Dear AIR Colleagues, Attached is a brief conference report that may be of interest. Please feel free to forward it where it might be helpful. With this I have tried to sketch the areas of some agreement -- themes found across more than one presentation and developed in the discussion -- but ethnography is one of the harder things to generalize about. For this brevity I oversimplified, with these words I speak only for myself. I would welcome any comments you might have about my comments. Regards, Christian -- Grounding Internet Regulation in Lived Experience: A Conference Report by Christian Sandvig (christian.sandvig@csls.ox.ac.uk) Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy Oxford University On March 8th, Oxford hosted leading Internet researchers, policymakers, and industry representatives from the on-line media to discuss the present state of the art in ethnographic Internet research and its implications for the many attempts to regulate the Internet. Forty-two people presented case studies or expertise from seventeen countries, considering settings both public and private, at home and work, urban and rural. (*) Further products will be forthcoming from this conference, but I would like to take a moment to briefly relate the lessons I learned as conference chair. These fall into six areas: INTERNET ACCESS. Even where Internet infrastructure is very poor, people find ways to use the Internet -- often through novel forms of sharing. Public access centers succeed in allowing the pooling of limited computer expertise among strangers. Relying on them is difficult without stable, neutral, portable email provision and file storage. The physical placement of the computer in a room at home or in a public place is one of the most important (and most often overlooked) factors that influence how the Internet will be used. INTERNET AND CHILDREN. Children (especially young children) do not use the Internet to find pornography nearly as often as policy discourse and news stories suggest. Children (even young children) are aware of so-called 'stranger-danger,' and they are often savvy in selectively releasing information about themselves, and minimizing their risk. They are equally skilled at circumventing both the technical and social restrictions of parents and teachers, and such circumvention is commonplace (e.g., time limits, 'educational' use only, prohibitions on chat). Children often know more about computers than parents and teachers. Content rating and filtering mechanisms are currently far too complicated for most intended users. INTERNET CENSORSHIP. Efforts by non-democratic states to 'selectively' liberalize ICTs are only partially successful - the Internet seems to allow at least some new opportunities for political action wherever Internet use is encouraged, even if only policies related to economic development are liberalized. In its present form the Internet is not inherently liberating, but it may tend to shift state control from ex ante to post hoc. INTERNET AND POLICY MECHANISMS. The recent emergence of complex regulatory schemes (e.g., in e-commerce) mixing state and non-state actors, co- or self-regulation, and a diverse package of incentives and/or penalties may reduce transparency and accountability, while creating policies that fail because they are incomprehensible. Co- and self- regulatory schemes in the area of Internet content were received with skepticism. In conditions of criminal harm, well-publicized prosecution in selective instances may be more effective and is almost certainly more efficient (e.g., in cases of child pornography and hate speech) despite the jurisdictional problems of national criminal laws. A considerable amount of Internet use is not easily interpretable in utilitarian terms, while policy discourse is usually restricted to utilitarian reasoning. This precipitates conflict with parents, employers, and the state about concepts such as 'economic value' and 'educational content.' PERCEPTIONS OF INTERNET. The present policy concern in the industrialized world with the dangers of the Internet (pornography and predation) is overstated, as are the benefits promised in the developing world. There may be an emergent public interest role similar to the UK tradition of public service broadcasting for Internet Service providers. The Internet is globally understood as a location of anxiety, pitting people against technology, adults against children, or individuals against the state. Despite the arrival of the 'mundane Internet' in some advanced democracies, people still hold strong beliefs about the emancipatory 'nature' of the network even while seeing few of these benefits or working at cross-purposes to them. INTERNET POLICY AND ETHNOGRAPHY. Ethnographic studies with methodological rigor and extended fieldwork are needed to understand the Internet, but they remain rare. The abstracts submitted to this conference indicate much current academic concern with the home and the 'everyday.' A wide range of methods use the term 'ethnography,' which is itself contentious. There is a new need in policy circles for more nuanced, 'on the ground' research, yet ethnographers have been reluctant to fill (or had difficulty filling) this role: chiefly because policy work usually assumes sequential causation and research objectivity. In addition, policy timelines are much shorter than ethnographic research timelines. Finally, the researchers that do wish to shape policy often wish to engage with an overly romantic notion of the policy process. Still, many of the ethnographic researchers came away appreciating the difficulties of achieving consensus on policy and a renewed sense that their work is worth presenting in an accessible manner to policy-making audiences. Many of the policymakers came away with some appreciation for the value of qualitative research - for some this conference was their first exposure to Ethnography as a research method. This meeting was hosted by the Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy (PCMLP), Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University. A brief rationale for this meeting, the agenda, and the complete list of participants is available here: <http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/Ethnographies/>. Information about future written products of the conference will be available soon from the PCMLP Web site. (*) Participants presented case studies or expertise from: Singapore, Malaysia, India, China, Japan, Russia, Croatia, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Trinidad, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and the UK. ------------------------ Christian Sandvig christian.sandvig@csls.oxford.ac.uk http://www.niftyc.org/