That tech and social media corporations' statement in full.

'The world's leading technology companies have united to demand sweeping changes to US surveillance laws, urging an international ban on bulk collection of data to help preserve the public's “trust in the internet”' 

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter joined together in a concerted effort to resist US Government attempts to acquire users' data for free. 'We're deeply concerned that the state is using technical methods to snoop on our users' data for free when everybody else has to pay for it' said a spokesman for the group. 'When Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, said "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place", he meant it, but he meant that your nefarious activities should make us money, not that the state should find out. Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems said "You already have zero privacy. Get over it". I would like to make it clear on behalf of Silicon Valley's leading social media corporations that there is a price to pay for information: even if you're the government. It's a new world, buster. Governments are history. Governments can't be trusted with your information, whereas we only sell it to anyone with a wad of cash. We're deeply concerned that if this intrusion goes on, our users will flee to some pathetic tax-paying European company which doesn't hand over your data to anyone who asks for it and we'll lose money the founding principles of the internet will be betrayed.  We own you now, and we insist on getting paid. We demand immediate legislation to ensure that we're never caught saying one thing to our users while handing over everything the government and advertisers want. This legislation should take the form of 438 pages of legal jargon in size 3 font with a checkbox at the end: we've got the iTunes guys drafting it right now. Don't bother reading it'.   

The spokesman concluded his remarks and climbed into a personal jet to visit the companies' money, currently holidaying in a tax-free resort out of reach of any government. The money declined to comment, citing 'privacy concerns'. 

(By the way: I'm completely opposed to what GCHQ, NSA and the various governments have been up to. I just don't think we should allow these intrusive media giants – who cooperated with the spooks until they got caught – should get away with pretending that they're suddenly interested in principle over profit). 

In my virtual absence…

Hi everyone. Like yesterday, I'm not properly back online: too much to do. But I thought some of you might like to see some photos of Jack Zipes' public lecture here at the Dark Place on Monday. 

On the big day itself I was away giving a lecture to first year students at the University of Gloucestershire, on the Mabinogi, myth and post-realist readers. Before my bit, I joined them for a lecture on nationalism by an incredibly charismatic historian who started off with Braveheart in French (a 'slightly more historically accurate' story of feuding Normans led by Robert le Bruce and Henri Plantagenet, as he put it) and explored the origins and ideologies of nationalism with some panache. As much as I loved it, I did wonder how on earth I could follow such a performance. 

Thankfully, his lecture segued into mine beautifully, as I was talking about the translation, revival and retelling of ancient Welsh myths in new cultural conditions, particularly Alan Garner's wonderful and disturbing The Owl Service and Gwyneth Lewis's The Meat Tree, both retellings of the Blodeuwedd story (man cursed never to have a human wife makes a wife out of flowers; she winkles out of him the extraordinary conditions needed for him to die; attempts to kill him with her lover; he escapes by turning into an eagle; she's turned into an owl, which is why they sneak around at night and are objects of hatred in Welsh tradition). The students hadn't read The Meat Tree but had seen a translation of the Mabinogi version, and talked really intelligently and interestingly. We talked about imperialism, the Enlightenment, Freud, Jung, postmodernism, science fiction and devolution. I made some Star Trek references and raised some pitying laughs, which was kind of them. 

It was fascinating being at a different university. The students were a very different demographic, so it was a bit like being on holiday. Not better or worse, but different. And of course I didn't have to mark anything!

As soon as that was over, it was on to the train and back to the Dark Place for Zipes. Posters to replace, welcomes to arrange and I had to work out how to use a professional video camera. Not quite well enough, it turns out: I now have 30Gb of Jack Zipes as a silent movie. I still can't work out why the sound didn't work, but nor can my Broadcasting and Journalism colleague, so I'm only feeling disappointed rather than moronic. For a change. 

Crowds gather for Jack Zipes

Jack Zipes

Jack Zipes

Candi Miller, Jack Zipes

The lecture itself went really well. I think there were about 230 people in the 250 capacity hall, many of them from outside the university. The Vice-Chancellor welcomed Jack, the interpreters did their thing and Jack was fascinating. He spoke mostly about the Disneyfication of Red Riding Hood, showing multiple versions of the story by Disney and others, including some compelling independent productions. Largely based on classical Marxist analysis, the lecture ended with an attack on the way the rape at the heart of the story has been elided or silenced. This, Zipes concludes, mirrors the way sexual assault has been marginalised or denied in society itself. 

Here's one rather outré version, starring Betty Boop:



and this rather racy (not to say misogynist) version by Tex Avery:



After the lecture, we went off for a curry with Jack which was joyful too: he's a master raconteur with a lot of tales to tell. Eventually we parted and he wished us well for the next morning's strike. 

5 hours later I was dragging myself out of bed and on to the picket line. Considering the employers have unilaterally imposed their settlement, the turnout was pretty good. We spoke to students and handed out lots of leaflets, and soaked up the usual parade of abuse and lies from so-called colleagues. One Principal Lecturer claimed it was 'illegal' for PLs to strike, which was news to the PLs on the picket line with us. Another claimed that she couldn't strike because she had a cold, the logic of which defeated me. Yet another claimed that striking was impossible because there were children to feed - which rather misses the point that missing one day's pay for striking is nothing compared with a fifth real-terms pay cut in a row. Honestly, I prefer the honest opponents who crossed the line. At least one guy had the selfish honesty to say 'my pay isn't going down, I've had a promotion'. Solidarity, baby! But at least he didn't bullshit us, unlike the Vice-Chancellor who keeps sending emails claiming that 'the majority' wanted to work, and that we're 'moving forward positively', which might cut the mustard at a meeting of PR Bullshitters and Management Consultants Anonymous but means precisely nothing other than 'tough shit: more pay cuts ahoy!'. 

By this point, i.e. Tueaday lunchtime I was exhausted and cold. As an antidote, I headed off to a colleague's house to plan some new research which will take in Dr Who, Star Trek, Beards of Evil, Poe and Lacan, just for starters. It'll knock your socks off, I promise. Unless this is just stoner logic of course. 

Wednesday was another killer - two long sessions without a break. I was already feeling exhausted and slightly ill, but the students were so good that I felt thoroughly revived. In the Shakespeare class I gave them several sonnets with the lines jumbled up. All they had to do was use their knowledge of poetic form and of sonnet conceits and narrative to get them in the right order. Nobody was completely right, but they were pretty good. The last one I gave them was a bit of a favourite, Wendy Cope's 'Strugnell's Sonnets VI':

Let me not to the marriage of true swine
Admit impediments. With his big car
He's won your heart, and you have punctured mine.
I have no spare; henceforth I'll bear the scar.
Since women are not worth the booze you buy them
I dedicate myself to Higher Things.
If men deride and sneer, I shall defy them
And soar above Tulse Hill on poet's wings --
A brother to the thrush in Brockwell Park,
Whose song, though sometimes drowned by rock guitars,
Outlives their din. One day I'll make my mark,
Although I'm not from Ulster or from Mars,
And when I'm published in some classy mag
You'll rue the day you scarpered in his Jag.

The students liked it too, which cheered me up a lot. 

After that, it was straight into my Ethics and the Media class, focussing on social media. We looked at footballers' tweets, openness and privacy, Bentham and Foucault, sock-puppetry, online reputation management, honesty on dating sites (research shows people are comfortable about stretching the truth a fair way because they assume everyone else is doing the same) and Glenn Mulcaire. We toyed with the ethics of editing the university's Wikipedia page, and discussed why nobody would tell the class when they last had a poo. There was a reason for this:

‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’. - Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

‘You already have zero privacy. Get over it’. - Scott G. McNealy CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc

All this was illustrated along the way by excerpts from The Circle, Dave Eggers' new novel. It is, like all of Eggers' works, written without any literary style whatsoever (the symbolism is astoundingly clunky) but it's packed with good ideas fairly carefully worked out. It's only a small step from the quotations above to the fictional CEOs of social media company The Circle saying things like this:

when thousands, or even millions, are watching, you perform your best self. You are cheerier, more positive, more polite, more generous, more inquisitive…Every day she’d done without things she didn’t want to want. Things she didn’t need…Anything immoderate would provoke a flurry of zings of concern, so she stayed within the bounds of moderation. And she found it freeing.

Mae is the central protagonist. At first resistant to the company's insistence on 100% surveillance, she is eventually converted and becomes an evangelist for the effect it has on the individual and society despite the increasingly oppressive demands on her to share every experience and constantly interact with others to build social capital.

It's an interesting novel not only for its exploration of the techno-utopians' ideology, but also for its fears about the nature of identity in a fully-integrated surveillance society. It is, quite literally, Foucauldian. Mae and others not only welcome surveillance, they internalise it. As Foucault points out in Panopticism, you don't need omniscient surveillance at this point, because the inmates act as if they're being watched at all times. This is where the conversation turned to the philosophy of ethics: we'd talked about the ethical responsibilities of social media companies and users, but the central question is this: is Mae acting ethically when she allows observation to dictate her behaviour, or is ethical choice impossible in this context? Her boss explains the new rules to her like this:

‘…my spouse said to me…I should behave as if there were a camera on me. As if she were watching…If I found myself alone in a room with a woman colleague, I would wonder, what would Karen think of this is she were watching…This would gently guide my behaviour, and it would prevent me from even approaching behaviour she wouldn’t like. It kept me honest.’

But did it? If the fear of getting caught is what keeps him honest, is he in fact honest? The utilitarian would say so, especially Bentham, but a Kantian would not: the motivation destroys the ethical nature of the act. The students definitely got the hang of this, and we had a really enjoyable discussion. The irony is of course that in-between reading this novel about the dissolution of the interior self under surveillance conditions (which is really a return to pre-Enlightenment, pre-psychology theories of the self, only with added consumer capitalism), I've been tweeting like mad on all sorts of matters. Now I feel guilty every time I tweet or share something, which is pretty inconvenient given that I do so about 347 times per day.

We finished with this clip of Glenn Mulcaire, News International's chief phone hacker. Going one step further than  Schmidt and McNealy, he has this to say about privacy: start at 1.13 in.

Just one Sonnetto, give it to me…

Afternoon all. And what time do I call this?

In my defence, I've been teaching for several hours without a break. The first session was with the English literature second-years, on the Renaissance module. Which makes me the Renaissance Man. Ahem. It was a session on sonnets today: a strict form subgenre requiring technical mastery while also avoiding cliché and predictability. There are a lot of bad sonnets around.

What I did to avoid the dreaded silence and passivity which often manifests itself when teaching poetry and in particular closed form poetry was to introduce scissors to the occasion. I gave them sonnets by Wyatt, Drayton, Spenser and Wendy Cope, but with all the lines in random order. The students had to draw on their knowledge of metre, rhyme scheme, quatrains, octaves, sestets and 'voltas' (the surprising 'turn'), sonnet history and culture to work out the correct order. So they had to develop technical and cultural skills to get it right. They did really well, some perfectly.

After that, it was into my Ethics class, mostly concentrating on the origins, meaning and application of privacy. Rather economically, I thought, I discussed the Renaissance development of the individual just as I had in the sonnets class! Individuality is a culturally and historically-located concept, owing a lot to the Reformation's insistence on private contemplation and moral self-interrogation. Add capitalism's self-defeating but lucrative need for you to express this new 'you' by constantly changing your outward appearance (new codpiece then, new iPhone now) and voilà: the self-fashioned individual. And individuals need physical and mental space. Which corporations and governments need for economic reasons but resent for political purposes. So we went from John Locke to Facebook's privacy settings in a single bound. Hugely enjoyable, though I was rather shocked by many students' cheerful willingness to abandon privacy for the sake of convenience. Facebook's business model (sell your data to other corporations) seems perfectly reasonable, apparently.

The point was that just as in the Renaissance, we self-fashion, only we do so in multiple forums now. We have to perform in person, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Blogger and everywhere else. Paradoxically, we perform both to conform and to distinguish ourselves. My Twitter feed tries to be trenchant and witty, to attract followers. But I can't be too creative or transgressive, because I'll be socially excluded. Learning where the boundaries are is what Foucault called disciplinarily – and its bound up with notions of the self and of power. Being visible online is an exercise in agency, but it's also a form of submitting to authority and surveillance both by the state and corporations, but also to the population which has internalised hegemonic values. We are each other's, and our own, policemen.

All in all, a glorious, though exhausting day. And being in the classroom meant I was temporarily shielded from the vicious, ideologically-driven government financial statement.

Do try this at home, kids

Can someone test an app for me? I'm interested in the social consequences of new media, so Creepy is fascinating: a programme which aggregates all your social networking activity to find out where you are in reality. It was written by an academic keen to point out new media's abolition of privacy - see more of his argument here.

You can enter a Twitter or Flickr username into the software's interface, or use the in-built search utility to find users of interest. When you hit the 'Geolocate Target' button, Creepy goes off and uses the services' APIs to download every photo or tweet they've ever published, analysing each for that critical piece of information: the user's location at the time.

While Twitter's geolocation setting is optional, images shared on the service via sites like Twitpic and Yfrog are often taken on a smartphone - which, unbeknownst to the user, records the location information in the EXIF data of the image. Creepy finds these photos, downloads them, and extracts the location data.

When the software finishes its run, it presents you with a map visualising every location that it found - and that's when the hairs on the back of your neck go up. While the location of an individual tweet might not reveal much, visualising a user's history on a map reveals clusters around their home, their workplace, and the areas they hang out. Everything a stalker could need, in other words.

Unfortunately, it's not yet available for Mac, so if one of my readers would like to try it out (perhaps using your own Facebook/Flickr/other details rather than another person's, I'd love to hear how effective (and creepy) it really is.

Mr Murdoch's watching you…

Quite a lot of companies use web browser security flaws to spy on you. Visit their sites, and they'll steal your browsing history.

Obviously, most of the deceitful scum doing this are porn websites, and frankly, I have little sympathy. But one of them is TheSun.co.uk, the online version of Rupert Murdoch's grubby little comic.

Quite shockingly, some respectable companies are up to it too:

YouPorn tops the list, but PerezHilton, Technorati, TheSun.co.uk, and Wired are also spying on their users' browsing habits by exploiting this vulnerability.

Stay away from those sites, or switch on 'private browsing' on Firefox and possibly Safari.

Who is the Plashing Vole?

Most of you know anyway, but I'd rather be discreet because I don't want to get myself or anyone else in trouble, including my institution.

So I'm a little concerned that the High Court has determined that anonymous bloggers can be identified by the press - that blogging is a 'public activity' which doesn't carry the right to privacy. I guess this is logical, but it doesn't make me feel any more comfortable. I'm likely to be much more truthful when the threat of the sack doesn't hang over me, and having a secret identity, as well as being cool, means that readers don't treat me as their teacher.

All this has come about thanks to a case involving Nightjack, a police blogger who won the George Orwell Prize this year. There are lots of uniformed bloggers including paramedics and others - presumably the demands of the job, the strict rules, the requirement of obedience wthout question and the daily exposure to the best and worst of human life are conducive to good, critical blogging. Much better than my 'went to a committee today'… Added to that - copper tend to be very rightwing, which leads to strongly expressed, simplistic opinions which work well on blogs. Nightjack's conservative but interesting.

O Brave New World

I blogged recently about a Digital Media lecture on social networking I went to - and asked for your responses to the new social formations promised by the information age. One of the participants has certainly responded to our suggestions that social-networking trains us to surrender personal information to any authority, commercial and public: the gentleman behind Unluckydip.com is closing down many of his accounts.

If you're bothered, matey, read this: 'Facebook users unwittingly reveal details' and this: 'Mobiles could spell the end of privacy': basically, Google et al. are tempting you to run location-sensitive applications - so that they (and whoever is tapping in to your account) and all the world's advertisers, know where you are for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, if you think technology can be fun, you'd be right. You can now use free Guardian APIs to do odd stuff, and one fan has tracked the history and characteristics of swearing in the Guardian. According to the graph, 'wank' is much underused. To the comment boards!