Week 4-1: Digital Divide

Digital divide is the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels with regard both to their opportunities to access information and communication technologies and to their use of the Internet. The digital divide reflects various differences among and within countries (OECD 2001).

Digital divide may also be caused by poor design of application. According to some surveys by Emor there were 42% of Internet users of age 15-74 in February 2002 and 66% in 2007. The number of people who are able and willing to reach Internet is rising but while they are interested in some kind of usabilities they are often not aware of the variety of services they could access or the design of the applications is confusing, not at good level of usability or difficult to learn. Consequently they avoid those. For example the e-Tax Board was first launched with so poor architecture that even technically experienced users had difficulties to navigate and reach the destination. I suggested some acquaintances to use e-Tax Board to get overview of some tax problems they had and they looked at me with great surprise asking if I thin they are some scientists to use this.

So I think one criteria to get computer users to use more Internet applications is to design them suitably for the user group they are intended to. Another problem causing great digital divide is the lack of interest from the group not acquainted to the new technologies. In rural areas the youth is certainly motivated to use computers and surf the Net but older generations are more difficult get involved.

Based on "Digital divide and how to bridge it" Emor (RISC study) survey indicates that non-users of the Internet account for 58% of the Estonian population bracket in the age group 15–74, i.e. 607,000 people, as of February 2002. So there was 42% of Internet users. In the end of 2007 there was 687 000 Internet users of age 15-74, which is 66% of the population of that age.

The Internet availability in Estonia is rather high in my opinion. First of all I guess it is possible to have Internet at almost any household if there is interest for it. There are very many public networks in towns. Without personal laptop there are libraries and several other Internet access points, but not so much in rural areas. In rural areas there are less possibilities for almost anything (to leave nature out) so it seems logical. But this may be one reason for digital divide for elderly people as they have less interest and skills for technology.

Week 3 - 2: Scams

The internet frauds may be either technological solutions or social engineering. I guess the technological side is more understandable at the first point - someone has the knowledge, time and interest to hack something and get access to critical data to profit. The social engineering part seems to be difficult for me. To combine social engineering and technological solution for example using DNS and visibly cheat users to give out their data is more understandable than to just get someone to make a bank transaction for me as a stranger.

It seems unbelievable that someone gives huge amount of money just like that. But reading more about it, I must believe there are so many people who just get scammed. I know some people who make a monthly trasaction to another side of the Earth while "they have a child there". A child who does not have parents and who is very poor. The "parents" receive some photos and see "their child". I suppose there are organizations dealing with the problems of orphans and raising money but having not much knowledge of those I would be very suspicious. And hearing an adult happily saying that she has a boyfriend in Africa who tells her when to be online for chat or if she is allowed to go to a party or not - "he cares you know" .. is just unbelievable but true. And the african "came to my skype just like that, he found me himself"...

On the websites like Scam O Rama.. I am just asking how do anyone find time and will to deal with sending back emails to such time wasters if he/she already gets that it is a scam. I never open emails from "strange" senders. If a stranger needs to write me they better explain the reason at the subject field. And "click to win one million" or "super offer only for you" is not a good one. Reading one case of Scam O Rama was enough. I find it to be good study material for those who tend to believe such offers. Otherwise it may be amusing to read it if one has nothing else to do. To react as a scambaiter.. I can not understand.

From the ethical point of view the sites telling about scambaiting are useful for study purposes on internet safety. On scambaiting, in my opinion, it is not unethical to fool back on the scammer but I do not think one should do it as it is such a waste of time. You never know the person behind it and you feel him/her important enough to get a share of youd time? I do not think so. Trying to get some profit from someone who scammed you is not ethical. It is not ethical at any point to act according to: "I do it because he/she did it to me" if it is a negative thing. Ofcourse it is subjective to evaluate on things but as long as the evaluation is made legally - a crime or not - it should be clear.

Week 3 -1: Echelon

Reading the article about Echelon system surely makes one think more about the way things work in the business and defense sector. Information from the Echelon network and other parts of the global surveillance system is used by the US and its allies for diplomatic, military and commercial purposes. If needs dating back to the years of war concerned mainly military and defense questions, they now follow the information about businesses abroad to get better contracts to help the well-being of their countries. This seems highly inappropriate in the means of international competition and ethics of the action is highly questionable.

To the global community such information seeking has different effects. Firstly, if communities know about the surveillance, they probably change the way they communicate, trying to avoid being intercepted. Secondly, when being unaware of probable interception, the outcomes, contracts and new deals are altered in comparison to what they might have been without someone getting inner information. The memory storage capabilities today are growing so much that on the one hand it seems like it is possible to follow and save everything. On the other hand the load of information going around has grown at least at same speed and finding the important one needs more and more work.

Week 2-2: Net censors

I read the reviews of my coursemates and I really struggle getting to the point of downloading and trying out one of the software mentioned in the lecture. I understand that there is more trouble than reward of them. If I think of downloading the software to the computer for my children to be protected from harmful information, I first come to the idea that if they want to search for some restricted materials, they must have spoken about it with friends and will see it anyway. If they get the idea of having a censor on their computer they will figure out how to remove it. If I wish them not to enter some sites.. I would ban them through router and hope they won't get to that themselves. So I have not completed the assignment on time but maybe I will in close future before the end of our course to truly see the trouble myself.

Week 2-1: Non-market production

The real applicability of non-market production on my field of interests. I had hard times finding an example here. Being a student and mostly interested in design solutions and practice I browse through lots of tutorials that are free online. Some practitioners share their work and experience and I get to train myself thanks to them. I also use some clearly market production tutorial sites but only the free parts of it. So I can profit personally from the number of tutorials they share freely hoping for me to become their customer and pay for more tutorials, training and conferences. I find it great that the professionals share their experience and help beginners to get on going with new software more easily.

Week 1 - 2

Robert Theobald's question of "mind-quake" - It is better if our shifts in thinking are small and frequent rather than large and catastrophic. All of us must become more competent at managing mind-quakes. The big changes in everiday procedures might bring us to mind-quake if the change has been so fast and enormous that we had no transformation time or means.

First example to come to my mind is the closest to us - the way we work at IMKE. It is not much difference to many of us. But to imagine giving an old-school professor the task to make a lecture so that he has hypertext materials and students should produce a collective conspect. No papers, pens just open laptops, projector etc.

Another mind-quake is the way elderly people must react when have always received their pensions from post office and suddenly have to go and get it from ATM. What does the machine mean to a person who never dealt with one. On the news there was an interview with a bank assistant who was helping people coming to the ATM first time. There was a long queue behind one machine whereas the one next to it was idle. The assistant invited the next lady in line to come to this machine. The lady stood still saying that her money has always come from this certain machine and she will not go the next one.

Charles Handy formulated paradoxes to come in the society. One of those is the paradox of intelligence. Intelligence is the rising form of property; yet such assets never appear on company balance sheets. I imagine it is also a kind of mind-quake to the people who are used to the idea that you must physically work hard to receive your salary and this can be calculated in the work hours. Nowadays companies must take into account their intelligence rate to be competitive. The way I see it, is that companies do profit from their intelligence if it comes to creation of software or any other creative product but the way to write it down still remains the same - working hours of this and that worker. Still the salaries of the workers differ while they are evaluated by their intelligence (and resulting productivity). On the other hand there are companies selling business intelligence as a service. They could name their outcome as intelligence and have it on the balance sheet?

Manuel Castells has described information society also with the transformation of work and employment. There will be a growth of self employment, temporary and part-time work. Particularly for women, he adds. I feel related. Flexi-workers who work without fixed time, place or regulations are certainly emerging phenomenon while professionals feel the earge to be more independent and choose freely their working hours. I share the idea that in future there will be a shift in employer-employee relationship as employers become the clients of those who were employees so far. Castells claims that this shift will procuce more stress and discontent. I do not agree on that while I find that the flexi-worker, temporary or self employed worker needs to have stron self discipline to achieve what he/she has taken as a goal. Without the ability to push yourself to work it is really easy to get stressed. In this case I suppose it is easier to stick to traditional work relationships.

Week 1 - 1: Himanen

Pekka Himanen' review on Information Society looks not to the far future but takes into account the changes ahead before 2010. The paper discusses different trends in Europe that affect the development of information society, the values to be kept in mind during the change process, different development models and concepts for social change. Interesting points I found: agreement on flexible working hours, problems with health coming from no physical activity at work, leisure time or teleworking and proactive behaviour.

My experience so far has shown that making the agreement on flexible working hours is not a complicated task. For sure it depends totally on the nature of the company. I have chosen companies that respect the values given in the paper - the balance between work and leisure must be met. I value highly the opportunity to choose your own best time for working while all the people do not share the most productive times of the day. Creative workers often get maximum out of themselves late at night therefore the company can profit the most when allowing the person rest in the morning and start later on. Seems reasonable for me. At that point of course it might come in handy to agree on some hours of the day when all employees must be accessible so that the "morning" and the "evening people" could meet up for teamwork purposes.

Employers should take into account the effect that sitting infront of a computer eight or more hours a day has on his/her workers. Himanen also points out the importance of physical activity during the day. My experience again shows that it has been counted with and various possibilities have been provided to takse some time off and relax at the office as well. Somehow more complicated for me was to share the work and leisure while working at home. Telework can have stronger effect on the health than working at the office with collegues.

Himanen describes three scenarios for future development in information society: Silicon Valley, Singapore and Finnish. The latter seems rather odd at that point, maybe a better name could be found. But the idea is that none of those is a positive scenario and bringing in the fourth combined model is needed. He uses terms proactivity and innovation to describe it. Innovation has been discussed a lot, we know we need to be innovative and find new ways to do things to become more productive. In addition he says that we should no longer focus on reacting to something that has already happened; instead we should act beforehand and boldly lead the way. I find the approach very approximate, saing a lot but not much.