"By hook or by crook" is an English phrase meaning "by any means necessary" and probably comes from the customs regulating which firewood local people could take from common land; they were allowed to take any branches that they could reach with a billhook or a shepherd's crook (used to hook sheep). The phrase was featured in the opening credits to the 1960s British television series The Prisoner.
6 - What do you want?
2 - Information.
6 - Whose side are you on?
2 - That would be telling. We want Information. Information, information.
6 - You won't get it.
2 - By hook or by crook we will.
The term "commons" derives from the traditional English legal term for common land, which are also known as "commons", and was popularised in the modern sense as a shared resource term by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in an influential 1968 article called The Tragedy of the Commons. As Frank van Laerhoven and Elinor Ostrom have stated; "Prior to the publication of Hardin's article on the tragedy of the commons (1968), titles containing the words 'the commons', 'common pool resources', or 'common property' were very rare in the academic literature.
The validity of the critiques of this article are clear. Hardin's work was criticized as historically inaccurate in failing to account for the demographic transition, and for failing to distinguish between common property and open access resources. The environmentalist Derrick Jensen claims the tragedy of the commons is used as propaganda for private ownership. He says it has been used by the political right wing to hasten the final enclosure of the "common resources" of third world and indigenous people worldwide, as a part of the Washington Consensus.
He argues that in true situations, those who abuse the commons would have been warned to desist and if they failed would have punitive sanctions against them. He says that rather than being called "The Tragedy of the Commons", it should be called "the Tragedy of the Failure of the Commons".
The geographer David Harvey has a similar criticism, noting that "The dispossession of indigenous populations in North America by 'productive' colonists, for instance, was justified because indigenous populations did not produce value", and asks generally: "Why, for instance, do we not focus in Hardin's metaphor on the individual ownership of the cattle rather than on the pasture as a common?"
The use of "commons" for natural resources has its roots in European intellectual history, where it referred to shared agricultural fields, grazing lands and forests that were, over a period of several hundred years, enclosed, claimed as private property for private use. In European political texts, the common wealth was the totality of the material riches of the world, such as the air, the water, the soil and the seed, all nature's bounty regarded as the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together. In this context, one may go back further, to the Roman legal category res communis, applied to things common to all to be used and enjoyed by everyone, as opposed to res publica, applied to public property managed by the government
The digital commons are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created. Examples of the digital commons include wikis, open-source software, and open-source licensing. The distinction between digital commons and other digital resources is that the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources.
The digital commons provides the community with free and easy access to information. Typically, information created in the digital commons is designed to stay in the digital commons by using various forms of licensing, including the GNU General Public License and various Creative Commons licenses.
Yochai Benkler, says that with the rise of the Internet and digitalisation, an economics system based on commons becomes possible again. He wrote in his book The Wealth of Networks in 2006 that cheap computing power plus networks enable people to produce valuable products through non-commercial processes of interaction: "as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system". He uses the term 'networked information economy' to describe a "system of production, distribution, and consumption of information goods characterized by decentralized individual action carried out through widely distributed, nonmarket means that do not depend on market strategies." He also coined the term 'commons-based peer production' to describe collaborative efforts based on sharing information. Examples of commons-based peer production are free and open source software and open-source hardware.
In practice internet users access information using digital resources that have been commercialized through the advertising revenue they generate, selling products and ideas to various niche constituencies on the world wide web.
For example, here is a video on YouTube:
Cattle grazing on Basing Common.
A common (or common land) is a piece of land owned by one person, but over which other people can exercise certain traditional rights, such as allowing their livestock to graze upon it. The older texts use the word "common" to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the name "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. (Wikipedia)YouTube
YouTube, LLC is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.
YouTube allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to favorites, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users. It offers a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media videos. Available content includes video clips, TV show clips, music videos, short and documentary films, audio recordings, movie trailers, live streams, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.
Most of the content on YouTube is uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, and Hulu offer some of their material via YouTube as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can only watch videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos and add comments to videos. Videos deemed potentially inappropriate are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old.
YouTube earns advertising revenue from Google AdSense, a program which targets ads according to site content and audience. The vast majority of its videos are free to view, but there are exceptions, including subscription-based premium channels, film rentals, as well as YouTube Premium, a subscription service offering ad-free access to the website and access to exclusive content made in partnership with existing users.
As of February 2017, there were more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute, and one billion hours of content being watched on YouTube every day.
This video was uploaded to YouTube by the e-space lab project in 2008 whilst instigating a number of streaming video based cultural exchanges across a number of venues in the sister cities of Liverpool and Shanghai.
The video was used to capture a time and a place where the commons, as common land, overlaps with digital video streaming as a digital commons information environment, and also illustrates the role of optics in the way "picturing" has created a significant shift in an understanding of scale and measure when it comes to sight and seeing throughout the modern period of history in Europe, and now impacting everywhere in a globalised digital information environment.
The commonplace
The everyday context of the experiments Re:LODE is undertaking is, technically, commonplace. Politically and culturally though, this context of human communication is of crucial importance. In a phrase, the wider significance of these activities rests on the fact that this context is potentially "open to everyone". This idea relates to the modern sense of the use of the word banal, including associated meanings such as "hackneyed", "ordinary', and leading to "trite" and "petty". An alternative meaning originates in the meaning of the old French banel (13c.) is that it describes the communal, from ban "decree; legal control; announcement; authorization; payment for use of a communal oven, mill, etc." The communal oven was known as the four banal was a common municipal institution in medieval France.
These ovens were owned by the feudal lord and operated by an ovenmaster or fournier; personal ovens were outlawed, requiring users of the communal oven to pay a fee to the fournier to cook their food. the design of these ovens originated on the Roman plan, stone buildings (fireproof) large enough to hold an entire community's ration of bread. So, bread, a staple necessity, is produced in a controlled communality.
The internet, likewise, is produced capitalistically, rather than in a feudal network, engineering a controlled communality. However, whilst ownership and control issues may in the near future become a serious concern for the users of a shared electronic information environment, there is the example of common land in English law.
Using digital virtual spaces, using blogs and skype and so on, makes us commoners of this particular type of newly created common territory. Rights and privileges also apply, and so it becomes a political as well as economic space.
The newness of spaces, perceptions and understandings is not new (especially in an industrial society), but when new dimensions burst on to the scene, then it is both exciting and alarming. In a phrase - Modernity becomes palpable.
According to Svetlana Alpers, in her book on Dutch art in the 17th century called The Art of Describing, she connects the new lens based optical technologies of both microscope and telescope to a significant shift in an understanding of scale and measure when it comes to sight and seeing.
An immediate and devastating result of the possibility of bringing to men's eyes the minutest of living things (the organism viewed in the microscopic lens), or the farthest and largest (the heavenly bodies viewed through the telescopic lens), was the calling into question of any fixed sense of scale and proportion. (Alpers p 18)She then comments on how:
To many it seemed a devastating dislocation of the previously understood measure of the world, or, in short, of man as its measure.To illustrate this point she uses the example of the painting The Young Bull by Paulus Potter (see above) in her chapter called Constantijn Huygens and "The New World", for she uses Huygens take on these new perceptions and experiences to show how this dislocation could be embraced as heralding a new era of possibilities.
The juxtaposition of a tiny crevice and huge town gate, or the expansion of the degree into a panoramic view brings to mind characteristic features of Dutch art. Paulus Potter's famous Young Bull looms against a dwarfed church tower and sports a tiny fly on its extensive flank. (Alpers pp 18-19)
The territory inhabited by Re:LODE, and future potential exchanges using streaming video, and the thinking about elsewhere, and the thinking about the here and now, are part of a big shift in the species of consciousness that is the body electric.
The body electric arrives in a poem by Walt Whitman from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass. Its original publication, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, did not have a title. In fact, the line "I sing the body electric" was not added until the 1867 edition. At the time, "electric" was not yet a commonly used term, but the electric telegraph had already inaugurated the age of electric communication over the previous two decades.
The 1840's saw the philosopher Kierkegaard publish major works that include critiques of Hegel and form a basis for existential psychology. Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Stages on Life's Way include observations about existential choices and their consequences, and what religious life can mean for a modern individual. No wonder, when it was possible, due to the telegraph, to know, simultaneously, the barometric pressures at a number of geographical locations, the space that God's consciousness inhabits had been substituted by a new species of human consciousness in the form of the daily telegraph and the weather report. This particular sense of dread at this substitution and abolition of space is no longer with us. What we need to guard against is feeling too comfortable with the way things are at this relatively early phase of this new electric communication structure. The new commons will need to be established through occupation and use. This is why open source is so crucial.
So yes, using skype is commonplace, relatively speaking, open source and accessible to many, as are many of the domains among the echolands of the internet. The particular use of this technology in this and other projects is significant in relation to the particular contexts involved in the instigation of the live video-streamed link, that is neither specifically “work” related or social network related, but somehow containing some elements of both of these commonplace situations in a “public” space that is the result of collapsing one space and another into the same space and time.
There is another sort of differentiation that I would like to identify here, and that is very obvious, and that has to do with an interest in the socially transformative power of communication technologies, specifically electric/digital technology. Right up there are the web based SNS, social network services the online services, platforms, or sites that focus on building and reflecting social networks among people who share interests and/or activities. All essentially consist of some sort of representation of the network user, their social links, and a variety of additional services such as e-mail and instant messaging. Although online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service SNS usually means an individual orientated service.
A changing landscape?
Facebook, Twitter widely used worldwide;
MySpace (anyone remember MySpace?) and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America;
Nexopia (mostly in Canada);
Bebo, Hi5, Hyves (mostly in The Netherlands),
StudiVZ (mostly in Germany),
iWiW (mostly in Hungary),
Tuenti (mostly in Spain),
Nasza-Klasa (mostly in Poland),
Decayenne, Tagged, XING, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe;
Orkut and Hi5 in South America, India and Central America;
Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, renren and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and Twitter, Orkut and Facebook in India;
WeChat in China, includes government led global censorship:
Each represents a domain of profiles, representations and mis-representations, securely and not so securely bound to the personal and private. There have been attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but essentially this is a galaxy of in-crowds.
So, going back to the Roman idea of a res publica, SNS networks do not apply. As begins his Richard Sennett says in his Fall of Public Man in Chapter 1; The Public Domain:
A res publica stands in general for those bonds of association and mutual commitment which exist between people who are not joined together by ties of family or intimate association; it is the bond of a crowd, of a "people", of a polity, rather than the bonds of family or friends. As in Roman times, participation in the res publica today is most often a matter of going along, and the forums for this public life, like the city, are in a state of decay. (Sennett, 1986 pp3-4)The potential of an "art situation" to function as a forum of this kind, to intervene, will always exist. The fact that these days this potential is only tapped occasionally, in the "one off", is a sign of the times. The silence that reigns in the gallery, during a performance, at the cinema is part of the Narcissus situation, locked into a closed system, transfixed, absorbed in the repeated reflected mirror image as the "other". This is not self-love, Narcissus does not recognize the reflection as an extended image of the self, so this infinite duration of silence cannot be broken, despite the efforts of the nymph Echo to break into the system with repeated fragments of Narcissus' voice.
Speech is a sign
In echoland
we might say to a stranger, “speak! That I may see you!” Silence in
the gallery, silence during the performance, is an aspect of the way
the arts have been moved from diverse kinds of public space to “inside”
each of the individuated bodies that the comprise the audience. This is
a private experience, bound to the spectacle and its duration through a
passive but intense observation, the outward persona (no longer the
mask that identifies a character) is reserved, the emotional vortex
within (if present) is obscured, hidden by the exterior surfaces of
outward appearances. There is no revealing, no self-exposure, the
investment in meaning is invisible and becomes un-shareable to the rest
of the group. The climax of the modern drama, according to Brecht, may
indeed take place among the individuals making up an audience, as
opposed to on the stage with the actors, but in the early 18th century
privileges for audience included occupying seating on the stage, at an
extra cost, and provide such audience members with the proximity and
opportunity to spontaneously require actors to make their “point”, and
sometimes repeatedly, as an “encore”!
In his The Fall of Public Man Sennett discusses examples of what he identifies as "speech as a sign" in a section of Chapter 4; "Public Roles". His view of the London coffeehouse is that they were part of the bridge that this system of speech allowed between stage and street:
In and out? private and public?
The social networking sites play on the narcissism of in-crowd dynamics, so, in the contrasting scope of other possibilities, operating in real places, actual and virtual geographies, opens up into the dynamics of a “maybe” out-crowd.
In his The Fall of Public Man Sennett discusses examples of what he identifies as "speech as a sign" in a section of Chapter 4; "Public Roles". His view of the London coffeehouse is that they were part of the bridge that this system of speech allowed between stage and street:
The urban institution in which this system of spoken signs ruled was the coffeehouse of the early 18th Century. (Sennett 1986 p 80)They were, he says “the prime information centres in both cities at this time.” Not only were these places used for reading the newspapers, they published newspapers, became centres of information sensitive business activities, as in Lloyds of London insurance, and as such “were places in which speech flourished”.
and the talk was governed by a cardinal rule in order for information to be as full as possible, distinctions of rank were temporarily suspended; anyone sitting in the coffeehouse had a right to talk to anyone else, to enter into any conversation, whether he knew the other people or not, whether he was bidden to speak or not. (Sennett 1986 p 81)This was essentially a fictional space, a place where it was possible to pretend that social divisions were surmountable, in order that information could flow freely. The clubs of the later 18th century, where like minds associated, were closed cliques that eroded this open source environment, and where conversation became dull by comparison.
In and out? private and public?
The social networking sites play on the narcissism of in-crowd dynamics, so, in the contrasting scope of other possibilities, operating in real places, actual and virtual geographies, opens up into the dynamics of a “maybe” out-crowd.
Returning to the discussion of social networking sites and services is relevant because not only are they different in fundamental qualities from the potentials we are trying to identify, but it is necessary to recognize that they are part of the context we are working with, and in terms of scale and influence, they are of immense importance. The psyche of art and artist are part of and implicated in this domain, even perhaps establishing a prime model of this force that blasts away an alternative and public domain. Sennett's organizing idea in The Fall of Public Man is this:
We have tried to make the fact of being in private, alone with ourselves and with family and intimate friends, an end in itself.
Each person's self has become his principal burden; to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means through which one knows the world. And precisely because we are so self-absorbed, it is extremely difficult for us to arrive at a private principle, to give a clear account to ourselves or to others of what our personalities are. The reason is that, the more privatized the psyche, the less it is stimulated, and the more difficult it is for us to feel or express feeling.
The obsession with persons at the expense of more impersonal social relations is like a filter which discolors our rational understanding of society; it obscures the continuing importance of class in advanced industrial society; it leads us to believe community is an act of mutual self-disclosure and to undervalue the community relations of strangers, particularly those which occur in cities. (Sennett 1986 p 4)Facebook is now employed by the self-absorbed "helicopter parents", or "drones", hovering above an internet generation, making a brave new world with Big Mother, or Big Father, monitoring their children as they struggle to become adults. How un-cool is Facebook? Now is the time to look for what is happening in terms of resistance through countering tactics. Narcissists pranked!
by Carmen Fishwick, Illustration: Janne Iivonen
When did Facebook become so uncool?
April 10, 2012
Something strange happened Monday on the Internet.
Facebook -- the once-underdog social network founded by a kid in a hoodie in a dorm room -- may have officially cemented its status as a titan of the tech establishment it once challenged.
What changed? Facebook -- no longer a feisty startup but a 3,000-person, soon-to-be-public corporation with $3.9 billion in cash and an $85 billion to $100 billion valuation -- spent $1 billion to gobble up a much-smaller competitor, the photo-sharing app Instagram.
When it did so, it stirred up a caldron of ill will that the "People of the Internet" have been harboring toward Mark Zuckerberg's once-hip company. Some Instagram users said they were downloading all of their photos and then deleting them from the app just so Facebook couldn't get its hands on them.
Pundits weren't kind to Facebook, either.
David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times, writing about the Instagram purchase, noted that the company is looking more and more like "Big Friend," a gentler variation on George Orwell's all-seeing Big Brother. Data indicate others share that view, too. A new poll, conducted before the Instagram news, found that 28% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Facebook -- twice as many as disapprove of Apple and nearly three times as many as Google.
This backlash highlights a new reality: As a technological juggernaut, Facebook is more Microsoft than Tumblr. To use a musical analogy employed on Twitter, it's the Nickelback to Instagram's Bon Iver.
Facebook and Instagram's images couldn't be more different, so it's tempting to say that this Goliath-buys-David event is a turning point for Facebook. But people have been writing about Facebook losing its mojo for years now. In 2009, AdWeek ran this headline: "Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24s?" A year later, mainstream news websites noted the phenomenon of parents and grandparents joining Facebook, scaring off younger people.
"It's official, Facebook is becoming uncool," CBS declared.
It's hard to pinpoint the moment when Facebook's image problem started. Maybe it was when users realized how much data Facebook was collecting about them. Maybe it was when CEO Zuckerberg started to seem less like that geeky, counterculture college kid and more like a run-of-the-mill billionaire.
But it is possible to take a look at the conversation and tease out a few factors that seem to have led to Facebook's current status as an inescapable, perhaps Orwellian, Internet giant.
First: Money
Nothing leads to public skepticism quite like a few billion dollars in pocket change. Compare that kind of situation at Facebook to Instagram, which as CNNMoney notes, hadn't monetized its product. It didn't support advertisements and apparently didn't sell its users' data.
Facebook, on the other hand, is accused of profiting wildly on the backs of the 850 million people who share personal details about their lives on the social network. For more on that, see The Wall Street Journal's recent feature "Selling You on Facebook," which analyzes the info that Facebook apps collect.
View some of the photos, comments from readers
Second: Size
As companies get bigger, people tend to question their motives. Google is a good example of this view. The Silicon Valley company once was the darling of the Internet -- the search engine that didn't have ads on its homepage and declared its company ethos was "Don't Be Evil." As the tech blog Gizmodo writes, Google "built a very lucrative company on the reputation of user respect."
That was easy enough when Google was small. As it grew, however, some people started to lose faith in the company -- and to question its motives.
Gizmodo: "In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services -- Gmail, Search, YouTube and more -- and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for."
People never talked that way about Instagram, which only had 13 employees and 33 million users. It's the kind of company journalists love to use the word "scrappy" to describe.
Third: Trust
As the company has grown, some people have come to trust Facebook so little that they're pulling photos from Instagram in advance of the takeover.
According to Megan Garber at The Atlantic, 25,000 people visited Instaport's site in six hours on Monday after the news broke, compared with 400 people on a normal day. Instaport is a service that helps people pull photos off Instagram for home storage.
"You could read that spike, on the one hand, as a mass freak-out on the part of users who don't trust Facebook -- despite Mark Zuckerberg's promises -- with their networks and memories," Garber writes. "You could also read it as an insurance play, a just-to-be-safe move on the part of people who want to feel sure that their photos are secure."
Mistrust of Facebook stems in part from concern about its privacy policies, which have been described as overly confusing. Facebook itself acknowledges that privacy concerns could trip up the company in the future.
In its initial public offering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company wrote: "We have in the past experienced, and we expect that in the future we will continue to experience, media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny of our decisions regarding user privacy or other issues, which may adversely affect our reputation and brand."
Finally: The cool factor
Maybe it's less that people see Facebook as evil and more that the site just isn't as cool as it used to be -- partly because it's so popular and also because it's not the new kid on the block anymore. Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, which is eons ago in Internet time. MySpace and Friendster -- all of Facebook's predecessors -- didn't survive (or didn't continue to grow) for this long.
Instagram, meanwhile, was founded in late 2010 and was only in recent months becoming part of the zeitgist. iPhone-toting hipster types liked the app for its mobility -- you cold post photos easily from your phone -- and filters that gave their pics a retro, vintage vibe.
"Instagram is, in a word, cool. Facebook is losing its 'cool', rapidly," wrote Allan Swann at the Computer Business Review.
Instagram managed to create a cache in part from its status as an underground hit. Even with tens of millions of users, the app was praised by reviewers as intimate -- a place, true or not, where it was safe to post personal photos and share stories with a relatively small network of friends. (Just to throw in some data: I have 815 Facebook friends but only 67 people whom I follow on Instagram, and I actually know almost all of them.)
It's not clear that any of that will change for Instagram. Zuckerberg says the app will continue to operate as a product that's independent from Facebook and that people won't have to post Instagram photos to Facebook just because the company owns the app. But the backlash helped crystallize the idea that Facebook no longer is seen as the always-cool company that everybody implicitly trusts.
"Some Instagram fans are acting as if this is a tragedy," Horsey of the Los Angeles Times writes of the acquisition. "They liked the idea that there was a little corner of the online world where they could gather and be outside the reach of the Zuckerberg empire. ..."
There was a time when people clamored to be part of Zuckerberg's network, which launched at first only for Harvard students. But now, as the Instagram backlash shows, Facebook has long stopped being an exclusive club. It's seen as the big, bland company that the app's users worry will ruin the cool thing they had going.
Update
How Instagram hides behind Facebook – and rakes in billions
Instagram’s parent company faces international scrutiny while the photo app retains its charming reputation
Scott Greer for Medium Sat 1 Dec 2018
Today, Facebook openly encourages all businesses to run ads on Instagram. Inside ads manager, it is simply another delivery mechanism for ads. You don’t even need an Instagram account to run ads on the platform.
And while more than 30% of the US population uses Instagram today, the majority of American adults don’t even know that Facebook owns it. Earlier this year, Sarah Frier wrote an excellent piece about Instagram’s ability to remain unscathed during and after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Culturally, Instagram has been able to maintain a charming image and dissociate itself from Facebook at every turn.
Instagram: from Facebook's 'best hope' to Russian propaganda campaign tool
The app was ‘perhaps the most effective platform’ for the Russian online propaganda campaign by the Internet Research Agency
Julia Carrie Wong for the Guardian Wed 19 Dec 2018
“Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform for the Internet Research Agency,” states the report by New Knowledge, an American cybersecurity firm which analyzed data sets from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter."
"During the period studied by the report’s authors, IRA posts on Instagram garnered more than twice as many engagements (such as likes or comments) as IRA posts on Facebook – 187m on Instagram vs 77m on Facebook – despite the fact that Facebook offers many more ways for users to interact with content, and Instagram has no native “sharing” button to promote virality."
And as public awareness of inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Twitter increased in 2017, the IRA increased its activity on Instagram. In the six months following the US presidential election, the IRA’s activity on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube climbed (by between 45-84%), while activity on Instagram soared (by 238%), according to the second analysis, by researchers at the University of Oxford.
The IRA created dozens of Instagram accounts, each with a particular identity. The most successful, including @blackstagram_, @american.veterans, and @rainbow_nation_us had more than 100,000 followers apiece.
Q. What do you want?
A. Information.
Q. Whose side are you on?
A. That would be telling.
When "in" a place, or "at" a place, or "on" a location it's good to know where you are. Navigation begins with where you have come from as much as it is about figuring out where you are. To triangulate and find out where somewhere "is" a third point of reference is required.
In trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by forming triangles to it from known points.
Triangulation in psychology is a manipulation tactic where one person will not communicate directly with another person, instead using a third person to relay communication to the second, thus forming a triangle. It also refers to a form of splitting in which one person manipulates a relationship between two parties by controlling communication between them. Triangulation may manifest itself as a manipulative device to engineer rivalry between two people, known as divide and conquer or playing one (person) against another.
In the social sciences, triangulation is often used to indicate that two (or more) methods are used in a study in order to check the results of one and the same subject and is a popular method of study in sociology. "The concept of triangulation is borrowed from navigational and land surveying techniques that determine a single point in space with the convergence of measurements taken from two other distinct points." The idea is that one can be more confident with a result if different methods lead to the same result.
What we need to create this context of three reference points is information.
The trouble is we have to struggle with "context collapse"!
On December 21, 2004, it was purchased by The Washington Post Company, later renamed the Graham Holdings Company. On August 5, 2013 it was announced that the Washington Post Company would sell the flagship newspaper for $250 million to Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com. The Washington Post Company agreed to adopt a new corporate name once the sale was finalized. It adopted Graham Holdings Company as the new name effective November 29, 2013. Amazon.com was not involved in the sale. Nash Holdings LLC, a company owned by Bezos, closed the purchase of the newspaper and affiliated publications on October 1, 2013.
On July 27, 2017, Jeff Bezos became the world's wealthiest person when his estimated net worth increased to just over $90 billion. Bezos's wealth surpassed $100 billion for the first time on November 24, 2017.
Since June 4, 2008, Slate has been managed by The Slate Group, an online publishing entity created by the Graham Holdings Company to develop and manage web-only magazines. Slate is based in New York City, with an additional office in Washington, D.C.
Facebook Isn't the Social Network Anymore
"According to confidential company data obtained by the tech blog the Information, Facebook has seen a decline in “original sharing”—posts by people about themselves and their personal lives, as opposed to articles they’re sharing from elsewhere on the web. Bloomberg’s sources corroborated the trend and added that the company is internally blaming it on “context collapse,” an academic term popularized by Danah Boyd to describe how social media tend to blur the boundaries between interpersonal and mass communication."
Whose side are you on?
Or, would that be telling?
Q. Where does Re:LODE source information about the relevant contexts for 22 places along the LODE Line?
A. The Press on-line, and when accessed news stories are accompanied by a link. As LODE and Re:LODE have their sources in Liverpool and Hull, a UK news media will have a presence, and it is the case that there are a predominant number of news stories from the Guardian newspaper, published by the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The Scott Trust was created in 1936;
"to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference".The Scott Trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to project the same protections for the Guardian as were originally built into the very structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than to benefit an owner or shareholders.
The paper's readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion. The newspaper's reputation as a platform for liberal and left-wing editorial has led to the use of the "Guardian reader" and "Guardianista" as often (but not always) pejorative epithets for those of left-leaning or politically correct tendencies.
Update December 2018
A December 2018 report of a poll by the Publishers Audience Measurement Company (PAMCo) stated that the paper's print edition was found to be the most trusted in the UK during October 2017 to September 2018.
In the PAMCo report, it was also the most read of the UK's "quality newsbrands", including digital editions; the brands included the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, and the i. While the Guardian's print circulation is declining, the report indicates that news from the Guardian, including its free web site, reaches more than 23 million UK adults per month.
The origins of the Guardian newspaper, and the others listed above, reflects a spectrum of ideology that is essentially rooted in what has been identified by as the history of bourgeois perception (see History of Bourgeois Perception 1983 by Donald Lowe).
Founded by textile traders and merchants, in its early years The Guardian had a reputation as "an organ of the middle class", or in the words of C. P. Scott's son Ted, "a paper that will remain bourgeois to the last".
In his book Building Jerusalem, Tristram Hunt sets out the human geography as applied to the physical separation of classes in nineteenth century Manchester.
One of the most telling aspects of Manchester life was that the other half, the bourgeoisie, rarely had to come face to face with the horrors of proletarian existence. the divide between the two nations was more than financial. It was physical. The prosperous middle classes made their way to and from the city centre as the demands of their business necessitated. And on their way, according to Engels, 'the members of this money aristocracy' take a route that avoids them having to see 'the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left'. The thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined with 'an almost unbroken series of shops' run by the middle and lower bourgeoisie, determined from commercial necessity to keep up appearances. So the wealthy middle classes could swan off to 'the breezy heights of Cheetham Hill, Broughton and Pendleton' to enjoy their 'wholesome country air' and 'fine comfortable houses' without coming into contact with the social consequences of their wealth creation. Engels believed he had never seen 'so systematic shutting out of the working classes from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie'.
(page 31, Building Jerusalem, by Tristram Hunt, Wiedenfield and Nicolson, London, 2004)In May 1836, the working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser called the Manchester Guardian:
"the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners".The early nineteenth century saw Manchester Guardian generally hostile to labour's claims. Of the 1832 Ten Hours Bill, the paper doubted whether in view of the foreign competition
"the passing of a law positively enacting a gradual destruction of the cotton manufacture in this kingdom would be a much less rational procedure."The Manchester Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of outside agitators:
"[…] if an accommodation can be effected, the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone. They live on strife […]"Associated at first with the Little Circle, a Manchester-based group of Non-conformist Liberals who held a common agenda with regards political and social reform. The first group met from 1815 onwards to reform political representation and gain social reform in the United Kingdom. The second group operated from 1830 onwards and was key in creating the political movement that resulted in the Reform Act of 1832. So it was then that the Manchester Guardian was associated with the ideology of classical liberalism as expressed by the Whigs and later by the Liberal Party. However, its political orientation underwent a decisive change after World War II, leading to a gradual alignment with Labour and the political left in general.
The Scott Trust describes one of its "core purposes" to be;
"to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to its liberal tradition"This so-called liberal tradition runs a broad spectrum of ideas across the establishment media in the UK. Re:LODE would describe this range of attitudes and positions as being to the middle and to the right of economic, social and political discourses. So, whose side is the Guardian on?
The Guardian is, seemingly, on the left, but who knows, and if they know different, would they tell us? Nevertheless, the Guardian provides an accessible on-line resource (currently without any charge) along with a prodigious archive of information, stories, investigative journalism, critical reviews and, what is more, creates an international forum where readers can find a wide range of analysis and opinion.
If we compare the Guardian with the Economist we find a world of difference in some of the "core values", but there are even bigger differences between the world views of UK media and the perceptions and understandings of people along the LODE Line, and, that if we encounter them, they will probably, and hopefully, make us stop in our tracks and help us do some new thinking.
The question on Quora: Is the economist left or right?
One of 45 answers is from Tom Standage who works for The Economist Magazine:
The Economist (magazine) is not inherently left-wing or right-wing; its political philosophy is rooted in 19th-century Classical Liberalism of the John Stuart Mill (philosopher, author) variety. Essentially we are fans of Free Markets (The Economist was founded to oppose the Corn Laws) and individual choice. So we favour, for example, a small state and the abolition of agricultural subsidies (right-wing fiscally liberal positions); but we also support gay marriage and the legalisation of drugs (left-wing socially liberal positions).
Generalising hugely,
- Right-wing parties tend to be fiscally liberal but socially conservative; they think it's OK for companies to do what they like but want to intervene in people's private lives.
- Left-wing parties tend to be keener on individual choice in private affairs but think they know better when it comes to spending people's money (via taxation) or regulating the market.
In France, a "liberal" is a right-winger keen on free markets; in the US, a "liberal" is a left-winger keen on letting people make their own personal choices. The Economist is liberal in both these senses.So, the answer, behind the camouflage of supporting same sex marriage and other libertarian "issues", is:
So we are neither of the left nor the right; or you could say we are both. This often causes confusion. When we declare our support for same-sex marriage, for example, we are characterised (in America) as holding typical left-wing European views; when we say markets should be allowed to work and criticise economic nationalism, we are accused (in France) of being knee-jerk Anglo-Saxon right-wingers.
Accordingly, we have endorsed both Republicans and Democrats for the US presidency; in Britain, we have endorsed both Labour and Conservative candidates for Prime Minister. We liked Tony Blair (former British Prime Minister), for example, because he combined left-wing socially liberal positions with essentially right-wing fiscally liberal ones borrowed from his Conservative opponents (though his government turned out to have a rather illiberal authoritarian streak on law and order). We also welcomed the current Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government in Britain for similar reasons.
In theory our position might be characterised as libertarian, but that term also has baggage: unlike many American libertarians, The Economist is in favour of gun control, for example, on the liberal ground that your freedom to do what you want (own lots of guns) ends where my freedom to do what I want (not being shot) begins. So, is The Economist left or right? The answer is yes and no.
The Economist is right! But that would be telling.
This kind of liberalism, classical liberalism, for free trade, at all costs, is, at its roots, a chimera.
Free markets don't exist!
See Ha-Joon Chang in his book 23 THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM
According to historian Asa Briggs, the Anti-Corn Law League was a large, nationwide middle-class moral crusade with a Utopian vision; its leading advocate Richard Cobden promised that repeal would settle four great problems simultaneously:
First, it would guarantee the prosperity of the manufacturer by affording him outlets for his products. Second, it would relieve the Condition of England question by cheapening the price of food and ensuring more regular employment. Third, it would make English agriculture more efficient by stimulating demand for its products in urban and industrial areas. Fourth, it would introduce through mutually advantageous international trade a new era of international fellowship and peace. The only barrier to these four beneficent solutions was the ignorant self-interest of the landlords, the "bread-taxing oligarchy, unprincipled, unfeeling, rapacious and plundering."The landlords claimed that manufacturers like Cobden wanted cheap food so that they could reduce wages and thus maximise their profits, an opinion shared by socialist Chartists.
Neo-liberals then? And do we need a reminder that The Economist magazine opposed the provision of aid to the Irish during the Great Famine of 1845-49? Yes we need a reminder! The Economist argued for laissez-faire policies, in which self-sufficiency, anti-protectionism and free trade, not food aid, were in the opinion of the magazine the key to helping the Irish live through the famine which killed approximately one million people.
Records show that Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. No such export ban happened in the 1840s.
We want Information. Information, information.
The Economist was a major source of financial and economic information for Karl Marx in the formulation of socialist theory; he wrote:
"the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class."When the news magazine was founded, the term "economism" denoted what would today be termed "economic liberalism". The Economist generally supports free trade, globalisation, and free immigration. The activist and journalist George Monbiot has described it as neo-liberal while occasionally accepting the propositions of Keynesian economics where deemed more "reasonable". The news magazine favours a carbon tax to fight global warming. According to one former editor, Bill Emmott, "the Economist's philosophy has always been liberal, not conservative".
We want Information. Information, information, by hook or by crook.
And this is how to get it . . .
. . . don't use your common sense, be awake to your own bias, beware click-bait, use your imagination and follow the links!
Hypertext and the invention of the world wide web
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, proposed and later prototyped a new hypertext project in response to a request for a simple, immediate, information-sharing facility, to be used among physicists working at CERN and other academic institutions. He called the project "WorldWideWeb".
HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information, such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN, including an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments... A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser. ― T. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, 12 November 1990, CERNIn 1992, Lynx was born as an early Internet web browser. Its ability to provide hypertext links within documents that could reach into documents anywhere on the Internet began the creation of the Web on the Internet.
As new web browsers were released, traffic on the World Wide Web quickly exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994. As a result, all previous hypertext systems were overshadowed by the success of the Web, even though it lacked many features of those earlier systems, such as integrated browsers/editors (a feature of the original WorldWideWeb browser, which was not carried over into most of the other early Web browsers).
In 2017 the Re:LODE project follows on from the questions that emerged as a result of the LODE project in 1992. In 1992 it was materials using print-based media, film and video that were assembled together to create views from points on the LODE Line. The difference in global reach and scale between these projects, divided by 25 years, is phenomenal. The question raised here in relation to methodology is:
Q. Where on the world wide web is there an information resource capable of functioning as a common point of reference?
A. Wikipedia?
Q. Why Wikipedia?
A. Why not? With all its problems and difficulties, it is multilingual, web-based, and free, providing encyclopedic information with openly editable and viewable content.
According to Wikipedia:
Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (About this soundlisten), /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ (About this soundlisten) WIK-ih-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual, web-based, free encyclopedia based on a model of openly editable and viewable content, a wiki. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web,[3][4][5] and is one of the most popular websites by Alexa rank.[6] It is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that operates on money it receives from donors. [7][8][9]
3. Bill Tancer (May 1, 2007). "Look Who's Using Wikipedia". Time. Retrieved December 1, 2007. "The sheer volume of content [...] is partly responsible for the site's dominance as an online reference. When compared to the top 3,200 educational reference sites in the US, Wikipedia is No. 1, capturing 24.3% of all visits to the category". Cf. Bill Tancer (Global Manager, Hitwise), "Wikipedia, Search and School Homework" Archived March 25, 2012, at the Wayback Machine., Hitwise, March 1, 2007.
4. Alex Woodson (July 8, 2007). "Wikipedia remains go-to site for online news". Reuters. Retrieved December 16, 2007. "Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has added about 20 million unique monthly visitors in the past year, making it the top online news and information destination, according to Nielsen//NetRatings."
5. "comScore MMX Ranks Top 50 US Web Properties for August 2012". comScore. September 12, 2012. Retrieved February 6, 2013.
6. "Wikipedia.org Traffic, Demographics and Competitors - Alexa". www.alexa.com. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
7. "Wikimedia pornography row deepens as Wales cedes rights – BBC News". BBC. May 10, 2010. Retrieved June 28, 2016.
8. Vogel, Peter S. (October 10, 2012). "The Mysterious Workings of Wikis: Who Owns What?". Ecommerce Times. Retrieved June 28, 2016.
9. Mullin, Joe (January 10, 2014). "Wikimedia Foundation employee ousted over paid editing". Ars Technica. Retrieved June 28, 2016.
The principles of Wikipedia are to be found on the Five pillars page.
Governance, of Wikipedia, by Wikipedia is to be found here.
Wikipedia's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time. An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article. Wikipedia's contributors avoid a tragedy of the commons (behaving contrary to the common good) by internalizing benefits. They do this by experiencing flow (i.e., energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment) and identifying with and gaining status in the Wikipedia community.Wikipedia's content policies and guidelines are governed by rules:
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like. A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability", which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article's subject. Further, Wikipedia intends to convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized. It must not present original research. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations. This can at times lead to the removal of information that, though valid, is not properly sourced. Finally, Wikipedia must not take sides. All opinions and viewpoints, if attributable to external sources, must enjoy an appropriate share of coverage within an article. This is known as neutral point of view (NPOV).Q. Can there be such a thing as a neutral point of view?
Andrew Famiglietti (USA) Negotiating the Neutral Point of View: Politics and the Moral Economy of Wikipedia from Institute of Network Cultures on Vimeo.
The Neutral Point of View (NPoV) is one of Wikipedia's most fundamental policies. However, simple understandings of the NPoC bely the almost baroque complexities of the current Wikipedia policy page that documents it, which runs some dozen pages. More importantly, it overlooks the myriad negotiations that Wikipedia editors undergo as they attempt to interpret the policy and apply it to their daily practices of production. This presentation will focus on the interpretations of the NPoV that accompanied the production of the politically contentious Wikipedia article documenting Israel's invasion of the Gaza strip in the winter of 2008/2009. I will show how these negotiations reveal what I have dubbed, following E.P. Thompson, the “Moral Economy” of Wikipedia. Like the English peasants described by Thompson, Wikipedia editors are guided by a moral sense of what is and is not a legitimate intervention in their productive process. This Moral Economy shapes the contours of political possibility on Wikipedia, both enabling and restricting resistance to currently dominant economic, social, and political formations.
A. Re:LODE's methodology is sceptical regarding such an assumption. All editing requires selection, all selections will involve degrees of bias.
Systemic bias
For example: Several studies have shown that most of the Wikipedia contributors are male. Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13% of Wikipedia editors were female. Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage females to become Wikipedia contributors. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology. Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, wrote in The New York Times that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly, is because identifying as a feminist may expose oneself to "ugly, intimidating behavior." Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.
Wikipedia has been described as harboring a battleground culture of sexism and harassment. The perceived toxic attitudes and tolerance of violent and abusive language are also reasons put forth for the gender gap in Wikipedia editors. In 2014, a female editor who requested a separate space on Wikipedia to discuss improving civility had her proposal referred to by a male editor using the words;
"the easiest way to avoid being called a cunt is not to act like one".
Nevertheless . . .
In 2017–18, after a barrage of false news reports, both Facebook and YouTube announced they would rely on Wikipedia to help their users evaluate reports and reject false news.
Noam Cohen, writing in The Washington Post states:
"YouTube’s reliance on Wikipedia to set the record straight builds on the thinking of another fact-challenged platform, the Facebook social network, which announced last year that Wikipedia would help its users root out 'fake news'."In answer to the question of 'how engaged are visitors to the site?' Alexa records the daily pageviews per visitor as 3.10 and the daily time on site as 4.11 minutes.
On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had Wikipedia's growth flattened, but that it "had lost nearly 10 per cent of its page views last year. There was a decline of about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by 12 per cent, those of German version slid by 17 per cent and the Japanese version lost 9 per cent."
Varma added that, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users." When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Security indicated that he suspected much of the page view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]."
By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked fifth in the most popular websites globally below Google at the top, YouTube in second place, Facebook in third place and Baidu in fourth place.
Vandalism in the commons
There is a Wikipedia page that lists the most vandalized pages on Wikipedia. Some of these pages are so regularly and frequently vandalized as to require some protection.
One of these "protected pages" is Criticism of Wikipedia.
Protecting the commons
Protecting the commons, to the extent that, what we might call such "spaces", spaces that exist in both physical and social terms, and in information technology, the so-called digital world, is not going to be straightforward or easy. The examples we may find of various socio-political histories and geographies of the physical commons in parts of England and Wales, and in other movements across the world, resistance movements to accumulation by disposession.
Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey, which defines the neoliberal capitalist policies in many western nations, from the 1970s and to the present day, as resulting in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public and private entities of their wealth or land. These neoliberal policies are guided mainly by four practices: privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions.
David Harvey sets out his theory on accumulation by disposession in this lecture you can see on YouTube.
This theory remains highly productive, and this includes the stimulus to the analysis of some of those critical of the theory and the consequent debate that this theory has provoked. For example:
There is a pdf accessible on the internet by Michael Levien that analyses the concept of primitive accumulation, including references to Marx and Rosa Luxemburg in relation to David Harvey's work, activism and thinking:
From Primitive Accumulation to Regimes of Dispossession: Six Theses on India’s Land Question
Saving Wandsworth Common
Philip Courtenay, the artist creating this blog, grew up in Battersea and Wandsworth when much of this area was a place of industry, and housing for working families. From the age of three, in 1952, he lived in the family house on the edge of Wandsworth Common. Wandsworth Common was a place to play, be free, be in contact with nature, walk the dog, escape. So, thanks to the campaigners of Wandsworth and Battersea who were able, during the 1860's create a movement to protect what was left of the common, and resulted in The Wandsworth Common Act of 1871. The common is now preserved for posterity and, ironically, for the benefit of the relatively wealthy residents who can afford the multi-million pound properties in this area, walking their dogs and pushing their prams.
The link below looks at resistances to the phenomenon of dispossession from the rights of access to the commons, and how this history of resistance shaped radical thinking.
Down with fences!
Protecting the digital commons
One possible upshot from Actor-network theory is the understanding by ANT that it is the continued and frequent use of connections in a communication network that assures that those connections become relatively durable, robust even, in the wider context of flux and instability within the general system as a whole. So, using material in the context of the digital commons contributes, potentially, to the sustainability of public and free access to common digital resources in what is generally a hostile environment. As far as the private forces that are constantly at work to accumulate as much of this digital world as possible, and by dispossession as much as acquisition or invention, the creative digital commons represents one guarantee at least, against the formation of vast scale monopolistic and private control systems for all the shifting networks of relationship going on at any one time within the totality of the information environment itself.
Actor–network theory (ANT) is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationship. It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans.
ANT holds that social forces do not exist in themselves, and therefore cannot be used to explain social phenomena. Instead, strictly empirical analysis should be undertaken to "describe" rather than "explain" social activity.
The fundamental aim of ANT is to explore how networks are built or assembled and maintained to achieve a specific objective. Although it is best known for its controversial insistence on the capacity of nonhumans to act or participate in systems or networks or both, ANT is also associated with forceful critiques of conventional and critical sociology. Developed by science and technology studies (STS) scholars Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, the sociologist John Law, and others, it can more technically be described as a "material-semiotic" method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic.
Rights of access and rights of use in the digital information environment.
Digital rights landscape
In 2005, the United Kingdom's Open Rights Group published a digital rights landscape, documenting the range of organizations and people active in the cause of preserving digital rights. The diagram related groups, individuals, and websites to interest areas.
Global Network Initiative
On October 29, 2008 the Global Network Initiative (GNI) was founded upon its "Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy". The Initiative was launched in the 60th Anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and is based on internationally recognized laws and standards for human rights on freedom of expression and privacy set out in the UDHR, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Participants in the Initiative include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, other major companies, human rights NGOs, investors, and academics.m
Internet access and Human Rights at the UN
The 88 recommendations made by the Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in a May 2011 report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly include several that bear on the question of Internet access:
67. Unlike any other medium, the Internet enables individuals to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds instantaneously and inexpensively across national borders. By vastly expanding the capacity of individuals to enjoy their right to freedom of opinion and expression, which is an "enabler" of other human rights, the Internet boosts economic, social and political development, and contributes to the progress of humankind as a whole. In this regard, the Special Rapporteur encourages other Special Procedures mandate holders to engage on the issue of the Internet with respect to their particular mandates.
78. While blocking and filtering measures deny users access to specific content on the Internet, States have also taken measures to cut off access to the Internet entirely. The Special Rapporteur considers cutting off users from Internet access, regardless of the justification provided, including on the grounds of violating intellectual property rights law, to be disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
79. The Special Rapporteur calls upon all States to ensure that Internet access is maintained at all times, including during times of political unrest.
85. Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all States. Each State should thus develop a concrete and effective policy, in consultation with individuals from all sections of society, including the private sector and relevant Government ministries, to make the Internet widely available, accessible and affordable to all segments of population.These recommendations have led to the suggestion that Internet access itself is or should become a fundamental human right.
What is the Creative Commons?
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.
What is the Electronic Frontier Foundation?
EFF provides funds for legal defense in court, presents amicus curiae briefs, defends individuals and new technologies from what it considers abusive legal threats, works to expose government malfeasance, provides guidance to the government and courts, organizes political action and mass mailings, supports some new technologies which it believes preserve personal freedoms and online civil liberties, maintains a database and web sites of related news and information, monitors and challenges potential legislation that it believes would infringe on personal liberties and fair use and solicits a list of what it considers abusive patents with intentions to defeat those that it considers without merit.
The internet and breaking barriers to accessing knowledge
