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December 18, 2007
Nart Villeneuve has an excellent round-up article on the state of Internet censorship. It’s part of the latest issue of Index on Censorship for Free Expression, in which I also have an article; unfortunately the issue is, ironically, behind the pay wall.
December 10, 2007
Hoder is asking his social network to publicize the lawsuit that threatens to bankrupt him. Ethan Zuckerman has posted about this with his usual cogency and moral insight. You don’t have to agree with Hoder to see the suit against him as an attempt to shut out a voice and ideas. You don’t have to agree with Hoder to support him in this.
September 25, 2007
After my presentation in Aarhus as part of ITForum.DK’s get-together, I chatted with Babak Djahari, a lobbyist for the tech sector. I asked what his issues were, half afraid he was going tell me how Net neutrality is a communist plot, but then I remember that, oh yeah, I’m not in America. He said the industry’s main issue is a shortage of programmers. The pay is excellent but, he said, programmers are considered nerds. Also taxes are very high (65-70% at the high end) and the weather is less than ideal; he says there’s only fall and winter, and during the winter there are only six hours of light. (Since when do geeks see the sun anyway?) On the other hand, you get to live in Denmark, the beer is great, there are lots of Danes here, English is the second language, the Danes rescued my people during WW II, and you’ll be just in time for when nerds become the new cool people, just like in the US.
After the meeting, I bicycled from the hotel to Aarhus, about 5k along the bay. I used one of Aarhus’ free public bicycles and had an exceptionally pleasant ride. After returning the bike to one of the stands, I wandered aimlessly, i.e., I got totally head-facing-backwards, wasn’t-I-just-here lost. The part of the city I saw — which included the pedestrian section — was quiet, old, unpretentious, possibly student-y. I went to an Asian restaurant, thinking I might find something vegetarian there. There was nothing on the menu, but they wokked up some vegetables. Then I wandered, trying to find the bay because my only way back to the hotel would be by biking along the water, although first I would have to bike a few miles to figure out I’m going in the wrong direction, since my experience has consistently taught me that the right direction is always the second direction, and no amount of figgering or trying to cheat the system (“Which is the way I wouldn’t go? That must be the way!”) circumvents this law of personal physics. Amazingly, I fell into a worm hole that brought me directly to the hotel, where “worm hole” = “taxi.”
September 12, 2007
According to a survey of Korean bloggers done by Edelman Korea (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, which is how I heard about this study), the leading reason (42%) Korean bloggers blog is “To create a record of my thoughts.” Only 1.2% blog “To raise visibility as an authority in my field.” This compares with 34% of American bloggers blogging to raise their visibility as authorities and 32% blogging to create a record of their thoughts. [Tags: korea blogging blogosphere edelman]
August 7, 2007
Ethan Zuckerman has a terrific piece in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section on “incremental infrastructure” as a hope for Africa. Incremental infrastructure comes about when someone starts a project that can grow in atomic increments, that’s financed in part by its customers, and that provides a new service. For example, Vodacom Congo now has a market valuation of $1.6B and 3 million mobile phone users. This, Ethan argues, can revolutionize Africa. [Tags: africa economics ethan_zuckerman ]
May 13, 2007
Ethan Zuckerman, one of the co-founders of Global Voices [Disclosure: Ethan is a good friend, and I am on a GV board] asks whether the Net is letting us hear voices unlike our own. He founded GV precisely so we could easily find bloggers in other nations opening up a window into their world. But now he wonders if that was “a phenomenon for a specific moment in time.” As the communities of bloggers have become available in many cultures where previously there had been only a handful, they are talking amongst themselves. “[T]hese conversations are taking place in a public medium, but I’m not part of their intended audience,” Ethan writes.
I am not arguing that bridge blogs are dying out – though there’s evidence that some, like Sandmonkey in Egypt, are – or that they’ve lost importance. My point is that when you’re one of the few people in your real world community who is online, the tendency is for you to address your thoughts to a global audience. When a larger segment of your real-world community comes online, there’s good reasons for you to start talking to that audience using the Internet, a global medium used for a local purpose.
Ethan seems wistful for a time when you could fool yourself into believing (as he says) that “a knowledge of English and a little curiosity was all you needed to explore the world of blogs.” Now it takes much more — Global Voices relies on over a hundred people putting in serious time and effort. He contrasts this with the pronouncements of the “cyberutopians” that the Net would make us all one people, engaged with one another and at peace.
But we need to ask whether they saw the Internet bringing people together into a single, unitary net culture, or whether they saw that the Internet could be a space that allowed people from all different cultures to meet on common ground. The former is a fun club to belong to, where we can trade All Your Base jokes and cat macros. But the latter is powerful, political, and potentially transformative. It’s something worth fighting for.
Indeed.
The global conversation isn’t all-to-all, for the reasons Ethan cites. For one thing, the fact that no one speaks every language means that all-to-all is impossible until we discover Babel fish. The Net is not going to erase all culture. Who would want it to? We don’t need homogeneity to be at peace. We need to live with difference.
For that, we don’t need everyone talking with everyone else. But we do need more people talking with more other people. We need to hear some voices, not all voices. We need Global Voices, plus many more global voices. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman globalVoices ]
April 26, 2007
Ethanz has yet another fantastic post. This one recounts a discussion at the World Bank at which Joel Mokyr, an economic historian, talked about what knowledge looked like in the 18th century as access to it suddenly increased. Ethan also talks about the “India fallacy,” his term for the illusory belief that one’s country can become the next India economically. Jeez, you can’t open up Ethan’s blog without learning something.
(Warning: Ethan starts off by saying something gratuitously nice about my book. So, please skip the first paragraph so you won’t suspect that I’m merely reciprocating Ethan’s praise. Thank you.) [Tags: ethan_zuckerman joel_mokyr india world_bank internet ]
April 24, 2007
Rob Faris and John Palfrey are giving a talk on “The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering,” a talk about the Open Net Initiative . The ONI is a joint project by Oxford, Cambridge, U of Toronto and Berkman. About 50 people have worked on gathering this data.The new study (coming out as a book called Access Denied) reports on forty countries that block access one way or another. Countries can’t do this on their own, he says.
Over the past five years, the states doing filtering have gone for a few to dozens. East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East are the main places that filter.
How can the ONI involve more people, John asks. How can the ONI make the data more relevant? Already you can suggest sites to test and you can submit a URL and see where it’s blocked.
Rob talks about a “taxonomy of Internet content restriction strategies.” There are many ways to limit information on line. A state can take down illegal sites, remove search results, filter content, arrest and intimidate, require registration and licensing and ID, hold ISPs responsible, and monitor. There’s no filtering in Egypt, for example, but a blogger was just imprisoned. Bahrain took down access to Google Earth just as a politically uncomfortable mashup was circulating. China blocks Wikipedia. Gay and lesbian sites are blocked in many countries. The Gulf states comprehensively block gambling sites. Thailand blocks access to the book “The King Never Smiles.” Anonymizers and The Onion Router are frequently blocked. (Rob mentions the great ONI page where you can see the search results at Google.com and Google.cn for the same term.)
To comprehensively block the Internet, countries rely on software, using automatic ways of identifying offensive material, which makes lots of mistakes. “Internet filtering is inherently flawed.” You get over-blocking, underblocking and mis-categorization. Some countries are transparent about the blocking, but many do not.
“Once you put in the infrastructure for social filtering,” says Rob, you also seem to institute political blocking.
Q: [yochai benkler] This is important work. But the most important part of it is the detail your work covers. “The level of detail that goes into the country studies suggests” a different way of presenting it. E.g., transparency. How do you do as someone who respects democracy deal with the transparent process in Saudi Arabia? The Saudis say exactly what they’re doing. They say they’re protecting a cultural discourse. They let people add to it or subtract to the list of blocked sites. Mapping these differences among countries would be very helpful.
A: [jp] We’ve spent three years collecting data. That’s been our aim. Now the challenge is how to make it useful. Do we want to give an open API to all the sites that are blocked? Do we want to give this list to everyone including the censors? And how much should we write in our country studies? The first ones were very long, with lots of context, but not many people read them. So, we’ve shifted to shorter reports, more coverage, and deep dives at times. And we’ve done a book that gives straightforward data, plus a series of contextualizing chapters. We’re trying to have it all ways. [I.e., they’re being miscellaneous. :) ] Also, we’re working with several companies on a code of conduct for international companies.
Q:[ethanz] People in filtered countries are often desperate just to get confirmation that they’re being blocked. It’s been tough to get rapid response out of ONI. Activists are writing their own tools, often not as good as ONI’s tools. And it’d be great if you had a handbook that others could use who are not as technical as you.
Q: There’s a lot of data to be gathered about how countries are changing their laws to achieve the aims of filtering.
A: We’ve started doing that. We’ve sent clinical students to countries to look into this.
Q: What do you do to help bloggers?
A: We’re not advocating, at least at this point. We’re just describing.
Q: ONI is done by a localized group. How do we get the average user to take part in checking on filtering, etc.?
A: We’re definitely thinking about this. Jonathan Zittrain wants to do a distributed app, like Seti@Home . We’ve started the design of this.
Q: As you’ve said, American high tech companies provide filtering technology. Corporate responsibility has been discussed forever…
A: For the past two days, a group has been meeting in London, drafting principles. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Vodaphone are there, as well as the ONI.
Q: How can you release the information listing the censored applications?
A: We have a tool under development that lets you see which countries block a site. We’re struggling with making it available because we are reluctant to give this information to censors. [The demo shows that Technorati is blocked in China and Iran and BoingBoing is blocked in Iran, Saudia Arabia, Sudan and Tunisia.]
Q: How has filtering changed since you started monitoring it in 2002?
A: We haven’t collected enough data. When we started we only looked at a few countries.
Q: [catherine bracy] How do you know what countries want to join the filtering club?
A: They’re debating legislation. There are a half dozen in Latin America. A bill is floating in Norway that’s breathtaking in its breadth…
Q: [ethan] Should you be helping people filter better? Thailand blocks all of YouTube to get rid of one offensive video. You could help them out…
A: [jp] I had a frank conversation with the Thai censor. Fascinating. I see us doing more of that.
A: [rob] That is remarkably close to The Google Question.
[Conclusion: Not only can the Internet be blocked, it’s way easier than we’d thought. There are so many ways to do it. And it can be done at multiple levels, from tech to legislation. Hence, is there no single way to unblock it?]
Seth Finkelstein figured out why BoingBoing got banned from Boston’s free wifi. Omigod. Censorship shouldn’t be this stupid. Unfortunately, it just about always is.
[Tags: oni censorship digital_rights berkman]
April 22, 2007
Ethanz has a terrific, honest, and unresolved post about living locally and globally.
I’ve spent summers near where Ethanz lives all of my life, and I’ve even been to Ethan’s house. So I understand the raw pull of the geography itself.
He also has a list of “great talks to watch.” I look forward to watching… [Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]
April 7, 2007
Ethanz’s got a great post about how the Tunisians beat the Obamanaics to the punch, remixing the Apple 1984 commercial for their own political ends three years ago. You can see the Tunisian version here, but you don’t want to miss Ethan’s contextualizing of it. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman remix copyright obama tunisia ]
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