19 November 2009 18:40
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Centre, National University of Singapore, has been visiting the OII recently, and gave a talk last night at Blackwells bookshop about his book: ‘Delete’. Listen to: The Virtue of Forgetting [33 min]
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
‘Delete‘ looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. ‘Digital technology empowers us to find and share information as never before, but we do not always foresee the consequences of these new powers.’
The talk was done as a conversation with OII Professor Helen Margetts. They looked at the important role that forgetting has played throughout human history: ‘from the ability to make sound decisions unencumbered by the past to the possibility of second chances.’
Things touched upon included: the Panopticon, self-censorship, social networking sites and employers, memory and time, ‘the curse of perfect episodic memory‘, decision making in the present, cognitive psychology, forgetting and forgiving, memory and mood, organisational change, compartmentalisation of data storage (and making connections across silos), creating a comprehensive image from disparate data, information context, anonymisation, ’solving the problem’, information privacy rights and law, information ecology post-9/11, the age of information retention, digital abstinence, Web 2.0, cognitive adjustment (can we share conditionally?), and … reviving forgetting.
Thought-provoking stuff, all of it.
And er it fell to me to record it, in a slightly last minute detour away from my competence zone. So I spent the evening lurking in a corner with headphones, surrounded by small complicated machines and (some) wire.
And yes, ‘Delete’ was precisely what I was attempting not to do.
18 November 2009 13:33
I’m not sure anyone’s ever attempted to gather together the scattered blogged thoughts and general stuff generated by all our Summer Doctoral Programmes.
So here goes. It isn’t at all comprehensive (sideways glance at best) and some of it may be only of erm academic interest now, but still … there’s some good, funny, serious and thought-provoking stuff here from past students and tutors.
So. SDP2009 (’the one about Creativity’) was held in Brisbane (QUT). Co-organiser (and SDP2004 student!) was Jean Burgess who blogged: OII Summer Doctoral Programme to be held in Brisbane in 2009. Nils Gustafsson blogged his Collegial Consultation with Bernie Hogan and Rami Olwan recapped the OII SDP 2009. There was an SDP2009 Flickr group (and yes, there are photographs of kangaroos).
SDP2008: Oxford (’Webscience’) was one that I got a bit excited by … fortunately I was able to decamp to the overflow room for the fortnight. SDP2008 seemed to be marked by a certain amount of introspection re ‘What exactly is webscience, then?’ (eg Sonny Zulhuda on Web Science in the Making – Or is It?)
There are recaps from Tobias Escher: Summer Doctoral Programme 2008 – Last Words, Oshani Seneviratne: Chaos: Summer Doctoral Program, and Sonny Zulhuda: Quotable Quotes from SDP 2008.
SDP2007 was hosted by our long-standing partners at the Berkman Center (Harvard University). This was the first year that the group seemed to throw themselves into the blogosphere. Berkman Director John Palfrey started things off with some personal thoughts: Summer Doctoral Program(me) Comes to Cambridge.
Michael Zimmer blogged his SDP2007 Presentation: The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine, Joris van Hoboken blogged his end-of One Full Summer Doctoral Week in Boston and there were posts by tutors Urs Gasser: Cambridge, Summer 2007: A Few Impressions and A Thank You and Ethan Zuckerman: Summer doctoral program at Berkman and Daithí Mac Síthigh, who tagged a whole series of SDP2007 posts … as did Ismael Peña-López on his blog ICTlogy (tagged as SDP2007).
There are also recaps from the Berkman Buzz, from Joris: SDP 2007; My Final Report, Cuihua Shen: OII SDP recap – Cool widgets, and Ismael: OII SDP 2007 (Epilogue): Last Thoughts About Web Science And Academic Blogging Or Why Did Not Academia Came Up With Wikipedia. And Some Acknowledgments Too.
There was an SDP2007 Flickr group.
SDP2006 is starting to retreat into ‘not terribly online’ territory. But two notable things: a post by Urs Gasser on a seminar by John Palfrey discussing a paper by Jonathan Zittrain: JP/JZ Mash-up: Live from OII SDP. And student Nick Anstead kept an SDP blog.
SDP2005 was held in China. I seem to have found nothing from China. So I guess we move on to SDP2004 (Oxford), and Kylie Veale’s SDP2004 Blog.
And 2003. Well, 2003 was a long long time ago.
I have undoubtedly left things out (let me know if so!) .. just thought it might be useful to do a little hunting and gathering. Go explore, have fun!
17 November 2009 11:04
In the desert, the mountains hover in the distance. Sun glances and taxis arrive at the gates of the conference center. Getting from outside to inside means going through security cordons, police checks, metal detectors.
Inside, discussions balance freedom and openness. There is no necessary consensus: freedom and openness can mean different things to different people. We want to secure human rights on the internet – we want to make the media that happens there as independent as possible. We have the same conversation as we did before, we talk about technology having values, and attempt to make those values as universal as possible. It’s not easy, and not everyone agrees.
Internet governance is a process, and unlike the IETF or ICANN, we use the time to disagree, to discuss. This is a great opportunity to talk about the process that we followed at Oxford bringing together free speech and child protection advocates. The same process applied, and the results were very positive.
Except sometimes the perspective of multi-stakeholder process is rattled by misunderstanding. I had dinner the other night with a group of folks from the Open Net Initiative who were troubled by their book promotion poster being tossed to the ground by UN security. This is another issue of balance: although the book poster mentioned Chinese firewalls the dialogue at these meetings happens in UN space. No one is allowed to hang posters, no matter what the subject.
This is a delicate process, and it means crossing the cordon at the gate. Not always easy.
UPDATE: I’ve talked to more people at the IGF about the poster incident – since I wasn’t there I can’t comment on exactly what occurred. A few people who were there noted that the disagreement was NOT about commercial posters but about references to China – even though the existence of China’s Great Firewall is not disputed. Why such a strong response to a statement of fact? Especially since one of the features I observed at the Forum was healthy disagreement. It would be deeply problematic for the internet as a global resource if this tolerance were limited.
13 November 2009 12:26
About a year ago I wandered into the Ashmolean and said (a propos the top floor, which seemed to be closed) ‘Hi er .. the modern art?’ And they said (I paraphrase) ‘Sorry. Modern art’s off. For a year’. And I sort of groaned. It was the start of the Ashmolean’s £61m redevelopment programme.
But it seems to have been completed. So Friday lunchtime seemed a fine time to give it a look over ..
The Ashmolean, 1845 frontage (camera died before could get onto the models of the new perspexey bit, behind; .. maybe next time)
WELL! There are lots of stairs and lots of glass and light. And it’s all pretty amazing, actually. Double the display and exhibition space, with the 39 new galleries all nicely integrated with the old bits (which remain untouched). So I spent most of the time just exploring the building, which is actually what everyone else was doing ['New Ashmolean' on Flickr].
And the modern art’s back! Though I was a little confused. My favourite gallery (the Sands gallery) is (was?) a small, nicely understated one, with about 40 mostly small, mostly British C20 canvases (Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, Walter Sickert etc) and some Epstein and Hepworth. The Observer (2001): ‘It’s a patchy account, full of lacunae, but its very inconsistency reflects the eccentricities of English interwar painting.’ And yes, it did feel slightly odd and totally charming .. a nice place to stand and stare and ponder.
But I’m not sure it’s there anymore? I think it might have stood on the old / new building divide, so I think (as far as I can tell) that it has been turned into a sort of modern art (transition space? articulation? elbow?) between all the old art and a staircase. It was full of people milling and staring at the building / each other, so perhaps worth a closer look in a few weeks, when everyone has calmed down.
This is what the Guardian had to say about the Sands gallery when it opened in 2001: Ashmolean plunges into world of modern art
And the Observer: That Sickert feeling…
The Ashmolean always was a nice museum to pop into for an odd hour. And now it’s even better. So go, go to the Ashmolean, and gawp.
Light and glass and light: a new way of climbing stairs
And errrrm. The Internet? None of this is very Internet, admittedly. But if you prefer your museums to be about technology we do have a webcast about the redevelopment of the computing galleries at the Science Museum (London), from a talk given by curator Tilly Blyth at the OII in 2008.
That is my Internet transition, or articulation.
12 November 2009 14:39
The following maps represent the first stage of a project I am embarking on to map out some of the spatial contours of Wikipedia. Data were obtained from the November 2009 Wikipedia data dump file and then ported over to a GIS. There are almost half a million
geotagged Wikipedia articles (i.e. Wikipedia articles about a place or an event that occurred in a distinct place), so the processing time alone for the files needed to create these maps was almost a week.
The map below displays the total number of Wikipedia articles tagged to each country. The country with the most articles is the United States (almost 90,000 articles). Anguilla has the fewest number of geotagged articles (4), and indeed most small island nations and city states have less than 100 articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterised by extremely low levels of wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of
Middle Earth and
Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia).
When examining the data normalised by area, an entirely different pattern is evident. Central and Western Europe, Japan and Israel have the most articles per landmass, while large countries like Russia and Canada have low ratios of Wikipedia articles per area.
Finally, the data were also mapped out against population. Here countries with small populations and large landmasses rise to the top of the rankings. Canada, Australia and Greenland all have extremely high levels of articles per every 100,000 people. Smaller nations with many noteworthy features or geotaggable events also appear high in the rankings (e.g. Pitcairn or Iceland).
As I've
previously argued, Wikipedia is an important component of the
palimpsests of place. In other words, presences and absences play a fundamental role in shaping how we interpret and interact with the world. The fact that the geographies of Wikipedia content are so uneven therefore leads to worrying conclusions. As we increasingly rely on peer produced information, large parts of the world remain 'terra incognita' (in a similar manner to the ways in which many of those same places were represented on European maps before the 19th Century). However, it is conceivable that it will only be a matter of time until the empty spaces on the Wikipedia map are filled in by Wikipedians in Zambia, Indonesia, and much of the rest of world.
These data certainly warrant a closer look, and I'll aim to get more maps (examining the distribution of content in specific languages, and looking in more detail at specific regions) uploaded soon.
12 November 2009 11:23
Last month I had the most amazing experience: with some superstar colleagues, I designed a qualitative study aimed at understanding why people don’t adopt broadband. The goal of the study was to understand barriers to broadband adoption, and we thought the best way would be to talk to people about how they communicate and why they choose to use some technologies and not others.
I’ll write more specifics about the study later, but I wanted to reflect on how exciting the research design process was for me, and share some of the reasons I felt it worked well.
Trust
First of all, my colleagues/friends/partners in crime were people I’d known for many years, fellow-travellers in the community wireless world. But we hadn’t seen each other much since I’d moved to England. One friend lived close to where we’d be having our full team meetings, and so all of us stayed there. I’ve heard this called the “couch-surfing theory of participatory research.” I don’t necessarily think you HAVE to sleep on the couch (or on the floor as we did) to do good research, but it is an excellent way of building trust, which is essential for designing and enacting good social research.
Doing your homework
Our timelines on the project were short. Before I arrived to sleep on the couch, we had about a week to prepare. Everyone did their homework. We called people who had done similar studies, talked to various members of the wider team to see what they wanted to know about, and researched the funding stream that was supporting the study so we could understand what values were at play.
Trust (again) and the Efficiency of In-person Meetings
After a week of telephone calls and brainstorming, we met for a head-to-head with the entire research team. Like sleeping on the couch, it made a big difference to be in the same room as the people we were working with – especially since some of them we hadn’t met before. Yes, we could have done the work by video-conference, but in cases when there are big ideas at stake, and a big team of different types of personalities, meeting in person saves more time and builds more trust. The meeting also contained what I think of as exemplary research design practices, including:
- careful listening for requirements and for philosophical perspectives: “I believe this is important, so can we make sure that we think about it?”
- flexibility, and core commitments: “This is what we are really interested in, but we know that we might not find it if we ask directly”
- productive disagreement “this could work, but it won’t fit our requirements”
- iteration “if we ask something more like this, will that help to answer our questions?”
- triangulation, or looking at things sideways “How about if we turn the question around”
Living-room floor categorization (The Big Picture)
The day after the full meeting, our smaller team spent the day rearranging the flipchart sheets we’d produced in the meeting, overlapping them in various ways on my colleague’s living room floor. Photographic evidence exists of me doing “research yoga” – adding a sheet of paper to the arrangement that later became our main analytical framework. My own living room isn’t big enough for this kind of research practice, but a big table and index cards will do; so that you can see the entire schema in one shot.
Take a Break
After all this intense work of brainstorming, finding field sites and establishing analytical categories, we all needed a break. We took a day off. The next day our brains were much sharper and clearer.
Tea and Peer Review
The next day, before I flew home, we met another colleague for tea and ran some of our field strategies and analytical categories by her. Since she hadn’t been consumed with moving around our sheets-of-paper categories, she had some excellent suggestions on where there were gaps in the questions we planned on asking, as well as some creative research strategies. We integrated what seemed to make sense, and then
Have a Beer
We relaxed!
Sadly, I couldn’t help with conducting the fieldwork. My colleagues are out in the field now, and I’m sure they are accumulating lots of other great insights on doing high quality social science research – the fun way.
11 November 2009 16:08
OII MSc student Jessica Richman has been chosen as one of twenty Google Fellows at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe (Barcelona, 20-21 Nov 09).
Jessica is a Clarendon scholar at the Institute, a member of Balliol College, and is working on the OII’s Fifth Estate Project.
Since 2002, the Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) has gathered politicos and technologists in the United States to learn from each other, network, and glimpse the future. This year, the conference brings its focus on using technology to make governance more transparent, participatory and effective to Europe.
Featured speakers at this year’s forum include Ellen Miller, Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation; Julian Assange, Cofounder of Wikileaks; Stephen Clark, Head of Web Communication for the European Parliament, Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety.org; Dominic Campbell, Founder of FutureGov; Scott Heiferman, Founder of Meetup.com; several Members of European Parliament; and many more.
Issues raised by this conference include using the Internet to open politics beyond party systems, using social media to transform the relationship between voters and their representatives, and how to navigate new media vs traditional media.
Jessica will be reporting back from the forum, so watch this space!
10 November 2009 15:06
Date: Friday, 4 December 2009 16:30– 18:00
Location: Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LU. A reception will follow the talk. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk
Speakers:
The Oxford Internet Institute will host a public panel discussion focused on the significance and impact of the Internet on interpersonal relationships. This follows an all-day forum on the topic, and will highlight the day’s findings.
This event is supported by a grant from eHarmony®, through its support of the OII project Me, My Spouse and the Internet.
7 November 2009 13:18
Somewhere between totally unrealistic fake humans (eg C3PO) and totally realistic ones it seems that we suddenly get creeped out. Basically, we don’t like synthetic people that almost (but don’t quite) match human expressiveness.
This ‘uncanny valley‘ may explain why some films (Beowulf, The Polar Express) have attracted criticism (as being soul-less / dead eyed / eerie / creepy etc).
Why bring this up? WELL! according to a recent paper in PNAS it seems that monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley too.
We presented monkeys with unrealistic and realistic synthetic monkey faces, as well as real monkey faces, and measured whether they preferred looking at one type versus the others (using looking time as a measure of preference). To our surprise, monkey visual behavior fell into the uncanny valley: They looked longer at real faces and unrealistic synthetic faces than at realistic synthetic faces.
The paper has been covered by BBC News (early origins for uncanny valley) and WIRED (Monkeys Fall Into ‘Uncanny Valley,’ Just Like Humans).
Monkey avatars: they creep monkeys out (image: BBC News)
Want to spend time in the uncanny valley? Well, there are obviously loads of weirdly realistic (= creepy) Japanese robots on Google Videos.
And there is the famous Philip K. Dick robotic head (basically an expressive mustachioed head stuck onto a slouchy body in shirt and jeans: see Philip K. Dick robot on YouTube) that follows people’s movements with the cameras in its eyes and (at least in theory) seems to believe that it is Philip K. Dick.
There is also a very bizarre Einstein head on a robot that clumps about declaring ‘I am Albert Einstein. I am a physicist’ (head by David Hanson, Robotics designer)
But probably the most realistic robot I found on YouTube is called Jules (eg watch Jules ponder his sexuality, and Jules discuss his being switched off).
Why do these objects make us feel uneasy? There are lots of theories about the uncanny valley, but according to MacDorman and Ishiguro:
An uncanny robot elicits an innate fear of death and culturally-supported defenses for coping with death’s inevitability … [P]artially disassembled androids… play on subconscious fears of reduction, replacement, and annihilation.
It seems that monkeys get freaked by this too.
6 November 2009 16:34
Edgar Gómez Cruz is a student from the IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute) in Barcelona, currently visiting the OII to work on his thesis, which he describes as ‘a sociological study with anthropological methodology .. with a focus on photography’. Practically, this means that he has been hanging about in Flickr for the last five years (the last two as an object of study) and is currently participating with some groups in Oxford.
I met up with him this morning to go out into the chill November air to discuss photographs and communities and digital things over coffee. He started off by telling me about the online photographer communities he studies and the fact that … they are aware that they are study objects. It sounded like they were being slightly hilarious by ganging up on him (in an affectionate way .. eg by giving him a slightly patronising pet name etc.) but I guess this is an occupational hazard for any ethnographer studying intelligent curious people.
‘These people just rearranged their lives around the technology,’ he said. He happened to be sitting there in a quite cool T-shirt with a big camera on it. So I asked if his years of studying and interacting with these communities had actually come to affect him in any way (preparing myself for something complicated and reflexive). He thought for a moment, then smiled: ‘Well. I had to spend A LOT of money on cameras’ and went on to describe how he has been developing a deep engagement with photography himself.
We hovered over many things: access to Flickr data and what you could do with it / Flickr recently introducing the (Facebooky) ability to tag Flickr users within photographs, and whether or not people liked this / where is Flickr going? / Microsoft bringing out the SenseCam that is ‘designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn’ / tagging and searching and metadata and ubiquity and surveillance and all of that / people as brands / photography as habit / and video: what’s with that?
We finally veered into the area of photography as artform (history of / implicit snobbery within / boundaries and boundary-busting / subversion etc. the usual stuff, I guess). I suppose we are all amateur professionals (or professional amateurs) these days, and that everything we do is beautiful and wonderful and important … but surely there must be a lot of terrible terrible stuff being uploaded out there? So I wondered: ‘Is there such a thing as objectively bad photography?’ [I have since spent time looking up 'mistake failure rubbish awful' etc on Flickr and ... well. Not actually as funny or interesting as I thought it might be. Hem. Rather boring and depressing, actually.]
Edgar’s own Flickr account is at: Tesista (A veces de pata de perro) [Flickr]
So we looked at his own photos for a while (seriously worth a look). And then it suddenly became very cold and we scuttled back inside.
Edgar blogs (and keeps his publications) at: Tesis-Antítesis (mostly in Spanish but with some posts in English), and his research group in Barcelona is at: [mediacciones.es]
Edgar will be at the OII until December. He is giving a DPhil seminar on his research (24 November 09) and then a brownbag seminar (1 December 09) later this term with OII Research Fellow Eric Meyer.
5 November 2009 17:39
Anthropologist Claude Lévi Strauss died recently. Which took me a little by surprise. And got me to thinking vague slim thoughts about him.
As the ‘father of modern anthropology’, he is famous for the books of ‘Mythologiques I-IV’ (1964-1971) that present grand all-encompassing theories on psychology, myth, culture and anthropology, based on structural analysis of a sprawling series of totally bonkers South American myths (endless variations on eg: Tapir steals cooked fish from his Jaguar wife, murders his half-monkey son then climbs up a creeper into heaven).
His basic premise is that mythical thought is ruled by universal laws (ie that myths tend to be similar in different cultures due to the underlying ways in which we think about things) and that myths consist of oppositions (eg living / dead) and the elements that mediate and resolve them (eg trickster figures).
I have read large chunks of The Raw and the Cooked (Mythologique I) but not very systematically (eg starting on page one). And I suppose I’ve never been particularly sure what to make of it all: I ought really to take a week’s holiday, drink a vast amount of sugary coffee and plough my way through it in one go. Perhaps with a pencil and a lot of paper to track all the binary oppositions (clean / dirty, raw / cooked, rotten / fresh, etc.) and their gradual resolutions.
Opened at random: ‘The theme of cooking, which is here divided into anticooking and real cooking …’
And: ‘These remarks do not invalidate what I said previously about the link between the rainbow and diseases’
What brilliant things to write. The other Strauss book that has been sitting on my bedroom floor for the last year is ‘Totemism’. I remember it talks a bit about Aboriginal moieties … but. But what we are supposed to make of them I can’t remember. It is perhaps time I gave him a proper go.
So. Claude Lévi-Strauss.
The following obits stand out as probably the most thoughtful in a large field of slightly pointless ones:
Claude Lévi-Strauss obituary (Guardian)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, Dies; Altered Western Views of the ‘Primitive’ (NY Times)
3 November 2009 11:14
Always a pleasure to be commissioned by the Financial Times, especially to write a lead feature for today's
Digital Business supplement:
Can creative industries survive digital onslaught?
Ian Brown examines the competing rights of content producers and file-sharers and argues that new business models are the future, not blocking users
If you are interested in following up any of the points made, here are some references:
- Jack Valenti told Congress that cable TV was “a huge parasite in the marketplace”: Richard Corliss (2007) What Jack Valenti Did for Hollywood, Time, 27 Apr
- …and that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session, 12 April 1982
- The recording industry claims… online copyright infringement will cost the UK music sector £200m this year: British Phonographic Industry (2009) Reducing online copyright infringement
- The US Supreme Court decided in 1984 that video recorders should not be considered as directly contributing to copyright infringement: Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)
- Google stumbled upon the sponsored search model that now earns billions of dollars each quarter: Google Inc. (2009) Google announces third quarter 2009 results, October 15
- James Murdoch asks, can online journalism compete with the “dumping [of] free, state-sponsored news on the market”? James Murdoch (2009) The Absence of Trust, Edinburgh International Television Festival MacTaggart Lecture, 28 August
- The Guardian’s Emily Bell worries that “the ecology of some parts of the UK media is now so uncertain and fragile that it can be depleted by a single blow from the end of the BBC's tail as it rolls over in its sleep": Emily Bell (2008) We need to start a new conversation about the BBC, The Guardian, 28 April
- Established musical acts recently had their most successful year ever on tour, grossing over $4bn worldwide in 2008. Tours by Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and the Police all grossed over $150m: Ray Waddell (2008) Bon Jovi Scores 2008's Top-Grossing Tour, Billboard, 11 December
- Two-thirds of the Guardian’s 30 million monthly online visitors come from outside the UK: Patrick Smith (2009) Guardian Hiring Bloggers For Local News Network, paidContent:UK, 12 October
31 October 2009 15:04
Amidst this week's
rejoicings at the
40th birthday of the Internet, Blogzilla is
celebrating his own fourth year on the Web. Doddering along behind is the prehistoric Web presence of the author: so old even the Wayback Machine didn't catch up until
1997. Perhaps fortunately, this avoided the purple flares phase of 1994-1996.
To think, it was only fifteen years ago that a first-year undergraduate friend eagerly introduced HTML 1.0…
30 October 2009 17:18
Just been forwarded an excellent comparative analysis of various Internet Institutes’ coffee mugs as blogged by Christian Sandvig: Institutional Dynamics of Internet Studies as Revealed by Coffee Mugs. And we actually come out fine, I think? In his photograph our mug does look about the size of a thimble, but that might be the perspective.
Soooo … the subject of coffee being newly placed in my mind I asked Tim (who has access to STATS for the OII library’s coffee machine) for an update on what’s hot and what’s not. And thanks to Excel, there is a graph. (No time component however; therefore no trending or sense of how much is actually being drunk: that’s apparently beyond a coffee machine’s data handling capacity.)
A nice graph of fairly meaningless data
So, my favourite (the ‘cappuchinochoco’) is not actually amazingly popular. And 22 people asked for ‘hot water’ (or maybe one persistent user). Tim assures me that it might actually be the coffee machine man skewing the data by running hot water through when he repairs it. But maybe there are people out there who just happen to like hot water. Also, picking up on the ‘effete / European’ theme … ‘cafe au lait’ seems vastly more popular than ‘white coffee’?
According to the OII library page: ‘All members of the University are invited to use our library for research and study’, and I guess it should add ‘and access a range of hot beverages including cafe au lait and hot water’. The library is open Monday to Friday (09.00-16.50) during Term and Vacation. Bodleian card holders can take out books. All the books are catalogued on OLIS. The coffee is FairTrade.
And those are all my coffee thoughts for this month.
30 October 2009 16:40
Just a quick note to say that a webcast is now available for Professor Manuel Castells‘ talk on ‘The crisis of global capitalism: towards a new economic culture?‘ given last week before a packed lecture theatre at Oxford University Press. The lecture was based on his latest book from OUP, ‘Communication Power’.
A Distinguished Visiting Professor at the OII, the lecture came at the end of a week’s visit, during which he gave (six hours of!) graduate seminars on Communication Power, co-taught with Bill Dutton an online doctoral course on interdisciplinary analysis of the network society, and met with students to discuss their research.
We also have a webcast of a lecture he gave during his visit last year: Communication Power in the Network Society (23 October 2008).
Manuel Castells
29 October 2009 16:50
Facebook has decided to treat the dead differently at last, so breaking through the old problem that, just as on the web you couldnt tell someone was a dog–as in the famous New Yorker cartoon–similarly you couldnt tell they were dead. Facebook now proposes to “freeze” and “memorialise” he sites of those who someone officially declares to be dead—though quite how you get a death certificate to Facebook isnt yet clear. Someone blogged somewhere recently that “if he didnt hear from his friends every hour he assumed they were dead”. Hopefully, it wont come to that!
The Facebook proposal is that only friends you have accepted before death will be able to find your “frozen” site, see it and add tributes to it. That seems a bit strong: after all, many others might care to jojn in a tribute after your death who didnt happen to have been your friend on Facebook in life–perhaps you relatives or children? Is there any more reason to fear malicious postings by those who know you already, as opposed to those who dont? In any case, it wouldnt be hard to have a truster “executor” or “Facebook filterer” who removed any malicious postings—such people could be appointed in wills in the future, as literary executors are now. The tricky bit will be using “defriend” to rid yourself of a growing list of dead friends—–but the huge mass of young users dont need to think about that just yet.
25 October 2009 19:54
The Information Communication and Society (iCS) journal will be co-organizing a 3-day symposium on ‘Networking Democracy? New Media Innovations in Participatory Politics’ at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, from the 25th through the 27th of June, 2010. I plan to participate and hope to present some of the themes from the Dagstuhl Conference I attended late this summer, develop some of the work I have been conducting on ‘The Fifth Estate’ and the Internet and politics more generally.
Babes-Bolyai University, Romania
The conference seeks to critically assess developing wisdom about the political significance and implications of such innovations in the Internet and Web as Web 2.0.
A call for papers is now on the Web. I encourage you to consider submitting a paper or attending.
24 October 2009 14:25
OII Professor of Society and the Internet Helen Margetts has a piece in the current issue of the ESRC’s ‘Society Now‘ magazine, in a feature that asks ‘Forty years after the first message was sent through the internet we are now connected on a global scale – but do we have a global community?’
I have scraped and pasted Helen’s piece below.
***
‘Social Science of the Net’ by Helen Margetts, Professor of Society and the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford [Society Now, Issue 5, Autumn 2009]
The shift of many areas of social and political life onto the internet has major implications for social science research. It provides an opportunity to understand areas of life and society that we have lacked the data and research tools to test before. When have we previously seen the complete transaction history of an organisation – as provided by the freely available edit history of Wikipedia, downloaded in its entirety by a research student at the Oxford Internet Institute?
Daily capture of some of the innumerable online campaigns can provide thousands of ‘joining curves’ of real political mobilisations. Social networking sites, such as Facebook, generate massive amounts of information on social networks. Automatic ‘web-crawlers’ can collect non-obtrusive data on links between and within sites to provide a structural view of any sector – government, commerce and the voluntary sector.
This change is exciting, but it also brings new challenges. At times we have ‘too much’ data. The download of Wikipedia generated a six terabyte database, requiring use of the UK National Grid Service to analyse. Web-crawling provides huge maps of organisational relationships and internal structures, which can be extremely hard to interpret. Thousands of curves showing take-up rates of online petitions or charitable campaigns can be difficult to understand without background knowledge.
Sometimes, we have surprisingly little amounts of data. User data on the internet is the property of the owner of a site, and even if we can obtain it we still know little about where users came from or where they are going. Search engine companies are the custodians of an extraordinary wealth of such data, but they tend not to publish it, let alone share it. There are ethical and legal barriers to data collection. Around 1.5 billion politically-oriented YouTube video clips were viewed during the 2008 US presidential election campaigns, analysis of which would be fascinating for political scientists. But YouTube does not allow the use of automatic crawlers to track download data. Likewise, Facebook operates strict rules which prevent analysis of the thousands of social networks it generates.
Rigorous study of life online is a technologically complex task, continually introducing new research challenges. There are ways around all these challenges though, which mean that studying social and political life is getting more exciting. Social science research increasingly involves borrowing from other disciplines as diverse as physics, computer science and epidemiology, and the development of methodologies such as advanced network analysis, agent-based modelling and experiments. The rich variety of data and insight that these tasks provide is worth the wait and pays back the hope.
23 October 2009 09:44
The FBI and UK Serious Organised Crime Agency are getting
heavy with
RIPE (thanks, Lilian!):
Andy Auld, head of intelligence at SOCA’s e-crime department… used the Russian Business Network (RBN) cybercrime network as an example of the type of criminal enterprise they were targeting. The now disbanded group used an IP network allocated by RIPE, a European body that allocates IP resources, to host scam sites, malware and child porn.
RIPE actions might lend themselves to interpretation, viewed in the harshest terms, as being complicit with cybercriminals and "involved in money laundering offences".
"We are not interpreting it that way. Instead we are working in partnership to make internet governance a less permissive environment," Auld said.
This explains some recent EU discussions about blocking "criminal IP address spaces". RIPE is
unimpressed:
Press coverage this week portrayed the RIPE NCC as being involved with the criminal network provider Russian Business Network (RBN). Any connection with criminal activity, or with RBN itself, is completely unfounded.
The press coverage arose from a speech given by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in the UK. SOCA has since contacted the RIPE NCC with an apology. The RIPE NCC will continue to work with SOCA and other bodies to ensure criminal investigations can be carried out in an efficient manner within established laws and guidelines.
21 October 2009 13:26
Will the financial crisis have a knock-on effect on the way the Internet is regulated and governed? How could the international push towards greater regulation of the financial sector spill over into the arena of the Internet? What can Internet stakeholders learn from economic crises past and current?
The following report is based on an OII forum The New Economic Context of Internet Governance (27 April 2009) which focused on possible regulatory spill-overs from the financial sector to the Internet in its exploration of how the current global economic crisis could influence the development of Internet governance processes.
Download:
The New Economic Context of Internet Governance [pdf, 650kb]
Desiree Miloshevic, Anna Dopatka and William H. Dutton
The executive summary notes that:
Although it was felt too early after the credit crunch had struck to draw firm conclusions, many valuable insights were provided to help prevent—or at least minimize and alleviate the effects of—an end to the Internet’s ‘golden era’, similar to that which had seen the halting of a long period of financial growth.
You can find position papers by
Jeanette Hofmann,
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond,
A. Michael Froomkin,
David W. Maher,
Kuo Wei Wu and
Rafid A. Fatani on
Bill Dutton’s forum blog post.
The main organising questions were:
- How will the new economic context change the dynamics of debate over governing the Internet (e.g. will it stimulate further development and use of the Internet – or handicap it)?
- Does the economic crisis provide any practical guidance for sustaining the effective delivery of Internet services or the conduct of Internet governance and coordination (e.g. whether there will be knock-on impacts with regulations in other areas)?
- Will the economic crisis lead policy-makers to view the structures and processes of Internet governance as more or less of a barrier or facilitator of initiatives to promote Internet growth (e.g. if policy makers who are generally sceptical about market regulations point to the financial market as an example for suggesting new regulatory controls on the Internet)?
- How will the downturn affect national and international initiatives to build and strengthen Internet infrastructures and user bases?
- In what ways can economic development be stimulated by Internet governance initiatives that foster worldwide diffusion and use of the Internet, and the diversity of its production?
- How could the changing perspectives on regulation in the financial sector spill over to the Internet (e.g. views on the role of ICANN)?
- Will economic constraints pose a risk to meaningful participation by civil society in Internet governance institutions and processes?
- What strategies should different actors consider?
The report was written by
Desiree Miloshevic (an OII Visiting Associate),
Anna Dopatka (a visiting student from the ifib-Institut für Informationsmanagement Bremen GmbH) and
William Dutton (OII Director), based on the forum discussions.
[There is another report coming soon about something totally different ie policy and legal frameworks for identity management, from an event organised by the OII with the Bradley Foundation ... I'll report it here when available!]
20 October 2009 17:25
Andrei Molodkin presents a multi-media installation of two hollow glass sculptures, silhouettes, representing Nike of Samothrace, the symbol of victory. One sculpture is filled with pulsing black liquid – oil, the other with red – blood. Video cameras are directed at the sculptures. The projection on the screen combines the two images so that streams of black and red pulsate inside Nike of Samothrace, bringing her to life and symbolising the ambivalence of any Victory.
Yep yep: I was standing in a small dark stuffy room full of confused and hopeful people at the Russian Pavilion: ‘Victory Over the Future‘ at this summer’s Venice Biennale: a dark room filled with the sigh and click of the pneumatic pumps squirting oil / blood over the lit interior spaces of the Nikes.
So far so symbolical. I was drawn instead to the machine that seemed to be running this gently wheezing pulsating whole .. the Power Mac, neatly set apart by the officious stripy tape that divided Art from not-Art. ‘Must must take photo of G5 for Arthur,’ I thought.
Bloody Nike of Samothrace in the background, all in lights
Anyway, the curator’s notes go on to explain:
“Since the spectator is unable to appreciate the viscosity of blood or the stickiness of oil, unable to sense their taste or smell, he cannot experience disgust [it was actually pretty disgusting] or acquire any real understanding of the sordid truth about our world built on money and death [fair enough]. On the contrary, Molodkin’s art objects appear sterile and hermetic.”
Wondering just how hermetic his art objects actually were I knelt down to take a closer look at the G5 and noticed a big wad of sticking tape covering up the OFF button.
Pretty hermetic, then.
20 October 2009 10:43
Two revealing examples in one day of how this government approaches policymaking:
The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country… Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.
Civil liberty campaigners claimed a victory today after the government announced it is dropping current proposals to retain the DNA profiles of innocent people on the national database… The authors of the research on which Home Office ministers based their plan had disowned the proposals. The Jill Dando Institute for Crime Science said its work should not have been used to decide the six- to 12-year time limits because the work was unfinished.
Sigh. Wouldn't it be nice if government departments thought through the impact of policy options before proposing, let alone enacting, legislation?
19 October 2009 10:14
Next month I will be acting as a rapporteur for the European Consumers' Association (BEUC) at their Brussels conference on privacy and marketing. Alongside the EU Commissioners for the Information Society and Consumer Affairs, there will also be keynote speeches from the European Data Protection Supervisor and a number of other prominent experts. You can see the programme and register
here.
17 October 2009 10:30
This is the moment I have been slightly waiting for. Having looked forward to the recent Social Media Convention (18 September 2009) for months, I realised fairly late the night before that .. well .. I knew that everything was going to be recorded. So I spent the day um working instead. Which I suppose is not very social at all.
There had been lots of pleading in the last few days (way after the registration deadine) to the events people re ‘but you don’t understand .. I HAVE to be there’ etc., so thought they could do with the extra space in any case.
Anyway. We are still waiting for permissions clearance on the recording of the opening session, but video (and audio) is now available for the following sessions:
David Levy, Richard Sambrook, John Kelly, Jonathan Ford:
Breaking News: The Changing Relationship Between Blogs and Mainstream Media
Felix Reed-Tsochas, Maxine Clarke, Ben Goldacre, Cameron Neylon:
Making Science Public: Data-sharing, Dissemination and Public Engagement with Science
Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Stefan Niggemeier, Evgeny Morozov, Richard Allan:
Social Media, So What? Assessing the Impact of Blogs and Social Media
Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, Kara Swisher, Simon Hampton, Mark Rogers:
The Growth of the Corporate Blog: ‘Letting go’ of Information Control or Maintaining the Official Line?
Helen Margetts, Iain Dale, Andrew Rasiej, Matthew McGregor:
Parties, Campaigns and Representation: The Political Impact of Blogs and Social Media
Enjoy!
Opening Session: how did we get to where we are today? Panellists: Nigel Shadbolt, Bill Dutton, Bill Thompson and Dave Sifry; Chair: Kathryn Corrick. Nelson Mandela (bust) and large tripod observe proceedings from the background
The news session: 'The Changing Relationship Between Blogs and Mainstream Media'
16 October 2009 13:07
Today is the meeting of the OII’s Advisory Board (Eli Noam will be talking about the Internet and the future of broadcast later today) and over lunch some of the important early founders and supporters of the OII gave a fascinating talk about how we came to be. I thought it would be nice to dig out some of the old photographs of the original building site and the potted (very early) history of the 1 St Giles site:
Like many buildings in Oxford city centre, it has had a long and varied history, with names of some of the former occupants known from as far back as the thirteenth century. By 1505 it was being described as a ‘messuage’ or brew house, and brewing apparatus is mentioned in several subsequent transfers. By 1660 it had become a substantial inn called the Dolphin. There are records of several anonymous Civil War casualties languishing and dying at the Dolphin. Their burials are recorded in the Register of St Mary Magdalen.
Pretty stirring stuff. The rest of the building’s history is rather less dramatic, largely involving the Morrells (a dynasty of Oxford solicitors and brewers who rebuilt the building around 1820), parts of the site being sold off to Trinity College (and possibly St John’s? They have a ‘Dolphin Quad’) and the rest (including our bit) to Balliol in 1989.
We were founded as a department of the University of Oxford in 2001, as an academic centre for the study of the societal implications of the Internet. Our current home at 1 St Giles was formally opened in July 2003.
View from St Giles: we are in the middle, with the blue door and pointy pediment. The backs of Balliol and Trinity are to the right and left.
The gaping hole that turned into the back half (ie the new bit) of the building. All that mud would turn into the seminar room. Balliol is to the right, Trinity is to the left
Bill's office on (I suppose?) the first morning, with chair, strange plastic thing on an arm, and pot plant
Yes, this is what the library used to look like .. before it was turned into: well, a library
15 October 2009 13:10
SOOO, the Summer Doctoral Programme 2010 application process is open.
The programme runs from 5-16 June 2010. And we are back home in Oxford this year (having done Queensland in 2009, Boston in 2007 and Beijing in 2005).
So not much else to say at the moment other than .. if you are doing doctoral research relating to the Internet and other ICTs, and you feel you need an exciting and intensive fortnight of learning and sharing and networking with an amazing group of students and tutors .. make sure to apply by 22 February 2010!
Over the next few weeks we’ll be scraping together content from some of the previous programmes, to hopefully give a bit of a sense of what everyone gets up to / where the SDP alumni are now.
Tutors and academic partners are still being confirmed: if you would like to know as they are signed up, check the SDP2010 webpage, or sign up to OII News.
15 October 2009 13:04
This is a slightly nothingy post, essentially just to say that the (what seem to be many many, but might actually be around twenty?) new DPhil and MSc students seem to be settling in, and .. here are some group photos!
The new DPhil student biographies are now mostly live. The first deadline for MSc and DPhil 2010/2011 applications is 20 November 2009 (see our teaching section for more information).
New Doctoral Students (2009/10 entry)
Our first ever intake of Masters students (2009/10 entry) looking extremely smiley
New DPhils standing rather further away, on the steps of Balliol College's Dining Hall
14 October 2009 10:22
Balliol College is inviting applications for scholars of outstanding distinction or promise to be Oliver Smithies Lecturers at Balliol College, Oxford, for the academic year 2010-11. The closing date is 16 April but full details can be accessed on the Balliol College Web site.
There are no subject matter restrictions, but Balliol appears to be particularly interested this year in ‘distinguished visitors from scientific disciplines’. Professor Oliver Smithies was a joint winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Medicine.
9 October 2009 07:07
Last month we held a small workshop in Brussels to draw on the knowledge of a number of external experts for the project. Here is a short report of the event — all comments welcome!
September 2009 Brussels workshop report
8 October 2009 14:50
Nuffield – OII Networks Seminar
Date: October 12 – November 30 2009 (Mondays Week 1 -8), 17:00 – 18:30
Convenors:
Location: Nuffield College Seminar Room, New Road Oxford OX1 1NF. No need to register: just turn up!
This a series of weekly seminars for fellows and students at the University of Oxford to discuss their research in an informal environment. Visitors are welcome.
Week 1 (Oct. 12)
Jennifer Flashman, “Change and Stability in Adolescent Friendship Networks: The Role of Academic Achievement”
Week 2 (Oct. 19)
David Strang, “Who Does an Elite Firm Emulate? Interorganizational Networks and the Spread of Managerial Practices”
Week 3 (Oct. 26)
Johan Koskinen, “Social Roles and Settings in Network Evolution: Placing the Individual in Context“
Week 4 (Nov. 2)
Dean Lusher, “Attitudes, Perceived Attitudes, Status and Norms in Groups”
Week 5 (Nov. 9)
Nick Harrigan, “Co‐evolution Models for Large Social Networks”
Week 6 (Nov. 16)
Caroline Haythornthwaite, “Analyzing Online Conversations”
Week 7 (Nov. 23)
Pip Pattison, “Exponential Random Graphs Models for Social Networks: the Model Specification Problem”
Week 8 (Nov. 30)
Felix Reed‐Tsochas, “The Spontaneous Emergence of Social Influence in Online Systems”
7 October 2009 19:49
The Oxford Internet Institute will be celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Internet by holding lectures by two of the most influential scholars focused on society and the Internet: Manuel Castells and Duncan Watts.
Manuel Castells, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Oxford, and Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia, will be speaking on Thursday, the 22nd of October 2009, from 16.30-18.00 at Oxford University Press, Walton Street. The title of his talk is ‘The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Towards a New Economic Order’. Manuel Castells is the foremost cited communications scholar in the world. He has authored 19 books, including his most recent book, entitled Communication and Power (Oxford University Press 2009).
Duncan Watts is Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, and director of the Human Social Dynamics Group. He is also professor of sociology at Columbia University, and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. Duncan will speak on Friday, the 23rd of October, from 16.00-17.30 at the Said Business School, University of Oxford (Seminar Room A) on ‘Using the Web to do Social Science’. The talk is organized by the OII in collaboration with CABDyN and the Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS) project. Duncan Watts is the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton 2003) and Small Worlds (Princeton 1999).
We think there is no better way to recognize the anniversary of the Internet than to hear from some of the most influential scholars in the field. Please join us.
If you would like to attend either or both events, please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk More information on both events can be found on the OII’s events Web page.
7 October 2009 16:01
Only half of those over the age of 50 have access to the web, leaving 10 million more unconnected. On the ”wrong side of the digital divide”, they miss out on the social, educational and financial advantages of internet access. According to the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), at Oxford University, many elderly people resist technology through fear of pornography or the lack of security associated with the web. See Daily Telegraph report
7 October 2009 15:23
Date: Tuesday 17 November, 18:30 – 20:00. A reception will follow.
Speaker: Michael Froomkin, Professor of Law, University of Miami school of Law
Location: Hunton & Williams, 30 St. Mary Axe, London, EC3A 8EP. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk
From its inception, many have recognized the Internet’s potential as a liberating, decentralizing, and, yes, destabilizing technology but also its counter-potential as a controlling and centralizing technology.
Over the last two decades, predictions about the social effects of the Internet have ranged from cybernetic anarchy (both utopian and distopian) to the instantiation of a fascistic regime of surveillance that would make Orwell look like a piker. Some see a winner-take-all economy of massive new monopolies emerging on the back of network effects, others see the growth of a new economy in which intermediaries are replaced by huge open networks of buyers and sellers trading with e-cash on anonymous electronic exchanges – and evading their taxes. Meanwhile enthusiasts of electronic democracy and popular empowerment offer a vision sharply at odds with that of Cassandras of globalization for whom the Internet provides yet another occasion for decision-making authority to seep away towards relatively undemocratic trans-national bodies.
One would think that such contrasting predictions could not possibly all be correct. Yet, for the last decade, to a surprising extent both sets of trends have manifested themselves simultaneously. The question is whether those two trends can continue, or if instead we are witnessing the start of a collision between them.
At present, ‘the Internet’ is neither ‘fraud’s playground’ nor democracy’s. (Indeed, there is more than one ‘Internet’.) Rather, different groups of people doing different things with different objectives have moved down independent paths. Now, however, these trends find themselves meeting at a crossroads: Largely well-intentioned political and legal reactions to the highest-profile risks of communications technology create a danger of at least wounding and perhaps in some areas even killing the goose that is giving us golden eggs of innovation, decentralization, and personal empowerment.
Advances in medical records technology might give patients greater control over their treatment, but are could also further disempower them, and (in the US at least) seem even more likely to become another target for data mining and marketing. E-government holds out the promise of more involved and better informed citizens. The same technologies may, however, also empower nosey neighbors, or the nanny state’s evil sibling Big Sister, who knows what is best for you and has honed predictive profiling to the point where many find their liberty practically encumbered without being formally curtailed.
Most immediately, technologies, practices, and technical standards that may appear benign in a democracy – may in truth be benign in a democracy – may take on a more sinister cast when adopted in more repressive regimes faced with indigenous pressure for reform. For example, the world witnessed via YouTube as Iranian demonstrators marched to protest the theft of an election. The communicative freedom making the sending of those images possible is a fragile thing, and could fall before the creation of standards and practices intended to foil digital piracy half a world away.
About the speaker
A. Michael Froomkin is a Professor at the University of Miami School of Law in Coral Gables, Florida, specializing in Internet Law and Administrative Law. He is a founder-editor of ICANNWatch, and serves on the Editorial Board of Information, Communication & Society and of I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. He is on the Advisory Boards of several organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Prof. Froomkin is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He is also active in several technology related projects in the greater Miami area.
Professor Froomkin writes primarily about Internet governance, electronic democracy, and privacy. Other subjects include e-commerce, electronic cash, the regulation of cryptography, and U.S. constitutional law. Before entering teaching, Prof. Froomkin practiced international arbitration law in the London office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. He clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, and Chief Judge John F. Grady of the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois. Prof. Froomkin received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as Articles Editor of both the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law. He has an M.Phil in History of International Relations from Cambridge University in England, which he obtained while on a Mellon Fellowship. His B.A. from Yale was in Economics and History, summa cum laude, phi beta kappa with Distinction in History.
The Internet, Society and Law Seminar Series
This lecture is the last of a series organised in collaboration with the Society for Computers and Law (SCL) to provide a platform for leading international scholars to address emerging legal issues concerning the Internet: its use, governance and regulation.
The Internet is raising new questions about legal principles, their implementation and enforcement in cyberspace. Does an understanding of law and the Internet simply require a more technologically sophisticated analysis of traditional legal principles, or is the Internet creating a need for new perspectives on law and regulation?
Each seminar in the series focuses on a different emerging legal issue concerning the Internet. Responses to the main lecture will be invited from a lawyer and a social scientist in order to offer a broad range of perspectives on the issue at hand. A moderated audience discussion will follow.
