Blurring Borders

It’s been impossible to miss the discussion of the role that social media is playing in the current insurrection in Iran, but the risk of adding to the echo chamber, I want to posit two quick points that are largely being missed in the breathless media accounts:

1. Every modern political conflict will utilize digital technologies, and
   
2. Technologies are, at least in the short term, politically neutral.

In the past couple years, technology’s role in conflict in Ukraine, Burma, Kenya, Colombia, Moldova and now Iran has been given increasing coverage. Almost invariably someone will point to SMS, Twitter, Facebook, or some other digital technology and claim that it is having a determinative effect on the events unfolding.

Though there certainly needs to be more research in this area, I think the role of these technologies is often far overblown. In fact, calling this or any other large-scale social movement a “Twitter Revolution” is myopic and belittles the very real danger those involved are taking. Bullets may beat tweets, but people marching beats tweets, too.

Technology isn’t the main event in #IranElection because these technologies are now so deeply embedded in our societies that, without fail, they will be used in political conflict.

Secondly, although some very smart folks will disagree with me, I do not believe it makes sense to speak of SMS, Twitter, Facebook or Flickr as inclined to support a particular political view. They can certainly help dissidents: Ethan Zuckerman and Gaurav Mishra point out how Twitter’s main role is as a broadcast medium for sharing news from inside the Iran conflict. But looking closely, and you can see that smart oppressive regimes can make use of the same tools: Twitter and the Iran hashtags are being monitored by security services who are also creating false users to spread misinformation and propaganda.

This political neutrality is lost on Thomas Friedman, whose column today argues that the digital realm provides a sphere for moderates to gather and mobilize:

What is fascinating to me is the degree to which in Iran today — and in Lebanon — the more secular forces of moderation have used technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogging and text-messaging as their virtual mosque, as the place they can now gather, mobilize, plan, inform and energize their supporters, outside the grip of the state.

For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network. The Times reported that Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook alone has grown to more than 50,000 members. That’s surely more than any mosque could hold — which is why the government is now trying to block these sites.

Having spent the morning at the launch of the Berkman Center’s Arab blogosphere report, Friedman’s wishful thinking was all the more painful to read. While online tools are useful to marginalized groups if they have connectivity (and that’s a big if), they are just as useful to extremists.

Take, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood who are strongly represented in the Arab blogosphere. Or consider the numerous Jihadi websites and forum, often hidden behind passwords, that are a central gathering space for just the type of people Friedman claims have no need for the Internet. They, too, use what Friedman calls the “Virtual Mosque” (and perhaps it is fitting, because a Mosque can, of course, be a gathering point for moderates and extremists).

As Nicholas Kristof points out in his far more thoughtful column, some technologies would seem to have a higher marginal utility to dissidents - take Tor or Freegate - and the USA or others could promote those. (In fact, they have done so already, but they could do more.) However, these, too, will be used by pedophiles, terrorists and copyright infringers. As Jonathan Zittrain pointed out on Charlie Rose tonight and Rebecca MacKinnon writes in the WSJ, when we in the West push for limits to privacy or openness, often in the name of copyright enforcement, national security, or “to save the children,” we risk those dissidents who will certainly be using digital technology in their protests.

We would do well to recognize that technologies are neither determinative of political success, nor are they really worth the breathless reporting.

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In case you aren’t following them already, Gaurav Mishra, Evgeny Morozov, Ethan Zuckerman and Katrin Verclas are all doing fantastic work on these topics.

Cell phones and the Internet are spreading in Cuba, apparently empowering dissidents. This follows illicit television that has been popular in Cuba for years:

Since the 1990s, television has been the censors’ Achilles heel. Thousands of Cubans, mostly in Havana, watch Spanish-language telecasts from Miami. U.S. State Department officials estimate that 10,000 to 15,000 parabolic antennas are in use in Cuba.

Will two-way communications empower more than TV broadcasts? Or will traditional power structures bring about changes in Cuba?

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Lots of good statistics about Internet usage in China.

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Another piece on the trade vs. aid debate, but with a heavier focus on African entrepreneurship. [For more information, see infoDev's page on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, including this report on the SME Financing Gap.]

My favorite class this year was about the rise of China and India as international powers. It was taught by a former World Bank economist who has done much of the work on these two countries’ “knowledge economies.” My term paper examined intellectual property in China and India.

Although many objective observers see stronger intellectual property rights as an amenable, even necessary, policy for China and India, there are significant downsides to increasing IPR protection and enforcement. Strengthened IPR is likely to disproportionately advantage the developed world, decrease the ability of China and India to diffuse productivity-enhancing innovations, prove both insufficient and unnecessary for promoting innovation, and even be counterproductive to the countries’ innovation systems.

Here’s the entire paper. (Also available for download here.)
There Is No Harmony In a Patent Thicket: Towards an Effective IPR Regime in China and India

(Some caveats: I’m relatively new to this subject, don’t have on-the-ground experience and haven’t yet read ‘Small Is Beautiful’.)

If you hang around ICT4D long enough (that is, more than a day or so), you’re sure to hear people promoting “Appropriate Technology.” The important idea is not widely understood outside the ICT4D community, but refers to designing and using technology with special consideration to unique environmental, cultural and economic situations. People that work on these issues know that the same technologies that are successful in Silicon Valley are unlikely to be successful in the Great Rift Valley - there are simply too many differences to make it possible.

Supporting “Appropriate Technology” (AT, to those in the know) is taken as something of an article of faith for ICT4Ders - worthy of my admittedly obnoxious capitalization. But, outside of broad (and rather useless) generalizations, how useful is the concept?

Take laptops. The OLPC was touted as AT because it was dust proof, highly readable, mesh networkable, etc. Where my MacBook Pro would kick the bucket in 24 hours, the OLPC would hum away contently. However, plenty of folks have argued that, actually, OLPC is inappropriate for education in important developing countries. In fact, maybe the ubiquitous mobile phone is better suited for educational technology. Or could it be radio? Or (*gasp*) simple paper?

My (half-formed) idea is that “Appropriate Technology” may, in reality, be of very little use to practitioners a priori. Obviously, the Mac isn’t right for a rural Rwandan classroom. But, in determining what specific technology to deploy, I think there are broader, more determinative, aspects of technology utlization such as the passion and dedication of the users and implementers, than simply designating some tech as appropriate and some as not. There are many possibilities and I worry that we lose sight of the non-technical aspects of ICT4D when quibbling about the ICT.

[By the way, infoDev has recently launched Educational Technology Debate, an interactive debate website, that will address issues such as this in the field of ICT for education. Check it out and spread the word - there are a bunch of fun debates coming up.]

Evgeny Morozov on a potential downside of (unrealized) connectedness:

Here is the main problem with the new networked public sphere that has emerged to replace our national and mostly self-contained public spheres: when one node on the network blunders, all other nodes have to suffer through the consequences. In this case, the blunder is Britain’s and the rest of us have to suffer from interminable Savage coverage on television and the Internet, as both mainstream media and bloggers feel some desperate urge to air Savage’s juiciest and most offensive quotes over and over again. It’s a real pity that the British authorities still believe in a world that recognizes travel bans; whether we like it or not, the only use of travel bans in the world we currently live in is to trigger viral tsunamis.

Blaise Alleyne on false dichotomies in technology policy:

The spectrum of technologies Thierer presents has “tinker-friendly” and “safe and simpler” at opposite ends. Why don’t we demand both? Wordpress defies this spectrum; a hosted blog at Wordpress.com is safe and simple, but that code is available at Wordpress.org for anyone to install and tinker with on their own servers. Few would disagree that Firefox is safe and simple, but it’s also “wide-open” free software with which anyone can tinker.

Hans Rosling on the media ignoring the real global killers:

I just went to a very interesting book talk by Stanley Nollen, a professor at Georgetown, and Neil Gregory of the IFC. Their new book, “New Industries from New Places: the Emergence of Hardware and Software Industries in India and China,” examines the reasons for the rise of different ICT sectors in the two Asian giants.

They began by showing graphs of the exponential rise in software revenues in both China and India since the 1990s, but when broken down into exports and imports, it becomes clear that Indian software is predominently written for exportation while Chinese software is for the domestic market. And although India does not have a similarly developed hardware industry, when that sector is analyzed, Chinese hardware is overwhelmingly exported while what hardware India does make is for domestic consumption.

A number of explanations are typically given for the difference, notably India’s English language proficiency, its higher education system that created a large labor pool of software engineers, and the overbearing regulation that was not extended to Indian software firms. The authors of this book believe that while these are necessary explanations, they are not sufficient. Using a variety of data, including firm-level interviews with 300 Chinese and Indian companies, they think they have flushed out the answer.

Their research suggests that Indian management, not labor, and their pool of larger, better educated professionals were largely responsible. The management can be applauded for seeking quality certifications for Indian software firms and utilizing the diaspora ties. Further, they strategically partnered with far more American software companies than the Chinese did - 60% of surveyed Indian firms had Western partners, compared to only 12% in China. (There was a lot of data thrown into the presentation that focused on the software industry, but I didn’t copy most of it down.) A final reason offered by the authors, more tentatively, was a cultural explanation - Indians tend to be more outspoken and tolerant of ambiguity. Because software creation is a creative enterprise, perhaps they have an inherent comparative advantage.

During the Q&A, Professor Mike Nelson offered some helpful insights from his time with the American IT industry:

• In hardware, you can thrive with 2-3 clients whereas in software, you need many more. Therefore, overcoming the “foreignness” of China is more of a factor than in India where multiple Western clients can be easily courted due to the relative institutional familiarity.
• Timezones shouldn’t be discounted - India is apparently much easier to schedule with than China.
• Given India’s relative governance instability, software (with lower fixed costs) is a more flexible industry - Wipro or Infosys can leave localities more easily than OEMs.

Overall a very interesting talk that adds great data to the debate while debunking commonly held beliefs like the importance of Y2K.

Yesterday, Ken Lipartito of Florida International University gave a lecture at Georgetown about his early research into an upcoming book entitled “Inside the Corporate Panopticon.” Lipartito’s focus is on commercial survieillance, which he sees as far more worrisome than government surveillance. I’ve copied my notes below (sloppy, mistakes, etc.), but two things Lipartito does really well:

• Elucidate how surveillance is dehumanizing: although the information obtained through surveillance (broadly defined) is personal, its use is impersonal and de-contextualized. For example, although Visa has access to vast amounts of information about me, it is hardly a definitive account of who I am. Take Michael Phelps - one photo of him doing drugs (surveillance) is taken out of context and comes to define him in the public eye; his humanity is lost to one fact.
• Explain the paradoxical, self-reinforcing cycle of surveillance: in order to find this dehumanization, people must provide context - they must provide more information, thus adding to the lack of privacy. Lipartito realized this when filling out a job application that asked if he had ever been in trouble with the law but provided no space to explain that it was a minor traffic violation. His instinct was to provide this information, but it only adds to the surveillance. The same phenomenon can be seen with the push for more financial transparency.

Inside the Corporate Panopticon

• Economic surveillance is the more important part of the surveillance
• Manifests in labor, management, credit, consumer knowledge
• Working on a book
• 1935 small town - total fingerprint surveillance
  • Had been controversial but was established by the ’30s. By this time there were 10 million files and and by ‘45 there were 100 million. Young Hoover expanded it drastically.
  • The argument of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” was made
  • 52,000 prints were collected and sent in after an enormous drive
  • Is this fear and paranoia in a small American town?
  • Yep. It happened in Berkeley, CA. These are broader
• Surveillance is not always imposed from the outside; it is often something we do to ourselves.
• Surv is a tool of social knowledge - gathering, sorting, maintaining of it is modern.
• Only over the past two hundred years have these demands arisen - a result of a distended society of relationships.
• Surv accompanied the shift from closeknit societies to urban ones of strangers
• We have little personal information, surveillance provides impersonal information
• Our lives are enabled via surv - birth cert, ssn, dmv, etc.
  • Those cut off from surv are cut off from the social benefits (illegal immigrants)
• Married women before the 70s were cut out from credit market because they couldnt get individual credit
• But we can be excluded via surv - police
• Memory hole in 1984 as dangerous because it is the lack of surveillance of the state. same story in kafka’s the trial because he cannot see the file.
• Surv’d facts are often limited and out of context
• Try to get the system to see us as we are, not as it wants to represent us. But in explaining ourselves, we are caught in the web.
• Mac 1984 ad plays to the myth that surv is easy to attack and see
• Modern economy runs on information. Much surv focuses on state, but commerce survs too
• Surv isnt brought about via one decider or technology. Surv grows on itself.
• Scientific knowledge can be transformed to surv, too (dna, etc.)
• Fingerprinting was taken to by eugenicists (Galton)
• Much of surv seeks to measure and categorize the human body
  • Anecdote about shoe sizing science (xray)
  • “needed level of exactitude”
  • Transfered authority from customer to shoe
  • What prevailed was not xray machines, but the branick foot measurers
  • “When surv is to be done on a large scale, the cheap and easy to use techs increase the spread of surv.”
  • Measuring of the body is implicated in far worse scenarios: slavery
  • “strange technologies of surveillance” and with surv, strange often meet soft - paper, bit/bytes.
  • Anything that augments memory/transfering info aids surv [what way does the flow happen? intentional tech or incidental?]
• Kodak brought archivable surveillnce to the masses
  • Newspapers brought wider circulation to photography, causing worse spread of private info
  • Prompted the first calls for privacy protection - Brandeis and Warren article - “right to be left alone”
  • privacy was now a matter for both government and private business
• corporations are giant information processing machines
• [short on time so moves on to labor]
• surv techniques were use in factories by a utopian welshman who sought “new harmony” where factory owned life and play, etc.
• by the 20th century, labor surv grew to facilitate info flow from floor to manager
• and personal lives were penetrated - ford.
• firms that invest in workers also raise the level of intrusion - efficiency experts, hr, drug tests, company towns, computer monitoring.
• calls into question those who think networked economy is more humane. he thinks it is a higher form of surveillance
• science of consumption - quant and psych methods
• “tell me what you buy and i will tell you who you are”
• focuses on predicting wants.
• surveillance categories capture the current zeitgeist - rice as female. muslim as terrorists.
• google continues a long time trend
• is surv a step towards panopticon or is it necessary to allow living in a globalized world
• credit reporting used to be investigation but in the 70s that started to change to constant surveillance
  • these investigations encoded the prejudices of the time
• credit rating ignored the complexities of local conditions. homogenized experience.
• the answer to criticisms of surveillance is often ‘more surveillance’
• FICO and other algorithms allowed them to say that the credit rating was objective [what about the values embedded in algorithms]
• epistemological conundrum of the marketplace
• information reduces uncertainty, but there is no way to determine reliability of information. which leads to more and more surveillance
• “1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual”

I just finished watching Nathan Eagle speak at O’Reilly ETech 2009 about his start up, txteagle.

Dr. Eagle’s interest in mobile phones and their broader roles in society brought him to East Africa where really fascinating innovations are taking place. While there, he saw a number of problems:

1. With unemployment in Kenya hovering a little below 50%, many relatively educated people have lots of idle time. With the exploding popularity of mobile phones, a cell phone is often present during downtime.
2. Cellular operators are searching for ways to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and to distribute the traffic volumes more evenly (less at peak times).
3. Corporations have millions of tasks that humans can do better than computers and cheap communication networks allow those to be distributed via crowdsourcing.

Dr. Eagle’s elegant solution pays Africans (in airtime or mobile money) to complete simple tasks like surveys, translations and transcriptions. As he says, think of it as “mobile Mechanical Turk.” And as he explains in the second half of his speech, there are a number of exciting secondary effects of this empowerment.

As you probably know, I care a lot about openness in education. I have a new post up at Techdirt proposing that academics can help create a vibrant digital news ecosystem via open access and academic blogging.

Instead, academia should be thinking larger. We do not need professors to write for newspapers — the medium itself is not necessary. Academia can do two things to support a vibrant, reliable information ecosystem: support open access and support faculty blogging. Open access publishing increases the availability and reach of scholarship; the original articles are more accessible, allowing more general purpose writing to piggy-back off them. And as for academic blogging, the future of news need not contain newspapers as we know them. Plenty of brilliant professors have compelling and informative blogs, but for the most part, these are not considered positively in the tenure process, creating a disincentive to young scholars. If Zimmerman and others who care about high quality information want to promote it, they should encourage tenure committees to support academic blogging.

Check out the rest of it.

This may be a week of Costa Rican sun and 24 hours of travel speaking, but amidst the search for viable business models for journalism, should we actually want monopoly?

As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, monopoly rents were a large reason newspapers were able to sustain expensive, important journalistic endeavors like investigative or foreign reporting. As the geographic monopoly source of information, newspapers could charge extraordinary rates for advertisements. In turn, these profits subsidized the type of reporting that Paul Starr rightly notes is essential to democracy. More efficient competition, like targeted online advertising, has undermined this status quo.

So, does (limited?) monopoly information control, have a desirable benefit? Could Google’s continued rise and importance to online advertisers signal a new opportunity to capture monopoly prices and subsidize “hard journalism”?

It goes without saying that this vast, unprecedented level of global monopoly would have terrible effects, so, more prudently, perhaps the title of this post should be “should we wish for false-monopoly?”

It’s late; help me figure this out.