6 February 2010 13:18
The OII has posted a new Policy Briefing written by our Visiting Associate Tony Wales, former General Counsel of AOL International, responsible for the company’s worldwide legal affairs outside the US. He offers his insights on issues arising from the UK Government’s Digital Britain report (June 2009) and Digital Economy Bill, focusing in particular on provisions for enforcement action against unlawful filesharing (where Internet users share music, video and other entertainment content without the permission of the copyright holders) by imposing new policing obligations on ISPs and other online intermediaries. The piece is: Tony Wales (2009) Industry self-regulation and proposals for action against unlawful filesharing in the UK: Reflections on Digital Britain and the Digital Economy Bill. The addendum to this article provides a briefing on the sections of the Digital Economy Bill that propose measures to deal with unlawful filesharing, together with recommendations for amendments.
Access the paper via: [people.oii.ox.ac.uk]
5 February 2010 12:40
The Pew Internet and American Life project released their findings on young people’s use of social media yesterday. Apparently young people are less likely to use Twitter than adults aged 25-40 (although teenage girls are an exception). They are also less likely to blog. I don’t think that this survey data indicates that young people aren’t engaged in meaningful social life online or elsewhere – youth do lots of socializing online. This finding should remind us that participating in social media is not a unified experience. The relationships that committed Twitterers of a certain age construct (your author included) may be more representative of our age and demographic than indicative of social media itself.
No, what I’m thinking about is along the lines of what Christian Sandvig is working on: these applications are now becoming infrastructures for participation. To understand them, we need to know more about how they are built, how they work, and who controls them. Yes, we want to make things together, and we want to make relationships with people. It’s easier to do this using applications like Facebook Twitter, and YouTube. But this also means creating a relationship with the platform itself. The algorithms to which we’ve delegated the work of connecting and communicating also have agency. We don’t know much about them, in the main. Sometimes, we get a small view into the algorithms of certain systems – this week, I learned more about the School of Everything and how its search and matching
The question of social media use and agency is not just a question of knowing or being able to understand the design process. If different generations or social groups want to relate to each other in different ways, then there’s social interest in understanding how different infrastructures shape and are shaped by those relationships.
I feel that sometimes, the social media world that I’m part of acts like an echo chamber, with the kinds of relationships that “people like me” form getting reproduced by our practices – and perhaps even by our media infrastructures. We start thinking that social media works a certain way because that’s the way it works for us. I think it’s critical that research understand both ends of this process – the way systems are designed, and the potentially very different kinds of things that designs make possible, among different kinds of people. Otherwise we’ll all simply be shouting into our own social media echo chambers.
3 February 2010 10:46
I was in the midst of writing this on Lessig’s recent article on the Google Book Search Settlement when I received the latest “Wired Campus” email from the Chronicle. Oh, the irony. The top 2 news stories were about Stanford expanding their deal with Google and approving the latest version of the settlement; and about UCLA pulling some videos from their course site after being accused of copyright infringement because of some video clips.
Why is this ironic? Well, because in his recent piece in the New Republic about implications of the Google Books Search Settlement, Lessig worries that this debacle of not being able to quote snippets of video is where we are headed with texts. It is a long piece, but much of his argument can be summed up:
The deal constructs a world in which control can be exercised at the level of a page, and maybe even a quote. It is a world in which every bit, every published word, could be licensed. It is the opposite of the old slogan about nuclear power: every bit gets metered, because metering is so cheap. We begin to sell access to knowledge the way we sell access to a movie theater, or a candy store, or a baseball stadium. We create not digital libraries, but digital bookstores: a Barnes & Noble without the Starbucks.
Clearly the folks at the Chronicle didn’t read Lessig’s article.. or maybe they did…
31 January 2010 20:58
A colleague of mine from my USC days, Guillermo Asper y Valdés, was in Oxford last week for a visit – but asking about UK research on personal health records. He and colleagues in Brazil and the US are undertaking research in this area. If anyone has suggestions of individuals he should contact, please let me know. I think they are interested in the whole range of issues surrounding the development and use of personal health records in the provision of more direct health and medical services. However, they want to understand leading-edge developments cross-nationally in order to contribute to the design of systems in this area. Any thoughts would be appreciated. My own contribution was to note the importance of focusing on the legal-institutional constraints surrounding the development of these systems, and not have too great a focus on the technological breakthroughs.
Guillermo Asper y Valdés and Bill
28 January 2010 17:49
Ethical ICT in Youth Work (c) Tim Davies 2010
[Summary: Ethics belongs to professions, not problems & an ethical framework for youth and ICTs will require each workforce to seek new equilibria based on a number of inter-related elements]
I spend a very interesting day yesterday at a workshop organised by DC10Plus exploring the possible creation of an ‘ethical framework for ICT and young people’. This post contains a set of reflections and ‘thinking aloud’ following that session…
With technologies and the dynamics of digital environments constantly developing, ethical frameworks, over and above guidance and best-practice, are very much needed to help all those involved in work with young people (and young people themselves) to think critically about the ways technologies are used in, and impact upon, the lives of children and young people. However, when it comes to practical ethics for the public sector, it’s crucial to remember that ethics belong to professions, not problems.
That was a point brought home to me the Connected Practice symposium in September last year, where it was clear that different professional groups approached their work from very different motivations and with very different practical and ethical frameworks. Whilst some would argue the rise of a network society leads to a dissolution of barriers between professionals, and consequently, the dissolution of clear and distinct forms of professional practice, right now we are in an environment of inter-disciplinary practice, rather than post-disciplinary practice - and there are real advantages to be found in each different professional group working out it’s own ethical responses to ICT. A ‘meta-ethical’ public sector framework of general ethical principles may support a degree of compatibility and interface between different professional ethical approaches to ICT, but should not try to replace the process of each profession working out it’s ICT ethics in it’s own context. For a real practice example of how professional context affects the sorts of ethical and practical implications of using ICT – take a look at this forum thread over on Youth Work Online – where the differences between the nature of practice and relationship with young people and youth workers in statutory and voluntary sector youth work settings is leading to a need to adapt and think critically about guidance on how youth workers should use social networking sites.
The point that ethics belong to professions, not problems also highlights that ICT ethics should start, not from concerns about ICTs per-se, but from a recognition of how ICTs impact upon and cut across the concerns of different professional groups within the public sector. And any approach to ethics for ICTs & Young People should have a clear account of where and why a specific focus on young people is warranted. In Safe and Effective Social Network Site Applications for Young People (p. 7) I’ve argued that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Law, and neuro-scientific understandings of adolescence are critical to any such account.
Finding a new equilibrium
Professional ethics guide how individuals and organisations with a set of specific goals should behave in the pursuit of those goals, given the particular contexts in which they work. It might be thought that professional groups can just look at their existing ethical codes and apply them directly to the Internet. However, in my experience exploring youth work values and ethics that turns out not to be quite so straightforward. Whilst it is possible (as we do on p.g. 17 & 18 of the Youth Work & Social Networking Report) to explore how the values of a profession play out in a digital world – deriving practical and ethical guidance for real world situations is not just a case of looking at values and the realities of the online world, but involves finding an equilibria between at least six different elements, as the diagram above shows. Each element is both a variable that may be open to change, but equally a constraint on working out an ethical position:
- Young people’s use of social media/ICT/the Internet – ethics cannot be built for the ‘ideal world’, but must be developed for the world we are in. At the same time, ethical approaches may involve challenging current patterns of ICT use and seeking to encourage young people to approach ICTs in different ways.
- Professional values and skills – professional values in many service start from an analysis of the world and a desire to change something in it – be that a desire to tip the balance of power in favour of young people in core youth work theory, or a desire to reduce crime and increase social control in the basic analysis of law enforcement services. However, ICTs are implicated in ongoing changes to the world – and so professional values need to be re-examined in light of the digital world – without being abandoned.
- Models of online communication and collaboration – there are many different ways of working online. Only some should be seen as ‘youth work’ ways of working – and the choice over which ways of working are ruled in, and ruled out, of a youth work framework of ethics for ICT use will impact upon the nature of that framework. The choice of ethics will also determine which forms of online communication and collaboration are (a) open to youth workers, and (b) likely to be open to youth workers in ways that allow them to be effectively used.
- Features of available / popular social media tools – this is a particularly interesting ‘variable’ – as to an extent, for most professionals, the tools available to use are not seen as something over which they have much control. Facebook works the way it does. Changing that is not in the power of the individual practitioner. However, the plug-in and application architectures of many social media spaces mean that it may be possible for them to be adapted to be made ’safer spaces’ for youth work practice, or more appropriate settings for the forms of practice a worker wants to explore. Right now, reshaping social media spaces is beyond the means of most practitioners – but if made more accessible, could enhance the possibility of ‘ethical and effective’ online practice.
- Institutional drivers of, and barriers to, online working. See the 50 Barriers wiki on this one.
- Consideration of opportunities and risks – based on real evidence about the opportunities and risks young people face online.
I recognise that this is still a fairly sketchy model – and my use of language above is neither as clear, nor as precise, as would be ideal. However, I wanted to share this now both for the Ethical ICT & Youth project, and as part of ongoing thinking for another project which I hope to be blogging more about soon…
27 January 2010 19:47
In many jurisdictions, such as the UK, you are free to kill yourself (without prosecution if you survive unexpectedly!) but not to help others commit suicide.
This may well be a wise position, and the distinction seems to be reemerging on the social web. You can, laboriously, defriend everyone you know on Facebook or you can poke around and find the Deactivate and Delete facilities so as to leave Facebook temporarily or permanently. But it seems you will get into trouble if you encourage others to do so, to commit “web suicde”.
Facebook is consulting their learned friends about new sites like suicidemachine.org which actively encourage users to leave all their social networks and to post on that very network how many friends they are cutting off by leaving the internet and giving their own last words on the web. Facebook’s spokesman said severely:
“Users rely on us to protect their data and enforce the privacy decisions they’ve made,” said Simon Axten, the company’s policy and security officer. “We take this trust seriously and work aggressively to protect it.”
There are many paradoxes and ironies here: former users of the social web advertising their own web suicide ON A WEB SITE; Facebook wanting to stop an organized but consenting deletion of data by claiming to be protecting that very data. Protecting the data for whom? Not presumably the would-be suicide? For the friends who cannot bear to lose you, for the Government, for advertisers who will be able to find you under Facebook’s new relaxation of privacy conventions?
In case you think this last is paranoia, check this blog from a tea-party-sort-of-person:
“shane farmer wrote:
All you little people sat at home typing to each other instead of meeting up for a night out, i know its not always possible but you type instead of. My wife thinks that the goverment loves the fact they know were most peopole are all the time, ie sat at home watching TV or typing bull to each other, while paying a mortgage on a hen hutch they can’t afford, its called house arrest in our new world communist country.”
This blog followed the Times article on the suicidemachine site: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999245.ece
and has the authentic and widespread sentiments that are pulling down Obama’s ratings.
A much stranger competitor to suicide machine is Seppukoo.com, which not only cuts you off from the web but gives you scores depending on how many of your friends you have persuaded to commit suicide themselves; it explicitly lists those of your friends who have left and those who are still on the social web, see:
http://www.seppukoo.com/how-it-works
and
“Top 100 suicidal users
Open your mind to a new meaning of popularity: with Seppukoo it’s not important how many friends you have, but how much you may influence them. A friend who follows you in Seppukoo Experience is a friend you can absolutely trust!”
Seppukoo is more a suicide cult, where you get to design an elaborate memorial site for your self and, strangest of all, encourages you to add to memorial sites it has set up for famous real world suicides (i.e. not web suicides) from Virginia Woolf to Jim Morrisson. Here the circle is complete: you are encouraged to leave the social web and bring your friends with you, but then to set up an alternative “afterlife” website where you and your (old? new?) friends add shrine-like comments —of the kind even Facebook now allows for the really dead—–congratulating you and celebrating their new afterlife. Or is it Purgatory? Or is it a very subtle recruiting ploy to undermine existing social sites but start all over again? As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages: “A triumph of hope over experience”.
27 January 2010 03:00
“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds”
Susan Sontag
Following up on the earlier discussion of the
user-created geographies of religion, the following maps simultaneously display all four religious references (Allah, Buddha, Hindu, Jesus) in order to visualise distinct religious cyberscapes. Below we see the data on a global scale. This map clearly mirrors many of the expected religious geographies of the offline world: references to Allah being most prominent in the Middle East, references to Buddha being most prominent in East Asia, references to Hindu being most prominent on the Indian subcontinent and references to Jesus being prominent in Europe and much of the Western Hemisphere.
Interestingly, there are are no large-scale homogeneities in the data and this reflects the sometimes scattered nature of religious practice in the world. Looking at the below map of user-created religious references in Europe, it can been seen are a significant number of places (e.g. parts of Switzerland, Germany, the UK) in which there are more references to Buddha than any other religious terms. Likewise there are parts of Belgium and France with a dominant number of references to Allah, and parts of the UK with a dominant number of reference to Hindu. (The cluster of Hindu references on the Estonian islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa is tied to a village named Hindu rather than religious practice). Also of note is the transition of religion as one moves eastward and southward with references to Allah becoming more prevalent in Muslim North Africa and Turkey. However, one can also see how this is far from monolithic with references to Jesus also sprinkled throughout this region as well as strong clusters in Israel/Palestine as well as within Armenia.
In Asia a similar amount of diversity can be seen. The United Arab Emirates is a particularly interesting example. While officially a Muslim country, Indians make up the largest demographic presence and the dominance of references to Hindu (rather than Allah) is likely a reflection of this fact. Likewise the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago (particularly the island of Java) illustrate the complexity of religious practice in this region. References to Buddha, Allah and Hindu are all in evidence on Java. Other examples include the predominately Buddhist nation of Sri Lanka with some Hindu areas to the North and the difference between Pakistan (more Allah) and India (more Hindu).
Finally, it is informative to include one additional map with this set. Here we included placemarks that reference the word ("sex"), a popular and international used term with very different connotations than the religious keywords used earlier. The purpose of including this term is to compare user interest in religion to user interest in sex. If (as some say) the three topics to avoid in polite conversation are religion, sex and politics it seems only right that this Internet blog (the antithesis to polite conversation if there every was one) takes on the question. Sadly, the inclusion of politics will have to wait until another day.
In Asia there are very few places where there are more references to sex than Allah, Buddha, Hindu or Jesus.
Constrasting this is Western Europe (especially the UK and Scandinavia) and North America (especially the East and West Coasts) there are more references to sex than any of the four religious terms that we searched for. The distribution in the U.S. mirrors our early maps of the
virtual bible belt and
church-bowling-firearms-strip clubs. There are, however, exceptions such as the Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal which continue to show more references to Jesus.
So it would seem that Susan Sontag's observation has some merit, at least in the European and North American context.
26 January 2010 14:25
Discussions about ‘informal learning’ seem to be growing. I am interested because libraries and museums have always been really important spaces for informal and unstructured learning.
I think it is important to study and understand how it works, and why informal learning is good. But can you actually plan for information leaning? At some point if you are planning for it, doesn’t it in fact cease to be informal?
21 January 2010 18:07
The US Secretary of State has issued a ringing declaration of the "freedom to connect" in her
speech today. I'll try and dig up links later to the interviews I've done on this for the World Service and BBC News, but here's what I
told Index on Censorship:
Hillary Clinton’s support for online freedom is welcome. I hope it leads to a push for Internet companies to make that freedom meaningful. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Cisco and others can all do much more to protect the privacy and free speech of Internet users around the world. Search engines should join Google in refusing to provide censored results. Webmail providers should store messages and account information out of reach of repressive regimes. Infrastructure companies should refuse to sell “surveillance-ready” Internet routers to countries such as China and Iran.
At the same time, democracies should be careful of their own online freedoms. The US and UK both require Internet Service Providers to enable real-time interception on their networks. The UK government has strong-armed ISPs into blocking access to web pages on a secret list of alleged child pornography, including last year a Wikipedia entry. European ISPs are required to log information about their customers’ online activity — which in the UK is accessible without a warrant to hundreds of central and local government agencies. We should hardly be surprised when repressive governments follow our own example.
You can also read a
preprint of a much longer article I've written on Internet self-regulation and fundamental rights.
UPDATE: Bruce Schneier
writes: "Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state."
21 January 2010 17:52
Awesomeness: Google in Search of a Value
MARCELO THOMPSON*
Google’s glove slap in the mainland reflects an ambiguity which is not atypical among Internet policies it normally champions. What has really prompted the Internet giant’s threat to move its search engine away from a regime it has, in the past, worked so closely with? It may have been an awakening to the importance of values it had arguably disregarded in agreeing to filter its search results. It may have been just business as usual, before its incapability to overtake Baidu in the Chinese market of general-purpose search.
Whatever the answer may be, we are left to try to make sense of the evaluative cacophony in the air. Two things are clear, however, in the episode. On the one hand, an important and difficult political choice has been made and will be reflected by Google in the architecture of its technologies. On the other hand, such a choice will have far-reaching consequences for how the Internet will unfold. The way Google structures its engines tends, in effect, to determine how information flows through the net and around the globe. Google is vindicating its right to do so.
Though all this may seem obvious, one is left surprised when confronting Google’s policy-choosing posture with its traditional advocacy of evaluative restraint for other important actors on the Internet. Google has been indeed at the forefront of a movement for network neutrality – the idea that Internet Access Providers should not be allowed to discriminate packets of bits according to their source, content or destination. The natural though often unstated outcome of a principle of network neutrality is that, in the absence of choices being made at the network layer of the Internet, it is at the applications layer that such choices will be cast. Search engines are a fundamental part of the latter layer and it is extremely convenient for them to leave the burden of neutrality for the former while remaining unfettered to make their own decisions.
As political theorist Joseph Raz explains, neutrality is a doctrine of political restraint; of exclusion of ideals. It excludes action which is based on a distinction “between valid and invalid conceptions of the good”. Within such logic, neutral Internet Access Providers would be those that do not act upon their choices on the goodness of the things they route around, even when there may be valid, sound reasons for doing so. A principle of network neutrality circumvents the liberal logic by placing severe restraints on the possibilities of action of Internet Access Providers – and doing so with regard to the very core of their activities. Such is, understandably, a burden that no company sanely wants to embrace.
Though the year has started big with Google’s stance on China, it seems that Google’s advocacy of network neutrality is also undergoing a paradigmatic change. Google’s traditional Guide to “Net Neutrality”, which used to rank first whenever one googled the quoted term, can now only be found on the Internet Archive. In November last year, Google authored a joint blog post with Verizon calling for an open and user-centric Internet, with flexible rules and transparent practices on how traffic is managed. On Thursday last week, Google filed comments before the Federal Communications Commission on that agency’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making ensuing from the Comcast case. Google’s opening statement? A remark on their interest in the Internet being kept “awesome for everyone”. The word neutrality, however, made few and brief appearances in both the blog post and the 98-page comments – almost always in attribution to someone else. In its place, clear rules have been demanded.
In much of contemporary liberal political theory a principle of neutrality has been abandoned. It should not happen otherwise. Evaluative choices are always made and conceptions of the good will be pursued whenever practical decisions – decisions on how to act – are at stake. Values such as openness, user-centricity and, why not, awesomeness are as much part of technological discourses of our societies as they should be addressed in this regard through our political processes. One should watch as closely and as respectfully Hillary Clinton’s statement this week and the one which will ensue, by the Chinese government. Both sides are staking out the values that constitute the architecture of their different moral traditions – “hypergoods”, as Charles Taylor would call them.
Google’s ambiguous move is less helpful as a political affront than it is as a call for clarification of choices that governments and companies do make in pursuing their visions of the good. The year ahead, as it seems, will be marked more by discussions on which values will define the architecture of the Internet than on if they will.
*Marcelo Thompson teaches “Regulation of Cyberspace” at The University of Hong Kong
20 January 2010 16:58
[www.nesc.ac.uk]/ | [research3.org]
Twitter hashtags: #eSIw2, #research3
Some notes & links from presentations are below. Full presentations will be available on the event site.
Day 2
Marina Jirotka and Annamaria Carusi, OeRC
Digital Economy Research Programme
Challenges to traditional information-sourcing (e.g. Kruger Valley observations by tourists) – rejected by National Geographic, but then publicised on YouTube and Ch4 made a programme out of it – after which NG was interested again…
Road/Mind map: http://www.mindmeister.com/17984994
Questions they raised – what forms of exchange, production & consumption, value & trust?
Writing as a disruptive technology – Plato, Phaedrus (Socrates speaking)
“Once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it just as easily as under the notice of those who comprehend; it has no notion of whom to address or whom to avoid. And when it is ill-treated or abused as illegitimate, it always needs its father to help it, being quite unable to protect or help itself.”
Meg Pickard
Head of Social Media Development, Guardian News & Media
Content, communities & Collaboration: How GNM is making media social
Works with technology/development, editorial (how to tell stories) and users
Guardian 300k circulation
Guardian.co.uk 36mill hits/week?
Content every day – some is web-specific
250k comments per month! 5000 character limit on comments – which is often used up (so comments aren’t like YouTube)
“Social media is not about making friends for life”
“Mutualised journalism” developing and nurturing audiences of value that can inform and improve our coverage of the issues that matter to them
“Listening to what the users say is not the same as letting them dictate our editorial perspective”
There are patterns they look out for about what’s happening
Guardian staff get taught how to deal with trolls, and how to manage conversations
Managing conversation is a really interesting area
Great Douglas Adams quote about “normal’ mainstream twentieth century media will be the aberration (because it was about consumption, not interactivity)
The technology:
- Permalinks and RSS for EVERYTHING (slice and dice anyway)
- comments
- reviews & ratings
- polls
- talkboards
- user recommendations
- lists
- etc.
Asking their journalists to
create, stimulate, listen, curate, acknowledge, consider -> create
good diagram of the relevance /irrelevance over time of twitter hashtags
Journalists – reasons cited for non-adoption are time, attention
Doing these activities gets journalists noticed by other journalists
IEEE Computing Now – Putting Social Back in Society
George Thiruvathukal, Loyola University Chicago
Dept of Com Sci
Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
Links:
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/home
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/e-learning/ekcourses#1
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow
Gary Graham – University of Manchester
Web 2.0 and the Creation of Local News Clusters
Local news model was an evening news paper that the workforce would pick up on the way home. 1930s was the peak.
Journalists are 30% of a newspaper’s costs
Advertising is the main source of revenue
Online revenues for newspapers are 5-10% of total
Regional newspapers – 26% decline in circulation between 2001-2008
7/7 bombings produced the first real user-generated content (and “citizen journalism”)
“prosumer” news consumers who also produce/contribute
Local news does not currently have a sustainable business model
Miami Herald actually train people to be citizen journalists
GG convinced that print will survive… due to people liking the medium?
Back to Day 1
18 January 2010 19:40
Seth Godin’s short post on the library of the future got a lot of librarians stirred up, which is how I found out about it. He criticizes the current model of libraries as “community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own)” and says it is unsustainable. The strange thing is that I think even the people who seem to agree with him get it wrong. (’It’, of course, being what libraries are and will be in the future.)
The comments and criticisms seem to fall into two categories. Either people get defensive, or they agree with his criticisms of the current state of the library and say that the answer lies in focusing more on the organisation of information and becoming an ‘information hub’ (i.e., libraries need more computers).
But the most important bit in Godin’s post is the last sentence:
What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.
This isn’t organising information and this isn’t more computers…not that there is anything wrong with either of those things, it’s just not what libraries need to focus on. Notice there isn’t a mention of these “leaders, sherpas and teachers” being librarians, but why shouldn’t they be? This reminded me of discussions I have been having with friends and colleagues about the future for libraries and librarians. As my friend Indy puts it, librarians should not be information managers, but agent provocateurs. This is what I think Godin is getting at. I don’t want to peddle information for a living. I want to make people think.
18 January 2010 14:02
Eszter Hargittai was in the Oxford Internet Institute earlier today sharing her research findings on the role of skills and socio-demographic factors in influencing levels of use of the Internet – and particularly web 2.0 spaces.
Implicit in Eszter’s argument was a relationship between the diversity of Web 2.0 use and democratisation. The presentation highlighted how socio-demographic factors, and particularly gender, can have an impact on the extent to which different groups contribute to public online spaces such as YouTube and Wikipedia. It’s not enough to give access to the web, and to web 2.0 for the imbalances in who is speaking and expressing their views through these online platforms to be challenged. Skills matter in addressing the imbalance.
However, as discussion at the presentation explored, if our concerns are of democratisation, social justice and equality, then the the skills that need to be promoted are far wider than technology skills, or skills to work with social media.
Skills to exercise public voice and to participate in community (online and offline) are arguably prior to the skills to use technology for public expression.
Both as we measure engagement online, and as we work to promote online engagement – keeping in mind a focus not only on digital skills, but also on general skills of public expression, interaction and dialogue is key.
For those working with young people and communities then that perhaps adds up to encouragement to address digital skills as part of wider civic skill-building programmes such as ‘Act by Right (now online as a free resource BTW)’ rather than to address digital skills and social media in isolation.
18 January 2010 12:34
We have just posted a new Policy Briefing written by our Visiting Associate Tony Wales, former General Counsel of AOL International, responsible for the company’s worldwide legal affairs outside the US.
It looks at socio-legal and regulatory issues arising from the UK Government’s Digital Britain report (June 2009) and Digital Economy Bill, which includes detailed provisions for enforcement action against unlawful filesharing (where Internet users share music, video and other entertainment content without the permission of the copyright holders) by imposing new policing obligations on ISPs and other online intermediaries.
Tony Wales (2009) Industry self-regulation and proposals for action against unlawful filesharing in the UK: Reflections on Digital Britain and the Digital Economy Bill [PDF, 230kb]
The addendum provides a briefing on the sections of the Digital Economy Bill that propose measures to deal with unlawful filesharing, together with recommendations for amendments.
All the OII publications
18 January 2010 11:25
Pilar Juárez was the head of the political section in the European Union delegation in Haiti. She was trapped in the collapse of the United Nations building in last week’s earthquake. On Sunday, 17 January, the Commission received news of the confirmation of her death, with High Representative Cathy Ashton releasing a press release, after her body was found the day before…but was it?
Today, we know that the body claimed as Pilar’s is not hers (in English). Apparently, the United Nations Police, UNPOL, made a mistake in the recognition of her body. The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs discovered the truth after checking the fingerprints. Her furious husband said that he was “disgusted” by this “very serious mistake.” He accused international organizations and donors of lack of proper channels of information and coordination among them.
Meanwhile, a relatively small organization called Ushahidi was mounting an impressive network of people to gather information on the field to help the coordination of aid assistance and rescue missions, which has been translated into a website (haiti.ushahidi.com) gathering all the reports they receive via SMS and web apps. On the Ushahidi Situation Room, Patrick Philippe Meier, one of the persons behind this effort of humanitarian crowdsourcing and writer of the blog iRevolution, tells us about a
live Skype chat between Anna here in the Sit Room and Eric Rasmussen (InSTEDD and former Chief Medical Officer of the US Navy). Eric skyping from tarmac of PoP airport asking for GPS coordinates of the most obscure addresses, sites, locations and Anna providing these in record time. She has wowed the entire team in PaP including military, UN, etc. Incredible to witness all this real time networking and collaboration.
Witness the gap between an international organization that is trapped in old bureaucratic, unnecessary and expensive procedures and the agility, low-cost efforts of a network of people sharing information. The gap is how they treat and respect information. One understands information as a secondary element of “action”, whatever the latter means. Ushahidi is born with information at its core. We need to understand that information is not what is written on a paper, stored in a computer or in a book, information is alive and it is the most essential element for action. Without information one is blinded. Information is not what an expert knows, it is what everybody knows and shares. The arrogance of bureaucratic organizations is their own nemesis, for they think they know, when they don’t. They thought they knew where Pilar was. The truth was unfortunately not theirs.
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18 January 2010 09:00
What is one to make of
Robert Putnam's now-infamous assertion that despite bowling reaching an all-time high in popularity, it's new found nature as a solitary activity is indicative of a decline in civic engagement, increasing social isolation and alienation amongst Americans? Although it cannot support any definitive conclusions, the relative concentration of listings of bowling alleys in the Google Maps directory[1] tells an interesting story about where this process of social isolation might be taking hold.
The above map shows places in which the number of listings for bowling alleys in a single place exceeds the national average number of listings by 20% (i.e., only indexed values >1.2 are shown). Although some of these places continue to show the dominance of urban areas (the larger a place is the more bowling alleys it might have), this explanation is far from sufficient. The maximum indexed value is located in
Southfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, a highly unlikely location, given that listings in Google Maps directory are concentrated in major cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Further inspection shows that much of the activity mirrors the
extent of the American Rust Belt, a region formerly known for its dominance in the manufacturing industry, now known more for its collective decline in the face of a severe economic downturn.
So what does this spatial correlation mean? A loose application (and we mean loose) of the theories of Max Weber (the 'iron cage') and Karl Marx (alienation of labor) might show that due to their full integration into the world of capitalist manufacturing, individuals living throughout the Rust Belt have turned to bowling as a refuge from their work lives, or lack thereof. It could be possible however, contra Putnam, that Rust Belt citizens have actually turned to bowling as a way of reconnecting with their community, rather than disengaging from it.
Or (stepping back from the brink of Germanic socio-economic theory) this map could simply highlight the cultural geography of a leisure activity with strong associations to the geography of early to mid 20th century manufacturing centers. Unfortunately for us, however, Google Maps cannot tell us why people bowl or whether they are bowling alone [2]. So for now, we remain wondering whether bowling is indicative of a resurgence of community or growing individualism. Let along the more troubling question of how Wii bowling fits into this.
[1] Google Maps directories are drawn from a range of sources such as yellow page listings. This category is distinct from and excludes user generated placemarks that we use in other maps.
[2] Or at least not until the release of Google BowlCam which is now in beta testing.
16 January 2010 15:28
See also Jonathan Zittrain, Ross Anderson and others in the New York Times:
Can Google Beat China?
15 January 2010 15:29
Not a very serious post, but it doesn’t happen very often:
Balliol College Dining Hall (1877), Senior Common Room (1966) and Igloo (15 January 2010)
I am guessing, from what Wikipedia has to report on igloos, that this represents the smallest of the three main types, that is: “a temporary shelter, usually only used for one or two nights. These were built and used during hunting trips, often on open sea ice.”
15 January 2010 14:47
Nicely produced by the ‘SDP2009: Brisbane’ student group, a two-part video documentary of the Summer Doctoral Programme 2009.
Voiceover: “Viewers are advised that this presentation may contain no academic content, and may present participants in a semi-frivolous manner, with little regard for context. The following presentation may be devastatingly abstract.”
It’s fun, shows some of the social side of the Summer Doctoral Programme, and many marsupials. For the serious stuff, go to the Summer Doctoral Programme.
The second part is available on YouTube at:
[www.youtube.com]
Enjoy!
14 January 2010 21:53
The New York Public Library recently redesigned their logo.
In their words, this was in an attempt to make a “new logo that is user-friendly, accessible, dynamic and relevant.”
The Library of Congress recently did the same. In both of these cases, the new logos are radically simple. There are practical reasons to go with a simple design. In the LoC case, you can tell they have thought a lot about how and where the logo would appear.
Image courtesy of the Brand New website: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/an_iconic_lion_for_an_iconic_institution.php
courtesy of Brand New: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/the_librabry_of_congress_gets_its_wings.php
Yet there is something unsettling to me about both of these. Somehow these both seem dumbed-down. Does the new (eerily Disney-like) NYPL lion really seem more user-friendly and accessible? It seems to me that its cartoon-ish nature just makes it seem out of place, that it looses its connection with the lions outside its doors that originally inspired the logo. It just doesn’t represent the very complex, awe-inspiring place that does everything from provide services to recent immigrants, to host a reunion of the Velvet Underground and sends out strange Tweets with quotes from Roger Moore’s biography. In that way it isn’t user friendly, it is misleading.
Both of these cases seem also to move away from a geographically-based icon to an object-oriented one. And I think that is a dangerous move for libraries these days. If information is getting more and more ubiquitous, don’t we need to remind people that libraries are in fact important as spaces as well (even if the spaces the libraries are creating might be virtual)?
It’s possible that I am reacting to a general dislike that I felt immediately for these new identities, but I just can’t shake the feeling that they both point to a trend. I am a huge fan of usability and accessibility, but I think these are both examples of something else entirely…something I can’t quite put my finger on. Am I over-reacting?
13 January 2010 11:28
Today we launch a new online toolkit that allows rating the difficulty of paper, online and phone-based forms (you can find infos on the launch event here). It is intended for government departments but most of the categories apply to non-government forms as well.
The toolkit is based on a guide that a team led by Professor Patrick Dunleavy from the LSE and Professor Helen Margetts from the Oxford Interet Institute developed for the National Audit Office and that underwent a consultation process within government. However, what I want to draw your attention to are some of the technical details of the online toolkit as in this major effort it was my responsibility to set up an interactive version of this checklist. So if you are only interested in checking how easy or difficult your form is to answer go straight to the checklist. If you are more technically inclined read on.
The whole site operates on Perl but what makes the checklist tick is Javascript. I am still used to a time when Javascript was frowned upon but with Ajax its now routinely used to make web pages interactive. It is still a pain to code until I came across the jQuery Javascript library. It extends Javascript with a variety of methods that just make it so much easier to code and adds additional functionality. In combination with a dedicated CSS framework, called jQueryUI, you have instant access to slick and beautiful features such as calendars and progress bars. Have a look here to see some examples! The latter has been incredibly helpful as I am not much of a design guru myself but by relying on the standard themes you get a rather professional looking site.
The checklist itself is a kind of interactive questionnaire that you go through page by page. It automatically calculates the difficulty score for a form as well as its individual sections and allows comparison with the difficulty scores of other forms rated by other users.
Some of the features I would like to mention are:
- The whole content as well as the structure (ie. the different sections of the checklist) are imported from an Excel file. In this way it is easily customisable and it is just one script for the three different types of forms: paper, online and phone.
- A load & save functionality – before saving the form an Ajax call checks if the filename is still available. Restoring a previously saved checklist was also tricky for a number of reasons, e.g. because the script won’t know from the save name what type of form it is but will redirect you accordingly.
- At the end of the checklist we provide feedback about the difficulty scores of forms rated by other users, in this way allowing you to compare the difficulty of your form with other forms. It is more of a gimmick really as of course these comparison have its problems but it gives you an idea.
- The whole site is using short, clean, memorable & “talking” URLs such as /paper-form/ or /saved/.
- No cookies. All necessary parameters are submitted via a html form.
The whole site is still in somewhat advanced beta stage so any bugs and problems you encounter – please let me know!
- The whole site is using short, clean, memorable & “talking” URLs such as /paper-form/ or /saved/.
- No cookies. All necessary parameters are submitted via a html form.
12 January 2010 16:00
Interesting short article from Dave Clark in IEEE Computer: Fighting over the Future of the Internet.
For much of the Internet’s life, it has coevolved with the PC. The relative maturity of the PC could thus lead to the erroneous assumption that the Internet itself is mature. But as computing enters the post-PC era over the next decade, with mobile devices, sensors, actuators, and embedded processing everywhere, the Internet will undergo a period of rapid change to support these new classes of computing.
11 January 2010 14:16
[ This week we ask Monica Bulger about her experiences at the OII as an SDP2008 (and Web Science exchange programme) student. She writes .. ]
On the first day of SDP 2008, Barbara Barbosa Neves delivered her presentation on Internet and social capital and, when an audience member suggested she look into Barry Wellman’s work, she replied, ‘Barry Wellman is my advisor.’
That’s when I knew this summer institute was going to be different.
There were 29 of us, plus mentors and guest speakers, crowded into a single conference room at the Oxford Internet Institute for two weeks, about 6 hours per day. Our mentors included the developer of the World Wide Web, creators of e-mail, former Chief Scientist at DARPA, Internet privacy specialists, and founding members of the Web Science Research Initiative. The graduate students were from all over the world, representing several disciplines, including Computer Science, Law, Communication, Information Science, Political Science, Media Studies, Economics, and Education.
Exploring Balliol College library
An accomplished, precocious group that wasn’t afraid to ask questions, we quickly established a challenging, funny, and engaging rapport. Together, we presented, debated, ate, punted, picnicked, hiked, and studied. We explored Oxford together, often getting lost, and we also attempted to define Web Science and apply it to our research interests, often getting lost there, too.
Jonathan Zittrain leads an informal afternoon discussion on the Balliol College lawns
One afternoon early in the program, Jonathan Zittrain had an informal session on the lawn at Balliol. We discussed the ‘meta’ stuff of research presentations – how to engage our audiences during the first few minutes, how to field questions, how to manage audiences when discussions get contentious. Our conversation shifted to a discussion of challenges we faced in interdisciplinary research, and future directions of the Internet and technologies.
Despite its seemingly short timeframe, the SDP was a transformative experience for many of us. By design, the program prioritized in-depth feedback on our research from several specialists in the field, including our graduate student peers. Our work was the focus of the two-week program and we had many opportunities for direction and mentorship.
Most importantly, we built networks. We immediately friended each other on Facebook and started sharing photos. We used a backchannel during the presentations to keep abreast of each other’s different disciplinary interpretations and to share expertise, when appropriate. We ate lunch together every day, continuing our discussions with both peers and mentors. We met with our mentors formally and informally, which challenged us to advance our thinking. Many of us made contacts that led to jobs and additional funding.
Over the past year and a half since the SDP, I have had daily contact with the friends I made in Oxford. We share our research challenges and successes, ask each other questions, and keep each other updated on our lives. Several of us were awarded Web Science Research Initiative fellowships which allowed us to extend our research work and continue our collaborations at Oxford, University of Southampton, Harvard, and MIT.
Waiting for a group photograph
Our small group continues its impressive accomplishments: Elisabeth Staksrud has published three book chapters and journal articles about protecting children from pornography on the Internet, Christine Madsen traveled to Nepal to test her theories about the future of libraries, Sonny Zulhuda teaches courses on Internet law, Jennifer Barrigar published a chapter on Internet privacy, Matthew Weber recently returned from a research stint at Reuters in Oxford, and several of us have advanced to candidacy or completed our doctoral degrees.
A few of us returned to Oxford in March 2009 as part of the Web Science Research Initiative and then traveled to Athens to present at the Web Science Conference. Also in the Spring, Christian Pentzold and Malte Ziewitz organized a workshop in which scholars from around the world discussed the interplay between networked digital media and social order.
As Yana Breindl and Matthew Weber have already mentioned in their reflections [read Yana on the SDP2009 book, read Matthew on Web Science], through the OII’s Summer Doctoral Programme we found our disciplinary home.
Our group continues the debates and supportive discussions started on the backchannel of OII and lawns of Balliol.
The Summer Doctoral Programme 2008
8 January 2010 15:51
Lots of goodies from RAND Europe today. Here is another just-published report, summarising their study on Policy Options for the Ubiquitous Internet Society:
This report has discussed and linked together technologies, connectivity technology trends, socio-economic impacts, and policy challenges, ending with recommendations for possible policies and approaches. It launched the concept of the ‘Internet of X’ as a generic description of the multiple of concepts that express the trends of converging information infrastructures, increasing computing power and its embedding in everyday objects, the convergence of humans and machines and the growing intelligence of the web. The report should provide policymakers with a rich account of what the Internet of X may entail and what can be done to support its socially and economically beneficial development.
8 January 2010 15:41
RAND Europe have just published a discussion paper on the Future of the Internet Economy, prepared for the Dutch government. Worth a look:
Openness and transparency are essential character traits of the Internet economy and should be embraced by governments as necessary components to deal with issues of privacy, security and active inclusive participation. The creative and entrepreneurial individual – organised or not – is at the heart of this development and the open Internet is his habitat. In this world government does not only ‘govern’ but facilitates, enables, shares, empowers, creates awareness and stimulates trust. Government will also retain an important role in ensuring effective competition and supporting innovation, through the use of open standards and the application of intelligent but not overly restrictive IPR policies, which support the innovators and not the concentration of market power.
National and international government cannot effectively control or regulate this space and needs to embrace industry, service providers and other stakeholders in self-governing and co-regulatory arrangements. Governments may back these up and strengthen them through political, financial and sometimes regulatory means.
The virtual and the real world abide to many of the same rules, with human rights and respect for personal space as guiding principles. Also there are risks and benefits like in the real world, which need to be understood and managed. Yet at the same time it seems important to only take measures in areas where it is seen to be necessary, because of facts, rather then because of assumptions, in order to avoid that unnecessary barriers are created that would stop innovation in technology and its application in ways that may well be of benefit to society at large. The Internet economy is truly global and diverse, which creates many interesting opportunities for all, and connectivity and access for all should be supported wholeheartedly, notwithstanding some of the risks.
6 January 2010 11:31
Through the miracle of technology and a bicycle, we proudly present: the snow commute! Watch, watch as our brave cyclist bears gamely down through the frozen morning wastes of north Oxford to the Oxford Internet Institute.
Snow! Snow on St Giles! Struggle! Despair!
5 January 2010 10:20
One of the outputs of the 2009 Summer Doctoral Programme will be an edited book, written (and edited by) the student group. They have a publisher and a first draft already .. we talked to editor Yana Breindl about the project.
DS: I gather that SDP2009 co-convenor Marcus Foth sprang an instruction on the student group: to ‘create something lasting’ from your time together .. what was your initial reaction on hearing this?
YB: The now famous ‘Legacy project’ .. yeah, that was great fun! But to begin with, honestly, we first didn’t really know what was expected from us. With 28 students, not so easy to find a common project we all agreed upon. But quite rapidly, people brought up enthusiastic ideas and we soon faced the hard choice to decide which ones to drop and which ones to realise.
DS: So how did the idea for a book form? And was there a defining moment when you knew it would take off?
YB: The idea for a book actually came from Ralph Schroeder who put it forward during one of the student sessions ‘You should make a book!’ and everybody was straight away enthusiastic about it. You could feel the electricity in the air. A small delegation kept track of the idea and started to think about its concrete realisation.
The main doubt was not whether it would take off or not but whether it would be a collection of papers like a special Journal issue or whether it would be a book. Once Daniel got the confirmation from Peter Lang in October, we knew: it would be a book!
DS: Were any other ideas discussed, apart from the book?
YB: Yes. We actually formed three ‘legacy project’ teams: one for the book; a second in charge of making a survey about our favourite journals and PhD habits with the aim to transform the results in a network map showing the links among us; the third group was in charge of the video project that ended up in a 10 minute video of the summer school, featuring interviews with all students (unfortunately we didn’t have enough time for the tutors), a snoring koala and heaps of kangaroos!
DS: Could you tell us a bit more about the book?
YB: The title is ‘Nexus: New Intersections in Internet Research’ and will be published by Peter Lang in the course of 2010. We absolutely wanted all 28 SDP09 students to contribute, with one major challenge: finding a middle ground with 1-3 co-authors as we teamed up in 12 groups.
The themes covered are rather extensive, ranging from linguistic interactivity on Wikipedia to networked marketing exploring the discourses in the monetization of Malaysian blogs and passing by a public sphere interpretation of the China-Taiwan cyberconflict. All the topics covered are at the cutting edge of current Internet research
DS: You all first met in July 2009, and chapter drafts were delivered in January: that’s pretty fast! How are you finding the job of Editor?
YB: Well, I’m not the only editor! Daniel Araya has done an amazing job in finding us a publisher in less than 2 months and Tessa Houghton is taking the lead for the third section of the book. So it’s really a team work. Tremendously exciting as the whole project is taking shape in a couple of months. The motivation was so high after SDP09 that we had to transform it rapidly into a concrete book project. Now, we’re impatiently waiting for the first drafts to come in. Fingers crossed!
DS: And .. any words or advice for SDP2010 applicants?
YB: Be creative and spontaneous! It’s not because the program will be dense and of outstanding quality that you shouldn’t have fun! For me the essential point I take back from SDP09 is that I found my academic community there. Besides the book project, several of us are collaborating on other projects, meeting again at conferences and keeping in touch over the Internet.
It’s an outstanding experience as you’ll meet amazing people and be confronted with exciting ideas – it’s very intense but only lasts 2 weeks… so enjoy every second of it!
31 December 2009 13:02
Ulysses and the Sirens (Herbert James Draper)
Ulysses knew how to pass safely by the coast of the Sirens. In the Odyssey, we are told how he instructed his sailors to put wax in their ears, bind him tightly to the mast, and by no means release him until they had passed the Sirens’ island. Ulysses knew that the Sirens’ temptation was such that he won’t be able to resist it without restraint. He knew that the wonderful Sirens’ song meant in truth destruction. It had, therefore, to be resisted.
Technology has a sweet, melodic and very attractive singing. It promises humans to do, make and achieve the impossible. It wonders us at all ages, and we fall quickly for its wonders. We imagine new perfect worlds that will bring us happiness and plenty, all thanks to our technological advances. Yet the Sirens of technology, if not resisted, can easily bring us to destruction. History is witness of this danger.
Technology and ethics are intimately related. How we approach and use technology is very much conditioned by our ethical values. Therefore, the construction of a society based solely on technological disruption is a dangerous evolution. For our behaviours, as individuals, groups and as society as whole are transformed unknowingly by these new technologies without the restraint of ethical principles that would, otherwise, guide our conduct in more beneficial directions. When Ulysses ordered its sailors to bind him to the mast and keep him there, he was imposing on himself an ethical principle to resist the temptation of the Sirens. He was telling his sailors not to follow his orders in any circumstances; he was innovating to resist a path he knew will bring him destruction.
Since the enlightenment and particularly since the XIX century, Western civilization has based great part of its social, economic, scientific and political development on technological advance. Despite all technological revolutions it has gone through, there hasn’t been an equivalent ethical revolution to help us cope with the transformations that they implied. Instead, we are now living in-between a conservative Christian ethic, which did indeed suffer a great transformation during the Reformation, and a materialist ethic based on external impulses of consumption and accumulation, ignoring other principles and values that form the complex nature of a human being, creating therefore what Durkheim called “anomie“: a lack of social ethics that produces “moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspiration.”
The Internet is the technological revolution of our era. At the same time, it is by and IN itself a social revolution. There are those, many, that want to see mainly its positive aspects. Or those that mostly focus on its negative consequences. Yet the nature of the disruption and revolution of the Internet depends not in the technology itself, but in the context where it is immersed, and how this context changes accordingly or not. A very important part of this environment is our ethics. If we use the Internet within our current ethics, I am afraid it won’t be as good as the optimists want us to believe. It is urgent, I believe, that we discuss seriously our values and principles that should drive our lives, and that we spread them in dialogue with the people. And it is in this need where we see the complexity of social phenomena; for the Internet is, at the same time, the perfect instrument and space to do so. In fact, I think it’s already happening at a small scale. How successful this ethical disruption and revolution in the making can be won’t be determined by a technological feat, but by many other factors that organize our human lives, among them our own will to bind ourselves to the mast.
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30 December 2009 12:11
[Summary: I’ve been looking for a definition of social media to use in research, but without much luck. So, tentatively, here is an attempt to provide one: Social media is the creation, publishing and/or sharing of content from an author to a crowd, providing a locus for horizontal interaction across the crowd. This blog post unpacks, and seeks to justify, this choice of definition]
Introduction
Definitions are useful things in research and critical thinking around a subject. When studying the youth work uses of social network sites, I found boyd and Ellison’s clear definition of what constitutes a social network site to be extremely useful in giving focus to the work. Right now I’m working with Kevin Harris on an essay around the potential uses of social media in frontline public services, and one of the first challenges I’ve hit is finding an operational definition of social media.
Search the web and you will find plenty of claims about ‘what social media is’ – but they tend either towards explaining what social media is by examples (e.g. ‘social media is sites like Facebook and YouTube’) or to conflate social media with a whole host of other concepts, often in a normative way (e.g. ‘social media is the open and free sharing of content and conversation between people operating as equals.’). A good definition needs to be general enough to pick out all those things which are, by consensus, examples of social media, and to identify new examples of social media, but to also be tight enough to allow us to ask questions about the empirical and normative properties of social media (rather than assuming them). So far, I’ve not found a definition to fit that bill – so, here is a very tentative attempt to provide one.
What do we want from a definition:
A choice has to be made in advancing a definition of social media.
- Should the definition only pick out those ‘new’ forms of media that we’ve commonly labeled social media, excluding older media by definition? Or should it allow the use of the term (social media) to refer to older things and historical experiences?
- Should the definition be tied to the digital? Or can there be non-digital social media?
- How will the definition set out the relationship and order of sub-terms and related terms. For example, is a social media platform something which hosts social media; or is the platform prior, such that social media is anything hosted on a social media platform?
- Should a definition try to take in all those things that people commonly call ‘social media’, or should it advance the claim that some of the things commonly called social media are, in fact, not.
My own choices are to: allow the terminology of social media to pick out historical phenomena as well as current ones; to talk first about people’s practice, and not to tie the definition to the digital; and to advance a definition which may exclude some things commonly called social media – but generally only as a result of a rejection of the primacy of platforms in defining what is, or isn’t social media.
Offering a definition
Based on those choices, the definition below is my tentative first attempt at capturing the concept of social media.
Social media is the creation, publishing and/or sharing of content from an author to a crowd, providing a locus for horizontal interaction across the crowd.
Or, for those on Twitter, the 140 character version:
Social media=creation, publishing &/or sharing content from author 2 crowd, providing locus 4 horizontal interaction across the crowd (@timdavies, 2009)
Of course, this is still a little dense – but hopefully with some unpacking I can show why I think this captures the essential concept of social media.
Unpacking the definition
Creating, publishing, sharing content
An interaction can only be a social media interaction when there is some media. Be that a video, a photo or a 140 character tweet. I’ve used the term ‘content’ to avoid importing any connotations from the idea of media that might lead people to exclude content such as simple interpersonal messages from their understanding of social media.
[I’m not entirely sure that these three terms are the best for this part of the definition, but retain them for the time being – open to alternative suggestions. They should be read as ‘Creating [and/or] publishing [and/or] sharing’.]
From an author to a crowd
One key difference between an e-mail and a blog post is that the author of the e-mail chooses, in a deliberate and technically defined way (by e-mail addresses), who to address the e-mail to, whereas, with the blog post, they publish to an unspecified or unknown audience.
It is not necessary that the potential audience of an item of content be ‘everyone’ for it to be social media. Social media can be published or shared within a relatively closed community, but it is always published/shared with the possibility of people within the community / domain where into which it is injected ‘overhearing’ or engaging with it – even if they were not the audience the author had in mind.
If you need an analogy – think of relating an anecdote at a crowded party. You have an idea of who is in the room. An idea of who you want to address the anecdote to. But you do not limit who may listen, and you accept injections from those in the room who overhear and engage.
This author->crowd aspect of social media operates at the level of both technology (e.g. the ease of publishing to a community) and at a level of social norms (knowing that people are not obligated to engage with the content produced, but allowing that they can).
A locus for interaction
Social media involves the possibility of interaction. But that interaction need not be described in terms only of some technical functions (e.g. comment boxes and rating boxes). Rather, in social media, content has the potential of becoming a social object around which interaction can be organized – and this can happen in at least two ways (which are not mutually exclusive):
- The platform through which the content is published allows for or enables comments and interaction;
- The content is licensed in ways that allow people to share / remix and engage with and around it in active, creative ways;
The interaction need not take place in a single location, or on only on platforms that call themselves ‘social media platforms’.
Horizontal interaction across the crowd
If the only interaction possible around content is between the author and individual members of the ‘audience’ (vertical interaction), then the potential social interaction around the content is highly constrained. In social media, there must be the possibility of audiences of content interacting with each other around or through the content, with or without reference to the originator of the content.
The requirement that the potential must be for horizontal interaction ‘across the crowd’ distinguishes cases where content is broadcast into multiple small ‘crowds’ where it becomes a social object (e.g. a TV programme watched & discussed in living rooms across the country) within sub-units of the whole crowd, from circumstances which can tie together interaction from right across the crowd who constitute the potential audience of the content (e.g. the use of a hash-tag on Twitter to discuss a broadcast media programme or a weather event).
This does not mean that social media necessarily equalizes people – or that all interaction around social media content is horizontal and peer-to-peer in character. But it does suggest that without the potential for horizontal interaction around content, that content is not social media.
Extensions of the definition
The definition unpacked above is essentially the definition of a process (creating, publishing, sharing content) under certain conditions. But from these we can derive a number of further definitions:
- Social Media Content – content is social media content iff it is created, published and/or shared from author to crowd in a way that can provide a locus for horizontal interaction across the crow
- A social media platform/tool – is a platform or tool which, to a significant and noticeable extent, intentionally, or unintentionally, facilitates the creation, publishing or sharing of social media
- Etc.
Testing the definition
I’ve tried in composing this tentative definition to apply a number of tests to check it’s utility. Example tests check if it rightly rules in, and rules out, certain examples of things that may or may not be generally considered to be social media. Question tests check whether the definition can be used to guide substantive enquiries into social media without including the answers to interesting questions in the definition itself.
For example tests, I believe that:
- This definition adequately rules in as generally social media: YouTube, Facebook & Twitter. I welcome other suggestions of examples to test.
- This definition rules out TV, E-mail, Telephone Conversations and Podium Speeches as not being examples of social media. It also rules out use of tools such as YouTube solely as media publishing platforms when all interactive features are turned off. An online video with no interactive features is only made into a social object when shared by someone who adds opportunities for interactivity to it – in which case the ‘social media’ consists of the original non-interactive video, plus the sharing of it in ways permitting horizontal interactivity across a crowd.
- This definition would rule in content-mediated discussions at an unConference of BarCamp; and the intentional facilitation of a participative workshop using media content – be that multi-media or paper-based media.(I expect this set of examples to be more controversial – and ones that go beyond most people’s commonsense ideas of social media
For question tests, I believe this definition should facilitate the answering of questions such as:
- Is social media a democratizing force?
- How can social media be used in front line public services?
- How do specific examples of social media structurally differ?
- What properties of social media contribute to collaboration?
- How can social media contribute to greater community building, rather than to greater individualism?
For questions about the properties of social media – the definition does not only pick out examples of social media, but also gives a framework for assessing different properties of social media – but I feel this is a justifiable bit of additional work done by the definition in this question context.
Use and development
This blog post (at [www.timdavies.org.uk]) is the first attempt at forming and sharing this definition. I will be giving it a practical test in at least one upcoming project – but wish to subject it to a wider critical test.
Perhaps, for purposes other than my own, it is a non-starter – and a definition that cannot achieve some wider than individual acceptance is little use at all. But I hope it can prove useful (in current, or a revised form) for others.
(All comments and feedback; pointers to other works etc. are welcome. Thanks to all who have contributed to conversations on this topic with suggestions of links to follow, or pointers to existing definitions also, and apologies that version 1 this blog post, written whilst I’ve been without Internet access, does not offer specific references and credits.)
21 December 2009 11:37
I took my sweetie to London’s best holiday nerdfest last night – Robin Ince’s 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People. It was a three-hour celebration of the wonders and beauties that science can reveal – along with lots of hilarious British standup comedy. Throughout, there was lots of emphasis on the role of evolution in creating fantastically complex organisms – and societies. But there was something bittersweet, to me, about celebrating how much our society has evolved, especially in the wake of the disastrous lack of results from Copenhagen.
Yes, our society has evolved and created astonishing innovations like the computer I’m using to write this, and the network that ensures all of you can read it. The internal combustion engine, in particular, has facilitated extraordinary developments in transportation, commerce, health and well-being.
But such development comes with consequences, as we now know. Our evolved intelligence has got us into this mess, and now must get us out of it. Unfortunately, much of society is now in thrall to a particularly well-evolved form of self-interested greed. The policy debates about how to respond to climate change illustrate this well: everyone agrees that something must be done, the conclusive data is building up, but there is hesitation. Why? In many cases, because agreeing to collectively solve a problem interferes with the pursuit of individual gains – a pursuit so well supported by today’s capitalism.
Luckily, we have also evolved an ethics of collective action. Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work explains that societies have also evolved innovative ways of sharing resources to avoid the “tragedy of the commons.” As the pressure to define ourselves as self-interested consumers mounts in this holiday shopping week, it’s important to remember what else our society has evolved: ethics, compassion, and a sense of the collective good.
Happy holidays – I’m off to slow down and enjoy the snow.
20 December 2009 15:19
In a castle in a remote village of Dagstuhl, Germany, about a dozen colleagues from the social and computer sciences debated the role that information and communication technologies could play in shaping democratic structures and processes. We co-produced a long set of notes, and then sought to edit this down to a brief overview of the discussion. The abstract of this paper, along with a downloadable copy of the full overview, is posted on SSRN, entitled ‘Machiavelli Confronts 21st Century Digital Technology: Democracy in a Network Society’. It is at: [papers.ssrn.com] I’ve had an earlier post on this event, and would welcome comments on the general topic or on our overview — either would be very welcome as comments on this post.
The Castle at Dagstuhl
Abstract
Computer science and informatics have great potential to improve citizen engagement with public officials, voting, access to public information and other democratic processes. Yet progress towards achieving these aims on a wide scale remains slow. A main reason for this lack of progress is that digital technologies create the potential to alter significantly the relative influence of different groups and actors in the political process, and thereby quickly become embroiled in a political debate that crosses and complicates technical discussions. These political conflicts and uncertainties have been made more transparent in applications of the Internet and related Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to support democratic processes. The challenges created by these techno-political tensions, and how to address them, were the overall cross-cutting themes that emerged from the interdisciplinary Dagstuhl Seminar on Democracy in a Network Society, on which this paper is based. The seminar involved a multidisciplinary group of computer and social scientists, legal scholars, practitioners and policy experts who aimed to chart the latest technical approaches to e-democracy and governance. Their intention was not to tell politicians how to maintain and enhance their power with the support of new technologies, in the manner of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli’s 16th Century adviser to the prince. Instead, participants explored how new technologies could enhance or constrain the power of politicians and the general public, depending on how the technologies and the systems based on them are designed and implemented.
Citation
Baer, Walter S., Borisov, Nikita, Danezis, George, Guerses, Seda F., Klonowski, Marek, Kutylowski, Miroslaw, Maier-Rabler, Ursula, Moran, Tal, Pfitzmann, Andreas, Preneel, Bart, Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza, Vedel, Thierry, Westen, Tracy, Zagorski, Filip and Dutton, William H., Machiavelli Confronts 21st Century Digital Technology: Democracy in a Network Society (December 10, 2009). Available at SSRN: [ssrn.com]
20 December 2009 11:26
The lack of a binding agreement on carbon emissions in Copenhagen is
regrettable in the extreme. That said, it is perhaps a warning signal to politicians that they have not yet done enough to persuade voters that radical action is needed. Too many political leaders are still terrified for their
jobs and
Senate majorities if they take the necessary steps to stop the planet frying. (Of course, the leaders of
non-democracies have no such excuse).
Matthew D'Ancona, former editor of the Spectator (which likes to promote absurd contrarian
denials of the climate impact of atmospheric CO2), at least has
this right:
If you want a "green revolution" — and the evidence suggests that you don't – it must truly be from the bottom up. This Government's strategy – to sneer at the doubters — is doomed, not only because doubt is the cornerstone of democracy but because, on this specific issue, the doubters are in the majority. Copenhagen marked the end of an era: it demonstrated the poverty and self-regard of elite politics, the introspection and self-congratulation of a political class still in love with itself because nobody else will love it. The lesson of 2009, from duck houses to green summits, was that that kind of politics is dead, and a new kind is needed. Any ideas?
Well, Matthew; since you ask…
Changing behaviour to reduce energy demandView more
presentations from
Ian Brown.
20 December 2009 11:01
"Our goal is for Goggles to recognize every image. This is really the beginning" - Vic Gundotra, Google vice president in charge of mobile phones.
Yesterday the
NYT reported that Google has recently unveiled a new app called Goggles. The software allows anyone to upload a photo from a mobile and then be returned detailed information about the subject of the photo.
Many similar ideas to connect the material and virtual realms already
exist. However, most of those technological practices rely on more complicated infrastructures (e.g. QR codes, compasses, GPS etc.). Here, all that is needed is a camera-phone and an internet connection.
The release of Goggles therefore lends a lot of support to
Tim O'Reilly's argument that networked peer-produced information will increasingly be used as a way of "brute-forcing identity out of reality."
The app can also be used to locate more than just famous landmarks. It can also be employed to take photos of commodities (and any other material objects) in order to link them to virtual information. A practice that could potentially lead to a fundamentally
altered politics of consumption.
20 December 2009 02:01
按:這一篇是得到科普獎第二名的文章, 供參考做未來改進並延伸
關鍵詞: 開放、善意、網路中立性、網際網路治理。
還記得在課堂上如何傳紙條？其實網際網路運作的基本原理很像傳紙條。你得跟你隔壁的同學小黑說，「這紙條傳給小白」，然後小黑會做出簡單的判斷，傳給他隔壁的小紅，然後這樣子傳下去傳到小白為止。
在瞭解網際網路科技相關的政治、社會、經濟意涵時，傳紙條的比喻是理解網際網路的第一堂課。
絕大多數的時候，你無法事先決定這傳遞的路徑，其實你也不需要決定，每一個在傳遞路徑上的同學會做出個別的決定，來紙條交給比較靠近小白的同學。
若有同學生病或上厠所不在座位的情況發生，傳遞路徑上的個別同學，就可以當下做出靈活的判斷，繞過暫時不在的同學。這種利用個別同學決定下一個傳遞節點的方式，就和傳統依賴電話交換中心的傳遞方式不同，前者的傳遞智慧是分散在各節點的選擇判斷，而後者則是集中在交換中心。
(一) 傳遞路徑的分散決策
如何避免交換中心的集中處理，正是網際網路的設計動機。在冷戰時期美國國防部委託學者設計可以面對核戰威脅的通訊網路，其設計目標是若有任何一個節點無法運作的話，相關的通訊還是可以靈活地繞過失效的節點。相反地，若傳遞的智慧與交換訊息的通道都集中在某一個交換中心的話，當該點失效時，整個網路的通訊能力就喪失了。
這就是網際網路的「封包交換」（Packet Switching）和早期電話線路的「電路交換」（Circuit Switching）原理的最大不同處。封包交換是共用一個傳一個的互聯網路，而電路交換則是專線。若封包交換是課堂上傳紙條，則電路交換像是專用的討論室，你要舉手向老師說，我要和小白單獨在討論室的交談。
的確，封包交換的網路，不像電路交換的網路需要一個交換中心，來決定某一點如何和另一點接上線並開始溝通。早期電話線路需要有接線生來建立專用的通話管道；現有的網際網路則是有眾多的中繼點，對各別封包的傳遞做出各別因地制宜的判斷，就像是讓每位同學自行決定要將紙條傳給哪一個隔壁同學一樣，一個傳一個下去。傳遞路線決定權的集中和分散的差別由此可見。
還記得 2006 年發生的恆春地震嗎？該地震讓海底電纜受到不小的損害，也突顯出傳遞路線決策集中和分散的差異。先從在一百多年前廣泛舖設的海底電纜說起，台灣最早的海底電纜是在清朝劉銘傳擔任巡撫時設置的，當時是用來發電報的。歷經科技發展及演變，現在的海底電纜可以傳遞的不只有電報通訊，更有電話、光纖及電腦網路通訊。所以恆春地震所波及的海底電纜，不只影響到亞洲鄰國之間國際電話及國際金融交易，還包括網際網路。當一般的電話通訊得仰賴電信公司緊急應變調度線路或轉換至衛星通信時，部分網際網路用戶則自行利用位於澳洲、泰國、等的代理伺服器的連上海外網站。從這實例中，我們可以觀察到封包交換及電路交換的差別，利用封包交換的網際網路是有可能從各端點做靈活的應變；而依頼電路交換的通信則只能等待交換中心做出改變。
(二) 以善意換取善意
傳遞路線的分散決定方式，像傳紙條一樣，仰賴的還有各傳遞節點的基本善意。當網際網路從美國國防部資助的學術研究計劃，變成學術界裡面的實驗網路時，網際網路內的每一個端點可以說都是「自己人」。
現為網際網路大部份的底層基礎的乙太網路（Ethernet），其所仰賴的CSMA/CD 協定的基本假設就是「大家都是自己人」的禮儀。在一個大家聽得到彼此的共享空間中，在沒有主席或司儀的情況下，若有人還在說話，其他人就先等待不發言，等到安靜下來時再試圖發言。若有兩人以上不巧在同一時間開始發言，則大家很文明地停下來，等待一段隨機長度的時間，再繼續觀察是否適合發言。
所以，當時學術界把網際網路視為共享資源，也意識到這資源是要大家共同維護的。像傳紙條，若小白不願幫小黑傳紙條，下次或許小黑也就不願意幫小白。可以說若沒法善意假定大家都會互相幫忙，將紙條往正確的方式傳遞，就根本無法有現在的網際網路。
「大家都是善意的自己人」的假定，可說是網際網路萌芽的出發點。然而，就和所有人類的文明一樣，假定大家都是出於善意，並不能確保不會發生惡劣的行為。特別像網路從學界延伸至業界及大眾時，濫發的電子郵件或稱垃圾郵件，就不當利用了這善意的環境。根據最新 2008 年十月的報告，電郵反濫用工作組（MAAWG）的大規模樣本的歷年統計，濫發的信件佔總體電郵數量的八成以上。
在善意假定及惡意行為中，網際網路要何去何從？這涉及到網際網路治理的重要概念：「網路中立性」（Network Neutrality）。
(三) 網路中立性
網路中立性的相關詮釋及立法都還有不少爭議，不過作為一個原則，網路中立性的簡單解釋是：「網路之前，個個封包都一律平等」。換句話說，任何中繼傳遞者不應對特定或某類封包有特殊待遇或歧視。用傳紙條的比喻情境來說，就是每一個人不應該因紙條的內容、形式和來源的不同，而對個別的紙條有不同的差別待遇。
網路中立性的原則，同樣的在網路使用大眾化時，在政府管制者、學者、及網路服務提供者之間出現了不同的聲音。支持網路中立性原則的人大多相信若能堅持此原則，就可以讓網路能夠在基本架構的層次上保障言論自由、鼓勵創新、及阻止不公平競爭。反對者則認為網路中立性對創新、市場競爭及網路的普及有負面影響，而也有人認為網路中立性根本就不存在。
不過，對 2008 年當選美國總統的歐巴馬而言，網路中立性的存在是正面的且有必要加以維護的。在選舉前歐巴馬於 Google 總部及 MTV 音樂頻道節目等場合上，數次公開發言支持網路中立性，並承諾支持相關的立法，也表示將會訴求聯邦通訊傳播委員（FCC）以網路中立性為基本原則來治理網際網路。
的確，從對各封包一視同仁的基本精神，可以簡單歸納為善意假定的延伸，希望能藉由對各類資訊公平對待的方式，來維持網路的開放性。然而，這樣不分級處理（篩選或收費）的方式，除了避免讓網路服務提供者及營運商有過多不當的商業及政治影響外，也部分造就了濫發的垃圾郵件的存在。
從網路中立性的相關討論中，浮現的是這個治理難題：如何在現有以善意為基礎的技術架構下，讓網路維持開放、自由但又能有效阻止惡意的行為呢？
(四) 網路的開放及自由
網路的開放和自由源自於善意的假定，然而善意偶有被濫用的情況。個別使用者面臨垃圾郵件、惡意軟體（malware）等威脅外，若不能再假定善意，網路還能是開放且自由的嗎？還是我們應該假定惡意，來重新設計網路？
網路上最多人使用的百科全書，維基百科（Wikipedia.org），認為善意的假定是無可取代的。的確，維基百科的基本的原則—人人可編輯的自由百科全書—正是假定大多數編輯的人是在幫助而不是破壞維基百科。這可不是天真的認為維基百科從來不會被破壞，而是維基百科有對應的技術手段及志工社群來回復破壞前的模樣。但維基百科並不因為有人破壞，而改變其自由開放的設計。維基百科社群所制定的方針中，就有假定善意及文明討論等的指引，這也反映了網際網路核心技術的設計原則。
要假定善意還是惡意的掙扎，也反映在保護言論自由及過濾不當內容的兩難上：政府或網路服務供應商是否應該替使用者過濾有害的內容？還是這些過濾行動會變成打壓自由言論的手段？是誰決定哪些言論有害而需要馬上被過濾呢？
在應禁止並加以過濾的內容上，目前國際上較有共識的有害內容是兒童色情；在德國和法國則包括任何否定納粹大屠殺歷史事實的言論；在中國，包含有關六四天安門及法輪功的言論。
雖然這些例子看起來相似，但其不同處更值得注意。各國立法者都意識到兒童色情的危害，也因此依各別的法律，對網路上兒童色情的散播及閱覽有不同程度的刑罰。否定納粹大屠殺歷史事實，在德國和法國也是違反刑法，德國及法國也是依其國內法來禁止相關內容。雖說在美國目前否定納粹大屠殺歷史事實的言論不違法，受自由言論的保障，在美國網站相關的言論在德國及法國會被過濾。
這兩個例子中，所謂的「有害」內容都有明確的「違法」定義，而相關政府可依法處置，而若其公民對其處置若有不滿的疑慮，都可依法律途徑來悍衛其言論的自由。
相較之下，中國過濾六四天安門及法輪功等言論的技術作為，讓中國內部的網路未有基本的開放自由。北京政府直接過濾的還不只是這些言論，許多台灣相關的媒體及政府網站也被過濾。換句話說，許多從台灣的紙條傳不到中國去，是因為被北京的網路服務提供者擋下了。
或許北京當局不能對來自台灣的內容進行善意假定，而是直接以假定惡意的方式進行過濾，但是更深層的問題是，北京當局是否也不能假定其民眾的善意而阻止他們取得並書寫相關內容呢？
(五) 結論：以鄰為豁是網際網路的天敵
北京當局要求電信服務業者及網站主動審查信息及言論，這提醒我們在阻止網路上所謂的惡意行為同時，除了要有建全的法律措施保障言論自由外，更要時時回想到網際網路的萌芽基礎，是假定善意及文明禮儀。若我們一味想要根除惡意行為而不注意到這一點的話，網路現有的開放及自由就會離我們而去。
網際網路運作的基本原理迄今變化不大，但網際網路的應用則日新月異，伴隨的治理挑戰也日趨複雜。假定善意、避免並管制惡意行為似乎仍是不變的法則。但是，我們在面臨網路上惡意行為時，會不會忘了網際網路運作的的基本是假定善意呢？若環境惡化到我們不能再相信隔壁鄰居可以幫我們傳紙條的話，傳紙條的網路也就不可能存在了。垃圾郵件及惡意軟體是對網際網路造成危害，但若是我們因此而開始不再假定善意、開始「以鄰為豁」，這將是我們所認知的網際網路的終結，也沒有第二堂課了。
第二堂課應該是要從傳紙條的比喻中，理解到紙條有可能被偷看，正如同基本的電子郵件其實是在傳遞路徑上任何人都可以翻過來看的明信片。這不代表網際網路運作的基本原理出現重大問題，也不代表我們得仰賴所有人的善意才有安全保密的網路通信。相反的，第二堂課是要對所使用的日常網路科技有正確的期待，並介紹現有的成熟科技，是如何建立在已有的網際網路基礎上，來達到保密及安全的要求。若第二堂課的預告讓你對第一堂課的結論開始產生懷疑，你得回頭重新思考第一堂課。
