OII Day 5

Copyright 2010: The Future of Copyright presented by Brian Fitzgerald, Wendy Seltzer, Bill McGeveran

This was an incredibly interactive session on copyright. It went really fast, and so the people that did not have previous knowledge of copyright/ip fundamentals might have been a bit lost. However, the discussion was fantasically recorded by Wendy Seltzer on the Wiki.

My favorite part of this discussion was when we broke up into three groups: the content industry, the company (ex Google), and the future. I was in the “future” section which was tasked with figuring out what the future of copyright ought to look like, in any terms including economic, social, or legal. My main contribution to this argument was that we should not erect barriers just to keep old business models. The content industry needs to adapt their business models to the changing world, not attempt to stifle and choke all channels of innovation and distribution. I wish the content industry would learn from its own history and thus try not to reproduce it. For example in 1984, Universal Studios sued Sony who created the Betamax machine (early version of the VCR) for copyright infringement. This became known as the Betamax Case. The Supreme Court found that the Betamax (and VCR) were not liable for infringement because many people were using the technology for non-infringing purposes such as time-shifting tv shows. According to Wikipedia,

“The case was a boon to the home video market as it created a legal safe haven for the technology, which also significantly benefited the entertainment industry through the sale of pre-recorded movies.”

During the 90s, the video market made up more than 70% of the entertainment industry’s profit. Unfortunately, the industry has not learned and are once again attempting to stifle technology, and potentially new sources of revenue, in order to hold on to old business models.

Obama Girl Confronts the Future: New Media Literacies, Civic Engagement, and Participatory Culture presented by Henry Jenkins, Carrie Lambert-Beatty

I introduced Henry Jenkins of this talk. I am a huge admirer of his work (Read Convergence Culture now!), so it was an incredible pleasure both to meet him and also to get the chance to introduce him. I also got him to sign my Convergence Culture book (and was giddy like a fannish girl). In my introduction, my main question of HJ was: How much of the participation and engagement with democracy through popular culture gets translated to action offline? Does engagement and play online invoke a soft activism, whereby people feel that their online participation/engagement is enough involvement in the democratic process?

Henry Jenkins talked very fast and his brilliant ideas shot out at me 100 mph, so I was not able to transcribe as much as I would have liked. Here is what I was able to accomplish:

What images of democracy do we have?

• Images of founding fathers/colonials
• In 1930’s, around FDR, citizen participation
• Same images recirculate today (uncle sam)

The infusion of popular cultural gives us the chance to reinvent images to move towards a democracy that looks to the future instead of in the past. The new images of democracy could look like avatars from video video games or second life.

What does is mean for a country to use massive multiple player games to have protests?

Henry mentioned a case where 10,000 people in China protested inside a video game. We can make an analogy to the masking of identity in history to enable political action. Games allow for the masking of identity in countries where bodily protests would be too dangerous.

What is the mechanism of democracy when we draw a comparison between American Idol votes and Presidential elections ?

    Citizen activism with the power to negate – keeping bad singers on American Idol
    Testbed for Chinese democracy with American-Idol like program

Henry Jenkins highly recommend Steven Duncombe’s book “Dream”, and said that it addresses many of the issues of participatory culture and how the language of popular culture can be used to manufacture dissent. Some quotes from the book which I was able to type out fast enough ..

“Our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape ourselves…”

“Spectacles will not cover over or replace reality but amplify it”

Henry then went on to talk about the ideals of progressive popular culture:

• Participatory
• Active
• Open-ended
• Transparent
• Transformative

He believes that skills are being learned from play that will later be applied towards more serious ends such as participatory democracy. He says that kids in a hunting society play with bows and arrows, kids in an information society play with information, that could be potentially be harnessed for political ends.

Additionally, much of the language we use to talk about politics shuts people out, its too cold, and well boring. What could we do to enable the same principles, skills, and social affiliation that people feel towards video games worlds towards politics? Perhaps we can develop new language to help engage young people in politics. There is also a question of the viability of long term engagement in our current “snack culture”. Guilds in video games provide different models of engagement, but we need to learn ways to move from guilds to real world. Henry Jenkins does not know how to accomplish this yet, but feels it is an important area of research.

He also mentions that in a hybrid media culture, there is a blur between top-down and bottom-up creation (ex: astroturf, top-down media that is producing fake bottom-up videos). Therefore, new literacies and competencies are required to be able to understand videos that mix up knowledge of both politics and popular culture.

Finally, the Internet is about spreadability, moving from sticky culture to a movable culture. The cultural object gains value from being moved, as from YouTube to being embedded in a blog. We can thus be informed by the locations to which do people move videos (blogs, journals, myspace, ect), what kind of discourse springs up around those videos.

At this point, Carrie chimed in with the loss of the sense of radically itself. Because of the quantity of material that is published there is a form of radicalism fatigue. In the pre-Internet days, underground groups would attempt to provide a big punch of resistance. Now resitance is less about disruption (Adbusters, Cultural jamming) but about participation.

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OII Day 4

The Tools of Government in a Digital Age presented by Helen Margetts

Helen talked about the impact that the Internet has on government, and the methods we could use to measure the tools of government.

Key Questions:

• What does government do?
• What tools does government use to change societal behavior?
• What are digital technologies doing to the tools?

NATO is an acronym for the constituent elements of public policy

• Nodality – being visible/connected in social and informational networks
• Authority – legally able to command or prohibit 
• Treasure – able to exchange using money/other goods
• Organization – ability to act directly (eg staff and skills, organization, land, buildings, equipment, computers)

Helen’s talk mainly concentrated on nodality as it is often the cheapest tool to use to effect change. Additionally it is much easier to share information rather than authority, money, or organization.

Nodality in the digital age

• New potential for government nodality
• Group targeted nodality is easier/cheaper (individualized and blanket messages     proportionally more expensive)

But …

• Greater competition for nodality
• Search engines are gatekeepers
• ‘Narrow-cast government’ – rise in group-targeted treatments across all tools
• Tools run up against individuals who:
• Do not fit into digitally identifiable groups
• Circumvent government digitally (eg false digital identities)
• Choose not to/can’t play digital game

Methodologies:

Measuring resources; making comparisons

• Over time
• Across countries
• Across sectors
• Across actors (individual and organization)
• Against some benchmark

We can measure nodality via webmetrics and experiments

• Visibility: is the site easily found
• Accessibility: are users directed to relevant information on site
• Navigability: can users find their way around the site
• Extroversion: does the site point outwards to other sources
• Competitiveness: does the site compete well against other information sources

Privacy, Anonymity, and Identity

This topic was presented utilizing the Socratic method between a whole slew of professors and us students as spectators. Here are the some concepts that I was able to catch from the discussion …

Definitions:

Anonymous – no one can connect your digital identity to your RL self in meat space

Pseudonymous – persistent identity that may or not be traceable to RL

Privacy – Is it a human right? Should we let market forces determine privacy? Is it a matter of dignity? Should anonymity be permitted (con: spam, fraud, ect.) ?

The problem

• People like anonymity [less scrutiny?] as they go about their and business, but without [accountability | identity | tracability] people can do bad things. So how to reconcile?
• Privacy protections carry costs (restrictions on speech, ect.)
• Too much knowledge about someone can unfairly disadvantage minorities or in business transactions (eg provision of insurance)
• Broadcasting certain facts | images | rumors ties to someone’s identity can humiliate and embarrass them
• It can also prevent them from engaging in legitimate but visible activities or from expressing important but marginal views
• However: todays kids are more difficult to embarrass (different privacy needs across people and generations)

Solutions

• Decouple unique identity from data
• Tell the story but don’t say who is doing the embarrassing thing
• Can still have a persistent identity, just not in physical world – like eBay identities that can accrue reputation without identifying the people behind them
• Don’t resort to regulatory solutions?
• How much do user choice/empowerment solutions rely on a high level of sophistication and engagement by people?

The session was wrapped up by a meta discussion by Jonathan Zittrain who wanted to outline some principles for asking good questions. Here is what we all came up with ..

• make ‘em short, on elegant question versus three not-so great ones
• speaker + panelist format inherently flawed/limited
• questions become public presentations of self
• don’t be afraid to look ignorant – often other are wondering the same thing
• speak up if one’s own question hasn’t come up yet – might represent a new direction
• “in my field, X: What do you think?”
• dangerous questions; borders on lecture
• otherwise can be very good
• don’t be rude

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OII Day 3

This was an incredibly busy day, with 3 formal presentations followed by student presentations. I was very brain dead by the end of this day, so my recap for this particular day might not be terribly coherent.

Old Media, New Media: Citizens, Journalism and the Net presented by Dan Gillmor

Dan talked about ‘democratized’ media in the sense of participation, production, access.

Traditional media was about producing and distributing, now its about access. People can access media where and when they want it. Technological advances have turned consumers into producers, and producers into collaborators. The participatory nature of new technologies has allowed the movement away from ‘me’ and ‘my’ towards a more collaborative sense of ‘us’ and ‘ours’. Some examples are blogging collectively, sharing videos, and discussing events.

Who is a journalist? What is journalism?

Journalism can now be no longer constrained to traditional definitions, but can now be found in many arenas and defined in a multitude of ways:

• Niche focused news
• Hybrid news (citizen reports, and professional editors)
• NGO: Advocacy journalism (non-profit model: global voices)
• Blogs by professors
• Companies/Corporate entities (Steve Jobs thoughts on DRM)

Due to the movement towards democratized media, the rules for journalism and news makers have evolved in the following ways:

• More difficult to keep secrets
• Media decline and renewal
• Advertising Competitors (ebay, craigslist)
• Database Journalism (Washington Post sorting lists of fallen soldiers)
• Web 2.0, maps and mashups (marking pot holes on google map – will effect how government in the city will do their work)
• Journalists are not oracles but guides
• Asking audience to help with journalism (“help us investigate”)

All of this is not new (ex: the Kennedy assassination was filmed by a spectactor with a home video recorder), the difference is the quantity of people who are all connected in a digital network.

With so much information, the problem now arises with understanding what to trust. What is accurate? How do we do this in a ‘photoshop’ world? Dan suggestions the following:

• Need new media literacy. Basic principles for audiences.
• Be skeptical about everything, not equally skeptical – trust meter (different skepticism for NY times versus blog comments)
• Adjust “trust quotient” for each site
• Keep reporting
• Learn media techniques (understanding manipulative power of media)

What next?

• Mobile, location based journalism
• Let communities tell its own story
• Objects can tell us stories (ex: bar code readers)

Key Thought:

We are witnessing an evolution of an ecosystem between the blogosphere and traditional journalism, as both are dependent on each other for news and dissemination.

Attentive Clusters and Info Bundles: Online Discourse Networks in the Blogosphere presented by John Kelley

This was an incredibly interesting presentation on the use of social network methods to map the interactions on the political blogosphere. John showed some incredibly pretty network graphs and presented some very surprising results. Read his paper: Debate, Division, and Diversity: Political Discourse Networks in USENET Newsgroups

John studied the attentive clusters of the political blogosphere. Attentive clusters are a grop of bloggers that are attentive to the same streams of information, and groups of people that are linking to the same thing.

One of Johns findings indicated that the New York Times is right in the center of the attentive cluster. So the political blogosphere talks about stories from the NYT as well as links to it to support their statements. This is true for both the right and left.

Regarding tagging on blogosphere (which is of course very interesting to me):

• The intelligentsia is more like each other on the right and left, compared to the mid-western blogger, or the mom-blogger
• You cannot rely on bloggers who tag their posts with “politics”, as you will actually end up missing 2/3 of the political bloggers
• More conservatives use the tag “conservative”
• Equal number of people use the tag “republican”, “democrat”

One of the points that was brought up during John’s discussion is that linking behavior has different meaning in different social contexts, for example there is a difference between links in posts and links in blogrolls. John does not differentiate in his blogosphere link-analysis.

John also mentioned that the A-list bloggers have a star shaped network, and have over 10K
links. The most interesting churn and network structure is the seed bed for the A-listers
that have about 1K links (are right below the A listers on power
curve). Then it quickly drops off to long-tail into fragmented
communities.

Finally, John mentioned that Twitter, Facebook, and blogs are different version of technical media, they are not channels as in shannon-weaver model. Unlike newspaper and radio, which are channels of communicate, it is much more difficult to separate technical media into channels. Additionally, there are waves of users of technical channels with the leaders coming first and then leaving when they hit mainstream.

Key Thought (mirrors Dan Gillmor):
The press and the blogosphere are dependent of each other in a symbiotic relationship.

Digital Identity presented by Judith Donath

I heard Judith speak about signaling theory at the C&T conference. This talk also briefly covered those concepts. I really like her approach to tying in the socio-technical phenomenon that are occurring online to theories from other disciplines, such as signaling theory in the animal kingdom. I would highly recommend reading her Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community paper.

In her talk, Judith presented the concept of individual identity, which is centered on the idea that you have a single body, for each person a singular concept of “I”.

• Authenticating identity relies on the notion of embodied/individual identity
• Biometric measure of identity (fingerprints)
• Online we use email addresses for identity
• The face as a marker for identity

Many markers for individual identity also give us a lot of social markers, such as facial expression, dress, choice of usernames or email addresses.

However, social identity is less about who a particular individual is, but rather the type a certain person is, in the sense of categorizing/stereotyping people. A category would be “European” or “African-American”, and the preconceptions and notions about the person that come with those categories, which are informed by social norms and values.

People also have facets of identity where they present different ‘facets’ of themselves in different situations. Interestingly for me, I actually feel like a different individual if I am in a Russian community versus an American versus an international one.

Judith mentions identity signals are aspects of identity we try to control, the
impression that people are trying to convey to each other. Even as we try to present out best selves, other people are attempting to figure out ‘who they really are’.

Finally, identity deception involves false signals (such as renting expensive cars to appear wealthy) or actually faking/stealing and identity.

In the digital world, avatars (especially more realistic ones such as those found in Second Life) are utilizing a lot of the identity markers in
order to lend credence the person’s identity, but there is not actually any information in the avatar. Thus an avatar that has a rounded face and is smiling is not actually providing you any information about the person that is operating the avatar.

When designing digital spaces, take into consideration how much of identity play you will allow in the space. The design/architecture of spaces often presupposes the type of social behavior that will occur in the space.

Key Thought: People construct an identity narrative

The Social Physics of Identity presented by John Clippinger

John asked: Is there a scientifically principled way of talking about identity? Can the principles be used to design digital identity systems?

John goes on to state that all livings thing negotiate their identity for survival and must learn what to characteristics to assert as well as whom to trust. He uses the example of the human immune system, which does not actually know who you are, but does know who are your are not, and thus is able to attack entities it identifies as foreign. He believes we could perhaps structure future digital identity systems on the immune system concept.

John goes on to outline what he calls the “Social Physics of Identity”:

• persistent identity is needed to build trust and achieve accountability
• cannot have community without persistent identities
• identities co-evolve through the interactions – joint constructions – of the group and the individual
• identities are continuously being negotiated in social contexts to manage for the risks of deceptions

Key Thought: What you are is a negotiated and socially constructed identity

Important terms

• identification – ties to the biological, personal, biometric
• authentication – tied to an accepted identifier – ssn
• verification – third party verification of a claim – e.g. Age

Designing identity, reputation systems

• Can be authenticated – persistent – and anonymous
• Principle of minimal disclosure – don’t need to disclose anymore than necessary
• Challenge between defining cooperative or competitive games – manage risk
• Relationship vs Transaction, end in itself vs instrumentality, multiple vs single trial games
• No totally secure system
• Manage risk at the margin, minimize costs of failure
• Respond to the failure

User centric identity

• designed on principles of a self-organizing networks – where control and storage are distributed
• control is transfered through meta-data and localized policies over discrete data about user
• user is the locus of control – they can assign it to proxies
• identities can be multiple, and need policies to manage

 
You can find out more about John’s ideas at: socialphysics.org

I asked Judith and John: What social solutions can we have for identity management?

John believes that in a few years time, appropriate technology will be available to manage the social aspects of identity management. He thinks we increasingly need evolving algorithms for managing and protecting identity, and that we need need to create a framework to protect and express identity. Because the technology is quickly changing, he advocates for the need to understand social physics of identity.

Judith mentioned that we could utilize:

•  social networks/small worlds for identity – invitation systems where you are responsible for the people you invite
• have different levels of privileges based on behavior
• let communities define social conventions for dealing with social problems

I truly have a problem with attempting to solve social problems with
technology. I believe a social problem can only be solved with a social
solution that may perhaps be mediated or advanced through user-centric technology.

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OII Day 2

So I have fallen a bit behind on my OII blogging because of being generally busy and also very tired at the end of the day. I am about one day behind in the blogging at the moment, and hoping I won’t get too far behind the rest of the week. Sunday will be my catchup day for anything that I have missed.

Internet Filtering presented by Jonathan Zittrain and Rob Faris

The second day was started off by Jonathan Zittrain and talking about internet filtering. This talk was a very interactive discussion on methodology. We talked about the What, Why, How, Challenges, and Implications of studying internet filtering.

What:

• Discovering which websites are filtered due to demand or influence of public authorities
• Discovering or developing means to circumvent internet filtering and also assessing the effectiveness of circumvention

Why test for internet filtering:

• Compare Internet filtering to censoring of traditional media
• Understanding filtering around the world can reduce it (censoring bad; human rights good)
• Conceptualizing changes in today’s Internet versus tomorrows

How:

• Technical enumeration: “20 Questions”: come up with a list of web sites or web URLs to test; test them from two places; one free and one unknown
• Contextual studies: legal, historical, cultural, institutional

Challenges:

Representiveness: What web sites to test? How can we say that one state filters ‘more’ than another?

Implications:

• Right of sovereigns to determine internal affairs vs universally vindicated rights
• When one sovereign [ought to] [has a right to] try to influence another
• To what extent does control of communication facilitate control of other institutions/tool/ect?
• To what extent control of communication a priority for a given authority?

After this discussion, Rob Faris presented his work on the OpenNet Initiative, there was a lot of discussion around the maps presented on the web page, which attempted to convey the pervasiveness of filtering around the world. My biggest concern, from a cultural studies perspective, is the very Western-centric view of both this research as well as its presentation. For example, if you look at the ‘political’ map, the gray area (which includes the most of North and South America) indicates areas where the study was not even conducted. Therefore, much of the study was clearly concentrated in the Middle East. To me, this indicates Western imperialistic tendencies to believe that “our” way is the best. Although I personally believe in net freedom, I do feel a need to be respectful of other people’s culture and beliefs. The Muslim religion, which is prevalent in the areas with the most filtering, could be one of the major reasons for the filtering. I do not believe it is necessarily wrong to filter based on religious grounds. Additionally, the maps and research presented attempt to separate the political and the social/religious filtering, which for the Middle East, might not pose as much of a clear distinction. The researchers of this project did address these criticisms and basically stated that they are not attempting to be neutral in this respect but are advocating for an international open internet.

The Impact of Information Technology on Presidential Campaigning presented by Sunshine Hillygus

The majority of the talk concentrated on the ways in which IT has impacted political candidates and the ways in which they conduct their political campaigns.

Overview:

Impact on Media

• Changes in format, changes in nature of news – greater availability of video
• Increased competition – greater pressure for media to run stories that people will buy (ex: constant Paris Hilton coverage in Paris); on the Internet, the audience size determines survival
• 24 hour news cycle – less emphasis on long term stories; shorter deadlines; greater reliance on press releases and on the government for news

Impact on Publications

• People who use Internet for politics are already politically interested
• Increases engagement among those interested
• Increased info sources widened gap in political knowledge – more tv channels and web sites allow people to ignore political news

Impact on Politicians

• Changed how communicate with the politically interested
• Changed how raise money
• Change how make it into political news

Sunshine argued that today IT has changed who politicians talk to and what they are willing to say. This is due to the fact that candidates have more information about individual voters then ever before, and utilize the communication technologies to persuade those voters through very targeted, personalized messages.

The hyperinformation environment enables candidates to microtarget different messages to different voters. This also enables candidates to take a stance on a very large number of issues. In 2004 the candidates took position on 75 different issues. This is a product of the explosion of IT and proliferation of information, which makes it more difficult than ever to be fully informed about candidates.

This talk really made me think of the commercialization of the political campaigns. Voters are no longer selecting a candidate, but rather consuming a brand that is polished, packaged, and customized for each individual (also comes in fun-size!). So in our consumer culture with microtargeting and candidate branding, are our votes just purchasing a candidate simulacrum?

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OII Day 1

Digital Natives presented by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser

John Palfrey described the Digital Natives project, which is a study of youth who were born digital – or don’t remember a time before computers and the Internet. Palfrey states that this project presumes that “a global generation of younger people that are born digital fundamentally interact with technology differently than people who are slightly older.” The main difference is that technology and the internet are inherently and naturally part of these people’s everyday lives. In fact, the subjects of the study had a hard time understanding why the researchers were even interested in such mundane activities as their daily internet and technology uses.

Palfrey then went on to mention the following differences between the daily activities of digital natives and us older folk:

• Digital Identity – creating digital identities through blogs, videos, and graphic representations in the forms of an avatar
• Multi-Tasking
• Interaction with digital media – expectation of malleable media
• Digital Creativity – media production
• Lightweight collaboration – multiple users, distributed work groups
• New Contexts, New Meanings

Some research questions that these studies are trying to illuminate include:

• How do we understand digital natives in an empirical sense?
• What policies do we need to create for this new generation?
• What does it mean to have a an environment that is much more interactive (Web 2.0) then the first set?
• What does this mean for digital identity?
• What does this mean for education and how should education be reformed?

Finally, the study attempts to address some threats such as security, privacy, intellectual property, credibility, and information overload. As well as present areas for opportunities such as the acquisition of media literacy skills, expression/identity, empowering creators, information sharing, maintaining connections, and semiotic democracy.

The Future of the Net presented by Jonathan Zittrain

Zittrain gave an excellent presentation that highlighted the main points in his “Saving the Internet” paper which was published in the Harvard Business Review. The paper and the talk basically touched upon the point of “generativity”. According to Zittrain, generativity as provided by our current PCs was the impetus for the huge technological explosion that we have seen over the past few decades. At the basic level, generativity means that a system enables the end user control over the system in the sense of being able to directly interact with it, as well as extend it in any way they choose, without having to go through gatekeepers. Zittrain outlines a framework for generativity that contains four elements:

1. Leverage – generative systems make difficult jobs easier
2. Adaptability – breadth of system uses and ease with which it can be modified
3. Ease of Mastery – how easy it is for broad audiences to adapt and adopt the technology
4. Accessibility – the ease with which tools, technology, and information can be obtained that are necessary to achieve mastery

Therefore, a system that contains all four elements is the considered to be the most generative.

The best analogy provided in Zittrain’s paper of generativity is legos versus a doll house. Legos are small blocks that can be easily modified to create any number of objects, and are certainly easy enough for kids to master. A doll house on the other hand only provides room for the child’s imagination, but does not actually allow the child to physically modify the structure, and is therefore less generative than legos.

Unfortunately, generativity is not always good because it leaves room for malicious behavior such as spam and security threats. Because people can execute code on their machines, the machines become vulnerable to malicious software. One of the “solutions” (also for economic reasons) to this vulnerability has been the creation of what Zittrain calls “tethered devices” . Devices such as iPods and Tivos are tethered because the user does not ultimately have the control over the device. Since the service and the product are becoming more intertwined, the companies are actually controlling the software of the devices. By pulling a switch, Tivo can “upgrade” the software on every user’s device so that certain programs are no longer recordable. This is often done without the user’s consent. Sure, the user is “safe” from malicious software that could break the Tivo, but at the same time the users rely on Tivo as a gatekeeper to the to the functionality and services available from the device (Analogy: Think CompuServe as the gatekeeper of the Internet).

Therefore, there is ever increasing lockdown of generativity by the most popular devices that we consume. Zittrain is mainly attempting to start a rhetoric around tethered devices as he (and myself included) does not want a locked down future where companies decide what we get to see, listen to, and the features we are allowed to utilize on the devices that we purchase. Not only does it stifle creativity, but also freedom.

This talk truly made me think of the iPhone, which locks down generativity on multiple levels. Not only are you restricted to the applications preloaded on the iPhone, but you are also locked down to a specific service provider – AT&T. Thus, if a consumer wishes to purchase the iPhone, they are required to subscribe to the AT&T wireless network, without even the option to go with Sprint or Verizon. By purchasing the iPhone, people are in a way condoning this kind of behavior. Therefore, we should all think twice before we buy the latest gadget, and the levels on which we are accepting being tethered.

Finally, last night as I was digesting the days events, I had a thought about Facebook. Has Facebook become more generative because it has opened up its API and is allowing third party applications? Something to think about.

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C&T Conference

So at the end of June, from the 28-30, I attended the Communities and Technologies Conference in East Lansing, Michigan. My life has been so crazy after I got back because of job hunting, house hunting, and catching up on things that I have not had a chance to post about it. I am currently at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme, and will attempt to liveblog the event. This post is currently a filler, which I will come back to later today and post about my takeaways from the awesome C&T conference.

So C&T edits to come soon, but now onto OII.

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