ICTlogy

On 14 May 2012 I imparted a seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property at the University of Alicante, Spain, kindly invited by Aureio López-Tarruella, expert and professor on Intellectual Property.

The purpose of my session was to provide a frame to explain while Law is nowadays having more trouble than usual in trying to solve many of today’s problems. In other words, the goal was not to enter in specific issues that Law can difficultly fix, but to reflect on how the foundations of our industrial society are being challenged by digitization and Information and Communication Technologies and, thus, how the Law that was built upon those foundations is shaking from head to toes.

The (long!) session was split in three parts

1. The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay, which explains how the end of scarcity and transaction costs in the areas of knowledge is questioning most of our institutions — Law amongst them.
2. The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media, which explains how the addition of the social layer to the World Wide Web has transformed communication, culture and creation as we knew it.
3. The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated, where some specific practices and malpractices are identified on a typical task done through the Internet — and challenging the concepts of who or what is the sender, the receiver, the message, the channel or the code.

Here follow the materials that I used in the session and a short collection of bibliographic references.

The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Further reading

Nous Horitzons — the review of the Fundació Nous Horitzons — has released issue #204 with the quite explicit title of Democratizing communication, communicating democracy (original title: Democratitzar la comunicació, comunicar la democràcia).

I was asked to write a piece where to reflect about what can be done and what cannot be done on the Internet, in the sense of what is allowed, what is not, where are the boundaries of our civic rights, where do different rights collide (e.g. freedom of expression vs. intellectual property rights), etc.

My article, The conquest of Internet: new maps for new territories, is originally written in Catalan (La conquesta d’Internet: nous mapes per als nous territoris — Spanish translation also available) and takes its title from William Gibson’s documentary No Maps for These Territories!.

I ended writing what it looks like a slightly different thing: that there is not an actual collision of rights, but the dawn of a totally new model of society. And what looks like a collision of rights is, indeed, the fight to set up new institutions, appoint new leaders and shape up this new model according to each one’s own views. Thus, the apparent collision of rights is but the symptom of a higher level matter: what is the “global order” going to look like in the next decades after the actual order, based on the industrial paradigm, has become obsolete by Information and Communication Technologies.

I want to heartily thank Marc Rius for the invitation to write this piece, for his patience on my repeated delays and, most especially, for not changing a single comma on what I acknowledge is a dense text that goes way beyond the simple answer to what can and cannot be done on the Internet.

Downloads

Peña-López, I. (2012)
La conquesta d’Internet: nous mapes per als nous territoris

Peña-López, I. (2012)
La conquista de Internet: nuevos mapas para los nuevos territorios

Nous Horitzons (nº204)
Democratitzar la comunicació, comunicar la democràcia

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) Law and Political Sciences department herby invite scholars, practitioners and policy makers to participate in the 8th International Conference on Internet Law & Politics (IDP 2012): Challenges and Opportunities of Online Entertainment by submitting papers, from either legal or political science perspectives, focusing on the following topics:

• Online Entertainment and its implications in fields such as, among others, the legal framework of audiovisual communications, the liability of intermediaries, legal aspects of videogames and online gambling, social networking sites, behavioural advertising, privacy, data protection, defamation, protection of minors, intellectual property, new models of content distribution, user generated contents, illicit and harmful contents, net neutrality, new generation networks, antitrust.

Papers may also focus on:

• Legal issues relevant to the current status and future perspectives of the Internet, such as, among others, online privacy, data protection, intellectual property, ISP liability, freedom of expression, cybercrime, e-commerce.
• Issues regarding electronic government, such as, among others, open data, reuse of public sector information, political participation online, e-procurement, Internet governance.

Interested participants should first submit an abstract (a 300-word outline) of their paper by 20 December, 2011, indicating clearly its subject and scope, and including a provisional title. There is no need to use a template for submitting the abstract. The abstracts received will be peer-reviewed and authors will be notified of the outcome by 10 January, 2012.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be required to send the full paper by 26 March, 2012. Full papers should not exceed 8,000 words in length, including notes and references. For the full paper authors should use the conference template that will be available to download from the web. The full papers will be peer-reviewed as well. The outcome will be notified by 16 April, 2012. Final version of the paper (camera ready) should be sent by 30 April, 2012. All papers accepted will be included in the electronic proceedings of the Conference, which will hold an ISBN number. Accepted papers may also be selected for oral presentation at the Conference.

Important dates

• Abstract submission: please submit a 300-word outline by 20 December, 2011.
• Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 10 January, 2012.
• Full paper submission: please submit the full paper by 26 March, 2012.
• Notification of full paper’s acceptance: 16 April, 2012.
• Final version (camera ready): 30 April, 2012.

Please send all submissions by electronic mail in a .DOC or .ODT document to: uoc.idp2012@gmail.com

The limits of the mass media and the emergence of mass self-communication in the digital age
Lluís Bassets (El País Associate Director), Manuel Campo Vidal (Journalist), Mayte Pascual (TVE Journalist), Ricardo Galli (Meneame.net), Klaudia Alvarez (Communication group DRYbcn), Vicent Partal (Vilaweb, chairs)

Ricardo Galli

(this speech is partly based on Ricardo Galli’s article Pienso, luego estorbo — I think, therefore I’m in the way)

Some of the reactions against the 15M movement were expected — as the ones from the extreme right wing — but some others were unexpected, and nevertheless were as foreign, strange, surprising for the activists of the social movements.

Several initiatives like #nolesvotes or Democracia Real Ya’s protests for May 15th (15M) became extremely popular in online platforms, with massive acceptance and viral communication and, notwithstanding, they would not appear on the papers. Why?

• Lack of belief that things would come to something real. That is, lack of belief that there would not be a transposition from online spaces to offline spaces.
• Lack of a press conference. Indeed, there were some, but were unattended by journalists.
• Avoid a call effect: if it appears on the papers, there is more likelihood of success. Thus, let us not air it.
• Phagocytosing of the topic by some journalists, that love being the subject of their own news, instead of reporting the real characters of the movement.

After the 15M, some media begin to cover the events, but also to discredit both the movement and some of the more visible heads (or arbitrary so-called heads of the movement — which were not).

Some of the things that have happened — and media still have to learn — is that lots lots of things have happened since 15M, there are lots of people involved, the movement is evolving… and nonetheless, it is still being ignored.

Lluís Bassets

We have to think of mass media as institutions that are evolving themselves, and sometimes it is this very same evolution or transformation of the media the most interesting event. Media are not mirrors of the society, but institutions that are part of it. And, as such, are actors worth being analysed too.

We also have to deal with the 15M phenomenon in its context: the Arab Spring and the economic crisis. This is a global revolution due to a crisis of representation, of mediation: the mediation of governments, of trade unions, of media.

What is a TV, a radio, a newspaper on the Internet? sections? a 24-hour cycle? Media have to become just the contrary of what they nowadays are. And journalists do still have a future — and a very bright one, indeed — if they stick to their core values: verifying the sources.

But big journalism needs time, reflection, quietness. And the problem is that the pace of the new times is so fast that makes it difficult for this journalism to take its time.

Manuel Campo Vidal

Media are in a deep and long transition. And not only because of the crisis of the paper vs. digital, and not only because of the crisis of advertisement. The economic crisis only implies more speed and depth, but the transition is not a consequence of the economic crisis. The nature of crisis of media is the divergence between old and new media.

But conspiracies might not be the best way to explain what is happening, the reasons why media companies and most journalists are fighting against the unstoppable change. It has to be acknowledged that we are living in disconcert: we know what we are leaving behind, but we do not know where are we heading to.

The Arab Spring was tweeted, but Twitter did not spark the Tunis or the Egypt revolution. Or Facebook. Or any other social networking site. The Internet was a valuous instrument, one without which the revolutions may have not been the way there were, but by no means the revolutions began on the Internet.

The real challenge now for traditional media is to recover their lost reputation. Reputation, in an Information Society, is the only thing of value (information is free), and that is the capital that a journalist should take care of.

Mayte Pascual

There is a mutual lack of confidence between traditional media and digital or new media. And mutual understanding would be highly beneficial for both parties.

We need to be more communication-literate to understand the new era we are entering. More and more things will be explainable in terms of communication, and thus we must know how communication happens, how it shapes people’s minds, etc.

And traditional media have to learn too how the inner functioning of social movements.

Klaudia Álvarez

What is relevant is not whether a medium is traditional or new or digital, but who owns it, who is speaking through it.

Related to that, another huge different is whether in a given medium sender and receiver are interchangeable or not. Can I be a sender and not only a receiver in that medium? This really makes a difference.

Being a writer and not a reader, having a blog, is not only writing or having a blog, but changing your mindset: you are building your own reality, they are now aware of their possibility to create a reality. Communication autonomy is about building realities.

But empowerment happens only for people that can actually be empowered, that is, people in the bad side of the digital divide, or socially excluded, are more difficult to reach by empowering tools.

And empowerment comes in detriment of (traditional) media. And traditional media usually fight this loss power, which indeed happened in the 15M.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: if there is something left to journalism, it is credibility. And there is a clear deadline for the disappearance of traditional media: the day all people now aged 60 or older are already gone. There is thus an unavoidable need for a transition, but this transition has to be smooth, with as less victims as possible.

Arnau Monterde: the collective intelligence is transforming the way information is created and distributed, the way the sources are verified. Thus, it is very difficult to state that media-literacy is a personal must, because now the media are produced by the collective and collectively. It is the outcome of minor contributions that becomes a major contribution.

Campo Vidal: there is a media bubble that is unsustainable, both economically and socially speaking. There are — in some fields — too much media (e.g. digital TV) and clearly overrated.

More information

• Mesa V. Los límites de los medios de comunicación y la emergencia de la autocomunicación de masas a la era digital, by Ricard Espelt.

The incidence of the new social movements. Exploring new fields for political action
Joana Conill (UOC-IN3, chair), Mònica Oltra (Coalició Compromís), Joan Subirats (IGOP), Raúl Sanchez Cedillo (Nomad University)

Mònica Oltra

Increasingly, governments and political parties lie as if their citizens were uninformed idiots. The political discourse has reached astonishing levels of misery that thus keeps the citizen away from politics. And it is very difficult to articulate a political discourse out of the party system, out of partidism.

Added to that, we live in an information blackout, as mass media have been taken over by political parties and lobbies.

Did the 15M Spanish Indignants movement had any impact on political parties and governments? Partly yes, as minority parties were just making the very same demands on the democratic process that were made on the 15M protests. Thus, these minority parties have somewhat been legitimated in their demands by the movements and, vice-versa, the social movements have also somewhat been legitimated by a part of the formal political institutions that are represented by the minority political parties.

But social movements should not be capitalized and appropriated by political parties, even minority ones. Parties should take part and participate in the movements — preferably at an individual or personal level —, but not appropriate them.

What parties can do is to represent the rhetoric of the invisible ones, the ones that are not represented by anyone, any political party, the ones that do not appear in the political agenda.

And the way to make (new) politics should be reporting accompanied by making proposals: “destroying” accompanied by “building”.

Participation is not freedom of choice amongst some given options, but freedom to decide what has to be chosen.

Joan Subirats

Democracy has been emptied out of values, and only the rules, the procedures remain:

• Representation: citizens do not believe that political parties represent them anymore.
• Intermediation: political parties do not seem to be channelling the needs of the citizens to the places where decision-taking happens.
• Function: political parties do not represent the citizens because they are no more their equals. Politicians are privileged ones and thus cannot understand nor share the needs of “normal” citizens.
• Insiders: political parties have evolved from citizen tools to influence the institutions to tools of the institutions to influence on the citizens.

The 15M movement is stating that politics can happen outside of institutions; that the public sphere is not the monopoly of the public powers; and that representation do not compulsory has to take place by means of institutions.

We need not to improve, but to transform. And this transformation might be a shift back to the commons:

Raúl Sánchez

It is difficult to tell where the thresholds of a movement are when it is based on network architecture and collective intelligence.

The 15M movement is an open, autopoietic system that is constantly creating and reshaping itself. The 15M is a movement based on Spinozan affections and the estigmergies amongst its members.

The 15M movement proved that it is possible to take decisions without anyone taking them. The 15M is a actor in a non-place, a neuronal network without a central subject, challenging the current scenario of politics, contesting the statement that things cannot be different.

Discussion

Q: does the 15M need to move from movement, and embody itself in an organization? Sánchez: most probably the network that the 15M is definitely in need of a “body”, a formal way to present itself before the others. And this can happen formalizing its members in an organization, or achieving some milestones that define the movement through specific actions.

Mayo Fuster: I sometimes have the feeling to be watching a 15M ad, in the sense that few people acknowledge that many things just happened, without much planning, and most of them difficult to foresee. How do you see the 15M in a 10 year horizon? Oltra: got plenty of hope with people camping on the streets, hope that the movement won’t be absorbed by other movements or institutions, that it will achieve something. Subirats: don’t think that the 15M is not a movement, but the expression of a change of era. Thus, in a 10 years future, what is likely to happen is that some structural changes if have not happen they will certainly be slowly happening. Sánchez: most probably there will be the very same sense of transition that we are now living in, only deeper.

More information

• Taula IV. La incidencia de los nuevos movimientos sociales y la investigación de nuevos escenarios para la acción política, by Ricard Espelt.

The transformations of Civil Society in the Information and Knowledge Society
Oscar Mateos (Ramon Llull University, chair), Joan Coscubiela (UOC-IN3), Gemma Galdón (UOC), Ada Colau (Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca).

Òscar Mateos

What are the big changes that we are facing? It is not an era of change, but a change of era, Joan Subirats. The 15M movement has put the spotlight on many ongoing dynamics that were working for the change. And, arguably, the ones that understand the 15M are part of it, and one can only be part of it if one understands the movement. There are new languages, platforms, ways to communicate, and that is part of the change too. And maybe these processes are the very true outcomes of the movement, and not what it is traditionally asked to a movement: an impact on institutions or the taking of power.

Joan Coscubiela

Our society is in a dire crisis, especially in our social organizations. And this crisis is boosted by technological change.

The relationships between economics and politics, and between corporations and unions have been altered, and the balance of power amongst these institutions has radically changed. Some reasons are that the habitat (the factory) has been radically transformed; the disappearance of the aggregation of interests due to the disaggregation of identities; the difficulty to build a collective identity upon which to leverage a movement.

The dismantlement of the factory, the dismantlement of the national economy, and the dismantlement of the nation-estate. The integrated factory becomes the networked enterprise. There are central workers and workers on the periphery.

There is also a crisis of the communication channels in traditional unions, based on the integrated Fordist factory and the assembly of workers.

All these crises are undoubtedly weakening the strength and even legitimacy of traditional trade unions. But, if this crisis of legitimacy will be especially tough in Anglo-Saxon unions (based on the firm or the factory, or European unions (based on the economic sector), it might be that Mediterranean-type unions (based on the notion of class, or of social equity) will have it more easy to regain legitimacy, even if a deep transformation is notwithstanding required.

The great opportunity for trade unions is how to leverage the power of ICTs to regain legitimacy to refund the forms of participation.

Gemma Galdón

With the coming of the Internet and the intensive use of social networking sites and similar tools make the medium become the message: the fact that the 15M movement is very live on the Internet is part of its very definition, of its DNA, and tells much on the nature and characteristics of the movement.

There is a qualitative leap in the way participation is understood: besides being present on a demonstration, being active on the Internet (gathering information, commenting, creating opinions, broadcasting messges, etc.) can be as much important as physical presence. Notwithstanding, either on the street or on the Internet, legitimacy comes not from the diffusion of information, but from being committed with the movement. Only commitment leads to legitimacy and reputation, and not only mere participation by being active on social networking sites.

The logic of expansion of social movements is no more centralized, but rhizomatic: it obeys to no traditional logics, especially cultural logics or logics of power.

Indeed, social movements of the past five years have detached themselves from the international political and economic agenda. Nowadays movements no more follow international leaders to their international meetings of the World Bank or the G8. Social movements increasing have their own agenda, and an agenda that is created and updated ad-hoc.

This change is partly due because information and the communication tools have been democratized to the limit. What is difficult now is opacity and non-transparency. Diffusion of information and ideas and calls to action are now cheap and fast. On the other hand, this is a double-edged sword: repression is now more easy than ever for the ones in power, as identification of individuals and collectives is immediate.

The problem is: are we making any impact? When the whole world protested against the second invasion of Irak, nothing happened. And, worst indeed, there does not seem to exist an alternative to the broken representative democracy.

The challenge is how to leverage the common sense we reconquered and turn it into a driver of change, based on new forms of political transformation.

Ada Colau

The new forms of participation not only surprised the traditional social movements, but also the newer ones, that became “obsolete” even if they were recent. These newer social movements were based on platforms that (a) focused on a specific issue and (b) acted as a helping collective so you could reach out (instead of a vertical organization where the individual helps the organization to reach out). These platforms had to transform into networks and the new ways to organized that the Internet and, especially, social networking sites made possible.

That was the case of V de Vivienda [H stands for Housing] in Spain, on of the seeds that afterwards would nourish the 15M Spanish Indignants movement. V de Vivienda was auto-convened and auto-organized, by means of SMSs and e-mails.

V de Vivienda succeeded in putting on the political agenda the housing bubble and the social and economic problems derived from it.

The answer from the political institutions to the movement was very shy and myopic. So, after all the energies poured into the movement, it does not seem be having much impact. What to do about it? How to keep on without being discouraged? The new strategy is increasingly being civil disobedience, so that a change in the Law is forced. But civil disobedience is individual, not collective, so the collective has to find ways to support the individuals that will enter civil disobedience (i.e. in the present case debated here, resistance to eviction and the movement helping people to resist evictions and, at last, stop them).

The network helped in building a critical mass around the issue of mortgages and evictions, as this is not a geographically concentrated problem, but quite a spread one.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: one of the reasons of the crisis of trade unions is that they are part of the power, they come from a paternalistic way to understand society. And social movements are fighting just against that.

Manuel Castells: changes, real and structural changes need their time and own pace, and that that change begins with a change in the processes.

Ismael Peña-López: acknowledging the truth of the aforementioned statement, the problem is that people’s lives happen in the short run (evictions, unemployment subsidies have limited time spans in the range of months), and thus some milestones have to be achieved in the short run. This is especially true not only to protect the victims of economic crisis, but also to avoid the draining of energy of social movements, that can fade away and dissolve if anything tangible and concrete can be achieved (and this should be achieved without violence).

More information

• Mesa III: Las transformaciones de la Sociedad Civil en la Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento, by Ricard Espelt.