• Response summary – [ 4chan Users' Survey ] – Google Docs
  Fascinating spreadsheet showing an internal survey of 4chan users, including demographics, participation in raids, and far more info on masturbation and porn than any researcher needs to know
  (tags: internet statistics culture 4chan data demographics)

• Global Publics Embrace Social Networking | Pew Global Attitudes Project
  Pew study examines prevalence of social networking use around the world, versus internet penetration. Countries new to social networking seem to be aggressively embracing it, while some long-wired countries like Germany are much more resistant to adoption.
  (tags: pew socialmedia global statistics demographics facebook)

• http://tyndallreport.com/decadeinreview/
  Amazing collection of data on the content of US television nightly news, showing prominence of different types of news. Site features annual reviews of coverage, trends from 1980s to present.
  (tags: media attention uspolitics television coverage data)
• How Facebook Decides What To Put In Your News Feed – These 10 …
  Experiments with adding a new user to Facebook allow the author to extrapolate ten interesting insights about Facebook's Edgerank algorithm and the composition of Facebook news feeds.
  (tags: facebook socialmedia algorithm ranking research experiment bias curation)
• ISP shuts down Wikileaks mirror over complaints from upstream provider – Boing Boing
  Wikileaks mirror taken down because upstream provider was concerned about DDoS. Story helps illuminate just how many actors have the capability of acting as intermediary censors.
  (tags: intermediary censorship ISP wikileaks freespeech)
• Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To) – Digits – WSJ
  Zach Seward looks at the data trails he leaves from his online activities. Suggests that heavy users of social media tools are logging their online behavior much as personal trackers and diarists are logging their physical activity.
  (tags: lifelogging data visualization socialmedia tracking personal foursquare)

It’s a few days before Christmas, ten days before the end of 2010, and there’s the wonderful sense of deceleration as I flip through my browser tabs. The blizzard of email has slowed to a few, scant flakes, the roaring river of Twitter updates is a trickle. There’s time to read, and evidently, time to reflect and write at more length.

In the past couple of days, a couple of excellent essays – and some flawed, but interesting ones – have been posted reflecting on Wikileaks, Anonymous and the philosophical motives behind these projects. For me, they’re a reminder that the opinions offered the most rapidly aren’t always (aren’t often?) the most insightful. Wikileaks’s release of diplomatic cables and the actions taken by individuals, organizations, corporations and governments in response have implications for dozens of ongoing debates, about transparency, privacy, internet architecture and ownership, free speech, human rights. It’s not a surprise to me that very smart people have needed a while to think through what’s happened before offering their analysis.

Much of the best writing I’ve read has been either published on or linked to via The Atlantic. Alexis Madrigal is maintaining a great collection of links to commentary on different facets of the case, and he’s also edited a few of the most interesting pieces I’ve recently had the time to read.

One – which I’d put in the “interesting but flawed” pile – is Jaron Lanier’s “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks“. As one respondent to the piece notes, it’s not really an essay about Wikileaks. Instead, Lanier connects some of his recent thinking on the internet as a threat to individual creativity, expressed at length in his recent book, “You Are Not A Gadget“. (This review is a sympathetic overview of the book.) Lanier sees a philosophical stance implicit in Wikileaks’s actions and Assange’s motives – the belief that a huge accumulation of data leads towards understanding or truth. Openness by itself isn’t necessarily productie, he argues – it’s possible that openness leads to the breakdown of trust, in each other and in institutions.

In the most interesting part of the essay, Lanier connects Wikileaks to the early days of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where very smart crytographers and digital pioneers explored the idea that hackers could change history, leveling the playing field with a superior understanding of technology. He sees this perspective as overly romantic and tells us he made the decision to step away at that point. In turn, he’s critiquing current Wikileaks supporters, and especially the Anonymous DDoSers as ineffective and potentiall dangerous romantics, a critique that might be better received had he not slammed them as “nerd supremicists” in his title.

Lanier asked Madrigal to disallow comments on his essay, as he wanted people to engage with the text and not skip ahead to refutations or responses. Madrigal agreed, but evidently didn’t understand how to actually shut off commenting within the Atlantic’s publishing system – the story began accumulating comments, and Madrigal felt compelled to step in and shut down the thread. This, in turn, led to tough questioning by smart folks like Jay Rosen about the wisdom of disallowing comments on a controversial essay. I found Madrigal’s post explaining what happened, why he acted as he did – and the open comment thread that followed his explanation – to be one of the best examples of an online community manager engaging with criticism and looking for a solution going forwards.

Madrigal also gets my respect for featuring an excellent essay from Zeynep Tufekci responding to Lanier’s missive. (Hers is the observation that Lanier isn’t writing about Wikileaks, but about his own framing of issues about technology, privacy and individuality.) She offers a thorough critique of Lanier, pivoting on the idea that Lanier errs in blurring the line between individuals and organizations, especially governments, and ends up trying to protect the privacy of powerful institutions that don’t have the same rights as individuals, no matter what the Supreme Court may have said in Citizens United.

In a neat rhetorical move, Tufekci accuses Lanier of using Wikileaks to promote his own agenda before explaining that Wikileaks really tells us something important about the tension between public and private spaces online (which happens to be her agenda… :-) I share her concerns, and though I don’t come to the same conclusion she does – don’t fear Anonymous; fear corporate control over the Internet – it’s an excellent essay and a great summary of important concerns about the challenges of public discourse in private spaces.

The essay I found most useful in thinking through Wikileaks early in Cablegate was Aaron Bady’s “Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy“, which took a close read of a 2006 essay by Assange to elucidate a possble set of motivations behind the release of diplomatic cables. Bruce Sterling takes a very different approach – he uses his knowledge of geek culture and his gift for speculative fiction to map Julian Assange and Bradley Manning onto hacker architypes and declares the situation surrounding Wikileaks inevitable and melancholy. It’s far from fair – we’re dealing with an Assange who’s a projection of Sterling’s understanding of hacker culture rather than a real individual – but it offers insights that are often easier to deliver in fiction.

Specifically, Sterling does a beautiful job of unpacking the lure of encryption, the romance of the cypherpunks, the tension of “secrets” that aren’t especially secret or exciting, the difference between leaks and journalism. Some of the commenters on the essay challenge Sterling’s understanding of the facts – I think that misses the larger point, which is that Sterling offers a picture of Assange and the logic behind Wikileaks that falls short as a work of biography, but is extremely helpful in understanding why he and his project have captured the attention of so many geeks.

Looking forward to more reflections on Wikileaks and its implications, and to the best part of the year – some extended reading about topics that have nothing at all to do with the internet… Happy holidays, everyone.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a quick interview with Jenna Wortham of the New York Times on the issue of digital identities. She was trying to figure out an experience she’d had where someone she’d met on an online dating site had found her on Foursquare and connected her identities. Was this something to worry about? Or merely how we expect the world to work in a world of online performance and digital disclosure?

The answer I offered ended up in her piece, which ran in the paper last Saturday: it’s still possible to create an online persona that’s difficult to trace to a specific person, which is important for whistleblowers and leakers. But if you’re using social media tools the way they’re intended – to share your interests, to meet people, to publish about your life – you’re going to leak data in a way that makes it easy to piece together different facets of your personality into a single whole.

The story that broke yesterday about Jets coach Rex Ryan is a better example of this phenomenon than any hypothetical I could have come up with. Barry Petchesky of sports blog Deadspin ran a report yesterday titled “This May or May Not Be Rex Ryan’s Wife Making Foot-Fetish Videos“. Despite the benefit of the doubt given to the coach’s wife in the article title, it’s pretty clear that Petchesky believes the feet in question are Michelle Ryan’s, and that Rex is the videographer. An update to the post includes a screen shot from a dating site where the author – who Petchesky implies is Coach Ryan – writes in unvarnished terms about his sexual preferences and about his wife’s body.

The article has now been picked up by such classy journalistic institutions as the New York Post. And Coach Ryan has now had the memorable experience of ducking questions about his wife’s feet in a press conference, leading to a sentence which may well summarize the perils of being a public figure in the Internet age: “Ryan did not deny, however, that is wife is the star of a series of foot-fetish YouTube videos.”

Petchesky is able to make a pretty good case for the identity of these particular feet because there’s a lot of information available online both about the Ryans, and available on the dating profile – birthdates, height and weight, city of residence. And, of course, there are photos of Ms. Ryan available online for comparison to the woman displaying her feet in the video. As with the suitor who connected Wortham’s Foursquare mayorship and dating profile, Petchesky puts publicly visible data from different sources together and comes up with information about people they didn’t realize they were sharing.

One response to this example might be to berate Rex and Michelle Ryan for their foolishness. Surely, as a highly visible public figure, Rex Ryan could expect an enterprising journalist to connect a series of popular foot fetish videos to an anonymous dating profile, both posted some years back, and then to his biography. Everyone knows that famous people either need better fake online identities or to eschew foot fetish dating sites!

Another response is to bemoan the current state of online and offline journalism, and perhaps society as a whole. A nation in which the sexual peculiarities of a professional sports coach are the target of investigative scrutiny is one well into its decline and eventual fall. Surely this presages the opening of a chain of vomitoria in Manhattan and a pressing need to defend our borders against Visigoths.

Or maybe we’re just at a moment where our norms need to catch up with our technology.

Because people are publishing vastly more data about themselves, it’s possible to make connections between that data and reveal formerly hidden aspects of someone’s online profile. I knew you were single and looking to date, and now I know you’re a regular at this sushi restaurant… which may, in turn, allow me to infer information about your income, your spending, what neighborhood you live in, etc. As Wortham notes, it’s unclear whether it’s socially acceptable to make these connections and inferences. She ends up deciding not to accept her suitor’s invitation because she feels he’s unfairly tilted the playing field, learning more about her than she knows about him.

There are lots of opportunities in life to obtain information about people that most people don’t engage in. When I’m invited to a friend’s house, I don’t rifle through their medicine cabinet to discover what prescription drugs are there, though the information might be interesting or might help me understand and relate to them better. There’s a social norm that suggests we pay attention to what friends make visible in their homes, not what’s hidden away in drawers or cabinets – we generally don’t need technological restrictions (locks) to enforce this norm, as most people wouldn’t want to suffer the consequences such a trespass might have for our friendship.

Norms aren’t automatic – they have to be taught. My friend and colleague Judith Donath observes that teaching your children manners is basically the process of teaching them when to lie (“Grandma, thank you for your gift – I loved it!”) and when not to ask questions they want answers to (“Why is that strange lady with Uncle Joe and what happened to Aunt Jane?”) In the early days of the web, there was a semi-concerted effort to help new users understand prevailing norms in the online space – Virginia Shea’s 1994 book on Netiquette might be the best exemplar of that effort. (It’s hard to know what Shea would make of Petchesky’s investigation, though her Rule 8 – “Respect Other People’s Privacy” – suggests she might have some issues with his behavior.)

We’re at a moment where norms are in flux. In a few years, privacy may not matter as much as a social norm, as Mark Zuckerberg has promised (threatened?). Or we may decide that some measure of personal privacy is essential if we’re all to survive in a world where information can persist forever. Dan Gillmor wrote a provocative essay in 2009 where he suggested that we may need to find a way, societally, to let people off the hook for stupid things they did when they were younger, or we’re going to doom ourselves to a world where the only people who are politically viable are those who are stunningly boring drones. Dan’s not suggesting a technical change, where our digital words start to fade after four years and disappear after seven – he’s suggesting that we need new norms to cope both with online disclosure and digital persistence.

We know that journalists are going to try to make connections between disparate sets of data, either to reveal important truths or to unseat the famous and powerful. We know that marketers will connect disparate pieces of data about our lives so they can more effectively target ads and market products to us. But the existence of new technologies doesn’t make behaviors inevitable. We respond to shifts in technology by building new norms. When we feel really strongly about those norms, we encode them into laws. In five years, it’s possible that what Petchesky did will be so routine that it merits no second thought. Or it’s possible that we might consider it a major transgression, an act inconsistent with how people are supposed to behave online. Or it might be illegal. The point is, we get to choose – individually, collectively and societally.

There are many reasons I disagree with Marshall Poe’s essay “The Internet Changes Nothing“, a screed so reactionary it makes Andrew Keen look like an early ’90s Wired columnist. The assertion I find most baffling in his piece is this one: “The Internet is not maturing. It is mature.” Poe’s essay is worth reading – basically, he’s arguing that there’s nothing new about the Internet – everything we can do online is something we could do offline, and so there’s no need to consider the possibility that the Internet could radically change human behavior. Poe might argue that what happened to Rex Ryan could have happened in a pre-Internet age – perhaps an enterprising reporter might have watched the coach pick up his fetish correspondence from a clandestine PO Box and mounted a sting operation.

My sense is that what happened to Coach Ryan is evidence that the Internet is far from mature. It’s vastly easier in an online world to find information and connect with people who share your interests, no matter how prurient those interests are. It’s easier to imagine that your behavior is anonymous, which may encourage people to take risks and release information they’d otherwise keep very, very private. And it’s easier to build connections between this information as it’s all available from a mouseclick than from a stakeout. All this means that we’re not entirely sure of a reasonable or safe way to act, or what our societal rules should be. As long as those rules are in rapid flux, it seems absurd to say that the Internet changes nothing. Better to say that we don’t know exactly what’s changing and whether we should embrace or fight the change in question.

• Culture That Unites Rather Than Divides
  A shared culture may be the key to unlocking tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, separated by a long and bloody war. Onnik Krikorian (UK/Armenia) and Aygün Janmammadova (Azerbaijan) look at the ways Armenians and Azeri come together in neutral spaces like Tblisi and the US.
  (tags: culture war conflict armenia azerbaijan language peace)
• The Internet Changes Nothing
  Essay by Marshall Poe may be the apotheosis of the anti-cyberutopian argument. This guy makes Keen look like an early 1990s Wired columnist. I disagree with his conclusions, but it's interesting, if only as one extreme pole in the debate.
  (tags: internet communication history web cyberutopianism)

Colleagues at the Berkman Center and I are releasing a report today titled “Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites“. Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I have been working on the paper and the research behind it for much of the last year, with great contributions from Jillian York and Ryan McGrady. It’s the sort of in-depth, detailed work we do at Berkman that we generally expect to be of interest to the folks who funded the research and to a small group of people whose work focuses on protecting human rights and independent media sites from DDoS attack.

And then Wikileaks came under sustained DDoS attack, and the topic of DDoS as a form of censorship started receiving international media attention. As Anonymous activists have started using DDoS to call attention to PayPal, PostFinance, Visa and MasterCard’s decisions to cut off Wikileaks as a customer, DDoS has become the subject of a great deal of media attention and reader interest.

Google Trends search for “DDoS”, 12/21/2010. Interest in DDoS recently peaked at about 3.5x average search volume for the term.

The bulk of our report, and nearly all our research, was conducted before Wikileaks’ release of US diplomatic cables, and the organizations we interviewed and surveyed generally receive much less international media attention than Wikileaks has received in the past month. When an organization like Viet Tan – a leading Vietnamese pro-democracy organization – suffers denial of service attacks, it’s rarely discussed outside the digital activist community. The focus of our research was on the effect of DDoS on organizations like Viet Tan, and the suggestions we offer to organizations, network administrators and the broader activist community were designed primarily for the benefit of organizations that receive much less attention and internet traffic than Wikileaks is currently experiencing.

For those organizations, the report offers the following observations:
- DDoS is a pretty common form of attack against human rights and independent media sites, and the volume of attacks does not appear to be slowing. The technique has been applied to a very wide range of targets and appears to have no strong ties to any particular set of political principles.
- DDoS doesn’t usually affect independent media and human rights organizations in isolation. These sites come under various forms of attack, and fending off DDoS is only one of the defensive actions site administrators need to take.
- Attacks don’t need massive amounts of bandwidth to adversely affect sites – we see evidence that very small attacks focused on vulnerabilities in technical architectures can disable some sites. In some cases, a single attacker can be effective in disabling a site, without the assistance of botnets or other volunteers.
- For many organizations, DDoS can be a crippling attack, making sites inaccessible for long periods of time. This is a function of inexperienced and overwhelmed system administrators, unhelpful ISPs, and isolation from the technical community that works together to fend off DDoS.
- We see no silver bullets for the independent media and human rights community. Our recommendations cover a variety of technical steps that can reduce the impact of attacks. Ultimately, we end up recommending building new social institutions that make it easier for targeted sites to seek help from the technical community and from large DDoS resistant hosting providers.

We delayed the release of our report so we could think through the implications of the DDoS attacks on Wikileaks and the group’s move to Amazon’s cloud architecture. Amazon’s decision to remove Wikileaks from their servers – under intense pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman – was deeply disturbing to me personally, and complicated one of the major suggestions we offer in the report. One of our core arguments is that organizations near the “core” of the internet – Tier 1 internet service providers and internet hyperpowers like Amazon and Google – are better positioned to fend off DDoS attacks than organizations near the edge of the network, like smaller ISPs and administrators of individual sites. The difference is a major one – Arbor Networks conducts an annual survey of core network administrators, and a large percentage report fending off most DDoS attacks within an hour. Our research shows that DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights sites can knock targets offline for weeks or longer.

Because these attacks can be so devastating, we recommend that organizations consider moving some or all of their sites onto shared core infrastructure, just as Wikileaks did in response to two large DDoS attacks in late November. Amazon’s disturbing (again, my characterization, not necessarily that of my co-authors) decision to stop providing services to Wikileaks suggests that our advice might need to be rethought.

On reflection, I don’t think that’s the lesson to take from Amazon’s actions. Instead, the lesson is actually a much more disturbing one: the ability of virtually anyone to speak freely online can be constrained by the corporate decisionmaking of internet intermediaries, including internet service providers, web hosting providers and social network operators. I wrote about the emerging threat of intermediary censorship in a chapter in Access Controlled, the new book edited by the key researchers behind the Open Net Initiative, and Jillian York, one of the authors on this paper, has written an important paper on the topic. We expect organizations like Amazon, Facebook, Bluehost and others cited as examples of intermediary censors in the aforementioned papers to protect their users’ rights of speech up to the point when they’re required by law not to. Unfortunately that’s not always what happens… and seldom does bad behavior by a service provider receive the sort of attention paid to Amazon’s actions towards Wikileaks.

Amazon’s actions are an important signal about their corporate attitudes towards free speech and their willingness to selectively enforce their terms of service under pressure. But they should also be a wake-up call about a basic architectural issue – the ability for anyone to speak online and reach an audience is mediated by commercial entities whose terms of service generally give a great deal of discretion to the content host and few protections for the end user. Other organizations may have a better track record of respecting speech, but are less effective at defending against DDoS, as they’re often farther from the core, which as we document in this paper, cuts them out of some of the key technical and social systems that help in defending against attack. As I described in my presentation at the Open Video Conference this October, this leads to a Hobson’s choice for activists who are frequently DDoS’d: they end up moving to core platforms to achieve DDoS resistance, even if they’re uncomfortable with giving that organization a potential veto over their content.

There’s been a lively debate about Anonymous’s actions in using DDoS as public protest against organizations like PayPal and Amazon. (That Anonymous wasn’t able to meaningfully affect Amazon with a DDoS attack helps support our case for core platforms and DDoS resistance.) Deanna Zandt makes an eloquent case for DDoS as a form of civil disobedience, suggesting that it’s a way to impact a corporation for a period of time without causing lasting damage. I disagree with her on at least two points – I think the anonymous nature of the group’s attacks is a major distinction between their actions and conventional civil disobedience, and I disagree with her assertion that there are no lasting damages from DDoS, as there are effects in terms of increased provisioning of infrastructure and increased cost. But I think this debate masks a much less tractable and more important debate: how do we defend the right to political and activist speech atop private networks?

One response to that debate is to attack companies that fail to protect online speech, as Operation Payback is doing. Temporarily silencing them via DDoS is one easy, crude way to make the point that the wider internet community expects the private companies that provide space for public, political discussion to protect the right to speech. A more thorough response would start mapping the companies that have a track record of protecting speech and those who’ve demonstrated less sensitivity to these issues, allowing users to make better decisions about who to work with and who to avoid. We may need cooperation between civil society groups and web service providers to establish a better set of procedures that allow discussion of free speech issues when content is removed for Terms of Service violations – at minimum, companies need an appeals process to allow people who believe content was unfairly removed to challenge the decision. It’s possible that there’s a legislative response to this challenge – one target could be section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts web service providers from liability as publishers. Perhaps such limitations of liability should only apply to companies that have a set of procedures designed to protect politically sensitive content from being unduly silenced.

None of these suggestions is particularly easy to implement… it’s much easier to download Low Orbit Ion Cannon and attempt to silence an online voice you disagree with. The ultimate conclusion of our paper is that silencing someone via DDOS – an activist, a newspaper or a corporation – is pretty easy to do. Protecting the ability to speak online? That’s the tough challenge.

My friend Dave Winer is working through a set of principles about online free speech at Techwithoutborders.org. They seem to me to be a very reasonable attempt to find common ground that people who care about free speech can agree on in reference to the Wikileaks situation, the actions of commercial providers and of the US government. I’m happy to virtually sign onto the principles – I believe Dave is going to be lining up other signatories to demonstrate broad tech industry support for the need to protect online speech. if you’re interested in learning more, there’s a link to a Google Group associated with the principles.

• Jillian C. York Facebook Use: Access, Filtering, and Languages
  Jillian observes that the gaps in the Facebook visualization – Brazil, China, Syria – are as interesting as the places that are present
  (tags: facebook visualization maps socialmedia cosmopolitanism globalization)
• Visualizing Friendships | Facebook
  Paul Butler's post about his lovely Facebook visualization, with useful commentary on the narrative he's constructing with the picture
  (tags: facebook visualization social cosmopolitanism maps globalization)
• The World's Facebook Relationships Visualized [PIC]
  Mashable's writeup of Facebook international friends visualization.
  (tags: map facebook visualization xenophilia gloablism globalization parochialism cosmopolitanism)

For Tuesday’s Berkman lunch, we’re blessed with a visit from DJ, blogger and ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall, one of my favorite chroniclers of the future of digital culture. His talk is titled “The Unstable Platforms and Uneasy Peers of Brave New World Music“, a title that we could probably spend an hour unpacking.

Wayne’s talk is timely, perhaps, because of the current attention to the events of Wikileaks cablegate and the takedown of Wikileaks from Amazon. “What people take to be public platforms turn out to be anything but, and our spaces for free speech are not necessarily so free.” They’re unpredictable spaces for public speech because they’re commercial spaces. And what happens to music in these spaces may prefigure other developments in online spaces. “The ways in which culture and music are routed through the web show us some of the fault lines in public culture,” Marshall argues. “We can hear some of these songs and dances as ‘canaries in the coal mine’” of online culture – sometimes, these works disappear before our eyes due to decisions made by tool and platform owners.

One of the signatures of new world music, Marshall argues, is the watermark. Many of the audio tracks and videos that define new music scenes are marked with watermarks left by unlicensed demo software. He suggests that these watermarks may be becoming part of the aesthetics of these new forms. The people producing them are using professional-grade tools and pushing them to a public that’s potentially limitless in size. But the watermarks suggest they’ve got a different set of priorities than most producers – they’re less concerned with polish than with immediacy and immersion in the moment.

He shows this video from LA dance crew Marvel, Inc. This is one of the groups associated with the “Jerkin’” movement, a street dance associated with a small set of high schools in LA. Dance crews often take their names from comic books and cartoons, hence “Marvel Inc.” Marshall points out that the dances take place in public places, on sidewalks and in traffic-filled streets, and suggests that jerk is about public performance, both “in public places and in places as public as YouTube”. The video is a promotion for them as a crew, and for the music they’re using – the tracks danced to are listed, as is digitaldripped.com, a site that shares links to new hiphop beats and tracks. (The tracks associated with Jerkin’ are usually not available for purchase, Marshall explains – they’re downloads, not traditional releases.) And the video is heavily tagged, not just with the Marvel Inc. name and “jerkin”, but with names of rival crews and other artists associated with the movement. Despite the watermark on the video, other aspects of production and distribution suggest a high degree of care and savvy, creating a non-commercial circulation mechanism intended for their local (and perhaps, global) peers.

Watermarks appear in audio tracks as well. One of the key Jerkin’ tracks is “Buckle My Shoe” by Fly Kidd. Every few seconds, a British female voice announces “AVS Media Demo” in the midst of a catchy track. Marshall has looked for an “original” version of the track without the audio watermark and hasn’t been able to find one. The track used to be available on YouTube, but it’s been taken down, perhaps due to a copyright complaint. Now it’s available on Dailymotion, where you can’t see the video until sitting through a 30-second ad. “These are our public platforms,” Marshall tells us, “riddled with pop-up ads and watermarks”.

These platforms and tools may be rough around the edges, but they’re easy to use and easy to learn. One of the seminal Jerk tracks – “You’re a Jerk” by New Boyz – was produced using Fruity Loops, a commercial software package designed for easy loop creation. (The program offers a downloadable demo, and Marshall tells us that unlicensed and unlocked copies change hands frequently online.) It’s easy to find instructional videos on YouTube that show you how to make hiphop beats in Fruity Loops, which lowers barriers to producing new tracks. The New Boyz put a beat together, added rhymes over it and uploaded the audio track to their MySpace page. People in the Jerkin’ community began making videos of themselves dancing to the song and posting them to YouTube, which allowed the Boyz to track their success by searching YouTube for their names.

You’re unlikely to find a good version of the song this way anymore. The track became so popular that the New Boyz were signed to a small record label, and that label’s parent company (Warner Brothers) evidently asked YouTube to identify videos using the music. You can find the “official” version of the video (above), which has been viewed over 45 million times on YouTube. (I mention that last statistic for those who, like me, hadn’t heard about Jerk and briefly thought we had an insight into underground American youth culture. Little late for that, evidently…) People who’d posted videos using the song were told by YouTube that they either needed to mute the audio or choose another musical track to accompany their videos. That led to some very strange videos like the one below:

This video shows the Action Figures crew dancing to “You’re a Jerk” – it’s one of the videos that helped break the song, and Action Figures are featured in the “official” You’re a Jerk video. But this video now sports a strange, synthesized, neo-tribal beat that’s pretty far from anything the dancers originally performed to. Action Figures get to keep their video up, and perhaps benefit if anyone buys the (dreadful) track they’re now featuring, but the original video, important in popularizing Jerkin’ is now a very different document.

Whole sites and the ecosystems they support can disappear as well. Marshall shows us a screenshot of Jamglue, a site that served as an audio YouTube, allowing you to upload, sequence and remix audio tracks. A search for “Jerkin” revealed 775 mixes and 812 tracks. When the site shut down, not only did the content disappear, but people’s profiles, information on what tracks they’d liked and disliked and other metadata was lost as well. (I suggested to Marshall that there’s an odd parallel to traditional ethnomusicology here. Pioneers like Hugo Zemp spent their careers visiting people whose cultures were in danger of extinction from assimilation or the death of elders and recording their music. Perhaps we’ll start seeing modern ethnomusicologists documenting fragile digital cultures before their extinction.)

If the platforms that support this new music are unstable, Marshall tells us, the peers involved are uneasy. The people building the Jerkin’ scene were using digital tools to communicate with local friends, often people they knew in the “real world”. But the tools they used ensured that their work circulated more widely, which in turn led to some fascinating remixes.

This version – “El Paso del Jerk” – from Panama uses the backing track from “You’re a Jerk” and updates it with a Spanish rap. The accompanying video steals large chunks from the official video, but inserts scenes of Panamanian youth performing the dance steps… and also sporting some of the fashions and cellphones featured in the American video. Marshall sees this as “Panamanian kids inserting themselves into global styles,” demonstrating that they’re part of a global trend, not just in music, but in fashion and style. Marshall notes that it’s harder for YouTube to automatically remove videos like this one – because the track has new vocals, it’s not visible to YouTube’s systems in the same way as slightly distorted versions of the original are.

Other adoption of Jerkin’ are closer to a fusion – “Yaba Daba Du” is a new “Jerk Bow” song that combines aspects of Jerk with “dem bow“, a distinctly Dominican version of Jamaican reggaeton. The dance steps featured in the video include elements that are recognizably from Jerkin’, as well as moves that are clearly local. And you can see elements of Jerkin’ fashion (backpacks, tight jeans, neon colors) meshing with other fashion statements.

The frontiers of this new musical space are being documented in blogs like Dave Quam’s “It’s After the End of the World” and “Ghetto Bassquake“, which document local dance genres around the world: Cumbia, Bubbling, Dancehall, Chicago Dancehall, Jerking, Kuduro and more. This music isn’t generally termed “world music” – it circulates as “global bass music” or “global ghettotech”. Marshall wonders about the motivations in featuring this music, noting that on some blogs it can turn into “flavor of the month”. Generously citing my work, he wonders whether we’ll see more blogs acting as bridges between musical cultures, not just featuring what’s going on in Angola or Panama, but translating and contextualizing. At present, though, that sort of translation doesn’t always happen.

This new musical space challenges the old definitions about “world music” – it’s no longer about the West and the rest, the Global North and Global South, Marshall offers. Jerkin’ can circulate around the world, moving from one “ghetto” to another, whether or not those neighborhoods are actually poor or are simply asserting themselves as part of global urban culture. We need to think through the problems that come from these uneasy peers – how do we understand each other and learn from each other’s adoption and remix of these influences? And how do we solve the problems we face with our platforms. It’s great to celebrate the ways people have worked through and around these constraints, but we also need to address the limitations.

David Weinberger and Jillian York both liveblogged the talk, and did a better job getting down comments and questions than I did, as I was moderating the discussion. And if you’ve got time, you might enjoy the video of the talk and the questions and answers that followed.

I should also mention that Wayne is a tremendous blogger and writes about these issues at length at Wayne and Wax – if you’re interested in what he had to say, you should go there immediately.

There are at least two big ideas I’m deeply interested in that came out in Wayne’s talk, which is why I was so thrilled he joined us at Berkman. First, the issue of corporate control of platforms and its influence on the spread of media is something where lessons from the music world may spread into other realms. You can argue that Wikileaks is, in a weird way, an outgrowth of Napster: once you digitize something, a song or a secret, its spread online may be inevitable. But that spread can be checked by decisions made by people who own the platforms on which we exchange digital information. YouTube might have argued that an original dance video to a copyrighted track could be entitled to a fair use defense and forced copyright holders to challenge “offenders” one by one, rather than building tools for mass content removal. Amazon could have demanded an injunction before ordering Wikileaks off its servers. I don’t mean to suggest a moral equivalence between these actions – I’m far more sympathetic to YouTube than to Amazon here – but it’s worth recognizing that platforms are shaped by corporate decisions, made for business reasons, and that these decisions may not be in the best interests of free speech or free culture. Whether the answer is pressuring corporate actors to change their behavior to protect public forms of expression on their platforms or to build platforms more free of corporate influence isn’t clear to me. But Wayne’s examples are a reminder that these platform constraints can be subtle and far-reaching.

Second, I’m interested in the idea that music might have more mobility in crossing national, linguistic and cultural borders than other forms of media, and as such, I’m pretty fascinated in what global bass music might tell us about cultural adoption, fusion or bridging. I’ve been thinking about encounters between cultures through a lens provided by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in their book “Cosmopolitan Communications“. Norris and Inglehart are interested in the question of whether encountering media from other cultures changes ones cultural values. They look at the spread of news and entertainment media across national borders and analyze the World Values Survey to try and determine whether encountering media from other cultures changes local values.

They suggest that four things might happen when we encounter media from another culture:
- We might embrace it and it could overwhelm our local culture. (This is a fear often cited with regards to the spread of US culture – the fear of the McDonaldization of the world – and used to justify cultural protection legislation.)
- We might violently reject the other culture and ban it, as the Taliban has done with aspects of western culture
- We might embrace the outside influences and incorporate them into a hybrid culture, creating something new and interesting, like the majestic Bánh mì sandwich, in my opinion, the tastiest byproduct of European colonialism yet discovered.
- We might encounter the other culture, acknowledge it as different and choose not to incorporate or reject it.

Norris and Inglehart suggest that reaction #4 – which they refer to as “cultural firewalls” – is the most common, which explains why Paris is still Parisian despite the invasion of Ronald McDonald. Good multiculturalist that I am, I’m excited about reaction #3 and am patiently waiting for my local McDonalds to begin serving kelewele with their new Ghanaian Chicken Shitor Din sandwich. Wayne’s stories offer a good chance to test the possible models of cultural influence.

“Jerk Bow” looks a lot like evidence for reaction #3, the fusion of cultures, with LA meeting Jamaica in the Dominican Republic, and perhaps especially in the Dominican neighborhoods in NYC. At the same time, watching videos of Jerk around the world gives some support for outcome #1 – if you think that McDonalds is a powerful cultural force, take a close look at the international spread of the New York Yankees baseball cap. Hiphop, an art form built atop sampling and appropriation is either being appropriated all over the world, or is America’s leading weapon in a battle for global cultural dominance. I’m not sure I buy Wayne’s assertion that we’re beyond “the west and the rest” that categorized some types of world music – it seems like much of the influence in these musical spaces is flowing out from the US into other cultures and not flowing back into American hiphop. (Wayne points out that Mexican teens in the US are getting down to cumbia and Dominiyorkers to dem bow. And he points to MIA as bringing global influence into mainstream US dance music. I remain unconvinced until Kanye drops a Kuduro single.)

Music apparently has superpowers to leap across cultural borders. I listen to Baaba Maal’s Senegalese pop and I hear piano lines from Cuban jazz… which in turn came from West African influences filtered through the American South and cities along the Mississippi. Baaba Maal doesn’t speak Spanish, but he was able to pick up influences from latin jazz records popular in Senegal in the 1960s and 70s – musical influence can spread without the sorts of translation or cultural contextualization that we need to appreciate much media that crosses national borders on the internet. This superpower can be a curse – the ease of sampling means it’s quite possible to fall victim to “flavor of the month”, as Wayne warns, or to using source material badly or unfairly. The same technology that makes Yabba Dabba Du possible allows Deep Forest to appropriate a Solomon Islands lullaby and pass it off as pygmy music from Central Africa.

Wayne’s talk suggests to me that web video has this same sort of superpower. Not only can it convey music, it carries dance and fashion as well. And if we want to know if we’re assimilating, rejecting, fusing or ignoring cultures as they bump against one another, watching youth culture through the lens of YouTube may be our best lab to carry out these experiments.