Internet Culture and Technology – Page 16

Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale

The other day while browsing around looking for books to read on my iPad I noticed what looked like a dissertation for sale. I’ve been wondering how dissertations could get into e-book stores when I remembered the license that graduate students are being asked to sign these days by Theses Canada. The system here encourages students to give a license to Library and Archives Canada that includes the right,

(a) to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell my thesis (the title of which is set forth above) worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats;

I now just came across this cautionary story in the Chronicle for Higher Education about Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale. It seems it is also allowed in the US.

New ‘Digital Divide’ Seen in Wasting Time Online

From @nowviskie a New York Times article on the New ‘Digital Divide’ Seen in Wasting Time Online.

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This fits in interesting ways with research I’ve come across in two other contexts. First, it fits with what Valerie Steeves talked about at the GRAND 2012 conference I went to. (See my conference notes.) She reported on her Young Canadians in an Online World research – she has been interviewing young Canadians, their parents and teachers over the years. Between 2000 and now there has been a shift in attitude towards the internet from believing it was good for learning to thinking of it as a minefield.

The other context is a cool book I’m reading on keitai or mobile phones in Japan. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian is a collection edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda about the cell phone phenomenon in Japan. They point out in passing how there are significant national/cultural differences in how technologies are picked up and used.

In the case of the PC Internet, differences in adoption were most often couched in terms of a digital divide, of haves and have-nots in relation to a universally desirable technological resource. By contrast, mobile media are frequently characterized as having different attractions depending on local contexts and cultures. The discourse of the digital divide has been mobilized in relation to Japanese keitai Internet access (see chapter 1) and is implicit in the discourse suggesting that the United States needs to catch up to Japanese keitai cultures. (p. 6)

While we need to be aware of differences in access to technology, we also should be critical of the assumptions underlying the discourse of divides. Why do we assume that the Internet is good and mobiles less so? Why did the Japanese discourse switch from viewing keitai as promoting youth rudeness and isolation to arguing for Japanese technonationalist exceptionalism (we use mobiles more because there is something exceptional about Japanese culture/spirit.)

Which reminds me of a TechCrunch article on How The Future of Mobile Lies in the Developing World. Cell phones for us are one more gadget with which to access the Internet. In the developing world they are revolutionary in that they leapfrogged the problems of physical infrastructure (phone wires) and now provide connectivity for many who had none. It is no wonder that the growth in the cell market is in the developing world.

For many communities, simple voice and text connections have brought about revolutions in access to financial, health, agricultural and education services and opportunities for employment. For example, many farmers in rural areas in Africa and Asia use SMS services to to find out the daily prices of prices of agricultural commodities. This information allows them to improve their bargaining position when taking their goods to market, and also allows them to switch between end markets.

Bonfire of the Humanities

I’m sitting at Congress 2012 in the beer tent at Wilfred Laurier. I’ve been writing a conference report of SDH/SEMI 2012. But in the beer tent they are talking about the ARG that Neil Randall (may have) started called Bonfire of the Humanities. Apparently the dean may have shut it down, but traces are left, see #bonfireofthehumanities. See also the YouTube video, Torch Institute Declares War Against University of Waterloo.

Because some may misunderstand, the Torch Institute is probably is Alternate Reality Game (ARG) satirizing the academy. With ARGs you never know what is real or not. The dean shutting things down, like the removal of the YouTube above may or may not be part of the game script. (You can see other Torch Institute videos here.) The guiding idea behind ARGs is TINAG (This is not a game.) ARGs are supposed to be games only in so far as you play with what may or may not be the game. Who knows about the Torch Institute.

‘The Demise of Guys’: How video games and porn are ruining a generation

CNN has a story on ‘The Demise of Guys’: How video games and porn are ruining a generation. The book is The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It and it is by retired Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. The book builds on a TED Talk that argues that:

The statistics show that guys are underachieving.
Guys are shyer than before. Few guys know how to talk to women.
Guys prefer homosocial situations which Zimbardo calls Social Intensity Syndrome.
All this is caused by computer games and internet porn.

“Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they’re totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.” (Zimbardo)

Compare this to Hanna Rosin: New data on the rise of women who argues that “the global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men.” She argues that there has been a hollowing out of the middle-class jobs men held for service jobs that women do better. Could the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy be responsible for the “demise of guys?”

Buffett Says Free News Unsustainable

Bloomberg has a story that Warren Buffett Says Free News Unsustainable, May Add More Papers. The days of expecting news online to be free to access may be coming to an end. We may find more and more news behind paywalls of the sort the New York Times brought in where you only get so many free articles a month.

Buffett believes that local papers with a “community focus” can make a profit as they are often the only source for community news. There will always be free alternatives for national or international news, but community newspapers often don’t have free alternatives.

This bodes well for journalism which has suffered recently which in turn has, I believe, created a democracy gap as the fifth estate loses its ability to monitor the others. Bloggers don’t reliably replace investigative journalism that profits from reporting on government and industry.

FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit

From Slashdot another story hinting at how government agencies are organizing to intercept and interpret Internet data. See FBI quietly forms secretive Net-surveillance unit.

My guess is that data mining large amounts of data produces so many false positives that organizations like the NSA and FBI have to set up large units to follow up on results. There is an interesting policy paper by Jeff Jonas and Jim Harper on Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining that argues that predictive mining isn’t worth it. The cost of false positives for industry when they use predictive data mining (predicting who might buy your product) is acceptable. The costs of false positives for counterterrorism are prohibitive as it takes trained agents away from better uses of their time. I doubt anyone in this climate it willing to give up on mining which is why The NSA is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center.

I wonder if we will ever know if money spent on voice and text mining is useful in counterintelligence? Perhaps the rumour of the possibility of it working is enough?

Battle for the internet

The Guardian has a great series on the Battle for the internet. This includes a number of interventions by Tim Berners-Lee including Tim Berners-Lee urges government to stop the snooping bill and Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook. There is an article, Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin, about the dangers of walled gardens like FaceBook and Apple’s App Store. One might say the same about Google.

Day of Geoffrey Rockwell

Tomorrow (March 27th) is the fourth annual Day of Digital Humanities. I will be blogging the Day of Geoffrey Rockwell. So far there are 254 members so it looks like another active day. People have been twittering under the #dayofdh hashtag. I must remember to charge the batter for my camera.