Lex Ferenda

Ralph Schroeder of the Oxford Internet Institute is about to publish a book on technological determinism and social shaping, Rethinking Science, Technology, and Social Change. A few of us have been talking with him about the book and how it will be received - something to look forward to, anyway! Out in October.

Yesterday, he gave a talk on a different topic, that of “being there together” and (shared) virtual environments. It was a wide-ranging discussion of computer games, videoconferencing, experimental technologies, and more. Ralph was anxious to point out that both ‘mediated’ and ‘face to face’ environments could provide for ‘being there’; he outlined his work on the connected presence ‘cube’, with axes representing presence, copresence and connected presence. I’ll try to add an image here when I can sort one out, because it’s much easier to explain it that way!

Our questions focused on things like the advantages and disadvantages of different technologies, factors of trust and perception, and questioning the definitions adopted by the speaker! I’d recommend reading his 2006 article (subscription may be required) which was optional for this session, and not directly related to the slides, but I found it very helpful in terms of understanding the macro-issues on virtual environments.

Week 2 of the Summer Doctoral Programme (see reports on last week’s sessions) is underway, and we were right at it at 9am with a session hosted by Lewis Hyde, Rob Faris and Wendy Seltzer. The fun title was “Making the Tragedy of the Commons into a Comedy” and the focus was quite theoretical and historical - very useful for putting a few other themes of the week in context. Having looked at extracts from Peter Barnes’ Capitalism 3.0 and Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, we discussed Hardin’s classic “Tragedy of the Commons” and the challenges to its vision of the inevitable destruction of the commons.

Helpful clarity was provided by a focus on the ’stinting’ of commons; a related topic was that of the right to ‘tear down encroachments’ (and Wendy Seltzer’s provocative - but correct - parallel with digital rights management, in order to defend “fair breakage”). A familar argument was that of the difference between public domains and commons-based systems (like the GPL) and the necessity for stewardship (whether formal or informal).

The main visual cue was the useful matrix of rivalrous and excludable goods, and an extended discussion of (as one participant put it) how going from “atoms to bits” change these balances.

Further readings were suggested by our presenters: including Hess and Ostrum’s Understanding Knowledge As A Commons (PDF of chapter 1) and Carol Rose’s classic Comedy Of The Commons.

Part 1 of our ‘field trip’ took in the Media Lab at MIT and a walk around the (sprawling, architecturally diverse) campus, which is not that far from Harvard. Talk about a knowledge cluster! Anyway, we were lucky enough to be brought into the Media Lab and to visit individual projects. Given my childish glee at ‘being there’, it was only appropriate that I chose to visit the Lifelong Kindergarden team, based in a true eAladdin’s Cave in the basement of the IM Pei-designed building.

We visited two individual projects. The first was Scratch, an innovative (not to mention fun) programming language / creative tool for use in schools (and elsewhere). I was truly smitted with this tool - you should go and play with it. All works created are uploaded and can be downloaded for immediate, full remix/editing/deconstruction. Please give feedback to the designers and consider recommending it to your nearest school. It’s very straightforward and has fantastic resources for users of all abilities. We even had a useful “exchange of views” on copyright and licensing issues, which was nice. But Scratch is nicer. The same people have been working on Lego projects (they invented/created Lego Mindstorm) and of course the place was surrounded with Lego and so forth. In Jonathan Zittrain’s discussion of generativity, he talks about Lego as a truly generative toy/tool; it wasn’t discussed on our visit, but I can certainly see the manifestation of this attitude in a lot of the work that Lifelong Kindergarden are doing, and Scratch is perfectly collaborative, generative and open. (The second project was What’s Up, some far-reaching ideas here, on combining phone trees, Internet use, community structures etc for poor or deprived neighbourhoods - less ‘flashy’ but with some very useful lessons in terms of technology and development).

 
We also visited Frank Gehry’s Stata Center - an astonishing building, as can be seen from the image on the right (which I took - the camera gods were obviously smiling on me yesterday!). The building, just as dramatic inside as it is outside, even contains an exhibition on the infamous MIT Hacks and is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Wow.
 

The last of my MIT things was a visit to the MIT Press bookstore. Cyberlaw and Internet studies researchers will know that the MIT Press is among the most prolific of publishing houses when it comes to our areas - in fact, it’s so much that I can actually recognise the MIT Press page layout, having used so many books in the course of my undergrad courses, my LLB dissertation and my current research! I wasn’t disappointed, and came away with an absolute bargain haul from damaged/delisted books - some of the classics of Internet law (Ludlow’s Crypto Anarchy, Godwin’s Cyber Rights, and more) - being six books for under €20. As some of the titles are out of print and very hard to find, I was very pleased with myself. The bookstore proper was like my personal collection (but expanded), and included non-MIT Press books of interest to the MIT audience (and to me - a lot on science, tech and society, ‘digital histories’, etc).

Friday morning schedule was mixed around a bit, meaning that we had our session with MIT’s Henry Jenkins, a truly world-renowed academic in the media studies field and eagerly awaiting by quite a few participants. The provocative title, “Obama Girl Confronts The Future: New Media Literacies, Civic Engagement, and Participatory Culture”, indicates the focus of the talk. In advance, we read “Photoshop for Democracy”, a chapter from Jenkins’ Convergence Culture: Where Old And New Media Collide; during the lecture we watched videos including Obama Girl v Giuliani Girl and reviewed images/campaigns/works such as Republicans for Voldemort, Votefortheworst.com and V is for Vendetta. We previewed the upcoming CNN debate (where questions are being submitted by YouTube users - on video, of course). Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beattywas a co-presenter and made some really interesting interjections on production and visual culture.

A number of us (myself included) were sceptical about the Obama Girl videos; arguing that it was too apolitical, that it had all the visual and gender cues of straightforward TV satire (that was me), that it portrayed politics as a brawl, that it was politics-as-consumption etc. In response, it was pointed out that whatever about the theoretical objections, the video was eye-catching and a way to get a message across.

Jenkins spoke highly of Stephen Duncombe’s Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, in the context of a discussion of the disconnection between liberal activists/politicians and political culture. I want to read this. He talked at some length about patterns of adoption - i.e. talk radio being a strong point of the right and comedy news being of the left. And of course, he gave us an overview of the key points in Convergence Culture, including shifts in the notion of consumer, how digital and old media work together, and of course that the ‘convergence’ is more than merely technical, and talked about his other work on fan and participatory culture.

More from ICTlogy.

It’s Friday morning, and we’ve shifted our schedule around a wee bit, currently doing Copyright 2010 with Brian Fitzgerald (QUT, Australia) and Wendy Seltzer (Brooklyn and Harvard). In preparation, we have been preparing a wiki page on the topic. The main focus so far has been general principles, and now we’re looking at Viacom v YouTube and s 512 of the US Act.

Some things that we’ve been asked to read, or that I’m reading for assistance (we’re doing a class argument, and I’m on the YouTube wing of the room - random assignment!)

• Summary of the CCBill case (and the PDF opinion) - this case deals with the direct financial benefit point which is a key one for the Youtube litigation
• Great blog post on the legal arguments in Viacom v GooTube
• Section 512
• Make Way For Copyright Chaos (Lessig)

We also touched on search engine liability (participant Joris van Hoboken is doing his PhD in this area), and talked more generally about Google and the law and the politics of the various lawsuits. We discussed the Perfect 10 (thumbnail) cases, and almost got into talking about caching (but pulled back from the brink!). (For SDP readers: a very interesting decision that we didn’t touch on is the Tariff 22 litigation in Canada - which dealt with a whole package of copyright issues - but had a significant discussion of caching around para 112 and onwards).

Maria Goméz Rodríguez (Madrid/Catalonia) gave a student seminar on net neutrality, Ex ante or ex post control: Net Neutrality in Europe. She situated her research in the timeline of European telecommunications regulation (and spoke on the history of such), and compared ex ante (regulatory - in advance) approaches with ex post (competition / “antitrust” - after the event) approaches. Maria will be looking at jurisprudence on access (the Access Directive) and broadband in general, and hopes to offer some kind of prediction as to the future regulation of net neutrality in Europe. It’s a topic that is very badly covered, but I think it’s important, and was looking forward to this talk a lot.

We had an interesting question and answer session. Important points included the danger of regulatory flight (Delaware effect, arbitrage, etc), the balance between DG Competition and DG Information Society (and indeed the internal tensions between the telecoms and other elements of Information Society!), the prospect of root splitting and how it would affect the neutrality debate, the questions around what significant market power is (in this context), and the ‘wait and see’ approached preferred by many in the Commission, watching how the US debate turns out.

Some of those participating criticised the length of time that competition cases take (citing the Microsoft litigation,where the ‘problem’ was quite quaint by the time that a final resolution was close), and the lack of precision in defining net neutrality (which is of course connected with ascertaining a solution). (Maria used the OECD definitions - but there are still three of them!)

More on today’s privacy sessions later this evening…

Today, we started off with Helen Margetts from Oxford, who is co-author of The Tools of Government in the Digital Age, a sequel/update/follow-up to the well-known The Tools of Government by Christopher Hood (who is Margetts’ co-author on the Digital Age book). She summarised the toolkit/toolshed approach (and NATO: “nodality, authority, treasure, organisation”), which was very helpful - in the past, I have been working with Peter Grant’s idea of the regulatory toolkit in broadcasting, so getting a well-known political scientist talking us through the broader concepts is invaluable.

The work that Margetts has been doing involves some interesting tools, including experiments on how people find information (and where they go). For example, experiment participants were asked to find an answer to a question that could be answered in full from a government information site, but only half of them used such a site, and one in seven used direct.gov.uk (citizensinformation.ie has a similar layout and look and feel - I used it every day professionally in TCDSU and USI but it’s quite a heap of text and a crowded front page; Helen mentioned the very funny Directionlessgov site, which compares direct.gov.uk and Google results!)). People Google, use Wikipedia, and (in particular) go to the private sector (e.g. monster.com for employment information/CV building/etc. Indeed, a related statistic (that 46% in the UK have used Government sites, as compared with 79% who bought online and 90% who looked for goods and services online) does indicate the work that is left to do.

Other things touched on in the presentation included the changes in government tool-selection due to IT and digital technologies (chapter 9 of the book), and indeed the positive and negative elements, including circumvention. We also discussed the difficulties of ‘bringing the citizen into the front office’, and web 2.0-type technologies (the headline to the post came from that discussion!)

I enjoyed reading the paper (Governing From The Centre? Comparing the Nodality of Digital Government) on measuring nodality - Helen added that it was important because traditionally this has been a difficult element to measure. A further source, and the source of many of the facts and stats of the presentation, was the work commissioned by the National Audit Office, Government on the Internet. This recently-published work is great, and I haven’t had a chance to digest all the research data that’s on the site. Essential reading for web designers and public policy analysts everywhere.

Karen McCullagh, former solicitor in Belfast (she escaped) and PhD student at the University of Manchester, spoke about private and sensitive data within the UK and the European Union. It’s a political (as opposed to thesis) interest of mine (1 | 2), and a core concern for Digital Rights Ireland.

Karen started off with showing the great ACLU private data animation, Pizza Palace (haven’t seen it in a while, but I want to use it in a class some day. Well done Karen - who even integrated it perfectly into the content of the presentation without even blinking at a strange computer setup). She gave a quick history and introduction to private and sensitive data in Europe, and told us about her project.

The project is a very ambitious one, including interviews, a large-scale telephone survey (conducted by the information commissioner, but with a lot of analysis by Karen), surveys of bloggers…and a lot of legal and statistical analysis and reflection added to the pot. It was interesting to hear Karen’s depiction of the tensions between her background (having studied law) and her current location (in a social statistics department).

Issues raised in the presentation and questions included:

• the difference between ‘protected’ sensitive data and ‘new’ categories (and the level of public concern of disclosure of the new categories, including biometric, clickstream, etc)
• the fact that 15% of the surveyed bloggers also kept a diary (and wondering how this compares to the full population’s diary-keeping habits
• how Karen dealt with the expert interviews and their concern for anonymity (with helpful suggestions from Helen of the OII
• the interesting way in which her snowball sample literally snowballed, with YouTubers making videos to encourage bloggers to do the survey

The final part of the presentation was a discussion of a proposed working definition of private data (moving away from categories of sensitive data). The definition, which I will reproduce when I get the full text, incorporates various elements and looks quite similar to an ECHR decision or indeed a convention provision (albeit more detailed) and is (at first glance) a better approach than the current EU directive. Some of the responses have indicated that there needs to be a presumption of privacy (i.e. not having private data as a subset of general data), and Karen has received a lot of voices expressing concern over national security exemptions. This is a complex legal issue but also a timely intervention in a politically crucial debate.

Fred Stutzman’s presentation (Social Technologies and Ongoing Relationship Management) was the first student seminar I attended this afternoon. He is doing his research on friend management and social networks - with a focus on transitions, e.g. between high school and college or college and the workplace. It is a very topical issue. Fred (who has created claimid.com and other projects) is interested in digital identity, but also in online social networks, and that’s part of what led him into the research. He started studying Facebook in 2005 (although they recently stopped him and other researchers from using data in a particular way - a real pity, in my view) but has moved on to looking at things like impression formation and the consideration of transition periods / migrating to the next period of life.

There are a number of technologies involved - IM, in particular, was mentioned, and I certainly agree. One of Fred’s questions was whether he should focus on one particular technology/application/system/tool, or broaden it out. He spoke at some length about the connection between adoption or use, citing the example of students who go to college together when email adoption is widespread, and continue to use email as a significant form of communication even when ‘younger’ generations have shifted to other tools.

Earlier, Judith Donath (MIT) and John Clippinger (Harvard) spoke about digital identity in general. It was a difficult enough topic, with a complicated (but rewarding) reading (Donath’s well-known Identity and Deception piece, a classic in the field). More on that a bit later.

So, as promised. Dan Gilmour started off with a telling remark, that citizen media is ‘evolution, not revolution’ (with ev pronounced as such, not ‘eev’), and continued with a presentaiton that took us through the world of citizen media, including some great examples (not least the classic Bush/Blair video; he noted that others, including Lawrence Lessig, use this to talk about copyright, but he used it to showcase remix culture) and with an underlying theme of moving from the “Daily Me” (as criticised by Sunnstein et al) to the “Daily Us” - a nice explanation.

Dan outlined some principles towards the end of the talk, and they’re worth reproducing in some more detail. People (as audiences) should be sceptical, adjust their ‘trust quotient’ for each site, keep reporting, and learn media techniques. While acting in the journalism sphere, they should be thorough, accurate, fair, independent (in thought), and in particular transparent.

Of course, this is difficult, but not entirely new. His example was the infamous JFK film - user-created influential content from over 40 years ago - but it’s not hard to find others. The difference, he argued, was a mixture of technology, business models, the practice of journalism, and more. Both Gilmour and David Ardia (from the floor) highlighted the importance of journalism rather than journalists (or from institutional focus to behavioural focus), the latter in response to my questioning on the importance of ’status of journalists’ law in the development and growth of citizen media (while noting that in particular areas, e.g. shield laws, actual malice standards etc, things are still quite unclear).

Steve Schifferes spoke about his experiences in the BBC - he has clearly had a lot of fun in his capacity as a Reuters Fellow, doing research on the BBC web presence. He took us through statistics on site use during the last election - I love the fact that there are huge spikes from people looking for election data (stats, counts, swings, etc). God bless the digital swingometer. He also highlighted a demographic difference (more male, more middle-class, younger), and the various attempts to promote user-generated content and interactivity.

Dan was quite good in pointing to the ups and downs of new forms of media - much more nuanced than is sometimes portrayed, it was certainly not a paean to the YouTube world, but there was a positive tone to the talk.

In the second session, John Kelly did talk a wee bit about his Usenet research (mentioned in the preview post from this morning) but the bulk of the presentation was newer, blogosphere work - with even more complicated and colourful graphs and visualisations of linking, tagging, buzzwords etc in blogs. A presentation rich in data, often surprising, and the author was very good at engaging with the material, asking for predictions/explanations etc before defining the graph or parameters (an old pedagogical tool, but often overlooked by statisticians!). As with the earlier discussion, Sunstein’s critique of people talking to their allies was part of the backdrop. Among the many points mentioned and illustrated were: conservative and liberal bloggers who link to ‘intellectual’ sources show more in common with each other than with their ideological bedfellows; ‘moonbat’ is a common term of abuse in conservablogging circles; the greatest amount of links go to the New York Times (i.e. the supposed other world of mainstream media).

A striking diagram was setting links ‘to the same side’ against ‘from the same side’ - with a huge majority of plotted points being in the top right corner (i.e. high proportion of incoming and outgoing links to/from the ’same side’) - and the fact that this differed from patterns of actual discussion (’attentive clusters’ etc). I’m impressed that Kelly does his own research, spidering, and so on - i.e. not relying on Technorati or Google.

He’s working on mapping out other languages and wants to do a book on the ‘global blogosphere’ and actively sought collaborators for this - I’m not an expert in the area but I’d love to read or review the book if it comes together…

Finally, do note this progress report from Dan Gilmour on the study of citizen media. Great timing, from my point of view