writing

tis done

Today, after spending the whole weekend re-reading and correcting, I approved my thesis manuscript for publication. This means:

1. The printer is pressing the big button

2. There is no turning back – on 2 October I defend

3. No more changes can be made to the thesis

The sensation is one of relief and anxiety. What if I have made a huge error in the middle? Have I said too much? Too little? Have I missed a weak spot in my arguments etc etc. Soon (very soon) the answer to these questions will become clear.

The whole final text and images of the cover can be found here.

Posted on by mklang

comfortably numb

The song Comfortably Numb is one of my favourits from Pink Floyd’s album The Wall. The lyrics reflect a “coversation” between Pink (who has passed out in his hotel room) and the doctor who is attempting to treat him (or drug him) so that he can perform. The first verse here is the doctor followed by Pink’s reply:

Hello.
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home?
…

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ships smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I cant hear what youre sayin.
When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I cant explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

Why post this today? Well I have been sitting re-reading and correcting my manuscript and the phrase comfortably numb is actually quite representative of how I feel.

Posted on by mklang

Beautiful Thesis

Today I picked up the proof version â?? including the cover â?? of my thesis. It looks great. I took pictures but forgot to bring the camera cable home with me. So I will have to put pictures online later. But there is another problem. The systems administrators have threatened to do important updates to all the servers. Everything will be down during the weekend. This means I will not have access to the blog until Monday morning!

So despite the fact that I have no pictures to prove it you will have to accept that I have a beautiful thesis. Also without my blog for the weekend I shall be spending the whole time proof-reading (well almost all the time).

As always the link to the latest draft is here – if you can reach it between the systems work.

Posted on by mklang

What, Me Worry?

Swedish universities have an old tradition of nailing the PhD thesis in the main university building. The act of nailing has both a formal and traditional element. The physical hammering a nail through the thesis is naturally a traditional element. But the formal part of the ceremony concerns making the thesis available for the general public three weeks before the thesis defence.


Photographer unknown ca. 1850

The thesis that is nailed to the notice board is naturally not intended to be read â?? or at least not read easily (imagine trying to read a thick book which has been nailed to the wall). Therefore the author provides copies to the university library. The idea is that the thesis will be defended publicly which naturally means that the public must have the opportunity to read and prepare their questions and criticism.

Before being able to nail a thick book to the wall â?? it has to be printed. The printer wants 1 day for making proofs and 5-8 workdays for printing. Between these days I need to check the proofs.

24th August â?? Files to printer
26-27th August â?? Check proofs
28th August â?? Printing begins
11th September â?? Nail the thesis (three weeks before defence)
2nd October â?? My defence

Nervous, me? No! Whatever gave you that idea? I just remember the wise words of Alfred E. Neuman: What, Me Worry?

For those of you who cannot wait and want the sneak preview. The most updated version is online here. This is the most current version will continue to be updated until its time to send it to the printer…

Posted on by mklang

Glowing Review

I came across a glowing review on Amazon for Human Rights in the Digital Age (edited by Andrew Murray and myself). Getting a glowing review is a very nice feeling! So good that I naturally feel the need to reprint it here!

I read this book following Conor Gearty’s advice in his 2005 Hamlyn Lecture Series “Can Human Rights Survive?” that this book “should be required reading for all those interested in the future good health of our subject”. Although it drew on a wide variety of contributors, some better than others, overall I found the book filled a void in the current literature and for this reason alone it would be a must read. That aside though I found the contributions to be thought provoking and useful. Some of the better chapters come from Mathias Klang who discusses Cyber-activism and online civil disobedience, Douglas Vick who puts US and European views of free expression to the test and Andrew Murray who challenges the orthodox views that government should look after itself – at least when it comes to controlling the information flow about itself.

This is an excellent collection of essays and I simply echo Conor Gearty’s words – buy it if you are interested in the future good health of the discourse on human rights.

Posted on by mklang

Creating the Information Commons

Who created the term Information Commons? Today we use it and expect most people to understand what it means – even if it is a term used in a relatively specific group discussion.

In part the term owes a lot to those who did not even use it. Writers such as Hardin (Tragedy of Commons 1968), Rose (Comedy of Commons 1986) and Ostrom (Governing the Commons 1990) have all created the term commons and formed the discussion to what it is today. The act of adding their term to the concept of information was, in reality, an obvious step. But who took this step?

Here are a few candidates to the early use of information or informational commons – please let me know if someone is missing…

Felsenstein, Lee. “The Commons of Information.” Dr. Dobbs Journal, (May 1993): 18-24. http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/commons.html

Peter Jaszi & Martha Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship 11 (1994) includes the quote: â??creeping enclosure of the informational commonsâ??

Alok Gupta, Dale O. Stahl & Andrew B. Whinston, The Internet: A Future Tragedy of the Commons?, Paper Presented at the Conference on Interoperability and the Economics of Information Infrastructure July 6-7, 1995

Andrews, William. “Nurturing the Global Information Commons: Public Access, Public Infrastructure.” Presentation at the 4th Annual B.C. Information Policy Conference Vancouver, B.C., October 28, 1995. http://www.wcel.org/wcelpub/present/ipc95t.html

Scott R. Lundgren â??A Tragedy in the Information Commons?â?? Fall 1997 http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~humae105/fall97/slund01.htm

Onsrud, H.J., “The Tragedy of the Information Commons” in Policy Issues in Modern Cartography (Elsevier Science) 1998, pp. 141-158. Online draft http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~onsrud/pubs/tragedy42.pdf

Brin, David. “The Internet as a Commons.” in Milton T. Wolf, et. al. Information Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1998: 240-245.

Halbert, M (1999) ‘Lessons from the information commons frontier’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp.

Beagle, D (1999) ‘Conceptualizing an information commons’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 82-89.

Posted on by mklang

Subtitles

Today I saw a book in my colleagues office. The cool title was interesting enough to make me pick it up. Book is Peter Morvilleâ??s Ambient Findability which is a thoughtful approach to searching, finding and dealing with information (in particular information overload). It didnâ??t take long for me to convince myself that I needed to read this book.

Now me buying a book is not really the point of this post â?? even if book recommendations are worth posting. What I wanted to write about came out of the very cool subtitle to the book in question â?? â??What We Find Changes Who We Becomeâ??

Read that slowly again – â??What We Find Changes Who We Becomeâ??.

Very cool subtitle. Many non-fiction books include subtitles but few, in my opinion, (well it is my blog) actually seem to spend time on the subtitle but tend to be more explanatory. The model seems to be think of a snappy, catchy title then add subtitle so people will understand the title. Even though Morville follows this model I still think his subtitle is great. It has become my instant favourite.

Whatâ??s your favourite subtitle? Oh no â?? itâ??s a new memeâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Summer progress

It’s a hot summer. Brains are melting and work is sluggish. Despite this deadlines loom over us the unrelenting sunshine. My PhD thesis defence is on the 2 October. The book goes to the publishers in the last week of August.

The title of the work is “Disruptive Technology – Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” and it will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The blurb on the back cover will have this text:

Social interaction is partly shaped by technology being used. Therefore technological innovation affects modes of social interaction. While gradual technological innovation is often assimilated, some changes can be more disruptive. This research examines the democratic impact of attempts to control disruptive technology through regulation. This is done by studying attempts to regulate the phenomena of online civil disobedience, viruses, spyware, online games, software standards and Internet censorship â?? in particular the affect of these regulatory attempts on the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy. By studying the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy this work shows that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.

If anyone wants to read an advance version it’s available here. If you send me comments before end of August then I can make changes in the text.

Other facts about the book:

It’s 272 pages long
It’s 103027 words long
It will have a cover design by Jähling.

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons Culture and Terra Nullius

I recently published an article in a Swedish journal called InfoTrend. The article included an English abstract which you can read below. The journal wanted me to sign a copyright form which I did. Their contract also included a clause granting me permission to reproduce the article on my website – so I feel I must! So here it is. I realise that I probably should refuse to sign all such documents and demand that they implement CC licenses and open access values but then not many articles would be published and I will not be able to spread the word. It’s a catch 22 kind of situation.

Creative common licensing model as an alternative The great land grab between the 15th and 18th centuries was often legitimised by the concept of terra nullius – since the land was not being commercially exploited, it was being wasted and was therefore free for anyone to take. This stance has in hindsight been criticised for its tragic impact on the cultures and ecology of the lands being taken. Thus today the concept of terra nullius has fallen in disrepute. Despite this the concept is being widely used in the debate on the ownership of copyrightable material. The actions of major cultural producers, such as Disney, show that exploiting from the public domain is a profitable business model. This article discusses the implications of these actions and presents the Creative Commons licensing model as an alternative for buildning a body of cultural material, which is secured under copyright, but can still be used in a manner akin to the public domain.

Posted on by mklang