This video has been removed
...just kidding.
Welcome to "Quick, print this page! The value of analog media in a digital world"
I'm Luke Haliburton, and together with my co-authors Matthias Albrecht and Thomas
we are here to discuss some difficult issues that are important in our increasingly digital lives.
I'm sure many of you ran into the situation on the first page there
where, for one reason or another, the video has been removed. It's either
not available in your region or it's been deleted by the original uploader.
This doesn't just happen with youtube videos, it also has happened with books! In 2019 the
Microsoft ebook store closed and users lost access to all the books they had purchased.
This example forces us to rethink the concept of ownership in a modern context.
And if you read our paper you'll find a similar challenge - the solution is in the title.
Print the paper off and you'll have your own hard
copy to read even if the online database is down in the future.
In our paper we outline several examples of data ownership,
privacy, and manipulation which will not be addressed fully in this presentation.
And rather than just repeat the information within
our paper we'll actually use our video format to illustrate some of our points.
So we encourage you to print off our paper and read it for more information.
And before we get too far in i'd like to clarify what we mean by analog and
digital in this conversation. We make the separation based on ownership rather than
based purely on physics. So a printed book is of course analog but we also consider a
DVD to be analog in the sense that you own a hard copy and can access it whenever you want.
In contrast we use digital in this conversation to mean streaming services and
cloud storage where you can access content but you don't physically own a copy.
So one of the topics in our paper is retroactively changing the content of media. One famous example
of this is from Star Wars: A New Hope. One of the main characters, Han Solo, in the original film,
which is shown here on the left, he shoots a bounty hunter who's after him. But later the
movie was re-released with the scene altered so that the bounty hunter shoots at Han first
and then Han shoots in retaliation. This altered scene is shown on the right. But the small change
actually changes Han's character development in a big way, and the big problem is that you can
only see the original if you own a hard copy, which is no longer available to be purchased.
And another topic that we touch on is archival and access to media. I'll use the last slide as
an example. The original material that we used in the slide is copyrighted,
and let's pretend that we didn't follow YouTube's "fair use" laws (which we do),
but there would then be a decision tree for the video.
One - the ACM could refuse to upload our presentation out of fear of copyright infringement
Two - the ACM could upload it and then be forced to remove it or adapt it immediately
Or Three - it could be uploaded and stay there, but then guidelines could change in the future
and the video could be removed retroactively. And that could still happen even given our
current adherence to the current guidelines, and since we're dependent on one platform,
in this case YouTube, our wonderful research could be taken down in the future.
But this is just one example. Maybe you don't think that it's important that our talk is
removed or a scene in Star Wars was changed, but there are larger potential consequences.
To start with there's a
weakening of consumer rights, like access to media that you've already paid for.
We could potentially have a "Digital Dark Age" - what if YouTube went bankrupt or had an
accident that happened and wiped out all of its content? We could lose
valuable historical and cultural information.
With the ability to manipulate digital media we can change history after the fact.
Consider a future civilization researching us - they may not be able to access the
information stored on our servers if they don't have an understanding of how to read it.
So is there anything that we're currently doing to try to solve this? Well there's
two examples, that are pretty famous, of approaches to related problems.
One is the golden record and the other is the Svalbard seed vault.
The golden record is something that we launched into space in hopes of contacting aliens,
and it actually contains analogue instructions for how to access its contents.
And the seed vault contains not only seeds in case of a global catastrophe, but also a
huge database of information stored on microfilm. And microfilm is much easier to reverse engineer
in case of complete destruction of our current technology than say a digital storage mechanism.
But these are designed for contacting aliens and a doomsday scenario,
how can they actually help us now?
We don't actually have a solution, we just have more questions!
We're hoping we can have a discussion with you all.
So how can we redesign media technologies to preserve both
personal ownership and creative freedom?
How can we include inspiration from analog to improve the longevity of our information?
What else could we do? How can we design information storage and sharing differently?
Hopefully this video stands as an inspiration point for some
rich discussions on the topic we look forward to chatting with you about it.
But for now this video has been removed