Tartu
Wolter Pieters starts the post-lunch session at CATaC 2006. He describes current moves towards e-voting as they have happened here in Estonia and elsewhere: is Internet voting the future? Estonia was the first country to use e-voting in local elections, but in the Netherlands and elsewhere there still exist many questions around it. There are promises that e-voting would increase voter turnout, but the Estonian experience does not necessarily support this - here, e-voting was introduced for its ease rather than to increase participation.

Overall, the feeling in Estonia is that e-voting is possible and doable, and that voting fraud can be avoided; at the same time, major researchers in the field suggest that to pursue e-voting is a foolhardy move fraught with problems. E-voting providers claim that e-voting is secure and public fears are unfounded, while other stakeholders feel that e-voting could be disastrous and the public need to be warned - both sides, therefore, claim to know the 'actual' security of the technology. However, the core issue here is perhaps more about the cultural embedding of technology - more than anything, this is in good part an issue of trust, and a cultural explanation of the e-voting controversy is needed.

Peter now moves to what is called 'monster theory' to explain this question of risk controversies. In many indigenous cultures, monsters are characterised as matters that are 'impure' or 'dangerous' - they are 'out of place' and do not fit into established categories. This may also lead to worship of such monsters as quasi-supernatural beings. Controversial new technologies can be described in such ways as well, if they do not fit traditional categories or taxonomies - this happened for plastics, genetically modified food, the Brent Spar oil platform, and so on.

Is Internet voting a monster, then - is there a clash of categories here, for exanple of humans and machines, of culture and nature, of democracy and technology? Focussing on the latter: Hannah Arendt distinguishes between three forms of human activity (labour for subsistance, work in creating things, and action towards innovation). Technology relieves us of labour, but in the case of democracy this is highly problematic - however, different technologies of voting have long been used already (secret and postal ballots both rely on technology, as do the U.S. voting machines). The categorisation of democracy is also different in different cultures, depending on their democratic histories, which can lead to more or less flexibility in adapting to new technologies.

The question of coping with the monster is therefore dependent on the flexibility of such categories, and largely this means an adaption of technologies and of cultural categories - overall, embracing, expelling, adapting, and assimilating the e-voting monster are all possibilities, then. However, there remains the question of whether this monster can be assimilated before the technology has even be introduced.

News Consumption Patterns in the United States

The next presentation os by Keith Beattie, Rob Elliott, and Anthony Faiola, focussing on the consumption of Internet news. Keith points out the increased availability of a broad range of news sources on the Internet, and the increased range of politically biased news organisations which are now available to users. But what biases, if any, are users looking for? How does this break down into subcultures even within the same socioeconomic and cultural groups? Possibly, news consumers with a biased perspective might want to look for similarly biased news sources.

This research worked with results from a recent Pew Center survey, which found that some 92.5% of Americans considered themselves to be news consumers. 56% of these consider the Internet to be an important or extremely important news spource, with 25% using the Net as their main source - however, these data from the Pew Project was collected just after the 2004 Presidential election and may therefore be somewhat skewed. The Pew study surveyed some 1500 online news consumers; of these, 28% wanted a similar news bias, 33% wanted no news bias, and some 22% wanted sites that challenged their point of view, while 17% either did not know or did not answer (but this does not necessarily give much information about the mix of news sites people might access in their news usage). Overall, then, some 50% online news consumers sought some kind of bias, while of these, only 57% sought 'their' kind of bias.

Further, then, these figures were analysed for specific sociocultural factors. For example, whites and mixed-race news consumers generally wanted news which agreed with their bias, while black Americans significantly sought news which opposed their views; people aged 18-29 sought shared and opposing points of view in equal measures, while with increasing age online news consumers moved increasingly towards agreeing news sources. City dwellers were similarly mixed, while with increasing distance from cities more agreeable sources were again sought out. Conservative and moderate users were balanced in their news consumption, while liberal and very liberal users sought sources that agreed with their point of view more strongly. Lower-income strata sought oppositional news perspectives, and this crosses over around the US$30,000 p.a. income mark and reverses at higher income levels.

Media Use Patterns in the United Arab Emirates

From the U.S. we now move to the United Arab Emirates, to a study by Robert Gulovsen of cross-cultural media use. The UAE are an oil-rich country where only some 15% of the population are local Emiratis; the rest of it is made up of expatriates, and this study focussed on the media usage of these diverse ethnic and cultural groups across the seven Emirates. It interviewed some 1100 respondents from the UAE, the rest of Arabia, India, Asia, and the West.

To begin with, then, the study found that amongst Indians, other Asians, and English-speaking Westerners the population was more likely to be male than female, and that income amongst English-speaking Westerners and Emiratis was much larger than for ither groups; further, in the case of the Emiratis the typical family in the country was far larger especially than for Westerners. For all groups, mobile phone usage was high, but Emiratis were far more likely to use Bluetooth than all other groups. They also led the way for desktop PCs, with English-speaking Westerners also high; Westerners overall had significantly more laptops than other groups.

Media usage for TV was highest for expatriate Arabs, and lowest (at 82%) for English-speaking Westerners; Westerners were higher for newspapers and the Internet, however (with non-English-speaking Westerners also using the radio more than others). Language use was divided roughly along ethnic barriers, but in terms of the perceived importance of language knowledge, some one quarter of non-Arabs found it not at all important to have a good command of Arabic in order to live in the UAE. As for sources of breaking news, Emiratis and other Arabs turned overwhelmingly to Al-Jazeera rather than Western equivalents like CNN or BBC News (the latter was first in importance for all others). Overall, then, this indicates that the UAE is not a melting pot of cultures: different groups maintain their cultural identity based on the media they access.

In terms of responses to advertising, the cultural background of individuals remained most important. English-speaking Westerners were most negative towards advertising, and did not believe themselves to be influenced by it; non-native English speaking Westerners were similar. Arabs were more attracted to advertising and especially to ads using celebrities, while Asians fall in the middle (with Indians finding advertisements often quite creative). This might indicate that Westerners have more developed perceptual barriers to advertising than other groups - but it also must be recognised that the advertising consumed by the different groups is different because of their different media consumption; indeed, there is a need for different campaigns to address these different groups differently.

Alternate Visions of Intellectual Property

Presenting a short paper, Ben Peters is the last speaker, and begins by noting that our understanding of intellectual property today is based on an anachronism - an outdated misunderstanding of the original sense of property. How can IP be reinterpreted towards a more appropriate definition? He suggests that a definition of IP which is based on a definition of property that predates Locke and Marx would be more useful. Property is today defined as a thing, when a definition as a right to a thing would be more useful - a definition as an abstraction rather than as an object. The biblical book of Genesis can be interpreted as an original definition of property: paradise is a place of common property except for the apple tree, and the taking of the apple is a transgression, a stepping over boundaries. Indeed, the boundaries of Adam and Eve's user rights for the Garden of Eden are explained at length in the text of Genesis.

Locke notes that we live in a world of common property, but that the contribution of labour can make things private property - but the limits of this private property do not extend beyond the hands, and this has been overlooked in today's Locke-based definitions of property. Mechanisation as well as the legal recognition of corporations as persons in some jurisdictions have also extended this definition beyond its practicable limits. On the other hand, Marx develops a utopia of common property - so Marx's visions are based on a utopia in the future, while Locke's definition stems from a biblical utopia in the past; similarly, Marx's vision of redemption through revolution is not all too different from judaeochristian descriptions of redemption, either.

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