Author: mklang

Facebook as censor

When I read that Facebook was censoring updates that include a rivals name – I was skeptical. Surely they wouldnt be so stupid? But then I tried it myself.  I logged into Facebook and wrote a status update: “Is it true that FB is censoring power.com” and pressed enter.

According to a blog post in the New York Times in 2008

Power.com, a Web start-up from Brazil with some prominent backers, aims to become the portal through which people access their online social lives. It’s up against no less than the world’s biggest Internet companies.

Facebook may be the biggest player in town but there are areas in the world where alternatives exist. Of course Facebook as a company has no obligation to play nice with others but let me quote Stan Lee: With great power comes great responsibility. If they do this then what is to stop Facebook from deleting people or other organizations?

Posted on by mklang

Cortado for the public sphere

The Nordic (Finland, Sweden, Norway & Denmark) countries have for a long time led the world in coffee consumption per capita (between 8-12 kg per person and year, compared to the US which has about 4 kg). The high amounts of coffee are not necessarily the same as drinking quality coffee.

In the history of coffee the actual location where the coffee was served has played an important part in the intellectual, political and social discussion in society. Coffee Houses where important in the development and support of the public sphere. In his work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas points argues that to develop a public sphere requires things like disregard of status and inclusivity and as such the coffee house provided an excellent infrastructure.

But this intellectual discussion does not spring from infrastructure alone. Twenty years ago coffee (in Swedish cafés) was badly brewed and stood warm for long periods of time. The quality of the coffee and the discussions was rather low. But there has been a fascinating development in café culture in most (all) Nordic countries with better raw material and freshly made ‘espresso’ style coffee.

So the coffee gets better but importance of the café for the public sphere is still minimal. The café does however play an important role in providing infrastructure for the public domain. It is not that we go to coffee houses to discuss the politics of the day but by providing a public place to sit and even more importantly access to the Internet through “free” wifi the coffee house is an office for the traveler, for the creative individual, for the small consultant. It is a shelter were we can sit and work.

entering the public sphere

The coffee house takes over the role of the library and the agora. It is a warm home for the digital nomad with a laptop providing access to the larger group & context of a larger discussion. The practice of sitting in public and staring at a screen may be seen as anti-social but that is only perceived so by those who fail to see the sociality of technology mediated communication.

The role of the coffee house is not what Habermas described, it is not the vibrant places of social discussion among the people who are physically co-located but if you remove the coffee or the ability of the shops to provide wifi for the wifi-less an important access point would disappear. Habermas recognized inclusivity and the coffee shop wifi provides just that. Along with a decent cup of joe.

Posted on by mklang

Call for Papers: GiKII VI

GikII VI, FREEDOM, OPENNESS & PIRACY?
26-28 June 2011
IT University
Göteborg, Sweden

Call for papers
Is GikII a discussion of popular culture through the lens of law – or is it about technology law, spiced with popular culture? For five years and counting, GikII has been a vessel for the leading edge of debate about law, technology and culture, charting a course through the murky waters of our societal uses and abuses of technology.

For 2011, this ship full of seriously playful lawyers will enter for the first time the cold waters of the north (well, further north than Scotland) and enter that land of paradoxes: Sweden. Seen by outsiders as well-organised suicidal Bergman-watching conformists, but also the country that brought you Freedom of Information, ABBA, the Swedish chef, The Pirate Bay and (sort of…) Julian Assange. We offer fine weather, the summer solstice and a fair reception at the friendly harbour of Göteborg.

So come one, come all… Clean your screens, look into the harder discs of your virtual and real lives, and present your peers with your ideas on the meaning of our augmented lives. Confuse us with questions, dazzle us with legal arguments, and impress us with your GikIIness. If you have a paper on (for example) regulation of Technology & Futurama, soft law in World of Warcraft, censoring social media & Confucius, the creative role of piracy on latter day punk or plagiarism among the ancient Egyptians – We are the audience for you (for a taste of past presentations see http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/gikii/ ).

Application process

Please send an abstract not exceeding 500 words to Professor Lilian Edwards (Lilian.Edwards@strath.ac.uk) or Dr Mathias Klang (klang@ituniv.se). The deadline for submissions is 15 April 2011. We will try to have them approved and confirmed as soon as possible so that you can organise the necessary travel and accommodation.

Registration

As with previous years, GikII is free of charge, and therefore there are limited spaces available, so please make sure you submit your paper early. Priority is always given to speakers, but there are some limited spaces available for students and non-speakers. Registration will be open shortly at http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/gikii/

Posted on by mklang

Gikii 2011 in Göteborg

Sharpen your pencils and polish your mice its soon time to submit abstracts for GikII 2011 which will run 26-28 June in Göteborg. The cfp is being tweaked as we speak and I am both honored and intimidated to be the local host of this great event – the sixth annual GikII.

For those of you who have not met the GikII check out last years call for papers:

GikII is a workshop concerned with exploring the legal interaction between popular culture, speculative fiction, and new technologies. It has been described unimaginatively as trail-blazing, innovative, fun and informative. We like to think of GikII as the legal workshop equivalent of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, in other words, it is “like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick”. GikII is where the bravest, fun-est (not to be confused with funniest) and zaniest ideas about law and technologies are discussed. In some instances we explore technologies so new that in fact there is not even a term to describe them, while some other times we have discussed technologies long gone. We only ask that you are imaginative and think of your fellow travellers instead of yourself. GikII is all about giving legal scholars the opportunity to engage in blue skies thinking (variations of the visible electromagnetic radiation spectrum may occur depending on which planet you may currently inhabit). If you have a paper that is languishing at the bottom of your hard drive and is crying out to see the light of a USB stick, GikII is the place for you. We laugh in the face of tradition and make rude comments about scholarly convention.

Or why not browse the five earlier events at Edinburgh 2006, Oxford 2007, Oxford 2008, Amsterdam 2009, Edinburgh 2010

Posted on by mklang

FSCONS @ GoOpen in Oslo

FSCONS is taking to the road! Having been in Gothenburg for the last four years, we felt like spreading our wings a bit to see how far they take us. The 22nd-23rd of March, we’ll be in Oslo to give a very special FSCONS track at the GoOpen 2011 conference organised by the Norwegian Open Source Competence Center. In traditional FSCONS spirit, we’ll mix, match, and find topics that express the convergence of technology, society and culture.

Time and date: 22nd of March 09.30-21.00 and 23rd of March 09.00-15.30 Where: Oslo (Radisson SAS Scandinavia, Holbergs plass) check out the Program and Registration.

Speakers from Germany, Iceland, Austria, Sweden, France and Norway itself will express their thoughts and ideas in 12 sessions running in parallel in the same place and time as the rest of the GoOpen program. Of particular interest for FSCONS participants might be the sessions taking place also in the technical track, which include previous years Nordic Free Software Award winner Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson talking about PageKite and Evan Prodromou talking about StatusNet.

Speakers joining us for the FSCONS track are:

* Pippa Buchanan on Community Learning On Demand & The Future
Of The Web Is Made By You
* Primavera di Filippi on Cloud Computing and Regulatory Policies
* Mathias Klang on Limiting the Open Society
* Bjørn Ruberg on Fighting a distributed denial of service attack
* Karin Kosina on Art and Hacking in Syria
* Smári McCarthy on The Industrialization of the Internet
* Berglind Ósk Bergsdóttir on the Icelandic Modern Media Institute (link not up yet)
* Christian Siefkes on Commons-based Peer Production
* Bente Kalsnes on journalism and open data (link not up yet)
* Stian Rødven Eide on Evolution of the Free Software Ecosystem
* Jonas Öberg on Cloudberries in Culture – Nordic Creativity in Focus

The program runs during the morning and early afternoon on both days. Just before lunch on the 23rd of March, we’ll open the floor to lightning talks, run jointly with the technical track. If you are interested in giving a presentation during the lightning session, you should contact jonas@ffkp.se to express your interest. Please note that the lightnings will be limited to 1-2 minutes in length.

Posted on by mklang

Koons ends dog dispute

Not long ago I wrote about the rather strange case of Jeff Koons balloon dogs. Koons has built much of his artistic reputation around the creative reuse of other peoples copyrighted work. So it was rather surprising to find him initiated a copyright violation case. The case is obviously strange because Koons’ work is basically a hard copy of the traditional balloon dog made by any clown with a long balloon.

Koons’ lawyers have now backed off and decided not to go forward under the condition that the objects were not sold as “Koons’ dog” – which they were not doing even prior to receiving the legal letter. Park Life writes:

Bloggers largely scoffed at the threat, but Park Life decided not to just sit around and see if Mr. Koons would sue. On January 20, its lawyer, Jedediah Wakefield of Fenwick and West, working pro bono, sued Jeff Koons LLC in San Francisco federal court, asking the court to declare that Park Life wasn’t infringing on Mr. Koons’s i rights. “They very quickly indicated they weren’t interested in putting up a fight,” Mr. Wakefield said of Mr. Koons’s lawyers. Ultimately, Jeff Koons LLC agreed not to pursue the gallery for the sale of the bookends, and the gallery agreed not to indicate that the bookends were by Mr. Koons, which, Mr. Wakefield added, “they hadn’t done and weren’t going to do anyway.” As a result of the deal, he said, he was planning to file on Thursday for a dismissal of the declaratory judgment suit.

Posted on by mklang

Geography irrelevant

That increased connectivity is giving us the impression of Globalization is nothing new. McLuhan wrote about the global village in The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962 and Timothy Wu explains in The Master Switch how the radio and telephone networks created a feeling of togetherness during the 1920s.

There are two elements today that make geography irrelevant one is obviously the Internet and the other is low cost travel. While the former is often discussed the latter is not given enough space. My physical reality is Göteborg: the countries second largest city on the West coast of Sweden. The dominant cultural norm – despite being very Americanized – is obviously Swedish.

Travel in and around Sweden is strange since our patterns of travel are not based on Geography but rather on cost and time. It may easier, quicker and cheaper to travel to a location that is geographically further away. This lessens the importance of the idea of geographical space.

An additional point that leads to the irrelevance of geography is our cultural consumption. For a long time our technology has been global: While sitting on a train in India I tried to talk my neighbor but failed miserably since we lacked a common language. But when his phone rang and played a melody from a popular Indian movie I took out my own phone and pointed to his phone and said “Bluetooth”? He smiled and sent me the song. We created a common micro-culture based upon our technology.

The discussion on cultural imperialism has been going on for a long time our clothes, music, films, books, magazines and political focus have been part of a global discussion with smaller or larger local variations. We are all branded.

But since I recently have become a podcast junky I have come to realize that I am letting go yet another local tether. Listening to fascinating podcasts from around the (English speaking) world I have managed to feel part of a discussion which is localized to no particular space. Or is it localized to any space where it is downloaded. Its a odd feeling to follow these podcasts no matter where I am physically located.

Posted on by mklang

Opportunity lost to bells and whistles

At the end of the 1800s most serious communication research was geared towards improving the dominant technology of the day – the telegraph. Then came the telephone.

And despite many others working on similar technology we built the mythology of Bell as the lone inventor.

But what got me thinking was the question of whether the early adoption of the telephone as a technology and its growth wasn’t a “mistake”. The telegraph was a sophisticated binary technology that was being rapidly developed. But most, and eventually all, this development was discontinued when the phone came along.

The telephone is was our dominant communications technology but the Internet has shown – voice is not our preferred mode of communication and today the telephone has taken the back seat to another binary based technology (the telegraph was binary).

If the telephone hadn’t dragged us off on an chase for flashy gadgets with bells and whistles – would we have had the internet much earlier?

Posted on by mklang

Happily drifting into the cloud…

Jan Nolin over at SociaMediaPedia has written an interesting post about the Swedish municipality Salem that has recently announced that they are the country’s first municipality to place all of their IT services at Google apps. Jan writes:

The involved people seem to be well informed, so maybe they have already thought about things that concern me:

• -What are the ethical and legal implications in moving data and services from computers and servers owned by the municipality to computers owned by an American multinational corporation?
• -What kind of freedom of choice does the municipality have when investing in future information technology?
• -What kind of competitive advantage is Google given concerning associated technology on the local market? For instance, regarding smartphones?
• -In which ways can Google Sweden safeguard its information in relation to the mother company?
• -Did officials of the municipality have the right to take the decision to move information from Swedish citizens to an American corporation?
• -Isn’t information to be seen as a kind of currency? That we are giving away for free?
• -In which ways is the Salem information linked with other nation-based resources? What else was Google given in this deal?

These are extremely important issues that are typically not well discussed when moves such as these are undertaken. One of the reasons for the lack of discussion in situations such as this is that the move to the cloud is viewed a technological issue and therefore best discussed by technicians.

Unfortunately this view is much too limited. While the choice may be one of deciding which technological infrastructure is best for the organization it is not necessarily a technological decision. Different technological (communications) platforms effect the way in which we communicate and interact. This is part of the fundamental thoughts from McLuhan’s work The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962): Communications infrastructure affects cognitive organization, which affects social organization:

…[I]f a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent.

The organization of technology is not a limited technological question. The organization of technology is the organization of society. Since it is a question of democracy it should be dealt with as such.

Posted on by mklang

National Vanity Projects

My hotel room overlooks the building site of the new Icelandic Opera – well actually its called the Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre but everyone refers to it as the new opera. Its an impressive building that is due to be opened in 82 days. What I find fascinating is the scale of the project. The concert hall will seat 1800 people which seems large considering the population of a Iceland is about 320,000 (Wikipedia). But is this excessive? The population of the capital city is around 120,000 (and over 200,000 in the Greater Reykjavík Area) (Wikipedia).

The new opera house

While digitalization and the Internet have killed (or wounded) some traditional national vanity projects: national encyclopedias and dictionaries have been hit very hard. Buildings remain ever popular methods of attempting to raise the national image (Oslo recently completed a gorgeous new opera house) and this new opera will be a fascinating building.

Posted on by mklang