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

BoingBoing recently published an extraordinary allegation - a reader claims Yahoo’s new web ad publishing network tries to insist that non-US web surfers must not see their ads. Of course this is very difficult if not impossible for a potential content publisher to guarantee - but imagine if it was? If successful, Yahoo would be responsible for ghettoising the Internet just in order to make their ad network more efficient. I’m a little disappointed the media hasn’t picked this up yet - I can imagine the furore if some French ad network did the same thing to American content…
This is not a new problem, by the way. There have been repeated attempts to produce artificial national restrictions to Internet-distributed content. The BBC’s Creative Archive License for example appears only to allow UK residents to re-use their material.

One of the cliches of weblogging advocates is that webloggers are disinterested ordinary people whereas journalists are biased and prey to PR ’spin’. Well it turns out that PR agencies are increasingly targetting bloggers as well - with some success. This NYT story about Walmart feeding bloggers stories shows bloggers doing the kind of things “MSM” journalists are often accused of - copying and pasting press releases.

You can see some of the early reaction to the story already on the blog of one of the bloggers named in the story.

And one aspect of the story the NYT didn’t concentrate on - the PR agency in question, Edelman, has written a report last year (Ironically entitled Trust ‘Media’: How Real People Are Finally Being Heard) urging just this kind of active engagement with selected bloggers.

I haven’t had a chance to read David Horowitz’s new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America but I have followed with fascinated/horrified interest the ensuing furore. I was finally moved to comment when I read Todd Gitlin’s response to being one of the 101 in which he notes in passing that he is accused by Horowitz of "immersing" his students in the "obscurantist texts of leftist icons like Jurgen Habermas."

It’s beyond me to conceive of teaching courses about the place of the media in society (for example) without ensuring some familiarity with Habermas‘ absolutely crucial work on the public sphere (even if only to critique it whether from the left or from the right). There’s a reason why the guy’s an icon. If that makes me a "dangerous academic"-in-training number 102, so be it!

25 American bloggers have been selected to go on a Dutch junket. They are required by the PRs to disclose the gift but will be interviewed by tourism officials who can use their comments for promotional material both on and offline. Such junkets are commonplace in trade publications at least here in the UK (who otherwise would not be able to pay to test cars, computers etc) but normally journalists here excuse themselves because they take presents equally from all sides… A furious debate has already begun in the blogosphere…

Sue Thomas of the Writing and the Digital Life weblog brought my attention to a row that broke out a few days ago between Mena Trott (co-founder of a major weblog software developer) and Ben Metcalfe, leader of the BBC’s developer network. Mena was arguing that bloggers should be more civil in comments to other people’s blogs while Ben argued honesty was more important. This is an argument that will never be resolved because both sides seem to be trying to make rules applicable to all webloggers when all the evidence (including my research to date) seems to be showing that webloggers are performing a wide range of practices, each with their own appropriate norms and values.

Mena is arguably right that commenters should respect the norms of behaviour that appear to be present on a given weblog but Ben is right to suggest that in the subset of weblogs dedicated to rational critical discourse (a small subset of the whole), norms of politeness may be inappropriate and stifle debate. The real problem they are (unwittingly) identifying is not "how can we enforce or encourage a single norm of weblogging behaviour" but "how can webloggers signal what the ‘rules of engagement’ are for the spaces they create?" Perhaps bloggers could create "creative commons" style "licenses" around commonly-held behaviour norms?

P.S. In that case this blog might be labelled "comments encouraged, politeness not required, provision of evidence for opinions encouraged, statement of conflict of interest required where appropriate".

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.

In response to comments by the “Cream gang” here’s a brief and I hope final statement of why I think their approach to improving the public’s digital rights situation is wrong.

I agree with them that the public is currently unlikely to rally behind any calls for (for example) a roll-back of the number of years of copyright protection or controls on DRM. Unlike them I don’t think that if we give corporations their heads they will eventually overstep and make themselves fatally unpopular. I don’t believe they are that stupid - they will push copyright as far as the public will accept and no further.

I think we both agree however that the public will accept a situation which is worse than it needs to be - mainly because they don’t really understand what might be possible if things were different. (I think however that the row over Google Books might just provide one easy to grasp example of how excessively strict copyright protection damages the public interest).

I also agree that lobbying the Guardian and the Register et al is a bit of a waste of time since as Nick Mailer, Martin Coxall et al point out they are already converted (though by all means keep lobbing them the press releases - after all it costs little to add a few names to the list).

I think however (and this is where we differ essentially) that there are a large number of elected representatives who have not thought through copyright issues and are not that interested in them but who could be persuaded to take the right path through reasoned argument even if there are no votes in it for them. That’s where the focus of the Open Rights Group should be (and I imagine where it will be). Not in lobbying Internet users or the general public but in presenting persuasive arguments about the public good to key expert decision makers.

Of course it would be better if the public understood the issues and got on board but there are large swathes of policy-making that take place without substantial input from the public as a whole because the public as a whole doesn’t care enough about the issue in question.

A few days ago I wrote arguing that the case against continued effective control of ICANN by the US government needs to be made as the "hands off" American argument seems to be almost ubiquitous online. Well, I finally found an organization making this case - IP3 - Internet and Public Policy - which has just put out "ICANN Reform: Establishing the Rule of Law". Ironically it is an academic at an American university who is making this case. Prof Hans Klein argues in the paper:

ICANN?s history shows how private governance can be captured by powerful players. At WSIS governments need to create and enforce a legally-defined framework that limits the power of all stakeholders — including governments themselves. By establishing the rule of law, the politicized processes of ICANN can be replaced by predictable, fair, and efficient decision-making.

It looks as if Hans Klein’s work and those of other allied academics is finally getting some press coverage in the run-up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Alex Halavais notes that his students seem fairly uninterested in protecting their privacy in the face of increasing threats and alludes to an argument often made by technological determinists: “Maybe privacy was just a social artifact of the mass society of the twentieth century”. The question I would ask is if societal norms move in a direction you think is dangerous shouldn’t you act even if the process is voluntary and at the end of the process society will believe itself to be just as happy? I think a lot of technologists are giving up too soon and saying that computers make spreading data around so easy that it must eventually get everywhere (’information wants to be free’).

The fact is that like any other social phenomenon, the draining away of our privacy is at least in part under our own control. If you think (as I do sometimes) that we are strolling blindly into a scary self-imposed “omni-opticon” society then you can try to organize people to become better aware of the dangers (as Alex is indeed doing) and/or you can get governments to take action (and indeed in Europe our privacy is better protected than it is in the US - at least from media and commercial prying).

P.S. By coincidence MSNBC is doing a special online series on privacy (from an American perspective) this week.

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.

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?

The Boston Review published a fascinating article recently, Do the Right Thing about how scientists and scholars are attempting to determine whether there is a universal moral sense. Rebecca Saxe’s roundup includes contributions from social science and anthropology on one side and from cognitive science and biology on the other.

Mentioned in the article is the Moral Sense Test - an Internet-based survey using sample moral dilemmas to see who answers in what way and find patterns across different cultures. If you think their work is worthwhile, take the test yourself…

Inna Kouper pointed me to a report by a left wing think tank claiming that there are now more readers of left than right wing weblogs. It is a pretty partisan report making some bold and not substantiated claims - for example that the right wing blogosphere is "nurtured by institutions and is part of the conservative,
right‐wing media machine" while the left wing blogosphere is "introducing new actors into the political scene".

The most interesting claim which they support with some survey evidence (though without giving enough methodological detail) is that "as of 2003, the conservative blogosphere was between two and three times as large as the progressive blogosphere, and held a commanding lead in terms of overall traffic", but "In less than two years the progressive blogosphere had grown from less than as big as the conservative blogosphere, to nearly
double its size" [in terms of traffic].

I find it hard to get too excited about the stats until I read some more detail about how the statistics were collected (particularly because the organization they say did much of the research, MyDD, is a Democrat politics blog not a market research organization). But if they were true it would be an interesting springboard for future research…

The insularity of American web publishers has long been a pet peeve of mine so the launch of the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers with accompanying American-style logo struck a sore nerve. It’s true that in their overview of common issues FAQ they point out that laws vary between countries but several of the sub-FAQs fail to make this point and some of them could therefore actually mislead the unwary. Like their guide to defamation law which says, “If the plaintiff is a public figure, he or she must also prove actual malice” - not true in the UK, for example, I believe. I think in Europe people also have more rights to privacy than here (eg I think you in theory have to get permission from people you take pictures of if you want to publish them though I am not sure about this).

Simply calling it the Legal Guide for American Bloggers would help a lot here, and if they encouraged other major blogging countries’ policy wonks to produce similar guides (and linked to them) that would help a lot too. Meanwhile, serious UK and European bloggers might want to look at The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information by Charles Oppenheim which I picked up some time ago though it is now four years old (can anyone suggest anything more recent and/or cheaper?). Suggestions via comments of websites and other online resources relevant to other countries would be welcome.

Of course, I should add, the EFF’s publication of a guide like this is, on the whole, a Good Thing, they have produced lots of other good stuff both for Americans and for the wider Internet-using public and if you are in the US and a blogger (or just want to see how their law affects ordinary members of the American web publishing public) this guide is well worth reading. Also see their guide to How to Blog Anonymously…

Human Events (a conservative publication in the US) made a list of books it thought were the most harmful. There were a few authors you could predict (Marx, Mao, Hitler) but some surprises too.

• 4 was the Kinsey Report which they thoughtfully characterise as "designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy". Heaven forbid we should actually know and come to terms with what people actually do in their bedrooms!
• 5 was Dewey’s Democracy and Education which "disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development" (ie social control) "and encouraged the teaching of thinking ’skills’" (quel horreur!). And…
• 8 was Compte’s The Course of Positive Philosophy which just made me think I should look up Compte!

I also thought it entertaining that they include John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty among the runners-up. Wouldn’t want any of that nasty liberty…

Washington Monthly riposted with some books the Left would rather hadn’t been written. Christopher Tassava suggests his own list including the Bible which might put the cat among the pigeons!

Blog censorship gains support | CNET News.com

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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.

The latest poll is a little CNN.com - Poll: Most Americans unfamiliar with blogs Thanks to Blogcount for the link.

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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…)