether corporations should have access to the Internet. It would certainly be different if that had gone the other way.

At the start of the free-nets the World Wide Web had not been developed so the FreePort menu system provided the accessibility that would later be provided by the web.

As an early member of the NCF, user ab190, I was also one of it's first “information providers” operating an information service for the Bridlewood Residents Hydro Line Committee on FreePort which later became the Bridlewood Electromagnetic Fields Information Service on the World Wide Web. It was one of and possibly the first NCF information services to move from Freeport to the Web. One of my proudest moments was when the World Health Organization (WHO) linked to the Bridlewood Electromagnetic Fields Information Service.

I took it offline when I stopped updating it but the Bridlewood Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs) Information Service is available on a mirror site provided by The Swedish Association for the Electro HyperSensitive - www.feb.se (FEB Sweden), in it's final state.

When the Internet became easily available via high speed broadband through DSL or Cable Internet the need for the free-nets disappeared, though many, like the National Capital Freenet became non-commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) aimed at making the Internet available to as many people as possible.

Communications Replaces Computing

With the Internet computers became as much a communications tool as a data, word and image processing tool and newer technologies to come would lead to a dominance of communications over computing in our electronic devices. Telephones (nobody calls them that anymore) would be marketed for their photographic capabilities and voice conversations would be their least important use.

And it all started with Agent 86 and his shoe phone. Once the purview of science fiction now it seems every ten year old has a compact portable videophone that is rarely used for making phone calls. Desktop computers are the rare purview of computer gamers and purists like me who prefer a larger screen and a desk to sit at to do my computing which still includes not just communication but a lot of writing and some photo processing. For most people laptop or notebook computers have replaced the standard desktop and some folks just rely on the new fangled tablets, for their entertainment, information and communications needs.

The smartphone has replaced the personal computer as the electronic device of choice and it may only be a matter of time until the smartwatch (which may even include a minor timekeeping function) will replace that.

Smart homes

Smart homes are the latest tech trend. Well actually not so new as the first article cited below points out: 'In 1975, the first general purpose home automation network technology, X10, was developed. It is a communication protocol for electronic devices.“

I certainly recall many years ago homes being built pre-wired with Ethernet (and sometimes also Coaxial) cable for home networking. The individual components like programmable home thermostats and video monitoring systems accessible from the Internet and of course remote controlled lighting systems just to mention a few have been available for quite awhile.

What is new is the use of voice commands yelled at tabletop orbs as the hub of smart home controls. In reality I doubt any serious smart home will be controlled that way. It will much more likely be via a dedicated control panel that is probably also accessible on a computer or tablet, perhaps even smartphone or watch via the Internet.

Smart home resources

Home automation - Wikipedia

The Best Smart Home Devices of 2020 - CNET

The Best Smart Home Devices for 2020 | PCMag

Smart home for beginners: How to lay a foundation you can build on | TechHive

Conclusion

This period since the birth of the baby boomers has certainly been one of technological change, though not all of it progress. While much of the world still lives in abject poverty another portion lives in relative wealth, some absurdly so. I have not mentioned all of the technological “wonders” the age has bestowed upon us, some of them just plain silly like electric plug in air fresheners and refrigerators that talk to your milk cartons so they can order new milk when you run out. My “favourite” misuse of technology are automobiles now being marketed, not for having the best engines or transmissions, but the best “infotainment system”.

Being a baby boomer is about living through change.

Postscript

I started talking about the gains made by the working class through the union movement during the baby boom years (1946-1964), gains we can actually thank the previous generations, including the so-called Silent Generation, for. They may have been silent but they were very active having been responsible for much of labour and civil rights movements and having built a more equal society.

That society has over the years become increasingly unequal, not only between the developed and third world but also within the so called developed world, with the latest generations, the so-called Millennials and Generation Z, becoming perhaps the first in recorded history to be worse off economically than the previous generations (except for a select few who control the economic system, what one might call the means of production). Their challenge is perhaps the greatest, to build a truly just and sustainable society, one that I discuss here: THE FIFTH COLUMN: Towards a Green Social Democratic Economy.

Can We, Should We, Will We Live Forever Online

When typing for this blog I have often wished I could just think my thoughts at the computer and have them type out on the screen. This, no doubt, has much to do with the fact I am a one finger hunt and peck typist (having been streamed into drafting and electricity in grade nine rather than typing and home economics).

But this got me thinking bigger.

First some thoughts on what makes us human. I have heard it said that what separates us from the (other) animals is that we are aware of our existence. I think it is probably somewhat more than that, extending to the fact that we philosophize and question the meaning of life. Of course we do not know what (other) animals are thinking but clearly thinking and communicating are more important to us than simply the tasks necessary for our physical existence.

On to the idea of living forever. It seems the biggest obstacle to living forever is that our bodies wear out, particularly our hearts and lungs that keep oxygen and blood circulating. The other big factor is that the earth could not sustain everyone living forever unless we stopped reproducing.

But what if we did not need most of our physical body and all those resources we live off of. What if we only needed to keep our brains alive.

If the essence of being human is thinking and communication, what if we only needed our brains to do that.

What if we had a brain-computer interface that would let us think our thoughts to our computers and communicate with other humans, including living brains. What then.

How much space and resources would it take to just keep our brains alive after our bodies died,

And what if we did not even have to do that. What if we could transfer the essence of our brains, our intellectual being and memories onto computer chips that required virtually no storage space and only required a few millivolts of energy to be sustained forever.

The big question is would you want to live forever on the Internet watching mankind make the same mistakes over and over forever and ever.

On Television

Definitions:

1 A system for converting visual images (with sound) into electrical signals, transmitting them by radio or other means, and displaying them electronically on a screen.

2 A device with a screen for receiving television signals.

Source: OED https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/television

Television (TV), sometimes shortened to tele or telly, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome (black and white), or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a television set, a television program ("TV show"), or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment and news.

Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television

That is the classic and technical definition of television when it was first introduced, the technology to broadcast video in the way that radio was broadcast and the receiver (television set) to view the video on.

I was three years old in Sudbury when television was first available to the city.

CKSO Television History

The station was launched on October 25, 1953 by Sudbury businessmen George Miller, Jim Cooper and Bill Plaunt.[1] It was the first privately owned television station to launch in Canada, and only the fourth television station overall after CBC Television's owned and operated stations in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Its original call sign was CKSO-TV. The station was a CBC affiliate, receiving programs by kinescope until a microwave relay system linked the station to Toronto in 1956. The station originally broadcast only from 7 to 11 p.m., but by the end of its first year in operation it was on the air from 3:30 p.m. to midnight.[2]

Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICI-TV (Redirected from CKSO-TV)

Although it was a few or several years before TV ownership became widespread enough that we had one I was old enough to remember first getting television. I guess one could call it our generation's “screen time” although we were not nearly as enamoured with it as people seem to be with “screens” these days. It was something that amused us when we were finished our homework and it was too dark to go out and play or early weekend mornings before we went to meet our friends. But overall we would much rather be out with our friends playing in the rocks along the creek or rail line near the slag dump, tossing rocks and watching the quicksand suck them up. Yes play at that time was not adult organized competitive activities but a time to use our imagination and learn to be independent.

At that time we had one channel which carried the CBC and eventually we got a CTV station. The next big thing was something called CATV or Community Antenna Television. This was the first iteration of cable television or Cable TV. A large antenna picked up the signals of the American networks that previously only southern Ontario could receive and they were distributed via coax cable to individual homes. This was the first version of Cable, no specialized or cable only channels just broadcast channels, from further distances and often a clearer signal than broadcast TV depending on where you lived.

At this point we essentially are still within the original definition of television which ties together the broadcast technology and the television set.

The next technological change started to change that. The introduction of the VCR meant one could watch content on a television set that did not originate with a TV broadcaster, mainly commercial movies and home movies shot on videotape. VCRs were later supplanted by DVD and Blu-ray players.

The cable companies that had been re-transmitting over-the-air (OTA) broadcast TV signals were beginning to receive these signals via microwave and satellite around the same time as competitors began transmitting TV packages similar to cable TV via satellite direct to the home.

This led to the next innovation and the elimination of the necessary link between TV broadcasters and television sets. Television sets no longer required an over-the-air signal to provide content to their owners as cable/satellite TV only channels started providing programming without any OTA broadcast facilities, their signals being delivered by cable/satellite TV providers.

Most TV watchers in urban centres now received their TV from cable (and in some cases satellite) TV providers without any outdoor antenna or infamous rabbit ears being used. Without the limitations of broadcast frequencies TV providers could provide unlimited numbers of cable only channels. These channels started out with higher quality content and without advertising to distinguish them from the free broadcast channels but soon they changed to channels full of reruns and cheaply produced “reality” TV with advertising. “Premium” channels without advertising and with higher quality content were then introduced at even higher prices. Of course, with control of the distribution of channels they could ensure subscribers paid for their channels that produced profits for them by including them in the packages people have to buy to get the channels they actually want.

At this point we have gone from free over-the-air television to fee for cable TV to cable TV with almost unlimited channels and unlimited price points for service and it appears unlimited room for customer dissatisfaction particularly in the United States and Canada.

The thing about paying more for a higher tier of cable television is that you are not actually paying to watch more television, just for more choice, most of which you are not interested in.

And then came “streaming”.

Streaming television (streaming TV or internet television) is the digital distribution of television content, such as TV shows, as streaming video delivered over the Internet. Streaming TV stands in contrast to dedicated terrestrial television delivered by over-the-air aerial systems, cable television, and/or satellite television systems.

Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_television

With the Internet, companies and individuals could provide content to anyone with Internet access without having to build their own distribution network. You no longer needed to be a huge corporation with mega-millions of dollars of infrastructure to be in the TV business. Even individuals could distribute content via websites and later via YouTube and other similar online video platforms, and then came Netflix followed by a series of other streaming services and everything started to change

But first let's step away from talking about television distribution technology and look at the other half of the technology equation, what we used to call “television sets” now more often just called screens.

The first TV I personally owned was a 17” black and white portable TV I brought with me to Ottawa when I started working for the Library of Parliament. I spent more time listening to CBC radio than I did watching TV at that time. I believe about 50% of what I learned about the world in those days I learned from CBC Radio.

In the early days a 20 inch TV was a large screen TV. The largest conventional analog cathode-ray tube (CRT) TV we owned before making the big jump to a flat screen liquid-crystal display/LED-backlit LCD TV was a 36 inch huge and heavy television set.

Nowadays such TVs have gone the way of the dinosaurs. There are only two acceptable ways to watch TV, either on a 60 inch plus wide screen TV or on a two to three inch smartphone screen.

Your big screen TV is no longer just a television set but part of a home theatre system often with surround sound and of course comfy chairs.

We do have to admit we noticed a huge difference in picture quality when moving from analog TV on a CRT to high-definition digital TV on an LED/LCD TV. However we do not notice a large difference between different levels of HD, and when downloading content we often download the lower HD file because of size and time considerations. We also notice a large improvement in picture quality on old SD content compared to our old CRT screen TV. I personally do not understand the need for ultra-high-definition television, except to get people to upgrade to new 4K (or 8K) sets.

This all comes as part of a trend of people spending much more of their time at home for entertainment rather than going to concerts, theatre or movies, often called cocooning.

And part of this, of course, is the dominance of television as it has become in the “million channel universe”. So we return to our discussion of how television programs as we know them are distributed.

The problem with the proliferation of choice from the conventional providers' multiple tiers of cable television with increasing prices per tier, coupled with the addition of multiple streaming sources all with their own price points, is that you are not actually paying to watch more television, just for more choice, most of which you are not interested in.

Indeed we found ourselves in that situation. After upgrading to a higher tier to get a channel we wanted that was only available in that tier we decided we were paying for too many channels we did not watch. We cut back to the lowest tier available and to CRTC-mandated Skinny Basic Cable TV as soon as it was available. We later supplemented that with some carefully chosen theme packs that included they types of programming we wanted, primarily scripted drama as well as history and science programming. While many people criticized the CRTC's skinny basic cable requirement it certainly improved the value for money we were able to get from our cable TV provider.

We also had Netflix and we later added Crave/HBO Canada to our Cable package. We supplement that with free sources of programming available online. We are paying a total of about $100 for television programming, a considerable increase from the $00 for free over-the-air TV when it was first introduced.

However some people are going a different route, using traditional torrents to get programming at no cost or unauthorized free streaming sites often along with the use of VPNs.

Free TV' Android boxes finding their way into many Canadian households, study says

The devices come pre-loaded with software that makes it easy to pirate movies and shows, says expert

Forget illegal downloading; many Canadians are getting hooked on unauthorized streaming, according to a new study. This emerging type of piracy often involves a simple box running an Android operating system that's loaded with special software.

Connect it to your TV, and you can easily stream a vast selection of pirated movies and TV shows —even live television, including sports.

Dealers sell the boxes for a one-time fee, typically around $100, with the promise of "free TV."

Source: CBC News

 

People do this often in reaction to what they consider to be a broken system where watching everything they want requires subscribing to multiple channels or services just to get the shows they want while paying for access to shows they do not want to watch. But of course this alternative is unsustainable for everyone as nobody would be paying for the production of content.

Where do we go from here. We have to acknowledge the system is broken to a large degree because the major players in content production and distribution have huge investments in what is now essentially obsolete technology – the broadcast and cable distribution system, at least as far as most of what people want to watch.

What still dominates the television system (perhaps not for long) is scheduled programming on set channels pushed at the consumers rather than programming consumers watch when they want to. And because for some reason these channels must broadcast 24 hours a day the majority of programming is repeats or multiple variations on shows about flipping houses, visiting pawn shops, how to do home projects you are not working on at the moment, housewives of every city on the planet, etc. etc.. Of course every channel has a few worthwhile programs and even some very good ones, but never enough for 24 hours a week, 7 days a week and certainly not possible to have the programs on when it is convenient for everyone that wants to watch them to do so.

Television providers try to get around this failing of push technology by providing DVRs/PVRs or On Demand services but that is just a work around for a failed concept.

Consumers have the Internet . When they are looking for information they are used to going to the Internet and finding what they want when they want it. They are now expecting to be able to access their entertainment as easily and simply as they access information.

But let us take a step sideways and consider whether there is still a role for traditional scheduled TV that you have to watch when the distributor makes it available, and the answer is yes.

Originally TV was broadcast live and some things are still best when watched live. I am thinking of sports and breaking news in particular but live broadcasts of cultural events such as concerts and theatre would fall in that category as well. Nobody wants to watch old news so there will always be a place for cable news channels (although the might be broadcast via the Internet) and most people prefer to watch sporting events as they happen since knowing the result beforehand compromises (to put it lightly) the experience.

But for scripted drama programs, movies and documentaries people prefer to be able to watch when they have time. Even reality TV, for those fans of pawn shops, real estate flipping, watching other people cook or yell at aspiring restaurateurs, and overly dramatized dating shows, is more conveniently watched at the viewers choice of time.

For television series, in the old days of only network broadcast TV, you watched them when they were on. If you heard about a show from someone you had to start watching it mid season. Today's viewers want to watch series from the beginning of the series and even Cable TV On Demand services rarely allow for that, having only the current season available at most.

Streaming services are best suited to provide television to viewers in the manner they wish to consume it. But consumers, who are leaving traditional TV because they have to subscribe to TV packages and channels that include mostly programming they do not want to watch to get what they want, are faced with the same dilemma with streaming services, having to subscribe to multiple services to get all the programs they want and pay for access to programs they do not want.

So is there a solution. We have the technology. Having the will to make it happen is the issue.

The first thing I would like to see happen, in the Internet age of international access to information, is getting rid of regional distribution rights, in fact get rid of exclusive distribution rights altogether.

We have the technology for streaming services to know how many times an individual has streamed a particular episode or film, in effect how many products they have sold to each customer. Just like manufacturers do not restrict the sale of their products to exclusive retailers (perhaps with some exceptions) neither should content producers.

All streaming services should be able to provide all content to all customers with regulations in place to prevent price gouging of both the streaming service by the content producer and the viewing customer by the streaming service.

Streaming services would then compete by their interface, how customer friendly it is, and their pricing structure. Customers should be able to just purchase individual movies or TV series at a reasonable price and have access to whatever type of packages the streaming companies wish to offer in competition with each other.

The answer is simple but realistically, without a complete rejection of the system with everyone abandoning paid TV service for piracy, the powers to be are likely to settle for small incremental changes with eventually multiple streaming services replacing Cable TV as the dominant source of programming.

As incremental changes go, one thing I would like to see happen is a co-operative established among public broadcasters to share their productions internationally.

The role of public broadcasters is to tell their peoples' stories as well as to inform their people about the world. But it is not only their own people they should want to reach but the rest of the world as well. One way they can do that is by making content freely available on the Internet and the other is by making it available, as part of o co-operative effort with other public broadcasters to share programming with their viewers. That one effort by itself would make large amounts of high quality content available freely to viewers.

And what does The Fifth Column watch.

We are certainly not part of the cult of folks who seem to hate everything Canadian, particularly Canadian music, movies and television. It seems to be a matter of pride for them to hate all things Canadian. Many of these are the people Trump would welcome into his country with open arms and since they seem to worship the USA I am uncertain why they are still here.

Probably about half of what we watch is Canadian, primarily CBC, followed by British, particularly BBC, and other foreign shows, including some very good Americana cable network shows. We find most American broadcast network shows to be formulaic and uninteresting, but there are some notable exceptions.

Facebook is NOT The Internet - The Internet IS The (Social) Network

In the beginning there were BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems). In a foreshadowing of things to come, almost immediately following the invention of the Personal Computer (PC) they became communications devices as BBS systems were set up for hobbyists to use to share information and home-written programs. At this time PC users were primarily computer hobbyists and the BBSs were mainly confined to dealing with techie things, although in another foreshadowing you could soon download Sunshine Girl like pin-up photos.

As personal computers became more prevalent and the Internet was established in academia more broadly based online service providers such as CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online (AOL) were established to allow people to access and share information on various interests and hobbies. These services while proprietary and limited to their own online resources also provided an interface to Internet email so people could communicate between service providers using email.

The first access the public had to the Internet was via Freenets, such as the Cleveland Freenet and National Capital Freenet (Ottawa). These used a text interface to allow people to access documents stored online, which were mainly of serious academic interest at that time. These documents were accessible via something called Gopher using search engineswith names like Archie and Veronica. This was before the invention of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and the World Wide Web (WWW). The Freenets also provided members with access to the Internet email network.

The Freenets allowed community organizations to communicate with members and the public by becoming Information Providers. Freenet Information providers included hobbyists in many different fields as well as community activists. This quickly became a way for the Internet to become a community organizing tool and extended it's usefulness beyond academia to the general public.

You could also connect into other Freenets from your local Freenet.

With the creation of the World Wide Web the Freenets established interfaces to access the content on the web as well as allowing information providers to provide information in HTML format.

All of these early online information providers were accessed via dial-up telephone at slow modem speeds but were soon to be followed by full fledged Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that provided the public with full access to the Internet and the emerging World Wide Web.

Although today most users access the Internet via the web, discussion forums, known as Usenet newsgroups can still be accessed via dedicated software and messaging and live chat can be accessed via Internet Relay Chat software, and many people still use dedicated email software. So the Internet is not just the World Wide Web.

But things were changing, high speed Internet via Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) and cable was becoming available and the controversial idea of allowing commercial and business use of the net was being proposed, again foreshadowing the current controversy over net neutrality and what is becoming commercial dominance of the Internet. While we cannot go back, and I would not want to give up access to Internet commerce and banking and the ability to research products online, we must maintain and protect the most important role of the Internet as a public utility and public information and communications network.

Which brings us to the seemingly most popular Internet phenomenon, Facebook. It seems that for many people the Internet, and they themselves, could not exist without this commercial proprietary site that makes millions be leveraging not only people's personal and private information but that of their friends, in what can best be described as a social marketing business plan.

Perhaps I have no right to criticize Facebook as I do not use it. But I do not use it because of what I have learned about it and my intuitive sense, as an early personal computer and Internet user, that Facebook is evil. While I may also have some concerns about the empire Google is building, and avoid Google Plus because of that, my intuition is that Google is still managing to remain true to it's "don't be evil" principles.

What surprises and concerns me most about Facebook is that it has been able to extend that same sense of necessity, that "we have to be on Facebook to reach the public", to progressive community organizations, that I believe should know better. Everyone that is on Facebook, the so-called social network, is on the Internet. The Internet is The Network and there are many organizing tools on the network for progressive organizations to use.

So what tools do progressive community organizations have available on the Internet.

The main tool for providing an online presence has always been a website. Although it does not have the sexy new cachet of a blog or Twitter, or even Facebook, a website provides the basis for connecting all of an organizations online tools. That is why the web was designed the way it was, why HTML was written the way it was, and why Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) allow all online tools to connect to each other.

A website allows an organization to provide basic and comprehensive information to it's members and the public as well as links to documents stored online using resources such as Google Docs. Organization websites can also to link to other resources such as blogs or Twitter accounts. The first website I was responsible for is now archived here.

Web forums connected to websites, which have replaced Usenet newsgroups, provide an excellent means for organizations to communicate with and hold discussions amongst their members and the general public. Forums can be organized by subjects with separate threads for each discussion and can be open to the public or private, in terms of ability to read them or post to them. They can allow interested persons to choose what to read and respond to and avoid receiving massive amounts of email, that can be restricted to more important urgent messages. An example of an effective web forum can be seen here.

Blogs are also very useful for organizations and their members to provide information and express opinions and can be linked from the organizations website, allowing individuals to use whichever blogging platform they choose. Two of the most popular platforms are Blogger and WordPress. This blog is written on Blogger and an example of a WordPress blog is here.

Blogging aggregators, such as Progressive Bloggers are great resources too. They allow you to reach like-minded people with your blogs as well as read blogs of interest. Aggregators are available according to political philosophy, region and subject interest

Another very interesting and little known, little used, Internet resources is Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which provides for real time group discussions, as well as one on one one chats and document transfers. It can be used to hold online meetings. All you have to do is log onto an IRC server using appropriate software and create a room, which can be public or invite only.

Twitter is one Internet resource in particular that I want to talk about. Twitter is the newest Internet tool and one of the most interesting - sort of like a mass e-mailer with a character limit, but not exactly. And of course like most Internet tools Twitter can be abused.

Twitter can be used to tell everyone you know what you had for breakfast or what you're wearing to the prom, but, please don't. I find one of its best uses is by journalists to tweet out breaking news before they have written their complete stories and to live tweet public events, sort of a current affairs play-by-play service. It can also be used effectively by organizations to send out news or event information to their followers.

I follow a few key guidelines in using Twitter. I only try to send out a few tweets a day, either links to my latest blog posts or blog or news entries I think are important and sometimes insightful or witty thoughts. My Twitter feed can be found here.

I limit myself to following people that post interesting and useful information and limit their amount of posting, I do not have all day to read tweets. I recently added, and then quickly deleted, WikiLeaks from my followers due to their over-tweeting. Tweeting a countdown from 10 to 1 in separate tweets before tweeting an announcement is not clever. It is just annoying. But not quite as annoying as random messages inviting people to porn sites.

I also do not understand people who collect followers by following random people hoping they will follow them. Do people who follow thousands of people actually read their tweets. If they have that little of a real life they are probably not worth following.

As the Internet evolves there will, of course, be various other new online resources organizations can use, all of which can be connected together via the main website.

It is very important that we, the public, do not let the telecommunications industry, or other commercial or proprietary interests take control of the Internet and progressive community organizations should avoid being co-opted by such attempts. The Internet IS The Network.

The Stages of Human Communication Technology

Language (pre-history)

Written Language (circa 3200 BC)

The Printing Press (circa 1440 ) (Johannes Gutenberg)

Telephone (1861/1875)

Radio Broadcasting (circa 1910)

Television Broadcasting (1928/1936)

The Internet (1969) (ARPANET)

Smart Phones (1992) (RIM BlackBerry 1999)

Why We Left Bell Canada (Short Version)

the5thColumnist Is a Twit

Yes, I've decided to become a twit, or a twitterer or whatever you call one who tweets. I've been watching Twitter for awhile and decided to try it. Like most forms of Internet technology I think it is misused more than it is well used, particularly as another way for celebrities to say "I'm more popular than everyone else - I have more friends without lives of their own following me than you do."

One of the things I think Twitter is really useful for for is live blogging - allowing 'citizen journalists to cover events live just like the mainstream media as well as for disseminating in formation on political/social/environmental campaigns and events.

I will probably be using it primarily to let followers know when I have updated either of my blogs - The Fifth Column or Richard' GPS Trail Maps and occasionally to draw followers attention to other blog posts that I am really impressed with.

So why now. Well I just broke my arm a week ago in a mountain biking accident and will be unable to bike for 6 to 8 weeks and somewhat limited in what I can do with just one useful arm and hand so I'm probably going to be spending more time at the computer for awhile.

You can find me on Twitter at Richard W. Woodley (the5thColumnist) on Twitter. You do not have to have a Twitter account to access this page and read my twits.

The People Get It - Harper Hates Democracy

Well perhaps this is a bit of an overstatement. Perhaps it's more that he just finds it an annoying irritant and inconvenience that prevents him from acting as Supreme Exalted Ruler.

The Tories might not get it, but the people do, as evidenced by their reactions both in cyberspace and in public spaces, not to mention polling results.

Well the people may not understand all the intricacies of Parliamentary procedure and the difference between prorogation and the House simply not sitting they finally have clued into what is behind it all - behind Harper's prorogation to avoid confidence motions and his prorogation to avoid being held accountable for his government's policy on torture and all his actions since the election.

Stephen Harper has no respect for the House of Commons, no respect for Parliament and no respect for democracy. No wonder he has no comprehension of the fact that a minority government has to earn the confidence of the House of Commons in order to govern legitimately.

No one elected him dictator. He has no right to bully the majority of the House of Commons into supporting him.

Indeed it is the majority of the House of Commons that has the right, and responsibility, to govern. Now if only they would act accordingly. The people are ready for democracy.

The Truth About Climate Change

For the real truth about climate change go to the best source on the Internet:

DeSmogBlog: Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science

Completing The Cuban Revolution - An Open Letter to Raul and Fidel Castro

The time is ripe for the completion of the final stages of the Cuban Revolution and the transition to a truly democratic and socialist society. Let us be clear. This must not be an American style “capitalist democracy” where wealthy corporate interests control the economy and political system, but a true peoples democracy.

I see three components to this transformation.

Economic Democracy – Beyond State Enterprises

This will include the expansion of the economy from state institutions to include small businesses, (where the owner works in the enterprise and earns his income from his labour and not from capital invested in the businesses) as well as co-operative enterprises, including both producer and consumer co-operatives.

Economic democracy must above all else ensure that foreign corporate interests are not allowed to dominate the economy.

Civil Democracy – Freedom of Expression and the Press

The revolution is truly strong enough to withstand competing ideas. The people of Cuba can be trusted with the full right of free expression, including full access to the Internet and the right of free expression on it, whether on forums, blogs or other means of communication.

As well a free press will invigorate the people and enhance the revolution. But we are not talking about the rights of corporate interests to build propaganda machines. We are talking about the rights of the people to have free journalistic expression by means such as newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, through their organizations such as labour unions and co-operatives, including co-operatives of journalists.

Political Democracy – Free Elections

It is time to move beyond one party politics - but not into corporate politics, where corporate interests dominate elections and conduct them as marketing campaigns. It is time to have real alternatives to the communist party candidates. These should come in the form of candidates from peoples organizations, such as labour unions and co-operatives, as well as independents. But election campaign funding and expenses must be restricted to ensure elections are grass roots activities and not marketing campaigns conducted by the wealthy.

Towards A Free Democratic and Socialist Cuba

Some will say that because this model does not mirror that of western democracies that it is not truly democratic.

Remember that Cuba had an American style “capitalist democracy” and when the people were about to elect Fidel Castro into government the corporate interests scuttled the election and it took a revolution for the people to put their chosen leader into power.

And I ask is our system truly democratic when the economic and political system is so heavily dominated by wealthy corporate interests as current events so obviously demonstrate.

I say to the leaders and people of Cuba you have a chance to set an example for the world of what a peoples democracy can truly be.

Windows Big Lies

As I was contemplating Bill Gates and Microsoft’s quest to rule the world I had to reflect on the big lies upon which Windows was built.

Remember the first lie - that Windows will be a platform with standards that software manufacturers can build software to comply with so that software from different venders con work together seamlessly. Nice idea and it got a lot of us to buy Windows.

Now how many of you remember buying new cars and the salesman would tell you how wonderful it was and that it would never rust and last forever and came with a wonderful warranty. Then you would go to close the deal and the “closer” would tell you forget all that - our warranty sucks and our cars rust horribly and you really have to buy additional overpriced rust protection and warranties if you want to be safe.

Well it was like that. As soon as Microsoft got us hooked on the software interoperability of Windows they told us that was really not true and if you wanted true seamless software interoperability you had to buy Microsoft Office and everyone you did business with had to do that too.

Of course none of that is true. The only thing that really matters is file compatibility, which exists for virtually all applications. Need to share a document, save it in Real Text Format, which every word processor can do and which includes all the features you need for any personal or business document (though it might not include flashing headings). As far as sound goes we have the MP3 format, JPG for photos and MPG for video. Even sophisticated database files can be saved in delimited format and imported into another database as long as the delimiter is defined. Indeed even most proprietary formats will now work on all the major platforms, Microsoft, Apple, Linux, etc.

And now, of course, Bill Gates and Microsoft want us to believe that the Internet will just collapse if we do not let them take control of it. Are we going to let that happen.

Long live open standards! Long live open source software! Long live wikis! Long live the free Internet!

Hate and Freedom of Thought

We all hate hate, but does that justify compromising our most fundamental of freedoms.

René Descartes postulated “I think therefore I am”, reasoning that thought is the very essence of our being.

Freedom of thought is guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which states:

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
a) freedom of conscience and religion;
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) freedom of association.

Freedom of thought is meaningless without the freedom to express one thoughts, thus freedom of thought and expression are interlinked in one statement in The Charter.

Popular ideas do not need protection. The very point of protecting freedom of expression in the constitution is to protect the expression of unpopular ideas. After all today’s heresy may be tomorrow’s science, as history has taught us. And it is those that espouse hate that would love to control what other people think and say. We know better.

The irony of combating hate with restrictions on freedom of thought and expression is that it is these very freedoms that are the best protection against hate. The very worst expressions of hate are those that are institutionalized by governments or corporate media. The best defence against such hate is the freedom of ordinary people to challenge it with logic and reason, without restriction on their freedom of expression.

Take, for example, government censorship and control of information and mandatory versions of history. The truth does not require being made “mandatory” or “official”. It can stand on it’s own. Such mandatory versions of history are virtually always false (with one unfortunate exception which is a subject the Fifth Column will examine separately in the future) and often used to promote hatred by authoritarian regimes.

Government restrictions on freedom of expression to fight hatred can also have perverse effects. Should we make it illegal to insult religion in order to combat hatred on the basis of religion. That is actually not such a huge leap of reason and we have seen what can happen when that leap is taken.

Much has been made of the use of the Internet to disseminate hate but the Internet is the best thing that could happen to the spread of hate. The old way was a lot more work for the hate mongers but a lot more effective. They would target susceptible individuals, often alienated or disaffected youth, and would then befriend them and provide them with an onslaught of controlled information via pamphlets and meetings and oratory. They would only see one side of the picture and this would all be done out of public scrutiny.

With the Internet we all can see the message of hate they are spewing and, more importantly, the target audience using the Internet to access hate messages has unfettered access to all of the counteracting anti-hate information on the web. More often than not the hate mongers will simply end up preaching to the converted, something us bloggers understand all too well.

The only restriction that should be put on freedom of expression is against promoting or counseling others to commit illegal acts that involve violence or cause harm to others and that is where the reasonable limits provision of the Charter comes into play:

1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Freedom of expression is too precious to compromise, even with the best of intentions, for the best of intentions can go awry. Allowing the government to decide what are acceptable thoughts for people to express is a very dangerous idea.

We must not let the hate mongers intimidate us into compromising our fundamental freedoms but instead we must take the attitude of Voltaire who wrote: “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write”.

It's Our Web

The Big Lie About Music Sharing - The Future of Music

We all know the big lie about the impact of free music sharing - that it will kill the music - that no one will make music because they will not be able to earn money doing it.

This big lie is based on two false assumptions - that no one will make music for free and that the only way to make money from music is to sell recordings of it. We all know both of these assumptions are false. People have been creating music since long before anyone was paid for it and people were making money from music long before there was any way to record it.

But the reality is free music on the Internet will not mean people will stop paying for recorded music.

I remember just shortly after CDs replaced records there was speculation on what type of media will replace CDs. Nobody at that time saw that the answer was "nothing". People do not want recorded music that is tied to media anymore. They want music that is portable and that they can use in whatever device they might want to, whether it be a CD player, an MP3 player, their cell phone or simply on their computer. They want to be able to play and use their music any way they might think of, including putting it in custom song lists or slide shows and videos they might create and sharing it with friends.

Music media is obsolete and that scares the hell out of the recording industry. They know that they are a top heavy inefficient way of recording and distributing music and the Internet scares the hell out of them. They know digital music is going to destroy the recoding industry as they know it but they do not know what else to do but circle the wagons and try to fight the inevitable. The fact is they are not needed anymore.

Actual recording costs have gone down with new technologies, and small recoding studios, or artist's home studios, can replace the big industry studios. They also know that the Internet and music fans networking can do a much better job of promotion than the recording industry can. They know that they are obsolete. The only thing they have left is "ownership" of the music and they see that dwindling away as new artists produce and promote their music independently.

With the elimination of the recording industry recorded music will be cheaper due to the elimination of the cost of media and the high cost of recording industry promotion

Ironically one of the things the digital revolution is going accomplish is a revival of live music as the emphasis moves from industry created superstars to more independent fan supported artists, The new artists know that the fans are not just customers but part of the music community. Artists are going to realize they have to make a real connection with fans if they expect them to pay for their music, and that is done through live performances. We already see a trend among young people to freely download music from the overpaid superstars, while at the same time buying music from the new struggling independent artists.

Artists can now deal directly with their fans selling their work at much lower prices and even giving some of it away as gifts to the fans that support them. The music will be out of control of the recording industry, who only see it as a commodity to profit from, and into the hands of the creators and fans who love it.

Artists realize the new reality, that going to war with their fans to get them to buy music is counterproductive and that, fans do, and will in the future, choose to buy music even as they share it with friends.

Governments and regulators need to see that their role should not be to support the obsolete recording industry but to support music creators and fans, who interestingly seem to be on the same side of the legislative/regulatory battles that are taking place now.