I&D Blog

Yesterday, the Boston Globe ran a piece on US-Iran relations. With all the news cycle obsession over a possible military conflict, this may seem like nothing new. The unique twist, however, is that instead of focusing on outspoken president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the article follows the considerably more complex relationship between bloggers, both Iranian and American, in dialogue with each other.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s diplomatic relationship with the United States has been tense, to say the least. Publicly at least both governments have exhibited mutual distrust, if not downright hostility. Average people writing blogs in Iran, however, seem to think that if not rapprochement, at least some form of dialogue with the West could be healthy.

The Berkman Center has been interested in the Iranian blogosphere ever since we published a full-length quantitative report on it. One of our key findings was that, although Iran harasses and jails bloggers, the Iranian blogosphere itself is wide-ranging, tolerant of a surprising amount of dissent, and spread across numerous ideological persuasions. Contrary to popular perceptions about Iran and the internet, it is not just young democracy dissidents writing blogs; instead, there are distinct sectors of reformists (both expat and native), conservatives, Shi’a religious blogs and Persian poetry enthusiasts.

The upshot of this diversity is that it is, to a degree, democratic in character. It resembles (even with the inconsistent interference of authoritarianism) the vital social organism which generally makes up public communication in a democracy. Though speculative, the question of whether the nature of blogging is responsible for this is still worth asking.

When, as for blogs, there are low barriers (economic or ideological) to expression, a continuum of democratic discourse seems to have less difficulty cropping up. The wider and more ample these networks of individuals become, the less plausible it is that the government can contain or adequately filter them (unlike the old mass media model). In a sense, blogs distribute influence and, potentially, power.

The Globe piece highlights a particularly interesting development in all this. Despite the best efforts of Iranian censorship and a hostile American embargo, bloggers and internet users from both sides are communicating, exchanging information and ideas.

“People are relating to the Americans on the computer,” he [Farhad Ghorbani, a 24-year-old journalist] said. “We can chat. Regardless of the political views and what the politicians do, we want to have this kind of cultural relationship with the United States.”

As if in response, both governments have begun to copycat these techniques of more open exchange. Ahmadinejad writes a blog in which he periodically addresses Americans, and even the State Department has started organizing informal debates with Iranian officials on blogs.

Perhaps if this trend continues, the political divide between Iran and America can be broached by the internet instead of diplomats, by ideas instead of drums of war.

Rebecca MacKinnon just posted an interesting excerpt of academic research on Chinese censorship. She focused her work on domestic blogging services in China and how politically sensitive material is censored within or without the “Great Firewall.” Since some blogging services are foreign companies operating domestically in China (MySpace, Yahoo! China), she broaches the now familiar quandary of corporate complicity in Chinese state censorship.

Google (and YouTube’s geolocational filtering) have been much discussed. Perhaps less visible was the story that came out a month ago about even Skype conversations are now being monitored (thanks to Toronto-based Citizen Lab) by an automatic filtering system hunting for keywords and targeted users. One wonders if there will ever be a moment when the sprawling expanse of internet expression will become too large and unwieldy for Chinese authorities to keep a costly censorship regime.

Unfortunately, the Chinese government has already found ways of increasing the efficiency of the operation. In addition to automatic filters and regional censors, China has practically outsourced the work to private companies by requiring licenses (and their implicit conditions) to operate.

What is interesting about MacKinnon’s work (which we earlier covered here) is how uneven and inconsistent blog censorship in China turns out to be:

All Chinese blog-hosting companies are required by government regulators to censor their users’ content in order to keep their business licenses. But as Liu [Liu Xiaoyuan, a prominent Chinese blogger] discovered, they all make different choices not only about how to implement censorship requirements, but also how to treat the users who get censored.

If you don’t get shut down on one site, you’re likely to slip through on another…

Interesting Times piece a few days ago about citizen journalism and the recent Mumbai terrorist attacks. It seems several bystanders used cellphone cameras, Twitter and texting to get details of the attack from inside cordoned off security zones and a raging firefight with the terrorists. This use of technology was particularly interesting as it spread news about the attacks much faster than any official information, or even mainstream media reports. As the Times perhaps somewhat existentially remarked:

The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.

While perhaps there are qualitative differences between the Twitter page of Arun Shanbhag (an assistant professor at Harvard Med who happened to be across the street from the Taj hotel when shooting erupted) and a fuller piece of reporting by a veteran journalist, the fact remains that Arun’s updates to Twitter and Flickr provided much more immediate access to the actual events than the recycled story about the Brooklyn rabbi which quickly flooded CNN. Even the rabbi’s story, it seems, was closely followed on Twitter by frightened members of his Hasidic congregation back in New York.

The phenomenon of citizen journalism as an effective conduit of information was well-documented during the Saffron Revolution in Burma. In fact, most of the details reaching Western news outlets were coming from grainy cameraphone pictures and rogue bloggers. The technological response to the recent attacks in Mumbai demonstrates greater technological sophistication. I’m sure that in large part this is because internet literacy and participation is much higher in India.

The possibilities of citizen journalism should therefore only continue to expand as knowledge and use of technology spreads.

I have been thinking about some remarks made recently at a Berkman luncheon by Atony Loewenstein, author of The Blogging Revolution. He suggested that blogs have a role to play in reducing the spin and distorted perspective not only of manipulative government mouthpieces, but also of the mainstream media as well.

It seems to me that something similar could be said of twittering in Mumbai. Citizen journalists can free us of the editorial lens inevitably a part of any major news source (whether liberal, conservative, philo-American or not, and so on). Indeed, to approximate reporting facts as nakedly as possible requires the rich and instant global connectivity which only the Internet can provide. Our picture of how events develop and conclude will be immeasurably complicated (but also enriched) by the dozens of individual perspectives writing news as it happens, clicking photos and, of course, twittering

Anthony Loewenstein, author of the recent book The Blogging Revolution, stopped by for a luncheon/lecture here at the Berkman Center yesterday. Loewenstein, a journalist in background, prepared for the book by traveling to some of the world’s more repressive regimes and interviewing bloggers about how the internet and blogging in particular is changing the world they live in. The full transcript of his remarks can be found here. I wanted to offer a few of the points I found to be particularly interesting.

1. Loewenstein repeatedly pointed to a sort of blind spot in Western journalism that is actually obscuring our view of the non-Western world. This includes the fact that most Western coverage is reported by Western correspondents who sometimes (as he himself confessed during the Q&A; he only spent a month there and mostly spoke to American bloggers living in Syria) do not remain long in a country or learn the requisite local languages to penetrate deeply into more indigenous stories and perspectives.

In particular, the Western “lens” (and here Loewenstein singled out the New York Times) tends to self-filter news into the categories and pre-suppositions that fit the exigencies of American foreign policy. On this point, one had the feeling that Loewenstein was mostly right (e.g. the newspeak “War on Terror”), though he seemed to have an almost conspiratorial conviction about Washington’s influence. He was careful to stress that the Manichean division of “good” versus “bad” nations (for example, “Israeli” vs “Arab”) has been more a hallmark of Bush-era policy.

The point of all of this is that bloggers fill in our picture of the developing and Islamic world where newspapers and major media fail, in large part because the bulk of Western stories obsessively follow themes like “terrorism” and “Palestine/Israel” which tend to reduce and oversimplify our view of the entire region. Instead of puffing our ghosts and specters, the West should be tuning in to hear the real story from the ground, as provided by citizen journalists and just average people writing blogs.

2. This does not mean, however, that bloggers are the harbingers of upcoming democratic revolutions in the Middle East or China. Although the internet widens the scope of free expression (or at least makes it more difficult for authoritarian regimes to contain dissent), Loewenstein often encountered a kind of weariness for calls to arms and revolution. One Iranian blogger, in particular, told Loewenstein that he felt strongly about reform, but that it needed to come about in a gradual, almost Burkean, sort of way.

Loewenstein connected this to a need for the West to overcome its epistemological shortcomings and embrace moderate factions, particularly elements of political Islam like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Instead, in the relentless fight against a spooky AlQaeda menace and pragmatic energy policy, Washington props up pretty bad rulers. If they read native blogs, they would have a better idea of who these factions are. The would hear the voices of moderate factions who are as uneasy with American or European meddling as they are with the regular torture, repression and abuse which characterizes their own regime. This includes Muslim women against female circumcision or restrictive social policies, pro-reform Islamists and change-eager Cubans.

3. Having said all that, most blogging in the developing world is not political in scope. Not everyone running a blog (and these are generally middle class folks to begin with) is a dissident or human rights activist. Much of it centers on dating or music, fashion and everyday life. Loewenstein rightly insists, however, that this is itself a kind of free expression and step toward an open society worth paying attention to.

I think there is a kind of cynical rebuttal to his argument which says that the banality of everday blogs in repressive regimes is highly conditioned by the fear of speaking out on anything political. Of course, this dynamic must differ from regime to regime. In Iran, where even Western music and fashion is banned by the morality police, the struggle to do banal and everday things is already a political struggle; in Thailand, where only the borders of internet are really policed (lese majeste and jihadist websites), it’s easier to maintain an apolitical kind of free expression.

4. Loewenstein had harsh words for internet companies which collude in censorship. He pointed, as we have before as well, to the geo-locational filtering YouTube uses to adapt content to local countries. He did concede that perhaps blocking four videos instead of four thousand is better, but I almost wanted him to stick to his guns and insist that countries take YouTube all or nothing. Not because I think this will loosen the knots of censorship, but because public outcry and dissent could be wide enough to choke back the state’s ever encroaching authority and control over democratic discourse.

All in all, a great talk and we thank Antony for stopping by!

Five days ago, Reporters Without Borders reported that the Thai government is stepping up its efforts to censor pornographic, terrorist and anti-monarchy material on the web by installing a country-wide firewall overseen by MICT (Ministry of Internet and Communications Technology). Estimates for the cost of the project range from 3 to 15 million dollars and would presumably replace the secret process of blacklisting and selective filtering already in place. (YouTomb, an outfit of MIT Free Culture, discovered awhile back that YouTube was using special coding flags to filter Thai content geographically, especially content held to be offensive to the royal family.)

Internet censorship is nothing new in Thailand. What makes this new initiative alarming is the political climate Thailand currently finds itself in. After years of military coups and failed constitutions, Thais held their first reportedly free and legitimate election in 2001. This brought Thaksin Shinawatra and his populist Thai Rak Thai party to power by a landslide. After winning again in 2005, however, allegations of corruption and hostility to the free press fomented a series of highly visible anti-government protests by an opposition group and then, even more dramatically, a bloodless military coup on September 19, 2006.

The junta scrapped the 1997 Constitution, dissolved the Thai Rak Thai party and, last May, passed an expansive Cyber Crimes Bill. (The bill gives Thai police extraordinary latitude in data seizure and investigation into “illegal” access.) Then, when elections were finally held in December 2007, a reorganized People’s Power Party (made up mostly of ex-Thai Rak Thai folks) managed to take a near majority in the Thai House of Representatives, despite intimidation from the junta.

In this politically charged environment, the internet has become a battlefield. Arguments over free expression and the touchy issue of Thai beloved monarchy are fanning partisan flames. The chief anti-government party has repeated claimed that Thaksin, and now his successors in the People’s Power Party, are perpetrators of lèse majesté, that is, the offense of insulting or defaming the Royal Family. Lèse majesté is an offense punishable by three to fifteen years.

According to some, the current government’s proposed firewall to block content insulting the king (many of the controversial YouTube videos mock the monarch as an “ape king”) is a bid to win over the anti-government opposition. Controlling the internet also gives the government the sort of law and order credibility needed to stave off another coup by the brass.

Thailand’s aging constitutional monarch, Bhumibol Adulyadej, seems to be above the fray. In 2005, the king publicly distanced himself from lèse majesté laws, often pardoning those convicted. Still, the zeal with which the Thai police are allowed to investigate allegation of lèse majesté is frightening.

An Australian national, Harry Nicolaides, is currently being held in a detention center without bail for writing three sentences in a small self-published novel (it reportedly sold seven copies), which may or may not “suggest” that the crown prince has a torrid sex life.

This example, combined with the fervor the government showed in attacking puerile YouTube videos, leaves one unsettled as to the potential for further and more substantive internet censorship in Thailand. After all, Burma’s crackdown on “cyber dissidents” took place just across the border. Thailand’s current instability (anti-government forces occupied the parliament building again today) would be fertile ground for using and controlling the internet as a political weapon.

Back in February Harvard adopted a mandate requiring its faculty member to make their research papers available within a year of publication. Stuart Shieber is a computer science professor at Harvard and responsible for proposing the policy. He has since been named director of Harvard’s new Office for Scholarly Communication.

On November 12 Shieber gave a talk entitled “The Future of Open Access — and How to Stop It” to give an update on where things stand after the adoption of the open access mandate. Open access isn’t just something that makes sense from an ethical standpoint, as Shieber points out that (for-profit) journal subscription costs have risen out of proportion with inflation costs and out of proportion with the costs of nonprofit journals. He notes that the cost per published page in a commercial journal is six times that of the nonprofits. With the current library budget cuts, open access — meaning both access to articles directly on the web and shifting subscriptions away from for-profit journals — is something that appears financially unavoidable.

Here’s the business model for an Open Access (OA) journal: authors pay a fee upfront in order for their paper to be published. Then the issue of the journal appears on the web (possibly also in print) without an access fee. Conversely, traditional for-profit publishing doesn’t charge the author to publish, but keeps the journal closed and charges subscription fees for access.

Shieber recaps Harvard’s policy:

1. The faculty member grants permission to the University to make the article available through an OA repository.

2. There is a waiver for articles: a faculty member can opt out of the OA mandate at his or her sole discretion. For example, if you have a prior agreement with a publisher you can abide by it.

3. The author themselves deposits the article in the repository.
Read the rest of this entry »

Since the 2007 Saffron Revolution, a popular uprising of students and Buddhist monks, Burma’s military government has been watching the internet with growing unease. The web, as our study of the conflict demonstrates, played a pivotal role in organizing and increasing the visibility of that conflict to the outside world. Citizen journalists, utilizing the content creation powers of Web 2.0 technology, were able to smuggle mobile videos and pictures out to the world, not only in person, but through anonymous uploads and file hosting sites at poorly regulated internet cafes.

Now, according to the exile newspaper Irrawaddy, Burmese authorities are stepping up their efforts to punish political activists who use the internet by imposing lengthy and draconian prison sentences. During the Saffron Revolution, the government’s response was to black out all internet access (possible because the government owns the only two ISP’s) and most mobile phone coverage. Yet when the internet was restored several weeks later, the government changed tactics. First, it limited bandwith at internet cafes, making even highly compressed audio and visual data difficult to transmit. Then, it began invoking a little used 1996 national security law which punishes unlawful access to an electronic network with jail time ranging between 7 and 15 years.

Burma’s authoritarian military-led government has never had a particularly warm relationship with free speech. Since its junta in 1962, the government has consolidated, restricted and stifled all traditional media outlets, putting them firmly under the watchful eye of state censors. The internet, however, and the rise of digital activism which it inspired, has been a much harder beast to tame. Even when it became possible (through ISP consolidation) to monitor and block internet access, citizens circumnavigated the blocks using foreign proxies and encrypted email services.

A disturbing sign in these most recent developments is that the increasingly nervous military government has begun cracking down not only on political dissidents critical of the regime (like the Generation 88 pro-democracy activists), but average Burmese citizens who happen to run blogs, like Nay Phone Latt who last Monday was sentenced to 20 years and 6 months in prison for blogging.

If the military autocracy hadn’t so ruthlessly (though perhaps less brutal, given the high internet visibility) quashed the Saffron Revolution, perhaps we could nurture aspirations for a freer, more open Burma. If there is any hope of cracking a regime that asserts absolute control over the individual, the internet’s capacity for instant and global expression is it. Right now, even this seems in jeopardy.

Craig Newmark was visiting the Berkman Center today and he explained how founding Craiglist brought him to his current role as community organizer. But these are really the same, he says.

In 1994, Craig was working at Charles Schwab where he evangelized the net - figuring that this is the future of business for these types of firms. He showed people usenet newsgroups and The Well and he noticed people helping each other in very generous ways. He wanted to give back so he started a cc list for events in early 1995. He credits part of his success to the timing of this launch - early dot com boom. People were alwyas influential and for example suggested new categories etc. He was using pine for this and in mid 1995 he had 240 email addresses and pine started to break. He was going to call it SFevents, but people around him suggested CraigsList because it was a brand, and the list was more than events.

So he wrote some code to turn these emails into html and became a web publisher. At the end of 1997 3 events happened: CraigsList had one million page views per month (a billion in August 2004, now heading toward 13 billion per month), Microsoft Sidewalk approached him to run banner ads and he said no because he didn’t need the money, and then he was approached with the idea of having some of the site run on a volunteer basis. He went for volunteer help but in 1998 it didn’t work well since he wasn’t providing strong leadership for them. At the end of 1998 people approached him to fix this and so in 1999 he incorporated and hired Jim Buckmaster who continued the traditions of incorporating volunteer suggestions for the site, and maintained the simple design. Also in 1999 he decided to charge for job ads and to charge real estate agents (only apt brokers in NYC, which they requested to eliminate the perceived need to post and repost).

He has generalized his approach to “nerd values:” take care of yourself enough to live comfortably then after that you can start to focus on changing things.
Read the rest of this entry »

From his SecondLife campaign headquarters to his comprehensive technology and innovation proposal, Barack Obama exudes an familiarity with the internet rare among his colleagues in the federal government. Though always measured, Obama seems “cool” in quite a different sense when discussing tech issues, something bordering on tech geek hip. The Boston Globe has amicably remarked that Obama possesses “cyber sensibility” and his popular, though debated, position in the “net neutrality” debate (about whether internet providers can discriminate against certain kinds of data) is just one such example.

His vision of the internet as an empowering tool is matched by his populism. His plan to beef up rural broadband access has the familiar ring of FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal program designed to bring electricity to isolated Appalachia.

Perhaps more important the specifics, however, are that his ideas seem to grasp not only the current importance of technology as an interface for democracy (take his staggering internet fundraising abilities, for example), but also a more visionary projection of how the internet will make government more transparent, efficient and responsive to the electorate.

The story of how Obama tapped the internet for fundraising has by now been thoroughly covered, re-hashed and debated. It earned him unique admirers, such as the conservative columnist George Will. Will was quick to point out the irony in McCain’s complaints that Obama’s massive fundraising was distorting politics with money, when the bulk of Obama’s war chest came from donations averaging around 86$ (in September) from thousands of first-time donors. The unstated implication to Will’s remarks is that the internet, when coupled with the First Amendment right to express support for a candidate financially, actually increases civic engagement and strengthens democracy.

If the new Obama administration can follow through on their promises with the same alacrity and skill they applied to fundraising, there is much to look forward to in the future of internet democracy. Yet, as the Boston Globe noted today, there are likely to be significant obstacles and interests working against his plans as well. Rural telephone companies are likely to oppose diverting some of their subsidies to build broadband networks. ISPs such as Comcast, who have tried to limit or eliminate the taxing bandwidth usage of torrent downloads and are now fighting the FCC in court, have a vested interest in opposing net neutrality legislation.

Obama’s various “sunshine” proposals are likely to be opposed by bureaucrats and lobbyists, who no doubt will find citizen oversight of the federal government alarming. Obama has even proposed video taping meetings, making large swaths of data available and encouraging periodic town hall sessions online, so that average citizens can participate in the workings of the government, even if they live far from the shadow of D.C. In particular, the proposed grant/earmark search engine, which allows citizens to track money in Washington, is likely to find lobbyists fighting for their livelihoods.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cass Sunstein, Professor at Harvard Law School, is speaking today on Extremism: Politics and Law. Related to this topic, he is the author of Nudge, Republic.com 2.0, and Infotopia. He discussed Republic 2.0 with Henry Farrell on this bloggingheads.tv diavlog, which touches on the theme of extremism in discourse and the web’s role is facilitating polarization of political views (notably, Farrell gives a good counterfactual to Sunstein’s claims, and Sunstein ends up agreeing with him).

Sunstein is in the midst of writing a new book on extremism and this talk is a teaser. He gives us a quote from Churchill: “Fanatics are people who can’t change their minds and will not change the subject.” Political scientist Hardin says he agrees with the first clause epistemologically but the second clause is wrong because they *cannot* change the subject. Sunstein says extremism in multiple domains (The Whitehouse, company boards, unions) results from group polarization.

He thinks the concept of group polization should replace the notion of group think in all fields. Group Polarization involves both information exchange and reputation. His thesis is that like-minded people talking with other like-minded people tend to move to more extreme positions upon disucssion - partly because of the new information and partly because of the pressure from peer viewpoints.

HIs empirical work on this because with his Colorado study. He and his coauthors recorded the private views on 3 issues (climate change, same sex marriage and race conscious affirmative action) for citizens in Boulder and for citizens in Colorado Springs. Boulder is liberal so they screened people to ensure liberalness: if they liked Cheney they were excused from the test. They asked the same Cheney question in Colorado Springs and if they didn’t like him they were excused. Then he interviewed them to determine their private view after deliberation, and well as having come to a group consensus.

Sunstein found that views they liked turned into views they loved and vice versa after discussion with the like-minded. This is a shift in *anonymous views*. And also, the internal diversity in the groups’ views that existed before discussion was squelched after they meet.

Sunstein extended this by examining voting patterns of 3 judge judicial panels. Do Democratic appointees vote differently if they are on panels with all dems or with mixed panels? And Republican appointees? Depending on the subject of the case it appears the same extremism appears when a judge is surrounded by other judges appointed by a president of the same party.
Read the rest of this entry »