Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
The Velveteen Rabbi and I are very pleased to announce the (closed alpha) release of our new joint project, drewzuckerman.com.
Andrew Wynn Kwame Zuckerman, born 12:44 AM, November 28th, 2009 at Berkshire Medical Center. Mom and baby are both well, and Dad is very tired and very proud.
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I’ve opened a lot of lectures lately – presentations about our Media Cloud research at Berkman – by complaining about the New York Times’s Africa coverage. I cite the fact that Japan tends to average roughly 8-10 times as many mentions in the paper of record than Nigeria in any given year, which is odd, given their comparable population size and importance. (I also mention that the Times is not alone – all US media outlets I’ve studied closely show this pattern – and that the Africa stories the Times runs are frequently excellent.)
If the Times is undercovering Nigeria, the same can’t be said for their recent coverage of Equatorial Guinea. One of the most fascinating and dysfunctional corners of the African continent, Equatorial Guinea is a couple of tiny islands and stretch of coastline between Gabon and Cameroon slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. The country is occupied by roughly half a million people, most of them extremely poor and a small number who are obscenely wealthy, as the islands of Equatorial Guinea sit atop massive oil fields. Much of Equatorial Guinea’s oil output is exported to the US – 132,000 barrels a day – making Equatorial Guinea the third-largest sub-Saharan exporter of oil to the US (behind Nigeria and Angola).
While oil wealth may help explain the Times’s interest in Equatorial Guinea (six stories this year, as compared to two this year on its vastly larger neighbor, Cameroon) – I’ve made the case in the past that American media attention tracks national GDP more closely than population – the Times’s focus may have more to do with another natural resource: absurdity.
Equatorial Guinea is, simply put, one of the most absurd nations on the planet. It’s not just a kleptocratic dictatorship run by a man who is arguably Africa’s worst ruler – it’s a staggeringly wealthy kleptocratic dictatorship. The CIA’s world factbook estimates per capita income for 2008 at $37,300, making the average Equatorial Guinean wealthier than the average Dane.
This wealth doesn’t seem to make the lives of the nation’s citizens much better. The image above is from Hans Rosling’s amazing Gapminder, and it shows the “development” of the country over the past two decades. The nation’s gotten dramatically wealthier in those years – the GDP per capita has increased by a factor of ten – and infant mortality has increased. Generally speaking, this doesn’t happen – infant mortality is much lower in wealthy nations than in poor nations. But Equatorial Guinea isn’t rich – it’s a nation where most citizens are desperately poor and a very small number are staggeringly rich.
Because there’s so much oil money in Equatorial Guinea, people periodically have the clever idea of overthrowing the government and installing a new one that would, gratefully, share future oil profits. Frederick Forsyth wrote a gripping novel that reads, more or less, as a blueprint for overthrowing Equatorial Guinea with a small force of professional missionaries. Some have alleged that Forsyth’s book was the result of his involvement in planning an attempted coup in 1973 – Forsyth admits he knew the coup plotters and that he passed money to them, but claims that his involvement with the plans were merely “research”. A more recent coup – The Wonga Coup in 2004 – allegedly used Forsyth’s novel as a planning document. The Wonga Coup involved South African mercenaries, Zimbabwean arms dealers and Mark Thatcher, the son of Britain’s former prime minister. It was one of the more absurd stories of the past decade, and it’s possible that we’ll finally get the complete story of the coup attempt now that the organizer, Simon Mann, was released from an Equatorial Guinean jail. (Not all the coups are quite this literary in nature. There’s no evidence that the 16 coup plotters arrested earlier this year were Forsyth fans – more likely, they were members of the Niger Delta resistance movement, MEND.)
A rich country with radical underdevelopment, a country so ripe for plunder that people read novels to plan coups? Not absurd enough for you? Okay, so here’s this – Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue is Britney Spears’s neighbor. Mr. Obiang is the son of the aforementioned kleptocratic dictator, and his shrewd management of his $4000 a month salary as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forests has allowed him to purchase a $35 million estate in Malibu, California, a Gulfstream V jet and a fleet of luxury cars and speedboats. The US Justice department reports that Obiang the younger pilfered an estimated $73 million from the EG treasury between 2005 and 2006 and moved it into the US.
As the New York Times reported this weekend, the strong evidence that Obiang is systematically looting his nation’s treasury hasn’t prevented him from getting US visas and visiting his estate several times a year. So why does Obiang get to play in Malibu while Robert Mugabe is forced to live it up in Hong Kong? According to the US State Department officials quoted in Ian Urbina’s New York Times story, the answer is simple: Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, while Equatorial Guinea does.
Urbina’s story is an example of advocacy journalism at its best. Armed with research conducted by Global Witness, a leading pressure group focused on increasing transparency in resource-rich countries, Urbina points to rules bent or ignored by two US government departments, the possible complicity of two US oil companies and the role played by a prominent Washington PR firm as the EG government’s paid apologists.
So what?
When I started working with Open Society Institute, I was introduced to the phrase “theory of change” by a colleague who persistently (and, usually, very helpfully) insisted we unpack the logic behind any project we were considering funding. What did we want to accomplish, in the long run, and how would this project advance those goals?
So what’s the theory of change behind Urbina’s story? There may not be one – Urbina saw a fascinating and provocative story and used the platform provided by the New York Times to share the tale. Even if that’s true, the folks at Global Witness who provided Urbina with the documents to make this case had a theory of change – a belief that a story in a prominent newspaper would lead towards a policy change in the US government, or increased support for their campaigns for transparency in resource-extracting nations.
Perhaps the US State Department will be sufficiently embarrassed by the Times story to change their visa issuing practices. Perhaps some of the readers of the Times story will be grateful for Global Witness’s research and support their work. (You should – they’re an extremely responsible and credible organization doing important work.) I’m interested in the question of how a New York Times reader, agitated and motivated by Urbina’s story, would take the information she received in the story and move towards constructive action.
Global Witness doesn’t make it especially easy for individuals to involve themselves with campaigns, except as donors. Their webpages on corruption in oil, gas and mining and on banks and corruption include lists of the organization’s laudable achievements, their publications and their partners in advocacy. They don’t include a call or action or participation beyond encouragement to donate.
Would Global Witness benefit from a Facebook group dedicated to convincing Secretary Clinton to deny Obiang a visa? A petition demanding that Equatorial Guinea hold free and open elections? Probably not. They’re making a bet that the way to influence a government like Obiang’s is to operate at intergovernmental levels, providing actors within the State department with information and impetus to act.
Here’s the rub: information alone is insufficient to provoke action. In “A Problem from Hell“, Samantha Power unpacks the history of genocides in the 20th century and the reaction of governments to these systematic mass killings. Pointing out that Clinton administration wasn’t unaware of the genocide taking place in Rwanda, just unwilling to act, Power argues that governments only act to prevent genocide in reaction to consistent, relentless citizen pressure. Given the reasons not to act against Equatorial Guinea (the fear of driving EG to oust US oil companies and invite in Chinese ones, for instance), it’s reasonable to believe that merely informing and embarrassing the State Department won’t accomplish anything, without building accompanying citizen pressure.
So let’s reexamine the idea of the anti-Obieng Facebook group. My friend Evgeny Morozov argues that a great deal of online activism can be best characterized as “slacktivism” – it’s a symbolic gesture, a fashion statement, not an action that could lead towards real change. The examples he offered at a talk at Ars Electronica were, to me, compelling ones – a Facebook group dedicated to “saving the children of Africa” with 1.5 million members and a total of $8,449 in donations; a psychology experiment in Denmark that demonstrated people’s willingness to sign onto an online protest against an imaginary injustice. Evgeny worries that such online activism isn’t just ineffective – it leads to social loafing, where people get less involved with actually saving the children of Africa because they see a group of likeminded individuals and assume the collective effort will solve the problem.
While I find Evgeny’s argument compelling, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s countervailing dynamic at work. During the June 2009 protests over the Iranian elections, there was a burst of online activity as people moved by accounts of the protests looked for ways to offer solidarity and support for the activists on the ground. Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location information and time zone to suggest that they were in Tehran. They joined Facebook groups, shared links to the Neda Agha-Soltan video, donated USB keys to load with censorship circumvention software and send to activists, and opened proxy servers to offer Iranians an uncensored path to the internet.
These efforts weren’t effective in overturning the Iranian election results or leading to a popular revolution in the country. That might reflect their ineffectiveness – it’s unclear that the greening of Twitter would strike fear into Ahmedinejad’s heart – or the fact that the current Iranian state is powerful, well-organized, controls an experienced security apparatus, and has support from many Iranian citizens. I’m wondering if they were effective in another way – they allowed people with no personal connection to Iran to feel like they were part of the events. This feeling, in turn, may have encouraged individuals to pay closer attention to the news in Iran than if they’d been non-participants.
I’ve got no data to support this theory, just an anecdote or two about friends who compulsively aggregated Iran information on twitter, and a quote from Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others:
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they” – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.
If the inability to act makes us bored, cynical and apathetic, is it possible that doing something – even something that’s ultimately ineffective – could keep us engaged and compassionate? If so, is there an interplay between action and information-gathering that could turn a story into a movement that builds public will?
I read Urbina’s story. I get pissed off, and start researching other articles on Equatorial Guinea, which I post to Twitter and Facebook under the #eqguin tag. I encourage others to do likewise and to propose actions we might take to persuade the State Department to ban senior Obiang regime officials from traveling to the US. We start online petitions, a postcard campaign to the State Department and keep twittering links to the #eqguin tag… which becomes a trending topic, prompting journalists to declare a Twitter revolution in Equatorial Guinea. Witnessing our vast public will, Secretary Clinton declares that the State Department will enforce anti-corruption legislation and stop issuing visas to Obiang’s family. We promptly start a campaign to pressure CNOOC not to take over the leases that Obiang cancels with Exxon and Marathon in response to Clinton’s decisions.
A blueprint for turning knowledge into action and into will, or a fantasy? I’m not sure. (I am sure that it’s a blueprint that smart advocacy organizations are starting to try to implement, which makes the efficacy of the strategy an important topic to study.) I’m watching a debate between Evgeny and academic/activist Patrick Philippe Meier on this topic, centering around Evgeny’s recent article in Prospect magazine, “How dictators watch us on the web“. Evgeny makes the case that the rise of participatory web technologies has benefitted repressive governments as much as activists, who often aren’t able to use these technologies effectively; Patrick respondsby repeatedly asking “so what?”, arguing that Evgeny doesn’t have the data to prove that online activism is effective or ineffective. (Evgeny’s response to Patrick seems to agree on only one point – no one’s got the data to answer these questions effectively.)
Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition? I’ve been making the case for years that Americans (and likely people in many developed nations) don’t get enough information about the developing world, and that this lack of attention has consequences for developed and developing nations. If Americans don’t hear about an economic boom in Ghana, they don’t invest… which slows the boom, costing Ghanaians growth and costing Americans business opportunities in a growing economy. Similar dynamics apply around aid, humanitarian and security intervention, export of physical and cultural products.
A couple of years back, I realized that this was a supply problem, as much as a demand problem – journalists want to write about the developing world, but they and their publications have little evidence that their audience wants to hear these stories. Without evidence of reader interest in the developing world, it’s hard for most publications to support the research and travel that goes into creating these stories. If action (useful or otherwise) and newsseeking behaviors are linked, starting a movement may be a way to aggregate demand for a story, and encourage more reporting like Urbina’s story.
So get pissed off and start a Facebook group. Launch a Twitter hashtag. Translate compassion into action. But realize that the most effective action probably involves aggregating and disseminating information, building knowledge and awareness that’s an asset even if it doesn’t lead directly to political change.
And help us – me, Evgeny, Patrick, the Berkman Center, and everyone else studying this phenomenon – think about how we can bring data to the table and test some of these questions. Is online activism effective in bringing about political change? What mechanisms and tools are effective? Does the ability to take action increase and sustain interest in a topic? Does action need to have political effect to sustain interest? Does increased interest lead to increased media attention, and does that attention lead to real-world change? What sort of data and experiments do we need to move these questions beyond anecdote and theory and into testable propositions?
Brian Lehrer, the moderator of WNYC’s excellent morning show, has been kind enough to invite me onto his show all month long, appearing every Thursday morning. It’s been a somewhat insane month for me to participate. As Rachel explained on her blog, the last few weeks of her pregnancy have been a little tricky and scary, and I ended up doing one of our interviews from the parking lot of the local hospital. Rachel’s well and home today, and I have high hopes of broadcasting shows with Brian today and this coming Wednesday before she goes into labor!
When we discussed what we might want to cover in our segments, we outlined half a dozen topics in international development. But as we’ve started talking on air, we’re hovering around my topic du jour – how the Internet can help make the world a smaller place. After looking at Meedan, a wonderful project designed to enable conversation between English and Arabic speakers (disclosure – I’m an advisor to the project) during last week’s show, we’re going to look closely at Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog today and how Obama’s visit to China was covered in the Chinese blogosphere.
Eldoret, Kenya at night. Photo by Joshua Wanyama
Brian has asked me to give his listeners homework assignments, asking them to look at sites before the next show. Next week’s conversation is going to be about dialogs regarding rebranding Africa, and the homework assignment will be Joseph Wanyama and Sheila Ochugboju’s remarkable site, AfricaKnows.com. Joseph is a brilliant photojournalist and many of his photos of contemporary life in Kenya are complemented with poems from Sheila. Collectively they give a picture of Africa that’s likely to surprise and challenge people who don’t know the continent well.
Hope you’ll tune in. And thanks for the opportunity to engage with your listeners, Brian.
Warning! Professor Bowles’s lecture was rich in economic jargon, and I’m not an economist. And it had an unusally high idea density. It’s quite possible that I missed large swaths of what he was saying and misinterpreted what he did say. If something here seems obviously wrong, please use the comments section to gently correct me.
Yochai Benkler introduces Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute as his “intellectual hero” referencing his ability to apply a completely different set of intellectual tools to problems, switching tactics each decade. The target of Professor Bowles’s thought is “the weightless economy”, and his talk is titled, “Kudunomics – Property rights for the information-based economy”.
The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.
Bowles suggests that we may gain some insight about the evolution of institutions under these conditions by studying the reverse transition: by studying the transition from the late Plioscene forager economy, where weath was difficult to own, to agrarian and industrial economies, based on ownership. We can study this by “running history backwards” with an agent-based model of the weightless economy. We understand the forager economy fairly well due to ethnographic research, and we might gain insights about the governance of this emergent weightless economy from studying governance dynamics in forager economies.
Bowles offers a model of wealth where the wealth of a person is the sum of network wealth, embodied wealth and material wealth. He puts exponential weights on these types of wealth in a Cobb-Douglas production function. He plots different types of economies in a triangular graph, showing their wealth in terms of these three different dynamics – material, network and embodied wealth. Recent economies based on the domestication of plants and animals concentrate in the material corner, while older economies cluster around the network wealth – embodied wealth axis.
Network wealth is the contribution made by your social connections to your well-being. This could be measured by your number of connections, or by your centrality in different networks. A simple way to think about this is the number of people who will share food with you. Embodied wealth is a combination of what you know and how strong you are. It measures factors like hunting prowess and grip strength. Bowles asserts that we’re moving from a history where network and embodied wealth mattered more that material wealth – we briefly (for about eight thousand years) moved into a world of embodied wealth, and now we’re moving back.
Smith’s invisible hand theorem suggests that “good fences make good neighbors”. Smith’s complete markets have certain characteristics:
- The effects of the actions of economic actors take the form of contractual exchanges.
- The cost of contract enforcement is low and handled by a third party.
- Increasing returns to scale are absent and small. This is important because it maintains competition.
Under these assumptions, goods will be priced at their marginal cost, which will equal their true scarcity. Price moves towards marginal cost, which also equals social marginal cost. This isn’t just false in a weighless economy, Bowles tells us – it’s proveably false.
In economies of grain and steel, you could weigh, fence and contract. To find examples of these classic Adam Smith markets, you actually need to go to the developing world and look at grain markets, in which homogenous goods are traded in competition by using simple forms of measurability, weighing grains out in tin cans.
These markets aren’t a good analogy for contemporary economies. Instead, we’re more likely to see economies where first copy costs are extremely high and marginal costs are low. The first copy of Windows 97 cost $50 million. The second copy cost $3… and it can be copied for even less. Generic drugs sell for about half the price of brand name drugs. For some drugs, the ratio is closer to 10 to 1. When copying costs are low, enforcement of property rights is difficult… and ultimately irrational. Intellectual property rights are a way of forcing a violation of the invisible hand theorem. You allow someone to charge $20 for a CD whose marginal cost is $0.85.
The market structure of the economy of grain and steel exhibited a mixture of competition – approximating Smith’s ideal – and stable oligopoly: the emergence of a small set of succesful, competing firms. Network externalities – the economies of scale on the side of demand – tend to lead towards a winner take all dynamic. Take the decisions inherent in deciding to speak a second language – if lots of other people learn how to speak Chinese, there’s a strong incentive for you to learn Chinese.
In the weighless economy, positive feedbacks and winner-take-all dynamics are very important. Those who get ahead will tend to stay ahead. They don’t need to be the best, just first and good enough. This dynamic tends to generate significant inequality – whether we’re considering pop stars or dentists. Private firms can’t confirm to the price equals marginal cost theory – marginal costs are much less than average costs because of the increased first copy costs. And property rights become both ambiguous and difficult to enforce.
In other words, the invisible hand isn’t working in a weightless economy. It might be time to look back to the Pleistocene.
Bowles has hunted with the Hadza people in Tanzania – he reassures us that he didn’t actually kill anything. Actually, that’s pretty common. The Hadza hunt kudu, an animal which contains about 160,000 calories. These people have no refrigeration, so it’s hard to eat your kudu over a month. And even very good hunters are lucky to kill a kudu once a month – there’s about a 3% success rate for a hunt. So when you get a kudzu, it needs to be widely shared. Something like 2/3rd of the calories are shared outside the nuclear family – Bowles watched roughly 60 people join a small set of hunters for a feast on the kudu they harvested.
The culture of the foraging band emphasizes generosity and modesty. There are norms of sharing. You depricate what you catch, describing it as “not as big as a mouse”, or “not even worth cooking”, even when you’ve killed a large animal. In the Ache people of Eastern Paraguay, hunters are prohibited from eating their own catch. There’s complex sanctioning of individually assertive behavior, particularly those that disturb or disrupt cooperation and group stability. This makes sense – if hunters can’t expect that they’ll be fed by other hunters – particularly by a hunter who suddenly develops a taste for eating his own catch – the society collapses rapidly.
Mobile foraging bands and accompanying collectivist and egalitarian norms were displaced by a society based around property rights, made possible through the domestication of crops and livestock. Initially, this domestication probably reduced individual human productivity… but it increased land productivity. This led to an idea that you should define a set of resource as yours and invest in those resources. This idea preceded states – they were enforced by interpersonal conflict, not by third parties – but the system became more efficient in a system with strong state actors.
As Smith speculated in “The Wealth of Nations”, the property rights revolution contributed to the wealth of states. It emphasized unambiguous ownership of land and resources. But now the most important resources – information and ideas – are difficult to own, risky to pursue, and wasteful if not shared. Strong property rights might not be the best strategy for allocating resources in this environment.
Bowles references Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”, where Diamond explores the challenges of domesticating individual plant and animal species. “Is a song or an application more like a cow or like a kudzu – something that will simply cause trouble if you try to tie it up near your house?” This question leads to the phrase “kudunomics”, which has a nice resonance with “kudonomics”, reflecting the fact that the economies of hunter-gatherer societies were reputation economies.
Information, suggests Kenneth Arrow, is a fugitive resource. There are contradictions between private property and information acquisition and retention. In this sense, Arrow is replicating Marx, and his recognition that “information was what allowed us to appropriate nature.”
Studying changes in institutions is hard. In history, we rarely encounter changes as large as the French revolution or the end of Chinese foot binding. Instead, we’d do better to build agent-based simulations. Bowles and his group at Santa Fe are building Markov process models to try to understand the dynamics of this hunter/gatherer-pastoralist transition. It’s a hard problem to solve as a system of equations. There are events outside the model, and a complex interaction of group and individual selection processes. The feedback of a society on individual decisions is non-lineral. Because we can’t easily solve the equations, we build models and watch them instead.
Watching these models, we discover that they’ve got multiple equilibria. In economic terms, what’s goint on is an equilibrium selection process, watching societies transition between multiple equilibria in a system.
Bowles’s model (which you can download and run on a Window machine) looks at three different strategies for coping in an economy:
- Bourgeois – if you’re in posession of an item, defend it
- Share – Share and don’t punish those who don’t share
- Civic – share and jointly punish those who don’t share
The civic strategy succeeds if there are lots of civic members in a group. If there are very few, they tend to fail. This is one of the dynamics which leads to multiple equilibria in a system. The bourgeois strategy is stable (an asymptotically stable symmetric Nash equilibrium) if property rights are well defined. But if property rights are ill-defined, the bourgeois stragegy is no longer evolutionarily stable.
The simulation introduces costs for conflicts between “firms”, groups of individuals which share a strategy. Because there’s a cost to conflict, firms that resolve conflicts without much expenditure of energy are going to outlast those that spend resources on conflict. Individuals within these firms are paired with cultural models drawn from a group of possibilities, conveye by “conformist transmission”. Individuals might simply draw from neighbors, or might compare how others are doing and change strategy. Losing groups are not eliminated – instead, they lose resources and tend to adopt the cultural model of the winning group. Individuals who are in losing firms will have a strong tendency to adopt the strategy of winning firms.
In these simulations, some fraction of the time, a bourgeois player will challenge someone over a resource he doesn’t own – i.e., he’ll attempt to steal it. Because of this, if there are very few bourgeois, civics will do well, and vice versa.
It turns out that simulations where all actors are bourgeois are stable. The two strategies where sharing is involved are equivalent if there are no bourgeois actors. A smiluation might drift between sharing and civic strategies without outside influences. As a result, All C (civic) is not a stable equilibrium – it’s subject to drift. And all B (bourgeois) is not stable if property rights are not well defined.
With Jung-Kyoo Choi, Bowles built models with 25 firms of 20 individuals. They were randomly seeded with S,B,C actors and run with different levels of property rights. The property rights are varied by changing how often bourgeois actors challenge ownership incorrectly – to simulate high ambiguity in property rights, bourgeois actors challenge property rights incorrectly quite often. Actors in the simulation go through a cultural learning process – someone in a minority could choose a model in the majority.
If you run the simulation with no ambiguity in property rights, there is rapid consolidation around B as a strategy. We watch a live simulation, and Bowles points out that “the ‘equilibrium’ is actually pretty volatile – we watch societies cluster around b-heavy strategies. As ambiguity increases, we see an emergence of strategies that orbit between the civic and shared poles – societies appear to go through rapid revolutions, shifting from one set of societal rules to another. An all-shared equilibrium is more efficient because there’s no cost for enforcement, but it’s not a stable state, as previously discussed.
Bowles points out that the evolutionary success of the bourgeois equilibrium depends on property rights being unambiguous – he shows a curve of experimental data where stability tracks ambiguity in a cubic relationship.
As we consider evolution of institutions in the weightless economy, we know of at least three forms of economic governance: communities, states and markets. Markets allocate resources well in conditions where the individual hand applies. States have superior powers of enforcement, which allow for powerful civic strategies. And as Elinor Ostrom has pointed out, communities can handle ambiguity of property rights, but tend to fail where inequalities between members are large.
Hayek’s work questioned the efficiency of central planning versus that of the market. At the center of that question is information – in societies where information is easily available, central planning might be very efficient. If it’s harder to acquire information, markets can act to aggregate that information. To govern in these systems, you can either adjust prices to get an equilibrium or collect sufficient information to engage in efficient central planning. Ostrom suggests that we need different mechanisms to govern by communities.
Bowles closes by reminding us that societies need to support high levels of information creation. We need incentives to provide these resources in the first place. But there’s a paradox: Why do hunters hunt if they have to give it away? In the Ache society, hunters aren’t allowed any of what they catch – they could spend their hunting time harvesting fruit and tubers. Why don’t they? This question has important implications for the creation of information resources in a weightless economy.
David Weinberger has a good accounting of the questions and answers that followed Professor Bowles’s talk – I largely missed the Q&A, desperately trying to catch up with the substance of the talk!
Who pays for content and services on the internet?
My friend Bo Peabody thinks we should be asking not just whether ad-supported journalism is feasible, but whether ad-supported social networks will work. In a Washington Post op-ed titled “Twitter.org?“, Bo leverages his experience founding and running Tripod.com to suggest that social networking sites are misunderstood as content sites, and won’t be profitable as ad-supported properties. He suggests that, because these spaces are critically important digital public spheres, we should consider supporting them as nonprofits if necessary, but shouldn’t expect them to sustain themselves based on advertising. As I look more closely at Bo’s thinking, I’m concerned that advertising may not be a viable model to support anything other than search online, and that systems we are increasingly reliant on may be supported by the shakiest of foundations.
Bo may not be right that social networks need to become nonprofits – I’m interested in communities where participants are willing to pay for membership (see Dreamwidth or Metafilter as examples), or communities that might thrive via an alternative revenue stream (see Brian McConnell’s suggestion for how Skype could run a highly profitable Facebook or Twitter and generate more call traffic in the process.) But I’m increasingly convinced he’s right that advertising is a lousy way to support social network sites.
Internet advertising works extremely well in the context of a search engine. Many searches are intended to lead to transactions, so matching a paid ad to a query is sometimes a good user experience. Advertising can work well in the context of niche content – a website focused on cross-country skiing is a great place to advertise to cross-country skiiers, and there’s a decent chance they’re going to be interested in learning about your ski wax. Ads on sites like Facebook work much less well, and while targetting those ads based on demographics may make them more effective, that targeting doesn’t fix the core problem: people are using social network sites to communicate, not to consume content, and they don’t want to be bothered by ads when they’re communicating.
The good news – for users annoyed by ads, not for advertisers – is that we appear to learn very quickly how to ignore online advertising. comScore, a company that monitors user behavior on the web for advertisers, reported in 2007 that only 32% of internet users clicked on banner ads in a given month. By 2009, that number had fallen to 16% of internet users, and that a core 8% of all internet users – “Natural Born Clickers” (yes, that’s what they called the studies) – are responsible for 85% of all banner clicks on the web.
There’s at least two ways to spin this finding. comScore, which exists to provide information to advertisers and would be out of business if people stopped buying online ads, uses this data to make the case that advertisers should stop obsessing over clickthrough rates:
“The act of clicking on a display ad is experiencing rapid attrition in the current digital marketplace,” said Linda Anderson, comScore VP of marketing solutions and author of the study. “Today, marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact.”
Anderson may be referring to this study by Gian M. Fulgoni and Marie Pauline Mörn, which finds a modest increase in users visits to an advertised website based on being exposed to that site in banner ads, even if they didn’t click them. The argument is a traditional advertising one – you can’t know whether that particular billboard led a customer to find you, but we know that exposure to ads builds your brand, so buy more billboards. And you may or may not be surprised to learn that Fulgoni is the co-founder and CEO of comScore.
There’s another response to the clickthrough study: ask yourself whether you, personally, ever look at banner ads on the web. You probably don’t – you’re “banner-blind“. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen uses this term to explain a wealth of eye-tracking studies that illustrate web users’ almost uncanny ability to sift through a webpage and focus only on the parts that contain actual content. (He’s reported on this behavior since 1997.) Nielsen concludes that web users are so good at avoiding paying attention to ads that the only way to make an ad banner effective is to be deceptive and disguise it as content. At the same time, his studies suggest that search ads – ads that are sometimes helpful to users – aren’t filtered out in the same way.
comScore’s study suggests we – collectively – may be becoming more banner-blind over time. If only half as many users click banner ads as did two years back, we might conclude that those users have learned how to ignore banners in the interim. If comScore would release demographic data on the 8% who are inclined to click, we might be able to confirm these suspicions. If those 8% are new internet users, it suggests a future internet with mature users too savvy to pay attention to most forms of advertising.
In the meantime, here’s a thought, this one from danah boyd – anyone building a new, ad-supported social network is building a business on that 8%. Assume for the moment that I’m right and that those 8% are the newest and most naive users. We’re at 74% internet penetration in the US – there just aren’t that many new users who can come online and click those ads. Instead, that 8% may well represent new users from other parts of the world, where internet penetration is much lower and where new, naive users are still coming online.
Companies like Facebook aren’t planning the future of their business around these users. As Brad Stone and Miguel Helft pointed out in a New York Times article, “In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit“, some social network sites are beginning to question whether they’ll be able to continue providing services to users outside the US, Europe and other markets they perceive to be lucrative. The article points to efforts at MySpace and Facebook to provide lower-bandwidth products for developing nations, both to improve user experience and to cut costs in serving these markets. It’s possible to imagine a future in which Facebook, strapped for cash, focuses on providing services only to users their advertisers are interested in reaching. Technorati recently relaunched their blog search engine with a near-exclusive focus on English-language content, de-listing prominent non-English blogs – my guess is that the change reflects advertiser demands.
Internet users all over the world have access to a vast array of powerful publishing and communication tools. While some premium users pay for access to these tools, the vast majority do not. Whether we believe these tools can lead towards more transparent and democratic governance, or whether we’re skeptical of such cyberutopian ideas, it’s clear the internet would be a very different place if these tools weren’t available for free. If Facebook weren’t free, it would likely be orders of magnitude smaller… which would increase exclusivity, but lose some of its utility as a powerful tool for reconecting with lost friends. It would include fewer users from developing nations where credit cards are significantly less common. Optimised for membership revenues rather than for ad views, it would be a deeply different place.
Revenue models have a deep impact on digital spaces. Why’s Twitter growing so fast? My guess is that it’s because the founders are following the traditional social media playbook: attract a ton of users, promise to monetize them through targeted advertising, sell the company to a larger one for billions and never confront the difficulty of monetizing that ad space. We can imagine a different Twitter, one that decided to focus on digerati and first-movers – that space might have used invitations to control access or membership fees to limit growth. It would be less ubiquitous, more exclusive and have a different utility curve. Or consider a company like Demand Media, which publishes more that four thousand articles and video clips a day, all intended to answer commonly asked questions on search engines and create targeted advertising inventory. We tend to think of the Internet as a place where questions are answered by random people all over the world, organized into a useful collection by Google. What if those questions were answered hastily and poorly, all by the same company, through content commissioned for $20 a video? Demand Media focuses on the business model first, and appears to be positioned to reshape the biggest internet space of all – the search and content space – in the process.
Fernando Bermejo sent me a paper of his, “Audience manufacture in historical perspective: from broadcasting to Google“, which suggests that researchers have a “blind spot” when it comes to considering the power of revenue models in media environments. He references a debate, sparked by Canadian social scientist Dallas Smythe, who suggested that communications research overfocused on the cultural side of communications and didn’t pay enough attention to the economic dimensions. Fernando worries that we’re doing the same thing today, ignoring the pervasive influence advertising has on the contemporary internet environment.
I suspect he’s right. We’re far more likely to discuss peer production, open-source models or collaboration at the Berkman Center than we are to discuss how advertising might shape the future of Facebook. I spend far more time trying to figure out how activists are finding clever ways to use social media and how those uses may be shaping these tools that I do considering how ad models are shaping these tools. “Blind spot” is putting it mildly
In our defense – it’s hard to study advertising. The data’s hard to get – it’s carefully controlled and tends to be released with large price tags on it, while participatory media projects tend to release usage data and welcome analysis. And researchers tend to be biased towards what we’re inspired by – I’m fascinated and inspired by independent and citizen media, so I pay attention to them, even if most of the use of social network tools is for communication, not for media publishing,
What if the social internet as we know it is being built on sand, on ads that almost no one looks at now and fewer will look at in two years? What if we’re optimizing tools for advertising audiences that don’t exist and turning aside models for social media built on membership fees or premium services? What if my assertions and speculations are wrong, and advertising’s a sure-fire way to build the social web?
I’m realizing that I (and probably anyone studying social media) need to understand at a much deeper level how advertising really works, because it shapes the systems I study, the systems we increasingly rely on. We need to know who those 8% of users who were “born to click” are, and we need to think about what happens if they stop clicking.
My colleague Hal Roberts has been hard at work on a fascinating research question: where in the world are the websites we pay attention to? It’s an important question for his work on surveillance – if most of the popular sites for Chinese audiences are hosted in mainland China (they are), then surveillance doesn’t have to occur at the edges of the national network, but within China.
The question is critical for my research, too. I’m interested in whether we’re more or less cosmopolitan in an internet age than we were in earlier media ages. One proxy for cosmopolitanism could be the ratio of domestic to international news sites that are popular in a given country – we might consider a country that looks abroad for news coverage to be more cosmopolitan than one where most media attention is focused on domestic sites.
For both of our research, we need really good data on global language distribution. It appears that country that acts as a center for a global language, as China does for Chinese, or France for French, will tend to have a higher degree of locality than a country in a language’s periphery (Algeria for French or Taiwan for Chinese). To test this – and to see if it’s hiding other factors that explain our data, we need to know how many people in a given country are fluent in a given language. And we need to know, or be able to calculate, what percent of a language’s speakers are located in one country or another.
Hal’s been discovering that this is really tough data to get. The CIA World Factbook has data for about half the countries we’re interested in, and we need data for all. Ethnologue is focused on mother tongues, which leads to weird distortions in the data. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in Tanzania speaks Swahili, less than 5% speak it as a mother tongue, so it shows up as a minority language in Ethnologue’s data. Wolfram Alpha seems to have what we need… but you’re banned from scraping Alpha, and there’s no source for their data, which leaves us very reluctant to use it. The data on Wikipedia isn’t especially helpful – it’s largely extracted from either CIA or Ethnologue, and not well footnoted.
I’m posting the question in the hopes that one of the brilliant folks who reads this blog might have a line on a data set for us, or could pass this query to someone who does. We need information on who speaks what where, what percentage of a language’s speakers globally are in a particular country, we need to know the source of the data, and we would greatly prefer to work with open data. If you’ve got any leads, please post ‘em in the comments, or drop me a line. Thanks in advance.
Dan Gillmor offered an observation a few days back about the challenges of being both fast and being correct in the world of journalism, suggesting a need for “slow news“. I got an email earlier today that reminded me that it’s not just news reporting where speed can trip you up – it gets those of us in the world of journalism criticism as well.
I subscribe to Columbia Journalism Review’s excellent cjr-press list, which distributes highlights from the CJR.org site every day. Today’s dispatch included this provocative-looking story:
“The Fort Hood Massacre: Be first or be right? Greg Marx measures the ripples of a story that a Texas paper ran with secondhand info that turns out to be wrong
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/when_is_news_fit_to_print.php”
I got that email at 12:34. At 1:07, I received one that read, in entirety:
Dear reader,
Our earlier e-mail message about this story said that the secondhand information in question turned out to be wrong. That is not accurate.
Apologies,
The editorsThe Fort Hood Massacre: Be first or be right? Greg Marx measures the ripples of a story that a Texas paper ran with secondhand info
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/when_is_news_fit_to_print.php
Oops.
The essence of Greg Marx’s story was the observation that Barry Schlachter Shlachter in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram broke news about Nidal Malik Hasan’s beliefs by talking to Kamran Pasha, who didn’t know Hasan, but knew a friend of Hasan’s. “In other words, the Star-Telegram hadn’t actually tracked down a close friend of Hasan’s—rather, it had found a novelist who said he had spoken to this unidentified friend, and had decided that, at least in this case, a bit of journalistic telephone passed muster.” Marx’s story goes on to suggest that the Star-Telegram was making a serious error in reporting information collected through such a long and unverified chain:
There are good reasons, after all, that newspapers don’t regularly run with unverified material, which run from the outlandish (Could Pasha have been fabricating this unnamed officer?) to the more prosaic (Is there reason to be skeptical of Hasan’s friend’s credibility? How might his words have been distorted in the retelling? Would his account have changed if reporters had been able to interview him directly?
Kamran Pasha, the “novelist” in question, jumped into the comment thread of Marx’s piece, to point out that he’d interviewed the unnamed solider for the Huffington Post, that he was an experienced journalist and hardly merited the level of skepticism raised in Marx’s piece. And he mentioned that the connection he’d reported between Hasan and Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaki has now been confirmed in other media, adding to his credibility.
What I’d love to be able to do is compare the current version of Marx’s story with the one that originally ran. The current story steps right up to the line of accusing the Star-Telegram of running a story that turned out to be false: “It may turn out, in this case, that the departure from normal journalistic standards did not result in inaccuracy—certainly, the picture painted by the Star-Telegram story jibes with the emerging portrait of a deeply troubled individual who was driven, at least in part, by extreme religious beliefs.” I don’t know whether the original story – distributed with the headline “Greg Marx measures the ripples of a story that a Texas paper ran with secondhand info that turns out to be wrong” was more directly accusatory. But the current story is a weird artifact – it’s sharpened to make a point – second-hand sourcing leads to inaccuracy – that appears to have been broken off in the current version. Or perhaps the article is unchanged, and it simply implied that the Star-Telegram had reported false information so strongly that the headline writer misunderstood.
There’s a great way to address these sorts of questions – use a Wikipedia “history” model, so readers can consult earlier versions of a published article. One of the reasons no one reads newspaper corrections is that they’re literally unreadable – they’re paper hyperlinks to an earlier day’s edition, which means they’re useless unless you keep a stack of papers around to correct after the fact. We can do so much better in a digital age – we could correct, while linking to the earlier version, and we could offer a blacklined version of stories to show how they were edited and changed. It would be unobtrusive for readers who didn’t care to see the earlier versions, and we’d avoid questions of libel by making it clear that the earlier edition had been corrected and was not for citation.
Until this feature becomes widely supported in publishing platforms, CJR did the next best thing – a visible, public correction. They should have shown the uncorrected story as well. And, of course, they should have been significantly more careful to have their ducks in a row before criticizing the Star-Telegram for failing to have their ducks in a row.
(I realize in writing this that I’m almost certainly getting something wrong which will force me to issue an embarrasing correction once confronted by CJR.org. At the very least, I’ll use strikethrough tags so you can watch me eat crow.)
A footnote: after ammending the headline on the article to a less inflamatory version, CJR acknowledged another error in their story: they misspelled Mr. Shlachter’s name throughout. They’ve corrected their error and, to their credit, added this note of explanation:
“The original version of this story misspelled Mr. Shlachter’s last name. The incorrect spelling was taken from the byline as it appeared on the McClatchy DC site, where the embedded link above leads. The byline is spelled correctly on the Star-Telegram’s version of the story.”
Marx has now weighed in on the comment thread and states that there were no additional changes to the story, beyond the spelling correction, the altered headline in the email blast (which he explains as the result of internal miscommunication) and a link at the top of the story to Pasha’s response in the comment thread.
Another note – told you I’d be editing this post for weeks to come. Marx clarifies that the article on CJR – including the headline – was not altered. The email I received contained an incorrect headline, and that headline was ammended with a subsequent email. The changes made to the story involved correcting a spelling error and linking to a piece of the comment thread.
I maintain that it would be great idea if we could examine versions of online news stories so you could flip through the story on the CJR site, rather than wading through my footnotes here. :-)
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