 This is Allison Powell in London and I am angry. I'm angry because the UK parliament last night passed the digital economy bill which is quite possibly one of the most significant bills for the future of the internet in Britain. It includes a wide range of provisions including two that are particularly interesting to me as a scholar of bottom-up innovation in the internet sphere. The first of these is disconnection for ISPs customers who are found to be file-sharing copyrighted material after a letter received from the internet service provider. So no law enforcement required, no warrant, no reasonable cause, just disconnection if you're found to be file-sharing anything that's copyrighted. The second provision that is in the bill that I find deeply problematic is the liability of operators of public wireless internet access points for anybody who is trading copyrighted material using their wireless connection. Since most of my research was in finding ways to share wireless connectivity to promote innovation within communities, this is basically like putting a gigantic lock on the ability of people to come up with new and innovative ways of sharing bandwidth and also creating new content that they can deliver on using that bandwidth. Essentially this means that public Wi-Fi will cease to exist in the UK including in places like the British Library. The other issue that is particularly getting my back up this morning is the way that this bill was passed. Now there was a very sustained online campaign raising awareness around this bill and its complexity and 20,000 letters were written to UK MPs encouraging them not to pass the bill without proper debate. The election campaign in the UK started on Tuesday, we are now Thursday, last night was the last time to pass legislation. So what happened? 20,000 letters were written almost 25,000 tweets were tweeted about the digital economy bill. There are 643 MPs, 227 of them voted on this bill, however only about 40 of them debated. Well what happened to the rest of the 187 MPs? Well they were somewhere else maybe at the pub, we don't really know and they were brought in at the last moment to pass this bill under the guidance of the party whip and the party whip in the UK parliamentary system is the person who tells the MPs how they are supposed to vote. So essentially this vote was not debated, it was debated for less than two hours, it includes all of these complicated provisions, it includes a set of responsibilities for the regulator in the UK, OFCOM, which OFCOM is not necessarily sure that it would be able to enforce. Regardless this bill went through in what's called the wash-up process and I think this raises a larger question about two things, the social media democratic sphere and the democratic sphere in general. I think the process of passing this highly complex bill demonstrates that there is a fundamental gap in the way that politics happens at the parliamentary level and the way that politics is now happening on the ground facilitated by social media. The BBC ran a live stream of the debate, there were up there were constant updates from people who were watching the debate that were visible on Twitter streams with Twitter tags that were for the most part not attended to by the MPs with one exception Tom Watson who is a Labour MP stated that he voted against the bill and he in fact even updated his own Twitter feed to say that it made him physically sick to oppose the party whip but he knew that he was doing the right thing. So we have this disconnection between the mediated politics that is largely a politics of debate that's happening in the social media sphere and the parliamentary politics but we also have something that I think is even more problematic because these digital these issues of digital activism have been perceived as being niche interests but in fact they touch every aspect of the economy, innovation from the bottom, innovation from the top and in fact everybody's access to and use of the main media channel of our age which is essentially now an open and uncensored internet. So what we have is a problem of connecting together the different constituencies using different media platforms to mobilise around political issues like this. It's one thing to use Twitter but the research on Twitter indicates that Twitters are mostly people like me who are about my age and who are talking to other people who are like me and who are about my age. So if we want to have a real social media democratic sphere we need to avoid this propensity for social media echo chambers where people are mostly exchanging pieces of information on platforms that are used by people who are mostly like them. If our wide-scale party politics and parliamentary politics are going to fail us we need to come up with ways that our social media politics don't fail us either.