The December issue of First Monday came out yesterday with a number of articles in the society & technology space. Looks like some good reads! Here are the articles on my list, along with parts of their abstracts.

• The Internet and the right to communicate: The development of the Internet challenges traditional conceptions of information rights. The discourse surrounding these rights and the Internet typically deals with each right in isolation and attempt to adapt long established understandings of each right to the new technological environment. ... This paper examines the development of a right to communicate and how it can be defined and implemented.
• The digital divide: Why the "don’t–want–tos" won’t compute: Why, when computing is available in a socially situated, convenient environment, at no cost, do people choose not to compute? This paper describes a community–based project that wired four computing centres (hubs) in a lower socio–economic urban area in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city.
• Effective use: A community informatics strategy beyond the Digital Divide: This paper examines the concepts and strategies underlying the notion of the Digital Divide and concludes that it is little more than a marketing campaign for Internet service providers. The paper goes on to present an alternative approach — that of "effective use" — drawn from community informatics theory which recognizes that the Internet is not simply a source of information, but also a fundamental tool in the new digital economy.
• The case of Wikipedia: This paper employs team and club good theory as well as transaction cost economics to analyse the Wikipedia online community, which is devoted to the creation of a free encyclopaedia. An interpretative framework explains the outstanding success of Wikipedia thanks to a novel solution to the problem of graffiti attacks — the submission of undesirable pieces of information. Indeed, Wiki technology reduces the transaction cost of erasing graffiti and therefore prevents attackers from posting unwanted contributions.

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