Category: internet

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“The dictatorship of data” (on BBC R4)

Just caught up with a programme aired on BBC Radio 4 last week called “The Dictatorship of Data“, presented by their Security Correspondent Gordon Corera. The role of the presenter certainly inflects the tone of the programme. It focuses on the growth in the collection of data, as the wholesale capture of data exhausts and meta-data from our devices and public platforms, and thus how that collection and then aggregation both allows and then presents problems for forms of surveillance.

It is an interesting programme insofar as it offers a general introduction to several key issues. The discussion of the geopolitical responses to the uses of social media platforms and how Russia in particular wants to capture some of that capability (particularly in relation to SORM) is good, and it mostly draws on the authors of a book that sounds good: “Red Web“. Likewise, there’s some entertaining and perhaps disquieting discussion of ‘The Hacking Team‘, purveyors of malware to governments. Again, this is understandably figured in geopolitical terms.

However, I’d say it is slightly wide of the mark in terms of the discussion offered of the prospects of social media enabling some kind of authoritarianism. The way it is discussed takes as it’s assumption that people are faithfully reporting their actual opinions, ‘real’ events and so on and that they are individuals (and not bots) – as though social media are some kind of unproblematic ‘social sensing platform’. Now, some will argue that there is a way to somehow ‘solve’ the ‘biasing’ of the sample represented by a given social media platform’s population and I’m no statistician so… meh. I remain skeptical that any kinds of claim about ‘representivity‘ are particularly meaningful.

I think those who want a more nuanced viewpoint on some of these issues probably ought to checkout Louise Amoore‘s The Politics of Possibility and her papers following on from this, likewise it’s worth checking out both David Murakami Wood and Francisco Klauser‘s work on surveillance too (of course, there’s more – but you have access to a search engine 😉 ).

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CFP> Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices, Apr 2016

This looks interesting:

Streams of Consciousness

Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices

21st and 22nd of April 2016

Call for Papers

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“What’s on your mind?” This is the question to which every Facebook now responds. Millions of users sharing their thoughts in one giant performance of what Clay Shirky once called “cognitive surplus”. Contemporary media platforms aren’t simply a stage for this cognitive performance. They are more like directors, staging scenes, tweaking scripts, working to get the best or fully “optimized” performance. As Katherine Hayles has pointed out, media theory has long taken for granted that we think “through, with and alongside media”. Pen and paper, the abacus, and modern calculators are obvious cases in point, but the list quickly expands and with it longstanding conceptions of the Cartesian mind dissolve away. Within the cognitive sciences, cognition is now routinely described as embodied, extended, and distributed. They too recognize that cognition takes place beyond the brain, in between people, between people and things, and combinations thereof. The varieties of specifically human thought, from decision-making to reasoning and interpretation, are now considered one part of a broader cognitive spectrum shared with other animals, systems, and intelligent devices.

Today, the technology we mostly think through, with and alongside are computers. We routinely rely on intelligent devices for any number of operations, but this is no straightforward “augmentation”. Our cognitive capacities are equally instrumentalized, plugged into larger cognitive operations from which we have little autonomy. Our cognitive weaknesses are exploited and manipulated by techniques drawn from behavioural economics and psychology. If Vannevar Bush once pondered how we would think in the future, he received a partial response in Steve Krug’s best selling book on web usability: Don’t Make Me Think! Streams of Consciousness aims to explore cognition, broadly conceived, in an age of intelligent devices. We aim to critically interrogate our contemporary infatuation with specific cognitive qualities – such as “smartness” and “intelligence” – while seeking to genuinely understand the specific forms of cognition that are privileged in our current technological milieu. We are especially interested in devices that mediate access to otherwise imperceptible forms of data (too big, too fast), so it can be acted upon in routine or novel ways.

Topics of the conference include but are not limited to:

  • data and cognition
  • decision-making technologies
  • algorithms, AI and machine learning
  • visualization, perception
  • sense and sensation
  • business intelligence and data exploration
  • signal intelligence and drones
  • smart and dumb things
  • choice and decision architecture
  • behavioural economics and design
  • technologies of nudging
  • interfaces
  • bodies, data, and (wearable) devices
  • optimization
  • web and data analytics (including A/B and multivariate testing)

Please submit individual abstracts of no longer than 300 words. Panel proposals are also welcome and should also be 300 words. Panel proposals should also include indvidual abstracts. The deadline for submissions is Friday the 18th of December and submissions should be made to cimconf@warwick.ac.uk. Accepted submissions will be notified by 20th of January 2016.
Streams of Consciousness is organised by Nathaniel Tkacz and Ana Gross. The event is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.

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Reblog> Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access Is Becoming Irrelevant?

A really interesting post by Gary Hall on his blog around what ‘open access’ means and how we negotiate what might be understood as the ‘attention economy’ of academia in relation to the ways in which sites like academia.edu and research gate leverage the ‘respectability’ of our work and our collective need to find audiences in order to generate valuable metadata. As Hall argues:

 In this world who gate-keeps access to (and so can extract maximum value from) content is less important, because that access is already free, than who gate-keeps(and so can extract maximum value from) the data generated around the use of that content, which is used more because access to it is free.

I heartily recommend reading the whole piece…

Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access Is Becoming Irrelevant?

brief discussion took place this month on the Association of Internet Researchers air-l listserve concerning a new book from the publishers Edward Elgar: Handbook of Digital Politics. Edited by Stephen Coleman and Deen Freelon, this 512 page volume features contributions from Peter Dahlgren, Nick Couldry, Christian Fuchs, Fadi Hirzalla and Liesbet van Zoonen, among numerous others. The discussion was provoked, however, not by something one of its many contributors had written about digital politics, but by the book’s cost: $240 on Amazon in the US. (In the UK the hardback is £150.00 on Amazon. Handbook of Digital Politics is also available online direct from the publishers for £135.00, with the ebook available for £40.) As one of those on the list commented, ‘I’d love to buy it, but not at that price’ – to which another participant in the discussion responded: ‘I encourage everyone to use the preprint option to post their piece on ssrn.com and academia.edu, perhaps others have other open access suggestions (e.g. Institutional Repositories of individual universities)’. Now, to be fair, the idea that is implied by this suggestion – that the Academia.edu platform for sharing research represents just another form of open access – is a common one. Yet posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository.

Read the whole post here.

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The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies – @furtherfield exhibition

I just wanted to flag this excellent exhibition about to start at Furtherfield (in London). It involves the Museum of Contemporary Commodities alongside a lot of other great work and will very much be worth visiting.

The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies

17 OCTOBER – 22 NOVEMBER 2015

Featuring Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Shu Lea Cheang, Sarah T Gold, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Rob Myers, The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC), the London School of Financial Arts and the Robin Hood Cooperative.

Furtherfield launches its Art Data Money programme with The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies at Furtherfield Gallery in the heart of London’s Finsbury Park.

The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies presents artworks that reveal how we might produce, exchange and value things differently in the age of the blockchain.

Appealing to our curiosity, emotion and irrationality, international artists seize emerging technologies, mass behaviours and p2p concepts to create artworks that reveal ideas for a radically transformed artistic, economic and social future.

Visit the Furtherfield website for more information.

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Reblog> The Facebook Liberation Army at Discovery Festival: live deleting of facebook accounts

From the Institute of Network Culture blog… This is a nice playful response to the ways in which we can see uses of social media as ‘work’:

The Facebook Liberation Army at Discovery Festival: live deleting of facebook accounts

On Friday 25 September the Facebook Liberation Army made fresh calls to arms at the Discovery Festival in the science centre Nemo, Amsterdam.

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Armed with pamphlets, zines and instructions on how to leave Facebook the resistance came disguised as Mark Zuckerberg. Many new rebels were enlisted in the Facebook Liberation Army and alternatives to social media platforms were discussed.

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As well as offering advice on alternatives to Facebook the army also presented zines from The immaterial Labor union – a collective aimed to galvanize the workers of Facebook – initiated by Lidia Pereira. The evening was a resounding victory with even some people deciding to deactivate their Facebook accounts right their and then, serving to go on with their lives without negotiating Facebook’s terms of service.

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Reblog> Here’s why visions of ubiquitous connectivity aren’t going to be realised any time soon

Interesting post from Mark Graham on his blog…

Here’s why visions of ubiquitous connectivity aren’t going to be realised any time soon

The last few months have seen a wealth of stories about visions to connect the world. Facebook, Google, large international organisations, states, and even Bono, dream of a world in the near future in which we are all hooked into the network.

In the midst of all of this, I found a comment made by Jimmy Wales particularly interesting.

This hope of the inevitability of ubiquitous connectivity is one that is widely reproduced by other policy makers, technologists, and thought leaders.

However, it is a hope that needs to be unpacked. There are two ways in which this hypothetical future in which everyone is connected could be brought into being.
The first one of these futures is a world where everyone can afford access. But as we demonstrated in our research about the global affordability of broadband, dropping prices is unlikely to be a sufficient strategy. There will remain billions of people making a subsistence living, for whom even extremely cheap access is unaffordable.  The average Mozambican worker, for instance, would need over one and a half year’s salary to pay for one year’s worth of broadband access.

In other words, Jimmy Wales’ prediction won’t happen simply by lowering prices.
Broadband_Affordability-1024x723
The second future is the one promoted by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. One in which large corporations sponsor free (and importantly, limited) access for billions of people in return for attention monopolies. This brings a very different sort of Internet into being: one in which winners and losers, centres and peripheries, are already pre-selected by those who control your access.

What this all ultimately means is that it seems unlikely that any sort of open Web will be ubiquitously available in the near future. Simply lowering the cost of access will continue to leave out the very poorest; and handing over the project of connecting the disconnected to large technology firms will leave us with a very different (and far less desirable) sort of Internet.

To read a bit more about visions of connectivity, here are two of my recent papers:

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Jean Lievens introduction to Michel Bauwens’ Sauver le Monde

Earlier this year I posted rough translations of both Bernard Stiegler’s Preface and Dirk Holeman’s Postface to Michel Bauwens and Jean Lievens’ book Sauver le Monde: Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer [To Save the World: towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer].

I’ve translated a bit more now and I make this translation available, for free, to the publishers to do as they wish with it. I hope it helps in some small way…

These are the first few pages of the book following the Preface, in two short sections: Introduction and About this book.

As usual, clarifications or original French are in square brackets and I welcome any comments or suggestions – although I’m not trying to offer an ‘authoritative’ translation…

Introduction

“We do not live in a changing age, but rather a change of age”
Professor Jan Rotmans
(Professor of the Theory and Management of Transition,
Erasmus University Rotterdam)

It would be pointless to try to convince the reader of a book entitled To Save the World that life on Earth, as we understand it today, is in peril. Following a recently published study in the journal Nature Climate Change, more that half of terrestrial plants and the habitats of around a third of animals will disappear because of climate change if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the current rate. Scientists at the renowned Global Footprint Network (an international laboratory of ideas that measures ecological sustainability using ‘ecological footprints’) have calculated that, at present, we will need a planet and a half to maintain the current global economy. Furthermore, the growth rate required to maintain this system until 2053 would require the global economy to quadruple. In this case, we would need six planets. One does not need to be genius to understand that endless growth on a finite planet is a scientific nonsense and we are heading for a crash. Faced with this bleak perspective for the future, there are different ways to react: simple denial, to resign ourselves to it, or to attempt to do something about it.

To change the world, we can draw inspiration from the past, but we need a new way of addressing the challenges of the future. Michel Bauwens brings us such a vision. Not the visions, but a vision. The title of this book thus reflects a certain arrogance inconsistent with his character. Indeed, very intelligent people are often very modest, because they are very conscious of their own limitations. But who is Michel Bauwens? Beneath the title “The most stimulating Belgian thinker is an unknown philosopher” in the newspaper De Morgen (on the 23rd March 2012) presents him as follows:

“Do you know Michel Bauwens? Perhaps not. This 54-year-old cyberphilosopher is not well known. Bauwens is the first Belgian to figure in a list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He finds himself in the illustrious company of people such as Mahatma Ghandi (9), Martin Luther King (24), The Dalai Lama (28), Thomas Malthus (55) and John Kenneth Galbraith (70). Bauwens occupies 82nd place, a few rungs above Eleanor Roosevelt (87).”

The list referred to in De Morgen, “The (En)Rich List”, is a table of 100 people established by the Post Growth Institute, an international group of scientists that lobby for a sustainable society in which prosperity can be created without a need for economic doctrine [besoin de croissance économique]. The list of the “most enriching people” is a foil [clin d’Å“il – literally “a wink”, could be translated to ‘a nod’] to the 100 “richest people” in the world, published annually by the American financial magazine Forbes.

Cyberphilosopher, futurologist, economist, researcher, conference convener, entrepreneur”¦ These are some of the epithets given to Michel Bauwens by journalists. Wikipedia designates him as a “peer-to-peer theorist”, and he describes himself in this book as a commentator and thinker attempting to forge a coherent link between the theories, hypotheses and explications of peer-to-peer, and to do so in the most ethical way possible.

So what is ‘peer-to-peer’ (abbreviated to P2P)? This is a term not well known or understood outside of the world of IT enthusiasts and geeks, nevertheless the collaborative economy, forged through networks of peers, has rapidly gained in popularity throughout our countries. A year before the publication of that short article in De Morgen, the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper De Tijd (on the 23rd April 2013) published a detailed interview with Michel, across a double-page spread. Little by little, he has gained notoriety even in his country of birth. As is often the case, local recognition comes on the back of an international breakthrough, and not vice versa. It is well-known that: “No one is a prophet in their own country” [«Nul n’est prophète en son pays» – this is an idiom that some suggest traces back to the apostles Luke and Matthew].

About this book

This book is the outcome of twelve Skype interviews, of around an hour each, between January and February 2014. If I had arranged twelve more hours, if someone else had interviewed Michel, this would have been a different book. In any case, our aim is to share with you some ideas at the heart of peer-to-peer, production between peers, in the hope of inspiring you to further your understanding through other lectures, books and studies. As this book contains a number of important new and uncommon terms (for example, you may have already struggled with the term ‘peer-to-peer’ in the subtitle of this book), we have created a glossary that is situated at the end of the book.

Personally, I think that politicians, whether on the right or the left, have a tendency to see the future [l’avenir] through the rear-view mirror. Just as Marxism is an ideological construct of the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism find their origins in the 18th century. From a historical perspective these ideologies each have respective values but they no longer offer a response to the enormous difficulties that confront us today. This is also expressed in the way that politicians are unable to offer solutions. Not only because the political class tends to defend the status quo and their vested interests but also because many of the problems can only be solved at a global scale and thus local authorities are powerless. This certainly does not mean that nothing is possible at a local level, quite the contrary. On those occasions when everything is paralysed at national and international levels, only local level action allows real progress. This is reflected in particular by increased urbanisation (since the beginning of the 21st century more than a half of the global population has lived in towns and cities), or what Eric Corijn calls the emergence of “urbanity” as new form of post-national society, but also by the development of peer-to-peer mechanisms through which a number of people take their fate into their own hands by launching new projects from within the very institutional framework with which they have often clashed. In the face of the pessimism of the political world, there is optimism within the science of peer-to-peer. This is why solutions will come first from civil society.

We live in an era of enormous possibilities, but also of contradictions and gigantic obstacles to the full realisation of those possibilities. Machines have releaved us of a large part of manual labour (and increasingly of intellectual labour), but the automisation of production processes has not translated into the redistribution or the reduction of working time. Financial markets, often governed by mathematical algorithms upon which no one has a grip, have a greater impact than governments upon our lives. Our parliaments vote for laws that render collaboration and sharing illegal. Our economic model is founded upon the absurd idea of material abundance and immaterial rarity. We behave as if the world was limitless and exploit it to the utmost, to the point of jeopardizing the survival of the human species. Furthermore, we use copyright and patents to build artificial barriers around human knowledge to complicate sharing and collaboration as much as possible. Yet, from the society of the industrial revolution emerged new models and ways of working, heralding a new society. Thus, today, in the words of the Dutch Scientist Jan Rotmans: “We do not live in an era of change but in a change of era”.

The emerging model of peer-to-peer, inspired by the open source movement, seeks to circumvent the false logic of material scarcity and the artificial scarcity of the immaterial. In the apparent tangle of new phenomena such as the collaborative economy, peer-to-peer networks, open source, crowd-sourcing, FabLabs, micro-factories, the “maker” movement, urban agriculture and so on, Michel Bauwens sees a model that leads us to a post-capitalist society, in which the market finally submits to the logic of the commons (the common good). This book is a first attempt to articulate ideas concerning peer-to-peer formulated by Michel Bauwens. It is not simply the result of the reflections of a single person but rather the collective inteilligence of a growing minority of active pioneers who are developing and revealing thousands of projects and experiences amongst peers. Hopefully they will be an inspiration for all who are active in this area and work to build a new world, starting with what affects us directly.

Jean Lievens
9th July 2013

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Reblog> Digital Commons (trans. @patrickcrogan )

Here’s an interesting translation and commentary by Patrick Crogan of the Conseil National du Numérique open letter / petition on the ownership of knowledge:

Digital Commons

I’ve translated a part of a recent open letter /petition initiated by the Conseil National du Numérique in France and signed by 75 prominent professors and leaders of research and cultural organisations. The petition was published in Le Monde on 10 September 2015. The full text is available on the Conseil’s website: http://www.cnnumerique.fr/communs/  . I think there are some acutely made points here about the threats from the privatisation of knowledge by a parasitic knowledge economy, and the general ‘situation’ of knowledge today in the digital transition. I’m not so sure the rosy picture of open access in other western countries is fulfilled in practice currently (and the more nationalistic tones of the petition are understandable but a little regrettable in their competitive tone), but the potential of open access policy and law is clearly an important subject for today.

Promoting the dissemination of culture and knowledge

The commons will soon make their entrance into French law, on the occasion of the future law on the digital announced by Manuel Valls, after consultation with the Conseil National du Numérique. This is to be welcomed: the commons always feed the exchange and sharing practices that underly scientific production and cultural creation.

Science has always been understood as a common. Historically, the scientific method involves a collective construction of knowledge, organized around verification and validation by peers. The massive influx of digital technology into most fields of human activity is creating new situations. Networks facilitate the emergence of large distributed communities which can mobilize to create and share their knowledge. These common knowledges are all deposits made up of the initiatives, creativity and engagement of individuals in a collective goal. In a broader perspective concerning the safeguarding of a way of shared ownership and the collective management of resources according to a “communal” model, they form part of the natural resources managed by all the members of a community. The digital has reactivated this notion that has brought together the dynamics of the two major transitions that our world is undergoing: the protection of the informational commons as part of the digital transition and the protection of the natural commons as part of the ecological transition.

It is therefore time to give a proper legal basis for preserving the commons, and to adapt the law to right existing practices”¦.

“¦ Public domain information is made up of what cannot and what is no longer framed by Intellectual property laws. At present its protection is not very effective. Indeed it is defined in the hollow of the code of intellectual property, which makes it impossible to fight effectively against abusive IP claims over a work– this is what is meant by the term ‘copyfraud’. Examples are numerous: it is common that the scanning of a public domain work, or even simply photographing it, is used as a justification to claim a copyright on this work! Is it not astonishing – and this is a euphemism – that the Department of the Dordogne could claim a copyright on reproductions of the cave of Lascaux, 17 000 years after the death of its creators? Because it limits the distribution and reuse of works that make up the public domain, the copyfraud constitutes an infringement of the rights of the whole community.

Creating a positive law concerning the public domain is also the way to protect any misappropriation of items that cannot be the subject of an intellectual property right, such as information, facts, ideas, and principles. For instance Amazon has successfully filed a patent for photography against a white background”¦.

[[Note: see this post about the Amazon patent: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/amazons-latest-patent-is-sillier-than-the-peanut-butter-sandwich-patent/]]

“¦ Open Access, already adopted by our neighbors, particularly in Germany and the UK, enshrines in law the possibility for researchers who wish to publish in open access research articles that have been funded by public money, after a short embargo period. This measure aims to limit the dependence of public research institutions to major scientific publishers. Currently these are subject to a system of double payment, although since 2012 the European Commission has invited member States to enshrine open access in their legislation.

In fact, researchers funded by public money are mostly obliged, for reasons of visibility and career, to publish in prestigious scientific journals. They are therefore in a situation of dependency to scientific journals that now belong to an oligopoly comsisting of a few large publishers (Elsevier, but also Springer, Wiley, Nature). In order to publish in these journals, the authors are forced to give up their copyright. These same researchers also provide their expertise to shape the editorial choices of the journals. In this respect, the increase in subscription prices of journals does not appear to be justified, especially as the transition to digital has significantly decreased publication costs.

Meanwhile, higher education and research institutions annually spend more than € 80 million for access to electronic resources. And access costs have continuously increased. The access prices have also continuously increased by 7% per year for 10 years”¦. This situation severely limits the advancement of research while weighing on public finances.

But open access does not only aim to reduce expenditures of public institutions– open access has a real impact on the advancement of research, and in some cases on the preservation of public health: The team in charge of Liberia’s response to the threat of the Ebola virus were unable to access certain items because of their high costs, impacting on their ability to identify the virus early and develop faster prevention and care measures.

Other measures are needed to build an open digital environment conducive to research, innovation and creation. The provision to enable the automatic search of text data (text and data mining) is to allow for automated search methods in a very large volume of text or data; it is possible through this process to obtain results that would not have been discovered by another method. This would give new impetus to the entrance of French research into the age of big data and to realize very significant productivity gains. Other countries such as the UK, Japan and the United States have outpaced us in this area.

The real enhancement of cultural heritage occurs through its open use by the greatest number. This is also the historical mission of public libraries, which will largely benefit from these provisions. The circulation of open science helps us to face the transitions that confront us. A positive definition of the public domain and its incorporation in law will benefit the influence and standing of science and culture in the digital age. The United States, the United Kingdom and Germany have already understood this. What are we waiting for, before we also benefit from a wider diffusion of this open science and the new audiences and the new reputation it will bring?

List of the 75 signatories on the version published in Le Monde:

ï‚· Pierre LESCURE, Président du Festival de Cannes, Journaliste

ï‚· Bruno CHAUDRET, Directeur de Recherches CNRS, Président du conseil Scientifique du CNRS, Académicien

ï‚· Denis PODALYDES, Acteur, metteur en scène, scénariste et écrivain français, et sociétaire de la Comédie-Française

ï‚· Bruno LATOUR, Directeur scientifique de Sciences Po

ï‚· Benoît THIEULIN, Président du Conseil national du numérique

ï‚· Marc TESSIER, Président de Video Futur Entertainment Group et membre du Conseil national du numérique

ï‚· Alain BENSOUSSAN, Avocat à la Cour d’appel de Paris

ï‚· Michel WIEVIORKA, Sociologue, Président de la FMSH, Directeur d’études à l’EHESS

ï‚· Paul JORION, Anthropologue, essayiste

ï‚· Judith ROCHFELD, Professeur de droit privée à l’Ecole de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1)

ï‚· Patrick WEIL, Directeur de recherche au CNRS, Président de Bibliothèques sans Frontières

ï‚· Yann MOULIER BOUTANG, Professeur des Universités en sciences économiques UTC

ï‚· Antoine PETIT, Président et Directeur Général de l’INRIA

ï‚· Nathalie MARTIAL-BRAZ, Professeur de droit Privé, Université Paris Descartes

ï‚· Melanie DULONG DE ROSNAY, Chargée de recherche au CNRS, Responsable du pôle Gouvernance de l’Information et des Communs de l’Institut des Sciences de la Communication du CNRS/Paris-Sorbonne/UPMC, Co-fondatrice de l’association Communia pour le domaine public

ï‚· Valérie PEUGEOT, Présidente de l’association Vecam

ï‚· Bernard STIEGLER, Philosophe, président de l’association Ars Industrialis et Directeur de l’Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation (IRI) du Centre Georges Pompidou

ï‚· Sophie PENE, Professeur à l’Université Paris Descartes

ï‚· Daniel KAPLAN, Délégué général de la Fondation pour l’Internet Nouvelle Génération (la FING)

ï‚· Serge ABITEBOUL, Directeur de recherche à Inria et Professeur affilié à l’ENS Cachan

ï‚· Pierre MUTZENHARDT, Président de l’université de Lorraine et Président de la commission recherche de la Conférence des Présidents d’Université

ï‚· Dominique BOULLIER, professeur de sociologie, médialab Sciences Po

ï‚· Camille DOMANGE, Chargé d’enseignement Sorbonne Paris I.

ï‚· Christine BERTHAUD, directrice du CCSD, CNRS.

ï‚· Claude KIRCHNER, Directeur de recherche Inria, Conseiller du président d’Inria, Président du comité de pilotage du Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe

ï‚· Jean-François ABRAMATIC, Informaticien et ancien président du W3C

ï‚· Brigitte VALLEE, Directrice de Recherche émérite au CNRS, rattachée au laboratoire GREYC (Caen Normandie)

ï‚· François TADDEI, Généticien, Directeur du Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires

ï‚· Albertine MEUNIER, Artiste

ï‚· Claire LEMERCIER, directrice de recherche au CNRS en histoire, présidente du conseil scientifique d’Openedition, membre du conseil scientifique du CNRS.

ï‚· Francis ANDRE, Chargé de mission Données de la recherche, Direction de l’information scientifique et technique, CNRS

ï‚· Alexandre MONNIN, philosophe, chercheur chez Inria, membre du réseaux d’experts d’Etalab

ï‚· Colin DE LA HIGUERA, Société informatique de France, directeur adjoint du Laboratoire informatique LINA à Nantes

ï‚· Christine OLLENDORFF, Directrice de la Documentation et de la Prospective, Arts et Métiers ParisTech

ï‚· Nicolas CATZARAS, Secrétaire général de la FMSH

ï‚· Maurice RONAI, Membre de la CNIL, Chercheur à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

ï‚· Fabienne ORSI, Economiste, chercheuse à l’Institut de Recherche pour le Développement

ï‚· Pierre GINER, Artiste

ï‚· Christian PHELINE, Membre de la Commission d’accès aux documents administratifs (CADA), ancien directeur du développement des médias

ï‚· Valérie BERTHE, Directrice de recherche CNRS et membre du conseil scientifique du CNRS

ï‚· Jean-Pierre FINANCE, président de COUPERIN et du CA de l’ABES, ancien président de la CPU

ï‚· Virginia CRUZ, designer, directrice adjointe de l’agence IDSL et enseignante à l’Ecole Polytechnique

ï‚· John STEWART, Chercheur en sciences cognitives, Université de Technologie de Compiègne

ï‚· Cécile MEADEL, Professeure de l’Université Panthéon Assas (Paris II)

ï‚· Brigitte PLATEAU, Professeur des Universités, Administratrice Générale de l’Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble

ï‚· Jean-François BALAUDE, Professeur de philosophie, Président de l’Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

ï‚· Hervé LE CROSNIER, Université de Caen Normandie

ï‚· Anne VERNEUIL, Présidente de l’Association des Bibliothécaires de France

ï‚· Sophie ROUX, Professeur d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, ENS

ï‚· Serge BAUIN, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, chargé de mission libre accès aux publications scientifiques au CNRS

ï‚· Margot BEAUCHAMPS, coordinatrice du Groupement d’intérêt scientifique M@rsouin

ï‚· Michel BIDOIT, Directeur de l’Institut des Sciences de l’Information et de leurs Interactions, CNRS

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Videos to introduce lectures on geographies of popular culture

I give seven lectures on geographies of popular culture at the end of a 28-lecture torrent of social and cultural geography that is our first-year, first-term module “Geographies of Place, Identity & Culture‘.

We are asked to commence the actual lecture five minutes after the beginning of the session and end five minutes before, thus giving us 50 minutes of time to engage the students.

I have found that it can be rather awkward setting up and just waiting and watching the students pile in, while many of them sort of stare at you… so, I’m going to give them something else to look at!

I did this for one lecture last year and have now found a video for the first five minutes (-ish) of all seven. Here they are:

Introduction to Geographies of Popular Culture, begins with:

Lecture 2, geographies of music, begins with:

Lecture 3, geographies of life online, begins with:

Lecture 4, geographies of books & reading, begins with:

Lecture 5, geographies of cinema and TV, begins with:

Lecture 6, spaces of games and play, begins with:

Lecture 7, geographies of consumption, begins with:

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Coded language online

By which I mean code as cipher or ‘secret’ (sort of) rather than code as in mark-up…

The UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre and ParentZone maintain a website for parents called parentinfo.org that has recently published a guide to “online teen speak“, with the rationale that parents should know what their children are up to.

There are some entertaining examples and it just goes to confirm I am now ‘old’ because I simply don’t recognise some of this stuff…

Now, in a way I have some sympathy with this rationale insofar as anyone (not just people of a given age bracket) can be naive in their behaviour through mediated communications. Whereas the more established risks of rumour and defamation might feel more distant the risks of the permanence of anything one posts online and its potential to spread unimaginably quickly are much more immediate and can be forcefully, sometimes tragically, felt.

Nevertheless, depending on your political persuasion, one might feel that there ought to be some limits to the oligopticon; that perhaps we ought not to be spying on one another all the time. It is thus striking that the rationale for ‘safety’ (in this case the entirely justified concern for the safety of our children) matches very closely to the sort of libertarian ‘nothing to hide’, radical transparency ideology of both the advertising moguls/data sharks at the helm of corporations such as Facebook and the supporters of technologies such as the blockchain. It is interesting (to me anyway) that the bounds of the conversation around privacy have moved so much in only 10 years… When the Labour government talked about introducing a national ID card around 2005ish, campaigns such as No2ID garnered a lot of support based on an appeal to arguments about personal privacy that are already (perhaps) beginning to seem slightly irrelevant, if one has maintained a use of Facebook, Google, Dropbox, PayPal, loyalty cards etc.

There is, of course, a significant difference between the perceived threats to ‘privacy’ by corporations hoovering up our data and the risk to personal safety from those with malign intentions – and I certainly don’t want to overly confuse the two… but the same rationale for an national identity card – to catch those with undesirable intentions – sits behind the perceived need to surveil our children and, indeed, was the rationale for ContactPoint here in the UK. This takes some very careful and nuanced unpacking (although it has attracted press commentary, e.g.) that I don’t think I’m best-placed to do here, but I wanted to record a reflection on this anyway.

The other thing that occurred to me while reading the press coverage of the guide to ‘teen speak’ was that this really isn’t new. As was made very evident by an episode of Fry’s English Delight on BBC Radio 4 the other week – there is a very, very long history of secret languages, and these are often used by groups that feel in a minority, or are a clique… from back slang, or ‘pig latin’ to medical slang (says the person most likely to be TTFO). But the power of these dialects is that they are secret – so what will a handy guide to them being published online do… we shall see… I’ll wait to hear from friends and colleagues with children that fall within the age group…

As an aside, ParentZone are convening an interesting looking conference in October on the Digital Family… worth a look if you’re that way inclined.