Current Berkman People and Projects

Keep track of Berkman-related news and conversations by subscribing to this page using your RSS feed reader. This aggregation of blogs relating to the Berkman Center does not necessarily represent the views of the Berkman Center or Harvard University but is provided as a convenient starting point for those who wish to explore the people and projects in Berkman's orbit. As this is a global exercise, times are in UTC.

The list of blogs being aggregated here can be found at the bottom of this page.

November 23, 2009

Doc Searls
WGBH/WCRB go the way of WNYC/WQXR

The longest thread in the history of this blog belongs to Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station, which I posted on July 26, and still has comments this month. The post followed a complex deal by which the New York Times divested its legacy classical music station, WQXR — and by which the station’s format, call letters, record library and some of its personnel survived as a noncommercial outlet of WNYC, on a different channel with a weaker signal. From the comments one might gather that more listeners were unhappy than happy with the deal. My post mostly presented the upside.

Now here in Boston a similar move is underway. WGBH, “Boston’s NPR arts and culture station” will go the way of WNYC-FM, which phased out classical music starting in 2002, eventually shunting it to HD side-channels and Internet streams while populating the FM signal (as well as its AM one) with news and information programming, which tends to be more popular and to attract more money in listener contributions. By saving WQXR, WNYC returned classical music to the airwaves (although the city was still down one classical station, or two if you want to go back to the very late WNCN.) WGBH clearly had the same thing in mind when it bought WCRB, which was already weakened in the Boston metro when it moved from its old local channel (102.5) to its current channel (99.5) in Lowell. (Wikipedia has good background poop on WCRB’s own long saga.) While both WCRB signals have about the same range, the old 102.5 signal radiates from the Boston FM and TV antenna farm in nearby Needham, while the new one on 99.5 comes from a hill overlooking the I-495/I93 intersection, far to the north near the New Hampshire border.

So now WGBH plans to move its classical programming to WCRB, whch will become a non-commercial station (as did WQXR), and to do more news and information programming on its own home signal (89.7), which is grandfathered at nearly 100,000 watts on Great Blue Hill (hence the call letters) in Milton on the south side of Boston. In terms of wattage alone, it is New England’s most powerful station. (The largest coverage belongs to WHOM/94.9 on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire.) As a result WGBH can go head-to-head with WBUR/90.9, which is the incumbent public radio leader in Boston.

The big switch happens on December 1.

WGBH is doing its best to gloss over the signal loss for classical listeners, especially in the southern reaches of Eastern Massachusetts, where WGBH has a very strong signal and WCRB is mostly absent. My own take in this case is the same as it was for WQXR: this is the best that could be done for classical music on Boston airwaves — and it offers opportunities not possible for WCRB had it remained a commercial station. Go back to that first link if you want to see what those are.

As for me, I expect to be more likely to listen to a ‘GBH-run noncommercial WCRB than I did to the commercial one. First, the commercials were annoying. Second, the WCRB repertoire was pretty close to all-hits, rather than the more varied and challenging fare found on WGBH. There should be a happy medium between the two, and I’m sure ‘GBH will work hard to find it.

Finally, a word about HD radio. I got one recently — a $99 Teac unit — at Costco. The tuner is remarkably good, and it gets most local stations’ HD side-channels. But “tuning” HD is a counter-intuitive chore. I’d be curious to know if anybody (beside those who pick a channel and stay put) has had a positive experience with tuning it.

by Doc Searls at November 23, 2009 10:32 PM

Christian Sandvig
Does the Living Room Computer Have to do Everything?

As mentioned in my previous post “My Game System is My New Cable Box,” the newest system update for the XBox 360 now includes a number of social networking and Internet applications, including Facebook, twitter, last.fm, and Zune (Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the iTunes store).  For me, the integration of these services feels like a kind of weird collision of different neighborhoods and cultures.

Facebook on XBox Live

The neighborhoods metaphor is apt, in part because of the debate earlier this year about the socioeconomic and race connotations of different social networking sites.  Danah Boyd notably described a “white flight” from MySpace to Facebook (here’s a nice overview article of her point).  Facebook, she argues, has been portrayed as a higher-class, safer place by media coverage.

Eszter Hargittai also published a revealing demographic analysis comparing SNSs two years ago in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, titled ”Whose Space?“.  She found a number of interesting differentiations among these sites: “different populations select into the use of different services.”  For instance, Asian-Americans are less likely to use MySpace.

So our Internet applications are like demographically distinct neighborhoods of a city.  Of course we know that all kinds of things are differentiated demographically (see: Stuff White People Like).  But the XBox360 merge combines the XBox’s own social networking system (based on Gamertags) with others systems like Twitter and Facebook and this is a different kind of mixing.  Yes these sites can reach different audiences but that they are used by the same audiences for different purposes in different contexts with different interfaces.  It’s not just that different people live in different neighborhoods (MySpace vs. Facebook demographics), but that when I personally visit different neighborhoods I expect them to look different (many people use multiple SNSs).

Everything is suddenly all mixed into the XBox interface. Having some of this stuff on my TV is actually pretty weird.  Adding Zune to the XBox makes a lot of sense — that’s a store to sell a/v products and I want to buy TV shows to watch on my TV.  But the other services are jarring — they echo Don Norman’s point from ten years ago in The Invisible Computer that single-purpose devices are often preferable to multi-purpose ones (here’s an old interview when he makes this point).

No one seems to be listening to him.  The interface is so much more difficult to get right on a multipurpose device.  Rather than a generic menu system that must fit everything, with a specialized device you can have a streamlined interface that helps you do what you are trying to do.  It makes so much sense to just keep each single-purpose device in the place where you want to do that task.

peek-email-device

For instance instead of a smartphone to do everything, you might want a dedicated e-mail device like the Peek (pictured above).  A friend of mine keeps both a Palm TX for the calendaring and an iPhone for mobile web surfing (and occastionally, telephoning).  I think this kind of thing is actually quite widespread.  The specialized devices are often so much better at a particular thing while a generalized device is bad at everything (or mediocre at everything).

So now the XBox is kind of a mishmash of Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, gamertags, etc.  Maybe it will grow on me but I doubt it.  For instance, Zune and Netflix now have to share the awkward XBox menuing system and are only differentiated by the fact that their backgrounds are different colors (Netflix is red, Zune is black).  To continue the neighborhoods metaphor, in their wisdom the XBox Live designers have taken all of the neighborhoods you like to visit in Manhattan and relocated their shops to a bland suburban street grid that stretches to infinity in every direction.

In my earlier post I praised the idea of the game console as the new basic entertainment computer in the living room that could handle a variety of video and gaming functions.  Let’s me temper my enthusiasm.  A game console is a good idea for things a gaming console connected to a TV can be good at!  If we try to cram everything else in there too I don’t think the results will be pretty.

by niftyc at November 23, 2009 06:12 PM

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive
Who’s the Hero?

Anderson Cooper CNNThe photo at left is from the back cover of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It exemplifies much of what can be right with American journalism, and some of what’s wrong, too.

The part to celebrate, of course, is CNN’s decision to highlight some eminently praise-worthy people. Yes, there’s an element of cliche about it — running the show in Thanksgiving — but so what? If we can’t give thanks for (some of) the people who deserve it on our best holiday, when can we?

The best part of the program, at least from the promos and articles about the people being honored,  is that they’re “regular folks” doing out-of-the-ordinary things. (Military personnel seem to be ineligible for these awards, which is an odd omission, but the honorees are certainly impressive in their own right.) You can find instructions on the website on how to donate your own time and/or money to various causes championed by the honorees. All in all, CNN is doing something good for the world with this event.

But look again at this image. Who’s that towering over the honorees? Why, it’s Anderson Cooper, the host of the program. Apparently he and his network are the real heros.

Look, I know this is about promoting an event. And I  know that Cooper is the face people will recognize.

But the way this is framed tells the story of network “journalism” today — a celebrity-infused system that conflates news readers with the people they cover.

Anderson Cooper may well be a fine journalist. I can’t really say, as I’ve given up on CNN and the other U.S. “news” networks for anything but stenography for the rich and powerful, fluff and, occasionally, breaking news where the events tell their own stories.

If Cooper is a indeed good journalist, or even a respectable one, this image should make him cringe. And someday, sooner than later, he should say so out loud.

by Dan Gillmor at November 23, 2009 01:48 PM

Jonathan Zittrain
Three perspectives on the generative web

Three great articles with themes and variations on FOI ideas:

Joe Hewitt, Facebook’s iPhone app developer, has quit developing for the iPhone because he is “philosophically opposed” to Apple’s review policies and their tight control over their platform. But instead of hitching his wagon to Android or some other mobile platform, he’s decided to focus instead on making the mobile web as strong as it can be. He told TechCrunch:

The web is still unrestricted and free, and so I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.

And he says on his blog that we can avoid a world where “the only technologies that matter” are the ones where Apple or some other gatekeeper makes decisions (however irrational or infuriating, as yet another developer has chronicled). I’m not entirely convinced that a vigorous mobile web is enough—for instance, Apple can still disable Flash on its phone, thus crippling many web apps—but it might be, and it’s a valuable complement to more open mobile platforms.

Then we have two people thinking about whether the web itself will remain free. First is Chris Messina on The Death of the URL. Messina writes from the perspective of a user experience designer, who understands why the complexity of the Internet can frighten users (”thar be dragons!”) but thinks that should be a challenge for designers, not a reason to give up on “the infinite organicity of the web” and the structures of “one of the most generative periods in history.”

Second is Tim O’Reilly on The War for the Web. He notes that Facebook and the Apple iPhone require users to play by the company’s rules to some extent, although the web still exists as a partial backstop—e.g., Google Voice is available on the web, if not as a native iPhone app. But he worries that the web itself will become less interoperable and less generative as companies with natural monopolies in one area attempt to gain control in other areas as well. Go read the whole piece; it’s worth it.

JZ argues that the PC and the internet have been the perfect combination for generativity. The internet itself could itself be a solution to the control of mobile platforms. But these pieces point out, yet again, how even that combination isn’t untouchable unless we’re constantly, actively working at it.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

by elisabeth at November 23, 2009 06:01 AM

November 21, 2009

David Weinberger
Will books survive? A scorecard…

New media generally don’t replace old media, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out. After TV we still have radio. After telephones we had telegrams for a good long while. So what about books? After we have networked digital books, we’ll still have and produce physical books. But will physical books be as ubiquitous and culturally important as radio? Or will they be as cherished but infrequently attended as live theater?

In my interview with Cory Doctorow, I wondered, in the midst of an overly-elaborate three-part question, whether ebooks will provide enough of what we value about physical books (pbooks) that pbooks will lose the historic significance Cory had pointed to.

We won’t know the answer until we invent the future. But, I’m going to hypothesize, predict, or stipulate (pick one) that at some point we will have ebooks (which may be distinct hardware or be software running in something other device we carry around), with paper-quality displays that are full-color and multimedia, that are fully on the Net, with software that lets us interact with the book and with other readers, that are a part of the standard outfitting of citizens, and within a physical environment that provides ubiquitous Net connectivity.

Those are a lot of assumptions, of course, and each and every one of them could be disrupted by some 17 year old at work in her parents’ basement. Nevertheless, if the future is something like that, then what of pbooks’ value will be left unreplaced by ebooks?

Readability. I’m assuming paper-quality displays, which may turn out to be unattainable without having to wheel around batteries the size of suitcases. But, even without that, the ability of ebooks to display text in various fonts and sizes should remove this advantage from pbooks.

Convenience. I am assuming that ebooks will be more convenient than pbooks: as good in sunlight as pbooks, at least as easy to hold and use, easier to use for those with certain disabilities, long enough battery life, possibly self-lit, etc. The biggest open question, I believe, is whether it will be as easy to annotate ebooks…

Annotatability. The current crop of ebooks make highlighting passages and making notes so difficult that you have to take a break from reading to do either of those things. But, that’s one big reason why the current crop of ebooks are pathetic. With a touchscreen and a usable keyboard (or handwriting recognition software), ebooks of the future should be as easy to annotate as a pbook is. And those annotations will then become more useful, since they will be searchable and sharable.

Affordability. The marginal cost of producing ebook content is tiny, which doesn’t mean prices will drop as dramatically as we might like. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine a world in which ebook content costs more than pbooks.

Social flags. You probably carefully choose which book you’re going to bring with you on a job interview, and which books get moved to the shelves in your living room. We use the books we own as tribal flags, as Cory points out. Ebooks can serve the same role when introduced into social networks, including social networks explicitly built around books, such as LibraryThing.com. They obviously don’t work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you’re going to have to get physical copies.

Aesthetic objects. Many of us love the feel and smell of books. While ebooks might be able to simulate that in some way — maybe their page displays could yellow over time — it’d still just be a simulation. While ebooks will undoubtedly develop their own aesthetics, so that we’ll call people over to see how beautiful this or that new ebook is, they can’t replace the particular aesthetics of pbooks. So, those who love pbooks will continue to cherish them.

Sentimental objects. For my bar mitzvah, some friend of my parents gave me a leatherbound copy of A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” and other poems. It was a beautiful aesthetic object, but I also understood that it had a personal meaning to the giver. I doubt that that particular copy did — I don’t think it came from his own collection — but the physicality of the book was itself a marker for the personal meaning it had for the giver. As Cory says, the books your father read — the very copies that were in his hands — probably have special meaning to you. It’s hard to see how ebooks could have the same sentimental value, except perhaps if you are reading the highlights and notes left by your father, and even then, it’s not the same.

Historic objects. Likewise, knowing that you’re looking at the very copy that was read by Thomas Jefferson gives a book an historic value that ebook content just can’t have. It’s hard to see how an author could autograph an ebook in any meaningful way.

Historical objects. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have pointed out, as has Anthony Grafton, books as physical objects collect metadata that can be useful to historians, e.g., the smell of vinegar that indicates the book came from a town visited by cholera. Ebooks, however, accumulate and generate far more metadata. So, we will lose some types of metadata but gain much more…maybe more than our current norms of privacy are comfortable with.

Specialized objects. It will take somewhere between an improbably long time and forever for all collections of pbooks to be digitized. Thus, books in special collections are likely to be required well after we can take the presence of ebooks for granted.

Possessions. We are headed towards a model that grants us licenses to read books, but not outright ownership. (This is Cory’s main topic in the interview.) If we lose ownership of ebooks, then they won’t have the sentimental value, they will lose some of their economic value to readers (because we won’t be able to resell them or buy them cheaper used), and we won’t be as invested in them culturally. Whether ebooks will be ownable, and whether that will be the default of the exception, is unresolved.

Single-mindedness. Books are the exemplar in our culture of thinking. We write our best thoughts in books. We engage with the best thoughts of others by reading books. Books encourage and enable long-form thinking. Ebooks, because they are (ex hypothesis) on the Net, are distracting. They string together associated chunks and tempt us with links beyond themselves. It is easy to imagine ebooks providing the singleminded pbook experience: “Press here to remove all links.” But, of course, you could always unpress the button. Besides, since your ebook is on the Net (ex hypothesis), all that’s stopping you from jumping out of the book and into your email or Facebook is self-discipline. So, while ebooks can provide the singledminded experience of pbooks, some of us may prefer the paper version to keep the distraction of the Net at bay.

Religious objects. Some books have special meaning within some religions. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that an ebook is going to replace the Torah scrolls in synagogues. In fact, orthodox Jews can’t use electronic devices on the Sabbath, so they are certainly going to continue to buy pbooks. But, this is the very definition of a specialty market.

So, what does all this mean for the future of books? It depends.

First, are there other values of pbooks that I left off the list?

Second, I haven’t listed any unique advantages of ebooks. For example, ebooks will allow social reading: Engaging with others who are reading the book or with the traces left by those who have already it. That’s pretty important. Also, ebooks are likely to radically reduce the cost of reading, especially of some categories of overpriced pbooks (e.g., textbooks). Also, ebooks will make it much easier to understand the content of books through embedded dictionaries, search capabilities, and links to explanatory discussions. Also, as more of the corpus gets digitized, ebooks will make it far easier for scholars to pursue the footnotes (except they’ll be embedded links, not footnotes). Also, ebooks will incorporate multimedia. Also, reading ebooks will build a searchable personal corpus that is far more useful to us than bookcases filled with out conquered pbooks. Also, we’ll always have our entire library with us, ready to be read or reread, which is good news for readers.

I leave it to you to decide how this mix of values is likely to play out. What will be the social role and meaning of pbooks as we go forward into the ebook era? In twenty years — giving ourselves plenty of time to develop usable ebook readers, to digitize most of what we need, and to built an always-available network — will pbooks be used mainly by collectors, and scholars working with unique texts? Will they be sentimental objects? The poor person’s medium? Will physical books be the equivalent of AM radio, of the road company of “Cats,” of quaint objects in book museums — and/or the continuing pinnacle and embodiment of learning?v

by davidw at November 21, 2009 10:45 PM

Herkko Hietanen
Finnish court: Administrators are not liable for activities planned at discussion forum
Vantaa district court decided in a case that defines the limits of freedom of speech and online liability that discussion forum administrators are not liable for people gathering to float down the river drinking beer. That is even as the participants used the discussion forum to discuss the organization of the event. The prosecutor got tired [...]

by Herkko Hietanen at November 21, 2009 07:22 PM

Wikimedia ja Creative Commons lisensointi
WIPO magazine julkaisi kirjoittamani artikkelin Wikimedian ratkaisusta siirtyä CC-lisenssin käyttäjäksi. Artikkeli kuvaa ongelmia joita massiivinen lukuisan tekijän yhteistyönä tehty sivusto kokee uudelleenlisensointitilanteessa. Käytännössä Wikimedian miljoonat artikkelit jotka aikaisemmin käyttivät FDL-lisenssiä siirtyivät äänestyksen jälkeen käyttämään CC-By-SA 3.0 lisenssiä. Äänestyksessä joukko, joka edustaa murto-osaa kaikista Wikimedian jakaman tekijänoikeuden suojaaman materiaalin tekijöistä, asettui uudelleenlisensoinnin taakse.  Joka tapauksessa lisenssimuutoksessa on [...]

by Herkko Hietanen at November 21, 2009 06:16 PM

Doc Searls
Catching up

I’m back in Boston after a great few days in Utah at the Kynetx Impact conference, where VRM and related stuff was brought up and discussed at length. It was an inaugural effort by Kynetx, which has what I think is a novel and profound take on the future of the Web.

The only bad thing that happened on the trip was a crash on my laptop that trashed my email and some other files. One result is that much of the email sent to my Berkman address  cyber.law.harvard.edu) since late Monday was lost. (Glad I back up almost constantly here at home. I do offsite as well, but lacked the connectivity speed during the trip to fix the problem.)

So if you sent me any email that mattered during that time, please send it again. Thanks.

by Doc Searls at November 21, 2009 03:20 PM

Herkko Hietanen
Arvio N900 luurista viikon käytön jälkeen
Sain alkuviikosta N900 multimediatietokonepuhelimen testikäyttöön. Luuri ei ole sama kuin tällä viikolla toimitukseen lähtenyt tuotantoversio. Ohjelmisto on yli kuukauden vanha ja buginen. Silti luuri on vakaa ehkä ole saanut sitä kaatumaan vielä kertaakaan. Ohjelmiston keskeneräisyys näkyy patterin kestossa ja näytön herkkyyden säädöissä. Ilmeisesti näiden ominaisuuksien puutteet ovat lykänneet Nokian aikataulua luurin markkinoille tuomisessa. En ole [...]

by Herkko Hietanen at November 21, 2009 04:05 AM

OpenNet Initiative
UAE unblocks access to top Israeli domain ".il"

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has unblocked access to Web sites on the Israeli country code top-level domain “.il"

ONI noticed earlier this month that .il Web sites have been accessible from the UAE, and has since been testing for filtering of tens of .il Web sites from different categories including government, politics, religion, and entertainment. All sites have been found consistently accessible via the country's two ISPs, Etisalat and du.

It is not clear why the UAE authorities have decided to remove the ban on .il Web sites and whether this unblocking will continue.

Like many Arab countries, the UAE has no official diplomatic relations with Israel.

ONI's technical tests run in 2006-2007 and 2008-2009 found that the entire “.il” top-level domain was blocked in the UAE.

In addition to .il Web sites, ONI's most recent research on Internet filtering in the UAE ( ONI UAE Country Profile published August 2009) found that the UAE censors a few political and religious Web sites, some sites belonging to Nazis or historical revisionists, and pervasively filters Web sites that contain pornography, content relating to alcohol and drug use, gay and lesbian issues, online dating, gambling, as well as online privacy and circumvention tools.

by Helmi Noman at November 21, 2009 12:31 AM

November 20, 2009

Berkman Center front page
Berkman Buzz: Week of November 16, 2009

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
If you would like to receive the Buzz weekly via email, please sign up here.

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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

read more

by syoung at November 20, 2009 09:00 PM

Citizen Media Law Project
Is Britain Putting an End to Libel Tourism?

Could Britain finally be moving to shed its unflattering title of "libel capital of the world"?  

We can only hope, of course, but it does appear to be edging that way, thanks to a recent High Court decision to toss a textbook "libel tourism" case.  In the case, Out-law.com reports that Mr. Justice Tugendhat threw out the claims brought by Zimbabwe-oriented investment firm LonZim and two executives against Andrew Sprague, who criticized the company on the website of a South African magazine in May 2009.  The plaintiffs alleged that Sprague's article false accused them of "cynically and greedily indulg[ing] in self-enrichment at the expense of, and contrary to the interests of, shareholders."

LonZim argued that "a significant proportion" of the South African magazine's traffic was from England and Wales, the High Court's jurisdiction.  But in a departure from some of the more objectionable British libel decisions — like the case against Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, which founded jurisdiction on 23 copies sold in the UK on Amazon — Tugendhat held LonZim's feet to the fire and required it to prove that this was the case.  And LonZim couldn't make the requisite showing:

Sprague presented evidence of traffic figures from the website for the two months following the date of first publication. The publishers had recorded a total of 65 visits for the contentious article.

"It is not possible to say whether these visits included more than one visit by the same person," noted Mr Justice Tugendhat. "Nor is it possible to say in which jurisdiction the visitors were located."

The publishers did say that on average approximately 6.79% of visits to their website are made by users of the internet based in the UK. "If the average percentage of 6.79% is applied to the 65 visits, the result is that about 4 visits might have been made by one or more visitors based in the UK," said the judgment. (Source)

Tugendhat noted that even those four visits may not have been within the court's jurisidiction.  Were the visits made from Scotland or Northern Ireland — both of which are in the UK but outside the High Court's jurisdiction — they wouldn't count for LonZim's purposes.  "London is not the only important financial centre in the UK," the judge noted.  "Edinburgh is another." Thus, the plaintiffs failed to show a "significant" number of English and Welsh readers of the article, undermining their claim of reputational damage.

Nigel Hanson of British firm Foot Anstey writes that Tugendhat was following the lead of the case of Dow Jones v. Jameel, which held that a plaintiff pursuing a libel claim must show that a "real and substantial tort had been committed in this jurisdiction," as measured by both the extent of the publication within the jurisdiction and the amount of harm that the plaintiff's reputation suffered.  Certainly, such a requirement like this ought to decrease the number of weak libel lawsuits imported into Britain.  With the web logging technology available out there, it ought to be relatively easy to distinguish legitimate claims from frivolous ones.

Still, Hanson writes, foreign publishers are justifiably wary of English libel law, despite these "sensible and pragmatic rulings":

Some American newspapers and magazines, for example, are said to be considering whether it is still worth the risk of supplying the 200-odd copies they make available for sale in this country for subscribers and hotels, because London is still regarded as the libel capital of the world.

Foreign publishers are also reported to be considering blocking access to their websites in this country for fear of being sued for libel here.

Media organisations including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times recently sent a Memorandum to the House of Commons, outlining their concerns about English libel law's 'chilling effect' on freedom of expression.

And pressure groups Index on Censorship and English PEN recently issued a report calling for radical reform of our libel law to facilitate the free exchange of ideas and information. Their report makes 10 key recommendations, such as capping damages at £10,000, expanding Fair Comment and Public Interest defences, and curtailing the right of corporations to sue for libel. (Source)

Hanson argues that the English judges enforcing this standard deserve credit.  And he's right, they do.  This is an admirable step.  Still, the rulings of a High Court judge and one Court of Appeals panel do not permanent British law make.  Until the British Supreme Court or Parliament weighs in on the matter, there's no guarantee that either of these cases will hold up.  And that being the case, foreign publishers are wise to keep the pressure on.  Britain hasn't shed its libel title just yet.  But hopefully it will soon.

Meanwhile, let's hope Congress takes action on the Free Speech Protection Act 2009, which is designed to combat libel tourism. For details, see CPJ Blog's article from earlier this week

(Arthur Bright is a rising third-year law student at the Boston University School of Law and a former CMLP Legal Intern. Before attending law school, Arthur was the online news editor at the Christian Science Monitor.)

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jerome Briot (http://www.flickr.com/photos/briot/), licensed under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

by Arthur Bright at November 20, 2009 08:30 PM

ProjectVRM
VRM Impact

kynetx_vrm_kml-ribbit

The shot above was made at the Kynetx Impact conference, which is the first one I’ve been to where VRM was a serious topic on its own — an acronym thrown around by participants, in ways that made clear that they knew what it was. No explanation required.

In other words, this wasn’t a VRM conference, but one where VRM was a central issue. The fact that the 140 people who packed the room included lots of developers, some of whom working right there on all kinds of stuff, including VRM.

I’ll have much more to say about the conference later. Right now I’m waiting for a flight at the airport and wanted to make a post while I had a shot at it, on the one browser that survived a really bad crash a couple days ago that seems to have affected some system libraries.

Still, a great conference. Thanks to the folks, and to everybody who contributed. Well done.

by Doc Searls at November 20, 2009 07:48 PM

Andrew McAfee
Enterprise 2.0 is Not THAT Big a Deal

I’ve been thinking about what to write in the wake of the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. One more summary seems unnecessary, since there have been so many good ones already. And the debates are starting to feel a little trumped up and warmed over, and so less fun to wade back into.

And then I got inspiration from Greg Lloyd, President and co-founder of Traction Software and longtime technologist. In addition to running his company Greg finds time to write a great blog, and his post after the conference was called “Enterprise 2.0 Schism.”

In it, he likens the current E2.0 controversies to a religious schism, and divides the community into three sects: Strict Proletarians, who believe it’s all about the people, Strict Technarians, who believe it’s all about the technologies, and Strict Druckerians, who “believe that “2.0″ should be considered a modifier of Enterprise rather than an allusion to mere Web 2.0 technology…”

Lloyd writes with a light touch and is clearly being a bit tongue in cheek, but he’s also making a smart and serious point. Two of them, in fact. The first is that advocates of Enterprise 2.0 really do believe different things about the phenomenon, and these differences matter. His second point is an argument for the Druckerian point of view: that the use of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) is going to change organizations so much that a new version number is warranted.

This got me thinking about what I believed. I’ve been using “Enterprise 2.0” in Lloyd’s Technarian sense — as a reference to the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches by enterprises. And do I also believe that such adoption is going to change companies? Sure –    virtually all technology adoptions do, to some extent. Do I believe that it’s going to change them enough to require a new version number?

Nope. I just think that’s too strong a claim. Let me try to explain why.

I yield to almost no one in my belief about the power and utility of ESSPs, but I just don’t think they’re going to transform the structure or purpose of the enterprise. As I wrote earlier, I don’t see E2.0’s tools, approaches, and philosophies making obsolete managers, hierarchies, org charts, and formal cross functional business processes.

It’s a rainy fall day in Boston, and after a wet walk into work I’m sitting here realizing that I need new boots. So maybe later today I’ll call up L.L. Bean and order a pair of Maine Hunting Shoes (Suave? No. Dry?  Yes.). I’ll talk to a customer service rep who will enter my order into an enterprise system. This system spans the call center, the warehouse, the credit card company and, in all likelihood, the marketing department. The people working in each of these areas have relatively stable job titles and descriptions that are tied to pay and benefits. And they all have bosses who manage and develop people, put together plans and budgets, and take responsibility for performance and improvement.

None of this is going to be swept away or rendered obsolete by the advent of ESSPs, even after they’re fully deployed and embraced. We can tell stories about how the new tools enable amorphous / gestalt / collectivist forms of organization that have no set structures and make their way through the environment much like slime molds do, but these stories are pure speculation, grounded in hope rather than reality or experience. They’re a type of cyberpunk science fiction (as an aside, I find it really interesting and telling that the best cyberpunk, like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, conjures up worlds where big formal organizations are more dominant, not less.).

I want to be clear: Lloyd’s post is fantastic: grounded and very thoughtful. He’s not in the enterprise-as-slime-mold camp. And I definitely agree with him that Enterprise 2.0 is a big deal. So what’s the right way to describe its impact?

Here’s my take: ESSPs will have about as big an impact on the informal processes of the organization as large-scale commercial enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, etc.) have had on the formal processes.

This is not a conservative statement. Enterprise systems have been a huge deal for organizations. They’ve turned reengineering from a whiteboard exercise into an unignorable reality for many, many companies. And Drucker was right when he said that “Reengineering is new, and it has to be done.”

It’s not a coincidence that productivity in the US really accelerated starting in the mid 1990s, just as enterprise systems started spreading, and accelerated most in the industries that spent the most on IT. And a great study by Erik Brynjolfsson, DJ Wu, and Sinan Aral which I wrote about here, found strong evidence that ERP adoption leads to performance improvement.

I believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be as big a deal for corporate performance and productivity. I believe this because I believe that the informal organization is as important as the formal one for getting work done (do you agree?) and that we have historically had lousy technologies for supporting the work of the informal organization (especially outside our immediate circle of strong ties). With the arrival of ESSPs, the tools available to the informal / emergent organization have gone from lousy to excellent, just like commercial enterprise systems advanced the formal organization’s toolkit from lousy to excellent.

So while I don’t think that the impact of ESSP’s is profound enough to warrant a new version number for the enterprise, I do think that we’re on the brink of a sustained period of corporate innovation, improvement, and productivity growth enabled by these new tools. I take some comfort from the fact that some very sharp and experienced corporate leaders like Cisco’s John Chambers seem to feel the same.

Do you?  In your opinion, what’s the right way to think about the broad impact of ESSPs? Will they lead to Enterprise, version 2.0, or just to Enterprise 2.0? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

by amcafee at November 20, 2009 05:05 PM

Internet & Democracy
Yandex on the Russian Blogosphere

The wildly popularly Russian search engine Yandex has released another useful report on the Russian blogosphere based on its search data. While it is nearly silent on methods, it is nonetheless helpful to have another data point out there on the Russian blogosphere, which we’ve also been digging into at the Berkman Center following our Iranian and Arabic blogosphere research. Yandex finds the following on the Russian blogosphere (pdf), as of spring 2009:

The ‘average’ Russian blogger is a 22 year old woman who lives in Moscow and posts on LiveInternet or Diary.ru (this is the first blogosphere we’ve looked at in detail where female bloggers are in the majority, and about 20% to 30% more females than we find in Middle Eastern blogospheres we’ve studied). Women write more often, and also comment more frequently on others’ blogs, than men in Russia.

LiveJournal, which we are focusing on at the moment, has the most active traditional bloggers in Russia, and this platform also hosts more men and older bloggers than the rest of the blogosphere. Seventy-six percent of active Russian blogs are hosted on just four blog services (LiveJournal, blogs.mail.ru, ya.ru and liveinternet.ru.) Liveinternet has the most blogs, but 96% have not been updated in the last three months.

ya_blogosphere_report_eng.pdf (page 3 of 9)

Russian bloggers are posting less often than in the past:

Active blogs (those with at least five entries and that have been
updated at least once in the past three months) continue to decrease –
currently totaling to 12 %. While two years ago every second blog was
getting regular updates, last year only one out of five blogs was regularly
updated.

Perhaps because they are to busy Twittering: Twitter has grown in popularity, as has the Jabber-based Juick.com, but still there are only 7,000 Russian users according to Yandex. At 80%, its users post more frequently than any other traditional blog service, though.

London has the most active Russian bloggers outside of the former Soviet Union, followed by New York.

Unfortunately, the report doesn’t go into any topical or political issues that bloggers discuss, and they also recently decided to stop listing the most popular daily topics on their blog data site, perhaps to avoid the same fate as mainstream media in Russia. More Yandex research here (in English), although the Russian research page is much richer (I’ve got my eye on the Ukrainian blogosphere report next).

by Bruce Etling at November 20, 2009 04:29 PM

David Weinberger
Cory Doctorow in support of copyright

In this edition of Radio Berkman, Cory Doctorow argues in favor of copyright … the part of copyright that protects the rights of readers to own (and not just license) books.

It being Cory, the discussion covers topics such as the way in which books are like dogs and his sentimental attachment to his digital collection.

by davidw at November 20, 2009 03:51 PM

Andrew McAfee - HBR
It's Time to Embrace Evidence-Based Medicine

Evidence-based medicine is gaining momentum in the US, which is a good thing. What's EBM? It's an approach to delivering health care with two identifying characteristics. One: Analysis of all available data, especially data from clinical trials and other rigorous studies, to determine the best course of treatment (this is the 'evidence-based' part). Two: Creation of protocols--standardized processes that describe the course of treatment in detail.

For example, a hospital could adopt a process checklist listing five steps that every ICU doctor should take before inserting an IV line.

Few if any health care professionals have a problem with conducting studies and analyzing data. And yet, many of them don't like being asked to follow standardized protocols that are based on this data. They prefer instead to follow their intuition. It's probably safe to posit that the more education, experience, and authority health care workers have, the less willing they'll be to set aside their intuition and abide by some procedure developed by others.

Resistance isn't surprising; autonomous and experienced craft workers have always resented more systematic approaches to getting work done, and have warned that such approaches would lead to inferior outcomes. Take away the master's discretion and devalue his intuition and experience, the argument goes, and bad results will ensue. And medicine in particular is too important, and too unpredictable, to be constrained by rigid protocols. As physician Jerome Groopman writes in his book How Doctors Think "... today's rigid reliance on evidence-based medicine risks having the doctor choose care passively, solely by the numbers...Numbers can only complement a physician's personal experience with the drug or a procedure..."

So what makes me say that evidence-based medicine is a good thing? Just the facts. Three separate sets of findings strongly suggest that we need more, not less, standardized medicine. First, there's a massive amount of variation in health care delivery, most of which is pointless and much of which is harmful. The Pronovost checklist for inserting an IV line mentioned above, for example, was shown to reduce infection rates to almost zero at 108 hospitals where it was introduced. Yet according to a great recent article in the New York Times magazine by David Leonhardt , it's still not the norm; ICU doctors continue to believe in their intuition and experience.

Second, there's ample evidence that standardization improves outcomes, and that health care is not any exception to this general rule. Joseph Hallinan describes in his book Why We Make Mistakes that as recently as the 1980s, one in every 5,000 recipients of anesthesia died. Standardization of machines and reliance on airline industry-type checklists has helped reduce this tragic incidence by a factor of 40, to one in 200,000.

Third, it's abundantly clear by now that human intuition has some serious flaws , and that we should relegate it to the sidelines as better decision-making methods become available. Daniel Kahneman , the first psychologist to win the Nobel Prize in economics, is quoted in the Times article saying that as more and more data become available, intuition beats out systematic analysis less and less often.

So what's all this got to do with information technology, the subject of my research and this blog? A few things. First, IT can obviously help accumulate and analyze data , and so tip the scales in Kahneman's direction--away from intuition and toward empiricism. Second, technology can also be used to digitize the protocols of evidence-based medicine. Many of these are now kept in three-ring binders, which are inconvenient to consult and easy to overlook. Standardized procedures can be embedded in applications and delivered to providers via the desktops, PDAs, and "app phones " that are increasingly part of health care delivery.

Finally, technology can be used to monitor compliance with protocols. This can be as simple as displaying the Pronovost checklist, then asking doctors whether they followed it. Compliance tracking can also be more detailed. Computerized Physician Order Entry systems keep track of all medications ordered by doctors in a hospital, and the more advanced applications alert users when a prescription exceeds recommended dosage levels or interacts harmfully with another drug. Physicians can override these warnings, but these exceptions can be tracked.

In both of these scenarios the goal is not to force adherence to the protocol, but rather to gather data on departures from it. If I were running an unit or a hospital I'd really want to know which of my people were ignoring evidence-based medicine most often and why--it's another important type of health care data.

Health care delivery is a deeply human process, and should remain so. I don't want robots listening to me describe symptoms or operating on me any time soon. But this doesn't mean that it should be a technology-free process, or that we can't use computers to improve what doctors do. Medicine is experiencing a deep shift. It's moving from a craft-based industry--the largest one left in the world--to a science-based one. As customers of that industry, we should applaud that shift, and also applaud innovators who are using data and technology to overcome the biases and limitations of intuition. It's a healthy development.

by Andrew McAfee at November 20, 2009 03:35 PM

Miriam Meckel
Symbolische Selbstverleugnung

sarah palin newsweek

Es ist eine interessante Frage, ob Sarah Palin als role model für die Frauenfrage taugt. Newsweek findet nach dem neuesten Titelbild zu urteilen eindeutig: nein! Damit hat das Magazin vermutlich Recht, denn Palin tut viel für die eigene Sache, aber wenig für die der Frauen. Wenn das schon “going rogue” ist, dann war die Frauenbewegung immer eine Tsunami gesellschaftlicher Unangepasstheit. Dennoch: Was geschehen ist, hat Frauen gestärkt, aber es reicht nicht. Wir müssen noch mehr tun für eine echte Gleichberechtigung von Frauen und Männern in allen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen. Und die Frauen müssen wieder mutiger sein, ihre Interessen klar und unzweideutig zu vertreten.

Rede zum Jahrestreffen der ARD-/ZDF-/ORF-Medienfrauen, November 2009, Baden-Baden

Es war irgendwann im Frühsommer 2002, dass ich das Vergnügen hatte, bei einem Mittagessen in Düsseldorf neben dem damaligen schwedischen Botschafter in Deutschland, Carl Tham, platziert zu werden. Wir haben uns gut über Gott und die Welt unterhalten – und schliesslich auch über die Frauen. Carl Tham lehnte sich nämlich plötzlich zu mir und sagte: “Sie haben doch da diese Talk-Show am Sonntagabend. So etwas wäre bei uns unvorstellbar.”

“Wieso unvorstellbar?” fragte ich irritiert nach, hatte ich doch im ersten Anlauf verstanden, das Talk-Show-Format an sich sei in Schweden unvorstellbar. “Die Männerriege, die dort jeden Sonntag Platz nimmt und eine einzige Frau, die Moderatorin, umrundet, das wäre in Schweden heute unvorstellbar. Die Menschen würden lauthals protestieren.”

Ich fand diesen Einwurf bemerkenswert. Zum einen, weil der Botschafter natürlich auf das noch immer währende Defizit von Frauenvorbildern in Medien und Gesellschaft anspielte. Zum anderen, weil es offenbar Gesellschaften gibt, die diese Tatsache nicht einfach als gottgegeben hinnehmen, sondern dagegen aufbegehren. Insofern ist es auch nicht verwunderlich, dass wir bei der Frage nach der Gleichberechtigung von Frauen und Männern mit Blick auf die skandinavischen Länder ein etwas anderes Bild erhalten, als es sich noch heute im Jahr 2009 in Deutschland und vielen anderen europäischen Ländern offenbart.

Nun leben wir nicht mehr im Jahr 2002  sondern im Jahr 2009, und inzwischen hat sich durchaus Einiges getan. Wenn ich heute die Sonntagabend-Talk Show von Anne Will anschaue, dann sehe ich ziemlich regelmässig Frauen als Gäste dort sitzen. Aber ich weiss auch, wie schwierig es immer wieder ist, Frauen für dieses Format zu gewinnen. Zum einen, weil sie tatsächlich noch immer in der Gesellschaft unterrepräsentiert sind und man deshalb bei vielen thematischen Schwerpunkten nicht naheliegend auf eine Frau als Repräsentantin eines gewissen Standpunkts kommt. Zum anderen, weil natürlich immer noch in vielen Köpfen von Journalisten und sogar Journalistinnen der Suchmodus “Frau” immer noch nicht richtig verankert ist. Und dann gibt es einen dritten Grund: Tatsächlich sind viele Frauen noch immer zögerlich, sich der öffentlichen Diskussion auszusetzen, sich zu präsentieren in einem medialen Umfeld, in dem ihnen die Aufmerksamkeit und damit womöglich auch die kritische Auseinandersetzung sicher ist.

Eine Talk-Show, wie das Format am Sonntagabend, sei es bei Sabine Christiansen, sei es bei Anne Will, ist ein Spiegel der Gesellschaft. Gelegentlich ist sie auch ein Zerrspiegel der Gesellschaft. Nicht alles, was wir dort sehen, können wir 1:1 als Realität interpretieren. Aber vieles gibt uns doch einen Hinweis darauf, wie es um die soziale Ordnung unserer Gesellschaft, und dazu gehört wesentlich die “Geschlechterfrage”, heute bestellt ist. Und dort zeigen sich auch immer wieder die Defizite, die in der Gleichberechtigung der Geschlechter noch immer auszumachen sind. Drei Aspekte sind aus meiner Betrachtung dabei besonders auffällig:

1. Es gibt noch immer zu wenig Frauen, die in Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft eine Führungsrolle übernehmen;

2. Es gibt zwar viele Frauen in den Medien, aber viele von ihnen übernehmen noch immer ganz bestimmte, nämlich Repräsentationsrollen;

3. Es ist schwer, Frauen zu finden und sie zur aktiveren gesellschaftlichen Teilnahme zu ermutigen, weil viele sich weniger zutrauen als Männer und weniger machtbewusst ihren Weg gehen.

1. Frauen und Führungsrollen

Wir haben eine Bundeskanzlerin. Das hat in Deutschland viel verändert, wenngleich es lange gedauert hat, bis diese Veränderungen in den Köpfen der Menschen angekommen sind. Welche Wirkung das hatte, zeigt sich zum Beispiel an der Wahl von Christine Lieberknecht zur Ministerpräsidentin Thüringens. Die Wahl hat in Hinblick auf den Frauenfaktor kaum noch Aufsehen erregt. Eine Frau in einer politischen Spitzenposition ist also ein Stück Normalität geworden.

Ich erinnere mich aber sehr gut, wie lange Angela Merkel gebraucht hat, bis sie ihre Form der politischen Machtrepräsentation gefunden hat, ihre Haltungsfrage, im physischen ebenso wie im übergeordneten Sinne, beantwortet hatte. Das liegt einfach daran, dass unsere Repräsentationsrituale vordringlich männlich besetzt sind und Frauen es daher schwer haben, für sich neue und adäquate Repräsentationsmodi zu entwickeln.

Eine Frau als Bundeskanzlerin kann sich nicht das Jackett vom Leib reissen und mit verschwitztem Hemd oder mit verschwitzter Bluse am Pult stehen, die Arme zum Himmel erhoben und gegen den politischen Gegner wetternd. Es würde als unweiblich, unhöflich und in der Form unangemessen empfunden. Inzwischen hat Angela Merkel diese Herausforderung für sich in ihrer ganz individuellen Art und Weise gelöst, und sie hat damit einige sehr entspannende und doch gleichzeitig durchaus machtbewusste Akzente in der öffentlichen und medialen Repräsentation von Frauen gesetzt. Wenn wir sonst in der Politik uns umschauen, dann ist das neue Bundeskabinett wahrlich kein Ausdruck der Frauenbewegung, die in den Spitzen der Politik angekommen wäre. Gut ein Viertel der Kabinettsposten werden von Frauen besetzt. Ein Viertel der Repräsentation einer Gesellschaft, die zur Hälfte weiblich ist.

In den Parlamenten sieht es nicht sehr viel besser aus. Zwar ist der Anteil der weiblichen Abgeordneten im Deutschen Bundestag seit Einführung der Quotenregelung sichtbar gestiegen. Immerhin, gut 32 Prozent der Parlamentssitze gehören Frauen (das ist ein unfassbarer Anstieg des Frauenanteils um ein Prozent!). Im Europäischen Parlament sieht es noch etwas besser aus, dort sind derzeit 36 Prozent der Abgeordneten Frauen. Etwa ein Drittel der Mandate als Volksvertreter haben also Frauen. Ein Drittel der Mandate für eine Gesellschaft, die zur Hälfte aus Frauen besteht.

Wenn wir uns in der Wirtschaft umschauen, wird es deutlich düsterer. Das Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW) hat kürzlich festgestellt, dass Frauen in den 200 grössten deutschen Unternehmen gerade einmal 2,5 Prozent der Vorstandsposten innehaben. In der Schweiz sieht es übrigens ähnlich aus: Gerade einmal drei Frauen sitzen auf dem Stuhl eines CEO, das sind bei den 100 grössten Firmen in der Schweiz fünf Prozent. Nur 4 von 10 Firmengründern sind Frauen, das vermeldet die KFW-Bankengruppe. Bei uns sitzt genau eine Frau im Vorstand eines DAX-Unternehmens, nämlich Barbara Kux bei Siemens. Und in den deutschen Aufsichtsräten waren 2008 auf Seiten der Kapitalgeber von 2811 Personen 113 Frauen – das sind vier Prozent). Insofern ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass Karrieren wie die von Barbara Kux bei Siemens oder von Simone Bagel-Trah, neue Aufsichtsratsvorsitzende bei Henkel eine enorme mediale Aufmerksamkeit erzielen. Die Ausnahme ist die Berichterstattung wert, das wissen wir aus der Nachrichtenfaktoren-Forschung. Und diese Gesetzmässigkeit funktioniert bei Genderfragen aufgrund der weiterbestehenden Ungleichverhältnisse hervorragend.

Ist das also die Regel, weil es anders nicht geht? Nein, so einfach lässt sich diese Frage nicht beantworten. Wenn wir beispielsweise beim Thema Aufsichtsrat uns die Arbeitnehmerseite anschauen, dann stellen wir fest, dass der Frauenanteil hier zumindest bei 20 Prozent liegt. Das ist immerhin vier Mal so viel wie auf Arbeitgeberseite. Wenn wir einen Blick in die nordischen Länger, von denen eben schon die Rede war, werfen, dann ergibt sich folgendes Bild: der Frauenanteil in Geschäftsleitungen in europäischen  Topfirmen beträgt in Finnland 19 Prozent, in Litauen 21 Prozent, in Schweden 24 Prozent und in Norwegen 32 Prozent.

Gehen wir einmal davon aus, dass weder auf Arbeitnehmerseite in den Aufsichtsräten noch im nordischen Europa die Frauen grundsätzlich klüger, selbstbewusster oder in grösserer Zahl vorhanden sind, dann sind diese Zahlen schon erstaunlich. Dann muss es einen anderen Grund für diese Diskrepanz geben. Meine These lautet: In den klassischen Wirtschafts- und Politikzirkeln der deutschen Gesellschaft herrscht noch immer ein defizitärer Diskurs, der nach den Regeln des meist männlich geprägten Establishments verläuft, die damit verbundenen Machtstrukturen und -positionen fortschreibt und es so Frauen schwermacht, sich zu behaupten.

Für dieses Argument spricht beispielsweise, dass Frauen in Deutschland im Durchschnitt noch immer für dieselbe Arbeit 23 Prozent weniger verdienen als ihre männlichen Kollegen. Eine ähnliche Statistik können wir in verschiedenen anderen europäischen Ländern auftun. Europaweit werden Frauen um 17 Prozent schlechter bezahlt als Männer. Leider ist Deutschland in diesem Zusammenhang also auch noch negativer Spitzenreiter: Bei uns werden Frauen im Vergleich zu anderen europäischen Ländern weit überdurchschnittlich unterdurchschnittlich bezahlt. Und während sich in vielen europäischen Ländern die Gehaltsschere in den neunziger Jahren wenigstens um einige Prozentpunkte geschlossen hat, ist sie in Deutschland sogar noch weiter auseinander gegangen.

Das ist Retro-Sciene-Fiction: Wir schreiben das Jahr 2009. In einer Gesellschaft, die zur Hälfte aus Frauen besteht, haben wir nicht mal ein Viertel der Führungspositionen mit Frauen besetzt. Dafür verdienen die aber fast ein Viertel weniger als ihre männlichen Kollegen.

Noch wilder wird es, wenn wir zur Kenntnis nehmen, dass empirische Forschungsergebnisse uns längst zeigen, wie wichtig Frauen in Führungspositionen sind. So lässt sich feststellen, dass heterogen geführte Teams erfolgreicher sind. Nicht allein im Sinne eines besseren Arbeitsklimas (Frauen haben ja diese sozialen und kommunikativen Kompetenzen, die immer sofort angeführt werden, wenn Mann Frauen loben und hervorheben möchte),. Erfolgreicher heisst: ökonomisch erfolgreicher. Die amerikanische Nonprofitagentur Catalyst hat in einer Untersuchung der 500 grössten Aktiengesellschaften der USA festgestellt, dass Firmen mit Frauen im Vorstand eine bis zu 53 Prozent höhere Eigenkapitalrendite erzielen als solche Firmen, die keine Frauen in ihrer Führungsetage aufweisen. Eine aktuelle Studie der Unternehmensberatung McKinsey hat herausgefunden: Firmen, die mindestens drei Frauen im Vorstand haben, können ihre Erträge nachweislich steigern.

Man muss schon blind und taub sein, um angesichts solcher Ergebnisse noch immer zu behaupten, die Situation in deutschen Führungsetagen sei gleichberechtigt oder es gäbe einen guten Grund dafür, dass sie eben nicht gleichberechtigt sei. Vorübergehend sprachlos wird man angesichts der Tatsache, dass wir bei diesen Zahlen über das Ende des ersten Jahrzehnts des neuen Jahrtausends sprechen. Ich muss ganz offen gestehen: Frauen, die heute im Brustton der Überzeugung behaupten, sie lebten in einer vollständig durch Gleichberechtigung gekennzeichneten Gesellschaft, lösen bei mir nicht nur Kopfschütteln aus. Ich kann darüber gelegentlich auch wirklich wütend werden.

2. Die Frauenfrage und die Medien

Warum spielen diese Daten und Fakten, diese noch immer kritikwürdigen Zusammenhänge in unserer öffentlichen Diskussion, auch in den Medien, nur noch eine untergeordnete Rolle? Weil es gerade in den Medien so scheint, als hätten Frauen den Zustand der vollkommenen Gleichberechtigung längst erreicht. In Deutschland liegt der Anteil der Frauen im Journalismus bei 37 Prozent, in Österreich sogar bei mehr als 40 Prozent. Immer mehr Frauen steigen in den Beruf “Journalismus” ein – und dann steigen sie wieder aus, bevor sie auf die echten Entscheiderpositionen kommen.

Wie die jüngste repräsentative Journalistenstudie der Universität Hamburg zeigt, sind Journalistinnen in der Altersgruppe ab Mitte 30 wieder auf dem Rückzug. Offenkundig passen dann Familienmodelle und berufliche Karriere nicht mehr recht zusammen. Diese Erkenntnis wird konterkariert, dass wir im Fernsehen immer mehr Frauen sehen, die Sendungen moderieren und uns dabei als Rolemodels für die Gleichberechtigung der Frau im Journalismus ins Wohnzimmer gesendet werden. Natürlich ist das eine Form von Gleichberechtigung und es liegt mir absolut fern, die Moderatorinnen wichtiger Sendungen im deutschen Fernsehen, wie Maybrit Illner, Sandra Maischberger oder Anne Will als Sprechpuppen zu denunzieren. Sie sind es nicht, weil sie ihre Sendung redaktionell gestalten, ihre Moderation schreiben, ja oft sogar gleichzeitig in einer Managementfunktion das produzierende Unternehmen leiten. Dass wir die Vorurteile über eine Talkshow als „Sendung mit der Maus“, wie Sabine Christiansen sie sich immer wieder anhören musste, auch heute noch in veränderter Form in der Medienkritik finden, zeigt alleine eins: Die Betrachtung von „Vorzeigefrauen“ in den Medien löst Kritikerreflexe aus, die oft sehr viel stärker durch Geschlechtervorurteile geprägt sind als durch Kriterien einer professionellen Medienkritik.

Ich will aber auch hier wieder auf die Machtstrukturen in den Führungsetagen deutscher Medien hinaus. Die ARD hat inzwischen immerhin zwei Intendantinnen vorzuweisen, das hat lange genug gedauert. In den Entscheiderposten sind Frauen dennoch weiterhin vollständig unterrepräsentiert. Und wenn ich mich daran erinnere, dass ich vor wenigen Wochen auf dem Printgipfel der Münchner Medientage wieder als einzige Frau in einer Runde älterer Herren mitdiskutiert habe, dann zeigt das: es sind nicht nur die Fernsehanstalten, die hier noch immer ein Defizit haben.

Frauen können also einsteigen und ein bisschen aufsteigen, aber bitte nicht ganz. Und dann steigen sie oft wieder aus dem beruflichen Karriereweg aus, weil die private Lebensplanung seine Weiterverfolgung nicht zulässt. Das ist nicht nur individuell für jede Frau sehr schade, sondern hindert eben auch den Prozess der gesellschaftlichen Gleichberechtigung in einer wichtigen Branche, der Medienbranche, die Multiplikatoren- und Vorbildfunktion hat.

Und schliesslich hat es Konsequenzen, die zwei Forscherinnen der Warthon-School an der Universität Pennsylvania gerade in einer Studie umfänglich untersucht haben und unter dem Titel “The paradox of declining female happiness” veröffentlicht haben. Das Ergebnis: Seit 35 Jahren hat das Glücklichsein der Frauen kontinuierlich abgenommen. Das subjektive Gefühl, glücklich zu sein, hat sich von den Frauen weg hin zu den Männern verlagert. Das gilt unabhängig davon, ob beide Geschlechter sich insgesamt eher glücklicher, weniger glücklich oder gleich glücklich fühlen. Wie kann das bloss sein? Seit Jahren bemühen sich viele Menschen, Frauen wie Männer, in dieser Gesellschaft um mehr Gleichberechtigung. Seit Jahren diskutiert diese Gesellschaft Sinn und Zweck von Gleichberechtigung sowie ihre Notwendigkeit intensiv, sie macht dabei Fortschritte, auch wenn sie manchmal eher klein sind. Und bei alledem werden Frauen nicht glücklicher, sondern unglücklicher.

Ich glaube, das lässt sich durchaus erklären, wenn man Emanzipation nicht allein als Gleichberechtigungsprozess, sondern als Prozess der Selbstwahrnehmung, Selbstreflektion und eines sich verändernden Selbstverständnisses von Frauen, aber auch von Männern, begreift. Dann bedeutet der Gleichberechtigungsprozess der vergangenen Jahrzehnte nämlich auch, dass Frauen sich ihrer Rolle immer bewusster werden, ebenso wie der Rolle ihrer Lebensgefährten, Partner, Ehemänner. Und dann sind sie auch immer stärker in der Lage und willens, festzustellen, wie schwer feministische Ideale mit klassischen Familienbildern zu vereinbaren sind, wie oft sie Rückschläge im eigentlich gewünschten Emanzipationsprozess hinnehmen müssen, wie viele Abstriche das wirkliche Leben am eigenen Selbstverwirklichungsideal verlangt, ja, wie wenig Freiheit und Glück einander eigentlich bedingen.

Dieses Phänomen spielt natürlich auch all den Reaktionären in die Hände, die allemal glauben, Gleichberechtigung mache Frauen nicht glücklich, sondern unglücklich und Frauen seien ehe mit ihren Kindern zuhause am besten aufgehoben.

Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es dann auch fast ein bisschen tragisch, wie wenig Frauen selber wirklich aktiv und provokativ dazu beitragen, das Anliegen einer Gleichberechtigung der Geschlechter auf der politischen Agenda zu halten und wie viele gerade jüngere Frauen Emanzipation statt dessen zum grossen Spassprojekt der Moderne machen.

Grundsätzlich gilt natürlich: je mehr Frauen sich überhaupt bei diesem Thema engagieren, desto besser. Je grösser der Varianten- und Facettenreichtum in der öffentlichen Diskussion ist, desto anregender und anschlussfähiger ist die Diskussion für viele Menschen, über diese Fragen weiter nachzudenken und sie zu einem Lebensthema zu machen, das auch den eigenen Alltag und das eigene Handeln betrifft. Und natürlich haben sich auch die Themen der Frauenbewegung verändert.

Während wir – zumindest in Westdeutschland – in den 70-iger Jahren über sexuelle Selbstbestimmung, zum Beispiel über den Paragraphen 218 diskutiert und für ihn protestiert haben, während es in den Anfängen um konkrete Rechtsgleichsetzungen von Frauen und Männern ging, die erst einmal zu erreichen waren, so geht es heute um das konkrete Zusammenleben der Geschlechter, zum Beispiel in Familie und Beruf. Das allerdings ist nicht allein ein privates, sondern es bleibt ein politisches Thema. Die Autorin Maria Sveland hat das in ihrem Buch “Bitterfotze” sehr schön in dieser Frage formuliert: “Wie sollen wir jemals zu einer gleichberechtigten Gesellschaft kommen, wenn es uns nicht einmal gelingt, mit demjenigen gleichberechtigt zu leben, den wir lieben?”

Maria Sveland ist 1974 geboren. Sie gehört also zu den jüngeren Vertreterinnen des Feminismus und ist damit ein Hoffnungsschimmer dafür, dass es auch in dieser Generation noch politische Denkerinnen gibt. Wenn ich an die “Alpha-Mädchen” denke oder an die neuen Eroberungen eines Handlungsspielraumes namens “Feuchtgebiete”, dann frage ich mich gelegentlich schon, ob das eigentlich der Feminismus ist, den wir heute haben wollen, und ob das eigentlich das politische Denken ist, zudem junge Frauen heute fähig und entschlossen sind? Ich finde den weiblichen Orgasmus auch wichtig und möchte nicht auf ihn verzichten. Aber ich bin ziemlich sicher, dass er nicht automatisch in eine Führungsposition führt.

Natürlich gibt es den Feminismus auch nicht nur in westdeutscher Sicht, wie ich sie hier aus Mangel an eigener Erfahrung anwende. Frauen aus dem Osten Deutschlands haben sich über manche Frauenfragen im Westen kaputtgelacht. Man kann durchaus die Frage stellen, ob es in Sachen Gleichberechtigung nicht der Westen ist, der vom Osten eine Menge hätte lernen können. So zeigt zum Beispiel der „Sozialreport“ Anfang dieses Jahrtausends, dass 75 Prozent der befragten ostdeutschen Frauen der Auffassung sind, sie seien in der DDR den Männern gegenüber gleichgestellt gewesen. Nur 10 Prozent meinen, dass sie benachteiligt waren. Demgegenüber glaubten 72 Prozent, dass Frauen im vereinigten Deutschland gegenüber Männern benachteiligt seien; nur 18 Prozent waren überzeugt, gleichgestellt zu sein.

Und natürlich ist Feminismus auch nicht mehr allein Alice Schwarzer, auch wenn man gelegentlich in den Medien den Eindruck bekommen kann. Und natürlich mögen heute manche Fragestellungen, mit denen sich Alice Schwarzer weiterhin beschäftigt, für junge Frauen nicht vordringlich scheinen. Aber auch in diesem Zusammenhang finde ich: Ein wenig kontextuelle Einordnung und Reflexion wäre hier angemessen. Wer die vergangenen Jahrzehnte einmal Revue passieren lässt und dabei bedenkt, was Alice Schwarzer für die Gleichberechtigung der Frau in Deutschland erreicht hat, der muss zu dem Ergebnis kommen: das war sehr, sehr viel. Und wer sich darüber hinaus einmal anschaut, was sie in diesem Zusammenhang hat ertragen müssen, der kommt weiterhin zu dem Ergebnis: das war eine sehr, sehr grosse Zumutung.

Wer in den 70-iger Jahren im Westen für den Feminismus an die Öffentlichkeit und auf die Strasse gegangen ist, hat sich im Establishment der Gesellschaft zur Persona non grata gemacht. Und so ist Alice Schwarzer auch behandelt worden. Die Berichterstattung über sie ist gelegentlich zur modernen Form der Hexenverbrennung geworden. Der Scheiterhaufen wird nicht mehr auf dem Marktplatz vorm Rathaus errichtet, sondern auf dem virtuellen Marktplatz der öffentlichen Meinung.

3. Mehr Selbstbewusstsein von Frauen für Frauen

Es bleibt ein dritter Aspekt, der uns Frauen den Weg Richtung Gleichberechtigung nicht leicht macht. Und das sind wir selbst. Frauen sind noch immer nicht bereit oder in der Lage, sich mit Volldampf auf die Chefetagen in Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft zuzubewegen. Sie sind zuweilen nicht bereit, das für sich einzufordern, was Männer für das eigene Geschlecht als selbstverständlich betrachten. Sie sind noch immer nicht bereit, die gleiche Bezahlung für die gleiche Arbeit zu verlangen.

Das sind keine losen Annahmen, die ich hier formuliere, sondern ebenfalls durch empirische Studien gestützte Erkenntnisse. Das Unternehmen Hewlett Packard hat zum Beispiel festgestellt, dass Frauen sich nur auf Stellenausschreibungen bewerben, wenn sie glauben, dem ausgeschriebenen Stellenprofil zu 100 Prozent zu entsprechen. Männern reichen auch 60 Prozent. Frauen tendieren dazu, ihre Leistungen eher klein zu reden. 70 Prozent der Frauen geben in einer Umfrage unter MBA-Studentinnen und Studenten in der Schweiz an, ihr Anteil an der Gruppenarbeit sei gleichwertig wie jener der anderen Kollegen. Bei den Männern glauben 70 Prozent, sie hätten mehr geleistet als die anderen. Wenn wir also einen Aufruf wie den des CEO von Siemens, Peter Löscher, hören, die Welt müsse weiblicher werden, dann ist damit ganz sicher nicht gemeint, dass wir alle jetzt beginnen sollen, diese Selbstunterschätzung der Frauen in unserer Gesellschaft um- und durchzusetzen. Vielmehr braucht unsere Gesellschaft die Diversität im Denken und Handeln, die Frauen einbringen. Dabei dürfen sie selbstbewusster sein, denn sie leisten viel, sind hervorragend ausgebildet, oft sogar besser als Männer.

Vor dem Hintergrund dieser drei Aspekte – immer noch zu wenig Frauen an Führungspositionen in wichtigen, gesellschaftlichen Bereichen, eine zuweilen falsch geführte öffentliche und mediale Diskussion über den Feminismus und die Gleichberechtigung von Frauen sowie die Unterschätzung der eigenen Fähigkeiten und Leistungen von Frauen – ist es erstaunlich, dass viele Frauen auf die Frage nach ihrer eigenen Situation eine positive Antwort geben. Gerade jüngere Frauen beschreiben ihre Lebenssituation oft als gleichberechtigt, als angemessen und unproblematisch. Es mag sein, dass diese Wahrnehmung einfach stimmt. Dann ist vieles von dem, was ich hier gesagt habe, einfach falsch und dann nehme ich das auch gerne zur Kenntnis. Das glaube ich aber nicht. Ich glaube, aus eigener Erfahrung, aber auch aus intensiven Gesprächen mit Frauen, die irgendwann aus ihrer Selbstrepräsentationsrolle heraus fallen und in eine wahre, offene Diskussion übergehen, dass es anders aussieht. Ich glaube, dass viele Frauen sich sehr bewusst sind, wie weit der Weg bis zur echten Gleichberechtigung unserer Gesellschaft noch immer ist, wie viel Arbeit, wie viel Kampf und wie viel Unbehagen auf der Strecke auf sie wartet.

Ich will diese Feststellung daher auch gar nicht als Vorwurf formulieren, sondern wieder versuchen, herauszufinden, woran das liegt. Und ich glaube, auch diese Erscheinungsform von Selbstverleugnung der Defizite in der eigenen Gleichberechtigung hat eine Ursache. Leon Festinger hat sie uns theoretisch mit seinem Ansatz der kognitiven Dissonanz erklärt. Danach empfinden Menschen dissonante Wahrnehmungen als unangenehm. Sie lösen Spannungszustände und Druck aus. Daher neigen Menschen in solchen Situationen zu selektiver Wahrnehmung: Sie nehmen eher die Informationen zur Kenntnis, die den Druck reduzieren, und meiden solche Informationen, die den Druck weiter erhöhen.

Im Marketing können wir das am Beispiel von Autokauf-Situationen verdeutlichen. Wenn man ein Auto gekauft hat, verschmäht man alle weiteren Prospekte und Informationen über alternative Modelle, um ja nicht in die Situation zu geraten, die eigene Entscheidung neu reflektieren oder gar in Frage stellen zu müssen. Der Mensch neigt also dazu, kognitive Dissonanzen, die er nicht aushalten kann, einfach wegzudenken und wegzureden. Wenn das beim Autokauf schon so ist, wie stark muss dieses Moment bei einer der wichtigsten und weitreichendsten Lebenssituationen des Menschen gelten – der Gleichberechtigung?

Will eine Frau wirklich zugeben, dass sie immer noch nicht gleichberechtigt mit ihrem Partner lebt? Will sie zur Kenntnis nehmen, dass sie selbst als Teil der weiblichen Hälfte unserer Gesellschaft nur im niedrigen Prozentbereich durch Führungsfrauen repräsentiert wird? Will sie akzeptieren, dass sie etwa ein Viertel weniger verdient für die gleiche Arbeit, die Männer machen? Ich finde es eine grosse und schwierige Zumutung, diese Fakten vor sich selber einzugestehen. Noch schwieriger wird es in der öffentlichen Diskussion.

Ich erinnere mich an viele Situationen, zum Beispiel in meiner Zeit als Staatssekretärin in der Düsseldorfer Landesregierung, als die Begrüßungsfomel lautete: „Sehr geehrte Frau Meckel, meine sehr geehrten Herren.“ Was habe ich da gemacht? Ich habe gelächelt, gute Miene zur schlechten Situation gemacht. Die Situation als junge Frau allein unter Männern war manchmal schon unangenehm genug. Es braucht enorme Kraft, das auch noch zum Thema zu machen. Stellen Sie sich vor, ich wäre am Tisch aufgestanden und hätte gesagt: „Meine Herren, wir sind mit der Gleichberichtigung wirklich noch nicht weit gekommen. Guten Appetit!“ Man kann eine solche Situation natürlich auch aus dem Alleinstellungsmerkmal in einen Vorteil verwandeln. Aber das Alleinstellungsmerkmal zeigt, dass eben keine Gleichheit herrscht.

Ich kann deshalb verstehen, dass Frauen zurückhaltend sind und andere Wege suchen, das Thema Feminismus und Gleichberechtigung umzusetzen. Politisch werden wir damit allerdings irgendwann in eine Zeitschleife hineingeraten, die immer nur das reproduziert, was wir schon erreicht haben, aber keine neuen Akzente mehr setzt. Ich glaube, es muss und es kann Einiges geschehen, um Frauen den Weg zu echter, vollendeter Gleichberechtigung zu eröffnen.

Dafür müssen Frauen mutiger werden. Sie müssen NEIN sagen lernen und lernen, Forderungen zu stellen. Dazu müssen Frauen konsequenter werden und den Finger in die Wunde legen. Ich erlebe immer wieder Situationen – auch solche, zu denen ich selber eingeladen oder aufgefordert werde -  wo ich als Frau Moderatorin spielen soll in einer reinen Männerrunde. Und ich finde immer wieder Beispiele, bei denen auch Kolleginnen die gleiche Problematik erleben (zum Beispiel Tissy Bruns bei den Schönhauser Gesprächen des Bankenverbands). Solche Anfragen lehne ich ab. Ich sitze gerne als einzige Frau auf dem Podium, wenn es denn sein muss, weil ich dort inhaltliche Positionen vertreten kann, aber ich lasse mich nicht mehr als Frau auf die Vermittlerrolle reduzieren, während die inhaltlichen Positionen von Männern vertreten werden.

Frauen müssen sich besser und stärker vernetzen. Das tun Männer sehr konsequent, viel konsequenter als Frauen, aber Frauen können es auch. Und hierbei spielen die neuen, sozialen Medien eine wesentliche Rolle. Ich bin in verschiedenen Frauennetzwerken aktiv, die sich zum Teil international zusammensetzen und über Facebook eine Möglichkeit der regelmässigen Information und Kommunikation, des Austauschs von wichtigen Ideen und Dokumenten ermöglichen. Man muss nicht jede Nacht bis zwei Uhr Uhr in einer verrauchten Kneipe sitzen und sich betrinken, um das Networking zu betreiben, was uns in Politik und zuweilen auch in Wirtschaft von Männern vorgelebt wird. Wir können das anders machen und dafür gibt es die Instrumente, die wir nutzen können. Aber wir müssen uns vernetzen. Wir müssen lernen, einander noch stärker zu unterstützen. Wir müssen auch lernen, den “Zicken-Faktor” aus unserem Verhalten möglichst weitgehend auszublenden. Wenn Frauen Frauen nicht unterstützen, wie sollen sie dann von Männern verlangen, dies zu tun?

Und ein letzter Aspekt: wir müssen auch etwas kreativer werden, unser eigenes Anliegen in ansprechender Form zu kommunizieren und für weite Bereiche der Gesellschaft anschlussfähig zu machen. Das heißt eben nicht, die Frauenfrage leicht zu nehmen und als Spaßfaktor zu kommunizieren. Aber es heißt schon, neue kreative Wege zu finden, auf die immer noch bestehenden Ungleichheiten hinzuweisen. Wenn ich mir beispielsweise die alljährliche Verleihung der “Sauren Gurke” anschaue, dann finde ich es grundsätzlich eine gute Idee, auch medial auf die Frage der Gleichberechtigung und ihrer Vermittlung zu achten und diesen Umgang öffentlich zu thematisieren. Ob das aber über das vermeintlich schlimmste Negativbeispiel sein muss, weiss ich nicht. Möglicherweise sind positive Vorbilder anschlussfähiger und werden freundlicher aufgenommen und wahrgenommen. Die “Saure Gurke” bleibt in der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung meiner Beobachtung nach immer eher als „Spaßverderberaktion“ an den Frauen selber hängen, als dass sie denjenigen trifft, der sie entgegennehmen muss.

Es ist mehr als dreißig Jahre her, dass die amerikanische Wissenschaftlerin Gaye Tuchman einen international viel beachteten Aufsatz über „the symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media“ schrieb, über die „symbolische Verleugnung“ von Frauen in den Medien. Missachtung, Trivialisierung und Ausgrenzung, so die Soziologin, prägten den Umgang mit Frauen in der Öffentlichkeit. „From children’s shows to commercials to prime-time adventures and situation comedies, television proclaims that women don’t count for much.”

Das ist heute anders. Und damit ist viel erreicht. Frauen zählen in den Medien und sie zählen in unserer Gesellschaft. Aber sie sind noch immer in der Unterzahl, wenn es um Führungs- und Entscheidungspositionen geht. Um das zu ändern, brauchen wir einen zeitgemäßen Genderdiskurs, der die aktuellen Fragen der Gleichberechtigung mit aktuellen Themen und Stilmitteln der öffentlichen Diskussion verbindet. Wir brauchen mehr rolemodels für junge Mädchen, die als nächste Generation vielleicht noch selbstverständlicher ihren Anteil an gesellschaftlicher Entscheidung und Macht einfordern. Vor allem aber brauchen wir Frauen, die diesen öffentlichen Diskurs hartnäckig und dabei nicht humorlos vorantreiben.

Die größte Gefahr ist heute nicht mehr die symbolische Verleugnung der Frauen durch die Medien. Die größte Gefahr liegt in der symbolischen Selbstverleugnung ihrer Situation durch die Frauen selbst. Daran können vor allem Medienfrauen, Journalistinnen und Publizistinnen etwas ändern, indem sie Akzente in der Diskussion setzen.

In diesem Sinne bedanke ich mich sehr herzlich für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit!

by Miriam Meckel at November 20, 2009 03:20 PM

Zettel Traum

Steinbrück_MM_Tresor

Foto: Matthias Lüdecke – FAZ

Was in diesem Tresor wohl drin ist? Ein Schatz aus alten Goldmünzen? Das geheime Coca Cola Rezept? Die Erkenntnisse und Einsichten eines Berufspolitikers?

Vielleicht liegen einfach die drei Zettel darin, die Peer Steinbrück seinem Nachfolger Wolfgang Schäuble zur Amtsübergabe im Finanzministerium anempfohlen hat. Auf dem ersten Zettel steht: “Schiebe alles auf Deinen Vorgänger.” Auf dem zweiten steht: “Schiebe alles auf das geringe Wirtschaftswachstum und die geringen Staatseinnahmen.” Auf dem dritten steht: “Schreibe drei Zettel.” Ach nein, angesichts der derzeitigen Lage und der Steuersenkungsplänen der schwarz-gelben Koalition steht da auf dem dritten Zettel wahrscheinlich: “Ein Zettel hilft jetzt auch nicht mehr …”

Wir wissen das alles nicht. Der Tresor ist hart und verschlossen. Er steht im Museum für Kommunikation in Berlin und ist Teil der Ausstellung “Die Sprache des Geldes.” Da die in heutigen Zeiten manchmal wichtiger scheint als die Sprache der Worte, wäre es konsequent, wenn ein paar beschriebene Zettel in dem Tresor lägen, der in der Ausstellung als “Geldschrank” beschrieben wird. Sozusagen als virtuelle Goldstücke der Zukunft, mit denen wir uns künftig an Vergangenes erinnern können.

Falls dann irgendwann jemand den Tresor öffnen kann …

by Miriam Meckel at November 20, 2009 06:36 AM

November 19, 2009

David Weinberger
Two long posts well worth reading

Ethan Zuckerman ponders what good is knowing if it doesn’t lead to effective action…and he isn’t asking this rhetorically. You want to read this because Ethan himself is an extreme knower, an extreme care-er, and a full time agent of change. I found that this post caused me to have an internal dialogue in which I kept interrupting myself. The world is just so hard to change, even when the need is so obvious and urgent, and yet we can’t let ourselves believe that knowing and caring can make no difference at all. What’s at issue here (at least in my internal dialogue) is that the model of knowing, caring, and acting isn’t explaining our experience. Or our hope.

Then there’s Evgeny Morozov’s review of Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution in the Boston Review. Evgeny likes Andrew’s book although he thinks it doesn’t explain enough about why Wikipedians wikipede. The comment thread is also well worth reading.

by davidw at November 19, 2009 11:36 PM

Ethan Zuckerman
From compassion to action, from action to knowledge

I’ve opened a lot of lectures lately – presentations about our Media Cloud research at Berkman – by complaining about the New York Times’s Africa coverage. I cite the fact that Japan tends to average roughly 8-10 times as many mentions in the paper of record than Nigeria in any given year, which is odd, given their comparable population size and importance. (I also mention that the Times is not alone – all US media outlets I’ve studied closely show this pattern – and that the Africa stories the Times runs are frequently excellent.)

If the Times is undercovering Nigeria, the same can’t be said for their recent coverage of Equatorial Guinea. One of the most fascinating and dysfunctional corners of the African continent, Equatorial Guinea is a couple of tiny islands and stretch of coastline between Gabon and Cameroon slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. The country is occupied by roughly half a million people, most of them extremely poor and a small number who are obscenely wealthy, as the islands of Equatorial Guinea sit atop massive oil fields. Much of Equatorial Guinea’s oil output is exported to the US – 132,000 barrels a day – making Equatorial Guinea the third-largest sub-Saharan exporter of oil to the US (behind Nigeria and Angola).

While oil wealth may help explain the Times’s interest in Equatorial Guinea (six stories this year, as compared to two this year on its vastly larger neighbor, Cameroon) – I’ve made the case in the past that American media attention tracks national GDP more closely than population – the Times’s focus may have more to do with another natural resource: absurdity.

Equatorial Guinea is, simply put, one of the most absurd nations on the planet. It’s not just a kleptocratic dictatorship run by a man who is arguably Africa’s worst ruler – it’s a staggeringly wealthy kleptocratic dictatorship. The CIA’s world factbook estimates per capita income for 2008 at $37,300, making the average Equatorial Guinean wealthier than the average Dane.

Picture 1

This wealth doesn’t seem to make the lives of the nation’s citizens much better. The image above is from Hans Rosling’s amazing Gapminder, and it shows the “development” of the country over the past two decades. The nation’s gotten dramatically wealthier in those years – the GDP per capita has increased by a factor of ten – and infant mortality has increased. Generally speaking, this doesn’t happen – infant mortality is much lower in wealthy nations than in poor nations. But Equatorial Guinea isn’t rich – it’s a nation where most citizens are desperately poor and a very small number are staggeringly rich.

Because there’s so much oil money in Equatorial Guinea, people periodically have the clever idea of overthrowing the government and installing a new one that would, gratefully, share future oil profits. Frederick Forsyth wrote a gripping novel that reads, more or less, as a blueprint for overthrowing Equatorial Guinea with a small force of professional missionaries. Some have alleged that Forsyth’s book was the result of his involvement in planning an attempted coup in 1973 – Forsyth admits he knew the coup plotters and that he passed money to them, but claims that his involvement with the plans were merely “research”. A more recent coup – The Wonga Coup in 2004 – allegedly used Forsyth’s novel as a planning document. The Wonga Coup involved South African mercenaries, Zimbabwean arms dealers and Mark Thatcher, the son of Britain’s former prime minister. It was one of the more absurd stories of the past decade, and it’s possible that we’ll finally get the complete story of the coup attempt now that the organizer, Simon Mann, was released from an Equatorial Guinean jail. (Not all the coups are quite this literary in nature. There’s no evidence that the 16 coup plotters arrested earlier this year were Forsyth fans – more likely, they were members of the Niger Delta resistance movement, MEND.)

A rich country with radical underdevelopment, a country so ripe for plunder that people read novels to plan coups? Not absurd enough for you? Okay, so here’s this – Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue is Britney Spears’s neighbor. Mr. Obiang is the son of the aforementioned kleptocratic dictator, and his shrewd management of his $4000 a month salary as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forests has allowed him to purchase a $35 million estate in Malibu, California, a Gulfstream V jet and a fleet of luxury cars and speedboats. The US Justice department reports that Obiang the younger pilfered an estimated $73 million from the EG treasury between 2005 and 2006 and moved it into the US.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the strong evidence that Obiang is systematically looting his nation’s treasury hasn’t prevented him from getting US visas and visiting his estate several times a year. So why does Obiang get to play in Malibu while Robert Mugabe is forced to live it up in Hong Kong? According to the US State Department officials quoted in Ian Urbina’s New York Times story, the answer is simple: Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, while Equatorial Guinea does.


Urbina’s story is an example of advocacy journalism at its best. Armed with research conducted by Global Witness, a leading pressure group focused on increasing transparency in resource-rich countries, Urbina points to rules bent or ignored by two US government departments, the possible complicity of two US oil companies and the role played by a prominent Washington PR firm as the EG government’s paid apologists.

So what?

When I started working with Open Society Institute, I was introduced to the phrase “theory of change” by a colleague who persistently (and, usually, very helpfully) insisted we unpack the logic behind any project we were considering funding. What did we want to accomplish, in the long run, and how would this project advance those goals?

So what’s the theory of change behind Urbina’s story? There may not be one – Urbina saw a fascinating and provocative story and used the platform provided by the New York Times to share the tale. Even if that’s true, the folks at Global Witness who provided Urbina with the documents to make this case had a theory of change – a belief that a story in a prominent newspaper would lead towards a policy change in the US government, or increased support for their campaigns for transparency in resource-extracting nations.

Perhaps the US State Department will be sufficiently embarrassed by the Times story to change their visa issuing practices. Perhaps some of the readers of the Times story will be grateful for Global Witness’s research and support their work. (You should – they’re an extremely responsible and credible organization doing important work.) I’m interested in the question of how a New York Times reader, agitated and motivated by Urbina’s story, would take the information she received in the story and move towards constructive action.

Global Witness doesn’t make it especially easy for individuals to involve themselves with campaigns, except as donors. Their webpages on corruption in oil, gas and mining and on banks and corruption include lists of the organization’s laudable achievements, their publications and their partners in advocacy. They don’t include a call or action or participation beyond encouragement to donate.

Would Global Witness benefit from a Facebook group dedicated to convincing Secretary Clinton to deny Obiang a visa? A petition demanding that Equatorial Guinea hold free and open elections? Probably not. They’re making a bet that the way to influence a government like Obiang’s is to operate at intergovernmental levels, providing actors within the State department with information and impetus to act.

Here’s the rub: information alone is insufficient to provoke action. In “A Problem from Hell“, Samantha Power unpacks the history of genocides in the 20th century and the reaction of governments to these systematic mass killings. Pointing out that Clinton administration wasn’t unaware of the genocide taking place in Rwanda, just unwilling to act, Power argues that governments only act to prevent genocide in reaction to consistent, relentless citizen pressure. Given the reasons not to act against Equatorial Guinea (the fear of driving EG to oust US oil companies and invite in Chinese ones, for instance), it’s reasonable to believe that merely informing and embarrassing the State Department won’t accomplish anything, without building accompanying citizen pressure.

So let’s reexamine the idea of the anti-Obieng Facebook group. My friend Evgeny Morozov argues that a great deal of online activism can be best characterized as “slacktivism” – it’s a symbolic gesture, a fashion statement, not an action that could lead towards real change. The examples he offered at a talk at Ars Electronica were, to me, compelling ones – a Facebook group dedicated to “saving the children of Africa” with 1.5 million members and a total of $8,449 in donations; a psychology experiment in Denmark that demonstrated people’s willingness to sign onto an online protest against an imaginary injustice. Evgeny worries that such online activism isn’t just ineffective – it leads to social loafing, where people get less involved with actually saving the children of Africa because they see a group of likeminded individuals and assume the collective effort will solve the problem.

While I find Evgeny’s argument compelling, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s countervailing dynamic at work. During the June 2009 protests over the Iranian elections, there was a burst of online activity as people moved by accounts of the protests looked for ways to offer solidarity and support for the activists on the ground. Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location information and time zone to suggest that they were in Tehran. They joined Facebook groups, shared links to the Neda Agha-Soltan video, donated USB keys to load with censorship circumvention software and send to activists, and opened proxy servers to offer Iranians an uncensored path to the internet.

These efforts weren’t effective in overturning the Iranian election results or leading to a popular revolution in the country. That might reflect their ineffectiveness – it’s unclear that the greening of Twitter would strike fear into Ahmedinejad’s heart – or the fact that the current Iranian state is powerful, well-organized, controls an experienced security apparatus, and has support from many Iranian citizens. I’m wondering if they were effective in another way – they allowed people with no personal connection to Iran to feel like they were part of the events. This feeling, in turn, may have encouraged individuals to pay closer attention to the news in Iran than if they’d been non-participants.

I’ve got no data to support this theory, just an anecdote or two about friends who compulsively aggregated Iran information on twitter, and a quote from Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they” – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

If the inability to act makes us bored, cynical and apathetic, is it possible that doing something – even something that’s ultimately ineffective – could keep us engaged and compassionate? If so, is there an interplay between action and information-gathering that could turn a story into a movement that builds public will?

I read Urbina’s story. I get pissed off, and start researching other articles on Equatorial Guinea, which I post to Twitter and Facebook under the #eqguin tag. I encourage others to do likewise and to propose actions we might take to persuade the State Department to ban senior Obiang regime officials from traveling to the US. We start online petitions, a postcard campaign to the State Department and keep twittering links to the #eqguin tag… which becomes a trending topic, prompting journalists to declare a Twitter revolution in Equatorial Guinea. Witnessing our vast public will, Secretary Clinton declares that the State Department will enforce anti-corruption legislation and stop issuing visas to Obiang’s family. We promptly start a campaign to pressure CNOOC not to take over the leases that Obiang cancels with Exxon and Marathon in response to Clinton’s decisions.

A blueprint for turning knowledge into action and into will, or a fantasy? I’m not sure. (I am sure that it’s a blueprint that smart advocacy organizations are starting to try to implement, which makes the efficacy of the strategy an important topic to study.) I’m watching a debate between Evgeny and academic/activist Patrick Philippe Meier on this topic, centering around Evgeny’s recent article in Prospect magazine, “How dictators watch us on the web“. Evgeny makes the case that the rise of participatory web technologies has benefitted repressive governments as much as activists, who often aren’t able to use these technologies effectively; Patrick respondsby repeatedly asking “so what?”, arguing that Evgeny doesn’t have the data to prove that online activism is effective or ineffective. (Evgeny’s response to Patrick seems to agree on only one point – no one’s got the data to answer these questions effectively.)

Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition? I’ve been making the case for years that Americans (and likely people in many developed nations) don’t get enough information about the developing world, and that this lack of attention has consequences for developed and developing nations. If Americans don’t hear about an economic boom in Ghana, they don’t invest… which slows the boom, costing Ghanaians growth and costing Americans business opportunities in a growing economy. Similar dynamics apply around aid, humanitarian and security intervention, export of physical and cultural products.

A couple of years back, I realized that this was a supply problem, as much as a demand problem – journalists want to write about the developing world, but they and their publications have little evidence that their audience wants to hear these stories. Without evidence of reader interest in the developing world, it’s hard for most publications to support the research and travel that goes into creating these stories. If action (useful or otherwise) and newsseeking behaviors are linked, starting a movement may be a way to aggregate demand for a story, and encourage more reporting like Urbina’s story.

So get pissed off and start a Facebook group. Launch a Twitter hashtag. Translate compassion into action. But realize that the most effective action probably involves aggregating and disseminating information, building knowledge and awareness that’s an asset even if it doesn’t lead directly to political change.

And help us – me, Evgeny, Patrick, the Berkman Center, and everyone else studying this phenomenon – think about how we can bring data to the table and test some of these questions. Is online activism effective in bringing about political change? What mechanisms and tools are effective? Does the ability to take action increase and sustain interest in a topic? Does action need to have political effect to sustain interest? Does increased interest lead to increased media attention, and does that attention lead to real-world change? What sort of data and experiments do we need to move these questions beyond anecdote and theory and into testable propositions?

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by Ethan at November 19, 2009 09:32 PM

Berkman Center front page
Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
November 19, 2009 // Upcoming events and digital media


[1] [MONDAY 11/23/09] CRCS Lunch Seminar: Media Cloud and Quantitative News Media Analysis with Ethan Zuckerman and Hal Roberts (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/11/mediacloud)

read more

by ashar at November 19, 2009 08:19 PM

David Weinberger
Legal advice for online journalists, bloggers, and other webby creators

The Berkman Center has announced the Online Media Legal Network that networks lawyers willing to provide free services with online journalists and other creators of online works who need legal advice for free or for cheap. It could be anything from helping to legally create a company to representing you in court when you are accused of infringing someone else’s tender copyright. This builds on the work that the Citizen Media Law Project at the center.

If you need some legal help, go to the OMLN.org website. If you are a lawyer who wants to volunteer to help, sign up at the website.

by davidw at November 19, 2009 07:54 PM

Herkko Hietanen
Television tulevaisuus -tapahtumassa
Olen viettänyt pari päivää kuuntelemassa televisiovaikuttajia jotka puhuvat television tulevaisuudesta. Viime vuonna samassa tapahtumassa pöhinä pyöri Hulun ympärillä. Nyt fokus tuntuu siirtyvät verkkovideoiden ja broadcast -ohjelmien yhdistämiseen. Tuntuu että televisiovalmistajat lisäävät verkkovideopalveluita laitteisiinsa ja verkkovideopalvelut pyrkivät lisäämään telkkarisisältöä. Erityisesti Boxee palvelu on noussut useasti esille. Myös uusia laitevalmistajia tulee markkinoille. Tästä esimerkkinä hetki sitten julkaistu [...]

by Herkko Hietanen at November 19, 2009 06:30 PM

PRX
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Welcome PRX 3.9

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Did you start in youth radio?
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Science Literacy Training
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by Genevieve at November 19, 2009 06:27 PM

Ethan Zuckerman
Bridging with Brian Lehrer

Brian Lehrer, the moderator of WNYC’s excellent morning show, has been kind enough to invite me onto his show all month long, appearing every Thursday morning. It’s been a somewhat insane month for me to participate. As Rachel explained on her blog, the last few weeks of her pregnancy have been a little tricky and scary, and I ended up doing one of our interviews from the parking lot of the local hospital. Rachel’s well and home today, and I have high hopes of broadcasting shows with Brian today and this coming Wednesday before she goes into labor!

When we discussed what we might want to cover in our segments, we outlined half a dozen topics in international development. But as we’ve started talking on air, we’re hovering around my topic du jour – how the Internet can help make the world a smaller place. After looking at Meedan, a wonderful project designed to enable conversation between English and Arabic speakers (disclosure – I’m an advisor to the project) during last week’s show, we’re going to look closely at Roland Soong’s EastSouthWestNorth blog today and how Obama’s visit to China was covered in the Chinese blogosphere.

eldoretstreet
Eldoret, Kenya at night. Photo by Joshua Wanyama

Brian has asked me to give his listeners homework assignments, asking them to look at sites before the next show. Next week’s conversation is going to be about dialogs regarding rebranding Africa, and the homework assignment will be Joseph Wanyama and Sheila Ochugboju’s remarkable site, AfricaKnows.com. Joseph is a brilliant photojournalist and many of his photos of contemporary life in Kenya are complemented with poems from Sheila. Collectively they give a picture of Africa that’s likely to surprise and challenge people who don’t know the continent well.

Hope you’ll tune in. And thanks for the opportunity to engage with your listeners, Brian.

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by Ethan at November 19, 2009 03:29 PM

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive
New Legal Help for Online Journalists

cmlp logo.jpgThe Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project has launched the Online Media Legal Network (OMLN):

a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.


This is a valuable initiative. It will help many more people than the individuals who receive assistance from volunteer lawyers and law students in specific cases.

One of the common misconceptions in digital media over the past few years has been the notion that bloggers may be somehow exempt from the laws that apply to other forms of publishing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The laws aren’t only about defamation, though that’s where the biggest threats to independent journalists can be found — in part because the independents don’t have legal teams at their disposal. Some plaintiffs have sued or threatened to sue largely to shut down criticism, not because they’ve actually been defamed, and just the threat of a lawsuit is often enough to shut down legitimate speech.

There are lots of other legal issues you need to think about if you publish on the Web, including fair use, freelance agreements, setting up businesses and the like. The new network will help with those issues, too, among others.

The CMLP has lined up an impressive collection of lawyers and law clinics for this initiative. They all deserve thanks as well.

(Note: I’m a CMLP co-founder and advisor.)

by Dan Gillmor at November 19, 2009 02:29 PM

Berkman Center front page
Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists

Cambridge, MA – The Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) announced today the public launch of its Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help.

read more

by syoung at November 19, 2009 02:00 PM

Citizen Media Law Project
Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Assistance Network for Online Journalists

We are delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono (i.e., free!) initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation. 

The idea for OMLN came out of CMLP's work over the last 3 years helping online journalists understand their legal rights and responsibilities.  During this time period, we've published and updated our legal guide and legal threats database, blogged on topics of interest to online publishers, partnered with like-minded organizations on a variety of educational projects, and filed amicus briefs in cases with significant implications for online speech. While we are proud of the impact we've made and the success of the CMLP website, we also recognize that many online journalists and bloggers need more than generally applicable legal information—they need their own lawyers to tackle their own individualized legal issues. 

From the press release:

"Unlike established media organizations that have the resources to pursue important reporting in the face of legal challenges, many online ventures lack the expertise and financial resources to protect themselves and thrive in an uncertain legal environment," said David Ardia, director and co-founder of the CMLP. "In order for these new media ventures to survive and flourish, they need a legal safety net, and OMLN aims to provide that safety net with the help of lawyers interested in promoting a vibrant online media environment," Ardia added.  Jay Rosen, a blogger, professor of journalism at New York University, and CMLP advisory board member, concurs:  "This network is trying to level the playing field for independent online producers. That's why it matters. That's why I support it."

OMLN will make it as easy as possible for participating lawyers and law school clinics to identify appropriate clients.  OMLN staff will pre-screen prospective clients and prepare matter summaries so that network lawyers can quickly decide whether they are interested in taking on a question, case, or transaction. These summaries will be sent out to network lawyers via a bi-weekly email newsletter and will be available at any time on the password-protected OMLN website (beta), where members can search and filter client and case information based on client location, type of assistance needed, and legal expertise required.  For more information on how the network matches lawyers and clients, see the How OMLN Works page. 

OMLN received its initial funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the first corpus of clients is made up of journalism projects that have received grants through the Knight News Challenge.  These Knight grantees include some of the most promising ventures and innovative thinkers in online and digital media, ranging from local community blogs to multi-national news aggregators. 

With today's public launch, OMLN is accepting applications for legal assistance from online publishers and media creators who meet the network's criteria of viability, adherence to journalistic standards, innovation, independence, original reporting, and public interest.  For details, see the OMLN FAQ

“We are proud to launch OMLN and look forward to collaborating with lawyers and journalists to help ensure that journalism thrives on the Internet,” Ardia commented.

CMLP would like to extend thanks to all the law firms, lawyers, and law school clinics that already have generously agreed to contribute their time and expertise to OMLN. If you're a lawyer, pro bono coordinator, or clinic director interested in participating, please submit a membership application, available here.

We would also like to thank Dan Collis-Puro and Anita Patel, the keyboard jockeys at the Berkman Center who built the OMLN site (and spent way too many hours dealing with our nit-picking).  Dan, in particular, was instrumental in developing the lawyer matching functionality that makes the entire network run.  Thank you both!

by CMLP Staff at November 19, 2009 01:48 PM

Berkman Center front page
Radio Berkman 137: Cory Doctorow – In Defense of ©

From the MediaBerkman blog:

Is the fate of books a forgone conclusion? Will they just continue to make their way out of print and into digital form? This week’s guest, author Cory Doctorow, suggests that we might want to keep books in print for a little while longer. Not just out of nostalgia – but actually to protect the institution of copyright.

read more

by syoung at November 19, 2009 01:00 PM

MediaBerkman
Radio Berkman 137: Cory Doctorow – In Defense of ©
Is the fate of books a forgone conclusion? Will they just continue to make their way out of print and into digital form? This week’s guest, author Cory Doctorow, suggests that we might want to keep books in print for a little while longer. Not just out of nostalgia – but actually to protect the [...]

by djones at November 19, 2009 10:00 AM

Digital Natives
Work with an effective youth-based Internet safety program? The Youth and Media Policy group wants to know about it!

The Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track of Harvard University Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative is creating a Compendium of youth-based Internet safety programs and interventions. We are requesting organizations, institutions, and individuals working in online youth safety to share descriptions of their effective programs and interventions that address risky behavior by youth online. We are particularly interested in endeavors that involve educators, social services, mentors and coaches, youth workers, religious leaders, law enforcement, mental health professionals, and those working in the field of public or adolescent health.

Program descriptions will be made publicly available. Exemplary programs will be spotlighted to policy makers, educators, and the public so that they too can learn about different approaches being tried and tested. Submissions also will be used to inform recommendations for future research and program opportunities.

by scortesi at November 19, 2009 06:33 AM

November 18, 2009

Citizen Media Law Project
CMLP Gets Lectured

Last week, the Practicing Law Institute hosted its annual program on Communications Law in the Digital Age.

Up for discussion were a lot of topics near and dear to CMLP's heart: trends in First Amendment jurisprudence (including prognostications in US v. Stevens), the federal reporters' shield bill, the protection of anonymous commenters, libel tourism, the application of the single publication rule to the Internet, what the hell Congress meant by "copyright management information" in 17 U.S.C. § 1202(c), the future of misappropriation and the "hot news" doctrine, and legal developments related to FOIA and government sunshine laws. 

As anyone who was watching the CMLP Twitter feed probably noticed (you are following us on Twitter, aren't you?), some of the more interesting panelist exchanges centered on privacy issues and the pending federal reporters' shield law.

While discussing the libel tourism bills currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress, Sandra Baron, Executive Director of the Media Law Resource Center, noted that claims based on invasion of privacy weren't covered.  As Google has repeatedly learned the hard way, European privacy standards (and the penalties for violating them) are noticeably stricter than those in the United States.  In fact, MLRC has already started seeing complaints out of the UK based on photographs taken on U.S. soil. Baron also noted that the usefulness of libel tourism bills is likely to be further limited by the fact that many major American media outlets have assets subject to seizure in the European Union. 

Some have advocated an industry-wide deployment of a nuclear option (geofiltering) to protect against runaway UK courts.  But least one PLI panelist (Robin Bierstedt, VP and Deputy General Counsel of Time Inc.) worried that the widespread deployment of geographic filtering would be the digital equivalent of the Munich Agreement, effectively conceding that libel claims to be indefensible on the grounds of truth.

Also up for discussion were the merits of the pending federal reporter shield law, which goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee this Thursday. The culmination of years of lobbying on the Hill by media groups, the bill finally appears poised for passage.  (If you're wondering why this is a big deal, just read up on some of the lovely precedent coming out of the Sixth Circuit.)

The PLI panelists were quick to point out, however, that as with most things that have made their way through the Congressional sausage-making process, the resulting bill is far from ideal.  Barbara Wall, VP and Senior Associate General Counsel of Gannett Co., pointed out that reporters' notes, which many journalists have come to view as inviolate, aren't covered by the statute.  But as another panelist noted, while the bill is estimated to cover only about 15% of the subpoenas currently directed towards media outlets, that 15% represents those requests that journalists are most concerned about.

Of course, we here at CMLP will continue to keep you up-to-date on these and other legal developments affecting digital media (and we won't even charge you $1500!).  What can we say? We're givers.

(And watch this space for a big announcement tomorrow morning!)

by Kimberley Isbell at November 18, 2009 11:51 PM

StopBadware.org
When bad policy attacks

Brian Krebs at the Washington Post reports on some ill-advised proposed legislation:

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee introduced legislation on Tuesday to prohibit the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software across all federal government computers and networks.

This is what happens when policymakers fail to separate problems from the technology that the problems are built upon. It’s roughly equivalent to observing that sports cars are involved in a lot of accidents and therefore banning sports cars from public roadways. Whenever possible, legislation should avoid even mentioning specific technologies, and instead should focus on the underlying problem (in this case, the inadvertent leaking of information by government employees/computers).

November 18, 2009 07:50 PM

OpenNet Initiative
Is Vietnam Blocking Facebook?

According to an AP report, access to Facebook in Vietnam has been intermittent over the past week, with many users fearing a government block.

Facebook has over 1 million users in Vietnam, a considerable amount in a country with 22 million Internet users total, or about 25% of the total population.

The social media site is among the most filtered sites in the world; Syria, Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia all currently block Facebook.

The ban in Vietnam was reported on Twitter as early as November 10:

by Jillian York at November 18, 2009 07:30 PM

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive
Why It Matters that Pierre Omidyar is Doing a News Startup

pierre omidyar.pngPierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is launching a for-profit news startup in Hawaii, where he and his family live. This is important news, and not just because he’s involved.

A few months ago Pierre and Randy Ching founded Peer News. Their first project was a Twitter-related experiment called Ginx, which didn’t get critical mass and is being closed.

Now they’ve announced Peer News’ more important move — a project aimed at creating the kind of local journalism that brings accountability and value to a community.

Pierre, in a note on the company blog, says he and his team are launching — they aim for early 2010 — based on deep research: “talking to a lot of people in the industry about journalism and how we might be able to have an impact, listening and learning as much as we can.”

I’m one of the people Pierre has talked with, but I’m not privy to the details of the new venture. In a conversation last evening, he did say this will be service combining professional journalists and citizen journalists in “a commercial model that hasn’t been tried yet.”

Tantalizing, no? Let’s focus for a second on the word “commercial,” because Pierre and team are going for something that seems to have fallen somewhat out of favor for local news startups, the notion that they can and should be profitable. Not-for-profits are springing up in various places, and while Pierre is happy to see them he also believes it’s essential to find solid for-profit models for sustainable media.

One message is for the local newspapers: Watch out. Pierre has analyzed the Hawaii media market and sees enough advertising money is going toward journalism in Honolulu “to fund a high quality operation” — but clearly not the kind that dominates the revenue stream today, namely the local newspapers.

Peer News will operate in the leanest possible way compatible with doing solid journalism and community information. It will involve social media in a big way as well. (The Omidyar Network, the investing and charitable arm of Pierre and his wife, Pam, has been deep into socially valuable media for a long time. Count on them bringing what they’ve learned into Peer News.)

Plainly, the Hawaii launch is a test bed, in part. If it works, expect more local versions in other places.

Peer News is looking for a founding editor. My advice has been to find someone local, if at all possible, but especially to find someone excellent. If you’re interested, here’s where you can find out more.

One of the people who’ll be talking to editorial candidates is Howard Weaver, a former vice president of news at McClatchy. Howard has been consulting with Peer News and offers some perspective on his own blog, including this:

I’m interested for a lot of reasons, but I’d sum it up this way: the new venture intends to demonstrate that a digitally native, technologically fluent web organization can profitably serve targeted readers who want sophisticated journalism focused on local civic affairs.

Maybe Pierre and his team have cracked part of the code for sustainable digital journalism. Maybe not. But the fact that they’re going to try, with some serious resources behind the effort, is great news.

So I’m looking forward to following the progress of Peer News. So should anyone who’s interested in the future of journalism.

(Note: The Omidyar Network was a seed funder of my long-ago Grassroots Media (Bayosphere) project. It lost money.)

by Dan Gillmor at November 18, 2009 07:21 PM

danah boyd
Call for descriptions: online safety programs

The Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is creating a Compendium of youth-based Internet safety programs and interventions. We are requesting organizations, institutions, and individuals working in online youth safety to share descriptions of their effective programs and interventions that address risky behavior by youth online. We are particularly interested in endeavors that involve educators, social services, mentors and coaches, youth workers, religious leaders, law enforcement, mental health professionals, and those working in the field of public or adolescent health.

Program descriptions will be made publicly available. Exemplary programs will be spotlighted to policy makers, educators, and the public so that they too can learn about different approaches being tried and tested. Submissions also will be used to inform recommendations for future research and program opportunities.
Submissions should be documentations of solutions, projects, or initiatives that address at least one of the following four areas being addressed:

  • Sexual solicitation of and sex crimes involving minors
  • Bullying or harassment of minors
  • Access to problematic or illegal content (including pornographic and violent content)
  • Youth-generated problematic or illegal content (including sexting and self-harm sites)

We are especially keen to highlight projects that focus on underlying problems, risky youth behavior, and settings where parents cannot be relied upon to help youth. The ideal solution, project, or initiative will be grounded in research-driven knowledge about the risks youth face rather than generalized beliefs about online risks. Successful endeavors will most likely recognize that youth cannot simply be protected, but must be engaged as active agents in any endeavor that seeks to help youth.

Please forward this call along to any organizations and individuals you think would be able to share information about their successful experiences and programs.

Should you have any questions, please contact us: ymps-submissions@cyber.law.harvard.edu.

safety youth internet bullying harassment

by zephoria (zephoria-blog@zephoria.org) at November 18, 2009 06:03 PM

StopBadware.org
Larry Clinton: Government must change market incentives

According to Wired’s Threat Level blog, the president of the Internet Security Alliance, Larry Clinton, blames many cyber security problems on individuals and businesses failing to take responsibility for the role they could/should play:

Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, told senators that public apathy and ignorance played as much a role in the current state of cyber security as the unwillingness of corporate entities to take responsibility for securing the public’s data.

“Many consumers have a false sense of security due to their belief that most of the financial impact resulting from the loss of personal data will be fully covered by corporate entities like the banks,” he said. “In fact, much of these losses are transferred back to consumers in the form of higher interest rates and consumer fees.”

As for corporate and government entities that collect and store the public data, they “do not understand themselves to be responsible for the defense of the data,” said Clinton, whose group represents banks, telecoms, defense and technology companies and other industries that rely on the internet. “The marketing department has data, the finance department has data, etc, but they think the security of the data is the responsibility of the IT guys at the end of the hall.”

Clinton goes on to say that the solution lies in government creating market incentives, and he promises a proposal from the Internet Security Alliance soon. It will be very interesting to see what they propose. As StopBadware board member Michael Barrett (CISO at PayPal) has pointed out, government involvement may be a necessary part of changing incentives and behaviors in an area where externalities are inevitable. At the same time, there are other ways to modify market incentives, as StopBadware and its partners have demonstrated over the last few years. The challenge for all of us working in this space is finding the right balance of public and private interventions.

Clinton himself points out one of the risks of trying to impose new market incentives in his explanation of why consumers don’t take credit card security seriously. As soon as government put the burden of liability on the credit card issuers, consumers no longer had the incentive to protect their card numbers. (Note: one problem with this example is it’s not clear what consumers would be likely to do differently if they were on the hook for unauthorized credit card charges.)

Another concern about imposing new incentives is reflected in StopBadware co-founder Jonathan Zittrain’s work: what happens to freedom (and, by extension, innovation) as the market increasingly values security?

There are no easy solutions here, but it’s clear that market incentives do, in fact, need to be changed, and that some combination of governmental and non-governmental will be required to make that happen. StopBadware and its partners have demonstrated some examples of the latter, showing that malware warnings, alerts about badware applications, and lists of infected hosting providers can encourage improved website security and better applciation behavior without limiting freedom. I look forward to seeing and weighing in on how ISA’s proposal complements what is being done, and can still be done, within the market.

November 18, 2009 05:42 PM

Hao "Donnie" DONG
What will happen when two utilitarian giants meet
This is the outline of my talk at Berkman Fellow's Hour on 17 Nov. 2009. Needs improvement, just post for commentaries.   1. Copyright protection is justified in a utilitarian way in the US. Contrary to many people's granted thought, my study find that although it is deeply affected by the Germeneric-japanese form of civil code system, China's current copyright law is also based on utilitarian

by Donnie (donnie@blawgdog.com) at November 18, 2009 04:44 PM

MediaBerkman
Nathan Eagle on Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems [Audio]
Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, infers behavioral dynamics on a broad spectrum of scales using technology; from risky behavior in a group of MIT freshman, to cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the UK, to disease transmission and slum formations in East Africa. Though the analytical techniques are sophisticated, the [...]

by aacuna at November 18, 2009 07:26 AM

Nathan Eagle on Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems
Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, infers behavioral dynamics on a broad spectrum of scales using technology; from risky behavior in a group of MIT freshman, to cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the UK, to disease transmission and slum formations in East Africa. Though the analytical techniques are sophisticated, the [...]

by aacuna at November 18, 2009 07:24 AM

November 17, 2009

PRX
Introducing a new interactive tool for PRX Producers

Our new PRX Pointer will help you get your pieces to show up in search results and score more hits, listens, and licenses.

Take me there!

Below is a snapshot of the PRX Pointer. Purple bubbles point to the most essential parts of the piece page. When you hover your mouse over the bubble, you’ll see a hint pop up. If you click on the hint, you’ll be directed to an in-depth explanation, and instructions on how to edit that part of the piece page.

piece-page-interact

Check out all of our PRX Pointers

by Emily at November 17, 2009 09:50 PM

PRX: Thanks a Million
Want to get weekly station newsletters via email? Subscribe.

PRX Station Newsletter
November 17, 2009

PRX: Thanks a Million

Hi friend of PRX,

Can you imagine a million…of anything? PRX can. For the last six years we’ve been paying out royalties and program support to stations, producers and others who use PRX. And we just passed the $1,000,000 mark!

That’s a lot of moolah. One elementary school even earned royalties for their radio pieces and the kids showed off their shiny nickels. OK, so how fast can we send out another MILLION? It’s up to you!

Doing our part in this recession,
John



Divorce in America | Grab Your Fake Antlers | New “Weird Al” Special
Plan Ahead | Other Good Stuff

Divorce in America 
People and perspectives

Divorced Kid
Sasha Aslanian | 00:54:00
Award-winning producer Sasha Aslanian explores the “divorce revolution” of the 1970s from the perspective of kids who lived through it and experts who have had three decades to make sense of it. The program debuted on Minnesota Public Radio and received tons of listener calls from those who wanted to contribute their own stories, and has already received positive feedback on PRX.

Recession Complicates Divorce for Some Couples
Tina Antolini | 00:05:02
Hear from a Massachusetts couple and a divorce lawyer about how the recession has changed the ways people handle divorce, from selling the house to figuring out child support wages.

Doing a call-in show about divorce? Want more unique perspectives? Hear from youth and adults, gay and straight couples, and others in our Editors’ Picks playlist.

Grab Your Fake Antlers
It’s time for holiday radio

Christmas Mashup
Hearing Voices | 00:53:57
A mix of holiday stories, found sound, and sampled songs: a bell-ringer at the Mall of America, holiday history as told by second-graders, a trip to the toy store, and carols sung by Zulu children in a South African orphanage.

Men Bearing Gifts/Hallelujah
CBC | 00:51:16
Two perfect-for-the-season documentaries. The first, “Men Bearing Gifts,” rips the wrapping off a hushed-up reality of Christmas. Then, get ready to feel good with Hallelujah People — a tribute to the word Hallelujah and the music it has inspired.

More for the holidays


Everyone Loves “Weird Al”
 
Fun new special

“Weird Al” Yankovic: Everything You Know Is Wrong
Joyride Media | 00:58:58
Acclaimed funnymen Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (”Reno 911″) get serious with America to present the real truth about “Weird Al” Yankovic. What’s behind his secret plot to parody every pop song ever written? Prepare yourself for the truth from the man himself and from people who know him best.


More from Joyride Media

Plan Ahead 




Other Good Stuff 

  • H1N1 is spreading:
    Do you have the facts about this crisis? Get them at FluPortal.org.



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Heart image by Moha’ Al-Bastaki. Cat image by Ben. Weird Al image by www.weirdal.com



by John at November 17, 2009 09:12 PM

Berkman Center front page
Reviewing comments on the Berkman Center's broadband study for the FCC

Last night the period for commenting on the Berkman Center’s broadband study for the FCC came to a close. We would like to thank those who took the time to provide substantive feedback and also to respond briefly to reports that incumbent broadband providers were negative in their assessments of our work.

read more

by syoung at November 17, 2009 08:30 PM

Harry Lewis
Newspapers and Universities

The Chronicle Review — the longer-format magazine that occasionally accompanies the Chronicle of Higher Education — is this week about the decline of journalism. One of the pieces asks a number of scholars whether the decline of the news media had important implications for universities. Here is a link to the answers — including my own. I decided to take a rather utilitarian tack — that universities will become even more mysterious and mistrusted institutions if we don’t have journalists touting our good works every now and then. There are lots of interesting answers to the question — I agree with my colleague Jill Lepore’s characterization of students, by the way. And she is not the only one worried about the increasing superficiality of thought, and the increasing difficulty in encouraging people to drill down and think deeply (see Ted Gup’s, for example).

by Harry Lewis at November 17, 2009 07:36 PM

David Weinberger
[berkman] Samuel Bowles on property rights in the information age

Samuel Bowles is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called: “Kudunomics: Property rights for the information based economy.” He wants to look at how institutions are likely to evolve in the “weightless economy.”

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. THIS TALK WAS ESPECIALLY DIFFICULT for me and certainly contains howlingly wrong misrepresentations of SB’s ideas. You are warned, people.

“In an economy based primarily on embodied and relational wealth, individual property rights are difficult and socially harmful to enforce.” Adam Smith’s invisible hand fails in important ways. SB says that that’s not a new idea. The new idea is that we should be able to gain insight about the evolution of institutions by studying the reverse transition from the Late Pleistocene forager economy to the agrarian economy. So, SB thought he should run that history backwards, which he may get to talking about in today’s session. The forager economy may provide clues for the weightless economy of the future.

SB puts up an equation explaining wealth, which I could not follow or capture, a cobb-douglas production function. [I hear Ethanz typing. He's certainly doing a far better job liveblogging this than I.] One point: Once we domesticated animals, we turned wealth into something we could own. Network wealth = the value your connections bring you. The number of people who will help you in your field, share food, etc. Embodied wealth = the value of what’s in your head that’s actionable by your body. [I'm not sure I got that, and I'm certainly paraphrasing.]

The basic idea of the invisible hand theorem is that good fences make good neighbors. Arrow and Debreu showed in 1953 that competitive market allocations will be optimal (in the Pareto sense), but only if the markets are complete (”the effects of the actions of economic actors on one another take the form of contractual exchanges”) and increasing returns to scale are absent or small [I don't know what that means]. “Under these assumptions, goods will be priced at their marginal cost which will equal their true scarcity (social marginal cost): p=M =SMC” SB is going to show that that is not true in a weightless economy.

Much of the economy – the grain and steel economy — fits this invisible hand theorem. It works best if the goods are tangible, easily measurable in standardized ways. In this classic economy, there was sufficient competition.

But, it’s different in weightless economies, where there’s high first-copy costs, and low marginal costs. E.g., it costs a lot to produce the first copy of a CD but very little for the rest of the copies. E.g., the first copy of Windows 97 cost maybe $50M, but the second copy cost $3.

In the weightless economy, enforcing property rights paradoxically force a violation of the invisible hand theorem: You let someone charge $20 for a cd the marginal cost of which is $0.85.

In the economy of grain and steel, market structure was a mix of competition and stable oligopoly (”competition restricted to a handful of firms”). The info economy may exhibit a serial monopoly structure, but that’s not what he wants to talk about.

SB gives a summary of what he’s said so far: Dilemmas of the weightless economy: Increasing returns on both the demand and supply side make competition difficult to sustain. This winner-take-all dynamic generates lots of inequality. The critical thing: Private firms cannot conform to the p=MC rule, and property rights are both ambiguous and difficult to enforce. The institutions that have worked well for the past 200 yrs are likely to work less well in the future.

Kudu = An antelope of some sort hunted in Tanzania for its massive caloric value. When one is killed, it’s widely shared (perhaps 2/3 outside of the nuclear family). The culture of the foraging band: generosity, modesty about one’s success, sharing. Christopher Boehm (1982) wrote that group sanction is “the most powerful instrument for regulation of individually assertive behaviors.” But mobile foraging bands “and its collectivist and egalitarian norms and properties was eventually displaced by agricultural production.” The critical fact is that that increased land productivity so that a small plot of band was productive enough to live on, which provided an incentive for putting up fences and defending it. These prop rights were not enforced by states but by some form of mutual consent.

Just as agricultural facilitated unambiguous prop rights, the info economy is reversing this process. We’re returning to the early Pleistocene economy. Most of the animals could not be domesticated. Some became more valuable when domesticated. Is an online song more like a cow or like a kudu? “Will the attempt to domesticate the modern day kudu’s prove costly and ineffective?”

Arrow: “Information is a fugitive resource.” It runs away. “We are just beginning to face the contradictions between the systems of private prop and of info acquisition and dissemination.” “If Arrow is correct, how would we expect our economic institutions to evolve under these new conditions?” Institutional change is very hard to study. There aren’t that many French Revolutions to study. He is doing Markov chain models with others at the Santa Fe Institute.

“Could between-group competition and technological advance combine to induce a new property rights revolution?” Darwin explained change via in-group revolution, while Marx looked at between-group. This is complex between there are both individual and group selection processes, so they’re almost impossible to predict using math. But you can use models. There are many quilibria. Initial conditions do not matter.

He talks about his agent-based model of institutional persistence and innovation. (You can play with his “artificial history” models here: http://www.santafe.edu/~bowles It looks like a Windows executable you can download.) He describes three strategies in the model: bourgeois (own prop and defend it), civic (share and penalize those who do not), share. [See Ethan! Or watch the webcast when it's posted in a day or too. Sorry.]

If prop rights are stable, then an all-bourgeois society (protect what they have) is in equilibrium. Likewise if all civics. If all civics (share and punish for non-sharing), you can drift toward all sharers because they are behaviorally indistinguishable if there are not B who are trying to protect what they have. Using these parameters (which I am expressing totally inadequately and probably inaccurately), he and Jung-Kyoo Choi have run simulations. If prop rights are stable, the system tends towards equilibrium. If they are not — a bourgeois contests ownership — there is no equilibrium, although there is some moving clustering. Summary: “Evolutionary success of the ‘bourgeois equilibrium’ depends on prop rights being unambiguous.

But this is not the right way to understand the future because we don’t know how ambiguous prop rights will be, which depends on technological advances and the legal system.

Diff institutions have diff advantages. States are good at coercing, Markets allocate well. Communities handle the ambiguity of prop rights but fail where inequalities among members are very large. The problem of the info economy is that information creates both substantial ambiguity or prop rights and a lot of inequality (winner-take-all). The ambiguity makes it hard for the state to adjudicate. The inequality makes it hard for the communitarian values to succeed.

He ends by quoting Hayek: Whether central planning or competition works depends on whether you put all the pricing info in the hands of a central authority or adjust the prices by giving the pricing info to individuals. But now we have a third player: Markets and states, but also communities. Fifty years ago, people speculated that computers would solve this problem. SB says that we need a high level of info creation as well as making it available at its marginal cost. This is the question asked for hunters in hunter/gathering societies: Why should hunters hunt if they give it all away? Understanding this activity — mirrored in today’s collaborative environment — may help solve the problem.

Q: What do we know about the scalability of communities? The ambiguity seems to grow as groups get bigger.
A: How many people work on Wikipedia?
Q: The ambiguity there occurs in small groups.
A: Hunter-gatherers can’t take advantage of economies of scale or of diversity. Can moral sanctioning be done in on-face-to-face environments? We’re finding out.

Q: Can you talk about common pool resources (Ostrom)? [and two more questions]
A: The value of the network is the number of possible connections. There are therefore huge economies of scale. That’s where you get the winner-take-all from. Ostrom took some insights of Ronale Coase and extend them beyond firms, to include things such as communities. Are the motivations for sw engineers the same for hunters? Reputation. Fun.

Q: [me] What’s a community?
A: The non-state, non-market ways that humans connect and interact. [Hugely paraphrased!]
Q: [me] Is there enough in common among all those ways to enable it to be used as a factor in your model?
A: Communities have in common that they have a public thing, they have to figure how to share the benefits of this, and they;re not doing this primarily through enforceable contracts. But I don’t want to pin it down too much. Read “Against Parsimony” by Albert Hirschman.

Q: One of the child’s first words is “mine” because that it eanables it to differentiate itself from its environment. I think your theory would change if you asked if that’s a universal.
A: It’s not. Children differentiate themselves from their mother, but they don’t universally claim physical objects as their own. Private property is incredibly recent.

Q: In your agent-based model, could you drill down to see which types of prop rights are likely to be stable?
A: Yes, but not with agent-based models. Our theory lets us address this. We just haven’t done it. You should be able to look at the nature of the project — first copy costs, e.g. — and develop a typology of the sorts of things that are hard to solve, although changes in tech or law would change this.

Q: The gov’t role has be quite diff if you an economy of cows or kudus. How does this affect gov’t regulation?

A: My preliminary ideas: I don’t think it leads to more or less gov’t. It leads into different kinds of gov’t interventions. The aim is to take seriously when designing incentives you have to take into account that people have their own motivations. And if you introduce monetary incentives, you may get worse outcomes; I’ve recently written about this for Science. The solution to problems is always some combination of incentives designed by economists et al. and the moral incentives of most humans. These two are inseparable; addressing one without recognizing this can be disastrous. Some problem are solved not just by financial incentives but by some combination of people’s incentives and motivations.

[NOTE: Samuel Bowles is way more coherent than this livebloggery makes him sound. I lack the background to follow much of what he says. Much for me was like typing in the dark. So, I apologize to him and to you. And here's Ethan Zuckerman's far superior bloggage.]

by davidw at November 17, 2009 07:25 PM

Ethan Zuckerman
Samuel Bowles introduces Kudunomics

Warning! Professor Bowles’s lecture was rich in economic jargon, and I’m not an economist. And it had an unusally high idea density. It’s quite possible that I missed large swaths of what he was saying and misinterpreted what he did say. If something here seems obviously wrong, please use the comments section to gently correct me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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by Ethan at November 17, 2009 07:24 PM

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive
YouTube Direct Needs a Payment System, Too

YouTube Direct is a platform to let online content providers, especially news organizations:

embed the upload functionality of YouTube directly into your own site, enabling your organization to request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos with ease. News organizations can ask for citizen reporting; nonprofits can call-out for support videos around social campaigns; businesses can ask users to submit promotional videos about your brand.

Essentially this lets anyone create the equivalent of CNN’s iReport operation. It’s a smart move by YouTube, and a welcome one in many respects.

But it’s the equivalent of iReport in another way that’s just as unfortunate as the original: no compensation for the video creators apart from a pat on the back.

In fact, it’s worse than that. Look at the terms of service at Channel 7 in Boston, one of YouTube’s partners, which include the following:

(W)hen you submit or post any material, you are granting us, and anyone authorized by us, a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, copy, modify, transmit, sell, exploit, create derivative works from, distribute and/or publicly perform or display such material, in whole or in part, in any manner or medium, now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose. The foregoing grant shall include the right to exploit any proprietary rights in such posting or submission, including, but not limited to, rights under copyright, trademark, service mark, patent or other intellectual property law under any relevant jurisdiction.

As far as I can tell, none of the partners has even suggested an intention to pay anyone for what they submit. Which makes the tool a giveaway for the creator — and a windfall for the collector, not to mention YouTube, which cements its position in online video.

But there’s a silver lining. YouTube has open-sourced the platform. This means someone could add a feature the system desperately needs. I wrote about it a few months ago in this post.

To repeat what I said then, we need better ways:

to reward creators when it comes to breaking news, where news organizations derive enormous benefits from having the right image or video at the right time and too frequently get it for less than peanuts. Indeed, practically every news organization now invites its audience to submit pictures and videos, in return for which the submitters typically get zip.

Which is why we need a more robust marketplace than any I’ve seen so far, namely a real-time auction system.

The sites currently promoting citizen journalists’ work don’t offer anything of this sort, as far as I can tell. This isn’t to say I don’t like those sites, which include NowPublic and Demotix, because I like them a great deal. But someone needs to go further.

How would a real-time auction system work? The flow, I’d imagine, would go like this:

Photographer captures breaking news event on video or audio, and posts the work to the auction site. Potential buyers, especially media companies, get to see watermarked thumbnails and then start bidding. A time limit is enforced in each case. The winning bid goes to the journalist, minus a cut to the auction service.

The premium, then, would be on timeliness and authenticity. One or two images/videos would be likely to command relatively high prices, and everything else would be worth considerably less.

Eventually, someone will do this kind of business — which could also be useful for eyewitness text accounts of events. For the sake of the citizen journalists who are not getting what they deserve for their work, I hope it’s sooner than later.

This is worth working on, and fast, before the news industry decides it has found a nifty way to make money on other people’s work.

by Dan Gillmor at November 17, 2009 06:06 PM

Berkman Center front page
Kudunomics: Information and Property Rights in the Weightless Economy

Tuesday, November 17, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

read more

by ashar at November 17, 2009 05:30 PM

Call for descriptions: online safety programs

The Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track of Harvard University Berkman Center's Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative is creating a Compendium of youth-based Internet safety programs and interventions.  We are requesting organizations, institutions, and individuals working in online youth safety to share descriptions of their effective programs and interventions that address risky behavior by youth online.  We are particularly interested in endeavors that involve educators, social services, mentors and coaches, youth workers, religious leaders, law enforcement, mental

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by rtabasky at November 17, 2009 03:00 PM

Andrew Eggers
Lobbying as legislative subsidy
I spent some time this morning reading Hall and Deardorff's 2006 APSR article "Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy," because Larry Lessig cited it in his talk on institutional corruption. I had looked at this a while ago, but somehow reading it again I saw it as newly significant.

The basic idea is that most lobbying is a subsidy to legislators; lobbyists essentially act as "adjunct staff" who increase the productivity of legislators who already agree with them. This contrasts with the more common view of lobbying as bribery or persuasion. The subsidy view fits better with the fact that most lobbying is directed at legislators who are already on board -- influential, committed advocates of a particular position. The bribery and persuasion models would predict instead that lobbying attention would go to legislators who are on the fence on something; Hall and Deardorff recognize that this kind of lobbying does happen in certain circumstances, but assert that their subsidy view accounts for more of the lobbying we see.

Their account falls short in at least two key ways. First, it doesn't account for a major component of lobbying expenditure which is, as I understand it, the brokerage of campaign contributions. This is what Abramoff was doing, and he is certainly not alone: a certain class of lobbyist gets paid by interest groups to help that group place its campaign contributions such that they will get favorable policy. Certainly this does not fall under Hall and Deardorff's explanation, and I wondered what amount of lobbying wouldn't.

Second, I think it gives the false impression that the only dimension on which lobbying-as-bribery could act would be roll call voting. Hall and Deardorff argue that the subsidy view explains why the NRA might lobby a strong NRA supporter in Congress: that NRA supporter has other priorities and limited resources, and will get more done on gun rights if the NRA helps him. But the influence/bribery account could be applied here as well: the NRA would certainly try to pile cash on a legislator who supports gun rights generally in order to convince him to focus on gun rights instead of abortion, or even to sponsor a bill on assault rifles rather than just concealed handguns. It could be either a subsidy or a bribe.

I think what's missing is empirical work to look at what lobbyists are actually doing. How much of what they are paid to do would qualify as constructive in some way, and how much would be bribery or the placement of campaign contributions? In other words, I am willing to accept that lobbyists are "adjunct staff" as Hall and Deardorff claim, but are they adjunct legislative assistants or adjust fundraisers?

by Andy Eggers (noreply@blogger.com) at November 17, 2009 01:52 PM

danah boyd
Web2.0 Expo Talk: Streams of Content, Limited Attention

I prepared a new talk today for Web2.0 Expo that I wanted to share with you:

"Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media"

The talk is about the shifts in information flow thanks to new kinds of technology, focusing on some of the challenges that we face because of the shifts going on.

Unfortunately, my presentation at Web2.0 Expo sucked. The physical setup was hard and there was a live stream behind me. I knew something was wrong because folks started laughing in the audience. Unable to see anything (the audience, the stream), I found myself closing down. And so I collapsed and read the whole thing, feeling mega low on energy and barely delivering my points. Le sigh. I feel like I failed the audience so, if you were in the audience, I'm sorry. But hopefully you'll get more out of reading the presentation than I got out of giving it.

web2.0 information socialstreams talk

by zephoria (zephoria-blog@zephoria.org) at November 17, 2009 12:18 PM

David Weinberger
Cory: No, three strikes and you’re out

I’ve posted a video interview with Cory Doctorow at Broadband Strategy Week. Cory talks about the disproportionality of “three strikes” laws that take away Internet access from those who have been thrice accused of copyright infringement. Perhaps, he suggests, we should also take away Internet access from rightsholders who inaccurately accuse people of infringing copyright. The six minutes are a string of wonderful Cory paragraphs.

Cory’s new book is Makers. His explanation of why he Creative Commonses his books is classic Cory. Which is a very excellent thing.

BTW, right before this, I interviewed Cory for a Radio Berkman podcast that will be up soon. We talked about the future of books as objects you can own.

by davidw at November 17, 2009 04:04 AM

November 16, 2009

Berkman Center front page
Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems

Monday, November 16, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (kglemaud@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

read more

by ashar at November 16, 2009 05:30 PM

Ethan Zuckerman
Christian Sandvig
Illinois Students Strike for Tuition Security

geoThe IFT/AFT Local 6300 AFL-CIO is on strike as of 8:00 a.m.  Picket lines run 8-5 today.  The union voted 92% yes for a strike.  Visit a strike coordinator in the University YMCA to find out where to go.

The Campus Faculty Association stands in support of the GEO.  The CFA has asked faculty to cancel classes and not to cross picket lines.  Faculty “We Support the GEO” picket signs are available at the picket lines.

Catherine Predergast (Professor of English) has this to say about the situation:

As it stands, TAs in many departments here are already drastically underpaid compared with what other schools in the CIC offer.  For example, one course in freshman composition is calculated to consume 17 hours of a TAs time per week at the University of Wisconsin. At the University of Illinois, that same course, which I direct, is only calculated to consume 13 hours. The real losers here are our undergraduate students. Why should they accept four hours less per week of instructional time than they would get at Wisconsin? If the University were to tinker with tuition waivers, whether in-state, or out-of-state, thus even further down-grading its support to graduate students, you might as well rename this  East Central University of Illinois, so shattering would be the consequence to the UofI’s R1 status. I think the GEO’s version of the language on tuition waivers is by far clearer than what the university has proposed, and should be accepted.   Please invest in this university:  Approve the GEO contract.

Many graduate students receive free tuition (called a tuition waiver) as part of their compensation.  This strike comes about after the administration failed to guarantee the security of these waivers in the future.  TAs rightfully have the jitters on that topic: rumors have been circulating about an impending overhaul in the tuition waiver system.  Undergraduate TAs in Chemistry recently had their teaching waivers revoked as a cost saving measure.  (One of them is our babysitter.)

geo2

EO facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/GEO/171984109397

You can help!  Phone numbers and script for calls for support:
http://funferal.org/blog/2009/11/15/geo-strikes-and-seeks-help-from-you/

Longer blog post summarizing the situation and the strike:
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/the_education_of_oronte_churm/strike_at_illinois (This post also points out that the last time Grad Students were on strike the results were disastrous for adjunct faculty on our campus.)

by niftyc at November 16, 2009 03:52 PM

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