Nicholas Sheppard
Someone
recently suggested to me that the cyberlibertarians who shouted "information wants to be free"
in the 1990s might be responsible for the present-day Internet being
awash with targeted advertising and the data collection that it entails.
As I understand the argument, the claim is that academic free-content
advocates — themselves largely supported by public funding — insisted
that the Internet provide information free of charge. Requiring funding
to actually create and maintain web sites, companies like Google and
Facebook turned to advertising. And so our searches, profiles, news,
emails and much else besides now come with corporate messages attached.
Even better, Internet companies are able to leverage the intimate
knowledge that they have of their users to better serve the messaging
needs of their actual customers (the advertisers).
Whatever the merits of this argument, I think it it does expose two
elephants in the room when it comes to making information free: public
funding and advertising. Little information of any substance is
ultimately free — most "free" information is paid for by the public or
by advertisers. I guess most of the rest is donated by contributors
after doing whatever it is they do to earn a salary.
Now, I think there
are some good arguments for providing public information at public
expense, and plenty of us accept advertising in return for free-to-air
television, inexpensive newspapers and convenient search engines. But
would it sound so cool to be proclaiming "information wants to be funded
by the public" or "information wants to carry advertising"? And would
anyone sign up for a service boasting that "your information wants to be free to advertisers"?
When I worked in copyright and digital media, I sometimes heard
suggestions that the music industry needed to find a business model that
"feels free". Google certainly seems to make plenty of money this way,
even if the return on investment for social media companies is open to debate.
But "feels free" implies "ignorant of the cost", leaving search engine
and social media users surprised and offended whenever the data
collection activities of their "free" service providers are disclosed.
All this got me wondering: would anyone actually pay for searching or
social media if it meant they could do so without advertising and
without being the subject of data collection machinery? (Let's assume
for the moment that we can trust our paid-for search engines and social
media providers to ignore or discard whatever data we send through their
services.)
Some people do pay for email services and personal web sites —
though a quick survey of my address book shows that the great majority
are using either a work address, or one of Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail. Most
of the exceptions, including me, are professional computer
technologists for whom setting up email systems and websites is all in
a day's work. Many people also pay for access to online virtual worlds
like World of Warcraft and Second Life, and
some pay for online dating services. But I don't think I've ever heard
of anyone paying to search the web or join a social
network.
I went on to discover (using a free search engine of course) that some psychologists have argued for the existence of a "zero price effect"
by which users choose products offered at no charge even when, all
things considered, paying for a similar product would serve them better. Lawyers following these psychologists consequently argue that
legislators ought to consider restricting the use of "free".
That's not to say that we should outlaw services and
products offered without charge, but that we should describe
ad-supported, publicly-funded and other indirectly-supported services as
such and not as "free". As David Adam Friedman puts it, "the free offer with accompanying obligation should no
longer be considered free".
So let me re-phrase my earlier question: given the choice between a
search engine or social network that collected your money, or one that
collected your data, which would you choose? Because "free" is not an option.
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 August 2014
Tuesday, 13 May 2014
Best meme in show: Unmediated thoughts on the internet and language
Angus Lang
My family owned a cat when I was growing up, but I think the internet has taught me that I’m a doge person.
My family owned a cat when I was growing up, but I think the internet has taught me that I’m a doge person.
LOLcats was an early iteration of an internet meme with
some potential: amusing images of cats accompanied by intentionally
ungrammatical text was a promising combination, but ultimately it didn’t hit
the spot. This, for instance, is cute enough, but not actually funny:
 |
| Image by Misterjack, provided by CC licence via Wikimedia Commons |
However, if you replace the cat with an image of a happily inane
and easily impressed dog (a shiba inu), and instead of the half-baked
misspellings use a mixture of eccentric noun phrases sprinkled with the
occasional “wow”, the whole proposition becomes much more compelling. This, for example, is doge’s take on the
topic of 3D printing:
 |
| Image from The Daily Dot |
It works best when there is an obvious gulf between the
depth of the topic and the doge’s treatment of it. Here, for example, doge
deals with the grey zone between terrorism and civil disobedience:
 |
| Image from FunnyJunk |
The doge is undoubtedly inane, but like many fools, he has a
certain wisdom about him. And, to my mind, it’s especially in the field of
internet linguistics that he has a thing or two to teach us.
Doge is a good example of the internet’s tendency to provide
conditions for the development of new language varieties, at greyhound pace,
and accompanied by multiple variations. David
Crystal, writer on many linguistic things, thinks that the
internet’s influence is unprecedented in this respect.
The sort of riffing that
produced doge out of LOLcats can be witnessed all over the place. For example,
the orthodox spoken or written phrase “I can’t even begin to describe this to
you” has produced the microblogging/texting/tweeting iterations “I can’t even”,
“I have lost the ability to even”, and “I have lost all ability
to can”.
Now, I confess I don’t know
enough about the field to explain the mechanisms at play, but I imagine it has
something to do with the playful (“ludic”) way in which language is used in
many popular forms of digital communication, the need for linguistic creativity
to be expressed within tight confines in such contexts (eg Twitter/SMS
character limits, or keeping it “micro” in the case of microblogging), and the impressive
capacity of internet communication to spread: with immediacy; to a wide number
of people; and over a geographically disparate population.
All of that is very cool, but if a variety of
internet-language could venture out of its natural digital habitat and enter
the spoken language, now that would really be something.
So far, apart from a
few bits and pieces here and there, it hasn’t really happened yet. Linguistic
prescriptivists and other concerned citizens have, over the years, expressed
their fears about the threat to standard spoken and written language forms
posed by net- and sms-speak, but by and large they have not materialised. U dont
eg omit pnctu8tn or abbrv8 or use pctgrms in 4ml wrtn work lk when u r txtng.
My
personal ambition for doge is that it will make this leap. The ingredients are
all there: it’s catchy, has its
own grammar, and it doesn’t even need the doge to work.
This poem from the daysofstorm Tumblr,
for example, is a fantastic rendition of Romeo and Juliet in doge-speak:
What light. So breaks. Such east. Very sun. Wow, Juliet.
What Romeo. Such why. Very rose. Still rose.
Very balcony. Such climb.
Much love. So Propose. Wow, marriage.
Very Tybalt. Much stab. What do?
Such exile. Very Mantua. Much sad.
So, priest? Much sleeping. Wow, tomb.
Such poison. What dagger. Very dead. Wow, end.
In my own conversations, I have been trying to deploy doge
whenever possible, preferably when least appropriate. It’s quite addictive. But
getting it right takes a bit of practice – it’s all too easy to lapse into
grammatical correctness. Even “Romeo and Juliet” is not quite perfect: “much love”
probably should have been “many love” and “such poison” maybe “so poison”.
I do, of course, realise that much of this is vanity. My doge
advocacy doubtless has to do with wearing it as a badge of contemporariness and
digital savoir faire. Never mind that the doge has, no doubt, already trotted off
to the meme compost heap, tail between its legs. But that, too is the power of
the internet. We can spend a disproportionate amount of our text-consuming
lives on various forms of bloggery, either out of fun, wannabe funkiness or
just because of the sheer volume of it.
But I feel we should stay sensitised to
the way in which the internet bestows prestige on certain forms of text. Naomi
S Baron has observed that a great mass of netspeak is unmediated, ie
produced spontaneously, and in the absence of reflection, drafting, redrafting,
editing or peer-review. There is, of
course, a place for this, but the patterns of our consumption involve a risk
that the mediated text may lose something of its cultural priority. It’s
certainly an interesting point. And the doge meme is aimed squarely at this
phenomenon: we like it because, like so many of us netizens, doge has no
inhibitions about broadcasting its thoughts, moment to moment, with hilarious
superficiality on topics undeserving of such treatment.
My cat, now that I think of it, was a more reflective and
introverted type.
Perhaps I should be reconnecting with my feline side.
Monday, 17 March 2014
If the web wants rules, who will make them?
Lyria Bennett Moses, Daniel Cater and David Vaile
Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants an online “Magna Carta” to protect and ensure the independence of the internet.
He’s also created a Web We Want campaign, calling on people to generate a digital bill of rights – a statement of principles he hopes will be supported by public institutions, government and corporations.
The new Magna Carta would deal with issues of privacy, free speech and anonymity, among other things.
The original Magna Carta
The Magna Carta itself is perhaps not the best historical precedent. While it is the foundation of many modern freedoms, it contained clauses that look discriminatory to modern eyes.
For instance:
Who rules the internet?
The internet has long been characterised by its very lack of centralised authority. This is not to say that some corporations, such as Google, and some governments, such as that of the US, do not exercise significant influence over all aspects of its usage.
On the internet, the “kings” (global giants of commerce and advertising) have taken control over various aspects of the internet (often with our implicit consent), but they do not hold power by divine right. The Magna Carta was about what absolute power the barons could take back; the internet is about what powers we insist on retaining.
This does not itself undermine Sir Tim’s project, which builds on the lasting positive impacts of the Magna Carta rather than its historical peculiarities, but it does foreshadow some of the difficulties likely to arise in deciding exactly what is the “web we want”.
This ought not to be about handing power from corporations and governments to today’s equivalents of the feudal barons. The feudal barons were a very homogeneous group; they did not represent the interests of everyone or even everyone in England. Similarly, it is not clear whether those participating in Sir Tim’s campaign will truly represent the global internet community.
What do we want of the web?
So, what is the “web we want”? Is it the same as Sir Tim’s vision?
Consider the notion of “anonymity”.
Some, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), argue that anonymity is crucial for freedom of communication (just as privacy can be essential for freedom of association).
Others, such as US columnist Farhad Manjoo and The Daily Telegraph, argue that “trolls” ought to be held accountable for threatening or offensive comments.
There are complex debates about how freedom of speech ought to be balanced against other values, such as a collective right of minority groups to be free from racial vilification and offensive speech.
You may have different positions on anonymity depending on whether you are expressing a political view online, or being subjected to vitriol (such as TV celebrity Charlotte Dawson), threats or libel.
Interestingly, the “web we want” campaign itself asks subscribers to confirm registration with “your real name”, presumably in order to preserve integrity.
Anonymity can be a positive or negative, depending on context and personal values. There may be ways to balance these perspectives, and amendments to the Australian Privacy Act, recently in force, attempt to do this. But it’s unlikely that any single solution would work for all people at all times.
Whose rules get to rule?
The difficulty Sir Tim’s proposal faces is that there can be no single vision of the “web we want”. This is true within internally diverse countries such as the UK and Australia and is certainly true among the wider international community.
At most, there might be the “web the majority of people wants at a given time” but to work out what that is requires more than a debate among those who self-select to join Sir Tim’s campaign.
Sir Tim calls for an “open, neutral” web. It is hard to disagree – who would want the world wide web to be closed or biased?
But use of positive language does not itself answer the question. To quote the former US historian Melvin Kranzberg and the first of his six laws on technology:
We should be aware of the form the internet is taking, the features it manifests, and the positive and negative implications of those features for us personally, and for communities.
But we should not pretend that there is a single agreed list of desirable features, or that there is such a thing as a “neutral” world wide web. There is no agreed-upon neutral position among the world’s diverse users and potential users of the web.
The real question is how we go about enabling conversations about the impact of public and private choices that, together, shape the web. These conversations need to take account of diverse languages, diverse perspectives and diverse cultures. In this respect, the Magna Carta is a poor precedent.
Yet it is only after such conversations take place that can we begin to think about whether it is possible to design a universal constitution for the internet.
This article was co-authored with Daniel Cater.
Lyria Bennett Moses is affiliated with the University of New South Wales, the Cyberspace Law and Policy Community and the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology.
David Vaile is affiliated with the Australian Privacy Foundation, of which he is vice-chair, and the Internet Society of Australia, of whose policy committee he is a member.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants an online “Magna Carta” to protect and ensure the independence of the internet.
He’s also created a Web We Want campaign, calling on people to generate a digital bill of rights – a statement of principles he hopes will be supported by public institutions, government and corporations.
The new Magna Carta would deal with issues of privacy, free speech and anonymity, among other things.
The original Magna Carta
The Magna Carta itself is perhaps not the best historical precedent. While it is the foundation of many modern freedoms, it contained clauses that look discriminatory to modern eyes.
For instance:
No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.It is important to understand the historical context of the Magna Carta. The monarchy had absolute power. Feudal landowners were attempting to diffuse the absolute power of the monarchy – largely unto themselves.
 |
| One of only four surviving exemplifications of the 1215 Magna Carta text. |
The internet has long been characterised by its very lack of centralised authority. This is not to say that some corporations, such as Google, and some governments, such as that of the US, do not exercise significant influence over all aspects of its usage.
On the internet, the “kings” (global giants of commerce and advertising) have taken control over various aspects of the internet (often with our implicit consent), but they do not hold power by divine right. The Magna Carta was about what absolute power the barons could take back; the internet is about what powers we insist on retaining.
This does not itself undermine Sir Tim’s project, which builds on the lasting positive impacts of the Magna Carta rather than its historical peculiarities, but it does foreshadow some of the difficulties likely to arise in deciding exactly what is the “web we want”.
This ought not to be about handing power from corporations and governments to today’s equivalents of the feudal barons. The feudal barons were a very homogeneous group; they did not represent the interests of everyone or even everyone in England. Similarly, it is not clear whether those participating in Sir Tim’s campaign will truly represent the global internet community.
What do we want of the web?
So, what is the “web we want”? Is it the same as Sir Tim’s vision?
 |
| Eye I. By Thomas Tolkien, Flickr, CC BY |
Some, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), argue that anonymity is crucial for freedom of communication (just as privacy can be essential for freedom of association).
Others, such as US columnist Farhad Manjoo and The Daily Telegraph, argue that “trolls” ought to be held accountable for threatening or offensive comments.
There are complex debates about how freedom of speech ought to be balanced against other values, such as a collective right of minority groups to be free from racial vilification and offensive speech.
You may have different positions on anonymity depending on whether you are expressing a political view online, or being subjected to vitriol (such as TV celebrity Charlotte Dawson), threats or libel.
Interestingly, the “web we want” campaign itself asks subscribers to confirm registration with “your real name”, presumably in order to preserve integrity.
Anonymity can be a positive or negative, depending on context and personal values. There may be ways to balance these perspectives, and amendments to the Australian Privacy Act, recently in force, attempt to do this. But it’s unlikely that any single solution would work for all people at all times.
Whose rules get to rule?
The difficulty Sir Tim’s proposal faces is that there can be no single vision of the “web we want”. This is true within internally diverse countries such as the UK and Australia and is certainly true among the wider international community.
At most, there might be the “web the majority of people wants at a given time” but to work out what that is requires more than a debate among those who self-select to join Sir Tim’s campaign.
Sir Tim calls for an “open, neutral” web. It is hard to disagree – who would want the world wide web to be closed or biased?
But use of positive language does not itself answer the question. To quote the former US historian Melvin Kranzberg and the first of his six laws on technology:
Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.Because of the way the web operates, it has particular features. In some ways, in some places, it is closed or biased. Pornography sites might be limited to a particular adult community; bias might be the result of the freedom of expression. In a sense, Sir Tim’s position that freedom of expression should be promoted is part of what enables a kind of bias to occur.
We should be aware of the form the internet is taking, the features it manifests, and the positive and negative implications of those features for us personally, and for communities.
But we should not pretend that there is a single agreed list of desirable features, or that there is such a thing as a “neutral” world wide web. There is no agreed-upon neutral position among the world’s diverse users and potential users of the web.
The real question is how we go about enabling conversations about the impact of public and private choices that, together, shape the web. These conversations need to take account of diverse languages, diverse perspectives and diverse cultures. In this respect, the Magna Carta is a poor precedent.
Yet it is only after such conversations take place that can we begin to think about whether it is possible to design a universal constitution for the internet.
This article was co-authored with Daniel Cater.
Lyria Bennett Moses is affiliated with the University of New South Wales, the Cyberspace Law and Policy Community and the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology.
David Vaile is affiliated with the Australian Privacy Foundation, of which he is vice-chair, and the Internet Society of Australia, of whose policy committee he is a member.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.Read the original article.
Thursday, 12 December 2013
Around the world in 80 hashtags
Earlier this year, I decided to leave the safety and predictability of day-to-day life and embark on an undefined overseas adventure. I wanted absolute freedom to see, do, relax, reflect and absorb everything without a pre-determined expiration date staring at me like the stamp on a milk carton. Aside from some bookmarked dates and destinations, my slate was clean. Maybe I’d travel for 3 months or 4, or 6 or more, before growing up and returning to work. My approach was admittedly indulgent, but it was the one I needed to ensure my travel bug was sufficiently fed.
When I told various friends and colleagues about my plan I was surprised by how many asked if I’d write a travel blog. There were several reasons why my answer was no. For one, I’d always disliked the sound of the word blog and I didn’t want to be a blogger [Editor’s note: no offence taken]. More importantly, I had a sneaking suspicion that if I committed to writing a blog it would ultimately detract from, rather than add to, the experience I sought. I knew I’d feel pressured to package my days into posts that would be interesting, funny or somehow read-worthy, with the result that I’d spend hours staring at my laptop and poring over words and photos when I’d rather spend those hours staring at the ocean and pouring a deliciously refreshing drink.
The reality is that blogging, sharing, posting, commenting, tagging, and hashtagging have become so prevalent, so expected, that I felt rebellious for choosing to be a relatively quiet traveller. Why wasn’t I updating my Facebook status upon arriving in each place? Why hadn’t I joined Instagram to tell my travel tales through daily photos? Why did I take 4 months to send my first real update to a relatively small list of friends and family (by old-school email, no less)?
Let me be clear - I didn’t entirely boycott social media while travelling. I did post some Facebook updates and photos, and I reaped great benefits that arose solely because of my participation in social media. For example, I chose certain travel destinations after being inspired by friends’ photos, and I met up with friendly faces in foreign places simply because one of us had posted something on Facebook that told the other where we were. Social media can undoubtedly connect and benefit its users (travellers or not) in incredible ways.
But what I feared was getting dragged over to the dark side, the point at which we shift our focus too far away from the live experience and we become preoccupied, too occupied, with how we will capture it, tag it, post it and wait for the “likes” to filter in.
At one point during my trip, I was one of what felt like 5,000 people packed into London’s Sloane Square to watch a large screen on which Andy Murray was seeking to become the first British man to win Wimbledon in 77 years. Last year, he lost in the final and cried. This year, he was hoping to do neither. The pressure on him was monumental, as was the tension that hung over the crowd. When Murray finally won the eruption was incredible: people cheered and clapped and jumped and hugged and did whatever victory dance they could manage on the tiny piece of pavement they’d claimed as their own for the last 4 hours. It was one of those spine-tingling live sporting moments that you’re thrilled to be part of and leaves you feeling like you’ve made a new best friend in the stranger beside you... and it was a moment that I shared with my phone. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I was one of those people who couldn’t clap, jump or hug my human friends beside me because I was busy holding my digital friend above the sea of flailing arms trying to “capture the moment”. While I’m glad to have caught some great footage (which I have actually watched since), the moment would’ve been better if I’d just lived it. I caught myself wondering almost immediately: was this what the dark side felt like?
 |
| A photo finish |
About a month after that day in Sloane Square, I overheard a brief but brilliant exchange between two friends which, I think, reflects an increasingly unhealthy addiction to social media and the tools that feed it (arguably most striking in its younger users, but the older ones aren’t immune; certain grown-up world leaders have, after all, just been roasted for taking a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service). After logging into his Facebook account in a hostel foyer, Traveller #1 exclaimed “This is an epic photo, how can I only have 5 likes?!” and traveller #2 replied “Who cares?”. Indeed, who does care? When we post things, who are we posting them for? Should getting only 5 likes or 3 likes (or, horror of horrors, no likes) make our epic travel photo seem any less epic to us?
Social media undoubtedly has its place, but the trick is to ensure it’s used for the right reasons and without letting it detract from our real-life experiences. Because, in the end, the live show is always better than the recording.
Photograph by Amanda Parks.
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
Draining the Heart of the Internet: Is targeted marketing destroying the surfing experience?
Izzy Woods
The saying “just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you” can be directly applied to Internet marketing these days. Targeted ads, often courtesy of Google AdWords and AdSense, appear on just about every page we visit online. Type an email to your mother and mention the carrots you ate the night before, and suddenly every sidebar and header ad is about carrots, cooking, or where to find cooked carrots. Casually type a comment about babies while responding to a friend’s Facebook comment, and almost instantly your entire Internet experience will involve baby-centric banner advertisements and notices. While Adwords and search engine marketing techniques have exponentially increased the efficiency of marketing and the reach of products and brands, and while most consumers have become accustomed to this rapid response to the minutiae in our heads, the practice is still mildly unsettling.
Back in the day
It all began with pay-per-click advertising in the late 90s. The ability of advertisers to place their ads where a potential customer could easily select the option to visit their site or product proved to be quite successful for all involved. In the late 90s, the average consumer was still wildly enamoured with the very fact that “surfing” the net, moving easily from place to place, was an option, so having a pay-per-click ad or two appear seemed novel. The fact that the ad was targeted was interesting as opposed to annoying. Google Adwords, launched in 2000, was the harbinger of developments to come. The Adwords program is now an integral part of our online experience. In a nutshell, the service, and others like it, allows advertisers to choose a series of keywords that will activate ads to appear in sidebars, banners, and pop-ups. The advertiser pays a specified amount per click by a potential consumer. The more money the advertiser is willing to bid per click, combined with the amount of traffic their site receives and the quality of the site itself, determines how prominently the ad is displayed on the page. Most often, it is Google Adwords that causes that one line about carrots to equal banner ads about vegetables for the next hour, or the appearance of advertisements about Gerber and Pampers that dot the electronic landscape once you leave Facebook.
This instant advertising gratification is further compounded by the use of more basic search engine marketing techniques, like keyword analysis, link and page popularity, back-end techniques like image tagging, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion in website directories, to name just a few. The result is that surfing the Internet now means navigating a series of advertisements, in addition to searching for the information you actually need. In the marketing community’s quest to generate more traffic and increase visibility, advertising has become almost as prevalent as general information on the web, and often the two are conflated in tricky ways that make it difficult to separate fact from a possibly manufactured version of the truth.
The real story
This is where “conspiracy theories” come into play. With targeted advertising and, recently, with the development of targeted links to content as well, our Internet experience is becoming more and more confined to those mentions of carrots and babies. The true “surfing” experience is no more. There was a time when it was possible to make cognitive leaps on the Internet that were solely based on where our brains chose to go, as opposed to where an advertiser nudged us to go. Those days seem long gone now. Consumer groups have been grumbling since the advent of paid search advertising. They point to the way advertising is presented on the Internet, and how some ads are presented in such a way that the very fact that they are advertisements is hidden. Pay-per-click advertising also opened up a whole new level of online trademark infringement, as companies raced to gain possession of common or popular terms, so that their ads would appear more prominently. In fact, in 2011, Google began preventing Adwords clients from buying up other links in order to increase their ranking. The end result is that the World Wide Web is becoming increasingly limited to only what exists in the user’s immediate world. Half the fun of going online used to be stumbling across a website or finding a new band from overseas. Now, the use of targeted technologies is drastically limiting our experience and, consequently, it is also limiting the possibility of connection or discussion with others that used to be the heart of the Internet.
The saying “just because you're paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you” can be directly applied to Internet marketing these days. Targeted ads, often courtesy of Google AdWords and AdSense, appear on just about every page we visit online. Type an email to your mother and mention the carrots you ate the night before, and suddenly every sidebar and header ad is about carrots, cooking, or where to find cooked carrots. Casually type a comment about babies while responding to a friend’s Facebook comment, and almost instantly your entire Internet experience will involve baby-centric banner advertisements and notices. While Adwords and search engine marketing techniques have exponentially increased the efficiency of marketing and the reach of products and brands, and while most consumers have become accustomed to this rapid response to the minutiae in our heads, the practice is still mildly unsettling.
Back in the day
It all began with pay-per-click advertising in the late 90s. The ability of advertisers to place their ads where a potential customer could easily select the option to visit their site or product proved to be quite successful for all involved. In the late 90s, the average consumer was still wildly enamoured with the very fact that “surfing” the net, moving easily from place to place, was an option, so having a pay-per-click ad or two appear seemed novel. The fact that the ad was targeted was interesting as opposed to annoying. Google Adwords, launched in 2000, was the harbinger of developments to come. The Adwords program is now an integral part of our online experience. In a nutshell, the service, and others like it, allows advertisers to choose a series of keywords that will activate ads to appear in sidebars, banners, and pop-ups. The advertiser pays a specified amount per click by a potential consumer. The more money the advertiser is willing to bid per click, combined with the amount of traffic their site receives and the quality of the site itself, determines how prominently the ad is displayed on the page. Most often, it is Google Adwords that causes that one line about carrots to equal banner ads about vegetables for the next hour, or the appearance of advertisements about Gerber and Pampers that dot the electronic landscape once you leave Facebook.
This instant advertising gratification is further compounded by the use of more basic search engine marketing techniques, like keyword analysis, link and page popularity, back-end techniques like image tagging, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion in website directories, to name just a few. The result is that surfing the Internet now means navigating a series of advertisements, in addition to searching for the information you actually need. In the marketing community’s quest to generate more traffic and increase visibility, advertising has become almost as prevalent as general information on the web, and often the two are conflated in tricky ways that make it difficult to separate fact from a possibly manufactured version of the truth.
The real story
This is where “conspiracy theories” come into play. With targeted advertising and, recently, with the development of targeted links to content as well, our Internet experience is becoming more and more confined to those mentions of carrots and babies. The true “surfing” experience is no more. There was a time when it was possible to make cognitive leaps on the Internet that were solely based on where our brains chose to go, as opposed to where an advertiser nudged us to go. Those days seem long gone now. Consumer groups have been grumbling since the advent of paid search advertising. They point to the way advertising is presented on the Internet, and how some ads are presented in such a way that the very fact that they are advertisements is hidden. Pay-per-click advertising also opened up a whole new level of online trademark infringement, as companies raced to gain possession of common or popular terms, so that their ads would appear more prominently. In fact, in 2011, Google began preventing Adwords clients from buying up other links in order to increase their ranking. The end result is that the World Wide Web is becoming increasingly limited to only what exists in the user’s immediate world. Half the fun of going online used to be stumbling across a website or finding a new band from overseas. Now, the use of targeted technologies is drastically limiting our experience and, consequently, it is also limiting the possibility of connection or discussion with others that used to be the heart of the Internet.
Wednesday, 23 November 2011
The demise of 'dot-comming'?
Joel Barrett
The Internet, as we know it, is about to change forever.
At least that's what ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, would have us believe. That's because on 20 June 2011, after years of board meetings, stakeholder submissions and fine-tuning, ICANN finally approved the introduction of a program to allow an infinite number of gTLDs onto the Internet.
A gTLD (which stands for Generic Top Level Domain) is the Internet extension that comes immediately after a domain name. gTLDs are best explained by way of example: .com, .net and .org are the most common ones, while .info, .biz and .pro are a little more obscure. gTLDs should be distinguished from ccTLDs, which are Country Code Top Level Domains and designate a particular country (.au for Australia, .ca for Canada, and so on). A basic Internet address generally looks like this: www.DomainName.gTLD or www.DomainName.gTLD.ccTLD.
There are 21 gTLDs at the moment, but this number is set to blow out under the New gTLD Program. Essentially, from 12 January 2012, any "[e]stablished corporation, organization, or institution in good standing" will be able to apply to ICANN for one or more new gTLDs to be added to the Internet. For example, a company like Canon, which has expressed interest, could hypothetically apply for .canon, .pixma, .camera, .photography, .technology, .smile or all of the above and more. A successful applicant will become the registry operator for the new gTLD, which means (among other things) that it will be able to sell a whole new set of domain names in that gTLD, keep the domain names for itself, or do a mixture of both. However, the price may prove too high for some smaller players: there is an administrative fee of US$185,000 per new gTLD, and that's just the beginning. Applying for a new gTLD could end up costing millions.
(Of course, the above description does not even begin to capture the complexity of the New gTLD Program. The gTLD Applicant Guidebook, which contains all the relevant rules and procedures, tops 350 pages.)
Although there are countless legal issues that arise from expanding the Internet so drastically (cyber-squatters and trade mark infringers will have a field day!), the interesting question for me is how companies will utilise their newly-acquired gTLDs and how we, as frequent users of the Internet, will respond. Cynics and critics claim that we are so wedded to the practice of searching, browsing and navigating the Internet within the .com paradigm (a practice I like to call "dot-comming") that new gTLDs may be fun and exciting initially, but will ultimately fall by the wayside like all other fads and gimmicks. Alternatively, hundreds of new gTLDs will turn cyberspace into a labyrinthine maze of back alleys, side streets and dead ends, making it impossible to locate even the simplest piece of information. Dot-comming, while not necessarily intuitive, is at least familiar.
I tend to agree with those who argue that if companies utilise new gTLDs in innovative ways, our searching, browsing and navigating strategies will adapt accordingly. Imagine how quickly you could check your phone bill if your personalised account page was located at YourName.vodafone. Think how easy it could be to shop online for a second-hand book if you could simply type in books.eBay. Want to rent a DVD, but not sure what's available in your suburb? Go to YourSuburb.Blockbuster. There could be a complete paradigm shift in the way we use the Internet, and companies will be able to reinforce these different ways of thinking through clever and persistent marketing and advertising.
I often have to fight my instinctive wariness of new technologies (back in 2005, I could not see how an iPod could improve my life when it was so easy to play CDs in my car, and a life juggling iPods and click wheels and iTunes just seemed too complicated). But I think that if companies take up the New gTLD Program as forecast, dot-comming could soon be a thing of the past, as obsolete as the floppy disk and the Discman (technologies that were all the rage as recently as 15 years ago).
So will the New gTLD Program actually revolutionise the Internet addressing system, or will it fizzle due to lack of corporate interest? And if it does take off, will the New gTLD Program improve the way we use the Internet, or will it just encourage gTLDs to spread uncontrollably across the online landscape like weeds, leaving a swathe of confusion, counterfeiting and cyber-squatting in its wake?
Only time will tell. If all runs smoothly (and it rarely does in the world of Internet addressing), we could know as early as January 2013, when the first new gTLDs are expected to land.
The Internet, as we know it, is about to change forever.
At least that's what ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, would have us believe. That's because on 20 June 2011, after years of board meetings, stakeholder submissions and fine-tuning, ICANN finally approved the introduction of a program to allow an infinite number of gTLDs onto the Internet.
A gTLD (which stands for Generic Top Level Domain) is the Internet extension that comes immediately after a domain name. gTLDs are best explained by way of example: .com, .net and .org are the most common ones, while .info, .biz and .pro are a little more obscure. gTLDs should be distinguished from ccTLDs, which are Country Code Top Level Domains and designate a particular country (.au for Australia, .ca for Canada, and so on). A basic Internet address generally looks like this: www.DomainName.gTLD or www.DomainName.gTLD.ccTLD.
There are 21 gTLDs at the moment, but this number is set to blow out under the New gTLD Program. Essentially, from 12 January 2012, any "[e]stablished corporation, organization, or institution in good standing" will be able to apply to ICANN for one or more new gTLDs to be added to the Internet. For example, a company like Canon, which has expressed interest, could hypothetically apply for .canon, .pixma, .camera, .photography, .technology, .smile or all of the above and more. A successful applicant will become the registry operator for the new gTLD, which means (among other things) that it will be able to sell a whole new set of domain names in that gTLD, keep the domain names for itself, or do a mixture of both. However, the price may prove too high for some smaller players: there is an administrative fee of US$185,000 per new gTLD, and that's just the beginning. Applying for a new gTLD could end up costing millions.
(Of course, the above description does not even begin to capture the complexity of the New gTLD Program. The gTLD Applicant Guidebook, which contains all the relevant rules and procedures, tops 350 pages.)
Although there are countless legal issues that arise from expanding the Internet so drastically (cyber-squatters and trade mark infringers will have a field day!), the interesting question for me is how companies will utilise their newly-acquired gTLDs and how we, as frequent users of the Internet, will respond. Cynics and critics claim that we are so wedded to the practice of searching, browsing and navigating the Internet within the .com paradigm (a practice I like to call "dot-comming") that new gTLDs may be fun and exciting initially, but will ultimately fall by the wayside like all other fads and gimmicks. Alternatively, hundreds of new gTLDs will turn cyberspace into a labyrinthine maze of back alleys, side streets and dead ends, making it impossible to locate even the simplest piece of information. Dot-comming, while not necessarily intuitive, is at least familiar.
I tend to agree with those who argue that if companies utilise new gTLDs in innovative ways, our searching, browsing and navigating strategies will adapt accordingly. Imagine how quickly you could check your phone bill if your personalised account page was located at YourName.vodafone. Think how easy it could be to shop online for a second-hand book if you could simply type in books.eBay. Want to rent a DVD, but not sure what's available in your suburb? Go to YourSuburb.Blockbuster. There could be a complete paradigm shift in the way we use the Internet, and companies will be able to reinforce these different ways of thinking through clever and persistent marketing and advertising.
I often have to fight my instinctive wariness of new technologies (back in 2005, I could not see how an iPod could improve my life when it was so easy to play CDs in my car, and a life juggling iPods and click wheels and iTunes just seemed too complicated). But I think that if companies take up the New gTLD Program as forecast, dot-comming could soon be a thing of the past, as obsolete as the floppy disk and the Discman (technologies that were all the rage as recently as 15 years ago).
So will the New gTLD Program actually revolutionise the Internet addressing system, or will it fizzle due to lack of corporate interest? And if it does take off, will the New gTLD Program improve the way we use the Internet, or will it just encourage gTLDs to spread uncontrollably across the online landscape like weeds, leaving a swathe of confusion, counterfeiting and cyber-squatting in its wake?
Only time will tell. If all runs smoothly (and it rarely does in the world of Internet addressing), we could know as early as January 2013, when the first new gTLDs are expected to land.
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Visionary or 'slackademic'? Social media's role in tomorrow's academia
Indigo Willing & Tseen Khoo
As the 21st century unfolds, various types of new media rival, and in some cases surpass, earlier forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the extent to which they impact our lives. Twitter and Facebook have been used most stunningly (and with astounding results) in the realms of politics and social protest movements. This is evident internationally: Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir has suggested, for example, that Iceland develop a more democratic constitution via the use of Facebook, while social networks played a notable role in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the ‘Arab Spring’ protests more broadly. Most recently, we have seen digitally mediated activism in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests, where a tweet in Canada on 13 July 2011 turned into a local protest in Zuccotti Park, New York City on 17 September 2011, before quickly escalating into an ongoing global movement.
In academic fields, however, enthusiasm for social media is not always evident. Just as some disciplines in academia struggled with the idea of harnessing the potential of CMC for their research in the 1990s, many academics currently remain resistant to opportunities to shift or expand their own networking activities over into new media such as Facebook and Twitter. From our experiences with the creation of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN), we have found that using new technology – and social media, in particular - creates conflicting rather than united discussions in academia.
Anecdotally, many academics mire themselves in the negative aspects of platforms such as Twitter, or dismiss all social media as activities befitting dilettantes and slackers. This negative orientation harkens back to the traditional denigration of academics who engaged too regularly and enthusiastically with the media. Further, many academics are sceptical of 'slacktivism' or 'clicktivism' (both pejorative terms for the emptiness that can underpin online declarations of commitment to a political, humanitarian or ethical cause).
Having hauled the AASRN network into the Web 2.0 world last year after being based for several years on 'traditional' email, and having embraced social media for several current projects, our perspectives straddle the old-school technology of mailing lists and static bulletin boards and today’s enmeshed social media strategies.
The advent of intensive social media platforms has brought about a significant transformation in the way we run our academic research network. With an active Twitter stream (@aasrn), professional website and Facebook group, we are reaching many more people than ever before. The immediacy and constancy of contact through social media has served the network well, allowing us to cultivate a sense of momentum and breadth of membership.
AASRN has been around (informally) since 2000, as an offline and sometimes online group, and occasional gathering, of academics with shared interests in Asian Australian studies. It was founded to establish and deepen scholarship in the field of Asian Australian studies. Is this aspect supported through the dynamism of the social media forums? Or is new media making our research network connections more shallow (as feared generally about social networks)? Perhaps it’s too early to tell, given our short, only year-long engagement with social media thus far.
The inaugural Asian Australian Film Forum (AAFF 2011), however, is an event that has embraced (and been embraced by) social media, with event momentum and word-of-tweet spurring a full programme of screenings and panels of Asian Australian filmmakers and media types.
That an event about evolving screen cultures should do so well using new media and social media is not all that surprising. Most stories these days are shot on digital video. Gone are the days when budding filmmakers cut their teeth using 8mm or 16mm film, a process that also became increasingly expensive and limited to a privileged few (especially with post-production costs factored in). Even the term ‘film festival’, if not redundant, has a quaint sound to it now.
The Internet plays a vital role in the distribution and promotion of contemporary video productions, fostering the necessary networks to support them. This includes the film press, film festival organisers, film industry bodies, television networks and most importantly, film fans who can (and do) actively communicate with each other through social media.
This heightened accessibility to digital technologies nurtures fresh perspectives and innovative approaches to create and showcase Asian Australian stories. Both Twitter and Facebook have been indispensable to the inaugural AAFF, from sourcing filmmakers to promoting the film programme, to strengthening the engagement of academically-founded entities (such as the AASRN) with Asian Australian creatives and the broader community.
There will always be a “digital divide”, and as Turkle has more recently suggested, there will always be a risk of becoming too introspective due to social networking. For the purposes of the AASRN, however, the horizons of connectivity are impressively vast and, contrary to people becoming more alone together, the web is proving to be a powerful tool for our promotion of collective engagements, on and offline.
Friday, 23 September 2011
Gamers boldly go where no scientist has gone before
Sarah Lux
Mothers and girlfriends worldwide have long yelled at errant sons and partners for being overly fixated on a video game.
This week, however, a group of gamers and scientists demonstrated that proficiency in World of Warcraft may be worth more than the geek cred it achieves.
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology has published an advance online copy of a paper that explains how enjoyment of and technical skills in playing video games can be harnessed to achieve remarkable outcomes in scientific research.
Examples of the trend are infinite. Travel review websites like TripAdvisor let you ask questions of a million strangers you never even knew had travelled to your intended location. Flickr, now with an in-built Creative Commons licensing system, connects you with talented photographers who will licence incredible works for your personal or professional use. And although the countless websites and forums containing basic medical information certainly do not replace the role of physicians, they do make for well informed patients who no longer have to defer all control over their health decisions to clinical experts.
Outsourcing tasks and questions to the millions of people connected to the internet is increasingly acknowledged as a legitimate problem-solving model. Crowdsourcing, the outsourcing of a task to an undefined group of people through an open call, can be arranged informally (for example, by a call for assistance over Facebook) or through companies like InnoCentive, which connect those with a problem (Seekers) with those who have solutions (Solvers), who are rewarded with cash prizes for proposing the right fix. Currently on InnoCentive, a novel idea for the development of glucose-responsive insulin may win you US$100,000, while a photo reflecting "the World in 2012" may result in the award of a $1000 prize. Crowdsourcing provides access to an entire world's worth of experts and eliminates costs of participation. As it is developed and refined as a model for various types of projects, it can only grow in popularity and impact.
Foldit is one of those refinements. Rather than issuing a completely open call, the scientists (essentially, Seekers) identified a particular group (Solvers) possessing skills the scientists lacked, and turned the project into a competitive game to make participation attractive.
While technology is so often lamented and lambasted for harming our relationships – lovers text rather than talk, friends chat online instead of meeting, kids engage in multi-player online role-play rather than kicking around a ball – the internet has a powerful ability to connect people, with substantial personal, professional, societal and now scientific implications.
And just think – if gamers can actually help to cure AIDS, what might be the value of your voice in the crowd?
This article was originally published here on The Punch.
Mothers and girlfriends worldwide have long yelled at errant sons and partners for being overly fixated on a video game.
This week, however, a group of gamers and scientists demonstrated that proficiency in World of Warcraft may be worth more than the geek cred it achieves.
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology has published an advance online copy of a paper that explains how enjoyment of and technical skills in playing video games can be harnessed to achieve remarkable outcomes in scientific research.
The scientists, hailing from the US, Poland and the Czech Republic, challenged players of the competitive protein folding game Foldit to produce accurate models of the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease. Scientists researching antiretroviral AIDS medication had tried and failed for years to map the protein with the requisite level of detail using more conventional scientific means. These particular scientists thought the Foldit gamers might have more success.
The experiment worked. In just three weeks, the gamers succeeded in generating models of sufficient quality to meet the scientists' needs. The result is incredible, and may lead to a significant advancement in AIDS research.
More broadly, considerable attention should be paid to the importance and ingenuity of this collaborative model for research, which harnesses skills possessed by ordinary humans to empower their meaningful contribution to the scientific process.
Foldit, the game in question, describes itself as "a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research". Understanding the structure of a protein is central to working out how to target it with drugs. This process is difficult and elusive, as the Foldit website explains:
The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical... Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.
The program builds on the concept behind a predecessor, Stanford University's folding@home, which networks participants' computers to create a supercomputer which works through possible folding patterns. Foldit adds to this concept the intuition and puzzle-solving abilities of human gamers to speed up and improve the results. When directed at particular scientific problems, this amalgamation of human and computer capabilities can achieve significant results, as demonstrated by the AIDS study.
This remarkable use of technology corresponds to a broader trend that has accompanied the increasing dominance of the internet in our lives and interactions. Unprecedented access to information, thanks to the internet, has substantially addressed the information asymmetry that used to mean ordinary people needed access expensive experts to make decisions and achieve certain goals. Almost all of us go to Google as our first port of call on almost every day-to-day question, and what we find includes the opinions, recommendations and warnings of an enormous unnamed audience who can help us solve our problem.
Examples of the trend are infinite. Travel review websites like TripAdvisor let you ask questions of a million strangers you never even knew had travelled to your intended location. Flickr, now with an in-built Creative Commons licensing system, connects you with talented photographers who will licence incredible works for your personal or professional use. And although the countless websites and forums containing basic medical information certainly do not replace the role of physicians, they do make for well informed patients who no longer have to defer all control over their health decisions to clinical experts.
Outsourcing tasks and questions to the millions of people connected to the internet is increasingly acknowledged as a legitimate problem-solving model. Crowdsourcing, the outsourcing of a task to an undefined group of people through an open call, can be arranged informally (for example, by a call for assistance over Facebook) or through companies like InnoCentive, which connect those with a problem (Seekers) with those who have solutions (Solvers), who are rewarded with cash prizes for proposing the right fix. Currently on InnoCentive, a novel idea for the development of glucose-responsive insulin may win you US$100,000, while a photo reflecting "the World in 2012" may result in the award of a $1000 prize. Crowdsourcing provides access to an entire world's worth of experts and eliminates costs of participation. As it is developed and refined as a model for various types of projects, it can only grow in popularity and impact.
Foldit is one of those refinements. Rather than issuing a completely open call, the scientists (essentially, Seekers) identified a particular group (Solvers) possessing skills the scientists lacked, and turned the project into a competitive game to make participation attractive.
While technology is so often lamented and lambasted for harming our relationships – lovers text rather than talk, friends chat online instead of meeting, kids engage in multi-player online role-play rather than kicking around a ball – the internet has a powerful ability to connect people, with substantial personal, professional, societal and now scientific implications.
And just think – if gamers can actually help to cure AIDS, what might be the value of your voice in the crowd?
This article was originally published here on The Punch.
Sunday, 11 September 2011
Distributed and anonymous: our say, our way on the Internet
Luke Giuliani
The distributed nature of the Internet is, I think, one of its greatest assets. It was definitely one of the main design considerations when ARPANET was first established. This non-centralised design has carried through with the way that services have treated user contribution, starting with modes like IRC and BBS, through to their modern equivalents like social networks and even more broadly any site that relies on user generated content. The option for anonymity in contribution has been omnipresent, if varying in degree. Of course whether you think this is good or bad depends highly on your point of view, in the same way that one's opinion of the whistleblower depends on whether you are the victim or the culprit.
With the growth of the internet as a primary communication channel, we have seen a more subtle result of this same distributed nature; a lack of a power of proscription. This lack of control has often led to an uptake of services in proportion to the risk averseness of the institution. Thus individuals and small businesses are quick to jump on the online bandwagon, but often government entities and decision makers - people with more to lose - are slower. Part of this is also a subtle transition in publishing power. Decision makers have historically had a "right-to-proof"; "I want to see that article before it goes to print" is a standard condition on working with the PR teams of politicians or big business. This control of information is in many ways antithetical to the publishing anarchy of the Internet.
In recent years, however, the invisible hand has pushed. Too many citizens consume too much of their information from (and thus base their decisions on) the Internet for decision makers to ignore, or even conditionally accept. Now PR teams have added "run your social media presence for you" to the list of services tendered. This has had an interesting result. We now have decision makers trying to control what is an inherently uncontrolled system.
We've seen this directly at OurSay, a project I am a part of, which connects decision makers with citizens. OurSay is a web based platform where citizens can ask questions of a decision maker and vote on other users questions that they think are important. Each user gets 7 votes, so they can use them all up in one go, or spread them around. After an OurSay question session closes, we go and get the answers to the top questions from the decision maker and put it up on the site. The interesting bit here is that without a doubt, everybody we talk to about answering questions voted for on OurSay asks: "But what happens if the top question is against my views?".
The idealist in me answers: answer it anyway! You don't get to be in a position of power without having to answer difficult questions sometimes. If the question asks "In what ways are you similar to a chimp?", tell them you share 96% of the same DNA. How about a question asking a decision-maker to back up policy with hard commitment? What about curlier ones, like asking the CEO of Telstra his thoughts on the environmental consequences of printing millions of copies of the Yellow Pages each year? (go here for the answer to that one.) We at OurSay have worked with all parts of the political or issue spectrum to try and get some really substantial questions asked of the people up the top. OurSay essentially provides a platform where the contribution of individuals is metered through the mechanism of voting. It is a compromise between the control desired by decision makes and the everyone-can-say-whatever-they-want model of the Internet.
OurSay provides one model of how relationships between decision makers and citizens might evolve in the future. People will expect and demand greater interaction with their policymakers. Additionally, the Internet has enabled the provision and consumption of information at phenomenal levels. (I must have opened up a browser at least 20 times just in the writing of this post.) I hope that this increased demand for interaction and increased levels of information accessibility will be symbiotically beneficial, resulting in leaders that are responsive to citizens and citizens who are informed and proactive about the issues they care about.
Let's face it, the Internet is a scary place. Voice your opinion and at some point you are likely to be misconstrued. At worst, you'll probably be ridiculed for what you say with varying levels of constructiveness. How much more scary if you are somebody with something to lose. The trick will be how to find the right balance of accountability, accessibility, honesty, privacy and transparency.
The distributed nature of the Internet is, I think, one of its greatest assets. It was definitely one of the main design considerations when ARPANET was first established. This non-centralised design has carried through with the way that services have treated user contribution, starting with modes like IRC and BBS, through to their modern equivalents like social networks and even more broadly any site that relies on user generated content. The option for anonymity in contribution has been omnipresent, if varying in degree. Of course whether you think this is good or bad depends highly on your point of view, in the same way that one's opinion of the whistleblower depends on whether you are the victim or the culprit.
With the growth of the internet as a primary communication channel, we have seen a more subtle result of this same distributed nature; a lack of a power of proscription. This lack of control has often led to an uptake of services in proportion to the risk averseness of the institution. Thus individuals and small businesses are quick to jump on the online bandwagon, but often government entities and decision makers - people with more to lose - are slower. Part of this is also a subtle transition in publishing power. Decision makers have historically had a "right-to-proof"; "I want to see that article before it goes to print" is a standard condition on working with the PR teams of politicians or big business. This control of information is in many ways antithetical to the publishing anarchy of the Internet.
In recent years, however, the invisible hand has pushed. Too many citizens consume too much of their information from (and thus base their decisions on) the Internet for decision makers to ignore, or even conditionally accept. Now PR teams have added "run your social media presence for you" to the list of services tendered. This has had an interesting result. We now have decision makers trying to control what is an inherently uncontrolled system.
We've seen this directly at OurSay, a project I am a part of, which connects decision makers with citizens. OurSay is a web based platform where citizens can ask questions of a decision maker and vote on other users questions that they think are important. Each user gets 7 votes, so they can use them all up in one go, or spread them around. After an OurSay question session closes, we go and get the answers to the top questions from the decision maker and put it up on the site. The interesting bit here is that without a doubt, everybody we talk to about answering questions voted for on OurSay asks: "But what happens if the top question is against my views?".
The idealist in me answers: answer it anyway! You don't get to be in a position of power without having to answer difficult questions sometimes. If the question asks "In what ways are you similar to a chimp?", tell them you share 96% of the same DNA. How about a question asking a decision-maker to back up policy with hard commitment? What about curlier ones, like asking the CEO of Telstra his thoughts on the environmental consequences of printing millions of copies of the Yellow Pages each year? (go here for the answer to that one.) We at OurSay have worked with all parts of the political or issue spectrum to try and get some really substantial questions asked of the people up the top. OurSay essentially provides a platform where the contribution of individuals is metered through the mechanism of voting. It is a compromise between the control desired by decision makes and the everyone-can-say-whatever-they-want model of the Internet.
OurSay provides one model of how relationships between decision makers and citizens might evolve in the future. People will expect and demand greater interaction with their policymakers. Additionally, the Internet has enabled the provision and consumption of information at phenomenal levels. (I must have opened up a browser at least 20 times just in the writing of this post.) I hope that this increased demand for interaction and increased levels of information accessibility will be symbiotically beneficial, resulting in leaders that are responsive to citizens and citizens who are informed and proactive about the issues they care about.
Let's face it, the Internet is a scary place. Voice your opinion and at some point you are likely to be misconstrued. At worst, you'll probably be ridiculed for what you say with varying levels of constructiveness. How much more scary if you are somebody with something to lose. The trick will be how to find the right balance of accountability, accessibility, honesty, privacy and transparency.
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