I lost an hour this morning to a documentary on Liberia, which I stumbled onto through Twitter. VBS – the television and video arm of Vice Magazine (wikipedia article, official site) – has produced critically acclaimed content including “Heavy Metal in Baghdad“, a documentary about Iraqi metal band, Acrassicauda. This month, they’re releasing an eight-part series titled “The Vice Guide to Liberia”. The first seven sections are available online – the next will be released within 48 hours. I’ve just watched the first seven episodes, and I’m not at all sure what I think.

There’s no shortage of earnest, thoughtful, responsible documentaries about Liberia’s civil war and its aftermath. A partial list might include “Liberia: America’s Stepchild“, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell“, “Iron Ladies of Liberia“, “Liberia: An Uncivil War” and “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here“. Vice’s production – narrated by magazine/production company/media empire co-founder Shane Smith – is an abrupt break from the careful interviews and swelling music that accompany most of these films. Then again, what would you expect from a group “which reliably regards the world with unbridled ridicule”? (Jon Fine, in Businessweek).

Shane Smith and Vice are in Liberia expanding on an earlier Vice Magazine story – “Gen. Butt Naked Versus The Tupac Army” – which considered the civil war from the perspective of fashion, reporting the widely reported but still titillating “news” that Liberian rebels fought dressed in hiphop t-shirts, women’s wedding dresses or naked. So it’s not a big surprise that Vice’s story is designed to shock at least as much as it is to enlighten. The third of eight episodes looks at UN and international relief efforts in the country, and dismisses their failure by focusing on a neighborhood with no plumbing where residents shit on the beach. (This may be shocking to Canadian hipster filmmakers, but isn’t especially shocking to anyone who’s spent time in West Africa or any very poor parts of the world.) As the end of that episode description puts it, “From there it’s off the visit a heroin den, where we watch a twelve year-old smoke heroin and describes raping a woman at gunpoint. It gets worse.” Much of the Vice travel aesthetic seems to come from Canadian journalist Robert Young Pelton, whose “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” isn’t the world’s most helpful travel guide, but is one of the most entertaining.

Much of what seems to scare Smith and his crew – situations they inevitably describe as having “a heavy vibe” – are cases where they (a bunch of white guys with expensive camera equipment) are surrounded by poor Africans who’d like some money. It’s hard not to notice that most of the uncomfortable situations are ones they’ve chosen to put themselves in – “Hey, let’s go film inside a brothel in a tough part of town in the middle of the night – what could go wrong?” On the other hand, some of the footage that comes from these poor decisions is evocative and worth watching. Their experience trying to get a former rebel general released from a police station so they can interview him – and, predictably, getting shook down for a bribe – gave me warm feelings of familiarity as I remembered my worst experiences with law enforcement in difficult parts of the world.

Charles Taylor Jr. with Vice magazine reporter in Monrovia, Liberia

So, is this a straightforward case of overprivleged westerners making fun of the poor, a contemptible piece of exoticism? I think the filmmakers see themselves doing something different: showcasing the strange culture collisions that occur in a world as interconnected as ours. This interview with aspiring hiphop star Charles Taylor Jr. – son of the notorious warlord and former President – captures that aesthetic neatly… as does the photo of Taylor Jr. sporting a Boston Celtics throwback jersey (what does Larry Bird think about this photo?)

The cultural collision at the heart of the Vice documentary is the story of Joshua Blahyi, the aforementioned General Butt Naked. Blahyi developed a reputation as a particularly savage rebel leader loyal to coup-installed President Samuel Doe. He and his men fought naked, except for their guns and Chuck Taylor sneakers, believing the rituals performed before battle protected them from enemy gunfire. Blahyi says the rituals involved slaughtering children, eating their hearts and drinking their blood. In testimony before Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he estimates that he and his men killed at least 20,000 people during the civil war.

The TRC accepted Blahyi’s testimony, and he is a free man in Liberia – a circumstance that some point to as evidence that Liberia needs a war crimes tribunal, not just a TRC. In recent years, Blahyi has converted to Christianity and now prefers to be known as “Evangelist Blahyi”. He leads the Vice filmmakers to the abandoned hotel that served as rebel headquarters, through a malarial swamp to the mission where he shelters former combatants, to a graveyard where he talks about exhuming bodies and sleeping in empty graves. In this last scene, he and Smith are dressed in matching white suits, looking like televangelists. They discuss cannibalism in the graveyard, then proceed to a church where Blahyi takes the stage and preaches about his conversion.

Are we to take Blahyi’s conversion seriously? The pairing of the evangelist and the skeptical filmmaker in matching suits suggests that the Vice crew is having fun with the scene, looking for a laugh. But they’ve put their finger on some of the most difficult questions that face contemporary Liberia. How does a nation recover from a brutal past – does it embrace those who’ve asked for forgiveness, or turn them away? Is Blahyi genuinely repentant about his ghastly past, or has he simply adopted an identity likely to allow him to survive (and thrive, evidently) in contemporary Liberia?

It’s worth watching Vice’s time with Blahyi (in episodes 6 & 7) and then the promo for Gerald K. Barclay’s film, which also centers on Blahyi. Barclay features chilling footage of Blahyi talking about his past crime, overlaid with pieces of Peter Gabriel’s score for the film “Passion”. It embraces the conventions of the American socially-progressive documentary film: an outline of the challenges facing a group of disadvantaged people, a set of stories that illustrate those challenges, a moving story behind the making of the film. Barclay is a Liberian exile, and he returned to West Africa – first to Budumburum refugee camp outside Accra, Ghana and then to Liberia – to shoot “Liberia: The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.”

I’m much more comfortable with the motivations behind Barclay’s work than with the newer piece from Vice. But I have no doubt that Vice’s piece – even if distributed solely online – will reach a wider audience. Smith and his crew aren’t shooting for an audience predisposed to care about Liberia – they’re making a film for an audience that’s looking for excitement, shock and the unexpected, qualities their story has in spades. This isn’t a usual documentary audience, as tweets about the series indicate:

Something about the VBS documentaries – the high quality of production, the unfamiliarity of the subject matter, the narrative of “adventure” rather than history – is generating a lot of buzz. As much as I want to object to the VBS video, which sensationalizes, uses historical footage with little context, and is a classic example of parachute psuedo-journalism, I have to admit that it’s a compelling piece of storytelling and that it caught my attention. Rather than critiquing it, I’m interested in picking it apart and starting to understand what makes it work. What could documentary filmmakers learn from VBS to generate a wider audience for their work? Is it possible to broaden your audience without playing to their desire to see something shocking and outrageous? Is it acceptable to use shock and outrage to get people to pay attention to parts of the world they know and care little about?

I’m fascinated by VBS because they appear to be getting people to pay attention to a part of the world that receives very little media attention. At minimum, Vice’s documentary demonstrates that there are stories to tell about Africa’s history that can reach an audience beyond the NPR/PBS community. The open question for me is whether the story they tell is a constructive one, one that can help Liberia move forwards, or merely a shocking, exploitative one. And, as I said 1500 words back, I’m not sure what I think – what do you think?

When disasters strike, one natural – and admirable – response is an outpouring of sympathy and support for those affected. Another natural response is more troublesome – the tendency to ask the question, “Could the same disaster befall me?”

My local newspaper, evidently short of news to report, ran this wonderful non-story two days after the tragic Haitian earthquake: “Berkshires unlikely to get major quake“. The article quoted an eminent geologist at nearby Williams College, who explained that the largest earthquake to hit Massachusetts had occured hundreds of years ago on the other side of the state, and that there’s essentially no seismic activity in our valley. I tweeted the link, noting “I understand the need to make news localy relevant, but this is absurd.”

Turns out there may be good reasons to report than an earthquake is unlikely to happen. Many Ghanaians spent Sunday night sleeping outside, for fear that a major earthquake would hit Accra, destroying vulnerable buildings and trapping their occupants. The story, coming out in blogs and news reports, reads like a textbook example of how bad information spreads and how hard it can be to contain.

Around 8pm on Sunday the 17th, people began receiving this text message: “Today’s night 12.30 to 3.30 am COSMIC RAYS entering earth from Mars. Switch off ur mobiles today’s night. NASA BBC NEWS. Plz pass to all ur friends.” As this message passed via voice and text message, it somehow morphed into a message about an impending earthquake, a message taken very seriously by Ghanaians who were watching the situation in Haiti closely. By early morning, the messages had grown more specific – some report receiving messages that the impending quake was an aftershock of the Haitian quake. David Ajao slept through much of the excitement, but woke to a pair of rumors, which he laughed off:

* an earthquake had already shook a town around Kasoa and was headed towards Winneba and Cape Coast
* an earthquake was due to shake Accra

Megan had a harder time shaking off the warning, in part because everyone around her was taking it quite seriously:

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

Frantic knocking. Check my watch. It’s 4am. Stumble out of bed to the door, and find a stranger standing there, already knocking on my neighbor’s door.

“There’s going to be an earthquake. You have to get out of the building.”

Ama and I walk outside together, confused, a little scared. Outside I see all 80 or so students who live in the ISH, milling about in their pajamas. The especially studious ones are hunkered down with flashlights reading microbiology (there’s an exam at 9am, and yes they are that intense), while the rest just mirror my own dazed look.

As she woke up, she began deciphering the rumors. “Everyone was just passing on the story they heard via cellphone from ‘a friend’ or ‘my family.’ I started to doubt the whole thing when I heard the followup rumors that ‘Cosmic rays are going to hit Earth from Mars!’ and got really upset that the person who felt the need to wake 80 students didn’t have the leadership to actually inform us of his sources, his information, or any school-wide evacuation plans.”

She explains that one of the problems was that radio stations – the most pervasive source of information in Ghana – were neither confirming or denying rumors in the early morning hours. According to BBC’s David Amanour, PeaceFM – one of Accra’s best radio stations – began calling the phone messages a hoax early in the morning, helping calm people’s fears. Unfortunately, by the time government ministers began taking to the airwaves to calm people, thousands – perhaps millions – had left their homes. Professor Stephen Yeboah paints a vivid picture:

Within minutes, the news had circulated down to even the last village you know of without proper access to telecommunication services.

Almost every Ghanaian was caught at parks, open fields and playing grounds with the notion that earthquakes are limited to houses only or less devastating in open places where there are no structures. Last prayers were said with diverse modes on biblical and unbiblical tongue speaking.

It’s unclear whether the initial message was a prank, an inside joke that got out of hand, or something more sinister. Close observers of Ghanaian politics won’t be surprised to learn that the propoganda secretary of the ruling NDC party has declared that the hoax was orchestrated by a rival political party to detract from NDC’s party congress in Tamale, the largest city in northern Ghana. Perhaps he’ll be proven right – The Ghanaian Times reports that various intelligence services are now trying to determine who started the rumors and why. Their article cites a businessman, who suggests the rumor points to a need to register all mobile phones and SIM cards. The Ghanaian Times reporter put this idea in front of a former Director of the Bureau of National Investigations, who praised the idea but made clear that it would be unlikely to pass parliament on grounds of individual privacy.

For me, the earthquake rumor is an interesting illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of various communications networks. A rumor like this one might start with malicious intent, but it’s spread by people who’ve got the best of intentions – they’re sharing critical information with friends and loved ones in the hopes of preventing disaster. The stranger knocking on Megan’s door wasn’t playing a prank – he thought he was saving her life. The pervasiveness of the message says a lot about the “we’re all in this together” nature of Ghanaian society, as well as the incredible reach of the country’s mobile phone networks.

The spread of the rumor evidently served as a stress test for mobile phone companies. David Ajao reports that the friend who reached him at 6:15 am had been trying to text and phone him since 2am – MTN’s mobile phone network had evidently prevented her from getting through, jammed with panicked phonecalls from other users trying to warn friends. If you’re a network engineer for MTN or competing carriers, this should serve as a wakeup call – a real emergency would likely unfold in much the same way, and if the networks can’t remain up in a hoax, it’s unclear they’d stay accessible in a real emergency.

I’m interested in the power of broadcast media being used to combat misinformation. It sounds like many Ghanaians didn’t realize they were in the clear until authority figures took to the airwaves to calm people down. Misinformation spread rapidly over mobile networks, taking multiple paths to its destinations, and gaining authority from the invocation of authorities like the BBC and NASA in the text messages and the imprimateur of a friend forwarding the message. Is it possible that the correct information could have spread over the mobile networks as well? Or does misinformation spread better through person to person networks and authoritative information through broadcast media? It’s an interesting thought experiment, if not something we’d want to test in the field.

Lest anyone conclude that rumors are restricted to the developing world, it’s worth looking at some of the hoaxes that sped around Twitter in the days after the Haitian earthquake struck. Twitterers shared the joyful news that American Airlines would fly any doctor or nurse to Haiti for free, and that UPS would ship up to 50 pounds to Haiti for free. Neither piece of “news” was accurate. It’s possible that someone posted a suggestion that AA should fly doctors for free, and that well-meaning retweeters turned a suggestion into fait (not) accompli. Again, it’s a demonstration of the power of well-meaning people, social media and the infinite human capacity for misunderstanding.

Since the underwear bomber attempted to bring down Northwest 253 on Christmas Day, it’s been all terror all the time across news media. Project for Excellence in Journalism reports a rare occurance – stories surrounding NW253 have dominated coverage in all the media they track – blogs, twitter, newspapers, television and radio. There are numerous threads to the story – a predictable debate over whether the attack is Obama’s fault, discussions of the failures of US intelligence, speculations about changes in airport security (theatre).

And then there’s Yemen. As Michael Cohen puts it on Democracy Arsenal, “Yemen is the New Black!” There’s no better way to get coverage on cable news this week than to declare that the US should invade/support/stabilize/redecorate/pave Yemen immediately to address the threat of Al Qaeda. And news organizations are falling over themselves to provide background information on the country, its politics and the possibility that Yemen may be emerging as a “safe haven” for terrorist training.

Brian Katulis, writing for the Center for American Progress, does an excellent job of shattering the “safe haven myth”, pointing out that the critical preparations for 9/11 took place in Germany and in flight schools in the US, not in Afghanistan. The first line of his piece, especially, is killer: “America’s attention deficit disorder-afflicted media spent the last week rediscovering Yemen as a country of serious concern for global security.”

Just how quickly has attention shifted on Yemen? The New York Times has run 79 pieces of content on their website that mention Yemen in the past 7 days. In the previous year, only 189 stories mentioned Yemen. In most years, 79 stories is roughly a half-year’s quota for Yemen attention. (I don’t mean to pick on the Times. The Washington Post ran 317 piece on Yemen since 2008, and 92 in the past three days. It’s just that the Times has the best archives of any US paper and lets me search year by year…)

New York Times stories on Yemen. The first 7 days of this year are in blue.

So what? Yemen’s important. If Al Qaeda is training bombers in Yemen, we need to hear this story!

Fair enough. But Yemen’s been important for a long, long time. In October 2000, the USS Cole was attacked by Al Qaeda suicide bombers, killing 19 (17 sailors and the two bombers). Yemen was likely the venue for the attack because it was a country where Al Qaeda operatives found it easy to operate. A second attack destroyed a French oil tanker in 2002, spilling 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Aden.

As Katulis points out, the US has had concerns about terror in Yemen since 1992, and removed personnel from Aden out of concern for their safety. Things haven’t gotten stabler in Yemen since the Cole bombing – a civil war, which some see as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has destabilized the northwest of the country and the Yemeni government doesn’t appear especially inclined to extinguish an Al Qaeda presence in the nation. In 2008, car bombs attacked the US embassy in Sana’a, killing sixteen – al Qaeda is widely credited with the attack.

So the question isn’t why Yemen’s receiving so much attention now, but why it’s not a regular focus in our discussions of insecurity, terrorism and failed states. In other words, why don’t we watch Yemen, Somalia and other failing and failed states as closely as we watch Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq?

The simple answer is that journalists – and their readers – are herd animals. We want to know the important, breaking story and so journalists work hard to deliver that story to us, at the expense of other, potentially important stories. When a major story is breaking, other stories get less attention. My colleague Hal Roberts and I tracked media attention to the Green Revolution in Iran in the weeks that followed the disputed elections. Iranian electoral protests were the biggest story in many news outlets… up until the day Michael Jackson died, displacing Iran as the most “important” story.

In a print age, media pack behavior made slightly more sense. Most readers read only a daily newspaper or watched a specific newscast. If that news outlet didn’t report on Michael Jackson’s death, their viewers wouldn’t have this critical bit of cultural information – it made sense for all the outlets to flock to the key stories. But it’s a maladaptive behavior in an internet age. If the Times is all over Yemen like white on rice, I don’t need the Post to be as well – in fact, I’d probably benefit if they were able to turn their attention to another part of the world, one not at the top of the news agenda today, but likely to be important in the future. Or if they used the shoebomber story to explore other related issues – Muslim/Christian tensions in Nigeria, the fact that the alleged bomber was the child of great privlege in Nigeria (characteristic of many terrorists, countering the narrative that terrorist cells prey on the weak, disadvantaged and ignorant), or even on the weird Ghana connection to the story.

Attention deficit disorder-afflicted journalism is virtually guaranteed to be bad journalism. The reporters jetting off to Sana’a don’t know the country as well as people who cover the country through news droughts as well as floods. Foreign Policy Passport has been doing an excellent job of lining up knowledgeable Yemen commentators, offering a useful Yemen for Dummies, links to Ginny Hill’s exemplary Yemen reporting, and Marc Lynch’s caution against military intervention in Yemen (or virtually anywhere else).

Houses in Sana’a’s medina – photo by Sandy Choi on ForeignPolicy.com

Most useful for me was a photo essay on Foreign Policy by Sandy Choi, a photographer who captured several corners of Yemen, urban and rural. Her photos turn an abstract spot on the map into a place that’s real, magical and beautiful.

In years past, newspapers and television networks had foreign correspondents living throughout the world, ready to report on breaking news if it occured, and filing stories on local politics, trends and ideas the rest of the time. The deep knowledge a reporter would develop of a country would make her insights indispensible when breaking news struck and the world suddenly shifted attention to the country in question. That age is over – it’s unlikely that newspapers will support dozens of correspondents, and I wonder whether projects like GlobalPost, a network of freelance foreign correspondents who syndicate to major news outlets, are the way forward. I’d like to see international media pay more attention to people who are from these countries and who write online, like Omar Barsawad’s Moments in Words blog from Hadhramout, Yemen.

The issue isn’t the content, ultimately – it’s our attention. There’s been rich, nuanced, sophisticated writing about Yemen for the past several years. I didn’t read any of it, in part because I didn’t know I needed to, and no one (successfully) made the case that it was worth my attention. If we want to get beyond the limitations of an ADD media, we’ve got to work to flock less and wander more in our own media consumption.

If I had to pick a project that most excited me in 2009, it would be Yeeyan, a distributed translation project focused on making influential English-language media accessible to a Chinese-speaking audience. Yeeyan’s founders built a community that included thousands of translators and struck partnerships with content providers like The Guardian, giving them permission to publish translated content. I was particularly struck by the talk Yeeyan cofounder Zhang Lei gave at the 2009 China Internet Research Conference at UPenn Annenberg – he made it clear that the motivation behind Yeeyan was a desire to use translation as a bridge between cultures, letting Chinese and English-speakers see the world from each other’s perspective.

I was singing the project’s praises to a journalist last week when he pointed out that Yeeyan’s website was down. I hadn’t checked in on the site in the past few weeks – I’ve been a little busy in newborn land – but was disturbed to find that Yeeyan has been mostly offline since early December. The Guardian, who partnered with Yeeyan, reported on the closure, and their editor Alan Rusbridger expressed his unhappiness and concern that the closure of Yeeyan reflected attempts to control the range of ideas and opinions Chinese readers are exposed to.

Danwei’s article on Yeeyan’s closure gives a sense for how abrupt the move was. Translating from Yeeyan’s status page on the closed site, the site administrators say:

Due to our errors in handling some of the articles on the website, we went against the relevant regulations; therefore Yeeyan has to temporarily shut off its server, and adjust the relevant content.

As for closing the website without giving notice, and for causing inconvenience, we are deeply sorry.

Please don’t worry too much, we have saved all users’ data. We will solve the problem we face as quickly as possible, and recover the articles and personal information treasured by everyone.

In other words, Yeeyan ran afoul of one or another group of Chinese internet censors and was told they’d have to stop publishing until they ensured tighter control over their content. The fact that the site hasn’t come back quickly suggests this was more than a couple of controversial stories that were translated – it suggests that Yeeyan may need to review translations to ensure they don’t cross any red lines.

(Censorship on the Chinese internet happens in multiple places – it’s not just a firewall that makes it difficult to access certain web content. Chinese web 2.0 companies maintain internal teams that monitor content and prevent certain sensitive content from being published. These teams have a great deal of discretion in their decisionmaking, and often come to very different conclusions, as this paper from Rebecca MacKinnon, experimenting with the censorship of blog content on 15 Chinese-hosted blogging providers demonstrates.)

I’ve been catching up on my China censorship news from friends who follow that space more closely than I do. It’s been a tough winter for free speech on the Chinese internet. Rebecca MacKinnon has an excellent overview of four troubling developments that have recently unfolded in the Chinese internet:

- A crackdown on pornography on mobile devices
- A focus on eliminating “obscenity” from search engines
- A shutdown of file-sharing websites
- Restrictions on .cn domain names, which can now only be registered by companies, not by individuals

Some of these steps are defensible – Rebecca reports that CNNIC put restrictions on domain name sales because so many domains were being used for phishing and other criminal activities. But as friends at Open Net Initiative have documented for years, a crackdown on pornography almost invariably turns into restrictions on political speech.

It’s hard to see how any of these crackdowns would affect Yeeyan directly – the site made it possible to read The Guardian, Time Magazine, the New York Times and ReadWriteWeb in Chinese, and none of those publication routinely print much pornography. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at least one of the authorities that control the Chinese internet – which include the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology – found the prospect of frequent, high-quality translation of US and European media threatening. This is consistent with the history of internet censorship in China – the BBC’s Chinese-language service is blocked far more often than the English-language version, for instance, suggesting that blocking focuses on content that can be easily read by large audiences, and less on potentially sensitive English language content. (That previous sentence is a massive oversimplification – ONI’s most recent country study on China is helpful in understanding some of the nuances of this complex situation.)

So what’s next for Yeeyan? A post on the site today announces that translation will begin again on January 8th. Reading an automatic translation of the most recent post, I believe there’s a new system announced that will audit all translations, holding some up as long as 24 hours before they go live. It sounds like the Yeeyan team has been working hard to review all previously translated content and will launch with about 70% of it, and will work to bring the rest of it online. The post also made clear that Yeeyan’s community had rallied around the founders and that there is a great deal of community support for bringing the project back to life.

Obviously, I’m no fan of censorship – much of my work focuses on testing, improving and disseminating tools that allow unfettered access to the internet and the ability to publish despite firewalls. But there’s something that I find particularly galling in seeing a project like Yeeyan censored. Yeeyan’s not an activist site – they’re not pushing a particular political agenda. They’re trying to open a window on another set of perspectives, to help people in China understand US and UK perspectives on the world. They’ve got a mission analagous to what we’re trying to do at Global Voices… a site that also gets censored fairly often.

So, as sad as I was to see Yeeyan go down, I’m at least as happy to see their community and founders rally around and bring the site back up. I’ll be interested to see if Yeeyan can sustain the energy of volunteer translators now that they won’t be able to see their hard work on screen immediately. It will be interesting to see what stories the community is and isn’t willing to translate, and what scrutiny the site will face from regulators. And I continue to wonder whether we could rally a parallel effort in the US or Europe to translate key Chinese media into English, building on the critical work done by Danwei and by the indefatigable Roland Soong.

So welcome back, Yeeyan – we missed you, even those of us who didn’t know we were missing you.

While we’re on the topic of questionable Facebook “features”… I’m happy to see that I wasn’t the only person complaining about Facebook’s “suggestions” today.

Earlier today, Facebook offered this helpful piece of advice:

Facebook suggests I reconnect with Hossein Derakhshan

I’d love to reconnect with Hossein – he’s been on my mind lately. Unfortunately, he’s in Evin Prison in Tehran, and probably isn’t being allowed to check his Facebook account.

Obviously, Facebook doesn’t know this – they’ve got an algorithm that, likely, is sensitive to inactive accounts. (This is pure guesswork on my part, with nothing to back it up.) Rather than prompting those users to return to Facebook, it encourages their active friends to send them a note, bringing them back within the Facebook fold – quite clever, actually, as it’s social pressure, not pressure from the tool itself.

Of course, it’s going to lead to some awkward suggestions – that you reconnect with a deceased loved one, or the girlfriend who dumped you. The brilliant Randall Munroe explored the topic on xkcd today with typically hilarious results.

I posted an angry Facebook status update and tweet complaining about Facebook’s insensitivity. Obviously, I understand that Facebook can’t be expected to know that my friend is a political prisoner being held incommunicado. But they could consider more carefully wording these suggestions. My friend Scott Hill offered this thoughtful insight:

Personally I’ve configured my browser to block the entire right-hand sidebar (mostly for the ads), but I think this feature could be redeemed with with a little more subtlety: maybe label it “Friend of the Day” with the usual links, without the pressure to do something. If it’s someone who has simply fallen off your radar screen, then the message may prod you into thinking about them and even contacting them if the mood strikes. But if that person happens to be dead or ill or imprisoned, it can still serve as a token of memory.

There are ideas that, when you first encounter them, you say, “That can’t possibly be a good idea.”

That’s how I and colleagues at the Berkman Center felt when we saw a preview of Facebook’s Beacon “feature” in November of 2007. Introduced in time for that year’s Christmas shopping season, Beacon used a cookie set on one website (Overstock.com, for example) to display information on Facebook (information that you’d just bought a DVD on Overstock) in your events stream. The geeks in the crowd were nervous because the new feature looked a lot like a cross-site scripting attack, while user advocates like David Weinberger thought the feature represented Facebook either trying to change the nature of privacy or misunderstanding user privacy norms.

Suffice it to say, we thought it was a bad idea. So did Facebook users, who organized online campaigns to protest the feature. Some sued the company. And Facebook, as part of the settlement of a class action suit, recently sent a fascinating email to some users. I received it this morning and it reads as follows:

Facebook is sending you this notice of a proposed class action settlement that may affect your legal rights as a Facebook member who may have used the Beacon program. This summary notice is being sent to you by Court Order so that you may understand your rights and remedies before the Court considers final approval of the proposed settlement on February 26, 2010.

This is not an advertisement or attorney solicitation.

This is not a settlement in which class members file claims to receive compensation. Under the proposed settlement, Facebook will terminate the Beacon program. In addition, Facebook will provide $9.5 million to establish an independent non-profit foundation that will identify and fund projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety, and security.

For full details on the settlement and further instructions on what to do to opt out of, object to, or otherwise comment upon the proposed settlement, please go to http://www.BeaconClassSettlement.com.

Please do not reply to this email.

Commenting on the settlement – which doesn’t pay affected users anything (fair enough – it’s a mostly free site), but creates a new non-profit foundation to work on online privacy issues – some have noted the irony that you need to choose to opt out of the class should you want to retain your right to sue Facebook over Beacon. (Part of the frustration with Beacon is that you had to choose to opt out of the system and it wasn’t especially easy to turn it off…)

I’d add another irony. As David Weinberger suggested, privacy norms are changing online. I shopped on Overstock.com for the first time in a couple of years, looking at birthstone jewelry to give my wife as a congratulatory gift for giving birth to our child. I bought a necklace… which proved to be sorta chintzy and ugly, and which I promptly returned. I’ve run into a dozen Overstock ads on different sites, each of which urges me to repurchase the ugly necklace I rejected, or similarly dreadful blue topaz jewelry.

It’s the same sort of cross-site behavior I found so uncomfortable in Beacon, though it’s not using the cookie information to publish on my behalf, simply to (ineptly) target ads to me. Perhaps David’s right, and Facebook has succeeded in changing social norms around purchasing. Or perhaps most of us are so good at ignoring web ads that it hardly matters that Overstock is taking what it knows about us and displaying it on other websites.

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve discovered that I really dislike blue topaz, but I can’t help thinking every time I see an Overstock ad, “That can’t possibly be a good idea.”

We’re nearing the end of our first week at home with a newborn, and he’s survived largely unscathed thus far. With a house full of extended family and nights spent sleeping in ninety minute intervals, it hasn’t exactly been the most restful or focused week in recent memory. Much as I’ve wanted to write a couple of long blog posts this week, the best I can do is offer a few links towards the pieces I’ve wanted to write about.

David Sasaki has an excellent post on MediaShift Idea Lab about the importance of mapping in marginalized communities. Referencing a number of projects designed to produce open source maps of favelas and slums, he quotes Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street : “Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents.”

Sasaki links to an excellent post from Mark Graham which raises another facet of geographic information – the amount of information available online about different communities and countries. Using geodata from Wikipedia, Graham makes a set of maps that display how many (English Wikipedia) articles about places are located in each of the world’s countries. Unsurprisingly, there’s much more content about North America and Western Europe than about sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia or Latin America. This isn’t a new issue – I wrote about attempts to address undercoverage in Wikipedia five years ago – but it’s extremely helpful to have Graham visualizing these disparities and challenging us to bridge some of these gaps. (Hanan Cohen was kind enough to point me towards Graham’s excellent post as well.)

I’ve been following proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda, largely through Haute Haiku’s excellent reporting on Global Voices. It’s an absurdly ugly bill – not only does it criminalize homosexuality (which is the case in several sub-Saharan African nations), but it creates a crime of “aggravated homosexuality” that’s punishable by death and broad enough to include anyone who’s both gay and HIV+.

I hadn’t seen much coverage of the Ugandan legislation outside gay-oriented media and my faith community, which tends to follow gay issues very closely. So I was thrilled – and somewhat stunned – to hear a discussion of the Ugandan legislation on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Gross was interviewing Jeff Sharlet, author of a book about a fundamentalist political movement in the US congress called The Family. According to Sharlet, The Family practices a strange branch of Christianity which celebrates strong, charismatic leadership (including that of reprehensible dictators) and recruits adherents from the corridors of power.

In his interview with Gross, Sharlet reports that there’s a Ugandan branch of The Family and that they appear to be the core organizers of the anti-gay legislation. This isn’t quite as strange as it might sound – Uganda’s been a battlefield for American religious politics in the past. The ABC (”Abstain, Be Faithful or Use a Condom”) approach to AIDS prevention, heavily favored by US religious conservatives, was celebrated as reducing Uganda’s HIV prevalence rate. In truth, a number of different approaches were used in Uganda, and reductions in HIV prevalence may have been linked to a reduction in coffee exports, not to any particular practices. But Yoweri Museveni – the Ugandan leader, who the Family has embraced (according to Sharlet) – is a committed evangelical Christian and gave advocates of a faith-rooted approach to HIV reduction a leader to embrace and a laboratory to experiment in.

Sharlet’s connection of The Family to the proposed Ugandan legislation raises the chances that we might see a coordinated push from activists in Uganda and the US against this ugly and discriminatory legislation – see change.org for some thoughts for what people in the US could do.

I’ve opened a lot of lectures lately – presentations about our Media Cloud research at Berkman – by complaining about the New York Times’s Africa coverage. I cite the fact that Japan tends to average roughly 8-10 times as many mentions in the paper of record than Nigeria in any given year, which is odd, given their comparable population size and importance. (I also mention that the Times is not alone – all US media outlets I’ve studied closely show this pattern – and that the Africa stories the Times runs are frequently excellent.)

If the Times is undercovering Nigeria, the same can’t be said for their recent coverage of Equatorial Guinea. One of the most fascinating and dysfunctional corners of the African continent, Equatorial Guinea is a couple of tiny islands and stretch of coastline between Gabon and Cameroon slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. The country is occupied by roughly half a million people, most of them extremely poor and a small number who are obscenely wealthy, as the islands of Equatorial Guinea sit atop massive oil fields. Much of Equatorial Guinea’s oil output is exported to the US – 132,000 barrels a day – making Equatorial Guinea the third-largest sub-Saharan exporter of oil to the US (behind Nigeria and Angola).

While oil wealth may help explain the Times’s interest in Equatorial Guinea (six stories this year, as compared to two this year on its vastly larger neighbor, Cameroon) – I’ve made the case in the past that American media attention tracks national GDP more closely than population – the Times’s focus may have more to do with another natural resource: absurdity.

Equatorial Guinea is, simply put, one of the most absurd nations on the planet. It’s not just a kleptocratic dictatorship run by a man who is arguably Africa’s worst ruler – it’s a staggeringly wealthy kleptocratic dictatorship. The CIA’s world factbook estimates per capita income for 2008 at $37,300, making the average Equatorial Guinean wealthier than the average Dane.

This wealth doesn’t seem to make the lives of the nation’s citizens much better. The image above is from Hans Rosling’s amazing Gapminder, and it shows the “development” of the country over the past two decades. The nation’s gotten dramatically wealthier in those years – the GDP per capita has increased by a factor of ten – and infant mortality has increased. Generally speaking, this doesn’t happen – infant mortality is much lower in wealthy nations than in poor nations. But Equatorial Guinea isn’t rich – it’s a nation where most citizens are desperately poor and a very small number are staggeringly rich.

Because there’s so much oil money in Equatorial Guinea, people periodically have the clever idea of overthrowing the government and installing a new one that would, gratefully, share future oil profits. Frederick Forsyth wrote a gripping novel that reads, more or less, as a blueprint for overthrowing Equatorial Guinea with a small force of professional missionaries. Some have alleged that Forsyth’s book was the result of his involvement in planning an attempted coup in 1973 – Forsyth admits he knew the coup plotters and that he passed money to them, but claims that his involvement with the plans were merely “research”. A more recent coup – The Wonga Coup in 2004 – allegedly used Forsyth’s novel as a planning document. The Wonga Coup involved South African mercenaries, Zimbabwean arms dealers and Mark Thatcher, the son of Britain’s former prime minister. It was one of the more absurd stories of the past decade, and it’s possible that we’ll finally get the complete story of the coup attempt now that the organizer, Simon Mann, was released from an Equatorial Guinean jail. (Not all the coups are quite this literary in nature. There’s no evidence that the 16 coup plotters arrested earlier this year were Forsyth fans – more likely, they were members of the Niger Delta resistance movement, MEND.)

A rich country with radical underdevelopment, a country so ripe for plunder that people read novels to plan coups? Not absurd enough for you? Okay, so here’s this – Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue is Britney Spears’s neighbor. Mr. Obiang is the son of the aforementioned kleptocratic dictator, and his shrewd management of his $4000 a month salary as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forests has allowed him to purchase a $35 million estate in Malibu, California, a Gulfstream V jet and a fleet of luxury cars and speedboats. The US Justice department reports that Obiang the younger pilfered an estimated $73 million from the EG treasury between 2005 and 2006 and moved it into the US.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the strong evidence that Obiang is systematically looting his nation’s treasury hasn’t prevented him from getting US visas and visiting his estate several times a year. So why does Obiang get to play in Malibu while Robert Mugabe is forced to live it up in Hong Kong? According to the US State Department officials quoted in Ian Urbina’s New York Times story, the answer is simple: Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, while Equatorial Guinea does.

Urbina’s story is an example of advocacy journalism at its best. Armed with research conducted by Global Witness, a leading pressure group focused on increasing transparency in resource-rich countries, Urbina points to rules bent or ignored by two US government departments, the possible complicity of two US oil companies and the role played by a prominent Washington PR firm as the EG government’s paid apologists.

So what?

When I started working with Open Society Institute, I was introduced to the phrase “theory of change” by a colleague who persistently (and, usually, very helpfully) insisted we unpack the logic behind any project we were considering funding. What did we want to accomplish, in the long run, and how would this project advance those goals?

So what’s the theory of change behind Urbina’s story? There may not be one – Urbina saw a fascinating and provocative story and used the platform provided by the New York Times to share the tale. Even if that’s true, the folks at Global Witness who provided Urbina with the documents to make this case had a theory of change – a belief that a story in a prominent newspaper would lead towards a policy change in the US government, or increased support for their campaigns for transparency in resource-extracting nations.

Perhaps the US State Department will be sufficiently embarrassed by the Times story to change their visa issuing practices. Perhaps some of the readers of the Times story will be grateful for Global Witness’s research and support their work. (You should – they’re an extremely responsible and credible organization doing important work.) I’m interested in the question of how a New York Times reader, agitated and motivated by Urbina’s story, would take the information she received in the story and move towards constructive action.

Global Witness doesn’t make it especially easy for individuals to involve themselves with campaigns, except as donors. Their webpages on corruption in oil, gas and mining and on banks and corruption include lists of the organization’s laudable achievements, their publications and their partners in advocacy. They don’t include a call or action or participation beyond encouragement to donate.

Would Global Witness benefit from a Facebook group dedicated to convincing Secretary Clinton to deny Obiang a visa? A petition demanding that Equatorial Guinea hold free and open elections? Probably not. They’re making a bet that the way to influence a government like Obiang’s is to operate at intergovernmental levels, providing actors within the State department with information and impetus to act.

Here’s the rub: information alone is insufficient to provoke action. In “A Problem from Hell“, Samantha Power unpacks the history of genocides in the 20th century and the reaction of governments to these systematic mass killings. Pointing out that Clinton administration wasn’t unaware of the genocide taking place in Rwanda, just unwilling to act, Power argues that governments only act to prevent genocide in reaction to consistent, relentless citizen pressure. Given the reasons not to act against Equatorial Guinea (the fear of driving EG to oust US oil companies and invite in Chinese ones, for instance), it’s reasonable to believe that merely informing and embarrassing the State Department won’t accomplish anything, without building accompanying citizen pressure.

So let’s reexamine the idea of the anti-Obieng Facebook group. My friend Evgeny Morozov argues that a great deal of online activism can be best characterized as “slacktivism” – it’s a symbolic gesture, a fashion statement, not an action that could lead towards real change. The examples he offered at a talk at Ars Electronica were, to me, compelling ones – a Facebook group dedicated to “saving the children of Africa” with 1.5 million members and a total of $8,449 in donations; a psychology experiment in Denmark that demonstrated people’s willingness to sign onto an online protest against an imaginary injustice. Evgeny worries that such online activism isn’t just ineffective – it leads to social loafing, where people get less involved with actually saving the children of Africa because they see a group of likeminded individuals and assume the collective effort will solve the problem.

While I find Evgeny’s argument compelling, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s countervailing dynamic at work. During the June 2009 protests over the Iranian elections, there was a burst of online activity as people moved by accounts of the protests looked for ways to offer solidarity and support for the activists on the ground. Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location information and time zone to suggest that they were in Tehran. They joined Facebook groups, shared links to the Neda Agha-Soltan video, donated USB keys to load with censorship circumvention software and send to activists, and opened proxy servers to offer Iranians an uncensored path to the internet.

These efforts weren’t effective in overturning the Iranian election results or leading to a popular revolution in the country. That might reflect their ineffectiveness – it’s unclear that the greening of Twitter would strike fear into Ahmedinejad’s heart – or the fact that the current Iranian state is powerful, well-organized, controls an experienced security apparatus, and has support from many Iranian citizens. I’m wondering if they were effective in another way – they allowed people with no personal connection to Iran to feel like they were part of the events. This feeling, in turn, may have encouraged individuals to pay closer attention to the news in Iran than if they’d been non-participants.

I’ve got no data to support this theory, just an anecdote or two about friends who compulsively aggregated Iran information on twitter, and a quote from Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they” – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

If the inability to act makes us bored, cynical and apathetic, is it possible that doing something – even something that’s ultimately ineffective – could keep us engaged and compassionate? If so, is there an interplay between action and information-gathering that could turn a story into a movement that builds public will?

I read Urbina’s story. I get pissed off, and start researching other articles on Equatorial Guinea, which I post to Twitter and Facebook under the #eqguin tag. I encourage others to do likewise and to propose actions we might take to persuade the State Department to ban senior Obiang regime officials from traveling to the US. We start online petitions, a postcard campaign to the State Department and keep twittering links to the #eqguin tag… which becomes a trending topic, prompting journalists to declare a Twitter revolution in Equatorial Guinea. Witnessing our vast public will, Secretary Clinton declares that the State Department will enforce anti-corruption legislation and stop issuing visas to Obiang’s family. We promptly start a campaign to pressure CNOOC not to take over the leases that Obiang cancels with Exxon and Marathon in response to Clinton’s decisions.

A blueprint for turning knowledge into action and into will, or a fantasy? I’m not sure. (I am sure that it’s a blueprint that smart advocacy organizations are starting to try to implement, which makes the efficacy of the strategy an important topic to study.) I’m watching a debate between Evgeny and academic/activist Patrick Philippe Meier on this topic, centering around Evgeny’s recent article in Prospect magazine, “How dictators watch us on the web“. Evgeny makes the case that the rise of participatory web technologies has benefitted repressive governments as much as activists, who often aren’t able to use these technologies effectively; Patrick respondsby repeatedly asking “so what?”, arguing that Evgeny doesn’t have the data to prove that online activism is effective or ineffective. (Evgeny’s response to Patrick seems to agree on only one point – no one’s got the data to answer these questions effectively.)

Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition? I’ve been making the case for years that Americans (and likely people in many developed nations) don’t get enough information about the developing world, and that this lack of attention has consequences for developed and developing nations. If Americans don’t hear about an economic boom in Ghana, they don’t invest… which slows the boom, costing Ghanaians growth and costing Americans business opportunities in a growing economy. Similar dynamics apply around aid, humanitarian and security intervention, export of physical and cultural products.

A couple of years back, I realized that this was a supply problem, as much as a demand problem – journalists want to write about the developing world, but they and their publications have little evidence that their audience wants to hear these stories. Without evidence of reader interest in the developing world, it’s hard for most publications to support the research and travel that goes into creating these stories. If action (useful or otherwise) and newsseeking behaviors are linked, starting a movement may be a way to aggregate demand for a story, and encourage more reporting like Urbina’s story.

So get pissed off and start a Facebook group. Launch a Twitter hashtag. Translate compassion into action. But realize that the most effective action probably involves aggregating and disseminating information, building knowledge and awareness that’s an asset even if it doesn’t lead directly to political change.

And help us – me, Evgeny, Patrick, the Berkman Center, and everyone else studying this phenomenon – think about how we can bring data to the table and test some of these questions. Is online activism effective in bringing about political change? What mechanisms and tools are effective? Does the ability to take action increase and sustain interest in a topic? Does action need to have political effect to sustain interest? Does increased interest lead to increased media attention, and does that attention lead to real-world change? What sort of data and experiments do we need to move these questions beyond anecdote and theory and into testable propositions?

Brian Lehrer, the moderator of WNYC’s excellent morning show, has been kind enough to invite me onto his show all month long, appearing every Thursday morning. It’s been a somewhat insane month for me to participate. As Rachel explained on her blog, the last few weeks of her pregnancy have been a little tricky and scary, and I ended up doing one of our interviews from the parking lot of the local hospital. Rachel’s well and home today, and I have high hopes of broadcasting shows with Brian today and this coming Wednesday before she goes into labor!

When we discussed what we might want to cover in our segments, we outlined half a dozen topics in international development. But as we’ve started talking on air, we’re hovering around my topic du jour – how the Internet can help make the world a smaller place. After looking at Meedan, a wonderful project designed to enable conversation between English and Arabic speakers (disclosure – I’m an advisor to the project) during last week’s show, we’re going to look closely at Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog today and how Obama’s visit to China was covered in the Chinese blogosphere.

Eldoret, Kenya at night. Photo by Joshua Wanyama

Brian has asked me to give his listeners homework assignments, asking them to look at sites before the next show. Next week’s conversation is going to be about dialogs regarding rebranding Africa, and the homework assignment will be Joseph Wanyama and Sheila Ochugboju’s remarkable site, AfricaKnows.com. Joseph is a brilliant photojournalist and many of his photos of contemporary life in Kenya are complemented with poems from Sheila. Collectively they give a picture of Africa that’s likely to surprise and challenge people who don’t know the continent well.

Hope you’ll tune in. And thanks for the opportunity to engage with your listeners, Brian.

Who pays for content and services on the internet?

My friend Bo Peabody thinks we should be asking not just whether ad-supported journalism is feasible, but whether ad-supported social networks will work. In a Washington Post op-ed titled “Twitter.org?“, Bo leverages his experience founding and running Tripod.com to suggest that social networking sites are misunderstood as content sites, and won’t be profitable as ad-supported properties. He suggests that, because these spaces are critically important digital public spheres, we should consider supporting them as nonprofits if necessary, but shouldn’t expect them to sustain themselves based on advertising. As I look more closely at Bo’s thinking, I’m concerned that advertising may not be a viable model to support anything other than search online, and that systems we are increasingly reliant on may be supported by the shakiest of foundations.

Bo may not be right that social networks need to become nonprofits – I’m interested in communities where participants are willing to pay for membership (see Dreamwidth or Metafilter as examples), or communities that might thrive via an alternative revenue stream (see Brian McConnell’s suggestion for how Skype could run a highly profitable Facebook or Twitter and generate more call traffic in the process.) But I’m increasingly convinced he’s right that advertising is a lousy way to support social network sites.

Internet advertising works extremely well in the context of a search engine. Many searches are intended to lead to transactions, so matching a paid ad to a query is sometimes a good user experience. Advertising can work well in the context of niche content – a website focused on cross-country skiing is a great place to advertise to cross-country skiiers, and there’s a decent chance they’re going to be interested in learning about your ski wax. Ads on sites like Facebook work much less well, and while targetting those ads based on demographics may make them more effective, that targeting doesn’t fix the core problem: people are using social network sites to communicate, not to consume content, and they don’t want to be bothered by ads when they’re communicating.

The good news – for users annoyed by ads, not for advertisers – is that we appear to learn very quickly how to ignore online advertising. comScore, a company that monitors user behavior on the web for advertisers, reported in 2007 that only 32% of internet users clicked on banner ads in a given month. By 2009, that number had fallen to 16% of internet users, and that a core 8% of all internet users – “Natural Born Clickers” (yes, that’s what they called the studies) – are responsible for 85% of all banner clicks on the web.

There’s at least two ways to spin this finding. comScore, which exists to provide information to advertisers and would be out of business if people stopped buying online ads, uses this data to make the case that advertisers should stop obsessing over clickthrough rates:

“The act of clicking on a display ad is experiencing rapid attrition in the current digital marketplace,” said Linda Anderson, comScore VP of marketing solutions and author of the study. “Today, marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact.”

Anderson may be referring to this study by Gian M. Fulgoni and Marie Pauline Mörn, which finds a modest increase in users visits to an advertised website based on being exposed to that site in banner ads, even if they didn’t click them. The argument is a traditional advertising one – you can’t know whether that particular billboard led a customer to find you, but we know that exposure to ads builds your brand, so buy more billboards. And you may or may not be surprised to learn that Fulgoni is the co-founder and CEO of comScore.

There’s another response to the clickthrough study: ask yourself whether you, personally, ever look at banner ads on the web. You probably don’t – you’re “banner-blind“. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen uses this term to explain a wealth of eye-tracking studies that illustrate web users’ almost uncanny ability to sift through a webpage and focus only on the parts that contain actual content. (He’s reported on this behavior since 1997.) Nielsen concludes that web users are so good at avoiding paying attention to ads that the only way to make an ad banner effective is to be deceptive and disguise it as content. At the same time, his studies suggest that search ads – ads that are sometimes helpful to users – aren’t filtered out in the same way.

comScore’s study suggests we – collectively – may be becoming more banner-blind over time. If only half as many users click banner ads as did two years back, we might conclude that those users have learned how to ignore banners in the interim. If comScore would release demographic data on the 8% who are inclined to click, we might be able to confirm these suspicions. If those 8% are new internet users, it suggests a future internet with mature users too savvy to pay attention to most forms of advertising.

In the meantime, here’s a thought, this one from danah boyd – anyone building a new, ad-supported social network is building a business on that 8%. Assume for the moment that I’m right and that those 8% are the newest and most naive users. We’re at 74% internet penetration in the US – there just aren’t that many new users who can come online and click those ads. Instead, that 8% may well represent new users from other parts of the world, where internet penetration is much lower and where new, naive users are still coming online.

Companies like Facebook aren’t planning the future of their business around these users. As Brad Stone and Miguel Helft pointed out in a New York Times article, “In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit“, some social network sites are beginning to question whether they’ll be able to continue providing services to users outside the US, Europe and other markets they perceive to be lucrative. The article points to efforts at MySpace and Facebook to provide lower-bandwidth products for developing nations, both to improve user experience and to cut costs in serving these markets. It’s possible to imagine a future in which Facebook, strapped for cash, focuses on providing services only to users their advertisers are interested in reaching. Technorati recently relaunched their blog search engine with a near-exclusive focus on English-language content, de-listing prominent non-English blogs – my guess is that the change reflects advertiser demands.

Internet users all over the world have access to a vast array of powerful publishing and communication tools. While some premium users pay for access to these tools, the vast majority do not. Whether we believe these tools can lead towards more transparent and democratic governance, or whether we’re skeptical of such cyberutopian ideas, it’s clear the internet would be a very different place if these tools weren’t available for free. If Facebook weren’t free, it would likely be orders of magnitude smaller… which would increase exclusivity, but lose some of its utility as a powerful tool for reconecting with lost friends. It would include fewer users from developing nations where credit cards are significantly less common. Optimised for membership revenues rather than for ad views, it would be a deeply different place.

Revenue models have a deep impact on digital spaces. Why’s Twitter growing so fast? My guess is that it’s because the founders are following the traditional social media playbook: attract a ton of users, promise to monetize them through targeted advertising, sell the company to a larger one for billions and never confront the difficulty of monetizing that ad space. We can imagine a different Twitter, one that decided to focus on digerati and first-movers – that space might have used invitations to control access or membership fees to limit growth. It would be less ubiquitous, more exclusive and have a different utility curve. Or consider a company like Demand Media, which publishes more that four thousand articles and video clips a day, all intended to answer commonly asked questions on search engines and create targeted advertising inventory. We tend to think of the Internet as a place where questions are answered by random people all over the world, organized into a useful collection by Google. What if those questions were answered hastily and poorly, all by the same company, through content commissioned for $20 a video? Demand Media focuses on the business model first, and appears to be positioned to reshape the biggest internet space of all – the search and content space – in the process.

Fernando Bermejo sent me a paper of his, “Audience manufacture in historical perspective: from broadcasting to Google“, which suggests that researchers have a “blind spot” when it comes to considering the power of revenue models in media environments. He references a debate, sparked by Canadian social scientist Dallas Smythe, who suggested that communications research overfocused on the cultural side of communications and didn’t pay enough attention to the economic dimensions. Fernando worries that we’re doing the same thing today, ignoring the pervasive influence advertising has on the contemporary internet environment.

I suspect he’s right. We’re far more likely to discuss peer production, open-source models or collaboration at the Berkman Center than we are to discuss how advertising might shape the future of Facebook. I spend far more time trying to figure out how activists are finding clever ways to use social media and how those uses may be shaping these tools that I do considering how ad models are shaping these tools. “Blind spot” is putting it mildly

In our defense – it’s hard to study advertising. The data’s hard to get – it’s carefully controlled and tends to be released with large price tags on it, while participatory media projects tend to release usage data and welcome analysis. And researchers tend to be biased towards what we’re inspired by – I’m fascinated and inspired by independent and citizen media, so I pay attention to them, even if most of the use of social network tools is for communication, not for media publishing,

What if the social internet as we know it is being built on sand, on ads that almost no one looks at now and fewer will look at in two years? What if we’re optimizing tools for advertising audiences that don’t exist and turning aside models for social media built on membership fees or premium services? What if my assertions and speculations are wrong, and advertising’s a sure-fire way to build the social web?

I’m realizing that I (and probably anyone studying social media) need to understand at a much deeper level how advertising really works, because it shapes the systems I study, the systems we increasingly rely on. We need to know who those 8% of users who were “born to click” are, and we need to think about what happens if they stop clicking.