Module Website

A quick reminder that this week's lecture slides and next week's reading can be found on the week-by-week section of the module website.

Bill Gates Calls For a Kinder 'Creative Capitalism'

Full story in the Wall Street Journal.

New Media vs Old

A few short years ago, 'read a good daily newspaper everyday' was a major piece of advice given to people studying degrees in social policy & social science. Such advice seems increasingly outdated. Do any of you regularly buy a paper? I feel I ought to, but even when I do, truth is I've already read most of the stories I am interested in on the paper's web version and have often done so 24 hours before I get my hands on a print version.

So where does this leave the old news media? Some papers have tried to charge for access to their online content, but that hasn't proved successful in the main. The New York Times (NYT), arguably the USA's best broadsheet, invested a lot of its hopes in this approach, but recently relented and made all their copy available free of charge from September of 2007. It turned out that charging just meant many people got their news from elsewhere and not only did NYT miss out on readers they also lost potential web based advertising revenue. For some pundits, NYT's move marked the death knell of the paid content model.

Yet, even with its increased advertising revenues from its new website, NYT is in trouble and some are asking questions about its long term future. Some think it could be that Google might look to buy NYT at some point in the near future. That would have been completely unthinkable ten years ago. Aside from the fact that the NYT is one of the most famous newspapers in the world, Google was little more than a handful of programmers helping people access the relatively new world wide web back then. Now, of course, Google is a giant global company and the main question for those who worked at Google in the early days is 'What should I do now I am a multi-millionaire?'.

If Google does buy NYT it will powerfully illustrate that some fundamental changes in the economy have been unleashed by the web.

Britain classed as "Endemic Surveillance Society" - worst in Europe

Theres a great study done on different surveillance societies. Ive included the map, heres the link for the abstract of it :http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-559597

The full report is almost too comprehensive...

Can Facebook be trusted?

OK, here's a topic to start us off. I am guessing that most people in the class are members of Facebook or something like it. Obviously it was one of the tech success stories of 2007 and the guys who set it up are now worth millions.

If you are a user, I guess chances are you take the service for granted: it's free, easy to use and a good way of keeping in touch with people.

But, some people are starting to question the service:

1. There are worries about user privacy. Recently, Facebook's Beacon advertising service caused a storm when (mainly USA based) users found that, without real warning, their profile and news feed started to display details of goods purchased from unrelated stores (e.g. recent movies rented or CDs bought). Beacon has now been changed so that people have to opt-in, rather than opt-out, but does this suggest that Facebook are playing fast-and-loose with their users' privacy?
   
2. There are concerns over who owns the data on Facebook. Social networking guru Robert Scoble was at the centre of a massive debate on tech blogs a few weeks back when Facebook banned him from the service for trying to export the contact details of his Facebook friends. Facebook said the data was theirs, not his, even though they were his friends. Does this seem right?
   
3. Which links with concerns about access to the service. There are some reports of people being banned from the service for little reason. If you can't export your friends' contact details, yet Facebook can ban you at any moment, is it prudent to use the service as key way of staying in touch with people?
4. And, on top of all this, it seems that spammers and fraudsters are increasingly attracted to the service. Is it not just too risky to be place so much personal information in the public domain?

A bit of devil's advocate here, perhaps, but some valid concerns too. Certainly some are valid enough to interest the government: the Information Commissioner's Office is investigating Facebook's data protection policies at present.

So, can Facebook be trusted? If you've some thoughts, leave them in the comments section below or feel free to start your own post.

Class Presentations

In the first session we allocated class presentations for the module. These are the dates and titles we agreed (or, if you were not present, that were randomly allocated). Let me know as soon as possible if there is a problem with your date or title.

Week 3:

• Virtual Seminar Round-Up: Andrew Godfrey
  
• Why does Florida think that, in the new economy, the creative class are the key to economic success? Matthew Mann
  
• What policies might cities/regions introduce in order to attract ‘creative class’ workers? Adam Formby
  

Week 4:

• Virtual Seminar Round-Up: Jorge Ribeiro
  
• Did the Blair government’s plans to make all services available electronically make a difference? Jangwon Seo
  
• Would it be better for the government to focus on e-democracy rather than e-services? Adam Lawson
  

Week 5:

• Virtual Seminar Round-Up: Tarek Allouni
  
• What is the digital divide? Ed Barden
  
• Should we be concerned by low levels of internet use amongst the socially excluded? Lin Li
• Is the One Laptop Per Child project misguided? Hyunguck Seo
  

Week 6:

• Virtual Seminar Round-Up: Adam Lawson
  
• What does Perri 6 mean when he talks of people being ‘divided by information’? Jorge Ribeiro
  
• What do Burrows et al mean when they say that internet based neighbourhood information systems (IBNIS) are 'being used to ‘sort’ places and the people who live in them in particular ways'? Sofia Benza Lezcano
  

Week 7:

• Virtual Seminar Round-Up: Adam Formby
  
• Will the internet increase the level of crime in society? Andrew Godfrey
  
• Should we be worried about the prospect of cyberterrorism? Tarek Allouni
  

Week 8:

• Virtual Seminar Round-Up: Hyunguck Seo
  

Week 2 Lecture Slides

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Welcome

Welcome to the State, Technology & Social Policy Class Blog.

This blog is an attempt to:

• foster engagement with an increasingly important form of internet mediated communication (i.e. blogging)
• take discussion out of the class room and onto the web in order to help us to exploit the vast range of module relevant materials in cyberspace
• boost your control over the agenda of the module itself by having an open forum whose content influences our weekly face-to-face meetings and end of term conference

There are two key ways you can interact with the blog:

1. Create altogether new posts -- if you've found a good resource, a news story or just have something you want to say then log-in and click new post link (you can click the link here to take you straight there or the new post link on the module home page or on the sidebar of the blog itself)
2. Add comments to posts by others -- if you want to respond or add to something someone else has said that click the comments link at the foot of their message. You can do all the same things here as in a normal post - leave links etc - but the message will appear underneath the same heading and help readers to see that the two posts are connected.

If you're new to blogging it may take a few posts to get used to this, but I am hoping it won't take long for you all to become comfortable with the process. If you're feeling a bit lost or just want to learn more about the blog's features then try the help pages.