Data Crunching
Protection of Personal Data in Cyberspace: The European Union-United States e-Market Regime
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tossapon Tassanakunlapan
The paper’s point of departure is international human rights law, as far as it recognizes a general framework to support and regulate personal data protection in the cyberspace realm. Nonetheless, the distinctive characters of cyberspace demand a well designed, at universal level, specific regulation and mechanisms to guarantee such fundamental rights relating personal data protection internationally. Accordingly, the research hypothesis is represented in double issues: first, effective personal data protection on cyberspace needs the establishment of an international/universal legal system treaty-based; second, EU regime on personal data protection in cyberspace and current EU-US agreements on this issue can be used as a model for initiating such international/universal treaty. The actors and relations included in the paper are the duty bearers of personal data protection law, both state and private entity activities. Nonetheless, the informal power relation between state and private organization is also taken into account since there are some informal agreements or coordination between state agencies and IT corporations on data sharing and processing. The time frame of the study is 2001-2016.
Facebook and Its New Way of Surveillance In the Name of Friendship
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yu Hui Yang
The invention of the social network was originally to bring people closer to each other. However, one of the biggest networking platforms, Facebook, with its design and layout has actually blurred the exquisite line of different types of relationships that give us different comfortable space to be in by generalizing all the relationships into one, friendship. The generalization means that one will show everything equally to everyone that s/he affirmed to be "friends," whether the other person is his/her professor, colleague, gossiping neighbors, or students. By participating in the system, with only "yes, she is my friend" or "no, she is not" setup and the pressure that the person sending the request is waiting on the other side of the screen and ready to view how closely you feel about them in real life, the users of Facebook give up their privacy and let others observe, investigate, and judge them in the name of friendship. This paper will first discuss how Facebook operates with the concept of friendship to build up the system and eventually modify the meaning of it. Then it will discuss how people behave accordingly in daily lives with their friends with this technology that was supposed to bring everyone closer and tighter.
Ballots as Cannons: The Aggressive Character of Referendums in Eastern Europe and Their Impact in the West
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Francisco Veiga, Carlos González Villa
This paper develops the idea that referendums in Eastern Europe’s recent history can be defined by their aggressive style and the prominence of identity politics. These characteristics concur with foundational moments of liberal democracies in the region, established concomitantly with the end of the Cold War. During this period, referendums were instrumental in the establishment of new definitions of the national community, which frequently involved territorial changes and exclusion of minorities. In the name of the people, voters were faced with existential dilemmas that, in fact, were defined in terms of the strengthening of local elites, rather than in terms of fortifying democratic institutions. Thus, referendums became an initial proof of the democratic character of new regimes, even in those cases in which the procedure was boosted by right-wing or ultranationalist populist actors. These dynamics eventually had an impact in the development of referendums in Western Europe, which, until the mid-two-thousands, had been working as balancers established democracies. Hence, events such as the French and Dutch European Constitution referendums in 2005, the 2015 Greek referendum, the Brexit referendum in 2016, and Catalan regional government successive attempts to celebrate a secessionist referendum, can be depicted as sequels of a long-term dynamics initiated in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War.
May ‘68 Reversed: Emergence and Success of a Far-right Troll Culture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Francisco Veiga, Carlos González Villa
This paper explores the idea that, in recent years, the new European and American far-right has developed a sort of anti-system (or alternative) culture of its own, which unfolds primarily in social media, but not only there. It includes charismatic celebrities, such as, among others, the French comedian Dieudonné, the Russian anti-system writer and politician Eduard Limonov, groups of neo-Nazi vegans, the American conspiracy journalist and theoretician Alex Jones, and Tomio Okamura, the Japanese leader of Freedom and Direct Democracy, a relevant far-right Czech political party. The emergence the new far-right sub-culture recalls the provocative displays of the May ‘68 New Left, with opposing, but also coincidental political attitudes. In this vein, the specialised journalist John Herrman asserts that there's something similar in the right’s is gradual appropriation of the word alternative – an appropriation that, for lack of a stronger claim by disappearing alt-weeklies or leftist publishers, seems to be working (“Why The Far Right Wants to Be The New `Alternative´Culture”, in: The NYT Magazine, June 27, 2017). This is better understood if we take into account that the far-right also experienced a major change in its own ideological course since 1968, with the emergence of the so-called New Right under Alain de Benoist. In many cases, ideological changes were not too deep. New attitudes, however, became increasingly provocative, so much so that it could be accepted, and even claimed, by many people who, until recently, were considered leftists, or those who started to see the left as an exhausted alternative.
