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MISTICA: Grounding Internet Regulation in Lived Experience

From: Roberto Roggiero ([email protected])
Date: Fri Apr 12 2002 - 11:42:18 AST

Un informe un poco extenso (y en ingles para colmo), pero con temas de
interes y discusion por parte de la comunidad Mistica.

Roberto.
============
>Dear Colleagues,
>
>Thank you again for your participation in our meeting one month ago. We
>were happy to have you in Oxford. I learned a lot from the day; to prove it
>I have written a two-page report, attached below. Please feel free to
>forward it where it might be helpful.
>
>With this I have tried to sketch the areas of some agreement -- themes found
>across more than one presentation and developed in the discussion -- but
>ethnography is one of the harder things to generalize about. For this
>brevity I oversimplified, with these words I speak only for myself. I would
>welcome any comments you might have about my comments.
>
>I will write again in the coming weeks with specific details of future
>events and research products from the conference so that we can continue to
>learn from each other.
>
>Regards,
>Christian
>
>
>--
>Grounding Internet Regulation in Lived Experience:
>A Conference Report
>
>by Christian Sandvig ([email protected])
>Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy
>Oxford University
>
>On March 8th, Oxford hosted leading Internet researchers, policymakers, and
>industry representatives from the on-line media to discuss the present state
>of the art in ethnographic Internet research and its implications for the
>many attempts to regulate the Internet. Forty-two people presented case
>studies or expertise from seventeen countries, considering settings both
>public and private, at home and work, urban and rural. (*) Further products
>will be forthcoming from this conference, but I would like to take a moment
>to briefly relate the lessons I learned as conference chair. These fall into
>six areas:
>
>INTERNET ACCESS. Even where Internet infrastructure is very poor, people
>find ways to use the Internet -- often through novel forms of sharing.
>Public access centers succeed in allowing the pooling of limited computer
>expertise among strangers. Relying on them is difficult without stable,
>neutral, portable email provision and file storage. The physical placement
>of the computer in a room at home or in a public place is one of the most
>important (and most often overlooked) factors that influence how the
>Internet will be used.
>
>INTERNET AND CHILDREN. Children (especially young children) do not use the
>Internet to find pornography nearly as often as policy discourse and news
>stories suggest. Children (even young children) are aware of so-called
>'stranger-danger,' and they are often savvy in selectively releasing
>information about themselves, and minimizing their risk. They are equally
>skilled at circumventing both the technical and social restrictions of
>parents and teachers, and such circumvention is commonplace (e.g., time
>limits, 'educational' use only, prohibitions on chat). Children often know
>more about computers than parents and teachers. Content rating and filtering
>mechanisms are currently far too complicated for most intended users.
>
>INTERNET CENSORSHIP. Efforts by non-democratic states to 'selectively'
>liberalize ICTs are only partially successful - the Internet seems to allow
>at least some new opportunities for political action wherever Internet use
>is encouraged, even if only policies related to economic development are
>liberalized. In its present form the Internet is not inherently liberating,
>but it may tend to shift state control from ex ante to post hoc.
>
>INTERNET AND POLICY MECHANISMS. The recent emergence of complex regulatory
>schemes (e.g., in e-commerce) mixing state and non-state actors, co- or
>self-regulation, and a diverse package of incentives and/or penalties may
>reduce transparency and accountability, while creating policies that fail
>because they are incomprehensible. Co- and self- regulatory schemes in the
>area of Internet content were received with skepticism. In conditions of
>criminal harm, well-publicized prosecution in selective instances may be
>more effective and is almost certainly more efficient (e.g., in cases of
>child pornography and hate speech) despite the jurisdictional problems of
>national criminal laws.
>
>A considerable amount of Internet use is not easily interpretable in
>utilitarian terms, while policy discourse is usually restricted to
>utilitarian reasoning. This precipitates conflict with parents, employers,
>and the state about concepts such as 'economic value' and 'educational
>content.'
>
>PERCEPTIONS OF INTERNET. The present policy concern in the industrialized
>world with the dangers of the Internet (pornography and predation) is
>overstated, as are the benefits promised in the developing world. There may
>be an emergent public interest role similar to the UK tradition of public
>service broadcasting for Internet Service providers. The Internet is
>globally understood as a location of anxiety, pitting people against
>technology, adults against children, or individuals against the state.
>Despite the arrival of the 'mundane Internet' in some advanced democracies,
>people still hold strong beliefs about the emancipatory 'nature' of the
>network even while seeing few of these benefits or working at cross-purposes
>to them.
>
>INTERNET POLICY AND ETHNOGRAPHY. Ethnographic studies with methodological
>rigor and extended fieldwork are needed to understand the Internet, but they
>remain rare. The abstracts submitted to this conference indicate much
>current academic concern with the home and the 'everyday.' A wide range of
>methods use the term 'ethnography,' which is itself contentious. There is a
>new need in policy circles for more nuanced, 'on the ground' research, yet
>ethnographers have been reluctant to fill (or had difficulty filling) this
>role: chiefly because policy work usually assumes sequential causation and
>research objectivity. In addition, policy timelines are much shorter than
>ethnographic research timelines. Finally, the researchers that do wish to
>shape policy often wish to engage with an overly romantic notion of the
>policy process.
>
>Still, many of the ethnographic researchers came away appreciating the
>difficulties of achieving consensus on policy and a renewed sense that their
>work is worth presenting in an accessible manner to policy-making audiences.
>Many of the policymakers came away with some appreciation for the value of
>qualitative research - for some this conference was their first exposure to
>Ethnography as a research method.
>
>This meeting was hosted by the Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy
>(PCMLP), Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University. A brief
>rationale for this meeting, the agenda, and the complete list of
>participants is available here:
><http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/Ethnographies/>. Information about future
>written products of the conference will be available soon from the PCMLP Web
>site.
>
>(*) Participants presented case studies or expertise from: Singapore,
>Malaysia, India, China, Japan, Russia, Croatia, Belgium, Spain, Italy,
>Germany, the Netherlands, Trinidad, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and the UK.
>
>------------------------
>Christian Sandvig
>[email protected]
>http://www.niftyc.org/

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