William H. Dutton

UNESCO is holding an ‘International Symposium on Freedom of Expression‘ on 26 January 2011, with the support of the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO. One panel session will focus on freedom of expression on the Internet, and we also expect that our UNESCO publication, entitled ‘Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression‘, will be launched. [...]

I’ve just finished a draft of a paper by this title for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Programme on Globalization, UK Poverty and Communities. My thanks to Bianca Reisdorf for assistance with the analysis, and Teresa Hanley for her valued comments. Abstract The Local Frontier of the Global Internet: Networked Individuals and Communities of Digital Britain [...]

I will be participating in a workshop session at the Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius this September on the 14th. The title of our paper and the session is Freedom of Connection — Freedom of Expression. Information about the session is available online from the IGF and the paper is posted on SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1654464 [...]

I attended the first Plenary Meeting of the International Academic Committee for the Global Communication Research Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tung University on 21 May 2010. It is headed by Dean Zhang Guoliang and his creative associate, Dr Pearl Wang. The Institute has about 20 full-time faculty, including 14 professors working on about 27 research [...]

Networked individuals are rapidly playing a more central role in holding BP and all parties more accountable for their roles in the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. One of the most promising developments is the launch of the ‘Oil Reporter‘. This is an open platform for citizens to keep and eye on beaches and other developments [...]

Anna Bradley, Chair of Ofcom’s Communications Consumer Panel, is visiting the OII on 6 May 2010. She will give an informal talk, from 16:30-17:30, in the OII Seminar Room at 1 St Giles. The panel has been active in a variety of issues, such as in focusing attention on actual versus advertised broadband speeds. Anna [...]

Cheryll Barron has written a new OII Internet Issue Brief (No. 4), entitled ‘The Keiretsu-Cooperative: a Model for post-Gutenberg Publishing’, which is available online at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1532173 It is an imaginative proposal for a new business model to support publishing in the digital age. Cheryll has written about computers, culture and society for the Economist, [...]

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 [...]

The Internet enables you to watch television on your computer. This is no longer the dream of a futurist. As Web TV continues to unfold, Internet users will have increasingly worldwide stores of programs accessible at anytime from anyplace. Long-held visions of on demand television might well be realized in the near-term. However, this convergence [...]

I attended a stimulating forum in Alpbach, Austria, from the 20th to 26th of August. The forum is well known in the German speaking regions of Europe, but less visible than it should be, in Britain, for example. The forum was launched in 1945, immediately following the Second World War, as a means to open [...]