Center for Civic Media meetings start with an icebreaker question: you introduce yourself, and tell us whether you prefer pirates or ninjas, homemade or canned cranberry sauce. You offer your favorite protest chant or tell us what percent (“I am the 99%”) you identify with. Yesterday, on seeing two of Civic’s finest dressed in argyle, I asked people to propose a Civic Media dress code.

The suggestions were wide-ranging and included Jeff Warren’s suggestion of facial tattoos that serve as achievement badges, Nathan Matias’s proposed adoption of Madeline Albright’s “pin code” and Molly Sauter offered a suggestion for remixable, snarky t-shirts.

My favorite suggestion was Lorrie LeJeune’s proposal of a Civic media tartan. (Since Lorrie weaves and spins, as well as writes, edits, makes jewelry, builds guitars and plays mandolin, it’s possible she is weaving a Civic tartan right now.) It was widely observed that we needn’t select a single tartan – instead, we could create a set of tartans that functioned like QR codes, encoding information for anyone capable of comprehending the code.

I’m home sick today, feeling like the cold I’m fighting is perfectly justified given my travel and sleep schedule this fall. (Spontaneous human combustion would also likely have been an appropriate bodily response to the strains of this fall.) So I’ve had some time to think about how we might actually implement a Civic tartan code.

First, some quick comments on QR codes:

- They’re very cool. It’s wonderful that Densu Wave in 1994 figured out such a compact way to encode a surprisingly large amount of data into machine readable form. And there are certainly lots of clever ways to use them, not just for labeling auto parts, but for bridging between the real and digital worlds, tagging physical objects and spaces with unique identifiers and URLs. (See Civic’s Timenesia project for one cool way to use QR codes to tag reality.)

- They’re ugly as sin, and also something of a fashion statement. Commenting on posters from a recent Occupy rally, Sasha Constanza-Chock noted that QR codes on many of the posters and wondered – since most of the codes translate as URLs – whether it wouldn’t be easier simply to put the human-readable URLs on the posters instead. “It seems like the QR code primarily signifies you as the sort of person technologically sophisticated enough to be using QR codes”

There’s a certain charm to having codes that are machine-readable but not human readable, I guess – you can wear http://goatse.cx on your shirt and disturb anyone foolish enough to read the code with their phone. But I suspect fashion statements like haute couture bodices decorated with QR codes are the sort of idea with very little staying power.

- They’re killing kittens. As Scott Stratten explains in this helpful video, most QR codes are misused, and each time designers misuse them, a kitten dies. It’s time we think of the kittens.

Embedding data into physical spaces is a cool idea. But it would be great if we could do so in a way that’s pretty, and at least partially human readable.

Like tartans. Prior to the 19th century, tartans were associated with different regions of Scotland, colored using local dyes to local weaver’s preferences. After the publication of the (wholly fictional) Vestiarium Scoticum in 1842, tartans became associated with specific clans, and it became possible to identify members of some families by the particular tartan they wore. Military units and businesses have created specific tartans, as do most US states, and there are now between 7000 and 14,000 “registered” tartans available.

The Bay State tartan, my state’s official plaid. You may now understand why I prefer my clan tartan.

It’s pretty obvious from looking at a tartan that you’ve got the potential to store a great deal of information within the design of the pattern. The Bay State tartan features 24 stripes before repeating. Each can be a different width and color. With a couple dozen colors to choose from, and stripes ranging from one to 64 stitches, you’ve got 36,864 patterns, or slightly more than 15 bits of information. All well and good, but not enough information to encode a URL.

QR codes can include URLs stored as alphanumeric characters – the QR codes we see most often can support 35-77 alphanumeric characters. That’s a lot of data – ~8.9×10^108 possible combinations, which would require either really wide tartans, or very subtle color variations. The problem is more tractable if we try to represent a shortened URL, using a service like is.gd or bit.ly. Yes, this means our tartan scanner will need to detect color and stripe width, then consult bit.ly before using the domain name service to resolve our website… but remember, QR readers are using the DNS system to turn their codes into websites, in part because encoding IP addresses doesn’t work well anymore now that a site can support thousands of independent domains.

bit.ly produces URLs that look like this: http://bit.ly/t658ko – that URL leads to Center for Civic Media at http://civic.mit.edu. To slightly oversimplify, the service turns each URL it encounters into the next of a sequence of numbers. Rather than use decimal numbers, they use a base-62 system (0-9, A-Z, a-z), which allows them to represent almost 57 billion numbers with only six characters. 57 billion is vastly smaller than the total number of possible URLs, but in practical terms, it works because people haven’t used the service 57 billion times.

Now we just need something capable of producing 57 billion different tartans.

Enter Tartanmaker.com. This lovely online service allows you to design simple tartans to be used as backgrounds for your webpages. You can create three stripes of width from 1-10, using hexadecimal notation to specify colors. That gives you 167 million or so options per stripe (256^3 colors times 10 widths), or roughly 4.722 x 10^24 possible tartans. While that more than satisfies our information needs, most of those colors are going to be too subtle for the human eye to distinguish.

Turns out we can solve our problem using only websafe colors. With three stripes chosen from 216 websafe colors, we get almost 10 billion combinations. Tartanmaker offers us two other options – three thread widths (which basically scale the pattern) and two orientations (horizonal versus diagonal), which bring us up to over 59 billion combinations, just what we need to represent bit.ly URLs.

If we actually wanted to do this, we’d need a good algorithm to map bit.ly’s base-62 numbers to a combination of 3 thread sizes, 2 orientations, and three stripes, each of 216 colors and 10 widths. We might get very clever and figure out how to have tartans darken over time, using darker colors as we move through our list of unique identifiers. And we’d need Tartanmaker to offer an API so we could take an URL, call bit.ly, then call Tartanmaker and produce appropriate outputs. Finally, for this to actually be useful, we’d need to program a webcam to distinguish between color shades and stripe widths.

But it makes me deeply happy to know that Civic Media tartan could exist, and could lead an appropriately equipped smartphone to our site. And it makes me want to build a tartan translator, if only to figure out what URLs I’m advertising when I wear my flannel shirts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media activists Marisa Jahn and Julian Rubenstein joined us for today’s lunch talk at the Center for Civic Media. Marisa is the new director of the People’s Production House, a New York based project that works with low income workers and youth, building capacity around media creation. Julian is am author and journalist who now works on Newsmotion.org.

Marisa walks us through some of her history as an activist and artist, showcasing some of her work as a graphic designer. For the 2008 Wall Street protests, she designed a “Bailout = Bullshit” logo and signage. An art project proposed cooking Thanksgiving dinners in five seconds using a model rocket shot into clouds under certain atmospheric conditions to generate lighting strikes.

Other projects have been more focused on community service (and perhaps more practical). A project in El Pital, Honduras has created a character, “Biblio Bandito”, who torments children until they write stories. Older kids in the village got into the act and helped put up wanted posters and threats, encouraging children to write stories and enter their names in a mustacio’d book to avoid being terrorized.

Other work has focused on curation, supporting a project by Amy Balkin to create audiotours of the Interstate 5 corridor through California. The highway features some high-pollution sites, like tire fires and chemical spills. The tour is built through community-produced audio pieces, and was presented to audiences through hosted listening sessions as well as distributed at truck stops. Another curation project produced the edited volume, “Byproduct”, a collection of cases of “artists embedded in non-art sectors”, including the case of mimes used as traffic cops in Bogota, Colombia.

During a residency in Tajikistan, she became fascinated by a two-line poem form called the biyat (think “Rubiyat”, which comes from the same poetic tradition.) She saw a parallel between this and the ways in which people used mobile phones in Tajikstan, making calls that lasted only the ten seconds of free time allowed by cellphone operators. This led to a contest to find the best 10 second poems, “juried by ‘the Oprah of northern Tajikistan’”, and shared with the country on national radio and television.

Her work in political media is connected to work with i-witness, a grassroots advocacy group documenting the policing of protests. This work, which she did with my colleague Sasha Constanza-Chock – was able to help in the dismissal of 1/3rd of protester arrests by comparing citizen and police footage to display police media manipulation.

Her current work as director of People’s Production House has worked on training teens in the New York City schools in media production, and has sent trainers into the field in places like Liberia, working on media monitoring and training civil war survivors in storytelling. People’s Production House also features a media policy channel which produces toolkits to educate people on how telecommunications policy affects lower income people and people of color.

A recent project with Domestic Workers United focuses on a law recently passed in New York State that gives nannies minimum wage, overtime and some other basic benefits. How do you communicate the essence of these laws to nannies via the phone? People’s Production House is now producing an interactive voice response system that offers audio readings of the laws, as well as detailed explanations of rights.

Julian comes from a different background: he’s a former sports journalist who cut his teeth as a sport writer at the Washington Post, dropping box scores into sports pages. He tells us about watching the transition from disinterested to deeply non-objective sports reporting, a transition that sharpened his interest in underdogs and outcasts. He spent weeks following El Duque around the minor leagues, telling the story of a celebrated Cuban pitcher trying to make it in unfamiliar America.

This interest in deep and complex storytelling led him to write a book about a truly peculiar Hungarian sports story, the tale of a minor league hockey player and Zamboni driver who ended up robbing post offices in Hungary. The book, “The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber“, is both a portrait of this figure and a rich picture of Hungary in its transition from communism to market-based systems.

His current project, Newsmotion, emerged from trying to offer narratives of the Arab spring through the view of eyewitnesses. Offering an overview of this complex story involves personal narratives, analysis of data and visualization.

Newsmotion and People’s Production House are now working together to build a platform, tentatively titled Basta! It’s designed specifically to help cover Occupy Wall Street and related movements, and Marisa tells us, the people building it have been working on these issues since 1999 in Seattle. The platform seeks to combine original content and curated aggregation, to identify the best, most relevant and accurate sources, whether they’re official, unofficial or citizen sources.

One of the key challenges of the system is finding a way to both tell the broad story – seeing the various points on a map where people are participating in the movement – and the deep story. The group is commissioning and serializing portraits of individuals to show off the complexities of these issues, with the goal of being able to tell subtle, multifaceted stories related to the issues. She offers the example of Christine Lewis, a nanny she’s worked with on the DWU project, who’s talked about the sense of guilt a nanny can feel about caring for a child for money, and the need to give twice as much love to your own child… and the tension of feeling like if you lose your job, you’ll be cut off from the child you’re caring for and have come to love. This sort of subtle, complex story may need to be told over a long time, in serial, not in a single dose.

The discussion opens up to talk about Basta!’s larger goals, as well as specific implementation. The Civic crew is skeptical that maps are the right way to present this data – Charlie deTar argues that community organizations are starting to move away from maps as a way of representing a diverse set of data points. I wonder whether maps send a message that counters the message of deep and complex stories – maps offer a narrative that a movement is broad and global, while deep storytelling offers more nuance. Leo Burd wonders whether we could connect the sorts of work Basta! is documenting with ways people could take action in their communities.

Ramesh Srinivasan is a designer who’s found himself pulled into cultural anthropology by his fascination with “digital diversity”. Some of the lessons he’s learned from this work found articulation in a piece in the Washington Post this weekend, which address the role of social media in the Arab Spring. More broadly, Srinivasan is intrigued by two questions:

- How do new networked technologies impact cultures and communities worldwide? Politically? In terms of economic development? Cultural history and memory?

- From a cultural perspective, how do we design and build new technologies? How do the ways we talk about the world, our ethics and cultures engage with technological construction?

One of the key tools in Srinivasan’s toolkit is the ontology, which he describes as a structured way to examine “theories of what exist”. Describing the world in terms of hierarchies (i.e., a plant is an example of a living thing, has characteristics including leaves, roots and flowers, requires light and water to produce food, etc.) is, Srinivasan, a western construct that’s not always how a community considers local knowledge. But Srinivasan believes we can learn a great deal about how communities think about knowledge both by trying to structure their knowledge into ontologies and by understanding how they traditionally structure their knowledge.

To illustrate this idea, Srinivasan shows us some alternative ways to map physical space. A map from the Qiche tribe in Peru is radial, not Cartesian. The image of a crocodile is an Aboriginal map, a visualization of the song lines that criss-cross an area in rural Australia, a drawing of a God as well as a practical map of the landscape. Srinivasan wonders if we’re creating technologies that are this diverse, or whether we’re facing a world where most technologies are produced within one conceptual and value system and exported.

Documenting the diversity of technological development and conceptualization is one way to answer this complex question. He shows us some “surprising” images of mobile phones, which have become surprisingly familiar to those of us who work in international development: the Indian sadhu talking on a phone, the fisherman who called from offshore to warn villagers living on the beach of a tidal wave. We can either see these as exciting examples of how western technology has diffused to India, or disappointing indications that local alternatives haven’t been well developed. As Srinivasan points out, these examples aren’t disappointing to Nokia, which has dispatched ethnographers like Jan Chipchase to understand local use and appropriation of technologies.

But to study technological diversity, we may need to look at how cultures create, mobilize and design technologies, and how we might engage in codesign with them. One of Srinivasan’s early experiments brought video cameras into Andhra Pradesh to see how people would use the equipment to tell their own stories. He notes that stories are important – Amartya Sen has described poverty as a “ritual”, a circumstance that’s repeated fatalistically, limiting people’s ability to escape from their circumstances. Given a way of telling stories differently, would communities find different solutions and escape existing paradigms? Would they increase consensus around controversial issues? The main discovery he made was that media usage expanded far beyond the few people he trained to use the cameras. They were used to document wrongdoings, to start debates about local change, to screen videos on the side of local temples. He sees the work as confirmation of the theories of Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito about the importance of self-representation through creation of media.

A similar project designed to document agricultural knowledge in rural Kyrgyzstan started along parallel lines, though fueled with significantly more vodka. (Pro tip: when it requires drinking 17 shots of vodka with your research subjects to get them to participate in your research, as it did for Srinivasan, it’s wise to throw at least a few glasses over your shoulder. Trust me on this one.) But his explorations in rural Kyrgyzstan led him to become interested in the urban elites who were blogging (and drinking cognac instead of vodka.) The bloggers he met were intensely political, involved with the ouster of Bakiev last year, and had reason to believe they would be arrested had they met in person. Srinivasan sees the Kyrgyz example as a counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell’s assertion that social media is used by people connected via weak ties. In Kyrgyzstan, there were strong ties between people involved with blogging – they simply interacted online because it was so dangerous to interact offline.

In Kyrgyzstan, Srinivasan became fascinated by the ways online and offline networks interconnected. Bridge figures made links between networks of labor activists and online activists – most of the former were offline, but a single figure who understood labor activism and the online space could connect the disparate networks and help coordinate their actions. Recently Srinivasan has been studying the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution and questioning those who’ve evangelized the role of social media in the protests. He notes that the people being followed by journalists and aggregators like Andy Carvin and Mona ElTawahy are not necessarily representative of the people organizing on the street. He’s engaged in a debate with (my friend and colleague) Zeynep Tufekçi, who is examining synergies and common ground between some of the groups represented in Tahrir Square. Srinivasan believes that there’s less overlap between disparate groups who briefly united in Tahrir and is more intrigued by the idea that different groups (Salafists, liberal reformists) have separate, bridged networks that include offline and online activists. Understanding how those networks work, and how they interact online would offer a richer understanding of the forces that shaped the Egyptian revolution that concluding that social media is a common ground for all protest. In fact, he argues, some of his friends in Egypt told him they were insulted that non-Egyptians were positing the idea that technology had made this complex bridging possible – the magic of Tahrir was human, not technological connection.

How does all this inform design? Srinivasan has an ongoing project working with Native communities in southern California, who live in a series of reservations east of San Diego. The reservations are physically separated, and it’s hard to get from one to another, even if they’re only a few dozen miles apart, as there’s no infrastructure to connect them. Srinivasan has been interested in the idea that you could create a digital village through wireless infrastructure that could somehow provide some coherence in the face of pressing problems like crime and alcoholism.

One of the problems his communities face is a loss of collective memory. The people in these communities come from the coast and have traditions of fishing and farming. They now live in arid desert hills where neither is possible. In the wake of separation and dislocation, how do we document and remember? Srinivasan has used digital cameras to help document physical objects and “fluid ontologies”, semantic maps to understand local knowledge. A surprising number of people – roughly 10% of the population of the reservations – have been involved with proposing pieces of local knowledge that belong in an ontology.

These ontologies can have practical implications to address community problems. In Mysore, India, Srinivasan is helping build a government public grievance system, which accepts input from paper, phone or web. One of the major problems with the system is that ordinary people describe their problems using different language than governments use. The government describes a flooded street as “water-logging”, a term no one in the community knew or understood. Through interview, Srinivasan found 65 other terms and phrases used to describe the condition and built an ontological map that “translated” from the state’s worldview to the people’s. The idea is to build systems around the language and ontologies people actually use and map that into the government’s language and reality.

This same idea comes into play in trying to bridge gaps between a Zuni community and the museums who hold many Zuni artifacts. As museums digitize collections (part of a process of returning ritual objects to their rightful owners), whose ontologies do they use? The language of geologists, where a pot is “a lump of concretion”? An art object with date, origin and maker? An object with a ritual purpose? Something that reminds you of your grandmother’s pot?

For inspiration (and, I sense, a bit of desire for adventure), Srinivasan traveled to Papua New Guinea in the hopes of getting to Bosavi Crater, an extremely isolated spot that features odd species like fanged frogs, 5 foot long rats (rodents of unusual size?) and tree kangaroos. The incredible ecological diversity of PNG is complemented by linguistic diversity, where over 700 languages coexist. Diversity seems to thrive in isolation – connection can lead to the elimination of diversity. How do we build systems that bridge between networks and respect sovereignty? How do we respect emergent diversity and learn by bridging local ecosystems? Can we avoid the problems of echo chambers and isolation, without sacrificing diversity to unitary systems and algorithms?

It’s a hell of a set of questions, and Srinivasan does a great job of concretizing the challenges through his examples. Most useful to me in his talk was the observation that you can look for bridges between networks by looking for “incommensurability”. Look at how one group of people maps and understand a space and layer it atop another ontology and look for where they differ. Those differences are opportunities to bridge, not the similarities. People who are straddling the networks and helping people resolve the incommensurabilities are the ones doing the hard work of bridging. It’s a fantastic observation, and a clue for me that ontologies may be a powerful tool for understanding some of the questions I’m most interested in.

Fifty years ago, Newton Minow, the 35 year old FCC chairman, gave a speech that’s still studied today. It’s taught in rhetoric courses, tested on the LSAT reading comprehension test and still is invoked in discussions of how communications technology affects entertainment, news, and democracy. The speech challenged broadcasters to actually watch their programming, and urged them to consider whether they were proud of what’s they’d see. It read, in part:

“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Today, Minow’s daughter, Martha Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, welcomed her father to the stage at her institution as part of an event titled, “News and Entertainment in the Digital Age: A Vast Wasteland Revisited“. Minow (I’ll refer to Newton Minow throughout the rest of this post) starts his talk by noting that we’re a day past the ten year anniversary of 9/11, a time at which there was no YouTube, no Twitter, none of the social media we discuss today to understand the tragic events of the day. If that shift is difficult to comprehend, it’s much harder to understand the landscape of fifty years ago, when phone calls traveled by wire, when there were no computers, one phone company and two and a half television companies. There was no public television or radio. Audiences, Minow reminds us, were passive – they gathered around the single set in the house and watched in silence.

When Minow came to the FCC, it was a group wracked by scandal – previous commissioners had been fired for corruption. Minow’s relationship was a highly personal one with President Kennedy. He recalls a meeting with Kennedy and Commander Alan Shepard, recently returned from the first American voyage into space. Kennedy was enroute to a speech at the National Association of Broadcasters, and asked Minow what he thought Kennedy should say to the broadcasters. He told him, “Mr. President, tell them that this is the difference between a free and a closed society: when the Soviets send people into space, we don’t know whether they succeed or fail. In the US, we let people see and hear what’s going on.”

Kennedy gave a brief speech to the NAB which used Minow’s talking points and got a standing ovation. Minow’s infamous speech didn’t get quite as warm a reception. Minow reminds us that Sherwood Schwartz, producer of the television show Gilligan’s Island, honored him by naming the sinking ship on his show the S.S. Minow.

Why give such an incendiary speech? Television was the dominant medium of the era. The televised Kennedy/Nixon debate had decided the election. But there was little discussion about public interest and public responsibility on the part of broadcasters. Minow’s contribution as an FCC chairman was to try to expand choice – licensing the UHF spectrum, early cable TV systems and satellite television. When Kennedy invited him to visit the space program, Minow observed that satellites were more important to sending a man into space, because they permitted sending ideas into space, and ideas last longer than people. Minow notes that there’s a strong possibility that the recent events of the Arab Spring were a product, in part, of satellite communication.

Both Minow and Kennedy had lived in cities where there was a strong public television statement. They both assumed that public television would spread throughout the country, but there was no public TV in New York, LA or Washington DC. When Minow left the FCC, he went on to serve on the board of governors of the Public Broadcasting Service, and on the Carnegie Foundation, one of the major funders of public broadcasting.

As someone who’s been concerned with public broadcasting for his entire career, Minow tells us that he’s deeply disappointed by the relationship between money and politics. “Politicians need massive amounts of money to buy radio and television ads. They raise money from the public to gain access to something the public owns: the airwaves.” This is an absurdity – the US is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide access to the airwaves to candidates. In the UK and Japan, it’s not possible to buy access to the airwaves. Much of the cost of American campaigning comes from the media.

Minow ends his remarks with praise for his host: “I wish the Berkman Center had existed 50 years ago,” because the issue of the responsibilities of broadcasters was neglected 50 years ago, and is still neglected today.

Anne Marie Lipinski, the new curator of the Niemann Center, is one of the three designated “respondents” to Minow’s remarks. She suggests that the most inspiring aspect of Minow’s remarks is the idea that we can do better – as individuals, as broadcasters. One of the challenges in helping us become better is defining the public interest. “I don’t think we have a shared ethos around te public interest in contemporary society.”

Journalist Jonathan Alter reminds us that Minow is also the father of the televised presidential debate. While we still see this important form of civic programming, most of what passes for civic discourse online is extremely poor. “The news business is the only business recognized by the Constitution and it’s largely dysfunctional.” Talk is cheap and reporting expensive, he argues – “the vast wasteland has a Tower of Babel on top of it.” Much of the news we get is “people like me babbling on MSNBC or Fox”, rather than the sort of expensive newsgathering required to report facts on the ground.

Yochai Benkler calls on a section of Minow’s speech where he challenges broadcasters to challenge their sponsors: “Tell your sponsors to be less concerned with cost per thousands and more concerned with understanding per millions.” This section points to the core tension between an American broadcast model that is anchored in markets, and the challenges of public responsibility. Public funding for media and nonprofit models tend to be foreign to American audiences. Yet there’s evidence that networks like the BBC produce some of the highest quality news content available.

Benkler provokes Alter by suggesting that there’s the possibility of producing key and investigative reporting via radically distributed methods. He suggests that the Neda Aga Soltan video, which Alter alluded to in his remarks, was an example of the power of citizen production. He (generously) references a talk I gave the week before about the complex interaction of Tunisians on the ground, activists in the diaspora and Al Jazeera – a state-funded media network – to amplify voices in Sidi Bouzid leading to the Tunisian revolution. “Because we all now carry sound, video and text generating and disseminating tools – phones – we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to close the gap between what costs a great deal of money and what we all need as citizens.”

Lipinski asks whether anyone is prepared to pay for this sort of crowd-sourced media, asking if any of us pay people whose blogs and twitter feeds we read. Minow suggests that this may be the wrong place to ask for support. He notes that the Japanese closely studied media models around the world before starting NHK and based their model on the BBC, including charging a license fee for television sets. “Other countries started building public media before they built commercial. We tacked on public broadcasting after the fact, without a way to pay for it.” This leaves us with a difficult choice: “Do you want the market to decide and provide everything? And if the market is not going to provide everything, do you want to build an alternative system?”

Alter suggests we don’t hold our breath waiting for the rise of a new public media system in the US. What’s happening instead is the fragmentation of what media exists. He points to the evening entertainment market, where big shows like Leno’s and Letterman’s are ceding ground to the Colbert Report. “It’s a move towards greater choice.” But the downside of this move is that we may be seeing a divide between elites who have access to a vast selection of media, and masses who get little critical media. “The political conversation involves a maximum of 10 to 15 million people,” he asserts, “but 130 million vote in Presidential elections.”

Ellen Goodman offers a nutritional analogy. “People don’t want to eat their broccoli, but they still might vote.” She’s suspicious of the idea that public media will produce the broccoli and be able to get people to eat it, because “public broadcasting in the US is weak and designed to be weak.” Proposals that are unrealistic but still worth making for the production of marketing of broccoli might not be directed to our existing public media institutions, she argues, because these institutions may not be capable of innovation. “It’s reasonable to ask these actors to solve our problems, but they are not going to solve them.”

Virginia Heffernan, cultural critic for the New York Times, suggests we consider not just news. When we look at television entertainment, especially HBO and Bravo, we’re no longer facing a vast wasteland. Minow invites us to imagine the forces of art, daring and imagination unleashed on the television screen, and the artistic explosion we’ve seen the last few years suggests that “television both as an art form and a public health hazard makes these things possible.”

She offers a caution to Alter’s skepticism about digital media and direct sources – we quickly found dangerous media online, like Loose Change, a video that offered the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job. But we also were able to find video of Saddam Hussein’s execution, shot and distributed by an American serviceman. “Our million dollar Baghdad bureau didn’t get the execution story right” because they were working from eyewitness testimony from individuals in the room, and that testimony wasn’t correct. The actual account of Hussein’s final words came from the video, not the reporting.

What’s key in this world of internet video, she offers, is contextualization. As the New York Times invests in international reporting, they need to make a major investment in contextualizing these images and videos. Asked by Jonathan Zittrain, our moderator, how we might take on Minow’s challenge to “do better”, Heffernan asks us to “register as a Wikipedia editor today. Twice, if you’re a woman.”

Zittrain observes that the phenomenon of Doris Kearns Goodwin, sitting next to Heffernan, registering on Wikipedia could lead to some interesting edit battles over Lincoln’s biography. Asked whether she will register as a Wikipedian, Goodwin offers, “I didn’t know I could!” (Note to Jimmy Wales – we still have work to do.) C

With three former FCC chairs in the room, Susan Crawford – introduced as a “shadow FCC commissioner” in the Obama administration – is offered the first FCC response to Minow provocations with a line about “beauty before age”. She responds to Reed Hundt with a quip about pearls before swine(!) and suggests we think about parallels between Minow’s speech in the service of a “handsome young president, with a beautiful family” and suggests that such a speech would be unthinkable nowadays. For one thing, Minow would have been speaking to the wrong people. Distribution networks are now so much more powerful than content providers, and players like Comcast now control programming and internet access. “There’s only four actors in America who have any power” around these issues of content of the media, “and they really believe that personal preferences equal good programming.”

Kevin Martin, FCC chair under George W. Bush, focused his observations on a topic dear to my heart – the state of international media. He observed that business network Bloomberg now devotes significantly more resources to overseas coverage than the New York Times. (For the record, so does the Wall Street Journal – business papers cover international more thoroughly than “general interest” sources…) Despite those coverage resources, some Bloomberg channels have had difficulty gaining carriage on some cable systems, where they are perceived as specialist content.

Reed Hundt, who chaired the FCC under President Clinton, calls his moves to force broadcasters to show three hours a week of children’s programming his way of honoring Minow’s legacy. “Mandating children’s programming turns out to be a violation of the first amendment, to my amazement.” Like Minow, Hundt was “honored” by broadcasters’ response to his work – the WB network’s show Animaniacs introduced a clown named Reed Blunt… and offered the show as evidence of their compliance with creating children’s programming.

Minow points out that lawyers end up as chairmen of the FCC because “it’s the only government agency that’s regulating a medium of communication.” Lawyers who understand the first amendment understand how treacherous it is and how complicated regulation in the space can be.

Asked to comment on Minow’s legacy, Nicholas Negroponte offers the observation that photography is a medium where artists have been the technical innovators, while broadcasting is a field where the engineers have worked out the tech while the artists were creative. What the Media Lab tries to do, he tells us, is do for computer media what photographers have done – advance the field by advancing both the tools and the creativity.

Zittrain invites Minow to comment on the rise of Twitter: “threat or menace?” Minow demurs, arguing “the more communication the better.” And he thanks us for considering these issues of public interest fifty years after he raised their importance.

Terry Fisher offers a summation that introduces several new, important ideas. New technologies, and some of the practices that surround them (though are not dictated by them) are eroding some existing, long-standing dichotomies: public/private, professional/amateur, speaker/audience, news/entertainment, university/society. There are huge benefits and costs to this corrosion. We see the collapse of oligarchies, address of systematic biases, democratization of processes. But we also have fragmentation, loss of a coherent single culture, the rise of a tower of pundit babel, and the superficiality of much programming. This move, he argues, is impossible to stop. Instead, we need to think through the new opportunities the shift presents: the ability to change who contributes to this process. And we need to figure out how to ameliorate the costs we suffer. That means creating distributed models for sifting, curating, organizing, like Wikipedia, Slashdot and academic projects like Jeffrey Schapp’s Digital Humanities project. In this new world, the FCC may not be the prime mover – the real power is located in intermediaries like Google, and if we were to push for the public interest, that’s where we’d apply leverage.

How do news organizations measure impact?

That’s the question I found myself talking with Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week. He’d gotten in touch to talk about what tools are available to help newspaper editors track audience and reach for their stories, hoping that I’d have some insights on “cutting edge” techniques to track the reach and impact of news stories posted online. We talked a bit about the challenges of social media tracking after the demise of Technorati, the possible benefits of bit.ly-type analytics, questions of influence and reach raised by Klout and similar systems. All well and good, but measuring how many people read a story is something any web administrator should be able to do. Audience doesn’t necessarily equal impact.

There may have been a day in the rosy past of newspapers when a wall between the publisher and the editor meant that newsrooms published only what was most newsworthy and civically important, without consideration of a given story’s appeal to their audience. In an age where editors can know instantly whether a story on a school council meeting is playing better than a story about a labor action, it’s hard to believe that access to analytics doesn’t shape coverage decisions. Some outlets, like the Huffington Post, have embraced this new world to the point where they are poster children for analytics-driven coverage, using feedback from Google Analytics to inform most if not all decisions about story placement and emphasis. This willingness to respond rapidly to market feedback has likely helped HuffPo’s rapid audience and market growth – whether or not AOL’s acquisition of the site was a wise move, most newspaper publishers would welcome ten-figure interest in their properties.

The danger of traffic-based analytics driving journalism is that you may end up with newspapers that look more like Demand Media-style content farms and less like the civic guardians we want and need them to be. It’s certainly fair to observe that newspapers have been audience driven, at least in part, since inception and that some of the shortcomings of contemporary papers, as well as local newscasts, derive from a focus on driving readership and viewership. But adding an analytics into the newsroom puts the question “Is this story reaching a broad audience?” front and center in a way that’s hard to ignore or avoid.

If an ideal editor is making decisions based on what’s newsworthy, and a realistic editor is civic and audience concerns, how do editors determine whether they’re successfully serving both masters? What are appropriate analytics for civic impact?

As Phil and I talked, I found myself thinking about the LA Times’s coverage of obscenely high government salaries in the city of Bell, CA. In depth, investigative reporting by Ruben Vives and Jeff Gottlieb led to fraud trials, a turnover of the city government, and ultimately to a Pulitzer for the pair of reporters. The reporting on Bell, CA suggests two ways newspapers might measure civic impact: the arrest of bad guys, and the praise of one’s peers and professional societies. But these aren’t exactly quick metrics, and not every worthwhile piece of civic journalism has this magnitude of impact.

Traffic doesn’t seem to be the right measure of civic impact. A story that gets lots of page views or is widely shared might be civically relevant, but might also be salacious – amusing and popular as much of the Anthony Weiner coverage has been, I’m not sure it’s been a positive contributor to our civic involvement. Phil suggested that comments aren’t an adequate metric either. Stories that garner long comment threads could suggest broad involvement, but also may suggest partisan controversy.

I mentioned an idea that I’ve been trying to pitch for a while: in an age of participatory media, news demands participation. Or to quote Benjamin Barber, “People are apathetic because they are powerless, not powerless because they are apathetic.” For people to pay attention to an important story, it’s possible that we need to work to make it possible for people to have an impact on the outcome of the story.

Ideally, we can find better ways to do this than turning our Twitter icons green in solidarity with Iranian activists. Reporting on local civic issues offers the possibility of connecting people to opportunities for action in their own communities. And if newspaper web sites start trying to broker these connections, we gain another possible metric – the efficacy of a story in connecting people to community organizations, volunteering opportunities, and other forms of civic engagement.

That’s not a comfortable role for newspapers to take, Phil reminds me – it smacks of advocacy journalism. But the Bell, CA story is another form of activist journalism: by relentlessly shining a light on political malfeasance, Vives and Gottlieb were demanding that someone take action against these corrupt officials. Eventually, both citizens and prosecutors did. The difference between what I’m proposing and what the Pulitzer winning reporters did is that I’m suggesting newspapers link to possible solutions and measure how effective at driving engagement they are.

This would be far from a perfect metric. It wouldn’t tell you how many people read a story on homelessness, and then sought out community organizations on their own to volunteer with… though adding a feedback cycle where local organizations could communicate changes in community involvement to newspapers might. And it wouldn’t track one of the most critical functions of investigate journalism: the fear it generates in politicians and corporate actors that they could end up on the front page of a newspaper if they break the law. Clay Shirky is worried that losing this deterrence effect is one of the dangers of losing “accountability journalism” in the transition from broadcast, offline models of journalism to participatory, digital ones.

My point is not that I’ve got good metrics for civic engagement for newspaper journalism… or any journalism. It’s that we need to be thinking about finding and developing them. What we measure, we become. If we measure only how many people view, like or tweet, but not how many people learn more, act or engage, we run the risk of serving only the market and forsaking our civic responsibilities, whether we’re editing a newspaper or writing a blog.

Yes, it’s sad that I’m blogging a talk three days late. But these were really good presentations, and I wanted to get a record of what Joi and Mohamed both said. From Friday, at the Knight-MIT Civic Media conference, a morning panel on civic media, citizen science and international news.

Mohamed Nanabhay is the online editor of Al Jazeera English. He’s responsible for Al Jazeera’s English language website, which has risen to prominence during the Arab Spring. Mohamed tells us that he was the “scrappy new media guy”, a barbarian at the gates asking the company to take social media seriously. Now he oversees 70 reporters, and is discovering that it’s harder to be charged with making these changes than to demand those changes.

The protests in Tunisia were documented, Mohamed tells us, thanks to social media. Al Jazeera was banned from operating within Tunisia, so all footage was taken by the general public, uploaded to Facebook (because it was the only unblocked tool for video sharing). Al Jazeera worked to verify the videos, then amplified them, broadcasting them into Tunisia, where they were widely seen, as most Tunisians have satellite dishes. This amplification brought the protests in Sidi Bouzid to a vastly larger audience than would have seen them online, as only a fraction of Tunisians are on Facebook. “Video would be taken, diffused on social networks, broadcast in living rooms, and activists would shoot more video,” recognizing that they were reaching an audience.

Documenting protests became so widespread, it became less dangerous, Mohamed argues. In the past, secret police might have tracked you down to seize your camera or tried to block the service you were uploading to. But the practice, promoted by Al Jazeera, became so widespread, that the widespread adoption of the tactic provided cover.

Mohamed suggests that we’re moving from protest as spectacle to protest as spectacular. To illustrate the former, he shows the famous, disturbing image of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation in protest of the Diệm regime in Vietnam. That image won Malcome Browne a Pulitzer, but it may also have contributed to form of media where protesters have felt compelled to go towards ever more violent extremes to communicate their distress. The shift to the spectacular begins with self-documentation – Mohamed Bouazizi (the Tunisian vegetable seller whose immolation started the Tunisian rebellion) wasn’t the first to set himself on fire in Tunisia, Mohamed reminds us. His was the first case documented, though. “We had a rock in one hand and a cellphone in the other,” a Tunisian protester told him.

People organizing demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt become increasingly smart about how they used the media and how they organized themselves. They used social media both to organize and to promote their events, ensuring a concentration of coverage. Once we reached Tahrir, we’ve moved from the spectacle to the spectacular: 18 days of people occupying Tahrir, with cameras rolling 24/7. What resulted wasn’t violent or extreme – it was a carnival atmosphere. And it was unavoidable: “You couldn’t miss it in Egypt unless you were watching state media,” Mohamed quips.

The widespread protest coverage helped Egyptians understand the movement was nonviolent and increased their willingness to participate. As the movement grew, the government tried to shut down the internet to slow the flow of messages. They tried older tactics, like imprisoning journalists and confiscating broadcast equipment. Ultimately, they tried to block Al Jazeera’s signal by broadcasting on the same frequency. In an amazing show of solidarity, 11 stations in the region began broadcasting Al Jazeera’s coverage verbatim. For him, Mohamed explains, that was “the moment you see this hegemonic discourse collapse”, where the government’s narrative dies and the spectacular has a life of its own.

To be clear, the success of the Egypt protests wasn’t just about social media and broadcast – “successful organizing is not just on the internet – it needs to be rooted in real world activism on the ground.” There’s a very long history of street protest in Egypt, and the veterans of pro-Labor, pro-Palestine or pro-Intifada protests were some of the key organizers in the Tahrir protests. But it’s important to consider the relevance of self-representation in media portrayals. The protesters in Tunisia and in Tahrir offered “a different image than the angry Arab burning flags and wanting to kill your children.” Dialog about the Middle East offered a choice between extremes – a hypersectarian dictatorship or Bin Laden-type extremism. “Instead, the people said there’s a third way, a path the majority of society is going for,” and civic media allowed for that sort of self representation.

Despite Al Jazeera’s role in helping the revolution spread in Egypt and throughout the region, Mohamed sees this as a victory primarily for decentralized media. He suggests we’re seeing what Castells predicted as a “reprogramming of communication networks.”
“What emerged in the last six months was crystalizing the move away from the hub and spoke of media networks,” Mohamed offers. “Anyone who thought that the rise of social media wasn’t fundamentally altering media: this has shown that vision was wrong.”

The shift to participatory media isn’t always easy for broadcast networks. Mohamed shows us a comedy clip from the BBC where a pair of presenters invite their audience to participate in a dialog, no matter how ignorant of the issues they are: “We know you might not know anything. Email us with what you reckon. Ignorance should not be a barrier.” The opportunity at Al Jazeera, Mohamed tells us, is to bring people into the conversation in a way that takes the story forward, building a narrative that provides context to complex issues.

All journalists at the network, including broadcast journalists, have gone through social media training, which includes finding stories on social media and verifying them. Al Jazeera’s focus is less on building the audience via social media, and more on “listening to a very wide variety of input media, and outputing onto any platform.” This shouldn’t be about cheap news gathering – it’s about building relationships and learning from people in new media as we would with more traditional sources. Al Jazeera was so well positioned in Tunisia and Egypt in part because Mohamed and others have had relationships with social media pioneers in those countries for years. “We disparage parachute journalism, and we know you can’t do that with social media either.”

The biggest sign that Al Jazeera is succeeding? Not the widespread coverage of Egypt or the movement in the US to get Al Jazeera available in cable packages. It’s the fact that the network’s web presence saw a bigger spike in traffic around the Japanese earthquake and tsunami than it did during Mubarak’s departure, indicating that the site is becoming a true source of international news for a broad audience.

Joi Ito, the incoming director of MIT’s Media Lab, and a man with his hand in many social media projects, explains that his first interview at MIT involved the earthquake. “It happened in the middle of the night between my two interviews.” And he shouts out to Mohamed and Al Jazeera. “The first media to interview the team we’ve built to document radiation was Al Jazeera.” Joi lives in Dubai and notes that “more Arabs talking about the earthquake than Japanese talking about Libya,” which suggests another market Al Jazeera may want to pursue.

In offering a reflection on the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Joi offers the provocation, “Twitter beat the pants off mainstream media.” In the chaos and shock that followed the quake, “foreigners couldn’t get any news in Japan.” The best news was available online. Journalists covered press conferences using Ustream, which allowed Japanese around the world to tweet the Japanese press conferences in English, providing some information for English-speaking residents of Japan.

And social media was able to help correct some of the distortions that came from broadcast media. “At the point when the Prime Minister said the workers have evacuated to a safer place – meaning a safer place in the facility, but he said it in a very subtle way – foreign media covered it as ‘they ran away’ and English media amplified this as an echo chamber.” One guy offering one wire post got it wrong, Joi tells us, but it took hours to get it corrected. (Joi called Mohamed directly and had him talk to NHK, which meant that Al Jazeera was one of the first networks to make the correction.)

From early on in the earthquake recovery, Joi was involved with a project called Safecast, which began life with the name “RDTN”. It was inspired by a visualization from a graphic design studio in Portland, Oregon which offered a map with radiation readings. On a list Joi frequents, Vint Cerf asked whether the science behind the visualization was correct. Joi started reaching out to scientists and to the small clique of people who build Geiger counters.

Reporting on radiation and its effects on health is difficult. “Health physicists are generally funded by the nuclear industry, so they don’t like speaking about these issues,” he explains. “It’s hard to get any professional academic to take a position.” And lots of data that was supposed to be opened by the Japanese government has proven very difficult to get – Joi suggests that crises are an excellent time to check the effectiveness of open data implementations.

Safecast was born and evolved in a Skype channel, open to anyone who wanted to join the team. The project’s main output is a map that shows how radiation levels in different parts of Japan compare to readings before the Fukushima disaster. Green squares show the same readings, while grey shows readings that are higher than before. You can click and drill down into the data, including data from drivethroughts of heavily affected areas in instrumented cars.

This hasn’t been easy to do. It’s not all that easy to get a bunch of Geiger counters. Safecast raised $37,000 on Kickstarter to get counters, but quickly discovered that they’re “messy analog devices”. The good ones were designed many years ago, and they don’t have wifi, bluetooth, ethernet or other useful features. So Safecast is now designing their own, as well as building platforms like the 5 mobile “bGeigie” car-based units, which can drive through affected areas and record levels.

Most geiger counters, Joi tells us, don’t measure all three types of radiation – alpha, beta and gamma. They generally just measure gamma, which is the one most people care about, as it’s high energy and can penetrate clothes. But isotopes that throw off alpha and beta particles can be very dangerous when ingested. Japanese inspectors have taken to scanning bags of rice with gamma detectors and proudly announcing they’re gamma free. That’s irrelevant – the concern is that the food might have isotopes that give off alpha and beta particles. Joi suggests that the country is suffering from “radiation illiteracy”, which is particularly dangerous for children: “In the sand and dirt around elementary schools, we’ve found alpha and beta radiation off the charts. And the TV is showing mothers washing surfaces in the school with soap and water – they’d need to be sandblasting.”

Safecast has been a victory for international cooperation. Bunny Huang is working on new radiation sensors, and collaborating with hacker spaces, who are experimenting with Arduino-based trackers. Aston Martin and Tesla are offering cars as vehicles to collect data. They’re working with GIS folks to overlay readings on maps, and have sketched an iGeigie, a Geiger counter that sticks onto an iPhone. The reason for all of this is that radiation is very granular. Joi reveals that his house is okay… mostly – there’s a patch of the front yard that’s highly radioactive, and like many Japanese, he doesn’t know quite what to do. But in the meantime, he’s advocating for a simple idea: “We’re asking anyone who sells Geiger counter parts to sell only to people who will disclose data under a CC-0 license.” If we’re going to map and measure radiation, he tells us, we’re all in this together.

This notes are an inaccurate as any of my liveblogging, and they’re late to boot. :-) Here are notes from our session Thursday morning at the Knight-Civic Media Conference.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi introduces our panel as one that begins with him describing the past of the civic media center, and two speakers (Sasha Constansa Chock and myself) representing the future. He reminds us that we define civic media at MIT as “any sociotechnical system that can strengthen a geographic community.” When you say “community” at MIT, people are thinking of online communities. We had to work hard to reeducate ourselves around that transition. It turns out that within geographic communities, there are just as many communities of interest as on the internet.

Chris’s talk focuses on three themes: Production and distribution, Principles of Civic Media and Spinoffs from the Center. He reminds us that MIT works by discovering fundamental technologies and engineering principles, and they often work themselves out in startups that spin out of lab research.

Reacting to Baratunde’s talk from last night, Chris mentioned that when the Center began, he and the cofounder intentionally decided not to use the term “citizen journalism”. It’s a term that implies a transition that hasn’t been fully thought out, like “wireless remote” or “horseless carriage”. He points out that Baratunde is thinking from the perspective of the Onion, which models a news operation. When we view situations through that frame, we think in terms of crowd sourcing, asking “How do you get the crowd to help your media outlet?”

As we think about innovation around media, it’s useful to look at Eric Von Hippel’s work on single user versus collaborative innovation. Single user innovation is common when communication costs are high and design costs are low. Producer innovators like corporations reduce communication costs, usually by putting people together in a building (like the New York Times, Chris suggests…). Once communication costs drop far enough, we see models of open collaborative innovation, which makes possible stuff like Linux. There are at least three models for building innovation: a private investment model, a government model, and a collective action model, each of which could leverage different models of innovation.

In thinking through the work the Center has done thus far, Chris lists five principles that have governed design:

#1 – All technology is politics. Even an automatic door closer is political – it forces compliance through a combination of labor and capital.

#2 – Technology is personal and geopolitical at the same time.

#3 – Politics of most technologies are socially regressive, because they’re made by the most powerful entities in the world. As a result, technologies tend to reinforce north/south divides and other power divides.

In thinking through these three principles, Chris suggests that “the quickest way to not make social change is to develop technology the way it’s always been developed.”

#4 – The free software model has principles that offer significant new modes of production and distribution, making it possible for innovation to spread in unexpected ways.

#5 – Most technologies configure their user as a consumer, not as a citizen

Chris then outlines some of the projects that have spun off from the Center and the principles we’ve learned from that process. Some of the Center’s influence has been most powerful as a leader in shaping the thinking around Civic Media. The 2003 Total Information Awareness project inverted a model in which the US government spied on citizens through all possible channels and suggested ways to invert the model and all spy on the government. This work inspired Little Sis, which used code from the TIA project, and suggests that Wikileaks was also inspired by this effort. Tad Hirsh’s TXTMob project is acknowledged as a major influence on Twitter by three of that company’s founders, who looked closely at the code to design their system.

In considering the projects that have spun off, Chris identifies these themes:

- Social media is known for supporting weak ties – can we strengthen those ties?
Rick Borovoy’s work with the people who sold Spare Change, a newspaper designed to help the homeless, tried to build links by places stickers with links to a homepage for the vendor on each paper. When a vendor got sick, his page received a flood of comments. Charlie de Tar’s Between the Bars project allowed someone who was incarcerated to rebuild ties with someone he’d served in the military with.

- Public dialog and accountability
Projects like Sourcemap make it possible to consider the inputs into the products we buy, and have a dialog about the materials we consume and what they mean.

- Globalism inverted
How do we take the tools of the most powerful people and invert them? Projects like Wellwatch and extrACT leverage these technologies and that work will continue under the auspices of an NGO that tracks the extractive industry.

- Community Collective Action
Platforms to allow communities to work in conjunction. This includes platforms that leverage phones. Chris reminds us that “phones are a bear, and Asterisk is a bear” – Leo Burd’s VoIP Drupal makes it more possible for communities to use phones for change, and we can see the success of the tool through the interest of Twilio, Tropo and Plivo in the product.

- Generating evidence for change.
Projects like Cronicas de Heroes shows that there’s a narrative for Ciudad de Juarez that’s different from the narrative of violence that characterizes local news.

Sasha Costanza Chock appears remotely via Skype, and encourages us to think about the role of co-design in creating Civic Media. He’s helping organize the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, so isn’t able to join in person.

He suggests that we think about the distribution of technological innovation not just from the model of innovators to early adopters. Lead-user innovation as proposed by Eric Von Hippel shows that users can become creators, and Francois Bar’s vision of “technology appropriation” suggests that companies produce technology, users redesign and hack those technologies, and firms reclaim and develop new technologies around them. Mobile banking is a good example of this – firms produced prepaid phone cards for African markets, African innovators figured out how to cards to transfer money over long distances, and companies incorporated this technology into the building of mobile banking systems.

We want to get beyond user appropriation, which leads to firms telling users they’re doing it wrong, and towards co-design, where we work together on human centered design, appropriate technology design, and participatory design.

Participatory design helped lead toward the VozMob – Voices Mobiles – project. Collaborating with VoIP Drupal, the platform is designed to project immigrant voices using mobile communications. The participants in the design are from working class communities in LA. Groups of gardeners and house cleaners participated in design sessions at USC. Their motivation: to challenge the representation of day laborers in the digital world.

Sasha shows us that if you Google the phrase “Day Laborers”, the top result is a virulently anti-immigrant hate site whose description reads, “Some of the most violent murderers, rapists, and child molesters, are illegal aliens who work as day laborers.” It’s not hard to see why “laborers want to retake control over representation of their communities.” Most of the people who work as day laborers don’t have conventional access to the web – Sasha shows a map of a composite tech index that shows that access to computers and broadband is very weak in low-income and first-generation immigrant communities. But through research with these communities, Sasha and they were able to discover that the majority of day laborers have mobile phones. They use them mostly for work, to call friends and family. 30% send texts, 50% receive them, 47% take photos and 36% send photos from their phones. This suggested great potential to use the phones for storytelling.

Designing a project like VozMob creates some interesting challenges. “How do you do web development with people who don’t have web literacy?” You work with paper models, and you design for participation via SMS. The project has culminated in a system built around open source software, primarily Drupal, and content that’s licensed via Creative Commons.

Sasha offers a set of key takeaways in a format designed to make the Unix geeks in the audience smile – they end up spelling out “sudo apt-get”, which is a command designed to let you install new software through a package manager on many Unix systems. Inside the acronyms are:

Enabling conditions:
- strong connections to communities of practice – build with the communities you expect to be the users
- focus on the tools people have access to, people who don’t have universal (that’s where he gets the U) access to ICT
- diverse project teams
- open everything – access, standards, source, data, tools

Universal design goals: Accessible Para Todos (accessible for everyone)
could have done something clever around smartphones, but that’s not what this community has

A rigorous codesign philosophy:
Generate ideas, user stories and prototypes
Evaluate everything on an ongoing, iterative basis
conduct this work Together.