Where marketers would never want to tamper

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Posted on by Amanda French 8 Comments

Here’s the thing: English professors don’t usually get asked to test drive and review cars. I’ve reviewed books, grant proposals, even web sites. Never cars.

Ah, this blessèd plot, this Internet.

Granted, I’m not an “English professor” — I have a Ph.D. in English literature, which means that I trained to become an English professor, but I’ve never made it even to the interview stage at the MLA convention. When people ask me what I do for a living, I often reply, “I have a Ph.D. in English literature.” Which is dodging the question. If I feel obliged to say what I actually do, I reply, “I work in various capacities on various projects having to do with technology and the humanities.” Or, of course, I describe my current project and position.

Really, I think, people expect an answer to the question of what I do that identifies who I am, an identity marker: “I am an assistant professor of English.” Honestly, even when I had a one-year teaching position at North Carolina State University with the words “assistant professor” in the title, I never claimed that as an identity. I’d say, “I teach English literature at NC State,” because I didn’t have a tenure-track position. What I am, professionally speaking (besides perennially underemployed, which condition applies to at least 50% of people with Ph.D.s in English literature) is still undefined.

Sometimes this lack of definition is decidedly stressful — I’d certainly like a permanent job with a permanent job title that I and others can immediately understand — but at other times, times like these, it’s actually kinda fun. I’ve never liked being categorized. (“Don’t LABEL me, man,” she said with a beatnik sneer.) I’ve been called a “poet” and a “musician” and a “singer-songwriter,” and those labels never feel right, either. Those are just things I do sometimes, and they don’t define me. “Grad student” was my label for a long time. I got used to that one, comfortable with it — too comfortable. Recently I’ve claimed “digital humanist,” though that term is arcane and hard to define. I define it as “someone with a humanities degree who’s interested in computers.”

Most recently, I earned another label: “blogger.” Someone named “Blogger Amanda French” was frequently cited in February’s hoo-hah about Facebook’s Terms of Service. Facebook, by the way, has since asked its users to vote on the new Terms of Service, and they (or some of them, anyway) approved the new ones. Gotta be honest here: I don’t much care. This was a good thing for Facebook to do, I think, and I’m especially glad as a former teacher of Intro to Composition that the new Terms are written in much clearer English. But who cares about my opinion? Not me. No pundit, I. I just like keeping up with technology news, and I do think that it’s important for us all to keep an eye on the tech companies (and all companies), especially as regards intellectual property and privacy.

What interested me about the controversy over Facebook’s Terms of Service was simply whether or not it was justified — whether or not the Consumerist’s claims that the Terms of Service were scary and horrible were true. That’s what led me to blog about it. I concluded that yes, the Consumerist’s claims or implied claims were pretty much true, and the hullabaloo therefore just.

I have reached, by the way, exactly the opposite conclusion about the swine flu hullabaloo, but fortunately there are already plenty of rational people protesting this particular viral mania for misinformation.

One label that I secretly like a lot and hope to deserve is “scholar,” and that’s what scholars do, I think: find out and tell the truth. Journalists do that too (ideally), but scholars get a lot more time to do it than journalists do, and scholars can seek out the truth about stuff that very few people care about at the moment. We scholars, bless us, can be as verbose and sesquipedalian as we like, and we can duck the current daily frenzy and spend our days humming through frenzies long turned to dust. That was my very favorite part of graduate school. While I was writing my dissertation, I got my investigation on, big time. Such fun.

And then I also had fun finding a way to write the truth in a way that was accurate, fair, compassionate, and interesting. The trick is always to balance the desire to be witty or shocking or alliterative or otherwise attention-grabbing with the mandate to be correct and thorough and just. Get out of balance one way, and you’ve got a tabloid; get out of balance another, and you’ve got a 1040 form. As a scholar, I want to be, oh, let’s pull a phrase out of the air, “engaging and authentic.”

All of which is a very long-winded way of getting around to telling you that since I’ve been christened a blogger, I am apparently entitled to receive e-mails such as this:

“I see that you like to write and tweet about social media, teaching, and blogging, and I am wondering if you would like an opportunity to document the experience of test driving a roomy and sturdy Ford Mercury Milan or a sporty yet stylish Lincoln MKX for a few days? It’s usually the car journalists who get to test drive the cars, but we’re looking for fresh perspectives and feedback, something a little more engaging and authentic. What do you think?”

I think I love the Internet. Hee hee.

Ah, well. I told her that I was tickled by her offer (it still cracks me up), turned it down (politely, I hope), and warned her that I was going to write about her e-mail. I ought really to have sent her a link to technology journalist Rafe Needleman’s Pro PR Tips and a link to Merlin Mann’s correspondence with a hapless marketing intern. Merlin Mann, who’s one of the hilarities behind the podcast “You Look Nice Today,” is neither a journalist nor a scholar and can thus pull out the snark bazooka.

Analysis of this e-mail? First, the sender (or her boss) doesn’t understand social media and should at once read the Cluetrain Manifesto; second, she doesn’t understand who I am, despite the presence of copious information on this site suggesting that I am not at all interested in cars or car reviewing; third, Ford might want to look for a new New Media marketing firm; fourth, she’s being disingenuous to the point of dishonesty by writing that they’re looking for “fresh perspectives and feedback.” What led her to e-mail me, I know as surely as if I were kicked back with my feet up on her frontal lobe, was the fact that I have those 2,000 followers on Twitter and got those 30,000 views on that blog post about Facebook. Hey, look at me, I’m an influencer! Who needs a tenure-track job in an English department?

Marketers, beware. I like what I like, and I write what I want to write, and I write it on my own schedule. I cannot be bribed. I cannot be persuaded. I have internal tenure, and you cannot take it from me. And I am not the only one, out here on this Internet.

Ada Lovelace Day: Mary Shelley

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Posted on by Amanda French 7 Comments

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, in which people are asked to write about “women excelling in technology.”

There are several women I could have written about. I could have written about my former housemate Chris Ruotolo, for instance, who teaches XML courses — we were in the same group in Jerry McGann and Pat Spacks’s class on “The Novel of Sensibility” back in 1995 (gulp), which, I’ll have you know, was where I wrote my very first web page. (Sadly, the links are all broken now: this was before I knew about relative links, and the site has moved.) I could have written about my former supervisor Kristin Antelman, who was the best manager I’ve ever had, who makes sure that the NCSU Libraries continues to build cool stuff, and who showed that people cite scholarly articles that are on the open web more often than articles that aren’t on the open web (amazing that it needed to be proven, but it did). I could have written about technology journalist Molly Wood, who demands daily that the filthy capitalist dogs at the technology companies take some freaking heed of the public good once in awhile.

However, I’ve chosen to write about Mary Shelley: Mary Shelley, who, in 1816, when she was 19 years old, wrote Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818). If you concede that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel (and many do), then it’s certainly worth honoring Mary Shelley on Ada Lovelace day. And, of course, Mary was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, who’s in the Most Famous Romantic Poets club with Byron, and Byron was there at the famed Swiss gathering where Mary began Frankenstein — and Byron was Ada Lovelace’s father.

I can’t write anything about Mary Shelley beyond what’s on the Wikipedia page, and I haven’t read the novel in years (as I recall it was rather turgid, sad to say), but this occasion has led to some pleasant idling around on the Internet, and I figure I can show you what I found.

For instance, did you know that Thomas Edison’s motion picture company made a Frankenstein movie in 1910? I happened to know this because back when I was in college, my uncle Bob David did a remake of it titled “Edison’s Frankenstein.” I helped him out with band-aids and safety pins, thus earning my only IMDB credit (to date). At the time, there was no way to get hold of the actual film — but now you can see Edison’s 1910 version of Frankenstein on the Internet Archive:

I mean, that is some great stuff. Terrific special effects in the creation scene; kinda looks like they burned something and then rolled the film backward. The monster is very creepy looking, and how about that explicit moral with the mirror trick?

I also located an image of a page from Mary Shelley’s original manuscript:

Really clear handwriting. You wouldn’t believe how terrible lots of nineteenth-century handwriting is. I did some research on Mary Somerville back in grad school (another great heroine of science), and I had to really work to read her writing. I agree, Mary: “beautiful” is much more effective than “handsome,” there, and “yellow skin” is much better than “dun skin.”

I also browsed through one of the original reviews of Frankenstein, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, and which called the book “a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity.” They just did not mince words back then. Interesting choice, that word “tissue” — wonder if the reviewer (who remained anonymous) meant to evoke the medical sense of the term. No one knew that the author was a woman, by the way, so you can’t attribute that blunt opinion to sexism.

Finally, I did a search for the word “science” in the book itself, which produced some interesting results. At one point, Frankenstein’s college professor advises him as follows:

“If your wish is to become really a man of science, and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics” (66).

This made me think of Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air, which I’ve just finished; Johnson argues that Joseph Priestley was a bit of a petty experimentalist but that he, and everyone, nevertheless benefited greatly from the innate interdisciplinarity of the era. Shelley got her inspiration for Frankenstein, by the way, from some experiments with electrocuting worms that Erasmus Darwin did, and Erasmus Darwin was an intellectual contemporary and crony of Priestley’s. There’s also this:

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. (68)

Yeah, I don’t really believe that. I think in all studies there’s “continual food for discovery and wonder.” However, I am mollified by the rather interesting discovery that when we stop getting the story in Dr. Frankenstein’s voice and start getting it in the monster’s voice (did you know that? that the monster narrates part of the story in eloquent Enlightenment prose? It was a shock to me when I first read the book, I’ll tell you.) — in any case, as I was saying, when the monster begins to write, he starts referring to language as a “science”:

So soon as he had finished, the youth began, not to play, but to utter sounds that were monotonous, and neither resembling the old man’s instrument nor the songs of the birds: I since found that he read aloud, but at that time I knew nothing of the science of words or letters. (155)

Sevearl times, the creature refers to language, to speaking, to writing, as a science. Imagine that.

Imagine this, too: no Frankenstein. Without Frankenstein, maybe no “mad scientist” trope in fifties B movies. Without Frankenstein, maybe no “Rossum’s Universal Robots (R. U. R.)” and no I, Robot from Asimov. Without Frankenstein, maybe no Jurassic Park.

Without Frankenstein, maybe no reminder that science and technology and even language, for all their wonders, have their horrors too.

Facebook terms of service compared with MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter

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Posted on by Amanda French 244 Comments

UPDATE 5/8/09: Facebook revised its Terms of Service, aka the “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” Here’s their blog post about it, and here’s the current policy.

***

With today’s outrage over Facebook’s newly altered Terms of Service at its peak, I figured I’d do a quick comparison of their terms of service as regards user-uploaded content to the terms specified by other social networking sites, just to see if said outrage is fully justified. It looks as though the finger-pointing at the Bush robots.txt file wasn’t justified, for instance, and I was guilty of spreading that story.

Conclusion? Go ahead and be outraged. Facebook’s claims to your content are extraordinarily grabby and arrogant. Here’s the rundown, which I go through in more detail below:

  1. Facebook apparently wants to keep all its rights to your stuff after you remove it from Facebook, and even after you delete your Facebook account; they just removed the lines that specified that their rights end when your content comes down. Nobody else (of those I looked at) would dream of that; mostly they specifically state that their rights to your content end when you remove the content from their site or delete your account.
  2. This one kills me: Facebook claims it can do whatever it wants with your content if you put a Share on Facebook link on your web page. Unbelievable–and unique, as far as I can tell. People can post links in Facebook to your content just by copying and pasting the URL, but if you want to save them a few keystrokes by putting a link or a widget on your site, Facebook claims that you’ve granted them a whole mess of rights. Count me out.
  3. Other sites point out in their terms of service that you still own your content: Facebook doesn’t mention that little fact. Facebook also neglects to remind you that you’re giving other Facebook users rights to your Facebook content, too — YouTube, for example, makes it clear that other people besides YouTube have a right to use and spread around the videos you upload. In general, other sites’ terms of service just have a more helpful tone.

So let’s look at what other popular user-generated content sites say about their rights to your stuff:

MySpace’s rights to your stuff:

6.1 MySpace does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post on or through the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain any such rights that you may have in your Content, subject to the limited license herein. By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace a limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on or through the MySpace Services, including without limitation distributing part or all of the MySpace Website in any media formats and through any media channels, except Content marked “private” will not be distributed outside the MySpace Website. This limited license does not grant MySpace the right to sell or otherwise distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services. After you remove your Content from the MySpace Website we will cease distribution as soon as practicable, and at such time when distribution ceases, the license will terminate. If after we have distributed your Content outside the MySpace Website you change the Content’s privacy setting to “private,” we will cease distribution of such “private” Content outside the MySpace Website as soon as practicable after you make the change.

6.2 The license you grant to MySpace is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to MySpace), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that MySpace is not required to pay you for the use on the MySpace Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that MySpace is able to use its affiliates, subcontractors and other partners such as Internet content delivery networks and wireless carriers to provide the MySpace Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the MySpace Services are global in reach).

See? MySpace grants itself a “limited” license and carefully spells out what those limits are. MySpace does a terrific job in that second paragraph especially of explaining what’s going on, I think. Maybe your average thirteen-year-old would still need some help, but way to go with the “human-readable” language, MySpace. Getting an explanation about why they need to be able to sublicense the content is terrific, and I’m sure that if they then tried to sublicense it for other purposes, they’d be tripped up by their own TOS.

Yahoo!’s rights to your Flickr stuff:

Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Yahoo! Services. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable […]:

With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Yahoo! Services and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Yahoo! Services.

Yahoo! makes distinctions between its Groups and other services like Flickr, but that need not concern us here (Yahoo! reserves fewer rights to Groups stuff than to Flickr stuff). They start by reminding you that they don’t own your stuff, then go on to say that they have the right to copy your stuff “solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted.” In other words, they don’t grant themselves the right to use it in their advertising, as far as I can tell. And, sanely, the license ends when you (or they) take the content down. I checked out the Flickr Pro TOS, as well, and there’s nothing extra in there, whew. I also love that Flickr makes it very easy to stick a Creative Commons license on your photos, although to be honest I’m not sure if I’ve done that with mine. Must check.

Google’s rights to your Picasa stuff:

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Picasa Web Albums. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Picasa Web Albums and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums, and other Google services. In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google will discontinue this licensed use within a commercially reasonable period after such Content is removed from Picasa Web Albums.

Sounds reasonable. I don’t really mind their using my stuff in their advertising, though “other Google services” may soon encompass every single conceivable service on the planet. They, too, stop the license when you take the content down.

YouTube’s rights to your stuff:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The above licenses granted by you in User Videos terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your User Videos from the YouTube Website. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted. The above licenses granted by you in User Comments are perpetual and irrevocable.

I really like it when these paragraphs start with the helpful information that “you retain all ownership rights.” Also note that YouTube points out that “You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website” some rights. Way to look out for the community. Good job. Now add the ability for us to put Creative Commons licenses on our videos somewhere other than in the description, okay? Thanks.

LinkedIn’s rights to your stuff:

License and warrant your submissions: You do not have to submit anything to us, but if you choose to submit something (including any User generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and data), you must grant, and you actually grant by concluding this Agreement, a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royaltyfree right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.

LinkedIn is the one exception to the general conclusion I state above: its language about its rights to your content is at least as strong as Facebook’s, if not more so. The thing is that people don’t upload pictures and videos to LinkedIn; the main user-contributed content is the facts in a profile (where I worked, where I went to school). People usually don’t mind having that information spread around. Also, you can tell that LinkedIn is thinking mainly about the suggestions for improvement that people submit (“ideas, concepts, techniques”) — but still, LinkedIn would be well-advised to revise.

Twitter’s rights to your stuff:

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

Isn’t that sweet? Granted, the only stuff people contribute to Twitter are their little 140-character tweets, plus a profile pic or two — these terms don’t cover what you post to TwitPic, for instance. But Twitter wants you to know that your stuff is yours, and it wants you to share your stuff with others. Twitter doesn’t reserve to itself the right to use your tweets in its promotional campaigns — does Twitter even do any self-promotion? They hardly need to; the New York Times has certainly been giving them enough press lately.

Facebook’s rights to your stuff:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Yeah, so I took the Facebook icon out of my Sociable WordPress widget. All my stuff here has a Creative Commons license, so I’ve already allowed everyone including Facebook to use my stuff for “non-commercial” purposes anyway; it’s not quite clear what counts as a “commercial” purpose in a Creative Commons license, granted (though they’re working on clarifying the term), but any use that Facebook would make would probably be commercial. I don’t even mind all commercial uses: I don’t really care if they want to use my profile picture to show that the people who use Facebook are really sexy and good-looking. But the stuff on my blog does not become Facebook “User Content” if I put a link that allows people to share it on Facebook. Come off it.