https://www.bond.org.uk/sites/default/files/resource-documents/using_icts_to_create_a_culture_of_transparency.pdf

Using ICTs to create a culture of transparency: E-government and social media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(12)60072-5.pdf

Adolescence: a foundation for future health

This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fjit.2015.5.pdf

Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization

social media Web sites is among the most common activity of today's children and adolescents. Any Web site that allows social inter- action is considered a social media site, including social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter; gaming sites and virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Second Life, and the Sims; video sites such as YouTube; and blogs. Such sites offer today's youth a portal for entertainment and communication and have grown exponentially in recent years. For this reason, it is important that parents become aware of the nature of social media sites, given that not all of them are healthy environments for children and adolescents. Pediatricians are in a unique position to help families understand these sites and to encourage healthy use and urge parents to monitor for potential prob- lems with cyberbullying, "Facebook depression," sexting, and exposure to inappropriate content. Pediatrics 2011;127:800-804 SOCIAL MEDIA USE BY TWEENS AND TEENS Engaging in various forms of social media is a routine activity that research has shown to benefit children and adolescents by enhancing communication, social connection, and even technical skills. 1 Social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace offer multiple daily oppor- tunities for connecting with friends, classmates, and people with shared interests. During the last 5 years, the number of preadoles- cents and adolescents using such sites has increased dramatically. According to a recent poll, 22% of teenagers log on to their favorite social media site more than 10 times a day, and more than half of adolescents log on to a social media site more than once a day. 2 Seventy-five percent of teenagers now own cell phones, and 25% use them for social media, 54% use them for texting, and 24% use them for instant messaging. 3 Thus, a large part of this generation's social and

/pdf/clinical-report-the-impact-of-social-media-on-children-49i6mab8jj.pdf

Clinical Report—The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families

People who have grown up with digital media are often assumed to be universally savvy with information and communication technologies. Such assumptions are rarely grounded in empirical evidence, however. This article draws on unique data with information about a diverse group of young adults’ Internet uses and skills to suggest that even when controlling for Internet access and experiences, people differ in their online abilities and activities. Additionally, findings suggest that Internet know-how is not randomly distributed among the population, rather, higher levels of parental education, being a male, and being white or Asian American are associated with higher levels of Web-use skill. These user characteristics are also related to the extent to which young adults engage in diverse types of online activities. Moreover, skill itself is positively associated with types of uses. Overall, these findings suggest that even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.

/pdf/digital-na-t-ives-variation-in-internet-skills-and-uses-575xfmbrlq.pdf

Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the “Net Generation”*

The first generation of Digital Nativeschildren who were born into and raised in the digital worldare coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture, and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these Digital Natives? And what is the world theyre creating going to look like?In Born Digital, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of these young people, who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow. Exploring a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical, Born Digital will be essential reading for parents, teachers, and the myriad of confused adults who want to understand the digital presentand shape the digital future.

Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states. The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall of China" is one of the first national Internet filtering systems. Today the new tools for Internet controls that are emerging go beyond mere denial of information. These new techniques, which aim to normalize (or even legalize) Internet control, include targeted viruses and the strategically timed deployment of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, surveillance at key points of the Internet's infrastructure, take-down notices, stringent terms of usage policies, and national information shaping strategies. Access Controlled reports on this new normative terrain. The book, a project from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the SecDev Group, offers six substantial chapters that analyze Internet control in both Western and Eastern Europe and a section of shorter regional reports and country profiles drawn from material gathered by the ONI around the world through a combination of technical interrogation and field research methods. Chapter authors: Ronald Deibert, Colin Maclay, John Palfrey, Hal Roberts, Rafal Rohozinski, Nart Villeneuve, Ethan Zuckerman Information Revolution and Global Politics series

Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace

Internet filtering seems like an infringement of the civil liberties of all of us who use this free, public, unitary, global network of networks. But states have a strong argument that they have the right to control domestic matters, whether or not they occur in cyberspace, and there is often little that other states can do to influence them. The future of the Internet, if not all geopolitics, hangs in the balance.

Access denied: the practice and policy of global internet filtering

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering - Book Review

This study explores the structure and content of the Arabic blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 Arabic-language blogs, mapped the 6000 most-connected blogs, and hand coded over 3000. The study is a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arabic-speaking world, which mainly clusters nationally. We found the most politically active areas of the network to be clusters of bloggers in Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, and the Levant, as well as an ‘English Bridge’ group. Differences among these indicate variability in how online practices are embedded in local political contexts. Bloggers are focused mainly on domestic political issues; concern for Palestine is the one issue that unites the entire network. Bloggers link preferentially to the top Web 2.0 sites (e.g. YouTube and Wikipedia), followed by pan-Arab mainstream media sources, such as Al Jazeera.

John Palfrey

Papers

Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace

Access denied: the practice and policy of global internet filtering

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering - Book Review

Mapping the Arabic blogosphere: politics and dissent online: