This afternoon, MIT’s Political Science distinguished speakers series hosts Regina Dugan and Kaigham Gabriel, director and deputy director of DARPA, the US defense advanced research project agency, who are here to speak about advanced manufacturing in America. The title for their talk is “Just Make It”, a response Dugan offers to people who ask her to predict the future. “Visionaries aren’t oracles – they are builders.”

She shows a five minute video of nerd porn, a montage of dismissive predictions about technologies (like Lord Kelvin’s statement about the impossibility of heavier than air flight, followed by footage of the Wright Brothers, and then from Top Gun. The video ends with observations about the time to 50 million users for different technologies is rapidly shrinking, pointing to Facebook’s sprint to 100 million users, and offers images of protesters holding banners celebrating the internet. “Still think social media is a fad?” the video asks. The video ends with a challenge for the engineers in the room – “just make it”.

Dugan tells us that the decline in America’s ability to build things is a national challenge, if not a crisis. Americans consume an increasing percentage of goods made overseas, and are less likely to be employed making things. Perhaps this reflects on productivity increases, or on currency manipulations, but it has implications, she warns, for national defense. Adam Smith warned that if an industry was critical to defense, it is not always prudent to rely on neighbors for supply.

There have been many years of debate around the inefficiency of America’s design and building of defense systems, Dugan tells us. One extrapolation of increase in airline design cost – sometimes referred to as “Augustine’s Laws” – suggests that by 2054, a single military aircraft will cost as much as the entire military budget at that time. Obviously, it’s dangerous to extrapolate linearly from current data… but if you do, the cost of military systems is growing much more rapidly than defense budgets. “Quite obviously, this is not sustainable”.

When we design aircraft, she tells us, we’re often designing ten years out. That means we’re trying to understand the threat environment ten years out. That’s risky. “Lack of adaptability is a vulnerability.”

What’s worse is that it’s really expensive. She shows a graph of production costs for the F-22 fighter. The price per unit keeps increasing, and the volume required keeps dropping. This might be because we need to amortize design costs over fewer units. Or it might be because the costs get so high, we simply can’t afford as many units as we wanted. This isn’t just true of the F-22 – it’s true for the Marine EFV project and the Comanche helicopter as well.

This difficulty in building complex systems has implications for defense and for the economy as a whole, she tells us.
“To innovate, we must make. To protect, we must produce.” DARPA is not a policy organization, she tells us, but pushing from “a buy to make strategy” is of strategic importance to the US Department of Defense.

There’s $200 million a year being invested in innovation, looking for ways to change the calculus of cost increase. Can we turn a long problem like vaccine design into one we can solve in weeks? Could we permit the participation of tens of thousands of designers into a process and harness their ideas? She suggests that the future of innovation is around increased speed of production and number and diversity of designs. The rise of electronic design aides revolutionized the semiconductor industry – could this shift in speed and diversity bring a similar paradigm shift?

Dugan tells us that the systems we have to manage complexity are inherited from 1969-era systems engineering. We take complex systems and split them along functional lines – power system, control system, thermal system – then try to put them back together. What happens is that we experience emergent behaviors that weren’t predictable. As a result, we end up with a design, build and test system that we iterate through, trying to solve those emergent problems.

This isn’t the only way to design complex systems. She shows a graph that measures time to design, integrate and test, versus a measure of product complexity, which includes part count and lines of source code. There’s a linear increase in time to build to complexity for aerospace defense systems. Another piece of the graph shows a flat design and test time cycle with increasing complexity – that’s the semiconductor industry. And a third industry – the best in class automotive manufacturers – show a decrease in time with an increase in complexity! How are they pulling this off?

Gabriel tags in here, to explain how the semiconductor industry achieved gains in complexity without extending the timeframe necessary to design and test their products. The key factor was a decision to control for time. “If we aren’t out there with new chips in 18-24 months, we’ll miss the next generation of PCs.” So the principles of VLSI design were optimized around producing new product on a timecycle as tight as that for less complex integrated circuits.

Two major design innovations characterize the VLSI shift, Gabriel tells us. First, it’s critical to decouple design and fabrication, a shift that was comparatively easy for circuit designers to accept. The second was initially heresy: you needed to stop optimizing each transistor, and sacrifice component performance for ease of system design and reliability.

We’ve seen a similar move in computer programming, a shift away from assembler, which produces very efficient code that’s hard to test, to higher level programming languages. Those languages abstract operations, which leads to a decrease in performance efficiency, but since we’re no longer as limited by how many operations a computer can perform, the design speed benefits outweigh the performance compromises. He hints that we may be seeing some similar shifts in biological sciences as well.

How does this work in terms of DARPA projects? Dugan retrieves the mic to speak about the Adaptive Vehicle Make program, designed to build a new infantry vehicle in two years instead of ten. A first step is developing a language to describe and design mechano-electric systems so they can integrate more smoothly. The vehicle, she tell us, will be flexibly manufactured through a “bitstream-configurable foundry-like manufacturing capability for defense systems” capable of “mass production in quantities of one”.

With facilities that can accept a design and custom-forge parts, she believes we can move to an increasingly democratized design system, which enables the participation of many more people to design and submit systems to foundry-like fabrication facilities. We’ll design vehicles “using the most modern techniques of crowd infrastructure and open source development,” in a program called VehicleForge.mil. (While a valid URL, there’s no webserver at that address. Just wanted to save you a Google search or two.)

Critics tell her this approach won’t work. But Dassault recently designed the Falcon 7x aircraft using “digital master models, by tail number, for aircraft” – i.e., building extremely complex individual models for each aircraft they build. The models only do geometric interference (i.e., they test whether the parts fit together), but they’ve halved the time needed to produce a new plane. Critics claim that the analogy between integrated circuits and military vehicles is an inept one. But in terms of part count, ICs are much more complex than vehicles. What’s complex is the diversity of components used in the combat vehicle.

A new experiment, conducted in cooperation with Local Motors, a small-scale vehicle fabrication company (see my notes on the founder’s Pop!Tech talk in 2009) invites designers to compete to design a combat support vehicle, the XC2V. $10,000 in prizes were offered, and instead of getting the 3 designs they get in an invitation-only design scenario, they received 159, 100 of which the judges deemed “high calibre”. It wasn’t a clean sheet of paper design – the chassis and drivetrain were designed by Local Motors – but it was effective at expanding the idea pool, and led to a functioning design within four weeks.

The power of the crowd may be even greater in a field like protein folding, where humans are still able to solve some problems better than algorithms. Foldit is the brainchild of a biochemist, a computer scientist and a gamer, who decided to turn protein folding into a game, building “a Tetris-like environment for folding”. 240,000 people have signed up to play, but what’s really cool is “the emergence of 5 sigma savants for protein folding, some of whom have very little biochemistry training.” Recently, Foldit solved a key protein – a retroviral protease SIV for the rhesus monkeys – which had been unsolved for 15 years. The community folded it in 10 days. Projects like this, she tells us, make her a believer that bringing many diverse minds to a problem and increasing the pace of building will increase the speed and diversity of innovation.

Gabriel offers three other examples where massive innovations are possible through new methods.

Optics are the dominant cost in many imaging and sensor systems. It turns out that making light do something different – bending, focusing, diffusing – requires materials and systems that are heavy, complex and expensive. M-GRIN – manufacturable gradient index optics – moves beyond lenses that are made out of a single material with a single index of refraction. Instead, they use a stack of multiple layers and films, combined via heat and pressure, to make lenses that are smaller and lighter. A test around a shortwave infrared lens produced a device that was 3.5x smaller and 7.5x lighter. That’s a breakthrough… but the real innovation is creation of a set of design rules that let you go from an application to a recipe for combining materials into the lens you need.

In telling us about maskless nanolithography, Gabriel tells us “Moore’s law is dead in circuit design, though the corpse doesn’t know it yet.” The culprit is heat – we can make tighter and smaller circuits, but they’re getting very difficult to cool. As critical is cost. Working at ultra-small line width is prohibitively expensive. It’s hard to spend tens of millions on a set of 45 nanometer masks to create a few hundred chips for a defense system, when building those masks costs tens of millions of dollars.

We know how to do lithography without masks, but it’s traditionally been very slow. So now designers have built a system that creates and bends an electron beam, then splits it into millions of beamlets, controlled by a “dynamic pattern generator”. Program that pattern generator, and it allows millions of writing operations to happen at the same time, leading to a current working speed of 10-15 wafers per hour, the minimum required to produce custom ICs for military applications.

His third example is the accelerated manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, a strategy he tells us was Plan B in 2009-2010 if the H1N1 flu virus had resurfaced. It’s very hard to produce vaccines quickly – egg-based strategies require a piece of virus and many thousands of chicken eggs. These methods work, but can require 6-9 months to build up a stockpile. A new method uses tobacco plants to produce custom proteins, working from strands of DNA in the virus. Envision a football-field sized building filled with lights and trays of tobacco plants. A facility like that can now produce a million doses a month of a novel vaccine. In scaling up capacity to 100 million doses per month, the key problem turned out to be lighting – it was impossible to light everything without switching to LED bulbs. Once they made the switch, they had a new opportunity – tuning the spectrum to optimize production. Using an experiment of “high school science complexity”, they grew plants under different lighting conditions for a few weeks, and determined a mix of blue and red frequencies that doubles protein production.

Gabriel ends with a slide quoting MIT scientist Tom Knight:

“The 19th century was about energy.
The 20th century was about information.
The 21st century is about matter.”

If we embrace this challenge, Gabriel tells us, we will be able to make things at the cost we used to produce and stockpile them in bulk, and this change will change how we innovate.

I thought the DARPA folks gave an impressive talk, inasmuch as they got me thinking about a problem I’d not considered – the insane cost and time frame of producing military equipment. But for a talk sponsored by the political science department, it seemed woefully lacking of discussions of politics or markets. If I were trying to explain the difference in production processes between military vehicles, consumer automobiles and integrated circuits, I suspect I might look at the power of markets. IC manufacturers needed to build chips quickly because customers wanted to buy newer, faster chips… and would buy other chips if the manufacturer wasn’t fast enough. Ditto for automobile companies.

The defense industry is different. It’s very hard to terminate a weapons system, even if it’s massively over time and over budget. The competition happens well before a product is built. Discovering that the F-22 production isn’t going well doesn’t create a market opportunity for another company to produce a better product faster – the company producing the F-22 is going to get paid, even if they take an absurd time to produce the product.

I admire the approach Dugan and Gabriel are putting forward, and certainly appreciate that it plays well to a room full of engineers. But I was very surprised not to hear questions (and I only caught the first five or six) about whether the DoD purchasing process can be reformed so long as military budgets are sacrosanct. We’re currently facing mandatory budget cuts with the failure of the budget supercommmittee, and conventional political wisdom suggests that the social service cuts will go through, while the defense ones will not. How do you encourage companies to innovate when they’re currently amply rewarded for dragging design and production out over decades? How do you innovate without market pressures?

My homogeneously left-wing family was talking politics over the Thanksgiving dinner table and realized the solution to America’s current social problems was to simply adopt the Egyptian political system – let the military run everything. The right doesn’t like cutting military budgets, but is okay when the military provides state-sponsored healthcare and subsidizes education. All we need to do is ensure all Americans are employed by the US military and we can build a thriving, successful welfare state. The same absurdity behind that suggestion is what makes DARPA’s ideas so hard to implement – if there’s no pressure to cut military budgets, anything is possible… except real innovation around cost and efficiency.

I’m traveling too much this fall, not getting enough time with my family or my students, but there are occasional trips that would simply be a mistake to miss. For the past two years, I’ve traveled to Nigeria with my friends and colleagues Colin Maclay and Mike Best. On our last trip, we ended up working with Nollywood directors and producers to brainstorm new business and distribution models for the field. This week, Nollywood filmmakers are in Atlanta, Georgia, visiting Georgia Tech and engaging in a discussion on the future of the industry.

They’re having some fun, too. Zik Zulu Okafor is working on a film while he’s here, a story of a Nigerian hero who finds himself at university in America, wrestling with relationships at home and abroad. As we’re having a discussion about the aesthetics and business model of the industry, Georgia Tech students are auditioning for the production in the next room over.

And we’re surrounded by some marvelous folks who, who’ve been generous in sharing their talents.

That’s Hausa rapper Ziriums – Nazir Ahmad Hausawa – performing his hit “This is Me” in front of an appreciative crowd, who looked up from their goat and jollof rice to cheer him on. The handsome dude dancing with him is Zeb Ejiro, one of the fathers of the Nigerian film industry. The beautiful lady who comes into the frame is Monalisa Chinda, one of Nollywood’s hottest contemporary stars. On the surface, it’s the sort of warm moment that happens often when you’re lucky enough to hang out with groups of Nigerians. But it’s richer and more complicated than that.

There aren’t many Hausa rappers in Nigeria. The language, spoken primarily in the predominantly Muslim north, isn’t heard as commonly in the commercial capital, Lagos, and when Ziriums looked for a contract from a Lagos record company, he tells us that he was not warmly received. And his work has proven pretty controversial at home as well.

While Ziriums’s music is rooted in his culture and faith (he’s the son of a religious singer, and his early performances were Boyz To Men songs rewritten to praise the Prophet), it’s also deeply political. One of the tracks he’s best known for is a reworking of Busta Rhymes’s “Arab Money” as “Government Money”, a satirical track that busts on money-obsessed Abuja. When Ziriums dropped his own album, it featured a track called “Girgiza Kai” – “Shake Your Head” – which pilloried the governor of Kano State.

The governor wasn’t pleased, and the song was banned from local radio. According to this report from Carmen McCain, his website was also blocked in Kano – while I can’t verify that, this would be a very unusual instance in Nigeria, where the internet has remained largely uncensored. (Carmen has contacted me – while the song was banned from local radio, his site was not blocked.) Ziriums now lives in New York, for fear of arrest or harassment in Kano, and is using digital means to ensure Nigerians at home can hear his music and his message.

So it’s not just a warm moment when one of the pioneers of Nollywood cinema shares the mic with a controversial political Hausa rapper – it’s a reminder that Nigeria, for all its complexity and conflict, is a place where respect for each other’s culture and creations can cross lines of language, religion and generation.

Award-winning Nigerian filmmaker Zik Zulu Okafor is one of the first speakers at today’s New Media Nollywood Conference at Georgia Tech. In conjunction with this academic gathering, Okafor is shooting a new Nollywood film at Georgia Tech this month, taking advantage of access to the campus to tell the story of a Nigerian student in the US.

While Nollywood has come to public notice in the past few years, Zik Zulu wants us to know that Nigeria has been making films for decades. In the 1990s, the military governments and economic austerity measures nearly killed the film industry. Television was tightly regulated, and there were fewer than 20 stations – now there are more than 100. But in the mid-1990s, the situation was “placid”.

At the moment of placidity, the Yoruba in southwest Nigeria were making home videos. And a group in the Southeast who spoke Ibo thought they could do something around video production around their language. They made a film called “Living in Bondage”, which Zik describes as “a little miracle”. Despite the fact that it was in Ibo, it became a hit throughout the whole country. Unemployed youth started to look for opportunities to make films and make money. At the peak of the Nollywood miracle, we saw 100 films produced in a week.

While films made in India and Hollywood were more professional, the Nigerian films were pushing them off the shelves. Why? They were films that spoke to our lives, our issues and our problems. But there were limits to how broad an audience these films could reach – questions about technical and commercial limits. Our need to consider Nollywood and new media is the chance to look at the current limits of the industry and how we could transcend those limits.

Documentarian Franco Sacchi tells us that, when you hear a story like Zik’s, want to tell a new and different story about Africa. “There is nothing more original and refreshing than a story like this one.” Sacchi was born in Africa, and knew he wanted to create a different story and narrative.

His film, This is Nollywood – made in 2005 – follows production of a Nollywood film as a window into understanding the creativity and power of this practice. The success of the film led to an invitation to speak at TED Africa, which connected him with people interested in media and social change.

Jay Winsten, public health scholar at Harvard, brought the Scandinavian concept of the “designated driver” to the US in the late 1980s, as a way of addressing death via drunk driving. To popularize the concept, he worked with the producers of the situation comedy, “Cheers”. The mentions on Cheers weren’t especially heavy-handed or paternalistic, but they generated interest in the concept. Shortly after the mentions, the Harvard initiative was able to measure a 30% fall in drunk driving fatalities.

Nigerian films reach the most rural areas, towns where there’s no electricity. He tells us about a man pushing a wooden wheelbarrow filled with films, selling in a rural area. Given this reach and power, we need to consider the possibility that these films are a tool for social good and social change.

Burkinabe cinema scholar Aboubukar Sanogo tells us that he was literally born into cinema. As his parents rushed to the hospital in Ouagadougou, his mother gave birth in taxi in a crowded downtown intersection, next to the Ciné Réal. While not a Nigerian, he’s an expert on older traditions of African cinema, the sorts of films that get shows at FESPACO, the biennial film festival in Burkina Faso that features African film and is the center of academic culture around these films.

aonogo sees Nollywood as the harbinger of a post-cinematic age. Homes, churches and other infrastructures have taken over the function of the cinema. “But some of the properties we associate with 35mm, 16mm, 8mm film are now associated with video. You can be a filmmaker with a VCR.” You can shoot, edit and create a narrative with inexpensive equipment and cameras. He offers his sense that Nollywood may be the future of cinema, and part of its creative and innovative genius.

He references Chidum Okwe, a young Nigerian who has started an alternative distribution channel called Izogn Movies. The website offers subscription-based access to Nigerian films, and builds a community around review snd and comments. Izogn represents a way that media that has powerful domestic reach can influence the diaspora and anyone else excited about Nigerian culture. “We’re shifting to a moment when the content consumed in a country is the content created in that country,” which is the dream of the people who began making cinema in Nigeria.

Jade Miller, a postdoc student at Tulane, wrote her PhD dissertation on the structure of Nollywood while at USC. Her academic interest is in media policy and the development of creative industries. Nollywood, as an industry, developed without any policy interventions from the government, and she notes that it’s possible that the government may not be able to influence Nollywood in positive ways.

She urges us to talk about monetization strategies that work within the current structure of Nollywood distribution. We can’t just talk about piracy – we need to think about models like product placement which could support our work. She wants to hear more about international distribution: are rumors that international distributors offering $5k a film true? She’s heard that satellite channel Africa Magic is commissioning and paying for movies – is that true?

The audience expresses some skepticism about Izogn Movies and other streaming models – are producers actually seeing any money from these services. Sanogo tells us that the site has registered 80,000 subscribers, registers personal data for subscribers, and tracks precisely what is being watched. He notes that one lady had watched 700 films in a year. There’s active spectatorship outside of Nigeria, with 35% of the audience is in the UK, 30% in the US.

What about syndication on airplanes? The revenue from one airplane for 3 months, Sacchi argues, represents 10% of a Nollywood film’s budget. The problem at present, he argues, is the lack of good curation.

Ian Condry offers an extended introduction to Mimi Ito’s work… because her plane has been delayed and it’s likely to be another half hour before she joins us at the MIT Media Lab. Her topic is “Fandom unbound: Otaku culture in a connected age”. Otaku is a term that refers to a specific type of Japanese geek, geeks obsessed with information about their particular field of interest.

Condry heads MIT’s “Cool Japan” effort, explaining that if you study cool, you are almost inherently uncool. But the term comes from a 2002 article on Japan’s “gross national cool“. The article suggests that Japan has been redefining the nature of the superpower. Japan emerged as a national superpower post-WWII as an economic and manufacturing powerhouse. When Ian was studying Japanese, he tells us, most of his fellow students were economics student, who hoped to make money in Japan. But as the Japanese bubble collapsed in the 1990s, leading to “the lost decade”, Japan’s confidence as well as economic power suffered.

During that lost decade, Japan began to ascend as a cultural superpower, exporting anime culture and cinema. Students who study Japan no longer are obsessed with making money – they’re obsessed with manga, anime, videogames, and subcultures like Yaoi.

This isn’t “soft power”, as defined by someone like Joseph Nye. Japan’s formal attempts at this – a blue robot cat as a cultural ambassador to China, a set of “cute ambassadors” (women dressed in schoolchildren’s clothing sent to anime conventions), perhaps this beats sending cruise missiles as a way of asserting power. Cultural power is more indirect, more subtle and perhaps more effective.

Condry, doing a laudable job of vamping, walks us through Mimi’s book “Engineering Play“, an examination of how a technology used for serious business and military uses turned into a tool for play. He proceeds to unpack “otaku” – a fandom usually associated with video games, anime, or other media fandoms. “Otaku” means “your house” or “your group”. “O” is an honorific – you’d never use it to describe your own house, as Japanese humility prohibits talking about your honorable house. “Otaku” may have come about as a term at Japanese scifi conventions – the home group you represent as a fan.

The term can be controversial – it’s used sometimes to refer to individuals who literally shut themselves away in their apartments. And a serial murderer, MIYAZAKI Tsutomu, was found with an apartment full of manga, and while that material proved not to be particularly transgressive, the connection between otaku and danger was made in Japanese news media.

More recently, otaku culture is also seen as a sign of successful, entrepreneurial net creatives…and sometimes, craziness. 2chan, the predecesor to 4chan (a reference to the fact that there’s no channel 2 on the Japanese television), reflects some of this tension. 2chan has shared secret documents as well as pranks and trolling. And “Train Man” is an example of the rehabilitation of otaku culture. An otaku, returning from Akihabara, carrying a shopping bag of sexy figurines, confronts a drunk man on a train who’s harassing a pretty woman. The geek in question posts on 2chan, talking about the experience, and bemoaning the fact that he didn’t get the woman’s name. As a proper Japanese woman, she sends him a thank you note… and a set of Hermes teacups. He becomes “trainman” and she becomes “Hermes”, and they end up dating… assisted by real-time commentary on 2chan advising him on what to do on a date. Condry notes that it’s a charming story, and likely to be real.

Mimi arrives 35 minutes into her introduction, and Ian’s still going strong. He explains that fandom may offer hints for how popular culture can influence civic media and connect people who are often excluded from political discussions into civic life.

Unlike Henry Jenkins, who identifies as an academic and fan, Mimi tells us that her interests in fandom comes from understanding her bicultural identity as American and Japanese. Her cultural identity between different contexts leads her not to think about straightforward comparisons between cultures, but to seek out points of mutual agreement. It’s hard to talk about Japanese culture, she tells us, without talking about American culture. We need to consider this broader, transnational flow of culture.

Anthropology traditionally considers national, or more local communities. Mimi is more interested in transnational cultures, spreads of media and identity across multiple locations. We need to consider Japanese culture on a transnational stage, even “traditional” Japanese culture, which is created in part as a reaction to the hypermodern, international and connected modern Japanese culture.

If culture flows mean that it may be more popular with American kids at MIT than Japanese audiences, how do we understand how to situate a culture? In her experience, being able to call herself American or Japanese has taken continual maintenance – our cultural identities may not be connected to ourselves in the future in uncomplicated ways.

Mimi’s forthcoming book comes from research she began in 1999, when she moved back to Japan. She became fascinated by Japanese mobile phones and Pokemon. A prior book focused on girl culture and mobile phone, while Fandom Unbound (forthcoming) is focused more on boy culture, including otaku culture. Empowered in part by the internet, otaku culture expanded from niche culture to what Clay Shirky calls “a superniche”. As Japan has moved from a hardware exporter to a software – and really, cultural – exporter, there are interesting questions about why certain aspects of Japanese culture jump across national borders.

Markets aren’t sufficient to understand the spread of net culture, particularly fan to fan, peer to peer, end to end. It’s not that the anime industry has figured out how to build an international market. It’s that the fans have figured out alternative distribution channels, and that there’s a deep affinity between fans and consumers. The businesspeople and cultural elites aren’t always in control in a network culture age – instead, there’s complex dynamics of transnational flow of culture.

Mimi notes that people often ask about phenomena she’s documented, “Is that a Japan thing?” The distinction seems to be between an unexplainable Japanese culture, and human attraction to technology – SMS is simply something humans are interested in, while Yaoi might be one of those strange things only attributed to Japan. That’s a cop-out, she warns, and something we need to avoid.

It’s important to understand the urban density of Japan, and Tokyo in particular. One of her collaborators is a train otaku, a fairly common identity in Japan. She shows us a photo from 1976, where early train otaku are photographing a subway train. There’s a new twist on the culture where certain trains are now identified with cute girls. This probably won’t be popular overseas – it’s likely connected to a particular form of urban density.

The specialization of parts of Tokyo is also significant. Akihabara was the electronics district in Tokyo, and about a decade ago, turned into otaku central. This wasn’t an urban planning decision, to transform the neighborhood where you went to buy a washing machine to a place that sells erotic videogames. This was the product of lots of small shifts, not a planned decision. It’s now virtually a theme park for otaku culture. Ikebukuro has now emerged as a center for female otaku, while Akihabara is for men. You’ll find maid cafes in Akihabara, butler cafes in Ikebukuro. The ability to create dense niches help create spaces for cultures that aren’t as easy to transmit digitally. These neighborhoods support specialty stores and events that would be hard to imagine in the US. Events for specific fandoms like Naruto or Full Metal Alchemist happen weeks – forget “Comicon”, this infrastructure supports very granular fandom.

There’s a sense of craft that underlies arts like cosplay, both in terms of the quality of the costumes and the policing of fan behavior that’s hard to understand from the US. It’s also hard to understand the volume of production of media like manga. In a day, Japan produces as many comics as the US produces in a year. As a result, there’s more diversity and experimentation. This helps explain “boyslove”, which would be called “slash” here – rewriting storylines to create homosexual storylines, written by women, for women.

Given the incredible diversity of media creation, Mimi asks us to consider the question, “Why do some of these media get circulated, and some don’t?” It’s not that “someone gets it right”, and the local suddenly goes global. Instead, it’s that global networks allow people to connect globally niche to niche, subculture to subculture. She reminds us that anime producers have traditionally been ten steps behind the fans. The emergence of phenomena like fansubbing shows how far behind the producers actually are – after fans figure out how to build rich translation networks, only then does the business case for translated materials become clear.

The transnational market for some of this content is making content more visible to Japanese markets. It’s unthinkable that, ten years ago, “boyslove” manga would be easily findable in bookstores. Based in part on the recognition of an international audience, it’s now visible in major bookstores.

One of the cultures Mimi studies is AMV – music videos made from clips of anime, usually set to popular American or European music. Mimi interviews a videomaker who builds videos around hiphop, fairly unusual for the scene. His motivations involve talking back to the stereotypes of the space… and what is created is a wonderfully culturally fluid object.

A first question observes the similarities between AMVs and fanvids and wonders why there’s so little overlap between those subcultures. Mimi suggests that this may have to deal with origin stories. AMVs started recently, a post-digital phenomenon, while vidding grew from slash fiction decades earlier. It’s possible that the genres have different rules due to this divergent history.

A questioner mentions a visit to a university in Japan that offers a concentration in manga, and a manga creator who asserts that non-Japanese audiences could possibly understand contemporary manga. How are creators thinking about their emerging international audiences? Mimi wonders if there’s a cultural pride about the non-translatability of Japanese culture that’s stronger in past generations than in the current one. Ian, who works with anime creators, tells us that directors are often ambivalent about international audiences – they’re afraid of being misinterpreted. But they’re also afraid of the cheapness of DVDs in other markets, as compared to the very high price in Japanese markets. Hollywood is looking to global audiences more than Japanese animators.

A grad student asks whether patterns of media consumption outside Japan constitutes appropriation of culture. Mimi allows that fansubbing has been a demand-driven process, not a market driven one, and this reflects audience power, if not appropriation.

A question from someone who teaches at Tufts and studied Japanese culture at MIT offers the idea that in the west, the body is free but the mind is captive, while in Japan “you’re stuck wearing a suit, but you can draw tentacle porn”. Mimi suggests that deviance is well tolerated in Japan, due to religious values, and to the overall safety of the real world for Japanese youth.

Sasha Constanza Chock, my partner in crime at Center for Civic Media, talks about the Naruto video she showed at the end of her talk. He references a video made to “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting” that looked at cultural resistance over the course of hundreds of years – can we complicate the video by looking at this transnational mashup of hybrid genres? Mimi suggests that martial arts is a space that’s got Asian origins, but is now owned by transnational cultures. How owns medieval fantasy? Ninjas? Fast cars?

I offered a question about what advice Mimi would give to the Nigerian filmmakers I’ll be meeting with at Georgia Tech next week about how Nollywood culture could become more viral. Mimi suggests that anime and manga can travel because they’re deodorized of cultural reference. Naruto doesn’t look Japanese – he’s got blonde hair. Power Rangers, a live action show, had to remade with white actors, while Sailor Moon didn’t need to – they already looked white. Live dramas can circulate within Asia, while cartoons seem to be more capable of being transmitted internationally. Perhaps we need Nollywood cartoons to help Nigeria take advantage of cultural power?

Dear Chris, June, Bruno –

One of my students at the Center for Civic Media and I were discussing the need for more conference venues for young speakers to share their ideas and polish their presentation skills. While TEDx has greatly expanded speaking opportunities, we felt that there was still more room to experiment with novel formats and extend the TED brand.

In the spirit of collaborative innovation, I posted a proposed new TED format to Twitter this morning:

Idea: TED Ex. Your former lovers have 18 minutes each to discuss your flaws, streamed live on the web.

November 9, 2011 9:17 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EthanZ

Ethan Zuckerman

While this would make for a short programme in my case, I suspect there are organizers who could convene an excellent roster of speakers around this theme. Indeed, one especially experienced respondent wondered whether the four-day conference format would be sufficient to accomodate all speakers he planned to invite.

Fortunately, the Twitter hivemind saw the wisdom of extending the TEDx format and have been posting suggestions to me directly, and using the #TEDHighConcept hashtag. I’ve collected some of the more promising ideas for your edification here.

@katecrawford @EthanZ TED SubteXt: Everyone will wonder what the speakers *really* meant.

November 9, 2011 9:48 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@nancybaym

Nancy Baym

TED Ex Parte: Speakers have 18min to make their case, while being judged by a remote audience that can’t hear them. (@nancybaym @EthanZ)

November 9, 2011 9:53 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@katecrawford

Kate Crawford

@katecrawford TED eXcuse: None of the speakers show up (@EthanZ)

November 9, 2011 9:54 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@nancybaym

Nancy Baym

@EthanZ @nancybaym: @katecrawford TED eXpel. Speakers vote each other off the conference one by one, Survivor style, till one is left.

November 9, 2011 9:59 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@techsoc

Zeynep Tufekci

@katecrawford @EthanZ TED: DEAD – Great historical figures return to give the present (and the future) a little perspective. :)

November 9, 2011 10:01 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@tamaleaver

Tama Leaver

@techsoc @EthanZ @nancybaym @katecrawford Ted X. Complete with hugging and glowsticks.

November 9, 2011 10:02 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@debcha

Deb Chachra

@tamaleaver @katecrawford @techsoc @arnicas @EthanZ TED eXterminate: Only Daleks speak. Audience destroyed at the end. Unless…

November 9, 2011 10:03 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@nancybaym

Nancy Baym

@EthanZ TED eXcommunicate. Speakers confess their sins for 18 minutes, audience decides which ones to eXcommunicate from TED.

November 9, 2011 10:13 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@techsoc

Zeynep Tufekci

TED Hex – the world’s top wizards and witches duel to prevent each other from taking the stage.

November 9, 2011 10:07 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EthanZ

Ethan Zuckerman

@EthanZ TED neXt: speakers talk about what they want to speak about in the upcoming TED event.

November 9, 2011 10:14 am via Tweetbot for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@ahmed

Ahmed Al Omran

Some of these ideas are more controversial than others:

@ethanz TED Next – speakers have 1.2 seconds to impress before the audience hits next. also, high risk that the next speaker is a penis

November 9, 2011 10:15 am via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@smwat

Sara Marie Watson

While others seem likely to involve litigation over intellectual property:

@EthanZ Ted Excellent! All the speakers are historical personages, whisked to the present day by a couple of teenagers in a time machine.

November 9, 2011 10:34 am via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@elfrankenstino

Paul Frankenstein

Yet some I can easily imagine working on the TED stage:

TED eX libris: speakers read directly from their books. @ethanz #TEDHighConcept

November 9, 2011 10:28 am via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@smwat

Sara Marie Watson

TEDLex – Lawyers forced to plead a case in under 18 minutes @katecrawford @EthanZ

November 9, 2011 10:23 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@grok_

Kate Darling

@EthanZ TedFX: Everything is in 3D, with CG anthromorphic animals and robots and aliens mucking about, then suddenly EXPLOSIONS

November 9, 2011 10:29 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@sprinksvherself

Michelle C Forelle

TED(ve)X – 18 minutes onstage, costumed as a bull. Your task is to destroy as many pieces of chinaware as possible cc. @ethanZ

November 9, 2011 10:32 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@toluogunlesi

tolu ogunlesi

@EthanZ TEDtreks: Deliver your talk while running the gauntlet. Bonus seconds for costumes, penalties for exertion noises.

November 9, 2011 10:38 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@kthread

Kristen Taylor

@EthanZ TED neXt Newly ousted CEOs defend their next project from skeptical shareholders. Fruit-throwing encouraged, especially apples.

November 9, 2011 10:40 am via TwitterrificReplyRetweetFavorite

@AaronGenest

AaronGenest

@EthanZ, EX-TED-NZ: speeches that last all night

November 9, 2011 10:41 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@lrakoto

Lova Rakotomalala

Xeni’s suggestion offers ample possibilities for collaboration with BoingBoing:

@EthanZ TEDMex: Drug war solutions? New tech manufacturing? Aw fuck it, just: an epic talent battle between 500 mariachis.

November 9, 2011 10:29 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@xeni

Xeni Jardin

And a number of suggestions attempt to leverage TED’s technological prowess:

@ethanz TED LaTeX: speakers find bugs in Donald Knuth’s typesetting program. Slides are done in TeX, of course. #TedHighConcept

November 9, 2011 11:25 am via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@springingly

A Springmann

@EthanZ @katecrawford MooTed: Ted talks given in a text-based online virtual reality system.

November 9, 2011 11:21 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Lawgeek

Lawgeek

@EthanZ TED X-Men. Speakers with freakish mutant powers of visualisation. Only Hans Rosling is invited.

November 9, 2011 11:01 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@stevesong

Steve Song

Finally, we understand TED’s focus on social impact and change. These ideas might prove helpful:

@EthanZ TEDeXtinction: talk about human civilization.

November 9, 2011 11:31 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@cascio

Jamais Cascio

@EthanZ TED Expat: only migrants allowed as speakers. Theresa May advised to stay away.

November 9, 2011 10:42 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@shefaly

Shefaly

@EthanZ @katecrawford WanTED: Fugitives on the run from the law are given amnesty to explain why they didn’t do it, in 20 minutes.

November 9, 2011 11:02 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Lawgeek

Lawgeek

@katecrawford #TEDrex, or why we need more monarchies. #TEDHighConcept

November 9, 2011 10:34 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@OxbloodRuffin

Oxblood Ruffin

If you’re concerned about the compatibility of these ideas with the existing format for TED conferences, here’s an especially helpful suggestion:

TED Xzibit: Yo dawg, we heard you like conferences, so we put a conference in your conference. #TEDHighConcept

November 9, 2011 10:36 am via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@smwat

Sara Marie Watson

And while existing conferences rarely suffer from these problems, this is a helpful intervention when events aren’t going well:

@EthanZ Ted Ex Machina: terrible speeches are saved at the last minute by increasingly unlikely plot contrivances.

November 9, 2011 11:10 am via Plume  ReplyRetweetFavorite

@thomaswilburn

Thomas Wilburn

Should any of these ideas prove viable as a future TED format, no need to share royalties – just send mainstage passes. We hope to offer more assistance in the future at the #TEDHighConcept hashtag.

Regards,

@ethanz and friends

This summer, Sasha, Lorrie and I started brainstorming the sorts of events we wanted to host at the Center for Civic Media this fall. The first I put on the calendar was a session on “mapping civic media”, a chance to catch up with some of my favorite people who are working to study, understand and visualize how ideas move through the complicated ecosystem of professional and participatory media.

To represent the research being done in the space, we invited Hal Roberts, my collaborator on Media Cloud (and on a wide range of other research), Erhardt Graeff from the Web Ecology project, and Gilad Lotan, VP of R&D for internet analytics firm BetaWorks. On Wednesday night, I asked them to share some of the recent work they’ve been doing, understanding the structure of the US and Russian blogosphere, analyzing the influence networks in Twitter during the early Arab Spring events and understanding the social and political dynamics of hashtags. They didn’t disappoint, and I suspect our video of the session (which we’ll post soon) will be one of the more popular pieces of media we put together this fall. In the meantime, here are my notes, constrained by the fact that I was moderating the panel and so couldn’t lean back and enjoy the presentations the way I otherwise might have.

Hal Roberts is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he’s produced great swaths of research on internet filtering, surveillance, threats to freedom of speech, and the basic architecture of the internet. (That he’s written some of these papers with me reflects more on his generosity than on my wisdom.) He’s the lead architect of Media Cloud, the system we’re building at the Berkman Center and at Center for Civic Media to “ask and answer quantitative questions about the mediasphere in more systematic ways.” As Hal explains, media researchers “have been writing one-off scripts and systems to mine data in haphazard ways.” Media Cloud is an attempt to streamline that process, creating a collection of 30,000 blogs and mainstream media sources in English and Russian. “Our goal is to get as much media as possible, so we can ask our own questions and also let others ask questions of our duct tape and bubblegum system.”

Hal’s map of clusters in popular US blogs. An interactive version of this map is available here.

Much of Hal’s work has focused on using the content of media – rather than the structure of its hyperlinks – to map and cluster the mediasphere. He shows us a map of US blogs that cluster into three main areas – news and political blogs, technology blogs and what he calls “the love cluster”. This last cluster is so named because it’s filled with people talking about what they love. Subclusters include knitters, quilters, fans of recipes and photography. The technology cluser breaks down into a Google camp, an iPhone camp and a camp discussing Android Apps. Hal’s visualization shows the words most used in the sources within a cluster, which helps us understand what these clusters are talking about. The Google cluster features words like “SEO, webmaster, facebook, chrome” and others, suggesting the cluster is substantively about Google and its technology projects.

While we might expect the politics and news cluster to divide evenly into left and rightwing camps, it doesn’t. Study the link structure of the left and the right, as Glance and Adamic and later Eszter Hargittai have, and it’s clear that like links to like. But Hal’s research shows that the left and right use very similar language and talk about many of the same topics. This is a novel finding: It’s not that the left and right are talking about entirely different topics – instead they’re arguing over a common agenda, an agenda that’s well represented in mainstream media as well, which suggests the existence of subjects neither the right or left are talking about online.

Building on this finding, Hal and colleagues at Berkman looked at the Russian media sphere, to see if there was a similar overlap in coverage focus between mainstream media and blogs. “Newspapers and the television are subject to strong state control in Russia – we wanted to see if our analysis confirmed that, and whether the blogosphere was providing an alternative public sphere.

The technique he and Bruce Etling used is “the polar map” – put the source you believe is most important at the center, and other sources are mapped at a distance from that source where the distance reflects degree of similarity. The central dot is a summary of verbiage from Russian government ministry websites. Right next to it is the official government newspaper. TV stations cluster close to the center, while blogs cover a wide array of the space, including the edges of the map.

It’s possible that blogs are showing dissimilarities to the Kremlin agenda because they’re talking about knitting, not about politics. So a further analysis (the one mapped above) explicitly identified democratic opposition and ethno-nationalist blogs and looked at their placement on the map. There’s strong evidence of political conversations far from the government talking points in both the democratic opposition and in the far right nationalist blogosphere.

What’s particularly interesting about this finding is that we don’t see the same pattern in the US blogosphere. Make a polar map with the White House, or a similar proxy for a US government news agenda, at the center, and you’ll see a very different pattern. Some right wing American blogs flock quite closely to the White House talking points – mostly to critique them – while the left blogs and mainstream media generally don’t. However, when Hal and crew did an analysis of stories about Egypt, they saw a very different pattern than in looking at all stories published in these sources. They saw a tight cluster of US mainstream media and blogs – left and right – around the White House. The government, the media and bloggers left and right talked about Egypt using very similar language. In the Russian mediasphere, the pattern was utterly different – the democratic opposition was far from the Kremlin agenda, using the Egyptian protests to talk about potential revolution in Russia.

The ultimate goal of Media Cloud, Hal explains, is to both produce analysis like this, and to make it possible for other researchers to conduct this sort of analysis, without a first step of collecting months or years of data.

Erhardt Graeff is a good example of the sort of researcher Media Cloud would like to serve. He’s cofounder of the Web Ecology Project, which he describes as “as a ragtag group of casual researchers that has now turned in a peer-reviewed publication“. That publication is the result of mapping part of the Twitter ecosystem during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and attempting to tackle some of the hard problems of mapping media ecosystems in the process.

The Web Ecology Project began life researching the Iranian elections and resulting protests, focusing on the #iranelection hashtag. With a simple manifesto around “reimagining internet studies”, the project tries to understand the “nature and behavior of actors” in media systems. That means considering not just the top users, or even just the registered users of a system like Twitter, but the audience for the media they create. “Each individual user on Twitter has their personal media ecosystem” of people they follow, influence, are followed by and influenced by.

This sort of research rapidly bumps into three hard problems, Erhardt explains:

- Did someone read a piece of information that was published? Or as he puts it, “Did the State Department actually read our report about #IranElection?” It’s very hard to tell. “We end up using proxies – you followed a link, but that doesn’t mean you read it.”

- Which piece of media influenced someone to access other media? “Which tweet convinced me to follow the new Maru video, Erhardt’s or MC Hammer’s?”

- How does the media ecosystem change day to day? Or, referencing a Web Ecology paper, “How many genitalia were on ChatRoulette today?” The answer can vary sharply day to day, raising tough problems around generating a usable sample.

The paper Erhardt published with Gilad and other Web Ecology Project members looks at the Twitter ecosystem around the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt. By quantitatively searhing for information flows, and qualitatively classifying different types of actors in that ecosystem, the research tries to untangle the puzzle of how (some) individuals used (one type of) social media in the context of a major protest.

To study the space, the team downloaded hundreds of thousands of tweets, representing roughly 40,000 users talking about Tunisia and 62,000 talking about Egypt. They used a “shingling” method of comparison to determine who was retweeting whom ad sought out the longest retweet chains. They looked at the top 10% of these chains in terms of length to find the “really massive, complex flows” and grabbed a random 1/6th of that sample. That yielded 774 users talking about Tunisia, 888 talking about Egypt… and only 963 unique users, suggesting a large overlap between those two sets.

Then Erhardt, Gilad and others started manually coding the participants in the chains. Categories included Mainstream Media (@AJEnglish, @nytimes), web news organizations (@HuffingtonPost), non-media organizations (@Wikileaks, @Vodaphone), bloggers, activists, digerati, political actors, celebrities, researchers, bots… and a too-broad unclassified category of “others”. This wasn’t an easy process – Erhardt describes a system in which researchers compared their codings to ensure a level of intercoder reliability, then had broader discussions on harder and harder edge cases. They used a leaderboard to track how many cases they’d each coded, and goaded those slow to participate into action.

The actors they classified are a very influential set of Twitter users. The average organization in their set has 4004 followers, the average individual 2340 (which is WAY more than the average user of the system). To examine influence with more subtlety than simply counting followers, Erhardt and his colleagues use retweets per tweet as an influence metric. What they conclude, in part, is that “mainstream media is a hit machine, as are digerati – what they have to say tends to be highly amplified.”

The bulk of the paper traces information flows started by specific people. In the case of Egypt, lots of information flows start from journalists, bloggers and activists, with bots as a lesser, but important, influence. In Tunisia, there were fewer flows started by journalists, more by bots and bloggers, and way fewer from activists. This may reflect the fact that the Tunisian story caught many journalists and activists by surprise – they were late to the story, and less significant as information sources than the bloggers who cover that space over time. By the time Egypt becomes a story, journalists realized the significance and were on the ground, providing original content on Twitter, as well as to their papers.

One of the most interesting aspects of the paper is an analysis of who retweets whom. It’s not surprising to hear that like retweets like – journalists retweet journalists, while bloggers retweet bloggers. Bloggers were much more likely to retweet journalists on the topic of Egypt than on Tunisia, possibly because MSM coverage of Egypt was so much more thorough than the superficial coverage of Tunisia.

While Gilad Lotan worked with Erhardt on the Tunisia and Egypt paper, his comments at Civic Media focused on the larger space of data analysis. “I work primarily on data – heaps and mounds of data,” he explains, for two different masters. Roughly half his work is for clients, media outlets who want to understand how to interact and engage with their audiences. The other half focuses on developing the math and algorithms to understand the social media space.

This work is increasingly important because “attention is the bottleneck in a world where threshhold to publishing is near zero.” If you want to be a successful brand or a viable social movement, understanding how people manage their attention is key: “It’s impossible to simply demand attention – you have to understand the dynamics of attention in the face of this bottleneck.”

Gilad references Alex Dragulescu’s work on digital portraits, pictures of people composed of the words they most tweet or share on social media. He’s interested not just in the individuals, but in the networks of people, showing us a visualization of tweets around Occupy Wall Street. Different networks take form in the space of minutes or hours as new news breaks – the network around a threatened shutdown of Zuccotti Park for a cleanup is utterly different than the network in July, when Adbusters was the leading actor in the space.

Lotan’s visualizations of Twitter conversations about Occupy in July and October 2011

Images like this, Lotan suggests, “are like images of earth from the moon. We knew what earth looked like, but we never saw it
We knew we lived in networks, but this is the first time we can envision it and see how it plays out.”

When we analyze huge data sets, we can start approaching answers to very difficult questions, like:
- What’s the audience of the New York Times versus Fox News?
- What type of content gains wider audiences through social media?
- What topics do certain outlets cover? What are their strengths, weaknesses and biases?
- How do audiences differ between different publications? How are they similar?
- How fast does news spread, and how does it break?

Much of media and communications research addresses these questions, though rarely directly – as Erhardt noted, we generally address these questions via proxies. But Lotan tells us, we can now ask and answer questions like, “How many Twitter users follow Justin Bieber and The Economist?” The answer, to a high degree of precision, is 46,000. It’s just shy of the number who follow The Economist and the New York Times, 54,000.

Lotan is able to research answers like this because his lab has access to the Twitter “firehose” (the stream of all public data posted to Twitter, moment to moment) and to the bit.ly firehose. This second information source allows Lotan to study what people are clicking on, not just what media they’re exposed to. He offers a LOLcat, where the feline in question is dressed in a chicken costume. “We can see the kitty in you, and the chicken you’re hiding behind.” What people share and what they click is very different, and Lotan is able to analyze both.

This data allowed Lotan to compare what audiences for four major news outlets were interested in, my measuring their clickstreams. Al Jazeera and The Economist, he tells us, are pretty much what you’d think. But Fox News watchers are fascinated by crime, murders, kidnappings and other dark news. This sort of insight may help networks understand and optimise for their audiences. Al Jazeera’s audience, he tells us, is very engaged, tweeting and sharing stories, while Fox’s audience reads a lot and shares very little.

Some of Lotan’s recent research is about algorithmic curation, specifically Twitter’s trending topics. Many observers of the Occupy movement have posited that Twitter is censoring tweets featuring the #occupywallstreet hashtag. Lotan acknowledges that the tag has been active, but suggests reasons why it’s never trended globally. Interest in the tag has grown steadily, and has a regular heartbeat, connected to who’s active on the east coast of the US. The tag has spiked at times, but remains invisible in part due to bad timing – a spike on October 1st was tiny in comparison to “#WhatYouShouldKnowAboutMe”, trending at the same time.

At this point, Lotan believes he’s partially reverse engineered the Trending Topics algorithm. The algorithm is very sensitive to the new, not to the slowly building. This raises the question: what does it mean to “get the math right”. Lotan observes, “Twitter doesn’t want to be a media outlet, but they made an algorithmic choice that makes them an editor.” He’s quick to point out that algorithmic curation is often very helpful – the Twitter algorithm is quite good at preventing spam attacks, which have a different signature than organic trends. So we see organic, fast-moving trends, even when they’re quite offensive. He points to #blamethemuslims, which started when a Muslim women in the UK snarkily observed that Muslims would be blamed for the Norway terror attacks. That tweet died out quickly, but was revived by Americans who used the tag unironically, suggesting that we blame Muslims for lots of different things – that small bump, then massive spike is a fairly common organic pattern… and very different from the spam patterns he’s seen on Twitter.

When we analyze networks, Lotan suggests, we encounter a paradox that James Gleick addresses in his recent book on information: just because I’m one hop away from you in a social network doesn’t mean I can send you information and expect you to pay attention. In the real world, people who can bridge between conversations are rare, important and powerful. He closes his talk with the map of a Twitter conversation about an event in Israel where settlers were killed. There’s a large conversation in the Israeli twittersphere, a small conversation in the Palestinian community, and two or three bridge figures attempting to connect the conversations. (One is my wife, @velveteenrabbi.) Studying events like this one may help us, ultimately, determine who’s able to build bridges between these conversations.

I can’t wait for the video for this event to be put online – we’ll get it up as soon as possible and I’ll link to it once we do.

There’s a great blogpost from Nancy Scola about the rise of Twitter hashtags as form of political discourse, specifically focusing on the #WeCantWait tag, which both quotes President Obama about the need for rapid action on a jobs bill, and invites snarky commentary on both sides of the political aisle about what Americans can’t wait for (a one term Obama presidency, a more cooperative Congress, etc.) Scola steps right up to the line of coining a neologism – the snarktag – with this observation: “Once the Dewey Decimal system of Twitter, hashtags are being embraced by the political class as an ideal way to snark.”

I mention the piece for three reasons. It’s a good read. It quotes Gilad Lotan of media analysis firm Social Flow at length, and Gilad spoke this evening at MIT, along with Hal Roberts and Erhardt Graeff on “Mapping Media Ecosystems“, an event I hosted for the Center for Civic Media, which I’ll blog about tomorrow. (Video will be up shortly – very cool event.) Third, Nancy’s piece got me thinking about another related, unnamed Twitter phenomenon that I’ve been experiencing: the mass rebuttal tweet.

Since the start of the Bahrain uprising in February of this year, I’ve been tweeting about Bahrain fairly often. I tweeted about the disappearance of Global Voices blogger Ali Abdulemam, and his sentence in absentia to 15 years in prison for his alleged role in plotting a coup against the government. I’ve tweeted about my frustration that the US continues to station a large contingent of military personnel in Bahrain and was close to selling armored Humvees and missiles to the country. (Under political pressure, the Obama administration has delayed that sale.)

When I tweet about Bahrain, I get fairly few retweets – it’s not an issue many people are following. But I started getting regular responses from @fatoooma92. This user identifies herself as a “Student @ CHS year 2″, which likely refers to the Bahrain College of Health Sciences. Much of her stream is in Arabic, but responses to me are in English, and they argue in passionate, if unpersuasive, terms that Bahraini protesters aren’t peaceful activists, but dangerous, violent traitors.

Fatoooma92 is fond of sending videos and images to make her case. While I don’t find them especially persuasive, evidently she does. And she sends these videos to a wide range of people who’ve written about Bahrain: not just me, but Barack Obama and Nick Kristof.

This is a little different from a now well-established Twitter practice: hijacking hashtags. If I want American conservatives to know about a story I think they’ll like (or hate), I can tag it #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter) and people following that tag will stumble on my link. (Yes, posting bit.ly links to The Lemon Party to #tcot has been tried, and no, it’s not all that funny. Besides, do it enough and conservatives will post their own disturbing links to #p2 – progressives 2.0 – or worse, to the universal liberal hashtag, #npr…) These rebuttal links aren’t going to the #Bahrain conversation, which has at least two sides to it. It’s a personal message, visible to only the targeted individual (and someone who happens to be following both the sender and the recipient.)

As Fatoooma92 is sending the same message to lots of people, it looks a little like spam. But it’s not commercial. And to a certain extent, it’s not unsolicited: I’ve posted using the tag #Bahrain, and Fatoooma92 is engaging with me directly, as someone who’s expressed an opinion on Bahrain. Unlike broadcast media in America, which abandoned right of response in the scrapping of the fairness doctrine for most new stories, Twitter ensures a right of response. Don’t like something I say? You can send me an @message, and there’s a decent chance I’ll read your response.

On balance, I think this is probably a good thing. Yes, it’s possible that Fatoooma92 is not a real student in Bahrain, but the astroturf creation of a PR agency attempting to defend Bahrain’s reputation in Twitterspace. (If Bahrain doesn’t have a firm attempting to contest perceptions in social media, it’s probably just a matter of time before they find one.) And this sort of activity reminds me more than a little of Zumabot, an early bot that trawled Usenet for references to Turkey and automatically posted rants accusing Armenians of genocide against Turks in WWI. (Zumabot had the odd habit of not being able to distinguish between the country and the bird, so discussions of Thanksgiving cookery had a tendency to become filled with anti-Armenian hate speech.)

But it’s also possible that Fatoooma92 is a real person, who really thinks I don’t understand Bahrain and am being brainwashed by a global media conspiracy. Whether or not she’s right or wrong is, to some extent, irrelevant. In the same way that it’s helpful for me to get pushback (as well as reinforcement) when I amplify a story like Morgan Housel’s argument that Occupy Wall Street protesters are likely to be part of the globally economically privileged 1%, it’s important to get the reminder that what I believe about Bahrain is not universally believed, and that other people are at least as passionate about the topic than I, often in a different direction.

The flip side, of course, is that being on the receiving end of this speech is pretty unpleasant. I checked in on my @messages while writing this post, and was greeted with this missive from @perrysupport129: “@UBCSMN @EthanZ Anti-Christ to Muslims: You’re filthy cowards and Muhammed was a child molester” followed by a URL, making the “argument” at more length. The trigger for this rebuttal appears to be the fact that I’m giving a talk on the Arab Spring at the University of British Columbia (@UBCSCM). Perhaps a Rick Perry supporter is searching for every mention of the word “arab” and tweeting offensive screed as a response. Or perhaps someone wants to portray Perry supporters as ignorant racists, and is creating accounts like this one to make the case. Again, it’s hard to know.

There’s some sort of psychological impact that comes from receiving a rebuttal tweet. Twitter is a social network, and to some extent, we’re all looking for the small serotonin burst that comes from an affirmative retweet – “Yay, a person liked what I have to say!” Not only does the rebuttal fail to provide the boost – it provides (for me, at least) a much stronger negative signal: someone I don’t know disagrees with me strongly enough to single me out and correct me. Did I get my facts wrong? Is this a chance to start a discussion, or is someone merely yelling at me? Even if I’m confident about what I wrote, the rebuttal tweet interrupts my comfortable echo chamber of affirmation and invites me to think about whether I’m considering an issue broadly enough. And that’s often a good thing.

Except when it’s not. I have friends who are knowledgeable about Israeli/Palestinian relations who choose not to write about the subject because they fear a flood of tweets, messages and blogposts in rebuttal. Many of those responses aren’t meant to convince – they’re meant to bully the initial speaker into silence. And perhaps that’s what Fatoooma92 is trying to do. Her first tweets made clear that she, as a Bahraini, knew more about what was happening in her country than I did, and that I should butt out. Had I not been following Bahrain closely, I might have taken her hint and shut up. It seems to me the value of the practice is directly connected to whether it’s attempting to silence speech, or attempting to challenge opinions expressed. Which direction it evolves in, and whether the practice remains fairly obscure or becomes commonplace: I look forward to watching and finding out.