The Digital Human Condition

Quite literally, with mobile and ubiquitous computing, every step we take, every action we perform, every word we say, and every gesture we use - the whole whizbang! - can in principle be recorded digitally and applied as input of some application, stored for later use, or transmitted elsewhere. To understand the full ramifications of this development must be a major theme of future research in ICT.

For many people, this potential future is a cause of alarm. Indeed, it is rife with potential problems such as the collapse of personal privacy, fragmentation of time, erosion of the distinction between home and work, and loss of control. Understanding the reality and the nature of such threats, and finding solutions for neutralising them, are surely a worthy thread of future research.

At the same time, I cannot help thinking that focusing just on the threats and problems of the digital future is insufficient, and may be based on a narrow view that should be relaxed. Underlying the various risk scenarios seems to be the assumption that a malicious third party - the KGB of the future digital society, a criminal organisation, a fraudulent big corporation - is somewhere lurking at the activities of the powerless consumer.

After a century whose first half was dominated by totalitarian governments chiefly occupied with mass murder of their own and other countries' citizens, and second half by triumphant globalisation dominated by multinational giant corporations, this mode of thinking is certainly understandable. Yes I do not see why the future should necessarily re-enact these patterns in a some kind of digitally enhanced Blade Runner world.

Ultimately, the future is what we make it to be, and how it will unfold depends on the decisions and actions we do now. Ideally, research should be able to inform these decisions and actions by studying their outcomes and exposing opportunities they can offer for enabling a better life characterised by freedom of expression, transparency of actions, and ubiquitous availability of information. This world has its own risks, but they are likely to be of a different kind than the Blade Runner world risks.

One of the opportunities that has started to fascinate myself as a researcher is the potentially revolutionary effect ubiquitous and mobile computing can have on sciences studying humans at various levels of scale starting from microscopic scale of neurophysiology and brain research (the operation of a single neuron inside subject's brain) all the way to the macroscopic scale of economics, political sciences, and legal research (the behaviour of millions of people forming a society).

This is not just science fiction. Instead, researchers in HIIT and other units at the future Aalto University have already launched, or are planning to launch, research activities that nicely map to different levels of scale in the above continuum.



At the microscopic scale, a research team led by academy professor Riitta Hari from TKK's Low Temperature Laboratory have prepared a bold research programme combining brain research with economics to literally study how people use their brain to ponder alternative actions and make decisions. Fittingly, the project will be called "Aivo-Aalto" in Finnish.

At a somewhat higher scale, HIIT and Finnish Institute for Occupational Health recently proposed to Academy of Finland a project called "Ganzheit" which would study mobile human behaviour literally skin-deep. The project aims to combine psychiological sensors with tiny cameras and portable recording equipment to allow comprehensive recording of user's pose, gaze, heart rate, and activity. With this, the project hopes to build a basis for a true breakthrough in cognitive, social, and usability related research, liberating them from the confines of a laboratory to the real world. A related AofF proposal plans to use a similar recording system to collect a massive record of test users' activities for a full year to settle once and for all just how much can be inferred from a maximally detailed data set.

At the next level of scale, several HIIT projects have focused on small-group behaviour and phenomena by building prototype group media services and observing their use (e.g., CoMedia system) and by enabling group interaction on large shared touchscreens (CityWall) or with maps enhanced by augmented reality (MapLens). At still higher level, the OtaSizzle experimentation platform is aimed to uncover user practices and preferences by collecting extensive data from a community planned to include thousands of people. The very highest levels of scale are populated by HIIT's ongoing and planned activities in future Internet economics, virtual economies, and empirical law.

A common thread that runs through all these activities is that they strive to enable a data-driven and experimental mode of research on their particular level of scale. To achieve this, they generally build service prototypes and related platform components for recording, processing, storing, and analysing experimentally derived data. Often they make use of HIIT's competencies in data analysis and probabilistic modelling to extract further insights from the data.

This state of the matters is not a result of some grand vision or foresight. Instead, the individual projects and initiatives have been created opportunistically on the basis of the individual interests of a number of researchers. At best, diffusion of ideas from one researcher to another, or emulation of successful practices and strategies have been at work.

Be that as may, seen as a whole, the portfolio seems to make it possible to introduce data driven, experimental methods in sciences such as sociopsychology, sociology, economics, political science, and legal studies, or at least greatly expand the range of interesting experimental settings that can be studied. If so, entirely new avenues of research in these sciences, and perhaps others, may be possible.

I have started to play with the idea that the portfolio should be recognised as such, and in fact as one of the major research domains of the Aalto University. A fitting title of the whole might be "Digital Human Condition" - no more, no less. Of course, its implementation will require not only extensive co-operation within the Aalto University, but also with various units in the University of Helsinki.

I cannot think of a research spearhead theme that would fit better the scope and promises of the Aalto University.

The New Internet

I have spent the three middle days of this week in the kick-off event of a new EU project commenced on January 1st. The experience compels me to write this longish blog entry. I must start it with a bit of background, so bear with me.

The Internet, as we know it, has by now been around for some 15 years, or 20 years for old hats such as myself. As we know, its growth has been phenomenal in the past and is likely to continue in the foreseeable future (which on the Internet is not necessarily a long time).

As a result, Internet is now being used for many purposes its original designers had no idea of. If we measure the raw number of bytes transferred, the Net of Nets is now mainly used for distributing digital content such as videos and music. It is used by more than a billion people, nearly half of which live in Asia. It reaches a widening variety of devices from mainframes and desktop computers to all kinds of mobile and embedded systems over equally wide variety of links from WLAN and satellites to 10 gigabit Ethernets.

Given this tremendous change, it may be considered a surprise that Internet manages to work in a useful fashion at all. Indeed its continuous build-up and maintenance has required a massive effort from the computer science and telecom engineering communities. This investment has been made feasible by the growing added value that Internet is generating to societies at large, and to various kinds of individual actors in them. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

At present, however, many otherwise sane and respectable people have started to express grave concern that the Internet is reaching its limits as a result of outgrowing the original design scope so dramatically. One obvious case is mobility. The original Internet was built on the assumption that the devices connected to it (the "hosts") can be designated with fixed addresses, the "IP numbers", that can be used to route messages to them. This assumption became broken with the advent of laptop computers that people carry around and connect to Internet at various points. At present, it is challenged further by the mobile multimedia phones that preferably should be always connected to the Internet. Of course, we have by now learned to live with the resulting difficulties by resorting to solutions such as VPN's or Mobile IP that make a node appear to the Internet as if it was connected at a fixed point somewhere else. Unfortunately, this is living on loaned time.

The most fundamental problem of the Internet as of today nevertheless relates to its very basic primitives. In the original design, every host has a publicly known IP number which every other host can send messages to, even without the consent of the recipient. This might have been fine in a network where all communicating partners share a common ethos of acceptable behaviour, including that the senders do not obfuscate their identities and that they will not continue sending unsolicited traffic. Unfortunately, the present Internet is hardly like that anymore. As a result, we have been forced to introduce various kinds of means of limiting undesirable traffic such as firewalls and Network Address Translators (NATs), and so to spend increasing amounts of resources on basically wasteful things such as virus protection and spam filtering. Again, the future progress of the Net does not seem to rest on a sustainable basis.

So what? The imminent demise of the Internet has been predicted almost from the start of its phenomenal growth, and so far the scarecrows have turned out to have been "somewhat premature" with their death news. Could this not continue also in the future?

That the predicted "Net meltdowns" never became reality, in my view, is because the community responsible of developing the Internet technology took heed of the warnings (well, some of them) and launched corresponding evasive actions. So far it has worked out. Unfortunately, each new layer of Band-Aid taped on top of the crumbling skeleton of the Internet reduces the flexibility that used to be its most compelling attribute. Already now the introduction of every new technology on the Net is made painful by the need to maintain interoperability with the plethora of fixes and kludges that the present Internet is.

And this brings me, finally, to the project we launched this week. It is called "Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm", and has the tongue-twisting acronym "PSIRP". (At least to Finnish ears, the acronym sounds like the sound of a little bird, so I expect that the project logo fill feature some feathery small animal).

Masking behind this mostly innocent name is a call for revolution. "Publish-subscribe" denotes a departure from the most fundamental idea of the present Internet: that hosts have publicly known names that other nodes can use. Instead, we propose a network that works in a completely opposite way: those hosts that wish to submit information ("Publish") must have a public name, whereas those nodes that wish to receive information ("Subscribe") can be nameless or anonymous. Thus, no longer spam, no longer unwanted traffic: only such messages that are explicitly subscribed to will reach the destination.

While this alone is already a significant effect, it is the ripple effects of the publish-subscribe paradigm that really make it cool. In effect, the new paradigm changes the division of work between the network and the hosts in that a number of functions and properties that now are provided by hosts' operating systems (e.g., file systems) or "server side software" (e.g., Internet search) will be assigned to the "network". This, if it happens, will wreak havoc with existing value chains and business models of many major players of the field, and thereby open new opportunities for some others, including newcomers.

The idea itself, radical as it seems, is nevertheless not novel but instead captures how existing services such as P2P systems or distributed event systems essentially work. What is new in our project is that we aim to push the idea deep down the network stack to packet routing level (and perhaps deeper). We not only claim that this is possible, but also, more importantly, that this results in a simpler and "cleaner" overall architecture that will work on the scale of the present and future Internet. We aim to demonstrate the claim by actually implementing the needed functionality, not only once, but twice: both as an overlay network that will permit rapid experimentation and take-up, and as very clean native implementation running directly on top of the link layer.

These claims and objectives are bold indeed. Thus it was with a certain degree of apprehension that we went to the kick-off event: will we really be able to pull it off? These feelings were intensified by the fact that HIIT is the co-ordinator of the project, and thus bears the overall responsibility of its success both to the EU commission (and EU taxpayers) and to our European partners.

The main characters of the coming play, Dr. Arto Karila who leads the project and the project co-ordinator Marja-Leena Markkula, concluded that such a tall order will require unconventional means. Indeed, the design of an architecture is a "wicked problem" that cannot be neatly broken in subproblems that can be distributed to parallel teams. Instead, it requires the integrated effort of several clear heads that rapidly is translated to the form of running code that can be investigated and criticised. This, in turn, requires that the experts from different countries, companies, and universities can develop a high level of mutual trust and respect towards each other on the basis of a shared vision and genuine excitement.

As a result of such considerations, Arto and Marja-Leena decided to spend the full first extended afternoon of the event in work sessions designed to make explicit the basic thoughts and feelings each of us had at front of the 2,5 year trek that we endeavour to make together. I must confess that I expressed a curious combination of excitement and angst: excitement, because this project indeed is what we have wanted to do for a long time, and already have worked hard and long to make happen; angst at the challenge ahead and whether we can kindle our own excitement also in other consortium members.

To our great relief, our apprehension turned out be to be a case of pre-curtain jitters that just gave an edge to the performance. There was little need to kindle excitement that already burned bright. While all of us were surely aware of the challenges ahead, we also were confident on our ability to deal with them. Moreover, we realised that we do not need to stand alone, but there are other groups around the world investigating similar themes and sharing the load.

With this mindset, the rest of the event went smoothly and we were able to get the first planned activities in motion.

Will we prevail? Only future will tell. The maximal success is a big leap, in networking terms comparable with the original introduction of packet switching to replace circuit switching. Thus the biggest fish in the pond is a whale. Fortunately, there are other success scenarios as well where our work will influence the future progress by more indirect routes.

Our biggest challenge, after all, may be to find and motivate a few good researchers who really understand networking architecture and are passionate to express their understanding in the kind of clean and crisp code the beauty of which approaches poetry in engineer's eyes. I think we will not need to search far: in the kick-off, the room was full of them.

The Paper 2.0 Pamphlet

Once there was an association of thousands of members. They wanted to update the association website to better serve the members. They had an old paper newsletter that they wanted to transfer into digital format. It turned out that the worst thing they could have done was to end the paper newsletter mailed into everyone's home. The paper newsletter was read, the digital alternatives were not. Probably all associations in the world are thinking about "going online". Who will tell them to think twice?

Once there was a large fan club with few hundred volunteer workers. The volunteers wanted to organize their work and create a feeling of community. They wanted to do the work on web and get the end result on print. They could not. There are no web tools available for collaborative publishing of print products. Who will build such open and free tools?

Once there was a research project that wanted to create and study user-generated paper products. The goal was to let regular people be as creative with paper media as people already were with digital media. The project talked to media companies who own web services with hundreds of thousands of users. The common answer was "Print products are not on our immediate roadmap." Who will promote innovative paper products and print services for media companies?

Once there was a paper industry that wanted to re-invent paper. They looked at the media industry where consumers were suddenly active producers rather than passive consumers. Web media services like MySpace and YouTube were changing the whole industry: innovation was made by the end users themselves. Nobody saw any role for paper in this turmoil. The problem was that paper was undervalued as old technology, there were no web tools for people to re-invent paper themselves, and there was no one shouting out loud that paper is still a superior media format in numerous situations.

These four stories are true. The last one can still be changed. But it will not change by itself.

The message of this pamphlet comes from over two years of research collaboration between social media researchers from two separate worlds: Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and the pulp and paper industry research institute KCL.

Here is the message:

The pulp and paper business wants to come up with new innovative products and services. A lesson learned from the ICT sector is to be open and facilitate innovation among the end users. To achieve this the pulp and paper industry must take an active role in enabling regular people to be creative with paper, especially using digital tools and online collaboration. The industry must show both consumers and businesses that paper is often far superior to digital alternatives. Finally, the industry must accept new design and business perspectives such as human-centric design and user-generated content.

Facebook is not social media

I have recently been reading, slowly and with considerable effort, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. What I have read seems to suggest a surprising conclusion: Facebook.com, and many other comparable forms of what is commonly called "social media" or "social computing", is not fundamentally "social".

I try to explain the line of this thought, with help from Arendt's book. A fundamental concept for her is vita activa, consisting of three fundamental human activities labor, work, and action. They designate, respectively, the biological processes of life, the activity of man towards the world, and the activity of man towards other human beings.

Vita activa is rooted in the classical world of ancient Greek city-states, where the free citizens considered life's true worthiness to be found from the public activity in the city, polis (whence "politics"). For Aristotle, public active life, bios politikos, was one of the ways of life man can choose in freedom, in independence of life's bare necessities (that is, labor and work). To excel in bios politikos was to rise over the bestiality of just living and multiplying; a life spent in the privacy of "one's own", idion, was literally "idiotic".

We have long lost the privative trait of the word "privacy", literally meaning the state of being deprived of the active public life amongst peers, which for Greeks was the highest and most uniquely human of man's activities. Arendt explains this as a side-effect of the rise of the social, the "rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere" (pg. 38), concomitant with the decline of the classic civilization.

Similarly, with the modern rise of the mass society, Arendt's own framework, "the various social groups have suffered the same absorption into one society that the family units had suffered earlier" (pg. 41). The resulting modern equality, based on society's inherent conformism, is very different from equality in the Greek city-states, where free life amongst free peers was fiercely competitive, requiring "everybody constantly to distinguish himself from all others" (pg. 41). It was only this public sphere where men could really show who they really were as individual and unique human beings.

Arendt explains that it is the modern conformism, that men behave instead of acting with respect to each other, that lies at the root of modern social sciences starting from classical economics, studying large uniform populations with help of laws of statistics. She writes: "If economics is the science of society in its early stages, when it could impose its rules of behavior only on sections of the population and on parts of their activities, the rise of the 'behavioral sciences' indicates clearly the final stage of this development, when mass society has devoured all strata of the nation and 'social behavior' has become the standard for all regions of life" (pg. 45).

Arendt wrote here book in 1958, perhaps at the peak moment of the "mass society" that she studies so sharply. Now, sixty years later, we already live in a different world, a compelling overall picture of which has been painted by Manuel Castells in his The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture. This world, called "network society" by Castells, is driven two major developments: various kinds of networks binding developed regions and their elites globally in dynamic whole; and new identities developed to replace the old ones such as nation-states inherited from the now defunct mass society. Thus, our world is definitely no longer "mass society", but rather characterised by incessant networking and fierce individualism.

And this brings me, finally, to social media. Just a few years ago, "social computing" was considered as something best exemplified by Amazon.com. This characterisation is indeed apt: Amazon excels precisely in capturing information of the behaviour of a large user population, and applying methods of statistical modelling to create models powerful enough the make fairly good guesses of what items a certain person might be interested to buy in the future.

(I must make a detour here. My younger son studies archaeology, and took a course in Akkadian just for the fun of it. For this, he needed an English-Akkadian dictionary, which I bought for him from Amazon.de. For a long time, the service kept recommending me books such as "Beginner's course of French" and like. Of course, the statistical cluster of Akkadian speakers must be fairly small these days, considering that the language has been extinct for more than 3,000 years.)

Thus, Amazon.com is social media in the truest meaning of the word. But how about Facebook?

As I see it, Facebook is primarily a platform of building and maintaining a (somewhat playful) digital identity through action, and making that visible to other people who the service calls "friends" but who more aptly might be called "peers".

Now, one could very well approach Facebook as a social platform, and hence study its mass of users and their behaviour with methods of statistics. This would actually constitute an interesting line of research, and I fully expect that some of Facebook's "applications" eventually turn out to be experiments of some clever sociology postgrads.

This angle nevertheless misses the point. I suggest that Facebook should really be viewed as the digital version of the Greek agora where the individualistic peers are expressing their uniqueness through actions, a kind of bios politikos in its more restricted way. To be excluded from such peer interaction, while not literally meaning the end of life worthy of living, would surely not appeal to Facebook's fans the least. It is thus logical that their views of privacy (as explained in Vilma's earlier blog) are not unlike those of the ancient Greeks.

Thus, I am led to the punch line of this blog: Facebook is not social media. Instead, it is action media.

Is this a useful way to look at Facebook, in that it suggests an angle of illuminating research? I don't know, but I would be interested to see somebody give it a go.

Mobile WOM Manifesto

If you receive a message on your mobile phone from a good friend of yours, would you open it? Surely. If the message contains some sort of a commercial message, would you read it? Most likely and certainly if your friend refers to it. Would you be offended or disturbed by this message? Most probably not. On the contrary, the odds are that you are interested in it because your close friend, who knows you, thought so. In addition, you are probably pleased that your friend thought about you, and you are flattered that he or she took the time to contact you, maybe even to the point that you will act upon the commercial message either by forwarding the message further or by purchasing the product or service promoted.

The scenario above explains why mobile media as a personal communication tool would seem to be the optimal platform for word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing. Still, groundbreaking mobile WOM campaigns are yet to be seen. Why?

Five years ago, I was doing my master’s thesis for Starcut Ltd. I studied how it would be possible to generate WOM around motion pictures using mobile devices. Back then, the buzz about WOM was only starting. The vast majority of mobile devices were still black & white and could hardly display an image. The content industries were in panic because of piracy and peer-to-peer distribution. It was clear that the industry wasn’t ready for mobile word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that needed understanding about WOM mechanisms, sophisticated mobiles devices, and a willingness to trust consumers to distribute branded content.

Since those days online word-of-mouth marketing has gained a lot of momentum. The fragmentation of media channels, the growing importance of reaching niche audiences and markets, and the poor return on investment (ROI) figures of traditional marketing methods have forced marketing professionals to look for alternative means to attract consumers’ attention.

Marketing techniques relying on word-of-mouth communication, that is non-commercial person-to-person communication concerning a brand, product or service, are not, however, a new or even a recent phenomenon. They have been studied since the 1950’s both by academics and marketing research companies. The interest towards word of mouth communication originates from studies trying to analyze consumers’ purchase decision behavior. Practically all studies demonstrated that the most influential advice and information regarding buying decisions come from the consumers’ peers.

Further research proved that through WOM, information can spread fast to different consumer clusters without loosing its persuasiveness and that WOM is especially influential in service industries where customer experience is paramount.

Over the years, many trials were made to harness the word of mouth concerning a given product, brand, or service. Although the results proved that within certain boundaries WOM can be influenced, WOM marketing strategies remained marginal within the over-all marketing mix, mostly because of the difficulty to measure the impact of WOM campaigns.

The digital revolution of the 90’s gave a new start to WOM-based marketing solutions. With the help of Internet and email people could communicate a lot easier and faster with much more people than before. The digital communication tools provided also new means to measure WOM and service providers could benefit from customer feedback and ratings to improve their service. This online WOM gave rise to such successes as Hotmail, Amazon.com, and Ebay. In academic circles, digital networks gave rise to a new interest in network analysis, links, and the small world –theory, all tightly connected to WOM research.

After the year 2000, the number of business books published on WOM has exploded many of them specializing in one form of sub-genre of WOM, such as viral, buzz, stealth, guerilla or influencer marketing. Numerous companies have specialized on WOM marketing, and the industry has organized itself around Word of Mouth Marketing Association WOMMA, founded in 2004. In addition, all successful web 2.0 services from YouTube to Facebook seem to be using WOM mechanisms as building blocks of their service offering. I must say, it is an exciting time to continue my research, now as a doctoral student, on word-of-mouth mechanisms and service design.

But coming back to my starting point, why hasn’t WOM reached the mobile media on a large scale? My guess is that the mobile industry has had a dubious attitude towards all sorts of marketing due to the fear of spam. It was because of spam that European Union enforced its opt-in regulation back in 2002 and for the very same reason industry organizations elsewhere in the world took similar self-regulating actions.

This fear is certainly well grounded when it comes to mobile advertising, but NGO-driven mobile campaigns have shown that WOM works also on portable devices. Only ten days ago, a worldwide SMS campaign urged people to wear red on September 28th in order to support the demonstrators in Burma (Myanmar) and last Friday I received a text message originating from Amnesty International inviting people to light candles in front of Russian Embassies to remember the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. I forwarded the messages, not to everyone on my contact list, but only to a selected few that I thought would appreciate it. I bet I am not only one acting this way.

Last September showed some signs that also mobile industry is slowly getting rid of its fears. September 17th Nokia announced the acquisition of Enpocket, a company providing mobile advertising campaign systems and management. A week later, Blyk, the first free ad-supported mobile phone service went live in the UK. Who knows, maybe next week we will hear of the first mobile WOM campaign. But no matter when it takes place, I am sure that the first company succeeding in making users forward its ads to their peers on mobile media is going to be on everybody’s lips.

P2P Survey results

HIIT collaborated with three Sanoma WSOY online newspapers to make an online survey about the utilization of p2p file-sharing services and user's attitudes concerning p2p file-sharing. In a week over 6000 people participated in the survey.

Almost 80% of the participants had used p2p file-sharing sites for illegal file downloading, whilst 10% had used only used p2p sites for legal spreading of files. Many of the p2p file sharing site users would be willing to pay for spreading of the files, however the technical protection measures remain unacceptable for them.

It can clearly be seen in the study that p2p users and the copyright owners are speaking a different language. Rhetoric used by the copyright owners and the comparisons of p2p users to professional criminals or even to terrorists is simply not believable among the users

It appears that the legislative maximum penalty for p2p file-sharing is not matching the participants’ sense of justice. When the copyright law was amended, the maximum penalty was raised to two years in prison. Maximum penalty of two years allows e.g. house searches. For these reasons it might be according to start thinking if there has been an overkill in the legislation.

The main findings:

The users of online music stores appreciate the easy use of the stores and furthermore found the chance to buy single tracks, as opposed to being forced to buy an entire album, important

The technical protection measures decreased the amount of customers for online music stores

The actions taken by the copyright owners have not had any significant effect to filesharing

The participants in the survey had problems recognizing the rights granted on the users by the copyright law

The chance of getting caught of using illegal p2p file sharing sites was estimated to be between the chance of winning the jackpot in lottery, and the chance of a television license inspector paying a visit

Large-scale p2p file-sharing was generally thought to be as condemnable as failing to pay for a television license

The use of p2p file sharing sites has not had any significant impact on the use of other medias, excepting portable recording devices, such as the iPod, which use it has slightly increased

Many would be willing to pay for a monthly service that enabled unlimited music and videofile sharing and downloading

About 80% or the participants thought they had learned to know of new artists better by using p2p file sharing sites

Selling pirated recordings of different medias was thought to be more condemnable than large scale p2p file sharing

Researches like this have been made before, but the data from them is locked away, and the results from them could not have been verified scientifically. We wanted to avoid this and bring our data available for everyone no matter were the use of it for the benefit of public discussion, writing a scientific paper or questioning our results.We have decided to share the data of the study for other research use. The set of data has been licensed with CC-by Finland 1.0 license. When referring to the data, the following citation is recommended: Hietanen, Huttunen, Kokkinen; HIIT P2P Survey Data 2007.

http://pong.hiit.fi/p2p/docs/P2P-survey/DATA_English.xls

http://pong.hiit.fi/p2p/docs/P2P-survey/HIIT_P2P_Results.xls

http://pong.hiit.fi/p2p/docs/P2P-survey/HIIT_P2P_Survey.ppt

http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/3810766/HIIT_P2P_Results.zip.3810766.TPB.torrent

One of the motives for the research was to find out how users perceive the claims about p2p file sharing networks. This was in my opinion achieved.

Violent discussions broke out about the survey and the questions in it in different discussion forums. It appears that p2p file sharing evokes violent emotions on each side of the argument. The people behind the survey were thought to be errand boys of the Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society (Teosto) and according to the wildest rumors the Central Bureau of Investigation (KRP, Keskusrikospoliisi) was tapping the prize cell phones to bust users for P2P crimes. As the instigator of the study I can assure that none of the aforementioned claims were true.

The schizophrenic approach toward the study led to the unfortunate incident when 800€ Nokia N95 cell phone prize had to be redrawn, as the participant, who originally won the phone, e-mail "loosers@KRP.fi" bounced. His contact information said:

HA haa, I wont tell you my contact information. F*ck you KRP.

Special thanks to Henriika, who helped organizing the data into a more readable form, and to Mikael, who tried teaching lawyers how to make surveys.