The excellent academic group weblog Crooked Timber has produced a kind of online seminar via their weblog about Yochai Benkler’s recent book The Wealth of Networks which has attracted much attention in the blogosphere and contends that the Internet has enabled a new model for producing public goods which is under threat from corporations and governments.

The seminar happened back in May ‘06 so you won’t be able to join the discussion there any more but the archives are still available and worth reading. And if you want to comment further Benkler’s book is - appropriately - online and in wiki form.

David Brake

If you’ve been wondering what the man who popularised the term virtual community has been thinking about these days you should check out this post he wrote on the Annenberg Centre’s DIY Media blog. It outlines the potential importance of digital literacy for enabling political engagement. Well worth a look as is the weblog as a whole.

The British Academy has produced a report on Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences which concludes inter alia while the law itself gives academics sufficient ability to use copyright work, “risk averse publishers, who are often themselves rights holders, demand that unnecessary permissions be obtained, and such permissions are often refused or granted on unreasonable terms” and “there are well-founded concerns that new database rights and the development of digital rights management systems (DRMs) may enable rights holders to circumvent the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate research and scholarship”.

David Brake

The Open Rights Group (which does need a proper website not just a blog) has been launched as a kind of British Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’m sure it will do some sterling work but it’s a shame that almost immediately some digital rights extremists (an unlikely grouping) came along to a brainstorm for its founding and put a cat among the pigeons by being very rude about it (entertainingly).

It’s hard to take seriously their argument that corporations should be encouraged to behave more and more badly until their digital abuses are recognised by the public, but they seem to have managed to spark a lot of online flaming. You’d think the respondents, most of whom have more than a decade of online experience would know better than to respond to trolling?

Update: The ORG doesn’t have a ‘proper’ website yet but when searching for something rights related I did find the Campaign for Digital Rights which seems to share a lot of the ORGs objectives and has quite a bit of useful information about the state of UK and European law and why it should be changed.

Online magazine Salon has a fascinating roundup of recent developments in the burgeoning market for kid tracking. I didn’t realise that intrusive technologies are already on the market - from GPS trackers (obvious) to RFID tags sewn into pyjamas or school ID badges (sneaky). It doesn’t go into surveillance of the online experience itself which is very common - AOL has a "guardian" feature that lists:

• Web sites your child successfully visited.
• Web sites your child attempted to visit but was restricted from.
• The number of e-mails and Instant Messages your child has sent.
• Your child’s Address Book and Buddy List activity.

But at least AOL’s tools notify your kid that you are tracking them - many other addon ‘parental control’ programs do not.
Is anything permissible in surveillance as long as you are monitoring a child? The UN convention on the rights of the child includes a right to privacy. But two countries have yet to ratify it - Somalia and the US.

Update: The department’s own Prof Sonia Livingstone has written a book chapter defending a child’s right to online privacy in “Information Technology at Home” (edited by Kraut, to be published by OUP).

The Institute for Public Policy Research (leading UK think-tank) has launched a 3-week consultation (on their blog) concerning Britain digital future.

Today we launch the first of three week-long online consultations, as a way of gathering opinion, ideas and recommendations for our Digital Manifesto. We will post questions under the following themes, over the following weeks:

• 7th-13th April: Innovating
• 14th-20th April: Reassuring
• 21st-27th April: Empowering

In each instance, we invite replies to our specific questions (added to this blog) from all sorts of perspectives, and all types of expertise. With authors’ permission, we would like to be able to use or quote these ideas in our final publication, and credit them accordingly.

I reckon that media and new media scholars should make their voice heard about their preferred direction of new media development in Britain (and elsewhere)? Top of my head: open source, in-house capacity, surveillance, digital inequality, etc, etc, and unfortunately etc. again.

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What the hell is “civil society”? Neera Chandhoke - openDemocracy

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Finally someone from the mainstream media (Steven Levy) asks this obvious question. He gets part of the answer - bloggers tend to link to people like themselves - but tacitly assumes that there are a large number of (for example) black women blogging about the same kinds of things that the leading (white male) bloggers are and being excluded.

This misses the wider point that sociologists like Bourdieu have explored - that many people - particularly those of lower social status or women - may simply never think of political discussion as something ‘for them’ either because they don’t see politics as relevant to them or because they feel their opinions would not be listened to.

Needless to say this has touched off a lot of discussion including a spectacularly over the top and sociologically uninformed contribution from one A list blogger.

I’m blogging this from the LSE itself today - I’m at an event about blogging and journalism. My comments in italics

Meta comment: The notes below may or may not turn into a ‘proper posting’ - as John Lloyd and Robin Mansell pointed out one of the problems with blogging as an alternative space for journalism is that good journalism requires time and time is money. I could spend several hours turning the comments that follow into a report on the event complete with my own thoroughly-thought-through comments but when I was a journalist that would cost you at least £200 to get. There are very few opportunities to make a reasonable income from blogging so it will always be dominated by people who have time to do it either because they have an income elsewhere and adequate spare time or because they have an axe to grind about some particular issue.

Time taken to improve this blog posting would come at the expense of my thesis and at the moment I can’t really afford it. Anyway, nobody said anything that sufficiently outraged me to make a counter-blast worth my while.

If I had spoken out at the meeting it would have been to suggest that what is needed now is some way to broaden the kinds of people who blog today. There are millions of people who might want some way to express themselves but who feel nobody would want to listen to them. Perhaps some kind of school blogging programme should be considered alongside other IT literacy items on the syllabus?

My notes on the event follow:
(more…)

WriteToThem.com - like the name says this site lets you locate and then email or fax not just your member of Parliament (as its predecessor faxyourmp did) but your local councillors, MEP or MSP plus Welsh or London Assembly Members. It’s bizarre that this had to be done through a charity - MySociety - set up by a committed policy wonk rather than being something that our own government would have implemented ages ago, but better late than never I suppose. At least the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister did fund the project in the end.

Now comes the question of whether these representatives will actually respond to enquiries. My MP, Jeremy Corbyn certainly didn’t when I tried sending him a message via faxyourMP (and the statistics suggest he rarely does respond). I ended up having to pick up his email address directly via a pamphlet…