I&D Blog

There has been a great deal of speculation lately, including in the British Telegraph and Boston Globe, that the military junta’s horrific response to the humanitarian crisis in Burma may lead to their downfall. As the New York Times reported, the junta went forward with a constitutional referendum to further entrench their rule everywhere in the country except in cyclone effected areas (and even there, the vote was only delayed until May 24th). Amazingly, those seeking shelter in schools or other public buildings because their homes were destroyed were kicked out by the government to make way for polling stations.

As highlighted in the OpenNet Initiative’s technical analysis of the shut down of the Internet after last year’s political demonstrations, the junta clearly wants tight control over all information that comes in and goes out the country. Their reaction to offers of humanitarian assistance from abroad is not surprising–they want to control all of it, just like everything else in the country. Most offers of assistance were initially turned down, the government has been slow to process visas for aid workers, aid that has made it through has been taken by the regime for its own use, and those that tried to distribute aid on their own have been stopped. There are now government road blocks to prevent foreign aid workers from reaching cyclone survivors.

But how realistic is it that the regime could lose power? In any political revolution, there is a flash point that raises already simmering discontent over to a boil. This often includes economic factors such as relative deprivation, food crises, and other factors that lead to demands for political change. There is something that must get the masses into the streets, and emboldened enough to stand up to the existing regime. The most recent Burmese protests were driven by plans to end government fuel subsidies, and photos and information were shared virally through the Web to increase knowledge globally about the protests and no doubt to generate international support, and possibly a level of protection for protesters.

Obviously, the situation was dire in Burma even before the cyclone. The regime appears to be bungling the relief effort and has further tarnished their already poor reputation. With such tight control of information within the country, one has to wonder if the stories of denied humanitarian aid, interference in aid distribution by the government and other examples of a severely mismanaged response are circulating within Burma as much as they are on the Internet and global press. These lead to international pressure, but the regime has been able to ignore those calls for change from outside for years. Sadly, it seems that without greater access to information internally about the regimes response to the crisis, that the average Burmese citizen will likely not be able to do much but continue to focus on survival in the short term.

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.

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.

Last Friday I went to ROFLCon, the “rolling on the floor laughing” convention. It was a two-day event organized by an enterprising group of Harvard undergrads (and sponsored by the Berkman Center) to celebrate and explore internet memes and culture.

Why is this an appropriate topic for the Internet & Democracy blog, you might ask. Although the conference was ostensibly about funny Internet memes it was really about how Internet is fueling the growth of user-generated culture - cultural democracy, if you will. Internet fame, which Berkman fellow David Weinberger discussed in his keynote address, is a perfect example of this new cultural democracy, in which ordinary people, not resource-rich broadcasters, are now able to identify a new class of famous people, redefine the parameters of fame, and otherwise re-tool the way fame operates in our culture. What will the political implications of this new citizen power be?

David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous and Berkman fellow, gave the opening keynote address at ROFLCon on Internet fame. Fame began with the broadcast system, which operated one to many. Media companies broadcast information, which we received gladly and were glad to know.

Who could broadcast - and thus who could be famous - was all cast in turns of scarcity. Very few people could afford to be in either group. Because it was an economy of scarcity, it also fed very well into a culture greed. Greed and fame go together well because fame is grounded in scarcity.

Famous people form their own special class. They have own rules. You can shoot someone in the face and nothing will happen to you. Famous people are different from us. It is all about alienation. The nervousness of seeing a famous person is a reaction to your awareness they this person is somehow above you, an elite.

But if fame is a network effect (rather than a broadcast effect), then this dynamic changes. Blogging is all about removing the make up. It is the work of a fallible human being, and the forgiveness we give a blogger for making the occasional spelling error is a form of intimacy.

A lot of online productions look like they were made by human hands. Perfection is the enemy of credibility. We once used to believe what was perfect and now we believe the reverse. Nothing can actually be perfect, so if it seems perfect that just means that the flaws are hidden. Perfection alienates us from credibility.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to a report by Al Jazeera English (see video here) Palestinian youth are using the Internet to run an informal phone bank to call voters in the US before every primary in order to convince them to vote for Barack Obama.

The organizer of the international phone-banking initiative, Ibrahim Abu Jayab, age 23, brings a group of 17 friends to a cybercafé in Gaza before every US primary to use Internet telephony to randomly call numbers in the state where the primary is being held and ask citizens to vote for Obama. Mr. Abu Jayab’s motivation for taking part in this action is that he believes that as president Senator Obama would have a positive impact on the Middle East peace process.

Given the prevalence of pro-Israel sentiment in American public opinion and the generally negative media portrayal of Palestine, it is not clear whether receiving a phone call from a Palestinian youth would encourage or discourage and American voter to support Obama, but the perspective of international phone advocacy, facilitated by low-cost internet telephony tools like Skype, presents an intriguing (and little-explored) are of digital activism.

cross-posted: Zapboom.com

Note: This post in the fourth and final post in a series on a panel, entitled “ICT and Public Diplomacy,” at the Edward R. Murrow 100th Anniversary Conference on public diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University. The first post covered the presentation of Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman. The second post covered the presentation of I&D research assistant Josh Goldstein. The third post covered a discussion of online dialogue between the “East” and “West” by Abeer Mohammad.

Eric Mullerbeck is the Senior Web Manager for UNICEF. He believe that the salient elements of the Internet and public diplomacy issue are how Internet speeds up the news cycle, facilitates the spread of video, and eliminates the intermediaries so that everyone can be a publisher.

He starts with an example from 2004, the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Because it occurred on December 26th, many Western tourists were involved in the disaster. In fact, more Swedish citizens were killed in that disaster than in any other in history, due purely to the number of Swedish tourists in the regions. For UNICEF, their web site allowed them to publish their own news, including video from the ground, and reports on how the funds donated were used. UNICEF has a news team dedicated to creating content for the site, which allowed the site to publish high-quality original content on the disaster.

The web site also allowed the public to engage directly in the relief effort. When people were looking for news, they were able to find the information they were looking for on the UNICEF site, which raised the profile of the organization. In addition, visitors to the site could donate to the cause on every page of the site. Following the disaster, there was a sevenfold increase in participation in the web site, both for information and to donate. (Mr. Mullerbeck unfortunately does not have a figure for how much money was raised online)

Mr. Mullerbeck’s second example is of the Belgian UNICEF affiliate, which created a public service announcement involving the Smurf children being killed as an anti-war message. It was captured by a non-Unicef person and posted on YouTube. Many people saw it online and found it upsetting and in bad taste. It was only because of the Internet that it was available outside of Belgium. As a result, UNICEF received critical letters asking why they had created a video which could traumatize children.

Mr. Mullerbeck says that UNICEF perhaps should have responded directly to the angry e-mails and responded to comments on blogs explaining why they felt the video was justified. UNICEF’s strategy was to respond by e-mail to all letters from concerned citizens, yet there was a fair amount of vetting up the chain which slowed down the response. His take-aways are the importance of rapid response in this media age using the Internet to engage on issues important to an organization.

Note: This post in the third in a series on a panel, entitled “ICT and Public Diplomacy,” at the Edward R. Murrow 100th Anniversary Conference on public diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University. The first post covered the presentation of Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman. The second post covered the presentation of I&D research assistant Josh Goldstein.

Abeer Mohammad is a scholar of social networks in the Middle East. She says the end of the Cold War has led to a decrease in interest in public diplomacy, and a resulting decrease in funding for such efforts. In addition, terrorists are using the Internet to spread hatred. NGOs are needed to assist governments in overcoming this public diplomacy gap.

Ms. Mohammad states that there are three elements to successful public diplomacy: a need for equal voice, a sense of commonality, and building long term relationships and trust.

She started with an example of Soliya an organization which has been organizing online dialogue session 2 hours per week between Middle Eastern, Europeans, and American university students. This young population has been chosen because they make of 60% of the Middle Eastern population. The discussions occur in an online “meeting room,” a chat room hosted by Soliya. An online white board and image viewer can be used by the Soliya facilitator to focus the discussion. Polls are also used to take short surveys of opinions. These poll often cause participants to realize the complexity of the views of the students they are dialoguing with, as difficult issues often reveal that several opinions are at play. This causes participants to start questioning the easy dichotomies drawn in the East-West debate.

How can the US government benefit from these online programs? They increase the reach of public diplomacy. This is not going to defeat terrorism, but at least we will have a presence in the online space, where terrorists are already very present. There are 180 millions young people in the Middle East, and Ms. Mohammad states that we are in a race against time to convince them not to take up the values of terrorism

Note: This post in the second in a series on a panel, entitled “ICT and Public Diplomacy” at the Edward R. Murrow 100th Anniversary Conference on public diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University. The first post covered the presentation of Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman.

Joshua Goldstein is a master’s candidate at the Fletcher School of Government, with a focus on Africa, and a research assistant for the Internet & Democracy Project. He begins with a plug for the Audio-Visual Club, a group of graduate students who meet at a bar down the street from the Fletcher School to discuss the intersection of public affairs and technology. Josh also mentions how his interest in technology began when he was part of a team using an Internet application to determine issues of land tenure in Uganda.

In December of 2007, the Kenyan elections occurred, pitting the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki against challenger Raila Odinga. When a winner was not immediately announced and Kenya fell into economic instability, technologies were used both by groups interested in promoting messages of hate as well as peace and reconciliation. One of the key groups of activists were Kenya’s bloggers.

The Kenyan blogosphere has been active since 2003, one of the most active in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are over 400 blogs in the country although the national Internet penetration is less than 10%. From approximately December 25th to January 1st there was a media black-out in Kenya, making the role of blogs all the more critical to the collection and dissemination of information. Blogs like AfroMusing, Mentalacrobatics, and Mzalendo reported and posted photographs of the aftermath.

One of the most interesting technological outcomes of the crisis was a map mash-up called Ushahidi (witness) which allowed people on the ground in Kenya to send texts and video taken via cell phone, which appear on an online map of Kenya. This kind of “mash-up,” which combine different types of media (video, text, and a map, in this case). Mash-ups are a critical new tool in visualizing data.

However, technology was also used to encourage hate. Text messages like this:

“Fellow Kenyans, the Kikuyu’s have stolen our children’s future…we must deal with them in a way they understand…violence.”

“No more innocent Kikuyu blood will be shed. We will slaughter them right here in the capital city. For justice, compile a list of Luo’s you know…we will give you numbers to text this information.”

These messages were sent en masses, hoping to stir up ethnic violence. The Kenyan government was considering shutting down mobile phone service in the country to put a hault to these incitations to violence, but Safaricom’s CE0, Michael Joseph, convinced them not shut down his network but instead sent text messages of peace and calm to its 9 million subscribers. A chat room called Mashada, however, was also shut down due to pervasive hate speech between Lou and Kikuyu.

What does this mean to governments interested in public diplomacy? If you want to influence people, get involved in networks. The online space is another public sphere, which can influence and exert influence which touches the outside world (online organizing during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which Josh has also written on, provides another key example.) There are great opportunities for engagement, though doubtless new challenges as well.

Today I am at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University to attend a panel organized by I&D research assistant (and Fletcher student) Josh Goldstein and chaired by Berkman fellow and Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman. The panel, entitled “ICT and Public Diplomacy” is part of a larger conference, the Edward R. Murrow 100th Anniversary Conference on public diplomacy. I took notes on all the panelists’ presentations but as I still need to edit the other sections, I’ll start with Ethan’s.

Ethan begins with an introduction to the Internet. There has been a fundamental shift in recent years. The ability to broadcast online, which was previously only accessible to physics professors connected to CERN, is now available to anyone. This greater access also applies to cell phones. In a recent study conducted by the London School of Economics, 79% of rural Tanzanians said they had access to a mobile phone if they needed one. (This potential access tends to realize itself at moments of political crisis.)

Mobile phones are part of a participatory broadcasting network. Ethan avers that Robert Mugabe has been unable to rig the election in Zimbabwe because mobile phones (and community radio) are the most effective forms of election monitoring. In Ghana, for example, people called community radio stations with news that voters were being prevented from voting at certain polling stations.

The Internet and mobile phones allow people to participate in politics. We have previously viewed diplomacy as being government-to-government and public diplomacy as being government-to-people. Public diplomacy has by and large been carried out by traditional broadcast media. “The trick nowadays in that everyone is a broadcaster,” says Ethan. They can work with you or against you.

Ethan moves on to an example from China (see image above). There were recently protests in Tibet, some of which turned violent. Editors at Ethan’s organization, Global Voices, read, filter, and contextualize blog content in China and other countries. Part of the content they have been covering recently are digital efforts by Chinese citizens to oppose the Western media coverage of the protests. We Just Want the Truth is a web site created by bloggers critiquing international media coverage of the protests.

There are also YouTube videos. Ethan shows a video, Riot in Tibet: True Face of Western Media, (dionysos615) which shows factual errors made by the western media, including photos of police from Khatmandu, Nepal, being mislabeled as being from Lhasa, Tibet. The the video, which has text in English, is meant to persuade the West that their media is biased, not inform a Chinese audience. Another video in English, Tibet WAS,IS,and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China, a historical polemic about why Tibet is part of China, has been viewed over 2.5 million times. Ethan suggests that it is actually nationalistic and digitally-literate young Chinese that are a critical part of this campaign, rather than some government conspiracy to oppose the Tibetan independence.

“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.