Paul Weideman of The New Mexican, Santa Fe, wrote this short piece. I felt that Paul does a nice job in communicating the issues to a broad readership.

Trebor Scholz is an artist, media theorist, and activist, and he's way into the Internet. Scholz, who offers a lecture and workshop for Santa Fe Art Institute this weekend, is at work on a critique about sociable media such as blogs and wikis (real-time, editable websites). "Every day you have new sociable software online where people make something new possible like http://del.icio.us/ that's all about sociable bookmarking," he said in an interview from New York. "If you go to del.icio.us/trebor I share some 4,228 bookmarks," he said, then laughed at the improbability of it.

So does he use them all? "I use them a lot. It’s fantastic," he said, then explained, "It references yourself and then you go somewhere else online and you share it with other people so those who have saved the same thing are visible to you and can go to their site and see what else they're into, whether it's coffee beans or whatever. You can find people with shared interests."
Wow. So if you (like me) hardly know what all this even is, check out his $5 lecture on April 20. Scholz will give an introduction and overview of recent technologies for online participation: blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, all the things that take social life to the Web.

The information will give you power (will be empowering) not only in respect to the networking possibilities at these Internet sites but regarding safety and privacy issues thereon.

You can read about some of those issues at Scholz' Web site, www.collectivate.net, where he has posted an essay titled “What the MySpace generation should know about working for free.”

In the interview he said the piece is about "issues of trust and other core issues such as the disappearing public sphere and how that contributes to a drift into the virtual, and how public spaces become spaces to drift through rather than staying and how they increasingly become inhospitable."

One of the problems is that so many users don't care that companies are profiting from the users' "distributed creativity," such as art or literary projects worked on collaboratively by geographically dispersed people at Web sites that permits exploitation through marketing.

In his “What the MySpace generation should know” piece Scholz says people spend most of their time on the sites of online giants NewsCorp, Yahoo, and Google and not in the "mom and pop stores" that exhibit “a much more benevolent ratio of participant benefits versus the company's running costs.”

About 73 percent of Americans have Internet access and of those 85 percent now have broadband access, according to Scholz. Almost 12 percent of all time Americans devote to online matters is spent on MySpace, one of the hundreds of social-networking sites that also include Jaiku, Twitter, Dodgeball, and Facebook.

What do people do on these sites? They “comment, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post, link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate, favorite, write; flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, and learn,” Scholz writes. And they fill in profiles: 18 million students have shared personal details in their Facebook profiles, according to Scholz. And how many users read the terms? These include Facebook's right to "use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute user content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof..."

The average age of MySpace users runs in the teen-to-25 neighborhood. And do they care about working for free and the issues Scholz brings up?) “I don’t think they care too much,” he said, “particularly because at least as of right now you have this paradox: on the one hand they get a lot out of it but on the other they are really used, which you can document.” One of the images Scholz provided for this story is of a Chinese man in front of microphones with his mouth taped. This is a subject I will talk about: the future of the digital divide and how countries like China are really taking over as far as content online,” he said. “Today there are 60 million weblogs but there are two billion cellphone users and a large part are Chinese.”

Scholz said English will soon take a back seat to Brazil, Russia, India, and China as the dominant language online. The image of the gagged man refers to Chinese censorship. “That’s why companies like Google withdrew from their attempt to pull off their own business in China,” he said. “Now they switched to supporting Chinese companies rather than having their own brand.”

He predicted the Internet will not be dominated by Google and YouTube but by Chinese equivalents: “basically proxies, so all Internet goes through a government service that can block whatever content they feel like.” Another area of interest for Scholz is the increasing proliferation of “embedded technologies.” This was the subject of a conference called Architecture and Situated Technologies, which he organized in New York last October. He calls the field “one of the burgeoning areas of architecture” because of the opportunities for architects to work technology into new buildings. An example of these devices now in use in New York and New Jersey is the EZ Card, which facilitates automatic toll-booth charges so the driver doesn’t have to pay each time. Another is the RF-ID tags in new passports.

“It’s a page with the same device you see on many products, TVs and even shampoos: a sticker with a dot in the middle, which is the transmitter, and a concentric antenna,” Scholz said. “It’s a radio-frequency ID and with that on your passport in England, for instance, it’s used to identify and trace the movements of everbody entering the airport as they make their way to the gate: now they’re in the restroom, now they’re buying water.

“Embedded technology makes it easy to create zones of exclusion where certain employees or consumers have access to specific areas to do certain things. I was recently in Boston and I had to swipe my room card to activate the elevator and it would take me automatically to my floor, so anyone who doesn’t have a credit card in certain circumstances will have a hard time getting access to some things.”

Scholz, a native of East Berlin, divides his time between New York City and Buffalo, where he is assistant professor and researcher at SUNY’s Department of Media Study. In 2004 he founded the Institute for Distributed Creativity, a research network that focuses on collaboration in media art, theory and education.

He expects publication soon of his new book The Art of Free Cooperation. In addition to the lecture, Scholz offers a two-day workshop ($200). “It will introduce and discuss with the participants these questions of the digital divide and whether or not the Internet democratizes society,” he said.