Academia

Swedish Slave Trade

It is not surprising to note that even the Swedes attempted to join in on colonialism, nor is it surprising that they also were a part of the slave trade. But it is good to remember even the darker parts of oour history. This is from wikipedia:

In the year 1784, the king Gustav III of Sweden bought the West Indian island of Saint-Barthélemy from the French. The first report concerning the island came from the Swedish general council in the French town of L’Orient, Simon Bérard. He reported that:

It (Saint-Barthélemy) is a very insignificant island, without strategic position. It is very poor and dry, with a very small population. Only salt and cotton is produced there. A large part of the island is made up of sterile rocks. The island has no sweet water; all the wells on the island give only brackish water. Water has to be imported from neighbouring islands. There are no roads anywhere.

In 1786 a privilege letter was made for the West India Company. The Company was granted the right to trade slaves between Africa and the West Indies. Paragraph 14 in the letter states: “The Company is free to operate slave trade on Angola and the African coast, where such is permitted”

People from all over the Caribbean would come to this island to buy slaves. People who came from other islands to buy their slaves on Saint Bartholomew had to pay a small duty when they exported slaves from the island. There was also a difference between a slave who had been taken to the New World on a Swedish ship and a slave who have been transported on a foreign one. The duty to export a Swedish-owned slave was only 50% of that of a “foreign”.

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Disruptive Technology

Is it a sign of senility or hubris that I occasionally post pieces of my thesis work in this blog? No idea. But here is a piece on disruptive technology.

While in many cases a disruptive technology can be seen as a technology that replaces the incumbent technology one must not forget that this replacement also displaces the social organisation around the displaced technology. Therefore printing presses replaced the scriptoria and also change the role of the scribe. Railways replaced canals and also changed the way in which the social organisation around the canals functioned. Therefore railroads did not only make an impact on the barge pilot but also on the bargeman, lock keeper, canal owners, canal-side innkeepers, barge builders, waterway engineers and the horse trade (most barges were horse drawn). This process is not only one of historical interest. Examples of disruptive technologies are all around us. It is, in fact, a continual process. Digital cameras are replacing photographic film, flash drives replace floppy disks, DVD players replace VHS players. Each change brings has social and economic effects to a larger of smaller degree.

Actually I wanted to use something else but after looking around I could not find a good work on the social history of writing and writing implements. Not languages but a social history of putting text on paper. This feels like a book I would like to read. Instead I found Henry Petroski’s book The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance which was not as good as I hoped it would be. I thought it would be a social history but it turned out to be more of a vague technical history which makes brief stops at erratic points in the development of the pencil. But to be fair I have only read a third of the book – so I still might change my mind.

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Herring and Creativity

Herring is not the foremost on my mind. However I came across a recent thesis (defended 10 December 2005) by Hrefna M. Karlsdóttir â??Fishing on Common Grounds â?? The consequences of unregulated Fisheries of North Sea Herring in the Postwar Periodâ?? Doctoral Thesis, University of Göteborg. Read abstract here.

The term common property resource has been effectively used during the last forty years especially after Hardinâ??s classic discussion on the problem arising from an exploitation of a common property resourceâ?¦many scholars, especially anthropologists, have pointed out the misunderstanding of using the definition common property resource to describe a resource without any regulation. They have criticised Hardinâ??s study for allegedly ignoring the possibility of an information arrangement over a resource usage.
â?¦
When one gets rights under a property rights regime they are regarded as rights to use for oneself the benefit stream from the resource. This definition of property rights means that the claim one makes to a benefit stream is regarded as legitimate to those who it concerns or that it is protected by some kind of authority. The point is that it is not the resource itself that has any entitlement. Such entitlement lies with those who have the right to use the resource and benefit from it.
pp17-18.

Naturally I ignored the fish and found the commons. Good arguments with a few sources to look up. The interesting argument (for me) that the thesis puts forward is on the topic of how to create a successful commons. Here Hrefna writes:

Successful attempts to establish common property regimes or governed commons…are most likely to happen in inshore fisheries. The important presumptions needed include a small group of fishermen that have a stronger feeling for the common interests than for the individual, who know each other well and are able to control each others fisheries.
pp 20-21 my italics.

The last sentence there is probably the most interesting. The local fishermen could more easily persuade each other. Using tools such as social control and shared local values the commons could be maintained – probably becuase the shared resource is not depenedent upon maximising profits but ensuring a continued benefit stream for them and the future fishermen. The question therefore for me (involved in Creative Commons) is can such a local agreement be scaled up to an international level while maintianing this interconnectedness and social control necessary to maintain the commons?

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Fair Use

The Center for Social Media has produced interesting material on Fair Use:

Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use

Peter Jaszi – â??Yes, You Can!â?? â??Where You Donâ??t Even Need â??Fair Useâ?? a guide offers to what falls into the category of free use.

Peter Jaszi – Fair Use: An Essential Feature of Copyright hearing testimony by explains the legal significance of the doctrine of fair use, for creators, consumers and commerce.

Peter Hirtle – How to Find Out What is in the Public Domain explains when copyrighted material falls into the public domain.

Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi – Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers – 2004 study shows how rights clearance problems hobbled creativity in documentary filmmaking.

Or watch the 7 minute video summarizing the results of the study Stories Untold: (43 Mb, streaming)

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What is Google?

Google is many things. To some its a symbol of the success of the dotcom ideal. To others it has become an activity online (to google), and to others it is almost synonmous with our experience of the Web and maybe the Internet since most people no longer differentiate these two things.

The position of Google has taken such proportions that we no longer remember the time before Google. Not many years ago the main search engine was Altavista – its still there, but it no longer commands the position it once did. Google has been moving in all manner of interesting directions. Just to menation a few: Google desktop, Gmail, Google Scholar, Google Maps and Google Earth.

Google’s position has spawned some interesting spoofs: for example Googlism – which shows what google “thinks of you, your friends or anything”. Another example is the mirror version world of elgooG. A final example is Woogle which uses the picture search to tell stories in pictures.

Even prior to this diversification there were voices being raised about the position which Google was creating for itself in the everyday online lives of users. The question, stated basically, is what happens if we become dependant upon a private company for our information? Google is not a public office but is a private company whose primary goal is not truth but profit. In this vein we have seen that Google stores vast amounts of information about its users and has acquiesced to Chinese demands to censor information to users in China.

The role of search engines is becoming an important area of research, recently Matthew Rimmer at the Law Department of the ANU has organised a public forum on Google entitled “GOOGLE – Infinite Library, Copyright Pirate, or Monopolist?” (9 December).

The audio files from the Public Forum are online so for those of us who could not make it to Australia in time we can now listen to the presentations.

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Metaphors

I keep meaning to write something serious, off-blog on metaphors. Does this mean that the blog is not a serious medium? (I will not attempt to answer that today). Anyway in a moment of casual blogbrowsing (I want there to be a term for the activity of jumping from blog to blog reading entries in a totally haphazard fashion) I came across an interesting paper written by van den Boomen of Meta BlogNote. The entry is on a paper written on metaphor theory. The paper is called Networking by metaphors and its about conceptual, material and discourse metaphors. The paper begins to explain how we are controlled by the metaphors which we use to understand technology – read it.

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Thesis abstract

Strange as it may seem I have never actually written an abstract for my thesis. The title is Regulating Disruptive Technologies…the rattling you hear is the dried up remnants of a brain which seem to shake inside my skull when I write.

Different groups claim to be superstitous. I think deep down inside all Phd students are superstitious (a bit like Pascal’s gambit – the odds are better on believing!). So I will say that the date is closing fast but I will not utter the actual calender date.

Abstract
The main point of this thesis is to show that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy. To understand how the regulation of technology effects the regulation of democracy this thesis will study the regulatory activities of the regulator and the reactions of those being regulated. The driving force is the understanding of the effect of technological change upon social institutions. This work will examine the technological challenges to central social institutions and show that the technological change has far outpaced the evolution of the social concepts in these areas and as a result the technology can be viewed as being a disruptive force in society.

The understanding of the concept of disruption within this work is important. Disruption is as an agent of change in society. Change is a semi-autonomous driving force in society brought about by disruption. Therefore, disruption is the motor of change, change is what pushes, or pulls, society forward. Therefore the basis of this thesis is that disruption is good.

The locus of this work is the Internet. The study is on the regulation and over-regulation of Internet based activities. The measure of whether a technology has been regulated or over-regulated will depend upon the democratic effects of the regulation. If the implemented regulation tends to not only regulate unwanted/undesirable behaviour but regularly criminalises or frustrates many types of legitimate behaviour then the situation is one of over-regulation.

It is therefore the purpose of this thesis to look at the use of power through the regulatory structures. While the study of the creation and adaptation of regulation shows the movements and flows within structures, the reactions towards regulation shows the human actors desires to adapt and negotiate the new social orders being created. To better understand these processes it is necessary to look at the way in which technology can be seen as a disruptive force and the way in which technology and democracy are being linked together in rhetoric and practice. This thesis will exemplify, discuss and analyse the democratic effects of the disruptive effects being brought about by technology and the attempts to regulate information and communications technology (ICT).

The development of understanding of the way in which we regulate disruptive technology helps us to understand the regulation of that which is new and which threatens that which is established. The results of such a study can then be applied to all domains where regulation of disruptive technology may occur. This may be within an organisation, a family group, a multi-national corporation or a state.

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Blogging revisited

In a previous entry I reported reasons why a blogger (especially academic) should blog. Naturally these views are not unanimous. Here is an anonymous submission to the Chronicle of Higher Education signed by the pseudonym Ivan Tribble. Remember the Tribbles from original star trek fame? Small furry, soft, gentle animals whose cute appearance and soothing purring endears them to every sentient race which encounters themâ??with one notable exception: Klingons.

Anyway Ivan Tribble writes about blogs:

â??The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one’s unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It’s not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it’s also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.

Worst of all, for professional academics, it’s a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.â??

The more positive approach to blogging mentioned above (Alex Soojung-Kim Pangâ??s If you’ve got a day job…) focused on four reasons to blog: Practice of the skill of writing, gain readers fame & credibility, participate in a discourse and finally market yourself. All these four are important to the academic (and to the blogger).

Tribbleâ??s argument against the blog concern the situation where you are a job applicant and the stuff which you have written online can be used against you. Both when the committee looked at the applicants online appearance â??…it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.â?? Another aspect which causes blogging concern is the very existence of the blog… â??Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.â??

tribble
Captain Kirk with Tribbles

So basically the blog is like the Tribble – cute, furry and soothing to all (except the Klingons) but remember the problem with Tribbles? The crew of the Starship Enterprise spent so much time cuddling with, and being cuddled by, the Tribbles that they no longer functioned as a crew. In a sense the blog can become like Tribbles. Surrounded by both our own and others we exist in a quasi world of our own creation which is not a bad thing unless we replace the â??realâ?? world with the blogged one.

Posted on by mklang