in case you forgot what I look like...

A friend just got a cybershot [?] as part of his grownup-job shwag, which was promptly handed over to me with the statement, "You're tech support, find out what it does." Of course, all instructions, menus, buttons &tc are in Swedish, so I was not as helpful as expected. On the plus side, you can now see what I look like in Sweden, and also what my boots look like.

Exciting, no?

Two sites to distract you, a medium dose of ranting

Firstly, I should recommend the Legal Torrents website. I found my way there from the LibriVox page - which, incidentally, is also very cool if you like strangers to read you books (or poems or plays or manifestos), which I do.

Anyway. I'm a little uncomfortable with illegal downloads, not least because I'm quite uncomfortable with the possibility of attracting some kind of official attention. Remote as the possibility is, it's enough to make the experience less than totally enjoyable for me. One a less pragmatic level, I guess I also feel a bit uncomfortable with it on an ethical level. If artists (or authors, or whatever) are going to charge $30 for their creation they're saying, in part, that they don't want me to listen to their music unless I'm willing to pay that much money for it. I realise that it's more complex than that, of course, but I'm not really capable of articulating my feelings on the subject fully just yet. Basically, I'd much rather listen to music, or read books, or watch shows, that people have made available under a Creative Commons license, because they seem to really want people to access it.

I guess it's a matter of where you see your end point.

I was talking to a friend a couple of days ago, and they were arguing that I could use all of my "low-level" activities (like proofreading or tutoring or advising on web-page construction, my rather weird newest addition) as a way to save up "points" for my "high-level" activities, the things that I think of as being more demanding. The low-level stuff I do doesn't give me much of a boost in terms of self-confidence or self-worth, whereas achieving high-level things (the example we used was writing a book) make me feel more accomplished.

I see the benefits of this in a general kind of way, but I noticed a big gap in the way my friend and I thought about this.

One view goes like this:

Do low level stuff -> get money -> enough money to publish a book.

Which I immediately balked at, since it sounded silly to me. I think of it more in terms of:

Do low level stuff -> get confidence, get skills, get good at time use -> write a book.

The end result for my friend was "get a book published", whereas the end result for me was "write a book". The hurdle for them was getting the book published, whereas the two hurdles as I see it are actually sustaining my attention-span for long enough to write a book, and then having people read it. For me, money is not really the issue - if I published something online and people downloaded and read it, it would "work" equally well for my purposes.

Where am I going with this? I'm not entirely sure, but I guess part of what I'm saying is that I'd much rather engage with people who are creating stuff along my model. But then, I'm also interested in how different people think about making information available, something that's been on my mind a bit as I do research for my PhD (as Freeculture points out, it's ridiculous for academic research to be locked up in closed journals, as well as being counterproductive). To me it seems like a generational difference, this insistence on seeing "publishing" in a certain way (and information in certain formats as more authoritative), but that's not really fair... there are pockets of people from all generations who think that information can flow differently, and then a a heap of others who disagree or don't think about it much. And, finally, I guess part of what I'm saying, in this roundabout rant, is that I'm still trying to work out what to do with myself, how to be use the bits and pieces that I've picked up around the place.

Anyway. As a change from all my information-wants-to-be-free-ranting, I've discovered The Pink Machine Papers website (but of course I must note with delight that all the papers are available for free download). I've only read one of the papers so far, The Anachronistic Economy: Performance and image in another modern age, but I enjoyed it enough to look into the group more. You can find a rundown of their project on the main page, of course, but I like this: the name "Pink Machine" comes from an interview carried out in connection with heavy industrial constructions, where the buyer of a diesel power plant worth several hundred million dollars confessed that he would have preferred his machines to be pink.