Information, Politics, Policy and Values

Chapter 1 of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” proved to be very insightful. It illustrated both the benefits and disadvantages of digital memory as they pertain to privacy and personal security. In this chapter the began author by walking the reader through two scenarios—one of a lady whose decision to post a picture of herself on Facebook prevented her from becoming a certified teacher and another of a man whose statement in a journal caused him to be banned from entering the US. These examples were provided to demonstrate how technology has given rise to a sort of perfect memory, one that can be called upon fairly easily. In the scenarios presented, the people volunteered information. Obviously they had no idea it would be used against them otherwise they might have decided otherwise.

Although in those example the individuals maybe thought of as being responsible, as mentioned in the chapter what is more alarming is the many times we distribute information without knowing. The example of a disco outside of Germany that collects all sorts of personal information from people entering the facility which is stored and shared with a third-party, is a good example of a place people maynot think this activity is going on. A disco with its dark lights and music is often thought of as a place to get away and relax. The author goes on to provide an example illustrating how data collected by popular search engines like Yahoo and Google enable them to connect queries specific to specific individuals.

This article has reinforced past conceptions of how invasive technology is and taught me several things to be cognizant of as I live my life:

1. Some is ALWAYS looking
2. This sort of data is collected EVERYWHERE (e.g Laundromat, arcade, social security office)
3. Jeremy Bentham’s conception of the panopticon is a reality
4. There is no getting away from it—not even behind the walls of your own home
5. Stay away from the disco

Because I too voluntarily make some information accessible to anyone who can locate it, I thought I’d see how much there is about me on the web. Understanding that the “The Net Never Forgets” I thought it would be an interesting exercise to search my name and see what comes up. I hypothesize that conducting a thorough search will reveal little to nothing that I would currently consider compromising. To complete this exercise I employed the following search engines:

• http://www.bing.com/
• http://www.blekko.com/
• http://www.google.com
• http://www.snap.com/
• http://www.yahoo.com/

Three of the five (5) search engines—Bing, Google, & Yahoo—are among the top 3 search engines over the last two years. Blekko is a fairly new search engine which aims to provide results that are different from those that might be produced in Google (Miller, 2010). Snap on the other hand attempts to empower website owners by giving them the ability to effect what users are presented with.

Entering the search query “Lassana Magassa” in to each of the search engines. Bing returned 56 results, Blekko 11, Google 682, Snap 171 and Yahoo 56 results. Having a unique name make finding “me” or rather the “me” I portray under the given name fairly easy. So, I wasn’t too surprised with the results. What I was interested in seeing is if I could discover one of my pseudo-identities through my primary identity. I am delighted to say, “Not yet”. Not that I have a past that would cause the FED’s to pay me a visit, but I would rather keep portions of my existence segmented. I think the two people mentioned in the scenario at the beginning of this article would probably concur with this statement.

Digital memory has made profound impacts across the globe. Like anything else they have qualities that are neither intrinsically positive nor negative. Instead, this is determined by the individuals using it. In a closing though, what concerns me most is the ability to put out inaccurate information with a level of precision and accuracy that would lead most to think it is legitimate. This is an issue we are currently experiencing. Is there really a way to get a handle on this issue?

Do you think you can find more about me? Give it a try and let me know what you find!

Miller, Claire Cain, 10/31/2010. A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More. New York Times

After reading the excerpt from Viktor’s Mayer-Schönberger’s “Delete : the virtue of forgetting in the digital age”, I wondered if I ought to delete my last post, Hacktivism, which isn’t terribly racy or radical, but ponders on how companies in the Security Software & Services Industry have an incentive to characterize any efforts – no matter how benign – of hactivists as a threat to America, and particularly, as a threat to you directly that only their software (for only $39.99, or bundled with a collection of other tools that you likely will never use for only $59.99) can protect you from. But this is America, where we have rights and can pretty much say what we like. Right?

Part of the point of ‘delete’ is that there is no way we can know how our actions today, in terms of posting pictures, videos, or personal opinions, could be held against us in the future. Indeed, the phrase in the Miranda Warning that starts, “Anything you say can and will be used against you”, could be modified to read “Anything you say, have ever said, or posted, including pictures, videos, links and random rants, can and will be lifted from its original context, reframed in the worst possible manner and used against you over and over and over again.”

Websites like the Wayback Machine, part of the Internet Archive Project, collected “over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.” So, even if I chose to delete my brief exploration of hacktivism, it may already be captured somewhere. If at some point in the future some individual/group/institution wishes me ill, they may find it and twist bits of it into some narrative about me that might do me harm.

Guin talks about our control society in “Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control”, and I can’t help but think about the fact that the internet gives us a sort of license, via easy to use technologies, to freely express ourselves. But, given the discussion in ‘delete’, our freedom of expressions of today may result in our reduced freedom tomorrow. And perhaps this is just a lesson that we, as a society, have yet to learn. Guin talks about license as mechanism though we which gain both freedom and a responsibility for self-regulation. So, for example, we are given a driver’s license, which gives us the freedom to drive but comes with a requirement that we know, and will abide by, the laws of the state that govern behavior on the road. I remember being 15 years old and wondering how it is that all of the drivers on the multi-lane freeway by and large seemed to be behaving well even though they could –they had the freedom too – randomly cross over lanes and drive poorly. People generally self-regulate in exchange for freedom.

So, given our license to easily self-express, how will the fact that anything we post can and will be used against us affect how or if we self-regulate? That could be where the ‘superpanopticon’ comes in. Perhaps people will start posting only safe topics and the promise of the internet as a venue for free expression of ideas will, over time, wither.

What is hacktivism? I visited the site www.thehacktivist.com to understand how they defined it. In short it is the melding of hacking and activism. Hacking is essentially writing software that circumvents computer or network security, and activism is generally a political effort to draw attention to, and persuade people, on some topic. In the site’s Hacktivist PDF pamphlet they note that a number of viruses were developed to call attention to some issue. For example, they describe the w32vote-a worm that infected millions of computers in last months of 2001 as a program that infected people’s computers and brought screens up that suggested people vote for peace.

But if you go F-Secure, a company that sells virus protection software, they tell a different story. They describe w32vote-a as a malicious, but poorly created piece of software that, after propagating itself, “modifies the autoexec.bat file in order to format the C: drive after the next reboot”, but, fortunately for all the people inflicted with the worm, that “part of the script is broken” (http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/vote.shtml). F-Secure’s description seems odd to me. How is it that someone capable of writing software that self-propagates and opens browsers on people’s computers isn’t capable of correctly modifying an autoexect.bat? Modifying a batch file is relatively straight forward.

I also did a news search and found a story on the worm by Cnet news that claims that “antivirus companies warned Monday that an e-mail message asking for peace between America and Islam actually carries an extremely malicious and destructive payload” (http://news.cnet.com/New-worm-exploits-terrorist-attacks/2100-1002_3-273427.html). This story quotes industry security experts who say the threat is real, but I couldn’t find any information in the story about anyone actually loosing data.

I’m not trying to say that we should believe the hactivists at their word, but why should we believe Cnet and F-Security at theirs? Aren’t their profits based on getting people scared enough to buy their software? Let’s just take a quick look at the Security Software & Services Industry (SS&SI), which is just one part of the larger tech industry. Yahoo Finance says the three biggest companies in SS&SI, Symantec, Check Point and MCAFEE, have market capitalizations of $13.6 B, $9.0 B, and $7.2B, respectively. That ‘B’ stands for billion, so together these three companies are worth close to 30 billion dollars, and they make up just part of the Security Software & Services Industry (http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/823.html). So these companies have a rather large incentive to portray any virus or worm as something that needs to be countered.

Would members of Corporate America stretch the truth to make a profit? Maybe? Would they intentionally block political messages aimed at calling attention to a minority view (which, in the months after 9/11, peace was an alternate minority view in America)? Personally, I don’t think CEO’s are focused on squashing political voices. But what about when it is a choice between letting a minority voice be heard and profit taking? Hacktivists may have legitimate political messages, and even grievances, that might otherwise not be heard in main-stream media. But by sending messages in covert ways that are easily, and often justifiably, framed by corporate interests as complicated threats perpetrated by criminals, they aren’t doing themselves any favors or winning over any sympathizers. On the other hand, for some, hactivism maybe the only voice left.

Although the main focus of this week’s readings was the mechanisms and consequences of state control over information networks, the thing that kept coming up for me as I read was the authors’ underlying assumption that the rise of global civil society actors in the age of ICTs was such a revolutionary and magical new phenomenon in the first place.

I have to admit that the reason I’m asking this is that I only recently got around to reading Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker piece that challenges the thesis that social media are effective for spurring social action. So when D & R started their 2008 piece with the bold claim that “Powerful…tools such as blogs and MySpace, and communicative systems like Skype make it easy to form virtual communities, mobilize support, and effect political change” (p. 123) my ears perked up right away. Gladwell says that while these media and the networks of ‘weak ties’ they foster can be very effective at disseminating information, they do not make effective tools for social action because it takes strong interpersonal connections to motivate people to take actions that are risky and/or time consuming.

D & R provide examples of several different kinds of movement networks, including ones that they call ‘dark nets’, that have had a range of impacts on nation states, societies and transnational entities. They claim that in certain cases (the Zapatista movement in Mexico, for example) these networks can motivate social and political change through spreading awareness and through enabling direct action (protests, DOS attacks, etc.). I don’t think Gladwell would disagree that these ICT-based networks are effective tools for increasing exposure for a cause and rallying tacit support, but he directly disputes the claim that networks built out of ‘weak ties’ have a documented history of helping grassroots social movements succeed. In order to keep up a sustained and effective campaign of sociopolitical action you need both strong ties and some sort of hierarchical organization. Neither of these are easy to create without an existing and acutely personal common cause (such as a common set of religious doctrine, in the case of Islamic fundamentalism) or a profit motive (as in the case of black hat hacker networks), or the material support of an existing sociopolitical structure (such as the support of existing nation states in the case of both of the above examples).

Gladwell also claims that several well-known cases that have been put forth as examples of social media-enabled social action (recent Twitter-fueled mass demonstrations in Iran and Molodova) were in fact much less reliant on the use of ICTs than they were portrayed to be in the media. He also claims that Al Qaeda was stronger and more dangerous when it was still a strong-tie, heirarchical organization and that it has become less of a threat now that it has lost strong nation-state support and become more distributed. I don’t know that I want to swallow any of these claims without a little more evidence, but their definitely food for thought.

However, this may be a moot point, since D & R’s real thesis in both of their articles is that nation-state’s perceptions of the power of ICT-based civil and uncivil society networks is what causes them to censor, criminalize and clamp down on dissenters and demonstrators. I don’t think Gladwell would argue with this: clearly, governments and traditional media believe to some extent in the power of these networks to effect change. The real question for me is how much of it is simply fear-mongering for the sake of increasing their own political power at this point. In other words, to what extent do they consciously perpetuate the idea of the power of decentralized, weak-tie un/civil networks as an excuse to increase their ability to control all communication channels?

Wadda ya think? Too conspiracy-minded for a Saturday blog post?

Resources

Deibert Ronald and Rohozinski Rafal, 2008, “Good for Liberty, Bad for Security? Global Civil Society and the Securitization of the Internet”, in: Deibert, R. J., Palfrey, J. G., Rohozinski, R., & Zittrain, J.,  Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, The MIT Press, ch. 6, pp. 123-150.

Deibert Ronald, 2009, “The Geopolitics of Internet Control: Censorship, Sovereignty, and Cyberspace”, in: Andrew Chadwick & Philip N. Howard (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, Routledge. Ch. 23, pp.323-336.

Gladwell, Malcom, 2010. Small change: why the revolution will not be tweeted. The New Yorker, October 4th 2010.

Internet control in a global, international, nation, regional, and a local context is straight forward and illusive at the same time. Interestingly most of the resources I have read regarding this seem to imply that Internet control is inherently negative. They position it as something that entities (e.g. governments, corporations, etc.) adopt to muffle voices that may disrupt their agenda. Using data from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) (http://opennet.net/) which documents “empirically patterns of internet censorship and surveillance worldwide” (pg. 324) this chapter summarizes findings.

Consequently virtually every example—(e.g. Google blocking Sudan IP addresses to comply with U.S. export restrictions) was about how mechanisms were used to prevent access certain segments of the Internet. Not that I disagree with the examples given, but this assertion leads me to wonder, are there any legitimate reasons, situations, instances in which Internet control would be justified.

One of the things that stood out the most was that “China is still the world’s most notorious and sophisticated censoring regime” (pg. 327). As an example, China “implemented a blocked string on their backbone/gateway routers that prevented any use of the Google cache function from within China” (pg. 329). This raises concerns for me. Specifically, as China continues to build power and influence, they have increased ability to leverage this to create new more complex Internet control mechanisms that are able to do filtering and blocking with increased accuracy. It will be able to handle new media types including pictures, videos and audio (language). The power combined with new tools will potentially enable them to have increased influence over companies that are looking to provide services to Chinese citizens.           

As you can imagine this is a very controversial topic. Because internet controls will are not going anywhere anytime soon, citizens and nations across the globe can expected some heated battles in the future.  What will be especially interesting is to see how democratic nations react to all of this in a post-9/11 environment were concerns of terror plots we

Internet Control, Public Enemy No. 1

In Good for Liberty, Bad for Security? Global Civil Society and the Securitization of the Internet authors Deibert and Rohozinski posit global civic society networks, consisting of civic networks, resistance networks, and dark nets, as some of the earliest adopters of ICTs to further their agendas.  The authors give many reasons for the use of ICTs by these networks, but the two most applicable for our discussions are overcoming traditional gatekeepers in the media and facilitating rapid sharing of information.

Blogs are used as a means of self-expression and Deibert and Rohozinski argue they are extremely important for networks because they allow alternative news coverage, a means of sharing information, and a way for organizations to gain supporters.  In the rest of the chapter, they describe blogger arrests by numbers from 2003-2006, the reasons for arrests, and the length of the sentences the convicted received.  Most of the discussion focused on bloggers in China and Iran, but little was said about bloggers arrested in the United States.  That got me wondering, who are the U.S’s “bad bloggers” whose blogs were worthy of getting them arrested?

First, I came across the World Information Access Report, written by Philip N. Howard.  According to this report, the United States arrested three bloggers in 2006 and 2007; one for violating cultural norms and two for “other” reasons.  Here is the graphic from that website:Although, I had a tough time tracking down these specific instances, I did find a couple worth mentioning:

Hal Turner, of Connecticut, was arrested because of his  Internet postings on June 2 and 3 where proclaimed “outrage” over the June 2, 2009, handgun decision by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer, of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, further stating, among other things: “Let me be the firs to say this plainly:  These judges deserve to be killed.” The postings included photographs, phone numbers, work addresses, and room numbers of the judges along with a photo of the building where they worked.  Turner was arrested for inciting violence.

Another blogger, this time video blogger Josh Wolf San Fran, was arrested for not turning over his video of a burning police car during the G8 protest.  Here Wolf is arguing independent bloggers should have the same rights as mainstream journalists.

Resources:

Deibert Ronald and Rohozinski Rafal, 2008, “Good for Liberty, Bad for Security? Global Civil Society and the Securitization of the Internet”, in: Deibert, R. J., Palfrey, J. G., Rohozinski, R., & Zittrain, J.,  Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, The MIT Press, ch. 6, pp. 123-150.

Deibert Ronald, 2009, “The Geopolitics of Internet Control: Censorship, Sovereignty, and Cyberspace”, in: Andrew Chadwick & Philip N. Howard (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, Routledge. Ch. 23, pp.323-336.

Howard, Philip N, and World Information Access Project. World Information Access Report – 2008. 3. Seattle: University of Washington, 2008.

This week’s readings have caused me to reinterpret every relationship I have and have ever had, online and offline in terms of gates. I am thinking back to elementary school trying to figure out where on the gated typology spectrum I lied at different periods in my life.

For the purposes of this post I will focus on Network Fuzziness of Inclusion-Exclusion. In this paper Karine Nahon takes readers through a series of ideas all intended to expose the inclusion/exclusion ambiguity that exists within networks. She starts by defining relevant terms—gatekeeper, gated. Next, Nahon explores different forms of power starting with Manuel Castells description which focuses on influencing through decision, moving to ones that calls the reader’s attention to non-decisions. Following this she goes into a discussion about how gatekeepers emerge in networks and defends the use of the word gatekeepers over transient elites. She then goes into an in depth exploration of the new power struggle that gated and gatekeepers go through. Nahon ends by highlighting five (5) factors that bring to light the “fuzziness of inclusion exclusion” and discusses the implications of this.

As I read through this article (like the others) a barrage of questions came to light. Some of which got scribbled in the margins, some shared space with my stack of cookies on a napkin and others remained in my head. I will share a few.

To start, I wonder if this needs to be a dichotomy or can individuals exist in and out of a network simultaneously. And if so, what does it mean to be between networks. Are the same rules expressed in Network Gatekeeping Theory (NGT) still at play or are a new set of rules necessary? Of course just before I finish typing the passage, I question my own question. Why? … oops, I lost my thought.

As mentioned by Nahon, gatekeepers are elected in some fashion and exist as long as there is an entity to be gated. Furthermore, there is a constant power struggle between the two. I think a perspective that can add to the richness of this discussion is gatekeepers who elect or target a particular group for purposes of gating them.  This leads me to think about very specialized niche networks, like social networking websites designed for social deviant communities. It reminds me of a presentation given in a course I took last quarter with Malcolm Parks (COM 597: Theories of Technology and Society). The presenter presented an “online community” which was created specifically for woman who suffer from bulimia, but were OK with it (I will provide the website and additional details when I hear back from the presenter). In this instance I believe it can be argued that a gatekeeper most likely someone who was bulimic as well created this community in search of individuals to be gated.

I acknowledge my thoughts on this topic are a bit scattered because of the many ideas that pop into my head as I read and reread the articles, nonetheless I hope I was able to provide you with ideas and questions to think over.

This post is more or less a response to Jeff’s post below, “Exploited Apprentice or Choice-Bound Gated?” And also to Beth’s response to Jeff’s post.

I like Jeff’s analysis of our relative power in this class, but I think there are additional nuances that are worth exploring. For instance, taking for granted as Jeff does that we are in fact gated in some sense by a gatekeeper (Karine), I would like to consider how our our ability to determine the agenda of this blog (specifically) and this class (more generally) is mediated by our enduring relationship with the gatekeeper.

I see this power relationship as more of an ongoing negotiation, rather than a concrete role set wherein we are either lackeys or agents.

See Nahon 2008 (p. 1500-1501, emphasis added):

“The existence of a direct connection and its endurance plays a major role by creating a venue for negotiation of stances between the gated and the gatekeeper. This variable changes dynamically as response to events. Having a direct exchange enables the gated to change their political power, or the nature of relations with the gatekeeper, and respectively requires attention from gatekeepers. Finally, note a connection between information production and relationship. The given ability of the gated to produce information creates a circulatory affect between gated–gatekeeper. The gated produce information taking into consideration reactions and feedback from gatekeepers and other stakeholders.”

Beth pointed out  that we control what we write about every week on this blog. I agree that we have that control, and also that Karine has the ultimate control of whether our writing is deemed acceptable. But in this case I see that control as bounded for both the gatekeeper and gated by a number of sociotechnical mechanisms, such as

a) the initial, general assignment instructions we were given at the beginning of the quarter. This set the general expectations of the assignment, such as its regularity, its weekly due dates, and gave some sense of the type of content expected (that the post be about the current week’s readings and that it be a reaction to or a synthesis of, rather than a description of, those readings. This bounds us somewhat obviously, but it also bounds Karine: she can’t dock us a grade just because she doesn’t happen to agree with the conclusions we come to.

b) the technical infrastructure and genre affordances of the blog platform. The technical affordances of the platform only allow us to contribute content in two ways: by posting blog posts and commenting on existing ones. Further, each of these contribution mechanisms has certain genre conventions associated with it: blog posts are usually a certain length and have a certain tone, and usually only address a small number of topics. Comments usually directly respond to and tend to be shorter than the post they follow.

c) feedback from Karine on individual posts. For instance, I initially chose to interpret the rules of the assignment as saying that we were required to make some weekly contribution to the blog, but that the contribution need not be a post. So for the first two weeks of the quarter my contributions in the form of two (rather long) comments. The third week, I chose to post an actual entry, and this was remarked upon in class by Karine as being a positive development. I interpreted Karine’s comment as having a normative motivation: she wanted me to post blog posts, not comments, from now on.

d) the content of every previous post. Every post Jeff, Beth, Lassana or I write further shapes all of our understandings (including Karine’s) of the expectations and requirements of this weekly posting assignment. As such, by writing (or not writing) every week we not only exercise power over each other, but also over the gatekeeper herself. If there’s anything that analyzing the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad Cartoon Controversy has taught me, it’s the power of precedent in distributed collaboration!

For this week’s writing I thought it would be fun to explore how our course blog relates to the gatekeeping readings. Not because I feel any particular angst or thrill about being gated or gatekeeper, but because as an Exploited Apprentice I am duty bound to produce some information content. Or, perhaps, as a Choice Bound Gated actor I just felt like setting an agenda. More on that soon.

First, I would suggest that the blog is the gatekeeping mechanism. Certainly it is a channeling mechanism whose purpose is to attract attention of the gated. In this case, the gated may be other contributors or the general public (who, by the way, have an ample number of alternatives). It could also be considered an infrastructure mechanism in that it controls access. As an example, note that I can write this post and save it, but until I publish it, our public readers do not have access to it. And the blog acts as an intermediary between us (who might be considered representatives of academia) and our non-academic public readers, who are the gated. Finally, it is also a regulation meta-mechanism that provides a framework for how we interact with each other and our readers. Normally, this is through comments, but certainly another contributor could post a counter argument of my assessment in another post.

So, as contributors, which gated class are we? I think it is obvious that we produce information. We also all have a relationship with the gatekeeper (Karine, which I will discuss below). If these are the only attributed we possessed, we would be Exploited Apprentices who lack the political power to change things and have no alternatives. But, we do have both political power and alternatives. But let’s nix alternatives as an attribute that we possess because at this point in the quarter the alternatives are certainly unattractive. This is because (1) dropping the class would result in a fee and drop us below the requisite 10 credits; and/or (2) switching to a different course this late in the quarter is intellectually prohibitive (and would add an additional fee on top of the drop fee).

That leaves political power. Do we have it? And if so, which power(s) do we have? For some reason this reminds me of the question: which supper power would you choose? Would it be the power to cause another to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, the power to control the agenda, or the much more subtle and pervasive power of influencing other’s preferences and awareness? I would say that as contributors we are directly interacting with the agenda (2nd. dimension of power) and so are Choice Bound Gated actors.

Karine as gatekeeper? She created the site. She gives us the readings that influence what we write. And we crown her by agreeing to read the information she provides for us. But we are the gatekeepers of our (if any exist) public readers, feeding them information of our choice, and Karine is certainly gated, possibly by the university, possibly by the actors who create the form and function of this blog.

Here is my final thought: if no one reads the information that we as gatekeepers publish, are we gatekeepers? I think not. No one has crown us.

In chapter 5 of Wiki Government, Beth Simone Noveck explores the role of information technology in promoting collaborative democracies. Noveck talks a lot about going beyond simple ideas of transparency (data for data’s sake), to one that encourages collaboration by government, non-government entities, and most importantly citizens. She points out several examples highlighting how they link the government to citizens and the benefits and some of the “life-saving effects” afforded by collaboration. As Noveck states, I agree that it has the potential to make it easier for people to understand and interact with information that might otherwise be foreign to them. One example of this highlighted by the author was the Many Eyes project which was designed so that different parties making up a group/community can make sense of what they are seeing.

She indicates that moving towards visual depictions may recreate some of the social cohesion that groups experience in “real” space.  On some level social cohesion will occur, whether or not there is a shift in the way information is presented. I question whether this will include groups that would not usually be engaged or meet offline as well as those negatively effected by the digital divide. Sylverster and McGlynn’s 2009 study reveals that the existence of the digital divide has real consequences on how actively engaged one is with the government (pg. 8). Thus, building tools with fancy bells and whistles is great. However, these tools should actively work to strengthen ties with otherwise marginalized groups. This may be a better indicator of the success of government efforts at “making information intelligible” and engaging citizens in the digital realm.

Next, we must be willing to act upon findings of intelligible information. I mention this because there are low-level technology tools that revealed things like the faults of the levee that led to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. More recently, the BP oil spill which could have been prevented had BP acted upon the advice and concerns of its staff and contractors. Where I see the advantage of what Noveck describes in her work is that policies could be designed so that such projects would be visible to all important stakeholders. Together the government, companies and citizens can collaborate to ensure safety measures are in place.

Again though how do we ensure all of the stakeholders, not just those with notoriety, status, or wealth are involved? As mentioned earlier, the creation of “tools” are not enough. As an example, would these  tools have changed anything for the thousands of New Orleans residents who’s lives were destroyed in the floods? I would argue it would not because those most heavily effected are of the lower socioeconomic strata and there engagement with the government is low. Thus there is a good chance their concerns may not be represented at the table.

So yes, having government create information policies “that goes beyond mete data transparency to ensure that groups can make use of public information” has potential! Yes it can transform communities, economies, hold the government accountable, and much more. Nonetheless technological determinism will not draw in those negatively effected by the digital divide. There must be a separate and equally passionate effort to draw in those that are not able to exploit the same benefits whether they are separated by geography, race, class, etc.

Noveck Beth, 2009, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful, Brookings Institution Press, ch. 5-6, pp.107-145.

Sylvester, Dari, McGlynn, Adam, 2009, The Digital Divide, Political Participation and Place, Social Science Computer Review, pp. 1 – 11.