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Virtual Society? Get Real!
Paper abstracts
Stream 3 - Citizenship
Dematerializing French Bureaucracy: (Ethno)graphic tales of
cryptology in the field by Jean-François Blanchette
Cyber-democracy and public participation in spatial environmental decision-making by Steve Carver
Little Brothers: Fear and Secrecy in Cyberia by Jodi Dean
The Impact of Private Sex Sites on the Web by Nicola Döring
BRIDGING THE GAP - Bringing the Information Society into citizens' everyday life by Ari Heinonen
Virtual Hype? New Media and the Transformation of Political Parties and Party Systems by Ivan Horrocks
Confronting Electronic Surveillance: Desiring and Resisting New Technologies by Brian McGrail
Negotiating Privacy in a Changing Environment (provisional title) by Charles D. Raab
Russia: from NGO's Networks to Community's Networks by Sergei Stafeev
Dematerializing French bureaucracy: (Ethno)graphic tales of
cryptology in the field For much of its history, cryptology occupied a limited growth
but highly stable niche market: protecting diplomatic and military
communications. In the last decade however, the phenomenal growth of the
Internet --- along with its perceived insecurity --- has transformed a
relatively obscure and esoteric science into a key link to the promises of the
New Economy: as the current wisdom goes, e-commerce will not flourish until the
public gains sufficient confidence that electronic transactions are secure.
"Security", in this context, is generally equated with the ability to
exchange information confidentially (e.g. credit card numbers), using
cryptology-based technologies. Yet, the main impact of cryptology might not lie
so much in its ability to provide confidentiality to the masses, but rather in
the way it has come to define authenticity of electronic transactions
(identification of parties + non-repudiation) and its technological realization
in the electronic world (public-key infrastructures). In the world of paper-and-ink documents, the practices by
which authenticity is enacted and sustained over time resists simple reduction
to algorithmical processes. In France, for example, "authenticity"
refers to a precise legal concept, as defined by article 1317 of the Napoleonic
civil code: "the authentic [legal] act is that one which has been received
with the required solemnity by public officers..." Authenticity is thus at
once a professional privilege (for the most part, that of notaries), the outcome
of a ritual with carefully prescribed forms, an economical interest (French law
requires that certain documents, such as wills, be made authentic), as well as a
specific location in the hierarchy of proof law (in trials, authentic documents
cannot be opposed by mere testimony). The sometimes ancient practices of
paper-and-ink authenticity and the sparkling new technologies of electronic
authentication were called to settle their differences when, in the fall of
1999, the French government announced a public consultation over the proper
legislative framework to guide France's entry into the Information Age. The
first piece of legislation to come out of this process has been an electronic
signature bill, adopted on February 29; amending articles 1316, 1317, and 1326
of the civil code, it defines the concept of signature (electronic or
otherwise), and introduces the notion of an electronic authentic act. Based on ongoing fieldwork conducted since September 1999 among French legal
scholars, notaries, legislators, standard setting bodies and cryptologists, this
paper documents the meeting of these two notions of authenticity. In the first
part, I outline how cryptology, from a professional concern originally centered
on confidentiality, came to invest the field of authenticity; secondly, I review
the legislative work leading to the French electronic signature law, from
UNCITRAL working groups, to OECD expert committees, to European Parliament
directives, to theoretical reflections of French legal scholars; in the third
part, I describe how the French notaries have strategized around the advent of
the electronic authentic act, as a potentially fundamental reorganization of
their professional activity. Emerging from this fieldwork is a picture of
authenticity as a contested category, at once legal qualification, technological
process, professional identity, civic institution, and political symbolic
device. Such research suggests the promise of critical examination of computer
security, beyond exclusive fascination with individual privacy, national
security, and hacker culture. Cyber-democracy and public participation in spatial environmental decision-making Traditional methods of public participation in environmental
decision making have tended to focus on local authority planning meetings. This
is often in an atmosphere of ‘them and us’ with the authoritative
decision-makers holding all the knowledge, expertise and information. It is
often the case in these more traditional settings that a vocal minority
(activists) dominate the public’s viewpoint with many people who may have
equally if not more valid points to make, resisting from expressing their
concerns, opinions and viewpoints (Healey et.al., 1988). It is suggested that
the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) in such situations has the potential to
break down the barriers to participation by taking away certain psychological
elements which the public often face when expressing their points of view at
public meetings. As Graham (1996, p.2) argues, the Internet will "generate
a new public sphere supporting interaction, debate, new forms of democracy and
‘cyber cultures’ which feed back to support a renaissance in the social and
cultural life of cities". Many environmental decision-making problems have at the core
of them a very important spatial element and can often be best represented with
what is called a Geographical Information System (GIS). This paper will explore
the ways in which GIS and the WWW can be used to provide the general public with
a mechanism for becoming more involved in local environmental decision-making
problems. By providing full access to spatial and aspatial data along with the
appropriate technology, which is usually only available to local decision-making
bodies, the general public can potentially become increasingly capable of
accessing, browsing and manipulating such data. This gives the public the
potential to have greater involvement in the decisions that affect them at the
local, regional and national scale. While in the past GIS have been accused of
being an elitist technology giving more power to those already possessing it and
depriving those, generally the public, who more often than not lack such access
(Pickles, 1995; Monmonier, 1996) a publicly accessible GIS could overcome this
criticism. It could be argued that this increase in participation is
contradicted by the lack of access which the public have to the Internet.
Current estimates of public Internet access vary from source to source but it is
becoming apparent that over the next decade access will continue to grow
becoming as widely used as other electronic gadgets. Access is also increasingly
being made available through open access points in public places such as
libraries, community centres and council buildings, as well as schools and
businesses giving ever widening opportunities to get on-line. Further issues
surrounding the empowerment of the public and how they may interpret and use GIS
type tools on the WWW are also explored. Monmonier (1996) argues that giving the
public access to GIS technology can put them in a vulnerable position. He argues
that the public "armed with a GIS but lacking the savvy to use the
systems appropriately become vulnerable to sarcastic attacks from site
advocates". We would argue that providing public access to GIS empowers
the public in a positive way. Examples in the USA in several communities has
returned positive results from all sides of the decision-making processes. In
the UK increasing numbers of community based organisation are taking on board
local decision-makers as public involvement in what takes place within their own
communities becomes ever more important. These issues are exemplified through the discussion of two
case study examples at the local and regional scale of spatial planning. The
methodology and results of these case studies provides a platform with which to
develop new theory and methodology relating to the use and implementation of
public participation GIS on the WWW as an aid to spatial environmental decision
making. This paper argues that providing open access to particular
decision-making problems over the WWW will play an increasing role in the way
future spatial environmental proposals and decisions are made. The practical
development and testing of these systems will help direct the future of public
participation in environmental decision-making by using GIS on the WWW. References Graham, S.D.N. (1996) Flight to the Cyber Suburbs. The
Guardian, April 18, pp.2-3. Little Brothers: Fear and Secrecy in Cyberia 1984 came and went and Big Brother is still not watching. But Little Brothers
are. Surveilling our transactions and disseminating our secrets, a network of
Little Brothers trades in information. They have access, data, Intranets, and
billion-dollar capitalizations. Although they lack Big Brother's state power,
the Little Brothers thrive in the excesses of the information economy. Radiating
a sense of the new, the now, the bleeding edge, they promise freedom,
prosperity, and democracy. With slogans like "we're all connected" and
"information wants to be free," the Little Brothers represent
themselves as all of us, for all of us. In contemporary global technoculture,
however, some of us are more connected than others. In this paper I ask: Why, given evocations of democratic access and freely
circulating information, have the disruptions brought about by new communication
technologies failed to provide significant new opportunities for resistance and
emancipation? Indeed, rather than producing informed activist subjects, the
nonstop flow of information and entertainment contributes to subjectivities
oriented around the event, choice, perfection, and fear. And, it contributes to
subjectivities ill-positioned either to question the ever-consolidating wealth
and influence of multinational corporations or to resist the ever-increasing
deluge of commodities and consumer entertainments (even when, especially when,
they lack the money to purchase them). To think about how this happened, I look
to the rise of the Little Brothers and the demise of Big Brother/the Big Other.
Here I analyse the Apple commercial, "1984." I then link this answer
into a genealogy of personal and networked computing. My answer involves the
ways in which the democratic ideal of publicity, of accessibility and
inclusivity, came to legitimise the new economy. There's a powerful ambiguity in Apple's evocation of Big Brother: he's more
than IBM; he's the state. The attack on Big Brother is an attack on a particular
mode of state power, one associated with the centralised, technologised, control
of mainframes, with a capacity to dominate the production and dissemination of
information, and with a monopoly on the secret and arcane knowledges associated
with computers, codes, and cybernetics. Through this attack, Apple
reappropriates the critique of technology so prominent in the 1960s and early
1970s. The Frankfurt School's critique of instrumental reason, the attack on
technique and bureaucracy found in French theorists such as Jacques Ellul and
Jean Meynaud, and the specter of a technology-driven wasteland in the work of
Theodore Roszak all challenged the vision of post-war, mainframed,
efficiency-minded planning by experts. In the Apple commercial, itself part of a
larger change going on in the computing industry, technology provides the
solution to problems of technology. As I explain, a number of conceptual shifts enabled this move: from
orchestration to interconnection, from invisibility to the fetishistic
visibility of technological processes, from the claim that technology solves (or
causes) all social problems to the claim that information solves (or causes) all
social problems, from the critical employment of play against technology-driven
work to the legitimation of computer networking via the construction of work as
play and play as work, from the association of computers with rationalisation,
centralisation, and expertise to their association with creativity,
decentralisation, and amateurism. The critique of technocratic control's
representation of computers as a secret technology of mainframes administered by
an esoteric, hierarchical, unapproachable elite was countered by a vision of the
personal computer as a tool of democratic publicity, a vision that, as it
remained contrary to market realities of the computer in the 1970s, had itself
to be heavily promoted and publicised. Precisely because the selling of the information age employed the reassuring
dynamic of publicity against secrecy, the critique of technocracy is dropped
rather than engaged. Instead of corporations coming to occupy the place that
government occupied in the age of the mainframe, they become the vehicle for
democracy, now figured in terms of the access enabled by expensive computers and
consumer electronics. The Impact of Private Sex Sites on the Web There are many sex sites on the web that sell erotic or pornographic
material. But there are also many non-commercial sex sites offering sexually
explicit content for free. Not a lot of money, skill or equipment is necessary
to do web-publishing. In addition, it can be done
Jean-François Blanchette, STS, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and CECOJI, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Jean-Francois.Blanchette@ivry.cnrs.fr
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Steve Carver, Andrew Evans, Richard Kingston and Ian Turton (University of Leeds)
Full paper
Healey, P., McNamara, P., Elson, M., and Doak, A. (1988) Land Use Planning and the Mediation of Urban
Change. Cambridge University Press.
Monmonier, M. (1996) Ridicule as a Weapon Against GIS-Based Siting Studies.
http://www.geo.wvu.edu/i19/papers/monmonier.html
Pickles, J. (1995) (Ed.) Ground Truth: the social implications of geographical information
systems. Guildford Press: New York.
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Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, JDean@HWS.EDU
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Nicola Döring, University of Heidelberg, Psychology Department, Nicola.Doering@urz.uni-heidelberg.de
So what kind of content do we find on private sex sites? What intra- and interpersonal consequences does maintaining a personal sex site have for the site’s owners? How are private sex sites used and evaluated by the site visitors? These general questions were addressed in three separate explorative studies: a content analysis of n=300 private sex sites, a survey of n=40 site owners, and a survey of n=100 site visitors. The results of the studies confirmed the expectation that private sex sites can neither be claimed to be revolutionary nor reactionary, but that they cover a broad spectrum of views ranging from traditional to subversive, from harmless to potentially dangerous, from clear cut to obscure. It turns out that private sex sites not only are used to deliver content but also are a means of invoking discourses and building personal relationships. All site owners reported receiving meaningful feedback in response to their web sites, and most entered in online conversations and let people in their offline environments know about their online activities. All site owners made it clear that sexual expression on the net was not a substitute but rather a reflection and extension of their general sex-related activities. Going online and public with private sex sites has nothing to do with virtualisation, on the contrary it stresses the realness of our hidden desires.
Return to top of pageBRIDGING THE GAP - Bringing the Information Society into citizens' everyday life
Ari Heinonen, Dept. of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Tampere, Finland, ari.a.heinonen@uta.fi
This presentation introduces a research and development project currently underway at the University of Tampere. Entitled "Locality in the Global Net", the project is aimed at bridging the gap between Information Society rhetorics and citizens' everyday life.
The purpose of the project is to generate and study local forms and contents of journalism and citizen communication by using new communication technologies, especially the Internet. The method adopted is that of participatory development and research: the project provides guidance and support to local communities in their efforts to create and maintain their own websites, at the same time extracting research data from these processes. Essential in the approach is the recognition that the communication features of community websites should reflect the interests of local citizens.
The project is organised around a portal website called Mansetori where the focus is on the city of Tampere, and an affiliated sub-site in the city of Oulu. The sub-sites represent various types of local communication spheres, enabling a comprehensive study. An important feature is that the different spheres are aware of one another together constituting a larger local communication space.
In line with this, the project's activities are divided into three categories with the corresponding sub-sites under the main portal site:
Preliminary observations of the project show that technology as such is not a sufficient condition for citizens' information society:
Virtual Hype? New Media and the Transformation of Political Parties and Party Systems
Ivan Horrocks, Leicester University and Dominic Wring, Loughborough University, Ijhorrocks@aol.com
he proposition that the so-called 'new' media pose both opportunities and threats for democracy has a relatively long and well-established history. On the one hand, they offer the promise of an information rich society in which citizens have access to a wide range of materials from a variety of sources. In this scenario every issue is extensively debated amongst the public and policy makers through interactive media. Participation in the political process is thus greatly increased. On the other hand, the same 'new' media may threaten to undermine democracy. They may do this by compounding existing biases in the distribution of knowledge and information; by fragmenting discourse between increasingly differentiated policy areas; and by reducing participation to a distanced and marginalised vote that occurs as a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to a limited number of 'soundbite' options.
Despite, and perhaps because of, the ambiguous yet profound consequences for democracy that accompany the ongoing development of new media, interest in exploiting these technologies for democratic purposes has continued to flourish. And it is clear that the continuous, rapid advances in the capacities and capabilities of the new media that have been witnessed over the last decade, combined with concern over the apparent crisis of political legitimacy throughout the developed world, has further heightened interest in electronic democracy.
The crises of democracy thesis, and its specific concern with political participation, has several important dimensions. One of the most fundamental relates to the apparent decline of the political party. It is the role that new media technologies have played and may play in reinventing this particular feature of democracies that is the focus of this paper. However, before examining the relationship between the new media and political parties the paper seeks to explore a number of crucial questions: What is it about the so-called ‘new’ media that is new and constitutes a break with the past? What distinguishes these forms of technology from previous developments in information and communication technologies? And will their impact be felt equally throughout the polity or be more pronounced within certain arenas and/or specific sets of political relationships?
Having addressed these questions and explored the emergence and impact of electronic democracy it will be argued that the new media should not always be construed as a radical departure with previous practices. More profitably, they can be viewed as representing the latest in a long line of technological developments that have been utilised by political parties in order to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. In addition to this, claims about the supposedly democratic properties of the new media need to be treated with a great deal of caution. For, as will be demonstrated, opportunities are accompanied by a range of threats associated primarily with centralisation, exclusion and control.
Return to top of pageConfronting Electronic Surveillance: Desiring and Resisting New Technologies
Brian McGrail (Open University)
The recent pervasion of 'new electronic technologies' throughout society has given some observers cause for celebration but enduced in others a sense of alarm. On the one hand, the extension of CCTV – the most notable form of electronic surveillance – into numerous public/private spaces is bringing into question the future of civic life, especially when there appears to be a lack of popular resistance to such schemes. On the other, electronic surveillance is viewed, not as a threat to freedom, but as a means
of protecting the rights of more vulnerable sections of the community to use and control space. Further still, new methods of surveillance are seen as a prerequisite to improved social care in a society with rising numbers of single-person households. Drawing on in-depth interviews across 10 case study housing estates this chapter attempts to short circuit a number of these debates by focusing on the actual conditions of production and reproduction of CCTV as a social technology.
Return to top of pageNegotiating Privacy in a Changing Environment
Charles D. Raab (University of Edinburgh)
New developments in law, technology, government policy and business practice have posed a severe challenge to conventional assumptions about information privacy and its protection. The increasing globalisation of information flows have added a new dimension to the dilemmas of finding appropriate and effective regulatory strategies and systems at a variety of jurisdictional levels and in diverse organisational contexts. The guidance provided by the legacy of privacy protection since the 1970s is a diminishing resource, yet policy actors and others grope to devise new ways in a highly uncertain environment in which the value of privacy itself is contested.
Based on research into these issues, this paper examines developments and the problems as well as the opportunities they create for privacy protection. It uses documentary and interview material to highlight and consider critically, in different domains of data-usage, the uncertain relationship among several intertwining instruments: These include legal provisions (and their redevelopment and enforcement at several levels), an emerging preferred option of organisational self-regulation, the deployment of technologies themselves - once seen as 'the problem' - as the 'solution', and market 'choices' made available to individuals concerning their own privacy.
Full paperRussia: from NGO's Networks to Community's Networks
Sergei Stafeev, gard@gard.spb.org
NGOs have a vital role in the development of a democratic society. Russian society is in transformation from Communism to an open democratic society. NGOs have blossomed throughout the region in response to the changes in society. Their health and fitness is crucial in the process of transformation. Analysts and experts attest that NGOs remain at a primitive stage. Most have developed in response to local communities needs, but do not have the capacity to play their full role in transforming Russia into an open democratic society.
There are more than 10000 NGOs in St.-Petersburg and Leningrad region that are working in the different fields such as environment, social help, women's movement, preservation of national cultures and many others. Some carry out project work on the ground, others focus on public relations and media campaigns whilst others scrutinize internal functions of organisations. Until the recent time the organisations of "the third sector" of this region have existed in an " information vacuum ", often not knowing that similar organisations exist. The development of democratic processes in Russia has brought about an increased need for receiving and exchanging information. This is especially important for both new commercial and non-commercial sectors.
Development of ICTs (especially Internet) giving the new principal possibilities for Russian's nonprofit sector. The Internet offers NGOs an opportunity to learn more about civil society and NGOs in particular in other parts of the world. Importantly, it offers the chance to establish active co-operation between like organisations. Thanks to the new informational technologies, Russian NGO can increase the critical mass of political actions against human rights violations or environmental destruction, by sending electronic 'alerts' to the world. The Internet also supports the quick exchange of vital information between local NGOs and their colleagues in other countries and so on. At the same time, on the local level, some of the active local NGOs could be the basic organizations for creation of informational municipal (community) networks which allow to have free Internet access for users which not readily accessible through private sector channels.
Russian NGOs today face demands to scale up development programs, increase their effectiveness and accountability, and expand cooperative activities with government, business, and other civil society organizations. The greater the capacity of our NGOs to involve target groups in civil dialogue, the better able are businesses and local authorities to make their contribution to sustainable development. In Russia nonprofit sector identify our communities' needs and make them places to live and work. That is why we consider that at the NGO base will be developed informational Community networks in Russia t and the future of informational Community networks in Russia exactly in development of local NGO's networks. Creation on the base of active local NGOs new organization structures (Networks, partnerships, coalitions etc) with participation of majority local social structures (small business, mass-media, NGO, local govts etc) should be a good sustanaible base for creation community informational networks in Russia and their empowerment in international projects in the field of community networking.
The network should give the equal possibilities for the residents of this territory for the ICTs access and for the ability to set their own information at the community’s web-server.
The socio-cultural aspects of this problem will be considered too. How the informational Communities will be formed in Russia, how the reinforcement of NGO role will promote to sustainable development and democratization at the post-Soviet territory.
Russia is slowly walking along the path of ICT uses for social and civic purposes. Not going into details we want to note that the main reason is insufficient financing of the federal programs of non-profit informational nets development . In these conditions a large amount of people with low income lack the possibility of access to new possibilities which are granted by modern ICTs.
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