Carlos Correa Loyola, UTPL's Director of the Information Technology Department.

One of the local leaders helping to make the event possible is Carlos Correa Loyola, who is the UTPL's Director of the Information Technology Department. However, he is also a blogger [es] and avid user of social media networks like Twitter (username @calu). Correa has already been featured on numerous occasions on Global Voices, including the articles on blogs in his homeland of Loja and when Creative Commons Ecuador was launched.

During a conversation via Skype, Correa said that the UTPL's ultimate goal is to “become the premier technology university in the country,” and for the institution to ultimately transform itself into being the “premier [technology university] in Latin America. To accomplish this, we are working with 20 PhD technology students, with 5 graduating in 2010, 10 graduating in 2011, and the rest will graduate later.”

He has met interesting people during his travels around the world, which has helped him outline the upcoming I Congress Campus with the theme “Building Common Spaces in Higher Education.” According to Correa, the work began as a small team or “four cats in a room,” a commonly used saying in Loja, and the event is becoming a reality thanks to the support of Luis Miguel Romero, PhD, the current President of UTPL and who is also the current President of the OUI-IOHE.

By following the 6 strategic goals set by the technical university, a larger team of 70 people along with the Centers for Research, Technology Transfer, Extension, and Services (CITTES for their initials in Spanish) have been organizing the Campus Connect. The entire university is taking a role in planning the event, and he feels strongly that this process should take into consideration the ideas of not just one person or small group, but all participants, which something that Correa prefers to call “universitology.”

Technical University of Loja's Campus - Photo used under Creative Commons license by UTPL VIA Comunicaciones

The meeting scheduled to begin on November 25th has three components: The Congress Campus, the Latin American regional meeting of Creative Commons, and the iSummit 2009 and will take place while “respecting their identities at the same time,” said Correa. In addition, a BarCamp will follow the official events over the 3 days.

Creative Commons

The 2nd gathering of the Creative Commons representatives from Latin American will take place in Loja, which follows the previous one held year in Santiago, Chile (.pdf format). The UTPL has had a large role in bringing the use of Creative Commons licenses in Ecuador. Correa says, “We [UTPL] are the counterpart of the organization in Ecuador. We focus on ccLearn in order to promote open content in education and higher education, especially.”

iSummit

During this event, there will also be Loxa iSummit 09, which, according to Correa will be an “annual technology conference, the first in Loja and organized by the UTPL. It focuses on four areas: Software Architecture, Knowledge Management via a differentiated Semantic and Social Web, Advanced Networks, and IT Entrepreneurship called Technology Valley that the university has been supporting and is under the direction of Alvaro Castillo.” With the iSummit we seek to “establish a collaborative space, linking different views and approaches to the role of IT in higher education and business.”

BarCamp Loxa 09

“And to close the formal parts of the event, after Wednesday workshops and other events, comes Saturday's BarCamp Loxa 09, which is nothing but organized chaos, a cycle of “unconferences” on technology and other topics,” said Correa. The Barcamp Loxa 09 is eagerly awaited by the Ecuadorian blogger community and will feature musician Riccardo Perotti. There are also plans for an after-BarCamp, which will be a place to continue the celebration. The Barcamp has its own presence on Twitter with hashtag #barcamploxa09 and also a Faceboook group.

Correa concludes and reflects on Loja's role on promoting technology in the country and in the region:

It is said that the misuse of technology adds to the digital divide. That may be happening in the U.S. and Europe, and indeed in Latin America. But we want to change that, many have laid eyes here, during these three intense days. The small towns can also work closely with large cities, so Loja being a small city, not just the university, but people are betting on a democratization of participation, thereby achieving that technology does not accumulate just in the major poles of development.

Carlos Correa Loyola, UTPL's Director of the Information Technology Department.

One of the local leaders helping to make the event possible is Carlos Correa Loyola, who is the UTPL's Director of the Information Technology Department. However, he is also a blogger [es] and avid user of social media networks like Twitter (username @calu). Correa has already been featured on numerous occasions on Global Voices, including the articles on blogs in his homeland of Loja and when Creative Commons Ecuador was launched.

During a conversation via Skype, Correa said that the UTPL's ultimate goal is to “become the premier technology university in the country,” and for the institution to ultimately transform itself into being the “premier [technology university] in Latin America. To accomplish this, we are working with 20 PhD technology students, with 5 graduating in 2010, 10 graduating in 2011, and the rest will graduate later.”

He has met interesting people during his travels around the world, which has helped him outline the upcoming I Congress Campus with the theme “Building Common Spaces in Higher Education.” According to Correa, the work began as a small team or “four cats in a room,” a commonly used saying in Loja, and the event is becoming a reality thanks to the support of Luis Miguel Romero, PhD, the current President of UTPL and who is also the current President of the OUI-IOHE.

By following the 6 strategic goals set by the technical university, a larger team of 70 people along with the Centers for Research, Technology Transfer, Extension, and Services (CITTES for their initials in Spanish) have been organizing the Campus Connect. The entire university is taking a role in planning the event, and he feels strongly that this process should take into consideration the ideas of not just one person or small group, but all participants, which something that Correa prefers to call “universitology.”

Technical University of Loja's Campus - Photo used under Creative Commons license by UTPL VIA Comunicaciones

The meeting scheduled to begin on November 25th has three components: The Congress Campus, the Latin American regional meeting of Creative Commons, and the iSummit 2009 and will take place while “respecting their identities at the same time,” said Correa. In addition, a BarCamp will follow the official events over the 3 days.

Creative Commons

The 2nd gathering of the Creative Commons representatives from Latin American will take place in Loja, which follows the previous one held year in Santiago, Chile (.pdf format). The UTPL has had a large role in bringing the use of Creative Commons licenses in Ecuador. Correa says, “We [UTPL] are the counterpart of the organization in Ecuador. We focus on ccLearn in order to promote open content in education and higher education, especially.”

iSummit

During this event, there will also be Loxa iSummit 09, which, according to Correa will be an “annual technology conference, the first in Loja and organized by the UTPL. It focuses on four areas: Software Architecture, Knowledge Management via a differentiated Semantic and Social Web, Advanced Networks, and IT Entrepreneurship called Technology Valley that the university has been supporting and is under the direction of Alvaro Castillo.” With the iSummit we seek to “establish a collaborative space, linking different views and approaches to the role of IT in higher education and business.”

BarCamp Loxa 09

“And to close the formal parts of the event, after Wednesday workshops and other events, comes Saturday's BarCamp Loxa 09, which is nothing but organized chaos, a cycle of “unconferences” on technology and other topics,” said Correa. The Barcamp Loxa 09 is eagerly awaited by the Ecuadorian blogger community and will feature musician Riccardo Perotti. There are also plans for an after-BarCamp, which will be a place to continue the celebration. The Barcamp has its own presence on Twitter with hashtag #barcamploxa09 and also a Faceboook group.

Correa concludes and reflects on Loja's role on promoting technology in the country and in the region:

It is said that the misuse of technology adds to the digital divide. That may be happening in the U.S. and Europe, and indeed in Latin America. But we want to change that, many have laid eyes here, during these three intense days. The small towns can also work closely with large cities, so Loja being a small city, not just the university, but people are betting on a democratization of participation, thereby achieving that technology does not accumulate just in the major poles of development.

The choir uses humor, which is reflected in their repertoire. They performed children's song “We are Macedonians” (Ние сме Mакедонци) [MKD] at the public holiday of the Day of the Macedonian Revolutionary Struggle, and had a performance in front of the Greek Liaison Office (a de facto Embassy of Greece) with the song “Dirlada” (Дирлада) [MKD] about summer love of a Macedonian boy and Greek girl who encounter difficulties due to visa restrictions.

On a grimmer note, the Singing Skopjans also sang “Kill me” (Убиј ме) by the local band Bernays Propaganda, which includes these lyrics:

Не сум како тебе,
немам иста боја,
омразата е твоја
…
Не сум како тебе
затоа у-б-и-ј м-е
убиј, убиј ме.

…in order to comment on the events of beating up student protesters on a Skopje square a few months ago.

The latest performance includes the Lumberjack Song by Monty Python, related to the cutting of the old threes on the Ilinden Boulevard, an act of Skopje's mayor which caused a lot of anguish and frustration [MKD] among ordinary citizens several months ago.

The word about this innovative commentary source has been spreading mainly through social media, especially through Facebook, and after a few weeks caught the attention of the traditional media: Dnevnik daily published an article about the choir [MKD].

As a business tycoon, Alaa Mubarak has always maintained a low profile. Last May, his 12-year-old son - Mohamed - died suddenly and Egyptians sympathized highly with the bereaved father, mother, grand mother, and grand father. Zeinobia covered the funeral saying:

President Mubarak did not attend the funeral … Alaa Mubarak was crying during the prayer and the funeral. It is hard for any father to be in this situation … Seriously I feel sad … I want to hint out that across the internet where the news was published the comments came to prove how great the Egyptian people are in these times.

Before the 14th of November Egypt-Algeria match there was a lot of tension for the encounter was to determine which of the two teams would qualify to next year's FIFA World Cup in South Africa. But instead of responding to the Egyptian-Algerian actor Ahmed Mekky's wake up call for unity, peace, and tolerance, Egypt's loss on November 18th in Sudan proved that it was much more than football!

The Mubarak brothers were in Sudan to cheer for the national team and, along with the rest of the Egyptian hooligans, they were assaulted by Algerian hooligans. Upon his return Gamal Mubarak was totally silent but Alaa Mubarak made two very angry live calls.

The first call was on Dream TV with Khaled Al Ghandour.

On this call, Zeinobia wrote:

We have reached the point of no return as Alaa Mubarak has opened his fire on the Algerian federation , the Algerian fans and the Algerian thugs in Sudan not to mention the Algerian press and the Algerian Ambassador. “The Algerian press attacked him and his brother unfairly if I may say , it is a normal thing that they would support their country’s national team for God Sake !!”
Speaking about Alaa himself , well he is more human and more simple than his pale brother. There is a huge difference. If you do not know who he is , you will think that he is normal Egyptian football angry fan.

His second call was on national TV (Al Beit Beitak). Once again Zeinobia said about his second strike:

It seems that Alaa Mubarak has a lot to say from that bloody night in Khartoum that left so shaken and so furious , last night he did it again and called a live night news show ; this time it was the official Al Beit Batik.

This time it was much long , he was ballistic and you have something interesting quotes more than the previous time with his famous line “ They were treating us as if we are Jews killing people in Gaza”

On Twitter, Sandmonkey and Pakinam Amer had questions:

On Facebook, the reactions varied from extreme sarcasm to extreme endorsement as status updates, fan pages, and groups were created overnight in support of the new national hero.

Spring wrote a cynical note about the elite that ended in:

The Arabist was furious at Alaa Mubarak's shamelessness and asks what about Egyptians?

Alaa Mubarak, denounces Algeria as a “country ruled by generals and pashas!”

Mourad thinks it's all a political manouver

Nawara Negm wonders where this Alaa Mubarak came from:

Moftah quoted Alaa Mubarak's statement:

Kareem El Behiery of Egyworkers quoted political analysts saying:

And in another post Kareem El Behiery wrote:

Jack Shenker of Chatoyant Crumbs wrote:

Mubarak adds fuel to the fire as football riots spread
President vows to defend Egyptians abroad as violence spreads across Cairo and Algiers
Egyptian regime accused of whipping up nationalist fervour for political gain

Alaa Mubarak called live for the third time on TV and pulled the “I am a provoked Muslim” card

Alaa Mubarak with Amr Adib

Nawara Negm wants Alaa Mubarak to be arrested in the name of the Egyptian emergency law:

As they mention on their site:

We want to send you on a five-day, expenses paid trip to the South By Southwest Interactive 2010 festival. Tell us your story and you could be headed to Austin on us. Plus, we're giving away three Flip Mino video cameras and a bunch of sweet T-shirts.

It's simple to enter: just make a video. In 60 seconds or less, make a case for open video. Then upload it anywhere and tell us the URL. You can make any case you like, in any form you like.

It can be in any language, any form, and any topic related to open video issues, to be posted before January 31, 2010. All videos must be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or other applicable license. For ideas of what to make the video about, they have a page with a list of topics or issues you can check before making or posting the video. Don't forget to check the FAQ as well.
So what is South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. It is a series of events and conferences which take place in Austin, Texas:

SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer.

Some of the issues relevant to the contest are Art & Remix Culture and Fair Use; Citizen Journalism, Activism and Human rights; Collaborative video; Commons & Licensing; Device Freedom; Digital Divide; Education and video; Royalty-free Codecs; Media Consolidation; Net Neutrality; Privacy & Censorship and Universal Accessibility.
Some of the videos that have been uploaded already on the site are:

Be smart, support open video from Adi

As they mention on their site:

We want to send you on a five-day, expenses paid trip to the South By Southwest Interactive 2010 festival. Tell us your story and you could be headed to Austin on us. Plus, we're giving away three Flip Mino video cameras and a bunch of sweet T-shirts.

It's simple to enter: just make a video. In 60 seconds or less, make a case for open video. Then upload it anywhere and tell us the URL. You can make any case you like, in any form you like.

It can be in any language, any form, and any topic related to open video issues, to be posted before January 31, 2010. All videos must be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or other applicable license. For ideas of what to make the video about, they have a page with a list of topics or issues you can check before making or posting the video. Don't forget to check the FAQ as well.
So what is South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. It is a series of events and conferences which take place in Austin, Texas:

SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer.

Some of the issues relevant to the contest are Art & Remix Culture and Fair Use; Citizen Journalism, Activism and Human rights; Collaborative video; Commons & Licensing; Device Freedom; Digital Divide; Education and video; Royalty-free Codecs; Media Consolidation; Net Neutrality; Privacy & Censorship and Universal Accessibility.
Some of the videos that have been uploaded already on the site are:

Be smart, support open video from Adi

As they mention on their site:

We want to send you on a five-day, expenses paid trip to the South By Southwest Interactive 2010 festival. Tell us your story and you could be headed to Austin on us. Plus, we're giving away three Flip Mino video cameras and a bunch of sweet T-shirts.

It's simple to enter: just make a video. In 60 seconds or less, make a case for open video. Then upload it anywhere and tell us the URL. You can make any case you like, in any form you like.

It can be in any language, any form, and any topic related to open video issues, to be posted before January 31, 2010. All videos must be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or other applicable license. For ideas of what to make the video about, they have a page with a list of topics or issues you can check before making or posting the video. Don't forget to check the FAQ as well.
So what is South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. It is a series of events and conferences which take place in Austin, Texas:

SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer.

Some of the issues relevant to the contest are Art & Remix Culture and Fair Use; Citizen Journalism, Activism and Human rights; Collaborative video; Commons & Licensing; Device Freedom; Digital Divide; Education and video; Royalty-free Codecs; Media Consolidation; Net Neutrality; Privacy & Censorship and Universal Accessibility.
Some of the videos that have been uploaded already on the site are:

Be smart, support open video from Adi

This past week at the Brazilian Digital Culture Forum [pt] I had a chance to meet up with Diego Casaes, a dedicated Global Voices author and translator from Salvador, Brazil. Much of Diego's writing on Global Voices has spread awareness about legislative threats to online freedom in Brazil, such as the infamous “Azeredo Bill“. He has also profiled cyber-activists like João Carlos Caribé and Daniel Pádua (who just lost his life to cancer) and their attempts to protect the individual freedoms and social bonds enabled by the Internet.

Diego will soon be headed to Copenhagen to report on the United Nations Climate Change Conference from December 7 - 18. He was invited to cover the conference as a winner of the Think About It blogging competition, where you can read all of his posts related to climate change in Brazil.

Transcript:

I'm Diego Casaes. I'm from Brazil. I live in Salvador in the northeastern part of Brazil. I am the coordinator of the Portuguese translation team and a voluntary author for Global Voices Online.

David: And how did you get started in Global Voices?

Diego: I got started in Global Voices when I met Paula on Twitter. She invited me to write. It was about the flooding in Brazil. And it was in May, 2009, this year. So it has been seven months.

David: What are some of the other topics that you write about on Global Voices?

Diegp: I mostly write about freedom of speech and cyberactivism. A couple of times it was about the environment. Mostly about cyberactivism.

David: How do you see the Brazilian blogosphere as different from other blogospheres around the world?

Diego: Well, maybe because we are very passionate when we discuss things
so bloggers take this passion from daily life to their blogs. So they are very optimistic and discuss really loudly with each other. They scream on Twitter. In many blogs you can see many comments … like flaming comments. People with passion. Actually, it's interesting to see how the Brazilian blogosphere is quite different from others.

David: And why do you think that is? You think it's just … cultural?

Diego: Maybe. Because I was talking to a friend from Kazakhstan and he says that the blogosphere in Kazakhstan is not very active. They have lots of blog posts, but not lots of comments. In Brazil it is very different. We see lots of comments in the blog posts. People really discuss things.

David: So what are some of the things that Brazilian bloggers are discussing these days?

Diego: These days, especially in 2009, they are very addicted to discussing about cyber-activism. Because we have lots of bills that want to take away our freedom on the internet. So, in this event where we are here now, lots of blogs from cyber-activism and freedom of speech are discussing all of this.

David: What do you write about on your personal blogs?

Diego: Well, some of my points of view on many subjects of communication, freedom of speech. But I also have a blog about Japanese culture because I listen to Japanese music and I watch many Japanese animations. So I mostly write about that. It's nice actually because nobody thinks you would write about that. I'm not very Japanese. I don't look Japanese, but I just love it.

David: You're going to Copenhagen, right? For a conference on climate change. How did that all come about?

Diego: Well, actually I got a message from my Global Voices reader profile asking me to go to Copenhagen to participate in the Think About It competition, a European blogging competition. I went to Copenhagen in December and we were at the launch event where we learned about what we were going to blog about on climate change. Now, last week, we got the news - me and two other guys - that we were selected to represent the European Journalism Centre in the COP15. From 92 bloggers only three of us.

David: Solana from Global Voices asks, “what are you going to do in Copenhagen with your blogging award?”

Diego: Well, I hope to bring bloggers' and journalists' views on the COP15. And maybe meet some world leaders and try to ask them if they really want to see the planet die. And try to bring citizen media into the discussion because there are plenty of journalists who are going to COP15 but I think this is the only actual event where many bloggers are going to a big even like this. So, it's quite different. And I hope to do a good job reporting on climate change.

David: Sylwia Presley asks, “How has working for Global Voices changed your life?”

Diego: Since I am Brazilian I am very passionate about many things and I think that Global Voices is part of us because we learn from it and we bring some of these themes that we're discussing on Global Voices to our daily life and discuss them with friends.

Sometimes I bring topics like wars in distances places like Africa
or people dying of hunger in Kazakhstan. I think Global Voices made me more aware that we are in a world and that there are other people in this life; not only our close friends.

David: This question comes from Ethan: “Where can I learn more about Technobrega music?”

Diego: I saw his question on Twitter and I was quite scared because I don't listen to technobrega. But I did some research and there is this website called bregapop.com and they gather many style of brega music
including technobrega and it is interesting because in the bands' profiles they had the Orkut profile telephone numbers. So if you want to contact them you can just go to this community and find many artists from Belém do Pará, which is the place where the technobrega emerged from.

They also embedded many YouTube videos of technobrega in this community so it's quite fun actually. It is interesting how they use citizen media
and other web 2.0 resources on this website.

David: What would you like to see for the future of Global Voices in the next five years?

Diego: For the future of Global Voices I think we are going to create much more content on the Lingua sites and I think that we'll establish a very well-known community. We'll get famous I think. Many more people will want to contribute to Global Voices. At this event where we are right now, many people came to me asking, “how can we contribute to Global Voices?” So I think that the community will grow.

On Nov. 3, I noticed that a new Twitter account was following me on that microblogging site, and its name intrigued me: @czyIKEAjestOK [is IKEA OK?]. It turns out that the account set up only a day before, on Nov. 2, belongs to an initiative of Polish citizens who work for IKEA via another, smaller, company called Solid Security, and who claim to be mistreated by those. They claim to be earning amounts below the national minimal wage, being assigned to work up to 16 hours daily and lacking the basic benefits, as we read on their Facebook page [POL]:

Our employers lower our wages, but also make us sign fictional contracts depriving us of the basic rights like annual leave or sick leave benefits.

When representatives of the employees entered IKEA building to turn in a copy of their petition containing the above-mentioned issues and signed by all of the affected, hoping to be able to talk to an IKEA spokesman, they were asked to leave the building by the head of security himself. This situation was filmed and is available on all of their social media sites.

The initiative's blog explains the main question they are raising via the on-line campaign [POL]:

We work for IKEA, but officially we are employed by another company. We earn low wages, we have no social fund. Buying medicine, illness is a financial catastrophe for us. IKEA washed their hands off it - officially they are not responsible. Is this OK?

It also hosts a voting where you can choose between ‘I am not bothered' and ‘ I think it's not OK' options.

‘And you, what do you think? Do you think IKEA is OK? Have your say:

I am not bothered. / It's not OK.'

On their site, in the FAQ section, we find a reason why the citizens have decided to contact IKEA directly to address their issues [POL]:

Of course we wanted to talk to Solid Security, the company which employed us, first, but we were ignored. Solid are aware of their position and the advantage they have over their employees, so any conversation is very difficult. That's why we decided to seek support at the company that pays Solid and thus can have a huge impact on their operations.

This initiative was picked up by a few on-line news portals, and was described by Interaktywnie.com (a Polish social media marketing portal) in a news article, where commentators praised the neat build-up of the on-line campaign. Generally, however, there is a small amount of reactions on-line, which focus mainly on questioning why IKEA was targeted instead of Solid Security, pointing out that no-one is forced to work there, and waiting to see how the initiative develops.

On a portal dedicated to the industry news, Abenador states [POL]:

I have no idea if IKEA is OK or not, but when it comes to work conditions at SOLID, their employees should talk to … SOLID. Including IKEA in this argument is probably unnecessary and makes no sense (they are not the employers).

Aaa2 responds to this on a different forum [POL]:

Of course the employees did go to SOLID, too. IKEA is one of the largest clients of Solid and it is also said to be socially responsible. It cannot avoid the responsibility for employees working on their grounds, if it is so sensitive socially.

Dink points out in a board discussion:

work at IKEA is not mandatory

On Wykop (a Polish version of Digg.com), crea says [POL]:

I must say it's not a good situation…but it's a corporation, so it will be difficult to win with them..

Przemek postshis opinion on an HR portal:

As I understand, Mr Roman and his company do understand the amount of brand damage they are causing… But it's not the scale of brand damage which requires serious treatment of similar cases. I will watch with interest how this case develops, mainly in the social media.

This action conduced mainly via social media channels with usage of both visual and textual content grows in followers on Twitter, Facebook and in views on YouTube, as well as in numbers of votes on the main site. Representatives of Global Union from Sweden, USA, Italy, Ireland, Holland and other countries have expressed their concerns about the case of the Polish employees in a document published on Facebook. After four weeks since the original incident, both companies remain silent.

Daniel Pádua was a well-known digital activist in Brazil. Photo brought by Cátia Kitahara in Wordpress-BR.

Brazil lost today one of its pioneers digital activists. Daniel Pádua [pt] (also known as @dpadua on Twitter) had been recently diagnosed with cancer and lost the battle this morning, in Brasília. Always present in open source software and free culture events in Brazil, he was a strong reference for many bloggers in posts about ciberactivism and freedom of speech on the Internet.

On the Wordpress-Br blog, Cátia Kitahara wrote [pt]:

Hoje perdemos um amigo queridíssimo, aqui da comunidade, o Daniel Pádua. Sentiremos muito sua falta, não só pelo grande talento e inteligência que ele possuia, mas principalmente pelo seu caráter. Queremos manifestar nosso carinho para sua família e amigos.

As the news spreads all over the web, Twitter users who known his work and commitment are honoring him and saying a last goodbye:

This is Global Voices tribute to Daniel Pádua. Rest in peace.

Town of Kraskovo coat of arms (from the official site)

Russian activists gathered in Kraskovo, a small town near Moscow, to call for increasing broadband Internet access and protest against Internet provider monopoly. The activists also talked about superficial regulations that slow down the development of wide Internet access in the country.

The story goes back to the beginning of 2008 when an Internet service provider (ISP) “CDMS, Ltd” ( “Creative Direct Marketing Solutions”) announced its plans to offer broadband Internet access to the residents of Kraskovo. Russian laws require an ISP to obtain a permission from municipal authorities before offering its services in any town. An ISP also has to get an approval of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and install a hardware that would potentially allow to sniff the Internet traffic.

With 10 years of experience in business, the CDMS got used to all sorts of bureaucratic hurdles. The vice-president of the company Vladimir Korvatsky (lj-user korvatsky [RUS]) writes on his blog that minor problems with local authorities are nothing new but Kraskovo case is different.

According to a Russian newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets [RUS], when the CDMS applied for a permission to install Ethernet-network in Kraskovo, Mikhail Chuiko, a newly elected mayor, sent the application back with a note that the process should be coordinated with the FSB “to ensure protection against terrorists.” When the FSB finally authorized the application, the mayor requested another approval from the security service. This time he wanted the FSB to investigate the company.

This shouldn't surprise anyone in Russia. Government officials usually come up with many excuses to delay the approval process so they can make businesses pay a bribe to speed it up. But, unlike in many similar cases, the Kraskovo authorities did not want any bribes from the CDMS. They stopped all contacts with the company representatives and showed that they did not want the CDMS to enter local ISP market.

Kraskovo currently has two ISPs offering a broadband access: netts.ru and avk-wellcom.ru. Korvatsky states [RUS] that his and other companies are not allowed into the town because of strong ties and commercial interests uniting local ISPs and the town authorities.

Vladimir Korvatsky and the youth organization “Our Yard” organized a protest against the status quo with ISPs in the town:

The Moscow Region Anti-monopoly Service recently issued a statement [RUS] declaring that the Kraskovo authorities violate anti-monopoly law.

This case is far from being unique. There are thousands of small Russian towns where people don't have a luxury of the broadband services. Very often geographical isolation and the lack of initiative are just excuses for widespread corruption of local administrations in those towns. The example of Kraskovo shows how ISPs try to overcome those issues by taking public actions. At the same time, it gives an additional reason for local authorities to accuse the ISPs of astroturfing.

Town of Kraskovo coat of arms (from the official site)

Russian activists gathered in Kraskovo, a small town near Moscow, to call for increasing broadband Internet access and protest against Internet provider monopoly. The activists also talked about superficial regulations that slow down the development of wide Internet access in the country.

The story goes back to the beginning of 2008 when an Internet service provider (ISP) “CDMS, Ltd” ( “Creative Direct Marketing Solutions”) announced its plans to offer broadband Internet access to the residents of Kraskovo. Russian laws require an ISP to obtain a permission from municipal authorities before offering its services in any town. An ISP also has to get an approval of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and install a hardware that would potentially allow to sniff the Internet traffic.

With 10 years of experience in business, the CDMS got used to all sorts of bureaucratic hurdles. The vice-president of the company Vladimir Korvatsky (lj-user korvatsky [RUS]) writes on his blog that minor problems with local authorities are nothing new but Kraskovo case is different.

According to a Russian newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets [RUS], when the CDMS applied for a permission to install Ethernet-network in Kraskovo, Mikhail Chuiko, a newly elected mayor, sent the application back with a note that the process should be coordinated with the FSB “to ensure protection against terrorists.” When the FSB finally authorized the application, the mayor requested another approval from the security service. This time he wanted the FSB to investigate the company.

This shouldn't surprise anyone in Russia. Government officials usually come up with many excuses to delay the approval process so they can make businesses pay a bribe to speed it up. But, unlike in many similar cases, the Kraskovo authorities did not want any bribes from the CDMS. They stopped all contacts with the company representatives and showed that they did not want the CDMS to enter local ISP market.

Kraskovo currently has two ISPs offering a broadband access: netts.ru and avk-wellcom.ru. Korvatsky states [RUS] that his and other companies are not allowed into the town because of strong ties and commercial interests uniting local ISPs and the town authorities.

Vladimir Korvatsky and the youth organization “Our Yard” organized a protest against the status quo with ISPs in the town:

The Moscow Region Anti-monopoly Service recently issued a statement [RUS] declaring that the Kraskovo authorities violate anti-monopoly law.

This case is far from being unique. There are thousands of small Russian towns where people don't have a luxury of the broadband services. Very often geographical isolation and the lack of initiative are just excuses for widespread corruption of local administrations in those towns. The example of Kraskovo shows how ISPs try to overcome those issues by taking public actions. At the same time, it gives an additional reason for local authorities to accuse the ISPs of astroturfing.

An interesting offshoot of my investigation in to Fair Mobile statistics was the discovery that some African operators charge an interconnect fee for SMS messages. Now interconnect fees are a topic of hot debate at the moment here in South Africa. Interconnection Fees are the charges that operators levy to terminate calls from other operators on their network. Regulators typically intervene on interconnect fees when they appear to be out of step with the actual costs of interconnection. Of course the “actual” cost of interconnection is a subject of much debate because it represents both a cost and a source of revenue for operators, the details of which are rarely revealed to anyone by the operators. Thus they are the subject of much speculation.

Less speculative is the cost to the operator of sending an SMS. I have written previously on the egregiously high cost of sending SMSes in Africa. However, to add insult to injury, in at least 17 African countries, operators charge an interconnect fee for connecting with other operators nationally. In many cases they are doubling even tripling the cost of sending an SMS. The argument for levying an interconnect charge is based on the need of the operator to recover the costs of terminating a call or in this case an SMS on their network. But let’s face it, the incremental cost of terminating an SMS on an operator’s network is effectively zero or near enough to zero to as to make no difference. In many countries, including South Africa, there are no internal interconnect fees for text messages. So here is a list of the most egregious offenders:

Filip Stojanovski is a Global Voices author and translator based in Skopje, Macedonia. He is the Program Coordinator of Metamorphosis, a think tank which seeks the development of democracy and prosperity by promoting knowledge-based economy and information society. He has been blogging in both English and Macedonian since 2003 and has written a number of essays and research papers. His essay “Some Sources Of Bias In Reporting About Macedonia” is especially relevant to those interested in global perceptions of Macedonia.

You might be surprised to learn that the Japanese cherry blossom festival, Sakura, is celebrated in Macedonia's capital, Skopje. Among Filip's other blog posts: the use of new media in Macedonia's 2008 election, Facebook's removal of the personal profile of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and a recent boat accident on Lake Ohrid. His post about Greece's opposition to Macedonia's entry into NATO attracted nearly 100 long, passionate comments.

Transcript:

My name is Filip Stojanovski. I am living in Skopje, Macedonia. I contribute to Global Voices through articles usually about the Macedonian blogosphere, and I also translate some for the Macedonian version of Global Voices.

Blogs in Macedonia didn't really take off until 2004 - and especially 2005 - and as far as I know the first blog from Macedonia was founded in 2001 by a young woman called Ana Maria who is living in Poland, and then the real impulse for development of the Macedonian blogosphere came from the development of a local Macedonian-language platform called Blogerei - blog.com.mk - which also used other, offline media to promote it's functionality.

David: You told me that Global Voices is one of the key aspects in your strategy
for more e-content in Macedonia. Why is that?

Filip: Well, generally Macedonian media do not provide much content
about the situation abroad that is different from the few mainstream agencies
that are dominant on the world market. Because some of the Macedonian media are connected to say Reuters or AP through their networks of ownership. Generally we lack a lot of information which is provided by Global Voices - information by regular people about events which are not only sensationalist, but are also often
interesting for the Macedonian public because they refer to things happening which are similar to situations here, and are not covered by the media. So it is very important for us that we have the perspective of how various problems are solved and various issues are raised elsewhere which can also be replicated here. And also to share our experiences.

David: So when you translate content into Macedonian, how do you choose which content you translate?

Filip: Well, all of our translators have the latitude to choose what they will translate. Because we are all volunteers and there is no central authority delegating which article to be translated. So if somebody wants to translate an article about a topic, they do it on their own. So, for me, myself, I usually have been translating articles which are about topics that I find interesting. And which I feel need further exposure within the Macedonian public. Especially because sometimes there are parallels that can be drawn but are not exploited by the traditional media.

David: What have you learned during your time as a Global Voices author and translator?

Filip: In general, I've learned more about the diversity of various citizen journalists around the world. And also about the need for the further spreading of information because what we have now is an experience where there are more people out there with whom you can do good things together than you would suppose before. It is probably the most important thing - that there is the possibility to do more and better things in the future.

David: What do you hope to see as the future of Global Voices over the next five years?

Filip: Well, generally I hope to have a bigger influence and more influence which would be connected to maybe offline activities within various communities. Generally, the content of Global Voices I think is great and should continue in the same direction. Maybe to attract even more authors and even more translators. Because it is not only beneficial at a social level - promoting progressive changes around the world - but also beneficial at a personal level. I find it very interesting that my Global Voices profile has a higher Google ranking than most of the things that I've done over the last 10 years online. And I think that as more translators get more global in a way of trying to find customers worldwide and not just in their own little business circle then this would provide a good incentive to attract more volunteers who are professional and willing to contribute their time. But in general it would also be interesting and very beneficial to continue with Rising Voices-like initiatives that would empower more users in more diverse communities worldwide especially those with less opportunities.

Filip Stojanovski is a Global Voices author and translator based in Skopje, Macedonia. He is the Program Coordinator of Metamorphosis, a think tank which seeks the development of democracy and prosperity by promoting knowledge-based economy and information society. He has been blogging in both English and Macedonian since 2003 and has written a number of essays and research papers. His essay “Some Sources Of Bias In Reporting About Macedonia” is especially relevant to those interested in global perceptions of Macedonia.

You might be surprised to learn that the Japanese cherry blossom festival, Sakura, is celebrated in Macedonia's capital, Skopje. Among Filip's other blog posts: the use of new media in Macedonia's 2008 election, Facebook's removal of the personal profile of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and a recent boat accident on Lake Ohrid. His post about Greece's opposition to Macedonia's entry into NATO attracted nearly 100 long, passionate comments.

Transcript:

My name is Filip Stojanovski. I am living in Skopje, Macedonia. I contribute to Global Voices through articles usually about the Macedonian blogosphere, and I also translate some for the Macedonian version of Global Voices.

Blogs in Macedonia didn't really take off until 2004 - and especially 2005 - and as far as I know the first blog from Macedonia was founded in 2001 by a young woman called Ana Maria who is living in Poland, and then the real impulse for development of the Macedonian blogosphere came from the development of a local Macedonian-language platform called Blogerei - blog.com.mk - which also used other, offline media to promote it's functionality.

David: You told me that Global Voices is one of the key aspects in your strategy
for more e-content in Macedonia. Why is that?

Filip: Well, generally Macedonian media do not provide much content
about the situation abroad that is different from the few mainstream agencies
that are dominant on the world market. Because some of the Macedonian media are connected to say Reuters or AP through their networks of ownership. Generally we lack a lot of information which is provided by Global Voices - information by regular people about events which are not only sensationalist, but are also often
interesting for the Macedonian public because they refer to things happening which are similar to situations here, and are not covered by the media. So it is very important for us that we have the perspective of how various problems are solved and various issues are raised elsewhere which can also be replicated here. And also to share our experiences.

David: So when you translate content into Macedonian, how do you choose which content you translate?

Filip: Well, all of our translators have the latitude to choose what they will translate. Because we are all volunteers and there is no central authority delegating which article to be translated. So if somebody wants to translate an article about a topic, they do it on their own. So, for me, myself, I usually have been translating articles which are about topics that I find interesting. And which I feel need further exposure within the Macedonian public. Especially because sometimes there are parallels that can be drawn but are not exploited by the traditional media.

David: What have you learned during your time as a Global Voices author and translator?

Filip: In general, I've learned more about the diversity of various citizen journalists around the world. And also about the need for the further spreading of information because what we have now is an experience where there are more people out there with whom you can do good things together than you would suppose before. It is probably the most important thing - that there is the possibility to do more and better things in the future.

David: What do you hope to see as the future of Global Voices over the next five years?

Filip: Well, generally I hope to have a bigger influence and more influence which would be connected to maybe offline activities within various communities. Generally, the content of Global Voices I think is great and should continue in the same direction. Maybe to attract even more authors and even more translators. Because it is not only beneficial at a social level - promoting progressive changes around the world - but also beneficial at a personal level. I find it very interesting that my Global Voices profile has a higher Google ranking than most of the things that I've done over the last 10 years online. And I think that as more translators get more global in a way of trying to find customers worldwide and not just in their own little business circle then this would provide a good incentive to attract more volunteers who are professional and willing to contribute their time. But in general it would also be interesting and very beneficial to continue with Rising Voices-like initiatives that would empower more users in more diverse communities worldwide especially those with less opportunities.

Politics aside, however, in some of Russia's regions winter has been there since around mid-September. In Yakutia, for example: Russia's largest federal region, close to India in size, with a population of less than a million, though, home to the Northern Hemisphere's Pole of Cold, the land rich in natural resources, including diamonds, oil and gas.

On Sept. 15, Yakutsk-based journalist and blogger Bolot Bochkarev posted two Flickr slide shows of autumn in Yakutia - in Yakutsk and in Pokrovsk - on his blog, AskYakutia.com, and wrote this (ENG):

At my Flickr account I received a good question from an Australian user, tanetahi. In his comment to one of my first autumn pics he wrote:

Do people get depressed or complain much about the cold as you progress from summer to winter in Yakutsk, or is the severe climate just accepted as an inevitable part of life there?

My answer was “September and the early October are very depressive. No, we don’t complain about the upcoming cold. We just regret sunny summer days are over, and we have to prepare to the long winter.” That’s actually depressive. […]

One day later, Bolot was forced to update his autumn post:

[…] UPDATE: Sept 16, 2009, The first snowfall happened in southern Yakutia!!! That’s in Nerungri, Tommot, Aldan! It can mean one thing only.WINTER IS HERE!!! )))

In Yakutsk it is too chilly and muddy. I wish to have snow right now, because it would be warmer a little.

Some two months later, on Nov. 18, Bolot posted this note (ENG) on his Twitter page, @yakutia:

next week we gonna have the first -40c days in yakutsk. too early. hard to believe.

(-40 degrees Celsius is -40 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Earlier this month, Bolot re-posted photos of “Yakutsk in November” taken two years ago by photographer Björn Steinz. And there is also plenty of practical travel information on Bolot's blog, including a review of a Yakutsk hostel and a “description of the standard tour to the officially acknowledged coldest Siberian place” - Oymyakon - provided by “Semen Baishev, an Oymyakon-based travel enthusiast,” who “arranges all the travel program in the Pole of Cold for individual tourists and travel agencies’ groups.”

In addition to blogging at AskYakutia.com, Bolot runs YakutiaToday.com portal (ENG) (which includes, among many other things, an editor's blog), and contributes to ColdUnited.com, “an international online project […] dedicated to the cold and everything related to the cold.” At this latter venue, Bolot has recently shared his “Don’ts in Cold Weather” - and below are a few of them:

[…] 1. I don’t smoke outdoors, when the temp is below -20C. Breathing cold air is not good for my throat. Sorry, but I smoke. I am trying to cease smoking.

[…] 4. I don’t stay outdoors longer than 20-30 minutes, when it is cold, like -40C. Even in reindeer fur boots and super warm Arctic Canada Goose parka I will start feeling chill.

5. I don’t talk much by a cellphone outdoors either. I like expressing emotions and being heard (btw, when a mobile is frozen, the microphone and speakers work terrible, as low as it can be possible). If I do that, I can get cold. Again it is not good for my throat.

7. I don’t spare money on taxi at late night. I will pay 100-200 rubles for one ride rather than 14 rubles for the public transportation. Taxi brings me straight to home in a short span of time. In case with buses, it’s always a long waiting at bus stops, and unsafe… street hooligans, you know, tend to appear at nights. […]

Elsewhere in the Russian blogosphere, Yakutia has been recently featured on LJ user sergeydolya's blog (ranked #21 on Yandex Blogs portal). The blogger posted two photo reports (RUS), on Oct. 20 and 29: one from the diamond-mining town of Udachny (the name translates from Russian as “lucky”) and the other from a deer-hunting trip (which involved lots of waiting and looking around, some drinking, but no actual hunting, as the deer never showed up).

Finally, here is what Russian photographer Oleg Klimov wrote about turning ice into drinking water in Yakutia, in his Nov. 18 post (RUS), which includes three photos:

[photo]

Traditionally, the Yakuts use proper names for any significant natural phenomena. […] [The Lena River] is known as “Grandmother Lena” and has a status of a respected grandma, while the Russians have been traditionally referring to [the Volga River] simply as “mother Volga.”

Since the Yakuts live in the permafrost conditions, they are extracting water from frozen areas, too, and they are doing it today the same way they were doing it 200 years ago. Tap water is still a luxury here. The thing is, it is a very labor-consuming process to dig up water wells in permafrost and it is not profitable in the age of “black capitalism,” so water is produced from ice that's cut from the Lena River with a [Soviet-made Druzhba gasoline-powered saw] or with specialized sawing devices. One ton of ice costs 500 rubles [approx. $17]. A truck is capable of carrying some 3 tons [of ice], which is not enough to last the whole winter. Water produced from ice is valued nearly as much as mineral water, because, it is said, crystallization freezes off all possible types of bacteria and infection.

[photo]

In villages and outside Yakutsk, they begin to store this “mineral” water in autumn, when the ice is still not too thick. And it is being delivered like stacks of firewood along the banks of the lakes and tributaries of the Lena. You're walking down by the river and see: here's the ice that belongs to the family of the Ivanovs, and here's the Petrovs' ice, etc. The best ice comes from the running water. No one is stealing other people's ice. […] If you need water (drinking or for washing), head of the household takes a crowbar […], splits the thinner ice, carries it inside the house and places it into a special barrel, where ice slowly turns into water. If you spend a week living in such a house, it is possible to forget that it's the 21st century out there, but you also begin to feel as if you are part of the nature, which, actually, we still are. Even though not its best part…

[photo]

Wiadomości24.pl, a Polish citizen journalism portal, wrote (POL) that, according to the blogger, Fakt’s success on the Polish market was mostly achieved by violating journalism ethics.

Here is an excerpt from one of the first posts (POL) on BrukowiecStory:

I think that the creation of Fakt was the biggest hit on the free Polish media since [1989]. Before 2003, there was only Super Express, an easy, light and somehow nice tabloid. It had one advantage – they always were writing the truth. In the tabloid way, but one could still call it journalism. And the status quo remained until Fakt entered the market.

For the first time in the Polish media history we experienced a new term – creating the truth. “Nothing happens? Then create the events,” the editor-in-chief was supposed to shout to working journalists. […]

The blogger also states that he wants to register an association for people damaged by Fakt, and also that a mass lawsuit for mobbing is being planned. As of now, he has not yet published concrete information about breaking the law by the newspaper’s staff.

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?

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.

Beckii Cruel started to gain popularity at the end of this year thanks to some videos posted on YouTube where she appears dancing in her room, to the tune of anime songs, attracting the interest of inveterate fans of anime and manga.
After becoming a celebrity on the Internet as user xBextahx, she was invited to perform in Akihabara, the district in eastern Tokyo that is widely acknowledged as the symbol of the otaku culture [en].

bluecafe09k48 sums up Beckii's profile for us.

イギリス・マン島在住の美少女、１４歳ですね～。
マンガ「フルーツバスケット」を読んで以来、
日本のオタク文化に嵌ったのが３年前とのこと。
ベッキー・クルーエル自身が日本のアニメソングなどで踊っている動画を
ＹｏｕＴｕｂｅで公開したのが今年の３月くらいから。
「男女」がニコニコ動画に転載されたのが５月頃で、人気が爆発。

PV of Danjo (男女)

Beckii Cruel's popularity is certainly a Japanese phenomenon, as demonstrated by the fact that the only Wikipedia entry on her is in Japanese. However, the word of mouth has spread also among those foreigners who are passionate fans of Akihabara and the otaku culture in general.

GodLen, at Animevice. com, for example, comments with a bit of mock jealousy on the British idol's career.

Beckii Cruel, oh how I wish I were her, for she is the Cinderella story of the otaku world. This 14-year-old girl from England has won over the hearts of moe-loving otaku in Japan by posting videos of herself dancing to anime and Jpop songs on youtube. Yesterday she had the opportunity to dance in front of over 600 fans at the Enta Matsuri in Akihabara; amazing, and it all started with a youtube video. Now she has a DVD coming out in Japan (which you can pre-order now) that features her dancing her dance, and being overall moe.

Sankei News interview to Beckii Cruel at Akihabara Enta Festival

Beckii Cruel, who was recently chosen by candy and sweets maker Lotte to promote the Fit's Dance Contest together with other celebrities, performed live for the first time at Akihabara Enta Festival on October 25 [here are some pictures of the show].

First rumours showed up on microblogging platforms such as Blip.pl. One of the users - shunkiano - wrote this (POL) on Nov. 1 :

Am I wrong, or OdSiebie doesn't exist anymore?

Then it was that OdSiebie.com was being shut down, and final confirmations started to show up on blogs. Paolo wrote (POL):

[…] Free hosting portal OdSiebie.com is rumoured to have been shut down. We are getting reports that the police have arrested its owner and creator [Łukasz Ć.], and also confiscated 200 CDs [with illegal copyrighted material] and four hard drives. The police have also secured userlogs. […]

Users started to be scared because the police said that they also had access to user logs of OdSiebie.com, and another rumour emerged - this time that users might be arrested as well. On Blip.pl, user frk wrote (POL):

Owner of OdSiebie.com was arrested. Police have user logs. Let's be careful.

There was much reaction to these actions in the blogosphere and throughout the Internet in Poland. First of all, it led to a protest organised by other users, which was highly popular on Wykop.pl (a service similar to Digg):

And here's a comment (POL) from Piotr Vagla, a blogger who writes about legal issues and the Internet:

Creators of YouTube have never been arrested, but I've read that owner of OdSiebie.com has just been arrested by police. Łukasz Ć. gave public interviews, saying that his portal was cool, and was making plans for the future. He also stated that the whole affair around the Swedish [The Pirate Bay] site was only a result of them not cooperating with any anti-piracy group. I don't know whether he worked with such a group but it seems that if he did, it didn't help him much. […]

At this moment, it's not clear whether the police are going to make arrests of OdSiebie.com users, although some people say so. No one has been arrested yet.

First rumours showed up on microblogging platforms such as Blip.pl. One of the users - shunkiano - wrote this (POL) on Nov. 1 :

Am I wrong, or OdSiebie doesn't exist anymore?

Then it was that OdSiebie.com was being shut down, and final confirmations started to show up on blogs. Paolo wrote (POL):

[…] Free hosting portal OdSiebie.com is rumoured to have been shut down. We are getting reports that the police have arrested its owner and creator [Łukasz Ć.], and also confiscated 200 CDs [with illegal copyrighted material] and four hard drives. The police have also secured userlogs. […]

Users started to be scared because the police said that they also had access to user logs of OdSiebie.com, and another rumour emerged - this time that users might be arrested as well. On Blip.pl, user frk wrote (POL):

Owner of OdSiebie.com was arrested. Police have user logs. Let's be careful.

There was much reaction to these actions in the blogosphere and throughout the Internet in Poland. First of all, it led to a protest organised by other users, which was highly popular on Wykop.pl (a service similar to Digg):

And here's a comment (POL) from Piotr Vagla, a blogger who writes about legal issues and the Internet:

Creators of YouTube have never been arrested, but I've read that owner of OdSiebie.com has just been arrested by police. Łukasz Ć. gave public interviews, saying that his portal was cool, and was making plans for the future. He also stated that the whole affair around the Swedish [The Pirate Bay] site was only a result of them not cooperating with any anti-piracy group. I don't know whether he worked with such a group but it seems that if he did, it didn't help him much. […]

At this moment, it's not clear whether the police are going to make arrests of OdSiebie.com users, although some people say so. No one has been arrested yet.

Yochai Benkler introduces Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute as his “intellectual hero” referencing his ability to apply a completely different set of intellectual tools to problems, switching tactics each decade. The target of Professor Bowles’s thought is “the weightless economy”, and his talk is titled, “Kudunomics – Property rights for the information-based economy”.

The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.

Bowles suggests that we may gain some insight about the evolution of institutions under these conditions by studying the reverse transition: by studying the transition from the late Plioscene forager economy, where weath was difficult to own, to agrarian and industrial economies, based on ownership. We can study this by “running history backwards” with an agent-based model of the weightless economy. We understand the forager economy fairly well due to ethnographic research, and we might gain insights about the governance of this emergent weightless economy from studying governance dynamics in forager economies.

Bowles offers a model of wealth where the wealth of a person is the sum of network wealth, embodied wealth and material wealth. He puts exponential weights on these types of wealth in a Cobb-Douglas production function. He plots different types of economies in a triangular graph, showing their wealth in terms of these three different dynamics – material, network and embodied wealth. Recent economies based on the domestication of plants and animals concentrate in the material corner, while older economies cluster around the network wealth – embodied wealth axis.

Network wealth is the contribution made by your social connections to your well-being. This could be measured by your number of connections, or by your centrality in different networks. A simple way to think about this is the number of people who will share food with you. Embodied wealth is a combination of what you know and how strong you are. It measures factors like hunting prowess and grip strength. Bowles asserts that we’re moving from a history where network and embodied wealth mattered more that material wealth – we briefly (for about eight thousand years) moved into a world of embodied wealth, and now we’re moving back.

Smith’s invisible hand theorem suggests that “good fences make good neighbors”. Smith’s complete markets have certain characteristics:

- The effects of the actions of economic actors take the form of contractual exchanges.
- The cost of contract enforcement is low and handled by a third party.
- Increasing returns to scale are absent and small. This is important because it maintains competition.

Under these assumptions, goods will be priced at their marginal cost, which will equal their true scarcity. Price moves towards marginal cost, which also equals social marginal cost. This isn’t just false in a weighless economy, Bowles tells us – it’s proveably false.

In economies of grain and steel, you could weigh, fence and contract. To find examples of these classic Adam Smith markets, you actually need to go to the developing world and look at grain markets, in which homogenous goods are traded in competition by using simple forms of measurability, weighing grains out in tin cans.

These markets aren’t a good analogy for contemporary economies. Instead, we’re more likely to see economies where first copy costs are extremely high and marginal costs are low. The first copy of Windows 97 cost $50 million. The second copy cost $3… and it can be copied for even less. Generic drugs sell for about half the price of brand name drugs. For some drugs, the ratio is closer to 10 to 1. When copying costs are low, enforcement of property rights is difficult… and ultimately irrational. Intellectual property rights are a way of forcing a violation of the invisible hand theorem. You allow someone to charge $20 for a CD whose marginal cost is $0.85.

The market structure of the economy of grain and steel exhibited a mixture of competition – approximating Smith’s ideal – and stable oligopoly: the emergence of a small set of succesful, competing firms. Network externalities – the economies of scale on the side of demand – tend to lead towards a winner take all dynamic. Take the decisions inherent in deciding to speak a second language – if lots of other people learn how to speak Chinese, there’s a strong incentive for you to learn Chinese.

In the weighless economy, positive feedbacks and winner-take-all dynamics are very important. Those who get ahead will tend to stay ahead. They don’t need to be the best, just first and good enough. This dynamic tends to generate significant inequality – whether we’re considering pop stars or dentists. Private firms can’t confirm to the price equals marginal cost theory – marginal costs are much less than average costs because of the increased first copy costs. And property rights become both ambiguous and difficult to enforce.

In other words, the invisible hand isn’t working in a weightless economy. It might be time to look back to the Pleistocene.

Bowles has hunted with the Hadza people in Tanzania – he reassures us that he didn’t actually kill anything. Actually, that’s pretty common. The Hadza hunt kudu, an animal which contains about 160,000 calories. These people have no refrigeration, so it’s hard to eat your kudu over a month. And even very good hunters are lucky to kill a kudu once a month – there’s about a 3% success rate for a hunt. So when you get a kudzu, it needs to be widely shared. Something like 2/3rd of the calories are shared outside the nuclear family – Bowles watched roughly 60 people join a small set of hunters for a feast on the kudu they harvested.

The culture of the foraging band emphasizes generosity and modesty. There are norms of sharing. You depricate what you catch, describing it as “not as big as a mouse”, or “not even worth cooking”, even when you’ve killed a large animal. In the Ache people of Eastern Paraguay, hunters are prohibited from eating their own catch. There’s complex sanctioning of individually assertive behavior, particularly those that disturb or disrupt cooperation and group stability. This makes sense – if hunters can’t expect that they’ll be fed by other hunters – particularly by a hunter who suddenly develops a taste for eating his own catch – the society collapses rapidly.

Mobile foraging bands and accompanying collectivist and egalitarian norms were displaced by a society based around property rights, made possible through the domestication of crops and livestock. Initially, this domestication probably reduced individual human productivity… but it increased land productivity. This led to an idea that you should define a set of resource as yours and invest in those resources. This idea preceded states – they were enforced by interpersonal conflict, not by third parties – but the system became more efficient in a system with strong state actors.

As Smith speculated in “The Wealth of Nations”, the property rights revolution contributed to the wealth of states. It emphasized unambiguous ownership of land and resources. But now the most important resources – information and ideas – are difficult to own, risky to pursue, and wasteful if not shared. Strong property rights might not be the best strategy for allocating resources in this environment.

Bowles references Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”, where Diamond explores the challenges of domesticating individual plant and animal species. “Is a song or an application more like a cow or like a kudzu – something that will simply cause trouble if you try to tie it up near your house?” This question leads to the phrase “kudunomics”, which has a nice resonance with “kudonomics”, reflecting the fact that the economies of hunter-gatherer societies were reputation economies.

Information, suggests Kenneth Arrow, is a fugitive resource. There are contradictions between private property and information acquisition and retention. In this sense, Arrow is replicating Marx, and his recognition that “information was what allowed us to appropriate nature.”

Studying changes in institutions is hard. In history, we rarely encounter changes as large as the French revolution or the end of Chinese foot binding. Instead, we’d do better to build agent-based simulations. Bowles and his group at Santa Fe are building Markov process models to try to understand the dynamics of this hunter/gatherer-pastoralist transition. It’s a hard problem to solve as a system of equations. There are events outside the model, and a complex interaction of group and individual selection processes. The feedback of a society on individual decisions is non-lineral. Because we can’t easily solve the equations, we build models and watch them instead.

Watching these models, we discover that they’ve got multiple equilibria. In economic terms, what’s goint on is an equilibrium selection process, watching societies transition between multiple equilibria in a system.

Bowles’s model (which you can download and run on a Window machine) looks at three different strategies for coping in an economy:

- Bourgeois – if you’re in posession of an item, defend it
- Share – Share and don’t punish those who don’t share
- Civic – share and jointly punish those who don’t share

The civic strategy succeeds if there are lots of civic members in a group. If there are very few, they tend to fail. This is one of the dynamics which leads to multiple equilibria in a system. The bourgeois strategy is stable (an asymptotically stable symmetric Nash equilibrium) if property rights are well defined. But if property rights are ill-defined, the bourgeois stragegy is no longer evolutionarily stable.

The simulation introduces costs for conflicts between “firms”, groups of individuals which share a strategy. Because there’s a cost to conflict, firms that resolve conflicts without much expenditure of energy are going to outlast those that spend resources on conflict. Individuals within these firms are paired with cultural models drawn from a group of possibilities, conveye by “conformist transmission”. Individuals might simply draw from neighbors, or might compare how others are doing and change strategy. Losing groups are not eliminated – instead, they lose resources and tend to adopt the cultural model of the winning group. Individuals who are in losing firms will have a strong tendency to adopt the strategy of winning firms.

In these simulations, some fraction of the time, a bourgeois player will challenge someone over a resource he doesn’t own – i.e., he’ll attempt to steal it. Because of this, if there are very few bourgeois, civics will do well, and vice versa.

It turns out that simulations where all actors are bourgeois are stable. The two strategies where sharing is involved are equivalent if there are no bourgeois actors. A smiluation might drift between sharing and civic strategies without outside influences. As a result, All C (civic) is not a stable equilibrium – it’s subject to drift. And all B (bourgeois) is not stable if property rights are not well defined.

With Jung-Kyoo Choi, Bowles built models with 25 firms of 20 individuals. They were randomly seeded with S,B,C actors and run with different levels of property rights. The property rights are varied by changing how often bourgeois actors challenge ownership incorrectly – to simulate high ambiguity in property rights, bourgeois actors challenge property rights incorrectly quite often. Actors in the simulation go through a cultural learning process – someone in a minority could choose a model in the majority.

If you run the simulation with no ambiguity in property rights, there is rapid consolidation around B as a strategy. We watch a live simulation, and Bowles points out that “the ‘equilibrium’ is actually pretty volatile – we watch societies cluster around b-heavy strategies. As ambiguity increases, we see an emergence of strategies that orbit between the civic and shared poles – societies appear to go through rapid revolutions, shifting from one set of societal rules to another. An all-shared equilibrium is more efficient because there’s no cost for enforcement, but it’s not a stable state, as previously discussed.

Bowles points out that the evolutionary success of the bourgeois equilibrium depends on property rights being unambiguous – he shows a curve of experimental data where stability tracks ambiguity in a cubic relationship.

As we consider evolution of institutions in the weightless economy, we know of at least three forms of economic governance: communities, states and markets. Markets allocate resources well in conditions where the individual hand applies. States have superior powers of enforcement, which allow for powerful civic strategies. And as Elinor Ostrom has pointed out, communities can handle ambiguity of property rights, but tend to fail where inequalities between members are large.

Hayek’s work questioned the efficiency of central planning versus that of the market. At the center of that question is information – in societies where information is easily available, central planning might be very efficient. If it’s harder to acquire information, markets can act to aggregate that information. To govern in these systems, you can either adjust prices to get an equilibrium or collect sufficient information to engage in efficient central planning. Ostrom suggests that we need different mechanisms to govern by communities.

Bowles closes by reminding us that societies need to support high levels of information creation. We need incentives to provide these resources in the first place. But there’s a paradox: Why do hunters hunt if they have to give it away? In the Ache society, hunters aren’t allowed any of what they catch – they could spend their hunting time harvesting fruit and tubers. Why don’t they? This question has important implications for the creation of information resources in a weightless economy.

David Weinberger has a good accounting of the questions and answers that followed Professor Bowles’s talk – I largely missed the Q&A, desperately trying to catch up with the substance of the talk!

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) should be used to support and encourage cultural diversity and to preserve and promote the language, distinct identities and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples, nations and tribes in a manner which they determine best advances these goals. The evolution of the information and communication societies must be founded on the respect and promotion of the rights of Indigenous peoples, nations and tribes and our distinctive and diverse cultures, as outlined in international conventions. We have fundamental and collective rights to protect, preserve and strengthen our own languages, cultures and identities.

But can ICT truly preserve and protect distinct identities and culture? Does ICT by its very intervention introduce an element of westernization amidst the indigenous culture that it purports to preserve and protect? What is the optimum balance between preserving traditional knowledge and embracing remix culture? The cultural debate surrounding deployment of ICT in the field of indigenous/ knowledge and culture simply refuses to die down.

According to Mark Oppenneer, “the implementation of ICTs in service to indigenous peoples in development settings is a double-edged sword”, as both the critics and proponents of ICT4D have seemingly irreconcilable perspectives.

Questioning the cultural neutrality of the ICT medium, Charles Ess, in his paper “Questioning the Obvious? Ethical and Cultural Dimensions of CMC and ICTs” states that

[..]. Far from serving as value-free or morally-neutral tools, CMC (Computer mediated Communication) technologies themselves appear to embed and foster the cultural values and communicative preferences of their Western designers. As a first example: South Africa has attempted to establish Learning Centres intended to empower indigenous peoples by helping them take advantage of the multiple potentials and capacities of ICTs. A series of observers have noted, however, that these Centres repeatedly fail – in part, because of basic cultural conflicts. Briefly, the Centres reflect their designer’s Western emphasis on individual and silent learning – in contrast with indigenous preferences for learning in collaborative and often noisy, performative ways (Postma 2001). This conflict is also captured in Edward T. Hall’s distinction between high and low context cultures (1976). In this schema, contemporary societies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Germanic countries show a preference for literate (i.e., textual), high content (but low context) information transfer – while societies such as Arabic cultures, indigenous peoples, and many Asian cultures prefer instead more oral, low content (but high context) modes of communication.

[…] Similarly, Western Group Support Systems (GSS) that favor anonymity as a feature intended to encourage open and direct communication proved disastrous in the Confucian cultures of South Asia, as this indeed succeeded in encouraging subordinates to make comments that were culturally interpreted – and condemned – as attacks on one’s “face” (Abdat and Pervan 2000). These and multiple other examples make clear that CMC technologies carry and further a specific set of cultural values and communicative preferences - ones that, far from being universally shared, are indeed limited to specific cultural domains.

Secondly, because these technologies thus clearly embed and foster specific cultural values and communicative preferences - the initial enthusiasm for these technologies inadvertently but powerfully only aids and abets a form of “computer-mediated colonization” that threatens to override diverse cultural values and communicative preferences with those defining the dominant economic and political powers of the West.

While Ess, worried about the medium defeating the intended purpose of preservation, calls for a more culturally-aware framework, others have pointed out that such concerns are not entirely correct.

In response to a query by David Sasaki, director of Global Voices' Rising Voices section, as to whether or not helping under-represented communities join the online global conversation inevitably leads to their westernization/Americanization, Álvaro Ramírez and Diego Gomez, co-founders of the HiperBarrio project, spoke of the community adapting Western culture to their own needs, infusion of new knowledge and broadening horizons.

Citing the example of hip-hop music, Alvaro pointed out that for the community, while there was definitely some US influence, the issue was not so much Americanization as adapting something western to their own needs. So it was not only about getting influenced but exerting influence as well, giving birth to something new, new knowledge or culture. Diego noted that the project had also opened up other doors of communication beyond westernization.

I think that in this project especially they have been influenced not just by Americans they now begin to think about India, Dubai, and other cultures that they didn't know existed before. Or they didn't have much reference.

Projects such as the E-Bario project in Malaysia, Community project of the indigenous Ngalia and Badimaya people of Western Australia, the Alan - Gluban project in Taiwan are a few cases in point.

In the final analysis, as Mark Oppenneer points out

…the critics are right: misguided ICT4D implementation that doesn’t take into consideration a wide range of cultural factors and explicitly or implicitly imposes Western processes or structures upon indigenous recipients does constitute a new form of computer-mediated colonialism. And yes, the proponents of ICT4D are right: ICTs, when implemented thoughtfully and respectfully – keeping the needs of the recipients at the fore – can be powerful agents of change in the fight to reduce poverty and improve the lives of marginalized peoples in developing nations.

In his 2008 presentation, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - The Role of ICTs, Jesse Fidler listed various possibilities for ICT to actively engage the indigenous communities and realize their visions.

And as far as preserving the pristine, isolated local culture is concerned, Professor Amartya Sen perhaps summed it up best in his talk at the 3rd IDRC/ Harvard Forum on the future of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) when he said that there is “no such thing as ‘unaided culture”, or ”culture that exists in isolation”.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) should be used to support and encourage cultural diversity and to preserve and promote the language, distinct identities and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples, nations and tribes in a manner which they determine best advances these goals. The evolution of the information and communication societies must be founded on the respect and promotion of the rights of Indigenous peoples, nations and tribes and our distinctive and diverse cultures, as outlined in international conventions. We have fundamental and collective rights to protect, preserve and strengthen our own languages, cultures and identities.

But can ICT truly preserve and protect distinct identities and culture? Does ICT by its very intervention introduce an element of westernization amidst the indigenous culture that it purports to preserve and protect? What is the optimum balance between preserving traditional knowledge and embracing remix culture? The cultural debate surrounding deployment of ICT in the field of indigenous/ knowledge and culture simply refuses to die down.

According to Mark Oppenneer, “the implementation of ICTs in service to indigenous peoples in development settings is a double-edged sword”, as both the critics and proponents of ICT4D have seemingly irreconcilable perspectives.

Questioning the cultural neutrality of the ICT medium, Charles Ess, in his paper “Questioning the Obvious? Ethical and Cultural Dimensions of CMC and ICTs” states that

[..]. Far from serving as value-free or morally-neutral tools, CMC (Computer mediated Communication) technologies themselves appear to embed and foster the cultural values and communicative preferences of their Western designers. As a first example: South Africa has attempted to establish Learning Centres intended to empower indigenous peoples by helping them take advantage of the multiple potentials and capacities of ICTs. A series of observers have noted, however, that these Centres repeatedly fail – in part, because of basic cultural conflicts. Briefly, the Centres reflect their designer’s Western emphasis on individual and silent learning – in contrast with indigenous preferences for learning in collaborative and often noisy, performative ways (Postma 2001). This conflict is also captured in Edward T. Hall’s distinction between high and low context cultures (1976). In this schema, contemporary societies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Germanic countries show a preference for literate (i.e., textual), high content (but low context) information transfer – while societies such as Arabic cultures, indigenous peoples, and many Asian cultures prefer instead more oral, low content (but high context) modes of communication.

[…] Similarly, Western Group Support Systems (GSS) that favor anonymity as a feature intended to encourage open and direct communication proved disastrous in the Confucian cultures of South Asia, as this indeed succeeded in encouraging subordinates to make comments that were culturally interpreted – and condemned – as attacks on one’s “face” (Abdat and Pervan 2000). These and multiple other examples make clear that CMC technologies carry and further a specific set of cultural values and communicative preferences - ones that, far from being universally shared, are indeed limited to specific cultural domains.

Secondly, because these technologies thus clearly embed and foster specific cultural values and communicative preferences - the initial enthusiasm for these technologies inadvertently but powerfully only aids and abets a form of “computer-mediated colonization” that threatens to override diverse cultural values and communicative preferences with those defining the dominant economic and political powers of the West.

While Ess, worried about the medium defeating the intended purpose of preservation, calls for a more culturally-aware framework, others have pointed out that such concerns are not entirely correct.

In response to a query by David Sasaki, director of Global Voices' Rising Voices section, as to whether or not helping under-represented communities join the online global conversation inevitably leads to their westernization/Americanization, Álvaro Ramírez and Diego Gomez, co-founders of the HiperBarrio project, spoke of the community adapting Western culture to their own needs, infusion of new knowledge and broadening horizons.

Citing the example of hip-hop music, Alvaro pointed out that for the community, while there was definitely some US influence, the issue was not so much Americanization as adapting something western to their own needs. So it was not only about getting influenced but exerting influence as well, giving birth to something new, new knowledge or culture. Diego noted that the project had also opened up other doors of communication beyond westernization.

I think that in this project especially they have been influenced not just by Americans they now begin to think about India, Dubai, and other cultures that they didn't know existed before. Or they didn't have much reference.

Projects such as the E-Bario project in Malaysia, Community project of the indigenous Ngalia and Badimaya people of Western Australia, the Alan - Gluban project in Taiwan are a few cases in point.

In the final analysis, as Mark Oppenneer points out

…the critics are right: misguided ICT4D implementation that doesn’t take into consideration a wide range of cultural factors and explicitly or implicitly imposes Western processes or structures upon indigenous recipients does constitute a new form of computer-mediated colonialism. And yes, the proponents of ICT4D are right: ICTs, when implemented thoughtfully and respectfully – keeping the needs of the recipients at the fore – can be powerful agents of change in the fight to reduce poverty and improve the lives of marginalized peoples in developing nations.

In his 2008 presentation, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - The Role of ICTs, Jesse Fidler listed various possibilities for ICT to actively engage the indigenous communities and realize their visions.

And as far as preserving the pristine, isolated local culture is concerned, Professor Amartya Sen perhaps summed it up best in his talk at the 3rd IDRC/ Harvard Forum on the future of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) when he said that there is “no such thing as ‘unaided culture”, or ”culture that exists in isolation”.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) should be used to support and encourage cultural diversity and to preserve and promote the language, distinct identities and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples, nations and tribes in a manner which they determine best advances these goals. The evolution of the information and communication societies must be founded on the respect and promotion of the rights of Indigenous peoples, nations and tribes and our distinctive and diverse cultures, as outlined in international conventions. We have fundamental and collective rights to protect, preserve and strengthen our own languages, cultures and identities.

But can ICT truly preserve and protect distinct identities and culture? Does ICT by its very intervention introduce an element of westernization amidst the indigenous culture that it purports to preserve and protect? What is the optimum balance between preserving traditional knowledge and embracing remix culture? The cultural debate surrounding deployment of ICT in the field of indigenous/ knowledge and culture simply refuses to die down.

According to Mark Oppenneer, “the implementation of ICTs in service to indigenous peoples in development settings is a double-edged sword”, as both the critics and proponents of ICT4D have seemingly irreconcilable perspectives.

Questioning the cultural neutrality of the ICT medium, Charles Ess, in his paper “Questioning the Obvious? Ethical and Cultural Dimensions of CMC and ICTs” states that

[..]. Far from serving as value-free or morally-neutral tools, CMC (Computer mediated Communication) technologies themselves appear to embed and foster the cultural values and communicative preferences of their Western designers. As a first example: South Africa has attempted to establish Learning Centres intended to empower indigenous peoples by helping them take advantage of the multiple potentials and capacities of ICTs. A series of observers have noted, however, that these Centres repeatedly fail – in part, because of basic cultural conflicts. Briefly, the Centres reflect their designer’s Western emphasis on individual and silent learning – in contrast with indigenous preferences for learning in collaborative and often noisy, performative ways (Postma 2001). This conflict is also captured in Edward T. Hall’s distinction between high and low context cultures (1976). In this schema, contemporary societies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Germanic countries show a preference for literate (i.e., textual), high content (but low context) information transfer – while societies such as Arabic cultures, indigenous peoples, and many Asian cultures prefer instead more oral, low content (but high context) modes of communication.

[…] Similarly, Western Group Support Systems (GSS) that favor anonymity as a feature intended to encourage open and direct communication proved disastrous in the Confucian cultures of South Asia, as this indeed succeeded in encouraging subordinates to make comments that were culturally interpreted – and condemned – as attacks on one’s “face” (Abdat and Pervan 2000). These and multiple other examples make clear that CMC technologies carry and further a specific set of cultural values and communicative preferences - ones that, far from being universally shared, are indeed limited to specific cultural domains.

Secondly, because these technologies thus clearly embed and foster specific cultural values and communicative preferences - the initial enthusiasm for these technologies inadvertently but powerfully only aids and abets a form of “computer-mediated colonization” that threatens to override diverse cultural values and communicative preferences with those defining the dominant economic and political powers of the West.

While Ess, worried about the medium defeating the intended purpose of preservation, calls for a more culturally-aware framework, others have pointed out that such concerns are not entirely correct.

In response to a query by David Sasaki, director of Global Voices' Rising Voices section, as to whether or not helping under-represented communities join the online global conversation inevitably leads to their westernization/Americanization, Álvaro Ramírez and Diego Gomez, co-founders of the HiperBarrio project, spoke of the community adapting Western culture to their own needs, infusion of new knowledge and broadening horizons.

Citing the example of hip-hop music, Alvaro pointed out that for the community, while there was definitely some US influence, the issue was not so much Americanization as adapting something western to their own needs. So it was not only about getting influenced but exerting influence as well, giving birth to something new, new knowledge or culture. Diego noted that the project had also opened up other doors of communication beyond westernization.

I think that in this project especially they have been influenced not just by Americans they now begin to think about India, Dubai, and other cultures that they didn't know existed before. Or they didn't have much reference.

Projects such as the E-Bario project in Malaysia, Community project of the indigenous Ngalia and Badimaya people of Western Australia, the Alan - Gluban project in Taiwan are a few cases in point.

In the final analysis, as Mark Oppenneer points out

…the critics are right: misguided ICT4D implementation that doesn’t take into consideration a wide range of cultural factors and explicitly or implicitly imposes Western processes or structures upon indigenous recipients does constitute a new form of computer-mediated colonialism. And yes, the proponents of ICT4D are right: ICTs, when implemented thoughtfully and respectfully – keeping the needs of the recipients at the fore – can be powerful agents of change in the fight to reduce poverty and improve the lives of marginalized peoples in developing nations.

In his 2008 presentation, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - The Role of ICTs, Jesse Fidler listed various possibilities for ICT to actively engage the indigenous communities and realize their visions.

And as far as preserving the pristine, isolated local culture is concerned, Professor Amartya Sen perhaps summed it up best in his talk at the 3rd IDRC/ Harvard Forum on the future of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) when he said that there is “no such thing as ‘unaided culture”, or ”culture that exists in isolation”.

Note: The post was translated in its entirety with permission from the blogger. All links were added by Tomomi Sasaki for reference.

You know how the online community is sometimes wowed with the emergence of services with new technologies and ideas like Google Maps, Google Earth, and YouTube? The one that I'm looking forward to the most is “Automatic Translation”.

Right now, if an English site comes up while you're searching (in Japanese), there's a little button that says [Translate this page]. Yes, the translation is still very underdeveloped. I'm not asking for it to be perfect, but wouldn't it be exciting if the translation was just “a little bit better” AND automatic?

‘Tower of Babel' by flickr user ThomasThomas (Tower of Babel By Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 16th century.)

It would be fantastic if whenever I did a search for something in Japanese, Google would retrieve results from all of the languages of the world. For example, a search for “鶏肉 トマト レシピ (chicken tomato recipe)” would retrieve chicken and tomato recipes from all over the world with all of the results being displayed in Japanese. Recipes from French Italian, Chinese, Arabic cuisine, originally written in that language would show up in Japanese on the Google results page.

Then, let's say there was a blog by an Italian farmer's wife with a post called “Family recipe for tomato chicken pasta”. And the translation might not be perfect but it would be readable and have photos so I could nod along as I read the post, and perhaps I could even try cooking that dish.

And then and then! If the pasta was really good, I might comment on her blog saying, “I'm Chikirin from Japan, nice to meet you! I REALLY loved your pasta recipe <3 !!!”. And she'd be able to read it in Italian. Remember, it'd just BE in Italian, since it was automatically translated for her.

I want to live in that world of automatic translation.

It would be so much fun. A search for “wife mother-in-law troubles” might let you learn how the problem manifests itself in other countries. Or a blog about erotic games (エロゲー eroge) might attract a comment from a faraway land like Honduras, saying “What's an EROGE?” Or if you searched for “pirates”, you might accidentally stumble upon an underground Somalian pirate recruitment site… hey, anything could happen!

Of course, negative comments would be translated as well. And everything would be open for rating. Wouldn't this be exciting? How about a site called “Negative comments around the world” Obviously, 2channel would receive a flood of comments from around the world.

What if there was a Chinese junior high school student asking “Who is higher ranked, Hu Jintao or Wen Jiabao?” on a Chinese Q&A site. And then people from all over the would say “You're Chinese and you don't know the answer?” or “Join the communist party!”.

An oblivious American might interrupt with “What? The president and premier aren't the same person?”. And a Bulgarian might chime in with “Where's China? I couldn't find it on Google Earth… is it this island?” and someone might reply with “Nah, that's Taiwan!” and the conversation would veer off. That's the kind of thing I want to read!

Low employment rates among young people is a common issue throughout the world, right? A search with those keywords might connect us with angry Lost Generation youth from other countries. And it would be interesting to learn how youth in different countries expressed their anger.

A Korean student studying in Japan might post on her blog, “On the train today, I saw a woman do her make up routine perfectly during her commute. Japan is so incrediblimnida!”

These days, only important or relevant information gets translated. What I'm looking forward to is a world where even the most trivial and useless information is translated and available to anyone!

TV stations and newspapers broadcast news about other countries but they only cover “important news”: earthquakes, floods, forest fires, or political news. Personally though, I'm much more interested in the kind of information that I've given examples above, more than any forest fire.

In every country, there must be blogs that most people don't care about. (Well, I can't be certain but it's probably the case!) I believe that if everyone, everywhere could read all of the trivial information that's out there, we would truly be able to live together in a more peaceful world.

While it may be paradoxical, “What is truly important is to translate the unimportant.” and a world where only so-called important information gets translated is a boring one.

When the legendary TED conference came down to India, Indian bloggers were understandably excited.

In the run up to TEDIndia, a few Indian bloggers got together to interview TEDIndia fellows and Geetha Krishnan put together a compilation of the TEDIndia fellow interviews.

During the conference, the TED blog fed the excitement by posting session-wise roundups (session 1, session 2, session 3, session 4, session 5, session 6, session 7, session 8, session 9) and reactions to the most popular talks (Hans Rosling, Devdutt Pattanaik, Tony Hsieh, Scott Cook, Pranav Mistry, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, Shukla Bose, Anil Gupta, Kavita Ramdas, Sunitha Krishnan, Sidi Goma, Ramachandra Budihal, Ananda Shankar Jayant, Kiran Sethi, Eve Ensler, His Holiness the Karmapa, Shashi Tharoor) and even did a roundup of reactions to the conference.

TED India participants at the venue. Image by Kiruba Shankar

Several bloggers wrote posts about how TED touched them in unexpected ways.

Rajiv Dingra was one of them –

In my last 3 years and more of blogging experience Ive attended over 50 events (atleast) and each of them have left me richer in knowledge or in insight. But none of them have ever moved me to tears or made me go in deep thought or made me proud to be Indian all in the matter of days. TEDIndia infact was more a reflection of what are the grave issues in India and the brilliance and the fallacy of India rather than being specific to Technology, Entertainment and Design.

Peter Elst summarized TEDIndia in ten quotes.

While the overall reaction to TEDIndia was overwhelmingly positive, several attendees were left a little underwhelmed.

TEDIndia fellow Amit Varma complained that TEDIndia catered to Western stereotypes of India –

There was much exotica, and much mysticism served up that says nothing at all about the country we are today. The average foreign attendee would have gone away with his stereotypes about India reinforced, not shattered. That’s an opportunity missed.

Awesome backdrop for a dance party. Image by Kiruba Shankar

Amit also shared an interesting sociological observation –

The pharmacy at the Infosys campus in Mysore does not sell condoms. I want you to think about that for a moment. This is a campus where thousands of young men and women stay and work together. The official Infosys position on this matter, thus, seems to be that either a) Infosys employees do not have sex or b) Infosys employees have sex, but it should not be safe sex. Isn’t this interesting?

Aditi Machado was surprised by TEDIndia's strong focus on India –

In retrospect the India-focus at TED was too strong. When TED is held in the UK or the US, does the conference become all about those countries and those countries’ contributions to the world? I don’t think so. The running theme at TEDIndia, beginning with the first talk by Hans Rosling, seemed to be: ‘India will become the next superpower. Oh, and China too. But we’re in India and India is a democracy and we hate Commies, so we like India better.’ I’m sure many Indians were flattered, and I’m as patriotic as the next person, but it was disturbing to see that almost every speaker, especially the non-Indians, felt obligated to give us a big pat on the back.

Manjeet Kripalani at Financial Express also complained about TEDIndia's uni-directional programming –

The title was promising: “TEDIndia: the Future Beckons”. On the Mysore campus, India’s future had already arrived. It did not reflect in the programming of TEDIndia. The idea of TED is unique. Brilliant new minds who expound their futuristic ideas in 18 minutes to a sophisticated celebrity audience, interspersed with entertainment, music and some socially responsible talk. This TED conference was more “Bono Saves the World” than either Technology or Entertainment or Design. No soft or hard power, but powerlessness.

TED India talks. Image by Kiruba Shankar

TED attendee Our Woman in Havana rounded off her series of posts about TEDIndia (day one, day two, day three, day four) by deciding that the real genius of TED lies in its ability to gather together people who are hugely talented and successful in a diverse range of fields –

Some of my best TED moments were little breaks when a randomly struck conversation brought nuggets of new thought –talking literature with A who worked in microfinance with the Acumen Fund and discovering our common heritage; discussing whether Urdu should be written in Hindi script in order to preserve the language in India with T; clashing head-on with J over Cuban politics at lunch; understanding from A why someone would want to put a boutique hotel in Ahmedabad; learning from B how designers can source organic materials; always always bumping into T and talking football, Punjabi and why lawyers are perceived as emptying rather than filling; dancing with a stranger; drinking coffee with an artist; discussing with C how to put Shashi Tharoor on the spot with a question about Indian state accountability over genocide. The genius in TED lay in those moments where nobody knew what would come next, and could then be blown away by what did come next. At times, those were the speakers, and often, those moments came in the all too brief meetings we had with people who already seem to have become friends.

For me, TEDIndia was about a rediscovery of the power of storytelling –

These stories reminded me that the most powerful stories we can tell about ourselves are, in fact, stories about other people. These stories reminded me that by telling stories about ideas that are bigger than us, we become bigger than ourselves. These stories reminded me that we are shaped by the stories we tell others, but even more so by the stories we tell ourselves.

TED India group photo - the crazy version. Image by Kiruba Shankar

The TEDIndia talks will soon be up on the TED website, so do look out for them.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

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.

The question is critical for my research, too. I’m interested in whether we’re more or less cosmopolitan in an internet age than we were in earlier media ages. One proxy for cosmopolitanism could be the ratio of domestic to international news sites that are popular in a given country – we might consider a country that looks abroad for news coverage to be more cosmopolitan than one where most media attention is focused on domestic sites.

For both of our research, we need really good data on global language distribution. It appears that country that acts as a center for a global language, as China does for Chinese, or France for French, will tend to have a higher degree of locality than a country in a language’s periphery (Algeria for French or Taiwan for Chinese). To test this – and to see if it’s hiding other factors that explain our data, we need to know how many people in a given country are fluent in a given language. And we need to know, or be able to calculate, what percent of a language’s speakers are located in one country or another.

Hal’s been discovering that this is really tough data to get. The CIA World Factbook has data for about half the countries we’re interested in, and we need data for all. Ethnologue is focused on mother tongues, which leads to weird distortions in the data. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in Tanzania speaks Swahili, less than 5% speak it as a mother tongue, so it shows up as a minority language in Ethnologue’s data. Wolfram Alpha seems to have what we need… but you’re banned from scraping Alpha, and there’s no source for their data, which leaves us very reluctant to use it. The data on Wikipedia isn’t especially helpful – it’s largely extracted from either CIA or Ethnologue, and not well footnoted.

I’m posting the question in the hopes that one of the brilliant folks who reads this blog might have a line on a data set for us, or could pass this query to someone who does. We need information on who speaks what where, what percentage of a language’s speakers globally are in a particular country, we need to know the source of the data, and we would greatly prefer to work with open data. If you’ve got any leads, please post ‘em in the comments, or drop me a line. Thanks in advance.

The conference slogan this year is “Micro power and a boarder world”, the organizing committee explained:

今年年会的口号是“微动力，广天地”，旨在展望越来越微观的信息分享手段和管道，促进社会进步与协作，并带来直接效应的生活方式。一段媒母，一张照片，或者一枚明信片，都可能带来积极的社会改变，更不用说有千千万万的可能性正在孕育中，带给我们一篇广阔的思想天地。

Hu Yong, the keynote speaker of this year's conference, further elaborated the idea of “micro power” in his talk:

每个人承担责任，不是别的，就是微动力。微，就是每一个普通的中国公民，我在上面称之为“大人物”的人。动力，指的不是别的，而是说，不论言语有前条万条，改变世界的其实还是行动。

微， 也可以指日常化的微观政治。政治可以分为宏观政治和微观政治，宏观政治是结构性的，微观政治是日常化的。匈牙利作家康诺德1982年写过一本书叫做《反政 治》，其中包含了许多被后来的人们追踪的议题。哈维尔经常用的概念有“反政治的政治”和“无权者的权力”、“公民的首创精神”等。既然极权的权力是无所不 在、无所不能的，它全面扑灭来自生活的任何自发性和自主性，是对于广大丰富的生活领域的全面攻击和扼杀，那么，从生活的任何一个面向、起点、领域开始，都 可能造成对于极权制度的抵制和反抗。哈维尔的翻译者崔卫平老师认为，“反政治的政治”不去追逐政治权力，不制定一种纲领反对另外一种纲领，不试图以政治手 段（更替领导人乃至改朝换代）解决问题。相反，“反政治”提倡在日常生活的领域中随时随地展开工作。其实，这也说的就是如何从身边的治理做起。所以，在以 上我说到的互联网激发的中国民众的公共精神之中，我们必须大力强调“公民的首创精神”，即任何人可以从任何地方开始。这就是我所理解的微动力。

微 动力为什么重要？在过去，少数几个动力十足的人和几乎没有动力的大众一起行动，通常导致令人沮丧的结果。那些激情四射的人不明白为什么大众没有更多的关 心，大众则不明白这些痴迷者为什么不能闭嘴。而今天，有高度积极性的那些人应致力于降低行动的门槛，让那些只介意一点的人能参与一点，而所有的努力汇总起 来则将十分有力。比如，一封小小的明信片，也能汇成强大的呐喊。

Blogger Guangyao, reflected upon Hu Yong's talk and pointed out that the precondition to the practice of micro power is the ability to think independently:

然而微动力之前必需是独立思考，因为在这个社会哺育了畸形的价值观。在这个国家对成功的普遍定义是你是否成为一个能比别人赚更多钱的财主，这个社会不断容 忍对于社会良知和道德的底线，当然最畸形的是太多人对于独立思考的不自知。这个国家无疑比60年前有更大物质自由又更高的学历，然而这个国家在60年前后 一样没有独立思考精神。50年或者100年的未来赋予了今天重要的社会及历史的责任，作为每个具体的个体，应当以微动力之势前行。用艾未未的一句话，“每 个人承担责任，可能是这个社会将来变化的一个最基本的可能。如果没有这种可能，这个社会不会发生变化。”

Media studies student from Let's blog together interviewed Isaac Mao during the Asia blogfest and associated the concept of micro power with “cloud intelligence”:

“微动力，广天地”体现的思想，与毛向辉的“Cloud Intelligence”理论一脉相承。
在网络时代，人们有更多的机会随时随地分享。当人们在不断分享自己、分享自己认同的别人的观点时，慢慢地形成了一种现象，毛向辉称之为“Cloud Intelligence”。

一个人分享了一个观点，其他人看到之后又分享了这个观点，更多人看到之后继续分享给其他人。通过这样不断地分享，就可以实现一群人做决定。这跟水滴 聚集形成云的过程相似——毛向辉把个体比作水滴，而当个体因为认同某个观点而不断分享时，他们就聚集起来，形成一股力量，一股甚至可以改变国家政策、社会 秩序的力量。

今年6月，厦门网友郭宝锋因传播严晓玲案被福州警方扣留，网友发动一人一张明信片的行动，给狱中的郭宝锋寄明信片，写着：“妈妈喊你回家吃饭。”从全国各地蜂拥而至的明信片，最后真的促进了郭的释放。

小小的明信片能把人从看守所解救出来，体现了“微动力”所创造的“天地”，这就是“Cloud Intelligence”的力量。

Blogger Kissfree spelled out explicitly that “micro power” is to call upon citizen's awareness:

促进社会改变不一定要刀枪，微动力的力量不可忽视，我觉得微动力的本质就是呼唤公民意识，让人们多了一份责任，不再茫然然过日子。微动力通过汇集众人力量 来促进社会进步，虽然公民社会在天朝起步不易，但人心所向，不是一两个人物或是某个集团能阻止的，相反“他们”应当顺应潮流甚至加入我们，微动力–人民的 力量！

I subscribe to Columbia Journalism Review’s excellent cjr-press list, which distributes highlights from the CJR.org site every day. Today’s dispatch included this provocative-looking story:

“The Fort Hood Massacre: Be first or be right? Greg Marx measures the ripples of a story that a Texas paper ran with secondhand info that turns out to be wrong
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/when_is_news_fit_to_print.php”

I got that email at 12:34. At 1:07, I received one that read, in entirety:

Dear reader,
Our earlier e-mail message about this story said that the secondhand information in question turned out to be wrong. That is not accurate.
Apologies,
The editors

The Fort Hood Massacre: Be first or be right? Greg Marx measures the ripples of a story that a Texas paper ran with secondhand info
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/when_is_news_fit_to_print.php

Oops.

The essence of Greg Marx’s story was the observation that Barry Schlachter Shlachter in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram broke news about Nidal Malik Hasan’s beliefs by talking to Kamran Pasha, who didn’t know Hasan, but knew a friend of Hasan’s. “In other words, the Star-Telegram hadn’t actually tracked down a close friend of Hasan’s—rather, it had found a novelist who said he had spoken to this unidentified friend, and had decided that, at least in this case, a bit of journalistic telephone passed muster.” Marx’s story goes on to suggest that the Star-Telegram was making a serious error in reporting information collected through such a long and unverified chain:

There are good reasons, after all, that newspapers don’t regularly run with unverified material, which run from the outlandish (Could Pasha have been fabricating this unnamed officer?) to the more prosaic (Is there reason to be skeptical of Hasan’s friend’s credibility? How might his words have been distorted in the retelling? Would his account have changed if reporters had been able to interview him directly?

Kamran Pasha, the “novelist” in question, jumped into the comment thread of Marx’s piece, to point out that he’d interviewed the unnamed solider for the Huffington Post, that he was an experienced journalist and hardly merited the level of skepticism raised in Marx’s piece. And he mentioned that the connection he’d reported between Hasan and Yemeni imam Anwar al-Awlaki has now been confirmed in other media, adding to his credibility.

What I’d love to be able to do is compare the current version of Marx’s story with the one that originally ran. The current story steps right up to the line of accusing the Star-Telegram of running a story that turned out to be false: “It may turn out, in this case, that the departure from normal journalistic standards did not result in inaccuracy—certainly, the picture painted by the Star-Telegram story jibes with the emerging portrait of a deeply troubled individual who was driven, at least in part, by extreme religious beliefs.” I don’t know whether the original story – distributed with the headline “Greg Marx measures the ripples of a story that a Texas paper ran with secondhand info that turns out to be wrong” was more directly accusatory. But the current story is a weird artifact – it’s sharpened to make a point – second-hand sourcing leads to inaccuracy – that appears to have been broken off in the current version. Or perhaps the article is unchanged, and it simply implied that the Star-Telegram had reported false information so strongly that the headline writer misunderstood.

There’s a great way to address these sorts of questions – use a Wikipedia “history” model, so readers can consult earlier versions of a published article. One of the reasons no one reads newspaper corrections is that they’re literally unreadable – they’re paper hyperlinks to an earlier day’s edition, which means they’re useless unless you keep a stack of papers around to correct after the fact. We can do so much better in a digital age – we could correct, while linking to the earlier version, and we could offer a blacklined version of stories to show how they were edited and changed. It would be unobtrusive for readers who didn’t care to see the earlier versions, and we’d avoid questions of libel by making it clear that the earlier edition had been corrected and was not for citation.

Until this feature becomes widely supported in publishing platforms, CJR did the next best thing – a visible, public correction. They should have shown the uncorrected story as well. And, of course, they should have been significantly more careful to have their ducks in a row before criticizing the Star-Telegram for failing to have their ducks in a row.

(I realize in writing this that I’m almost certainly getting something wrong which will force me to issue an embarrasing correction once confronted by CJR.org. At the very least, I’ll use strikethrough tags so you can watch me eat crow.)

A footnote: after ammending the headline on the article to a less inflamatory version, CJR acknowledged another error in their story: they misspelled Mr. Shlachter’s name throughout. They’ve corrected their error and, to their credit, added this note of explanation:

“The original version of this story misspelled Mr. Shlachter’s last name. The incorrect spelling was taken from the byline as it appeared on the McClatchy DC site, where the embedded link above leads. The byline is spelled correctly on the Star-Telegram’s version of the story.”

Marx has now weighed in on the comment thread and states that there were no additional changes to the story, beyond the spelling correction, the altered headline in the email blast (which he explains as the result of internal miscommunication) and a link at the top of the story to Pasha’s response in the comment thread.

Another note – told you I’d be editing this post for weeks to come. Marx clarifies that the article on CJR – including the headline – was not altered. The email I received contained an incorrect headline, and that headline was ammended with a subsequent email. The changes made to the story involved correcting a spelling error and linking to a piece of the comment thread.

I maintain that it would be great idea if we could examine versions of online news stories so you could flip through the story on the CJR site, rather than wading through my footnotes here. :-)

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.

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.

Here is a first stab at putting together an index that relates the cost of mobile services to income at the bottom of the pyramid in Africa. I found some ILO data on minimum wage that covers 24 African countries and a I found a couple more by googling. Here are the assumptions that I’ve made so far.

Mobile Costs

In order to relate mobile charges directly to income, I needed data that hadn’t already been converted into USD or similar. This mean going to the operator’s websites for data. Obviously there are hundreds of different rates and packages for mobile access. I started by choosing the operator with the largest market share in the country. From that operator, I chose one minute of air time during the day i.e. prime time and outside of the mobile network. I was in some doubt as to whether to choose outside to the fixed line operator or outside to other mobile operators and went with the latter assuming it would represent the widest possible access. I deliberately chose off-net calls to bring in the issue of interconnect fees. This represents about the most expensive local call you can make in a country.

Minimum Wage

As I mentioned, the ILO were kind enough to point me at a spreadsheet they maintain which has a fair amount of data on minimum wage in African countries. They have up-to-date data from 24 countries. However, as we start to unpack things, there is some complexity here that I haven’t fully processed yet. For instance, when I looked for data for Kenya (which was absent from the ILO data), I found this article which mentions two minimum wages, one for urban and one for rural agricultural workers. In South Africa I know there is a specific minimum wage for domestic workers. I would like to focus on the lowest wage earners but it is challenging to try to pick something that is consistent across countries. I also thought of nurses wages or a day labourer’s wage.

Another assumption I made was that people work five days a week. The ILO data gave a monthly wage but I wanted a daily wage for the index so I divided by the average number of working days in a month (22). I’m not sure whether this is a fair assumption at the bottom of the pyramid.

Needless to say, I welcome corrections and insights here.

Number of SMSes a days work will earn you at minimum wage

Number of call minutes a days work will earn you at minimum wage

Katrin Verclas and I and a few others have been kicking around the notion of Fair Mobile for some time now. The essence of Fair Mobile is the idea of developing some metrics for equitable, competitive mobile markets that deliver optimal value for money to mobile users, particularly in developing countries. It has taken me far too long to get going with this but I am finally finding some steam. So why bother with this?

Magazines like The Economist have embraced the miracle of mobiles (see their recent special report “Mobile Marvels”) and among development agencies, adding the letter “m” for mobile to existing initiatives e.g. m-health, m-governance, m-learning, etc has become the latest in tech-savvy development. Unfortunately not enough attention has been paid to two significant downsides to the current status of mobile infrastructure in Africa, namely uncompetitive telecommunications markets and walled garden practices by mobile operators.

1. Uncompetitive Markets

Mobile markets are dominated by incumbent operators and are typically uncompetitive and overpriced. Telecommunications regulatory expert Ewan Sutherland neatly summarises the issue:

A very small number of market players, protected by high politico-regulatory barriers to market entry, can easily result in price shadowing and even in collusion. Analyses of the markets for mobile call origination in France, Ireland and Spain have illustrated this problem, despite operators competing on the market for some years. In the case of France there has been shown to be collusion between the three operators, resulting in heavy fines (Conseil de la Concurrence 2005). To date, there has not been detailed analysis of markets in Africa, nor the regulatory action to remedy the lack of effective competition.i”

African countries still lack detailed market analyses that could lead to regulatory action but we know enough to suggest that such analyses are needed if prices are to be brought down. By any standard, mobile markets in Africa are uncompetitive. Vodafone and MTN, two of the largest operators in Africa, command on average more than 50% of the market in the nearly 20 African countries in which they operateii. Safaricom, the largest operator in East Africa, holds more than 80% of the mobile market in Kenya.

Evidence from the pan-African research network, ResearchICTAfrica, points to a remarkably high percentage of income being spent by the poor on mobile services. For low income earners across 17 countries studied, the average African is paying more than 50% of their disposable income on mobile services.

At the same time, mobile operators are posting impressive profits. Kenyan operator Safaricom generated over 900 million USD in revenue last year of which a staggering 40% was Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA). Other operators are also posting impressive profits with most operators on the continent announcing year on year increases in revenue.

The startling contrast between the remarkable benefits of mobile infrastructure and the high price being paid for mobile services in Africa while mobile operators post record profits leads to the conclusion that more competitive mobile markets in Africa would lead to even greater social and economic benefit for all but especially the poor.

2. Walled Gardens

Most of the discussion of the benefits of mobile infrastructure focuses on the increase in efficiencies that access to communication can provide. What is not often discussed is the environment for innovation and entrepreneurship that mobile infrastructure can provide.

There have been some significant innovations with mobile services in Africa. The most significant one is the development of mobile banking and money services such as mPesa in Kenya. This and other similar innovations are largely top-down from the operator and have been slow to evolve in spite of the obvious demand. What is missing on the continent is end-user innovation of the sort that leads to serendipitous discovery of social and commercial services.

In Africa, mobiles are too expensive too encourage the kind of experimentation that leads to innovation. Consider that in Rwanda, 4 minutes of local mobile communication or 10 SMSes constitutes an entire day’s wage for a labourer. While this is expensive, it is obviously useful enough to spend a significant proportion of income on its use for essential calls. What will never happen in this context is the kind of playful use that happens when one doesn’t have to consider the cost of each call and each SMS.

The cost of SMSes in particular are a barrier to innovation because they represent a gateway to the Internet for every mobile phone no matter how simple. Because an SMS message carries data, it offers the opportunity to extend the reach of Internet applications whether for data collection, commerce, social networks or other innovative services. Yet SMS services represents the most profitable aspect of mobile operator networks. SMS charges are estimated to be between 80 and 90% profit.

However, it is not just cost that is a barrier to innovation. Mobile operators jealously protect their mobile services and use them to help lock users on to their network. It is impossible to launch a mobile service across mobile networks without negotiating access with every mobile network involved.

This is in stark contrast to the generative environment of the Internet which has spawned what are now some of the largest companies in the world (Google, Facebook, et al) from the minds of individuals who developed these services without huge corporate backing and in markets that did not exist until they created them.

If we were able to drive down the barriers to mobile voice and SMS use through reduced cost and more Open Access style networks, individual and small-business innovation in the delivery of novel voice and data services would very likely blossom on the continent.

So What Can We Do?

When I initially chatted with Katrin about Fair Mobile, what I had in my mind was an index of how fair mobile markets are in various countries. Now the ITU already maintain an excellent ICT Development Index but I was thinking of something simpler and more focused, something like the Economist’s Big Mac index which uses the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger as a proxy for purchasing power parity (PPP) but perhaps even closer might be the Alternative Big Mac Index which measures how long one has to labour in a given country to earn the price of a Big Mac.

So what would that look like? Well, what initially sent me down this path was Nathan Eagle’s description of nurses in Kenya and how they refused to send SMS updates to an online blood bank database simply because the cost of an SMS represented too significant a proportion of their daily wage. Since then Katrin and I have discussed various indicators and metrics that might best make up a Fair Mobile Index. Armed with these ideas, I went off a couple of weeks ago to the IDRC’s Acacia Research and Learning Forum 2009 in Dakar and had the opportunity to organise an OpenSpace session on Fair Mobile at the event. About a dozen people attended the event, including among others, Alison Gillwald, Christoph Stork, and Godfred Frempong of the ResearchICTAfrica network as well as Willie Currie from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC).

We discussed the basic dilemma of the high cost and closed nature of mobile networks and brainstormed a number of factors that affect equity in mobile access, including:

• transparency and market complexity
• number portability
• tariff complexity and transparency
• issue of quality of service: dropped calls, network coverage, voice quality, etc
• demand perspectives – cultural influences on usage
• taxation issues both on handsets and on usage
• the need to establish mobiles as a generative platform for innovation
• foreign ownership
• interconnection rates

A Simple Ratio

In the end, Alison suggested that it might be simpler to start with something very basic such as the ratio of basic mobile costs to the national minimum wage in a country. Discussion followed on how to get the average cost of mobile and the suggestion was made to take a minute of peak time use on the largest operator in the country. In the end, I propose to take 2 minutes of air time and 4 SMSes as the proxy which hopefully represents what might be a typical day’s phone use.

Obviously this simple ratio of mobile usage cost to minimum wage only begins to scratch the surface of Fair Mobile but it seems to me now that it is better to start with something simple and easily understood and refine it over time rather than try to come up with the perfect basket of indicators.

The next thing I think I would like to add is the percentage EBITDA of the largest operator in the country. This would add a sense of proportion or disproportion between what people are paying and what sort of profit the operators are making. More complex will be developing a metric around the “thickness” of the walled gardens.

So stand by for more as I start to compile some of this data. I’m hoping that AfricanSignals will prove an ongoing useful resource on mobile pricing.

Finally, I should emphasise that these are just emerging thoughts on Fair Mobile. I reserve the right to recant, adapt, and evolve rapidly.