There will be a Digital Participation Web site very soon, but comments on the plan are most welcome. In addition, information about the consortium is posted on the Web.

Bill Emmott, under whose leadership The Economist doubled its circulation between 1993 and 2006, is also the author of eight books, including Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade (2008).

David Goodhart started the current affairs magazine Prospect in 1995, after working as a senior correspondent for The Financial Times, and continues to serve as its editor.

Godfrey Hodgson, who often blogs for the e-zine openDemcracy.net, was director of the Reuters’ Foundation Programme at Oxford University. He has also been the Observer’s correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. He is the co-author (with Lewis Chester and Bruce Page) of the best-selling account of the 1968 presidential campaign, An American Melodrama (1969). His other books include More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the new century (2006).

Dr Frances Pinter is the publisher of Bloomsbury Academic, and is the former publishing director of the Soros Foundation, where she ‘directed major projects aimed at reforming publishing in Central & Eastern Europe.’ She has been a pioneer in offering libraries inexpensive digital access to thousands of learned journals. At twenty-three, she founded Pinter Publishing. (An OII Webcast of Frances Pinter’s talk on the transformation of publishing in the Internet age is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn more about this area.)

Through this blog, or your own outlets, I hope you will add your comments on this issue brief and the responses. My hope is that this brief will stimulate and inform more discussion of innovative business models for online publishing.

My thanks to Cheryll Barron, Bill Emmott, David Goodhart, Godfrey Hodgson, and Frances Pinter for their views on one of the most critical issues facing online publishing – the need for new business models.

Regards,

Bill

I am baffled by the decision of Ofcom’s Communication Consumer Panel to support this tax. The panel argues that it is a ‘pragmatic’ approach, but also recognizes that it will put low income households at risk, leading some to have compared it to a ‘poll tax’; hit small businesses harder; and put consumers in the devolved nations in a position of paying twice to fund NGA rollout. They make recommendations to deal with these inequities, but appear overly optimistic that these difficulties will be dealt with — somehow. Shouldn’t they (charged with representing the interests of consumers) withhold their support unless and until these problems are resolved? I had hoped they would.

In my personal opinion, support of this tax on phones to subsidize the Internet will further alienate those who are non-users of the Internet — and rightly so, and therefore work against public policies aimed at getting more people online. I am as supportive of fostering the vitality of the Internet in Britain as anyone — I am a student of Internet Studies, but to impose a redistributive burden on those most dependent on fixed line phones, and not using the Internet in many cases, seems wrong in principle, and likely to undermine the vitality of the Internet, and the larger economy. It is far from a pragmatic response.

*See for example: Walter Baer (1996), ‘Telecommunication Infrastructure Competition: The Costs of Delay’, pp. 353-370 in Dutton, W. H. (ed.), Information and Communication Technologies — Visions and Realities. (Oxford University Press).

Access the paper via: http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/?p=1194/

Edited by William H. Dutton and Paul W. Jeffreys
Foreword by Ian Goldin

Forthcoming from MIT Press

CONTRIBUTORS: Hal Abelson, Robert Ackland, Roger Barga, Tim Berners-Lee, Christine L. Borgman, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Alan Bowman, João Caraça, Gustavo Cardoso, Annamaria Carusi, Paul A. David, Grace de la Flor, Matthijs den Besten, David De Roure, Matthew Dovey, Ricardo B. Duque, William H. Dutton, Paul N. Edwards, Rita Espanha, Michael A. Fraser, Jenny Fry, Ian Goldin, Wendy Hall, Tony Hey, Steven J. Jackson, Paul Jeffreys, Marina Jirotka, Jane Kaye, Cory Knobel, Julia Lane, Xiaoming Li, Sharon Lloyd, Christine Madsen, Andrew Martin, Sandro Mendonça, Eric T. Meyer, Kieron O’Hara, Savas Parastatidis, Michael Parker, Justine Pila, Tina Piper, Rob Procter, Ralph Schroeder, Nigel Shadbolt, David Shotton, Wesley Shrum, Michael Spence, John Taylor, Mike Thelwall, David Vaver, Andrew Warr, John Wilbanks, Yorick Wilks, Paul Wouters, Marcus Antonius Ynalvez, and Jonathan J. H. Zhu

Overview

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines.

Advances in information and communication technology are transform- ing the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly powerful and versatile computer-based and networked systems promises to change research activity as profoundly as the mobile phone, the Internet, and email have changed everyday life. This book offers a comprehensive and accessible view of the use of these new approaches—called “e-Research”—and their ethical, legal, and institutional implications. The contributors, leading scholars from a range of disciplines, focus on how e-Research is reshaping not only how research is done but also, and more important, its outcomes. By anchoring their discussion in specific examples and case studies, they identify and analyze a promising set of practical developments and results associated with e-Research innovations.

The contributors, who include Geoffrey Bowker, Christine Borgman, Paul Edwards, Tim Berners-Lee, and Hal Abelson, explain why and how e-Research activity can reconfigure access to networks of information, expertise, and experience, changing what researchers observe, with whom they collaborate, how they share information, what methods they use to report their findings, and what knowledge is required to do this. They discuss both the means of e-Research (new research-centered computational networks) and its purpose (to improve the quality of world-wide research).

William H. Dutton is Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Professor of Internet Studies, and Professorial Fellow of Balliol College at the University of Oxford. Paul W. Jeffreys, formerly Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, is Director of IT at the University of Oxford, Professor of Computing, and Professorial Fellow of Keble College at the University of Oxford.

Forthcoming July 2010
7 x 9, 424 pp., 8 illus., $33.00/£24.95 paper ␣ 978-0-262-51373-9

Brian D. Loader

Since 1997, the journal of Information, Communication & Society (iCS) has been charting the global diffusion and implications of digital media, communication and information technologies for individuals, households and society at large. The ubiquity of such media is a striking testimony to their influence in the contemporary world. This rich interdependence and inseparability of social and technical manifestations is well represented in the titles of articles published in iCS covering almost every facet of our lifestyles including patterns of work and leisure, entertainment, consumption, education, environmentalism, political activity, domestic life and individual identity. From the outset iCS has encouraged a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis and understanding of the economic, political, cultural and other social implications of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This has and continues to be reflected in the contributions by academics, practitioners and policy-makers drawn from such fields as communication and media, political sciences, sociology, philosophy, psychology, geography, gender studies, computer sciences, social and public policy, science fiction and many more.

A defining objective of iCS is the publication of the highest quality material from these varied sources and to provide an international forum for accessible but critical analyses of the social shaping and implications of technological change. It has always avoided the more hyperbolic claims of technological futurists and has instead sought to ground our knowledge and understanding on high quality empirical and theoretic studies of media, communication and information technologies and society. As such it addresses such questions as:

• What are the social issues of new and evolving forms of social networking?
• What is the geography of communication on the worldwide network of networks? Will ICTs facilitate globalization or reinforce local identity, ethnic difference and region sub-cultures?
• Are new technologies, from the Internet to sensor networks leading to an age of electronic surveillance?
• How are ICTs affecting daily life and social institutions such as the family, work, organization, education, politics, health care and leisure activities?

iCS publishes eight issues a year which includes a number of special issues and book reviews. We are also pleased to publish special issues of selected papers presented at the annual conferences of The Association of Internet Researchers and The American Sociological Association (CITASA Group). iCS has become the place to submit leading articles on the social issues of our networked society.

For more information, see the journal Web site at Taylor and Francis-Routledge.

The problem was that Josh did not want to do a traditional paper. Instead he wanted to build a model of his multimedia computer. I could not convince my colleagues to accept this proposal. It was shortly after this that he became disillusioned with the value of graduate school, and left to seek his fortune, which he soon did. In 1986, he founded Jupiter Communications, one of the world’s first Internet market research companies. He made millions went it went public. Later, in 1994, in line with his vision from a decade before, he founded the world’s first Internet-based interactive television network (Pseudo.com).

Called the ‘Warhol of the Web’, Josh was too constrained by academic institutions and processes. More importantly perhaps was his commitment to doing things – building models so that people could see what he envisioned rather than simply to read about it. This might be common in design and technology, but Josh personified this commitment.

Therefore, I can only celebrate his next creation – a world in which there would be no privacy. Surveillance was everywhere. Today, in 2010, most computer and social scientists who think about it are alarmed by the ways in which new technologies promise to erode privacy in society. One need not be a technological determinist to see how the technological capabilities are being developed in surveillance technologies, from satellite imaging to miniature cameras and sensors, to see everything. But also, and importantly, people want the technologies, whether security cameras or Webcams to check on the children at preschool. Josh saw this and built an environment in which he and 1000 other inhabitants lived for one month – a place with no privacy, branded ‘We Live in Public’ — created well before reality TV.

Josh is the best person to describe this vision and related projects. Take a look at this 2009 Sky Television interview with Josh or look at a trailer for the ‘We Live in Pubic’ documentary, which won acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival.

Josh has kept in touch with me through the years as one of the professors who supported his proposal. Schools are hard to build for a Joshua Harris. We should have let Josh build the model, but we did not dampen the creativity of a budding Internet pioneer with a vision of the future that everyone should seriously ponder.

Putting to the side all of the issues that might be raised about the reliability and validity of any weekend poll of Britains, from sampling to question wording, it struck me as a tremendous example of a very common feature of research on climate change — its focus on the hard sciences, from climate forecasting to earth sciences, and the relative neglect of the social sciences. Some of the biggest questions that the article raises are: Why do people hold these beliefs? Why are the findings of scientists not well understood or accepted by more of the public? Why are policy initiatives so difficult to implement nationally and globally? Why does the press focus on the 2 in 5 who do not accept a fact, versus the 3 in 5 that do? These are all basic questions of the social and political sciences, not the so-called hard sciences. Yet, the funding of research on climate change is hugely skewed toward the sciences, as compared with the social sciences.

Even when these questions are asked or foregrounded, leaders look to the hard scientists to answer them. Environmental scientists sign a petition and wonder why it is not directly translated into policy, leading social scientists to wonder if they have a clue about how policy is shaped, how opinions are formed, how influence works in politics and public policy. Do people realize that entire fields are devoted to the study of influence, persuasion, communication, the politics of policy-making and policy implementation, and so on. These ’soft’ sciences are needed to address the hardest questions about whether governments around the world will be able to respond to the threats of climate change. Part of the success of Al Gore’s work on climate change has been his ability to communicate with the public, but even former Vice President Gore focused on the science of climate change rather than the politics of climate change policy. Hopefully, he and others are doing much more behind the scenes to shape policy and practice, including public opinion, by employing what we know from the social sciences.

Until governments place priority on the social sciences in addressing some of the hard questions about influence and policy related to climate change, we cannot expect to make real progress. The common refrain of the scientist is that we know what should be done, but the policies are not being implemented. ‘Why are our pronouncements not automatically reflected in policy?’ Well, the study of the politics of public policy has a long history, and much to offer, but remains largely neglected by the climate change community that seems to adopt this overly rational view that scientific findings are immediately translated into law and policy. Where is Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli when we need him?

*Dutton, W. H. (2008), ‘Social Movements Shaping the Internet: The Outcome of an Ecology of Games’, Chapter 19, pp. 499-517 in Elliott, M. and Kraemer, K. L. (eds), Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion: From Mainframes to Ubiquitous Computing. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.

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.

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.

I think the typology of older users has a great deal of face validity. The piece argues that older people will be increasingly isolated if they are not online. OxIS does find that those who are not online feel more lonely than do Internet users, a relationship we are trying to better understand. However, the flip side seems very clear. The Internet could be used by older people to keep in contact with their family, friends and the world and this opportunity is missed by most.

Oxford Internet Institute

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 of the Internet and broadcasting is raising many questions. For example, will social and legal factors constrain or even set back the realization of this technical development? Will the lack of adequate business models undermine the production of quality television? Will this convergence bring regulators to the Internet, and impose broadcasting models on Internet regulation? How can traditional broadcasting regulations, such as designating time periods for children’s programming, be transferred – if at all — to the anytime, on demand world, of the Internet? Will these developments prop up or undermine public service broadcasting?

The OII is organizing an Advisory Board Forum on this topic to be held at our Seminar Room, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford on 16 October 2009, from 4.30-6.30 pm. This workshop will outline possible scenarios for the development of broadcasting, particularly television, as the Internet becomes an increasingly accessible channel for its distribution and consumption. Participants will address the social and technical shaping of these trends, and their potential implications for the broadcasting sector, the Internet industry and society. Based on this discussion, the workshop will also address the role of multidisciplinary research in this area, and how Internet studies, and the OII in particular, should be addressing the many issues surrounding the Internet and the future of broadcasting.

Participants in this workshop will include members of the OII’s international Advisory Board, along with OII faculty, staff and students, and a set of invited experts in broadcasting and the Internet. Participants are invited to send short position papers in advance of the meeting, outlining key issues that should be discussed, as well as suggesting key readings or projects that the workshop should review. The primary aim of the workshop will be to influence the research strategy of the OII, helping its faculty and staff to determine the kinds of research that should be fostered in the near-future.

While this is an invited workshop, anyone who wishes to attend may contact events@oii.ox.ac.uk and their participation will be considered in light of space considerations. In addition, this blog is designed to enable a larger community to inform this meeting. Please post your own views on these issues, and your advice regarding directions for the OII’s research in this area. I am hoping also that many of the participants in the forum will post position papers as comments to this blog. [Please register on this blog in order to comment - we need to know you are a person.]

Headline in The Times 24 July 09

Related journalistic coverage has illustrated that individuals who have been quarantined due to the swine flu have been able to keep in touch over the Internet. E-mail, Skype, and other tools are helping individuals to stay isolated and still get help as needed from friends and family. Preparations are already underway for how the Internet could help students keep up with their studies if they must remain home during the coming months, when the flu epidemic is expected to spike.

That said, the major media stories have been critical of the services – both the telephone hot line and the Website. One criticism is that the users are not speaking directly to a qualified physician. One editorial claimed that the operator on the hot line had mispronounced several medical terms. Another concern was that users would fabricate their answers in taking the online self-assessment to obtain inappropriate access to antiviral drugs. It stikes me that the whole point of these electronic service options has been to address the impossibility of physicians dealing directly with a flood of individuals calling at their offices or coming into their doctor’s offices or hospitals with the added risk of spreading the virus to others. Doctors have designed the questionnaires and real people are manning the phones, so I would be happy to defend these approaches in comparison with the alternatives — no service or overwhelming demands on health facilities.

This case will be remembered as a real turning point in recognition for what the Internet can contribute in the healthcare arena. Many seniors (70% of whom do not have access to the Internet in the UK), who often believe that the Internet has nothing of relevance for them might learn from this experience. Fortunately, the elderly are less at risk from swine flu, but other flu epidemics and communicable diseases do put senior citizens, or other demographic groups, at risk. Being able to obtain information directly from one’s household is of great importance, as illustrated by this pandemic. The advocates of e-Health have hit a home run in having the courage to establish this Internet service, knowing it would be a target of criticism, and demonstrating that the Internet can provide a response to contagious disease or the risk of spreading a flu virus.

Soon we should be learning something from the patterns of use of this Website. It should be possible to have more information to map the incidence and spread of swine flu by tracking access to this and other Websites focused on this flu. In such ways, services such as this can help generate additional information that will help address public concerns.

My own focus is tied to the Advisory Committee for England (ACE), on which I serve. So I would welcome your comments on this committee or Ofcom. I am particularly interested in key issues facing the Southeast region of England, as well as the nation as a whole. Do comment.

If you have thoughts on how to interest the uninterested, please comment.

If you would like a copy of the 2009 Oxford Internet Survey report, entitled ‘The Internet in Britain’, and find out more about the OxIS research at our OxIS web page on the OII Web site.

*Dutton, W. H., and Piper, T. (forthcoming), ‘The Politics of Privacy, Confidentiality and Ethics: Opening Research Methods’, Chapter 8, in Dutton, W. H. and Jeffreys, P. (eds), World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.