Lex Ferenda

Search Engine (witty title, eh?) is a new CBC Radio show about ‘the Internet’, with a focus on collaboration and new platforms. It was featured as this week’s Editors Choice and it’s a very good show. Of course, there’s a podcast.

I’m up to my eyes with academic work and other stuff, and have been neglecting Lex Ferenda. But I do want to take a moment to note today’s shortlist for the Booker prize, as part of the Booker-reading project that I’m one half of.

For some odd reason, it turns out that of the four books I’ve read so far (Consolation, Gifted, What Was Lost and The Welsh Girl), none - none! - of them made it to the shortlist. Oh dear. I am reading Darkmans (which is listed) but I’m only 100 pages through and at this rate it’s going to take me a while, I’ve finished three other books (What Was Lost and two non-fictions) since I started it. Beautiful paper and font, though. I’ll also be reading Mister Pip (yup, it’s listed) when I manage to track down a copy.

Three of the four I’ve read (all bar Consolation), plus The Gift Of Rain (which Ruth thoroughly approved of) are debut novels. And, yup, none of them made it either. (The Gift Of Rain and What Was Lost get extra brownie points for coming from small independent publishers, though).

It does seem a rather ’safe’ choice for the shortlist. More upsetting is the dreadful press release from the prize organisers (do we really need banal summaries of the books ‘from the judges’ and notes that “The winner receives £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and recognition worldwide” (my emphasis)?

Anyway, I found The Welsh Girl interesting but not fully to my liking (some intriguing ideas about nationalism and gender and language) - a historical novel with quite some details about the period (World War II, mostly in Wales). It took me some time to read although it is not a difficult book. More promising was What Was Lost, a surprisingly spooky tale that I enjoyed not necessarily for the mystery-story element but for the pointed skewering of consumerism and ‘development’ in their ugliest forms. I found the ending a little too convenient, but by then I was reading for the wonderful lines and descriptions rather than the mystery alone, so I wasn’t too disappointed in that regard.

From Slaw comes a mention of a fun database of law-related movie and pop culture references. There are no movies listed about Internet law. You could say that they don’t exist, unless you count Hackers. Which, quite frankly, you shouldn’t.

On the other hand, the general sci-fi genre has a great record on law and technology more generally. Last year’s GikII had two great presentations on this topic: Andrew Adams, From 1984 to V for Vendetta via Minority Report and Andrés Guadamuz, Killer Robots, Evil Scientists and Other Tales of Woe: How Technophobia in Culture Affects the Law.

I think we can now agree that Web 2.0 is here to stay.

(sorry!)

Nevertheless, despite the emergence of online election humour, it has been generally overlooked by academic scholars (We found only three papers that dealt directly with this theme - all of them based on US experiences (Warnick 1998, 2002; Foot & Schneider 2002)). Our paper, therefore, represents a first attempt to analyse a range of online humorous political genres in the UK. The central research questions considered here are twofold: How was online humour used by different actors in the 2005 UK election campaign? And, what were the specific characteristics of online humour in this campaign?

Limor Shifman, Stephen Coleman and Stephen Ward take on this challenge in a new article, Only joking? Online humour in the 2005 UK general election. Here’s the abstract, but you’ll need a subscription to go further. This is a deadly serious article , what with references to Freudian approaches to Flash games about certain acts not normally performed in Parliament and detailed parsing of graffiti - but it’s of interest to anyone who follows political campaigns and the sillier side of them in particular. I’ve heard Coleman speak before. He has a great job - serious academia that involves being absorbed in all elements of politics and the public debate over politicians, in his role as a professor of political communications.

As it happens, while I was writing up this post, I saw news of the FEC decisions on blogs and campaign finance law; nothing too new given an earlier FEC statement on Internet activities and the media exemption. Much as this is being celebrated as a victory for free speech and blogs being treated like media and all that, I find it hard to cheer anything that emerges from the mess that is US campaign finance law (and the continuing notion that money really does talk, at least as far as the regulation of elections is concerned). It’s still broken. Blogs grabbing one of the fifty million opt-outs doesn’t mean all that much.

Damien Mulley’s familiar ‘fluffy links’ includes an embedded KLF video today. Not the first time that Damien has shared the love of Mu Mu with the world - he posted a series of KLF videos before - but all of those links have died. Such is the fate of the dance of GooTube.

Anyway, Damien links to the ‘million pounds’ documentary and the Boing Boing post about it. What’s more, though, recently I noticed a flurry of interesting KLF archive pieces turning up on YouTube and elsewhere. For example, user klfcommunicationsnet (presumably the people behind this) has posted a whole load of things (view the channel here). For now, this includes a rake of the infamous Top of the Pops appearances, such as Justified and Ancient (complete with ice-cream cones playing guitar and Tammy W on a big screen) and Doctorin’ The Tardis (mmmm). Also available through various sources are things like the ‘final’ performance at the Brits (KLF v Extreme Noise Terror), the chaotic comeback (***k The Millennium, and no I’m not being prudish, that’s what it’s called) complete with Liverpool dockers, audio (but not video, that I know of) of the Justified Ancients of M.U. (probably not actual KLF) singing about Cantona and the Acid Brass (no, I’m serious) version of What Time Is Love (which made an appearance in the comeback).

Darius Whelan notes that the Attorney General’s office here in Ireland now has a page for ‘new’ statutory instruments (SIs); there’s a good archive up to 2005(in the online Statutes Book) but getting released ones (online and without charge) has been very hit and miss.

Good news.

The UK Centre for Legal Education (UKCLE) has reminded interested academics and others of the October closing date for submissions to next January’s “Learning In Law” conference. An interesting event, for sure - I couldn’t attend last year’s, but might yet make it to this year’s shindig, taking place in Warwick just after the New Year. There’s an early-bird rate and a 50% discount for students.

The obligatory clever title is: (Dis)integration…designs on the law curriculum

This comment (from the above-linked page), catching my technological as well as political eye, is also interesting:

A sustainable conference – reducing environmental impact
In response to comments from the 2007 conference, UKCLE is working to make this a paper free event. We are not intending to have bags or packs. On the day, delegates will be provided with a memory stick containing the programme, abstracts and biographies. The programme and abstracts will also be available on the UKCLE website in advance of the event and will be on display at the venue, with the delegates list.

We hope you will support us in this objective.

No doubt the responses will range from What’s a memory stick to can they recycle the hot air for heating to cheapskates!, but I do think this is a good idea (and I hope that they could get rid of the unnecessary memory stick in a few years)…