infopolitics http://infopolitics.net Understanding the Internet and information in politics Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:15:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Zittrain’s syllabus on “Controlling Cyberspace” http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/zittrains-syllabus-on-controlling-cyberspace/ http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/zittrains-syllabus-on-controlling-cyberspace/#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:15:53 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=188 Jonathan Zittrain has a history of teaching interesting classes on the internet. Here’s another, syllabus shared under Creative Commons and put here for my reference.

Description:
Why does the Internet environment exist in the form it does today? What does its future, and the future of online life in general, look like? To what extent is this future malleable? Governments, corporate intermediaries, and hackers are empowered to different degrees by the space, and their interests and strengths are often in tension. This class uses academic as well as non-traditional texts to engender a broader understanding of Internet culture and technology, with an end focus on making informed choices about the future.

A Note about Reading:

The reading for this class will be anywhere between 30-100 pages per session. It will probably be helpful to read the selections in the order they appear in the syllabus, as some of the texts assume knowledge provided by the ones before them. Of course, inclusion of something in the syllabus should not be taken as an endorsement of its position or author. People are still wrong on the Internet.

Readings are subject to change. Material not available publicly online will be posted to the course iSite.

Class 1: Monday, January 30th: The Internet’s Past

Class 2: Monday, February 6th: Whatever Happened to Jurisdiction?

Class 3: Monday, February 13th: Copyright and Free Speech

Class 4: Thursday, February 23rd : Representing Ourselves Online

Class 5: Monday, February 27th: Defamation, Civility and Attribution

Class 6: Monday, March 5th: Generativity

Class 7: Monday, March 19th: DRM and Circumvention

Class 8: Monday, March 26th: Crowdsourcing: Threat or Menace?

Class 9: Monday, April 2nd: Gamification is…

Class 10: Monday, April 9th: Regulation, Governance and The Internet’s Future

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/zittrains-syllabus-on-controlling-cyberspace/feed/ 0 Is US nuclear energy stuck short of the thorium solution? http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/is-us-nuclear-energy-stuck-short-of-the-thorium-solution/ http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/is-us-nuclear-energy-stuck-short-of-the-thorium-solution/#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:34:37 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=186 From Vice’s Motherboard and my friend Alex Pasternack, here is a great short documentary on an alternative nuclear energy model that many interviewed believe would have safety and economic benefits. Moving from a uranium and plutonium fuel cycle to one based on thorium, they say, would produce reactors whose failure state would be a safe one. The doc is a sympathetic view of folks who may look like cranks—but what’s to say they’re not on to something?*

*I have literally no idea whether this would work. As your local nuclear physicist.

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/is-us-nuclear-energy-stuck-short-of-the-thorium-solution/feed/ 0 The private sector battle over SOPA (me in Al Jazeera) http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/the-private-sector-battle-over-sopa-me-in-al-jazeera/ http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/the-private-sector-battle-over-sopa-me-in-al-jazeera/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:47:54 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=182 Following yesterday’s demonstrations against U.S. Congressional legislation that could severely constrict free speech and online innovation, I argue in Al Jazeera English that private interests in internet policy are here to stay.

It would have been the most expensive political ad buy in the history of the world. Google’s search engine, the most visited website in the world, displays a black block over its logo. Wikipedia, the sixth most visited site globally, has disabled its English-language service. This unprecedented action to oppose legislation under consideration in the US Congress signals the importance of the private sector in Internet policy – and it won’t stop here.

Private companies are almost entirely responsible for your ability to read this article. The text travelled through a purchased operating system, over an enterprise office network, through privately-owned wires and fibre optic cables, and finally reached the privately-run “cloud” service in which it was composed. If you’re overseas from Al Jazeera’s servers, the message also travelled through privately-owned undersea cables-the bedrock of international communication and finance.

Many experts, including Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard and the leaders of the MIT Media Lab, have described in detail the threat to free speech, innovation, and the technology business posed by the legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. Most people, however, learned of the controversy through today’s online demonstrations, in which the online goliaths of our day have filled the picket lines.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera English.

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2012/01/the-private-sector-battle-over-sopa-me-in-al-jazeera/feed/ 0 The nomadic mode of scholarly production http://infopolitics.net/2011/09/the-nomadic-mode-of-scholarly-production/ http://infopolitics.net/2011/09/the-nomadic-mode-of-scholarly-production/#comments Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:49:58 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=179 Ian Miller, a former classmate of mine who continues to work at the intersection of Chinese history and the history of agriculture and human productive capacity, has proposed a discussion on what it would mean to be “a nomadic academic.” His post is excellent, and should be read.

I got to writing a rather lengthy comment in response, and thought I’d put it here, selfishly, so that I don’t lose it.

Ian argues that “information has become diffuse,” and that scholars need strategies for the gathering and consumption of information that befit this dispersion. Instead of a few hand-copied books or a few hugely important libraries, information can be grazed and one must move among different sources and types of sources to gather the fullest picture. This he compares to the sparse biomass of the steppe, where people need tools like horses (for travel) and livestock (for storage of biomass to eat later) to gather enough to survive. Nomadic societies move across space to gather enough resources, where sedentary agriculturalists stick around and exploit the dense resources in a given spot.

What does this mean for an academic? First, it means that the advantage of residency at a library like the one at Harvard is diminished. Though the well there is deep, the information environment has changed. Information was always diffuse, but now there’s no excuse for ignoring far away sources. Second, it means that, as Ian argues, scholars need tools to gather diffuse information.

Now, my comment. A scholar must eat and obtain resources. Usually, this is accomplished through affiliations with the feudal, bureaucratic institutions we’re all so familiar with. Even as the mode of knowledge production and information processing has shifted, we have seen few new ways to feed a scholar. So, I want to propose one (that I, ahem, may be trying out).

The institutional structure of academia encourages people to walk one of a relatively closed set of paths. You need a degree in something, and that something is defined by a department or committee—a bureaucratic entity. The authority for deciding what can be studied, at least nominally, lies in a hierarchical institution with limited autonomy at lower ranks.

With the new information environment, however, knowledge production has a tendency to skip across “disciplines” or perspectives and to employ a wide variety of sources. Even in libraries, research is done with keyword searches, and someone interested in a particular moment in history may find a mathematical text that refers to it. Such topic-based search is really new, and it performs one of the functions that librarians used to provide (thankfully, they have other jobs and recent innovations). It’s as if a sedentary agriculturalist had to eat twenty crops to use the local land, but they decided they really only wanted strawberries, and the strawberries of the region were spread out. Our former omnivore now must spend each day walking from one strawberry patch to another. This only works if there’s a map of strawberry patches; otherwise, a random walk would result is starvation. Search engines and keyword searches produce such a map for any given topic, so the nomadic scholar bounds across sources, languages, and types of media to follow the map.

Now, we have a nomadic scholar, following a topic across institutional divisions in academia. Who’s going to hire this rube? Here, I think, we have the trouble for a researcher in the contemporary information environment. So, I propose that in addition to diffuse sources of information, a scholar in the new mode will need diffuse sources of physical sustenance, shelter, and other biological non-negotiables.

In my case, this means a combination of academic support and more standard jobs. The question for me is how well I can continue knowledge production from outside an academic institution. I don’t need a university to provide information for me, academic databases notwithstanding. My information gathering habits are portable. My academic experience so far serves to partially credential my work even as I work from outside. So, can the conversation move away from the institutions of academia and into a diffuse realm fueled by diverse contributors? Will academic employment stop being a standard component of scholarly production?

What do you think?

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2011/09/the-nomadic-mode-of-scholarly-production/feed/ 0 On the conservatism of political science http://infopolitics.net/2011/09/on-the-conservatism-of-political-science/ http://infopolitics.net/2011/09/on-the-conservatism-of-political-science/#comments Tue, 06 Sep 2011 23:50:55 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=174 Here we have a great (partial) paragraph from Alexandra Samuel* on the conservatism of political science, based on her experience heading back to the meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle after a few years “away” from the discipline.

I am most intrigued by the idea of unsettling a field that one APSA blogger excorciated for its innate conservatism. That conservatism is not so much a political position (like many academic fields, political science skews left) as a temperamental one. As I noted last week, this is a conference in which people still focus on publishing books and talking at you on panels. They take notes on paper, and nobody seemed to be having a panic attack at the lack of wifi. The Internet revolution has arrived, and given way to the social media revolution, and political science has remained largely unchanged except for the appearance of a few booths hawking e-textbooks and software tools for data analysis. And that conservatism makes sense, in a way, because we’re talking about a field based on the idea that research is a cumulative and incremental process in which each researcher builds on those who have gone before. [more]

I agree that such conservatism makes sense in a way, but I also find it regrettable. As Samuel notes, the Information Technology and Politics section is, predictably, a bit different, but it’s also small. Political scientists, I think, face a relevance dilemma: how can they be relevant to society, to readers or information consumers outside the discipline’s guild, and of course to students.

It is no longer the case that almost every academic with a blog studies the internet, but active use of online media would help academics understand the way their students communicate. Professors should be on Facebook and other platforms that are so essential to the way college students communicate. The professor’s teaching job, after all, is to communicate with students. The research task is to produce scholarship that will endure. Consider readers who grew up with the internet and social media, and tell me a manuscript with lumbering literature reviews is the way to share knowledge.

</rant>

* Of course, I mistyped Samuel’s name as Samuels. Apologies, and it’s fixed.

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2011/09/on-the-conservatism-of-political-science/feed/ 1 Remember: The U.S. is also big on cyber OFFENSE http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/remember-the-u-s-is-also-big-on-cyber-offense/ http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/remember-the-u-s-is-also-big-on-cyber-offense/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:37:36 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=172 At Motherboard.tv, Alex Pasternack and I took a look at the U.S. cyber offensive, one that’s far more secret but seems to match its worries about defense in scale.

I think it’s worth checking out.

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/remember-the-u-s-is-also-big-on-cyber-offense/feed/ 0 U.S.–China cybersecurity: an asymmetrical Cold War http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/u-s-%e2%80%93china-cybersecurity-an-asymmetrical-cold-war/ http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/u-s-%e2%80%93china-cybersecurity-an-asymmetrical-cold-war/#comments Fri, 05 Aug 2011 02:12:47 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=169 No matter how you look at it, the United States and China are in some form of cybersecurity competition. Though attributing specific activities to the Chinese government or other groups or individuals in China is difficult, it is increasingly disingenuous to maintain that it’s unclear whether widespread hacking originating in China is happening.

So, following on the notion that Chinese cybersecurity is “crowdsourced” while U.S. efforts emanate from a creaking bureaucracy (h/t Evan Osnos), I wrote a little essay yesterday for Motherboard.tv on what I’m cutely calling an asymmetric Cold War.

The Cold War parallel is never far below the surface, but the dilemma for targets of attacks is how to face the “Adversary.” As a practical matter, creating unbreakable security is impossible; you can only make things better. But practical concerns make it hard to levy direct, public pressure on governments in China, Russia, and other hacker-heavy states. The result is something like asymmetrical cold war, with no mutually assured destruction and with destruction defined in terms of potential attacks during a hot war, or loss of financially valuable intellectual property. And there’s a lot of it, experts fear. Says one Senate staffer: “But terrorism is not the best analogy here. Who could have imagined that people would have flown airplanes into buildings?The difference with cyber is there are people trying to fly planes into buildings every day now.” [full text]

Perhaps invoking the Cold War would tend to exaggerate the scale of things, but, then again, perhaps not. After all, I lack hacking skills and security clearance. What do I know?

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/u-s-%e2%80%93china-cybersecurity-an-asymmetrical-cold-war/feed/ 0 New York and tech entrepreneurs http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/new-york-and-tech-entrepreneurs/ http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/new-york-and-tech-entrepreneurs/#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:58:44 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=167 The New York Times has its room for debate feature today on a New York City effort to build a new engineering school in the city in hopes of spurring an innovation industry. The question for the respondents: Can New York rival Silicon Valley? Here are two interesting passages.

Until recently, “technology” was largely about “moving electrons on wires.” Now, “technology” is about building all kinds of interesting applications on top of the Internet. An increasing number of engineers and entrepreneurs are applying their ideas and energy to creating compelling services on the Internet. —Fred Wilson

and

New York can never become Silicon Valley; and it shouldn’t. The mythologies of New York are entirely different from the singular lore of the valley. The start-ups we see emerging from New York already have a texture unlike those in California. Tumblr vs. Posterous is one often cited example. Kickstarter is another example of a start-up that seems quintessentially New York. This difference should be nurtured. —Craig Mod

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/new-york-and-tech-entrepreneurs/feed/ 0 Morning briefing: Understanding Bitcoin in 20 minutes http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/understanding-bitcoin-in-20-minutes/ http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/understanding-bitcoin-in-20-minutes/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:41:36 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=162

Screen capture of Bitcoin price in USD from Mt Gox, a Bitcoin exchange.

I’ve been following the story of Bitcoin, the not particularly anonymous online currency that has been getting a lot of attention. As with any number of other issues, the best quick way to understand this economic phenomenon is NPR’s Planet Money podcast.

The Bitcoin episode (listen here) manages to explain the tough technical side without getting into the weeds. More exciting, they talk about trust in the currency, fluctuations in the price for USD-Bitcoin trades (like the one last weekend, pictured), and they talk to at least one person who really gets it.

So, give it a listen if you want a quick primer.

]]> http://infopolitics.net/2011/08/understanding-bitcoin-in-20-minutes/feed/ 0 Obama loses Twitter followers on etiquette, not message http://infopolitics.net/2011/07/obama-loses-twitter-followers-on-etiquette/ http://infopolitics.net/2011/07/obama-loses-twitter-followers-on-etiquette/#comments Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:13:49 +0000 Graham Webster http://infopolitics.net/?p=155 Reports are emerging that the presidential Twitter account is losing a reasonably large number of followers in its present campaign to reach an agreement on the debt ceiling. When taken in context, the loss of followers is small, and I argue that it’s not policy disagreement but Twitter etiquette violations that are losing the president his followers.

SPAMTASTIC? — U.S. President Barack Obama has been calling on supporters to contact lawmakers.

Mashable reports that the president has lost more than 30,000 followers today, and that the Republican lawmakers his account is calling out have gained from the exposure.

Meanwhile, Mashable reports that NM Incite counted 22,000 uses of the #compromise hashtag the @BarackObama account has been pushing. For an account with more than 9 million followers, a loss of 30,000 is no biggie.

I do think there is a reason for the rather sizable drop. As any long-time Twitter user knows, any period of rapidfire tweeting will result in a follower shift. If you happen to hold the key to world news and tweet incessantly about it, you can go from dozens to hundreds of thousands of followers overnight. But if you’re following some event that many of your followers don’t care about, some less loyal contacts will bail on you in annoyance.

So, the president’s account has lost some followers. Who cares? Politicians, investors, and citizens alike have much more to lose if this isn’t resolved well.

Given how easy it is to annoy followers with spammy posts, it might be worth note how few followers that account lost. What do you think?

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