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.

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.

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:

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.

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?

Eye I. By Thomas Tolkien, Flickr, CC BY

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:

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.
       

Santa Claus: As likely true as not

[Eds' note: We are pleased to present the annual Social Interface Christmas post by Colin B. Picker. We look forward to hosting more vibrant discussions and debates around the social implications of technology in 2014; in the meantime, wishing you all happy holidays and a great new year.]

Colin B. Picker

This post will, using logic and relying on the current inadequacy of science and technology, show that it may be legitimate for a free-thinking person to believe in Santa Claus.  

Were that not enough, this post may also allay concerns that person may have about mortality.

The route to permitting a free-thinking person to legitimately believe in Santa Claus will start with a rather fundamental concern – mortality.  Mortality can be considered in the context of the three fundamental views of existence, which can be simply stated as three possibilities:

1. I do not exist
2. I exist but everyone else is an illusion
3. I and everyone else exists.

If option one is true then there is no meaning to death, for if I do not exist now then my cessation to exist later, my mortality, is simply not possible.

If option two is true then without me there is no existence, so my non-existence is not possible or makes no sense.

If option three is true it means that others like ourselves exist, which means they too think and have a consciousness.

Here is where science and technology enter the discussion.  At the moment, science and technology cannot explain consciousness other than describing some correlated physical activities within the brain (e.g. neurons shooting off here and there).  The truth is that, despite great advances in medical science and technology, we are no closer to scientifically understanding consciousness than prehistoric humans were to understanding the television.  We really have no idea from a scientific perspective what happens to consciousness when a person dies.  Certainly, we know that the associated neural and other currently understood physical activity ceases with death, but the scientific connection of neural activity to consciousness, thinking and existing, is rudimentary at best.

Science may at some point in the future unravel the connections between consciousness and how the body, specifically the brain, works.  But until then, at a fundamental level science and technology remain almost completely out of the picture in understanding what happens to our consciousness when we die.

As such, all sorts of possibilities remain.  The conventional, non-mystical/spiritual/religious view is that consciousness ceases when we die.  But given the lack of any real understanding of what makes up consciousness, it seems that logically other possibilities may exist.  True, proof for those other possibilities is essentially non-existent, but then there is equally no proof of the expiration of consciousness at death.  

The idea of a soul, a non-corporeal embodiment of our identity, is logically not an invalid option.  So too, heaven, Valhalla, reincarnation or anything that our imagination can conjure up.  All of those possibilities are not ruled out by our current scientific and technological understandings.

So, an agnostic or atheist need not assume that the only alternative option to non-existence at death are those presented by religions.  Scientific understandings today do not require an atheist to accept non-existence at death.  That is but one of the many possibilities opened up by our uncertainty, and arguably it may make as much sense to choose to believe a scenario that is most comforting and most allays one’s concerns about mortality.  The interface with science and technology here is thus through the absence of science and technology.

So, how can this be related to Santa Claus – whose existence is for many a more fundamental question at this time of year?  The answer lies, as it did for our concerns about mortality, in considering the three possibilities that explain our existence.

Under scenario one above - that we do not exist - then presumably too Santa would not exist.  But then we would not care for we too would not exist.  Under scenario two in which I (or you the reader) exist alone, Santa could not then exist (as he is not me or you, the reader).  But then no one else would exist, in which case concern about Santa’s existence would pale by comparison for one’s concern about the non-existence of loved ones.

Rather, it is with the third option - that we all exist - that the likelihood or potential for Santa’s existence is revealed.  As noted above, given the fact that we have no clue about what happens to our consciousness on death, we can then just as plausibly argue that our consciousness does indeed wing its way up to heaven, or to Valhalla or be reincarnated – with all the gods and bible stories and other beliefs that go along with those views.  With the freedom to believe any of these scenarios, it is but a short leap to assume that, as with the afterlife, there may be other fantastic things in the universe that interact with our life even before death.  And among those fantastic things that we are permitted to accept as not unlikely may be an elderly red-suited jolly gentleman, riding a sleigh through the sky, pulled by magical reindeers, delivering presents to children throughout the world.


Image by Kevin Dooley, made available by Creative Commons licence via Flickr.

Around the world in 80 hashtags

Amanda Parks

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

Happily, my travels involved very few moments like that one and, for the most part, I did what I’d hoped to do when I decided not to blog: I saw, I did, I relaxed, I reflected and I absorbed and I didn’t feel tied to a gadget while doing so.

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.

Read without seeing: improving access to books for visually impaired persons

Sarah Lux-Lee

On 27 June 2013, the anniversary of Helen Keller's birth, a Diplomatic Conference of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) adopted the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled.  The treaty is intended to ensure that books and other published materials can be made and distributed in formats accessible to people with print disabilities, such as Braille, audio and large print formats.  It does so by obligating its signatories to adopt exceptions to copyright infringement in their domestic laws, to allow accessible copies to be made and distributed within those countries without the need for permission or payment.  It also requires exceptions to enable cross-border circulation of accessible copies of copyright material, in order to reduce the global costs of providing access to copyright works.  Fifty-one countries signed the treaty on 28 June 2013, with several others having followed suit in the months since.  The treaty will enter into force once 20 countries have ratified it.

The treaty is a significant move toward ensuring equality of access to learning materials around the world.  At present, it is estimated that only 5% of the world’s books and published materials are ever published in an accessible format.  In developing countries, where blindness and visual impairment is particularly prevalent, the problem is even more acute, with an estimated 99% of published works never being made available in any accessible format.  The problem is not a technical inability to make the conversions; increasingly, sophisticated technologies are available for the fast and affordable conversion of books and other published materials into Braille, audio and large print versions.  Rather, this “book famine” persists in large part because in many of the world’s content-producing countries the conversion of a published work into an accessible format, and the import or export of such products, would amount to copyright infringement.   

According to a 2006 survey conducted by WIPO, fewer than sixty countries have limitations and exceptions in their domestic copyright laws that enable the creation and distribution of accessible works.  In addition, because of the “territorial” nature of copyright law, the exceptions that do exist in various countries rarely make allowance for the import or export of accessible works, which need to be separately negotiated with rights holders.  The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) does feature a number of exceptions and a statutory licence relating to the creation and distribution of accessible works; in this sense, Australia is a leader in the effort to ensure equal access and opportunity to those suffering print disabilities.  

The trans-border provisions of the treaty offer the potential for Australia to further enhance its contribution by implementing an additional exception for the import and export of accessible format copies.  This component of the treaty is intended to ensure that the conversion of a published work only needs to occur once, and that the accessible copy can subsequently be made available to those who need it anywhere around the world.  Cross-border circulation of accessible versions of works will enhance access both directly, by increasing the volume of available converted works, and also indirectly by avoiding the costs of unnecessary duplication and freeing resources for the addition of new titles to the global accessible library.  It will have particularly significant implications for blind, visually impaired and print disabled individuals in the developing world.

The adoption of the treaty was a moment of great significance for the beneficiary communities and their advocates, who have worked tirelessly to improve outcomes in this area.  The World Blind Union has expressed hope that the treaty will be an effective step toward the achievement of equality of access, while noting that work in this area is not yet complete:

In plain language, this is a Treaty that should start to remedy the book famine. It provides a crucial legal framework for adoption of national copyright exceptions in countries that lack them. It creates an international import/export regime for the exchange of accessible books across borders. It is necessary for ending the book famine, but it is not sufficient. Countries need to sign, ratify and implement its provisions. Non-profit organizations, libraries, educational institutions and government need to take advantage of these provisions to actually deliver the accessible books people with disabilities need for education, employment and full social inclusion.

Then-Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus QC lauded the agreement as "a landmark copyright treaty, the first of its kind in the history of the multilateral copyright system”. Curiously, despite Australia’s leadership in negotiations and proud reportage of the treaty’s adoption, it was not one of the 51 nations that signed the treaty in June and, at the time of writing, it does not appear to have subsequently signed. Vision Australia and other representative bodies of Australia’s blind, visually impaired and print disabled communities have nevertheless expressed optimism about the future impact of the treaty in Australia and are continuing to work toward signature and ratification.

Image by Diego Molano, made available by Creative Commons licence via Flickr.

Cyberspace? Well, sort of.

Nicholas Sheppard

I recently got around to reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds (2006). Around the time that Castronova was writing, synthetic worlds — notably Second Life — seemed like big news in the computing community of which I was a member. Major corporations, we were told, were opening offices in Second Life; newly-minted entrepeneurs were establishing successful businesses; and luminaries were giving press conferences. Reading Castronova's book seven years later, though, prompted me to wonder: where are they now?

The worlds themselves are still operating, and are presumably producing revenue sufficient to keep their operators in business. But I no longer hear much about them in the mainstream media, in technology media, or even from gaming friends. I don't feel like I'm living in cyberspace or The Matrix any more than I did in 2006, or even 1996. (I should note at this point that I'm one of those people that the computer games industry is at pains to show doesn't exist any more: a once-young man who, upon becoming older, grew tired of shooting up yet more pixellated baddies. So perhaps everyone has disappeared into synthetic worlds, leaving me alone on the outside wondering where everyone has gone.)

All of the above media, though, have much to say about Facebook and Twitter. And rightly so, to go by the numbers: Facebook has over 1,100 million accounts and Twitter over 550 million, according to Statistic Brain. The largest synthetic world, World of Warcraft, had a comparatively measly twelve million subscribers at its height. Of course twelve million customers is nothing to sniff at, and World of Warcraft is arguably a sounder business proposition in that its users actually pay to be there. Nonetheless, it's World of Warcraft and Second Life that have those ubiquitous "like me" and "follow me" buttons on their home pages, and not Facebook and Twitter with "fight me" and "visit second me".

At least part of the explanation for these numbers is that the population of synthetic worlds is fragmented across numerous distinct worlds catering for individual tastes like fighting dragons, exploring alien worlds or wearing outlandish costumes. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, try to appeal to a universal desire to communicate and to maintain relationships. 

Furthermore, communication tools exhibit strong network effects, in which the usefulness of a tool to one person depends on the number of other persons also using that tool. Network effects tend to create winner-takes-all markets in which the player with the greatest market share rapidly drives out all other players: the main reason to join Facebook is that everyone else has joined Facebook, not that Facebook is intrinsically better than any other communication tool.

In that sense, the market for synthetic worlds is a healthier one than that occupied by Facebook and Twitter: each of us is free to choose the world that best meets our needs and means, and entrepreneurs succeed or fail on how well they meet these needs and means. Castronova sometimes uses a metaphor of "migration" to or between synthetic worlds, following an economist's view that people migrate to the places in which they think they will be most happy. So just as I, a computer scientist, might find it attractive to migrate to a city in which there are many computers to be programmed, so might a dragon-fighter find it attractive to migrate to a synthetic world in which there are many dragons to fight.

There is, however, one world from which we cannot migrate. However much we might prefer fighting dragons or designing our own islands, we still need to eat, wash and procreate in the physical world. There's even a school of thought that, even if we could migrate into synthetic worlds, we wouldn't want to. In 1974, Robert Nozick posited the "experience machine", which would provide its user with any experience that he or she desired. Nozick asked: how many people would choose to live his or her life in such a machine? Nozick, and I'm sure many others, think the answer is "almost nobody".

And so to Facebook and Twitter, and, for that matter, older communication tools like telephone and email. To paraphrase a famous observation of Arthur C. Clarke, I imagine that our pre-industrial ancestors would find these tools every bit as magical as dragons, wizards and warp drives. Having augmented our existing world with such wonders, why bother synthesising a new one?

Image by Giampalo Macorig, made available by Creative Commons licence via Flickr.

Protecting privacy in the digital era

Tessa Meyrick

The arrival late last month of the new heir to the throne was unsurprisingly attended by a flurry of media interest in the UK and beyond, with reports of the royal birth apparently accounting for a staggering 5 per cent of online news content consumed globally on 22 July 2013. When the (yet-to-be-named) Prince George of Cambridge made his first media appearance the following day, every portal, page, RSS and Twitter feed continued to be jammed with details of the Prince's BMI, speculations as to his naming (commiserations to those who'd put their cash on 'James'), and even the Royal swaddle he left wrapped in. 

Somewhere among all this emerged concern (including from the media itself) over how the Royal parents are to construct some semblance of an ordinary life for the Little Prince once the natal storm has passed. In the UK Government's official response to the news of the birth, Lord Hill of Oareford, Leader of the House of Lords, shared with his peers a hope that the Prince (and his no doubt fatigued parents) be given some privacy. The media agreed, with one major UK newspaper at pains to stress that 'no one, and certainly not the media, would want to deny the Duke and Duchess some time alone with their baby son'.

With the UK Government's plan for a new press regulator (set in chain by the Leveson inquiry) put on the back-burner until the Australian spring, it's uncertain which body in the UK will be responsible for ensuring the media comes good on its commitment to honouring the Royals' privacy. In any case, it's also not entirely clear that it’s the conventional media that’s going to need to be held to account.

Prince George is the first future monarch to grow up in an era of social media and under the gaze of many-a-quick-fingered 'citizen journalist' in possession of a smart phone. Which is to say, Prince George's privacy (or lack of it) won't depend purely on the strength and structure of media regulation in the UK, but will also hang on the development of a freestanding right to privacy in that jurisdiction. For the record: there is no such right in the UK, and nor is there in Australia. But if 'the right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom', then the influence of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the extension of the law in relation to breach of confidence to cover misuse of private information by the Court of Appeal actually puts the UK in comparatively good stead. 

In Australia, the idea that privacy is solely a media regulation issue continues to hold ground. This was helped along by the Federal Government's decision in March this year – expressly in the context of its ill-fated media reforms – to sideline the question of whether Australians should be able to sue for serious invasions of privacy. Concerned that earlier consultations on a privacy tort (the 28 month Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry finalised in 2008 and the Government's own consultations in 2011) showed little consensus on what such a right would look like, the Government has referred the issue to the ALRC for yet another inquiry. That inquiry, 'Protecting privacy in the digital era', kicked off in June. The final report, focusing specifically on the legal design of a statutory cause of action, is due to be delivered in June 2014. Whether that report stays with its earlier counterparts in the 'too hard' basket will remain to be seen.

This piece first appeared on the Allens intellectual property blog, Scintilla.