The Internet Bill of Rights: A Way to Reconcile Natural Freedoms and Regulatory Needs?

International audienceWithin broad debates on freedom, security and human rights on the Internet - carried on during recent years in national and international fora - the proposal for the creation and adoption of a Bill of Rights for the Internet has been the subject of uneven attention and mixed reviews. Taking stock of the renewed interest in the proposal showed by the Committee on Civil Liberties of the European Parliament, this article analyses the current state of the Internet Bill of Rights (IBR) project. The analysis briefly retraces the history and main promoters of the IBR proposal, outlines the rationale and perspectives behind it, and debates its promises, limits and future challenges

When social links are network links: The dawn of peer-to-peer social networks and its implications for privacy

International audienceDespite the success they enjoy among Internet users today, social networking tools are currently subject to several controversies, notably concerning the uses their administrators make of users' private data. Today, many projects and applications propose decentralised alternatives to such services, among which one of the most promising appears to be the construction of the social network on a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. This paper addresses and analyses the "first steps" of applications at the crossroads between social networks and P2P networks. More specifically, it discusses how such applications anticipate modifications in the management of users' right to privacy, by harnessing both anonymity and knowledge of identity - aspects generally identified with P2P networks and social networks, respectively - depending on the different functionalities and layers of the application

Connectés mais protégés : le pari des réseaux sociaux décentralisés

L'éclatant succès actuel des réseaux sociaux a un revers: il s'appuie sur le captage, réalisé avec leur consentement mais à des fins marketing, des données personnelles de leurs utilisateurs. Conséquence: les problèmes liés à la protection de la vie privée et des informations personnelles sont aujourd'hui en pleine lumière. Cet article s'intéresse aux développements récents dans le domaine des réseaux sociaux décentralisés, qui permettent de dépasser le dilemme entre préservation de la vie privée et présence sur les réseaux sociaux. Ces outils pourraient même être les premiers à tirer pleinement parti du potentiel social des outils de réseaux virtuels

Walls Built Up, Walls Written Down: Of Symbolic Value, Material Effectiveness and Media Representation of Barriers in Padua, Italy

In the last few years, the city of Padua, Italy has had a place in the media spotlight thanks to its "walls", urban barriers of different kinds, dimensions and purposes, the foremost example of which is the so-called "Via Anelli Wall". This essay means to contribute to the investigation of the "Padua Walls" phenomenon. By trying to move a step further from current debates on negative and positive features of the proliferation of "walls" in Europe and the world, it argues that such barriers - and the politics behind them - should be read as symptoms more than as solutions (regardless of their actual effectiveness as such). I propose an interpretive key for the "Padua Walls" phenomenon that treats them as signals of a lingering malaise (of which Padua is a case study but by no means the only example) that stems from the current devolution of concepts such as solidarity, belonging, community. By doing so, I address both the concreteness and materiality of such barriers and of their construction, and the representation that media have produced, in parallel, of them as processes and concepts. Particular attention is paid, in the blend of case studies and discussions that constitutes this article, to the juxtaposition of symbolic value and practical efficacy of the "Padua Walls", and its implications in the formation of societal rites and policy-making choices

The Internet Bill of Rights project: The challenge of reconciliation between natural freedoms and needs for regulation

Within broad debates on freedom, security and human rights on the Internet - carried on during recent years in national and international fora - the proposal for the creation and adoption of a Bill of Rights for the Internet has been the subject of uneven attention and mixed reviews. Taking stock of the renewed interest in the proposal showed by the Committee on Civil Liberties of the European Parliament, this article analyses the current state of the Internet Bill of Rights (IBR) project. The analysis briefly retraces the history and main promoters of the IBR proposal, outlines the rationale and perspectives behind it, and debates its promises, limits and future challenges, with a special focus on its potential as an instrument of reconciliation between natural freedoms and needs for regulation

Alternative internet(s): Governance by internet infrastructure

Francesca Musiani is a researcher with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated with the Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC). In this latest post in our series on alternative internet(s), she looks at the implications of governance by control of internet infrastructure

Editorial Policies, "Public Domain" and Acafandom

Full text also available at http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/275/224Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.International audienceThe article analyzes the several aspects related to the relationship between editorial policies of periodicals and fan privacy, as evolution is taking place in the field of acafandom. It is stated that, fans need to consider their privacy when they publish their work on the Internet, as it is being increasingly used for fan studies

Dalla ricerca all'insegnamento (il passo è breve)

The analysis of technical and scientific controversies has emerged over the last thirty years as one of the cornerstones of the study of science and technology embedded in their social and cultural contexts. This article focuses on research and teaching experiences, conducted at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) of MINES ParisTech, revolving around the analysis of controversies. It examines their origins, mutual influences and key principles to finally discuss how a pragmatic approach to the study of controversies constitutes an opportunity for the development or evolution of innovative teaching methods, able to include a critical approach to the very contents of knowledge, and means of learning. Far from refusing the search for objectivity itself, this approach proposes to seek objectivity by means of dense descriptions of the associations that develop in and around the subject of study.L'analisi delle controversie tecnoscientifiche si è imposta negli ultimi trent'anni come una delle pietre angolari dello studio della scienza e della tecnologia nei loro contesti sociali e culturali. L'articolo si focalizza sulle esperienze di ricerca e di insegnamento riguardanti l'analisi di controversie condotte al Centro di Sociologia dell'Innovazione (CSI) di MINES ParisTech, e ne riprende le origini, le reciproche influenze ed i punti chiave, per discutere infine di come l'approccio pragmatico all'analisi di controversie costituisca un'opportunità per la messa a punto o l'evoluzione di insegnamenti innovativi, che includano un approccio critico ai contenuti ed ai modi della conoscenza. Lungi dal ricusare la ricerca dell'obiettività in se stessa, tale approccio propone di cercare l'obiettività tramite una descrizione densa delle associazioni che si sviluppano attorno all'oggetto di studio

Caring About the Plumbing: On the Importance of Architectures in Social Studies of (Peer-to-Peer) Technology

International audienceThis article discusses the relevance, for scholars working on social studies of network media, of "caring about the plumbing" (to paraphrase Bricklin, 2001), i.e., addressing elements of application architecture and design as an integral part of their subject of study. In particular, by discussing peer-to-peer (P2P) systems as a technical networking model and a dynamic of social interaction that are inextricably intertwined, the article introduces how the perspective outlined above is particularly useful to adopt when studying a promising area of innovation: that of "alternative" or "legitimate" (Verma, 2004) applications of P2P networks to search engines, social networks, video streaming and other Internet-based services. The article seeks to show how the Internet's current trajectories of innovation increasingly suggest that particular forms of architectural distribution and decentralization (or their lack), impact specific procedures, practices and uses. Architectures should be understood an "alternative way of influencing economic systems" (van Schewick, 2010), indeed, the very fabric of user behavior and interaction. Most notably, the P2P "alternative" to Internet-based services shows how the status of every Internet user as a consumer, a sharer, a producer and possibly a manager of digital content is informed by, and shapes in return, the technical structure and organization of the services (s)he has access to: their mandatory passage points, places of storage and trade, required intersections. In conclusion, this article is a call to study the technical architecture of networking applications as a "relational property" (Star & Ruhleder, 1996), and integral part of human organization. It suggests that such an approach provides an added value to the study of those communities, groups and practices that, by leveraging socio-technical dynamics of distribution, decentralization, collaboration and peer production, are currently questioning more traditional or institutionalized models of content creation, search and sharing

Private Yet Connected? Yes, We can: The Challenge of Decentralized Social Networks

International audienceIn the age when the massive success of social network sites relies on users' willingness to freely disclose their personal data for profiling purposes, issues of user privacy and personal data protection are under the spotlight. This article addresses current developments in the field of decentralized social networking as a way of countering the trade-off between privacy and connectivity in social network services. We argue that such tools may constitute the first attempt to fully leverage the social opportunity of virtual networking tools