Politics in the era of Networks
Daniel Innerarity, lecturer in philosophy at the Universidad de Zaragoza, researcher at Ikerbasque and director at the Democratic Governance Institute.

A democratic tension

When we speak about politics and social networking sites, we’re used to speak about David vs. Goliath: common people fighting against the powerful.

For the first time in many years, we are not facing a strong political power, but a weak political power. A political power disconcerted by the markets, globalization, a smart society. But, is that society that smart? Is it true that the digital revolution has had an impact on politics (and political parties and governments) and not on common people? Why should be common people be spared from that impact?

It is only natural that the political system and what happens out of it (unions, nonprofits, civil associations, etc.) advance in parallel and, in their confrontation, consensus and solutions emerge. This means that it is interaction what makes society advance, and not that it is society that is right despite the opposition of the political system.

Indeed, we do need an articulated civil society, as articulated as political parties and governments. Not a chaotic or disorganized one. Only an organized civic society can face a disorganized, weak political power. But there is a deep difficulty to articulate a general purpose strategy, especially when populisms leverage the fact that no-one seems to be accountable for their decisions.

The utopia of dis-intermediation

We are witnessing times were intermediation is toughly fought against: there seem to be no need for politicians, journalists, teachers, distributing industries, etc.

While there may be a positive side of dis-intermediation (lesser costs, a more straightforward access, increased availability of knowledge, etc.) there is also a dark side of it. The expert becomes a contested institution while the cult of the amateur becomes the norm.

The huge challenge is how to rebuild new mediators, more flexible, more participative, and not getting rid of them. Democracy is about commitment and engagement, and oftentimes this can only be achieved through representation.

Ballot boxes and dreams

A mature democracy is not about setting highest ideals, but about identifying what is the second best and being able to tell whether it is acceptable. If the second best is too far from ideals, society won’t progress; if the second best is too close to ideals, fanaticism takes place.

Our society is deeply de-politicized: not only technocrats are taking the power, but “tea parties” are stepping in the centre of the political debate. Those are parties or groups of people, without second best options, and that fight within the party for it not to agree with anything with the “enemy”. This breaks party-to-party and party-to-society communication. In many senses, the hardcore of the political blogsphere is made of “tea parties”, extremist partisans that radicalise the debate.

Paradoxes of democratic self-determination

Echo chambers (Sunstein) and the Daily Me (Negroponte) have been side effects of democratic self-determination, with the result that the quality of democracy is impoverished. People that thinks different from us protects us from insanity and fanaticism.

We certainly need to keep a certain distance from reality to see other opinions. And representation is just about this, about seeing the whole picture.

Untangling an illusion

The Internet implies a high degree of empowerment for the citizenry. And, historically, every new technology has come along with a utopia: technology will bring a social change or revolution. But, will it?

There is a common believe that a new technology appears in the void, in no social or economic context. But it does. And that is why the same (new) technology has different effects in different places, or “unexpected” or “undesired” changes instead of what we dreamt of.

There is a common believe that social media decentralizes and democratizes power. But the nature of power is not so: there are gatekeepers and mediators in the Internet. The Internet does not removes the relationships of power, but transforms them. E.g. in the top 40 political blogs in the US, there is also one woman, two hispanics, and no afroamericans. The top 40 political blogs in the US are made up by WASPs… as US politics.

Censorship, for instance, is not any more about governments censoring, but about crowds doing it willingly. Search engines are not really neutral, as they redirect traffic, etc.

We have to acknowledge that democracy is about design: social and power hierarchies have their mirror in the online world. Imperialism is not anymore about culture, but about protocols: we are living the imperialism of protocols.

There is a common believe that criticising (or demanding accountability) and building is the same thing, and it is not. Democracy is not only about winning elections, but about governing; or about reporting injustices, but about coming up with a better social design to avoid/correct them.

Digital revolutions have been more focused on accountability and reporting than on building.

The Internet is based on easiness and trust, and that is, precisely, its weakest point.

Discussion

Q: is it possible that the Internet stops us from a critical thinking? Innerarity: It depends. We sometimes need some things to just happen, without us having to think about how their work; but we sometimes need to stop and think. What we are in need of is to be able to turn the switch on or off, so that we are able to stop and think about a given aspect, and without, in the meantime, being dragged around because of the speed of times. Politics has lost its ability to set up, to propose: it’s reactive and not propositive, thinks short term instead of long term.

Q: are we confusing mobilization with engagement? Innerarity: organization is fundamental to perform deep and lasting changes. What organization? Whatever, but organization.

Q: has the Internet been able to engage more participants in politics? Innerarity: the network has sometimes provided an illusory activism, where the activist believes that they are having a deep impact and the truth they are having not.

Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí: so, the Internet is a menace for politicians and they should fight against it? Innerarity: it definitely is not, the Internet can help in doing better politics. The problem with politics and the Internet is usually on the politicians’ side.

Ismael Peña-López: what will be easier: to transform the actual institutions (parliaments, parties, schools and universities, etc.) or to substitute the with brand new ones? Innerarity: renewal is a must, that is out of question. Or parliaments become spaces for reflection, or they will legislate about the past, about past problems. But we’d rather update the institutions we have than try and substitute them with new ones: the cost might be higher and no one says traditional institutions could not be transformed.

More information

• Resum i impressions de “La política a l’era de les xarxes socials” amb Daniel Innerarity, by Roc Fernández.
• Brief interview to Daniel Innerarity:

Even more important, other institutions not specifically aimed at promoting ICT usage — firms, schools, universities, governments… — have set up “ICT spaces” to help with the adoption of ICTs within their walls.

Those ICT spaces are usually run by a person or a team with a singular collection of skills: they are managers, they are computer engineers, they are social workers, they are communicators, they are educators… all at the same time.

During much of year 2011 I had the luck to be working with the Catalan Government and its Institut Català de les Qualificacions Professionals (ICQP) [Catalan Institute for professional qualifications, part of the Catalan Ministry of Education] to try and define what were the competences, skills and, very important, training required to run an ICT space.

There were five of us on the team: two of us — Isidre Bermúdez Ferran, from Fundación Esplai, a major telecentre actor in Spain, and I — provided experience on the field, while three others — Xavier Delgado Alonso, from the Catalan Institute of Social Services, and Manuela Merino Alcántara and Bru Laín i Escandell, from ICQP — provided all the methodological background.

Working sessions were really intense and what was learnt from the whole process was incredible. Now, the result of our work has been made public for public scrutiny and can now be downloaded from the ICQP website, both in Catalan and Spanish. Comments are really welcome.

Qualificació professional Dinamització de l’Espai TIC
(266 KB)

Cualificación professional Dinamización del Espacio TIC
(440 KB)

When we speak about leadership in a digital age, we use to list plenty of “new” skills that the “new” leader should have, namely: problem solving, critical thinking, team-working, etc. While I might share this or any other combination of skills that one may make up, the problem I find with this approach is that it focusses too much on the consequences and not on the cause, on trying to deal with the resulting scenario of the deep changes we are witnessing instead of trying to understand the causes behind that very same change. In other words, most lists of 21st Century Skills are symptomatic when they should be systemic.

In the following interview (in Spanish) for The Project I tried to depict what is a leader in a digital era and, by construction, what is an “Enterprise 2.0″ — a term with which I do not feel very comfortable, but that everybody seems to understand (which is what matters).

The baseline is that we have succeeded in digitizing information and communications, with two major consequences: the end of scarcity and transaction costs, and the substitution of human mind-work by machines. In this context, two main strategies arise:

• The substitution of hierarchical structures by horizontal networks, which imply being able to work very differently, enabling connections.
• The need to master digital skills — a complex set of — as the new landscape is digital.

Networks

In an industrial society, goods are scarce (apples are not infinite, nor are sheep or any other resource) and working with them requires transaction costs.

Hierarchies and intermediaries used to be efficient and effective ways to cut down transaction costs while working with scarce goods. Information — which was embedded in physical supports as books or brains, both of them scarce — was also scarce and costly to handle. Thus, decision making had to be centralized: only the one on top would be able to have all the information necessary to make an informed decision.

When we digitize our inputs (information), the way we apply labour (knowledge), capital (computers), and our output (information and/or knowledge), goods become non-scarce (as material goods used to be) and dealing with them (storage, “handling”, transformation, distribution, etc.) becomes costless.

The hierarchical architecture becomes now a burden: information has to artificially circulate along the chain of command, infringing an added cost in matters of time and, sometimes, matter. When information is abundant and transaction costs are few, networks are more effective and efficient than hierarchies. That is a fact.

In a digital society, the good leader is the one that enables the network to be, to run smoothly, to create connections between all the nodes, to shift the process of decision making to the nearest and most appropriate node, more likely to be much more knowledgeable about a specific matter than any other node in the network.

Digital skills

Not only understanding that the network is the new architecture is what is needed, but also being able to live in it. And as networks are boosted by digital technologies, a collection of digital competences apply.

An explanation of such a collection can be found at Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills. I will just list them here:

• Technological Literacy: HOW
• Informational Literacy: WHAT
• Media Literacy: WHERE
• Digital Presence: WHO
• e-Awareness: WHY

When asked for an example where all these skills can be put into practice, I like to cite Analyzing digital literacy with a single simple tweet, where each and every conception of digital literacy can be explored by using a message on Twitter.

Social networking sites

A typical question that usually comes at this point is whether firms should be on social networking sites. In an interview (also in Spanish) entitled Redes sociales: ¿oportunidad u obligación? (Social networking sites: opportunity or obligation?) I talked about this.

The main points of the interview are the following four:

• Living in the social networking sites is both a problem and a requisite of the “new times”. On the one hand, as social animals, we have to acknowledge that social networking sites are boosting our social potential: committing with a cause, hanging out with friends or engaging in collaborative work are much more easy when gone digital. On the other hand, if we are knowledge workers (and we increasingly are), social networking sites are tools which usage we should master.
• Digital technologies are becoming general purpose technologies. This means that each and every aspect of our lives will be affected and transformed by digital technologies. And now that we just added the “social layer” onto the Internet, we will never more be able to tell a social networking site from the “rest of” the Internet and vice versa.
• This is a change of era, not a collection of small changes. Institutions will be radically transformed as will be the concept of citizen (or worker, in the context of businesses).
• Thus, we have to acknowledge and understand those changes. And we have to acquire the necessary (digital) skills to deal with the new scenario that is unfolding before our eyes.

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.

Net neutrality struggle and new movements in the digital era
Ismael Peña-López (chair), Txarlie (Hacktivistas.net), Carlos Sánchez Almeida (Bufet Almeida), Gala Pin (X.net)

Txarlie

Hacktivism works as a free software project: it collects information, documents the processes and implements actions. The idea is avoiding reinventing the wheel but implementing the same ideas and processes in other social projects — in this specific case, the Spanish Ley Sinde.

Each revolution has its tool. The Protestant Reformation cannot be understood without the printing press, the soviet revolution without fliers and posters, and the 1960s protests without the television.

The Internet is thus the tool of the 15M movement, and not only the Internet as a device, but also as a philosophy, as an architecture, with distributed power, policentric. Indeed, the 15M movement is not a protest without leadership, but, on the contrary, it is a protest with multiple leaders, more leaders than ever.

When it comes to Net Neutrality, the idea is do not wait until the Net is not neutral, but to actually prevent its enclosure. And there is indeed an urgent need to digitally empower people, so that there is no need to prevent the stealing of liberties, freedom instead of having to recover it.

Facebook is becoming less of a social networking site, of a democracy site, and more of a shopping mall. That is why activists are constantly moving from one platform to another one. This is not happening, though, with Twitter, that is keeping its horizontal, totally flat essence.

It is interesting to stress the fact that often people use some applications for their own purposes, and purposes that were not foreseen by the owners. And sometimes these new usages do confront the current law and thus the owner of the tool either takes sides with the activists or against them, but can no more remain neutral.

It is not a crisis, it is the system. The only difference is that we are now better informed on what is happening. Let us, so, take the chance to make an informed change.

Carlos Sanchez Almeida

Sometimes it is possible to define common rules for a collective, but sometimes it is not. And sometimes it is the very design of a system the one that has its own rules embedded in its architecture. That is happening on the Internet, that was designed in a way that included its functioning rules.

When a new territory is conquered, the first thing is imposing one’s will, the second one is to try and justify it morally, and last comes the making of rules to accommodate the new reality. The conquest of (or attempt to conquer) the Internet is no different in its aims… even if we have not yet gone through the first stage.

But as the Internet is resisting the siege, the power is trying to come through the back door and impose new rules. But the way these rules are legitimated is through media and by changing people’s minds. Thus, the centre of the power are media. What tools do we have to achieve that?

The problem with the Internet is that there are as many tools as initiatives, and as much initiatives as people.

What happened with the Spanish Ley Sinde is that it indirectly and unwillingly contributed in clustering all the different initiatives fighting for different liberties, ending up in a unique voice that colluded against the attack to social rights.

Once out of the narrowness of Internet-focussed fights, it is now the time for the assault to the very fundamentals of power: money and the media.

Gala Pin

The attacks against the Internet are not attacks against a technology, but against civil liberties like the freedom of expression, the freedom of thought, etc.

On the other hand, promoting the changes that the new technologies now enable does not necessarily goes against some private interests (e.g. the artists’). On the contrary, it quite often defends those interests, although most times requires a redefinition of how things are made.

Hacking is another type of civil disobedience, and especially effective one in this new territory that is the Internet. Hacking plus collective intelligence is certainly a very powerful combination to resist the attacks to the Net.

Discussion

Carlos Sánchez Almeida: there is a high probability that cybercrime will increasingly be on the papers, as it will be the alibi that the power will use to be able to be “legitimate” in attacking the Internet. The first aggression will be against the place where we met to prepare our revolutions.

Q: on the one hand we picture the power as a very smart institution and, on the other hand, we also picture the power as completely clueless. Isn’t that a contradiction? Txarlie: it’s probably both. It is true that the power understands the Internet as a whole, looking at its possibilities and the powers it challenges; but it is also true that its forms are mostly unknown, partly because the Net is so flexible that it is very difficult to predict in its next action. The collective intelligence moves in the boundaries and thus circumvents the power. The power understands its potential, but not its boundaries. Carlos Sánchez Almeida: one of the reasons the governments have attacked P2P networks — when they kept people quite and numb at home — is because they are not the ones in power: the power is financial and the corporations (who own what is exchanged in P2P networks).

Q: so, what’s the next step? Carlos Sánchez Almeida: we need a democracy; a new and reformed one, but a democracy. And this new democracy must be more transparent and, over all, more accountable. In the case of Spain, bipartidism should be broken by voting the smaller parties.

Mayo Fuster: why has not the 15M and other activisms taken more into account the tradition of the commons, of cooperatives, etc.? Txarlie: partly this has been due to the fact that it was preferable to begin from scratch, to avoid predefined mindsets, to promote trial and error, to experiment. The idea was that any solution had to come from the debate within the 15M itself to be legitimate.

Mayo Fuster: what is going to happen after the 15M with the Internet? will it become a 11S of the Internet? Gala Pin: We are living a dire crisis while which there has been poor or any proposal at all to improve people’s lives. The 15M has been, in many ways, the only thing that has happened to directly address the crisis. Thus, it is not a only movement of protest, but the expression of a general feeling of a real need of change.

Mayo Fuster: how does power works inside the 15M? Carlos Sánchez Almeida: there is no power in the 15M movement, the power is outside. The 15M is a network of networks, with their own programme, working autonomously. Thus, there is no such thing as power in the 15M movement, which is but a mere platform. The Indignants Movement cannot be defined in terms of power, of structure, of hierarchy. The movement must not provide answers, but communication channels, build agorae where debate can take place.

Net neutrality struggle and new movements in the digital era.
John Perry Barlow (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also truth, Niels Bohr.

We are living in an era where we are both able of greatest advances in human technology and, at the same time, able to destroy ourselves or endanger the lives of all of us. The corporation is supposed to be made of humans, but as a construct they are more than that. Corporations used to mediate between people, and because of the instantaneous network of global communications all those processes have been increasingly accelerated. And they corporations are now in the process of swallowing the Earth, for the benefit of all of us, but at the same time against our survival.

While it is true that huge corporations are like a cancer, it is also true that each individual is like a cell that is part of that tumour. And, thus, the question is: as a cell from a tumour, what do you do?

Once there is a possibility to communicate your thoughts instantly across the world, the you as a container of thought, or knowledge, is challenged. And this is related with the crisis of monotheism, which is based on thoughts not easily spread and shared, about the monopoly of thought. Monotheism is opposed to pantheism, as the unity of thought is opposed to the multiplicity of thought.

The same tools that are so useful for sharing your thoughts and acts are, at the very same time, the best surveillance tools ever. And not only in the real time, but also in past times, as your actions can be traced back because of the breadcrumbs you left behind.

And there is almost no way to avoid the visibility. Privacy is thus arguably not defensible — even sometimes not desirable either — but this does not mean that we have to change the way institutions look down on people, or to change the way that institutions present themselves before the public. But until this change happens, there have to be ways to balance the powers of institutions and citizens.

There is a will to control expression and its spread. And copyright has become one of the main barriers to expression, despite the fact that it was designed to protect the freedom of expression. Sharing is hardcoded in human beings, and the fact that sharing can be prevented because somebody owns them is, basically, against the future.

An incredible gift to the future is the ability to be able to discover everything that one needs to know.

There is a problem that we must address: the growing concentration of wealth, energy and power. And a concentration that still wants more, as stated in Barlow’s Law of Economic insufficiency: the more you have, the shorter it feels. We have to collectively stand up and find ways that they do not get more, of that the more they get the more it gets redistributed. We have to find ways to make the world work the same way that we found ways to make the Internet work, taking into consideration the ecology of the resources.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: the world is run by “ungrateful dead”, the institutions that rule the world are dead and it is impossible to expect from them any kind of change, or even reflection. And, as some demonstrators said, it’s not about the crisis, is that I don’t love you anymore. So, dead institutions on one side, people willing to love something else on the other side. The way of reconstruct this world is through a long process, so we need patience and a road map for the long run. But something quick must be done also in the short term to avoid the total collapse of the system. Surely the networks of solidarity will work to avoid collapse.

Q: We have to try help people understand that the nature of authority has changed. John Perry Barlow: If you change consciousness, politics will change itself. The problem is that some issues are like a religious view that might not be able to change. Maybe half the population has to die first before a change is acknowledged.

Ismael Peña-López: will the death of half the population really make a change? Won’t we hit a glass ceiling that will prevent any kind of change? JP Barlow: the cyberspace is, in may ways, a feminine movement, made of sharing, of collaboration. And even if women are still struggling with their own glass ceiling, they are actually changing the mentality of many, substituting a monotheism (male) with a new pantheism (feminine).

Panel: Politics in the Internet age (II)
Arnau Monterde (chair), Marta G. Franco (Acampada Sol participant), Javier Toret (Democracia Real Ya Barcelona participant), Mayo Fuster (Berkman center for Internet & Society)

Arnau Monterde

The different movements that have been born on the Internet (especially) during 2011 have many things in common, and not only about the form, but also in what are their goals, their purposes, the reasons and causes behind their protests, etc.

On the other hand, forms also matter. There is, beyond the organization of the protests, a sort of metaorganization linking and binding together the sprawl of local movements at a global level, thus contributing in the emergence of a global movement and its organization.

The globalization of the movement, or the collectivization of the movement, have also meant that despair due to lack of a clear horizon has turned out into hope due to the openness of the movement itself.

Javier Toret

Technopolitics and the 15M: flow, power, hack, translate, sensibility.

Nowadays, communication and organization are increasingly tied together: most communications actually invite people to engage in a specific action, and do not only give a piece of information or news to a passive receiver.

Our literacies are determined by new technologies that require new literacies. Indeed, these new literacies determine our habits, the way we interact, the way we consume… the way we live.

In this framework, how were the 15m protests in Spain organized?

In February 2011, a group of people meets on Face book and creates a platform to coordinate their actions and to call the citizenry to action. The reaction of people fed back the project and, in many senses, helped in defining what was acceptable in a society and what was bearable (or unbearable, as a matter of fact). The definition of what was unbearable became the actual message to spread and driver for further mobilizations.

Especially, the first big success was building a communicative ball that succeeded in going through the communication wall of mass media.

The movement took the plazas partly because there was an actual list of social demands, but more importantly because it succeeded in creating a collective frame of mind about specific issues and its broad context.

There was a collective building of a Twitter strategy, where many different Twitter users swarmed together to globally broadcast a few, direct, clear messages and a huge debate around them. The openness and simplicity of the process (Twitter + camp) helped the movement to be replicated all around the world. And the fact that most information could be geolocalized also contributed in making the different local initiatives be part of a global movement.

An interesting outcome of the movements has been the reflection about the process of organization and the proliferation of free software tools to empower and boost the optimization of such processes and its cheap and fast replication.

Marta G. Franco

Acampada Sol started as a way to reflect together and settle things down after the demonstration of 15m. The idea behind the acampada was not to stay or not, but to stay together and try to overcome everyone’s fears.

This sense of collective spreads beyond the geographical bounds of the acampadas, as they begin to link and talk one to another one, share fears, ideas, doubts, feelings.

The challenge was how to have a single voice without centralizing the thousand of voices of the movement. That became particularly evident when it came to registering the Internet domain(s) where to publish a website. In the end, there were as many domains/pages as camps or initiatives that joined the movement implicitly.

Another challenge was how to put together the online and offline worlds, each one with their one procedures and processes and ways of acting. A certain degree of success came whenever it was possible to take the best of both worlds, but that was not always an easy thing to do.

In general, mass media missed the way the Indignants were organized, what they were claiming, etc. In fact, most of them ended up taking Acampada Sol (the Madrid Camp of the Indignants) as their unique source of news and information, thus forgetting that Acampada Sol did not represent anyone (any other acampada) but themselves. On the other hand, though, many journalists would be more confident reporting from the sources of user generated media rather than form “official” communicates, even citing verbatim non-official declaration by particular individuals taking part in the protests. Twitter was used to hack the mass media system.

Alternative tools, like the social networking site N-1, were used to stand free from the potential control of third parties, in a sort of techno-political strategies of activism.

Mayo Fuster

Most of social movements are thought as ways to challenge the political agenda and the conventional political organization. Another dimension is challenging the established productive model and the cultural codes.

Besides the usual ways to manage the resources by either the State or the market, a third way is a model of management and provision of resources by the civil society: the commons.

The origin of the new digital commons can be tracked back until the 1950s with the hacker culture and the hippy contraculture, the free software ideology and communities, the Creative Commons, etc. The logic of the commons is opposite to the corporate logic, the former one based on openness, freedom and autonomy. In this sense, the system becomes an open one with a governance that enables participation. The conflict between both logics is the reason behind the free culture (and knowledge) movement.

If we link the 15M movement with the free culture movement, it is easy to find out that beyond the specific demands, there is a very important — arguably the most important one — goal that aims at changing the productive model, and it is a goal that goes implicit in the way the protests and the organization if performed: freely, openly, heavily relying on the idea of the public commons.

Some examples of these are Lawrence Lessig’s move from Creative Commons to Change Congress, or, in the case of Spain, the move from the campaign against the “Ley Sinde” to the “No les votes” campaign. In both cases, especially the latter, the free culture movement merges itself with the Indignants movement. There is somewhat the acknowledgement that there will be no “free culture” unless the whole system is transformed, thus why the change of target from culture itself (the “what”) to the political institutions (the “why”).

It is important to note that this change of the system is non-partisan, and being non-partisan is an explicit tactic so that the movement can be comprehensive and inclusive.

Discussion

Òscar Mateos: in a certain way, the 15M movements have witnessed the coexistence of the traditional civic movements with a more post-modern ones. How has this happened or been made possible? Toret: Democracia Real Ya was more a platform than an institution, and this implied that as there was no central message to be imposed over the members, anyone felt free to contribute with their own voice, either at the individual level or organized in traditional movements. Notwithstanding, there have been clashes between a more chaotic or networked way of working and the vertical and traditional ways to organize civil movements. Franco: the crisis of media and political parties — and their dependence from ideological and economic lobbies — definitely helped the movement to be something plural, a window open to fresh and unfiltered information, which was something that every citizen, despite their origin (traditional or post-modern) was in very much need of.

Gala Pin: how can the digital divide be overcome so that no people is left behind? Toret: the digital divide is addressed on a peer-to-peer basis. Many workshops and training sessions are being organized so that everyone catches up with the state-of-the art skills and technologies.

Q: how was the offline linked with he online? Toret: there was continuous feedback between both worlds. Many documents were printed or distributed in many analogue ways, but also some creations in paper or in speech were digitized (photos, footage, etc.) and spread through social networking sites.

Gala Pin: how can we focus, how can be optimize the energies poured into the movement so that they are more efficient (how can be participation optimized)? Franco: there is an ongoing challenge on how to be able to map, link and somehow organize the zillion platforms where the conversation takes place. Castells: maybe a solution could be to get in touch with research centres that are specialized in just that, so that synergies can be built between activists and people willing to do research on activism.

More information

• Mesa II. La política en la era de Internet (II), by Ricard Espelt.

Presentation by Joan Coscubiela, co-director of the Seminar

The IN3 has made up this year a research seminar called Communication and Civil Society to debate around the new role of communications in politics, especially when the tools to broadcast a message have become of personal use.

In this framework or communication revolution also come political revolutions like the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignants Movement (or 15M movement) and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. To analyse these movements we need not only to approach them from the ivory tower, but from the inside, with an activist and participatory approach.

The goal of the seminar is, thus, to find out what the social impact is of this crossroads between communication and politics.

Panel: Politics in the Internet age (I)
Manuel Castells, Joana Conill, Amalia Cardenas

Manuel Castells

Politics is the exercise of power to accomplish common goals within the established institutions; while social movements aim at changing values of the society, at transforming people’s minds. And the problem comes when common goals and social values are disconnected. Then comes revolution, which is the occupation of the institutions by non-established means to impose the new values and transform or rewrite the rules according to them.

We live in specific communication frameworks, with which we communicate with our peers, build communities… and build our own minds in the process. It is not exactly that technology determines the way we are, but it certainly has a major role on how we build our societies. When the communication framework changes, society changes: we are shifting towards communicative autonomy, that leads towards social autonomy.

When there is oppression, there is resistance. Thus, the new communication tools that provide autonomy have had two consequences: on the one hand, the explosion of resistance; on the other hand, the attempt to control such tools to avoid resistance.

The Tunisian Revolution is a clear case of this increase of resistance to impose, through social activism, the change of a system. In Tunisia, the feeling of humiliation is worst than exploitation, as it is portrayed by the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi.

Fear is one of the strongest feelings and one of the main barriers for revolutions. Fear is a mechanism of survival of the species. Fear paralyses and stops us from self-destruction. But once fear is overridden, the sense of community provides a feeling of security and then comes enthusiasm. That is what happens after the Tunisian Revolution, that spreads enthusiastically to Egypt, and then to Spain.

But what is the spark that helps overriding fear? In the Tunisian case that is Internet. The first call for a revolution in Egypt comes through the Internet in January 25th, 2011, when Asmaa Mahfouz posted a video of her calling out for a protest.

After that, movements like the April 6 Youth Movement join the call and activate their networks to raise the population up. And the activation is very fast because of the flat structures of the networks.

When the government tries to stop the revolution by cutting down communications, the international community comes to the rescue with several solutions. This international community is partly made up by for-profit firms (e.g. Google, Twitter, Facebook) that are interested in the success of the movement: they are in the business of selling freedom and, thus, that is their business, to provide freedom to communicate. As Lotan, Graeff, Ananny, Gaffney, Pearce and boyd demonstrated, The revolutions were tweeted.

Indeed, the total blackout of communications is nearly impossible. If the international community of hackers — like Anonymous and Telecomix in Egypt — is committed to restablishing a way of being connected, a government can make it more difficult, but not impossible.

When there is communication, a movement is strong. When communication fails, the movement gets waek and normally ends up violently, as it is the ultimate lasting resource.

Main characteristics of these movements

• Instantly generated, sparked by indignation.
• Multimodal, images impacting people thanks to distributed by networks.
• Horizontal, and based on trust.
• Disintermediation of the formal political representation.
• Viral, expansive.
• Have no centre, they cannot be controlled, they reconfigure their architectures all the time.
• Both local and global.
• Self reflective, on a continuous process of deliberation.
• Both online and offline.
• Leaderless, with no strong affinities.
• Do not aim at political projects, but at specific goals.
• Deeply transforming, deeply political, without being programmatic.
• Express feelings, generate debates, but do not support political parties or governments.
• Aim at rebuilding democracy, more base on direct and/or deliberative democracy. They generate utopias not as unreachable things, but as drivers of change.

Joana Conill, Amalia Cardenas

After all these revolutions, especially in Spain, what has been achieved?

It is important to note that not all achievements necessarily mean taking the (political) power.

On the one hand, a huge achievement has been transforming the processes. The processes to share information and opinion, or the process of deliberation. Within these processes, some achievements have been the acknowledgement that being wrong can be right, or that errors can be discussed and their solutions be fed back onto the deliberation process.

Meetings are facilitated so that everyone can speak despite of their gender, status, shyness. And conflict resolution mechanisms are put into practice so that participation does not only come smoothly, but conflicts are solved and actually provide good input into what is being discussed.

Feelings are put into the equation. There is a shift from the I think towards the I feel, including I believe, I guess, in my opinion, from my point of view, etc.

The ultimate goal is more and better participation.

And it is not only about more and better participation of people, about not excluding people from the process, but also about not excluding some values from the process.

The relationships amongst people determine the quality of the interchange, of the communication. If communication determines society and politics, it is crucial that we care about the quality of personal relationships.

Discussion

Q: Why people do not have (enough) fear in Spain? Why do all people agree with the Indignants but so few people participate? Why is there so much resignation? Castells: there is fear, and a lot of it: there is fear of losing one’s job or fear of breaking the rules or fear of being hit by the police. All these fears are stopping many people from participating. Nowadays, institutions are not sustained by legitimacy, but by resignation.

More information

• Mesa I. La política en la era de Internet (I), by Ricard Espelt.

Conclusions for day 2
Javier de la Cueva, Lawyer.

All the debate around Net Neutrality and the right to be forgotten is about a new container — the Internet and all new technologies at large — and a new container — digital content and services.

And what this container is asking us is to feed is for ourselves, for free and providing personal data in exchange.

And not only are these data consciously provided, by uploading content, of befriending people on 3rd parties’ platforms, but also in a hidden form, by means of cookies, scripts or other devices.

There still is an unanswered question and it is whether technology as an ideology. And the Law should deal with this issue explicitly and bravely. This includes code, that in some aspects is becoming a derivative or procedural law.

And not only whether technology conforms an ideology, but also whether it conforms a new 4th generation of human rights.

An interesting question to explore in the future is whether we can proceed with the concept of habeas data.

We are now fighting the inefficacy of Law, that always arrives late at regulating and, when it does, there are hackers and crackers (conceptually very different) that make many laws irrelevant in practice. Thus, we need global solutions, founded on the Philosophy of Law and Law Theory, so to provide solid and long-lasting frameworks.

Track on e-government and e-democracy
Chairs: Ismael Peña-López, Lecturer, School of Law and Political Science (UOC)

Lorenzo Cotino Hueso
The European electronic citizen initiative

The new European normative makes it possible that with the addition of 1,000,000 signatures, the political debate on a certain topic can be initiated in the European Parliament. And one of the good things about this new normative is that it has been designed for the XXIst century, as online participation (i.e. signing) is considered in equal terms as offline participation.

The procedure is the usual one, where an initiative is registered and then signatures are collected within the member states. Once the European Commission validates the firms (the person signing is a European citizen, has not signed more than one time, etc.), then a new legislative process can begin.

Another asset is that the European Commission must provide free software platforms for the collection of signatures in any website. These platforms will work with digital signature, whatever its kind: certificates, tokens, smartphones, etc.

The initiative can be started at any member state and, once the platform is validated, the process of gathering support can begin.

The regulation is written as if it was about data protection, as that is the major issue when providing a (electronic) vote supplying personal data, but the regulation to be applied will be the one of any member state.

Daniel Guagnin; Carla Ilten
Self-Governed Socio-technical Infrastructures. Autonomy and Cooperation through Free Software and Community Wireless Networks

Net Neutrality is the freedom to use a communication infrastructure in all possible ways without constrains. And free software is a matter of liberty, not price, it is about free as in free speech (not as in free beer).

Technology is society made durable: social “programmes” are inscribed in any technology. In expert systems rules are disembedded from the realm of use, and defined by experts. Free software opens up the experitse to laypeople, why proprietary software stays opaque.

Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work freely available and with the compulsory condition that any other work based on it will also be available in the same way.

Community Wireless Networks are based on free software and DIY hardware. They use wireless peer-to-peer mesh network architecture and have collectively organized and owned communication infrastructures.

An example can be the Chicago Wireless Community Networks [in Spain we have the very interesting initiative Guifi.net.]. Chicago Wireless Community Networks is a non-profit project to serve disadvantaged neighborhoods, in cooperation with CUWIN open source programmers. It’s community building through network set-up and maintenance. The Pico Peering Agreement acts as a constitution for peer networking.

That is certainly a new approach to Net Neutrality, as Net Neutrality is, all in all, a battle about the control over infrastructures.

Mayo Fuster Morell
An introductory historical contextualization of online creation communities for the building of digital commons: The emergence of a free culture movement

Online creation communities (OCCs) are a set of individuals that communicate and collaborate mainly via a platform hosted on the Internet with the purpose to create a final outcome of the joint work.

These communities are deeply rooted in the movements of the 1950s like hacking culture, hippies contraculture, action-participation methodologies and popular education, etc.

If the free software projects imply the appearance of OCCs, there is a shift from free software to free culture with the change of millennium with movements like the Creative Commons, the Wikipedia, alternative news media (e.g. Indymedia), peer-to-peer file sharing, open access of scientific research, etc. The explosion of the web 2.0 is greatly powered and fostering at the same time the concept of OCCs.

Infrasctructure conditions:

• Level of freedom and autonomy of the content generators in regard to the infrastructure.
• Level representation of the interests of the community of creators in the infrastructure provision decision-making and provision transparency.

Two main types:

• Autonomy + open = commons logic; they reinforce more collaborative communities.
• Close + dependency = corporate logic. Tend to generate larger communities.

The free culture and digital rights movement has 4 main goals: preserve the digital commons, to make important information available to the public, promote creators, remove barriers to distribution of knowledge and goods.

Lately, the movement has been shifting from free culture to meta-politics. This can be seen in the Change Congress initiative in the US (2008) or the #nolesvotes and #15M movements in Spain.

Georgia Foteinou
Institutional Trust and e-Government Adoption in the EU: a Cross-National Analysis

Why citizens that are used to e-commerce appear sceptic when it comes to using e-government websites? Normally, it is attributed to the poor quality of services, few available services, insufficient infrastructure… but evidence shows that is none of the above, at least not as a strong determinant not to be using those services. In fact, e-government usage is higher than e-commerce in most European countries, even if it has a decline of -4.5% (of all Internet users) over the period 2005-2010. On the other hand, in aggregate, e-government is growing at 30% (accesses) while e-commerce is growing at 75%.

It seems that the digitally reluctant could not be trusting the government, but not of a specific agent, but in government as a whole. This is what data seem to be telling at statistically significant levels.

Jorge Luis Salcedo
Conflicts about the regulation of intellectual property in Internet: comparing the issue networks in UK and Spain

In the issue of the conflicts about the regulation of intellectual property, how is media visibility distributed between the stakeholders in this conflict? What actors have more visibility? This is crucially relevant in mass-mediated democracies.

A first hypothesis is that the regulation supporters (Copyrights coalition and governments) will achieve a greater visibility level on the news channel.

A second hypothesis is that the Digital Rights Activists (DRA) will have a higher visibility on non traditional media (blogs, websites) than the CRC.

3r hypothesis: DRA will have a higher visibility in specific web channels, but not on the entire web.

4th hypothesis: The most visible agents on the news channels are going to get the most visibility as a whole, especially in search engines.

It is very interesting to see how in Spain, DRA have huge coverage in online platforms, in the UK they are even with CRC and both of them having less visibility than the government’s official position. In search engines, though, both UK and Spanish DRA seem to be having the same impact.

The differences may come from different resources from the different stakeholders, a more lax regulation in the UK in downloading matters, the worst reputation that the coalition has in Spain in comparison to the UK’s, including the dynamics of politics in the different countries.

Track on the Right to be forgotten, data protection and privacy
Chairs: Mònica Vilasau Solana, Lecturer, School of Law and Political Science (UOC)

Pere Simon Castellano
The constitutional regime of the right to oblivion in the Internet

It is the principle of consent the one that gives us the legitimacy to claim for a right to privacy or data protection.

Especially related to search engines (though not only) is the legality of a given content another important factor when claiming for our privacy rights or the right to be forgotten.

Jelena Burnik
Behavioural advertising in electronic communications. A benefit to electronic communication development and an intrusion of individual’s right to privacy and data protection

Behavioural advertising tracks Internet users’ activities online and delivers only relevant advertisements, based on the data collected and analysed over a given period of time. It is normally enabled by cookies, that are placed by websites or advertisements on websites.

Behavioural advertising is defended in the name of relevance of advertisements, enhanced user experience, precise segmentation and less money spent on non-relevant audiences, support to free Internet content and a driver of innovation.

But it is a controversial practice that requires a fair balance between the interests of the industry and the rights of individuals. As cookies assign a unique ID with an IP address, there can be concerns on data protection. On the other hand, cookies are normally placed in the computer by default, while maybe a debate on opt-in vs. opt-out of cookie placing and cookie-based tracking should be considered.

A new “cookie” European directive should aim at shifting from an opt-out principle to an opt-in one, and cookies being placed only under explicit user’s concern. But how is the technological solution for an opt-in cookie principle?

In the US, though, what seems to be more acknowledged is an enhanced opt-out model.

But only true opt-in provides for transparency, and self-regulation of the industry will not suffice.

María Concepción Torres Diaz
Privacy and tracking cookies. A constitutional approach.

It is worth noting the difference between privacy, intimacy and personal data. And cookies can harm privacy. So, users should get all necessary information on cookies and tracking so they can decide whether a specific behaviour puts at stake their privacy. In case the user decides to go on, explicit consent should be provided to the service to perform its tracking activity.

We have to acknowledge that new technologies will bring with them new rights and new threats to old rights. Thus, we should be aware of the new technologies so that the law does not fall behind.

Philipp E. Fischer; Rafael Ferraz Vazquez
Data transfer from Germany or Spain to third countries – Questions of civil liability for privacy rights infringement

There are data transfers at the international level continuously. If those data got “lost”, the operator might have incurred in privacy rights infringement.

The European Directive on data transmission, it has been established that there can be data transmission within the European Union (nationally or internationally) or with 3rd countries with adequate level of data protection. There still are some issues with the US and there are other countries which are simply banned from data transmission between them and member states.

Faye Fangfei Wang
Legal Feasibility for Statistical Methods on Internet as a Source of Data Gathering in the EU

Privacy protection steps: suitable safeguards, duty to inform prior to obtaining consent (transparency), consent, and enforcement. Request for concern should be looked at as a very important step towards privacy protection. Consent must be freely given and informed.

There is an exemption clause in the UK legislation, to be used when gathering some data is strictly necessary for a service to run, or for scientific purposes, etc. But the exception clause must be used legally.

Ricardo Morte Ferrer
The ADAMS database of the Anti Doping World Agency. Data protection problems

The ADAMS database stores whereabouts, reporting where a sportsman is during 3 months, for a daily time span from 6:00 to 23:00 and including a full daily 1h detailed report of their whereabouts. Instead of presuming innocence, this database kind of presumes guiltiness.

That is a lot of information and, being the holder an international agency based in Canada, a threat on data protection as it implies a continuous traffic of personal data internationally.

Inmaculada López-Barajas Perea
Privacy in the Internet and penal research: challenges in justice in a globalized society

The possibility that personal information of citizens can be retrieved, remotely, by law enforcement institutions, is it just the digital version of the usual (and completely legal) surveillance methodologies, or is it something new and something that threatens citizens’ privacy?

More information

• Tracking without cookies, by Smári McCarthy.

Panel: Internet Privacy and the Right to Be Forgotten
Chairs: Esther Mitjans, Director of the Catalan Data Protection Authority and Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Barcelona

Norberto Nuno Gomes de Andrade, Scientific Officer at the European Commission, working at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS, Spain)
The Right to be Forgotten. An Identity Perspective

The right to be forgotten should be anchored to the right to identity.

The data protection – data privacy – identity triangle: the data protection directive presents and apparently harmonious and coherent articulation of the concepts of data protection, privacy and identity. Data protection protects the righ to privacy by relying upon the notion of personal identity. This assumed harmonious connection is flawed and problematic. In reality, it is much more complex and dynamic.

Data protection should be procedural right, while data privacy and identity should be substantial rights. Substantial rights are a social interest, while procedural rights set the rules, methods and conditions through which those substantive rights are effectively enforced and protected.

Right to identity is the right to be unique, the persons’ definite and inalienable interest in the uniqueness of their being. The right to identity is infringed if person A makes use of person B’s identity in a way contrary to how that person B perceives his or her identity.

Right to privacy protects the personal condition of live characterized by seclusion from, and therefore, absence of acquaintance by the public. Right to privacy is only infringed if true private facts related to a person are revealed to the public.

The right to be forgotten can be seen from an identity perspective. Reinforces the anti-essentialism view of Ientity (a narrative identity): a process of negotiation, social construct, a matter of choices; corresponds to the ever-expanding manner in which law is allowing the individual to infuence aspecte of their identity; and matches the rational of the right to identity: the right not to have one’s identity miss represented, right to new beginning, right to be different Unot only from others, but also from one self).

The right to be forgotten from an identity angle also coves the facts that are already in the public domain, public factas, and covers also the not-necessarily truthful or decontextualized information, the one that is out-dated.

Milagros Pérez Oliva, Ombudsman of El País

It is worth noting that the information that appears on a newspaper is very different from the one that appears on a social networking site. In principle, all the information published in newspapers is public interest, and thus, that information should be publicly available. The problem is when (a) newspapers upload all their archives to the Internet and (b) finding out information (oftentimes serendipitously) is now easy and cheap and quick.

Historical archives cannot be modified and must be public. Period. Of course, that is not the final solution in the case of information vs. privacy, but the beginning of all problems. A first recommendation is to write new information according to some cautionary rules: avoid names (just initials) if the person is not a public celebrity, avoid contextual information that can lead to their identification, etc.

The problem comes with already published information. The suggestion could be to put out of the search engines’ reach some obsolete information. The problem comes, again, with defining what is obsolete information, or what has become non-relevant information.

Yet another problem, added to obsolete information or non-relevant, is incomplete information or plain wrong information. Those are pieces of news that were discontinued (e.g. trials) or never corrected and that pose a problem, as there are thousands of pieces of news within this category.

There is a need for a collective decision on how to add or link new information to an already published piece of news.

María González Ordóñez, Head of Legal for Spain, Portugal & Israel, Google Spain

Google’s policy is to not delete personal data from their cache if the original source has not also deleted those data. In this sense, Google is very respectful with what instructions a webmaster gives to Google (usually via robots.txt) in relationship with indexing and caching.

This policy is based in the fact that Google wants to provide what is available in the Internet. If Google erases information that still is on the net, the search engine will lose transparency and neutrality. On the other hand, there is also the fact that Google can do the very same claims of newspapers concerning the right to information and freedom of expression.

Ricard Martínez Martínez. Professor of Constitutional Law, Universitat de València

We have a dire need to balance the different rights put at stake with the digitization of our lives.

And as citizens usually cannot control their profile on the net, the responsibility to take action relies, on the one hand, on the legislator to design a legal framework, and on the other hand, on the online service and content providers.

We could try and have new tools to “prune” our public information. And those tools should be developed by the industry itself.

More information

• ¿Tenemos derecho a ser olvidados en Internet? (IDP 2011), by Cristina Aced

Introduction by Esther Mitjans, Director of the Catalan Data Protection Authority and Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Barcelona.

Three reasons why the right to forget is not already in the Law:

• We could not know.
• We did not know we were to lose all control on our own data,.
• We could not have known that segmented marketing would highly value personal data.

We face a trade-off between economic profits from data exploitation and privacy and security.

Cécile de Terwangne, Professor, Centre de recherche informatique et droit
Internet Privacy and the Right to Be Forgotten

Privacy does not mean intimacy or secrecy, but individual autonomy. In the context of the internet, it is informational self-determination, the control over one’s personal information. This personal information is made up by confidential data, but also by professional data, commercial data, published data, photos, films, sound…

In Europe, this “informational self-determination” has been recognized and protected by several norms, and the right to oblivion of the judicial/criminal past has been recognized by case law in several countries, based on the right to privacy or on personality rights.

The justification for the right to oblivion is justified by faith in human beings’ capacity of improving, the conviction that man should not be reduced to their past, the idea that once you have paid what was due, society must offer the possibility to rehabilitate.

But the right to oblivion conflicts with the right to information.

The criterion to resolve the conflict should be time:

• If there is newsworthiness, the right to information should prevail.
• If the information is no more newsworthy, then the right to oblivion should prevail.

What do we do, though, with digital newspapers archives and case law databases, which are clearly breaking the balance that we had reached?

Related to case law databases, the solution that has been proposed is anonymization, with respect of the purpose principle — by which only relevant data in relation with the purpose may be processed — and the proportionality principle — by which no excessive data may be processed.

Related to newspapers, one thing is to restrict the dissemination of old personal data, a different one is a right to delete those data. Deleting data out of “chronicles” is tempering on one’s own history.

On the other hand, there is of course a conflict with freedom of the press, a conflict that becomes a dilemma as there is not an a priori hierarchy amongst personal rights freedom of the press or the right to information.

In general, though, legislation shows that too many definitions/thresholds are subjectively defined, like “data won’t be kept longer than necessary” or some conditions under which it is possible to anonymize or delete data.

With the pervasiveness of the Web 2.0 and cloud services, there is a claim for a new right to oblivion, due to the problem of long lasting records kept by certain Internet actors of traces unconsciously left when surfing the web. But, again, as some economic models heavily rely on those data basis, there is a trade-off between personal and corporate rights.

A first solution is having the possibility to stablish a right to have information deleted and not only rendered inaccessible.

Another solution could be based on basing the right to be forgotten on a right based on the no-collection of personal data and established by default, that is, privacy by design.

More information

• ¿Tenemos derecho a ser olvidados en Internet? (IDP 2011), by Cristina Aced