Wednesday 12 June 2013

Collecting culture

We are all meant to be curating our own collection of culture, or at least that's what I gather from the hundreds of websites devoted to social sharing of cool pictures and videos we find online. So how do we do that when our websites and our tools are always being revoked, changed, locked down and sued? The answer from, say, Facebook would be "come and do it here!" but if another video site forbids embedding, then no website is a complete suite for cultural curation. Even keeping a list of bookmarks synchronised to disk is no good, because websites die or change all the time, or some video owner decides that their creation is no longer going to be available outside the USA. Now most of the world is screwed.

We need the most simple, basic tools that allow us to download - yes, download, copy and keep - that media, in case your website melts, and we need ways of cataloguing it and sharing it with each other. Those methods may change, but the fundamental concept behind it all is that the preservation of our culture requires that it be free of DRM, free of limits and locks, available to copy and share with each other without any exceptional tools. That's what made the web great. Taking it away again is not going to make it greater.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, for a short time, it might make it better for some few people.
PPS - And for those people, that's all that matters.

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