I wrote about the pricing disparities between print and online media a few weeks ago, curious why my local newspaper was able to charge a $45 CPM for advertising inserts, while top websites are able to charge a fraction of that sum for highly targeted leads. Commenters on my site and elsewhere suggested a variety of explanations, from speculation that online advertising simply doesn’t work very well (an explanation I find pretty unsatisfactory) to the observation that my newspaper has a pretty effective monopoly in delivering timely sales information to my neighbors (a much more believable explanation.)
Jeff Jarvis points to a story in today’s Wall Street Journal that helps me understand the disparity in pricing – and efficiency – between online and offline advertising. Baylor Health Care Systems, a large Dallas-based NGO, compared the effectiveness of three ways of finding job applicants – web-based ads placed on search engines, ads on job boards, and ads in newspapers and magazines. The results were pretty stark:
In the first six months of the program, Ms. Bouthillet says, the search-engine ads delivered 5,250 applicants, at an average cost of $4. By contrast, Baylor paid an average of $30 for each of the 3,125 applicants who came via job boards, and $750 each for the 215 applicants who replied to a newspaper or magazine ad.
Baylor’s experience isn’t the only point of comparison between search and print advertising. A UPS recruiter points to an online campaign that yielded great response for part-time drivers and sorters, at roughly a fifth of the cost of conventional advertising. This advertising, the article points out, is geographically targeted – Baylor might only be looking for Dallas-area hires, and UPS needs to hire drivers in specific areas. In other words, it’s precisely what local newspapers have traditionally been good at… and there’s every indication that it’s cheaper to deliver job candidates via Google.
It’s worth noting that one reason that online job advertising works is that so many job hunters are online – the first bit of advice many laid off employees are receiving is that they need to get online to seek new opportunities. No one’s telling my neighbors that they need to get online to get specials on tangerines at the local supermarket – once they’re online and supermarkets are targeting them via Google rather than via the Berkshire Eagle, that newspaper is in a lot of trouble.
To be clear, I’m interested in following this issue not because I want to join the pack of bloggers calling for the death of newspapers. The point I tried to make in my earlier piece was that the model that made high-quality journalism possible in a print age – local and national advertising – is probably not possible in a digital age. Yes, publications (mine included) need to find ways to monetize online attention, and that almost surely means selling ads online. But it’s unrealistic to hope that online advertising is going to yield even a fraction of what print advertising continues to yield. The numbers above from the Wall Street Journal suggest that online advertising can be 200 times as efficient as print advertising, which implies that online advertising may only yield a tiny share of the revenue we’ve grown to expect online.
In other words, we should be watching projects like Mother Jones very carefully. Nonprofit news models are one of the possible ways we’ll continue to afford to produce difficult journalism, and one of the few that’s proven itself. Syndication models, like the model of GlobalPost, are exciting, but I’m not convinced that newspapers that are in financial trouble will continue to pay syndicators for content.
The ugly truth is this – we know we need good quality journalism and we don’t know how to pay for it. My contention – it’s probably not going to get paid via online advertising, as much as I wish it would be.
Reports from friends in Zimbabwe suggest that the country is now largely disconnected from the internet. Utande Internet Service has a useful update dated March 5, 2009 – I reproduce it here in full so you don’t have to visit their site and further stress their servers:
Most of Zimbabwe relies upon two possible ComOne provided paths for data traffic flowing out of the country. At around 10:30 pm on Monday 2nd March the most important of these links, a 17 Mb/s Intelsat connection shown as GlobalConnex on our live Internet Weather Report, ceased operating. We are reliably informed that it was disconnected for non-payment of account but have no official word on this from ComOne.
As a result, the only outbound route available is through the 6 South African connections of 2Mb/s each. Unfortunately these microwave links have for a long time been unreliable as they are frequently affected by load shedding. Thus, when these SAIX links are down e-mails will not flow in to nor out of the country. Browsing to sites outside Zimbabwe, or outside the .zw name space is not possible either.
…. and when they are up the nation has only 40% of normal outbound data capacity.
Our systems remain fully operational but have been under stress at times from the accumulation of mail waiting for onward delivery. We have taken measures to ensure that local mail is delivered as efficiently as possible. However, international mail flow will remain a challenge and you are urged to avoid sending lengthy or unnecessary mails to reduce the impact this national problem has on the flow of important and useful messages.
As at 7am today there is no mail backlog.
We have been given no indication of when normal service will resume but past experience suggests it could easily drag on another week or more. We are also investigating alternative bandwidth sources but given the requirement that ComOne be the only gateway out of Zimbabwe this may prove difficult to achieve. In addition, alternative bandwidth of our own will not resolve the problems caused to the .zw namespace as seen from outside Zimbabwe and will not provide complete relief.
A further update will be available here as and when the situation changes.
What’s amazing is how little this has affected the news sources I use to follow the situation in Zimbabwe. While the government’s official newspaper, the Herald, is “Temporarily Unavailable” according to their otherwise inaccessible website, opposition newspapers like the Zimbabwe Times are hosted in South Africa or off the continent, and are fully accessible, reporting important stories like the aftermath of the USAID truck crash that killed Morgan Tsvangirai’s wife, Susan. (Tsvangirai has been working hard to dispel rumors that the crash was anything other than an accident.) Activist sites like Kubatana and Sokwanele are both up, and their blogs are being regularly updated.
My guess – the folks at Kubatana and Sokwanele are updating the blogs via email, posting at night when links are less congested. But I may be wrong about this – Sokwanele’s recent posts include images, and Kubatana’s are pretty link heavy, implying web browsing as well as posting. That said, other friends in Zimbabwe have reported via email that it’s virtually impossible to browse and that they’re limited to sending emails in the middle of the night.
One way or another, I continue to be amazed at the resilience of my Zimbabwean friends, in the face of incredible challenges. It’s amazing enough that people are finding ways to find food and water for their families in the current circumstances – to find ways to update the rest of the world on the situation in this country despite these obstacles is pretty incredible. I hope a recognition of the sacrifices Zimbabweans are making to communicate their circumstances and struggles might motivate more people to pay attention to what’s going on in the country.
In early March, we all go a little crazy here in western Massachusetts. It’s been snowing since November, and there’s no guarantee that it will stop until May. In March, local stores start advertising “cabin fever” sales. Local families attempt to sell themselveson eBay. We’re all looking for an excuse to get out of the house, and more or less anything will do.
Looking back through some old photos this evening, I realize that March is my best month for photography. I seem to react to cabin fever by engaging in my favorite hobby: milling.
Milling is a variant on a phenomenon some call “urban exploration“. We don’t have too many urbs around here, but we have a wealth of beautiful abandoned mills. Milling involves finding ways into these mills and photographing them. This, in turn, involves driving around looking for promising looking mills, scouting them out and returning with milling gear (steel-toed boots, good flashlights, reflectors to bounce light, cameras, tripods…)
So I was scouting yesterday afternoon when I came across an utterly beautiful collapsing mill in the south side of Troy, NY. I started following back roads to get closer to the buildings, and was stunned to discover that I was able to drive up to some of these hulking wrecks, climb out and start shooting photos – generally, milling requires you to park a truck and hike into sites, climbing fences, crossing railroad tracks, wading streams. I shot photos with my phone until my battery ran out and drove out… straight into the parking lot of the Rensselaer county jail.
Looking for an access road that didn’t take me past a couple dozen of Troy’s finest, I discovered that the site I’d been exploring was blurred out on Google Maps. I’d read about sensitive sites – like the Vice President’s house or Dutch military bases – blurred out on Google Maps. I’d read enough on the issue to know that this probably wasn’t Google’s fault – some government authority had approached a satellite imagery provider and demanded that a feature be obscured. And I quickly discovered that the same site was unblurred on Yahoo Maps, though not available at the level of resolution that most of Troy is on Google Maps.
Still – this was the first time I’d found myself at a location in the real world that was invisible to Google Maps. Why would someone so carefully obscure this area, leaving the jail’s basketball courts visible a few hundred meters away? And if it was so important to obscure it, why was it so easy to get into?
The ease of entry is pretty easy to explain. Based on the site is an electronics recycling company called eLot. The eLot folks are in the business of disposing of old computer hardware, televisions, comact fluorescent light bulbs, and the other detritus of our digital age. While they probably don’t get a whole lot of walk-in business, they do maintain a store, where you can pick up desktop computers for $59, or old Cisco switches. While they’re not open on Sundays, the site is open so that trucks full of dead televisions can be offloaded.
So why’s a publicly accessible site blurred out on maps?
Here’s my guess, based on a little 19th century history, and a bit more recent history. The site I was exploring (and intend to explore again, just as soon as I can find a better way in) is part of the Burden Ironworks. Built by Scottish inventor Henry Burden, the Ironworks harnessed the flow of the Wynantskill creek towards the Hudson river to power an automated horseshoe making machine. The machine was a wonder of the industrial age, and featured the largest vertical water wheel in the world, a 250 ton beast that produced 300 horsepower.
The Burden Ironworks converted from water power to gas in the late 19th century, and the wheel was abandoned in 1890, collapsing about twenty years later. From what I can tell from old maps, the northern part of the Burden complex has evidently been razed and replaced with the Rensselaer county jail – the southern part, which features the gas boilers, is still partially standing, and is the facility I began exploring. I’m looking forward to visiting the Burden Ironworks museum, which stands in the facility’s former office building, at some point soon – as it’s open by appointment only, that might require a bit of planning.
There’s a move to renovate some of these historic industrial structures. At least, there was. The Rensselaer Iron Works, just up the river from the Burden Ironworks, was purchased from its owners by the city of Troy, and New York governor David Patterson had announced plans in April 2008 for the building – post-renovation – to become the hub of an ecological monitoring center to track pollution across 315 miles of the Hudson. Less than two months later, the buildings were burned to the ground in a case of probable arson.
The gorgeous Lost Landmarks of Upstate New York website features a photo tour of the ruined buildings before the fire, noting that one of the mill buildings had been damaged by an earlier arson, and that the remaining structures were filled with abandoned cars and boats. While I can construct a narrative of someone in the Troy underworld realizing that a corpse hidden in an abandoned Edsel was going to be discovered in the renovation… but it’s as likely that someone decided to burn the building down because they were bored.
My guess for why the Burden site is blurred out – to help prevent future arson. That seems crazy to me, but I don’t have a more plausible explanation. I know that I use Google Maps to plan my routes into mills, and for all I know, arsonists do the same. Given that accessing the site involves little more than parking behind Marty Burke’s South Side Tavern and strolling in, this seems like overkill, but I’ve got no better explanation. If urban explorers, millers or Troy historians have a better explanation, I’d love your input on the comments thread.
Apologies for lighter than usual blogging the past couple of weeks. I’ve been wrestling with recurring eye problems, and since the TED conference I’ve had to cut back on reading as my left eye is partly occluded. (For those following the details – I had surgery on my right eye last year. This is the same problem that led to surgery, just the other eye. Hoping to put surgery off on this eye for a couple more years, but another month like this and I may have to change those plans.)
My eye doctor’s advice during episodes like this is to read less, sleep more and watch lots of TV. That last bit of advice isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds – focusing on a television across a room keeps your eyes still, and stillness helps the blood that’s occluding my vision settle. And so that’s how I found myself watching DVDs at 3pm on a work day, not my usual modus operandus.
Fortunately, my friends at Nomadic Wax just sent me their brilliant new documentary, Democracy in Dakar. I’m a huge admirer of the compilations of African hiphop the label’s been putting out – African Underground: Hip-Hop Senegal has been in heavy rotation on my iPod since it came out – but I had no idea how talented these guys were as filmmakers.
Democracy in Dakar is mindblowingly good. It’s not just a portrait of a country’s vibrant music scene – it’s the complicated story of how hiphop emerged as a political force in Senegal, and how that force has been both empowered and thwarted in recent elections.
Ben Herson, the founder of Nomadic Wax and the director of the film, tells the complex story of the emergence of Senegalese hiphop and its political weight almost entirely through interviews, carefully edited into a tight narrative. He – through the voices of dozens of legendary Senegalese MCs – make the case that Senegal adopted some of the most political strains of American hiphop, translating Public Enemy lyrics into French and Wolof and building rhymes around political topics from early on. Some of the more unfortunate aspects of hiphop culture – misogyny and celebration of gangsta culture – have largely failed to take root in Senegalese soil, in part due to a strong set of Islamic values shared by most Dakar rappers.
Listening to the crews featured in the documentary is a bit like a trip back in time for me, when positive, conscious hiphop seemed like it might be able to go toe to toe with odes to thug life. Watching an MC like Didier Awadi of Positive Black Soul toss off a freestyle rap about the limitations of the International Criminal Court is like waking up in an alternate reality where Dead Pres and Slum Village outsell Diddy and Kanye. It’s not clear whether all the MCs in the country are as deeply political as the ones Herson features in the film, but it’s very, very clear that there’s a thriving music scene in Dakar where the politics are as important as the beats.
This scene became deeply important in local politics in 2000 when Aboulaye Wade challenged Abdou Diouf, who ruled Senegal for twenty years in a socialist government that provided few benefits to the average citizen. Wade was a long-time opposition leader, who’d been jailed by Diouf years earlier, and many young Senegalese – including most of the hiphop scene – put their hopes in the old dissident. A great deal of music in 1999 and 2000 focused on urging the youth to vote, and to celebrating the possibility that Senegal could change and move forward.
Democracy in Dakar is set seven years later, in the days leading up to the 2007 presidential elections. Seven years of Wade’s rule hasn’t done much for Senegal’s economy, at least in the eyes of the local rappers. Their rhymes talk about frustrated young men who board pirogues and try to set sail for the Canary Islands or the French coast, often drowning in the process. Herson shows us pro-Wade graffiti that’s been crossed out, and electoral posters with the President’s face painted out.
But Wade won re-election in 2007 without even the need for a run-off. (Many African democracies have two-round elections: if no candidate has a majority in the first round, the top two run off in the second round.) While there’s widespread frustration with Wade, at least from the MCs we see, none of the 14 opposition figures emerge as a clear leader, and Wade was able to win what most observers believe was a free and fair election.
While international observers may have signed off on the election, the MCs interviewed in the film see something more sinister going on. They’ve all been recruited to perform at pro-Wade concerts, and those who’ve refused find that they have trouble getting played on the radio, or that they’ve been threatened with arrest. Some have left the country, either out of fear or for economic reasons. And those who remain are offering rhymes that are the diametric opposite of those seven years earlier – they dismiss all politicians as corrupt and ineffectual and wonder who’ll emerge to lead the country forward.
(It’s interesting for me to see parallels and differences between Senegal and Ghana, two of the more stable countries in West Africa. In both, politics continues to be dominated by politicians who were active in the struggle against colonialism. Most of these folks are pretty old, and they need to win votes in countries that are very, very young, with large portions of the population under 25 years old. But Ghana’s much more politically open, with freer media institutions and a wider space for debate… but a much less political music scene. Perhaps there’s a negative correlation between political freedom and the quality of local hiphop?)
The question left unanswered at the end of Democracy in Dakar is whether these brilliant MCs can emerge as a political force, or whether they’re going to end up marginalized and frustrated. That’s not the filmmaker’s fault – that’s a question Senegal is still answering. In the meantime, Herson and crew have turned their focus north, documenting hiphop and politics in the banlieus of Paris in “Democracy in Paris“. I’m hoping a future piece might focus on the relationship between hiphop and politics in Tanzania, where my friends tell me you’d never dream of mounting a political campaign without an MC on your campaign team.
Beautiful, provocative stuff, and something very much worth watching – if you’re half as interested in this field as I am, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.
The Chinese internet is lots more complicated than you think.
That’s the core message of Rebecca MacKinnon’s talk at the Berkman Center on the Chinese internet, deliberative government and internet filtering. Most of the models we have for understanding the Chinese internet are wrong, or at the very least, deceptive. Scholars who follow the Chinese internet closely, like Rebecca, and wrestling with explanations of what, in fact, is happening with the Internet and movements towards participatory democracy.
Rebecca begins her talk with a quote from Lao-tzu, which talks about the difficulty of maintaining control by grasping at something. This reminds her of a quote by Bill Clinton, who in referring to Chinese internet censorship in the 1990s, remarked that “trying to control the internet is like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall.”
Some of that nailed Jell-o might look a little like a video of The Back Dorm Boys, a pair of guys from Guangzhou who posted a YouTube video of themselves lipsynching to the Back Street Boys. These guys have become incredibly famous, spawning fan clubs and landing a recording contract. Rebecca argues that they signify “a loss of control by the government over culture – you no longer have to wait for a gatekeeper to allow you to be published. Novelists, poets, and singers are finding audiences, and circumventing state apparatus.”
The internet is a profound influence on youth culture in China. The web is the main source of video entertainment for 66% of Chinese youth, who are finding videos like the Back Dorm Boys via social networks and instant messaging with their friends. Many of these youth consider officially sanctioned culture to be lobotomized and boring, while this web-based media is intriguing and exciting.
Despite the rise of web video, “no one has managed to organized an opposition party on the web,” Rebecca points out. “There’s no Lech Walenza, no religious movement – Falun Gong has been squished pretty thoroughly.”
We tend to think that these movements are squelched via censorship and police pressure. But the situation is far more complicated. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao recently conducted a two hour live chat online with Chinese netizens, answering questions that were both political and personal. “Grandpa Wen” built a great deal of internet goodwill by starting his remarks by declaring, “My mother told me always to be honest, so I will try to be honest and upfront with you guys,” and answering questions about his skills at cooking dumplings.
Not all the questions were softballs about his kitchen skills – Wen Jiabao took questions on economic problems, on corruption and on rural issues. This makes clear that questions and criticisms aren’t always met with crackdowns – they’re sometimes met with a proactive PR approach.
This isn’t the only example of internet openness in contemporary China. An online service center at the Gov.CN site allows citizens to access government information much as on e-government sites anywhere else in the world. A new site associated with the “two conferences” – the annual people’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress – invites people to participate in the “strong nation’s forum” and offer questions about governance. Participants in the fora have offered questions on fighting corruption, improving safety in coal mines, and “cracking down on illegal medicine as hard as the government is cracking down on pornography.” One comment thread includes an edgy proposal on ending the one-child policy and allowing population rates to increase, as well as a hearty debate both for and against the proposition.
Is this Chinese cyber-glastnost, Rebecca wonders? People are starting to talk about the internet as a framework for democratic discussion in China, a new form of “Internet democracy”.
Not so fast, she warns. An edgy political blogger, Wang Xiaofeng, offered a post suggesting that Chinese netizens were celebrating too much about the Premier’s online chat. This was political theatre, he asserted – without changes to political structures, this is all we’re going to get, and ultimately, it’s meaningless. This morning, his blog was closed with a note that said, “Due to certain problems, Wang Xiaofeng’s blog is closed temporarily (for a few days” – Rebecca believes that Wang was told to close the blog and briefly took it down rather than having it be censored. Now Chinese bloggers are discussing the fact that his blog was “temporarily ‘smutted’” – a reference to January’s anti-smut campaign, which closed down political sites by claiming they were disseminating pornography.
Before celebrating too much about “Internet democracy”, it’s worth remembering that dissidents like Hu Jia are still in prison, and that the leader of the nascent “Chinese netizen party” is behind bars. So should we see this as “Cybertarianism”, a form of internet populist authoritarianism? Here Rebecca is influenced by Yongnian Zheng’s idea of “authoritarian deliberation”, articulated in his book Technological Empowerment – the Internet, State andSsociety in China. Zheng argues that you can have an authoritarian state with a great deal of deliberation, but not have it be a democracy. A democracy has rule of law and strong protections for free speech – widespread deliberation can take place even in deeply repressive societies.
This view challenges the dominant paradigm we use to understand the Chinese internet, the Great Firewall. Rebecca argues that this makes it harder to understand cybertarianism. We’re tempted to assume that if we just lift the Firewall, China will be free… and that’s an extremely naive view. The GFW only ertains to servers hosted outside of China. For sites hosted within China, the Net Nanny is a much better metaphor for understanding content control. Search for “Tiananmen massacre” on Google.cn and you’ll get images of the square, and of the Nanjing massacre, but none of the events of 1989. The same search on Baidu gets nothing at all. Every company operating in China controls content, somehow, but they don’t all do it the same way.
Rebecca’s recently released a major study of Chinese blogging platforms. She tried posting 108 potentially controversial posts on 15 blog hosting services. One service blocked 60 of the posts – another blocked only one. The distribution was broad – each service had very different standards and methods of censorship. Some sites search for keywords and block posts that contain them – others allow controversial posts up, then delete them after the fact. The timing of these posts matters as well – right now, during the “Two Congresses”, speech is especially constrained.
When these constraints come into play, Chinese bloggers get very creative. This past summer, there were riots in Weng’an, where citizens burned the offices of the public security bureau. They were angered by the death of a girl, which the police ruled a suicide, and which the public thought was a murder, covered up by the authorities. The term “Weng’an” was quickly blocked on blogs, so bloggers seized on a strange detail of the case to write about it – a young man was doing pushups on a bridge and witnessed the girl’s leap to her death. So posts about the riots became posts about “pushups”. When censors blocked that term, bloggers posted a plethora of images of young men – and eventually of babies and kittens – doing pushups.
This technique has become pretty common. In my Cute Cat Theory talk, I refer to an image of a river crab, dressed in three watches. This image was created because the term for “harmonize” – the term used in explaining why some blogs have been removed from websites – sounds similar to the term for river crab. The three watches are a pun on “the three represents”, a political philosophy advanced by the previous premier. The image, which was quite common in the Chinese blogosphere, is a commentary on censorship, politics, language and, ultimately, on absurdity.
Or try this example. The video above features a chorus of children singing “The Song of the Alpaca Sheep”. The term for alpaca sheep contains the same sounds as an extremely rude phrase, which translates roughly as “f*ck your mother”. When Chinese is sung, the tones of ordinary speech are replaced with the tones of the song… so the schoolchildren are basically singing extremely crude curses… though the lyrics of the song are sweet, sappy ones about Alpacas. The video, which is becoming increasingly popular, is basically a commentary on the frustration of political censorship and the malleability of the Chinese language to avoid such censorship.
A serious political essay is now making the rounds in the Chinese blogosphere, asking who’s winning: the River Crabs (the censors) or the Alpaca sheep (the clever bloggers, playing with language.)
Of course, not all online speech in China is as lighthearted as the Alpaca video. Cybernationalism has become a major force in the Chinese internet. When Chinese vice premier Xi Jinping gave a talk in Mexico and said , “Some foreigners who have eaten their fill have nothering better to do than point their finger at our affairs,” many Chinese netizens reacted positively, arguing that China needs to be more frank in standing up to foreign critics. The best known of these cybernationalists are the “50 cent party”, a group that includes both paid commenters and volunteers who follow online discussions, post pro-government commentary and spin conversation in certain directions. But there are many groups that are purely voluntary, and groups like Anti-CNN.com probably aren’t paid by the government, but are simply patriotic individuals expressing nationalist sentiments.
These cybernationalists may be at their scariest when they turn into cyber-vigilantes. Rebecca tells us about a campaign to find officials who went on an African junket. Netizens somehow obtained video from the trip, circulated frames that showed the officials and mobilized the “human flesh search engine” – a large group of online citizens united in the task of identifying and harrassing individuals. The officials were identified, shamed and had their careers ruined. Rebecca notes that this is reminiscent of the Red Guards, Mao’s cadres who worked to root out corrupt officials. (The human flesh search engines have also been turned on the family of students who’ve expressed support for Tibetan rights, or other anti-nationalist stances.)
Since these are popular movements, Rebecca wonders if they’re best understood as “cyberbonapartism – a broad, centrist political movement that advocates the idea of a strong and centralized state, based on popular support.” Or perhaps it’s cyberconfucianism, reflecting China’s traditional values and paternalist desire for just, strong, moral leaders.
None of these explanations suffices to describe the entire Chinese blogosphere. Chinese blogger conferences are working to create independent platforms for discussion and dialog, and avatars of this movement, like Isaac Mao, make sophisticated arguments for free speech. Isaac promotes an idea called “sharism”, a belief that the spirit of the open source movement will help liberate Chinese thinkers, helping them first become free thinkers, then to exercise free speech.
Whatever is possible on the Internet, some bloggers and many civil rights laywers argue that internet democracy isn’t real democracy. The struggle may begin on the internet, but ultimately it needs to include institutional transparency, rule of law, accountability and meaningful protections for free speech. But these aren’t values that all Chinese are pushing for. Others see the internet as a space that could easily descend into social dischord… and there’s evidence to prove their case, through nationalist movements that can turn violent, or for local protests that gain national attention and support.
Rebecca sees this as a tension between web freedom and control, a struggle that parallels discussions between Jefferson and Hamilton. She points to internet scholar David Post’s new book, “Jefferson’s Moose”, where Post sees debates over free speech and the prevention of societal dischord playing out online, more than two centuries later. There’s a lively Chinese debate about these issues, Rebecca tells us, centered on the question “Where does the balance lie between freedom and control?”
The best role for those who’d like to promote democracy in China is to promote and enable this debate, Rebecca argues. This may involve looking closely at the institutions that make the internet possible. Between citizens and government, we’re seeing the emergence of a powerful network of web and IT services that enable certain types of interactions and communication. A variety of movements – civil society and otherwise – are trying to shape this layer. Groups like the Global Network Initiative – a group that champions best practices for online companies in nations that control speech – are pushing for one set of practices, while technical and standards bodies sometimes pull in other ways. This debate, ultimately, will involve the engineers and standards geeks, corporate lawyers, human rights activists and government officials… an the stakes are very high. Rebecca wonders whether we need to push back more on this process, and whether we need ” a much better informed global citizenry that can push on these infrastructures and standards.”
I muse about the future of mobile communications in Africa for friends at Nokia. Video clips of me talking about mobile money, mobile reporting, citizen journalism
It's all greek to me. But not for most of the world – when most of the world can't understand something, they think it sounds like Chinese. A map of linguistic incomprehension
The Economist is an unusual publication. In a world where print newspapers and magazines are facing extreme hardship, the Economist has seen its circulation more than triple in the past two decades, a period in which weekly news magazines have generally lost readers. While hyperlocality is a major trend for news publications, the Economist is almost willfully global, reporting news from countries many of us have trouble finding on a map. In a blog age, where objective detachment has given way to the primacy of personal perspective, the Economist has no bylines. Citizen journalism it’s not – letters to the editor begin with “Sir”, and the paper advertises its elite credibility, with advertisements featuring an endorsement from Bill Gates.
It’s expensive (an annual subscription is over $100), it’s dense and sometimes stuffy and it’s extremely unlikely to feature a swimsuit section. (Which is all for the best. I don’t think anyone needs to see Ben Bernanke in a Speedo.) It’s a very, very good magazine, and my constant companion on long plane flights.
The one problem with the Economist? It’s not written in Chinese.
That’s a problem that Shi Yi and the 240-strong volunteers of the EcoTeam are happy to take on. In an excellent article on Waxy.org, Andy Baio explores a translation community that’s dedicated to translating each edition of The Economist from English into Chinese, releasing a bi-weekly PDF file with two full magazines worth of content to a community of subscribers. Community members log into a shared workspace and claim articles they’re interested in translating. Translations take place in moderated BBS forums – commenters can suggest better translations, and the thread’s moderator is responsible for synthesizing comments and translations into a single article.
Table of contents for a recently translated issue of The Economist by EcoTeam
The Economist doesn’t officially authorize the translation, but it sounds like they’re aware and unconcerned. This is a smart approach for publishers to take regarding fan translation – if the Economist isn’t planning on releasing a Chinese edition, why alienate a set of passionate fans? Mimi Ito, who studies communities that subtitle and translate anime, observes that smart publishers watch fan translation to see what titles might work in overseas markets – if there’s a passionate viewership for Full Metal Alchemist in the US, perhaps it makes sense to translate the series professionally and re-release it. My friends at the TED conference are well aware of the “TED to China” fansite, a project that summarizes TED talks in Chinese, trying to share the ideas expressed at the conference with a Chinese-speaking audience. Rather than asking the fans behind the site to “cease and desist” using the TED logo, the TED organizers decided to adopt a community-sourced approach to subtitling and translating their videos, and reached out to the TED to China community for ideas and advice.
The rise of fan translation isn’t a real surprise to me, because it’s already become an important part of the Global Voices community. Shortly after Global Voices began publication, a brilliant young Taiwanese man named Portnoy Zheng began translating selected articles we published, and organizing friends to translate others. As we’re under a Creative Commons attribution license, there are no legal barriers to doing this with Global Voices content, so we started linking to Portnoy’s version. Eventually, we adopted Portnoy’s model as the method for translating Global Voices – loosely organized communities around the world, encouraged to translate as much or as little as they’d like, linked as the “official” translations from the Global Voices site. There are now more people involved with translating Global Voices than with producing the English-language site, and the project is overseen by Portnoy and by the equally remarkable Leonard Chien.
What’s amazing to me is how much work is involved in some of these translation projects. Very active Lingua communities like Spanish translate up to half a dozen pieces a day, some of which are more than a thousand words. But the task of translating The Economist every week is something else. I flipped through some back issues of the Economist and did a quick estimate, guessing that the magazine contains 60-80,000 words of translatable copy a week. One of the least expensive online translation services (that’s not an endorsement – friends who’ve used it rave about the price and complain about quality) charges just under $0.04 a word. That’s $2,400 to $3,200 to translate an issue of the magazine. Professional translators are quoting rates of between $0.20 and 0.30 a word, suggesting between $12,000 and $24,000 for a polished job. Even using the lowest rates, an amateur community is doing $120,000 worth of work a year… so that participants can have a magazine readable in Chinese, and for the sheer enjoyment of working on the project.
(Keep in mind that all the people translating The Economist have significant English skills, significant enough to be able to translate complex text. So the motivation can’t purely be the desire for a more readable edition of the magazine – the people involved with the project are some of the best qualified to be reading the English-language version of the Economist.)
Clay Shirky argues that involvement with projects like Wikipedia reflects people around the world finding ways to better utilize our “cognitive surplus”. As industrialization has given people a strange new commodity – free time – it’s also found ways to help people spend that time. In the early industrial revolution, the solution was gin (Shirky references stories of gin pushcarts working the streets of London, allowing people to cushion the shock of moving from a rural to urban lifestyle.) For the last half of the 20th century, television has been the drug of choice.
With the rise of community projects like Wikipedia – or even more banal pursuits like authoring Lolcats or playing World of Warcraft – Shirky sees us changing from passive consumers into interactive producers, no longer wasting our surplus cognition, but channeling it towards worthwhile projects. Clay estimates that the cognition spent watching television could power a hundred Wikipedia-sized projects per year.
Some of those projects will be translation projects. We’re living in the age of the polyglot internet. The interesting stuff isn’t all in English, or in Chinese. As we start learning about the fascinating stuff that’s out there in Mandarin, Macedonian or Malagasy, the mediocre machine translation tools we currently rely on won’t be acceptable anymore. We need efforts to translate the Economist into Chinese, and efforts to translate critical Chinese media into English. (Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog is a great resource, but it’s the work of one alarmingly smart man, and a lot of us who don’t read Chinese are basically screwed if Roland ever decides to stop his translation efforts.)
What’s exciting about the Economist translation project and other translation efforts is that they’re a great proof of concept for distributed human translation, the most realistic system we know of now to translate complex texts accurately, inexpensively and relatively quickly. The success of this project, using very simple tools, helps demonstrate that there’s no technical barrier preventing us from implementing this strategy on a wide scale – the barriers involved are those of interest and enthusiasm.
What will really excite me is seeing a similar project that’s translating critical non-English media into English, because it will demonstrate that English-speaking readers realize that there are perspectives, opinions and news that we’re not getting because not everything gets translated into our native language. I’d love thoughts on what media you’d like access to if communities could be organized to translate it.
