I&D Blog

Trade unionists across the globe have come together online in support of The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The International Trade Union Confederation has launched a digital mosaic, which pictures Lovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, the President and General Secretary of the ZCTU. Matombo and Chibebe were arrested on May 8th of this year after speaking out about the political violence that has ransacked Zimbabwe. The photo mosaic is comprised of the faces of over 2,000 trade unionists across the globe, who have made a public declaration of their support for ZCTU. The website that houses the mosaic calls for visitors to “spread the word”, “add your support”, and “lobby for change”, and also updates various news reports on Matombo and Chibebe’s upcoming trial.

Similar to what was done following post-election violence in Kenya, the web has documented Zimbabwe’s election turmoil and has served as an activist mechanism. We have learned how Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change utilized Google Maps in order to inform citizens of campaign rally locales and areas of violence or detention. We have also seen how Sokwanele, a Zimbabwean activist group, has made use of e-cards to get out the vote and digital photos to index violence.  Wearezctu.org is yet another example of creative digital activism, but this time it is digital activists outside of Zimbabwe banning together in solidarity with trade unionists inside the troubled nation. While we normally associate union activism with offline protest, this group is expressing solidarity through cyberspace and using digital media to convey a powerful message.

The Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews, has a video and transcript of Smart Mobs author Howard Rheingold reflecting on recent Korean protests over US beef. According to Rheingold, we need to make sure that smart mobs become smarter, and less mob-like. (You can read our earlier post for more background on the protests.)

In the video, Rheingold argues that he has been tracking events around the world where he sees the convergence of politics, political discontent and technology. He says:

…my investigation revealed what I believe to be an important stage in human development in that every time there’s a technology that enables people to communicate in new ways, whether it’s speech, the alphabet, or printing or the Internet or the mobile phones, people develop literacies. They develop ways of using those technologies in communication media to do things together.

Science, technology, democracy, knowledge. Many of the aspects of the modern world really have been enabled by the literacies and collective action from the technologies that made print and the Internet possible.

Rheingold also sees an important role for citizen journalism, including OhmyNews and its impact on the 2002 Korean Presidential election, which was one of the first Internet and Democracy case studies. Rheingold believes that with OhmyNews, its citizen reporters, editors and activist, all the pieces are in place to move from spontaneous demonstrations to movements that can actually impact policy. He believes that for protesters to have impact, there needs to be more than just mass demonstrations and protests; this is where he argues that smart mobs need to become smarter. In Rheingold’s own words:

How do you build movements? There needs to be rational, critical debate among citizens. Citizens need to use the Internet and other media to talk about issues, to use the news media — OhmyNews citizen journalism and mainstream media — and what kind of research can they do on the Internet to find out what’s true and what’s not true, and to debate policies.

Until citizen are able to do that in an informed way, and in a rational way, their demonstrations may be doomed ultimately to the kind of failure that demonstrations were doomed to in the USA [in the 1960s].

You need to be able to influence the political apparatus in a democracy, in order to have a long-term influence.

For Smart Mobs to really become smart, they may need to adapt many of the traditional, successful organizing techniques that Kennedy School professor Marshall Ganz teaches. Although others like Lance Bennett argue that the Internet and online organization may be creating new types of citizenship and totally new ways of organizing for impact, I think the jury is still out on this question. It’s more likely that some mix of ‘old school’ organizing techniques with new communication and social networking technologies will have the greatest impact. I also think we are still waiting for an example of a movement, campaign or protest that truly combines the two well enough to have long-term political impact.

In a seminar on human rights in Iran, held in San Jose last weekend, one of the panels explicitly discussed how the Internet has emerged as a major social network structure in Iranian society. The panel director, Alireza Azizi, opened the discussion by explaining the growing role and importance of the Internet among different Iranian political activists and how it has affected their social networking practices. He argued that based on social statistics, Iranians trust the information on the Internet more than the official media in Iran.

The discussion continued on how some Iranian networks have been created based on the Internet and it was argued they could not exist without this networking tool. Parastoo Forouhar argued that Internet allows new ideas and movements to break the boundaries of governments and to spread around the world. Particularly in a society like Iran, where the Government suppresses the media and social life has been limited to private platforms, the role of the Internet as an important rival platform needs careful consideration.

Soheila Vahdaty argued that the international reactions towards some of the human rights violations and arrests in Iran have been a significant constraint for governmental actions. Considering the media environment in Iran, these reflections would have been impossible without the Internet. The major advantage in these cases is that the Internet is extremely fast and networking is widespread. Once news on human rights violation is released online, the UN immediately reacts to it by contacting Iran’s ambassadors in European countries, putting the Government under pressure to consider international opinion. The Internet has been extremely effective at mobilizing international networks particularly in cases of capital punishment of children.

The panel then discussed the limitations and disadvantages of the Internet. Arsham Parsi argued that there is no control on the publication of news on the Internet and this allows for a great deal of spam and misuse of the platform for false news and statements. Azarm Fanni raised an interesting issue about how the Internet limits network activities to the virtual world. When Iranians rely on the Internet as the primary forum for political expression and protest, it is easy to forget other alternatives for dissent in the real world. This is a concern we’ve heard from a number of Iran watchers, that an unintended consequence of the Internet’s use in Iran is that it allows individuals to complain and let off steam online, inadvertently preventing action in the real world.

Posted by Mahsa Rouhi

A recent Chinese Internet Research Conference in Hong Kong has inspired much discussion about the myths surrounding the Internet in China. In his paper titled The Great Firewall as Iron Curtain 2.0, Lokman Tsui argues that U.S. communications policy towards China is still primarily based on the traditional broadcasting model of the Cold War, and the belief that freedom of information in regimes like China will eventually erode communist rule. However, Tsui warns that “our use of the Great Firewall metaphor leads to blind spots that obscure and limit our understanding of Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China.”

In traditional broadcasting systems, freedom of information and censorship are a zero-sum game: an increase in one leads to an automatic decrease in the other. But in the Internet realm, according to many empirical studies about the Internet in China, both access (the rise of the Internet population, blogging, instant messaging, and social networking sites) and control (See the OpenNet Initiative’s report) appear to both be on the rise. Although WikiPedia, Bloggers, and Typepad are blocked in China, Chinese Internet users can still have blogs, and wiki service hosts are also available, including Blogbus, Sina Blog, and Wiki.cn. However, as former Berkman fellow and co-founder of Global Voices Rebecca MacKinnon has noted, “the system that filters or blocks external websites from internal view is only one part of a complex set of mechanisms of China’s Internet control.”  The social behavior of users online is as important, if not more so, than access to information when determining the level of online free speech in China.

According to one Chinese blogger

We live in a strange society in which de-politicization and pan-politicization co-exist… The fates of certain democratic fighters have a cautionary effect on the people, who become politically indifferent. But when political incidents keep occurring inside and outside China to the point where cover-up is impossible, the repressed political demands and discontent are released and the people become politically passionate.

Unfortunately, China’s Internet surveillance and internal censorship regimes discourage and limit citizens’ online political expression. For example, many bulletin board systems do not allow individuals to discuss political issues, and many measures (such as real name registration policy) create a Foucault’s panoptic surveillance environment where participation in sensitive political discussion is highly risky. My empirical study of Chinese Internet users’ online political participation revealed that the perception of government surveillance is an important predictor of individuals’ online political expression, both in local and foreign online forums.

Although China’s online political space is limited, chaotic, and sometimes even nasty, internet scholar Zheng Yongnian believes it is enabling greater political liberalization and forcing the leadership to be more responsive to public opinion. For evidence of this one could look to Chinese President Hu Jintao  online chat with netizens via the People’s Daily online forum. He argued that “the web is an important channel for us to understand the concerns of the public and assemble the wisdom of the public.”  According to Hu’s webcast, online public opinion is considered by the government as a cooperative tool to improve the Party and the bureaucracy’s progress. In other words, China limits public online expression and the development of the Internet to the Party’s interests—not exactly a great harbinger for democracy.

However, Zheng says that most unsuccessful online movements in China tend to advocate the “exit” option (i.e. the Chinese people should exit one-party communist rule), while successful online movements tend to use what he calls the “voice” option, where the Internet provides the state with feedback from social groups to improve its legitimacy (see Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog on this topic).  Jiang Min has dubbed the public deliberation in Chinese cyberspace as “authoritarian deliberation.” Compared with the deliberation in democratic countries, authoritarian deliberation is akin to political liberalization 1.0. Min says that due to one-party rule, the goal of the deliberative process is to improve policies and create more accountable government, as opposed to Zheng’s “exit” option. Indeed, this is part of the process of political learning, where people can learn anew how to contemplate politics and make their own judgment and choice—a critical democratic process.

Sine May 2nd, South Korea has seen nearly daily protests against its new president, Lee Myung-bak, over his decision to resume imports of U.S. beef, which were suspended in 2003 after an outbreak of mad cow disease. In the history of South Korean collective action, these protests show the merger of Korea’s penchant for both the Internet and street demonstrations. Some media have dubbed this protest movement as “Web 2.0 protest,” which build off of the themes we identified in our case study on the impact of the citizen journalism site OhmyNews during the 2002 Presidential election.

Yesterday, the International Herald Tribune discussed in detail the role of the Internet on these demonstrations. When South Korea’s President Lee signed a deal in April with the U.S. to lift a ban on American imported beef, it quickly became a hot topic on the Internet among young people and lead to widespread fears of mad cow disease. In just one week, about 1.3 million students signed a petition on an Internet forum calling for the President’s impeachment. On May 2, thousands of teenagers who had networked in cyberspace and coordinated via mobile phone poured into central Seoul chanting “No to mad cow!,” igniting South Korea’s biggest anti-government protest in two decades.

After examining the increasing number of global political protests that have started in cyberspace (e.g. boycott against Carrefour in China and “A Million Voices against FARC” in Columbia), I found some interesting similarities in the process of Web protests that lead to street demonstrations.

• Online discussion forums and personal blogs are the ideal seedbed for Web protests. Internet users, especially young users, often respond quickly to current events or government policy and begin virtual petitions with alluring slogans, such as “No more FARC” and “Completely Boycott Carrefour”, on online forums or their personal blogs. These virtual petitions and slogans are quickly circulated in hundreds and thousands of online forums and blogs. After cyber protests go viral, often simultaneously stirring up people’s anger or nationalistic sentiments, it is time to stop talking online and take to the street. Cyber activists post plans and schedules about upcoming street protests on online discussion forums, and circulate such information immediately in cyberspace. For example, one media outlet has reported that many South Korean demonstrators rely on internet forums to get information on rallying points, weather forecasts and riot police presence.

• Social networking sites, Instant Messenger (IM), and Short Message Service (SMS) are tools to recruit more demonstrators among peer groups and help organize group actions and coordinate each protester in street demonstrations. For example, in the boycott against Carrefour in China, protestors, especially college students, sent short messages via mobile phone and IM to their friends asking them to participate in the boycott and distribute information about local protests. Besides, the use of IM, SMS, and social networking sites can allow for more efficiently organization of large street protests (often divided into small group actions) and also allow protestors to avoid government crackdowns. (See more cases about how social networking tools and SMS are used to organize protests)

• Camera phones, webcast, and networked citizen journalists extend the influence of street demonstrations to larger audiences, often tapping into large transnational networks. With camera phones, digital camcorders, and wireless Internet technology, demonstrators can instantly shoot and upload photos and videos to Internet sites during the demonstration. In South Korea’s protest, dozens of sites, like OhmyNews a popular participatory media web site, have been offering live broadcasts of demonstrations using videos or photos collected from volunteers with some even hiring commentators to liven up the action. The videos, photos, and stories from citizen journalists not only provide independent and (arguably) trustworthy information about protests that may encourage more citizens to participate, but also can serve to protect protesters from crackdowns by the authorities. In South Korea’s protest, a blogger suggests, “Take pictures and videos whenever police use violence or arrest people. Send the footage to OhmyNews by dialing 5055.”

Despite the positive side of young people’s passion on the Internet, we still should be cautious about irrationalism in cyberspace that may threaten online democracy (as I mentioned in my last post). Yesterday, South Korean President Lee warned that “the spread of false and incorrect information through the Internet and spam email is threatening the people’s rational thinking and mutual trust.” One political scientist in South Korea said that “In the online discussions on beef, you are welcome only if you voice a certain opinion, and you’re attacked if you represent an opposing view.” Regarding Chinese boycott against Carrefour, some media said that the young protesters are very irrational, “since there’s no proof that the French company has been part of the anti-China conspiracy”.

Lee Raine of the Pew Internet & American Life Project shared with us the results of a fascinating poll on the Internet and the 2008 Presidential election that he and Aaron Smith just completed. According to the Pew report:

In total, 46% of all adults are using the internet, email, or phone text messaging for political purposes in this election. That is the percentage of those who are doing at least one of the three major activities we probed—getting news and information about the campaign, using email to discuss campaign-related matters, or using phone texting for the same purpose.

I’m especially glad that this poll asked questions about mobilization and creation of online political content instead of just use of the Internet to read campaign news. According to the report:

Online activism using social media has also grown substantially since the first time we probed this issue during the 2006 midterm elections. Among the findings in our survey:

–11% of Americans have contributed to the political conversation by forwarding or posting someone else’s commentary about the race.
–5% have posted their own original commentary or analysis.
–6% have gone online to donate money to a candidate or campaign.
–Young voters are helping to define the online political debate; 12% of online 18-29 year olds have posted their own political commentary or writing to an online newsgroup, website or blog.

The survey also tracks the use of new tools like social networking, video-sharing sites and text messaging for political purposes. As we’ve seen around the world, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are increasingly being used to mobilize networks around causes. The poll found that 66% of Internet users under 30 have a social networking site profile, and that nearly half of them use that platform to get or share information about the candidates or campaigns.

Not surprisingly, 35% of respondents (nearly triple the amount in 2004) have watched campaign videos on sites like YouTube, no doubt including the will.i.am Obama video that went viral earlier this year, which we’ve discussed at Berkman on a couple of occasions. Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about online campaign videos, particularly less polished, user-generated videos. To me, these videos stand out as some of the best examples to date of semiotic democracy, or how individuals take cultural and political images from mass media, mash them up, and create their own culture and political meaning out of them. This phenomenon may be the most interesting but least talked about aspects of the narrative surrounding the Internet and this year’s campaign, and is emblematic of politics in the Web 2.0 era.

Further, nearly one in ten text message users regularly send or receive text messages about the campaign or politics. Like social networking, video sharing and other new tools, I expect that text messaging will increasingly be used in politics as those tools become more ubiquitous and as younger users mature into voting age. The poll argues that these younger voters are giving Democrats the edge over Republicans online. According to the report:

Young voters in our survey tend to gravitate toward the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign at greater rates than their elders, and their comfort engaging with the political world online is clearly in evidence in our survey. Online Democrats outpace Republicans in their consumption of online video (51% vs. 42%). Furthermore, Democrats are significantly ahead among social networking site profile creators: 36% of online Democrats have such profiles, compared with 21% of Republicans and 28% of independents.

Finally, I was a bit surprised (although I guess I shouldn’t be) that 60% of Internet users believe that “The internet is full of misinformation and propaganda that too many voters believe is accurate.” The majority must have read Cass Sunstein. However, 28% still say that the Internet allows them to be more personally connected to candidates and almost a quarter (22%) say they would not be as involved in the campaign if not for the Internet. It was also surprising that only 6% of Americans have contributed online, since online fundraising seems to be a much larger part of the news story in this campaign.

Check out the full survey report. We will wait anxiously for results of the next round of surveys from the Internet and American Life Project, and hope they can dig more deeply into questions about the Internet’s role in offline political mobilization.

There is already a growing narrative about the impact of the Internet on the 2008 Presidential election. For example, Wired argues that Sen. Barack Obama owes his recent Democratic nomination victory to the Internet. Noam Cohen picked up on this theme in the New York Times, writing that the themes of Obama’s campaign–“openness, transparency, and participation”–were “merged perfectly” with the Internet. Further, Cohen described Mr. Obama as the first real “wiki-candidate,” whose supporters generated video clips, created posters, built enthusiasm for the campaign, and even gently mocked him online. Most of the narrative in the press revolves around the Obama campaign, but it’s necessary to also highlight the use of the Internet by others, particularly the Ron Paul campaign, which used Facebook as their primary online organizing tool–as we discussed last month at the Institute of Politics. And it will be interesting to see how John McCain harnesses the Internet (or not). For one, he’s reached out actively to political bloggers, while Obama has not.

These anecdotes raise the question of the Internet’s impact not just on political campaigns, but also on deliberative democracy. Antje Gimmler notes that the Internet strengthens deliberative democracy in two ways. First, the Internet provides unrestricted and equal access to information. Second, it facilitates opportunities for interaction and participation. In terms of increased access to information, a recent Pew study found that nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) regularly learn about the presidential campaign from the Internet, almost double the number from a comparable point in the 2004 campaign (13%). However, the Pew study also found a growing generation gap regarding campaign news, with those under age 30 more likely to gather their campaign related news from the Internet than older Americans.

The Internet is also becoming an important platform for political participation through social networking and online video sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. Pew reported in January that nearly 10 percent of people under age 30 say that they have signed up as a “friend” of one of the candidates on a site. In the hard-fought battle in cyberspace between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, more than 800,000 peoplehave registered on Obama’s social networking website, making him the most popular politician on Facebook. Perhaps most importantly, Obama’s support in the virtual world has led to action in the real world, with more than 30,000 events organized to support his candidacy.

However, Jame Surowiecki cautions that the collective wisdom of the crowd in cyberspace might not produce the best outcome for deliberative democracy. Deliberation is essentially a procedure of open interaction aimed at achieving rationally motivated consensus through rational, tolerant, and civil interaction or debates. Cass Sunstein and many others have found that deliberative interaction on the Internet is problematic. They argue that polarized and extreme positions often dominate the online discursive space. Participants, especially young Internet users, often cannot detach themselves from their preferences, which results in a discourse of exclusion and persuasion. In the end, the ability of the Internet to improve deliberative politics and the openness of decision-making processes remain open questions.

Hamid Tehrani, the Iran editor for Global Voices, has an interesting new article on the History News Network site about anti-Semitism in the Iranian blogosphere: “Iranian anti-Semitic Bloggers: From Mickey Mouse’s Plot to Gaddafi’s Jewishness.” Hamid reviewed some 30 anti-Semitic blogs, which he sees as a subset of Islamist bloggers, that can be further sub-divided between nationalists and Islamists. Hamid also believes that these blogs have a pretty small readership. Further, he finds they all blog anonymously, are pro-government and emerged after Ahmadinejad became President.

Hamid concludes:

Anti-Semitic blogs are a small part of the Iranian blogosphere and can be considered a sub-group of Islamist blogs. These blogs show that anti-Semitism is a dynamic movement in Iran, able to combine traditional/religious, national and Western elements.

The conspiracy theories these blogs peddle reflect the trademark rhetoric associated with Ahmadinejad: denial of the Holocaust, suspicions about 9/11, claims that inflation is a Jewish plot. All of these claims have a common element: the denial of facts.

All Iranian statesmen do not support Ahmadinejad’s attitude. Former President Khatami calls the Holocaust a reality. Many Iranian religious leaders, despite their strong anti-Israel rhetoric, seldom sound anti-Semitic.

In our own Iranian blogosphere research we did not specifically look for anti-Semitism, but we noted that some blocked blogs reviewed by the OpenNet Initiative that were outside of the Secular/Expatriate cluster (the most frequently blocked cluster), appeared to be blocked because of anti-Semitic remarks.

This is a social network map of the German blogosphere, created by John Kelly, our partner on Iranian and other blogosphere studies. German blogger Markus Beckedahl interviewed John about the map and his early findings. Berkman Center visiting researcher Jan Eilhard was kind enough to provide a summary translation of Markus’s post.

This post summarizes Podcast 057 with John Kelly, the founder of Morningside Analytics and a partner for the democracy and internet project at Berkman. Presenting an alpha-version of a map of the German blogosphere, he explains how mapping the blogosphere works: They used spiders to explore 10000 German blogs and all linked pages from these blogs. In a next step a scientific team familiar with the cultural background evaluates the blogs, sorts out spam-blogs and sites that are not blogs. At the same time they also evaluate several properties of the blog and the bloggers themselves, e.g. age, gender, blog topics etc. This material is updated regularly.

The analysis shows that a lot of blogs link with mass media, e.g. spiegel.de, heise.de. More interestingly, a large number of blogs appear to belong to spam blog networks, more than in other countries. Apart from the large chunk of general blogs, two clouds are noticeable, blogs on knitting and blogs on blogsport.de. They assume that Blogsport.de involves a lot of anti-fascist sites that link to each other. In contrast, right-wing blogs were more closely related to law blogs, suggesting that readers link to both types of blogs.

Comparing this with a map of the French blogosphere [see below], they see that in France the majority of blogs are hosted on one site, canalblog.com. John Kelly interprets the different pattern as signs for different degrees of maturity. The author is looking forward to seeing more results as well as a global map of the blogosphere and ends the article with a link to Ethan Zuckerman’s blog about John Kelly’s speech from the Media Re:public conference.

And here is the French Map referenced above:

You can catch the full podcast in English at the netzpolitik blog, as well as an old interview with Berkman Faculty Co-Director Yochai Benkler.

I was pleased to see that the Foreign Policy editors’ blog picked up our research on the Iranian blogosphere. We are already off and running on our next blog research project, which will analyze the Arabic blogosphere and will use a similar methodology to our Iran study (a combination of social network analysis and content analysis). As we dig into the Arabic blogosphere, I was interested to see a post about Arabic bloggers on PostGlobal. Nicholas Noe and Maha Taki raise many of the same criticisms that John Kelly and I heard about the Iranian blogosphere–specifically, that the view of foreign bloggers is driven by media attention on a limited number of bloggers, often those who write in English and are therefore easily accessible to the Western press. These types of bloggers also fit with what the West wants to think about the Arabic (and Iranian) blogosphere–that it is full of secular democrats. As Noe and Taki write, “These bloggers are the type to which the Western media generally reaches out. Young, active, secular and opposing the authoritarian states of the Arab world, they fit well with the general rhetoric surrounding the use of the Internet for democratization.” As we wrote in our Iran study, “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.” We expect we will find a similarly wide range of opinions in the Arabic blogosphere.

Our understanding of foreign blogospheres is also clouded by the natural bias of bloggers (and most of us, to be fair) to inflate ones own importance and to interpret the world based on our understanding of one little corner of it–be it your hometown, or, in the online world, your network neighborhood. John Kelly calls this phenomenon ‘Network Myopia.’ Social network analysis of blogospheres allows us a better way to understand the shape of an entire blogosphere, and the issues discussed in it, than talking to a few ‘A-list’ bloggers.

Social network analysis also shows that most bloggers tend to read, write about and link to similar things, usually sources that reinforce their own views. This tendency to surround ourselves with those that think and read the same things is called homophily, a term originally coined by Lazarsfeld and Merton in 1954 and more recently discussed by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and James Cook in “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman has thought a lot about this recently and has a long but thoughtful post on the subject that is well worth the read; it also has several great links. Some of the most important bloggers, then, may be those that are read by more than one network formation (or social group), and that draw different groups into debates on certain topics. In terms of the Arabic blogosphere, it will be interesting to find those bloggers that link different countries together, since early mapping of the Arabic language blogosphere seem to show that different Arabic speaking countries form the largest groups in the network.

We expect to release the results of our research on Arabic blogs this summer. In the mean time, we will present our Iran research and early Arabic maps at the Networks in Political Science Conference here at Harvard next week.