technology

Gender & Technology

Most of us (should) know that the net is not a particularly nice place. It is a neutral tool that allows all users to go out there and be themselves. Unfortunately the technology also offers people pseudo-anonymity or the illusion of real anonymity. I say unfortunately because this really brings the weirdos out of the woodwork. One of the most casual forms is the misogynist – but racism may be more common.

In an article on Women on the Web, Caitlin Fitzsimmons writes about the way in which men use technology to spread fear against women and approaches ways in which to deal with the issue. Many tend to think that the best approach is to ignore those who behave badly. This approach can be justified in different ways:

1. The simplest reason many ignore the problem is by claiming to be too tired/busy to react. This is usually connected to arguments that there are simply too many things to react to. So in general I agree with this argument except for the problem that too many people use this as an excuse all the time and react to nothing. If you cannot fight against everything then at least pick one injustice and fight against that!

2. Social shunning as punishment. In real life when someone behaves badly we often do not tell them or make a big fuss. Often it is enough to ignore what has happened, in particular if we ignore it visibly. We can, for example, create an embarrassing silence. This is the social equivalent of banishment and the socially aware individual recognizes that boundaries have been crossed and will adjust his/her behavior in the future. The problem with attempting this online is that the offender must feel the need to belong to the group for this to work. Also embarrassing silences only work when the whole social group falls unnaturally silent. This does not work online.

3. The third approach is the concept of the marketplace of ideas. This basically means that it is actually good for the weirdo’s to get out in the open and test their ideas since this will only encourage the opposition to develop better arguments and convince the weirdo’s that they are wrong. In an offline world this may work in theory in an open debate but it is hardly likely to work in practice.  In an online environment this approach is misguided. It also gives the weirdo’s way too much leeway and opportunity to cause pain to others.

Fitzsimmons writes:

The question is then how to tackle the problem. The panellists agreed that while there was no point in engaging directly with hateful comments, ignoring them was not really a viable option. Feministing.com’s Valenti said online misogyny was different to offline abuse in two key respects. “Unlike someone coming up to you on the street, it can be really hard to assess what kind of danger you’re in,” she added. “You don’t know if it’s a 15 year-old in Idaho spouting off or a really scary guy who really is likely to come around and rape you.”

The online/offline worlds are different and attempting to apply theoretical approaches to handling uncomfortable/threatening/harmful situations in the online world may only cause more harm. No I do not have a solution but I really like the way in which blogs like Feministing are using  technology to reach new readers – or actually viewers since Feministing uses YouTube videos (check out their channel here).

Posted on by mklang

PhD in Edinburgh – short deadline

SCRIPT – a law and technology research centre at the University of Edinburgh, School of Law – is seeking to recruit a suitably-qualified candidate to undertake a fully-funded PhD studentship. This is a full-time, full maintenance, three-year position sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which also supports the Centre. The area of research will fall within the “Open Science Business Model” strand of the Centre’s activities and the successful candidate will be supervised by Professor Graeme Laurie and Andres Guadamuz, Co-Directors of the Centre.

This studentship will benefit from collaboration with Roslin Cells Ltd, a not-for-profit company associated with the Roslin Institute which produces high-quality embryonic stem cell lines for research and clinical application. Roslin Cells, which is interested in issues of Open Science and wishes to develop a suitable open licensing strategy, will serve as a case study and this is expected to form a central part of the thesis.

This studentship is being fully funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and candidates must be eligible to receive such support. Further details of the eligibility criteria are available from http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/aboutus/studentshipguidelines.aspx

Queries relating to this studentship can be addressed to Professor Graeme Laurie, Director of SCRIPT at graeme.laurie@ed.ac.uk or on 0131 650 2020.

An application form is available from the SCRIPT Administrator via john.anzani@ed.ac.uk

The closing deadline for application is 09:00 Friday 13th June 2008. Interviews will be held on the afternoon of Friday 20th June 2008.

Posted on by mklang

Mobile Phone Popcorn

Following the recent YouTube films showing popcorn being popped by mobile phones a discussion arose as to whether this was possible. Some argued that they had been able to replicate the films while others cried hoax! Thankfully the Guardian Online conducted the following experiment:

In search of the truth we gathered all the phones in the G2 office, placed some freshly purchased uncooked popcorn in the centre of them and simultaneously dialled them all. The result?

Absolutely nothing.

Which is probably not surprising as the popcorn kernels has to be heated to over 230 centigrade before it pops…

Posted on by mklang

Confused Politicians on Copyright

Without being too cynical it is easy to see that politicians are struggling with online copyright violation. Even the terminology is confused – copyright violation is too difficult and most people will talk about file sharing and thereby confusing technology with law.

In Sweden, where computer literacy is high and fixed price broadband is the norm, intentional copyright violation through filesharing is rife. In addition to this the moral concepts surrounding these acts have been fundamentally re-interpreted. Due to its relative ease, low cost and widespread acceptance – illegal file sharing is not considered by many to be morally wrong. Some not insignificant numbers also argue that it should not even be illegal.

Naturally politicians are concerned. Not all are cynically using the debate to forward their own popularity – some are sincerely concerned about the rift between law and morality in this question. Swedes, believe it or not, are a rather moral bunch. Sure we have reputations for free sex, expensive alcohol and high suicide rates but this is no longer a true picture if you compare Sweden to the rest of Europe. What I mean by being moral is that Swedes are relatively honest and prefer not to cheat – so when the rift between morality and law is apparent it is a greater reflection of a problem in Sweden than in some other countries.

So the Pirate Party wants to abolish copyright, The Swedish Left Party recently decided to strive to legalize online file sharing. Now the Centre Party are calling for change in a recent report by their spokesman on Copright Annie Johansson (report in Swedish Pdf) on the future of copyright.

Their report is interesting in that they want to attempt a re-evaluation of copyright in order to make it into a fair balance of rights. The report is also heavily influenced by the concept of Fair Use and the Creative Commons system which is good on the one hand but unfortunately the concepts are misunderstood in the
report. The fair use system is not easily applied in the Swedish concept due to different legal cultures and histories. And the Creative Commons licensing system cannot go beyond the legislation in hand.

Are politicians weary about talking to experts?

Despite these minor misunderstandings there seems to be growing political will to discuss the purpose of copyright. This could become very interesting.

Posted on by mklang

War on photography

There has been some really weird stuff happening to photographers. The mood is growing against public photo takers are being hassled by police. The idea is that taking photo’s in public is becoming more and mote connected to terrorism.

Schneier on security writes:

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

He develops this as an interesting theory. Read the rest here…

Posted on by mklang

Digital Culture book

The book Structures of Participation in Digital Culture is now available for download for free. Here is a part of the blurb:

Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, …explores digital technologies that are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms…

The contents include some familiar and some unfamiliar names and a lot of chapters that seem worth reading, take a look at this:

  • The Past and the Internet (Geoffrey Bowker),
  • History, Memory, Place, and Technology: Plato’s Phaedrus Online (Gregory Crane),
  • Other Networks: Media Urbanism and the Culture of the Copy in South Asia (Ravi Sundaram),
  • Pirate Infrastructures (Brian Larkin),
  • Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production (Mizuko Ito),
  • Pushing the Borders: Player Participation and Game Culture (T. L. Taylor),
  • None of This Is Real: Identity and Participation in Friendster (danah boyd),
  • Notes on Contagious Media (Jonah Peretti),
  • Picturing the Public (Warren Sack),
  • Toward Participatory Expertise (Shay David),
  • Game Engines as Open Networks (Robert F. Nideffer),
  • The Diablo Program (Doug Thomas),
  • Disciplining Markets in the Digital Age (Joe Karaganis),
  • Price Discrimination and the Shape of the Digital Commodity (Tarleton Gillespie),
  • The Ecology of Control: Filters, Digital Rights Management, and Trusted Computing (Joe Karaganis).

Download the Entire Book

Posted on by mklang

The dumbest generation

A new book that may be a good read is Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) – another recommendation by Kevin at Question Technology (his recommendations are always worth looking into).

dumbestgeneration.jpg

From the book’s website:

According to recent reports from government agencies, foundations, survey firms, and scholarly institutions, most young people in the United States neither read literature (or fully know how), work reliably (just ask employers), visit cultural institutions (of any sort), nor vote (most can’t even understand a simple ballot). They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount foundations of American history, or name any of their local political representatives. What do they happen to excel at is – each other. They spend unbelievable amounts of time electronically passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, savoring the thrill of peer attention and dwelling in a world of puerile banter and coarse images.

The book argues that this is not the typical elder generation complaining about, or not getting, the younger generation but it is a serious problem.

To those of us outside the US its no point in laughing at the Yanks – the evidence shows the same trends even in Europe and based upon my (non-scientific, anecdotal evidence) students – I cannot say that I am impressed.

On the other hand, for as long as I can remember, I have been hearing how the great thinkers have all gone. As a young PhD I was taught that the pace of life and the realities of academia no longer allow for the great works – we have to force research to create publications. Reading is almost frowned upon and when was the last time you could sit in your office and just think?

Still I see plenty of evidence of thought, and great thought at that. No, it is not in the same pattern as the old thought. It is more communicative – it must be to catch the reader who is not allowed to read and think. To enable this depth may, sometimes, be sacrificed.

If we look to the past it seems populated with genius – but this may be because we tend to forget the idiots, unless they were spectacularly idiotic. But if we look around us we seen the idiots but cannot see the geniuses, this may be that they are working instead of appearing on talent shows for the untalented.

ps trust me, I am 41 today 🙂

Posted on by mklang

Books not dead – bookshops are dying

For a long time there have been claims that the book is dead or at least terminally ill. The most recent revival of these claims was with the launch of the kindle ebook reader.

In the 1979 book The Micro Millennium, Christopher Evans forecasted that due to electronic media, “…the 1980s will see the book as we know it, and as our ancestors created and cherished it, begin a slow but steady slide into oblivion. . . . there are a number of reasons this is imminent.” Naturally Evans was wrong.

Again when the Internet became commonplace the book was given another obituary and again, judging from book sales, it was another premature prediction.

The thing is that technology will not kill the book. Technology has the ability to organize, reorganize information. It facilitates storage and searching but it will not kill the traditional book form. The book has other values that will not be easily replaced by technology. Steven Poole has written a great post on this.

Old Spines
Creative Commons License photo: Old Spines by brighterorange

So the book is not dying but the bookshop is! So this was nothing new but it was driven home to me in force when I happened to walk past one of my favorite small bookstores, it was having a moving sale (not a closing down sale).

News of a book sale usually makes me happy, but after browsing the generous 30-50% sale offers I realized that even with the discount the books were cheaper to buy new ones online. So this is not something new but I thought that a discount this large would even things out – but it didn’t.

Posted on by mklang

Trusting Technology

Claire over at Mummys Bracelet has written about the drawbacks in the blind trust in technology and used a row of fun/scary examples about people who have followed the advice of their satellite navigation systems into dead ends, rivers and other traps. Ignoring their better judgment and the evidence of their own eyes.

This is the kind of stuff I have written about before but it reminded me that I had a book chapter called “Trust & Technology” in Swedish which has never been online so I decided that it was time to but the preprint where it belongs – unfortunately it’s in Swedish but I was very happy with the way in which the chapter turned out.

The basic point of the article is that we should not trust technology more than necessary and, more importantly, we should not allow experts exclude us from discussing the pros and cons of technology.

Posted on by mklang