I&D Blog

The logic in a New York Times article that discusses concerns by Kuwaitis before Parliamentary elections that they are falling behind their neighbors economically because of their (limited, but growing) democratic institutions seems a bit off. Blaming a democratic political system for economic problems (slow growth , high unemployment, etc.) is unfortunately quite common in new or transitioning democracies. Before any election in any part of the world, the economy is often a leading, if not the top issue on voters minds. The article raises interesting and still unsettled questions about causation versus correlation between healthy democracies and strong market economies. The two go together, but are not necessarily caused by one another. Seymour Martin Lipset was one of the first to argue that wealth was a precondition for democracy. Samuel Huntington observed that poverty was probably the principal obstacle to increased democratization. But, there is a mutually reinforcing effect of a strong middle class on democracy. Look at the world richest countries and you will also find the strongest democracies–except in the oil-rich Gulf states like Kuwait. Huntington and others have argued that this democratic deficit in the Middle East is because autocrats there have been able to give citizens state-financed public goods–schools, healthcare, etc., all with low or no taxes–in return for limited political freedom. In Kuwait,the question really should be why when oil is hovering around $120/barrel, how in the world is it managing it’s economy so poorly. That sounds like poor governance and inept management of the economy, not too much democracy. Kuwaitis are among the few in the region who actually have the ability to vote out those they think are managing the economy poorly and replace them with those they believe can do a better job. If it was more of a dictatorship, the opportunity to debate the issue at all would not even be possible. It is easy to understand frustration with poor economic performance, but a bit of a stretch to blame it on democracy.

Stacy Perlman, a senior at Northeastern University, interviewed me a few weeks back for a piece on the use of Google Maps for human rights activism. The result, “Mapping Genocide: Google Earth and Darfur,” is a wonderful narrative piece of journalism, plotting the emergence of Crisis in Darfur through Ushahidi. Stacy captures the crucial crux of this issue:

 While there is no way to monitor how many people have been influenced by the map to join an advocacy group, lobby congress or donate money, a case study report on the project noted that “more than 100,000 have visited the “What Can I Do?” page on the museum’s site to find out how they can help.” The page provides a variety of ways to take a stand including contacting the media to tell them there is a lack of coverage on the issue and communicating with decision-makers such as the U.S. government and the United Nations about the need for humanitarian assistance.

While crediting the Crisis in Darfur Map as a great awareness tool, Joshua Goldstein, a graduate research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School noted that the obvious pushback to a project like this is that “at the end of the day you’re not saving lives.” Although awareness about Darfur is critical, Goldstein makes the point that awareness that leads to activism is even more crucial.

Some interesting results on global attitudes towards press and Internet freedom from a poll by World Public Opinion in honor of Press Freedom Day–including who leads the pack. The good news is that majorities around the world support press freedom. However, two countries we have been following lately, Iran, as part of our study of the Iranian blogosphere, and Russia, have relatively low levels of support compared to others. The survey says the following about Iranian public opinion towards Internet and media freedom:

“While two thirds of Iranians favor press freedom, overall their support is among the weakest. Iranians are one of two publics asked that lean in favor of the government having the right to restrict access to information on the Internet and among the few nations that feel the government should have the right to prevent the press from publishing news and ideas that could be destabilizing. However, a large majority believes Iranians should have the right to read publications from all other countries.

–A majority of Iranians (65%) agrees that it is important for the press to have the freedom to publish news and ideas without government control.

–44% support the government having the right to prevent people from having access to some things on the Internet, while 32% believe people should have the right to read whatever is on the Internet.

–A plurality (45%) favors the argument that the government should have the right to restrict the press’ freedom to publish things it thinks could be destabilizing, while 31% prefer the argument that the press should have the right to publish news and ideas without government control.

–A very large majority (79%) believes people in Iran should have the right to read publications from all other countries.

–Iranians most commonly say that the press has “some” freedom in their country (45%), while just very few (17%) say that it has “a lot” of freedom. Most say that the press should have the same amount of freedom as it does now (43%), while fewer say it should have more (34%) or less freedom (9%).”

And for Russia, equally low support in regard to government regulation of speech if helps ensure stability. According to the survey results:

“Although a substantial majority of Russians agree it is important for the media to be free to publish news and ideas without government control, it is the second smallest majority. More significantly, Russians are one of the few publics (and the only non-Muslim one) divided on whether the government should have the right to control the media in the effort to preserve stability. They are among the publics with the lowest levels of support for the media gaining more freedom than it already has.

–64% of Russians feel it is either somewhat (41%) or very important (23%) for the media to be free to publish news and ideas without government control, while 57% believe they should have the right to read whatever is on the Internet.

–Given two positions, Russians are one of the few publics divided on whether the media should have the right to publish news and ideas without government control (45%) or whether the government should have the right to prevent the media from publishing things in order to preserve stability (44%).

–71% in Russia believe that they should have the right to read publications from all other countries, even those considered enemies.

–Asked how much freedom the media currently have in Russia, the most common view is it has “some” (44%), followed by “a lot” (25%). Only 39% believe the media should have more freedom, while 33% believe it should have the same amount and 17% believe it should have less.”

And which country has the highest level of support for Press Freedom? US? UK? Sweden? Nope.

It’s Mexico.

As the poll says, “Mexicans have the largest majorities saying freedom of the media is “very important” and that the media in their country should have greater freedom. Mexico has one of the largest majorities in support of media being free to publish news and ideas as opposed to allowing the government to impose restrictions to maintain stability.”

It would be interesting to learn why Mexican support for press freedom is so high.

“Sometimes there is just nothing more you can do than report what you see.” This was Erik Hersman’s impetus behind creating a tool called Ushahidi, which allows people in Kenya to report acts of violence via mobile phones and theinternet, and have them appear automatically on an online map for others to see.

Ushahidi is a mashup, a blending of two Internet applications to relay information in a visually compelling way. Over the past few months, experimental mashups, particularly those centered on Google Maps, have emerged in an attempt gain a better understanding of humanitarian emergencies and democratic processes.

While Ushahidi is unique in allowing witnesses to report incidents of violence via mobile phone with picture or video, there are three other particularly interesting Africa-centric smashup experiments, each with a slightly different set of functions. This first is Darfur Museum Mapping Initiative|Crisis in Darfur, which is a collaboration of Google Earth and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. This platform allows the user to view professionally collected photos, video and written testimony from Darfur, as well as view images of destroyed villages and IDP camps.

Also, the Zimbabwe Civic Action Support Group recently developed the Mapping Electoral Conditions in Zimbabwe project, a map-based collection of reports of everything from voter fraud to looting to vote buying. Understanding that a crackdown from the authorities is more likely in Zimbabwe’s tightly regulated news space, this site is designed as a secondary news source, reporting only reports published by others. Finally, my friends and colleagues at Northwestern University’s Center for Global Engagement launched Assetmap.org/Uganda, which is an effort to map “ongoing community-led philanthropic partnerships in northern Uganda.”

There seems to two be two particularly compelling reasons that mashups are effective. First, reporting an act of violence or voter fraud is an act of participation in a chaotic environment. It’s a way to be a witness, and urge the world to do the same. Daudi of MentalAcrobatics writes:
“We as Kenyans are guilty of having short-term memories. Yesterday’s villains are today’s heroes. We sweep bad news and difficult decision under the carpet; we do not confront the issues in our society and get shocked when the country erupts as it did two months ago.”

Secondly, an interactive map is a remarkably effective way to tell a story. Tragic violence in Kenya’s Rift Valley or Sudan’s Darfur calls for empathy and action, but it is difficult to feel a connection with a place you can’t imagine. C.J Menard’s famous map of Napoleon’s march to Moscow is often hailed as the best statistical graphic ever made, because it powerfully represents the decimation of 470,000 troops in the frigid Russian winter of 1812. Mashups like Ushahidi and This is Zimbabwe do not claim to be statistically complete representations, but like Menard’s drawing they aim to pull the reader into a visually acute experience.

Tools like Ushahidi are created in order to compellingly present crimes that should not be allowed to face impunity. The obvious criticism, perhaps most acutely felt by those who make these tools, is that they do not actually do anything to help prevent crimes or save lives.

However, many are working to change this. Patrick Meier, a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Institute (HHI) is attempting to apply the lessons of digital activism to humanitarian early warning systems. Meier is developing a tool called the Humanitarian Sensor Web, which allows community leaders and service providers like the World Food Program to coordinate their efforts in emergency humanitarian situations. Further, the Sensor Web aims to serve as a source of collective intelligence, with a map-based database of places and events, which will help those who are responding to current crisis or planning for future security or humanitarian relief.

Needless to say, all of the tools discussed in this article are in their nascent (in web terms ‘beta’) stage, but they are evidence of an exciting new set of tools that can provide a variety of important functions, from demonstrating the need for a humanitarian intervention to actually implementing one.

cross-posted to In An African Minute. 

As covered in Sunday’s New York Times by Neil MacFarquhar, the Internet and Democracy project is pleased to release “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere”, the latest in a series of case studies aimed at understanding the Internet’s impact on the public sphere around the world. Utilizing a unique methodology that blends computational analysis and human coding, this case study investigates the contours and scope of the discussions taking place in the Persian blogosphere. John Kelly and Bruce Etling, the authors of this report, write “in contrast to the conventional wisdom that Iranian bloggers are mainly young democrats critical of the regime, we found a wide range of opinions representing religious conservative points of view as well as secular and reform-minded ones, and topics ranging from politics and human rights to poetry, religion and pop culture.”

In last week’s WaPo, Anne Applebaum writes about mobile phones in political organizing in East Asia. “That covert cellphones have become the most important means of transmitting news from certain parts of East Asia is no accident. Llasa, Rangoon, Xinjiang and North Korea are all places dominated, directly or indirectly, by the same media-shy, publicity-sensitive Chinese regime.”

She is almost certainly wrong that there is something specific to China-dominated regions that make them more amenable to using mobile phones for activism. Anyone who follows this space can immediately think of a handful of anecdotes from Eastern Europe or East Africa where mobiles have played much the same role. But is these any evidence that certain types of regimes make certain digital activist tools more useful? While there may be different kinds of government surveillance or various levels of internet penetration in different regimes, I think the fundamentals of digital activism are the same. What MIT Computer Science professor Steve Mann calls ‘sousveillence‘, using mobile technology to keep governments accountable, is useful regardless of location.

Cross-posted to In An African Minute. 

Last week, as protest rocked Tibet, the news was not only of the protests themselves but also of the role of the Internet in bringing news of those protests to a global audience. However, it was unclear whether the overall Internet story was hopeful or pessimistic. Did the Tibet case show critical weaknesses in the ability of China to control the Internet or was it just another story of oppression and censorship?

On one hand, the protests demonstrated the capacity of native and expatriate Tibetans, as well as foreign tourists, to use the Internet to get news of the protest out of the country despite the Chinese governments attempts to keep the story contained. (Chinese media - all state-controlled - paint Tibetan protests in a very negative light, which results in rampant anti-Tibetan feeling in most of China. There is a ban on non-Chinese journalists in the Tibetan region.)

It is noteworthy just how many means were used to spread the news online. From the cell phone images sent to Tibetan rights NGOs abroad (see image above) who posted the photos on their web sites to the travel blog of two Belgian tourists that became ad hoc citizen journalists and published photos, video, and text about the protest on their travel blog to mainstream news outlets like the BBC that published user-generated images, the options for ordinary people to collect and distribute news is growing ever broader.

Wrote theVancover Sun:
“During nearly 50 years of Chinese rule since the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in 1959, periodic reports of protests and violent repression have been based mainly on second-hand accounts, often well after the events. But digital technology coupled with the Internet has made it nearly impossible to seal off parts of the world where media access is closely controlled by the authorities.”

cell phone image of protests published on the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, based in India

But there is a darker story as well. China blocked YouTube over the weekend of March 14th and 15th after it became clear the dissidents and foreigners were using the service to upload cell phone videos of the protests.

While it was hard to confirm reports due to intentional limitations on the flow of information by the Chinese government, estimates range from 30 to 300 as of early this week. Web sites from outside the country, which support Tibetan sovereignty, posted reports of mass arrests and shootings in areas of China with high populations of ethnic Tibetans. The overall feeling of pessimism was summed up by the title of a Tibet post by tech mega-blog Boing-Boing’s: “Tibet: China blocks YouTube, protests spread, bloggers react”

Yet I believe that despite the tragic nature of China’s repression of the protests, the Internet story from Tibet is a positive one. These protests would have occurred with or without the Internet, but it is because of the Internet that (to the great chagrin of China) the world is now aware of what is occurring behind the Great Firewall of Chinese Internet censorship.

The Internet cannot yet stop genocide merely by shining a light on it (Internet activity around the crisis in Darfur provides another discouraging example.) But shining a light is a necessary precursor to public pressure and diplomatic rebuke.

It is harder than ever to cage information. While the Chinese government has proven very effective at preventing outside information from getting into China (outside-in control), it is more difficult to prevent information from getting from inside China out into the wider world (inside-out control).

It all depends on the freedom of the network, regardless of the point of entry. If sensitive information enters China through a savvy citizen using a proxy server, there are multiple forms of filtering and censorship on the domestic Chinese Internet which would limit the spread of that information. However, once one Tibetan sends a few cell phone images and a press release to a New York Times reporter, the whole world is watching.

Outside of China, information about the country flows much more freely than it does with China, so as soon as there is a leak of information to the outside world, the Chinese government has lost significant power over their ability to control the story. The Chinese government can control the Internet within its borders, but it cannot control the Internet in the world at large, a distinction which becomes problematic in the case of human rights abuses with an eager international audience.

The internationalization of China’s domestic human rights abuses causes a considerable headache for China, not only through humiliating denunciations by supposed allies, but also through a boomerang effect, by which international coverage of Chinese news creates unrest within other parts of the country, such as Taiwan.

Tibet showed the cracks in the Great Firewall. While the country can control the inflow of information it is far more difficult to control the outflow. Moreover, this outflow has a very feel effect on China’s relations both with the rest of the world and with its own citizens. The effects of the inside-out cracks in the firewall should give hope to those who look forward to its demise.

cross-posted on ZapBoom

The Internet & Democracy Project is interested in the democratic effects of the Internet, and thus in the Internet’s ability to empower the individual to play a more influential role in society. As has been noted elsewhere, the Internet inverts the previous political cultural hierarchy. Whereas now most of the culture we consume is created by others - books, movies, clothing, news, food, spirituality - the Internet allows everyone to create their own culture. So, if culture was created by the common man, rather than simply marketed to him, what would it look like? As of March 2008, it looks something like this:
Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight I went to a Berkman-sponsored talk by Clay Shirky at Harvard Law School o discuss his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Clay Shirky is a professor of new media at New York University, where his classes discuss peer-to-peer technology and how online social networks effect culture.

“The Internet is not a decoration on society,” Shirky begins, “it’s a challenge to it.” He claims that we are currently in the greatest period of innovation for human expression in history. He talks about the previous revolutions - telegraph, telephone, television - and points out that in the past two-way communications didn’t create groups and one-way communications did. (You’ve never heard of a telephone club, have you?) With the Internet, this is changing. “Group action just got easier”, says a Power Point slide projected behind him. “If I had to create bullet-point for my whole talk,” he says, ” that would be it.”

Why did groups form more slowly in the past? Because when you add more people to a group, there are disproportionately more connections (a group of 5 has 10 connections, a group of 15 has 105.) For this reason groups broke down. Now, maintaining these links is easier to produce. This is known as “ridiculously easy group formation,” a key attribute of the Internet. The “reply all” function of e-mail was the first truly social function of the Internet. Having a group conversation became as easy as clicking a button.

This hasn’t been revolutionary in all spheres. Shirky claims that interesting social effects only occur when a technology is deeply rooted in the culture. It is ubiquitous and even boring. All college students and all white collar workers are now online. This is when things get interesting.

Shirky describes online organization as a ladder of increasing levels of complexity:

1. Sharing

In a service like the social bookmarking site del.icio.us, sharing is primarily driven by selfish motives and collaborative structure forms above it.

2. Sharing and Conversation

Action is not coordinated in advance, but coordination can happen subsequently as people identify themselves while taking part in sharing of previously-produced content. For example, when an image made using a new photography technique appeared on the photo-sharing site Flickr, the comments stream soon became a master class in how to reproduce the technique.

3. Collaboration

At the next level of complexity is collaboration, which requires team work. One group of anime fans got together to subtitle the best Japanese anime so it could be brought over to the US. There was no market motivation. When the anime owners created their own subtitles, they tool down there own subtitled versions down. The group members simply loved anime and wanted the best of it to be more widely distributed, so they worked together to identify, subtitle, and post their favorite shows.

4. Collective Action

Collective action is the rarest and most complex form of cooperation. After a flight was left on the runway for 8 hours in 2007, airline passengers got together and forced New York State to pass a Fliers’ Bill of Rights. One passenger, Relo Hanni, started posting comments on news stories about the incident asking other passengers on the flight to contact her. Soon they began a nationwide campaign for a Fliers’ Bill of Rights. Thousands of people signed an online petition. People called their political representatives. The bill failed in Congress, but it succeeded in the New York legislature.

Shirky also gives examples of Belarussian LiveJournal users organizing a flash mob of ice cream eaters that were arrested by the police for demonstrating in the central square of Minsk. Photos of the ice cream eaters being arrested were then posted online, drawing attention to repression in Belarus.

Shirky sees collective action increasing in the future. From the standpoint of the Internet and Democracy Project, we certainly hope it does.

cross-posted on ZapBoom

One of the most promising realms of Internet & Democracy is transparency and accountability. This Tuesday, we welcomed Fernando Rodrigues, an innovative leader in this field, to talk about his work on exposing corruption in Brasil. Fernando says:

“The Politicos do Brasil is a website, the project started in 2000. We have more than 25,000 politicians listed on the site, covering the three national general elections - 1998, 2002, and 2006. Everyone who ran for office in those elections are listed (most of them). It’s a free search website. Anyone can search, look for information about any politician. And just to give you a flavor of what this is all about, in 2006, when we last updated it, it had an audience of more than 1 million unique visitors on the first day.”

See the Berkman Events blog for a complete transcript of the talk and Ethan Zuckerman for liveblogging and commentary.