I think the main thing is that it's a much more "interesting" Internet geopolitics story for a U.S. business magazine (and research mailing list ;) than e.g. the discussions in Geneva right now on how the rest of the world might get some decent representation in running the Internet. http://www.internetgovernance.org/ http://www.wgig.org/ Cheers, Danny -- http://www.dannybutt.net adventures in cultural politics - http://acp.dannybutt.net digital media - http://digital.dannybutt.net On 4/20/05 10:19 AM, "jeremy hunsinger" <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:

umm, if you really want to know. that study entailed last week congressional testimony, which was probably the origin of the article. it also had a press release or two. opennet is utoronto, harvard, and cambridge more or less. if you want specific info, I can provide contacts as appropriate. On Apr 19, 2005, at 7:10 PM, Ellis Godard wrote:

...

Since that conclusion should surprise no one, what else did the study find? Surely it involved more than observing and stating the obvious.

-eg

...

-----Original Message----- From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Ed Lamoureux Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 6:50 AM To: Association of Internet Researchers Cc: mm 250 Subject: [Air-l] interesting article about net censorship in china

<http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx? a=11815&hed=Net%20Censors%20Active%20in%20China> "Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country Study" is a result

of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI). Funded by George Soros' Open Society Institute, ONI is a collaboration of researchers at Harvard University,

the University of Cambridge, and the University of Toronto working on issues of Internet censorship and surveillance. The organization's conclusion: in China, web users are both closely watched and often prevented from seeing content of a political, religious, or sexual nature.

Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D. Director, Multimedia Program and New Media Center Associate Professor, Speech Communication 1501 W. Bradley Bradley University Peoria IL 61625 309-677-2378 http://hilltop.bradley.edu/~ell/ http://gcc.bradley.edu/mm/ ______________________________________________ _ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

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Hi Jeremy My point was simply that the geopolitical imaginary of "the Internet" and what's "interesting" about it depends a lot on where you sit. So, for example, if I had to guess a story about the Internet in China that would make its way into the US tech business press, I'd say "censorship" because this fits with the dominant narrative of Chinese politics that appears in publications like Red Herring. (Rather than China as home to the second-largest nation of users in the world, or the largest IPv6 network in the world). That's not saying that I don't think that the censorship isn't a valid concern for those working on these issues, but in an environment where there's so little discussion of East Asian use, its role as a "general news item" seems a bit gratuitous. Those bad Chinese, eh! Although, the story tells us, "new technologies may keep total censorship in China at bay". The good Internet, eh! On the other hand, outside of the U.S., UK, and Australia, very few researchers on internet governance would claim as you do that a) that the existing coordinating bodies adequately represent global interests or b) the relationship between internet governance bodies and the US government is "tenuous". To give an example, it is possible under the terms of reference of the MoU constituting the relationship between the Dept of Commerce and ICANN, for an entire international country code top level domain (such as .cn) to be removed from the root zone file on the demands of the U.S. government. This would effectively remove it from the Internet. No one seriously expects the US government to do that (but note, none of the "endpoints" have the ability to do that). Yet, you may be able to understand why many do not see that as being a viable state of affairs for a global medium. It may also be possible for us, extrapolating from the "censoring Chinese" story, to see how this situation might also play into certain common assumptions about the United States government's role in international affairs.

From US media sources Internet governance is overwhelmingly posited as a "UN grab for power over the Internet", rather than a serious issue with the potential to make or break the "global" nature of the Internet. I'm implicitly suggesting that a) this is a big deal, because it affects the entire net, not just a nation state, b) it's being decided right now, and there are many important documents awaiting comment and c) it's something that many researchers on this forum are well placed to affect, as most of this list reside in the nations seeking to maintain the patently unbalanced status quo.

As a network of researchers in this medium we have 1) our own research interests, but also 2) a responsibility for the medium's development, that suggests we should be monitoring the issues/news of the day and developing understanding of them. It's good to share articles etc. outside of our own specialisms. But on the second point, I think we'd do well as researchers to take a critical perspective on who decides what counts as news and what our implication in the stories is. Cheers, Danny ps - anyone interested in the governance issues, as well as checking the wgig and internetgovernance.org papers, may also want to look at two excellent papers: Peake, Adam (2004) Internet governance and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Report for Association of Progressive Communications, http://rights.apc.org/documents/governance.pdf Drake, William. "Reframing Internet Governance Discourse: Fifteen Baseline Propositions." http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/publications/Drake2.pdf On 4/20/05 9:34 PM, "jeremy hunsinger" <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:

but... this has been covered in the news too... at least the wgig for wsis has been covered. it is interesting. but it is unclear what you mean by 'running the internet'. if you mean icann, which is the only bit that really is tied to the u.s. government, though tenuously... I hardly think that human readable domain names, which is pretty much all they do, is 'running the internet'.... even if, for instance one claims that icann is running the internet, under the ausipices of the u.s. commerce, you would still be hard pressed to say it is a u.s. organization, or non-representative of international interests(granted though, only certain types of interests are represented well) if you mean ietf, iab, irtf, isoc, w3c... well those are all open organizations with solid international credentials.

now do any of those organizations really run the internet? or govern it? each does in some way, to some extent, but none does it entirely, nor do the whole of them govern it entirely. most of the internet is governed by the endpoints, and those that profit from them, which is why censorship is important, because it shows precisely that fact, that countries can govern the internet as well.

Hi Jeremy I'm pleased to know that you're working on Internet Governance for the AIR conference. Hopefully you'll also be able to contribute comments on the WGIG's papers. More voices are good. We should probably discuss some of these questions in a specific governance forum, but I would like to suggest a couple of things for the casual readers. 1) While the implementation of the Anycast system expands the geopolitical *accessibility* of DNS root servers, it in no way expands the *control* of them. It's kind of like arguing that Starbucks is international because it shows up in a lot of countries. And the 13 "recently original" root servers (10 of which are in the US) still have a critical role which the others "mirror" (if they say strawberry frappuccino's on the menu, *it's on the menu*. 2) While I understand it is technically possible for individual root servers to "roll their own" root zone file, with the number of sites coming online every day, in a practical sense they are reliant on the master file from the "A" root server (which, as an irrelevant aside, I understand is not Anycast yet?). 3) Any edits to the master root zone file - which, let's remember, includes *all* of the "country code top level domains" that we mistakenly associate with actual countries (.jp, .ie, etc) - are approved by the US Department of Commerce. Not good if, for example, you're at war with the US. 4) Almost no one - outside the Chinese government ;) - wants to see the ITU running the internet governance show. But still, governance of any sort attains its legitimacy through accountability to stakeholders, and the current US-dominated bodies have a response which is routinely "What's the problem? We don't *really* run anything?" That wears thin after a while, so you might want to watch how your suggestions are received along the lines that, technically, it's a lot more open than it appears :). Regards, Danny -- Danny Butt New Media | Research | Education | Development | Consulting db@dannybutt.net | http://www.dannybutt.net +64 21 456 379 | Aotearoa New Zealand ( in Australia through June 05 - +61 410 524 486 ) On 4/22/05 1:35 AM, "jeremy hunsinger" <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:

I think that depends on what they mean by 'internet governance' as I noted earlier. If you mean icann, it is representative in a sense. if you mean ietf, etc. it is representative in a sense. however, if you mean the u.s. contract, then of course it is not representative at all. if you mean the powers that be in the non-state and non-technical sense, then those are not representative, and that will be covered in part at my hopefully soon to be accepted ir6.0 talk this year entitled Capital Policy: the transnational subpolitics of internet governance.

not really, because while ICANN can direct, who will enforce? other than economic enforcement... there may not be any real system of enforcement within the system other than exclusion, and that would require a unified effort, one that I doubt is possible.

actually, you can remove routing at any border or any endpoint, just like you can add it at any of those places. true, that doesn't make it disappear for everyone, but you can make whole areas of the world disappear for anyone depending on your place in the chain. That is what is interesting about dns. by the way although icann and the post-arpa roots are the dominant hegemony, they are not the only name system in operation, they can be ignored entirely if your country has the technical capacity to do so, which many countries do.

also, we should note that while the ruling root sits in the u.s. currently, the other root servers are fairly well distributed in various nations http://www.root-servers.org/. what that means to me is that in a realpolitik mode, the u.s. is only governing by consent, because any given one of those could break and become an independent root should they so desire or should the authority in their country demand it.

yes, I should say that I support the dissolution of icann and the movement of naming to a u.n. associated body, but do not currently see that it should be the ITU.

http://wiki.aoir.org feel free to add stuff. jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu jeremy.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

Hi Jarek EduTools - this site enables you to compare products: http://www.edutools.info/course/ Commonwealth of Learning - this site provides you with useful information regarding open source software (and why would you consider anything else?): http://www.col.org/Consultancies/03LMSOpenSource.htm Regards Stewart Professor Stewart Marshall Director, Distance Education Centre The University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, Bridgetown, BARBADOS, West Indies phone: +1 246 417 4497 fax: +1 246 421 6753 Gmail: stewartmar@gmail.com url: http://www.dec.uwi.edu/smarshall Please view the open access e-journal on ICT in education and development at: http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu//index.php and the recently published books edited by Marshall, Taylor & Yu: "Closing the Digital Divide" http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=Q602 "Using Community Informatics to Transform Regions" http://www.idea-group.com/books/details.asp?id=4146 "Encyclopedia of Developing Regional Communities with ICT" http://www.idea-group.com/encyclopedia/details.asp?ID=4460 _______________________________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org]On Behalf Of J. J. Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 1:46 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] software ranking Hello, Could anyone help me find a list or ranking of software platforms used for online course development and delivery? Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle ... etc? Thank you in advance, Jarek Janio Santiago Canyon College Orange, California _______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

I know this is out of the list-topic but I found this interesting and couldn't help myself on sharing it with you all. Best, nuri,- Nuria Widyasari Université de Paris 8 Vincènnes à St.Denis UFR 6 - Langage, Informatique, Technologie Dept. Hypermédia DEA - Enjeux Sociaux et Technologies de la Communication Option: Réseaux d'Information, Réseaux Sociaux Website: http://nurisoeharto.multiply.com --- Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i33/33b01001.htm From the issue dated April 22, 2005 The I in Sociology By BARBARA KATZ ROTHMAN My husband and I were sitting in the kitchen, the edited manuscript of my first book in my hands, the galleys in his. I always read aloud, he always proofreads -- that's our system. That was the first time, though, and we didn't really have a system yet. It was just the two of us, trying to figure out how to review galleys. Daniel, our first child, was 8 years old. I can't quite remember what he was doing, but I can picture him, leaning back against the kitchen cabinet, engrossed in something, while I read. Suddenly his head snapped up, he turned to me, and he demanded: "What?" I'd just read a description of his birth, a graphic, personal account of what it felt like to give birth to him. It was from the preface of my book, a piece that would segue into an academic discussion of the home-birth movement and the politics of midwifery, the work that had been my dissertation. The book opened with my own story, my own birth. But "my own birth" was Daniel's birth; my birth story, his. He had become a character in a book. As, by now, have my other two children, my husband, other family members, friends, colleagues -- and, of course, I too am a character in my own books. Writers of fiction are known for stealing bits of life and putting them in their books. That practice also defines the increasingly popular genre of memoir. But what does it mean for a sociologist? What does it mean when I "use" my life and the people in it that way? More and more sociologists are doing just that: mining our own lives, our own experiences. Just as the anthropologists have moved closer to home, losing some of their fascination with exotica and exploring their own locales, sociologists have moved in closer as well. But for us, it was never about sailing off to some island somewhere -- we were always exploring close to home. Increasingly, though, we've come closer and closer, turning our sociological eyes on our own lives. In that first book, I used the personal as a frame -- Daniel's birth in the preface; Leah's birth, which also took place at home seven years later, in the epilogue. I published the book in the early 1980s, and that was pushing the envelope about as far as I cared to: I felt uncomfortable enough discussing intensely personal experiences, let alone ones as physical as giving birth. So why did I do it? I was criticizing contemporary medical practice, and I must have sounded like a total flake. Whenever I presented my work about home birth, except at midwifery meetings, someone was sure to ask me -- no, accuse me -- "But is it safe?" People seemed to think that home birth was an indulgence for the mothers, but what about the poor, helpless, abused babies, born without the benefit of a labor-and-delivery suite? The way to counter that was not, I came to realize, with endless statistics demonstrating the safety and improved outcome of births outside the hospital. This was just not about the numbers, not to be answered with studies showing home birth to be safer. More effective than data, I had myself. I was a graduate student when I had my first baby, an assistant professor when the second was born. I was married to a computer programmer, living in Flatbush. Could anybody be more normal, more square? If I introduced myself to the reader -- placed myself in my home, with my family, in all my ordinariness, decency, plain old niceness -- maybe the reader would accept me enough to hear what I was saying. What I was saying was, I thought, really fascinating sociologically, which made it worthy of being a dissertation. The work came about because I was at a particular moment in my life and my work: Academically, I was finished with my course work; personally, I wanted a home birth. As I explored my options (really, really limited in Brooklyn in 1974), I found my mind was working on two tracks. One was trying to solve the immediate problem of finding someone to attend a home birth, getting what I wanted for myself. The other was listening to my sociological imagination, which kept saying, "That's fascinating." I knew there was something important in what I was going through that I needed to get back to in my scholarly work. And so I did. When I had the baby, when I'd accomplished what I wanted for myself, I went back and mined what I had found in the world of birth. I was, of course, primed to find things: Years of sociological training had made me ready to see the ways that obstetrical knowledge, like all knowledge, is constructed, and the powers served by that construction. So I finished my dissertation, using very standard research techniques. I analyzed the content of medical and alternative literature; I conducted long interviews with medically trained nurse-midwives who had begun to do home births. Between my first book's preface and its epilogue, the word "I" appeared only to represent the researcher ("I asked the midwives I interviewed ... ") or the author ("In this chapter I will show ... "). I the mother, I the woman, I the character in the book showed up only at the beginning and end. Now, more than 20 years later, I have just finished another book inspired by my transition to motherhood: this time, on account of my third child, Victoria. Victoria is mine by adoption, and it is a kind of adoption that has a troubling -- and fascinating --history in America. It's a "trans-racial" adoption: I'm white, as are my husband and thus, definitionally, our first two kids; Victoria is black. I find that sentence very difficult to write. I need pages and pages to discuss the meaning of terms like "race" and "transracial adoption," and to explain why I prefer "white" and "black" in this instance to "East European Jewish" and "African-American." I took that amount of space to examine those language issues in my new book, Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption (Beacon Press, forthcoming). I have written books in between, and probably more as a matter of style than substance, my use of "I" has grown over the years. Still, most of the time in my books, it is a fairly restrained, controlled "I," used to announce my authorial presence, to provide a helpful anecdote, to ease the reader along with a personal touch when I present difficult, troubling, or perhaps threatening material. That is how most of us in sociology have been using the personal voice in our work. But my latest book is different, not only because of the informal language or the more-frequent use of "I." This is a far more personal book, one that grew out of and is informed by my life, not simply framed by, or sprinkled with, personal anecdotes. I weave back and forth in my writing between my research and my feelings and responses to that research. Some sociologists call such work autoethnography, to distinguish it from simple memoir. In memoir, the driving force is the story: You want to tell your life. In autoethnography, your life is data. Autoethnography is a methodology that makes particular sense when you're living a fascinating life, when you're having interesting, informative experiences. But who isn't? To a sociologist -- particularly the kind of sociologist I am trained to be, someone who does qualitative work, trained to regard the ordinary world itself as fascinating -- data are always and everywhere thick on the ground. Sometimes when I'm talking to a student about events that are happening in her or his life, like a relative's dying, or a traumatic move, I say, "Take notes!" When the situation has been resolved, the student may find something intellectually valuable in the experience, something on which to do scholarly work, maybe even autoethnography. And yet that's not quite what my book on race and adoption really is. It's not an ethnography of my family's lives and experiences. Partly that is precisely because of the question Daniel asked so forcefully when he was 8: Who owns the data? The experience I had giving birth was, I felt then and still feel now, very much my story, which I own. But Victoria's story is not entirely mine. I had the difficult -- and yes, intriguing, so here I am writing about it -- problem of figuring out where the boundaries are. What parts of the experience are my story, to which I am fully entitled, and what parts are hers, for her to use if and how she chooses? One thing I did was have her read the book before I gave it to the publisher for editing, or at least read all of what she so charmingly calls the "nonboring, nonsociological" parts. We went through the manuscript together and stopped at every mention of her name. Occasionally she changed a word, edited a phrase. But even before that, I had given the manuscript to someone else who knows and loves both of us, and asked her to read it through Victoria's eyes, to show me where I was treading too close to the line, where we needed to protect her life from my writerly grasp. In the end, what I am doing in the book is pretty much what I do in the classroom. It is not memoir, though I certainly do tell some stories from my life. And it is not autoethnography -- not an analysis of my life. The driving force is neither the story nor my life as data. Instead, I have a number of concepts that I want to get across to the reader. I search for examples in whatever is available to me. That includes my life. On the other hand, my life is also what gives me some of my ideas: Concepts develop out of living; experience congeals into thought. When I express the idea, I draw upon my life. I'm not searching my life for interesting scenes and seeing how I can fit them into a book, the way I would if I were doing a memoir. I'm wrestling with ideas, which have often come to me in the course of living my life. I use my writing to try to explain those ideas and introduce them to other people. Inevitably, then, in my new book I slide back and forth between memoir and sociology, treading recklessly close to what my colleague, Juan Battle, calls "mesearch" rather than research. "What theory are you using?" one of my graduate students asked me at a party when I described the book a while ago. She's doing a dissertation, and she listed the theorists who seemed appropriate. I stammered answers -- we were at a party, not an exam. I sipped my wine. Hell, I thought, I'm not using theory here, I'm using practice. But practice is, for all of us, grounded in theory, in ideology, in ways of thinking about the world. I'm a sociologist. I'm more a sociologist than I am a Jew. It's my way of thinking, my stance in the world. So when I saw how interesting so-called transracial adoption was, just as when I saw how interesting home birth was, my mind went off on two tracks: getting done what I needed to in my own life, and taking sociological notice of things to set aside for later use. Perhaps inevitably the book has a lot about who I am, how I live my life. As I have noted, we see more and more of that kind of work in the social sciences these days. Some of my colleagues regret that move to the personal, and some revel in it. Oddly enough, I am unsure how to feel about it. I hate to read autobiography; I rarely even read biography. The stories of individual lives interest me less than the contexts in which they are placed. So I have to ask myself if I am spreading my emotions across the page, my reactions to both the events of my life and to my research inspired by those events, just because it has become more fashionable to do so. Is the use of the personal voice what one expects or needs these days, to reach readers outside academe -- a way to be nonboring, nonsociological? Or am I making good, intelligent use of myself, my life, and my experience, as a resource? What I like to think I'm doing is being nonboring and sociological. But I've just been reading a paper by one of my graduate students, Colin Jerolmack, about sociability and pigeons -- he hung out in parks and watched the interactions between people and birds. It was perfect sociology. And it made me jealous. I know how to go out and gather data. I could do that again. But my life, well, my life keeps getting in the way. Just let me finish revising a book on birth and midwives, wrap up the one on adoption, make some progress on the new work I'm thinking about doing on home cooking -- just let me get past my own life for 10 minutes, and maybe I could think about something else. Maybe I'll go hang out in the park and see what strikes me as interesting. Barbara Katz Rothman is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York's Baruch College and Graduate Center. She is the author, most recently, of Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption, forthcoming next month from Beacon Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 33, Page B10

What I found new and interesting in the report, at least compared to prior studies I'm familiar with, is the level of detail provided about the censorship mechanisms deployed and their actual tested impact on accessibility of sites and content. To see the full report: http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/ONI_China_Country_Study.pdf Mark

Since that conclusion should surprise no one, what else did the study find? Surely it involved more than observing and stating the obvious.

-eg