Preoccupations

Net Neutrality

From Four Eyed Monsters. Via Dave Snowden, who got it from a friend on Facebook, who …

US Citizens: Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Technorati tags: net neutrality, internet, web

You Can't Picture This

Thousands of UK residents have signed a petition against a law preventing photography and filming in certain public places. Yet this all turned out to be a misunderstanding, and no such law was proposed. Rajesh investigates the way we view the lens and the way it views us.

via Tom.

Technorati tags: UK, filming, photography, surveillance, security, law, rights, privacy, fear

if the algorithm holds ...

Doug Rushkoff's Edge formula entry:

Edge's Formulae for the 21st Century ('What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?'). More about Doug Rushkoff, on Edge, here.

Technorati tags: Edge, Doug Rushkoff

In the UK, "aspirations are [still] rooted in class"

Last week, The Sutton Trust released details of their research into the university destinations of school-leavers:

New research by the Sutton Trust into the university destinations of more than one million students over the past five years highlights the dominance of admissions to the country's leading universities by a small number of schools, mainly fee paying. The Trust is committing a minimum of £10 million over the next five years to widen access to these universities and is calling on others to join the cause and to support innovative new projects which will increase the number of entrants from non-privileged backgrounds.

The study - University admissions by individual schools - is the first to analyse in detail admission rates between 2002 and 2006 for 3,700 individual schools and colleges on the UCAS admissions database. It shows that:

• 100 elite schools (less than three percent of all schools and colleges offering post 16 qualifications) accounted for a third of admissions to Oxbridge
• At the 30 most successful schools, one quarter of university entrants went to Oxbridge
• 100 elite schools accounted for over a sixth of admissions to the 'Sutton 13' group of leading, research-led universities

Over 80% of these elite schools are in the independent sector, which accounts for 7% of the school-age population.

The analysis reveals that these trends cannot be attributed to A-level results alone:

• The proportion of university entrants going to Oxbridge from the top performing 30 independent schools was nearly twice that of the top performing 30 grammar schools -- despite having very similar average A-level scores.
• At the 30 top performing comprehensive schools, only half the expected pupils were admitted to the 13 Sutton Trust universities, given the overall relationship between schools' average A-level results and university admissions.
• At the 30 top performing independent schools, however, a third more pupils than expected were admitted to the 13 Sutton Trust universities, given the overall relationship between schools' average A-level results and university admissions.

Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Trust, writing in today's Sunday Times (his words are quoted in this post's title):

According to our research, parents in professional and managerial occupations believe that their children will go on to take A-levels, to attend good universities and end up in high-paying careers. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those in lower-paid jobs, by contrast, are likely to think that their children will leave school at 16 and go into routine employment. You might think the classroom would act as a corrective. But all too often low expectations are reinforced by our socially selective school system.

… social mobility has declined in Britain and we languish at the bottom of the international league table. Also, the relationship between children’s educational performance and their family background is stronger here than anywhere else in the developed world. If you are born poor, your qualifications will reflect the fact and you will remain poor.

Raising the aspirations of young people – as well as parents and teachers – is half the battle. The Sutton Trust is trying. We work with children in the early years, through school and into further and higher education, to provide the sort of support and encouragement to non-privileged youngsters that better-off families and high-achieving schools provide as a matter of course. More is needed. Why not open up leading private and state schools to those from non-privileged backgrounds, as has been done successfully at the Belvedere school in Liverpool and Pate’s in Cheltenham? We should learn from successful schools and extend the opportunities they offer to all. Children’s futures should not be down to luck: we must ensure that all young people have access to real educational opportunities.

The Sutton Trust repays attention. Its 2005 report, 'The Educational Backgrounds of Members of the House of Commons and House of Lords', is available here (pdf); also from 2005, 'The Educational Backgrounds of the UK’s Top Solicitors, Barristers and Judges', here (pdf); from 2006, 'The Educational Backgrounds of Leading Journalists', here (pdf); and the full report referred to above, 'University Admissions by Individual Schools', is here (pdf). Finally, from their News & Features page, there's a news bulletin of their latest research into the educational backgrounds of 500 leading people in the UK.

Some moves afoot — St Paul's (where I teach) has committed itself to going needs-blind, and Marlborough College (where I once taught) has established a link with Swindon Academy that 'will loan staff, share expertise and provide facilities' (BBC):

The partnership between the two schools will include linking some departments and supporting the establishment of a new sixth form at the academy. They will share relevant expertise - in areas such as sport or performing arts - to develop joint ventures which would benefit young people in both establishments.

Technorati tags: The Sutton Trust, Peter Lampl, education, university, social mobility

Never mind the 70s, watch out for the 90s

Read Momus yesterday on how the 70s might come back for a second time, but probably won't. Woke up this morning to hear IDS on 'the family' (BBC link here). Well, we've been there before!

So thinking about that made me dig out something Stephen Fry wrote for The Spectator (Diary), commenting on the rise and rise of 'family values' as a core part of the 'agenda' of Conservative politicians:

It has become impossible now to utter a sentence without the barons of the new trendiness insisting on the inclusion of the words 'standards', 'individual', 'values', 'responsibility' and 'family'. It doesn't matter in what order they occur or what meaningless nonsense they denote, the words must dominate what statesmen like to call our 'agenda'. Eight years ago I wrote an article in the Listener wondering at the half-cocked stupidity of politicians displaying such impertinence. The trendy belief in family values had already been going for a good seven years by then and there seems even now to be no end in sight. Nobody minds that the Conservative governments of the last 15 years have contained at least six adulterers and two homosexuals at cabinet level and dozens more on the back-benches. If these men want mistresses, love-children and boyfriends, then good luck to them. The British are a decent, tolerant and friendly people and like to see their fellow citizens enjoying themselves in a kindly, responsible and adult way. What really gets our goat is when these same men and their colleagues stand on podia in seaside towns at Party Conference time and tell us how to behave in private; what causes us pain and indignation is to hear them lecture the nation about the virtues of the family and deride those of us who prefer not to have our moral horizons dictated by the Daily Mail. The Family: that noble institution responsible for 70 per cent of all murders, over 80 per cent of incidents of child abuse and a full 100 per cent of all cases of incest.

Date? 13 November, 1993.

Into this stream of consciousness there came a discussion thread on ORG-discuss, focusing on this, 'Oral Answers to Questions: Home Department' (House of Commons, Monday, 9 July 2007) — on Internet Service Providers. Excerpt:

Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire, Conservative):

Although I welcome the Home Secretary's comments, does she agree that it is a tragedy that what used to be the place where childhood innocence was protected and preserved—the home—is now often the place where it is corrupted and destroyed?

In the ORG thread, Suw quotes the indispensable danah boyd (quoted in a piece dated from midway through last year):

Unfortunately, predators lurk wherever youth hang out. Since youth are on MySpace, there are bound to be predators on MySpace. Yet, predators do not use online information to abduct children; children face a much higher risk of abduction or molestation from people they already know – members of their own family or friends of the family. Statistically speaking, kids are more at risk at a church picnic or a boy scout outing than they are when they go on MySpace. Less than .01% of all youth abductions nationwide are stranger abductions and as far as we know, no stranger abduction has occurred because of social network services.

Romanticising the past, or an institution, and demonising technology won't help anyone.

Technorati tags: ORG, ISPs, chidlren, youth, family

David Miliband: 'a new age of social activism'

In two recent speeches, UK politicians are beginning to show they understand the web. First, George Osborne. And now, David Miliband:

When we think of education, we tend to think of formal teaching in classrooms by teachers.  This remains important.  But the range of resources to support learning is far wider than that - from workplaces and museums to individuals with skills to contribute, and passions to share. They lie beyond the school gates and they are 24/7. And the key to genuine educational transformation is inspiring children and adults to learn more for themselves – what Yeats called ‘lighting a fire’ as opposed to ‘filling a pail’.  So the challenge is to connect people with skills and time to give, from university students, part-time employees and people in retirement, to others with similar passions and interests.  ‘Every citizen a teacher’ may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not impossible to imagine an educational world where a large minority of citizens play an active role, either on a voluntary or paid basis in supporting learners as personal tutors, running after-school clubs, or integrated into the curriculum and the classroom. The web can create the potential to aggregate the dispersed supply of citizen-teachers and connect them to learners with particular interests. It can also help learners filter the good from the bad through peer to peer recommendations and make sense of a world where educational resources are much more diverse.

And much more besides: 'I believe the businesses and government that succeed in the future will be those that give people greater power to shape the future of their individual lives and greater capacity to collaborate. A sense of I can and we can.'

Technorati tags: David Miliband, learning, teaching, activism

Armando Iannucci

I'm not sure if this is an infringement or not (I'll take it down if it is), but I see it's not online and I enjoyed it so much and think others who didn't buy the Observer on Sunday should also get to see it …

 

 

Click the image to see a larger version of the same.

Iannucci is wonderful. I particularly enjoyed Cherie's comment.

Technorati tags: Tony Blair, Armando Iannucci

Voting Conservative?

As a rider to my last post, I've just read and enjoyed Andrew Rawnsley writing in today's Observer:

It has been one of David Cameron's best insights about the Conservative party that it is not going to be more attractive to 21st-century Britain until it starts to look more like 21st-century Britain. He is a middle-aged, white old Etonian. He wants and needs a Tory party that looks and sounds a lot less like him.

George Osborne celebrated the growth of websites and online political networks originating from Conservative quarters. Rawnsley, commenting on the sacking of Patrick Mercer:

In the wake of the sacking, I've cruised around a few Conservative blogs. It's dirty work, but someone has got to do it on your behalf. There's a lot of Tory fury that Colonel Mercer was taken out and shot. Opinion is running heavily in sympathy with the MP for Newark and strongly against David Cameron, who is accused of sacrificing 'a good man' to the forces of 'political correctness gone mad', to quote one of the less rabid contributions in the right-wing blogosphere. This illustrates what the Tory leader is up against. Large chunks of his party cannot grasp either the reasons of principle or the imperatives of politics that meant Patrick Mercer had to be removed from the Tory front bench.

And I don't think there's much to add to this:

Is he [Patrick Mercer] a racist? He says not. His colleagues say not. More significantly, some black soldiers who served with Colonel Mercer say they don't regard him as a racist either. What we can say for definite is that he is an industrial-grade idiot. He was plain wrong to suggest that black soldiers should put up with being racially abused as par for the course in the army. He sounded just ludicrous when he claimed that soldiers with red hair were more likely to suffer from abuse than members of ethnic minorities. He displayed fully saturated stupidity by suggesting there's no difference between being called a 'ginger bastard' and being called a 'black bastard'. There are no known organisations dedicated to inciting hatred against people with red hair.

George Osborne clearly gets the digital age. About the Mercer affair, Rawnsley concludes that 'David Cameron gets it. His problem is that many in his party still don't get it at all.' Two people an electable political party do not make.

Technorati tags: Conservative Party, David Cameron, George Osborne, Patrick Mercer, racism

'Top down politics is no longer sustainable in a bottom-up age'

Thought-provoking and rather more valuable than the thing I just read — George Osborne's talk at the RSA last week, 'Recasting the political settlement for the digital age'. Paul Miller drew my attention to it with his post:

Normally, listening to politicians talking about technology is a bit embarrassing. They fall into lots of very obvious traps and sound very naive. But the shadow chancellor has met the people, read the books and obviously spends a fair amount of time online (using Firefox which earned him extra brownie points).

The speech begins:

We are all here this morning because we share a common belief: we believe in the power of technology - in its ability to help transform society for the better by giving individuals more freedom, more choice and ultimately more power. At heart we are technology optimists. Of course technological change isn't always easy to deal with because it so often disrupts the established way of doing things. … Last November, in a talk on politics in the internet age, I identified some of the key social changes that have been unleashed by this technological revolution. Today I want to go further …

You can read the speech in full here. It describes 'three pillars on which I believe this new political settlement should be built':

• 'The first of these pillars is about equality - equality of information - or what Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive of Google, called "the democratisation of access to information" when he spoke to our Party Conference. For centuries access to the world's information - and the ability to communicate it - was controlled by a few: the powerful, the wealthy and the well educated. … No longer is there an asymmetry of information between the individual and the State, or between the layperson and the expert. This shift is changing the world. It is empowering individuals; raising expectations of government services; and increasing accountability for all of us who work in the public sector and in politics. …
• The second pillar of a new political settlement will be founded on new social networks. … On-line political networks are springing up in the UK too now - and interestingly they are almost all Conservative ones. There are those networks actively set up by the Conservative Party. … But it is not the official Conservative websites that I find most exciting. It is the unofficial ones. Take Conservativehome.com. … Although I, and other Shadow Cabinet members, am frequently the target of Conservativehome.com, it is for me unambiguously a good thing that it exists. … Top down politics is no longer sustainable in a bottom-up age. … 
• The final pillar of this new political settlement is open source. … Open source politics means rejecting the old monolithic top-down approach to decision-making. It means throwing open the doors and listening to new ideas and new contributors. It means harnessing the power of mass collaboration. And rather than relying on the input of a few trusted experts, it means drawing on the skills and expertise of millions. … Companies are now increasingly using "Wikis" to solve internal problems - because you can have lots of people working on them at once. Those people don't necessarily have to work for the company. This is a radical departure from our traditional understanding of the business model. … Similar collaborative approaches could be applied in government. … The direction of travel is clear. The government needs to get onboard. … Another way the government could harness an open source approach is through the procurement of open source software. … Ever since I visited the headquarters of Mozilla in Palo Alto I have become a user of their open source Firefox web-browser. … most central governments departments make use of no open source software whatsoever. What's going wrong? The problem is that the cultural change has not taken place in government. … Not a single open source company is included in Catalyst, the government's list of approved IT suppliers. … Another problem has been the lack of open standards in government IT procurement. All too often, a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation. Looking at the litany of IT projects that have collapsed or spiralled over budget, it's clear too that this has meant billions of pounds wasted and public service reform being hampered. The government's entire approach needs to be overhauled.'

Striking in itself — a speech about the changed and still changing world in which politicians now work, the challenges, the ways forward — every educator should be reading it:

… the internet is like the child pushing at boundaries of authority and challenging the established way of doing things - the business models from the last century, traditional media, long accepted notions of national jurisdiction and concepts of governmental control. The challenge is for the "pushed" - probably most of us here in this room - to resist the urge to push back: to regulate and legislate; to try to tame and to control.

… the most basic reaction to new technology: doing the old thing a new way. Instead … successful companies are harnessing this new technology to do things in a new way …

What's needed in government is as much a cultural shift as a technological change. A shift to a culture that welcomes criticism and comment - then reacts to it. A shift to a culture that seeks customers' views and ideas at every stage of developing a service. And a shift to a culture where every service can be improved, and no service is ever fully developed. That means more than constantly tinkering with public services for the sake of it. It means being open to fresh thinking and input from both users and deliverers.

How are we, educators and schools, adapting and changing to life in this world?  How are we preparing our students for this world where technology has rendered knowledge abundant; where innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial flair and initiative are prized skills and qualities; where teenagers are collaborating and networking and hacking yet little or none of this is informing and transforming the formal curriculum? (For an index of numerous previous posts to do with education, click here.) The direction of travel is, indeed, clear and schools, too, need to get onboard.

Technorati tags: George Osborne, RSA, open source, schools, digital immigrants, digital natives

Tony Blair

I was listening to the excellent Reduced Shakespeare Company on Radio 4 perform 'The Condensed History of Tony Blair'. You can catch it again here (about 45 minutes in) between now and next Sunday's Westminster Hour. Jonathan Isaby, writing on The Daily Telegraph website:

It opens with the line: "In the next 15 minutes, we will present 10 glorious years of the greatest prime minister ever known to man," announced by Long with several large dollops of irony. Now I did initially wonder whether having Americans playing the characters would work, but it really does. Blair and Brown are played in the style of Californian dudes, rather like Bill and Ted meets Beavis and Butthead. … listen out for the hilarious song about the Millennium Dome, the love duet between Blair and Alastair Campbell, and the 45-second finale which summarises the entire Blair decade.

***

Armando Iannucci's Observer column yesterday was again great stuff:

Am I going mad? I heard that Tony Blair thinks so. Not just me; everyone. You too. He thinks we're all mad. Someone close to his circle told me recently that the reason Blair seems so resolute, so calm in the face of criticism, is that he thinks the media are just mad. And he confronts unpopularity with the knowledge that we, the public, are turning mad as well. The more we say: 'He's going mad', the more it proves to him that we must be mad. Is that the logic of a madman?

I only mention this because I was struck by the madness of a remark Blair made last week. It was just as the High Court ruled that the government's recent consultation with the public over what our future energy policy should be wasn't consultative enough, and that he and his ministers would have to consult us on the policy again. Asked if this would put on hold his plans to build more nuclear power stations, he said: 'No. This won't affect the policy at all. It'll affect the process of consultation, but not the policy.'

Take a good hard look at that quote again. It's mad. It's based either on a belief in the possession of psychic powers so discriminating they can predict the outcome of a consultation before it happens (which is mad) or they're based on the belief that words have no meaning other than the meaning one chooses to give them and that this meaning can change at any particular moment (which is at least three times as mad as the first example of madness).

John Naughton quoted this yesterday and wrapped up, 'Britain needs a new constitution. At present we have an elected dictatorship which can do what it likes so long as the Prime Minister has a working majority'.

***

k-punk, writing about Robbie Williams and post-modernism:

There's surely a Robin Carmody-type analysis to be done of the parallels between Williams and Tony Blair. Williams' first album, the tellingly-titled Life Thru a Lens was released in 1997, the year of Blair's first election victory. There followed for both a period of success so total that it must have confirmed their most extravagant fantasies of omnipotence (Blair unassailable at two elections; Williams winning more Brit awards than any other artist). Then, a decade after their first success, an ignominious decline into irrelevance (the post-Iraq Blair limping out of office as a lame-duck leader, Williams releasing a disastrous album and checking himself into rehab on the day before this year Brit awards, at which he had received a derisory single nomination). Of course, there are limits to the analogy: Blair is popular in the States, whereas Robbie...

Williams and Blair are two sides of one Joker Hysterical face: two cracked actors, one given over to the performance of sincerity, the other dedicated to the performance of irony. But both, fundamentally, actors - actors to the core, to the extent that they resemble PKD simulacra, shells and masks to which one cannot convincingly attribute any inner life. Blair and Williams seem to exist only for the gaze of the other. That is why it is impossible to imagine either enduring private doubts or misgivings, or indeed experiencing any emotion whose expression is not contrived to produce a response from the other. As is well known, Blair's total identification with his publicly-projected messianic persona instantly transforms any putatively private emotion into a PR gesture; this is the spincerity effect (even if he really means what he is saying, the utterance becomes fake by dint of its public context). The image of Blair or Williams alone in a room, decommissioned androids contemplating their final rejection by a public which once adored them, is genuinely creepy.

Spincerity — who coined that? Search for it on Google and you get (just now) 87 results, headed, 'Did you mean: sincerity'.

Technorati tags: Blair, Tony Blair

America

A lot for the Democrats to do now, but, for the moment, relief:

This was a resounding and emphatic rejection of the core, defining premises of the so-called "conservative" movement and what has morphed into the grotesque Republican Party. Nobody doubts that Americans vigorously rejected George Bush and his signature policy -- the invasion of Iraq. But it wasn't only Bush and Iraq.

Democratic candidates won -- in every part of the country and regardless of their ideology -- by committing themselves to one basic platform. They vigorously opposed what have become the defining attributes of the Republican Party and they pledged to put a stop to them: unchecked Presidential power, mindless warmongering, a refusal to accept or acknowledge realities (both in Iraq and generally), and the deep-seated, fundamental corruption fueling the Bush movement and sustaining their power.

Virtually every Democratic winner, from the most conservative to the most liberal, in the reddest and bluest states, have that in common. They all ran on a platform of putting a stop to the radicalism, deceit and corruption that drives the so-called "conservative" political movement.

… yesterday's results should galvanize everyone who recognizes the danger this country has been placed in by the radical, hate-mongering, deeply corrupt authoritarians who have been controlling (and destroying) it. That movement has been severely wounded, but not yet killed. Glenn Greenwald (Unclaimed Territory)

*

I was beginning to wonder if America had the ability to see. I don't now. I stayed up until 2pm eastern last night just to make sure. The american public has seen what's really going on and they have sent a message to washington.

Democrats + 27 (maybe more) in the House and take control
Democrats + 6 (I know VA is a recount) in the Senate and take control
Democrats +6 in statehouses and set the stage for 2008

But more importantly, we have a new kind of Democrat emerging. Jim Webb, former Secretary of the Navy. Claire McCaskill, tough pragmatic midwestern woman. Bob Casey and Joe Lieberman.

The Democrats are moving to the center, occupying the vacuum left by the disappearance of the moderate Republican. … america has woken up from it's tilt right. We are back in centerville. Thank God. Fred Wilson (A VC)

Technorati tags: USA, America, Democrats, Democratic Party

Today, Truth!

Today, we hold our annual upper sixth (year 13) conference, something we run jointly with St Helen & St Katharine. (For those outside the UK, upper sixth = secondary school leavers/18 year-olds.)

I've enjoyed my involvement with these conferences, brief though it's been, and recall the others with pleasure:

• 2004: 'at the school I teach at, we are preparing for a sixth form conference on 'IT and the challenge of change'. Speakers include Cory Doctorow and Jyri Engeström. Cory will be talking about DRM and, in the run-up to this event, I have begun chatting with Colin Greenwood (Radiohead), getting the views of an artist, someone without whom there would be no music to share in the first place.'

Colin, Jyri and Cory gave memorable talks, and there was a great "panel" session with Cory sitting alongside Colin, fielding questions from some very engaged students. Jyri's talk, much admired on the day, is online here.

• 2005: 'Today, we hold our annual conference for our school leavers and this year the theme is 'Making a Difference: changing the world'. I am delighted that we will be welcoming to speak Sir Thomas Shebbeare, James Mawdsley and Julian Filochowski: respectively, they will be addressing — How to Make a Difference, Global Democracy and Justice, Global Poverty Issues.' (More about each speaker on my original blog post.)

James Mawdsley and Julian Filochowski made a great impact, comparable only to that of Clive Stafford Smith (Wikipedia) when he spoke here last November.

And today? Truth …

• Truth in Politics: Ann Widdecombe, MP — Wikipedia, own website
  
• Truth and Satire: Craig Brown, satirist — Wikipedia
  
• Truth, Diplomacy and The War on Terror: Craig Murray, formerly our Ambassador to Uzbekistan — Wikipedia, own website
  
• Truth and Activism: Laurie Pycroft & Tom Holder of Pro-Test

My colleague, Jim Summerly, a historian, will talk about 'Truth and History' (official histories and propaganda vs what's really going on — from Stalinist Russia to contemporary, democratic regimes). Now, if all that doesn't get the hall a-buzzing …

I particularly enjoyed establishing that Laurie could join us: he had to get out of school for the day. That's humbling. What were we each doing, aged 16?

Technorati tags: truth, activism, DRM, Cory Doctorow, Jyri Engeström, Colin Greenwood, James Mawdsley, Julian Filochowski, Ann Widdecombe, Craig Brown, Craig Murray, Laurie Pyecroft, Pro-Test

1984 revisited: 'the future, eventually, will find you out'

Fine piece by William Gibson in the NYT:

Today, on Henrietta Street, one sees the rectangular housings of closed-circuit television cameras, angled watchfully down from shop fronts. Orwell might have seen these as something out of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, penal theorist and spiritual father of the panoptic project of surveillance. But for me they posed stranger possibilities, the street itself seeming to have evolved sensory apparatus in the service of some metaproject beyond any imagining of the closed-circuit system's designers. …

The media of "1984" are broadcast technology imagined in the service of a totalitarian state, and no different from the media of Saddam Hussein's Iraq or of North Korea today — technologically backward societies in which information is still mostly broadcast. Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society. …

… driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information. …

Orwell's projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.

That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret. … 

… truths will either out or be outed … I say "truths" … A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily. … 

Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. … But the ground of history has a way of shifting the most basic of assumptions from beneath the most scrupulously imagined situations. … "1984" remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present. We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.

Date of publication? 25 June, 2003 …

Article found via Foe Romeo's del.icio.us links.

Technorati tags: William Gibson, 1984, Orwell, future, futurism, surveillance, sousveillance

Net neutrality and cognitive bias

To recap, on 8 June this year, 

The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality … By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others. cnet news.com

Given how important the net has become in our lives in such a short space of time, it's striking that, like a number of important things happening in the States of late (other "examples" include the "re-consideration" of America's relationship to the Geneva Convention and the removal of the protection of habeas corpus from any 'alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination', Military Commissions Act 2006), there hasn't been the kind of coverage in the European media of the US net neutrality debate that the subject merits. From what there was, I thought the Guardian background piece in a July Media FAQ article was worth bookmarking, and John Naughton wrote an Observer column in July, As TV tunes into the net, the equality principle drops out. 

Last month, Esther Dyson was quoted in a Guardian interview as saying this about net neutrality: 

The problem with all of this is that it costs money to distribute rich media. When you have things like this, then either advertisers or consumers have to pay for it. In the dispute over net neutrality, actually, I have a problem with both sides. Really what we need is a Federal Communications Commission that's good at enforcing non-discriminatory action. But when you legislate things you just force people to spend time finding loopholes.

I've admired Esther Dyson whenever I've read something by her before, so that made me sit up as until then I'd thought that things were clear — and my heart was with the net neutralists. Tim Berners-Lee: 

I think the importance in [sic  'is'?] that neutrality is well understood by a lot of people, and I think for example outside the United States I haven't heard any concern about it. If you go to Europe and ask somebody about whether they're concerned about Net neutrality, they say, what? You know, people didn't know the phrase. It's only that in the US there were some speeches by executives of large telecommunications companies in which they suggested that maybe they should change the whole way they charge for the Internet and block people like Google, so that Google didn't get connection to their customers, quote, for free, unquote. As though Google doesn't pay for its Internet connectivity.

So I think what happened was that put a scare through. And when you look at...when you look at American industry, you know that companies are beholden to their shareholders to try to make whatever money they can. And so where they can find a business plan which they think will produce larger profits in the short term than they may feel obliged to try to pursue that, even though it might be very completely destructive, it would be destructive of the Internet community, the Internet markets and the amazing phenomenon which is built on top of the Internet at the moment.

So I think in fact Congress will understand the concern. There's a huge education process going on at the moment that a lot of people are taking the trouble to explain to American congress what it means, this important concept that if I've connected to the Internet, and if you've connected to the Internet we can then communicate. Nobody else can then start suddenly charging us extra money to building up because they feel that you're making too much money selling me your audio podcast or something.

I think it's really important that the market for Internet connectivity and the market for content are independent markets. It's thus why the Internet has expanded so quickly, because we've had one group of people working on innovations to the Internet infrastructure, and it's more or less since we started, you know, it's gone up, we're talking about, we started off by talking about thousands of bits per second and now we're talking about millions of bits per second, so that's a factor of a thousand increase in speed, which has happened during the time I suppose that the Web was being developed over the last 15 years.

And a month before that interview, Sir Tim blogged:

Net neutrality is this:

If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

That's all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.

Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.

Sir Tim is maintaining and developing the argument. In the NYT for 27 September:

Q. Is your view that the anti-Net neutrality infrastructure actually threatens political democracy? Does it go beyond just the technical structure of the Internet?

A. Net neutrality is one of those principles, social principles, certainly now much more than a technical principle, which is very fundamental. When you break it, then it really depends how far you let things go. But certainly I think that the neutrality of the Net is a medium essential for democracy, yes — if there is democracy and the way people inform themselves is to go onto the Web.

Q. So there are political consequences. Are there are also economic consequences? If so, what are they?

A. I think the people who talk about dismantling — threatening — Net neutrality don’t appreciate how important it has been for us to have an independent market for productivity and for applications on the Internet.

Now, if we compare what you can get into your home with earliest modems, it’s maybe 1,000 times as fast. So that market has been very competitive, very successful.

And I think we wouldn’t have seen this explosion in the exciting, tremendous diversity of the kind of things you see on the Web now. So in the future, obviously, we expect to see many more things. We expect to see, very importantly, television streaming over the Internet, which is going to make a very exciting market in television content and maybe entertainment, maybe educational ideas.

The people deploying these things rely on the fact that the Internet is sitting there waiting to carry whatever they can dream up.

If I've understood Esther Dyson aright, then TBL has a word for her: 'Nobody is suggesting that you shouldn’t be able to charge more for (eg) a video-capable Internet connection. That’s no reason not to make it anything but neutral.'

The comment, though, that has interested me most in all that I've read about this issue, online (mainly) and (sometimes) off, was made in August by James Boyle. Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. In an important article in the FT, A closed mind about an open world, he discussed behavioural economics and cognitive bias:

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. …

It is not that openness is always right. Rather, it is that we need a balance between open and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong. Partly this is because we still do not understand the kind of property that exists on networks. Most of our experience is with tangible property; fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard). There the threats are different, but so are the opportunities for productive sharing. Our intuitions, policies and business models misidentify both. Like astronauts brought up in gravity, our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall. …

Control and ownership seem intuitively the right way to go. How do you feel about today’s debates? Should we preserve “net neutrality” and openness or give network owners greater control? Should we create new rights for broadcasters and database owners? The next project of the behavioural economists should be to study our cognitive frameworks about property, control and networks. Like the pilot in the cloud looking at his instruments, we might learn that we are upside down.

 

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Other articles/material on or around this theme that I recommend:

1. An earlier posting by TBL on his blog, Neutrality of the Net. 
2. Kevin Marks, Internet regeneration: 'My generation draws the Internet as a cloud that connects everyone; the younger generation experiences it as oxygen that supports their digital lives. The old generation sees this as a poisonous gas that has leaked out of their pipes, and they want to seal it up again.' Also, Tiered versus Weird: 'Network engineers draw the Internet as a cloud, because it doesn't matter to endpoints how the packets get there. … By contrast, telco's and networking providers … see the wires and the complexity, because that's what they do. … they fall back on thinking hierarchically, which is another way of coping with complexity. This contributes to the difficulty of getting the open network argument across to governments - the hierarchic frame is a good fit for their default approach to organisation and information flow, so regulatory capture is a likely outcome.' 
3. 'I did have some trust in the telecoms when they were in a free market, but they have not been playing fair as their numbers have dwindled. In the Net Neutrality debate they have taken a three legged argument (telecom, consumer, and content provider) and removed themselves from the argument. The telecoms want people to believe a lie that it is the content owners and the customers that are on opposite sides. But, in reality it is the telecoms that stand between the people and the content and the telecoms have threatened to extort money from the Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. The telecoms fed the lies to Senator Ted Stevens to make him look like a buffoon talking about the "Internet are just tubes".' Thomas Vander Wal 
4. 'Vint Cerf is quoted in the International edition of Newsweek (May 15-22) saying: Sadly, it looks like the period in which the Internet functions seamlessly is over.' That's quite a warning, and I'm surprised that - in a world where the borderless and efficient functioning of the Internet is becoming vital to governments, businesses and individuals alike - it has not been picked up and commented more widely.' Bruno Giussani 
5. In July, David Weinberger posted that 'John Palfrey and Robert Rogoyski have written a paper about Net neutrality as an architectural ideal and as a reality' and linked to a download site for the paper. 
6. Doc Searls: '"Broadband" is like "long distance": just another name for transient scarcity. We want our Net to be as fast, accessible and unrestricted as a hard drive. (And in time even that analogy will seem too slow.) The only way that will happen is if the Net becomes ubiquitous infrastructure -- something which, in a practical sense, nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. There is infinitely more business in making that happen, and using the results, than Congress can ever protect for the carriers alone.' 
7. ORG's Net Neutrality links on their 'List of relevant expressions of digital rights issues in artistic form' page. 
8. Wikipedia's net neutrality entry. 
9. Scientific American editorial: 'On balance, those favoring net neutrality make the better case. A system for prioritizing data traffic might well be necessary someday, yet one might hope that it would be based on the needs of the transmissions rather than the deal making and caprices of the cable owners. Moreover, personal blogs and other Web pages are increasingly patchworks of media components from various sources. Tiered service would stultify that trend. If the costs for video are not to be universally shared, perhaps it will ultimately be fairer and more practical for individuals to pay for the valued data they receive.' 
10. It'sOurNet and (thanks, Glyn — see comment) SavetheInternet.com.
11. On Senator Ted Stevens and 'the internet of tubes', there are numerous sites and sources of comedy available: eg, CheZLark, the Daily Show.

 

Technorati tags: net neutrality, Esther Dyson, Tim Berners-Lee, democracy, cognitive bias, openness aversion, James Boyle

"The Google Generation"

The phrase Tony Blair used on Thursday in his conference speech is examined in today's Guardian:

"Google isn't actually something I associate with young people any more," says Andy Hobsbawm, the European chairman and co-founder of the digital marketing company Agency.com - and son of the decidedly non-digital Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. "To me, it's part of the fabric of everyday living. It's too universal." By way of better signifying the youthful flash the PM was presumably after, Hobsbawm would recommend a quick dip into the discourse of marketing and advertising. "There are lots of different versions of the same concept," he explains. "It usually refers to the people for whom the internet and communications technology were in the world when they were born. A few years ago, somebody [Marc Prensky] wrote an article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, about the people for whom the world had always been that way, as against the ones who had to adapt to it. Everything else is just versions of that."

The broadest label, he explains, is Generation Y - those "born between 1977 and 2001, or thereabouts". Those who have focused specifically on the impact of technology have also talked about the Internet Generation ("probably born from the late 80s onwards"), and the IM - as in instant messaging - Generation. Then, in recent years, there has been much talk about the MySpace Generation, and even the Mypod Generation, "which is meant to be a combination of MySpace and iPod, but I think that's probably getting a bit silly".

Running through all these terms is a loose set of common assumptions: first, that this generation is globally attuned, propelling all kinds of cultural product, from Japanese cartoons to American indie rock bands, around the planet at extraordinary speed. How they might digest particular aspects of the media defies the old rules. In the US, for instance, there has been a great fuss about the fact that Jon Stewart's Daily Show is the most popular news outlet among those between 18 and 25. And their habits of interacting with the new media means that, often by word of mouth, small-scale internet operations can suddenly flower into huge concerns. Just as Napster heralded the decline of the compact disc, now YouTube makes traditional TV look positively stone age.

Most significantly, though, given the traits Tony Blair implicitly ascribes to the Google Generation, today's under-25s turn out not to conform to their caricature as consumerist slaves to all things "aspirational", but to be much more complicated. "Young people are still defined by what they consume - it's still important to have the right badges - but I'm not sure that's about any display of purchasing power," says Hobsbawm. "It's more about knowledge: being up with what's cool and interesting, defining yourself by what you do than rather what you buy."

And there's this, which certainly squares with how my sons and my younger friends are experiencing things, here in the UK and in Europe:

… the prime minister seemed to imply, they are the lucky pioneers of life on demand. But in stark contrast to all this, another version of the Google Generation represents today's young people as the victims of a historical curse. Earlier this year, there was a great buzz in the US about a book entitled Generation Debt, written by a 24-year-old Yale graduate named Anya Kamenetz, and cheerily subtitled "Why now is a terrible time to be young".

"I was born into a broke generation," she wrote. "I look around and I see people who have borrowed more to go to college than they can repay, who can't find a good job, can't save, can't make solid plans. Their credit card bills mount every month, while their lives stall on the first uphill slope. Born into a century of unimaginable prosperity in the richest country in the world, those of us between 18 and 35 have somehow been cheated out of our inheritance."

In Britain, the picture seems little different. "Debt is the ever-present conversation among my friends," says a university student I spoke to. "When we talk about the future, it's always, 'Will we ever be able to afford a house? Will we be able to get a decent pension?' It's kind of simultaneously normal and quite shocking. And even when it's kept in the background, it's there with just about all the people I know."

According to a view crystallised in the title of a recent report by the centre-right thinktank Reform, the Google Generation might easily be rebranded as the Ipod generation - "Insecure, pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden". "You would think this generation have never had it so good, to quote another prime minister," says Andrew Haldenby, Reform's director. "The opportunities for international travel, education, very liberated social mores - it's a great time to be young, you would think. But then you start to look at people's circumstances and talk to young people themselves, and they expect to have a difficult career and be in a difficult economic position well into their 30s. They're probably going to have a low disposable income, difficulty getting on the housing ladder and high levels of debt."

By 2010, he estimates, the average graduate will be paying half their income in tax, loan repayments and newly high pension contributions. The future Haldenby foresees is of a glaring disjunction between the supposed opportunities of a hi-tech society and the lack of cash to actually pursue them.

John Harris goes on to look at the way this B-side of life in the Google Generation is reflected in contemporary pop songs. He concludes:

Those who are seeking to snare the attention of a supposedly digital generation should take note: among these people, the idea that new technology is worthy of comment is almost pathetically old-fashioned. Once you've implied that using the web is remarkable, you've probably lost them.

Trying to be politically hip with technology is just embarrassing, but this of course doesn't mean that we should settle for taking technology for granted. Good teachers spend a great deal of their time reminding themselves and their students that the world (and more) is remarkable —'worthy of comment'.

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Talking of getting used to technology, I've just read Maciej Ceglowski's fine posting in his blog, Idle Words, about flying over the North Pole. It's a beautiful and characteristically amusing piece, finishing with this:

Passing over the North Pole hardly helps make the experience less dreamlike. Such flights were a novelty even into the 1950's; it's only within the last twenty years that routine passenger service over the Arctic have become technically possible, but already people are able to pull down the window shades and calmly watch the DaVinci Code or even just sleep through the whole spectacle. It makes me wonder if there is anything we can do to help our world recover its former vastness.

Back in 2004 I noted briefly how experiences of awe and wonder in relation to the net seem to have the power to excite and stir us, and that these experiences are in turn very important to