It’s been an interesting few days for people who study social media. As the protests over election results have continued in Iran, and Iranian authorities have prevented most mainstream journalists from reporting on events, there’s been a great deal of focus on social media tools, which have become very important for sharing events on the ground in Iran with audiences around the world. I, like many of my friends at the Berkman Center and Global Voices, have spent much of the past two days on the phone with reporters, fielding questions about:

- Whether social media is enabling, causing or otherwise driving the protests in Iran
- How Iranian users are managing to access the internet despite widespread filtering
- The ethics (and practice) of distributed denial of service attacks as a form of information warfare
- Whether such online activities are unprecedented

Rather than tell you what I and colleagues have been saying to reporters, I’ll point you to one of the better stories, by Anne-Marie Corley in MIT’s Technology Review - she interviews several of my Berkman and Open Net Initiative colleagues and outlines the argument many of us are making:

- Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground.
- Iranians have been accessing social networking sites and blogging platforms despite years of filtering - there’s a cadre of folks who understand how to get around these blocks and are probably teaching others.
- Because so many Iranians use social media tools - often to talk about topics other than politics - they’re a “latent community” that can come to life and have political influence when events on the ground dictate.

Gaurav Mishra rounds up dozens of blog and MSM articles and offers an excellent overview of arguments around these questions (with a strong dose of his own interpretation, much of which I share.) He references Evgeny Morozov, who’s got a thorough denunciation of DDOS as a strategy for protest, correctly pointing out that it mostly functions to make participants feel better about themselves by giving them a way to feel involved with the protests. Unfortunately, unlike positive online gestures of solidarity (retweeting reports from Iran, turning Twitter or Facebook pictures green), this one does little more than piss off sysadmins, helps Iranian authorities make the case that forces outside Iran are “attacking the country” and encourage user-driven censorship as a response to unwanted speech.

So, given the wealth of commentary on the questions above by folks smarter than me, let me weigh in on some of the questions I haven’t heard asked.

Biases and social media - One of the reasons MSM outlets are so focused on social media is that they’re not able to deploy reporters to cover these protests. In some cases, the majority of reporting from the ground is coming from social media. It’s worth asking what the biases might be in amplifying those social media reports. Ahmedinejad’s supporters tend to be poorer, more rural, less educated and more likely to speak Farsi than Mousavi’s supporters - a picture of the protests via social media runs the danger of overstating Mousavi support or minimizing Ahmedinejad support. We’ve been trying to counterbalance this a bit at Global Voices - Hamid Tehrani, our Iran editor, did a brief roundup last night of bloggers supporting Ahmedinejad. It’s worth noting that the posts he quotes are all in Farsi: language may well be a barrier that is influencing coverage as well, if voices for reform are easily quoted in English and voices for the status quo are in Farsi.

My friend and colleague David Sasaki reminded GV editors that bloggers had predicted a Rafsanjani victory in 2005, and suffered their “Howard Dean” moment when it became clear that their candidate had little support outside the most liberal bloggers. That’s a very different situation than what’s happening now - the hundreds of thousands of peple in the streets points to profound support for Mousavi - but reminds us that the online voices from Iran, especially the English-speaking ones, probably aren’t representative of mainstream opinion.

An Iran story, not a social media story - Iran is one of the countries American and British media pay closest attention to. The use of social media for protest - especially to promote a protest to international audiences - is far from unique. But because there’s such strong media focus on Iran, and such interest in the use of social media for protest, this is a perfect storm for interest in this topic.

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assasination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers - the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

Flock - I’ve written at some length about homophily, the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. Turns out that reporters flock, too. It’s somewhat amazing to me the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions. I’m glad that people are taking a close look at the phenomenon of social media in the Iranian protests - it’s an important, fascinating and worthwhile topic. But there’s a lot of topics out there, and I wonder whether we benefit from a thousand well-researched stories on this phenomenon rather than a hundred, and nine hundred other stories.

Ten years ago, when the internet was young and innocent, four provocateurs posted their manifesto, The Cluetrain Manifesto. It was snarky, it was smart, it sold well, and it influenced a lot of thinking.

It’s ten years old now, and it’s worth asking how it aged. So Jonathan Zittrain is questioning David Weinberger and Doc Searls about their baby, in front of a star-studded group at Harvard Law School. This should be fun.

(Star-studded? Let me put it this way - Dan Bricklin, the creator of Visicalc, the world’s first spreadsheet, spends the talk running around with a microphone, ensuring that the questions from the audience get captured on the webcast. It’s that kind of gathering…)

Here’s my attempt to capture the conversation in realtime, paraphrasing liberally.

JZ - Against what were you raging?

DS - Can we get that movie flashback music? Actually, we didn’t get together in the same place - I was in California, David was in Boston and Chris Locke was in Boulder. But we were on the phone and emailing a lot about ways in which people were misunderstanding the internet. We thought it was this miraculous, utopian new thing, and they were treating it as the information highway, a place where you invested and made a lot of money.

DW - It was new company versus old company. We were having this conversation and rallying against the man. The media coverage was very positive, but they were focusing on the financial utopia.

We thought we were articulating common sense, what everyone who was on the web and loved it already knew.

JZ - We know you had 95 theses. What’s the bumper sticker version?

DS - We had 95 theses because it worked for Luther. We called it a manifesto because it worked for Marx. And we called it “cluetrain” because it’s an old silicon valley joke - the clue train stops there four times a day, but it never takes delivery

But here’s a bumper sticker: Talk is cheap and silence is fatal.

DW - Markets is conversations is the phrase that really stuck and became the emblem of the book. But we all viewed it as being about more than marketing.

JZ - That seems like a fairly extreme anti-coporate screed, when people hand-traded their wares, traded them in a noisy agora and went home and didn’t listen to the radio…

DW - That’s pretty much right, but I’d like to avoid the implication that the internet is only about selling flower pots and bongs. But it’s not just a throwback - we’re digital, highly networked, connected in new and interesting ways.

JZ - So, have we finally gotten the clue?

DS - The main thing for me was the net was not well understood. If it would be, you wouldn’t have written your book. One of the major messages was that “we” weren’t seats or eyeballs. Eventually, I had to think about who “we” were - I meant ordinary folks, people who loved and used the net, not necessarily customers who would support IPO valuations. The stock market crashed helped correct some of this mystique. And now we’re dealing with a new “us” - a world where the net is everywhere, on phones, accessible all over the world.

JZ - How does this fit into your views on authenticity?

DW - This is one of the things that I think is wrong with the book. I still think the web is incredibly disruptive, as disruptive as the printing press. But I think the anger of the book is now misplaced - angry, middle-aged men raging against broadcast, a truly repressive regime. But now stepping into the internet isn’t liberation - it’s just what it is. And the angry, smug tone of Cluetrain may not be out of date.

The problem with authenticity: Chris used to say that corporations can’t be authentic because they can’t fuck. They don’t have bodies, they don’t experience the reality that we do. Authenticity is dangerous, it can make you feel good about something without engaging with the substance of it. It’s a useful term, but there’s not much metaphysics behind it - it makes me nervous to hear it raised, and I now think it’s a grab bag of stuff that doesn’t resolve to much.

DS - I don’t agree. I think what we’re experimenting with with Twitter, with blogs is embracing this voice, this authenticity.

DW - So what’s Proctor and Gamble’s authentic voice?

DS - Fort Business is an absurd conceit of an old regime that can’t survive in the new era.

DW - The idea that building a business is like building a fort, keeping information away from customers, is absurd now - we’re all on the net and all informed.

Thesis seventy-something - Advertising doesn’t work anymore. It’s totally wrong.

DS - Companies have to live in a world where there’s zero distance from everyone. The cost of communicating is very low, and that makes all the difference. There’s a high cost to keeping information from customers, or even competitors. Some things need to be secret - trade secrets…

JZ - Public companies can’t share their thoughts in a live stream…

DW - Actually, someone at Ebay does. And we agree that astroturfers should rot in hell. But the problem with advertising is that the advertising that blares at you and appeals to the lizard part of your brain - it totally works. I’ve got ad jingles in my brain since the 1970s and I’d pay for a surgical procedure to have them removed. (David sings the Eastern Airlines jingle.)

We do have the ability to undo some of the damage the mindless, lizard-brain stuff used to do. We were consider buying a Mini - in the past, we would have asked the dealer. Now you’re going to go online and find out whether it does or doesn’t work.

JZ - And you’re happy if that’s from CarTalk or Trip Advisor, or Amazon.

I want to see Twitter as a case study because it’s the flavor of the month. Is Twitter exactly what Weinberger talked about when he said, “On the Internet, everyone will be famous for fifteen people”? Or is it the modality that can be subverted by Twitter brand managers.

DS - It’s a silo, there’s one company sitting in the middle of it. Sure, they’ve got no business model, but I’m not sure that getting continuing investment isn’t a business model.

Every company has two models - you sell to customers, and you sell to your investors. The second got out of control in the dot.com years. Evan Williams is a master of this - he sold Blogger to Google, and now Twitter’s working on something similar. But it does perform a service.

JZ - Vendor relationship management. Turning CRM - customer relationship management - on its head. You’re saying, no, let the consumers do it to the vendors…

DS - We call them customers, not consumers. Consumers are gullets with eyeballs that crap cash (he’s quoting someone, don’t know who). VRM is the reciprocal of CRM. CRM is what sends you junk mail, sets up the callcenters you hate. We’re turning that around, being able to change your address once for everyone you deal with, giving customers control over their relationship with sellers in the marketplace. The Public Radio tuner - VRM will be showing up in that.

JZ - So let’s try some of this wisdom in politics. Have we seen some of this wisdom work out in the political space?

DW - Yes. (pauses) Do you want more?

One of the things I’m proudest of with the book, Joe Trippi read the book and used some of the insights to manage Howard Dean’s campaign. We always thought Cluetrain was about the effect of the web with business as one example. Politics is harder to change than business - business will change if they see a profit, while government and politics has deeper, harder patterns to alter.

The idea of sending messages to the troops is a broadcast model, it’s what we’re trying to overturn. You can’t just invert it - Howard Dean can’t read 600,000 emails. So you scale at the base of the period, building cohorts around any sets of interest. You could form groups like Pilots for Dean, Educators for Dean… even Howards for Dean. Conversations as a way of undoing pyramidal structures is a lasting legacy in contemporary politics.

JZ - How do we respond to the fact that Obama’s conversation spaces seem to be hosting nothing but conversations about the legalization of marijuana?

DW - These spaces are being gamed. Eszter Hargittai and (yours truly) are quite persuasive on the idea that the net isn’t truly ubiquitous and evenly distributed - that’s influencing these conversations as well.

DS - During the Dean campaign, lots of campaign tools were still on spreadsheets and other proprietary tools. In the Dean campaign, there was some experimentation with Drupal and open tools. But by the time the Obama campaign came around, all voter rolls were in open, easy to use tools. It had a lot to do with a geek diaspora from the Dean campaign.

JZ - Let’s let our medium and message overlap. JZ moves to the audience.

Daniel Derne - Do you feel that the Cluetrain gave dangerous ammunition to the “they” so that they could do damage to us? In our 2.0, 3.0 world, are we approaching a similar point of co-option? For all the companies who want to be my friend or buddy, if I pay attention to them, I end up ignoring something else. At this point, I think I’d rather have Jon Stewart tell me not to believe.

DS - There were some vexatious opponents of Cluetrain who believe we wrote a marketing book. I don’t think that’s true. The BS detection we have is better than ever, and if marketers send messages at us, claiming they’re Cluetrain messages, it just means they didn’t understand it.

DW - One way of reading the web is thinking of it as continuous reinvention of how we sort through information, to find what we need and want to see. We’ve got too many blogs, so Dave Winer comes up with RSS. We’ve got too many tweets, so someone will design another filter. In quite a Cluetrainy way, lots of these creations use social filtering.

JZ - For every digg, is there a subvertandprofit.com? There’s always a social media participant who’s willing to take a buck per digg.

DW - That is a rot in hell zone. We’re always going to have bad actors who use the net to their slimy advantage. Otherwise, we need strict authentication, and we turn off generativity. I hope we’re always in a place where we can game this stuff.

DS - I think it’s wonderful that there’s so many ways to not have a life.

Shava Nerad - Does the Internet, and tools like MoveOn, make you think you’re participating even if you’re not?

DW - Trippi always wanted a shoeleather and mousepad campaign, where the online involvement led you to real-world involvement. This is something the Obama campaign finally worked out.

Questioner - Deval Patrick used these tools pretty well, but he’s not governing using them. Obama isn’t mobilizing his millions of supporters to push for his agenda. It’s a function of power - you get locked into your particular bubble.

DS - It’s easy for a campaign to work out the problems the Obama campaign worked out, especially stealing from the Dean campaign. Solving governance is much, much harder - there’s entrenched bureaucracy, resistance from the whole Beltway system.

JZ - Is the toolkit we want as a challenger and an insurgent a different one we want once we’ve got a tickertape parade.

Britt Blazer - Six years ago, I was at David’s house when we agreed that the President who needed the net to get elected was the President we wanted. So I joined the Dean campaign.

Campaigns don’t have a web services platform - they’ve got piles of young people with energy you couldn’t pay for. At 11pm, the Saturday before Christmas, piles of kids trying to resolve 17 disparate databases.

JZ - Is this a heartwarming story, or a modern day sweatshop?

Britt - Both. There’s lots of money and romance around a presidential campaign… and you’ll notice that no one has really replicated this energy. Until someone can build a soup to nuts platform - a GRM project - this is going to be a hugely labor-intensive project.

JZ - Phil Jacob from Stylefeeder is here - it’s more an insurgent than a dominant player. How does this question apply to insurgent companies?

Phil Jacobs - Reads from Louis Vuitton’s CEO in the Financial Times. He suggests that we need a way to put morality online. What on earth is it going to take for guys like this to get it, 15 years after the birth of the commercial web?

DW - Failure.

Jacobs - Nope. They’ve got huge capital reserves, they’ve survived through SARS, 9/11…

DW - What can I say? There’s a complete lack of vision and understanding. There are probably hundreds of his people in his organization begging him to stop saying these things.

Questioner - Can you give examples of companies that actually get it? Have learned from Cluetrain?

DW - All companies have some sense of this - the fact that you have uncensored product reviews from customers on sites is a reflection of the Cluetrain ideas. IBM defined the conservative business approach, command and control - it was the icon of that era. And now they’re doing IBM “jams” - conversations between equals over the web. This is a company that’s stopped developing their own webserver, and adopted Apache. It’s pretty cool.

DS - A couple of years ago, the guy in charge of kernel hackers at IBM told me he realized he couldn’t tell the hackers what to do. It was cluefull of them to realize that they were becoming a Linux company whether they liked it or not. Microsoft set up usenet newsgroups for hundreds of their products and monitor what’s said there - that’s clueful. Southwest Airlines - they like their employees, don’t stand on formality. The net is changing not just the culture of organizations - it’s changing how they literally work.

DW - This is not a company, it’s an industry - the news media. Very mixed environment - it ranges from the ridiculous to the pretty impressive. I’m not convinced that CNN paying attention to random tweeting is better than man on the street interviews. But the fact that the New York Times has a beta page where you can aggregate articles not just from the Times but other papers, is pretty cool.

JZ - In 2004, you were ranting about the Times’s referentiality. It’s fixed that and now it’s thriving… :-)

Zittrain turns to Dan Gillmor and quotes from a review, as a book that would change the way we think about the world.

Gillmor - The fact that you’re celebrating the NYTimes doing something way too late, and the fact that they’re ahead of almost all papers shows that newspapers still don’t get it and are pretty determined not to.

Haley Suitt - Let’s ask not what Obama can do for us - let’s ask what we can do for Obama. The book changed the way many people thought about business, gave many of us energy to try new businesses. I’d love to hear what you guys think about what we should do now to get this deadbeat economy going. Are you going to do another book to get us going?

DW - A geeky history of information? And a book on how businesses are taking on the properties of networks.

JZ - Clearly part of your ethos is about entering into a conversation. How do businesses - or authors - handle the negative stuff? Would you ever want to foreground it on a website?

DS - I like to engage critics who’ve got something substantive to say.

DW - The book I wrote after this got one review: “Like it was written by a room full of monkeys, but not as good.” I added it to the site in the midst of the other reviews.

SJ Klein - You’ve got different groups of people with different motivations, Marketers want to sell - it’s in their DNA - I think that’s a good thing to see these behaviors in these networks. People used to go online to sign petitions… eventually they figure out how to make flashmobs. It’s exciting when people figure out you can make phonecalls on their PCs.

Assume that what you said about ubiquity is wrong. And assume that there’s millions of people with lots of free time, and you’ve got access to them via the internet. There’s hundreds of new pyramids - how do you get filters for their pyramid bases?

DW - Obviously, this is the problem of abundance. It’s one of those words you need to understand to understand the net. The old techniques don’t scale - they were intended to find the best person to do the job, the single answer. In a time of genuine abundance, good enough is good enough. There isn’t a single canon - canons don’t scale.

JZ - I’m going to try to bring this in to land. Do either of you have questions you want to throw out there?

DS - There are lots more phones than computers. When do phone systems become data systems? When do cable systems become data systems? Infrastructure is a big deal - how do we get close to as many people as possible?

JZ - Are you convinced that bringing the net to everyone will really be a delicious treat? Or will it be cable television?

DS - I’m a utopian on that front. It’s not that I think the net is a panacea - I think human beings are incredibly resourceful and creative.

DW - For the past eight years, I’ve been a clinically depressed utopian. I’m not at all convinced that we’re free of locked-down, non-generative devices… like the iPhone. Perhaps they’re going to decide that the ap store is a good idea and we end up with locked down computers. I remain a utopian who’s still scared shitless.

Questioner - Could you speak about China? The collective memory of Tienanman has been erased, despite all the tech you guys think make this connection inevitable?

DW - Ten years ago, I was more of a John Perry Barlow, internet routes around obstacles person. It looks like, culturally, you can lock down the Internet. So it’s hard for me to retain my belief that the internet will always route around and hard to believe that our internet - ours, not the US’s - will remain free.

Qustioner - From a consumer perspective, I wonder if there will be a convergence between cluefull companies and customers skeptical of locked-down technologies? Is there some hope for utopia in the kids behind us.

DW - I remain utopian and more hopeful than ever. Those hopes are based in the new administration and the new generation. But Doc and I have to die.

DS - Then you’ll be free.

JZ - No! You can stick around and be elder statesmen.

DS - I’m more optimistic. In the long run, locked down will fail. Right now, it still pays off enough. As individuals get more power, it will change. As customers give their own terms of engagement, perhaps they won’t sign the lousy, one-sided privacy agreement. The Apple Ap store is slick, but it can’t scale - they keep rejecting programs on specious grounds. Why spinchter everything? It’s discouraging that the Jabber protocol hasn’t been widely adopted, allowing everyone to have different IM systems. Why should Yahoo have their own IM system? In the long run, it’s self-defeating?

JZ - What will it mean to check in ten years from now? Will we have the Minority Report holodecks? That’s my prediction, and you can take it to the offshore Icelandic bank.

Beth Kolko manages the Design for Digital Inclusion research group at the University of Washington, a group that includes undergrads, grads and faculty across fields, focusing on a wide variety of topics: technology in Central Asia, non-instrumental uses of techology, technology and autism, games for development, and other topics.

Uniting her work is a basic questions about technology use in different communities: What ICTs (information and community technologies) are adopted in diverse communities and why? The “what” gets very complicated in this question - a technology may be used very differently in one community than another. The overarching questions focus on what people in diverse communities do with ICT, and how can we design better technologies and policies?

There are lots of people in different academic fields looking at these questions - Beth points to user-centered design, learner-centered design, and value-sensitive design. Her goal is to contribute to how people think about design, and to incorporate more varied perspectives and functions, especially “discourse at the margins”. She argues that diversity lends robustness to environments, and helps you avoid designing brittle, fragile systems.

Beth’s field, information and communication technologies for development - ICT4D - focuses on technology in areas of resource constraint. She points out that these constraints aren’t static - they tend to change over time, sometimes even within a day. Constraints are also not purely geographic - Beth believes that some of the work she’s been doing in Central Asia has direct applicability for the Yakima Valley, for instance.

Most of her work relies on two sets of data, a yearly survey of 4,000 people in four Central Asian nations, with questions on media confidence as well as technical use. Only 11% of the survey respondents identify as Internet users, which gives a small sample for those questions, but it’s carefully demographically controlled and should be an accurate representation of the net-using population. She and her team also run qualitative, ethnographic studies based on interviews with teachers, businesspeope, and mobile internet users in Central Asia.

Her observations are organized into two categories, “form and function”:

Form - internet as weather dependent:
In nothern Cambodia, Beth wanted to interview customers at a local cybercafe. It was empty. Beth asked the proprietor why - it had just rained, and regular customers knew that the internet usually went down for a couple of hours during a rainstorm. “Wait two hours and come back - we’ll be full.” They were.

She argues that this complicates what is the internet - unlike in developed markets, it’s not a ubiquitous technology. It also forces us to rethink what an internet user is - “it’s often defined as someone who’s once touched the internet.” Understandings of internet users need to recognize that the net is not ubiquitous, and there’s a vast gap in how people use the internet, how often and how long they get to use it for.

Form - Internet as a shared public resource:
In Central Asia, internet use is primarily in shared spaces like cybercafes. It’s not always net use as we think of it. In a Kyrgyz cybercafe, we see pricing structures, which charge 2.5 times as much for web usage - downloading web pages - as for playing LAN games or chatting. The constraint is bandwidth, which is the cafe’s most expensive cost. Other behaviors, like Voice over IP, tend to be shaped by policy environments.

Form - Phones as banks:
Phones weren’t designed to be a banking device, but in countries like Kenya, they’ve become one. This raises questions about phones and security - people access their money, their email and other sensitive information on their phones, and often don’t set passwords. “How transparent is password protection on your phone?” Beth wonders.

Function - internet as strengthener of ties:
Beth and her team have been trying to do surveys of internet non-users as well as of users. Non-users generally offer three reasons why they’re not online: it’s difficult, it’s expensive, and there’s nothing to interest them online. She observes that everyone characterizes the Internet as appropriate for “the youth” - and that everyone defines the youth as themselves and younger, whether they’re 20 or 40 years old. Controlling for demographics, she and her team see a small but visible correlation between people with strong social networks and trust in those social networks and use of the internet.

Function - mobile phone as purveyor of fraud
It’s currently fashionable to look at the mobile phone as the platform of the future for the developing world. While Beth acknowledges the power of the mobile platform, she warns that it’s a dangerous platform - she points to a spam message she got in Kenya, promising her that she’d won a Safaricom contest. She returned the call, and her scammer proceeded to demand her passport number, which she refused. Her message - don’t assume that these platforms are always going to be used the way we’d want them to be used.

Function - SMS as weapon
With protests in Iran taking place as Beth gives her talk, it’s worth considering the ways SMS can be used - and is actually used - at moments of conflict. Analyzing the Lemon revolution in Kyrgystan, she explains that SMS wasn’t really used for planning demonstrations. Instead, it was used to warn people to stay away from riots, or to organize family and friends to protect businesses from looting. There is speculation - which she couldn’t confirm - that SMS was used by looters to coordinate their work. In Kenya, during election violence, SMS was a very effective platform for disseminating virulent ethnic hatred, using stories that were mostly true - and therefore credible - but had been exaggerated to be inflamatory.

Function - games as tech training
Since games are cheaper than the internet in many countries, people who aspire to modernity often gravitate to them first as an introduction to an online existence. As such, they end up being an alternative pathway towards technical training for users.

Based on these observations, Beth has tried to inform her design processes. This involves design ethnography - exposing aspects of a design to end-users and studying their reactions - as well as to modified design methods and prototyping. Her lab has worked on two main projects, MoSoSo and Starbus.

MoSoSo is a yellow pages - business directory - service for mobile phone users. It tries to take advantage of the realworld social network behaviors Beth observed in Central Asia to build trust in the system. It includes a general directory of businesses, where any user can rate the businesses. It also has a private, password-protected directory which users share with family and friends - the theory is that this closed directory will be believable and reliable in a way that the public directory might not be.

Starbus attempts to solve a common developing world problem - waiting for the bus. In Seattle, where Beth lives, there are great mobile phone and online tools designed to let riders figure out where the bus is and when it’s arriving. In developing nations, where transport tends to be adhoc and shared, there’s very little information on routes and timing. She and colleagues designed a tool called “the starbox” - a GPS receiver attached to a bus which communicates to a server via SMS - users can access the bus position on the server or query its location via SMS.

The system worked great in Seattle as she prototyped it, but failed utterly in Bishkek for the first several days. She and colleagues had made a design decision to use as little power as possible, to conseve battery life - a classic developing world strategy. Unfortunately, GSM towers in Bishkek weren’t as powerful as in Seattle - she needed to use more power to get the tool to work. Once they adjusted the signal strength, users of the system loved the new functionality and urged her to find a way to bring the system to Bishkek permanently.

One of the takeaways for me from Beth’s talk is the sheer complexity of reframing thinking about design in developing world environments. I’ve offered my set of suggestions for designing from constraints, which has some overlap with Beth’s observations, but not much. My guess - there’s no hard and fast rules for designing for constrained environments, just lots of practice, observation and careful information sharing…

See also David/JOHO’s take, as well as Rebekah/Jackfruity’s take.

My friend and colleague Hal Roberts is one of the internet’s top censorship and filtering researchers. When Chinese authorities announced that a client-based piece of filtering software called GreenDam would be required for installation on new PCs, Hal downloaded the software and spent a good chunk of this week trying to understand how it works. He and colleagues released a report earlier today that demonstrates that GreenDam is incredibly ambitious and invasive to user privacy, but also badly broken and virtually unusable.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this fact is the video Hal put together earlier today and posted on his blog. It shows GreenDam slowly realizing that it wants to block a Falun Gong site… then blocking any other sites that begin with the letter “f”, due to the way Internet Explorer handles autocompletion and GreenDam blocks content.

Basically, GreenDam approaches censorship very differently from conventional filtering tools. Most client-side filters rely on lists of banned sites downloaded from the internet. Not GreenDam - Hal’s test shows that it doesn’t appear to know that falundafa.org (a site that the Great Firewall always blocks) is a banned site until he comes across a sensitive phrase, three clicks into the site. That phrase is checked against an internal dictionary. This allows GreenDam not only to censor the net, but to shut down an application like Notepad if someone writes sensitive content. Similarly GreenDam apparently doesn’t keep watchlists of porn sites - instead, it attempts to detect if an image is pornographic by checking against an internal algorithm. (Some testers have discovered that the algorithm blocks light-skinned naked people, though not dark-skinned ones.)

My guess is that problems like the ones Hal documents in his report and video are going to prevent GreenDam from being mandated across China. And I have confidence that Chinese hackers will find effective ways to shut off the tool shortly after it’s released widely. But it’s hard to know… and the ambitions of the tool designers to censor the ability to even type certain phrases is pretty chilling.

Lewis Hyde, poet, critic and intellectual historian, has been hard at work on a book about “the commons”, and specifically the notion that ideas should be part of a cultural commons, not treated as private property, as they often are today. The idea of commons is an ancient one, from medieval Europe, where lands, streams, and forests were treated as common property by villagers

We’re challenged to offer a definition of property, and most of our definitions center on our ability to make use of a property. Lewis confirms that this is a valid way to think about property - as a right of action. “I have a right of action to drink this cup of tea, to sell it, to pour it out.” Property can be thought of as a bundle of rights of action. But there’s a strong tradition of property based on exclusion - Lewis quotes Lord Blackstone and his description of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” where one asserts rights above and over all other rights. The right to exclude, in western jurisprudence, is asserted as a core property right. Lewis, on the other hand, believes that the right to exclude is a subset of the rights of action.

Many Americans know about the commons from Garrett Hardin’s essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons“. Hardin wasn’t a historian, but a population biologist, who was concerned with problems of population growth. Lewis argues that Hardin’s prediction - that individual economic maximization will destroy collective resources - is based on a fantasy of a commons. In reality, commons had serious limitations on rights. You could only cut wood between Christmas and February, for instance. And commons were local entites - locals could exclude those from outside the region. These customary use rights meant that commons weren’t tragic - in fact, they lasted for millenia in Europe. (I interjected here to ask why Hardin’s idea has had such currency. Lewis offers two speculative reasons why - it’s a great phrase, and it came out at a moment where the Cold War was in full swing, and Hardin’s idea was a strong defense of private capital against communism.) Lewis suggests a different way to look at the commons, quoting Carol Rose, who talks about “the comedic commons”, one with a happy ending. As such, the commons was a site of action, a space for citizens to act on their own rights.

Enclosure was the practice of converting commons into private property. In England in the 18th and 19th century, there was a widespread enclosure movement, and pushback from commoners. Law protected rights to “tear down encroachment” - if someone’s hedge was growing into the common field, you had a right to prune it back. A community ritual of “beating the bounds” was a convivial affair, designed to celebrate the commons while tearing down anything that infringed upon it. Critical legal documents like the Magna Carta and the Great Charter of the Forest contained extensive references to preservation of common rights, forbidding the fencing of land that prevents access to common lands.

The connection of property to exclusion was a challenge for defining the idea of “intellectual property”. The “non-rivalrous, non-excludable” nature of ideas led to an argument that published works were, automatically, not property because they meant someone else would have acces to those ideas. Other arguments pointed to the ancients as a commons, “where you have a free right to fatten your muse.”

As the monopoly on publishing in England - granted by the Crown to a selected set of publishers - was challenged by Scottish printers, who created cheaper editions of works, three theories emerged for protecting intellectual property:

- The labor theory - I made a work, and therefore I own it and can constrain how people use it
- The moral rights argument - The book is an extension of me, and you can’t affect it without affecting my personal rights
- The utilitarian theory - We wish to incentivise creation, which may require us to protect rights so that people can monetize them.

Jamie Boyle argues that, in the past twenty years, we’ve seen a rise in enclosure of intellectual property, exemplified by changes to US copyright law which means that there’s no need to register works to gain copyright and term extension that’s essentially indefinite. Lewis argues that Boyle is actually talking about a second enclosure - an earlier enclosure surrounded the emergence of intellectual property legislation under crown copyright. And he wants to argue that there’s a third enclosure, the “enclosure of the wilderness of the mind.”

Lewis is worried that a lot of our IP rules instantiate a certain model of the human self, the self as a creator and owner of property. But this isn’t the only way to create. He quotes Dogen Zenji, a 12th century zen master: “We study the self to forget the self. And to forget the self is to wake up to the world around you.” Creativity can come from self-abnegation; he quotes a letter from Elizabeth Bishop describing her admiration for Darwin as someone who stared at a mass of material and forgot himself to come up with something new. “To get to something truly new, you can’t work from the known.”

We usually think of what’s outside of intellectual property as “the public domain”. But public domain, Lewis tells us, is a domesticated sphere, a space filled with things we are familiar with. Beyond that is a which is not yet explored. He explores the idea that human beings need to go into silence, to experience solitude to emerge as human beings.

To explain about the enclosure of silence, he cites John Cage and his visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard. Cage experienced two sounds, a high whining which was the sound of the nervous system operating and a low rumble, the circulatory system. Silence, for Cage, is non-intention. It’s the things you don’t mean to happen. And silence, as explored in pieces like 4′33″, is that makes you listen to that which you don’t intend to listen to.

You may be surprised that silence can be litigated. But Lewis tells the story of a rock album, “Classical Grafitti” by The Planets. To separate two sections of the album, the producer, Mike Batt, put a minute of silence between the two sides and credited it to “Cage/Batt” as something of a joke. But then mechanical royalties from the recording started accruing to Cage. When Cage’s published got a check for £400, he sued Batt for copyright infringment, specifically for the violation of Cage’s moral rights, a right not to be misattributed. The suit was settled out of court with the producer cutting a check to the John Cage Foundation. Lewis sees this is ironic - Cage’s intention was to remove his intent from the work, as he did with chance operations. But intellectual property legislation is designed to protect the personality of the author.

We enclose silence - unknown possibility - at our own risk. Jonathan Zittrain demonstrates in his recent work on generativity that the value of systems often comes from unknown uses - the Apple II became succesful when Visicalc, the first spreadsheet, was written for the platform. If you want generative uses for a technology, Zittrain warns that you need to be careful what you lock down. Lewis also cites a case in which cell biologists patented a particular series of amino acids. They had no idea their purpose, but “purifying and describing gives you a right to own.” A later set of researchers speculated that these aminos bloc the growth of cancer cells - on publishing their research, the first researchers sued them for many millions of dollars. This can very effectively prevent exloratory science, he argues.

“When we enclose wilderness, we begin to give property rights in areas where we have yet to understand what’s happening.” An enclosure of silence affects the human self and the world we inhabit. How do you become a creative actor in this world? How do you beat the bounds of this commons?

As he so often does, David Weinberger has excellent notes of the same talk, which may offer a different perspective.

What do you choose to study when you’re a Dutch media scholar of Chinese descent? You could focus on Chinese internet filtering, a rich, provocative and depressing topic of study. You could study the ways in which Dutch society is wrestling with cultural difference and cultural complexity, with the emergence of nationalist attitudes in the wake of the deaths of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh. As the son of Chinese immigrants to the Netherlands, raised in Amsterdam, Lokman Tsui doesn’t think much of these two choices: “Would you prefer to have your left or right arm chopped off?”

Searching for a topic for his PhD dissertation, Lokman found himself talking to Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American media scholar who’s research has focused on the Wikipedia community. Lih urged Lokman to study something emergent, exciting and positive, helping explain how an unknown system actually worked. And so Lokman found himself studying Global Voices and the people behind it. “Global Voices solved my identity crisis,” he offers.

(Some disclaimers are in order for me to blog Lokman’s talk at the Berkman Center yesterday. I’m one of the co-founders of Global Voices, so I’ve been one of his research subjects. Lokman is also a good friend and a valued colleague - he’s part of a group called “the book club” at Berkman which provides critique and moral support to those of us working on book-length projects, which means he’s reading the book proposal I’m struggling with. He and I are working on a couple of papers together, and he just oranized the China Internet Research Conference where I presented a paper. I’m in no way, shape or form objective about Lokman or his work.)

Lokman sees Global Voices as a community of internationalists committed to curating, amplifying and aggregating conversations that other media ignore. In the process, Global Voices serves as a community for people whose identities are complicated, for bridge figures who’ve got their feet in different communities, like the Netherlands, China and the US.

Much of Lokman’s talk seeks to situate the work Global Voices is doing in a theoretical framework, looking at theories of journalism and what each model values, and examining how Global Voices aligns and differs from these models. He quotes Hannah Arendt, who worries that we may lose a public sphere if people embrace “freedom from politics as a basic freedom”. This withdrawal from the public sphere might not harm individuals, but it harms society as a whole, because “the world lies between people”. How does this world - the one that lies between people - come to know itself? How does the internet help create and realize this in-between space? These are the questions Lokman hopes to address by examining Global Voices as a case study of cross-cultural connections possible in a digital age.

The public spheres described by Habermas around coffee houses and by Benedict Anderson around daily newspapers may be giving way to new, virtual spaces. “The internet challenges us to rethink and reimagine journalism and democracy,” though we’ve not yet done a good job of picking up this challenge. In particular, Lokman worries that we’re doing a disservice to the field by looking at the internet as harming journalism - more interesting questions focus around building journalism for a world of strangers united by the internet. “How do we designing better instituions fit for a cosmopolitan age?”

There’s a great deal of literature that seeks to understand journalism by engaging in ethnographic study of newsrooms. Lokman sees his work following in this tradition, though with Global Voices, the newsroom has been replaced with rowdy annual meetings and lively online discussion groups. When scholars like Herbert Gans analyzed newsrooms in terms of modes of news production, they established that biases in the production of news had a great deal to do with the processes involved. Journalists weren’t seeking to silence certain voices - they overemphasized government sources, for instance, because they helped journalists avoid credibility issues and because these sources learned to carefully package news for consumption by journalists. By studying Global Voices from a newsroom perspective, Lokman hopes to identify some of the value judgements that are at work in the course of our production of news. He argues, though, that these techniques can’t apply too directly, because we can’t measure new systems with standards designed for older systems.

This tension comes up most clearly around the question of whether what Global Voices does is journalism. Lokman notes that my co-founder, Rebecca MacKinnon, is insistent that GV is not a journalistic organization, because we don’t have methods for fact-checking, don’t seek to be objective (though we do seek to be transparent and fair) and because most participants don’t see themselves as journalists. (My take on the question isn’t quite as strident as Rebecca’s. I think GV frequently commits acts of journalism, thugh I think we often provide helpful, non-journalistic content.) Lokman would prefer we not ask the question, because it’s not that interesting.
“It’s like asking me if I’m Chinese or not - I just shrug my shoulders.” Instead, it might be useful to see GV as a complement to journalism, a different way of seeing. (Here he quotes Susan Sontag, who describes photography not as seeing, but as a way of seeing.)

Lokman identifies three schools of thought about journalism, each of which contains - he asserts - a democratic theory and an implicit purpose for journalism. A professional theory of journalism - as advocated by scholars like Walter Lippman - implies a belief in liberal democracy. In this case, the purpose of journalism is to provide information, either to the public or, as Lippman seems to imply, to an elite group of decisionmakers.

Alternative media is based around participatory democratic theory - democracies function best when they represent a broad range of actors. The purpose of this media is representative. We can judge the success or failure of journalism by how well it represents different groups in society, especially marginalized groups. Public media, advocated by scholars like Jay Rosen, is based around the idea of deliberative democracy - democracy functions when we have the space to discuss and argue, seeking common truths. The purpose of journalism, in this model, is to offer a space for conversation.

This model of three types of journalism and their implicit value-spheres gets complicated by technological constraints, which Lokman points out have changed over time. It used to be extremely costly to access multiple voices and incorporate them into journalistic discourse, so we engaged in “representative journalism”, asking professional journalists to represent the perspective of the individuals they interviewed. But the costs of speech and of production have changed dramatically, and we haven’t really figured out what peer-produced journalism might look like. We need to revise how we judge and value journalism, Lokman believes.

He proposes that we move beyond objectivity as a key journalistic valye towards hospitality. Objectivity as a gold standard makes sense when information is your goal. But if what you’re hoping to do is manage an inclusive conversation, perhaps we need different standards - we need to focus on whether spaces are hositable to conversation.

Lokman invokes Iris Young’s idea of a communicative democracy, a space in which groups are able to find meeting grounds for conversation. Habermas is interested in these spaces, but believes they are neutral grounds - everyone’s equally comfortable or uncomfortable at a coffee house, right? Lokman doesn’t buy this - there are always power dynamics between people having conversations. But hospitality allows a good host to level these power imbalances. He cites a conversation with me at my house - I’m obviously more comfortable in my home than he is, and I have the power to invite him into my space or throw him out… but if I’m a good host, I’ll work to level the playing field and allow as equal a conversation as possible.

This suggests a new model for excellence in journalism, Lokman believes - one way of judging journalism is the extent to which it creates a space for conversations to take place. Good spaces include mechanisms for greeting and welcoming participants, acknowledging where they’re coming from and what their differences are. It values storytelling and narrative, often as an alternative to deliberation. This requires solving some difficult challenges, like the problem of inclusion. Lokman argues that Indymedia’s failure is that it’s never figured out how to tolerate the intolerant. At the same time, hospitality doesn’t insist on unrestricted access, ala Wikipedia - the door is open, but that openness is conditional.

Lokman doesn’t believe that hospitality is a form of philanthropy - it’s a right, granted by the fact that we all share a common world. He traces this idea back to Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace”, where Kant argues that one cannot refuse a visitor if this would lead to the visitor’s destruction. This has implications for asylum, immigration and for language, and offers a rather strong condemnation of hostility - he shows a sign hanging in Gino’s, a legendary cheese steak joint in Philadelphia This is America - when ordering ’speak English’”. The irony, of course, is that the restaurant is owned by a long line of Italian immigrants who adapted foods of their home to fit local tastes, and who now insist on a badly punctuated form of American English.

Hospitality is about who you let in and keep out, but it’s also about how you include them. Lokman suggests that we analyze spaces in terms of access, recognition and appropriate response. We want to build spaces that are accessible to a wide range of people, we want to realize that they’re coming from different cultures and interpretive frameworks, and we respond appropriately to these contributions. Global citizens, Lokan believes, understand these rules of hospitality better than most.

How could the idea of hospitality change journalism? Most likely through approaches that complement existing, information-focused approaches. Lokman examines a movie critics site, Rotten Tomatoes. It’s got an objective component - the synopsis of the movie - and a deeply subjective component - the reviews. We don’t ask reviewers to be objective - instead, we realize the value of aggregating and curating these perspectives and bringing them together. Global Voices does something very similar - many stories include a couple of paragraphs, often derived from other news reports, explaining the current political situation in Madagascar, then followed with excerpts from blogs offering different opinions on the situation. The value is in aggregating these different perspectives around a base of objective reporting and providing a hospitable space for these other opinions, including the opinions of commenters and linkers.

Lokman acknowledges that a version of journalism based around hospitality can seem hokey or “new agey”. It’s an aspiration, not a reality, and he recognizes that the world is far from hospitable. It’s easier to be hospitable to friends than to strangers, harder with enemies than with friends. But hospitality recognizes that we “need to subvert power relationships to have conversations.” In turn, this means that hospitality is a duty and an obligation, but that we shouldn’t pretend that we can prevent exclusion from some spaces.

David Weinberger wonders why hospitality used to be such a critical part of our collective culture - the Old Testament is full of stories about hospitality. Why has hospitality slipped away? Is it because we’re experiencing the false intimacy of a globalized world? Lokman suggests that we’re seeing a paradox of choice emerging online - as we’ve got more choices, we often make decisions that isolate and cucoon ourselves. Part of this may come from the biggest way in which we isolate ourselves - we restrict the flow of people across national borders to a much greater extent than we restrict financial or cultural flows. Perhaps we’ve become better at accomodating a person’s CDs or movies, but less good at accomodating the person herself.

Jason Kaufman offers the argument that journalism is best understood in terms of professionalism - in the last century, journalism became a profession, and has reinforced the idea that not anyone can write the news. Lokman argues that we’d do better to see journalism as craft, a practice that can be engaged in by professionals or amateurs.

Dorothy Zinberg worries that Lokman is overfocusing on theory and failing to see the reality of journalism - it’s the practice of hard-drinking guys looking for stories that will sell newspapers. She suggests he look closely at Erik Erikson’s work on childnood and society - what is it in human experience that allows us to identify ourselves by difference? These ideas may be increasingly important in a connected world.

I took advantage of my moderator’s role to offer a closing critique - I think Lokman is vastly too kind to Global Voices and that his analysis needs to look at the ways in which we’ve failed as well as those that have succeeded. We may have created a new way of doing something like journalism, and it may be a particularly hospitable space, but it hasn’t had the influence we’d hoped to have. We’re not making measurable progress in changing the news agenda of large media outlets - we may be introducing a new paradigm, but a framework that evaluates our work needs to be critical rather than just celebratory. All that said, I think it’s incredibly helpful to examine the world of journalism and new media with new tools that recognize that global conversations may follow very different rules than those we’ve seen in the past, and I think Lokman’s analytic frame adds a great deal to these discussions.

See as well.

I gave a talk in Washington DC a few weeks ago, and had a strange realization - with a change of political administration, I know a whole lot more folks than I used to in my nation’s capital. Two old friends showed up to my talk, both people I know from Berkman Center events and ongoing debates over domestic and international internet policy. As I fielded increasingly thorny questions from the two of them, I realized that their questions had an edge to them. They weren’t the theoretical questions I’m used to getting in an academic context - they were the sorts of practical policy questions that come from people who are making policy decisions every day. It’s a surprise for me to have friends working on issues I care about in government, a pleasant one, and it’s forcing me to sharpen my thinking so I can offer advice that has a chance of actually being implemented.

With this in mind, I’m thrilled to learn that my friend Andrew McLaughlin is heading to the White House, where the New York Times reports he’ll be serving as deputy Chief Technology Officer, reporting to Aneesh Chopra, Virgina’s former secretary of technology. Andrew has been at Google for the past several years, as Google’s head of public policy and government affairs. In explaining what he did for Google, Andrew often described himself as “Google’s secretary of state” - as Google tried to figure out how to react to Chinese demands to censor content or Thailand’s decision to block access to YouTube, he was the guy on the ground negotiating with authorities in other countries. As David Weinberger notes in a post about Andrew’s new role, “You may disagree with his policy recommendations on, say, Google’s presence in China or how to handle Turkey’s desire to block YouTube videos that mock Mustafa Kemal Ataturk but if you have a chance to hear Andrew talk about such issues, you will come away impressed by his knowledge, his seriousness, his vision, and his empathy.”

I’d echo that. I’d also point out that the Obama administration is gaining someone who understands the Internet in a deep, profound way. I’ve had the pleasure of teaching classes with Andrew and helping design policy prescriptions with him - we’ve written educational articles together that still get used at Berkman despite their age, primarily because Andrew’s descriptions of the “internet elves” (ICANN, IETF, IANA and others) is a hugely useful introduction to anyone trying to figure out how the net is actually governed. Before Google, Andrew was the founding CFO of ICANN, the internet body responsible for the domain name system. In a city known for people who think the internet is a series of tubes, it’s good to know we’ve got someone in a position of authority who deeply understands how the net actually works and who is personally committed to an open, generative internet.

I’ve written in the past about my friend and colleague John Kelly’s excellent work visualising connections in different blogospheres. His best known research is on the Persian-language blogosphere, where his analysis of linking behavior showed clusters around liberal and conservative politics, but also around poetry. Subsequent analyses have seen clustering around different factors. Russian blogs appear to cluster around platforms - Livejournal users link primarily to other Livejournal users, and so the Russian “blogosphere” is a mess of disconnected communities. The Arabic blogosphere clusters based on location, rather than on interest - Egyptians tend to link to Egyptians, Saudis to Saudis.

The Chinese internet, Kelly tells us, has a complex and hybrid form. It has aspects of clustering via platform, but there are also “trading zones”, where people group by interest and mix content across platforms. He’s looking at techniques of “attentive clustering”, joining people together based on sites they’re paying attention to, rather than on direct links to one another. The research is in an early state, but it looks like Kelly’s techniques will be able to release some interesting information.

Roger Dingledine of Tor offers some insights into his unique and exciting platform for censorship circumvention and anonymity. He reminds us that it’s free software - you’re encouraged to build your own Tor network, though you might have a hard time replicating the 1500 active relays and 200,000 users he’s got on his network. Tor has the most users in China, followed by the US and Germany.

Tor is now a “real live 501c3″ non-profit organization, and it’s been funded by an amazing variety of organizations: the US Department of Defense, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Voice of America, Human Rights Watch and Google. Speaking to all these funders requires using different language. “When I talk to Walmart, I talk about communications security. Talking to my family, I mention privacy tools. To the military, it’s ‘traffic-analysis resistant communications networks’. It’s the same tool, but I phrase it in terms of the characteristics people care about.”

All these users, Roger reminds us, are needed to keep the network robust and anonymous. Good cryptography isn’t sufficient to provide anonymity - you need to disguise who’s talking to whom, which means Tor benefits from being a network used by privacy freaks, online gambling fans and human rights activists. “Nobody tries to break crypto anymore - they just do social network analysis, find the hub, then break into your house.” Tor helps with one aspect of this problem - it disguises a great deal of communication between people who could otherwise be linked via traffic analysis. On the other hand, Roger remembers a training he and I gave a few years back, where our clients explained were being surveiled both electronically and in the physical world, with parabolic microphones intercepting conversations. Online security can only take you so far.

Roger notes that groups like Tor can help control the pace of the censorship and circumvention arms race. The more publicity tools get, the more likely they are to get blocked - Roger’s very interested in building a tool that’s useful for Chinese internet users, but not aiming at overthrowing or somehow overcoming the Chinese government, because that’s almost guaranteed to make the tool a target for blocking and censorship.

Zhang Lei, the founder of Chinese translation community Yeeyan, starts his talk with a story about his last name. While Zhang is the world’s most popular last name, it’s generally considered exotic in the US, and most Americans can’t pronounce it correctly (”Jong”, not “Zang” or “Zeng”.) He sees this as an illustration of the difficulties people have in understanding one another when separated by barriers of language.

While 18-20% of world’s internet users are Chinese, it’s unlikely that Chinese is as well represented linguistically on the net. Zhang points out that there’s really no accurate data on what languages are represented online - he references an old and probably bad cite on Wikipedia that suggests that 80% of web content is in English, followed by German and Japanese. If this is true, there’s a massive imbalance between users and the content available to them. A simple experiment confirms this suspicion. A search for “breast cancer” on Google reveals 38 million pages - a search for the Chinese equivalent yields only 6 million, and the quality of content is much lower.

Machine translation isn’t a satisfactory solution. A simple paragraph of text, translated from English into Chinese via cutting edge technology, yield about one third readable text, two thirds gibberish. There’s a ton of content that would be worth translating from English to Chinese, and we’re not going to be able to do it automatically.

Zhang’s project, Yeeyan.com, wants to be “wikipedia for translation”. His community involves 8,000 volunteer translators, who’ve created 40,000 translations. The community includes 80,000 participants, who are able to comment on or improve translations. Perhaps the most exciting new project is a collaboration with The Guardian, to translate the newspaper into Chinese on a regular basis, producing an official, sanctioned edition - this is an interesting contrast to ECOTeam, which translates The Economist via an informal understanding with the publisher.

The motivation for Zheng’s project is to build understanding across gaps of language. He explains that terms can mean something very different, even in translation: “The term ‘conservative’ in relation to economic policy means ‘anti-freemarket, pro-government control’ - the opposite of what it means in the US.” These misunderstandings get in the way of dialog and understanding. In 2008, we saw major understanding gaps built on language gaps, centered on Tibet and Chinese nationalism. “I can’t solve these problems, but I can translate,” Zheng tells us. “Translation is the first step and a must to bridge the divide.”

Isaac Mao has been blogging since 2002, and he’d be the first to tell you that blogging has changed how he sees the world. His work now is on developing a theory called “shareism”, based on the idea that humans are inclined to share with one another, but that cultural barriers have emerged to restrict sharing, and that losses and absences in our society arise, in part, from our failure to share. Isaac sees the hierarchical system of Chinese society, and several thousands of years of history of top-down control, as providing an especially challenging environment for shareism.

Chinese people, he believes, are being separated into two groups - those who are connected and those who are disconnected. Bloggers spend a lot of time sharing, subscribing to other bloggers, and connecting with one another. They have more authentic relationships to one another, he believes, based on their willingness to share and connect. The unconnected are influenced primarily by mainstream media - the connected can influence each other, can access information that’s hidden from the unconnected and circumvent censorship. Ideally, they’ll connect via social media, access important information, and share information with the unconnected people, empowering them. “This could be the hope and the future of the Chinese community.”

It’s not reasonable to posit the elimination of China’s hierarchical systems - it needs to be replaced with something, and Isaac believes the sorts of connection he’s talking about could offer that necessary structure. He sees this change already happening in small ways - communities that have access to alternative media stop being as dependent on highly controlled mainstream media. As attention switches to these new spaces, business and political leaders need to pay attention to these new spaces, as do foreign journalists. He notes that journalists covering China are now paying close attention to bloggers, not just to established media sources.

(I’m at the 7th China Internet Research Conference at the Annenberg School of Communications. Information on participating is here.)

The second session at the China Internet Research conference is a roundtable on the Global Network Initiative, an association of academic institutions, corporations and nonprofit institutions working on a set of best practices for corporations to follow in engaging with governments on online freedom of expression issues. Hosted by my colleague Rebecca MacKinnon, the round table includes Colin Maclay from the Berkman Center, Leslie Harris from the Center for Democracy and Technology, Bob Boorstin representing Google, internet entrepreneur Isaac Mao, and Ang Pen Hwa from Nanyang Technical University.

Rebecca explains that the GNI is a result, in part, of hearings in US Congress about actions by US corporations in China, emerging in part in reaction to Yahoo’s role in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. Corporations wanted advice on best practices working in nations that don’t respect rights of free speech, and NGOs wanted to ensure that companies worked to protect human rights. This created a sense of common interest, which has allowed the companies to meet on common ground and discuss strategies.

Boorstin acknowledges that being the representative of a large US corporation at a Chinese internet conference can be “like being the fire hydrant at a dog show”. He explains that Google has much less leverage in China than most people think - if Google threatened to leave, he says, “The Chinese government would say, ‘Bye bye’”. Their market share is small compared to Baidu’s - 22% versus 70% market share - and Boorstin argues that they’ve got less influence than larger Chinese companies would have.

Without disagreeing with him, Isaac Mao points out that his open letter to Google (published over two years ago, and never responded to by Google…) was directed because Google has such a strong reputation for being socially progressive - he hoped Google would choose to do the right thing and engage in China in a way that explicitly promoted freedom of expression.

Ang suggests that GNI not try to get the US first ammendment adopted around the world. Instead, it’s important to celebrate a best practice - immunizing a provider from third-party liability. In other words, individuals are responsible for their speech, not companies. Without this limitation on liability, it’s virtually impossible to run book reviews on Amazon or maintain a site like Trip Advisor. It’s not unreasonable, he argues, to expect regulation of offline media to creep into regulation of online media, but this single principle makes a great deal of free expression possible. Colin Maclay questions whether we want to regulate the internet like media, or like free expression, pointing out that online expression is very different from traditional media: it’s cheap, unlicensed, and yet still persistent, having an impact even after a takedown order.

Leslie Harris responds to criticism that the GNI doesn’t include small companies or non-US companies - it’s based primarily around Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. “When we started, we wondered whether we could get these three companies to sit in a room together… and the answer was initially ‘no’.” In other words, it’s required a great deal of work to get as far as the initiative has gone so far - we may need to be patient in expecting the group to extend any time soon.

Rebecca calls on Michael Anti, reminding us that his blog, hosted on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces (now Windows Live) was censored in 2005, not by China but by the company. He offers the observation that Chinese users are offering “a quiet acceptance of some compromise - without some compromise, we know we’ll lose these key services.” But he suggests that these companies formalize a bargain with their Chinese users: “We want companies to udnerstand that when they do business in China, it’s exchange - we exchange part of our freedom to support you. You should have some special group to help civil society as an exchange for us ignoring your compromise with the government.”

Harris fields a question about whether the US Congress has a seat at the table of GNI. “They’re at the table, but not as a welcome guest,” she quips. While Congress isn’t represented at the table, pressure from congressional committees helped bring participants to the table, and it might require EU pressure for European companies to participate as well.

In response to a question about whether GNI serves as a “fig leaf” for corporations, Boorstin points out that Google added a notice at the bottom of their Chinese search results making clear that filtering is taking place - other engines have caught up and provided a similar notice. “What’s under the figleaf: pretty much the three Ts, and one F - there’s more than that, but I think most Chinese users know what material they can’t get.” (That would be Tibet, Taiwan, Tienenman and Falun Gong, for those not following the Chinese internet closely…)

Isaac Mao and Ang Pen Hwa field a question about setting up an initiative like the GFI in Asia, with Asian stakeholders. Isaac believes GNI could be localized to Asia, because there’s a “cultural history of controlling culture” which leads to attempts to control the internet too closely. This, in turn, means that Asian companies are facing the sorts of pressures that brought US governments to the GFI table. Ang tells us he’s hoping to set up a “committee of internet experts” - “it’ll be like the EFF, but you can’t use the word ‘Freedom’ in Singapore without being misunderstood.” Support for the initiative is more likely to come from small businesses and academia in Singapore, he believes, not from civil society.

I’m at the 2009 Chinese Internet Research Conference at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. My colleague Hal Roberts and I are presenting some of our research on circumvention tools this afternoon, and I’m enjoying the chance to catch up on research in a field I don’t know a ton about - the Chinese internet. The conference is organized in part by my good friend Lokman Tsui, who apparently hasn’t slept in weeks.

Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School, oints out that study of the Chinese internet reminds us that “the internet means very different things in very different settings.” Studying the Internet in China means moving back and forth between understanding the medium itself and understanding the cultures and economic and political settings in which it is placed. The conference, which focuses on the Chinese internet and civil society, includes talks on the public sphere and deliberation, censorship, surveillance, civil society, women and minorities, panics, nationalism and grassroot cultures. Delli Carpini warns us, “Let’s not pretend we understand the internet in the US on these issues” - we’re still figuring out how these online spaces work everywhere in the world.

Min Jiang of UNC Charlotte used to work for CCTV in Beijing, so she’s well positioned to study Chinese media, propoganda and citizen participation. In a talk titled, “Spaces of Authoritarian Deliberation”, she explains that we need to moderate our understanding of the Chinese internet. It’s not a controlled space punctuated by bursts of protest, as usually portrayed in the Western media. Nor is it the emerging deliberative public sphere as Chinese authorities like to claim - it’s somewhere in between.

The online space in China is huge, with 298 million internet users. 2/3rds of these users are under 30, and lots of them are bloggers. (She uses the figure of 162 million, which seems very high to me, but would be interesting to see the number sourced.) 700 million Chinese have mobile phones, and 117 have phones with internet access. This, she suggests, creates an unprecedenced ability for users to engage in collective action.

There’s an impression, she suggests, that “if we bring down the great firewall, China will be free” - in truth, it’s a lot more compicated. China’s not as simple as a repressive dictatorship - it’s a complex authoritarian state, evolving over time, especially in online spaces. She offers the example of a comment by Jackie Chan in a public forum: “We Chinese need to be controlled.” Chan was offered the opportunity to respond, saying “I was quoted out of context.” Chinese netizens didn’t buy it - some suggested that perhaps Chan should be sent to North Korea to see what it’s like to be controlled. “Modern authoritianism is deliberative - it listens and responds to the people.”

She looks closely at four kinds of spaces:

Central propoganda spaces, where the government controls the message. Despite the control of these spaces, there’s a surprising amount of open discussion, including complaints posted about local government and discussions of issues like the global financial crisis.

Government-controlled commercial spaces are even more lively - while the spaces are centered on topics like music, news and messaging, there’s a great deal of discussion on political topics. When these spaces get too frisky, they can get shut down until they tone down - some spaces, after being shut down, reopen overseas. They’re emerging as increasingly important spaces to discuss public issues.

A small number of new spaces are emerging as civic forums. They’re sometimes explicitly focused on defending rights. As a result, these sites are generally asked to register their presence with the government. But other civic spaces are emerging, sometimes on sites like a Facebook clone - these are platforms for self-organizing.

Finally, she considers international deliberative spaces, a category that ranges from international media sites like China Radio International and CCTV online, which try to shape the image of China online, to spaces built by overseas bloggers and translators, like the ECOTeam (which translates The Economist into Chinese), or groups that translate entertainment content like Desperate Housewives.

The open questions Min Jiang is interested in focus on how we can engage emergent civil society in China, engage with reformist bureacrats, and engage the digital generation.

Yuan Le presents a paper that she and Boxu Yang at Peking University developed from studying two Chinese bulletin board communities - Qiangguo Forum and
Maoyan Kanfren Forum. The former is a long-established forum, online since 1999, and seen as an officially sanctioned space. The latter is more associated with the right. Yuan and Yang develop a sophisticated political model that divides Chinese political culture into “old left”, “new left”, “nationalist” and “neoconfucian”. They’re interested in studying what debates emerge between these groups - some are ideological questions, while others are debates over the language used, particularly between old Marxist language and more modern language of the social sciences.

Analyzing 398 threads and 1243 replies, handcoding posts for political opinion, the researchers discovered a clear left/right break between the two studied forums. They also saw evidence of very different agendas between the spaces - on Qiangguo, conversations often centered on issues of social welfare, while discussions of liberal democracy and individual freedom dominated on Maoyan Kanfren.

Sarah Cook of Freedom House presents their recent report, Freedom on the Net. It’s an attempt to rank fifteen countries in terms of internet freedom, using 19 indicators in three thematic areas: obstacles to access, limits on content and violation of user rights.

China comes up as “not free” under the Freedom House methodology, grouped with Cuba, Tunisia and Iran. She posits a paradox - China is aggresively embracing the internet, and is one of six countries they considered where internet penetration has recently doubled, but there’s sophisticated and multi-layered apparatus of control.

Cook points out that there are several phenomena which are unique to China, including strong pre-publication controls (which Rebecca MacKinnon has studied at length). Other controls, like paid manipulators of public opinion, like the 50 cent party, are seen in other venues like Russia and Tunisia.

Freedom House uses a similar points-based methodology to score press freedom, and Cook compares press and online freedom. While there’s not a large difference in highly-controled countries, there is a big gap in partially free countries - there’s more freedom online, though Cook worries that gap is closing.

(I’m not especially thrilled with Freedom House’s decision to try to rank internet freedom on a single hundred-point scale. Comparing Tunisia and China, which have utterly different filtering methodologies and social implications, feels like comparing apples and oranges to me. And trying to correlate two indexes which both measure factors that are very hard to quantify strikes me as potentially very misleading. Then again, I’ve worked closely with colleages at the OpenNet Initiative, and feel like the Freedom House work doesn’t add much to the work they’ve done over the past several years.)