My friend Andrew travels more than I do - which is a dubious sort of achievement - and with at least as much joy in his peregrinations. He tells me that one of his favorite moments is that instant where the boarding door closes, where you have to shut your laptop and power down your cellphone, and you’re irrevocably cut off from the world. For a day, a week, a month, your vacation message reads, “I’m sorry, but I’m in Timbuktu and won’t be able to get back to you in a timely fashion. Please harass my assistant/business partner/underpaid intern instead.” You are, in other words, off the hook.

I share Andrew’s joy in that moment where the phone goes silent and the wifi fades away - I suspect everyone who’s overwhelmed by demands on their time does. (And I suspect almost everyone is overwhelmed by demands on their time.) However, the signature joy of that moment, for me at least, is that I get to read everything that I’ve been saving up for the days or weeks between flights. And that’s not an option for this particular downtime.

Tomorrow morning, I’m having “23-gauge pars plana vitrectomy” on my right eye. In my past experience with less intrusive, laser-based procedures, I’ve recovered distance vision very quickly, but had a very tough time getting my eye to the point where I can read. I’ve heard varying prognoses on recovery from vitrectomy, from two weeks through six. A lot depends on what the doctor finds inside the eye, whether scar tissue on my retina has caused a tear, which would make recovery longer and much less comfortable.

My plan is to take a week off from driving and at least three off from reading. For those attending Berkman@10 - and you should, as it’s going to be a great event - I have high hopes of seeing you there (with one or two eyes) but offer no guarantees. I’m also planing on ignoring the blog and email for the duration. My wife and other friends have promised to help me keep up with incoming missives, but I offer no guarantees on my ability to respond.

Several friends have offered the wonderful suggestion that I ask blog readers to read to me during the weeks I can’t read to myself. I love the idea conceptually, but am a bit worried about asking friends to help me finish reading Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media”, for fear that nasty, toothy lawyers from Basic Books will come chasing after me. That said, I wonder whether asking if people are interested in reading academic papers would somewhat reduce the risk. I’d really love to read “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook (30 pages) and “Self-Segregation or Deliberation” by Farrell, Lawrence and Sides (26 pages) in the net couple of weeks. If you’re interested in getting together with a friend or two and recording a podcast of either paper, let me know and I’ll have Rachel send you the PDF (use the comments to leave your email address and your willingness to read…) (And for any of the paper authors - if this isn’t okay, let me know and I won’t circulate the papers.)

Thanks for all the kind words and good wishes I’ve received thus far and for any that are to come. Have a wonderful May, and hope to see/read you in three weeks or so.

My friend David Weinberger has famously observed that “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.” (Modestly, he has noted that he’s probably not the first person to make this observation.) David makes the point that fame in an internet age can be a very different phenomenon than fame in the broadcast age. When there are only three channels on the television in a nation, being famous means becoming famous to an entire nation; in the age of participatory media, we’ll see thousands of microcelebrities, people who are famous to their own small or large communities.

David is right, of course. (He usually is.) But being famous to fifteen people is a very old phenomenon, not just a very new one.

I spent last evening in the small, stuffy gymnasium of the high school I graduated from 19 years ago. Like three hundred others, I’d come back to Danbury, CT, to celebrate the brilliant fifty year teaching career of Korb Eynon. Korb was - unhappily but steadfastly - the headmaster of the school when I enrolled in 1984. By the time I graduated, he’d returned to his natural environment, the classroom, introducing seniors to King Lear. His technique included offering himself as a picture of the half-mad king in his declining years. I bet that trick works even better twenty years later.

After patiently receiving praise from five decades of students, Korb took the stage to explain, “It’s not me, it’s the institution.” Patiently - as if we were especially slow pupils struggling with iambic pentameter - he explained that he was simply “part of the Pantheon,” part of an ever-rolling stream of teachers who’d preceded him and who now follow him. He invoked their names - Hobart Warner, Joe Grover, Donald Schwartz, Aaron Coburn, John Verdery - to murmurs of respectful approval from the crowd.

Don’t bother Googling those names - they’re not famous men. This is a small school - in just over eighty years, there are probably no more than a few thousand students who’ve passed through, and perhaps a thousand who’ve shared a classroom with each of these local legends. But in that gymnasium, to that audience, those names resonate like those of biblical prophets or Red Sox MVPs. Looking around the room - my sister to my right, three of my closest high school friends to my left, the older sister of my first girlfriend seated behind me, old friends and rivals scattered about - I saw an extended family, a small tribe. There are only 556 references to Korb Eynon on Google, but to that tribe, he’s Plato, Bobby Kennedy and Carl Yastremski rolled into one.

It’s easy to think of this “new” type of fame as being smaller, less profound than the broadcast model of fame. But this older fame is more personal, more intimate and likely much more important.

Driving home late last night, I realized he’d done it again, 19 years after I left his classroom for the last time. Korb hadn’t impressed his thinking on me - he’d shared something that caused me to explore my own line of thinking. In other words, he’d taught. Just like he’s been doing for five decades. Thanks, Korb.

It’s been very gratifying to read comments and posts linking to my post last week on homophily, serendipity and xenophilia. I have high hopes of writing more on the topic, and am currently digging into “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks“, which danah boyd recommends as a thorough academic introduction to the subject. (That link will give you a summary of the paper, which is available in full text on JSTOR, a subscription-only journal archive. You may be able to get the full text of the paper if you access JSTOR from a university library… which is how I got a copy of it.)

So far, the research I’ve done has given me a sense for just how far back in time I need to go to understand scholarship on this issue… which appears to precede Aristotle, who writes about the phenomenon in Nichomachean Ethics, but who may be quoting Diogenes when he references “birds of a feather flock together”. Guess I picked a terrific time to take a month off from all reading…

One of the most exciting (for me, at least) conversations that’s come out of the post was one I had with Brooke Gladstone on Wednesday evening at WNYC’s studios in New York City. I was in NYC doing a bit of consulting for friends at Open Society Institute when I got a call from Jamie York, one of the producers of On The Media, my favorite public radio show. He’d shared my post with Brooke and they were kind enough to invite me into the studio to discuss the problems of homophily in digital media and possible solutions. You can listen to my segment on the audio player above, or on the page for our conversation. But I’d urge you to subscribe to the podcast - if you’re interested in smart, sharp, relavent critique of media around the world, this show is for you.

It was a great honor for me to be on the air with Brooke and I’m looking forward to thinking through these issues a bit more so I can speak more intelligently next time (and so I can be a bit less of a stuttering fanboy around one of my favorite public radio figures.)

• The Cognitive Age - New York Times
  Excellent piece from David Brooks trying to complicate globalization conversations with the idea that a skills revolution and an emerging “cognitive age” is more important and relavent than outsourcing of manufacturing
  (tags: globalization commentary oped economics)
• YouTube - Sami al-Hajj speaks of his Guantanamo ordeal - 02 May 2008
  Journalist Sami al-Hajj speaks to Al Jazeera after his release from Guantanamo after more than six years in prison. Worth listening to his anger and frustration with the US, as much of the world certainly will be listening
  (tags: sudan africa aljazeera uspolitics freedom guantanamo humanrights journalism)
• CJR: Prisoner 345
  Background information on Sami al-Hajj’s arrest, detention at Guantanamo and (thwarted) hunger strike - which the US government calls “a voluntary fast”…
  (tags: afghanistan guantanamo journalism media humanrights sudan africa)

• on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  Redditors - myself included - send Helen Thomas flowers to thank her for asking Dana Perino tough questions about the Bush administration’s authorization of torture
  (tags: uspolitics journalism networks)
• BBC NEWS | Technology | BBC exposes Facebook flaw
  BBC develops a simple trojan horse application for Facebook designed to grab personal details of you, your friend and send to a third party. Shouldn’t be a surprise, but disturbing nonetheless
  (tags: facebook bbc malware privacy security)
• BBC NEWS | Europe | Italy posts income details on web
  Italian Deputy Economic Minister Vincenzo Visco posts income and tax information about all Italian citizens online. Revenue transparency or phenomenal privacy violation?
  (tags: italy economics finance law privacy taxation internet)
• The real US deficit with China – knowledge | csmonitor.com
  Useful post from professor Xu Wu about American misperception and ignorance about contemporary China
  (tags: China uspolitics knowledge xenophilia)
• A Poem Dedicated to the last 150 years of this planet. ‽ Life In Motion
  Poem by “silent, silent Chinese” about frustration with Western perceptions of China: “When we were silent, you said you want us to have free speech. When we were silent no more, you say we are brainwashed racists.”
  (tags: china freespeech bridgeblogging poetry)
• YouTube - Silent, Silent Chinese
  Video version of the “Silent, silent Chinese” poem
  (tags: china poetry video youtube bridgeblogging)
• NHK WORLD English
  The foreign correspondent’s club in Beijing reports that ten foreign journalists have received death threats regarding percieved biased coverage of events in Tibet
  (tags: china freespeech journalism humanrights)
• World Public Opinion
  Survey of public opinions on media freedom finds surprisingly high levels of support for government censorship in order to maintain social stability from people surveyed in Russia, Middle East
  (tags: media freespeech journalism censorship internet)

Aden Hashi Ayro, one of the leaders of the al-Shabab insurgency in Somalia, was killed last night in a US airstrike. Seems like a) a good time for a review of the third front in the perpetual “war on terror” and b) a discussion of just who’s in al Qaeda and who’s not.

I’ve written at length about the situation in Somalia over the past couple of years. For a quick intro to the situation, you might try “Somalia: Possibly More Complex than Nigeria”. If you’ve got lots of time to kill, you could follow some of my other posts on the topic:

December 7, 2006 - UN Peacekeepers in Somalia - Is that a good thing?
December 21, 2006 - Ken Menkhaus’s insights on Somalia
December 28, 2006 - Ethiopian Army Seizes Mogadishu
December 29, 2006 - Ethiopian Liberators greeted with cheer and flowers
January 4, 2007 - A historic opportunity for what?
January 11, 2007 - A quagmire no one wants to be stuck in
June 22, 2007 - An update on the “third front”
November 19, 2007 - The possible resumption of the world’s stupidest war
December 14, 2007 - Somalia spirals out of control. Or it’s completely peaceful. Depends on who you ask.
February 18, 2008 - Steve Bloomfield breaks new ground in Somalia reporting

Or you could accept this incomplete, biased and massively oversimplified summary:

Somalia has been without a central government since 1991 - it’s been run by somewhat functional governments in northern provinces Somaliland and Puntland, and by competing groups of warlords in the south. There have been thirteen unsuccesful attempts to create national unity governments for Somalia, all of which have failed. Attempt #14 - the Transitional Federal Government - has support of the UN, the US and has been able to occupy southern Somalia with the backing of the Ethiopian army. The TFG, backed by the Ethiopian Army, supported by US military assistance, chased out the Union of Islamic Courts, a group of warlords who managed to bring some semblance of stability to Mogadishu and its environs by introducing a form of sharia law.

Ethiopia got involved because it sees a strong Islamist Somalia as a threat - specifically, it is fighting a civil conflict in its eastern Ogaden region, which shares a border with Somalia and which some Somalis see as a part of Greater Somalia. Eritrea may have gotten involved on the side of the UIC, as a way of opposing their enemy Ethiopia… with whom they are threatening to resume fighting the world’s stupidest war. The US got involved because it feared that a UIC-controlled Mogadishu would become a haven for Al-Qaeda. Got all that?

Ethiopia invaded in late 2006, with intelligence, training and logistical support from the US, rapidly routed UIC, which dispersed, a common tactic in guerilla warfare. Since then, it’s become increasingly clear that Ethiopia is trapped in its own “Vietnam”, an unwinnable guerilla war that’s sapping its strength. The US has bombed Somali targets several times with limited success. The AU is on the ground as a peacekeeping force, but only 1600 of a promised 8,000 troops have shown up. Meanwhile, violence is increasing and spreading north into previously stable Puntland.

And, in the meantime, there’s a refugee crisis in Somalia that’s at least as serious as the situation in Darfur - at least 1.5 million Somalis are believed to have fled their homes to avoid violence between the FTG/Ethiopian forces and militias like al-Shabab. Public spaces, like markets, have become extremely dangerous for citizens, as Ethiopian forces have shown willingness to shell public spaces to target militants.

So, who was Ayro, who are these al-Shabab guys, and will this latest development make things better or worse?

After the Union of Islamic Courts was ousted from Mogadishu, the alliance that had helped stabilize the city broke up into at least three forces. My friend Abduhrahman Warsame, a Somali who works in Qatar, offers this analysis:

It’s becoming clearer that Islamic Courts were only an umbrella for diverse groups each with a different agenda. One of those groups was the clan militias, led by a warlord nicknamed “Indha Adde”, who held the biggest force within the Islamic Courts, they were used to defeat the warlords allied with the US. Another group was the Islamic Courts militia, mostly militias of the powerful businessmen in Mogadishu. Then there’s the hardcore Al-Qaeda-type group, mostly Somalis who fought overseas alongside the Taliban and elsewhere, and unlike the other groups their aim was to capture the whole of Somalia. However, the leadership of the Islamic Courts were more realistic, and that’s what kept this group in-check.

One of the “hardcore” militias Abdurahman refers to is Al-Shabab, and Ayro, who analysts believe trained in Afghanistan, was one of the leaders of the militia. There’s no doubt that Ayro was an extremely bad guy, and that techniques he and followers use are similar to techniques being used in Afghanistan and Iraq. But does it make sense to identify him as the head of al-Qaeda in Somalia?

I’m guessing this question is being asked in newsrooms around the world today. The New York Times ran a story initially titled “Qaeda Agent in Somalia Killed in U.S. Attack”. It’s now titled “Key Militant in Somalia Killed in U.S. Attack“. (At present, the link above leads to a story with the first headline in the title bar and the second headline on the webpage.) The BBC story mentions al-Qaeda, but only in references to US military assertions about the target: “The US says al-Shabab is part of the al-Qaeda network, although correspondents say it is impossible to accurately establish those links. Al-Shabab leaders say it is a purely Somali movement and they deny any involvement with al-Qaeda.”

And there’s the question. If Al-Shabab is the local chapter of a global terrorist organization, attempting to train fighters to wage jihad against US interests around the world, it makes sense for the US military to target it. But if Al-Shabab is a violent, brutal, domestic terrorist organization aimed at ousting the TFG and Ethiopian soldiers from Somalia, what the heck is the US doing in the fight? Are we simply doing favors for Ethiopia, in exchange for continued military and diplomatic support? Or do we now have a policy of bombing terrorists anywhere we’ve got the possibility of doing so without the complaints of the local government? (Easy enough to do in Somalia, where the government has been installed by the Ethiopian military with US backup.)

I’ve asserted that the US strategy in Somalia represents a new form of military strategy - a proxy war, using our special forces and airpower, but the ground troops of another nation, designed to fly under the radar of media scrutiny. While this particular strike got a good deal of coverage, articles have largely picked up the “US got a bad guy” storyline and have had little speculation on the larger security and political situation.

Two stories written prior to the strike that killed Ayro might shed some light on the larger context, and might have useful predictions for the future. Abdulkadir Khalif, writing in Kenya Today, notes that UIC and Al-Shabab militias have been reclaiming territory that had been controlled by TGF forces. Other large swaths of territory appear uncontrolled either by TFG or by UIC-related forces. Khalif notes, “For many people, this has come as a surprise since few expected the Islamists to regroup and gain ground so fast. Their defeat by the TFG forces, with the help of Ethiopian troops, over a year ago seemed so decisive that no one expected the Islamists to recover in just about a year.” It will be worth seeing whether the strike killing Ayro will slow this process - if not, it’s a pretty good sign that Al-Shabab isn’t the only powerful milita fighting TFG, or that killing a single guerilla commander isn’t as relevant in winning a war many reports are making it out to be.

Nick Wadhams, writing in Time, has a stark analysis of the situation in Somalia. Though pubished before the strike on Ayro, his words may prove prescient:

The al-Shabab used to be the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union, the group of Islamic militias that had taken over towns across the country before being ousted by the Ethiopians. Now, however, they appear to be gaining power, raising fears that moderates among the Islamic groups are being sidelined. “What has been happening is the steady deterioration in the security situation and the inability of the TFG and the Ethiopian forces to contain the insurgency and impose some sort of stability,” Andebrhan Georgis, an adviser to the Africa Program at the International Crisis Group, told TIME. “I’m afraid what we’re seeing is increasing radicalization.”

That’s been a major embarrassment to Ethiopia and, by extension, the United States, which supported Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s decision to invade, on the premise that it would quell the deepening Islamic fundamentalism that seemed to be taking hold. So far, events in Somalia suggest that it has had the opposite effect, driving moderate factions of the Islamists out of the country and shifting power to the best-armed and most hardline among them.

Why pay attention to Somalia? Because this new strategy of proxy warfare may prove more dangerous, in the long run, than fighting directly. Because evidence is mounting that toppling governments is easier than building nations. Because we’re discovering that fighting guerilla armies is different from fighting standing armies. Because US actions in the world have relevance for US citizens whether they know it or not.

Chris Conley leads one of the most difficult research projects we’ve undertaken at the Berkman Center - the surveillance study of the Open Net Initiative. Over the past five years, the good folks at ONI have gotten very smart about how the internet is filtered in nations around the world. What’s much less clear is how the internet is monitored and what governments, law enforcement agencies, corporations and others are able to track as far as online behavior.

One problem: if surveillance is performed competently, it should be undetectable. Second problem: it’s often to someone’s advantage to claim that surveillance is taking place, even when it’s not, as it can change behaviors. (Think about “dummy” cameras mounted on your house as part of a fake “security system”. If they’re convincing enough, perhaps they don’t actually need to work.) Conley mentions my comments about the panopticon effect of surveillance in a recent Newsweek article - I assert that Zimbabwe isn’t able effectively monitor the Internet… but by stating that they will, they’ve forced a large number of users to remove sensitive information and conversations from the Internet.

In attempting to understand and explain surveillance to academics, activists and the general public, Conley would prefer to study what’s actually happening. Unfortunately, that data’s pretty uncommon. We know about situations where surveillance is discovered by the target and cases where information is either leaked or publicly released, but these situations are quite rare.

Instead, in many cases, we do better to study capabilities. What tools are available that individuals or governments could use to monitor networks? What tools can be used to scan a hard drive over networks? What are the capabilities and vulnerabilities of tools like GMail, Google Docs and Facebook? How is the network laid out and what does that mean about technological constraints on monitoring?

It’s been widely reported - though only very thinly disclosed - that there’s widespread domestic surveillance taking place in the US with the intention of monitoring suspected terrorists. And CALEA - the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act - provides a legal framework to enable wiretapping of traditional, mobile and VOIP phones in the US. These facts have implications for privacy, for civil liberties and human rights.

Conley wishes that those doing surveillance will consider more carefully the possibility that transparency is sometimes in their best interest. Unfortunately, that’s very counter to the ethos of the surveillance community. He quotes Ed Giorgio, a security consultant to the NSA, who says “We have a saying in this business: privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” The fear is that revealing surveillance would allow potential targets to avoid detection and monitoring. But he believes that there are cases where transparency might make surveillance more effective for the surveillers.

Transparency can raise awareness of surveillance - which might be to the advantage of a program designed to alter the behavior of people under surveillance. He notes that the effects of transparency depend on the purpose of the surveillance. Facebook, for instance, surveils your activity constantly to report it to your friends, but users really disliked it when Facebook began surveilling purchasing behavior on other sites via their Beacon program. He also suggests that transparency might need to be very specific to achieve a desired end. The RIAA can claim to surveil filesharing networks, but most users believe they won’t be caught. If the RIAA advertises that they can detect 5% of all illegal filesharing, that might be an incentive to stop sharing. But if they announce the can detect only BitTorrent sharing, that will likely drive people to alternative tools.

If Conley could influence those implementing surveillance, he’d suggest that the following types of disclosure might benefit the people performing surveillance - this is information with “limited negative effect and substantial benefits to disclosure”:

- the mere existence of surveillance programs
- the purpose of the program
- the scope of the program - is it targetting everyone, or just pre-selected targets
- third party cooperation which is nominally voluntary

There’s a complex set of legal issues that arise over surveillance in a digital environment. For one thing, there are many more channels for surveillance - systems like OnStar, a vehicle tracking system, can be turned on for law enforcement purposes. What are the legal rights for an OnStar user? What sort of US Fourth Amendment (privacy) restrictions apply to data you’ve stored online? As the project goes forward, analysis of these legal questions needs to complement research on what we know about surveillance and what might and might not be possible.

• Sierra Leone: Bio Diesel
  Wonderful post about making biodiesel from palm kernels in Sierra Leone. Via Afrigadget, Emeka Okafor
  (tags: africa sierraleone energy green innovation)
• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
  Clay gets snippy with a TV interviewer who wonders why people “waste time” on Wikipedia. Observes that TV functions as an energy sink for global minds and that if we could tap this energy, we could build 2k wikipedia a year
  (tags: attention communication culture ideas internet wikipedia television)
• Change.org
  Interesting part-time job offer for bloggers focused on social change issues
  (tags: blogging environment activism)
• Homophily, xenophilia and empathy. ‽ andrew golis
  Excellent post from Andrew Golis connecting my thoughts on homophily to Barack Obama’s talk about an “empathy deficit”
  (tags: uspolitics blogs xenophilia homophily)
• Urban miners look for precious metals in cell phones | World | Reuters
  At current precious metal prices, recycling of e-waste, especially mobile phones, looks like an economically wise activity
  (tags: environment gold green recycling ewaste)

There’s been a small but fascinating blog conversation going on surrounding the term “homophily”. Journalism and media critic Amy Gahran encountered the term in an interview I and Solana Larsen gave with Chris Lydon of Radio Open Source and explored the concept in an extended riff and a set of bookmarks. Tom, an educator living and working in Ankara, weighed in with a moving story about learning from a Guatemalan colleague. Michele Martin, an education blogger, worries that the internet as a whole is a source for homophily and may be making her (and all of us) dumber. (Here she’s pulling on some threads explored by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com and Infotopia. More on that in a bit.) And yesterday, my colleague and friend David Sasaki invoked the conversation in an important post on the difficulties of getting people to pay attention to voices from the developing world.

I love it when smart people join a conversation I was trying to get started. So here’s my attempt to flesh out a bit more of why I think homophily, serendipity and xenophilia are useful concepts, what little I know about the academic literature about them, and what I’m reading to learn more.

I was introduced to the term “homophily” through a post on Nat Torkinton’s blog titled “Homophily in Social Software“, which led me to an excellent piece by Shankar Vedantam titled “Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You“.

“Homophily” is a remarkably useful term, a compact word that succinctly expresses the idea that “birds of a feather flock together” - that you’re likely to befriend, talk to, work with and share ideas with people who’ve got common ethnic, religious and economic background with you. It’s not a new word - it was coined by Lazarsfeld and Merton in 1954 in an essay titled “Friendship as a Social Process” - but it’s never quite caught on. A Google search for the term gives you 51,000 results, roughly as many as my favorite obscure, Greek-derived sociological term, “xenophilia”. (One of the high ranking results for “homophily” is an interesting question on Yahoo Answers with the unhelpful answer, “Homophily does not exist as a word although homophile (gay)does.”

I’ve been talking and writing about homophily as one of the concepts that helps explain the challenges and issues that surround Global Voices and my larger media attention work. It’s my contention that living in the 21st century requires understanding what people think, feel and want in different parts of the world, given that both the challenges and opportunities of next several decades are global, not local ones. (Understanding Iraqi attitudes towards a US occupying force and Shia/Sunni/Kurdish tensions better might have mitigated the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Understanding Chinese and Indian economic aspirations is probably a prerequisite to figuring out how to regulate carbon emissions while those nations embrace automobile ownership. And activists trying to change Chinese policy in Darfur would benefit from better understanding of Chinese pride, the concept of “face” and the power of nationalism.)

Historically, our understanding of attitudes and opinions in other cultures is a heavily mediated one. As Kwame Appiah elegantly outlines in Cosmopolitanism, it’s only in very recent times that most people have been able to directly encounter people from different parts of the world. And despite air travel, most Americans have an impression of Nigeria through newspapers, movies and 419 emails rather than from travelling to the country or spending time with Nigerians. We understand the world, for the most part, through what we hear about it, not what we encounter of it. To the extent that our understanding of the wider world is a poor one, it’s worth asking questions about our media is working correctly.

There’s no shortage of voices reporting a crisis in the world of journalism. In 2001, media critic David Shaw reported that foreign coverage had shrunk “70% to 80% during the past 15 to 20 years” due to economic and cultural factors. He quotes a 1998 study from UC San Diego which saw international news coverage in American newspapers shrink from 15% to 2% of total content. More recently, Alisa Miller - president of PRI - produced an elegant short video that graphically depicts the paucity of international news coverage on American television.

(News isn’t the only way we encounter other countries - movies, television and music shape perceptions as well. But journalism has an explicit public service function, a social responsibility to inform citizens so they can make political decisions. Some of the blame for an isolated, ill-informed citizenry has to fall on the news media.)

The shift from broadcast media to read/write media has the potential to shift this equation. Rather than encountering people through the filter of professional media, perhaps we can reach them directly through their blogs, videos, photos. (This isn’t always possible - the digital divide is very real, and I’d argue that many of the arguments I made about digital exclusion in “Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower” still hold.) We no longer need to wait for CNN to connect us with people and stories in Bangladesh or Brazil - the explosion of personal publishing means that someone is likely speaking up in those corners of the world.

The rise of the read/write web turns the problem of paying attention to the rest of the world from a supply to a demand problem. You can find Brazilian, Bengali and Bulgarian voices, but only if you bother looking for them, stumble across them or are led to them by creators and curators of content.

This new “digital disorder”, as David Weinberger describes it, requires new systems to make navigation possible. Some systems rely on trusted guides, editors who we trust to help us sort through the mess. (Think BoingBoing and the crew who man that ship, or any prominent site capable of driving traffic to smaller sites.) Others rely on collective intelligence of their users to suggest stories - Digg, Reddit, etc.

The systems that rely on network effects, as Torkinton points out, are deeply affected by homophily. (So, as it turns out, are the systems based on human editors.) Some of these systems ask you what stories you liked, then find others who liked those stories and recommend their favorite stories - this is a technique called “collaborative filtering“, and it’s become increasingly popular as a paradigm for navigating a complex, choice-rich world of media. You can see how CF could be a homophily trap - tell Netflix that you liked the film “Sneakers” and it will find you other people who liked “Sneakers” (most of whom are, like you, ageing computer geeks), and suggest other films they liked. The recommendations you’ll receive are likely to be good, but are less likely to be surprising and challenging.

Systems simpler than CF fall victim to homophily traps as well. A site like Reddit attracts a lot of young men who work technical jobs and lean to the left politically - rely on Redditors for your news and you’re unlikely to encounter many stories from the developing world, from the political right, from non-technical disciplines. (Yes, I’m writing in huge, sweeping generalizations here - comments pointing out a single Africa story on Digg to refute this aren’t especially helpful.)

Why is homophily a trap? Cass Sunstein argues that it can polarize us - in Infotopia, he cites a study he helped conduct that demonstrates that deliberation of political issues with like-minded people leads subjects to a more politically polarized stance. From this, and from a close reading of political polarization in the blogosphere, he argues that the Internet may make it easier for us to share information with likeminded individuals, and that in a political context, this could be a bad thing.

I’ve made a much less persuasive and elegant argument summarized by the aphorism “Homophily can make you stupid.” My argument, basically, is that it’s possible to miss huge trends, changes and opportunities by talking solely to people who agree with you. I use myself as an exemplar of this sort of stupidity - I found myself so baffled by the results of the 2004 US Presidential election that I invited Republicans to come have a beer with me to explain what they were thinking. (One did. Thanks, Ian.) If homophily is capable of misleading Americans about local politics, just imagine what we fail to understand about Egypt, Pakistan and Fiji by virtue of not consuming media recommended by people from those places?

Writing from an engineering perspective, Torkinton suggests that authors of social software need to first decide whether homophily is a feature or a bug. If the goal of an application is to broaden your information universe, homophily may be a bug, and designers may want to include “less relevant but also likely to be interesting” recommendations. He recommends framing this as a feature, searching for ways to deliver “serendipity”, which he defines as “pleasantly surprising the user”.

(”Serendipity” is a fascinating term. It was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, a prolific British novelist and correspondent. He referenced a Persian fairytale, The Three Princes of Serendip, referring to a set of characters who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” While that definition - and, indeed, the story cited - don’t precisely map to current usage of the term, Richard Boyle offers a long essay tracing the coinage of the term and feels that Walpole’s invention was the definitive first use. “Serendip”, incidently, was a Persian name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Always nice to discover that a concept like serendipity has global origins.)

Serendipity is harder than it sounds. It’s one thing to surprise someone - it’s another to surprise someone helpfully. It’s even hard to define - lately I’ve been arguing with David Weinberger about whether certain examples constitute serendipity. Looking on a library shelf for a particular title, discovering it isn’t particularly interesting, but discovering the exact book you need nearby? (Fortunate, but also a consequence of the power of a topical organizational system.) Finding a newspaper story you never would have searched for but found very useful because the editors put it on the bottom of the front page, in what Dan Gillmor has called “the serendipity box”? (Again, very fortunate, but hardly surprising that editors would drive readers to less-read content.)

The reason serendipity is important to consider is that it’s one of the few affirmative ways to get people to pay attention to news from the developing world. I’ve argued that there’s three basic paths to get people to pay attention to, say, Somalia:
- Fear: There’s no government there, and there are lots of angry Muslims. If we don’t pay attention, we’re ignoring the next hotbed of terrorism
- Guilt: People are dying there. If things get out of hand, you might see Ethiopia slaughtering large numbers of Somali. Let’s not ignore another Rwandan genocide.
- Greed/Opportunity: Sure, it’s a mess, but did you know that Somali Telecom is making a fortune in the north of the country?

These arguments always put me in the mind of Melissa Rossi’s book, “What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World“, a book which seems to be designed solely for people who are embarrased at cocktail parties when countries they can’t find on a map become topics of conversation. My guess is that avoiding embarrasment is not an especially powerful motivator for engaging with international issues and opinions.

I’ve argued for some time that a different model exists - xenophilia. There are people in the world who are genuinely fascinated by the very breadth, complexity and difference of the world. Many of these people are “third culture kids”, people who were raised in one country but “from” another country. Others are people who live, work or love outside their home cultures. My colleagues at Global Voices are, for the most part, people identifiable as xenophiles. I think there’s an argument to be made that xenophiles are uniquely equipped to thrive in a globalizing world and that cultivating xenophilia should be both a personal priority and an aspect of a nation’s educational and diplomatic strategy.

But xenophilia’s hard. It’s one thing to say to oneself, “I really should pay attention to matters in Somalia” and another thing to do it. Joi Ito has talked about “the caring problem“, the difficulty of really caring enough about people in another part of the world to engage with news from that community. At Berkman, we’ve been discussing the problem in terms of broccoli and chocolate - you know you should eat broccoli because it’s good for you, but there’s just so much tasty chocolate out there!

Serendipity breaks the chocolate/broccoli paradigm - it gives you broccoli as you’re searching for chocolate, adn it turns out to be just the right thing at the moment. It doesn’t require you to identify as a global citizen - it just means you’re following your interest in sumo wrestling and find yourself discovering a debate about Japanese identity and Asian politics.

So… that’s more or less an outline of the ideas I’m wrestling with right now, trying to figure out if they might represent the outline of a book. Specifically on the questions of homophily and serendipity, I’m interested in these questions:

- Do people who are ethnographically/psychographically similar consume the same media? Where’s the causality in this? Do we both read the NYTimes because we’re both liberals, or are we liberals because we read the NYTimes?

- Does consumption of the same media lead to the polarization Sunstein sees in deliberation, or is that a feature/bug of the deliberative process?

- Is homophily in terms of bridging and bonding social capital? If so, is Putnam right that bowling leagues create bridging capital? (There’s a lot of middle aged white dudes in my bowling league.) What do institutions that create international bridging capital look like in an internet age?

- How do you create serendipity? Is this something that’s algorithmically possible in collaborative filtering systems or other recommendation engines? Is serendipity a function of breaking out of your existing, homophilic social circles, or is it better generated within those circles?

On my immediate reading list:
Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks, by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook
Lazarsfeld and Merton’s essay introducing the term “homophily” in Freedom and Control in Modern Society, edited by Berger, Abel and Page, 1954
Putnam, both Bowling Alone and his recent, worrying research on trust and socioethnic diversity

Would love your suggestions, directions, critiques and feedback, both from people already in this conversation and those who’ve been watching from the sideline.

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