Hello Digital Civilization community. I'm Gabriel, but you can call me Gabe. I'm a late addition to this class, but glad to be here nonetheless. Ariel--we go way back--got me interested in this class. I'm not always certain that much of what people post on their blogs is worth anyone's time (it is so precious.) But I readily acknowledge that there are some posts that are valuable additions to the potion of humanity that they reach. I am not certain that my own posts will be worth your reading, but I they may well be. Uncertainty is before us. Anyway, I'm not the one in charge of your time. I'm just going to throw what I've got into our conversations and see what happens.

So, the 17th century...Good times. I don't know much about it specifically off of the top of my head.

So after a brief refresher by Wikipedia's 17th Century page, I still feel fairly uninformed about the subject. Colonization of the Americas--that was big. The North American colonies that would become the United States of America are a hopeful element In bitter contrast is the exponential expansion of the slave trade. It was bad in North America but nowhere near as bad as the South American mining outfits. Some great thinkers came during the 1700s. Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics and articulation of the influence of gravity were, of course, scientific breakthroughs on a grand scale. Only within the last century--with the studies done in modern physics--are we beginning to see holes in his principles.



Control. That's my digital studies topic. It's a "tale as old as time" [thank you, Disney, for this great phrase.] After all, the issue of who's in control (agency) a central part of the War in Heaven, a war that continues in our lives today? But more directly, the issue of digital control appears to be the biggest--or second biggest, after hacking and other forms of digital sabotage--threat to the infrastructure of the Internet. Already lawmakers have displayed an unsettling willingness to barrel into digital rights issues (specifically whether producers or consumers control online content) with guns blazing at the encouragement of big media lobbyists. SOPA, an act Congress is considering, represents a futile attempt to solve control issues using ineffective means which will have many bad consequences, such as making U.S. based web sites less competitive internationally. Also, from time to time enterprising businessmen suggest the idea of dividing Internet traffic into a (over-simplified terminology warning) slow lane and a fast lane, leaving the faster connection rates for those who will pay for it. I don't know how much of a real threat it is.

There is no question that producers of media and data need some protection of their work. Wikileaks is an example of the "ultimate freedom for consumers" mantra carried to damaging extremes. And it's wrong to steal the hard-earned creations of our generation's great songwriters and filmmakers. Perhaps the most promising developments come from creative business models like Spotify and Pandora. These services are getting royalty money into producers' hands while providing the free content consumers demand (and can have illegally instantly). That helps the music industry, but there's no such software poised to provide the same service to filmmakers. YouTube enjoys a monoploy as the web's free video collection, and since recent court disputes with Viacom and others have gone their way, their hegemony is unlikely to end anytime soon.