There are many things I admire about my friend and colleague, David Weinberger: his intellectual curiosity, his generosity with his time and guidance, his sense of humor… One facet of David I most admire is his willingness to think in public. Most people who speak for a living (as David does, and as I aspire to do) use well-worn and carefully roadtested material. David is brave enough to put new ideas in front of audiences and work through new ideas, live and in public. And we’re lucky enough at the Berkman Center lunch today to hear his new talk, “What Information Was: Bits, Links and the Iron Rule of Irony”, an exploration of issues that David is starting to think about and wrestle with.

David starts with the provocative question, “How did we become the information age?” We’re moving out of that age and into a new one, one we haven’t named and don’t even understand yet. So we’re at a good point to reflect on this closing age and ask, “Why did information become the central metaphor?”

Information has been a cradle to grave metaphor for this age. David tells us that, if he were to stand up and say, “DNA is not information” – we’d probably think I was anti-science and an idiot. But DNA doesn’t come labeled with base-pairs. When we look at DNA, we see information… but DNA is a squiggly little molecule, a physical thing. It’s helpful to consider it as information and analyze it that way… but it’s a molecule.

Ray Kurzweil represents the “grave” side of the metaphor. Kurzweil’s “Age of Spiritual Machine” asks “when will we have computers large enough to model the brain, and allow Kurzweil to pour himself into a computer and survive his own death… .” Our willingness to consider this idea – the idea that a computer running a model of Kurzweil’s brain, the idea that this even makes sense to us, shows us that we think of ourselves as information.

In epistomology, we’ve traditionally considered sensation, perception, and judgement. In the past century, we’ve added “sense data” to this paradigm, and in the last fifty years, added information. We tend to consider information to be a basic constituent of the human mind. Stephen Wolfram argues that the universe itself is made from information – he suggests that the univese can be thought of in terms of cellular automota, reductions to pure information.

Despite the fact that we’ve reconsidered huge aspects of our culture in terms of information, we’re extremely bad at answering the question, “What is information?” Weinberger cites Ronald Day, who mentions that he’s discovered roughly 200 definitions of information. There’s a technical definition for the term, but that’s almost never what we mean.

There’s a conventional history of information, which moves from the Jaquard loom through Babbage, through Hollerith, through Turing and Shannon. But that history is a reading back into the 19th century of a concept that we didn’t have, a Shannonian definition of information. Instead, David proposes we look at Babbage and see how he considered information, long before Shannon’s information theory. Babbage uses the word “information” 28 times in his autobiography. Initially, he’s talking about information as “something you didn’t know, and now you do.” The second use is as “the contents of a table” – a set of data that was useful to the railroad industry.

In 1948, Claude Shannon took over the term and introduced a new definition for it. He did this for “noise” as well, and redefined them with highly technical meanings which allowed us to discuss the carrying capacity of different channels. In this definition, information is “a sequence of choices from a finite set of elementary symbols” which can be transmitted.

The history of information starts with simple definitions, takes a detour into complex mathematics, and then becomes a metaphor for… well… everything. So what enabled information to take over the world? Its utility, and its politics. But David’s interested in the implications of the metaphor:

Information scales. Information allows corporations to grow to new sizes. But the secret of the information age is that information works by reducing the amount of information – you simplify individuals to the simple categories you decide are important. Information helped companies only because we made the decision to strip things down.

In that paradigm, we might reduce an employee as a few database fields – name, title, social security number, salary. Now, we might represent an employee as a Facebook page – a vast set of connections, an abundance of information. Links aren’t about stripping down – they’re about expanding the universe. In an age of abundance – an abundance of good stuff and of crap – we’re actually better at managing the crap than the good stuff. We still use email because we’ve figured out how to avoid the crap.

We’re less aware of the good stuff – we believe that good ideas are fairly scarce, and this turns out not to be true… and this may be what’s killing newspapers. Institutions that depend on scarcity start to fail in an age of abundance. These institutions used to separate signal from noise. But that’s the wrong way to think about things today – we’ve got an abundance of signal, not of noise.

Information is a resource. We can query information and we can fetch from it. Alternatively, we can navigate it, entering a space. We thought about this a lot in the information age – think of a movie like Tron where we enter into data, becoming an avatar. We also thought about ourselves as being engulfed and threatened by information, like Katherine Hepburn in “The Desk Set“. These days, we routinely think of ourselves as entering the web space. The web and the real world are now so integrated, we can’t bring our children out of this space – they’re on their phones, in virtual space at he same time as the real world.

We used to measure our ability to query and fetch information in terms of precision and recall – did we get what we were searching for? Did we get all of it? In a world where we query trillions of pages, we’ve begun to think about relevance and interestingness. Precision and recall are generally less important, especially in the gigantic world of the web. Relevance has to do with whether information meets your needs; interestingness is obviously an idiosyncratic characteristic. We’re no longer using objective metrics – we’re using deeply personal ones.

Bits apply to everything. Nothing escapes being “bitified”. And we have a sense for what bits are – David quotes Gregory Bateson: “bits are a difference that make a difference”. A bit measures some sort of difference. While we talk about “atoms versus bits”, we don’t talk about “atoms versus links”. Bits are useful because they can apply to everything – “plain or peanut M&Ms, Kurzweil is or is not in the machine”. With these distinctions, we can build models that are coextensive with the world. They apply to everything, or almost everything.

We can only do this because bits are unlike atoms. We believe that atoms actually exist. Bits don’t have that same, objective reality. The holes in a punchcard are bits – the holes in your shoes are not. Bits have to be in a system, a system that is highly regularized or standardized. If you punched holes in a card at random, they wouldn’t be bits – they’d be noise.

There are a hundred billion neurons in Ray Kurzweil’s brain. We could model his brain in a swirling cloud of dust, somewhere out in the universe – a piece swirling to the left could be a 1, to the right, a 0. Somewhere, if we consider the left and right spin of clouds of dust, we have a model of Ray Kurzweil’s brain as it was in the ten minutes when he first met his wife and fell in love. But this is absurd – reverse the spin, and we’ve got an entirely different representation. Bits are not real.

When we turn the continuous, real-world into bits, we need to decide what our resolution is. That resolution is different between a satellite map and mapping each rock on a coastline. Bits depend on our resolution, what we’re intending to do. This is true in computers as well – we decide to measure certain voltages as positive or negative, ones or zeros, based on a defining line.

Bits are about reducing distinctions to the simplest possible states – black or white, yes or no. They simplify. The web, by contrast, is a web of links. They agree, they amplify, they endorse, they denounce, they connect. Those links aren’t as simple as on and off – they build an enormously complex and intricate world, an abundance of rich, linguistic human intentions.

Information explains communication. At the very beginning of his critical essay on information, Shannon makes it clear that he’s not talking about semantics. But he introduces a very clear, formal model: Information is created by a sender, encoded, put through a channel, decoded and delivered to a recipient. Warren Weaver, who is credited as developing this model with him, acknowledges at the beginning of his seminal book that communication has a much broader sense – not just written and oral communications, but music, theatre, ballet and all human behavior. So why did the Shannon-Weaver Mathematical Model – an extremely narrow, formal model – turn into what we think communication is?

We adopted a conduit metaphor for communication before information theory, a vision of communications that looks like tin cans with a string between them. Communication isn’t a signal that’s a vibration in the air – it’s an act within a world where people share context and concerns. So why is the tin can model so powerful for us?

Descartes solved the mind-body problem, culminating a long tradition in western philosophy. He explains that we live in mental images, not just in the real world. It’s a lonely view of the world: each of us live by ourselves, in our own mental images of the world. In that space, communication has to be the act of communicating a worldview into another person’s heads. This is, “strictly speaking, a pathological, schizophrenic metaphysics.”

A less schizophrenic vision is that two individuals share a world, share perceptions and concerns. There is something interesting and relevant to them, and by talking, one may now see the world differently than before. Yes, there are vibrations in the air. But the tin can model of communications strips out everything that’s important – it’s a bad, incomplete, way of understanding communications.

In Shannon and Weaver’s model, communication is content, transmitted through a medium, disrupted by noise. That makes some sense – the model was developed in part in response to studies of communication during wartime. If you want to understand communications and start from the battlefield, then communication looks like a challenge that needs to be overcome – how the hell do we ever communicate? It’s a model based on examining the failure of something, not based on examining how communication actually takes place. That’s something we often do in our culture – we study failure, not a functioning system, and that study can lead to weird distortions in our understanding.

Hyperlinks, on the other hand, assume a path through an existing world. They’re generative paths – making a new hyperlink increases the abundance of that world. In the age of links, we assume that communication is possible, not a challenge. This model breaks the information age understanding of communication.

We can build models of anything using bits. We’re all familiar with the critiques of models – we’ve just seen models of a financial system lead towards massive disruption. The Department of Energy required a 10,000 year model to evaluate storage of nuclear material at Yucca Flats. This helps show the absurdity of models – we assume regularity and predictability, but there’s all sorts of possibilities that we can’t model. (David shows us dinasaours destroyed by asteroids – “didn’t plan for that!”) Models exclude that which doesn’t fit. They inherently deny the abundance of the world, the overflowing, uncapturable abundance of the world. And they’re purely formal – they leave something critical out: the body.

A bit is a measurement, the measurement of a difference. Any other measurement measures something in particular – weight, length. Bits just measure difference, which means they apply to everything. But the world never shows itself to us merely as a difference – it only presents itself in particular ways, differences between things we perceive in light, warmth, texture. The pure formality of bits comes from the fact that they are exactly how the world is not.

Returning to the Shannon-Weaver model, David asks us to focus on noise – the disruption in the system. But the noise is the world. The world shows up in Shannon’s diagram as the problem with the system. “In the system of abundant hyperlinks – this abundant system which is beyond systemization – we’re embracing, not avoiding the noise”. On the internet, we know that this information is interesting to at least one person because they put it there. It is a web of noise – that’s where it gets its strength.

Moving from the age of information to the age of noise on the web, the problem might be that the web is not noisy enough – we’re not appreciative enough of the differences.

I was catching up with David’s words and wasn’t able to accurately transcribe the questions. But I caught John Palfrey’s question, which asked David whether this new project represented a shift from the normative to the descriptive. Intercepting, and making the question much less polite, I rephrased, “So what?”

David argues that there is no “so what” – he’s intrigued by the idea that we embraced this broken model of the world. But it’s not a prescriptive or polemic project, he argues. I beg to differ – I think he’s starting to articulate a vision of a linked age, rather than an information age, and starting to think about the implications of how that age might work. And I suspect that he’ll be talking about those implications in the next few talks…

David offers an outline of his talk on his blog, though he tells me that the outline is an earlier version of the presentation. J’s of J’s scratchpad offers her notes from the talk as well – might be useful as a complement to my account here.

Friend and colleague Dan Gillmor came up with a powerful idea at a Berkman retreat this past week – the need for a “slow news movement” in journalism, a focus on reporting that’s about careful, reasoned analysis, not about speed. (Dan credits the term to me – that’s too kind. I’m merely the wiseass who took the complex idea he was putting forward and reduced it to a soundbite.)

Dan offers two reasons why news outlets publish news as quickly as possible, forcing themselves to correct and retract when following a story like the tragic Ft. Hood shootings. A newsroom veteran, Dan credits journalists’ natural competitive instincts for some of the need for speed. And he points out that speed is a way of maintaining an audience: “Being first draws a crowd. Crowds can be turned into influence, money or both. Witness cable news channels’ desperate hunt for ‘the latest’ when big events are under way, even though the latest is so often the rankest garbage.”

Much as I love to blame the media for the world’s ills, I’m increasingly convinced that the specific dysfunction of American media as it transitions to an internet age is the feedback loop between journalists and their audience. In other words, journalists want to produce fast news, in part because fast news is what we consume. I’m as bad as anyone else – I kept hitting reload to see whether Falcoln Heene was in the balloon, along with millions of others.

Why? Why do we persistently refresh news, looking for updates? (See my comments on AP’s ethnography of news consumption, which suggests that this is a common pattern.) It makes sense for certain types of news – if you’re directly impacted by an event, tracking a storm enroute to your town, for instance. But that’s not why we refresh most news – it’s rare that having the most timely (and, as Dan suggests, the least careful) information has a direct impact on our well-being.

Here are a couple of possibilities:

- The media made us do it. We don’t want to eat fast food, but that’s all we’re fed, due to the newsroom factors Dan suggests.

- We’re bored. AP’s “deep dive” suggests that relentless refreshing is something we do mostly when we’ve got nothing better to do.

- We’re building social capital. If we’ve got the most up-to-date information on the breaking news, we can use it to open conversations with friends and position ourselves as in the know, raising our stature.

- We’re narrative junkies. A breaking news story is like a novel that ends after a few chapters – we keep reloading in the hopes that someone will tell us the rest of the story.

I suspect there’s some truth to each of those explanations… and I suspect that each is badly incomplete. I also suspect that figuring out what drives our patterns of news consumption, and our susceptibility to fast, often-wrong news is critical for Dan’s slow-news movement to gain momentum.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Josh Levinger leads off the final session at CFCM’s show and tell, titled “Crossing Borders”. His project, Virtual Gaza, aggregates the stories of civilians who were present in Gaza as bombs fell earlier this year during the Israeli incursion. The project centers on a map of Gaza that shows bombed houses.

The impetus for the project was the lack of media coverage of Gaza, a fact complicated by the fact that there were only 6 international journalists in Gaza during the war. Levinger is troubled by the ways in which the suffering of Israelis and Gazans was reported as equal in US media – he feels like this is a distortion of what happened on the ground.

The project grew from a collaboration with the Harvard Alliance for Justice in the Middle East. Working with a social network, they maped 77 testimonies from 29 authors, mapping 32 neighborhoods in 5 cities. People were able to upload their stories and annotate the map, helping combat the “media blockade” against Gaza by showing personal stories.

The project shows the power of Open Street Map – “in conflict areas, there’s much better data through Open Street Map.”

Josh acknowledges the challenges of getting people to pay attention to these maps. “We never got mainstream media to really pay attention to this.” He hoped to travel to Gaza this summer to improve the maps – that wasn’t possible, so he went to the West Bank, and helped with a project called Voices Beyond Walls, a project that mapped the local neighborhoods through video, drawings and photos.

Aside from improving Boston’s signs, Rick Borovoy is pioneering “microtourism”, a new strategy to build bridges in local communities.

He shows us the photo of a Brazilian restaurant in Framingham in a beautiful old building. It’s very popular with Brazilians, but not outside of the community. Why don’t people go there? Borovoy has talked to Framingham residents and they tell him “the traffic’s bad, it’s not safe – basically, they’re saying it’s not on their map.”

Brazilians rescued the downtown of Framingham, Borovoy tells us, and the downtown of the city isn’t especially unsafe. He tells us that non-Brazilians do go to the library, which is downtown, but tend not to go any further.

Talking to Brazilians, some mentioned that they thought that community members wouldn’t come downtown unless they were literally led by the hand. So they’re leading people by the hand. They’re issuing paper passports that have barcodes – those codes are scanned at sites downtown, and people who complete the circuit – led by Brazilian-American guides – will be send an incentive to come back downtown. The hope is to turn a guided tour to self discovery into a rediscovery of downtown. Borovoy recognizes tourism as one of the world’s biggest industries, and hopes that the process of exploring the other will lead to a joy of discovery in our own communities.

The first microtourism excursion takes place this weekend – I hope for a website shortly after the tour is completed.

Charles DeTar is building a blogging platform for prisoners, making it easy to blog on paper using US postal mail. The project, “Between the Bars: Human Stories from Prison” is intended to fight recidivism. He points out that, with prison populations rising, we’re seeing an even bigger population of ex-prisoners. These people have reduced opportunities for civic engagement (they usually can’t vote), have a hard time finding a job, and face cultural exclusion. This leads to high recidivism rates. But people who retain an identity outside of the bars are much less likely to be recidivists.

DeTar points to Jon’s Jail Journal, an amazing blog started by a prisoner in an Arizona jail. The journal was maintained by sending paper letters and posting them online. The father of the blogger tells audiences that the blog ended up being a lifeline for his son. Citing my work (thanks!) DeTar points to the idea of bridgeblogging and the importance of listening and of being heard.

Between the Bars is a platform to scan letters, post them online and enable communication and commenting within the framework and constraints of the US prison system. At this point, DeTar is working with “prison stakeholders” – families, former prisoners, prison employees – and waiting for approval from MIT’s research review board to start talking to prisoners.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Rick Borovoy’s project Lost in Boston focuses on what might well be my pet peeve with Boston – lack of signage. (Seriously. It’s a big problem. I suspect we do it to avoid letting Yankees fans find Fenway.)

He shows off a new sign, built by students at Mass Arts. It shows key local arts institutions, pointing to sites like the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s put up on private land and was designed through a student contest.

The point is that signs don’t need to come from governments. We can use local neighborhoods and local know-how to solve local problems. He invites us to participate – if you want a sign, want to sponsor or design one, email info AT lostinboston DOT org.

Jay Silver makes very personal maps. Inspired by the caricature maps he remembered from diner placemaps, he’s made maps of his childhood that feature his home birth and plates of tofu, and a map of a workshop he ran – a spiraling timeline punctuated with flower petals.

He calls this philosophy Awareness Mapping, and recently brought the technique to a community in India. He encouraged students to take photos of their environment, to make papercraft models of buildings, measured by hand, and turned into complex 3D popup maps. To show maps of motion, children danced and performed some of their maps.

Silver shows a video that intercuts images of the local community and maps displayed on a small video screen, mixing these digitized maps with local materials. He closes with a brief video of some scenes in Bangalore. “Maybe it’s a map, I don’t know.”

Jeff Warren is building a powerful set of tools for mapping called Cartagen. He’s interested in making “maps of things that Google cannot or will not map.” As an example, he shows the dotted line on the Google map between Morocco and Western Sahara. That dotted line represents “an avoidance of taking a political stance.”

Cartagen, at its root, is a rendering tool that renders in front of you at 15 frames a second. He’s used this to make a map of the world that loks like Warcraft II, converting contemporary map information into icons from the game. More practically, he offers a map of Cambridge, made using open streetmap data and overlaid with pavement quality data – very useful for bicyclists or community organizers.

The power of the tool is that it’s a scriptable, dynamic mapping environment. To show the powers of the tool, Warren build a system called Newsflow, which visualizes where a story occurs in the world, and where it was reported, connecting the two points with an arc.

His ultimate interests are in making mapping accessible to people who don’t have computers or smartphones. He’s working on systems to scan drawn maps and stretch them to correlate them to geographic coordinates, and another system that turns a cellphone into a sextant.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Cristina Xu leads off a segment focused on the future of news. She introduces her project, the News Positioning System, by digging into American history to talk about “transient newspapers”. When the US postal system heavily subsidized the mailing of newspapers, they began being used as mementos, or as post cards, underlined to make certain points. The practice became so widespread that Congress had to intervene, deciding that underlining a sentence in a newspaper was okay, while underlining letters to send a letter was not.

Working on ExtrAct, Christina noticed the importance of binders, notebooks carried by community organizers filled with newspaper clippings. They’re critically important for these organizers to document what’s going on in their communities and around the country, but they’re easy to lose and hard to share.

Organizers are now moving to mailing lists, which look higher tech, but they’re still hard to search and share. So the News Positioning System combines the functionality of a bookmarking site (delicious) with a map. This provides critical content for news. And since it includes an email scraper, people who are comfortable using mailing lists don’t need to adopt new tech, while those comfortable with bookmarking can use a bookmarklet. They’re now releasing the code – looks extremely cool and worth checking out.

Florence Gallez worries about the lack of collaboration in the news industry. So she’s working on Open Park,a platform for collaborating on the creation of hyperlocal, national and global news. It’s designed so that people in the community can learn to report the news using the tools. The system includes a code of ethics for collaborative journalism and instructions on using new media tools. She’s testing the tool in the local Russian community, using the platform to report on US-Russia relations.

Dharmishta Rood is fascinated by college media. She admires the fast pace of newsrooms, the need for students to learn journalism very quickly because of the rapid turnover of students. But she worries that college newspapers tend not to be able to customize or update their publishing platforms to improve their web presence, organizational tools, and community support. The Populous platform is being rolled out at UCLA, and includes a system called Campus Walk, a community hub of information, which group profiles, allowing campus groups to publish and share their information, adding context to news stories. The project is based on Django and like all CFCM projects, it’s open source.

Lisa Williams is the pioneering creator of Placeblogger, the largest index of local news blogs. The project celebrates the “scrappy little newsrooms that are thriving while mainstream newsrooms are dying.”

There are only 5,500 named places in the US – it shouldn’t be that hard to locate local information sites in each of these places. As Placeblogger does so, it becomes an observatory for these places on the map, and a distributed news corps that can cover stories in new ways.

Lisa reminds us of the Washington Post expose of the Walter Reed hospital – the problem with any in-depth expose is that it allows the authorities to declare, “this was just an isolated incident.” If we can mobilize a distributed news corps, we can ask questions like, “What percentage of returning US servicepeople who had amputations have been issued prostheses?” The goal, she tells us, is to “turn stories into signals”, which could emenate from one community and influence others, providing bigger and broader pictures in the process.

In discussions afterwords, Lisa points out that placeblogs are startups – we might expect them to fail at the rapid rate that most startups experience. But most actually survive, dying only when authors move.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink, a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online financial information. The bleeding edge in this field is financial tools for collective action – carrotmob, groupon, merry miser, buy it like you mean it.

Red Ink fits into this latter category. It’s a “social financial platform” designed to let you visualize spending at regional levels, in different industries. This is useful information for organizing a boycott – you can show the effectiveness of a collective action by asking everyone to report their purchasing behavior. Similarly, you could get a constituency of people to report on local spending, or just try to negotiate a discount on your local beer spending. The goal for the platform is to be highly private and anonymous, maximizing communications and minimizing private data leakage.

Nadav Aharony focuses on close proximity communications. He points out that we have good tools to send information around the world, but few tools to send things locally. His project – Comm.unity – focuses on connecting devices to one another through WiFi or Bluetooth, independent of central servers.

This vision could be very important for activists, allowing them to spread information person to person. It might also matter to people off the grid, allowing communication in an otherwise unwired village. And for general users, there could be services allowing communication and discovery.

Some of the projects that have emerged from this work are:
- SnapN’Share, a sort of local twitter that works totally off the grid
- Social Dashboard, which displays devices around you, sorted by social trust
- Will It Blend? – A living lab/reality mining approach to evaluating these new social technologies.

Matthew Hockenberry shows off the new iteration of SourceMap, a powerful tool to visualize open supply chains. He shows a bottle of Poland Spring Water and points out that you can figure out where this water actually comes from – a set of springs in Maine. There’s no similar labeling information for a laptop, so it’s hard to know about the Indonesian tin in the product.

With this information, we can consider the carbon impacts and social impacts of our products through supply chain transparency. A demonstration shows the inputs into an Ikea Alsarp bed, including the origins of the wood and steel – this report is published and becomes a resource for anyone looking at purchasing the bed in the future.

Hockenberry’s strongest example is a map of breweries in Scotland, all of which are currently bottled in northern England. By mapping their supply chains, he was able to make an argument for a transition to a central Scottish bottling plant, which might transform the local brewing industry.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi speaks on behalf of the ExtrAct project, a project focused on mapping and countering the ill-effects of energy extraction. Chris asks the question, “How do you unionize a community to oppose outside forces?” He roots his work in Manuel Castells, who points out that local democratic systems have been transformed by global capital and markets.

ExtrAct focuses on energy extraction and its impact on communities in North Texas and Colorado, specifically the impacts of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas. This process is very chemically intensive and is unregulated by federal law. Chris tells us that it’s causing such severe health and environmental damage that we’re seeing communities organize to fight fracturing.

The ExtrAct project started with extensive ethnographic studies in these communities. That study pointed to the landman – a representative of the energy companies sent to purchase mineral rights from homeowners – as a pivotal piece of the extraction system. ExtrAct functions as a “Landman review site, like Rotten Tomatoes or Yelp.com”, trying to address the problems of accountability in the process of acquiring land for mineral extraction.

It’s very easy to experience whiplash if you hang out at the academic institutions of Cambridge, MA. I spent the day in the basement of Harvard’s wood-panelled faculty club, in a discussion about the future(s) of the Berkman Center, then took the T two stops to MIT for the Communications Forum, where students in MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media program are presenting recent work, held in the deeply non-Euclidean Stata Center.

Once my head stops spinning from looking for a local vertical, I’ll do my best to report on the new work put forward by Chris Csikszentmihalyi’s students and collaborators. (Chris is leading today’s discussion, but points out that CFCM is led by Mitch Resnick and William Uricchio as well.) Chris describes the event as a “lightning round”, five minute tastes of the work. CFCM’s focus, Chris tells us, is to build technologies that strengthen social bonds and build communities, with a focus on real-world communities.

CFCM is funded by the Knight Foundation via the Knight News Challenge, part of Knight Foundation’s strategy of moving beyond journalism education to building new tools to serve community’s information needs. Chris explains that CFCM is looking for ways that tools and systems can provide the services journalists have provided to a free society. 20th century journalism in the United States was a unique moment, and might be an exemplar, he argues, but might not be the only way to get towards a free and just society.

CFCM’s collaborations have included a focus on reporting on the narcowars in Mexico, working with the US state department, work with kids in the West Bank and Gaza, a study of product sourcing in Scotland, and research on the introduction of YouTube in the Amazon. Not all projects are so far from home – one focuses on encouraging “intracommunity tourism” in nearby Framingham, Massachusetts, in the hopes of reducing violence.

Reflecting on the lessons learned in the past few years of CFCM, Chris offers the following:

- Allowing for local knowledge is key to a system’s adoption
- Switch between local and global contexts
- Use community-driven design to enable community sustainability
- Monitor over time – a successful technical project is a continuous commitment
- New technologies can make new social practices more acceptable
- Collaborative community initiatives can circumvent problems in existing social and technical structures
- People only engage when they see an effect

This last point it a real challenge – web2.0 tools only work when you’ve got a group of people – how do you get a group of people when they don’t yet see the effect of the tools?

Introducing the speakers, Chris points to a new CFCM initiative – a blog focused on the tech tools the group is developing and disseminating – looks well worth a look.

What do you know about Fiji?

Before getting involved with Global Voices, I knew that it was an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific much beloved by vacationers and honeymooners and that, despite being an island nation surrounded by seawater, they export a lot of high-priced bottled water.

As I’ve followed Michael Hartsell’s reporting on Fiji on Global Voices, I’ve gotten a very different impression of the nation. The tensions between ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians have divided the nation politically, leading to rewritings of the constitution and severe government instability. Fiji has had four (or four and a half, depending on who’s counting) military coups since 1987 and is currently under the thumb of Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who’s taken power three times since 2000, twice via military coup. (Earlier this year, the Fijian supreme court declared his 2006 coup illegal. Bainimarama stepped down from his post of interim Prime Minister for 24 hours, while the President abrogated the constitution and fired the judiciary, then immediately reappointed him as Prime Minister. That’s the half coup, for those of you counting. Confused? This might help.) Fiji has been expelled from the Commonwealth, condemned by Amnesty International for arresting opposition politicians, church leaders and journalists, and today, severed diplomatic relations with Australia and New Zealand, its two largest and most powerful neighbors.

(This last one is a doozy. The row with Australia and New Zealand concerns Bainimarama’s plan to hire Sri Lankan judges to replace the justices fired earlier this year, when the supreme court was liquidated. Australia and New Zealand have had travel bans against senior members of Bainimarama’s government in place, and when the Sri Lankan judges travelled through Australia to Fiji, they were informed that they would be subject to the same bans once they took their positions in the Fijian government. Bainimarama argues that Australia and New Zealand had banned transit; Australian authorities say they merely informed the Sri Lankan judges that they’d not be able to return through Australia once joining the coup government. Given the importance of Australia and New Zealand as trading partners, it’s hard to imagine this ending well for Fiji.)

I’ve been fascinated for years with the concept of “nation branding”, an idea promoted by Simon Anholt, a UK-based researcher and consultant. I heard Anholt on a BBC broadcast years back making the salient point that Ethiopia has a great brand for recieving famine aid (even if that’s an outdated understanding of the country) and a lousy brand for tourism. It’s an idea I’ve found useful in understanding some of the challenges that African nations face in encouraging tourism and foreign investment – if everyone thinks your country is impoverished and ill-governed, who’s going to want to visit on vacation or buy shares on the local stock exchange? Part of the challenge of rebuilding Africa is rebuilding an image and narrative of the continent that shows it as open for business. (See “Africa’s a continent, Not a Crisis” for more of this line of thought.)

Fiji is somehow blessed with a nation-brand that many African nations would kill for. Despite the 2006 coup, Fijian tourism brought in nearly $500 million in 2008, 24% of GDP, more than the nation earned from the next seven industries combined. Major international hotel chains have large properties in Fiji, and air travel patterns suggest the importance of tourism – international flights land in Nadi, the tourist capital, not the governmental capital Suva, which is served by a prop plane from Nadi. Fiji Water is now the leading imported bottled water in the US, and represents 20% of Fijian exports and 3% of GDP, benefitting from and reinforcing an image of Fiji as an unspoiled tropical paradise.

Defending the brand of Fiji has become a major political cause for the Bainimarama government. In April, after expelling a number of foreign journalists, the government instructed journalists that they needed to begin practicing “the journalism of hope“. Some journalists responded by filling local newspapers with non-news – the Fiji Daily Post ran stories titled “Man Gets on Bus” and “Weather to Improve Soon”. Bloggers have filled in the gaps, taking great risks to publish ferocious political commentary, usually under psuedonyms.

Anna Lenzer, a journalist for Mother Jones, found out just how serious the Bainimarama government was about nation brand when she came to Suva to report on the various ironies that surround Fiji water – a green-branded product with an immense carbon footprint, a premium bottled water produced in a community with no drinkable tap water, a dominant player in the local economy with a stated disinterest in Fijian politics. She was detained and questioned after sending an email from a cybercafe with links to articles critical of the government, and fled the country with the help of the US Embassy.

Her article, “Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle” is an excellent introduction to the strange phenomenon that is Fiji water, though I think she lays too much blame on the Fiji Water company and not enough on the military government and the circumstances that led to the recent coups. It’s worth reading Fiji Waters’s response, even if it’s something of a cop-out – I think Lenzer is right to point out that it’s hard for the company to position itself as environmentally and socially responsible while working with a repressive government. And I can’t argue with this line: “The reality of Fiji, the country, has been eclipsed by the glistening brand of Fiji, the water.”

Fiji may be a case study in eclipsing a complex reality with a shiny brand:

- Start with a country with low media attention.

- Invest massively in tourism, presenting visitors with a reality that’s not wholly, though mostly, divorced from ordinary life in the country. (All tourist destinations do this to one extent or another. Fiji appears to have embraced this strategy thoroughly, providing a string of five-star compounds insulated from the outside. This blog post complains that, at some resorts “Fijian society is reduced to over-chlorinated swimming pools and overpriced palm hats which fall apart in the departure lounge of Nadi Airport.” At the same time, the author wonders why service at these resorts seems so poor these past few months, and worries that, “It appears to be lethargy and uncaring when a guest asks for something. I think all of this is more dangerous to the future of Fiji Tourism than anything else, including the oft-mentioned ‘political instability’.”)

- Build or embrace an export that reinforces your brand image.

- Surpress contrary media voices via censorship or exile.

What would it take for circumstances on the ground in Fiji to damage brand Fiji? What would it take for Fiji to move beyond this mirage and build this vision of a nation in reality?

My friend and colleage Sami Ben Gharbia just launched a fascinating and useful new site: Threatened Voices. It’s an interactive map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world, with an accompanying timeline that makes it possible to track the phenomenon of arresting bloggers over the past several years. It’s an uncomfortable fact that, as blogs become a more influential public space, the technique of arresting bloggers to silence online speech becomes increasingly common.

The Threatened Voices map complements another map that Sami maintains on Global Voices Advocacy, the Access Denied Map. That map is an overview of government efforts to block online publishing platforms, like Blogger or YouTube. I continue to believe that censorship of these types of sites is one of the most serious problems the web faces today. When a government blocks a website, it blocks the voice of one person or one group – when they block a tool like Wordpress or Twitter, they block all the voices that wanted to use that tool, which might represent hundreds or thousands of alternative perspectives. While I believe we should combat all online censorship (or, more to the point, I believe that any filtering should be done at the edge of the network, by parents, schools or businesses that pay for internet access, not by governments or ISPs), I think there’s a special importance in calling attention to these blocked platforms.

But the blocking of a platform for speech is an abstract idea. Threatened Voices helps personalize the idea of internet censorship, making it clear that it’s a technique that doesn’t just involve blocking packets – it can involve harrassing and arresting individuals, sometimes detaining them for months or years. The goal was to provide a complement to organizations like Committee to Protect Bloggers and Reporters without Borders, who do a great job of leading campaigns to call attention to the imprisonment of individual bloggers. Threatened Voices isn’t campaigning for any of these individual bloggers – it’s trying to present a picture of how vast the phenomenon of imprisoning and threatening bloggers has become.

There’s no way a map like the one Sami is building will ever be complete. We don’t know about every blogger who’s been arrested. And it’s a difficult question whether someone has been arrested for their blogging or for other alleged offenses – is Hossein Derakhshan still in prison because he’s alleged to be an Israeli spy (an absurd accusation) or because he’s an influential blogger? Sami’s trying to broaden the information available, asking people to contribute reports of bloggers under threat to the map.

Knowing what countries are harrassing and arresting bloggers is a first step. What’s the most useful next step is an extremely difficult question. Not all countries respond well to external pressure, or to direct lobbying. It’s possible to harness a great deal of energy around the cause of releasing an individual blogger, but it’s not as clear how that energy should be productively channelled. My hope is that efforts to map this problem will help build solidarity between organizations that have a long track record of protecting journalists, or protecting human rights more generally, and the emerging movements to protect bloggers and the tools of online speech.

Hossein Derakhshan (”Hoder”) has now been in prison in Iran for more than a year. My friend Cyrus Farivar has followed his case closely, and has been in touch with Hoder’s family, who confirm that he’s beeing held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Reports from the activist group Human Rights in Iran suggest that Hoder has been held in solitary confinement for long periods of time, beaten and otherwise mistreated, and that Hoder was considering a hunger strike to protest his extended detention.

I’ve written about Hossein’s detention previously – it’s a complicated topic, as Hoder’s a complicated guy, and understanding his wishes is a difficult matter. Hoder held Iranian and Canadian passports, and according to a CBC article on his detention, may have believed that the Canadian passport would have made it more difficult for Iranian authorities to detain him when he came home. More to the point, I think, Hoder had a political change of heart and became an outspoken supporter of Ahmedinejad – angering and alienating most of his reformist colleagues inside and outside Iran – and believed that the Iranian system would handle his “transgressions” – trips to Israel, critical articles on his blog – in a just fashion. As such, he told his friends that he didn’t want a campaign for his release if arrested, especially not a campaign led by the US human rights community.

From the Free Hoder campaign

I’ve thought a great deal about my conversations with Hossein before his return to Iran. In retrospect, it seems clear that he expected to be arrested and questioned and perhaps detained for some weeks while the government punished him for his transgressions and assessed his political change of heart. At the same time, I don’t believe that Hossein believed that he’d be held for so long, treated so badly and cut off from contact with his family. The few clues we’ve gotten about his state of mind from contact with his family suggests that he regrets asking friends not to agitate for his release, and is now deeply worried (understandably so) that no one is working to secure his freedom.

Hossein’s family has come around as well – Cyrus published a translation of a letter from Hossein’s father, Hassan Derakhshan to the head of the Iranian judiciary, explaining that he and his family had patiently refused requests from western media to comment on Hossein’s arrest, expecting that he would receive fair treatment from the courts system:

In all these months, days, and hours, my family, my wife and I were hoping that in the arms of Islamic law and the mercy of the Islamic judiciary, Hossein’s case will be dealt with in the way it deserves

There is no need to mention the numerous times that we refused the requests of foreign media to explain Hossein’s situation…

Our complaint is not because you are exercising the law, but to the contrary, because of its suspension, lack of information and disrespecting of the law. The accused have rights, the family of the accused has some rights…

If the question had been whether the international community should become involved with advocating for Hossein’s release, the question is now what that community could effectively do. Circumstances have changed dramatically in Iran since Hoder went into prison. The protests after the July elections helped cement the view of Iranian authorities that online spaces were dangerous ones when used by activists, an interpretation that may explain Hossein’s extended detention, as he’s widely acknowledged as one of the first Iranian bloggers and a major promoter of blogging tools in Iran. As such, an online campaign for his release, supported by the blogging community, is unlikely to lead directly to his release. And, as Cyrus points out in a story for PRI’s The World, it’s unclear how many of his old friends are still willing to support him, given his change in views.

The reason to write about Hoder and support campaigns like the Free Hoder blog is not to influence the Iranian government, but to urge the Canadian government to do whatever they can. Hoder holds a Canadian, as well as an Iranian passport, and while Iran doesn’t respect dual nationality, Canada does, and has an obligation to push for Hossein’s release. Cyrus has been regularly calling Canadian authorities to seek updates, but has received little information from those inquiries. My hope is that by continuing to discuss Hossein’s detention, we can call attention to the ongoing situation and urge Canadian authorities to push for his release. But even knowing that Hossein is now looking for the world’s help in pushing for his release, it’s very hard to know what to do.