Information Systems in Society

Only marginally more people are online today than three years ago. A newly published report reveals the digital divide to be as entrenched as other divisions in society, with those still stuck on the wrong side more deeply excluded and harder-to-reach than ever before.

Understanding Digital Inclusion reveals that:

75 % of people counted as socially excluded are also digitally excluded and lack convenient access to the internet.

those who are out of work, in poor health, live in social housing, live alone, or have a low level of qualification are being set at a further disadvantage by digital exclusion.

Kablenet reports that:

“These people are missing out on the opportunities, choices, savings and services that computers and the internet provide. Neither government policy, market forces, nor demographic trends are making any significant inroads to bring more people online, the report finds.”

“Technology is opening new doors and new worlds for 61% of the population, connecting them to better paid jobs, instant information, new forms of communication and social interaction, community infrastructure, government services, consumer power and convenience,” commented UK online centres managing director Helen Milner. “But for a stable 39%, those benefits remain firmly out of reach. And it’s unacceptable those already at a disadvantage are three times more likely to be the ones missing out.”

Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks, sets out the socio-economic backdrop of the 21st century as follows. The last years of the 20th century saw an acceleration of a long-term trend in the West towards post-industrial economies centered on information (financial services, accounting, software, science) and cultural (films, music) production, and the manipulation of symbols (branding, marketing). A second move was the collapse of the barriers to entry on large scale communication associated with cheap processors, high computation and bandwidth capability. The core feature of industrial-age communication was that any scope beyond the local meant ever-larger investment in physical capital (telegraph, mechanical press, cable, satellite, etc). The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy. Thus in the networked information economy, the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed throughout society in the shape of the networked PC.

Critically, he articulates a choice policy makers are required to make between a future where information is the enabler of social and economic activity, or where it becomes a commodity in the classical economic sense, and is the purpose of economic activity. Whether we choose the community or commodity route is a big question as how we make information, acquire and distribute it is a core issue in shaping freedom in any society.

The BBC has an excellent report on the digital rights dispute concerning DRM technology and user generated content. The debate revolves around the future of the internet as an open platform for all to use as a medium for creative expression, and the extent to which content owners should use technology to extend copyright control. Locking down our digital future presents both sides of an argument that probably still has a long way to play out.

Lawrence Lessig has been a long-term advocate of the right of ordinary people to adopt up-to-date digital technology to do what they’ve always done with creative content. His original book Code, and other laws of cyberspace, published in 1999, consolidated the intellectual framework for the current debate and made an appeal for a policy that balanced market imperatives with public benefit. He also practices what he preaches and this book is now being rewritten in wiki form. Check Lessig’s blog for contemporary opinion on this issue.

The Institute of Public Policy Research has a new report on intellectual property laws arguing that “When it comes to protecting the interests of copyright holders, the emphasis the music industry has put on tackling illegal distribution and not prosecuting for personal copying, is right. But it is not the music industry’s job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of Government.” The BBC reports the IPPR calls for the government to stop the content industry preventing people from legally copying CDs and DVDs they have purchased for their own use.

How disputes over control and access to IP are resolved over the next few years will probably shape the nature of the information society in the 21st century, as well as being a key structural influence in economic development.

There are many excellent resources on the web considering the digital IP issue. For starters try one or two of the following:

• Unbounded Freedom: A guide to Creative Commons thinking for cultural organisations, an excellent 2006 survey from Counterpoint, the cultural relations thinktank of the British Council.
• Owning ideas: The boom in the intellectual property market will not reap rewards for us all, Andrew Brown in The Guardian, Saturday November 19, 2005
• A closed mind about an open world, James Boyle in The Financial Times, August 7 2006.
• The year of free culture? by Becky Hogge, for openDemocracy.
• Richard Barbrook, ‘The Regulation of Liberty: free speech, free trade and free gifts on the Net’, Science as Culture, number 2, volume II, 2002

In the meantime, many big players are busy shaping the information infrastructure for us. Why should Google fork out $1.65 billion in shares for YouTube when it already had its own video sharing site Google Video? Youtube, like most video-sharing sites, makes losses, incurs large costs from storing and delivering all those videos, and has no revenues to speak of. It is also hopelessly exposed to legal action because many clips violate copyright.

However, a recent Economist report, “Two kings get together” suggests Google has its eye on the long term prize of becoming the steward of the worlds’ information. It knows that much information is in video form, and as a search company it knows how difficult it is to search and index video. The answer to this problem lies in YouTube’s approach: tagging and using social networks. Moreover, Google knows that network effects gained through buying into the communities supported by YouTube matter more than anything else on the web. The purchase of YouTube therefore invites the possibility of seeing off competitors such as Yahoo or Microsoft, while establishing such a presence in online video, that Google could strike independent deals with content owners in a way that in now happening with music. Moreover, the company would probably have the clout to see off the sort of predatory lawyers that did for Napster.