I’m transcribing interviews with my London-based bloggers at the moment and no matter how many times it happens it still fills me with pleasure to hear the really interesting stuff come out as I listen effectively for the first time (during an interview itself I find I am only about 50% listening and 50% thinking about what to ask next or what I might have missed). But transcribing is also a gruelling discipline. I started transcribing one woman just now and was five minutes in thinking ’she’s interesting but she’s also speaking quite fast - I hope I won’t wear out before I finish’. Then I looked up at the audio track and saw that this interview is two hours long!

Most of them tend to be an hour to an hour and 20 minutes but that’s both the strength and the drawback to semi-structured interviewing. If you are getting good material you can keep it going but at some point you are going to end up having to transcribe and then analyse all that material which you tend to forget is much more time-consuming than the interview itself. This one interview will probably take me about eight solid hours just to transcribe (and since I can’t transcribe like that without copious breaks that probably means a few days’ work). Phew. Better get back to it…

If you are or have been a long-term resident of the US or of China, please visit this survey by a student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. It “focuses on different uses of weblogs in mainland China and the United States and is a first step to investigating the increasing political influences of the weblogs in Chinese civic lives.”

I do not have a strong view on who should govern the underlying technology of the Internet but I am beginning to become alarmed at how only one side of the debate seems to be being heard - at least online. Maybe it’s just in the parts of the Internet and mainstream media I read but there’s a remarkably consistent tale being told from Foreign Affairs to NPR to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Put baldly it says that letting other countries than the US have a say in the running of fundamental aspects of the Internet like the allocation of domain names is at best an unneccessary risk and at worst a plot by totalitarian regimes like Cuba, Syria and China to make the Internet more easily controlled. Strikingly (as I noted earlier) I am not aware of any comment pieces that put the other side. So I asked a friend of mine who has done research in this area, Lee Salter, what he thought and I provide his response below to, I hope, kick off a discussion:

Hmm, why non-US governance is important? Well, we can start by reversing the question ? why is US governance important? Well, it is important to US political and socio-economic interests ? control the internet and you control a great deal. This control is not direct or explicit, but like so much in the American Empire, indirect and implicit. For many in the USG control of the Internet is about extending a very particular American set of social relations around the world ? in much the same way as the domination of Hollywood sought to spread not just values, but specific forms of film making. On the other hand, there are some very explicit motivations, such as preparing American IT firms for the Internet in the first place to give them a ?competitive edge? when the net finally did start spreading. It also helps American concepts of (formalistic) free speech spread, not, of course, with the intention of really freeing people as such, but with the knowledge that the economic power of American (and European) media interests is such that they can flood the Internet with their content. In fact, we don?t even need to say that it is specifically American interests (though it is ? lots flows out of American through the Internet, but their parochialism prevents much getting in), because the functioning of the capitalist system (within which the Internet is embedded) is such that money wins most of the time. Finally, it helps American political interests in the same way as radio and television helped push American political interests during the so-called Cold War: Mark Poster cites Regan as saying that ?Electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as though it were lace?. The Internet, similarly, opens the world to the American vista.

From the other perspective ? why is non-American governance importance, well, it is a strange question ? shouldn?t each political community be able to govern itself? Isn?t that what the ?democratic values? and ?freedoms?, for which the USG has killed millions of people around the world, are for? And if this is not possible, should they not have an equal or at least proportional say in how governance takes place? Why should the rest of the world be subject to America?s will? I expect if the rest of the world had a say, there would be the ?threat? that quite a different Internet would emerge ? for example, the Americans pushed for TCP/IP when Europeans were arguing for X.25. Of course, X.25 would have allowed each state to develop internetworking that would be quite specific to that state, but the TCP/IP model was forced through. I don?t think that the USG would be happy to have others having a say in the governance of the Internet if that say runs the threat of being different to the US model, not least because it might hit American economic expansion.

Danah alerted me to the fact that Stanford has its own spot in the iTunes music store. It features a small but growing series of lectures on US foreign policy, other public speeches and discussions of books among other things (all free). I wish that UK universities had the funding to play around with this kind of stuff. We certainly have enough public lectures here at the LSE to make a similar project worthwhile.

Update: Princeton also has a very similar offering (tilted more towards foreign policy). I couldn’t find anything similar by Harvard or Yale yet…

It has been a little frustrating to spend days at AoIR6 meeting all kinds of interesting people but not being able to tell them much about my own research because I had not yet done any analysis.

Well, I spent a good year and a half narrowing down my question and theoretical framework (Stage I) and several months doing data collection (Stage II) - today I ‘officially’ start analysing my fieldwork (Stage III)! In this case, this means producing a rough coding frame for my 24 interviews (so far) with London-based personal webloggers.

Don’t get too impatient to see my results yet - I don’t expect to have produced anything for Stage IV (writing up) until next year but I feel like I’m moving along at last. This is certainly a different rate of progress than I had in journalism when a month seemed like forever to produce something - but of course I hope to dig a whole lot deeper in to my subject…

P.S. I was wondering why my posts about AoIR weren’t appearing in the AoIR6 feed - I had mis-written the tag. Oh well.

I listened with interest to an interview with Steve Jones who co-founded the Association of Internet Researchers (AoiR). Towards the end of the interview he was talking about features the AoIR6 conference had that others should adopt. I think he was absolutely right about the value of face to face features like lengthy coffee breaks with coffee right there in the hallways to encourage informal discussion but I think he over-sold the benefits of accompanying the conference with various Internet communications options like the conference wiki and the IRC channels that were available. I have to note that both features were woefully under-used by participants. And if you can’t get a bunch of Internet researchers to use Internet tools to complement face to face interaction despite fairly frequent prompting then I have to question their utility in any but the most geeky of settings (though I gather some Internet technology gatherings have used ‘back channel chat’ successfully).

My experience as a virtual communities consultant has shown me time and time again that people will not invest the time and energy to try new forms of interaction unless there is a strong incentive to do so. This may also explain why the AoIR still relies on email mailing lists for communication when there are any number of sophisticated messageboard systems which would do a better job of structuring communication (eg Caucus, which is open source or WebCrossing). I’m afraid that no matter what the benefits of moving to one of these platforms there would be a sufficient number of people who would hang back that would make the move impossible. (Also, I would not suggest making such a move unless most current and likely members of AoIR had broadband Internet connections, as email is more suitable for narrowband users).

The first keynote speaker at AoIR6 - Ang Peng Hwa - was an advocate of international regulation of the Internet and taking control of ICANN out of the hands of the US (see Ordering Chaos: Regulating the Internet - summarised here). Even the predominantly US audience at this year’s Association of Internet Researchers conference appeared sympathetic to his view (or at least not actively hostile!). The Economist (nominally British) takes different view [registration required]. The leader makes some interesting assertions quite quickly:

ICANN’s stewardship has succeeded because its focus has been not on politics, but on making the network as efficient as possible. The sometimes fierce debates that break out among techies have been conducted transparently.

I’m not an Internet governance scholar but from what I remember reading this is rather dubious.

It is also no accident that many of the countries loudest in their demands for the internet to be taken out of American hands are those, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that are keenest on restricting its use by their own citizens.

Well, as we have recently heard private Internet companies are hardly standard-bearers of freedom on the whole.

In the accompanying article the Economist did unearth an interesting factoid which didn’t come up in the keynote speech we heard (which was largely lacking in the all-important gossip about this process):

Some countries demanded that groups representing business and public-interest causes be thrown out of the room when governments drafted documents for the summit in November. In one instance, delegates from China and Brazil actually pounded on tables to drown out a speaker from industry.

I would really like to know what that industry speaker was trying to say…

Update: I have started to run across more and more US coverage (on American Public Radio’s Future Tense, for example, or on This Week in Tech which is currently the most popular podcast. I have yet to hear anyone invited to speak when the issue comes up from the anti-US-governance side on this issue. I suspect it is because they don’t know who to ask. So is there a media-savvy person prepared to point out the real or potential problems in US dominance over the Internet’s architecture and to make the case for international governance? For that matter, is there a good document available online that makes this case?

… is the headline result from a collection of seemingly random Internet-related factoids from a Guardian report of a UK poll.

Among those with a web connection at home, 31% [of 14 to 21 year olds] said that they had launched their own personal site or blog. Those aged 16 to 17 have taken most avidly to personal online publishing, with a female bias.

I hope the full results get published somewhere.

Might be interesting for others at AoIR6.