Archive for January, 2010

Over the past couple days, millions of dollars have been donated to help Haiti through the use of text messaging. This will surely be chalked up as another example of the role that ICTs can play in saving the world. People with that view are right to be excited about what this signals – another example of technology lowering the transaction costs to doing good.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the good news is all there is.

As an example, Chris Blattman points to a recent paper [PDF] about the infamous “hate radio” in Rwanda that played a role in motivating the genocidal violence. By looking at the variety of radio coverage in villages (due to hills interfering with radio waves), the author concludes that “complete village radio coverage increased violence by 65 to 77 percent, and a simple counter-factual calculation suggests that approximately 9 percent of the genocide, corresponding to at least 45,000 Tutsi deaths, can be explained by the radio station.”

ICTs are a tool and it’s important to remember that other factors (people, geography) will impact whether they are used for good or ill.

In Mobile Communication by Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner (a great introduction to mobile phone scholarship), the authors contrast two social movements facilitated by mobile phones: the 2001 protests in the Philippines which ousted Joseph Estrada and the 2004 demonstrations at the Republic National Convention. Working off a 1975 book, The Strategy of Social Protest, in which William Gamson argues that oppositional movements fail, at least in part, due to their tendency towards factionalization.

“Those protest groups that had the ability to maintain a unified focus and ideology were the most successful. Those that were plagued by competition between different factions were not as successful in carrying out their agenda. Carrying this thought into the realm of personalized mobile communication, it is clear that, while the mobile telephone can help to facilitate the logistics of protest it can also facilitate the logistics of ideological splits.”

They speculate that, compared to the Filipino protests, the RNC protesters did not significantly disrupt the convention because there was no unified focus – environmentalists rubbed shoulders with pacifists who bumped into pro-choice supporters. Although they all opposed the RNC, the protesters never came together for something.

As a specific matter, the choice of the RNC protests has its strengths and weaknesses. If the metric of success was “significant disruption” of the convention, I think the sophistication of the NYPD and fear of ever repeating the 1968 Chicago DNC experience makes such disruption highly unlikely (just as significantly disrupting trade talks after Seattle 1999 is highly unlikely); however, this example is nice because just four years later, many of those discordant protesters were successfully united in opposition to the GOP, this time under the banner of Hope, Change and Obama ’08.

More generally, understanding the relationship between nichification and digital democracy seems like a fruitful exercise. A few years ago, Clay Shirky wrote about the rise of the mega-niche in Wired, and that magazine’s editor, Chris Anderson, made the theory of The Long Tail famous. Both concepts point towards the role of ICTs, and especially the Internet, in facilitating factionalization: I’m a student who cares about the esoteric issue of copyright reform, so I can find an organization especially for students who care about copyright reform.

To what extent is this involvement to the detriment of my broader political engagement, perhaps by isolation in Sunstein’s digital echo chambers? And how do leaders of movements keep them unified? (At least as far as the Obama effort, Micah Sifry has some thoughts about the post-election disunity and how it might have been avoided.) On a global level, if some cultures are more individualistic or communal, will ICTs differently affect their digital democracy efforts?

The apparent ties between the Nigerian man charged with plotting to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day and a radical American-born Yemeni imam have cast a spotlight on a world of charismatic clerics who wield their Internet celebrity to indoctrinate young Muslims with extremist ideology and recruit them for Al Qaeda, American officials and counterterrorism specialists said. [Emphasis added]

This is the lede of a recent NYT article about the failed Christmas bombing of a Detroit-bound international flight. It is, I think, the common way for the public to see the process of terrorist development: Naive, wide-eyed Muslim youngster gets pulled into the web of extremist ideology by a Rasputin-esque character with a bushy beard and flowing white robes. These nefarious characters are the only ones who have any form of agency; the suicide-bomber to-be is warped and cajoled into his murderous mission by promises of martyrdom by the celebrity clerics. After all, who would actively choose to blow themselves up, right?

This narrative, though, is far from accurate. As the NYT piece rightly points out (much further down), the suicide-bombers are, more likely than not, acting on their own accord, especially when the choose to enter the terrorist networks. As a former CIA employee notes,

“Young people have a mind of their own,” he said. “They are not robots, brainwashed. They are already radicalized. What they want in a sense is a validation of what they already believe. The religious leaders are lightning rods, because of the extreme statements. They form a community around them.”

This viewpoint is not the full story, however. It still lacks an understanding of why a wealthy Nigerian or a Major in the American military seeks out the bushy bearded bad-guy. Why do they choose to start down that path? And why do they stay on it?

To understand what motivates “them” to hate “us” requires seeing the world from a very different perspective than most Americans do. It requires what may be uncomfortable and quickly labeled unpatriotic.

But it also requires recognizing that the ideal of America is something that is both powerful and unquantifiable – it is something immeasurably harmed by White House-sanctioned torture and mistakenly aimed bombs that kill civilians. As Robert Wright wrote after the Fort Hood massacre, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were supposed to make the U.S. safer, but by placing America in the position to compromise its ideals (“victory at any cost”), it makes it more likely that more and more people will lose their faith in the country so many strive to join each year. It will make the way Americans see the world will be increasingly at odds with others.

Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them

We have to recognize that our foreign policy choices have direct consequences to the thinking of those would-be terrorists. It is not just clerics and imams who influence murderous Nigerian or Army Medics, it can be us.