something for the weekend

I’m a Queen, I Outrank You!

Not my story – kindly sent to me by Marie Griffiths - a kind of joke, and yes a stereotype – but funny… enjoy…

My flight was being served by an obviously gay flight attendant, who seemed
to put everyone in a good mood as he served us food and drinks.

As the plane prepared to descend, he came swishing down the aisle and told us that
‘Captain Marvey has asked me to announce that he’ll be landing the big scary plane shortly, so lovely people, if you could just put your trays up, that would be super.’

On his trip back up the aisle, he noticed this well-dressed a woman hadn’t moved a muscle. ‘Perhaps you didn’t hear me over those big brute engines but I asked you to raise your trazy-poo, so the main man can pitty-pat us on the ground.’

She calmly turned her head and said,
‘In my country, I am called a Princess and I take orders from no one.’

To which (I swear) the flight attendant replied , without missing a beat,

‘Well, sweet-cheeks, in my country I’m called a Queen, so I outrank you.
Tray -up, Bitch’

Digital Cultures 2009

I co-organising a workshop in June and thought I’d throw the details on here.  The closing date for submissions is next week and I’m getting kind of nervous – I hope we get a good turnout like last year!  We even had good weather, I remember sitting outside a bar at the end of day one with about 20 people enjoying a glass of wine ;o)  This year, if I can get things sorted, I’m hoping we can enage different forms of social media with the event so that people who can’t be in the room can engage with it… more soon… B.

2nd Digital Cultures Workshop: Social Media Publics
4-5 June 2009, University of Salford, U.K.

Final Call for Contributions

Organizers
Ben Light and Marie Griffiths, University of Salford
Sian Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores University
Steve Sawyer, Syracuse University

Confirmed Speakers
Dr. Carsten Sørensen – Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, London School of Economics
Dr. Theresa Senft – School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London

It is clear that the boundaries between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ are becoming increasingly blurred within and amongst sites of home and work. Indeed, in the wake of reality television shows, national identity card schemes, increased social media usage and the like, publicity appears to be the order of the day. For this workshop we seek papers that discuss the issues raised for those living in environments where there is seemingly little room for privacy. As was the case last year, we intend for the workshop to be multi-disciplinary in nature, broad in the approaches participants take and issues they cover. If your work is about any aspect of digital culture, this is the workshop for you! The following are thus only indicative of potential topics that could be raised:

- How do people domesticate social media in their attempts to maintain a balance in publicity and privacy? Do they? Why do they, or don’t they?
- What matters are raised by increased access to data about individuals and organizations?
- What does the blurring of boundaries between public and private mean for our knowledge and experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and disability?
- How are ICT mediated spaces created and maintained at home, work and those spaces in between? For example, how are ‘geek gamers’ finding spaces to play now the only console in the house can be in the living room?
- How are ICT policies shaping public and private spaces throughout societies around the world?
- What privacy issues are presented by media convergence?
- What role are mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies playing in public and private spaces?
- How is the increased commodification of social media affecting our privacy?

Following from the first workshop we continue to see this workshop having three purposes. First, we seek to give voice and structure to existing new media, ICT and technology related research which may not readily sit within conventionally accepted areas. Second, we wish to draw in research on new forms of digital technology, ICT, computing, organizing and social interactions. Third, we want to continue discussions regarding potential futures for ICT related research which combine research as related to the evolving forms and functions of work organizations and the changing boundaries and relations between these organizations and their social milieus.
We seek abstracts (of up to 600 words) that focus upon some aspect of digital culture. We hope to have a special issue of a journal associated with the workshop as was the case last year (a special issue of the Journal of Information, Communication, Ethics and Society was published early in 2009 – Vol 7, Issue 1). Abstracts should be submitted to Ben Light at: b.light@salford.ac.uk

Important Dates
Abstract Submission Date: 28 February 2009
Notification of Acceptance: 31 March 2009
Workshop Dates: 4 and 5 June 2009

Workshop Arrangements
The fee for presentation/attendance at the workshop is £75 GBP. This will cover refreshments and meals throughout the workshop and a workshop dinner to be held on the evening of the 4th of June.
There is no fee for PhD students, however they still need to register for the workshop. PhD student registration includes refreshments during the workshop but excludes attendance at the workshop dinner (This is subject to a £25 GBP fee, payable upon registration).

You will be able to register for the workshop at: https://shop.salford.ac.uk
Further details regarding the location of the workshop will be posted nearer the time at: http://www.iris.salford.ac.uk

Virgin Mobile Grrr… Things to know to protect your mobile…

Okay so here’s some lessons we learnt from experience the other week – following the lessons is the background story which explains the lessons a bit more …

1. Try to keep tabs on your phone, especially if you don’t use it regularly
2. Find out what the credit limit the the provider has set for themselves on your account, for their purposes and have it reduced if it’s way more than you spend.
3. If your phone is stolen and your provider wants to lay all the call costs on you – use whatever you can to argue against it, including cancelling your custom with them if possible (you’ll likely get a reduction, if not the whole costs wiped)
4. If you have mobile insurance, make sure you keep your provider up to date about any changes in your circumstances such as address and if you change handsets
5. If your phone as a pin capability use it – okay some people can crack them, but the opportunistic theif might not be able to…  Yeah it makes calling clunky but better than than a £200 bill!

The background…

The other week my partner went out one evening and lost/had stolen, his mobile phone.  I say lost and then stolen in that he didn’t come home with it and then we found out a bill of £220 had been racked up on it!  The problem is he didn’t realise until 7pm the day after that his phone wasn’t around.  So we dilligently rang Virgin Mobile, got the sim blocked, ordered a new one and thought no more of it.  Bad move!  The new sim arrived and I rang to activate it – I was told this couldn’t be done until we’d paid of the balance owing as it was over its limit.  This is when I found out about the 220 quid!  As people who normally only use our 300mins/300texts £10/month allowances or thereabouts - you can imagine the shock.  Moreover, noone had told me about this bill and it would have been taken as a direct debit from my bills account!  As I put around the right amount of money in the bills account every month, had I not found out about this transaction (and shoved more money in) this would have taken me overdrawn on that account and incurred further charges.  I do get emails notifying me of my latest bill, but (I suppose foolishly on my part I don’t check them as I know how little I spend on my phone).  You’d think that when we reported the phone stolen, or a few days after Virgin could have informed us?  Thanks Virgin!

Anyway, the poor call centre operator had to tell me that we were liable for all of the charges incurred before the phone had been blocked.  Actually she also told me that the original operator hadn’t blocked the phone and it had been used after so she would deduct that (all 7 quid of it – whooppee!).  To cut a long story short, I aruged this was unreasonable and that they were profiting from the mistfortune of others.  She essentially said they weren’t, it was policy and that they had to protect themselves from those customers who racked up astronomical bills themselves and tried to pass it off as a case of a stolen phone!  I pointed out that there really should be saftey procedures put in place in much the same way as credit card companies do (I can’t count the times my credit card has been refused because I forgot to tell my provider I’d be hopping between countries or making a few big purchases!).  I didn’t wash…  Indeed to rub salt in the wound, she said we were lucky it had been stopped at that as the saftey measure for Virgin had kicked in at £200.  That is, they blocked the phone at around £227 because ‘we’d’ gone over our limit.  Apparently, this info is on my direct debit agreement -  I only know this as I asked why I wasn’t told about this, because, had I been, we would automatically have had very low limits set as a protection at the beginning of our contracts given we spend so little on mobile communications.  In terms of any possible fraud on our part – I suggested they looked back at the account history in terms of numbers dialled, numbers of calls within particular periods etc and see how these marry up the spending spree over 18 hours which amounted to around £227.  They weren’t having it, even though they could tell me there’d been a stream of overseas calls (now we do know people overseas of course – but we have MSN and Skype too!).  They told us to call the police – which we have, but we doubt anything will happen as they told my partner that mobile phone companies rarely pursue cases such as this (so why did Virgin even bother telling us to report it to the police – wasting ours and their time). 

After I kicked up a fuss and said I’d pull our TV, Internet and Mobile business the call centre person said they’d speak to a manager and get back to me the next day.  True to her word she did, and said, actually, they’d got it wrong and our credit limit was £150 and even though the bill was over 200, as a gesture of good will they would only make us acocuntable for that.  I said it wasn’t a gesture of good will and that they were only implementing the credit limt… Wrong again!  I was told the credit limit is there to protect Virgin, not the the consumer!

Anyway, luckily for us we thought, my partner also has mobile insurance with Lloyds TSB… Wrong!  When he called them, they checked which handset he’d lost…  The one that was registered stopped working and so he was using a different handset and hadn’t told them – that was their out and they said they wouldn’t pay up!

It’s nice to know that in times when customers are not gonna have much money flying around, there are still companies out there willing to profit from you – however they can…

Web 2.0 Cyber-Stalking?

Below is the text from a Cutter IT Email Advisor I wrote last week.  It’s on Web 2.0 and work. 

What’s Your Web 2.0 Ethics?

Many are engaging with Web 2.0 technology in their personal lives, and increasingly at work. Even if you don’t think there’s much new in Web 2.0 technologies, that it’s merely a renaming of extant things, you can’t ignore the power of them as presented now, and as widely adopted. It is perhaps the level of adoption of these technologies, combined with the potentialities for social interaction of different kinds, that make Web 2.0 so interesting from an ethical perspective. For years, it has been well recognized that there are inextricable interplays between our home and work lives — many people meet their life partners at work; we have rules governing the use of office equipment for personal use, such as phones and PCs; and, of course, who can forget the office Christmas party! These examples immediately bring to mind ethical issues surrounding them. I would argue that Web 2.0 — particularly Web 2.0-enabled social networking sites — complicate this even further. In this short communication, I want to look at a few examples, consider some of the ethical questions arising, and discuss what we can do about them — if anything.

Recruitment
The popular press is awash with stories of employers screening candidates by cyberstalking them. To some extent, there is nothing new in this — noncomputer-based social networks have long been used to source employees and weed out undesirable ones. Indeed, before the rise of Web 2.0, people were often Googled (and still are). So what’s the problem? Isn’t this merely an extension of technological usage in the recruitment process? We’re only looking at stuff that’s already public, right? Yet academics such as Judith Donath have pointed to the fact that users of online sites often see these as personal spaces — as safe and closed worlds where they can publish material. This is also the case in my research on sites such as Facebook. It is clear that for many, such sites are for personal use only — even though they are usually publicly accessible. We might ask, then: is it right to use any media possible to find out about candidates?

Usage at Work
Another theme that has arisen through my research on Web 2.0 relates to how managers and employees perceive access to technology at work. In the so-called developed world, and increasingly in developing countries, there has been a shift over the past five years in our relationship to technology usage for socialization purposes: we rely on it more, and it is shaping our interactions in unanticipated ways. This is coinciding with greater Internet use within business and, unsurprisingly, the two are becoming intertwined. I’ve heard stories of employers banning access to social networking sites and others allowing this within certain parameters (as historically might have been the case with telephone use for personal purposes). Thus, we might ask how much control should managers (who are usually also employees) exert over other employees’ activity related to their personal lives at work? Do employees have to manage their personal lives so that they do not affect their work lives?

‘Technology Made Me Do It!’
So far, I have emphasized the ethical issues raised by people’s use of Web 2.0. My work on Facebook’s ethics (with Marie Griffiths and Kathy McGrath) focuses on the role of technology. From this study, it is clear that privacy settings confound users who wish to maintain a degree of privacy. For example, Facebook automatically submits your profile to search engines upon account creation, and privacy settings present themselves to the user in ways that are notoriously difficult to navigate and enact. Moreover, the applications that operate via classification and recommendation algorithms add further complications. Consider the scenario where Facebook recommends you friend your boss or the situation where your boss does not appear in your “Top Friends,” for example. In such arrangements, where does morality lie?

So What Do We Do?
The interrogation of a candidate’s personal life raises considerable ethical questions given the expansion of the possibilities for data collection Web 2.0 brings. Such activity is further made problematic by the lack of clarity around a person’s consent for, and knowledge of, the use of data presented in a particular context being reappropriated in another. Similarly, for these reasons, many parents and siblings agree not to friend each other — the “some things are better left unknown” principle. It seems people are learning — and need to learn — about identity management. Some people are taking dramatic action in this respect, taking the stance of “maximum publicity” and shunning privacy, the idea being if anyone can see anything about me, no one can “get me.” Moreover, if a potential employer doesn’t like what it sees, then I wouldn’t want to work for that company. This latter reflection applies equally to the use of technology at work. Indeed, in response to the narratives about the control of technology use at work, business students have told me that they expect to be able to engage with Web 2.0 and, in doing so, they gain valuable transferable skills and contacts they can engage for work purposes. I recently moved to a school of media, music, and performance where such questions aren’t even on the table. The philosophy here is that if it makes us creative and successful, let’s use it. Perhaps there’s a lesson here from the creative industries.

Finally, with respect to the role of technology, I adopt the position that technology never plays out in exactly the way the designer intended. Thus, it becomes very tricky to say it’s the “fault” of the user, the developer, or the technology. Instead, one might construct responsibilities for guiding the ethical use of Web 2.0 experientially over time. It is clear to me that we can properly understand these issues only as we learn to live with such technologies, the flashpoints created around them, and their positive influences.