Prof “Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/ gave another barnstorming performance in a visit to a small, packed room full of LSE media and regulation students. I had heard much of his presentation before last year at a presentation he made in Oxford but there were some interesting new factoids in the latest version – notably:

* The average time a book remains in print is about one year.
* There are 100k titles “alive” in Amazon but 26m titles that have been printed and are available in the Library of Congress.
* Products from one part of a big corporation tend to get used in movies and other programmes made by that company not necessarily because of straightforward plugging but simply because the process of copyright clearance is easier with products from inside those corporations than outside.
* Before the 1976 copyright act in the US, copyright holders had to re-assert their copyright periodically. Only 10-20% of them did so.
* Whoever managed the ebook distribution of his book “The Future of Ideas”:http://the-future-of-ideas.com/ set the DRM flag in Acrobat not to allow anyone to copy text from, print or even have the book read aloud. Talk about an own goal!

If you want to see the abstracts of the essays I’ve written so far and the bibliographies I have used, check “this page”:http://davidbrake.org/papers.html out – it now includes the abstract and bibliography of my dissertation on UK activists’ use of the Internet as well. If you would like to see any of the papers I have asked that you contact me by email so I know who they are going to. I hope to get one or more of them published at some point so I don’t want to put them into wide circulation.

Incidentally, has anyone written anything useful about how journals treat papers that are available in their raw form on the Internet? I am nervous that if I publish them online publicly I may not be able to get a journal to accept them later because they want first publishing rights. Am I right to be nervous?

David Wilcox “blogs here in detail”:http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2004/01/nonprofit_tech_.html about a research report from Jeremy Wyatt at a regeneration consultancy, “Hall Aitken”:http://www.hallaitken.co.uk/. It suggests UK Online centres should be less in libraries and more in community centres and integrated with the voluntary and community sector, but says nonetheless that they are largely successful in reaching those they target (disadvantaged people who wouldn’t have Internet access elsewhere).

By sheer coincidence on the same day I came across a paper by “Dr Neil Selwyn”:http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/selwyn/ in the September 2003 edition of the journal “Information, Communication & Society”:http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/1369118x.html – unfortunately not publicly accessible (unless you are an academic with a subscription – if so look “here”:http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/ExpandTOC/ingenta;jsessionid=3ok9ubgqnr53e.circus?issue=infobike://routledg/rics/2003/00000006/00000003&index=5)
The paper seems to be largely based on “a report Dr Selwyn did for BECTA”:http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/digidiv_selwyn.pdf in any case (which is publicly accessible).

Anyway here are some key findings:

…The survey data suggest that, in terms of people’s effective access to ICT, public access sites have a relatively slight profile when compared with household and wider family access – perceived to offer ready access to ICT by only a minority of respondents. Moreover, when the use of these public ICT sites is examined, there is little evidence of public ICT sites attracting those social groups who may otherwise be excluded or marginalized from the information age.”

Update:Jeremy Wyatt himself was good enough to comment on this post. He said:

“I can see where you have seen a contradiction in the two reports but actually they don’t conflict in any way. As as researcher you’ll forgive me for suggesting you read the whole of both reports…we actually quote the work Neil and his colleagues did in our report.

One of the thrusts of Neil’s report is that people don’t use public internet access points much. The thrust of ours is that UK online centres have helped to introduce the internet to many new users and helped many gain skills and confidence. Our report stresses the introduction and skills services. It does not confirm or deny that public internet access once you have these skills is a viable approach. It refers to Neil’s work to suggest that there is data to suggest the opposite.

But, and its a big but, things change fast in this field and maybe public internet access has a big future once its ubiquitous.”

Mea culpa! I don’t have time to go more into this at the moment but I do encourage people to read both reports. The Hall Aitken report is “here”:http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research/programmeofresearch/index.cfm?type=5&keywordlist1=0&keywordlist2=0&keywordlist3=0&andor=or&keyword=CMF+funded+uk+online+centres&x=94&y=15.

Like Wyatt, Selwyn suggests that siting UK Online centres out of libraries, schools, colleges and museums would help and suggests

“another alternative strategy would be to develop a shift in emphasis away from community sites towards developing systems of community resources, which can then be loaned into people’s houses, thus building upon and augmenting people’s existing access to and use of ICT in friends’ and relatives’ houses.”

However he concludes pessimistically, “Although proving useful for those that use them, it appears likely that such sites will only ever fulfil a limited social role and are certainly not a panacea to the perceived inequalities of the information age.”

I share his pessimism because I feel not enough is being done to explain to disadvantaged people how what is on the Internet is relevant to their needs (and particularly not enough is done to encourage them to contribute themselves – which would help in turn to narrow the relevance gap).

I hope at least that the common recommendation of both reports – moving public access closer to where the public actually likes to hang out – will be listened to. To its credit the Office of the e-Envoy in its “annual report”:http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/00/60/69/04006069.pdf seems to be taking this on board to some extent. The Government is funding ‘get online’ initiatives with the voluntary and community sector and spending around £3m (not a lot admittedly!) through Culture Online to, “engage hard-to-reach audiences, encouraging them to discover the potential of new digital technologies (p. 11)

It has been noted before that search engines’s algorithms don’t magically provide the ‘best’ results for any query – they only provide the best matches using a given algorithm, and that algorithm can be biased. The latest issue of “First Monday”:http://firstmonday.org/ – an excellent e-journal – includes a detailed examination of one key aspect. Dr “Susan L Gerhart”:http://pr.erau.edu/~gerharts/ has attempted to determine whether the problems with such algorithms tend to conceal controversies and while her results (done on a small scale) don’t seem to show consistent failures she nonetheless suggests that search engines may indeed suppress controversy and adduces some interesting arguments why this might be the case alongside recommendations for search engine programmers of how to produce more representative results.

Whether the weblogging ‘community’ is ‘fair’ or not depends on whether you look at opportunity or outcome. Not everyone has the opportunity to blog (this takes time and an internet connection) but as “Danah Boyd”:http://www.danah.org/ points out in a pair of recent postings about blogging and fairness the weblogging community looks even more unfair when you look at outcome – who is actually doing it.

In her first post on the subject she suggests out that propensity to blog seems to be “concentrated among straight white men”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/001400.html#001400 – in the “second”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/001402.html#001402 she suggests that just because the world of blogging is in principle open to all (or at least all with time and money to spare) and therefore fair (according to “Clay Shirky”:http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/06/joi_are_blogs_just.php) it doesn’t mean that the situation is necessarily right.

Clay appears to agree but suggests, ‘I can’t imagine a system that would right the obvious but hard to quantify injustice of the weblog world that wouldn’t also destroy its dynamism.’

Both he and Joi Ito, whose “posting”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/01/06/are_blogs_just.html sparked the discussion in the first place seem to suggest that if a solution were to be found it would be through changes to the software itself. I think the definition of the problem and its solution needs to be broader – a ‘technical solution’ to the problem of inequality of participation and outcome in weblogging is not likely because that problem is largely a reflection of inequalities in society itself.

[Update: Oops – it seems I missed a later “post by Clay”:http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/06/boyd_ahtisaari_and_butterfield_v_me_dont_bet_on_me.php in which he actually partly makes my point below himself, saying there is ‘equality of technological opportunity, but one heavily dependent on other, external factors.’]

My own evolving PhD project at the “LSE”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm
will be looking at what kind of people do Internet self-publishing, why those people do it and what social effects this new capability is having (currently using Bourdieu’s work as a theoretical basis).

The main point that has been largely missing so far in the discussion I think is that the barriers to blogging or other self-publishing (in the developed world at least) are not solely (or even mainly) money and time but attitude. It takes a certain attitude to want to share your thoughts and experience in this way and many people who one might argue should contribute (poor and/or minority people for example) don’t because (among other things) it isn’t the kind of thing they would think of doing and nobody they know does it.

If one believes that it would be of benefit both to society and to the individual participants that the practice of weblogging were more widely distributed, making the tools cheaper and easier to use is a necessary but not sufficient step. The benefits of such activity would need to be demonstrated and promoted by and among people of those other communities.

P.S. Has anyone done a recent study of webloggers or personal home page creators that looks not just at age and sex but at education level, occupation, ethnicity or better still class?

P.P.S. There’s lots more on the question of whether we should worry mainly about inequality of opportunity or of outcome (when looking in this case at the economy) over at “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001040.html

I have just finished my library run for the holidays and as you can see my stack of material to read is pretty formidable. I have done a quick count and found I have a little over 5,000 pages of academic text to read in less than a month (not counting any of the papers I have downloaded that I may want to read).

Somewhere before mid-January I will also have to produce 10 to 15 pages on how Bourdieu’s ideas of symbolic capital – particularly notions of field and habitus – relate to the production of personal home pages and weblogs, mark six essays and prepare to teach an undergrad course at the London College of Printing.

Of course, I am somewhat exaggerating the travails of this holiday season – I have already dipped into several of the books and some of the others I signed out on the off chance they might be useful and will probably not get around to reading. Above all, several of the books are collections of essentially separate chapters, so I won’t need to read them all (and anyway I like reading – if I didn’t, would I do a “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm?)

FWIW the books I have taken home to read are hidden below:
(more…)

David Wilcox posts a link to “twelve academic reports about technology and everyday life in Europe”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/EMTEL/plan.html recently published by the “European Media and Everyday Life Network”:http://www.emtel2.org/ and suggests given their usefulness that a user-friendly version should have been written. Indeed it should but one could argue that it is not necessarily the role of the academic to produce such a summary.

To some extent the complexity of the language does stem from the fact that the papers are aimed directly at an academic audience and only indirectly at the wider public (as “Prof Roger Silverstone”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/rogerSilverstone.htm, one of the report’s authors, responded).

As far as I can make out there are four possible paths from academic research to policy:

• paper -> policy (rare – as papers are usually not widely read or readable outside their intended audience)
• paper -> journalist/writer -> policy (here is where hopefully someone like David Wilcox or myself might fit in)
• paper -> academically-trained civil servant -> policy (does this happen often? I hope so, but lack evidence)
• paper -> academics -> students who eventually become politicians/activists/journalists etc (the ‘mainstream’ way academic knowledge gets used – rather slow and indirect but, I hope, effective)

I would be curious to hear from my readers which road to academic policy influence is most effective and how academics with interest in policy could help the process along.

Getting back to these particular reports, many academic papers these days come with abstracts – a hundred words or so providing a summary of what the research has found – and often keywords as well, for integrating into databases. It is a shame that the ‘house style’ in this instance seems to be not to have such a summary. There are abstracts for the project reports but these are easy to overlook on the report web page and they are themselves several pages long.

David Wilcox’s observations point to a possible need for a second abstract for academic papers aimed at policy questions – one that tries to give the layman an idea of the paper’s findings without touching on the theoretical background- even if all that does is get the layman to ask an academic friend to take a look at it for them!

Today I graduated from my “Masters”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mScInNewMediaInformationAndSociety.htm here at the “London School of Economics and Political Science”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/aboutLSE/information.htm but I am already hard at work on my “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm – being supervised by “Robin Mansell”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/robinMansell.htm (at L) and “Nick Couldry”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/nickCouldry.htm (at R). Wish me luck!

P.S. On the morning of graduation day I received the first line or so of a spam email on my mobile phone. It read, ‘Want more respect? Get a PhD’ – I found that obscurely encouraging…

A local paper claims the Independent Media Centre that started it all in Seattle closed partly because of its decision to have a downtown location costing $3000 a month so that it could be at the heart of the Seattle WTO protest (which was four years ago) and so it could offer its multimedia services to other left-leaning groups.

More controversially the paper’s ‘obit’ suggests classic problems of left splintering were also partly to blame – “the core group running the IMC was cliquish and inaccessible; at one point, nonwhite media activists discussed starting their own competing local IMC” and it also pointed out one of the drawbacks of the open publishing model – readers had “to sort out for themselves the solid, well-researched, well-presented stories from the jargon-laden, factually incorrect anarco-leftist rants”.

Of course Seattle Weekly is part of the alternative press themselves so it may be they had an axe to grind – and the Seattle Indymedia website is still running, with a front-page explanation of their status that is “dismayingly revealing”:http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=36723&group=webcast …

“John Weeks”:http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/ob/weeks/ at Insead did an interesting bit of ethographic research entitled “Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226878120/qid=1070905181/ and was interviewed about this in the ever-interesting “Thinking Allowed”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed_20031126.shtml programme on the BBC. One of the first things he said was that he became interested as a grad student when he heard about the MIT project Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century and contacted one of its sponsors. Well a little Googling later wouldn’t you know – there was only one British bank who sponsored that particular project – NatWest.

He said (paraphrasing) he would come back from a hard day’s ethnographic observation and talk to colleagues about his study of organizational learning and have something like this exchange:
“What do you see?”
“I don’t think I’m seeing anything!”
“Well what are they doing then?”
So I’d describe what they were doing (complaining mostly) and they’d say
“Well that’s what they’re doing – that’s what you need to write about!”

A succinct description of the purpose of good ethnographic research!