I came to the Berkman at Ten conference under doctor’s orders to keep my eyes closed. This leads to an unusual - for me, at least - approach to conference-going. I’m here in Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School with a heavy blindfold on, sitting next to my friend Thomas Kriese, who’s telling me about the slides projected at the front of the room.

The blindfold is off now, because I lost a challenge with David Weinberger - it turns out that I cannot, in fact, liveblog blindfolded. I can, but what results isn’t exactly readable - turns out that I move one key in a random direction every few minutes if I’m not typing continuously.

Anyway. This event is an interesting blend of birthday party, complete with a certain degree of self-congratulation, and academic conference, featuring Berkman faculty as speakers. There’s a lot to celebrate. John Palfrey, our fearless leader, has just been elevated to vice-dean of the law school, responsible for the library and information services of the institution. The Center is moving from a Law School center to a “university-wide” center… though it’s a bit unclear what that move will mean. Yochai Benkler has joined our team, and with Cass Sunstein moving to Harvard Law, we’re hoping he’ll join as well. And Dean Elena Kagan urges us to use this conference as a chance to convince Jonathan Zittrain to accept an offer to take a tenured position at Harvard, where he taught until a few years ago.

Zittrain is the opening speaker, offering an overview of the argument in his new book, “The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It“. His argument - in a nutshell - is that the amazing power of a programmable computer and an open internet, which he refers to as “generativity”, may be in danger of making the internet such a dangerous place that we try to shut off this generative magic.

Zittrain uses the “g-word” infrequently in today’s talk - instead, he refers to this magic as “the dark energy” of the internet… which is appealing to me, as the world is very dark indeed with this blindfold on. But the darkness of his vision provokes some serious pushback from the audience, which includes net luminaries like Scott Bradner and David Reed, who helpfully point out that people have been predicting the implosion of the internet for a long, long time now… and somehow the network proces resilient enough to survive.

Terry Fisher, framing Zittrain’s talk, explains that most conversation about the net has focused on a debate between market forces and open, commons-based creation. Zittrain offers a different model - a matrix that includes axes from top-down to bottom-up, and from hierarchy to polyarchy. The generative net has lived in the quadrant defined by bottom-up and polyarchy. Many of the solutions to the scary problems of the net move towards top-down, centralized solutions like that offered by the ITU. Zittrain’s hope is for a bottom-up, but hierarchical solution.

That’s the quadrant he’s pointing to on the screen, but his argument seems a lot more basic - we need to trust human nature and people’s willingness to do the right thing. I’m reminded that when I spoke to Brooke Gladstone at On the Media a week or so ago, she told me that all net visionaries she knows ultimately believe that human nature will save the Internet - it’s interesting to discover that JZ is soundly in that camp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Years ago, the fellows at the Berkman Center decided that we needed a single day a week where we would all make a best-faith effort to be at the center, so we could socialize, talk about our research, share ideas and generally do whatever it is that fellows are supposed to do. By tradition, this day is Tuesday, when many of the fellows attend the Berkman lunch series, and a large number of us show up for “fellow’s hour” - an informal 90 minute roundtable.

Sometimes these roundtables are quite serious and involved, especially when a colleage is presenting new research. Sometimes… not so much.

Yesterday afternoon, I talked a bit about my fascination with Chinese pushback on western media coverage of protests in Tibet - anti-cnn.com and videos on YouTube promoting the view that Tibet is an integral part of China. I’ve argued on this blog that these are a form of bridgeblogging, and made the case that these are a form of amateur “public diplomacy” at a conference at the Fletcher School yesterday.

While my colleagues seemed somewhat interested in those arguments, what captured everyone’s attention was the phenomenon of YouTube video at fellows’ hour. David Weinberger somehow made a segue to Senator Mike Gravel’s exceedingly odd campaign video where he covers “Helter Skelter”.

(I recommend skipping the first thirty seconds and beginning once Gravel takes the stage. Gravel has released a number of interesting videos, including a cover of “Power to the People“, and two “avant-garde” pieces - a seven-minute film of a campfire called “Fire” and downright disturbing piece where Gravel stares into the camera for seventy seconds before dropping a rock into a lake and walking away. The latter two videos are the products of a pair of video professors in USC - Gravel explains that they approached the candidate and offered to make the videos for free.)

The floodgates opened, and we spent the next hour trolling the net for presidential song videos. There’s a wealth of them out there, ranging from the inspiring to the truly bizarre, ranging far beyond will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” (and the wonderful parody john.he.is) and Obama Girl (and the Obama Girl/Giuliani Girl “debate“.)

Jake Shapiro, one of my fellow fellows and the head of PRX, a project that’s helping change how independent producers access US public radio, has been collecting citizen video for the BallotVox project, a site that is covering citizen media responses to the elections. (Think of it as a domestic version of our Voices With Votes project.) He’s got a great set of videos indexed at del.icio.us, collecting people talking and singing about their candidates of choice.

It’s quite hard to find pro-Hillary and pro-McCain music videos that haven’t been produced by the campaigns themselves. Those you can find tend to be somewhat cringe-inducing. An amateur remix of the Rocky theme song to promote Hillary is reasonably painless, but it’s been watched only 4,000 times.

Watched far more often is Gene Wang’s “Hillary4U&Me“, embedded above. It’s a musical bridge back to the 20th century, arriving somewhere in the early eighties, shorly before “We Are the World”. Comments were disabled on YouTube, but it’s safe to say that’s not because they were overwhelmingly positive - the site retains a one-star review for the video. (I strongly recommend viewing the video above, then viewing one of several available videos depicting an unwary viewer watching Wang’s song.)

The song is so bad that there was a widespread blogosphere discussion about whether it had been produced by the Obama camp to critique his primary rival. Nope - it’s the brainchild of a Hillary supporter and tech entrepreneur, who admits that his may not be the most successful product in promoting his candidate: “I do agree that some of the Obama videos are better. But we have the better candidate by far.”

The pro-McCain videos, at least, were intended to be funny. Humor site 23/6 has released “It’s Raining McCain” and “Here Comes McCain Again“. It’s unclear the connection between the Arizona senator and eighties songs with rain metaphors, but there’s no debating the fact that it’s very difficult to get the image of McCain, falling like rain, out of your head.

That’s not to say that all pro-Obama videos are pain-free. It’s not especially easy to make it through magicalchaswick’s “Hey There Obama“, a moody folk song sung by a boy soprano. (I’d pay to hear him sing a duet with 12 year old Brook Pernice, who may be looking for a new candidate after her man, Mike Huckabee, withdrew despite her impassioned country-western outline of his positions and traits.)

But it’s possible that Obama’s got the greatest range of musical styles represented, from roadhouse country through reggaeton to reggae and calypso.

Some of these are clearly professionally produced - Amigos de Obama’s Tejano and Reggaeton songs have some pretty high production values, and Viva Obama (above) isn’t exactly the sort of thing you produce in your living room some afternoon. But some of the most amazing may well be, like this Bollywood masterpiece, below:

Roughly a year ago, my friend Bruno Giussani offered a prediction for the 2008 elections. In response to the pro-Obama remix of Apple’s 1984 ad, he argued, “2008 will be the campaign of user-generated swiftboating. It will be a campaign dominated by information chaos.”

I think he’s right about the chaos, and off on the swiftboating. Not that there isn’t a great deal of nasty political disinformation on YouTube. There is. But the viral nature of the medium seems to favor the spread of some videos over others. If it’s funny and/or has a good beat, it’s got a much better chance of going viral.

I did an informal timeline of Reverend Jeremiah Wright videos on YouTube, both before and after ABC broke a news story about the “God Damn America” sermons - there were videos of Wright circulating previously, but with very, very few views. After the story broke, hundreds of videos were uploaded featuring the Wright clips. It wasn’t a YouTube story until it became a mainstream media story, at which point political actors in both camps took to YouTube to play through their attacks and responses.

My significantly less serious prediction for 2008 - the winning candidate will be the one who convinces Moldovan band O-Zone to re-record “Dragostea Din Tei” as a campaign song.

“Hallo, Barack?”

I’d very much welcone any other links to music videos produced by any of the US presidential candidates… or for that matter, candidates anywhere else in the world. My comment thread is your comment thread…

A special bonus - while flooding you with videos, allow me to recommend a wonderful radio segment from South Africa parodying election rigging in Zimbabwe. Many thanks to Abdulrahman for forwarding it.

John Kelly, a researcher with Berkman and Columbia University, is one of the founders of Morningside Analytics, a company that’s trying to discover and map connections in the blogosphere and media as a whole. He’s presenting his recent research at the Annenberg/Berman Media Re:public conference.

Before showing some of the quantiative research he’s worked on, Kelly offers some observations that guide his research:

- “Bloggers versus journalists” is just a food fight - they’re all part of one system of communications

- Communications is in a long process of deep evolution, moving from the postal service to telephone to internet. (He notes that very little has been written on social impact of telephones.)

- Blogs are a key to understanding networked social spheres.

- Communications research needs an overhaul, because our current methods misunderstand society.

- We’ve always been a networked society, and now we know it.

With these principles in mind, Kelly shows some of his maps. They’re collections of colored dots, each representing media sources (blogs and mainstream media). Some show clusters of blogs that link to one another. Others show “attention maps” - what sources the bloggers are linking to, representing what they pay attention to. At the center of these attention maps, Kelly tells us, are the New York Times and the Washington Post. Attentive clustering allows Kelly to group together bloggers who share common news sources.

He shows us maps f five different language blogospheres - English, Persian, Russian, Arabic, and Scandinavian (Swedish, Norwegian and Danish). Each has a different shape, a different number of clusters. The Iranian blogosphere, which Kelly has studied closely, has some unusual clusters:
- poetry bloggers
- secular, expatriate reformist bloggers (what most people think of as the Iranian blogosphere)
- the conservative, religious blogosphere, which has clusters around shia sects and youth groups

The clusters in the US blogosphere are, unsurprisingly, quite different. Much of his work has focused on looking at what media liberals and conservatives look at and what terms they use. Both left and right-wing bloggers use the term “wingnut”, for instance, while the right uses the term “moonbat” to describe the wacky left, and the left-wingers don’t really know the term. Tools like a “word radius analysis” look at words that appear within five words of a term like “security” - based on cluster analysis, he determines which terms are used by liberals and conservatives. He concludes that conservatives use more abstract terms to talk about security, while liberals tend to talk in extremely concrete terms when using that word.

Some recent work looks at the speed and persistence of linking to certain media objects. Kelly is interested in questions like, “Was the video of Reverend Wright’s viral, or was it merely salient?” If something was simply salient, it would cause ripples in the communication environment, almost like background radiation. His analysis shows that different types of media have different attention patterns: mainstream news stories tend to peak very quickly, while wikipedia articles are linked over very long periods of time. YouTube videos tend to peak as quickly as mainstream media, with a small exception for videos that truly go viral. Kelly believes it may be more common for videos to be put on YouTube by people attempting to set agendas in mainstream media - they seed YouTube, then point to it as a way of arguing that “the bloggers are talking about a story”, even though they’ve planted the story.

My colleague David Weinberger has been teaching a course at Berkman this semester on the topic, “What’s different about the web?” He answers this question on his first slide of his Media Re:public talk: “No atoms, no centralized control, and everyone’s connected.” But to really understand what changes are brought to us by the web, we need to understand how frames and metaphors are changing.

The metaphor frequently used for the world of information online is “the ecosystem”. David believes this is too comfortable, and reminds us that there are ecosystems that aren’t especially pleasant. (There’s a slide that references insects that support themselves on the vomit of other creatures.) Another metaophor - professionals and amateurs - is too rooted in money and in sports to make David comfortable. And the metaphor of information flow is too abstract and impersonal to explain why people produce and seek news.

David suggests that we wrestle with a difficult metaphor, suggesting that the less comfortable the metaphor, the more likely we are to benefit from it. This metaphor is a metaphor of abundance, a world in which there’s vastly more information than we could ever encounter. We tend to overfocus on the abundance of bad information, he believes, worried that others will “fall for it.” (We’re never worried that we might fall for it.) But is the abundance of bad information really a worry in the world of tremendous abundance?

“The battle over the fron page is an accident of atoms.” When we fight about what news makes it onto the front page, we’re fighting an old fight based on the fact that there’s a limited amount of real estate on a paper page. When we fight over “the Daily Me” (here Weinberger is involing Negroponte, and later Sunstein), we’re ignoring the fact that we all have our personal frontpages: our email inbox. We pay attention to news because we are driven by recommendations from others, both positive and negative. Our inbox doesn’t give us all the good stuff, of course, but it gives us information that’s “good enough”.

“Every tag is a front page. Every tag is a bookshelf.” The front page is metadata - it’s information on what stories are highest priority, which are most important. “In an age of an abundance of good, the struggle is over metadata.” Fortunately, we’re building new tools to handle this metadata. We create tools like tags, seek information through social networks (which offer not personalization, but socialization), and organize information through the (oversold, but fascinating) semantic web.

All these are tools that unsettle knowledge. They’re forcing us to get more comfortable with te fallibility of information. They remind us that information comes from humans, and that we are all inherently fallible. And they’re changing the nature of the public. “We’re all creating our own publics in public.” We’re all questioning what’s data and what’s metadata, what’s information and what’s information on how you interpret information. And that’s an uncomfortable - and therefore likely useful - frame.

Professor Roberto Suro is a veteran print journalist, formerly with the Chicago Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post and other major publications. He’s our resident journalist, asked to frame
journalism’s role in democracy for the Media Re:public conversation.

He reminds us that we should separate journalism’s social role from its business reality. “The decline of journalism as a business is portrayed as decline in social role,” and it’s not clear that that’s true. He also offers a distinction between “participatory journalism” - places where people comment and interact around the news - and “the journalism of participation”, journalism that fosters more effective participation in the civic space.

This latter form of journalism sometimes uses new tools, but can happen in old-fashioned one to many media. “In weighing journalism’s social role, we need to pay more attention to its impact than to its means.” We should ask what are the outcomes of participation in journalism, and whether journalism makes engagement in democracy more representative.

To explain the shifts in our understanding of journalism, Suro invites us to travel backwards to the journalistic feud between Philip Freneau and Benjamin Franklin Bache. The two men edited rival newspapers, which represented the Federalist and Republican parties. The papers “pushed the limits of the technology available in the day, promoting discussion with readers, organizing readers into networks.” The papers had a watchdog role, examning government responses to foreign policy and domestic issues. And they both slung mud, engaging in truly nasty personal attacks against each other.

We’d fire either of these editors immediately for being overly partisan. But it’s worth remembering that their patrons were Madison and Jefferson, on one side, Adams and Hamilton on the other side. Certainly the work these men did was fundamental to the American notion of democracy. And it’s hard to argue with their dedication - when yellow fever struck Philadephia, both men refused to leave the city unless the other left first. They both died, four days apart from one another, from yellow fever.

The debate between the two men was basically a debate about whether the press’s role was to inform the elites, or whether it should inform the broadest swath of citizenry. This debate is with us today - in some ways, it’s the professional versus citizen media debate.

We’re seeing a pivotal moment in the evolution of journalism. There’s a resurgence of partisan news organizations. In Europe, these organizations tend to be explicitly aligned with political parties, which actually helps keep them fairly moderate. It’s more factional in the US, where partisan media tends to cluster at the ends of the political spectrum - they’re capable of criticizing their own movements for being insufficiently conservative or progressive. This leads to a greater polarization in government, and probably to a less effective government. Suro has studied the US debates over immigration closely, and believes that citizen media was effectively used to polarize the debate to the point where compromise and reform was impossible. The new medium doesn’t guarantee more productive debate.

For the next 48 hours, I’m in LA, where it’s sunny, warm and basically impossible to park your car… which is only a problem because you need a car to get anywhere. I think I’d trade 20 farenheight degrees for functional public transit.

I’m at the USC Annenberg Center, attending a conference cohosted by Annenberg and the Berkman Center. The conference is the brainchild of my friend and colleague Persephone Miel, who is managing the Media Re:pubic project, a careful, close look at the benefits and limitations of citizen media.

That’s more or less the subject of this event - a skeptical look at participatory media and its impact on the rest of the media landscape. Ernie Wilson, the new dean of the Annenberg Center, sets the stage by encouraging us to be “extremely positive and extremely skeptical.” He wonders whether we’ve seen evidence yet that social media and related phenomena are leading to the outcomes we care about - more to the point, it’s extremely unclear that increased connectivity correlates to increased democracy. (He references Open Networks, Closed Regimes, a book that looks closely at the affect of internet access on China.)

Wilson invites us to consider four epistemic communities: traditional print media, the emerging digital media community, the public broadcasting community and commercial media. What do each of these communities think about the changes in the media landscape and democracy?

The print journalists, he tells us, argue, “Newspapers are the bedrock of democracy. Newspapers are dying. American democracy is in grave danger.” The digital media folks are a bit more optimistic, pointing out that digital media is creating new ways to connect, making it possible for new forms of democratic relationships to emerge. The public broadcasting folks are insistent that non-commercial media space is essential to democracy’s survival. And the commercial folks often think, “Democracy is a good thing, in principle… but I’m too busy to think about democracy - let me think about what I need to pay attention to,” the need to run a sustainable business.

Wilson tells us that all these views are inaccurate, and that all are right. The challenge we face is figuring out what each of us does about it.

Elspeth Revere is one of the people who needs to figure out what to do about it. She’s the head of the General Program at the MacArthur Foundation, the program that supports media work. Traditionally, MacArthur has funded public media. But the foundation is very interested how digital media has shifted the landscape.

MacArthur has funded research on intellectual property, and has recently focused on “digital natives”, people who understand technologies in a deeper, more fundamental way because they’re literally growing up with them. She and others are studying questions of credibility and believability online, wondering how one decides to seek out believable information online. And MacArthur is fascinated with the idea of individuals as media producers, and questions of who isn’t choosing to produce media.

With Berkman, MacArthur is trying to figure out this new media landscape - Miel’s work on Media Re:Public is funded by MacArthur, and John Palfrey of the Berkman Center notes that it’s very forward-looking for MacArthur to be investigating these questions in public, rather than behind closed foundation doors.

Our “keynote speaker” - or resident provocateur - is Richard Sambrook, the director of BBC’s global news division, responsible for a set of properties which includes BBC’s World Service, probably the world’s most important news broadcaster in terms of pure reach. He’s an excellent blogger, sharing insights gleaned from BBC’s media monitoring services as well as his perspectives on traditional and new media.

Sambrook’s talk is titled, “How Participatory Media Has and Hasn’t Changed the News”, and he begins by rolling the clock back to the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference held by Berkman (organized by Rebecca MacKinnon). He reminds us that Jay Rosen declared, “Blogging versus journalism is over, and the forces of denial are in retreat” - a proof that a good soundbyte never dies. “It’s remarkable how different the world was in 2005″ - since then, we’ve seen social networks have a major impact on the digital world, and seen a text-based web get significantly more dynamic with video and audio.

This change has led to a change in the way of thinking at media companies. “The phase of denial is over - the future is moving online.” There are now over 100 podcasts available on the BBC. There are blogs on the Washington post, though they rarely link out. The Guardian just won an award fo TV journalism. But very little of this innovation is participatory.

That said, there’s great enthusiasm around citizen journalism and user-generated content. “It’s become a marketing tool - you must talk about being open to contributions from the public.” He offers a framework for citizen media:

- Sharing of experience. We’re seeing reports from the ground in Tibet or Burma. This is a pretty old idea, though - news networks have always always interviewed eyewitnesses.

- Sharing opinion. Blogs are very good at this, but mainstream media has been quite poor at incorporating it. It’s actually something mainstream media has done in the past, using phone-ins, but somehow, it hasn’t happened well with blogs.

- Sharing of discovery. News breaks on the net, sometimes, and can be picked up by mainstream media.

- Sharing of expertise, which points to more sophisticated models of networked journalism.

Sambrook reminds us that “participation is a minority sport” - despite excitement over this medium, most people are passive consumers, not participants. He tells us about a BBC project, a river trip in Bangladesh, designed to focus on communities that may be eliminated due to climate change. The stories were translated into 17 languages for broadcast on audio and video. Photos from the trip were seen by at least 50,000 people on Twitter. But only 26 people ended up following the trip via Twitter. This might serve as a reality check for cyberenthusiasts… which include Sambrook, who’s a regular Twitter user.

Part of the problem is figuring out what the right combination of technologies are. He references a Namibian journalist, who helped him understand the relationship between radio and telephones in her country. “The most popular radio program in Namibia are the death notices.” People broadcast news of deaths and funeral announcements, “using the radio like a telephone.” It makes sense, because funerals are the most important social obligations, ways for people to network and build ties with one another.

All media finds itself in a state of revolution right now. You used to be able to sell a record by getting a song on the air, getting a video on MTV, then shipping discs to stores. Now, record companies have to execute 25 steps at the same time - ringtones, downloads, music blogs. “It’s just what happens. And there’s something similar in journalism - it’s fragmenting.”

Providers of journalism are transforming themselves. The Guardan is transforming from a newspaper to a global digital content platform… without really working out the revenue model. The paper’s boss has declared a strategy of “invest… and hope.”

This hope can be in the face of some difficult numbers. A senior manager at the New York Times argues that “demand has never been greater” for quality journalism, pointing to the 17 million people who use the Times website every month. But while NewYorkTimes.com turns a profit of about $100 million a year, it’s nowhere near what’s required to run the Times newsroom.

The BBC is looking for new forms of community involvement, inviting people who watch Newsnight to help set the day’s new agenda. And he’s optimistic that individuals and companies will be “the new creatives” - a group innovating especially around video journalism. The caution is that most of this innovation has been pretty un-newsworthy so far. “There’s Seesmic, a video blogging service, where you can see Loic Le Meur three times a day tell you how wonderful his life is.” The technology is great stuff, but people have to step away from their webcams and into the real world. Once people are streaming video from mobile phones at places where news is taking place, the equation will change radically.

Another form of public participation is likely to be as curators. He points out that DJ’s are now as respected as musicians, choosing the appropriate content for the correct time. This may start hapening on the web as the semantic web becomes a reality, allowing people to find the information they want, when they want it, and remix it into their own curated collections.

He leaves us with a series of questions:
- How do we invite participation so that media becomes more of a public dialog?
- What are the new metrics we use to measure attention in a new media universe?
- Can big media really adjust to this new world of increased acces, new competition and new business models? Can they do it without losing their social purpose?

Lewis Hyde is a fellow at the Berkman Center, and is a professor of creative writing at Kenyon College. He’s probably best known for his work in cultural criticism, including an influential book, The Gift, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. He’s currently working on a book about the cultural commons and its historical roots.

At Berkman today, he introduces the idea of a program to defend educational fair use. Such a project would document the norms of academic fair use, and would focus on helping academics claim certain rights of fair use. Hyde points out that Berkman focuses heavily on studying content controls and on providing education bout democratic processes - both subjects bear on the subject of academic fair use.

To remind us of the history of commons, Hyde shows us an engraving of Richmond Park in London, the largest urban park in the world. Charles the First enclosed Richmond Park to make a deer park, and upset commoners in the process. They lost certain use rights - to traverse the park, to take gravel, to take water, to cut shrubs. An English court determined that Charles was in the wrong, and that commoners had the right “to throw down encroachements” - “If the Lord doth inclose any part and leave not sufficient commons, the commoners may break down the whole inclosure.” The engraving shows a vicar leading a group of commoners to break down the walls around Richmond Park put up under orders of the king.

Hyde believes that similar encroachments have happened in the copyright realm. He points out that copyright, in a US context, used to be short and carefully limited. “Now, statistically, it is unlimited,” he says, making the point that copyright keeps being extended to protect certain works. In the 19th century, copyright was much less restrictive - copyright protected against literal transcriptions. But a translation of a work into another language would not violate copyright. Nor would the abridgement of a multi-volume work into a single volume.

That is, until 1841, when a case arose in Massachusetts around abridgement - in Folsom versus Marsh, an author of an 11-volume collection of George Washington’s works sued the author of a two-volume collection. The smaller collection contained substantial amounts of the larger work - 30% of the volume came from the larger work. Judge Joseph Story wrote for the court, stating that fair abridgement is not a violation of copyright, but asks what constitutes fair abridgement. “We must often, in deciding questions of this sort, look to the nature and objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used and the degree in which the use may prejudice the sale, diminish the profits or supersede the objects of the original work.”

Story’s guidelines served lawyers and judges until 1976, when a revised copyright law substantially tightened fair use exceptions. Hyde quotes from the preamble of Title 17, Chapter 1 section 107 of US code, “Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair Use”:

“Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”

That seems like really good news for educators - there’s an explicit mention of the academic use of texts, and specific protections for criticism, scholarship, research and teaching. Unfortunately, the text that follows - the four factors - are significantly more explicit:

“n determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

Hyde points out that these clauses are quite abstract - that’s intentional, as the authors of the code are cognisant of the danger of being overly restrictive. Hyde points out that it’s surprisingly hard to use these tests as guidelines. Section three seems to suggest that you need to use a small section of text… but a court ruling regarding the Betamax allows consumers to record entire TV programs, and it’s allowable to copy a chapter of a book for use in your class.

Two cases have been litigated around academic course packets - one involved Kinkos and the other involved Michigan Document Services. In both cases, course packs were found to be infringing. But Hyde points out that both cases involved commercial copy shops. He offers a hypothetical: a communications professor copies magazine ads and adds commentary to teach students about advertising in a communication class. The pack is produced by a University copy show and is sold at cost. Is this legal? Hyde points out that there’s not clear caselaw to settle the matter.

To help professors figure out these matters, publishers have created guidelines, instructing academics how to stay out of trouble. These guidelines are quite restrictive, suggesting that professors shouldn’t copy more than an article from a periodical or a chapter from a book. It includes language about brevity - “a complete poem of less than 250 words, or less than 10% of the total work…” Hyde argues that “the very clarity of these guidelines obscures” the actual law. This is intentional - users were excluded from the final formulation of these guidelines - academics objected angrily to these guidelines, but they generally circulate without these objections.

These guidelines don’t actually have much standing in the law. Unfortunately, they’re often enforced pretty strictly within a university context. When threatened by a publisher with litigtion, NYU agreed to adopt these fair use guidelines as the maximum of what professors should do, rather than the minimum they probably should serve as. NYU has helped disseminate these guidelines, and Hyde argues that 4 of 5 universities nationwide basically use the NYU guidelines.

It’s possible to fight back against overly restrictive guidelines. Hyde points to a project by the American Univesity Center for Social Media, which worked with documentary filmmakers to advise the community on fair use. The project met with dozens of documentary filmmakers, asked them what copyright problems they had and helped them articulate their own statement of norms. The pamphlet documents the norms of the documentary community, and tries to resolve those norms with copyright law. It’s created a resource that’s proven very helpful for filmmakers - a documentary caled “Wanderlust” saved $400,000 by not getting explicit permissions for footage it used, relying instead on fair use. The project has also helped films that might not have been released overcome barriers to release, including “This Film is Not Yet Rated”. And companies that provide “errors and omissions” insurance to filmmakers are beginning to incorporate these guidelines.

So why don’t professors do something similar? Hyde points out that he mostly teaches 19th century literature, because he saves a month of preparation in not having to clear his texts. He believes the approach is not to try to teach the law to professors, but having them focus on “what’s fair and reasonable.” In this sense, filmmakers are a good community to start with, as they’re both users of fair use and copyright holders - they can see both sides of the situation.

Hyde ends with some concrete questions about starting a movement:
Where would you start?
Would you need a defense fund?
Who would fund it?
and, more or less, Who’s in?

The discussion around the table at Berkman focuses mostly on the complexity of implementing such a plan. John Willbanks of Science Commons points out that the practice in academic science can vary widely between fields - biologists share very well, and were able to create a database of genetic information by compelling people who publish to add their sequences to a database; other scientific fields aren’t nearly as good at playing nice together. Oliver Goodenough offers the idea of a compulsory license - pay a penny per copy into a fund that compensates copyright holders. Hyde dismisses this as an abandonment of fair use, and Terry Fisher, who’s studied the issue closely, thinks it can’t happen. Fisher advises avoiding university counsel in these battles, and focusing on defending the principle that education is different from other uses of copyrighted materials and should have a privleged status under the law.

I’m in Turkey this week participating in a Berkman conference on internet and democracy - it’s a meeting of activists from almost twenty countries, talking about ways that activists can use the internet to promote democratic movements. Many of the sessions are off the record or under Chatham Rules, to protect the identity of people speaking here. But the first speaker this morning is Sami ben Gharbia, the leader of Global Voices Advocacy and a leading Tunisian free speech advocate, and he’s not exactly a shy guy. :-)

Sami’s presentation is on video advocacy and mashups, with a focus on advocacy in Tunisia. While Sami and other Tunisian activists have worked hard on other free speech campaigns around the world, this presentation focuses specifically on activism in Tunisia, specifically around the legislative and presidential elections of 2004 and the World Summit on Internet and Society in 2005. Sami and other activists were urging a boycott of the 2004 elections, which they expected to be rigged. And they wanted to ensure that the political and internet leaders from around the world who came to Tunisia in 2005 would encounter the Yezzi Fock Ben Ali (Enough is enough, Ben Ali) campaign that they were running.

Sami argues that Tunisia is one of the most successful propoganda machines in the world - despite being a highly repressive nation, it’s rarely criticized by Europe and North America - he believes that Tunisia is viewed as a model for repressive dictatorships. To take on such a propoganda machine, Sami argues that you need to create your own propoganda, including video, which is easy for non-activists to understand and be moved by.

He shows some early videos, often flash animations that have turned into videos distributed on YouTube and DailyMotion. One shows Ben Ali in a washing machine, making the point that a military dictator can’t wash off his military and security background. Another shows reports of human rights organizations about Tunisia and urges Tunisian internet users to “enlarge their vision.”

Several of Sami’s videos use footage of animals. One shows a gorilla looking directly at a camera. Her motions are subtitled and tell the viewer, “I’m a primate, you’re not a primate. You’ve got the power to vote for someone other than Ben Ali.” Another video uses footage of lions chasing and killing a zebra - the point is that manufacturers of filtering and censorship software are chasing down and killing freedom of speech. The film ends with a slide that says, “Smartfilter - your dirty business is killing our freedom of expression”.

A video I’ve written about at length is Astrubal’s remix of the Apple 1984 commercial. Years before American activists remixed the Apple ad to promote Obama over Hillary Clinton, Astrubal used the commercial to protest against Ben Ali’s never-ending presidency. Another video focuses on the 404 error page - a page the Tunisian internet authorities show when a site is blocked, to try to fool users into believing that the internet is experiencing a technical problem, rather than being censored. Sami tells us that “404″ evokes a Peugeot motor car, and offers a video clip from a 1962 commercial parodying these 404 errors.

Much of the Tunisian video activism focuses on humor. Sami points to an article that appeared in Tunisian newspaper La Presse - “the Pravda of Tunisia” - that reported that a city in Italy had named an avenue for Tunisian president Ben Ali. Sami and others researched the street using Google Maps and discovered that the “avenue” was actually a small alley, a dead end, in a tiny village. To show the disparity, they created a video that highlighted the claim in the newspaper and then showed the actual road on an online map.

Google Maps and Google Earth are increasingly popular in Tunisian activism. A new video uses the theme of 1001 Nights and features Ben Ali and his wife on a flying carpet, touring Tunisian presidential palaces via Google Maps. Another video looks at the use of the Tunisian presidential plane. Sami and Astrubal started searching for images of the Tunisian presidential plane on “planespotter” websites - they discovered that the plane had made at least 13 trips outside the country in an interval when onl one official trip had been reported. They used Google Earth to show the thirteen trips and raise the question about who was using the plane and why.

Sami mentions that the video was blocked in Tunisia within five days - the Tunisian authorities blocked DailyMotion, where it had been posted. (Oddly enough, they haven’t blocked either Google Maps or Google Earth.) But Sami had been promoting the video on his blog in Arabic, and Astrubal promoted it on his in French. When Global Voices picked up the story, it became accessible to the Anglophone world as well. Sami credits my blog post on the situation with bringing the story to the attention of Foreign Policy magazine, which has now reported both on the Tunisian activism, and offered advice on how you, too, can become a presidential plane spotter.

One of the questions offered after the talk is whether video advocacy is appropriate for low-bandwidth environments. There’s evidence that videos, once they go viral, are shared even by people who don’t have high bandwdith - Sami has seen some of the videos he’s made being distributed on DVD in Tunisia.

Judith Donath of the Socialble Media Group at MIT’s Media Lab, is one of this year’s new fellows at the Berkman Center. Her lunch talk today is titled “Designing Society” and looks at the ways that communications technology can be designed to enhance human interaction and make communication more expressive.

Donath’s current work is on signaling theory in human communication - she has a forthcoming book at MIT press called “Signals, Truth and Design.” She shows a table of contents, which includes topics like “signals, cues and meaning”, “deception” and “gossip, ratings and reputation”. She explains that most critical social information isn’t visible. “Do you like my gift?” “Would you be a good partner and care for my offspring?” It’s hard to see the answers to these questions, so we read social signals instead. A key question is how reliable these signals are as a way of detecting what lies beneath. This turns into a question about economics: “What are the costs of being deceptive?”

When we raise children, a good part of socialization is teaching children not to tell the truth. A three-year old wants to tell you that you look funny, that he hated Grandma’s gift, that he thinks a stranger is ugly. A good part of parenting is telling children when it’s appropriate to be truthful and when you need to be deceptive.

Much of her talk focuses on projects that her students have built at the Media Lab and the questions that they’ve raised. One set of projects focuses on improving conversation in online spaces. A project called Chat Circles was a response to the first generation of online chat systems that included avatars, like The Palace. She argues that “putting up a picture of a sofa as a way to encourage people to talk seems a bit heavy handed.” This is an example of a tension between abstraction and legibility - it’s possible to recreate very accurate, very legible spaces in virtual worlds, but it tends to miss some of the power of abstraction that can come from the digital realm.

In Chat Circles, each user is represented by a colored circle. The circle expands when you’re speaking and contracts when you’re silent. The words of people near you in the virtual room are visible - if you’re further away, you can see a person speaking, but can’t comprehend the words. The interface therefore uses space in a way that makes intuitive sense - if someone bothers you, move away and you won’t hear what he’s saying.

Donath observes that people have an odd tendency to fill physical needs in virtual space, despite the fact that these needs are non-existent. Why provide chairs in Second Life? Avatars don’t get tired and want to sit down. Yet people build meeting rooms with chairs, conference tables and fluorescent lighting - the goal is to signify a meeting space by providing acoutrements that aren’t strictly necessary. (One audience member observes that she gets tired with her avatar standing in Second Life and feels better when it sits down. John Clippinger suggests that this may be due to mirror neurons, which percieve someone standing and evoke a feeling of strain or exhaustion in the viewer.)

Rather than recreate a meeting space by rendering chairs, Donath is interested in building a space that shows subtle cues. In a real-worl meeting, we can see if people are paying attention, nodding off, or looking away from the speaker. A new space she and students are working on allows users to show agreement and disagreement with an idea being discussed by moving to different parts of a room. The conversation is archived in small balloons above the speaker’s head. This makes it easy to review the conversation, but also to see who’s been dominant and who’s been silent. (In the slide she shows, the people disagreeing with an idea are more outspoken, a phenomenon that I suspect is not uncommon.)

Another piece focused on making conversation visible is RadioActive, by her student Aaron Zinman. The project, a master’s thesis, was a response to the problem of people making phonecalls because they were bored, not because they had something to say. Zinman responded by designing a phone-based, audio interface to something a bit like usenet newsgroups - persistent, asyncronous threaded conversations in audio. The system tracked the behavior of users encountering the audio, and allowed for simple annotations, including whether people listened to an entire post or gave up halfway. A visual system used three factors - the size of a colored circle, the size of a ring around the circle, and color saturation to communicate message length, perceived value of the contribution and age of the post, making it very simple to evaluate multiple axes of a post in a single glance.

Knowing Berkman’s fascination with poker - see our founder Charles Nesson talking with Stephen Colbert about poker - she shows us a project by Scott Golder. Golder was interested in making online poker more like real-world poker, so his program communicates a number of factors usually invisible in online poker games. It shows you when another player looks at her cards, and forces people to bet by setting sliders, which makes it possible to see how certain their bet is. It adds information to the equation, letting people’s actions be visible to others… which can be a technique for bluffing as well.

Donath leaves this section of the talk with the question, “How much deception do we desire?” In partial answer to this question, she tells us about an experiment to enhance online social interactions with gloves that measure galvanic skin response. These are very crude tools for measuring human arousal - they don’t distinguish between excitement, anger and stimulation, but they do give a basic sense of whether something has captured someone’s emotional mind. Adding this sort of feedback to chat situations revealed high group interest when someone told jokes, stimulating everyone in the room. But she’s not sure it would be a good addition to all online systems - “we haven’t really evolved to use hand sweat as a form of communication”, and we’re bad at controlling inappropriate responses, or using this form of communication with care and restraint.

To show us the world of social media visualizations, Donath begins with a visualiztion that she thinks was a failure - though a very popular one - Rebecca Xiong’s visualization of threaded discussions as flowers. A message board is represented as a garden of flowers. Each flower’s stem length is determined by the length of that person’s involvement in the conversation. The bloom of the flower includes a petal for each post, color-coded for whether the posts are original or responses. It’s a beautiful visualization, clearly a very compelling metaphor. But the boards she was tracking included some very hateful neo-nazi speech, and the most active posters were some of the most virulent authors… though they were represented by the prettiest flowers. From this, Donath observes, “the semantics should be correct in a visualization.”

ThemeMail, by Scott Golder and Fernanda Viegas, was an attempt to solve the semantics problem. The project helped users visualize their stored email. Most users keep a huge set of mail on hand - ask them why, and they’ll tell you they might need it. Most of us don’t. But that mail is a fascinating representation of our relationships and seems to have a great deal of sentiment for most of us. The ThemeMail visualization showed portraits of your correspondents based on histograms of word usage in your exchange with that person. The researchers found that they could often identify who a person was just based on the histogram. And many users chose to print out their histograms and keep them as an art object that embodied their personal relationships, almost like photo snapshots of friends. Donath asks, “How do we handle the end of ephemerality? What do we do when history no longer fades away?”

The rise of complex new online social tools gives researchers a whole new set of spaces to study. Aaron Zinman has been studying spam in social networks. In a space like MySpace, it’s possible for people who don’t know each other to “friend” one another. Sometimes this behavior is harmless - often, it’s the precursor to commercial spam. It’s possible for humans to identify spammers by certain subtle patterns - someone who has 100 friends, but all friends were made on the same day, is likely a spammer. To tell real friends from spammers, it may be neccesary to look at more “expensive” forms of interaction - it’s cheap to “friend” someone, but more expensive to leave comments on their profile. When analyzing these networks, you need to consider, “what is the significance of a connection?”

Robin Dunbar, a British academic, has offered an interesting theory in his book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language.” He observes that apes maintain social ties through grooming, which is time consuming, and keeps groups small, as only a small band can reinforce ties by grooming each other. With language - and specifically with gossip - humans can maintain ties within a much larger band. One of Donath’s interests is how digital spaces can make socialization more efficient, allowing people to meaningfully expand their pool of friends.

She suggests that technology can serve as a social catalyst, giving people a group experience that can cause people to engage with one another. Increasingly, people in public spaces have their attention on personal-sized screens - technology can force people out of that private space and into common space. She shows off Agoraphone, a project by Kelly Dobson, which allows users to phone into a number and speak, via loudspeaker, to a public passing by. In the six weeks the piece was present at MIT, one user started scheduling a weekly call-in radio show, broadcast over the speaker. Other users called it while they could watch it, using mobile phones. The technology became a very effective icebreaker to encourage interaction in public spaces.

Other projects designed to serve as social catalysts include “Chit Chat Club”, which turns empty chairs into avatars - of a sort - for people participating in conversations remotely, displaying text or images on monitors embedded in the chair. She closes by showing us Foosball Land, a foosball game that’s played simultaneously by real-world players and players in Second Life. The goal of the designer was to create a game that requires interaction from the physical and the virtual to achieve victory.

She closes with yet another provocative question: “When do we care if you are human?”