Fenwick McKelvey

Blogs I read: partisanship and party loyalty in the Canadian blogosphere

ABSTRACT This article builds upon current hyperlink mapping research to determine the degree of party loyalty and partisanship in the Canadian political blogosphere. The article develops a hyperlink-based method of determining blogger endorsements as a means of tracking cross-party recommendations. The article concludes that bloggers affiliated with the governing Conservative Party of Canada exhibit the most cohesive ideological and party loyal set of blog recommendation links.

A consensual hallucination no more? The Internet as simulation machine

In this article, we investigate the macro-role being played – and played out – by digital, social and ‘new’ media today. We suggest that these media, facilitated by the Internet, can together be understood as a vast simulation machine that mediates and modulates everyday life to refashion what was once the ‘real world’ in its own image. Life in the ‘meatspace’ (the physical world) is most valuable, we suggest, not because it involves tweets, opinions or our desires but because these data produce useful and computable digital resources for finance, business and government. Today’s Big Data mining and predictive analytics allow for digital priorities to become non-digital realities, resulting – we suggest – in the algorithmically generated landscapes of today (and tomorrow). The imperatives driving today’s Internet and mobile technology have more to do with making the world computationally comprehensible than with the facilitation of free expression, open markets or open communication. We discuss the conditions created by these digital simulation machines as well as emerging opportunities for subversion and resistance.

Porting the political campaign: The NationBuilder platform and the global flows of political technology

Political parties rely on digital technologies to manage volunteering, fundraising, fieldwork, and data collection. They also need tools to manage web, email, and social media outreach. Increasingly, new political engagement platforms integrate these tasks into one unified system. These platforms pose important questions about the flows of political practices from campaigns to platforms and vice versa as well as across campaigns globally. NationBuilder is a critical case in their study. It is a leading non-partisan platform used in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The case of NationBuilder in Canada analyzes how political engagement platforms coordinate the global flows of politics. Through interviews, we find reciprocal influence among developers, party activists, consultants, and the NationBuilder platform. We call this process porting. It results in NationBuilder becoming a more portable global platform in tandem with becoming an imported, hybridized part of a campaign’s digital infrastructure.

We Like Copies, Just Don’t Let the Others Fool You The Paradox of The Pirate Bay

The Facebook page of the anti-copyright The Pirate Bay (TPB) explains much about the group in few words. “We like copies,” it explains, “just don’t let the others fool you.” The paradoxical phrase reveals the contradictions of TPB. Their use of “copies” deliberately chaffs with their opponents who equate piracy with theft of intellectual property. Pirates copy digital bits; they do not steal intellectual property. Championing copying is problematic for a group at the center of the Piracy Movement. The warning that “others [might] fool you” acknowledges the tensions brought about by celebrating copying while depending on their privileged voice. This article addresses these contradictions by describing TPB as an assemblage defined by conflicting forces of centripetal pull and centrifugal push. Understanding the contradictions of TPB offers greater insights into the challenges faced by other Hacktivism groups as they struggle for political change and legitimacy.

Complementary Realities: Public Domain Internet Measurements in the Development of Canada’s Universal Access Policies

This paper evaluates public domain Internet performance measurements available for characterizing the state of connectivity and developing universal access service quality standards in Canada. As access to the Internet has become more essential to social and economic participation, public domain Internet measurements have become an indispensable tool for users to validate quality of service their network operator delivers and for policymakers to identify and address gaps in broadband infrastructure. Unfortunately, most data about Internet performance remains in the private domain. Furthermore, due to their distinctive methodologies, different sources of broadband speed measurements can generate inconsistent results both in terms of absolute performance metrics and in relative terms. This creates a significant problem for validating service level agreements by users and minimum standards of universal service policymakers are increasingly adopting around the world. In contrast to previous debates about which testing approach is more or less “realistic�?, we argue that distinctive approaches to Internet measurement should be viewed as complementary windows into a complex and fast evolving reality of broadband connectivity. We explore how “big data�? and “small data�? approaches to measurement can complement each other in universal access standard setting. Despite their potential shortcomings, large scale crowdsourced open data network testing platforms have a central role to play in enabling broadband infrastructure policy coordination across different levels of government, empowering consumers, and validating speed and universal service quality standards.