RConversation

The power of Cyber-Grannies: Gender equality and the Internet

The woman in this photo is a 77-year old Ugandan grandmother named Anastasia. She is illiterate, but managed to get "hooked" on computers thanks to an interactive CD full of pictures and sound explaining how women in Uganda can use technology to make money. According to Nancy Hafkin, a leading scholar on technology, development, and gender, Anastasia "used the information on the CD to raise her income from raising chickens and now travels through her district to promote awareness among women, especially those without formal education, on how new information technologies can improve their well-being."

Anastasia's new career as cyber-granny didn't just happen because somebody donated money for a bunch of computer centers and cyber cafes in Uganda. Her new-found role is thanks to an organization called WOUGNET (Women of Uganda Network), an organization that has put a lot of effort into figuring out how to make computers accessible to women who are badly educated or illiterate, how to make technology relevant to solving problems in women's daily lives, and how to create female-friendly environments in which women have the opportunity and time to learn. Here is a video shot by WOUGNET, documenting the challenges that women in one community in Uganda face in trying to use the local computer center:

These stories were part of a luncheon talk on gender and technology at the Berkman Center by Nancy Hafkin editor of a new book called Cinderella or Cyberella? Empowering Women in Knowledge Society. She posed several challenges to common assumptions that technology is "gender neutral."  Many people assume that the introduction of computers and the Internet into a society will transform everybody's lives positively, and that the technology naturally "trickles down" to benefit both women and men.

Colleagues Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger have both blogged the talk in detail, but here are my major take-aways:

• Just because you introduce the Internet into a society doesn't mean that it will be used equally by men and women. Interestingly, the percentage of women vs. men using the Internet vary widely from country to country  - where there are statistics on this at all. In some countries with widespread Internet penetration (the U.S., Canada, and Hong Kong for example)  Internet useage is split fairly evenly between men and women. While in other countries with high levels of Internet penetration there is significant disparity (France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK). Same in developing countries with low Internet penetration: in some developing countries with low Internet penetration, there are nonetheless relatively equal numbers of men and women using the Internet, while in other countries with similarly low Internet penetration levels, the relative proportion of men and women using the Internet is badly skewed. What this shows is that there are lots of social and cultural factors that dictate the extent to which women will take advantage of the Internet's existence in their country. It also means that choices made by people with power and money - education policy choices, business model choices, and development project funding choices - can all make a difference. Unfortunately Hafkin believes that policymakers, NGO's, and businesses tend to lack awareness about the gender implications of their decisions about how technology will be implemented, taught, or marketed.  Hopefully, her ongoing research will help make them more aware.

• You can't assume that technology - just by virtue of existing in a society - will bring immediate positive benefits to women's lives. In fact there may be ways in which the technology might worsen women's lives in the short term. Hafkin brought up the fact that the Internet has fed the growth of the porn industry and the child porn industry, which in some parts of the world increases the victimization of girls and women. She also pointed to studies in some parts of Africa that indicate increased domestic violence arising after women attempt to use the Internet or mobile phones, because their husbands and fathers tended to interpret this as an effort to communicate with other men. She did not raise this as an argument against the spread of technology, but rather to point out that women in some communities may first come into contact with technology via negative experiences such as these, which may in turn cause women and their parents to view technology as a male realm that they had best avoid in order to be safe. This context needs to be understood and kept in mind when we are thinking about questions of gender equality in the use of technology. How do you create opportunities for use of technology that will not feel threatening to women or to family members who may control what they can or can't do?

• In communities where Internet and computer resources are scarce, women and girls will be left behind if they don't feel safe or if circumstances to use the technology are stacked against them.  It appears that in developing countries where there is relative gender parity of Internet use, one major reason is that a lot of women are working in the formal economy - i.e., in offices that have computers. Many "ICT4D" (internet and communication technology for development) projects created in rural communities by well meaning non-governmental organizations often fail to create environments that are conducive to women and girls being able to use that technology as easily as men and boys. Parents and husbands tend to be leery of a woman's reasons for wanting to go and spend a few hours a week in a computer center. Cyber-cafes are often full of men watching porn and playing violent games, creating an environment in which women don't feel comfortable and or which parents forbid their daughters from entering.

Hafkin argues that women can basically have a "Cinderella" relationship with technology or a "Cyberella" relationship with technology, hence the title of her book.  According to two of her slides which she generously shared:

Cinderella:

• Works in the basement of knowledge society (if she works at all)
• Has little opportunity to reap its benefits
• Waits for "her prince" to decide the benefits she will receive

Most women around the world today are Cinderella. Hafkin believes the goal is for Cinderella to become Cyberella, who is:

• Fluent in the uses of technology
• Comfortable using and designing computer, technology and communication equipment, software, and in working in virtual spaces
• Devises innovative uses for technologies across problems and subjects
• Finds information and knowledge to improve her life and expand choices
• Active knowledge creator and disseminator 
• More than a user, designs information and knowledge systems to improve all aspects of her life.

Will Cinderellas magically transform into Cyberellas over time? Initial research indicates that the answer is not necessarily.

This is where cyber-granny comes back into the picture. Hafkin mentioned the Grameen phone project, in which village women in Bangladesh and elsewhere are given micro-loans to create businesses in which they rent out uses of mobile phones. What if women like Anastasia could get capital and support, systematically, to run computer and Internet kiosks in their villages? Would that create environments that would feel more friendly to women, and less threatening to their parents and husbands? Hafkin said that in India and elsewhere there are village Internet kiosk projects, some of which are run by women. She pointed out that it would be interesting to see some statistics comparing the number of female customers at women-run cyber-centers versus the numbers of women using other cyber-cafes and computer centers in similar areas.

Why am I writing about all this at such length? Because I've been thinking a great deal lately (in between packing and winding up various projects before I move to Hong Kong) about the question of how policy and business choices affect the extent to which the Internet is or is not transformative for different kinds of people.  Hafkin's work is important because it highlights how - if we really want technology to make the world a better place for everybody - spreading computers and Internet access around as widely as possible is certainly a start, but it's probably not going to be enough.

U.S. Military censorship?

Whatever gripes we may have, at the moment most Americans have a lot more freedoms and rights than most Chinese. This is without question. But will it stay that way? Not unless we work to keep it so.

In the past few months I've started predicting to friends and colleagues that if trends continue on their current trajectory, in a few more decades there may be little difference between the U.S. and Chinese governments as far as censorship, surveillance, limits on freedom of expression, use of propaganda, and manipulation of the public are concerned. And if that does happen, it will be because the majority of Americans allowed it to happen in the name of national security, fighting terrorism, and protecting our kids from perverts - which are incidentally the same excuses that the Chinese government gives the Chinese public, and which many people there are inclined to accept as well.

Yesterday, Wonkette and Daily Kos reported that U.S. Airforce personnel have been blocked from accessing their sites - while conservative political sites remain accessible. One reader wrote to Wonkette:

It seems that every non-conservative politics website has been blocked by our firewall guys…including your site. The reason it is blocked is because it is a “personal page.” Which means they don’t have a reason to block it … but they want to block it, so they do. This was done recently, just in time for mid-term elections. As I said, it was not only your website, I have gone through lists of liberal sites and most of them are blocked. I’ve also taken the time to go to some conservative sites….none of which are blocked.

Cyber-activist Nart Villeneuve has investigated the technical side of what's happening here, specifically retracing the cause of one error message received by a person with an army e-mail address who tried to access one blog, The Memory Hole. He found that the error message matched one used by a product developed by the company BlueCoat using a URL database from another commercial filtering product, SmartFilter. Nart does not conclude that the blocking was intentional, however:

The facts indicate that http://www.thememoryhole.org/memoryblog/ is blocked, most likely by a BlueCoat appliance configured with SmartFilter 3.0. But the site is not classified as “Extreme;Politics/Religion” but simply “Politics/Religion”? The most likeley explanation is that the military is filtering the “Extreme” category and not using to the most recent version of the SmartFilter database. At some point the Memory Hole was probably doubly classified as Extreme and Politics/Religion and, if the military has not updated their blocking lists, is blocked by the military as a result.

Innocent error? Honest mistake? Certainly, there is plenty of technical-error-deniability- wiggle-room here. But why did this "error" only just manifest itself recently in the runup to a congressional election where the Republicans might lose their  majority? 

I am reminded of my efforts to transmit politically sensitive TV reports by satellite from Beijing when I was working there for CNN in the 1990's (in the pre-broadband days).  There were often conveniently-timed "technical failures" at the state broadcasting facility that controlled our satellite uplink out of China. Those failures always happened when certain kinds of video appeared, and were more common during certain politically sensitive periods. Always plenty of technical deniability. Nobody ever admitted they were censoring anything...

Chinese journalists say enough is enough

Since the news came out earlier this week that the Chinese parliament is considering a draft law which would - among other things -  fine media outlets for reporting breaking news without authorization, the outcry from Chinese journalists and many others in China has been growing. Even Chinese media outlets like China Radio International are covering the controversy.

A number of people are following developments closely and translating key Chinese-language articles and blog posts. Roland Soong at ESWN is naturally on the case, wondering whether, if professional news outlets are prevented from covering breaking news, perhaps this might make blogs, BBS, and other citizens' media even more important?

Hong Kong University's China Media Project has excellent translation, summary, and analysis here and here. They point out that newspapers in Southern China are "are leading the push against the media-related clause." Here's one quote from a Guangzhou editorial that they have translated in full:

In such situations this clause of the draft law would actually become a tool for corrupt local officials who want to cover up their dirty deeds – a highly effective legal sanction for [these governments] to set their own ground rules and avoid watchdog journalism ("supervision by public opinion").

Read the whole post here. 

China Digital Times continues to link furiously to everything coming out on the web about the controversy. Danwei has some excellent stuff from the Chinese blogosphere (one blogger says: "Huh? So what are you going to report?"). Non-violent Resistance calls the bill an "audacious assault on press freedom" and then points us to an analysis on the website of the Beijing-based Caijing Magazine. He writes:

The story quotes Yu An, a law professor at Tsinghua University and a member of its drafting committee, as saying, "I have no idea how this clause was added into (the bill). It was not there when the experts first discussed (the bill)."

Ying Songnian, a member of the NPC's Civil and Judicial Affairs Committee who will be one of those reviewing the bill, told Caijing, "based on our experience with SARS, only information openness would help calm people down, and make disaster-relief efforts more effective."

Another interviewed legal scholar, Prof. Zhang Qianfan of Peking University's law school, says that the bill is "inappropriate" because "only under extremely peculiar situations could media coverage render more negative effects (on emergency management) than positive. The bill makes an extreme situation into a general rule, which is unbalanced legislation, and inappropriate." 

Another "constitutional law expert" who wishes to remain anonymous is more blunt, if less open about his identity: "What if a local government tries to cover up an emergency situation? Can't the media even expose that?" He goes on to call the proposed fine for media outlets "ridiculous" in the sense that, under the law, a county government trying to manage a local emergency situation like a mining disaster or avian flu outbreak, would have the power to "regulate" all media seeking to cover the incident. "How much discretionary power will this local government have?  And who is to supervise it?"

It is exactly this kind of domestic media fire what we need to thwart this EVIL attempt to silence the country's honest media outlets. So far it seems only a few are daring enough to do this, including Southern Metropolis Daily. I just hope it's not too little too late.

It is encouraging to see how many journalists in China are sticking their necks out to fight for their right to do real journalism. Let's hope that enough people in the Chinese government recognize that if the media is prevented from reporting breaking news without approval, China will become even more ungovernable than it already is. Killing journalism is bad for China's economy. It's bad for investment, which requires reliable and fast information from credible sources (not just rumors from anonymous sources in Chinese chatrooms). It will not be good for Chinese social stability, public health, disaster, response or anything else. Muzzling the media as the legislation proposes will send local corruption even further out of control.

Journalists won't stop trying, though. They will just be driven even further underground, and onto the Internet BBS forums and blogs. It will be even harder for the public to get access to reliable information for which the author is able to take responsibility, because they'll have no alternative to an online rumor mill. Public panic in the face of disasters will thus be more likely.

Such legislation will also make Chinese journalists even more disillusioned about the regime. Most of the Chinese journalists I know would like to see their government succeed. They would like to serve as loyal watchdogs, uncovering problems not to tear down the government but so that problems can be fixed and crises can be addressed. If the Chinese government won't allow Chinese journalists to play this role, it will once again be cutting off its nose to spite its face. 

Let's see how smart or dumb the Chinese leadership really is. Let's see whether they're so paranoid they're willing to destroy the country and alienate many patriotic Chinese citizens in order to stifle any possible threat to their personal power.

Never forget.

It has now been 17 years since the Tiananmen square massacre of June 4th 1989. Here's a story I did on the 10th anniversary. How many anniversaries must we pass before the Chinese government has the guts to acknowledge what happened?  As my friend Xiao Qiang points out the Internet is keeping the memory alive with videos such as the above, posted on YouTube.  Frank at GlobalVoices has a great post about the online commemorations taking place in Chinese cyberspace, including this del.icio.us page and this Flickr page.
 

Imagine if one of your loved ones died violently 17 years ago. Imagine what it would be like if the government didn't acknowledge he or she had died - and thus erased that person's existence. Imagine not being allowed to mourn in public. Imagine plainclothes policemen standing guard outside your home to prevent foreign journalists from talking to you. Imagine being sent out of town on an all expenses paid "vacation," courtesy of the Public Security Bureau every year around this time.

That's the life of Ding Zilin and probably thousands of other people. We don't know exactly how many because there is still no certain death toll - but human rights groups believe the number is in the thousands based on the  number of bodies in hospitals and morgues after the event. Professor Ding, whose 17-year old son, Jiang Jielian was shot near Tiananmen square, is now the head of the Tiananmen Mothers Group: a group of brave people who are gathering information and evidence about the victims and how they died. One day they hope to be able to hold their government to account for what was done. They want the Chinese government to acknowledge the facts of what happened. Visit the Human Rights in China page for information about her organization's latest call for justice. Click here to read more testimony from Tiananmen victims' mothers, and click here to sign a petition to support them.

Beyond Broadcast Highlights

Quote of the day:  Prof. Charlie Nesson: "There is divinity in the net and the challenge is to be gentle to your enemies."

My favorite panel of the day was about online communities - moderated by my colleague Ethan Zuckerman. He has a great writeup of his intro to the panel. Andy Carvin has great notes from Brendan Greeley's descripton of Radio Open Source and Tom Kriese about Omidyar.net. A lot of great blogging from conference participants is aggregated here.

A lot of the discussion all day focused around a question near and dear to me: how media - whether it's professional or citizen-produced - can better serve and facilitate an informed public discourse, which I believe is essential to healthy democracy. At one point during a morning panel on public media, Terry Heaton of Corante claimed that the Internet is the "new public." Several of us challenged the panel that a lot of people are excluded from this online discourse due to economic and social reasons. I asked whether American public media organizations are going to do anything to work directly on digital divide issues  so that everybody in the U.S. can have easy access to high speed internet, which is essential to full participation in online discourse. Also I asked whether they are going to do education and outreach so that people throughout society are aware of the tools that are available to them. As it turns out, unfortunately, not all public broadcasters think that should be their role. Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network blogged in detail about the exchange and his reaction.

Sociologist Eszter Hargittai had a great presentation about what young people really do online (thanks Andy again for the great detailed blogging). Her research indicates that giving people internet access may not be enough if you want to encourage widespread public involvement in media creation and discourse. There needs to be more education about what tools are out there and what can be done with them - and that there's a lot more to the web than chatting, shopping, and dating. She concludes: "Differences in skill, not just access, may contribute to digital inequality...Skill differences may result in differential web use suggesting different opportunities." Addendum: Lynne Johnson has an interesting reaction to Eszter's talk here.

There was a panel about business models that was as usual inconclusive. Mark Cooper: We need a different business model than charity or advertising. The problem is not distribution; the problem is attention.  I thought Mark made another important point about basically 2 kinds of journalism that are worth preserving and nurturing, and which we need to figure out how to support:

1. Professional insight journalism: High quality, expensive investigative journalism that needs to be monetized and supported financially in order to be done well.
2. Networked individualism: non-monetized work motivated by passion or duty.

UPDATE: I was going to explore the relationship between these two kinds of journalism further on day two in a workshop with Dan Gillmor, but unfortunately I have come down with a bad chest cold and went home to bed.  Fortunately, there are session notes on the conference wiki here.

beyondbroadcast

Beyond Broadcast Conference Begins

I'm at the Beyond Broadcast conference here at Harvard where James Boyle of Duke Law school just gave a brilliant opening keynote. See Ethan's thorough summary of the talk here. (You can follow the conference on the live webcast here.)

Boyle pointed out that the Internet - and its freeness - actually happened by accident.  "Its not that history is sweeping us to greater openness inexorably," he points out. It's that a bunch of geeks were accidentally allowed to make this happen.

If a bunch of government officials, lawyers and companies had been able to sit down and design the internet, rather than the network where control is at the ends and anybody can create virtually anything, it would have been constructed in a much more top-down, centrally controlled way. Corporate and government forces worldwide are trying very hard now to take it in that direction. We cannot assume that freedom will win because the net is intrinsically free. It's not. And it will cease to be free unless people fight to keep it that way.

Boyle points out that we as  humans have a horrible track record at predicting the future. With this in mind we need to operate under the following assumptions if we want to create system that maximize social benefit and individual freedom:

1. Make sure you leave as open as possible for as long as possible the construction and design of the system you're making;

2. Make sure you're open to as many kinds of feedback as possible for as long as possible in order to collect and incorporate ideas, and adjust to problems that never would have occurred to you independently;

3. Push against your own instincts about what kinds of control are needed.

Sounds like good advice for any media organization.

beyondbroadcast

Don't trust your phone company

When speaking about how U.S. and other multinational technology companies collaborate with political censorship and surveillance in China, I often conclude with this simple slide on the right. It is meant to illustrate the quandary faced by many internet and telecoms companies.  I ask: "What do you do when the user’s rights & interests and the host government’s interests are clearly in conflict?" The problem is by no means unique to China, it's global.

No country claiming to be democratically governed is immune, as we are reminded by today's revelations in USA Today that the NSA has collected a massive database of the phone calls made by tens of millions of Americans, using data handed over (without court order or FISA approval) by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.  Qwest (yay!) questioned the legality of the request and refused to comply. Civil rights and free speech groups are outraged. See reaction from the Center for Democracy and Technology here. If you visit the front page of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you'll be reminded that they've been fighting AT&T's collaboration with the government's domestic spying program for a while, with a class action lawsuit filed in January. Their work, along with the CDT's, and that of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and many other free-speech fighters is extremely important.

Generally, I don't write much about U.S. telecoms and free speech battles on this blog because there are many bloggers out there who have much greater expertise on U.S. telecoms and U.S. law than I do, and I don't think I have much of substance to contribute - I would only be adding my personal rant to the pile of many other similar rants.

But it's time to make absolutely clear: As an American who has always been proud of the freedoms and opportunities I've grown up taking for granted, I'm gravely concerned and deeply ashamed about what is happening.

Now, the U.S. is far, far from being anything like China, where my friend Hao Wu has been under detention for almost 80 days with no charges, no formal arrest, no access to a lawyer, and his family has no idea where he is. I am quite confident the same thing will not happen to me no matter what I may say about my government on this blog, and am very confident that my blog host, Typepad, is under no pressure to censor me. But unfortunately, as a result of the Bush Administration's behavior, it becomes increasingly difficult for an American person to advocate for freedom of speech in China and be taken seriously.

That said, I'm not going to stop.  I will also continue to emphasize that ALL users of internet and telecommunications services must be protected from excesses of ALL governments, EVERYWHERE. 

This is why I have been critical of the Global Online Freedom Act, legislation introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman Chris Smith, because its language and approach imply that U.S. corporate collaboration with governments against the rights and interests of users is only a problem in authoritarian countries - as defined by the U.S. government. That is obviously wrong. It is obviously a universal problem and to claim otherwise is dangerous.

But coming back to the first slide, and the fundamental, global problem we face today: Many - if not most - major multinational technology and telecoms companies seem inclined these days to prioritize their perceived obligations to governments over their obligations to individual users when the interests of government and user are not aligned.

We must make it clear as users, customers, investors, and as voters that this inclination is unacceptable. Click here for some guidelines on what to say if you have a chance to speak with your elected representative.

China's State Kidnappers

I've got an editorial running in today's Washington Post, titled Shattering the China Dream. I talk about the way in which Chinese state agents are in the habit of what amounts to kidnapping: abducting people for long periods of time without any kind of charges, formal arrest, or any kind of legal process whatsoever. Blogger and filmmaker Hao Wu has now been held for 58 days in this way. As far as many Americans are concerned, such unlawful detentions cast a very long shadow over Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the U.S. this week.  My piece concludes:

With Chinese President Hu Jintao in the United States this week, Americans have an opportunity to assess his regime. What is this country to think? On the one hand his government has raised the living standards of millions of its citizens with economic reform and international trade. On the other hand his underlings trample shamelessly on his people's basic human rights.

The careers of some politicians in both countries -- not to mention military budgets -- would no doubt benefit if our two nations became enemies. As an American who lived and worked in China for more than a decade, however, I continue to believe that peaceful engagement between the United States and China is in the best interest of both nations' people.

But we have a serious problem that won't go away: How can Americans respect or trust a regime that kidnaps our friends?

Hao's birthday was on Tuesday. His sister Nina says you can give him a birthday present by doing something to lobby for his realease. Click here to participate in our letter writing campaign and click here to sign an online petition demanding Hao's release.

Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace

I'm at the first day of a conference here in Manila called "Freedom of Expression in Asian Cyberspace" organized by the South East Asian Press Alliance.  Chi Dang from Vietnam just told us that two members of her delegation were arrested at the airport on their way to this conference.

My colleague Ethan, as usual is doing an amazing job of live-blogging the speakers - people from around Asia who are at the forefront of pushing for free speech online.  The speakers are also being videoblogged  here. And Portnoy from Taiwan is blogging the conference in Chinese here. Also see blog coverage on the blog of PCIJ, one of the conference's Filippino sponsors.  More TBA.

Public Media, Citizens' Media & the Internet

Last week I attended a very stimulating conference on the future of public media put on by the Center for Social Media. At the end of it, David Liroff, VP & Chief Technology Officer of WGBH, gave a public talk:  "In a global village, where is the 'public square'?"

Public broadcasters in the United States are struggling to remain relevant at a time when public discourse is increasingly taking place in the blogosphere: online grassroots citizens media that has little to do with the NPR/PBS model. “In recent months weve hit tipping point at which rate of change in media environment is accelerating exponentially.” Liroff said that the key problem for public media, to quote the Harvard Biz School guru Clayton Christiensen, “what's the job they're hiring us to do?”  And who is the “they” that public media is trying to serve?

Liroff talked about generational differences in media consumption and the challenge this poses. Many young people are engaging in some sort of “public discourse” online all the time. So, “if young people are connected 24/7 to global consciousness what is the role for public media?”  He also pointed out that as the influence of the internet grows, if the public discourse is to be truly representative of the public at large, there is also the problem of access: the gulf in this country between those with high-speed internet access and those without.

I spent all of Thursday and half of Friday in a room with about 20 people – some public broadcasting people, some people doing online citizens media (I was there because of Global Voices, which as a nonprofit project meant to help improve the global public discourse, is a kind of public media), media scholars, and some people from foundations that fund public media. How can public media remain relevant in the age of Web2.0?

The conversation was grounded in a belief that media – in all forms – has a critical role to play in enabling the informed public dicourse necessary for a healthy democratic society. But left to its own devices, there will be certain audiences commercial media may not be particularly bothered with because they are unlikely to translate into advertising revenue, as well as certain types of journalism or conversations that are difficult and unprofitable to pursue. Grassroots media is no panacea either. When left to take its natural course it looks likely to be dominated by the early adopters, the loudest voices, and the ones who can afford access to the technology that is increasingly necessary in order to speak and be heard on the internet.

By the end of our conference I came away convinced that the best role for public media is to find ways to fill the gaps left empty by commercial and grassroots media. What kinds of journalism simply isn’t profitable for the likes of CNN and even the New York Times to pursue well?  What kinds of investigations are not possible for bloggers with other day jobs to pursue effectively? Whose voices aren’t being heard in the media (public, private, or grassroots) right now and why? How can we find them and help them be heard? Who isn’t talking online, why not, and how can we help them do so when it makes sense? And when it doesn’t make sense or isn’t feasible, how do you bridge offline conversations with online conversations?

To be relevant in this new media age, public media need to think beyond the immediate management priorities of their stations to the larger purpose of civic discourse. How do we best serve that discourse?  How do we help public media organizations around the country engage with the rich and multifaceted public discourse happening across the internet, rather than try to compete with it for eyeballs, ears, clicks and downloads? How can public media better interact with commercial media when doing so will further the interest of the public discourse?

It also became clear to me that in order to serve the public discourse properly, American public media must engage directly with both public education and the national communictions infrastructure. By education I don’t mean journalism schools. I mean integrating media literacy and low-cost media production skills into the public school curriculum – perhaps even as early as grade school but certainly junior high and high school – not to mention college and adult education programs. We have entered the new age of We Media: we are all potentially media now. All citizens must learn how to think more critically about the various kinds of media we are interacting with, and be able to distinguish between various types of media and the different motivating forces behind them. All citizens need to better understand how and why these various forms of media are created, and be better empowered to create their own. Media participation comes naturally to some but not to many others who have spent a lifetime passively absorbing it.

By engaging in the “communications infrastructure” I mean advancing the freedom to connect for all Americans. As my colleague David Isenberg points out: “It is written that Freedom of the Press is only for those with presses. But Freedom to Connect is potentially available to everybody.” Potentially, that is, if we commit to making connectivity truly affordable and accessible to all Americans. How can one claim to represent “public media” in this day and age without becoming actively involved in policy debates over public internet access?  Public media organizations must help to shape a legal and regulatory environment that enables all citizens to innovate, create and speak freely – and stand a chance of reaching larger audeinces if their work merits, whether or not their work has commercial backing or value. Otherwise, how can we have a truly democratic public discourse?

Les Blogs: technology and democracy

Here is my favorite image of the Les Blogs conference: this cartoon drawn on the back of my namecard by Hugh McLeod.  I have enjoyed his blog tremendously since I discovered it a year and a half ago or so. He nails it on the head when it comes to the future of marketing, micro-branding and personal branding. During his panel Tuesday he talked about how blogs enable us to free our personal image or "personal brand" from the identities of the companies and organizations we work for. As he put it: "We have these identities that transcend our jobs, which is very good because most jobs suck." 

David Sifry of Technorati said: "The internet is starting to be used in a new way and we need a new metaphor to better describe the way we use the web."

He described the web as no longer a succession of pages but a "conversation stream" or "event stream," enabling individuals and companies to enter into a more direct conversation. "In next 10 years the whole idea of the consumer economy will shift and we'll be calling it a participant economy." He also believes a new model of civics will emerge as a result of this transformation. Citizens' media, says Salim Ismail of PubSub, sitting on his right, makes it "impossible for corporations to manage their message." 

They're right. Companies - and increasingly I believe governments - can no longer control their messages. Their employees' reputations and identities (and thus market value) are less dependent on employers. Citizens' identities may also become more independent of their governments' national "branding."

Ben Hammersley gave a very provocative talk about the future. (Provocative not only because he was wearing a kilt!) He believes "We are on the tipping point of the next step in the evolution of human society." Ethan blogged an excellent summary of it here.

I must admit, I don't believe that technology - or anything else for that matter - is going to enable human beings to transcend our fundamentally flawed human nature. I tend to feel that we're better off if we plan for the future based on the assumption that human capacity for evil and stupidity will remain pretty much constant, and then make sure to build in the requisite institutions and systems to protect ourselves from the dark side of our own nature.

Yat Siu of Outblaze made some really good points about how a lot of these conferences make assumptions about the future of technology based on the assumption that it will emerge from a Western cultural context - which is a wrong assumption, given that soon the largest group of internet users in the world will be Chinese, and given that Northeast Asian companies and consumers will increasingly be driving information technologies of the future.
In our Monday afternoon media & blogging panel, both Ethan and I raised the point that you can't assume that a more democratic society will result just because blogs have emerged. Censorship technologies can be baked into the software and hardware, and people in some online communities exercise a great deal of self-censorship. You also see waves of nationalism and polarization emerging in some blogospheres, which can lead to tyrannies of the majority and herd mentalities -  which are not particularly conducive to democratic discourse.

Yes, I agree that information technology and citizens' media are powerful tools - that's why I quit my job in TV to build an international blogging community. World-changing things can be done with these tools. But I believe that truly world-changing solutions can only be the result of concerted human efforts to be less selfish and evil. We cannot sit back and expect technology to do our work for us. If we want the world to be better, we must reach out to other human beings outside our immediate comfortable circle. And human effort - assisted by technology - is ultimately what Global Voices is all about.

(final photo by "altaide")

China: Fear of Smartmobs

China's latest efforts to control online news are being sold to the Chinese public by the Chinese media as an effort to protect innocent citizens from swindlers, pornographers, and rumor-mongerers. But everybody in China I've been communicating with over the past 12 hours thinks the real reason has to do with fear of the kind of thing depicted in the picture on the above right: smartmobs. This picture was taken by a blogger during the anti-Japanese protests (which occasionally turned into riots) last spring. The protests sprang up in true smartmob-fashion, mobilized by people on internet bulletin boards, mobile phone text messaging (SMS) and e-mail.  (Thanks to Chris Myrick of Asiapundit for permission to use the picture.)

In case this interpretation is in any doubt, the expat blogger Danwei points out an interesting factoid:

"Today, The Beijing News dutifully reports on new regulations to control the internet, saying that the incitement of demonstrations on websites will now be banned. Juxtaposed with the story, however, is an admiring photograph depicting the thousands of anti-war protestors gathered in Washington on Sunday. We like to think that the irony was conscious."

Admiring? Or terrified? Clearly the authorities are connecting the need to prevent political protests and spontaneous activism with the need to tighten controls over online information.  The headline reads: "The Internet is forbidden from inciting illegal protests."

Chinese news reports make it clear that the regulations include internet bulletin boards (BBS, as they're known in China) and SMS mobile text messaging. Should the regime be nervous about these technologies? You bet. After all, just a short flight away from Beijing in Seoul, South Korea sits a President who was elected thanks to a grassroots youth political movement galvanized by the online citizens' media news site OhMyNews, but which couldn't have been successful without the mobilizing power or chatrooms and SMS text messaging.

If you go through the original Chinese text of the regulations released this weekend, you'll find them to be an update of regulations released in 2000 (Thanks to Roland Soong for that archive link!)

As Sophie of China Digital Times points out, the number of forbidden content-categories has been expanded from 9 to 11, and all of those new categories relate to people's ability to organize online. Reporters without Borders and Roland of the EastSouthWestNorth blog have English translations of those points.

(UPDATE: China Digital Times now has an English translation here.)

Roland of ESWN has pointed out that in China, the internet bulletin boards and chatrooms are more powerful than blogs. Why? One big reason, he says, is because professional journalists use internet bulletin boards as a place to anonymously post stories their editors won't publish because they were too politically sensitive. Putting them on a blog leaves the individual too exposed and too potentially traceable. So Chinese who want to find alternative news know that the BBS are where they're most likely to find it.  It's not clear whether the new regulations cover blogs or not, but if they cover BBS there's no reason they wouldn't cover blogs. (UPDATE: it appears they definitely do.) But blogs don't actually appear to be a major concern right now. All the blog hosting services like Bokee, Blogcn, and Blogbus are required to censor and police the blogs on their services anyway. And all the independent bloggers were required to register their identities earlier this year. So from the government's perspective the blogs have been sufficiently neutered.  The BBS and SMS are what they fear.

An example of this fear is how the government recently banned all further internet forum discussion about rural democracy and unrest in a village called Taishi. More on the Taishi story from the tireless ESWN here, here and here.

The list of content that online news sites are not allowed to report includes "state secrets." Roland provides an example (scroll down to the bottom) of how arbitrary the definition of "state secrets" can be, and how people often find themselves in possession of documents (handed to them by officials) which are not marked anywhere as classified - but then they are busted for possession of them later. Charges of reporting state secrets could also be levied in this manner - as an excuse to nail somebody. This tactic has been used against plenty of Chinese conventional newspaper journalists in the past. We are simply reminded that online news organizations cannot escape. It could be extremely easy for a journalist to be nailed for posting "state secrets" on a BBS without knowing he or she had done so.

So the Chinese government is trying to extend the same kinds of regulations it uses on mainstream media to the internet - to professional and grassroots media alike. It will be interesting to see just how far they're able to go. With the quiet compliance of the commercial sector I think China's leadership will buy themselves more time in power.

Now, before you argue that flashmobs aided by BBS and SMS may still ultimately prevail and bring democracy to China in the longer term, think again. It's going to take a lot more than that. The Chinese Communist Party has learned to control the internet not perfectly, but well enough:  Nascent opposition groups have been successfully prevented from using the internet to grow into any kind of national movement. Outside the Communist Party, there's currently no viable alternative group of people capable of governing China.  If an altermative is going to emerge from anywhere it will likely be from within the party itself. 

The Chinese government has very good reason to be scared of flashmobs and I very much doubt they'll succeed in preventing them in the future. Flashmobs could indeed bring the government down if they get big enough and out of control. But flashmobs can't incubate a generation of leaders capable of democratic governance. On the other hand, mobs are very good at crowning new demagogues to replace the old ones. After all.. that's how Mao came to power...

False claims of Chinese censorship?

My friend Kaiser Kuo, former Tang Dynasty rockstar and currently Red Herring's correspondent in Beijing, has just written an article: China Net Star Cries Censorship. The story describes the rise and likely fall of China's recent blogging sensation Sister Hibiscus (sometimes also known as "Sister Lotus" in the western media though her Chinese nom-de-blog "Furong Jiejie" actually translates to "hibiscus," not "lotus"). Now the important thing to understand about Sister H., who is plain and not very talented, is that her stardom was basically the result of bloggers and chatroom denizens making fun of her - a situation which in her egotism and lack of sophistication she herself failed to understand.  The plot only thickens from there.

Like most people who follow such things (including many snickering bloggers around the world) I had been under the impression - thanks to this Reuters article widely reprinted, re-posted, and broadcast in video and audo versions around the world - that the Chinese authorities had cracked down on her, and that her blog host bokee.com had complied with their request to, er, de-emphasize her on their site. While Reuters quoted Sister Hibiscus herself as claiming to have been cracked-down upon, Kaiser could find no further evidence that this was the case. The people at Bokee.com strongly denied having been asked by the authorities to stop featuring her blog on their front page, and pointed out that Sister Hibiscus' blog remains one of the most well-trafficked in the Bokee blog constellation.  But the "in thing" had moved on (to "Super Girls", a phenom I'll discuss in a later post). 

So anyway, Kaiser called the Reuters correspondent to see where he got his information. Apparently, the reporter had nothing more than Sister Hibiscus' claims, plus the quote from a Daily Telegraph article about her in which she told the Telegraph reporter  "They blocked me. The Propaganda Department told the television stations and big newspapers to stop covering me."  Usually, when somebody claims to have been cracked down upon, a responsible journalist will make the effort to get at least off-the-record confirmation from official Chinese contacts (even if indirectly via friends of Chinese officials or people who work in Chinese media organizations who tend to know about crackdowns) that such a crackdown has in fact occurred. When I worked as a journalist in China, I myself ran across situations in which artists and writers claimed to have been censored when the reality was they just weren't very talented - but were trying to salvage their careers by claiming political victimhood and getting buzz with Western journalists. The tactic works surprisingly often, I'm afraid. 

Apparently, no effort to confirm Sister H's claims was made by the Reuters journalist. Kaiser's efforts along those lines have turned up total blanks. It appears, indeed, that China's bloggers and chatroom denizens - as fickle as bloggers and chat-roomers anywhere -  have lost interest. Welcome to 15 mintes of fame. It ends. The cyber-herd moves on.  Sister Hibiscus appears to be trying to revive her edge by turning herself into a censorship victim, whether it's true or not. (That said, if anybody out there has evidence that authorities have indeed made deliberate efforts to diminish her fame, please hit the comments section and let everybody know.)

As Kaiser points out in his article, Western reporters can get away with this kind of sloppy reporting because there is so much real censorship happening every day in China. So reports of censorship are always believable - to foreigners as well as to many Chinese. This situation is reinforced by the fact that the Chinese government routinely lies and obfuscates about what it censors, why and how. So denials - even when true - are not believed. Similarly, companies involved with censorship and filtering are generally evasive and un-transparent about what they're up to and what the Chinese government has asked them to do. Bokee, like all Chinese blog-hosting companies, filters and censors the blogs they host. Users know this through their posting experiences, not because Bokee has been publicly upfront with them about what they're doing. So I wonder, when Sister H. cries censorship, and the Reuters article gets cut and pasted around the Chinese blogosphere and chatrooms, do Bokee's users believe their denials or not? 

It's an interesting question. I'd love to know what Chinese bloggers out there think.

IT Industry, "Policenets" and "Warnets" Worldwide

My latest Cisco post has generated a lot of debate and a fair amount of criticism.

Several people have pointed out that the issue goes far beyond the question of how U.S. tech companies may be assisting Chinese police thuggery and state censorship. As many, including Dan Gillmor point out, there is a much bigger question about the relationship between the tech industry and curtailment by governments of freedom of speech and human rights worldwide. Dan writes:

...Moreover, the issues get even more fuzzy when you consider our own government's race toward creating a surveillance state, or worse. As Congress moves to reauthorize the grotesquely named "Patriot Act," who are we to blame domestic companies for cooperating with repression overseas when we're creating our own version at home?
...

On a discussion list, Sasha Costanza-Chock writes of the need for more "ICT for Development" to balance out the extensive resources put by governments into "ICT for War" :

...Now, my point is not to argue about the equivalence or relative levels of state repression of internal dissent in China vs. the USA. And if it comes to that, then we could just shift the conversation to Cisco's role in the US' current multiple wars of aggression and occupation.

But the point is really not about relative levels of state violence, it's about the need to recognize the deep structural links between, not just Cisco, but the IT industry in general and the military-police apparatus everywhere. The IT industry can't be decoupled from state repression and violence by picking a few instances for delinking.

Yet Cisco-DOD contracts are of course funded by the public. So maybe the conversation and strategies are really about how to ensure that public money put into ICT isn't used to enhance state surveillance and violence but instead is used for 'development.' One (small) step for researchers is to be able to demonstrate the comparative spending levels for networked warfare vs. networked development. I'm shocked that, in all the WSIS process, I've barely heard mention of the military (though we did get a clause about information warfare into the CS Declaration at Geneva) and haven't seen 'civil society,' let alone government delegates, make frank comparisons of the budgets for ICT4War vs. ICT4Dev.
...

Food for thought.

Final Madrid roundup, off to Austin

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about the criticism received by our Thursday Madrid panel when we presented a set of recommendations about how not to destroy free speech on the internet while fighting terrorism. He also has an excellent summary of the discussions and debates that our group had all day Wednesday as we put those recommendations together. David Weinberger summarizes the press conference our group gave – mainly to Spanish press – later on Thursday.

After a weekend traveling and then recovering from travel, I’m off again to Austin, TX for the end of the South-by-Southwest conference, where I’ll be on two Tuesday panels: Blogging vs. Journalism (the title is a non-starter but I didn’t name the panel), and How to Think About Democracy & Technology. Then I’ll participate in an all-day workshop on Wednesday focusing on activist technology.  I’m looking forward to learning a lot… despite my conference fatigue.

Kumi Naidoo calls for reality check

I'm listening to the opening panel of the Atocha Workshop on terrorism. Kumi Naidoo of Civicus  believes that by calling the war on terror a "war," governments are actually breathing more life into terrorism. Calling it a war, he believes, gives momentum, inspiration, and legitimacy to "those who would perpetuate attacks."  He says: "How you can wage a war against a tactic doesn't make sense." 

Naidoo is also concerned - as many of us are - that the discourse and language of "the war on terrorism" are being used by "regimes with no propensity to democracy." The "war on terror" provides convenient language to justify human rights abuses by non-democratic governments, crackdowns on dissidents, and "closures of democratic spaces." 

One example I'm quite familiar with is the Chinese government's use of the "war on terrorism" as a convenient excuse to lock up members of muslim groups in Western China - many of which do not advocate terrorism at all, they just want more autonomy. 

My group of bloggers and technologists is concerned that governments will use the war on terror as an excuse to crack down on freedom of speech on the internet.

Naidoo makes another fairly radical assertion: he believes that global civil society is becoming the "second superpower" that will be in the best position to fight evil, terror, poverty and injustice. Not governments.

Study of Terror: a growing industry

Here in Madrid, at the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security, there are a lot of people who study terrorism and try to figure out how best to counter-act it: government officials, law enforcement people, technologists, psychologists, sociologists, and academics.  Many of them are honorable, hard-working, ethical, and admirable people.

However I've also encountered a number of people - mainly academics as well as people from government agencies and even non-governmental organizations - who are using the terrorism phenom to advance their careers and get grant money. This is disgusting. It reminds me of journalists who are gleeful about covering wars because it advances their careers. Sick.

Safe Democracy & the Internet

David Weinberger has posted the IRC for our workshop yesterday.

Ironically, while the press has been barred from this conference, we've got a bunch of bloggers here. Ethan Zuckerman interviewed Martin Varsavsky, one of the organizers, about this ironic situation.

We have just drafted a document titled " The Infrastructure of Democracy:Strengthening the Open Internet for a Safer World."  It's on the Global voices Wiki here, or continue reading.

UPDATE: a summary of the session where we presented our recommendations is posted here. 

Terrorism, Democracy & the Internet

I'm in Madrid now, at the Safe Democracy conference, where people from around the world have gathered to discuss how you fight terrorism without destroying democracy. See some news coverage here, here and here.  Joi Ito has organized a workshop focusing on internet issues. As one participant just asked: How do you save the internet without destroying it?  How do you continue to protect privacy and political dissent? Joi points out that anonymity must be defended, despite the belief of some that all internet users should be identifiable. Others are talking about the delicate balance between privacy and security concerns. How do you find the right balance?

There's a lively IRC chat on freenode at: #madridopendemo.