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I presume there is literature out there taking a phenomenological view of what using a computer feels like but I am not sure where to start looking. I hope to use it to buttress a hunch I have about why people seem to have trouble in managing public vs private space online. My feeling is that it’s because typing stuff into a computer just doesn’t feel like you’re addressing a large crowd at that moment - it feels like you are talking to yourself (unless you are addressing it to particular named other people who you can then visualise). One can make a similar point about the long life of blog postings. They feel conversational, not like having something published and indexed.

Anyway the only relevant reference I have been able to dredge up from my memory and Endnote database so far is this

Le cahier est inerte, plat, il appartient a la nature inanimee, c’est un fantome de lettre, un ersatz de livre. L’ordinateur a plus de relief et de personnalite, c’est un organisme vivant qui s’allume et s’eteint, vous joue des tours, vous surveille… (LeJeune 2000, p. 20)

(Roughly translated: A notebook is inert, flat and inanimate… The computer has more personality. It is an organism which starts and closes down… and which looks at you.)

Lejeune, P. (2000) “Cher ecran– ” : Journal Personnel, Ordinateur, Internet, Editions du Seuil, Paris.

Can anyone out there point me to some relevant papers or books about this?

David Brake

Fred Stutzman blogged recently about the move from blogging to the use of “in betweenâ€? software tools for very short postings. I am struck by the extent to which the framing of software tools affects their use. Even when tools have quite similar functionalities they get used differently depending on what they are ‘supposed’ to be for. For example, as Fred noted, people could choose to blog about very micro events but now that twitter has come along they use that instead. Or in my interviews with MySpace users they say that conventional email is ‘looong’ (ie they feel they have to write formally on email) while they can send short messages using MySpace’s internal email system because the norms that have emerged on MySpace are different. Though of course there is nothing in principle to prevent them from simply writing shorter emails - it’s not like there’s a per-message charge (yet!)

Fred seems to suggest that these tools are used differently because of their affordances – particularly that tools like twitter are explicitly directed at friends while blogging is “cast to the ether�. There may be an element of this by more sophisticated users but my research with personal bloggers suggests that many of them feel they are sending messages exclusively to their social network even though what they write may be visible to everyone.

PS apologies to our readers about the recent disappearance of the site - we hope we’ll be back for good now…

David Brake

I know it raises familiar awkward questions about Google’s market power but in this instance I have to agree. Google’s ban on advertising for essay writing services joins its existing bans on ads for “weapons, prostitution, drugs, tobacco, fake documents and miracle cures.”

Just wanted to take the opportunity to highlight two very useful resources danah boyd has recently brought to my attention via her blog.

First is a presentation (available in audio and video though not alas transcribed) by her and three other US leaders in the study of online risks for young people - David Finkelhor, Michele Ybara and Amanda Lenhart. I was surprised as she was about how much their conclusions (particularly those of Finkelhor and Ybara) seem to have been misrepresented by the media. They do an excellent job of separating the hype about online dangers from the realities and the remedies they suggest for educators and for parents (and their criticisms of current thinking) seem to me very well thought through and argued.

danah mentioned an idea which I hadn’t seen promoted before - “digital street outreach” - the idea that peers online would intervene when they see behaviour or profiles that suggest the author is having trouble. I had thought the Cyber Angels might be doing this kind of work but it seems their focus is now on schools and parents not on the troubled kids themselves.

On a similar theme, but with more qualitative detail, I recommend a paper of danah’s she recently published online both as text and as audio - “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?”. It was very broad-ranging and gives an excellent introduction to some of the issues around young people’s use of social networking software.

The invaluable Pew Internet & American Life Project has just completed some more research trying to come up with a typology of American Internet use. You can fill out your own David Brake

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

I thought I would look up the stats on weblog production in the US to see whether they appear to justify the conventional wisdom that blogging continues to increase in popularity. Well it turns out that the picture according to Pew Internet’s longitudinal data don’t appear to back that point of view - in fact, the graph of American Internet users having ‘ever created a weblog or ‘blog’” appears to peak in Jan 05 at 10% and decline to between 7 and 9% since. In principle of course the number who have ever created a blog can only rise. But the survey has a precision of +-3% so almost all of the variation is within that range. The best we can therefore say is that in January 2005 between 7 and 13% of Americans had created a weblog and by April 2006 that number had likely not changed much (the range being between 5 and 11% at that point - though the question asked had slightly changed).

 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.

Sonia Livingstone has asked me to pass this on. Please respond to her directly (as below) but it would be interesting if you could share your favourite new media papers here in the comments as well (and comment on my choices - at the bottom - if you wish):

My colleague Leah Lievrouw and I have been asked to develop and edit a major compilation of “classic” must-read articles in new media studies - a sort of “desert island” collection that will be published as a (rather hefty) four-volume reference.

Leah and I have made our own preliminary list. However, our experience with the Handbook of New Media has taught us that this field is a very big umbrella, covering everything from media law and regulation, to studies of communities and social networks, to education and the workplace, to digital arts and culture (and more). The challenge is to assemble a collection that fairly and comprehensively covers the field as we specialists understand it.

So, we are seeking your help! We’d love you to tell us about up to three nominations for journal or proceedings articles, key book chapters, or other publications of similar length that you would consider essential reads for anyone wanting to know what new media studies (broadly construed) is about.

These might be readings you always assign to students, items you consistently cite in your own work, or pieces that have made a difference in the way you think about and study new media yourself. We are particularly interested in items that have historical value, tend to be overlooked, or concisely capture a writer’s most important ideas. We’re also keen to make this an international list, since this is an international field. You may suggest your own publications, BUT we are more interested to know what or who has influenced you.

Leah and I will select the final list for the collection, but we will be happy to summarize and share everyone’s nominees after we get feedback, which itself should be a very interesting resource. We’d like your suggestions and ideas by October 1 if possible - we’re also eager to see if this exercise generates any discussion!

Thanks very much for your time and interest!

Sonia Livingstone - please reply to s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk

For myself (David Brake) I must admit I haven’t been as conscientious as I could be in keeping track of which papers and books I have found most useful or thought provoking but here are three that I thought were excellent and which others might not have run across:

Browne, K. D. and C. Hamilton-Giachritsis (2005) “The Influence of Violent Media on Children and Adolescents: A Public-Health Approach“, Lancet, 365 pp. 702-710.
A clear and concise overview of the extensive scientific debate on this contentious issue.
Bruckman, A. (2001) “Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet”. in Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiries, Lancaster, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html

Nuanced discussion of different ways of ethically treating people whose texts and other works appear online ranging from full disclosure of their identities to complete concealment.

Crawford, A. (2002) “The Myth of the Unmarked Speaker” in Critical Perspectives on the Internet, (Elmer, G. ed.) Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 89-104.
An excellent and thoughtful debunking of the notion that text-based Internet communication eliminates status differentials because of the lack of visual or verbal cues.

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

According to a new report by Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulatory authority (reported on the BBC News site) a staggering 70% of 16-24 year olds online (compared to 41% of the general population) have used some kind of social networking site, such as My Space, and one in five have their own website or blog.

The interesting bits are from page 68 of the telecoms section PDF (p 172 of the report). For example:

41% of UK adults with internet at home say they have used social network sites, with around half of those doing so on a weekly basis . Nearly one third use them for discussing hobbies and interests, and a further 26% discuss work-related topics online. Fewer internet users take advantage of websites for discussing personal issues (17%) or meeting new people (15%).

There has been a recent report by the excellent Pew Internet and American Life project on bloggers in the US as well that I imagine many of you have heard of but because they measure things differently (eg treating social networking software as a kind of blog for statistical purposes) it is hard to directly compare them with the results of this survey. Both the UK and US have some way to go in matching S Korea in blogging, however. Last year according to the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication more than half of all of S Koreans in their 20s had a blog (that’s in part because more than 95% of S Koreans that age were online).

Pew makes their raw data available a few months after the reports they produce emerge and I understand it is possible that Ofcom will do the same so if you are a researcher it may be worth visiting their research page from time to time to see if it turns up…

David Brake

I’ve been listening to this podcast of a conference presentation by Anil Dash at MeshForum 2006 where he (one of the earliest weblog developers) makes a number of interesting statements including this snippet relevant to my upcoming thesis about personal weblogging, 4 minutes, 57 seconds in to his talk:

You have to know who the audience is that you care about. One of the assumptions that a lot of us that have been in technology make is that if we just let them everybody would want to talk to 100 people around the world and tell them how they feel. That’s actually not true and for most people they consider those of us that do that to be somewhere between strange and psychopathic.

Now how would you cite that? At the moment I guess that it should be treated as a conference proceeding:

Dash, A. (2005) “Scale Social Networks and Livejournal.Com “. in MeshForum, San Francisco, California,May 7, IT Conversations. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1069.html

But that doesn’t tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesn’t tell you that the part you want to hear is around 5 minutes in. This useful guide to Harvard citation says BS:5605:1990 (whatever that is) doesn’t include recommendations for electronic sources. Is there an advanced Harvard Style Lab somewhere coming up with standards for this stuff? What would you do? Should I just make up my own style?

David Brake

I have just been listening to NPR’s Technology podcasts and their coverage of the furore about strangers molesting children they first met through MySpace. I have some sympathy with the view that not enough had been done by the company to ensure the safety of children but some of the comments by those who are concerned make me worried as well.

Take for example the comments of Carl Berry, the attorney for a girl suing MySpace for letting an adult contact her “If they want to chat with each other that’s fine but I don’t see the social benefit of allowing children to talk to complete adult strangers online”, or those of Representative Diana DeGette (D) who told NPR, “we used to say to our children if a man comes up to you in the park or in the shopping mall don’t talk to them, run away. Now we have to translate that to the digital era.”

Are Americans really so terrified of each other? Fairly recent (2000) US research indicates only 7.5% of sexual assaults on children and adolescents were perpetrated by strangers (and quite a high proportion of assaults on teenagers are perpetrated by other teens, not predatory adults). The tens of thousands of ’stranger on pre-teen’ assaults in the US each year are terrible crimes but by far the majority of children will never face this danger. Is it worth creating a climate of pervasive fear and limiting childrens’ freedom to explore (and yes, even to make mistakes) in an attempt to tackle this? Just as adults’ civil liberties can be endangered in the ‘War on Terror’, those of children can be imperilled in the ‘War on Perverts’. And children arguably have even less of a chance to put their point of view than accused terrorists.
(Also see earlier posts Big Mother is Watching and The Death of Privacy).

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

I thought I had written my own robust defence of Google Book Search and book digitisation in general but it seems I haven’t - at least I haven’t found any on this blog or my personal one (though I posted enthusastically about meeting Brewster Kahle who runs the Internet Archive and briefly mentioned my own experience of using Google Books).

Kevin Kelly has had a go at providing a popular account of the potential importance and utility of the widespread availability of books online in Scan This Book! in the New York Times. He rehearses many of the good arguments against the ever-lengthening text copyright regime and for the social utility of book scanning programmes but unfortunately his argument is somewhat spoiled by his need to “epater les bourgeois”.

First by hyperbolic statements: “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” Inventions? Talmudic scholars (for one) would be surprised to learn we had just invented annotation.

Secondly, and more importantly, by un-necessarily sweeping and apocalyptic predictions about the way technology will (must?) change existing businesses (like publishing).

Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.

Much of what he says is arguably valid for non-fiction and particularly scientific research but less so for fiction where (as Updike says) we actually seem to like reading (or viewing) self-contained narratives (though we may then go on to comment on them or construct other self-contained narratives based on them).
He usefully points out that academic science is heading faster than other fields towards the universal library but doesn’t think through the implications. Academics need to publish freely to advance and do so happily but only because there is a state system in place that pays them to be experts because society benefits from their creation and dissemination of knowledge. It is hard to imagine the same model being applied to the writers of cookbooks, say, but in the UK we pay authors a (very) modest sum when their books are checked out of the public library.

Could some form of super-UNESCO (or a number of national government initiatives) help to fund freely-available fiction (or other creative works) to be added to the universal Internet library of the future? Perhaps paid for through a levy on broadband subscriptions as suggested by some in France - the Global License? This is approximately the way the BBC works, for example (though it is not as free as it should be in sharing the content that our license fees have paid for). Surely this is a more attractive proposition for artists than having to individually flog “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, ads, sponsorship or periodic subscriptions” which KK suggests are the options that will be available to artists in the brave new world when their individual works themselves are no longer saleable.

KK anticipates some of the hostile reaction that followed from John Updike (speaking predominantly on behalf of fiction authors) and by Nicholas Carr (among others) more generally:

Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

I for one am in the young enthusiast camp but I don’t think it means that the way things work in the creative industries has to be swept away in order to bring the (near)-universal Internet library about.

If we could reduce the term of copyright to 14 years, renewable for another 14 (as Creative Commons suggests) and if copyright could be easily asserted at a central database but the default for works where the ownership was unclear was that such work would be in the public domain, authors would still be able to get paid for their works during their most valuable commercial life but we would have a huge public domain of useful information instead of the stunted one we have now.

The above suggestions still radical (more radical than many authors and publishers would like, I am sure) but are consistent with the new potentials technology offers without requiring the total restructuring of publishing…

I’ve not provided as fully thought-through or well-ordered set of arguments here as I’d like (and not perhaps a particularly original point of view either - it draws heavily on Lawrence Lessig’s thinking, for example) but there’s as much polishing here as I can spare considering the £0 I am getting paid to write this! What do you think?

Update: As if in answer to my wishes, I have just heard about a very promising bill in the US House of Representatives - the Orphan Works Act which would release into the public domain works where the owner is no longer known. Someone should set up a campaign to support Lamar Smith (the bill’s sponsor).

David Brake

Since it is illegal to advertise smoking on TV and Hollywood and TV directors are being increasingly discouraged from glamourising the practice, nicotine peddlers are following ‘citizen journalists’ into DIY media. One savvy entrepreneur has decided to produce the Up in Smoke Video Podcast - guest starring technology pundits John C. Dvorak and Steve Gibson to give it some online word of mouth - and is trying to promote it via bloggers (the creator contacted me via my weblog).

I note that while the website of the company selling the cigars and producing and promoting the podcast asks that you be over 18 to view it, there is no such barrier to access the website or directly download the podcast and the only barrier to downloading the programme via iTunes is that it is rated ‘explicit’ (a tag normally used to describe language or nudity). iTunes does let you restrict access to ‘explicit’ content but that parental control option is not switched on by default.
Alas, the hype around weblogs being a ‘free’ media where the plucky independent citizen can challenge corrupt corporate and governmental interests is obscuring the manner in which business interests are sheltering behind its current lack of regulation for their own ends (as I have blogged before).

P.S. Smoking cigars is a fatal addiction - just say no!

P.P.S. To save you a lengthy download, the quality of the acting in this ‘mini sitcom’ is, perhaps unsurprisingly, truly awful. Not even laughably awful…

Who are the scholars who have written most about the social function of phatic speech? (For example, “turned out rainy again today” - a favourite British expression). I have a feeling it’s something Goffman or Garfinkel or Harvey Sacks might have studied but I am not sure which texts to look in. I am not so much interested in the structure of such speech but why people do it, what they expect from people who they talk to and perhaps something about the power relations implied.