searchandresearch – Scholarship

Search & Research

Protections for intermediaries from liability for users’ content are necessary to a vibrant, innovative Internet. These legal protections allow Internet access providers, content hosts, social networks, and others to support a robust online environment for free expression without worrying about potential liability for the material stored on or moving across their networks. Without them, services would be much less willing to accept user-generated content for fear of potential civil and criminal liability. Center for Democracy and Technology Definition

The Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Wikimedia Policy pages both speak openly and in support of intermediary non-liability. The aim is an exchange of ideas; materials shared across the internet. In the US, and Europe specific laws or sections of acts are essential for creating this environment Section 512 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act (CDA Section 230), and the EU E-Commerce Directive are essential to ensuring to allowing isp, hosts, and social media to waive editorial responsibility. I find it interesting as well that Wikimedia keeps track of and publishes openly any take down notices it executes on. I do respect it as a kind of shareholder accountability, less fiscal and more socially responsible.

One article offers that “generally” Brazil, Russia, China, Thailand, and India have similar approaches to the matter.

Among the reports’ most positive findings, Bakhmetyeva said, is that the five countries generally do not hold internet intermediaries liable for unlawful content posted by users unless they knew about the content and failed to remove it. Most countries usually grant online service providers immunity, referred to as “safe harbor,” provided they comply with certain rules and remove problematic content quickly.Liability of internet ‘intermediaries’ in developing countries

I was struck by the analogy offered in this article by a journalist. Saying that holding internet intermediaries responsible for content is like holding the post office responsible for content. I also think it is fascinating once we get past the democracy, and creativity arguments and explore the potential economic impact of moving away from this model.

Requiring platforms to screen content hurts the entire U.S. economy.
Emerging technology businesses are driving economic growth in the UnitedStates. Placing more onerous requirements on internet services would decrease U.S. GDP by an estimated $44 billion and eliminate more than 425,000 jobs each year. That would be equivalent to giving away the annual GDP of Iceland, Jamaica, and Nicaragua combined and firing all McDonald’s workers in the U.S. Internet Safe Harbors: The Laws That Protect Speech & Creativity

When I read this, I understand a lot better why the US and Europe have the legislative protection it does. It also helps me figure out why countries like Brazil, Russia, China, India, and Thailand have at least the spirit of the laws. The economic multiplier is huge and no self-respecting government is going to get in the way of that economic engine for the sake of vague ideals.

Sources

Internet Safe Harbors: The Laws That Protect Speech & Creativity

The Center for Internet and Society: Intermediary Liability

Intermediary Liability in the United States

Liability of internet ‘intermediaries’ in developing countries

Wikimedia Policy Intermediary Liability

Liability of Online Intermediaries: New Study by the Global Network of Internet and Society Centers

Your Choice Assignments: Search & Research

Technological Somnambulism

Definition:

Langdon Winner seems to develop a McLuhanian concern about the value-free quality of tools; he as well questions technological determinism. Versions of determinism as defined in Wikipedia:

Hard determinists would view technology as developing independently from social concerns. They would say that technology creates a set of powerful forces acting to regulate our social activity and its meaning. According to this view of determinism, we organize ourselves to meet the needs of technology and the outcome of this organization is beyond our control or we do not have the freedom to make a choice regarding the outcome (autonomous technology)….
Soft determinism, as the name suggests, is a more passive view of the way technology interacts with socio-political situations. Soft determinists still subscribe to the fact that technology is the guiding force in our evolution, but would maintain that we have a chance to make decisions regarding the outcomes of a situation. This is not to say that free will exists, but that the possibility for us to roll the dice and see what the outcome exists….

“For the interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” (107). Winner offers several reasons that we take our technology for granted. One is the “tool” metaphor that we employ in speaking and thinking about technology. We pick it up and use it and put it down. Second is the disconnection between making and consuming technology. Third, is the illusion that technology creates new worlds in which we inhabit. The second is fascinating and particularly right with our new seduction and fascination with communications technology. The internet and my cell phone are tools beyond my keen. Whereas, I have used a forge to make a simple but useful pot hanger for cooking with a dutch oven suspended above a fire. I have knapped stone to craft a quick and dirty serrated knife. Turning back to the first the moral argument we attach to our technologies divorces them from any implicit ethical values, rather we say, this knife can be used well to cut bread or used poorly to harm a person. We rarely think beyond that statement.

From this point of view, the important question about technology becomes, As we “make things work,” what kind of world are we making? This suggests that we pay attention not only to the making of physical instruments and processes, although that certainly remains important, but also to the production of psychological, social, and political conditions as a part of any significant technical change. Are we going to design and build circumstances that enlarge possibility for growth in human freedom, sociability, intelligence, creativity, and self-government? Or are we heading an altogether different direction?(112)

So, for me, “technological somnambulism” represents the negative phrasing of the positive values entailed in notions of “appropriate technology” or perhaps said better is that taken together we can probably make better choices about our technological adoptions and applications. Wikipedia offers this first definition of appropriate technology, “Appropriate technology is an ideological movement (and its manifestations) encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally autonomous.”

I stumbled on a fascinating use of the online resource Quizlet. Langdon Winner, “Technologies as Forms of Life” a short set of flashcards that captures ideas in the article. In truth, it does not cover what I consider all of the key and crucial ideas but is still a fun little resource.

I also stumbled on a previous ED 654 student’s blog posting on the topic, and Chris’s comments as well. Sarah Kessler-Frick explores the question here. Her blog post is dated in as much as some of her linked material no longer connects. But she wrestles with the same fundamental ideas.

References

Appropriate Technology. (27 May 2017)In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 29, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology

Kessler-Frick, Sarah. “Technological Somnambulism” EdHeadEd accessed May 29, 2017.

Technological Somnambulism. (5 January 2017). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 29, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_somnambulism

Technological Determinism, (16 May 2017). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 29,2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism

Winner, L. Technologies as Forms of Life. in Readings in the Philosophy of Technology., ed. David Kaplan Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, pp. 103-113.

searchandresearch

Your Choice Assignments: Search & Research

Digital Humanities

Just having completed Skip Via’s ED 677 Digital Storytelling class, it made sense to start with this topic.

Definition:

Bryan Alexander offers a working definition: “Simply put, it is telling stories with digital technologies. Digital stories are narratives built from the stuff of cyberculture” (Alexander, 2010, Loc 110 of 3318). I think there is a subtle difference between these two sentences. The first sentence is broadly inclusive. And so content creators who purchase a sailboat and document their adventures online and content creators who stream MMO gameplay are both engaged in digital storytelling according to the first sentence. Alexander’s second sentence I think modifies the first, focusing the definition on being more exclusively online, “stuff of cyberculture.” I think this turn privileges the MMO streamer’s story. This is a turn with which I do not easily resonate. Rather, it is our shifting back and forth between our online selves and our embodied selves that describe this historic moment for humanity. Perhaps in a few years with AI and robotics have lightened the burden of our embodied selves we will have a fuller sense of entirely digital humanities.

Pausing, because my undergraduate degree is in humanities it seems reasonable to ask what that meant previously? “Humanities” were those fields of inquiry other than math, science and social science. So for example, poetry, painting, theater, and writing both essay and creative, were some of the inquiries that traditionally informed the “humanities.” Hence, why I at the outset reached back to the storytelling of last semester. In summary, these were inquiries that tried to make sense of our human being. And, that detail, I think is why I hold out for a notion of digital humanities at this time that explores our shifting between online and embodied selves.

That said, it is prescient and relevant to anticipate a future where we live almost entirely online. Celebrating Alexander’s foresight, we can begin to predict a “digital humanities built from the stuff of cyberculture.” I recall studying, in the 1990’s, with an artist who was using fractal geometry to create images, or perhaps to let a computer create images, original each of them. His struggle to define “art” at that moment was interesting, but taking it the next turn, what happens when computers refer to images constructed by computers to craft subsequent images? When humans view these images what impact might that have on our person? The computers lack emotion, certainly, AI may become sophisticated enough as to offer us a convincing simulation but that is not the same thing as passion or desperation or any other distinctly human trait. Will we use our unburdening to become distinctly human, or will we just consume and gradually retreat from our human being?

The Wikipedia article on Digital Humanities is particularly useful in term of its “values and methods” section. If we are going to define something as “new” part of that newness necessarily needs be methods, for the postmodernist in me, I love the blurring that is implicated in these methods, for example, one tells a story, and is at once writing literary criticism as well. Treating programming languages as languages and discovering the poetry in them is fascinating as well, as examples.

Historically the arts are driven by patrons and donors, and happily, we see that the National Endowment for the Humanities has a subsite devoted to the Digital Humanities. The Office of Digital Humanities despite its unfortunately glum name offers access to grant funding and a wealth of information about projects and research.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education provides both a catalog of resources and debate around the relative accessibility of digital humanities as a turn in one’s professional scholarship. One might say that this article is itself a practice in digital humanities since it curates other catalog’s of resources as well. It is a criticism/observation of higher education’s moment.

centerNet is an international resource for digital humanities scholars. It catalogs the locations of centers of study around the world.

The online journal “Digital Humanities Quarterly” has been published since 2007, they describe themselves saying, ” open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.” A quick review of recent articles shows a pretty even split on doing digital humanities and on methodological self-reflexion as one would expect from a youthful cluster of research.

Digital Humanities although a commonplace in higher education and academic libraries is perhaps less ubiquitous a notion among the general public. This article again captures the unsettled moment in higher education. Interestingly reporting on an MLA presentation from a community college professor simultaneously advocating for digital humanities and celebrating how the lack of funding at her home institution forces her to be precise in her disciplinary practice. Other comments point to the joint practicing of scholarship by professors and students, changes in publishing, the article ends with a salute to the media literacy that grows out of digital humanities scholarship offering that as a pretty good reason to be involved on its own.

I think these articles were interesting because my approach to Digital Humanities was focused on what ordinary people were doing online with SoundCloud, Storify, YouTube for examples. I was thinking about the production of music, art, and storytelling, not about the scholarship of and around those activities. The scholarship, however, does an interesting thing to our traditional notion of humanities because the practices blur some of the clear lines between social science and humanities or math and humanities and that is fascinating.

References

Alexander, B. (2011). The new digital storytelling: Creating narratives with new media. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger.

Digital Humanities. (2017, Jan. 26). In Wikipedia. Retrieved May 28, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

Bessette, L.S. (March 14, 2017).Digital Humanities Training Opportunities and Challenges, In The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved May 28, 2017, http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/digital-humanities-training-opportunities-and-challenges/63709

Fenton, W. (JANUARY 13, 2017). Digital Humanities: The Most Exciting Field You’ve Never Heard Of, In PC Mag. Retrieved May 28, 2017, http://www.pcmag.com/commentary/350984/digital-humanities-the-most-exciting-field-youve-never-hea