I just read that Demos – an influential UK thinktank – has now put almost all of its catalogue up online for free download (using a “license”:http://www.demos.co.uk/aboutus/openaccess_page296.aspx derived from the “Creative Commons”:http://www.creativecommons.org/ license).

Worth a browse if you are a UK-based policy wonk…

“A new survey”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~oxis/index.html by the “Oxford Internet Institute”:http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/ has provided some invaluable detail about the exact nature of the digital divide. I find the conclusions drawn in media reports as interesting as the data itself. The Guardian’s headline and opening paragraphs: Digitally divided by choice concentrate on the survey’s discovery that only 14 percent (mis-reported as four percent) of the UK population doesn’t have Internet access themselves and doesn’t at least know someone who could send an email for them.

It’s true that many of those who are not online themselves could get access at local libraries or ‘borrow’ Internet access from a friend, but without much first-hand experience of Internet access they are unlikely to understand what it could do for them.

The BBC: “Net ‘worth little to many Brits'”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3121950.stm gets more to the heart of the matter, though its headline is misleading – it should say something more like, ‘Net perceived as unimportant by many Brits’.

I think Tom Steinberg gets it exactly right when he “suggests”:http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2003/09/its_about_the_v.html that if 96% of Internet non-users don’t feel they are missing anything it is important that government and civil society organizations start giving them good reasons to get interested. I would add that the way the Internet is presented when it is discussed is also at fault. The Government depicts it as a way to learn and get employed, commercial organizations depict it as a place to shop and the news often depicts it as full of oddballs and paedophiles. There isn’t much room for discussion of how to use it to meet people (other than sexual partners), express yourself creatively or to organize politically.

It is worth noting that the questionnaire options for perceived disadvantages of lack of Internet access appear to be limited to: ‘could do job better [if I was online]’, ‘trouble being contacted’ and ‘disadvantaged at work’. Nothing about learning, information gathering or even saving money let alone political organizing as possible things someone might have missed out on.

The information available via the OII and news reports remains sketchy – the full results are due to be publicised and discussed “in Oxford on 22nd October”:http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events.shtml

Thanks to “Techdirt”:http://techdirt.com/articles/20030918/0047201.shtml for the link

A rather densely-argued “academic paper”:http://www.brookings.org/dybdocroot/gs/events/paysatisfaction.pdf presented at the Brookings Institute has been summarised by “ScienceDaily”:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031003060615.htm – ‘our rank position within an organisation has a bigger effect on our happiness within that job than the happiness generated by our actual level of pay’.

Pretty uncontroversial I would have thought but this suggests that, for example, it might be better for a country to risk a lower standard of living if it could also produce a more equal standard.

Irwin M. Stelzer in a recent article about European vs American attitudes to income equality (referenced in “last week’s blog posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_europe.html#000892) casts doubt on an earlier study that showed this effect – I hope this latest, more large scale study will put an end to remaining doubts on this point.

When I “posted earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_online_media.html#000877 about The New Standard I forgot to mention another interesting example of alternative media different both from the IndyMedia and The New Standard styles. OhMyNews, a newspaper from South Korea, has thousands of “citizen reporters”. These get paid and go through the conventional editorial process but the pay is less than for conventional journalism and no credentials are necessary. This would seem to allow for the kind of “native reporting” (reporting by “ordinary people” and those directly involved in news events) that Chris Atton and others find a particularly appealling function of the new alternative media while preserving some of the quality standards that ensure good material is read and bad material hidden or discarded.

Significantly, OhMyNews seems to be successful as a business and a social phenomenon, though this may be in part simply because South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world.

“Indymedia”:http://www.indymedia.org/ and similar sites – created by unpaid, largely un-edited reporters – are one way in which the Internet is enabling alternative voices to be heard more widely, but this publishing model has its weaknesses. Because participants are unprofessional and unpaid, there tends to be more opinion venting and comments on existing coverage than original research. Also, the lack of editing means contributions can be ungrammatical, unreadable or even occaisionally “anti-semitic or racist rantings”:http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=44851. While many Indymedia sites have now started to hide or remove such postings, the problem is still bad enough that it is hindering the acceptance of Indymedia sites by the mainstream media and even “search engines”:http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/09/1639862_comment.php.

The New Standard wants to be a different kind of alternative media entity- one a lot closer to traditional news sources. It intends to pay its contributors to do real investigative research not just produce opinion pieces, and it will “charge its readers”:http://newstandardnews.net/promo/membership.cfm $4 to $10 a month when it launches in December.
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D.M. Gorman “writes”:http://www.policyreview.org/FEB03/gorman.html in Policy Review about policy researchers (in this case health promotion researchers) who claim to be scientific but resist evaluating their projects using measurable outcomes. He recounts the hostility he encountered when he tried to challenge the validity of a project he encountered. He also cites the example of “Dr Nina Wallerstein”:http://hsc.unm.edu/fcm/docm/faculty.html who wrote a paper about the evaluation by a government agency of a health promotion project in New Mexico:

bq. Rather than assessing program outcomes, what Wallerstein chooses to do is describe her “learnings” (sic) concerning “the power relationships between myself as evaluator and the communities during the implementation of the evaluation…” The agency seems not to have shared Wallerstein’s emancipatory ideology and by the second year of the project had the temerity to demand more accountability from the community groups in terms of the actual activities that were being undertaken. For Wallerstein this was not a case of the state government acting responsibly with tax dollars, but rather an expression of the “illegitimate abuses of power over others by the funding agency.”

bq. True to her postmodernist creed, Wallerstein challenges the positivist social scientist’s claim to objectivity and value-free science, claiming instead that science is just one of “a multiplicity of truths” and the researcher just one of many storytellers and interpreters of what happens in the world. Even worse, scientific data represent the “power/knowledge” discourse of positivist researchers, and this is frequently at odds with the “subjugated knowledge” of the community at whose expense they pursue their own interests.

Without reading Wallerstein’s paper in full, it is hard to really judge whether she was deserving of the criticism Gorman heaps on her, but he certainly identifies an interesting issue – whether postmodernism has a place in social science which is being applied to achieve practical goals.

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I just finished reading Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide by Mark Warschauer and I was bowled over. This is to my mind the academic text on this subject – I agree with him almost throughout. He wrote a Scientific American piece which summarised some of his thinking available in PDF form. You may also want to see this First Monday article for a more academic take.movies lesbian homemovies pussy lesbians lickingclit lick mybest list scene sex moviesmovies porn list micheals sean ofmovie little darlingslittle movie mermaidtheaters loews moviemovie documentary making amovie making a

Yesterday I handed in my dissertation – my MSc in New Media, Information and Society is now officially over and in a month and a half I return to the LSE to start a PhD in Media and Communications. Here’s the abstract of my dissertation, which I hope to turn into a published paper later. I am also keen to summarise the results for a non-academic audience for a thinktank or newspaper so if it sounds interesting, give me a call!

Civil society campaigning organizations have an important role to play in the public sphere according to deliberative democratic theory. The new communicative capabilities offered to such organizations by the Internet in recent years must be evaluated in the light of a digital divide that has persisted even in developed countries. This study measures and attempts to explain patterns of Internet usage among activists, and examines the possible implications of these choices for the public sphere and political participation.

Drawing on a postal survey of 109 London-based activists and open-ended interviews with four of those surveyed, respondents were found to have predominantly high levels of education, higher than average incomes and high levels of access to the Internet consistent with those factors. However, high levels of access did not translate into high levels of use in all contexts.
While email was extensively employed, other uses like participation in open online discussion or web-based publishing were much less prevalent than traditional campaigning activity. Some access and skill barriers were noted but the principal barrier to greater use of the web in campaigning appeared to be a perceived lack of its relevance or importance in that context. The fact that much Internet use by activists is via email and therefore tends to be “invisible” except to participants in the dialogue might contribute to that perceived lack of relevance.

The study also suggests that the existing socio-economic divide between the “core” activists surveyed and the broader public could be accentuated if, for reasons of efficiency, those activists moved their attention away from traditional activities like meetings and newsletters towards email-mediated dialogue or if the Internet does make it easier for the relatively privileged who are already online to become more involved at the expense of those who continue to fall on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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Dr Duncan Watts a social network scholar who I blogged earlier appearing on the radio in the US back in June has turned up on the excellent Thinking Allowed programme on Radio 4. He’s flogging his book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. If you listen in you can also take part in a little psychological experiment…for credit loans 125 home fairair canada cards miles creditpower uniom alabama creditaccept accept verification id credit cardcredits pirates end after worldscredit approved cards 100adult acreditation educationand loans adverse mortgages credit Map

After producing an excellent study on what people on low incomes want from the Internet (easy-to-read, relevant content) and what they get, the Children’s Partnership has produced a follow-up paper for the Community Technology Review called Closing the Content Gap: A Content Evaluation and Creation Starter Kit which brings together some useful resources and gives a brief overview of projects like Firstfind which are being trialled at NY public libraries – a virtual library that provides information to low-level readers and adults with limited English skills. (Also see starthere.org a UK charity trying to do a similar job but using kiosks).