FRS 127: Sex, Money and Rock and Roll: Information Technology and Society

 

Paul DiMaggio                                      David Dobkin

                  Sociology Department                                     Dean of the Faculty and

                                                                                         Computer Science Department

dimaggio@princeton.edu                                         dpd@cs.princeton.edu

 

Princeton University

Fall Semester 2005/2006

 

The aim of this seminar is to combine the perspectives of computer science and the social sciences to equip students with the expertise necessary to participate in the critical policy debates with which the U.S. and other societies are faced by the rise of the Internet as a major medium of communications and information.   Through a combination of readings, discussion, and hands-on activity, you will be encouraged, for each of the policy dilemmas that we confront, to a) identify the values that are at stake;  b) clarify your own positions on these values; c) understand the range of technological solutions that constrain or facilitate different policy approaches; and d) understand the social and value implications of dif­ferent policy prescript­ions.  What makes this course very different from all but a handful of courses on the Internet offered at universities throughout the world, is that we are committed to providing both kinds of tools one needs to address such quest­ions: the computer science that lies behind the policy issues and the social science required to understand the technology’s human impact.

 

Assignments, class lists, and other course-related paraphernalia will be available at the course web page, which you can reach through www.frs127.org.   To distribute materials, use the class e-list: everyone@frs127.org.   You are required to purchase only one book: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig.   This is available at Micawber Books (at 110-14 Nassau Street, across from the University).  (Please note: Ask for this book from behind the counter.  It is NOT with the other course books in the basement.)  Other readings will be available on line or will be distributed.

 

Evaluation will be on the basis of: (a) Participation in seminar meetings (attendance is required); (b) timely completion of assignments; and (c) Completion of a research paper of at least 15 pages on a public policy issue related to the Internet.   There will be no mid-term or final examination (but we will meet during the exam period to share the results of the research projects). 

 


Session 1 (Sept. 20): Technology in Historical Perspective

 

Readings to finish before class:  

1. Manuel Castells. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001.  Pp. 9-35: “Lessons from the History of the Internet.” 

2. Paul Starr. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. Pp. 83-111, “America’s First Information Revolution.” 

3. Claude S. Fischer.  American Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.  Pp. 60-85: “Educating the Public” and pp. 175-92: “Becoming Commonplace.”

4. “Ten Years that Changed the World.”  Wired Magazine’s recap of the history of the Internet, from Netscape to Wonkette (August 2005).  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html

5. William Shaw. 2001. “In Helsinki Virtual Village.”  Wired  9.03 (March 2001). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/helsinki.html

 

 

In class: 

Pt. 1: Orientation and introductions

Pt. 2: The history of technology – 3 points and a few examples

Pt. 3: Computers and Internet technology in particular – 3 more points.

           

Pt. 4: Changing technology:  News and Telephones in the 21st Century

Pt. 5: Show Museum of Media History, history of the media through 2014 program:  http://www.lightover.com/epic/ols-master.html

Pt. 6: Technologies and human values: What should we ask of the Internet?

Pt. 7: What is inside of a computer box?

Pt. 8: How to set up a blog.  Visit http://daviddobkin.blogspot.com and read the entry from September 9.

 

Paul’s lecture notes on Technology

Notes on the class discussion of values

For next time: Set up blogs and write first entry (on readings for Sept. 27). 

 

*     *     *

 

Session 2 (Sept. 27).  The Internet, Public Policy, and Social Choice

 

Readings to finish before classs:

1. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Pp. 1-108.

2. Marcia Smith et al. “Internet: An Overview of Key Technology Policy Issues Affecting its Use and Growth.” (41 pp.) Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress.  Updated April 13, 2005. http://www.usembassy.it/pdf/other/98-67.pdf 

3. Here are web sites from several organizations that are concerned with public policies that concern or affect the Internet.  Browse a few of these sites and note some differences in what different organizations view as the most important issues.

American Civil Liberties Union: http://www.aclu.org/Cyber-Liberties/Cyber-Libertieslist.cfm?c=59

Center for Democracy and Technology: http://www.cdt.org/

Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/tech/

Electronic Frontier Foundation: http://action.eff.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ADV_homepage

Public Knowledge: http://www.publicknowledge.org/

U.S. Chamber of Commerce. http://www.uschamber.com/issues/index/technology/default

 

In class:

Pt. 1 --  Discusson of Lessig – How people build values into technology

Pt. 2 --  Policy issues: Introduction to the policy agenda: (Dimaggio's  Lecture notes)

            Common carriage vs. selectivity (Brand X case)

                Is file-sharing inherently illegal? (Grokster Case)

                Laws regarding blogging

[d1]

 Pt. 3 – Introduction to code (Dobkin’s Lecture notes)

Pt. 4 – Politics and social choice  (Dimaggio's  Lecture notes)

Pt. 5 – Discussion of blogging

 

For next time:  Write 2 page prospectus for term project (what question you will answer and what you will do to answer it, with a concrete list of tasks and a schedule for completing them).  (Both instructors will be available for meetings throughout the week.)  If you aren’t sure what you want to write on, spend some time with collection of policy-related materials (news articles, reports, etc.) available at the course web site.  (Put your draft on your blog.)

 

*     *     *

 

Session 3 (Oct. 4 ) :  Code – Open and Closed  (NB this class will have to be rescheduled)

 

Readings to finish before class: 

1.      Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, pp. 1-65 (“The Cathedral and the Bazaar”) and pp. 113-66 (“The Magic Cauldron”).  Or read online at:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/      and

 http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/

 

2. Yochai Benkler, “The Battle over the Institutional Ecosystem in the Digital Environment.” Communications of the ACM 44 (2), pp. 84-90 (February 2001).

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359235&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=1297399&CFTOKEN=49580941#FullTexthttp://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359235&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=1297399&CFTOKEN=49580941#FullText

 

3.  Visit http://www.scipionus.com/ -- Hurrican Katrina emergency wiki, enables people to pool information by putting pins on a regional map…

 

4.  Daniel Pink, “The Book Starts Here.”  Wired 12:3 (March 2005).  About Wikipedia.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html

Visit the Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/

 

5. Julian Dibbell, “We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin.” Wired 12:11 (November 2004) – on Brazil’s embrace of open source. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/linux.html?pg=2&topic=linux&topic_set=

 

6. “The Power of Us: Mass Collaboration on the Internet is Shaking up Business.”  Business Week. (June 20, 2005).  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938601.htm

 

In class:

Pt. 1 – Recap on last week’s meeting and discussion of Raymond and open code reading

Pt. 2 – Technical aspects of open code software development

Pt. 3 – Where and how Internet policy gets made

Pt. 4 – Discussion of term project ideas

 

For next time:

1. Technology b/log --- Make a log of your use of information and communication technologies dur­ing any weekday.  Each time you use an information or communication technology (other than your body and voice in f-to-f communication), write down what you did, when and how long you did it, and why you did it.  Put the list on your blog.

2. Visit at least three highly interactive  web sites (e.g. Facebook, Friendster,  moveon.com, match.com, computer gaming networks, E-Bay, Neopets, or websites of your choice)  and think about how each one operates – What is the incentive to participate?  What mechanisms increase commitment?  What, if any, business plan keeps the website going?  Be prepared to talk about these in class.  

*     *     *

 

Session 4: Networks and Network Technologies (Oct. 11)

 

Readings to finish before class:

1. Mark Buchanan. 2002. Nexus: Small World and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks. (New York: Norton).  Pp. 23-60 and 73-89. 

2. Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian. 1999. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, pp. 3-17.

3. Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, Ric Friedman and Ko Kuwabara. “Reputation Systems.” Communications of the ACM 43 (December 2000)): 45-48.

4. Howard Rheingold. 2005. “Technologies of Cooperation.” Report to the Institute for the Future. http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/Technology_of_cooperation.pdf

 

In class: 

Pt. 1. The art and science of networks: small worlds, network externalities, reputation and insurance effects.

Pt. 2.  Varieties of physical networks: How the Internet moves information.

Pt. 3. How you manage your networks (discussion of tech logs).

Pt. 4.  How design choices influence how technology helps you manage your networks.

Pt. 5. Network effects on the Internet (discussion of networking site visits).

Pt. 6. Presentation of search engine assignment for next week (distribute materials & search terms)

 

For next time: Web business model exercise.  4. Read business plan/annual report/press reports for your search engine.  Be prepared to report in class on the following: Within what universe of web pages does your search engine search and how does it identify those web pages?  On what basis does it rank hits?  Who owns the company? What is the company’s business strategy?  Is it working?   For each of three search terms (distributed in seminar last week) report on number of hits and print out the top 20.

 

*     *     *

 

Session 5: The Business of Cyberspace:  (Oct. 18)

Readings to finish before class:

 Eszter Hargittai. 2000. “Open portals or closed gates?  Channeling content on the World Wide Web.” Poetics. 27: 233-253. Download .pdf version from http://www.princeton.edu/~eszter/portals.html

            “The Complete Guide to Googlemania.”  Various authors. Wired 12: 3 (March 2004). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=

            Gary Wolf, “The Great Library of Amazonia.” Wired December 2003: 216-20.

            Josh McHugh, 13:09 (November 2005). “The Supernetwork. Why Yahoo will be the Center of the Million-Channel Universe.” http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/yahoo.html?pg=2&topic=yahoo&topic_set=

            Ly Fie Sugianto and Sen Sendjaya. “Business Models in the Digital Economy.” 7th International Conference on Global Business and Economic Development. Bangkok, Thailand, 2003.

http://blake.montclair.edu/~cibconf/conference/DATA/Theme7/Australia.pdf

        Ju-Yong Ha, Steven Dick and Seung Kwan Ryu. “Broadcast via the Internet: Technology, Market, and the Future.” Trends in Communications 11(2):155-68. http://www.leaonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/S15427439TC1102_06

            Rodney Rothman. “My Fake Job.” New Yorker, November 27, 2000. Account of life in a NY Internet startup by comedy writer who walked in and announced that he was a project manager from the Chicago office.  Life in the fastlane of the Internet boom. (The firm was Luminant.  Rothman apparently engaged in some embroidery.) http://www.abdot.net/dle/nyt-nov2000.html

 

 

In class:

Pt. 1:  A brief history of the Internet bubble, with some web pages from the era (courtesy the Wayback Machine – www.archive.org). 

Pt. 2:  Aspects of business plans: Intellectual property/DMCA; Disintermediation; Tracking, cookies and privacy; Attracting and keeping eyeballs; Advertising and business plans; common carriage vs. cable convergence; Failed plans: Owning people (AOL) and Pets.com, webvan.com

Pt. 3:  What are the values that public policy should seek to nurture in dealing with commercial­ization of the Web?

Pt. 4:  Search engines: In-class demonstration and discussion of results of search-engine/portal research OR discussion of big four business plans…

 

For next time: Just do the readings and blog on them.

 

 

*     *     *

 

Session 6: Intellectual Property on the Internet (Oct. 25)

Visit from Clayton Marsh of Princeton University General Counsel’s Office

 

Readings to finish before class: 

Lawrence Lessig, Code, Chapter 10. 

 

Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka. “Amateur-to-Amateur.”46 William and Mary Law Review 951 (Forthcoming, December 2005). http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601808

 

 Read summary of Digital Millenium Copyright Act provided by the U.S. Copyright Office.  www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf

You may also want to read or skim the legislation itself, which you can find at:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/t2GPO/http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=105_cong_bills&docid=f:h2281enr.txt.pdf

or at http://anti-dmca.org/index.html, an anti-DMCA site which provides one-stop center for downloading the legislation, court cases about the legislation and related materials.  Also see http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php (“Unintended Consequences: 5 Years Under the DMCA” – list of actions and cases).

 

Atlantic Recording Corporation et al. v. Daniel Peng (U>S. District Ct. for New Jersey, Civil No. 03-1441 (SRC), “Complaint for Direct and Contributory Copyright Infringement” http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/riaa/arcopeng40303njcmp.pdf

 

John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace.” http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

 

Edward W. Felton, “Googleocracy in Action,” http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000509.html.

 

Ben Greenman, “The Mouse that Remixed.” The New Yorker Feb. 9, 2004, p. 24ff. www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040209ta_talk_greenman

 

Lauren Gitlin, “Jay-Z Meets the Beatlers: DJ Mixes Two Albums into One Clasic,” Rolling Stone  2/19/04 p. 18 http://www.rollingstone.com/mews/story?id=5937152

 

Clive Thompson, “The Bittorrent Effect,” Wired   14:1 (January 2005: 151-53, 178-79);

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html?pg=4

 

Jeff Howe, “The Shadow Internet,” Wired  13: 1 (January 2005: 155-59).  Inside film pirating networks.  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html?pg=3

 

Read Creative Commons license – copyleft (noncommercial version) -- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/

 

Here are two important cases, which you may want to look at at some point.

 MGM v. Grokster.  The case in which the Supreme Court declared technologies that permit incidental sharing of copyrighted materials liable for damages.  http://fairuse.stanford.edu/MGM_v_Grokster.pdf

 

Eldred v. Ashcroft 537 U.S. 186 (2003).  Lessig and a cast of thousands argued that the extent to which Congress had extended copyright was a violation of constitutional principles.  The S.C. agreed that Congress was unwise, but didn’t agree that they had violated the Constitution.   http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/search/display.html?terms=ashcroft&url=/supct/html/01-618.ZS.html

           

In class:

Pt. 1: Technical issues – Napster v. KaZaa and beyond – MP3s, protocols, client servers vs. peer to peer, broadband, and technical issues bearing on convergence.

Pt. 2: A brief history of sampling: Dali’s Mona Lisa; William Burroughs and cut-up prose; Warhol and pop art; DJ Cool Herc and refashioning tunes for dancing through sampling and remixes; fan sites; the Death of the Author: Art as Process

Pt. 3: With Clayton Marsh: DMCA – what does it do and does it do the right things?  Does it embody the right values? What are its unanticipated consequences (for public goods? for free expression? etc.).   Will the Internet turn into cable TV? Would that be a bad thing?

For next time: Prepare final version of research-paper proposal and post on blog.  

*     *     *

 

Week 7: Digital Divide (Nov. 8)

1. Readings: 

 

Eszter Hargittai, “Informed Web Surfing,” Pp. 257-74 in Society Online: The Internet in Context, ed. Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones (Sage Publications, 2004).

 

Jan A.G.M. Van Dijk. 2005. The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society, pp. 181-217 (“Policy Perspectives”).

 

Sonia Arrison, “What Digital Divide?” C/Net News.Com, March 13, 2002, 4pm.  http://news.com.com/2010-1078-858537.html

 

Andrew Leigh and Robert D. Atkinson. 2001. “Clear Thinking on the Digital Divide.” PPI Policy Report, June 2001. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=%22clear+thinking+on+the+digital+divide%22

 

Community Wireless – Read About the Ongoing Effort to Wire Philadelphia

See articles archived at Wireless Philadelphia (the project web site): http://www.phila.gov/wireless/press.html

 

Larry Lessig, “Why Your Wireless Sucks.”  Wired 13:03 (March 2005).  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/view.html?pg=5 (read it or listen to the podcast of Lessig reading it to you)

 

2. Write down two empirical questions suggested by the readings (for example, things you wonder about what kinds of people do what kinds of things on the Internet), to try to answer in the last part of class.

 

In class:

Pt. 1 – Presentation and discussion of digital divide issues

Pt. 2 – Technological solutions to digital inequality – Large-scale wireless

Pt. 3 – Play with data on digital inequality

Pt. 4 – Set up team assignment on cyber-communities

 

Next time: Teams will study cyber-communities and report back on their blogs and in class next week.   How many web sites did you find? What kind? What are the patterns of interlinkages?  Is there a single community or a set of subcommunities? How commercial are the sites?  How up to date are the linkages? Is there a list-serve?  f you enter the list-serve do you get responses? Are there interactive spaces?  What sites are easiest to find on search engines?   

 

*     *     *

 

Week 8 – Internet and Community (Nov. 15)  (NOTE: This class will meet from 2:30-5:30)

Visit from Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup.Com.

 

1. Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman. 2003. “Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb.” City && Community 2:4 (Dec. 2003): 277-311.  

 

2. Cass Sunstein, “The Daily Me,” from Republic.Com. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press (on-line at http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/s7014.html). 

 

3. Review Lessig, Code, ch. 6 (“Cyberspace”), pp. 63-84.

 

4.      Chen, Y.-C., Chen, P., Song, R., and Korba, L.  Online Gaming Crime and Security Issue - Cases and Countermeasures from Taiwan.”  Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust. Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. October 13-15, 2004. NRC 47401. http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/iit-publications-iti/docs/NRC-47401.pdf.

 

5.      Johannes Hummel and Ulrike Lechner. “Social Profiles of Virtual Communities.” Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii Annual Conference on System Sciences, 2002. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/7798/21442/00994154.pdf

 

6.      Visit and explore the Meetup.Com site to see a successful model for using on-line tools to reinforce face-to-face community: http://www.meetup.com/

 

 

In class:

1. Report results of team projects.  Assignments are available here

 

2.  Introduction to technologies for building communities – e-mail, list serves, chat rooms, Amazon-type feedback systems, Web circles, other commercially induced communities

 

3.      Discussion of Wellman and presentation of other research on whether Internet is building or corroding community, trust, and social capital.

 

4.      Discussion with Scott Heiferman about Meetup.Com   

 

Next time:  Break into teams to develop policy proposals that (a) define problem and desirable goals  (b) describe values and tradeoffs among them and (c) put forward a policy solution, considering its impact on values.

 

*     *     *

 

 

 

Week 9 – The Dark Side of the Internet (Defending Children and Ourselves) (Nov. 22) 

Visit from Leslie Burger, President-Elect of the American Library Association and Director of the Princeton Public Library.

 

Readings to finish before class. 

 

Re Defending Children:

1. Pro: Jack Balkin et al. Filtering the Internet: A Best Practices Model http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/filtering/papers.html

 

2. Con: Marjorie Heins, Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report.   http://www.ncac.org/issues/internetfilters.html

 

Re: Defending Ourselves:

3.      R. Oscar Boykin and Vwani P. Roychowdhury, “Leveraging Social Networks to Fight Spam.”  Computer 38 (April 2005) : 61-68. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/2/30759/01432647.pdf?isnumber=30759&prod=JNL&arnumber=1432647&arSt=+61&ared=+68&arAuthor=Boykin%2C+P.O.%3B+Roychowdhury%2C+V.P.

 

4.  Neal Leavitt. “Mobile Phones: The Next Frontier for Hackers?” Computers 38 (April 2005): 20-23.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/2/30759/01432639.pdf?tp=&arnumber=1432639&isnumber=30759

 

5. Visit and browse Fraudwatch International for descriptions of leading Internet scams. http://www.fraudwatchinternational.com/internet/

 

In class:

Part 1.  Technical issues in phishing, viruses, worms, malware, adware etc. and methods for controlling them.

Part 2.  Presentation on library filtering policies.    

Part 3. Students present policy proposals on filtering.  Discussion.

 

Next time:  Go to Google Earth and find a picture of your home.  Then pick three people you know personally – a contemporary, someone in your parents’ generation, and someone about your grandparents’ age – and see how much you can learn about them on-line (without spending money).    Blog about what you learned, and about what might determine the extent of the on-line info that is available about someone. 

 

*     *     *

 

Week 10 – Privacy and Encryption (Nov. 29)

Readings to finish before class: 

 

1. Lessig, Code, ch. 11 (“Privacy”), pp. 142-63.

 

2. The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. U.S. Government Policy Report, February 2003. 76pp. (skim)  http://www.whitehouse.gov/pcipb/cyberspace_strategy.pdf

 

3. Agenda for the Next Administration: Proposals by the National Cybersecurity Industry Alliance. December 2004.  The cybersecurity industry doesn’t think that our government has gone far enough.  Here is what they recommend. (9pp.)

https://www.csialliance.org/resources/pdfs/Agenda_for_Next_Administration.pdf

 

4. National Infrastructure Advisory Council. 2004. Hardening the Internet: Final Report and Recommendations by the Council.  Department of Homeland Security, 28 pp. So the administration tries again.  http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NIAC_HardeningInternetPaper_Jan05.pdf

 

5. U.S. General Accounting Office. 2004.  Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04548.pdf.  12 pages + appendices. (The GAO is a nonpartisan Congressional staff agency that produces reports in response to requests from congressional committees.  It tells us what the feds are already doing.)

 

6.  Marcia S. Smith, “Internet Privacy: Overview and Pending Legislation,” Updated May 16, 2005. Congressional Research Service.  (What Congress is thinking of doing.) http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/35133.pdf.

*

7. What’s good for the goose, makes the gander mad…

Elinor Mills, “Google Balances Privacy, Reach.” C/Net News.com. July 14, 2005. http://news.com.com/Google+balances+privacy%2C+reach/2100-1032_3-5787483.html

Saul Hansell, “Google Gets `Googled,’ and Irritated.” E-Commerce Times. August 9, 2005. http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/45333.html

 

Optional reading:

8. K.A. Taipele. “Technology, Security and Privacy: The Fear of Frankenstein, the Mythology of Privacy and the Lesson of King Ludd.” International Journal of Communications Law and Policy, Issue 9 (Winter 2004-05):4-102.

http://www.digital-law.net/IJCLP/Cy_2004/pdf/Taipale_ijclp-paper.pdf

 

In class:

Part 1: Presentation on technical issues in encryption, data mining, and “hardening” the Internet infrastructure.

Part 2: Visit with Professor Ed Felton (invitation pending) of Computer Science Department, who will lead discussion on the capacity of governments to spy on their citizens, drawing on blogging as well.

Part 3: Discussion: How should we balance privacy vs. security?  What are the relative dangers involved in public vs. private “spying”.   How might these be regulated?

 

For next time: Blog on (a) desirable qualities for a democratic polity and (b) how the Internet might enhance or degrade these qualities (or both).

 

*     *     *

 

Week 11: The Internet, Politics, and Government (Dec.  6)

Visit with Amy Sullivan, Editor of the Washington Monthly and political blogger.

 

Readings to finish before class:

1. Readings:  Bruce Bimber. 2001. "Information Technology and the New Politics: Brief Remarks on Political Change.”   http://www.polsci.ucsb.edu/faculty/bimber/research/infotech&newpolitics.html

 

Jane E. Fountain. 2001. “Paradoxes of Public Sector Customer Service.” Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration 14: 55-73.  This paper is available at the Princeton University Library website, through the digital journal collection (under Governance). 

 

Phil Howard and T.J. Milstein 2003 “Spiders, Spam and Spyware: New Media and the Market for Political Information. Internet Studies 1.0 ed M. Consalvo NY Peter Lang. http://faculty.washington.edu/pnhoward/publishing/articles/howardmilstein.pdf

 

California Secretary of State Task Force on Internet Voting. 2000. Final Report and Technical Appendix A. http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/ivote/appendix_a.htm  and http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/ivote/appendix_a.htm

 

Jeffrey S. Juris, 2005. “The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-Corporate Globalization Movements.” Pp. 189-208 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, special issue on Cultural Production in a Digital Age, ed. Eric Klinenberg.  597: 189-208.

           

In class:

Part 1. Student Presentation and discussion of memos.

Part 2. Presentation on how people are using the Internet to organize social movements; inform and persuade voters; and take part in elections.

Part 3. Distinguished visitor and political bloggers.

Part 4. Set up next week’s activity.

 

For next time:  Break into teams to design an Internet policy that enhances social values and is reasonably practical, with suggestions for building these values into the design of the technology and into laws and regulations of public policy.

 

*     *     *

 

Week 12: Recap (Dec. 13)

Visitors: Professor Kim Scheppele, Director of Princeton’s Program on Law and Public Affairs, and Professor Stanley Katz, Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School.

 

Readings to finish before class.  Marjorie Blumenthal and David Clark, “Rethinking the Design of the Internet.”  http://www.ana.lcs.mit.edu/anaweb/PDF/Rethinking_2001.pdf

 

Chapter 6: “Conclusions and Recommendation,” Pp. 199-240 in National Research Council, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2000.  http://www.nap.edu/html/digital_dilemma/ch6.html

 

In class:

Our modest goal for this week is to take stock of the semester and to design an Internet policy.

Teams will present proposal, and distinguished visitors will respond. 

 

Next time: In lieu of exam, we will meet in January over pizza for project presentations.


RESOURCES

 

Business Issues

 

“What is the Best Global Strategy for the Internet?” by Mauro Guillen.  Business Horizons 2002.  Excellent overview of issues business face in conducting e-commerce business globally.

 

“Realizing Digital Life in Korea: CoreTechnology and Promotion Policy.”

By Jungmann Lee, Kiyong Om, Myung-Hwan Rim and Yeong-Wha Sawng. Korea has the highest level of Internet (and broadband) penetration in the world.  This is how folks there are thinking people will use all this bandwidth flowing into their homes.

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~jmueller/its/conf/helsinki03/papers/Lee_Om_Rim_Sawng.pdf

 

Tech Buzz Game -- http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/dm/info/help.html.  On-line virtual fantasy stock market for competing technologies.  See if you can win more money than the other players.  See if the results of the fantasy game predict outcomes in the real technology market.

 

General Policy: Multiple Issues

 

Cato Institute. Conservative think tank that publishes working papers and other pieces on Internet policy issues. http://www.cato.org/tech/intproperty.html

 

Center for Creative Voices in Media.  Media writers and other artists who oppose policies that foster concentration of power in the media.  http://www.creativevoices.us/

 

Center for Digital Democracy.  Anti-media-concentration, pro-common-carriage web site.  http://www.democraticmedia.org/

 

Electronic Frontier Foundation. www.eff.org.  Libertarian and techy, EFF is the brainchild of former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, and is devoted to the proposition that “information wants to be free.”

 

U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Leading business organization.  http://www.uschamber.com/issues/index/technology/default

 

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/bdquery -- Type “Internet” into the box and get a list of bills before Congress that refer to the Internet in their title or keywords.


The Progress and Freedom Foundation. www.pff.org.  The Progress & Freedom Foundation is a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy.

 

 

 

 

Government Agencies

 

Federal Communications Commission – regulatory body for the media:

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/SilverStream/Pages/edocs.html

 

Department of Homeland Security -  Research Page has section on Research and Infrastructure.    http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?theme=26

 

National Telecommunications and Information Agency – During Clinton administration, took lead in efforts to foster the commercialization of the Internet and then to identify and overcome limits to access to the Internet.  Published several important reports, including Falling Through the Web. http://www.ntia.doc.gov/reports.html

 

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  Advises President on Science and Technology issues, including those related to the Internet. http://www.ostp.gov/

 

National Journal Insider’s Update. http://www.njtelecomupdate.com.  The National Journal Insider’s Update offers news and updates on telecom and government actions and publications about telecom.

 

 

Cybercrime

 

FBI Cybercrime Unit – A wealth of useful info.   http://www.cybercrime.gov/

 

Fraudwatch International  - http://www.fraudwatchinternational.com/internet/

 

Privacy International Cybercrime Page – Lots of info on and links to international topics, from organization concerned with privacy as well as cybercrime.  http://www.privacyinternational.org/index.shtml?cmd[342][]=c-1-CC+Home+Page&als[theme]=CC%20Home%20Page&conds[1][category........]=CC%20Home%20Page&als[_parent_]=Cyber%20Crime

 

 

Intellectual Property

 

Consumer Electronics Association.  They make the things you use to rip, burn, and download.  So they favor broadly permissive policies.  http://www.ce.org/public_policy/default.asp

Creative Commons. Site started by Lawrence Lessig to promote creative solutions to intellectual property issues, including “copylefts” and licensing schemes. http://creativecommons.org/

 

Freedom to Tinker.  Princeton Computer Science Professor Ed Felten’s blog, dedicated to “your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you own.” http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/

 

Future of Music Coalition.  Represents interests of indy music community; generally favorable to exchange of music on the Web.  http://www.futureofmusic.org/

 

Motion Picture Association of America. On the front-lines of the anti-piracy campaign. http://www.mpaa.org/home.htm

 

Public Knowledge. www.publicknowledge.org,  Monitors and opposes bills extending IP rights and criminalizing distribution and use of copyrighted material.

 

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).  Trade association of major record companies and primary advocate of industry position in debates about intellectual property and recordings. 

http://www.riaa.com/issues/default.asp

 

RIAA will serve new subpoenasBy Chanakya Sethi – good Prince story on RIAA suits against students using intranet in spring 2005.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/03/29/news/12469.shtml

 

 

Digital Divide

 

Digital Divide Network.  http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/

Created by Benton Foundation and lodged at Educational Development Corporation, a nonprofit education think tank, its concerns are primarily but not exclusively international. 

 

Open Source

SSRC Open Source Wiki – lots of good essays and discussions on open source, in the U.S. and around the world  http://www.ssrc.org/wiki/POSA/index.php?title=Main_Page

 

Politics on-line

Daniel W. Drezner, Univ. Chicago, “The Power and Politics of Blogs”

 

Security & Privacy

Cybersecurity Industry Alliance. https://www.csialliance.org/home

 

Markle Foundation Task Force. 2003. Creating a Trusted Network for Homeland Security. Thoughtful and detailed report on technological, organizational, and legal issues involved in homeland security.

 

www.matrix-at.org

 

American Civil Liberties Union.  www.aclu.org/privacy

 

Electronic Privacy Information Center. Nonprofit group dedicated to cultivating awareness of and opposition to government data-mining efforts. http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/

 

Online Privacy Alliance.  Coalition of businesses devoted to making consumers feel that their private information is secure online.  http://www.privacyalliance.org/

 

National Plan for Information Systems Protection: An Invitation to a Dialogue. 2000.  Clinton administration pre-9/11 plan for cybersecurity.  199 pages.  http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd/CIP-plan.pdf

 

 

News

 

BoingBoing.  News at the intersection of technology and culture.  http://www.boingboing.net/

 

CNet.  Sidestep the consumer dreck by typing in www.news.com.com (yes, 2 “com”s).

 

Internetnews.com.  You guessed it: www.internetnews.com

 

Slashdot.com.  “News for nerds” – what can we add?  http://slashdot.org/

 

Wired Magazine.  For the fashionable nerd.  Terrific archive.  www.wired.com

 

ZdNet. Zipf-Davis web presence.  Consumer-oriented, but some good news and blog links.  www.cdnet.com

 

 

Research Publications: Journals and Reports

(All of these can be accessed on-line or through Firestone Library’s site.)

 

Computer. Flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society.  Sort of Scientific American, but just for computing and information science.  http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isYear=2005&isnumber=30759&Submit32=Go+To+Issue

 

First Monday.  Peer-reviewed web-based journal of research on the Internet.  Good mix of technical and policy/social-science material.  http://www.firstmonday.org/

 

Imagining the Internet.  http://www.elon.edu/predictions/   Elon University and Pew Internet and American Life Project.  Perhaps should be called the “Is my face red!” Project – a compendium of predictions that well-known people made about the Internet during the 1990s.  Also contains some useful materials on the history of the web.

 

The Information Society.  Social-science research, mostly from communications scholars. http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/

 

IT & Society.  Edited by John Robinson, an on-line journal of social science research, primarily on the Internet. http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/itandsociety/index.html

 

Pew Internet and American Life Project.  http://www.pewinternet.org/  Nonpartisan think tank that generates a steady stream of valuable survey-research-based reports on which Americans are on-line and how they are using the Internet. 

 

Proceedings of the ACM.  Academy of Computing Machinery – computer science professional society, publishes some good papers at the interface of technology and policy.  http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm?coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=53650001&CFTOKEN=80120162

 

Social Science Computer Review.  Interesting mix of papers – newest issue is on information technology and the war on terror.  http://hcl.chass.ncsu.edu/sscore/info.htm

 

 

Academic Web Sites

 

Phil Agre.  Interesting, eclectic, and prolific information science professor at UCLA. http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/

 

Yochai Benkler, Yale Law School.  Lots of good papers on a range of internet-related topics.  http://www.benkler.org/

 

Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School.  http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/

 

Erik Brynjolfsson, economist, M.I.T. Good stuff on economics of e-business. http://ebusiness.mit.edu/erik/

 

Center for Information Technology and Society, University of California at Santa Barbara. Directed by Bruce Bimber, who has done excellent work on the political impact of the new information technologies.  http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/

 

Center for Internet and Society, Stanford University.   Wide range of papers, blogs, etc. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/

 

Nosh Contractor – communications, University of Illinois.  Expert on communications networks, self-organizing systems, and many other interesting things.  http://www.benkler.org/

 

Mark Cooper – legal scholar, Stanford University. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/cooper/archives/mediabooke.pdf

 

Jon Kleinberg – computer scientist, Cornell University.  Studies the architecture of the web, including creative use of data-mining to study social trends.  http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/

 

Eszter Hargittai ­­ ­- sociologist, Northwestern University.  Lots of terrific papers, and links to her blog.  http://www.eszter.com/research/

 

Information Society Project – Democracy and Civil Liberties for a New Age. Yale University Law School. http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/ - includes papers by Jack Balkin and other Yale legal scholars.  Also check out Balkin’s own page: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/

 

Sara Kiesler – computer science and psychology, Carnegie Mellon University.  Tons of great work on impact of computer and internet use on personal psychology, organizational interaction, and other aspects of everyday life, including reports from the HomeNet Project. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kiesler/

 

Lawrence Lessig – legal scholar and activist, Stanford University.  Books, articles, media interviews, and more.  http://www.lessig.org/

 

W. Russell Neuman. Communications, Sociology and Politics, University of Michigan.  Much good work on communications policy.  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rneuman/nav_pub.html

 

Howard Rheingold. Well, more journalist than academic (tho he is teaching at Stanford this semester), but an interesting person nonetheless.   http://www.rheingold.com/

 

Hal Varian. Economics, U.C. Berkeley.  Leading figure in information economics. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/

 

Barry Wellman – sociologist, University of Toronto --  research on Internet and community, including University of Toronto Netlab and the Netville wired community study. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/

 


 [d1]This is just a start of a list and so we don’t forget these, which may be too recent to be in the CRS report = we should scratch them from the syllabus we distribute  we face an interesting situation because if we keep our working draft of the syllabus on the web site, the students can read our thoughts.  I’m inclined to do this.