Society

Turkey tomorrow

Tomorrow I am off to Turkey to attend and teach on a course called Legal Aspects of the Information Society in Sile on the Black Sea. This is a great opportunity to meet some interesting people and to travel but there is one thing that really annoys me. Since I have just started on a new job I don’t really have the time to stay in Turkey. This means that I will not have time to explore Istanbul which is one of the cities that I have always wanted to explore.

Turkey, Istanbul, the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, Marmara Sea – all this evokes the exotic region to be explored. I have been totally fascinated by the region and its history since I read Michael Psellos‘ histories of the Byzantine emperors and lots of crusader literature. This fascination continued and I almost wrote my masters thesis in maritime law on the transportation of oil through the narrow straights of the Bosphorus. But in the end my thesis was on IT law – despite this my fascination remained.

Despite the fact that I will have no time to spend in Istanbul I cannot help myself. I have bought an Istanbul guidebook and I am reading Orhan Pamuk’s amazing book Istanbul –

Reading about a city which I will be crossing but not exploring is a peculiar form of masochism but I think the root lies in the desperate hope that somehow I will find time to see something of the city.

Posted on by mklang

Web Politics

Andrew Chadwick (author of Internet Politics – fantastic book which I reviewed for Information, Communication & Ethics in Society) is organizing a conference Politics Web 2.0 to be held at Royal Holloway, University of London in April 2008.

Has there been a shift in political use of the Internet and digital new media – a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards Web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does Web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

(via Lex Ferenda)

Posted on by mklang

Social Norms

Sweden likes to think of itself as an enlightened place. In particular when talking about gender roles. And to give Sweden its due – we have come a long way. That is why I was particularly amused when I saw this piece of graffiti. The artwork is an adaption of a typical sign on the road marking a pedestrian lane. It portrays a father walking with his daughter.

The artists adaptation of the sign shows the child dreaming of walking together with a man and a woman. I presume this to mean that the child longs for a complete family. I have never reflected upon this sign before but the artist made me think of several things at once.

First: Despite our progress in gender roles it is more often the woman who takes care of the children and therefore the sign on the road portraying a man and child shows gender roles as they are not. This can be interpreted in a friendly manner to mean that this is a vision of a better future where the father pays a more active role in child rearing but most probably it is an attempt to portray men in a better light.

Second: The child dreaming of walking with a male and female. If the image of the father and daughter can be seen as a portrayal of life as it is not then the dream of the family consisting of father, mother and child is a re-enforcement of a socially acceptable norm vis-a-vis the heterosexual family. Is the artist aware that by critiquing one social norm she/he is re-enforcing another?

Third: The child is the one dreaming of family. The male has no such thoughts. Significant?

Forth: Is the child’s longing for a mother figure a cry for security or normality?

All these questions from a drawing on the pedestrian lane. In addition to this the artist has received a response. From the thought bubble showing the child’s dream or longing rises another bubble with the words “hate him” written in Swedish. Is this the child’s thoughts? Is it the woman’s thoughts? Or should this be seen as a comment from the society around this little group?

It’s amazing what a morning walk can bring…

Posted on by mklang

Librarians Rock

The general image of the librarian is definitely uncool but this image has been changing for a long time. When the New York Times published its article A Hipper Crowd of Shushers last week (8 July) this was a sign of the times.

Librarians? Arenâ??t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons â?? the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging…

How did such a nerdy profession become cool â?? aside from the fact that a certain amount of nerdiness is now cool? Many young librarians and library professors said that the work is no longer just about books but also about organizing and connecting people with information, including music and movies.

The upcoming documentary The Hollywood Librarian (release 29 September) will also become part of the way in which the perception of librarians is changing.

Instead of being only the strict formal organizer the librarian is actually on the forefront of several important debates in the information society. The questions of access to knowledge, privacy, free speech, open access and parts of the DRM debate are being lively discussed among librarians.

Posted on by mklang

A room of one's own (in Lund)

When Virginia Wolf wrote the long essay A Room of One’s Own in 1928 (published 1929) it was a call for the need for authors to have a physical and mental space within which they would have the possibility and acceptance to create. It was also a criticism against the male dominated society and the way in which women were denied such a room. Naturally there is an online version under CC license – it is well worth reading.

Since I will be beginning a new job at the University of Lund in September I really need to find such a room (in Lund).

So if anyone knows where I can rent a room or an apartment in Lund – please let me know.

Posted on by mklang

University email & student privacy

Some time ago Linköping University proudly announced that they were outsourcing their student email to Google. Basically the students will see the university email address but “under the hood” the system will be run by Google. The BBC reports (11 June) that Trinity College Dublin is doing the same thing.

Google email (gmail) has some privacy issues:

Google automatically scans e-mails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, assumed private, e-mails, and that this was a security problem. Allowing e-mail content to be read, even by a computer, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, e-mail that non-subscribers’ choose to send to Gmail accounts is scanned by Gmail as well… (wikipedia)

So an uninformed gmail user may be losing some integrity. This is bad but at the same time it can be seen as a question of choice. (Don’t get me started on the problems of uninformed choice). But now the universities are pushing students to become gmail users. In Sweden universities are publicly funded government bodies and therefore they should be more concerned about forcing citizens to become customers of a private corporation.

Generally people are not to aware of the privacy risks which technology may create. Universities should help people to understand society and it is a shame that they are now acting as a sales representative for a company providing them with customers instead of acting as an example and educating citizens about the advantages and disadvantages of technology.

Posted on by mklang

Resisting Science

Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg have written a very nice article entitled “Why do some people resist science?” in which they put forward the interesting discrepency between the status of the scientist and the trustworthiness of the scientist in society. Despite the fact that scientists are proud of their objectivity and method they still have not managed to convince everyone that they are telling the truth.

In a 2005 Pew Trust poll, for instance, 42% of respondents said that they believed that humans and other animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.

This means that almost half of the people asked rejected the basic theory of evolution.

But this rejection of science would be mistaken in the end. The community of scientists has a legitimate claim to trustworthiness that other social institutions, such as religions and political movements, lack. The structure of scientific inquiry involves procedures, such as experiments and open debate, that are strikingly successful at revealing truths about the world.

But these results also show something else. They show that no matter how much increased communication is available in society, on a certain level, individuals will not find the truth themselves. They will reject it in favor of  belief. Additionally the over-belief in democracy will lead to the situation where untrained people will “know” better than the trained scientists.

Posted on by mklang

Social Impact of the Web

If you happen to be in London on 25th May then you may want to attend the RSA special event Social Impact of the Web: Society, Government and the Internet. With speakers Cass Sunstein, Tom Steinberg, Andrew Chadwick, William Davies, Matthew Taylor, Bronwyn Kunhardt, Georgina Henry it promises to be a very interesting day (in addition to this the event is free). Unfortunately I will not be in London so I cannot attend (how annoying) I would very much have liked to have been there.

Here is the text from the advert:

How can new internet technology empower us to interact with each other in novel ways?

This conference will address this question by focusing on the political culture and norms that the internet has been instrumental in fostering, both in relation to centralised politics and more diffuse social and civic networks.

It will also look at the psychology of the internet â?? as we create virtual fully living worlds, lines may be crossed between what is real and unreal in our lives.

Virtual environments let people create their own digital identity with their own unique psychology. When online do we treat people differently, does the technology that we are using change how we would behave in the real world? If people create their own representation what does it say about them and what are the wider implications, social and political.

To book a place at this conference visit http://socialimpact.eventbrite.com/

Location: RSA, 8 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6EZ
Date: 25 May 2007
Time: 10.30am – 4.00pm

Posted on by mklang

Libraries and Copyright

Copyright has a tendency to make library work difficult. This is a growing trend and many of the larger libraries in the world are struggling to come to terms with copyright issues.

Yesterday the EU’s High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries – which includes, inter alia, stakeholders from the British Library, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Federation of European Publishers and Google – presented an advisory report on copyright issues to the European Commission.

The group also discussed how to ensure more open access to scientific research and how to improve public-private cooperation. The work of the High Level Group is part of the European Commission’s efforts to make Europe’s rich cultural and scientific heritage available online. For this purpose, the group advises the Commission on issues regarding digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation of cultural material.

Read their Report on Digital Preservation, Orphan Works and Out-of-Print Works, Selected Implementation Issues available here and the annex Model agreement for a licence on digitisation of out of print works available here.

(EU Press Release)

Posted on by mklang

Does anyone have a spare?

[pdf, 3.08 MB] The Living Planet Report is WWF’s periodic update on the state of the world’s ecosystems. Pdf file over here.

And it is not good news. The Living Planet Report 2006 confirms that we are using the planetâ??s resources faster than they can be renewed â?? the latest data available (for 2003) indicate that humanityâ??s Ecological Footprint, our impact upon the planet, has more than tripled since 1961. Our footprint now exceeds the worldâ??s ability to regenerate by about 25 per cent.

The consequences of our accelerating pressure on Earthâ??s natural systems are both predictable and dire. The other index in this report, the Living Planet Index, shows a rapid and continuing loss of biodiversity â?? populations of vertebrate species have declined by about one third since 1970.

The report describes the changing state of global biodiversity and the pressure on the biosphere arising from human consumption of natural resources.

It is built around two indicators:

  • the Living Planet Index, which reflects the health of the planet’s ecosystems; and
  • the Ecological Footprint, which shows the extent of human demand on these ecosystems.

These measures are tracked over several decades to reveal past trends, then three scenarios explore what might lie ahead.The scenarios show how the choices we make might lead to a sustainable society living in harmony with robust ecosystems, or to the collapse of these same ecosystems, resulting in a permanent loss of biodiversity and erosion of the planet�s ability to support people.

Find out how you can reduce your ecological footprint.

Posted on by mklang