Panel:
Chaired by @jamesrbuk.
Privacy is a matter of organising things in your life. It is a vital part of feeling you have control over your life. This is what is understood of the term by the legal world.
Mark Zuckerberg famously said the age of privacy is over. He said people will give up privacy for popularity. This is a gross misunderstanding of what privacy is. Privacy is not about hiding (see above definition) and his statement was just designed to promote Facebook's business model which makes money from users sharing.
It was mentioned there was a good article about the gathering of your data by the large corporations such as Google by Julian Assange. Think it was this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html.
It was asked the biggest lesson from Snowden and the panel all seemed to agree on two things:
- how amazing is was how little effect it has had
- how it's impossible to find a single argument to persuade people of the need for privacy and how illegal it is what Snowden uncovered governments doing
I liked a suggestion one of the panel members made that you should be able to see a counter of how much Google/Twitter/Facebook make from all your actions on the internet as your carry them out. Money could be a good way to see the value of your information.
Panel:
Chaired by Jude Kelly.
Melanie Lenz gave a brilliant talk to start on the role of women in computing and in art through the years. She mentioned a few things about women outside of art that Wendy Hall expanded on.
She also showed some amazingly misogynistic adverts from the 50s/60s telling businesses they could replace the jobs women did with computers.
Women working in ICT were often referred to as 'computers' in the 1940s/50s. Jobs in computing were much more aligned with the Maths and Science disciplines and so the gender split was relative to that field. In fact, before the 1980s 30% of people in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) were women.
This ended with the advent of the personal computer. Marketed at boys and not used for the same type of problems, the majority of its users were male and this shaped who entered ICT from that point. By the end of the 1980s less than 10% of those in ICT were women.
Science and Engineering, as a whole, doesn't have this problem and these ratios are very much a western thing. The reasons women take these roles abroad can be very different.
She also noted her ICT classes in Qatar were over 90% women but when she talked to the students she found this was mainly because they had less access to good funding. The men all studied courses abroad which were thought to be better.
In India families of the women studying ICT often think this will lead to them marrying a male programmer which in their eyes is good.
Martha Lane Fox pointed out the effect it has on female business people that the world of finance is mainly male. She recalled a meeting with a Venture Capitalist (VC) where she was asked the risk of her getting pregnant on the business they were asking for funding for (lastminute.com). The fact that this was possible and considered a normal part of a business meeting was testament to the fact of how the language of finance is a male one.
She also recalled another meeting with a VC where she, as the chairperson of a business, had to repeat to the VC that her colleague was the person who organised the main dealings of their business because he couldn't believe a woman could do this.
Ruth Nicolls mentioned women often find interest in working with data sets which will increasingly become a larger field of work.
She also talked about how some of the girls she works with with Young Rewired State start programming because they want to change their blogs or other ways they publish.
@WomenShiftDigi was mentioned as a great organisation for addressing some of the themes raised by this panel.
Kirsty Walk's documentary Blurred lines was a mentioned as great, though troubling, summary of the treatment of women online. Apparently this video was put on YouTube by some sexists as an example of bad feminism.
It was pointed out (by Jude Kelly, I think) that Wikipedia, the main source of general information on the web, is mainly written by men. Melanie Lenz has organised events where women get together to write articles on Wikipedia to address that balance.
My favourite bit was someone on the panel (not sure by whom) telling the story of Dame Stephanie Shirley who famously got so fed up with her treatment as a woman by the business world she changed her name to Steve.
Louise Orwin is a performance artist and she was talking about her project Pretty ugly.
As part of the project, she lived online as 3 teenagers. This was started by her posting videos on YouTube for each, all of which ended with them asking the question: "Am I pretty or not?".
The origin of this was her seeing a video by a teenager called Lexie who asked the same question and the comments this produced. She became curious why Lexie wanted to do this and what effect it had had on her.
It turned out this is the tip of the iceberg. There are over 500,000 videos like this on YouTube.
After posting the videos she recorded the following stats on the response (may be a little off, the figures were delivered quickly):
The girl she was playing with a slightly darker personality got the most comments.
60% of comments were from men. 40% of comments were from women.
80% of females who commented were under 18. 80% of males who commented were over 18.
30% of the female comments were negative. I forget how many of the comments from men that were negative (sorry) but it was massive
She got 91 private messages as a result of the most popular one. Almost all were from men and very pervy. That's my words not hers, she presented some of the comments but I can't type that quickly. I think pervy captures them quite accurately.
One of the private messages was from a boy who said he was sorry to hear about the abuse she received as he'd been bullied so could emphasise. She responded and they ended up messaging each other.
After a lot of messaging, involving her having to make up excuses for why she didn't want to do video chats and him asking her if she had a boyfriend. She became worried about the ethics of her not being the person she was pretending to be.
After a while the boy admitted to her he was a 42 year old man. The messages started becoming more graphic and aggressive.
She cut all contact.
She traced the 42 year old man and found he'd done similar things to many others. He was even revealed for what he was in the comments of some videos.
Some of the girls who posted these videos were interested in the number of followers it generated. Some would also ask their audience to go and look at their YouTube channel.
The panel:
Chaired by: @afjellema.
Africans are using the web in very interesting ways because they are using it to solve their needs and those needs are very different to the rest of the world.
She mentioned a quote by a famous author (wasn't sure who):
"Everyone has accepted the Northern American or the European in themselves. Once people accept the part of them that is African we will get somewhere."
Bills proposed for defining people's digital rights in Africa are often based on legislation which was drafted in very different contexts. This can mean they miss the mark as they ignore the concerns of internet use in the modern African world. These are mainly around access, affordability and the support for all the African languages.
He is working on http://africaninternetrights.org.
The barriers around languages are in software (support for all the languages used) and in hardware (keyboards that don't support the characters in those languages).
Ordinary people are generally ahead of governments when it comes to digital and this can cause governments to be see it as a threat. A common reaction is to clamp down on usage.
Problems with access often come down to infrastrcture. Unlike in other countries, a lot of Africa doesn't have an existing infrastructure to build on.
Many areas do not have roads, which is normally where cables are laid, and power is often not continuous or is not present at all. The cost of bringing the kind of internet other countries have to Africans is not seen as worth the cost, which is a much larger percentage of average income.
Mobile doesn't have most of these problems and the cost is just that you get for data. This is why the internet in Africa is mainly on mobile.
Language is a big thing. It is often said that you can't find an African who only speaks one language. This is testament to how many languages are spoke on the continent.
She recalled a beautiful quote from Nelson Mandela:
"When you speak to someone in your language, you speak to his mind. When you speak in their language, you speak to their heart."
Many online industries can not work in Africa. Online shopping, for example, relies on a working postal system which is often not present. By contrast, Africans often create businesses where those in other countries would not think to. Some businesses in Kenya operate entirely over Facebook, for example.
Use of 'dumb' (not smart) phones is the norm. Social networks get this:
- Facebook has a version in Africa that works on dumb phone
- Twitter is looking at enabling people to do sms-to-tweet
This is a good report on it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9759485.stm
The Panel:
- @literacyonline
- @ellenhel
- Eleanor Fogden
The chair: @hubmum.
There is a big difference between those born before or after 1997. Those born before are digital consumers whereas those after are generally more participatory (via social media).
It's also useful to look at:
-
the ability to digest information
-
having digital social skills
-
is about being able to use the information you find and 2. is about being able to deal with the situations that arise from the online context.
There is an aspect of vulnerability involved. There is often a level of confidence assumed when talking with younger people about being online. This doesn't actually map to how confident they really are.
Academics would describe a digital native as anyone born after 1980. This is a bit of a red herring because it's more about capability and their ability to take up opportunities that arise online and your ability to deal with them.
There's a misconception that people who use social media know how to use computers and this is often far from the case.
She talked about having received abuse over Tumblr and didn't know what to do. The 'report it' button was apparently there but quite well hidden.
She said you also have to be careful what you post on there. If you post 'Am having a bad day' you will get connected with lots of content about self-abuse.
One of the interesting things that helped her was her friends going online and watching out for her. The panel noted how this mirrors similar situations in real life.
What skills do you need to navigate these spaces?
There is actually almost no difference between ages in handling and trusting informantion. It's less to do with having these skills and more to do with how comfortable people feel with the tools used to get online. When online, the skills used for dealing with information are often the same.
Social skills are also skills that cross age barriers. If you have them in the real world, this will be reflected online.