If the “description of Cybergypsies I gave earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_arts_reviews.html#001171 piqued your curiosity there is an interview with the author of Cybergypsies, Indra Singha on “The Well”:http://well.com in a part of it that is open to the public – “inkwell”:http://engaged.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue where lots of author interviews take place (his is number 52). It turns out that the promotional website he created for the book has been (incompletely) captured via the “Internet Archive”:http://web.archive.org/web/20010610025144/www.wiseserpent.com/cybergypsies/menu.html and what do you know – the multi-user dungeon he spent much of his time in is “still running”:http://games.world.co.uk/shades/!

The report on children’s Internet use I “mentioned earlier”:https://blog.org/archives/000905.html has now been made available in full.

UK Children Go Online is an excellent overview of kids’ online experiences in Britain and I am pleased to see it taking a very sensible balanced view of the risks and benefits of childrens’ online use. From the conclusion:

one cannot simply recommend greater monitoring of children by parents. From children’s point of view, some key benefits of the internet depend on maintaining some privacy and freedom from their parents, making them less favourable particularly to intrusive or hidden forms of parental regulation. Moreover, the internet must be perceived by children as an exciting and free space for play and experimentation if they are to become capable and creative actors in this new environment.

I am a little disappointed, however, that the press release leads on “parents underestimating risks”:http://personal.lse.ac.uk/bober/PressReleaseJuly04.pdf and lo and behold the “BBC’s coverage”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3910319.stm doesn’t mention anything about the possible benefits of childrens’ online use or the divide that was found in the ‘quality’ of their use.

It is true that, ’57 per cent have come into contact with pornography online (compared with 16
per cent of parents who say their children have seen porn online)’ but as “Josephine Fraser”:http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2004/07/lse_uk_children.html points out a large problem with this survey is that it’s investigating ‘children’ between the ages of 9 and 19 (of course the data is usually split by age in the body of the report but not often in the summaries).

If you are concerned mainly about under-12s exposed to porn (for example) the proportion drops to 21 percent and this doesn’t indicate how often this exposure happened or how ‘severe’ it is. Would a single exposure to the promotional front page of a porn site in a few years of a ten-year-old’s surfing really be traumatic? Doesn’t it depend on what kind of stuff is considered pornographic (the report does not provide a definition)? I presume such sites don’t normally display really hard-core stuff on their front page without payment and young kids are exposed to soft-core images like that in lots of other ways. It’s true that 20% of 12-19 year olds say they have seen porn on the Internet five or more times but 17% of the same kids say they have seen it that often on TV.

Likewise it may be true that, ‘8 per cent of young users who go online at least once a week say they have met face to face with someone they first met on the internet’ but of those only 1% – one person (!) age unknown – said they didn’t enjoy the experience.

I guess as the report concludes what you see in it depends on your prior expectations and I am a ‘glass half full’ person more keen to ensure that kids have the opportunity to become digitally literate without having parents and teachers excessively limiting their chance to explore. And of course I am not the parent of an Internet-surfing child – if I were my views might be different!

The Cybergypsies : A True Tale of Lust, War, & Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier by Indra Sinha is yet another book about unusual experiences online but with several key points of interest. Many such books were written by over-excited US journalists who just dipped into that world. This was written by someone based in the UK who had a life outside the online world (a responsible job, wife and child) but who got very involved in online communities. It’s also of some historical interest because he was writing about the pre-Internet online world where being online 24/7 wouldn’t just cost you time but a considerable amount of money.

He gives an interesting, colourful and personal glimpse of what life online was like back then for some but though the book appears to be an autobiography it is written in a deliberately poetical/impressionistic style leaving the reader uncertain how much of what they’ve read they can believe.

If there is someone out there reading this blog who was around online in the UK back in the early to mid 90s, hung out on Shades or the Vortex, met ‘bear’ there and has read the book I would be interested in your comments (public or private). How was he seen in those communities after he published? I have a feeling I have met one or two people who were there…

Here’s something truly hair-raising I’m glad I didn’t know about at the time. Remember in all those movies where the nuclear missiles require a top-secret code to launch? It turns out for about a decade in the US the secret code was 00000000. Apparently, ‘Strategic Air Command remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders.’

Seb Paquet references an “interesting paper”:http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html on the history of scientific publishing and the impact of ISI ranking. It points out how assigning numerical rankings to measure academic quality distorts the way that academic research is published.

What that paper doesn’t mention – at least not in ch 6 which Seb highlighted – is that because high citation ranking = $ many journals end up “gaming” their impact factors by choosing the kind of papers they publish in order to maximise it, which has unintended consequences. If a journal has 10 papers that it knows will be highly cited it may limit the number of other papers it accepts for example to try not to ‘dilute’ its impact factor.

It’s the same with the ranking systems used by Google and by weblog ranking search engines. If there are benefits to being scored highly, human nature being what it is people will try to maximise their scores. Yet because the ranking is ‘automatic’ it is often assumed to be value neutral and therefore above criticism.

I can’t improve on the Berkman Centre’s blog entry:

An international team of researchers has launched a new program to map censorship of the Internet.  The Open Net Initiative — a partnership of the Berkman Center, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Toronto — has formally begun tracking international filtering of the Internet.  As the Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain explains, “The aim of the ONI is to excavate, analyze, and report censorship and surveillance practices in a rigorous, ongoing fashion.”  Read more about the project in this News Release.

The UN has released a report into the negative environmental impacts of computers. Much of the BBC’s summary is familiar (at least to me) but here’s something I didn’t think of – energy-saving devices which automatically switch devices into standby mode can be deceptive as they are frequently ‘woken up’ by traffic from servers if they are connected to a network.

More information on the report is available from the UN University’s “Zero Emissions Forum”:http://www.unu.edu/zef/publications.html. Also see an “this entry about the negative impacts of computing”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_negative_uses_of_technology.html#001000 and “this posting about an earlier report”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_interesting_facts.html#000301

New Scientist “briefly describes”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994663 research that compares lying behaviour on the phone, by email and in face to face communication. Turns out it’s not email – it’s the telephone where most lying occurs (at least in this experiment). Who would have thought? The researchers suggest a reason we don’t lie as much by email is that it leaves a trail and we can be called to account for it later.

“Bob Hughes”:http://www.dustormagic.net/ wrote an opinion piece about the sweatshop labour and environmental harm involved in making computers and in disposing of them. On a similar note, see this “new report from CAFOD”:http://www.cafod.org.uk/news_and_events/news/computer_factory_sweatshops_20040126?PHPSESSID=4b0151f1c256c83acdd6dafeeda118c1 on conditions for workers making high-tech components which has encouraged the BBC to “follow up the findings”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3452373.stm with computer makers.

I note that Bob hasn’t given up using computers yet, and I’m not likely to either. But it’s worth bearing in mind the unseen costs of anything we buy or consume and trying to reduce them as much as possible by buying only when we need to or campaigning for better corporate behaviour.

“Fernanda Viegas”:http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/ at MIT’s Media Lab has produced a Blog survey on the interesting subject of, “how bloggers think about issues of privacy and liability as they publish online”. I am not sure how representative a sample the respondents will be but it is certainly an interesting subject – one with some relevance to my own research – and I look forward to the results. Do fill it in if you run your own weblog and have a minute…