AUTHOR
Hendrik Opdebeeck

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the now classic works on globalisation by such authors as N. Hertz and N. Klein, who draw attention to the darker sides of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a globalised context, authors such as J. Norberg argue that the problem is not so much the role of ICTs in the process of globalisation, but the lack of ICTs. Reading Norberg’s In Defence of Global Capitalism, one is immediately struck by a series of assertions (substantiated by empirical data and tables) in favour of globalisation: “Things are getting better by the day”, “the world is becoming more and more democratic”, “global inequality is declining”, “progress is leading to more adequate environmental regulations”. Now at last a new wave of publications is appearing that considers the profound social consequences of IT. These authors call into question the primacy of ICT. State and culture, it is argued, are too subservient to ICT companies, so that ecological, syndical, social-democratic and fiscal regulations are in danger of becoming of secondary importance. Authors such as the previously mentioned Hertz and Klein have expressed the fear that the planet may be threatened with ecological and social destruction by the hubris of our ICT culture, especially if we fail to contemplate on our common global responsibility.

According to R. Safranski, on the other hand, it is self-deceit to believe that the profound social consequences of ICT could lead to a worldwide solidarity. Our extremely communicative global community appears to be losing its ability to function as a subject. All power lies with States and alliances between States, while ‘humanity’ is left utterly impotent. We continue to dream about an urgently required humanity that is capable of acting, but time and again strife on a small or large scale stands in the way of unity between men. ICTs, which all too often measure the applicability of values in money and reduce the world to a commodity, are threatening to connect everything with everything else. Hence, ICTs place themselves above the diversity of the world and begin to function in a ‘subjectless’ fashion.

As a consequence, it has become almost inappropriate in the face of these challenges to recall the meaning of the individual. Nevertheless, we can only cope with the consequences of ICTs if we take due account of the shaping of the human person. Essential in this respect is the strength to restrict ourselves as human beings in order that we could process the innumerable ICT stimuli that come our way daily and thus avoid being paralysed by them. Wherever we go, we inevitably end up in situations where, disquietingly, we come to realise that the scope of familiarity with globality and the scope of possible action are driven apart dramatically. As this is untenable, we try to secure our own private future at all costs, without allowing ourselves to be led by a global ethics that aims to prevent a catastrophe. As we are increasingly moving through a self-made universe, man is in danger of losing sight of whatever transcends life. In the impenetrability of an all-too-often degenerated natural world, for example, man was nevertheless offered an opportunity to come into touch with this secret. Today, however, ICTs are increasingly imposing a forest of symbols, information, interpretations and signs in which man has become utterly lost.

This contemporary inability to cope with the social consequences of ICTs is the superlative case of what has been described as social alienation since the writings of J.J. Rousseau and K. Marx. According to Rousseau, a certain kind of socialisation maims man. His response is a return of man into himself as an individual, detached from others and from soulless society. Of course, the risk of this flight inside is that we might come to ignore the freedom of the other, so that what is a solution for the one reveals itself to be a totalitarian eclipse for the other. While Rousseau wants to protect the real self against the societal process, Marx discerned the condition for liberation in this very process. This, he argued, would offer light at the end of the historical tunnel. As we now know, this light was no more than a will-o-the-wisp.

What, then, is the path in between Rousseau and Marx, between getting lost in the past and in the future? This is where the significance becomes clear of standing in the here and now without allowing oneself to be fragmented by either the past or the future. This is the positive equanimity of ‘keeping a distance’; of cherishing manners of behaviour and thought that keep at bay the ‘global hysteria’; of being receptive only to as many ICTs as one can cope with. This can only be achieved if one knows what one wants and needs. This delimitation implies an awareness of the point where one stops allowing oneself to be formatted and informed. Like Nietzsche, one then becomes good neighbours again with the closest things around oneself. Only in this way can man become a whole in miniature. Only then will we succeed in averting the profound social consequences of ICT and in preventing that global time devours individual time. In view of the rather limited amount of ICT that man can cope with, it would appear that we can rightly call into question the great slogans of such globalists as Norberg according to whom the problem is not so much the social consequences of ICT as the lack of ICT.

AUTHOR
Brian O’Flynn

ABSTRACT

Throughout the Arab world, the concept of official paper documentation to certify a qualification is taken extremely seriously. In applying for a job, the posession of the actual certificate or diploma is as important as the possession of an official transcript. Holders of foreign degrees need to undergo a laborious process of diploma translation and multiple attestation before their qualification is considered trustworthy. Zayed University, a government run institution in the United Arab Emirates, graduated its first students in 2002. It took the groundbreaking step of eliminating the traditional paper certificate, replacing it with a digital diploma – a virtual certification with CD-ROM and online components. A first in the region, if not the world, its impact was deep, given the aforementioned emphasis on certification.

The initial reaction of graduating students was extremely positive. A sense of being on the cutting edge of technology was pervasive, helped by a concerted pr and media campaign by the university. Most Emirati graduates actively seeking employment traditionally turn to the public sector for career opportunities. Thus, the reaction of the ministries and municipalities was crucial in determining the early success of the digital diploma. Not surprisingly, public sector organizations, caught largely unaware of Zayed University’s action, claimed that the digital certification was insufficient and demanded officially authenticated paper diplomas from job applicants.

This work-in-progress focuses on the status of the digital diploma one year on from its initial distribution. All 379 graduates from the class of 2002 have been surveyed on their experiences and feelings towards the concept. A similar survey has been administered to current students at the University. Finally a cross section of organizations and companies now employing or considering employing Zayed University graduates were asked about their perceptions of the project.

This paper also focuses on the broader ethical issues raised. Privacy, accuracy and trust in the information presented are issues that we are currently grappling with. The digital diploma concept is growing into a larger, more encompassing digital portfolio, which incorporates reports on internships, capstone projects and a sampler of student work. This in itself raises questions related to quality control, authorship, ownership, data protection and granulated access. The paper will address these issues within the context of a conservative Arab society

AUTHOR
Flávio Nunes

ABSTRACT

Teleworking, as the use of telecommunications to partially or completely replace daily commuting to and from work, is predicted to have a great impact on various fields of society, both directly and indirectly, and because of that it has been a subject of an intense technical and public debate for a few years now. However the high expectations have not yet been realized, ranging from decrease of commuting costs to time savings or the diversification of employment in peripheral and rural areas.

The slow adoption of teleworking practices, among industrialized countries, calls for empirical studies with a careful analysis of all elements that may influence its implementation, which would allow some international comparability in order to respond to the information needs of policy makers. This paper reports the empirical findings of several surveys conducted among enterprises in Portugal in order to identify relevant drivers and constraints that may influence the implementation of telework in the portuguese business environment, and in addition, attention will also be given to the perceived social advantages and disadvantages of pursuing organizational teleworking programmes on portuguese citizens as individuals and as employees.

There are several terms and definitions used to describe a flexible working alternative that involves work done away from the traditional office locations through the use of telecommunications and networking tools. Telework, telecommuting, electronic homeworking, virtual officing, ework are a few examples of an enormous range of terminology that in some cases are restricted to a particular form of remote work, and in other circumstances have the benefit of avoiding over-specificity, like homeworking, and are capable of being applied to any time of work which involves the digital processing of information and which uses telecommunications technologies for receipt or delivery of the work to a remote employer or business client. Obviously its seems clear that in the first part of this paper there’s a need to present and justify a conceptual framework, determined by the need to collect and analyse empirical data, in a precise and unambiguous form, about the diffusion of telework in Portugal.

Although the large-scale implementation of teleworking has not yet occurred in Portugal, this study will try to catch and analyse some visible trends in order to understand the effective role of telework during the past years in some diverse issues:

• as a new opportunity for the inclusion of marginalized portuguese groups, specifically people with disabilities, because of their comprehensive difficult to combine labour market participation with the temporal and spatial constraints of traditional office work;
• as a way to exclude those groups without technical skills or financial resources to access the informational technologies, as well as those who live in the portuguese remote rural areas bypassed by the most relevant infostructures (optical cables, wireless web access,?);
• as an instrument with clear implications for housing planning and land-use policy, as well as for the implementation of transport policies related with the commuting journeys which have been replaced and the alternative forms of travel which have arisen in the context of telework;
• or as a way to improve the productivity of existing enterprises, in order to enable them to compete more effectively on world markets.

The promotion of teleworking can not merely be based on the high level of awareness, if concrete results are to be achieved, systematic actions are needed and must be improved to allow the attitudes and technical facilities in public and private organizations, as well as facilitate their decision-making concerning teleworking experiments. For this reason, to better understand and evaluate these trends related to the dissemination of telework during the past years, its important to analyse the evolution of portuguese government policies and legislation in this field. What are the main political objectives and what instruments have been created to help the appearance of teleworking programmes on portuguese enterprises and with which results, are questions that need to be answered in this research, in order to better understand the progressive contribute of Portugal to the new strategic goal of the European Union set up by the European Council in Lisbon, March 2000, for the next decade: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy capable of sustained economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.

Although Portugal has been somewhat slow in formally adopting telework practices, one of the main results of this paper suggest the high number of potential teleworkers in Portugal. During a research conducted on the APDT (Portuguese Association for the Development of Telework) it was analysed over than one thousand information demands to this institution (done from 1998 to 2002). This paper summarizes the results and findings of this empirical work that give us the opportunity to better understand the profile of the portuguese potential teleworker, in terms of age, gender, marital status, qualification and residence patterns, as well as a better knowledge about what are the most important difficulties to someone who recognise telework as a way of increasing quality of living and well being standards, but can not yet start working in this new form of work organization.

AUTHOR
William H. M. Nelson, III and Anne Nelson

ABSTRACT

The United States is at risk of turning into a full-fledged surveillance society. There are two simultaneous developments that are behind this trend. The first trend is the tremendous explosion in surveillance-enabling technologies. George Orwell’s vision in the mid-twentieth century of “Big Brother” has now become technologically possible.The second trend revolves around the legal system. Even as technological surveillance grows, the U.S. increasingly exhibits the weakening of the legal restraints that keep it from trampling its citizens’ privacy. The literature points out that there is hope, however, that this drift toward a surveillance society can be stopped. Unfortunately, the current legislative, judicial, administrative, and societal tendency is for continuation and even growing momentum of the surveillance movement.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a new report released in August 2003, the U.S. has now reached the point where a total surveillance society has become a realistic possibility. Founded in 1920, the ACLU is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization in the U.S. devoted to protecting the basic civil liberties of all Americans, and extending them to groups that have traditionally been denied their basic civil rights.

The ACLU is not alone in its concern for providing a suitable legal and regulatory framework to take into account technological advancements, protect individual rights, implement regulations in a global context, and enable a global information society. Nor is the ACLU alone in its detection of a drift in the U.S. toward a surveillance society. Steinhardt (2003) remarked on the drift and warned that the insidious trend has growing momentum because the American society still does not grasp that “Big Brother surveillance is no longer the stuff of books and movies.” The literature also points to the issue that given the capabilities of today’s technology, the only factors protecting American citizens from a full-fledged surveillance society are the legal and political institutions that have been inherited as part of the American culture. Experts also suggest that the September 11 attacks have led some U.S. citizens to embrace the fallacy that weakening the U.S. Constitution will strengthen America.

The ACLU (2003)suggests that the movement toward a U.S. surveillance society is the “bigger picture” within the information society context; it is broader and more rampant that merely new surveillance programs and technologies. The body of knowledge argues that even as surveillance capacity grows like a “monster in our midst”, the legal “chains needed to restrain that monster are being weakened”, citing not only new technology, but also erosions in protections against government spying, the increasing amount of tracking being carried out by the private sector, and the growing intersection between the two. Ehrlich (2003) noted “from government watch lists to secret wiretaps, Americans are unknowingly becoming targets of government surveillance”. Ehrlich added, “It is dangerous for a democracy that government power goes unchecked and for this reason it is imperative that our government be made accountable.”

A recent illustration of the danger, according to the ACLU (2003), is the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, which seeks to sift through a vast array of databases full of personal information in the hunt for terrorism. The TIA also aims to root out potential terrorists by aggregating credit-card, travel, medical, school, and other records of everyone in the U.S. “Even if TIA never materializes in its current form,” the ACLU noted, “what this report shows is that the underlying trends are much bigger than any one program or any one controversial figure like John Poindexter.”Poindexter is the head of the U.S. government’s TIA project. A retired Navy Admiral, Poindexter lost his job as National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan (U.S. President from 1980-1988) and was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal. He was also the Vice President of Syntek Technologies, a government contractor and worked for many years with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop Genoa, a surveillance device that is a combination cutting-edge search engine, sophisticated information harvesting program, and a peer-to-peer file sharing system. Experts often described Genoa as a “kind of a military-grade Google/Napster for use in instant analysis of electronic data.”

Steinhardt (2003) has said that Americans have not yet felt the full potential of the new technology for invading privacy because of latent inefficiencies in how the U.S. government and businesses globally handle information. “Database inefficiencies can’t be expected to protect our privacy forever,” noted Steinhardt. “Eventually businesses and government agencies will settle on standards for tying together information, and gain the ability to monitor many of our activities – either directly through surveillance cameras, or indirectly by analyzing the information trails we leave behind us as we go through life.”

Current litigation is being used to mitigate this risk of the U.S. becoming a full-fledged surveillance society. Examples include the ACLU’s challenge to U.S. Patriot Act, the ACLU FOIA Lawsuit (an effort to monitor the Patriot Act), the case of Ashcroft v. ACLU (challenge to Internet censorship law), the Supreme Court Ruling on the challenge to Library Web Blocking Law, the case of Edelman v. N2H2 Inc. (a suit to protect censorware research from DMCA), and the case of Melvin v.Doe (challenging frivolous breaches of online anonymity).

With the advent of cheap and powerful new technologies, and the ever-increasing collection of data about citizens’ activities and lives, mass surveillance has become easier than ever. Unfortunately, the threat of terrorism has prompted many Americans to embrace sharp increases in government surveillance over their private lives. The literature suggests that too many people assume that U.S. terrorism can be eradicated by monitoring all the hundreds of millions of people who live in America, and by removing the legal safeguards that protect its citizens against government spying. This paper will show that fundamentally, the rush to surveillance is doubly tragic: not only does it threaten the loss of privacy of American citizens, but it is likely to leech resources from other, more effective measures that actually would make Americans safer. This study also has implications for the global information society and should be studied in the global context as well. These are not privacy challenges faced by the U.S. alone; these are universal challenges facing all governments and their agencies wishing to provide services to the general public or to support access and diffusion of innovative technology to all citizens.

AUTHOR
Evangelos Moustakas and Penny Duquenoy

ABSTRACT

The Internet introduced the concept of email – a means of communication that arguably provides the communication base for industry in the developed world. Advertisers have not been slow to take up the opportunities offered by the Internet and the World Wide Web – in many cases subsidising web-site presence. Email is an efficient method of soliciting customers and selling products. As small consumers obtain email addresses, the efficiency of using email as a marketing tool will grow.

The effectiveness of the EU Directive is small since most spam originates from outside the EU. When a consumer is interested in a specific product or service the consumer will have to request information from relevant companies. Although there will be an awareness of the larger companies, the consumer is unlikely to know about many of many small and medium size companies who offer similar products/services at competitive prices. This results in a reduction of market competition and a reduction in consumer choice. Strict legal requirements reduce the impetus for business to develop effective software solutions. The Directive does not prescribe how to meet the requirement for information about commercial communications to be clearly identifiable. Unfortunately we have not yet seen any email contain a statement that it is a ‘commercial email’ or ‘unsolicited commercial email’ as required by the Electronic Commerce Directive.

Technical measures (software applications) can also go someway to address the problem – but they too raise other issues. Using the ‘black list’ approach to control spam is not effective since the originating address of a message can be spoofed much more easily than the address of a Web page. Spammers can simply make e-mails look like they are originating from innocuous addresses, or they can continually change the addresses that their messages seem to originate from. Using Content Filtering Technologies in order to deal with the problem of spam raises the question about who can decide what words are offensive as well as whether inbound and outbound e-mail confidential information is read from unauthorised parties during the filtering process. Finally there were several cases where ISPs incorrectly blocked legitimate personal communication as unwanted email. Legitimate messages were wrongly tagged as junk mail, half went to junk-mail folders and half was never delivered.

This paper explores Spam as an increasing problem for information society citizens. Despite attempts at legislation (from the west mainly), and technical solutions (filters etc), the problem is growing. The focus of this paper is on the role of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) as the principle gate-keepers between the Internet and email-users. Legislation recognizes this role and addresses the problem of spam. Other approaches to tackle the problem come from self-regulation and software applications (filtering technologies

The objective of the research described in this paper is to define the highest level of ISP’s responsibility to eliminate illegal Spam whilst at the same time to allow companies to use e-mail as a Marketing tool. The co-operation between the Law and the I.T. Sciences is the most effective way to combat and manage spam and therefore a defence in depth will be based on combination of the two areas. This paper reviews and critiques the current attempts at legislation, self regulation and technical solutions. It presents a case for an integrated, user-oriented, approach; recommendations will be given in both IT and Law area. We believe a co-operative approach is needed, utilised by Internet Service Providers as the primary gatekeepers between senders and recipients, and further research will continue in this direction.

AUTHOR
Ananda Mitra

ABSTRACT

One of the most significant developments of the twentieth century has been the way in which people are able to move from one geographic location to another. With the advent of transportation technologies, it is now possible to efficiently and affordably travel great distances. For the West (developed nations) a significant impact of that process has been the influx of immigrants from the East (developing nations). For the people who have immigrated the impact has been on the loss of a sense of spatial stability and an emerging angst over identity as the dwelling place (the original Greek word for which is indeed ethos) of the diasporic people has changed. Furthermore, such displacements have been particularly problematized in a post-9/11 World where the West has become wary of the Other, and the Other, in turn, has had the urgent need to find a “safe” place in the West where the identity anxieties can be resolved. The idea of safety has thus become particularly problematized in a real world where the threats of terrorism, for instance, have produced threats to privacy and identity in real life. For instance, the increasing incidence of “hate crimes” in the United States becomes an indicator of the way in which the diasporic immigrants have to reconsider the safety of their real dwelling place as well as invent new dwelling places, perhaps in the virtual, where they can feel safe.

In this essay I would propose that the virtual space produced by the burgeoning Internet could provide such a safe place for the diasporic people. This proposition is grounded in two other theoretical premises. First, it has been suggested that cyberspace can be theorized as a discursive space where people with traditionally low “speaking capital” can find a voice (Mitra, 2001). By gaining that voice, a sense of agency develops which brings with it the ethical demand of speaking in a responsible fashion. At the same time, the speaking capital obtained on the Internet calls into questions the authenticity and trustworthiness of the many voices that could often be speaking together. Eventually, the sense of place is produced around the discourses that make up the fabric of the virtual, which remains embedded in the real.

The fact that the virtual is intimately tied to the real is the second key component of the current perspective since it has been argued that interaction with the virtual cyberspace necessarily happens within the context of the real spaces occupied by Netizens thus producing a synthetic cybernetic space which is defined by the material practices of a “real” geographic space and the “virtual” discursive space (Mitra and Schwartz, 2001). Consequently the construct of cybernetic space is built on the premise that real space is constantly being transformed and re-negotiated by the emergence of the virtual space that itself attempts to mimic the real. As a consequence it becomes urgent to consider the interaction between the discursive virtual place and the real material space. The advent of tools, such as portable computers with seamless Internet access, that allow the simultaneous tethering in the virtual and the real increases the possibility that people constantly dwell in cybernetic space.

Using these two perspectives it is possible to examine the way in which diasporic individuals and groups use their voices to create the discursive virtual while their everyday lived practices are embedded in the real. I argue that for people in diaspora the synthetic cybernetic space could produce the ethos or dwelling place where they can perhaps produce a sense of safety around familiar voices and discourses. This is particularly important to consider at this moment in time precisely because the sense of safety could be disappearing from real life. There is ample evidence of the increasing anxiety in real life as the diasporic, who are always already marginalized, find their voices and discourses increasingly controlled and censored.

These propositions and arguments would be supported using the discourses from a variety of web sites maintained and used by immigrants in diaspora. As pointed out earlier, immigrants have been particularly active in producing web sites that address many of their concerns that can not be discussed in the real-life public sphere. In this analysis the focus is primarily on the digital discourses produced for and by immigrants from India who have been particularly prolific in creating the web presence and utilizing the web to produce a sense of community. I would suggest that the ethos of the Indian diaspora is at a turning point as Indian immigrants are constantly re-thinking their speaking position and their diasporic dwelling place by living in the cybernetic world produced at the intersection of the real new places of the West and the virtual old places of the East. In the end, the analysis could suggest that, for those in diaspora, the Internet can influence the inevitable crisis of identity and the anxiety related to that crisis. Perhaps as the ethos of diaspora transforms and the diasporic spend more time in the cybernetic space producing and circulating their authentic voice an ethical response will be demanded by these voices as they attempt to carve out their diasporic safe spaces. The strategy mobilized by those in diaspora can eventually be appropriated by others who also feel a need to voice themselves in the virtual to produce a cybernetic safe space.

REFERENCES

Mitra, A. (2001). Diasporic voices in cyberspace. New Media and Society, 3, 1, 29-48.

Mitra, A. and Schwartz, R. L. (2001). From Cyber Space to Cybernetic Space: Rethinking the Relationship between Real and Virtual Spaces. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 7(1).