Alvi, I., et al. (2007) “Meeting Their Potential: The Role of Education and Technology in Overcoming Disadvantage and Disaffection in Young People” - the 125 page report is free to download from BECTA, which sponsored it - co-authors from Media@LSE include Sonia Livingstone, Ellen Helsper and myself. Comments would be welcome.

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This video is very popular among technophiles, as its ranking on Technorati demonstrates. It suggests that thanks to Web 2.0 technologies (which it neatly explains) “we’ll have to rethink copyright, identity, ethics… ourselves”.

While I am by any measure a heavy user of Web 2.0 technologies, the sunny optimism of some social web enthusiasts this video and the absence of a wider social perspective on the phenomenon really irks me.

Update: Michael Wesch responded to this post (see comments below) and it appears I have misrepresented him - I should not have read sunny optimism into the video. After all in the time available it is asking a lot to both present the potentials of Web 2.0 as he has done impressively and to critique them. But to continue…

The fact remains that according to a recent survey only a little more than a quarter of US online users have ever tagged anything and only 7% of them do so daily. And who are the people who tag (and by extension use a variety of Web 2.0 services?). As Pew notes, “classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.” Eszter Hargittai’s earlier research bears out this relative lack of interest in Web 2.0 usage - even among American college students. Hell, this video itself, although it is the toast of the blogosphere at the moment, has been viewed less than 20,000 times. Doesn’t that say something about the limited scale of interest in Web 2.0?

So what? Well the creator of this video and other Web 2.0 enthusiasts believe that tagging is “easy” and “anyone can do it”. Tacitly then they also believe that the contents of user-content databases and the “folksonomies” that are created therein represent (if not now then soon) the preferences and interests of everyone - or at least everyone who matters - instead of the somewhat self-reinforcing interest clusters of a technologically savvy elite.

It concerns me that thanks to this presumption and thanks to the ease with which this data can be mined by journalists, marketers, politicians, PRs and other trend-spotters, the interests and preferences of this narrow group will tend to be over-stressed at the expense of those without the time and inclination to surf and tag.

Of course tagging is in its infancy and doubtless it will grow in popularity. But does this mean it will become mainstream? I have my doubts. And even if it does I suspect most content creation and tagging will continue to be done by a passionate (or geeky) few, like myself.

This, I suggest, is what we need to bear in mind before we “rethink governance” based on an enthusiasm for this new set of technologies.

David Brake

PS it is an ironic commentary on the “ease of use” of Web 2.0 technology that I had a great deal of difficulty embedding this video. Comments are now working so please feel free to add your own in the usual way (and comment on any past posts here if you had trouble doing so before!).

I have been thinking about a methodological issue - online interviewing vs face to face. One issue is simply the likely amount of data one can reasonably get from an interviewee in a given time. If the average Internet user’s typing speed is 30-40 words per minute (based entirely arbitrarily on what Microsoft seems to think an “average user” might achieve) while the average speed of normal speech is 280 word per minute (again only rather loosely sourced) then given the same time commitment from your interviewee you’ll only get about 15% as much typed info as you would get face to face. Of course there are a lot of other variables in there to help you decide what method to use but I would still be interested to know if anyone can provide proper citeable estimates of typical typing and speaking speeds to use as rules of thumb. It strikes me that differential typing speed might be an under-measured index of the digital divide as well…

David Brake

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

Wikipedia in English has a couple of things working for it. English is the international language of science and a first or second language for most of those already connected to the Internet. The population of people from whom the core editing population is likely drawn - literate people in developed countries with good Internet access and enough time after their basic needs are met to devote to a volunteer project - are also largely English speakers. But it turns out according to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (speaking at TED), only about 1/3 of accesses to Wikipedia are to the English language part.

When I heard him say this I immediately wondered (given the fact he admits that 600-1,000 people make up the ‘core’ of wikipedia’s editors) how many people are primary contributors in other languages? It turns out in the case of Swahili at least the answer appears to be just four, and only one of them is African (living in America).

When contributor numbers are low and when the big English language volunteer community at Wikipedia can’t keep an eye on things (because they can’t read the language) what is to prevent individuals or groups with an axe to grind exploiting the Wikipedia brand? Has anyone looked to see whether the entries on the causes of AIDS written in small African languages are consistent with current science or lean towards crackpot theories? What does the Chinese language version of Wikipedia say about the ‘June 4th incident’ at Tiananmen Square and is its ‘neutral point of view’ account significantly different from that of the English language version of the same event? I just checked on this and a Google translation of the Chinese language account seems to tone down the casualty figures, saying something like “specific figures are not known, there are hundreds of thousands of view” while the English version says “Estimates of civilian deaths vary: 23 (Communist Party of China), 400–800 (Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000″.

This is of particular concern given that it recently emerged that selected Wikipedia articles will be installed on the $100 laptops being produced by the One Laptop Per Child Consortium. Is there a danger that articles in non-English languages (selected by whom?) may not be produced to the standards held by the English-language Wikipedia and yet may be seen by impressionable children as the infallible wisdom of the Internet handed down in their magic boxes?

But I’d like to end on a cheerful note. If the students who receive these laptops are very lucky their teachers could use Wikipedia articles as a way to introduce critical media literacy. They might be told that these Wikipedia articles are written by ordinary people like them and can be edited by them. It would be pleasing to think that the dearth of Internet content aimed at developing countries could be tackled, at least in part, by those nations’ schoolchildren.

David Brake

There is now an official site about the One Laptop Per Child project and the announcement of this prompted a small explosion of debate about their merits on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list . It has encouraged me to blow the dust off the collection of links I have been holding on to since November and to weigh in myself a bit on the subject.

Others’ Criticism:

• Institute for the Future of the Book: hundred dollar laptops may make good table lamps “it’s hard not to laugh at the leaders of the free world bumbling over this day-glo gadget, this glorified Trapper Keeper cum jack-in-the-box (Annan ended up breaking the hand crank), with barely a word devoted to what educational content will actually go inside, or to how teachers plan to construct lessons around these new toys.”
• Further criticism in more depth by the (competing) Fonly Institute. I agree with their issues completely, though I think they rather ‘over-sell’ the problems. I do fear as they do that if this device doesn’t fly it might make it more difficult to get any future interest in a better thought through ICT programme based on low-cost computing.
• Ethan Zuckerman also frets about one key aspect the Fonly Institute and others highlighted: the optimistic forecasts by the laptop’s designers that students will spontaneously fiddle with and create with them.

Description

• A week ago Ethan produced an excellent in-depth technology overview which reveals among other things that while the laptops will be human-powered the hand-crank has been eliminated from the design.
• An eight minute video tour of the device was the first I came across several months ago - it might be interesting to compare to the overview above.
• If you are interested in description of the project from its leader there is a 55 minute video interview with Negroponte about it (which I haven’t managed to listen to yet).

My thoughts on the AoIR debate

I would say most of the discussion on the mailing list has been critical of the OLPC project. Much of the criticism is for reasons I agree with but some seemed a little doctrinaire. This is not an ‘inferior’ technology as Christian Fuchs suggests - it is an appropriate one. Even if ‘conventional’ laptops costing ten times as much were made available in the countries where the OLPC will be trialled, they would arguably be less useful as they would be less durable and would rely on more expensive components and software. These laptops will not tie their users in to Western commercial technology and standards as Christian fears (at least not any more than they are already) because they are based solidly on open source software. And rightly or wrongly these are not aimed at the countries whose inhabitants live on $2 a day - they are aimed at middle-ranking developing countries like China, India and Brazil which have enough money to consider this kind of investment in their children (though I would still argue that this major sum spent in ‘conventional’ ways on teachers or books would yield a better result).

Lastly, Jeremy Hunsinger says there is no plan for teacher or student training to go with these devices. This would of course be a big concern if true. It is true that the designers appear to have weirdly utopian ideas about children teaching themselves using these laptops with little or no teacher intervention (as echoed by Wojciech Gryc). See for example the OLPC FAQ - note it does not even mention as a question the need for training kids to learn with them and it says, among other things:

While the younger generations who are affected by this project become more computer literate and technologically developed in a modern sense, they will begin to have a more profound social leverage than their elders. The formative years of childhood, and the education received during that time span contribute to a wholistic result, which will present a tremendous contrast between those who have been given a computer-based education and those who have not.

Which is techno-utopianism at its finest. I can only hope that (since the wiki is open to anyone to edit) this is the view of a OLPC ‘fellow traveller’ not the staff. It is true that there have been a few promising pilots that demonstrated even Delhi slum children will teach themselves how to use computers out of sheer curiosity given the chance but I would be amazed if there has been enough research on how this works and under what conditions to satisfy the academic pedagogical community (has there been thorough discussion of pilot projects like the ‘hole in the wall’ one yet in academic journals and conferences?).

In any event I am a little more optimistic - since pilot organizations will be investing a lot of money (relative to their budgets) on these devices I would hope some of them at least will devote some careful thought to the issues that Jeremy and others pointed out and turn deaf ears to the OLPC team’s assurances that these are pure ‘machines for learning’ - no teacher input required.

David Brake

TakeAway - ‘the Festival of do it yourself Media’ is on in W London. This sounds like a great idea and I hope events like this one take off across the country. So much of government policy about the digital divide is about enabling people to consume Internet media - little effort seems to be going into helping people produce their own. My only concern is that the programme does look a little ‘art world’ inward-looking. I wonder whether it will manage to reach out to people not already integrated in the art and techie communities…

Over the past several months, Global Voices Online has emerged as the leading online portal and guide to international blogs beyond North America and Western Europe. It has also become the hub of a growing community of international bloggers who want to build a better global conversation.

The Global Voices Summit, on December 10th, will be an opportunity for contributors and community members to take stock of what we?ve done, promote our successes, and brainstorm about what a global citizens? media community might accomplish going forward.

Alas the physical meeting is already full but they will be encouraging online participation as well with video streaming and IRC.

… 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.

The American consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports recently published a online hazards survey which found:

• 33% of those surveyed said a virus or spyware caused serious problems with their computer systems and/or financial losses within the past two years.
• 50% reported a spyware infection in the past six months. Of those, 18% said the infection was so bad they had to erase their hard drives.

  To avoid spyware, 51% of all online users reported being more careful visiting Web sites, and 38 % said they download free programs less frequently.

• 64% of survey respondents said they had detected viruses on their computer in the past two years. 4% found them at least 50 times.
• Macs are safer than Windows PCs for some online hazards. Only 20% of Mac owners surveyed reported detecting a virus in the past two years, compared with 66% of Windows PC owners. Just 8% of Mac users reported a spyware infection in the last six months vs. 54% of Windows PC users.

To this I would add that my guess is that a fair amount of the virus reporting by Mac owners is probably "false positives" - people whose Macs stopped working for some unrelated reason and they blamed it on viruses. Ditto for spyware. I don’t think viruses or spyware aimed at current Macs are still around outside of the labs of anti-virus software companies.

There are some good recommendations linked alongside the report but interestingly it fails to mention one of the best ways to reduce the incidence of viruses and spyware - don’t use Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. It’s not that they are bad in themselves (though I would argue the free alternatives like Eudora and Firefox are better) - it’s that virus and spyware writers tailor their programs to work with the most popular email and web browsing programs out there.

A note about computer literacy - 17% of respondents weren?t using antivirus software and 10% of those with high-speed broadband access–prime targets for hackers–said they didn?t have firewall protection.

Also see two recent reports from the excellent Pew Internet and American Life project:
Spam & Phishing (April)
Spyware (July)

The UK government is trying out a new service - the People’s Network Enquiry Service where you can ask (it seems) just about any question you like and a librarian either from the UK or somewhere else in the world (if you mail outside 9-5 Mon to Fri) will try to answer it. Will this encourage those not online to use it by providing an easy to understand alternative to surfing? Time will tell…

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At a recent presentation, the OII unveiled some data from its 2005 survey of UK Internet use (and put it in an international perspective). That data is on their site now. I found the slide below particularly interesting:

The choice to ‘go broadband’ in the UK doesn’t seem as income-constrained as I thought. Of course that is the percentage of UK Internet users with broadband so if you adjust for the fact that low earners are less likely to be online at all, it looks more stratified. But you can check out the presentation yourself…

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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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According to the 2005 International Business Owners Survey, reported in The Economist, there were wide variations in the amount of time spent by business owners on email. Interestingly, this time does not correlate particularly closely with domestic Internet penetration - it is highest in the Philippines.

It is also striking that the percentage of those who think the Internet has increased their revenues ranges from 13% in France to 84% in (again) the Philippines (graph follows below).
(more…)

As David Wilcox points out, there is a new site/service recently launched - the Digital Divide Network which offers an array of communication tools to practitioners from blogs to good old fashioned discussion boards as well as collections of articles.

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Did you know there are more Korean bloggers than American ones? That 90% of South Koreans in their 20s have a blog?! UsageWatch.org cites the makers of Cyworld and some market research to suggest that one in four of all South Koreans have a blog on that service alone. Makes the November figures for the US (7% of adult US internet users or 2.7% of the US population according to Pew) seem puny by comparison.

I will be studying UK weblogging for my thesis but this really makes me wish I spoke Korean and could do my research there… Also see:

• this International Herald Tribune article for the demographic and financial figures
• ‘I Was a Cyholic, a Cyworld Addict’ for a more personal view (from one of the ‘citizen reporters’ for OhMyNews - another S Korean phenomenon I blogged about earlier…
• and here for some suggestions about why S Korea has such high broadband penetration.
• Update: Blogcount cites sources suggesting even higher numbers of Korean bloggers and points out that the various blog monitoring services like Technorati don’t seem to be tracking them.

Russia Broadband Overview

the residential sector is dominated at present by the informal ‘Home Networks’ which use Ethernet LANs to link up buildings, housing developments and sometimes whole neighbourhoods to ‘broadband’ access (2 Mbps up to the buildings is considered the average by local observers). These operators account for some 75% residential users, or some 550,000 by end 2004, connected households throughout Russia, according to analysts. They are generally very low cost. These informal networks are expected to dominate for perhaps a further two years until DSL is more widespread. During this period the larger telcos are expected to try to buy up the small Home LAN companies and cooperatives.

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If you believe as I do that broadband Internet access is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from dialup access (see this Pew report and this ethnographic report in the UK from iSociety for some examples) then this recent global suvey of broadband access gives pause for thought.

Of the 128m broadband users worldwide, 53m are Asian, 42m are in the Americas and 32.8m are in Europe. While user growth in Asia is a little slower than elsewhere it is still well ahead in overall numbers and it will be interesting to see what difference this makes to the domestication of Internet in those countries and perhaps to their power in Internet governance debates. Sadly Africa seems as ‘digitally divided’ as ever, no matter how you look at it. The report lumps the Middle East and Africa together with ‘nearly 1m’ subscribers. And I’d be prepared to bet most of them are either white South Africans or wealthy Arabs and Israelis.

As to Europe, to my surprise, France (which has historically lagged behind in overall Internet penetration - see ITU) has the largest number of broadband subscribers in Europe - 5.27m (though Germany has 5.26m and the UK has 5m). Broadband prices in Europe have apparently dropped by 23% since the beginning of 2004. I hope this year brings continuing falls to the point where it no longer makes financial sense for Internet users to stick to dial-up…