An Emerging Research Agenda on Internet and Society

Berlin.
I’m in Berlin for the opening of the new (Google-sponsored) Institute for Internet and Society, a very exciting new research initiative which was launched today. The launch itself is accompanied by the three-day Berlin Symposium, which will map out some of the research agenda of the Institute, and the Symposium opens with a few statements of intent by the founding directors.

Jeanette Hofmann begins by highlighting her research interests – including issues of privacy, and broader online regulation (including co-regulation with users and operators, beyond state regulation itself – what Jeanette calls ‘online ordering’). Other key areas include intellectual property, of course, and collaborative online content creation. There’s also a need for further interdisciplinary education of participating online actors: content, technical, and legal fields have yet to speak to one another more effectively and more frequently.

Ingolf Pernice adds further questions about the role of online rules and norms, generated through non-legislative means, and about how these rules may at some point be adapted and adopted by legislators, for example through domestic laws or international treaties. Such adoption is uneven, however, creating islands of legislation (or the lack thereof) on the global Internet – which is a major problem. What may be necessary here are constitutional systems which transcend national borders. (The current scandal around the German state intelligence services’ trojan horse virus – which has been uncovered, but how many others are out there? – is also raised here.)

Wolfgang Schulz continues by noting the use of old paradigms in understanding the Internet – media regulators have approached it as a new form of cable TV, for example; print publishers as an online newspaper; and so on. But the nature of online content makes a difference – and in many cases, that difference must be addressed by different legal and regulatory processes as well. The societal function of online media, in comparison to old media, must also be considered; traditional media are still important, of course, but online media play an increasingly important role in democracy, too. What changes to the public sphere does this cause – what new ‘private public spheres’, as Jan Schmidt has called them, emerge here? How do citizens’ perceptions of what issues matter to society at any one point change as a result? What societal power shifts may occur?

Another key area is copyright – a recent German parliamentary commission has begun to recognise that authors’ rights must be balanced more effectively with the need to support innovation through sharing of intellectual property; this is a subtle but very important shift, which has yet to filter through more substantially. Such sharing is also important in the context of crowdsourcing and collaborative content production, of course; and these processes must be further investigated as well.

Finally, Thomas Schildhauer picks up on this point; his research interest is in examining these collaborative processes further, and in the implications of how these processes are organised in each specific case. What about the commercial embrace of these collaborative processes, too? How are contributors to collaborative processes rewarded or even remunerated for their work? What works, what doesn’t?