Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Wrap-Up

by Professor Tobias Escher 17/09/2010

Making an assessment of the Internet’s impact on politics and policy.

by Professor Tobias Escher 17/09/2010

Our two-day conference is just about to come to an end with an evening reception at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum (you can have a live view through OII’s very own webcam). Its aim was to try to make an assessment of the Internet’s impact on politics and policy. The presentations approached this challenge from a number of different angles and we would like to encourage everyone to browse the archive of papers on the conference website to get a comprehensive overview about much of the cutting-edge research that is currently taking place in many different parts of the world. The submissions to this conference allowed setting up very topical panels in which the different papers fitted together rather well. Helen Margetts, the convenor, highlighted in her summary just how much discussion and informed exchange has been going on within these panels. But a conference is more than the collection of papers delivered. It is just as much about the social gathering of people who share similar interests and the conference schedule tried to accommodate for this by offering many coffee breaks to encourage more informal exchange. It is a testimony to the success of this strategy that the majority of people have very much welcomed the idea to have a similar conference in two years time, details of which are yet to be confirmed. Great thanks to everybody who helped to make this conference happen, in particular OII’s dedicated support staff such as journal editor David Sutcliffe and events manager Tim Davies.

Conferences

Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Closing keynote by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

by Professor Tobias Escher 17/09/2010

What he sees at stake is power because of the permanent threat of our activities are being watched by others—not necessarily now but possibly even in the future—can result in altering our behaviour today.

by Professor Tobias Escher 17/09/2010

Our two-day conference is coming to a close with a keynote by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who is soon to be joining the faculty of the Oxford Internet Institute as Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation. Viktor talked about the theme of his recent book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (a webcast of this keynote will be available soon on the OII website but you can also listen to a previous talk here). It touches on many of the recent debates about information that has been published on the web in some context and which might suddenly come back to us in a completely different context, e.g. when applying for a job and being confronted with some drunken picture of us obtained from Facebook. Viktor puts that into a broad perspective, contrasting the two themes of “forgetting” and “remembering”. He convincingly argues how for most of human history, forgetting has been the default. This state of affairs has experienced quite a dramatic change with the advances of the computer technology, data storage and information retrieval technologies available on a global information infrastructure. Now remembering is the default as most of the information stored digitally is available forever and in multiple places. What he sees at stake is power because of the permanent threat of our activities are being watched by others—not necessarily now but possibly even in the future—can result in altering our behaviour today. What is more, he says that without forgetting it is hard for us to forgive as we deny us and others the possibility to change. No matter to what degree you are prepared to follow the argument, the most intriguing question is how the current state of remembering could be changed to forgetting. Viktor discusses a number of ideas that pose no real solution: privacy rights – don’t go very far in changing actual behaviour information ecology – the idea to store only as much…