TJ McIntyre has a brilliant quote from Glenn Greenwald that summarizes much of what is important in the privacy debate:
The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals.
The purpose of today’s lecture was to familiarize the audience with social media and what they may need to know about it. The lecture began with examples of what the media reports when social media is mentioned. The interesting thing is that media today has turned from the previously optimistic position to being more openly critical. To exemplify this I used three recent examples from Swedish media where the papers reported that research showed: smart phones make us selfish, Facebook spreads unhappiness & the need to be connected causes insomnia among young people.
Generally speaking the extremes of the debate either view social media as revolutionary (and fundamental for the Arab spring) or trivial. Defining the Arab spring as a Facebook revolution degrades the pain, suffering and efforts of the individuals doing the work. My example of the trivial is a response from an older professor when he heard I was working on an article on Twitter:
“Twitter? Isn’t that where everyone talks about what they had for breakfast?” Just as with the revolutionary view of social media this may have a grain of truth. Social media can be used for trivial conversation but it would be incorrect to see social media as only trivial. It may also be important to remember that most conversation is trivial. Trivial conversation is what creates and maintains social relations.
The approaches to social media belong to a longer tradition of techno-optimism and pessimism. My examples of optimism are a quote from Wikipedia:
Social media…At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. (Wikipedia, May 2009)
What does “the democratization of information” even mean? My second optimism example is Time Magazine’s choice of YOU as person of the year in 2006.
My choice of pessimists were a quote from Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture” (2007)
“Out of this anarchy… what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated.”
Say what you like about Keen, but he is extremely clear about his position. The second pessimist quote is from Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield:
“My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.”
From here the lecture moved on to the developments to what led to social media decade and the changes our new toys have caused. Naturally there are profound changes occurring all around us but the small stuff is fun to note.
The Wordfeud app is an interesting example. A couple of years ago admitting of regularly playing Scrabble may have been a form of social suicide – today things have changed and we happily boast of a high score. Similarly, a few years ago looking at pictures of your friends, enemies and other loose ties would have been voyeurism and maybe borderline stalking – today it’s just Facebook. Our use of technology has normalized abnormal behavior.
Our connectivity and our toys have also diminished our need for boredom – a feeling that may have filled an important purpose. I have written about Boredom as source of creativity earlier.
At this point the lecture moved on to some important points about what technology can do. Beginning with my favorite example of the Tokyo park bench read it here.
When we look at the effects of social media the most important point to begin with is the seminal quote by blue_beetle
If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold
I like this quote but I have always felt that there was something missing. We are not really the product – we are the creators of the product, which is data. We are digital dairy cows and the product is digital milk.
A social change caused by social media is our relationship with our contacts. We are the stars in our own performance attempting to present our ordinary lives in extraordinary ways. We document our lives for the entertainment of others – or maybe for the creation of the image of a more exciting life. As an example I showed my coffee project (a mix of entertainment, amusement & sadism – to be explained in a later blogpost).
In order to understand more about what we are doing it is good to know what the controllers of the infrastructure think about. It is important to understand the digital dairy farmers.
One of the main players is Mark Zuckerberg and his position on “radical transparency”
“You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”
There are several things wrong with this position (not even focusing on the fact that his company profits from this position). According to Zuckerberg the days may be coming to an end (which I seriously doubt) but what to do now? The media is full of examples where individuals have been punished (socially or economically or more) for information that may not have been illegal or even immoral.
In addition to this Zuckerberg has claimed that privacy is no longer a social norm. Additionally, Zuckerberg’s goal seems to create a personalized view of the world (check out Pariser’s Filter Bubble or some stuff on personalization I wrote here). In Zuckerberg’s own chilling words:
A Squirrel Dying In Your Front Yard May Be More Relevant To Your Interests Right Now Than People Dying In Africa.
It is worrying that Zuckerberg is profiting from pushing these positions at the same time as he develops a technology that promotes excessive sharing and profits from the same.
So if social media is not going to show social responsibility, then who will fix this problem?
Usually we turn to the law. However the law is all focused on concerns with Orwell’s view of surveillance via Big Brother. But today we are the ones giving away our information for the sake of convenience and entertainment – we are in the controlled world of Huxley’s Brave New World (check out the Orwell/Huxley paradox here).
So we are left to our own devices – in more ways than one. What can we expect of the future? First we will see an increased efficiency in personalization (as I have written earlier):
The same is true of information. The sweet and fatty information in a long historical context was an understanding of who was allied with whom? Who is sleeping with whom? And whom can I get my genes over to the next generation (obviously just a nicer way of thinking about getting laid!). This is why we today have a fascination about gossip. Which minor celebs are attempting to sleep with each other takes up an extraordinary part of our lives. But this was all ok since the access to gossip was limited. Today, however, we are connected to the largest gossip engine ever conceived. Facebook may try to hide it in its spin, but part of our fascination is all about looking at each other. The problem is that there is only a limited amount of time in life and spending too much time on gossip limits our ability for more relevant information. We are becoming information obese and the solution is to decrease fatty information intake and go to the information gym regularly.
The development of walled gardens or information silos… Facebook (and other silos) is branding us like the cattle we are. By attempting to lock our behavior into their site and prevent us from leaving they are diminishing our freedom – a freedom which was originally created in the design of the Internet and is being subverted by the growth of social media (Read Long Live the Web by Tim Berners-Lee).
We are not going to be helped from our locked stalls by either law or corporations. We are left to practice thoughtful self-restraint and hope that the law will eventually catch up with our technology and needs.
Being invited to talk somewhere else is always thrilling. Being asked to go to Berlin was even more so. The event was part of Internet und Gesellschaft Co:llaboratory who have been working on Internet & Human Rights. The event was a full day of talk (admittedly a lot in German but I had wifi and work to do so I was happy) followed by an open seminar with three talkers. These notes are from the presentation I gave at the seminar.
The lecture opened with a look at three historical highpoints of privacy regulation and thought. First was 1890 which was the year where Warren & Brandeis published their seminal paper The Right to Privacy which attempts to create a new right in society. Today, living in a rights-focused society arguing for rights seems natural (or banal) but what was it like to be the first to argue the right to privacy?
To exemplify the situation I showed the killer app of the 1890s. It was the Hollerith Tabulating Machine
The legal protection of privacy did not immediately spring to life and the next great step came in the 1970s where first the Lander of Hesse in Germany and the in 1973 Sweden created data protection legislation. The idea was to protect against the abuses of data collection but the state and large corporations.
The killer app of the 1970s is the impressive UNIVAC computer
UNIVAC image from Musée de l’Informatique
Kind of looks like the communal laundry room in my apartment building.
The next step was the European Data Protection Directive which attempted to harmonize data protection across Europe. It came in 1995 which as a killer app had the Windows95 operating system (couldn’t resist it!) and more importantly the first browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer (Microsoft released versions 1 and 2 in 1995). The browser wars are incredibly interesting as they show the importance of controlling the flow of information to the end user was not dependent on the hardware or operating system. It also shows that power consists of inserting oneself between the information and the end user – but I digress.
Before continuing I wanted to remind the audience that the law (and lawmaker) is behind the times so I quoted the late great Douglas Adams from his book The Salmon of Doubt
“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Following this I added a theoretical dimension to the lecture. The regulatory pyramid is intended to show that we focus on the law – this is what I was taught at law school. But the law is a self-sustaining system that ignores (or struggles to) the realities of social norms/rules and architecture. Social norms, not law, are what control most of our behavior the law is often too expensive, too drastic, too formal to be an efficient mode of conflict resolution. When someone “steals” “your” parking space, you don’t sue or call the prosecutor. You apply social norms. Your reaction depends on your upbringing and context – you may smile sweetly, flip them off or become verbally or even physically violent. Architecture is how the world works. It controls us by the rigidity of its being.
Regulatory Pyramid
If you want to slow down cars from speeding the law could be applied (a traffic sign will remind us of a pre-existing rule), or we use social norms by reminding drivers of accidents or children playing in the area. By implementing architecture we remake the physical environment and, for example, add bumps in the road – at this all cars must slow down. It is, however, important not to confuse the equal treatment with fairness. Architecture will prevent even an ambulance that may have good reasons to drive faster in a slow area.
As an example of my theory I show this wonderful/awful park bench in Tokyo.
image from Yumiko Hayakawa essay Public Benches Turn ‘Anti-Homeless’ (also recommend Design with Intent)
The bench is an example of outdoor public furniture known as anti-homeless technology or anti-bum benches. In order to prevent an undesirable group of people from using a public space we could create a rule against it – but by creating a law we need to accept the democratic constraints in rule making. Someone could remind us that in a democracy excluding people is inherently wrong. By choosing a bench that is unsuitable for sleeping the democratic process is bypassed. Additionally the park officials can always claim to have made an aesthetic choice i.e. we like this bench, rather than being against homeless people. This is control through design choice – imagine the control that may be created in manipulating communications technology.
The next segment is surveillance theory. As individuals we constantly leak and spread information. Most of us attempt to create strategies of control for our information flows. The most common is the process of compartmentalization which means that we present different information to different groups. I.e. the information you give about what you did over the weekend may be different when presented to your boss, wife, mother, children, best friend or lover. This is not necessarily lying but it is an attempt of controlling flows of information. Technology, and in particular social media, is all about losing the ability to practice this control.
Traditional surveillance theory is based upon Michel Foucault’s developments of Jeremy Bentham’s plans for the Panopticon prison. The concept is basic – if we are unaware of being watched we will internalize our own surveillance and become our own jailers. This is the whole premise of George Orwell’s book nineteen eighty-four: Big Brother is watching you. People under constant surveillance can be controlled. But is this really true? The control by the state is under constant refinement and yet citizens still attempt to cheat and steal – violent crime in general remains constant despite cctv. Could it be that Foucault (and Orwell) got it wrong?
The next step is technology. For me it’s the radical Huxleyian shift. What Orwell feared was totalitarian control via surveillance technology. But Huxley premised a more base society. Give people enough sex and drugs and they won’t care who controls them. Enter the convenient, comfortable, entertaining world of social media.
Social Media Timeline
Our newfound joy of communications technology has already changed our behavior in a major new way. Patterns of behavior that were deemed amoral, antisocial or even illegal have now become acceptable. Spending an evening looking at pictures of your ex-partners new partner would have been a textbook case of voyeurism and stalking. Today, its just Facebook. This reminds me of this early cartoon:
Additional changes in our behavior which should concern us are the fact that we can no longer refuse, ignore or exclude social media from our lives. Many claim they don’t have time for such nonsense but this will not be an efficient information control strategy. Even individuals outside social media use are being photographed and tagged by users and therefore identities are being created of them. These “friends” will also ensure that opting out is not a viable option.
The final level of surveillance is autoveillance. This is the self-chosen role of spreading information about ourselves. This is not the fact that my telephone stores and communicates my location information and more. This is part of the performance lifestyle which has created a performance anxiety, a need to present interesting inspiring activities from an ordinary lifestyle.
This may be silly, but is it harmful? Here it is not enough to study the moves of individuals (even millions of individuals).
Basically we are being seduced by technology, locked by licenses & killed by a lack of social responsibility. This creates four harmful outcomes that need somehow to be countered: Privacy, Personalization, Information obesity, & mind control.
As with the Japanese park bench above, understanding the users will not enable us to see the intentions of the manipulators. We must look to those with influence in social media and who can be more influential than Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying privacy is no longer a social norm
Which is interesting given the fact that he has created a system which helps us to forget our inhibitions about sharing personal information and that his business model is premised on our sharing. He has a stake in the removal of protections against privacy.
Zuckerberg on the topic of personalization of technology: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa” (Pariser NYT)
Sure there have always been gatekeepers choosing which information is important for me or not. But these gatekeepers did not create a personal information resource only for me. The daily newspaper is created to appease a society of readers. I may chose to ignore an article but at least it’s there in front of me. In a personalized world I will no longer be confronted by any kind of information that does not fit my profile.
The Holy Grail of many Internet providers is to give us this kind of personalization. The problem occurs when this kind of convenience and service removes our ability to control our flows of information. We lose the ability to read information that we may need – because we are constantly being bombarded by the information Facebook thinks we want.
Information obesity: Our bodies crave sweet and fatty foods. One way of looking at this is through the lens of evolution. Finding fatty and sweet foods was key to our survival but these were not to be found everywhere or everyday. Today we are surrounded by fatty and sweet foods so access is not the problem. The problem is overindulgence and obesity due to accessibility. This forces us to think about diet, to think about exercise. Self-control is essential to our survival.
The same is true of information. The sweet and fatty information in a long historical context was an understanding of who was allied with whom? Who is sleeping with whom? And whom can I get my genes over to the next generation (obviously just a nicer way of thinking about getting laid!). This is why we today have a fascination about gossip. Which minor celebs are attempting to sleep with each other takes up an extraordinary part of our lives. But this was all ok since the access to gossip was limited. Today, however, we are connected to the largest gossip engine ever conceived. Facebook may try to hide it in its spin, but part of our fascination is all about looking at each other. The problem is that there is only a limited amount of time in life and spending too much time on gossip limits our ability for more relevant information. We are becoming information obese and the solution is to decrease fatty information intake and go to the information gym regularly.
The final concern is of mind control. This is all about what happens when a social media is told that you are interested in a certain thing. Say, for example, you have a secret pleasure in seeing videos of kittens being kicked. You would never say this aloud – and if you did your social group would correct you by telling you this is an unhealthy impulse. You may even manage to convince yourself that you have no sadistic urges in this area. However, social media knows the truth and will continue to give priority to information about kitten kicking. You may resist some of it but if you have an urge you probably will click on some of the information. By clicking you re-enforce the information algorithm and you will be sent even more kitten kicking information. A question of moral responsibility can now be posed: While your latent sadistic tendencies are being reinforced and enhanced – what is the moral responsibility of the provider? This is akin to asking whether a drug pusher has any moral responsibility to his clients. In your answer consider that many users of social media are very young and there is no general awareness or discussion on the harms of social media.
So what about regulation? Well the problem is that we are considered to be autonomous. In other words we are old and wise enough to live our own lives. Indeed we have all agreed to the terms of use of social media sites. We may not have read them, maybe not understood them, they may have changed drastically since we read them – but legal fiction is that we agree to them.
This shouldn’t be a problem. If society deems an activity harmful enough it can, and should, legislate against it – even if some may protest this regulation. There have been protests against: motorcycle helmets, seatbelts, hitting children and the right to smoke (makes you lose faith in human intelligence) but the social cost was deemed greater than the loss of individual autonomy. The problem with social media is that the social costs are not particularly visible.
Finally on the question of gatekeepers and Orwellian or Huxleyian control it is interesting to note that typical Orwellian control is easier to see and therefore easier to protest against. Therefore the cost of maintaining it against the wishes of the people is too high to bear in the long run. But Huxleyian control is based on making me happy, fulfilling my desires. Counteracting this requires that I first become aware and then exercise self control. This is difficult on an individual level and close to impossible on a social level.
Not really sure if this should be called a lecture as it was part of a panel presentation where we were allotted 15 minutes each and then questions. The setting was interesting as it was part of the Swedish Parliaments annual conference about the future and the people asking the questions were all politicians. So for my 15 minutes (of fame?) I chose to expand on the ill effects of politics ignoring technology (or taking it as a stable, neutral given).
The presentation began with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.
It cannot be helped, it is as it should be, that the law is behind the times.
What I wanted to do was to explain that the law has always been seen as playing catchup. This is not a bug in the law it is a feature of the law. Attempting to create laws that are before the time would be wasteful, unpopular and quite often full of errors about what we think future problems would be. I wanted to include a quote from Niels Bohr
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
But time was short and I needed to avoid meandering down interesting – but unhelpful – alleyways.
Instead I reminded the audience that many of our fundamental rights and freedoms are 300 years old and, despite being updated, they are prone to being increasingly complex to manage or even outdated when the basic technological realities have changed. This was the time of Voltaire who is today mainly famous for saying
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
(Actually he never said this. The words were put in his mouth by the later writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall. But lets not let the truth get in the way of a good story.)
The period saw the development of fantastic modern concepts such as democracy, free speech and autonomy may be seen as products of the enlightenment. They remain core values in spite of the fact that our technological developments have totally changed the world in which we live. For the sake of later comparison I added that the killer app of the time was the quill. Naturally there were printing presses but as these are not personal communication devices they provide easier avenues of control for states. In other words developing concepts of free speech must be seen in the light of what individuals had the ability to do.
As I had been asked to talk about technology and society I chose to exemplify with the concept of copyright which was launched by the Statute of Ann in 1710. In Sweden copyright was introduced into law in the 19th century and the most recent thorough re-working of the law was in the 1950 with the modern (and present) Swedish copyright Act entering into the books in 1960. The law has naturally been amended since then but has received no major reworking since then. The killer app of the 1960s? Well it probably was the pill – but that’s hardly relevant, so I looked at radio and tv. The interesting thing about these is that they are highly regulated and controlled mass mediums. While they are easy to access for the consumer, they are hardly platforms of speech for a wider group of people.
Moving along to the Internet, the web, social media and the massive increases in personal devices have created a whole new ball game. These have create a whole new way of social interaction among citizens. The mass medium of one to many is not the monopoly player any more. So what should the regulator be aware of? Well they must take into consideration the ways in which new technologies are changing actual social interaction on many levels and also the changes in fundamental social values that are coupled with our expectations on the justice system.
The problem is that all to often regulators (as they are ordinary people) tend to take as their starting point, their own user experience. In order to illustrate what I meant I include one of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes (it’s from The Salmon of Doubt)
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Therefore it is vital not to ignore the role of technology, or to underestimate its effects. Looking at technology as – simply technology – i.e. as a neutral tool that does not effect us is incredibly dangerous. If we do not understand this then we will be ruled by technology. Naturally not by technology but by those who create and control technology. Law and law makers will become less relevant to the way in which society works. Or does not work.
In order to illustrate this, I finished off with a look at anti-homless technology – mainly things like park benches which are specifically designed to prevent people from sleeping on benches. In order to exclude an undesirable group of people from a public area the democratic process must first define a group as undesirable and then obtain a consensus that this group is unwelcome. All this must be done while maintaining the air of democratic inclusion – it’s a tricky, almost impossible task. But by buying a bench which you cannot sleep on, you exclude those who need to sleep on park benches (the homeless) without even needing to enter into a democratic discussion.
If this is done with benches, then what power lies in the control of a smart phone?
Last week was an intense week of lecturing, which means that I have fallen behind with other work – including writing up lecture notes. One of the lectures was Dangerous bits of information and was presented at the NOKIOS conference in Trondheim Norway. Unfortunately I did not have much time in the city of Trondheim but what I saw was wonderful sunny city with plenty of places to sit and relax by the river that flows through the center. But there was not much sitting outside on this trip.
The lecture was part of the session “Ny teknologi i offentlig forvaltning – sikkerhet og personvern” (New Technology and Public Administration – security and data security). In the same session was Bjørn Erik Thon, Head of the Norwegian and Storm Jarl Landaasen, Chief Security Officer Market Divisions, Telenor Norge.
My lecture began with an introduction to the way in which many organizations fail to think about the implications of cloud technology. As an illustration I told of the process that surrounded my universities adoption of a student email system. When the university came to the realization that they were not really excellent at maintaining a student email system they decided to resolve this.
The resolution was not a decision of letting individuals chose their system. But the technical group (it was after all seen as a tech problem) was convened and decided in an either – or situation. The decision placed before the group was whether we go with Google or with Microsoft. The group chose Google out of a preference for the interface.
When I wrote a critique of this decision I was told that the decision was formally correct since all the right people (i.e. representatives) where present at the meeting. My criticism was, however, not based on the formality of the process but rather about the way in which the decision was framed and the lack of information given to the students who would be affected by the system.
My critique is based on four dangers of cloud computing (especially by public bodies) and the lack of discussion. The first issue is one of surveillance. Swedish FRA legislation, which allows the state to monitor all communication, was passed with the explicit (though rather useless) understanding that only cross border communication will be monitored. The exception is rather useless as most Internet communication crosses borders even if both sender and receiver is within the same small state. But this cross-border communication becomes even more certain when the email servers are based abroad – as those of gmail are.
The second problem is that some of the communication between student and lecturer is sensitive data. Also the lecturer in Sweden is a government official. This is a fact most of us often forget but should not. Now we have sensitive data being transferred to a third party. This is legal since the users (i.e. the students) have all clicked that they agree the licensing agreements that gmail sets. The problem is that the students have no choice (or very little & uninformed – see below) but to sign away their rights.
The third problem is that nothing is really deleted. This is because – as the important quote states – “If you are not paying for it you are not the customer but the product being sold” – the business model is to collect, analyze and market the data generated by the users.
But for me the most annoying of the problems is the lack of interest public authorities has in protecting citizens from eventual integrity abuses arising from the cloud. My university, a public authority, happily delivered 40000 new customers (and an untold future number due to technology lock-in) to Google and, adding insult to injury, thanking Google for the privilege.
Public authorities should be more concerned about their actions in the cloud. People who chose to give away their data need information about what they are doing. Maybe they even need to be limited. But when public bodies force users to give away data to third parties – then something is wrong. Or as I pointed out – smart people do dumb things.
The lecture continued by pointing out that European Privacy Law has a mental age of pre-1995 (the year of the Data Protection Directive). But do you remember the advice we gave and took about integrity and the Internet in the early days? They contained things like:
Post-Facebook points such as these become almost silly. Our technology has developed rapidly but our society and law is still based on the older analogue norms – the focus in law remains on protecting people from an outer gaze looking in. This becomes less important when the spreading of information is from us individuals and our friends.
The problem in this latter situation is that it extremely difficult to create laws to protect against the salami-method (i.e. where personal data is given away slice by slice instead of all at once).
At this stage I presented research carried out by Jan Nolin and myself on social media policies in local municipalities. We studied 26 policies ranging between < 1 page to 20 pages long. The policies made some interesting points but their strong analogue bias was clear throughout and there were serious omissions. They lacked clear definitions of social media, they confused social media carried out during work or free time. More importantly the policies did not address issues with cloud or topics such as copyright. (Our work is published in To Inform or to Interact, that is the question: The role of Freedom of Information & Disciplining social media: An analysis of social media policies in 26 Swedish municipalities)
Social media poses an interesting problem for regulators in that it is not a neutral infrastructure and it does not fall under the control of the state. The lecture closed with a discussion on the dangers of social media – in particular the increase in personalization, which leads to the Pariser Filter Bubble. In this scenario we see that the organizations are tailoring information to suit our needs or rather our wants. We are increasingly getting what we want rather than what we need. If we take a food analogy we want food with high fat and high sugar content – but this is not what our bodies need. The same applies to information. I may want entertainment but I probably need less of it than I want. Overdosing in fatty information will probably harm me and make me less of a balanced social animal.
Is there an answer? Probably not. The only way to control this issue is to limit individual’s autonomy. In much the same way as we have been forced to wear seat belts for our own security we may need to do the same with information. But this would probably be a political disaster for any politician attempting to suggest it.
Thanks to the hard work of people like Bente Kalsnes the first Nordic Techpolitics conference will be held in Oslo on Friday 2 September. The event
…is a must-attend conference for everyone interested in how technology is changing politics, government and societies in the Nordic countries.
What:
Technological changes affect every aspects of society, and institutions and policy makers are struggling to catch up with the latest tools and possibilities. This conference will explore how we can use technology to improve politics and governance, increase participation and create smarter solutions in everyday life. We will also peek into some of the dark sides of how technology is changing society for worse.
Expect to learn about how transparency, innovation and collaboration are the driving forces for change in modern societies.
Check out the schedule here.
Yesterday I was in Borås at the Social Media Day which is an annual politics and social media conference (ppt slides and movies here). This year was opened by the US ambassador to Sweden Matthew Barzun, who gave an interesting talk (ppt) (much of it in Swedish, which was impressive). He spoke about the promise of technology and the difficulty of predicting the future and the importance of values in developing and using technology.
He also told the story of the Swedish engineer Laila Ohlgren, who, in the early days of mobile phones, solved an interesting issue of data roaming: by the time you finish dialing you have lost contact with the original phone mast. She proposed the simple – but breathtakingly fundamental – change of dialing the complete number first and then hitting the dial button. Fantastic, simple, basic… and totally revolutionary thinking.
Next up was Marie Grusell who spoke on the topic of party leaders use of twitter in their communication. She made interesting points on the differences between dialog and monologue and the relatively low usage of twitter among Swedish politicians. My focus on this was cultural and I wondered why the use was so low. An interesting comparison to the low numbers (the highest was Gudrun Schyman with 183 following and 9,447 followers) is the Norwegian Prime Minister @jensstoltenberg who follws 34,768 and is followed by 48,698.
This was followed by Per Schlingmann & Hampus Brynolf who held a low-tech (i.e. no ppt) discussion on social media now and in the future. There talk was experienced based and they seemed to be in relative agreement that social media would become a natural part of the political dialogue, that nobody wins elections through social media – but they may lose them through social media, that technology has led to the need for politics to be prepared with immediate answers for everything – which creates a need for an artificial, slowing down to think before you tweet. They also pointed to the unfortunate lack of focus on the everyday social media use in politics and the overemphasis on campaigning.
This was followed by Anders Kihl who demonstrated the ways in which Borås has been working to create multiple access points to municipal information and dialogues. As a practitioner Anders is very down to earth and the work done in Borås shows that everyday social media use in politics is important and engaging.
Jan Nolin introduced the concept of Wikipolitics into the discussion which had so far been very much focused on the concept of social media as a communications channel. He argued that social media channels does not take into consideration the importance of the possibility of using social media as political movements – not only in protests but provides a potential for the harnessing of the power of crowds in everyday socio-political life.
Next up was Grethe Lindhe from Malmö who presented the ways in which the region was using technology to enable citizens to propose and bring up questions into the political arena. By creating this possibility the Malmö region believed that politics would be made more accessible to a larger section of the citizenry.
Lars Höglund took his starting point in the large SOM-survey to attempt to deepen our understanding of the participatory elements of politics and the internet. My main beef was that I got stuck on the group they call “the internet generation” which was defined as those born between 1977-1997. What annoys me about this is that this groups’ aspect is that they have not experienced a pre-web age. Why this classification annoys me is that these digital natives (a term coined by Marc Prensky) are supposed to have special insights into technology. Let me give an analogy: While I was born during the age of the automobile this does not make me competent to talk in depth about the effects of cars on society, our dependence upon fossil fuels or the rise and fall of the car industry.
Last up – before the closing panel was me. I had been asked to talk about the links between social media and the law but I used my time to present some of the interesting points from my latest research into attempts by municipalities to regulate social media through policies. Its a work in progress and yesterday I addressed the concept of the municipality lawyer being negative to social media in a talk entitled Law is simple, people are not. Slides below
One of the things we were asked in the panel was whats up next? What will we be doing with social media today and in the future. What is post-social media? All in all it was a very good meeting. Lots of interesting people and discussions. I am looking forward to the next time.
Tomorrow is the second annual MSMBorås (twitter @msmboras & #msmboras) a growing interesting conference on the relationship between politics and social media. One of the great things is that this meeting does not take place in the political center of Sweden (i.e. Stockholm) but in the town of Borås.
The meeting is a good mix between researchers and active politicians, political commentators/observers and social media aficionados.
This year is opened by Matthew Barzun who will speak on the topic Social media, politics and democracy in the US. Today Barzun is the US Ambassador to Sweden but he has worked on Obama’s first campaign and has been invited back to lead the coming presidential campaign.
This will be followed by Marie Grusell talking on twitter in political elections, Per Schlingmann & Hampus Brynolf on social media in politics now and in the future, Anders Kihl on social media in local politics.
After lunch Jan Nolin presents on Wikipolitics as a collective method of political problem solving, Grethe Lindhe on citizen dialogues, Lars Höglund on the citizens opinions of social media in politics, then I will talk about legal consequences of social media use (kind of boring title – I wish I had chosen more wisely). Then the day is closed with a discussion.
This is going to be extremely interesting.
One of the greatest hinders to access and reuse of cultural material lies in the long terms of protection. The way in which copyright law works today is that it automatically protects (almost) all forms of cultural production (mainly) for a period of the life of the author plus 70 years. The effect of this is that nothing produced in my lifetime will be free in my lifetime.
This extension of the time of copyright is a major shift in the original idea of the bargain of copyright. The bargain was that the creator receives a limited monopoly and in return society will eventually receive the products of his or her work. Today the bargain is that the creator is protected and then his or her heirs take over the monopoly. This results in the situation where the children or grandchildren of the creator have the exclusive rights to the work.
My criticism is that the grandchildren of the creator should not have better rights to the work just because they have a genetic link to the author.
One area where the term of protection has remained shorter is the time span under which sound recordings are protected. But now the argument is why should sound recordings be discriminated against? Instead of arguing that the terms of protection are too long.
We all now have a chance to send a message and prevent this progress. Check out this attempt from the Open Rights Group to prevent this development. Read! And work for your rights.
The disastrous proposal to extend the term of copyright protection for sound recordings to 70 years is back on the European Council’s agenda.
There is a chance to stop this. You can help by writing to your MEPs now to tell them about your concerns, and ask them to make sure the Directive gets proper scrutiny from the European Parliament.
The economic evidence is stacked against the proposal. It will result in large parts of our cultural history being locked up. And it will benefit only a small number of artists and businesses. Leading IP professors, the UK government’s ‘Gowers Review’ of IP, and independent analysts commissioned by the EU have all said that extending the copyright term is unwise. You can read more about the evidence here.
You can help to make sure European decision makers look again at this damaging proposal by writing to your MEP now.
Many of the civil rights that we today claim to be “natural” or “fundamental” have their roots in an ideology of the individual which dates back to the 18th century. The importance of a free press, free speech, democracy and the fundamentals of integrity can be traced back to the enlightenment period which believed that all were created equal and that people – not systems – were valuable and important enough to be in control.
Since then these ideologies have been slowly been implemented into law. Not uniformly nor quickly but still the ongoing process of bringing implemented, real civil rights has been measurable. But lets not get carried away. One thing lacking in our (for example) right to expression has been our ability to express ourselves to a wider audience. Sure we have the right to do so – but do we have the ability to do so?
The fact that not everyone could speak was seen as unfortunate but inevitable and this scarcity created a marketplace of ideas. Well, in reality, it created a marketplace of platforms from which to speak from. If you fit the profile of the platform you may (still if you are lucky) exercise your right to speak to a larger audience.
In this way many of our rights are strongly linked to the platforms which give us the ability to carry out these rights. And what are the Internet, the Web & Web2.0? They are a form of easily accessible platforms. The barriers to entry to these platforms are widely reduced (compared with old or traditional media). With the lowering of barriers to entry millions (?) of people have been exercising rights which have previously only been theoretical.
Unfortunately this does not suit everyone. What we have seen is that with the removal or reduction of technical or economic barriers to entry the law is often being used to create an artificial barrier to reduce or minimize the impact of our rights.
Now the interesting thing is that no politician today would dare to challenge the enlightenment ideal. No politician today can openly say that they want to reduce our fundamental freedoms even if they are tempted to. What happens instead is the interesting removal of rights by creating levels of control in our communications intermediaries. What this means is that instead of telling people that they will reduce their rights governments are applying burdens of surveillance and control on the companies that provide our infrastructure.
And what can we do? Well not much really. Most of our infrastructure use is voluntary. If we want to use the net we are forced to play along with the conditions of the companies that provide the net to us.
A recent example of this process (one of many) reported by Wired is that the Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.
As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.
A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.
The companies — including Google, AOL and AT&T — maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.
But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government’s way.
The process is an excellent example of the cynical application of power. On the face of it government still maintains its support for rights, while in reality slashing the practical application of rights at the point of the technology upon which the rights stand.