Draft of my talk on the end of information at the Berkman Center

I have been working for weeks on a talk I’m giving at a Tuesday lunch at the Berkman Center, where “work on” means erasing more than I’ve written. I’ve done more complete rewrites than I can count, mainly because I can’t figure out what the point of the talk is. I started out knowing what the point was, but as I actually wrote it, I knew less and less. So, here’s a rough outline of the current sorry state of the talk.

I. Information has been the dominant metaphor

This is the easy part. From cradle to grave, we’ve reconceived of ourselves and our world as information. But, except for the technical definition, we don’t know what it is (and most of how we’ve reconceived of ourselves has nothing to do with the technical def, and most of us don’t know the technical def anyway).

II. A discontinuous history

“Info” has two ordinary senses that precede its take-over by Claude Shannon in 1948: It’s something you’re about to learn, and it’s the content of tables. Shannon then introduced his technical definition, which only a tiny percentage of the population understands. Nevertheless, info became the dominant paradigm. So, what enabled it to take over our culture? Two notes: 1. I am explicitly not going to talk about its utility or its politics of control and mastery, both of which are obviously crucial to the answer. 2. I am going to contrast the Info Age with the Link Age (or whatever we’re going to call the new epoch).

Enabler 1: Information scales

Info scales sufficiently to enable large corporations to manage themselves. But its scaling strategy is to exclude everything that doesn’t fit its rows and columns. E.g., the personnel database contains only a tiny bit about what employees know about one another. In the Age of Links, we include everything. Links create a world of abundance. The irony is that while the Info Age’s strategy was to exclude bad and useless info, in the Age of Links we’re better able to manage the abundance of crap than the abundance of good stuff.

Enabler 2: Info is a resource

It’s a resource in that it’s useful to us. We can retrieve stuff from it, using the criteria of precision and recall: Did our query get only the right stuff and all the right stuff? In the Link Age of Abundance, however, getting all the right stuff is a disaster. (Which is why we invented two new criteria: relevance and interestingness.)

Furthermore, info is a resource from which we fetch nuggets of value. The Web, though, is a place that we enter and navigate. The irony is that in the Age of Info, we thought about entering an info space as becoming Jeff Bridges in Tron. Or, we thought that if we entered the info space because it engulfed us, it would be a cold world of men with clipboards, as in movies such as Desk Set. In the Link Age, the place we enter is fully social, and is becoming completely integrated with the real world space.

Enabler 3: Bits apply to everything

We sometimes talk about atoms vs. bits because anything can be turned into a bit. Bits are thus coextensive with the universe. But, bits can represent anything in the world because they are so fundamentally unlike the world. Every other measurement measures some property of the world (height, weight, shoe size, whatever), but bits measure pure difference. The world bits model always shows itself in particular ways, in particular properties. Bits are thus profoundly unnatural; they exist only because we take them as bits. They are thus very much unlike atoms.

Further, bits reduce everything to the simplest of differences: yes/no, 1/0. Links, on the other hand, are put in place to find and tease out differences that are complex enough to require language and to be worth pointing out.

Enabler 4: Information explains communication

Although Shannon expressly was not trying to explain human communication, his diagram matches our basic view of communication as the movement of code through a conduit. (Paul Edwards is good on this, as on many other issues.) Plus, Shannon’s popularizer, Warren Weaver, expressly said the theory applies to people speaking, pipers piping, dancers dancing, and just about every other form of communication. Still, we have to ask why think of communication as the process of moving symbols through conduits when so much else is required, and so much more is implied, by even the simplest of human conversations. Part of the answer is, I think, our Cartesian metaphysics that thinks that we experience representations of the world, and thus can only communicate by shipping messages to others that affect their representations of the world. The world itself has dropped out of this equation: We only have heads and conduits between them.

This basic picture of communication of content moving through a medium to a receiver treats communication as an obstacle to be overcome, for noise keeps banging on the conduit. This is how the world looks if you come out of an experience where communication was difficult, as was the case for the early info scientists, some of whom had worked on how to improve communications on a noisy battlefield. (Paul Edwards again: The Closed World is excellent.) But hyperlinks are neither content nor medium; more exactly, they’re both. Like a path, a hyperlink assumes an existing world, a shared ground. (Links are a very special sort of path, though, because they are generative of their world.)

Enabler 5: Information lets us understand the world

Models let us find what is essential and common among all that which they model. But they deny the abundance of the world and the fact that the world doesn’t behave the way we want. The contingent does show up in the Info Age view of the world. It shows up as noise. In the Link Age, succeed by making the world noisy: creating a path among ideas that differ. (This is not noise in Info Theory’s sense.) Of course, we rightfully worry that amidst this differential linkage we will only seek that which is familiar and reassuring. The success of the Link Age depends upon it remaining as noisy and full of difference as possible, the opposite of how the Info Age measured success.

So, as I write this out, I can see some sections that don’t really add up. For example, Enabler 3’s discussion is pretty incoherent. But that’s why I’m writing this out now.

I have one day left to get something presentable out of this, since I am out all day on Monday. And I’m jetlagged and pretty exhausted now. Ack.

While Apple has blocked the Someecards app because some of the cards have made fun of public figures, Google has asked the app to port on over to Android phones.

(BTW, I got a Droid today.)

Not long after I overheard a Comcast ad on a college football broadcast, the doorbell rang. It was a guy wearing a Comcast shirt and carrying a clipboard-type contraption with some kind of a phone-like keyboard at one end. Under the clip was a list of channels. We greeted each other, and he asked me if we had cable. I said no, we just had Internet service.

“Oh, from RCN?”

“No, Verizon FiOS.”

“Oh. Just Internet?”

“That’s it.”

“No telephone?”

“We dropped it along with the television. We only use the Net.”

“Just Internet?”

“Just Internet.”

“What kind of speed are you getting?”

“We have 20Mb symmetrical service. Twenty up, twenty down.”

“We can beat that.”

“How?”

“We have fifty.”

“Fifty up and down?”

“Fifty. It’s expensive, though.”

“How much?”

“Seventy a month.”

“That’s not bad, if it’s symmetrical. What’s the upstream speed?”

“Fifty.”

“You sure? If you can tell me twenty up, we might have a deal.”

He wasn’t sure. “Hang on. Let me make a call.”

A conversation with somebody at Comcast followed. “Oh,” he said to the phone. “Okay… okay.” After hanging up, he said, “It’s fifty down and ten up.”

“Can’t do twenty, huh?”

He started to walk down the stairs in front of the house. “Only a tiny minority wants that,” he said.

“That might be the case nationwide,” I replied. “But around here with all these universities and businesses, you’ll get more demand. You might have sold me if you could have beaten Verizon’s offer.”

He shook his head. “It’s just a tiny minority.” And then he walked down the sidewalk, toward the next doorbell.

Bonus link.

I have been negligent in not commenting on the Harvard Book Store’s marvelous print-on-demand engine, dubbed Paige N. Gutenborg. For those of you in the area, the store is right across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard Yard, and the press is right  on the main floor — just keep walking straight ahead to the back of the store. In a few minutes, you can have any public domain book printed that is available via Google Books. Some copyrighted works are available too, but the big buzz is over the access to copies of old books, many in foreign languages, of which only a few libraries may have copies. What you get is just what you want — a printed book, on good paper, bound and trimmed, and with a full-color soft cover in the original design. The machine prints, binds, and trims, in only a few minutes. And for only $8 per book.

While I was watching this process a couple of days ago, the book being printed was an old French text — a professor had ordered copies for his class. A nearby shelf has a variety of other samples.

The first book printed on this press was a copy of the first book printed in North America — the 1640 hymnal, The Bay Psalm Book. In a wonderful loop of history, it had been printed in Cambridge, only steps from where the Harvard Book Store printed the copy 369 years later.

Paige is fascinating to watch. Even more than its (her?) marvelous automation, it is simply energizing to witness the bits, coming from heaven knows where, becoming atoms in front of your eyes. The imagination runs wild. Maybe, if I ever move, I’ll just throw all my books out and have new copies printed of anything I discover I actually want. I can’t find half the books I own anyway. If you don’t like that fantasy, come up with a better one of your own.

I have to congratulate Jeff Mayersohn, the president of the store. He has seen independent book stores die, one after the next. Even the Harvard Book Store, which offers outstanding service and a knowledgeable staff and is operating in a book-loving community if any such still exists, must have felt threatened. He’s decided to make the technology work for him rather than kill him. Good for him and good for the store. I wish them the best.

Bonus for those of you able to drop in: the trimmed edges are there for the taking. They are bound booklets of blank pages, an inch or so tall and six or eight inches wide. Kids can create their own books by writing or drawing on the pages. How neat is that?

This week, Herdict is proud to announce the latest addition to its bundle of fantastic tools…the Herdict Discussion Board (a.k.a.  Herdict Commons).

Herdict Commons aims to serve as a haven for discussions that go beyond the comments section of the Herdict Reporter; as a place to answer the “what” and “why” of an inaccessible report.

Take www.maktoobblogs.com, a blogging platform, for instance.  The site has been reported inaccessible in Saudi Arabia a number of times, but almost none of the reports have comments attached, and nobody knows why the site is blocked.  Or maybe non-Arabic speakers don’t know what the site is.

Enter Herdict’s Discussion Board…From the Herdict report, you can click a link to be directed straight to existing reports on the subject (or if there are none, a new report opens up for you):

Once you’ve arrived at the Board, you can make a report, like the one shown below.  Reports and tags can be added in any language.

Other users can add comments and replies to the original post.  For example, users can translate comments if they have the skills!

We think the Herdict Discussion board can be useful for all kinds of folks – activists might use it to find out more about Herdict Reports they see, and Herdict users around the globe might use it to discuss their experiences with filtering.  Anything goes!

Google has released a dashboard tool that makes it easy for you to review all the settings and preferences you’ve provided for the various Google products you use (Docs, YouTube, Gmail, etc.). The short video here shows you how to access it. (Basically, pull down the Settings menu in the top right of the Google home page, select Google Account Settings, and then select Dashboard and log in a second time.) It’s a bit sobering to see what you’ve told Google about yourself, and what documents of yours Google has, all in one place.

Of course, Google actually knows a lot more about you, or may, than what you’ve said in response to the various invitations it has given you to fill in forms. The Dashboard doesn’t reveal what Google may have concluded about you by retaining and analyzing your searches, for example. You can observe a lot by watching, as the great Yogi Berra said and Google knows better than anyone. The Dashboard gives you no information or control about the privacy threat from inferred data rather than explicit question answering.

For more, see the ComputerWorld article.

Yochai Benkler, the project lead on the Berkman Center’s analytic survey of how broadband works around the world [pdf] responds to critics and questioners.

Das ist einer der verführerischsten Buchläden auf der ganzen Welt. Alteingesessen, unabhängig betrieben und chaotisch. Wer den Harvard Bookstore als Buchliebhaber betritt, kann darin ganze Nachmittage verbringen. Wen es in das untere Stockwerk in die Abteilung „used books“ verschlägt, kann dort auch aus Versehen übernachten. Ohne das wegweisende Tageslicht, das einem zeigt, es ist schon sehr spät geworden, verliert man zwischen den Büchern vollends das Gefühl für Zeit.

Das kommt seit dem 29. September leichter zurück, wenn der Besucher gleich beim Betreten des Bookstores oder dem Wiederautauchen aus dem Keller auf das Computerterminal im Eingangsbereich zusteuert. Seit diesem Tag bietet der Harvard Bookstore „print-on-demand-“-Books an. Aus 3,6 Millionen Büchern, die zum Teil seit langem nicht mehr erhältlich sind, können die Nutzer auswählen. Vier Minuten später liegt das Buch auf der Ladentheke und kostet acht Dollar.

Ich entscheide mich für „Gutenberg and the art of printing“ von Emily C. Pearson aus dem Jahre 1871. Damals wurde das Buch in Boston gedruckt. Heute auch wieder, allerdings unter anderen Vorzeichen. Das passt irgendwie alles.

Nach der Buchsuche am Computerterminal und der Abgabe des Druckauftrags bei einem wirklichen Menschen an der Ladentheke, kann ich meinem Buch beim Gedrucktwerden zuschauen und zuhören. Seite für Seite produziert die riesige Maschine im hinteren Teil des Harvard Bookstore. Das leicht gelbliche Papier (das laut Aussage der freundlichen Dame im Store gewählt wurde, weil es allen am besten gefiel und an richtige Buchseiten erinnert) wird mit einem langgezogenen dumpfen Zischen durch die Maschine gezogen, bedruckt und landet dann mit einem hellen Klacken, wenn der Rand des Papiers auf die metallene Begrenzung des Ausgabefachs trifft, auf dem fertigen Stapel.

Das Buch, das ich nach vier Minuten in den Händen halte, ist ein richtiges Buch. Paperback zwar, nicht gebunden, aber ein Buch – mit Widmung: „To the gifted inellects, willing hearts, and dexterous fingers engaged in making the great art a blessing to the world.“ Eine Verlagsangabe entfällt. Das liegt in der Natur des „print-on-demand“-Vorgangs. Stattdessen steht dort: „Supplier: Google“.

Es ist phantastisch, dass man ein solche Buch heute wieder bekommen und lesen kann als gedrucktes Werk, dass die Gedanken und Argumente einer vergangenen Zeit darin wieder auffindbar sind. Im Vorwort des Buches schreibt die Verfasserin: „Printing has been styled »The telescope of the soul«.“ Als solches bringt der Druck längst vergessener Bücher uns wieder entfernte Gedanken und Welten näher, lässt uns auf sie focussieren und für die Zeit des Lesens in ihnen verweilen.

Wenn wir – jeder für sich – die eigenen Telescope ausfahren und ausrichten können, brauchen wir keine Sternwarten mehr. Wenn ich im Keller dieses Bookstores herumstöbere, finde ich das dann doch wieder schade.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Josh Levinger leads off the final session at CFCM’s show and tell, titled “Crossing Borders”. His project, Virtual Gaza, aggregates the stories of civilians who were present in Gaza as bombs fell earlier this year during the Israeli incursion. The project centers on a map of Gaza that shows bombed houses.

The impetus for the project was the lack of media coverage of Gaza, a fact complicated by the fact that there were only 6 international journalists in Gaza during the war. Levinger is troubled by the ways in which the suffering of Israelis and Gazans was reported as equal in US media – he feels like this is a distortion of what happened on the ground.

The project grew from a collaboration with the Harvard Alliance for Justice in the Middle East. Working with a social network, they maped 77 testimonies from 29 authors, mapping 32 neighborhoods in 5 cities. People were able to upload their stories and annotate the map, helping combat the “media blockade” against Gaza by showing personal stories.

The project shows the power of Open Street Map – “in conflict areas, there’s much better data through Open Street Map.”

Josh acknowledges the challenges of getting people to pay attention to these maps. “We never got mainstream media to really pay attention to this.” He hoped to travel to Gaza this summer to improve the maps – that wasn’t possible, so he went to the West Bank, and helped with a project called Voices Beyond Walls, a project that mapped the local neighborhoods through video, drawings and photos.

Aside from improving Boston’s signs, Rick Borovoy is pioneering “microtourism”, a new strategy to build bridges in local communities.

He shows us the photo of a Brazilian restaurant in Framingham in a beautiful old building. It’s very popular with Brazilians, but not outside of the community. Why don’t people go there? Borovoy has talked to Framingham residents and they tell him “the traffic’s bad, it’s not safe – basically, they’re saying it’s not on their map.”

Brazilians rescued the downtown of Framingham, Borovoy tells us, and the downtown of the city isn’t especially unsafe. He tells us that non-Brazilians do go to the library, which is downtown, but tend not to go any further.

Talking to Brazilians, some mentioned that they thought that community members wouldn’t come downtown unless they were literally led by the hand. So they’re leading people by the hand. They’re issuing paper passports that have barcodes – those codes are scanned at sites downtown, and people who complete the circuit – led by Brazilian-American guides – will be send an incentive to come back downtown. The hope is to turn a guided tour to self discovery into a rediscovery of downtown. Borovoy recognizes tourism as one of the world’s biggest industries, and hopes that the process of exploring the other will lead to a joy of discovery in our own communities.

The first microtourism excursion takes place this weekend – I hope for a website shortly after the tour is completed.

Charles DeTar is building a blogging platform for prisoners, making it easy to blog on paper using US postal mail. The project, “Between the Bars: Human Stories from Prison” is intended to fight recidivism. He points out that, with prison populations rising, we’re seeing an even bigger population of ex-prisoners. These people have reduced opportunities for civic engagement (they usually can’t vote), have a hard time finding a job, and face cultural exclusion. This leads to high recidivism rates. But people who retain an identity outside of the bars are much less likely to be recidivists.

DeTar points to Jon’s Jail Journal, an amazing blog started by a prisoner in an Arizona jail. The journal was maintained by sending paper letters and posting them online. The father of the blogger tells audiences that the blog ended up being a lifeline for his son. Citing my work (thanks!) DeTar points to the idea of bridgeblogging and the importance of listening and of being heard.

Between the Bars is a platform to scan letters, post them online and enable communication and commenting within the framework and constraints of the US prison system. At this point, DeTar is working with “prison stakeholders” – families, former prisoners, prison employees – and waiting for approval from MIT’s research review board to start talking to prisoners.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Rick Borovoy’s project Lost in Boston focuses on what might well be my pet peeve with Boston – lack of signage. (Seriously. It’s a big problem. I suspect we do it to avoid letting Yankees fans find Fenway.)

He shows off a new sign, built by students at Mass Arts. It shows key local arts institutions, pointing to sites like the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s put up on private land and was designed through a student contest.

The point is that signs don’t need to come from governments. We can use local neighborhoods and local know-how to solve local problems. He invites us to participate – if you want a sign, want to sponsor or design one, email info AT lostinboston DOT org.

Jay Silver makes very personal maps. Inspired by the caricature maps he remembered from diner placemaps, he’s made maps of his childhood that feature his home birth and plates of tofu, and a map of a workshop he ran – a spiraling timeline punctuated with flower petals.

He calls this philosophy Awareness Mapping, and recently brought the technique to a community in India. He encouraged students to take photos of their environment, to make papercraft models of buildings, measured by hand, and turned into complex 3D popup maps. To show maps of motion, children danced and performed some of their maps.

Silver shows a video that intercuts images of the local community and maps displayed on a small video screen, mixing these digitized maps with local materials. He closes with a brief video of some scenes in Bangalore. “Maybe it’s a map, I don’t know.”

Jeff Warren is building a powerful set of tools for mapping called Cartagen. He’s interested in making “maps of things that Google cannot or will not map.” As an example, he shows the dotted line on the Google map between Morocco and Western Sahara. That dotted line represents “an avoidance of taking a political stance.”

Cartagen, at its root, is a rendering tool that renders in front of you at 15 frames a second. He’s used this to make a map of the world that loks like Warcraft II, converting contemporary map information into icons from the game. More practically, he offers a map of Cambridge, made using open streetmap data and overlaid with pavement quality data – very useful for bicyclists or community organizers.

The power of the tool is that it’s a scriptable, dynamic mapping environment. To show the powers of the tool, Warren build a system called Newsflow, which visualizes where a story occurs in the world, and where it was reported, connecting the two points with an arc.

His ultimate interests are in making mapping accessible to people who don’t have computers or smartphones. He’s working on systems to scan drawn maps and stretch them to correlate them to geographic coordinates, and another system that turns a cellphone into a sextant.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Cristina Xu leads off a segment focused on the future of news. She introduces her project, the News Positioning System, by digging into American history to talk about “transient newspapers”. When the US postal system heavily subsidized the mailing of newspapers, they began being used as mementos, or as post cards, underlined to make certain points. The practice became so widespread that Congress had to intervene, deciding that underlining a sentence in a newspaper was okay, while underlining letters to send a letter was not.

Working on ExtrAct, Christina noticed the importance of binders, notebooks carried by community organizers filled with newspaper clippings. They’re critically important for these organizers to document what’s going on in their communities and around the country, but they’re easy to lose and hard to share.

Organizers are now moving to mailing lists, which look higher tech, but they’re still hard to search and share. So the News Positioning System combines the functionality of a bookmarking site (delicious) with a map. This provides critical content for news. And since it includes an email scraper, people who are comfortable using mailing lists don’t need to adopt new tech, while those comfortable with bookmarking can use a bookmarklet. They’re now releasing the code – looks extremely cool and worth checking out.

Florence Gallez worries about the lack of collaboration in the news industry. So she’s working on Open Park,a platform for collaborating on the creation of hyperlocal, national and global news. It’s designed so that people in the community can learn to report the news using the tools. The system includes a code of ethics for collaborative journalism and instructions on using new media tools. She’s testing the tool in the local Russian community, using the platform to report on US-Russia relations.

Dharmishta Rood is fascinated by college media. She admires the fast pace of newsrooms, the need for students to learn journalism very quickly because of the rapid turnover of students. But she worries that college newspapers tend not to be able to customize or update their publishing platforms to improve their web presence, organizational tools, and community support. The Populous platform is being rolled out at UCLA, and includes a system called Campus Walk, a community hub of information, which group profiles, allowing campus groups to publish and share their information, adding context to news stories. The project is based on Django and like all CFCM projects, it’s open source.

Lisa Williams is the pioneering creator of Placeblogger, the largest index of local news blogs. The project celebrates the “scrappy little newsrooms that are thriving while mainstream newsrooms are dying.”

There are only 5,500 named places in the US – it shouldn’t be that hard to locate local information sites in each of these places. As Placeblogger does so, it becomes an observatory for these places on the map, and a distributed news corps that can cover stories in new ways.

Lisa reminds us of the Washington Post expose of the Walter Reed hospital – the problem with any in-depth expose is that it allows the authorities to declare, “this was just an isolated incident.” If we can mobilize a distributed news corps, we can ask questions like, “What percentage of returning US servicepeople who had amputations have been issued prostheses?” The goal, she tells us, is to “turn stories into signals”, which could emenate from one community and influence others, providing bigger and broader pictures in the process.

In discussions afterwords, Lisa points out that placeblogs are startups – we might expect them to fail at the rapid rate that most startups experience. But most actually survive, dying only when authors move.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink, a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online financial information. The bleeding edge in this field is financial tools for collective action – carrotmob, groupon, merry miser, buy it like you mean it.

Red Ink fits into this latter category. It’s a “social financial platform” designed to let you visualize spending at regional levels, in different industries. This is useful information for organizing a boycott – you can show the effectiveness of a collective action by asking everyone to report their purchasing behavior. Similarly, you could get a constituency of people to report on local spending, or just try to negotiate a discount on your local beer spending. The goal for the platform is to be highly private and anonymous, maximizing communications and minimizing private data leakage.

Nadav Aharony focuses on close proximity communications. He points out that we have good tools to send information around the world, but few tools to send things locally. His project – Comm.unity – focuses on connecting devices to one another through WiFi or Bluetooth, independent of central servers.

This vision could be very important for activists, allowing them to spread information person to person. It might also matter to people off the grid, allowing communication in an otherwise unwired village. And for general users, there could be services allowing communication and discovery.

Some of the projects that have emerged from this work are:
- SnapN’Share, a sort of local twitter that works totally off the grid
- Social Dashboard, which displays devices around you, sorted by social trust
- Will It Blend? – A living lab/reality mining approach to evaluating these new social technologies.

Matthew Hockenberry shows off the new iteration of SourceMap, a powerful tool to visualize open supply chains. He shows a bottle of Poland Spring Water and points out that you can figure out where this water actually comes from – a set of springs in Maine. There’s no similar labeling information for a laptop, so it’s hard to know about the Indonesian tin in the product.

With this information, we can consider the carbon impacts and social impacts of our products through supply chain transparency. A demonstration shows the inputs into an Ikea Alsarp bed, including the origins of the wood and steel – this report is published and becomes a resource for anyone looking at purchasing the bed in the future.

Hockenberry’s strongest example is a map of breweries in Scotland, all of which are currently bottled in northern England. By mapping their supply chains, he was able to make an argument for a transition to a central Scottish bottling plant, which might transform the local brewing industry.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi speaks on behalf of the ExtrAct project, a project focused on mapping and countering the ill-effects of energy extraction. Chris asks the question, “How do you unionize a community to oppose outside forces?” He roots his work in Manuel Castells, who points out that local democratic systems have been transformed by global capital and markets.

ExtrAct focuses on energy extraction and its impact on communities in North Texas and Colorado, specifically the impacts of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas. This process is very chemically intensive and is unregulated by federal law. Chris tells us that it’s causing such severe health and environmental damage that we’re seeing communities organize to fight fracturing.

The ExtrAct project started with extensive ethnographic studies in these communities. That study pointed to the landman – a representative of the energy companies sent to purchase mineral rights from homeowners – as a pivotal piece of the extraction system. ExtrAct functions as a “Landman review site, like Rotten Tomatoes or Yelp.com”, trying to address the problems of accountability in the process of acquiring land for mineral extraction.

It’s very easy to experience whiplash if you hang out at the academic institutions of Cambridge, MA. I spent the day in the basement of Harvard’s wood-panelled faculty club, in a discussion about the future(s) of the Berkman Center, then took the T two stops to MIT for the Communications Forum, where students in MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media program are presenting recent work, held in the deeply non-Euclidean Stata Center.

Once my head stops spinning from looking for a local vertical, I’ll do my best to report on the new work put forward by Chris Csikszentmihalyi’s students and collaborators. (Chris is leading today’s discussion, but points out that CFCM is led by Mitch Resnick and William Uricchio as well.) Chris describes the event as a “lightning round”, five minute tastes of the work. CFCM’s focus, Chris tells us, is to build technologies that strengthen social bonds and build communities, with a focus on real-world communities.

CFCM is funded by the Knight Foundation via the Knight News Challenge, part of Knight Foundation’s strategy of moving beyond journalism education to building new tools to serve community’s information needs. Chris explains that CFCM is looking for ways that tools and systems can provide the services journalists have provided to a free society. 20th century journalism in the United States was a unique moment, and might be an exemplar, he argues, but might not be the only way to get towards a free and just society.

CFCM’s collaborations have included a focus on reporting on the narcowars in Mexico, working with the US state department, work with kids in the West Bank and Gaza, a study of product sourcing in Scotland, and research on the introduction of YouTube in the Amazon. Not all projects are so far from home – one focuses on encouraging “intracommunity tourism” in nearby Framingham, Massachusetts, in the hopes of reducing violence.

Reflecting on the lessons learned in the past few years of CFCM, Chris offers the following:

- Allowing for local knowledge is key to a system’s adoption
- Switch between local and global contexts
- Use community-driven design to enable community sustainability
- Monitor over time – a successful technical project is a continuous commitment
- New technologies can make new social practices more acceptable
- Collaborative community initiatives can circumvent problems in existing social and technical structures
- People only engage when they see an effect

This last point it a real challenge – web2.0 tools only work when you’ve got a group of people – how do you get a group of people when they don’t yet see the effect of the tools?

Introducing the speakers, Chris points to a new CFCM initiative – a blog focused on the tech tools the group is developing and disseminating – looks well worth a look.

So I just went to look up Debora Spar’s Ruling the Waves, on Amazon, and was greeted by the above. Never mind that I wasn’t looking for what they said I just looked at. Consider instead the strangeness of having something with my name on it, as an author, and that I can reasonably be presumed to own recommended to me as a purchase. (As it happens I also own the third item. Dunno if I bought it from Amazon or not.)

For what it’s worth, can I find anywhere in my Amazon account info a place where I can let them know I’m an author and not just a customer.

Am I wrong about that? Is there a way I can let them know that? Is it worthwhile to either of us?

For my readers in Santa Barbara, I highly invite you to come over to the open house, Noon-2pm today at CITS — the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB. This is a great bunch of people, doing great work, in a nice new space that I wish I could be in myself. Alas, I have a prior commitment on the East Coast, where I am now (keeping me away from the last day of IIW as well — and that’s an event I helped start).

CITS is at 1310 Social Science & Media Studies Building. Some details about that here.

On Tuesday Ellen Goodman and I presented at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University as part of the Center’s weekly luncheon series.

The topic was “Public Media: from broadcast to broadband” and we managed to cover a lot of territory and start a good discussion in the 90 minutes or so we had at our disposal. Considering that there are not infrequent multi-day convenings and conferences on these issues it was quite an exercise to boil it down to some essentials.

Ellen is working with the Ford Foundation (of which PRX is a grantee) to help shape a research and policy agenda on public media, and PRX itself is in the thick of things as a player in the field effecting change through our services and projects.

The video is embedded here (downloadable and non-YouTube versions here), and below that I’ve posted the slides from the presentation.

The Supreme Court of Arizona has ruled that the metadata included in electronic doucments is covered by the public records law. If the state has to make the document available, it also has to make the metadata available.

The court reasoned analogically:

“It would be illogical, and contrary to the policy of openness underlying the public records law, to conclude that public entities can withhold information embedded in an electronic document, such as the date of creation, while they would be required to produce the same information if it were written manually on a paper public records,” Justice Scott Bales wrote.

According to the AP article:

The Arizona decision likely will have a “persuasive effect” on other states’ courts, said Dan Barr, an attorney who filed a brief on behalf of the Society of Professional Journalists and other media organizations…

The ruling also means requested electronic records must be provided in that form rather than paper printouts, which makes them difficult and costly to search, Barr said.

Sounds like a good ruling to me…

I’m in an airport, beginning a day of transit that seems to bend time in a Time Zonish way, so I haven’t had time to actually read this Pew Internet report, but my understanding is that it challenges the assumption that mobiles, texting, the Internet, and all the rest make us more isolated. It turns out (apparently), that Internet and cell phone users have larger and more diverse social networks than non-users. Which way the causality runs, I don’t know. But the Pew Internet stuff is invariably interesting, so I thought I’d point it out.

Now, it’s off to the airport gate so that I can circle the globe in the wrong direction, reverse the flow of time, and finally remember where I put that Superman comic in 1958.

I’m at IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) in Milan. The Europe-wide president of IAB, Alain Heureux, is giving a talk that includes a section on the self-regulatory mechanisms IAB is proposing as it watches Brussels begin to formulate policy.

Alain goes through the following “road map”:

1. Opt out. It’d be a burden on the user to ask for opt in for IP addresses and cookies, so it’s important that there always be opt-out mechanisms. There could and should be centralized pages that explain exactly what the various types of cookies are, what they’re used for, and that give users the ability to turn them on or off.

2. Education and transparency. There should be sites [built by IAB?] that educate the public and that are completely transparent about the practices.

3. Good practices and codes of conduct.

4. Communication.

5. Research. Alain points to a survey of 32,000 customers across Europe (the MCDC), and a consumer benefits study that tries to quantify the economic value that users are getting at all those free sites we love so much.

By the way, attendance at the Italian IAB (pronounced “yob”) continues to increase. It started 7 years ago with 300 people, and this year there are 7,000 attendees, which is up 20% over last year. Pretty impressive given the state of the economy.

Some folks, including Nadia El-Imam, have put together an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 that is going to be presented alongside the declaration of the European ministers at the Malmö ministerial conference in about 3 weeks. They’re looking for signatures.

What do you know about Fiji?

Before getting involved with Global Voices, I knew that it was an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific much beloved by vacationers and honeymooners and that, despite being an island nation surrounded by seawater, they export a lot of high-priced bottled water.

As I’ve followed Michael Hartsell’s reporting on Fiji on Global Voices, I’ve gotten a very different impression of the nation. The tensions between ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians have divided the nation politically, leading to rewritings of the constitution and severe government instability. Fiji has had four (or four and a half, depending on who’s counting) military coups since 1987 and is currently under the thumb of Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who’s taken power three times since 2000, twice via military coup. (Earlier this year, the Fijian supreme court declared his 2006 coup illegal. Bainimarama stepped down from his post of interim Prime Minister for 24 hours, while the President abrogated the constitution and fired the judiciary, then immediately reappointed him as Prime Minister. That’s the half coup, for those of you counting. Confused? This might help.) Fiji has been expelled from the Commonwealth, condemned by Amnesty International for arresting opposition politicians, church leaders and journalists, and today, severed diplomatic relations with Australia and New Zealand, its two largest and most powerful neighbors.

(This last one is a doozy. The row with Australia and New Zealand concerns Bainimarama’s plan to hire Sri Lankan judges to replace the justices fired earlier this year, when the supreme court was liquidated. Australia and New Zealand have had travel bans against senior members of Bainimarama’s government in place, and when the Sri Lankan judges travelled through Australia to Fiji, they were informed that they would be subject to the same bans once they took their positions in the Fijian government. Bainimarama argues that Australia and New Zealand had banned transit; Australian authorities say they merely informed the Sri Lankan judges that they’d not be able to return through Australia once joining the coup government. Given the importance of Australia and New Zealand as trading partners, it’s hard to imagine this ending well for Fiji.)

I’ve been fascinated for years with the concept of “nation branding”, an idea promoted by Simon Anholt, a UK-based researcher and consultant. I heard Anholt on a BBC broadcast years back making the salient point that Ethiopia has a great brand for recieving famine aid (even if that’s an outdated understanding of the country) and a lousy brand for tourism. It’s an idea I’ve found useful in understanding some of the challenges that African nations face in encouraging tourism and foreign investment – if everyone thinks your country is impoverished and ill-governed, who’s going to want to visit on vacation or buy shares on the local stock exchange? Part of the challenge of rebuilding Africa is rebuilding an image and narrative of the continent that shows it as open for business. (See “Africa’s a continent, Not a Crisis” for more of this line of thought.)

Fiji is somehow blessed with a nation-brand that many African nations would kill for. Despite the 2006 coup, Fijian tourism brought in nearly $500 million in 2008, 24% of GDP, more than the nation earned from the next seven industries combined. Major international hotel chains have large properties in Fiji, and air travel patterns suggest the importance of tourism – international flights land in Nadi, the tourist capital, not the governmental capital Suva, which is served by a prop plane from Nadi. Fiji Water is now the leading imported bottled water in the US, and represents 20% of Fijian exports and 3% of GDP, benefitting from and reinforcing an image of Fiji as an unspoiled tropical paradise.

Defending the brand of Fiji has become a major political cause for the Bainimarama government. In April, after expelling a number of foreign journalists, the government instructed journalists that they needed to begin practicing “the journalism of hope“. Some journalists responded by filling local newspapers with non-news – the Fiji Daily Post ran stories titled “Man Gets on Bus” and “Weather to Improve Soon”. Bloggers have filled in the gaps, taking great risks to publish ferocious political commentary, usually under psuedonyms.

Anna Lenzer, a journalist for Mother Jones, found out just how serious the Bainimarama government was about nation brand when she came to Suva to report on the various ironies that surround Fiji water – a green-branded product with an immense carbon footprint, a premium bottled water produced in a community with no drinkable tap water, a dominant player in the local economy with a stated disinterest in Fijian politics. She was detained and questioned after sending an email from a cybercafe with links to articles critical of the government, and fled the country with the help of the US Embassy.

Her article, “Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle” is an excellent introduction to the strange phenomenon that is Fiji water, though I think she lays too much blame on the Fiji Water company and not enough on the military government and the circumstances that led to the recent coups. It’s worth reading Fiji Waters’s response, even if it’s something of a cop-out – I think Lenzer is right to point out that it’s hard for the company to position itself as environmentally and socially responsible while working with a repressive government. And I can’t argue with this line: “The reality of Fiji, the country, has been eclipsed by the glistening brand of Fiji, the water.”

Fiji may be a case study in eclipsing a complex reality with a shiny brand:

- Start with a country with low media attention.

- Invest massively in tourism, presenting visitors with a reality that’s not wholly, though mostly, divorced from ordinary life in the country. (All tourist destinations do this to one extent or another. Fiji appears to have embraced this strategy thoroughly, providing a string of five-star compounds insulated from the outside. This blog post complains that, at some resorts “Fijian society is reduced to over-chlorinated swimming pools and overpriced palm hats which fall apart in the departure lounge of Nadi Airport.” At the same time, the author wonders why service at these resorts seems so poor these past few months, and worries that, “It appears to be lethargy and uncaring when a guest asks for something. I think all of this is more dangerous to the future of Fiji Tourism than anything else, including the oft-mentioned ‘political instability’.”)

- Build or embrace an export that reinforces your brand image.

- Surpress contrary media voices via censorship or exile.

What would it take for circumstances on the ground in Fiji to damage brand Fiji? What would it take for Fiji to move beyond this mirage and build this vision of a nation in reality?

The Berkman Center is looking for an intern for its Youth Policy Working Group. The Working Group is part of the Berkman Center’s Digital Natives initiative, which studies how young people interact with digital media. The Youth Policy Working Group specifically seeks to draft policy prescriptions around three areas of youth interaction: privacy, safety and information quality/creativity.

The intern will perform research and draft text for a literature review for the information quality/creativity track of the Working Group. Knowledge of issues surrounding youth engagement with digital media; advanced research skills; and attention to detail are a must for successful candidates.

To apply, please send a copy of your resume and a cover letter to Sandra Cortesi ( scortesi at cyber.law.harvard.edu).

My friend and colleage Sami Ben Gharbia just launched a fascinating and useful new site: Threatened Voices. It’s an interactive map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world, with an accompanying timeline that makes it possible to track the phenomenon of arresting bloggers over the past several years. It’s an uncomfortable fact that, as blogs become a more influential public space, the technique of arresting bloggers to silence online speech becomes increasingly common.

The Threatened Voices map complements another map that Sami maintains on Global Voices Advocacy, the Access Denied Map. That map is an overview of government efforts to block online publishing platforms, like Blogger or YouTube. I continue to believe that censorship of these types of sites is one of the most serious problems the web faces today. When a government blocks a website, it blocks the voice of one person or one group – when they block a tool like Wordpress or Twitter, they block all the voices that wanted to use that tool, which might represent hundreds or thousands of alternative perspectives. While I believe we should combat all online censorship (or, more to the point, I believe that any filtering should be done at the edge of the network, by parents, schools or businesses that pay for internet access, not by governments or ISPs), I think there’s a special importance in calling attention to these blocked platforms.

But the blocking of a platform for speech is an abstract idea. Threatened Voices helps personalize the idea of internet censorship, making it clear that it’s a technique that doesn’t just involve blocking packets – it can involve harrassing and arresting individuals, sometimes detaining them for months or years. The goal was to provide a complement to organizations like Committee to Protect Bloggers and Reporters without Borders, who do a great job of leading campaigns to call attention to the imprisonment of individual bloggers. Threatened Voices isn’t campaigning for any of these individual bloggers – it’s trying to present a picture of how vast the phenomenon of imprisoning and threatening bloggers has become.

There’s no way a map like the one Sami is building will ever be complete. We don’t know about every blogger who’s been arrested. And it’s a difficult question whether someone has been arrested for their blogging or for other alleged offenses – is Hossein Derakhshan still in prison because he’s alleged to be an Israeli spy (an absurd accusation) or because he’s an influential blogger? Sami’s trying to broaden the information available, asking people to contribute reports of bloggers under threat to the map.

Knowing what countries are harrassing and arresting bloggers is a first step. What’s the most useful next step is an extremely difficult question. Not all countries respond well to external pressure, or to direct lobbying. It’s possible to harness a great deal of energy around the cause of releasing an individual blogger, but it’s not as clear how that energy should be productively channelled. My hope is that efforts to map this problem will help build solidarity between organizations that have a long track record of protecting journalists, or protecting human rights more generally, and the emerging movements to protect bloggers and the tools of online speech.

The Google Operating System blog (independent of Google) has a useful post explaining why it’s a bad idea to send large attachments, even though Google now lets you attach files up to 25MB in size.

The reasons the post gives have to do with how inefficient attachments are for the system: They get expanded and require multiple uncached downloads. But, those reasons won’t carry a lot of water for people who just want to send their 25MB Powerpoint presentation to 35 people who simply have to see it. (Mea culpa. Except these days it’d be Keynote for me … which seems to make much larger files than Powerpoint.) Until we come up with an easier way to send around files — or a way that adds enough other benefits — we’re going to be wrapping our attachment anvils in brown paper and twine, sticking stamps on them, and sending them through the emails just like God and Google intended.

I have to say I enjoyed this message from Bill, urging his fellow Mainers to vote against Question 1, which would undo the state’s gay marriage law. I’m in agreement with Bill’s opinions, but I also admired the writing and rhetoric.

(Potentially a continuing series…)

1. Clover Food Lab
2. This giant snake (click to enlarge slightly):
   
   
   
   
3. Petsi Pies
4. The MIT Press Bookstore
5. The smell.  (Maybe it’s the sea air?  It smells fresh.)

I’ll post more if I like more things.

Hossein Derakhshan (”Hoder”) has now been in prison in Iran for more than a year. My friend Cyrus Farivar has followed his case closely, and has been in touch with Hoder’s family, who confirm that he’s beeing held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Reports from the activist group Human Rights in Iran suggest that Hoder has been held in solitary confinement for long periods of time, beaten and otherwise mistreated, and that Hoder was considering a hunger strike to protest his extended detention.

I’ve written about Hossein’s detention previously – it’s a complicated topic, as Hoder’s a complicated guy, and understanding his wishes is a difficult matter. Hoder held Iranian and Canadian passports, and according to a CBC article on his detention, may have believed that the Canadian passport would have made it more difficult for Iranian authorities to detain him when he came home. More to the point, I think, Hoder had a political change of heart and became an outspoken supporter of Ahmedinejad – angering and alienating most of his reformist colleagues inside and outside Iran – and believed that the Iranian system would handle his “transgressions” – trips to Israel, critical articles on his blog – in a just fashion. As such, he told his friends that he didn’t want a campaign for his release if arrested, especially not a campaign led by the US human rights community.

From the Free Hoder campaign

I’ve thought a great deal about my conversations with Hossein before his return to Iran. In retrospect, it seems clear that he expected to be arrested and questioned and perhaps detained for some weeks while the government punished him for his transgressions and assessed his political change of heart. At the same time, I don’t believe that Hossein believed that he’d be held for so long, treated so badly and cut off from contact with his family. The few clues we’ve gotten about his state of mind from contact with his family suggests that he regrets asking friends not to agitate for his release, and is now deeply worried (understandably so) that no one is working to secure his freedom.

Hossein’s family has come around as well – Cyrus published a translation of a letter from Hossein’s father, Hassan Derakhshan to the head of the Iranian judiciary, explaining that he and his family had patiently refused requests from western media to comment on Hossein’s arrest, expecting that he would receive fair treatment from the courts system:

In all these months, days, and hours, my family, my wife and I were hoping that in the arms of Islamic law and the mercy of the Islamic judiciary, Hossein’s case will be dealt with in the way it deserves

There is no need to mention the numerous times that we refused the requests of foreign media to explain Hossein’s situation…

Our complaint is not because you are exercising the law, but to the contrary, because of its suspension, lack of information and disrespecting of the law. The accused have rights, the family of the accused has some rights…

If the question had been whether the international community should become involved with advocating for Hossein’s release, the question is now what that community could effectively do. Circumstances have changed dramatically in Iran since Hoder went into prison. The protests after the July elections helped cement the view of Iranian authorities that online spaces were dangerous ones when used by activists, an interpretation that may explain Hossein’s extended detention, as he’s widely acknowledged as one of the first Iranian bloggers and a major promoter of blogging tools in Iran. As such, an online campaign for his release, supported by the blogging community, is unlikely to lead directly to his release. And, as Cyrus points out in a story for PRI’s The World, it’s unclear how many of his old friends are still willing to support him, given his change in views.

The reason to write about Hoder and support campaigns like the Free Hoder blog is not to influence the Iranian government, but to urge the Canadian government to do whatever they can. Hoder holds a Canadian, as well as an Iranian passport, and while Iran doesn’t respect dual nationality, Canada does, and has an obligation to push for Hossein’s release. Cyrus has been regularly calling Canadian authorities to seek updates, but has received little information from those inquiries. My hope is that by continuing to discuss Hossein’s detention, we can call attention to the ongoing situation and urge Canadian authorities to push for his release. But even knowing that Hossein is now looking for the world’s help in pushing for his release, it’s very hard to know what to do.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost: “The road not taken” (1920)

From Personal Democracy Forum:

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

This is a pragmatic decision because open source software is more likely to withstand time’s arrows (time’s arrow faces forward but it seems to fire them backwards at us), but it’s also important as a symbol: It is yet another validation of open software’s robustness and capabilities; it says that the White House is of and by the people, just as open software is; it symbolizes the Obama administration’s understanding of tech and its embrace of openness.

So, this is good techie news, but also a bit more.

(Here’s the NYT on the news. And I heard about this from my friend Britt Blaser, whose Open Resource Group citizen-to-government software runs on Drupal. (Disclosure: I volunteer as an adviser to Britt’s group.)

Rupert Murdoch’s influence on the Wall Street Journal has not been the disaster many feared it would be when News Corp., the company he controls, bought Dow Jones several years ago. In many ways, the paper has actually improved.

The worry was that Murdoch would do what he’s done at almost every other media property he controls: Turn the journalism toward political ends. The Journal’s editorial page has been an entirely predictable arm of the American political right for some time now. Would that infect the news columns as well?

It appears that this is indeed happening. That’s the significance — assuming this is not a one-time case of an editor going overboard — of a news story in yesterday’s paper, which carried the headline, State Death Taxes Are the Latest Worry and began this way:

With the federal estate tax disappearing for most people, state death taxes have emerged as a surprise new worry.

This is not neutral language. Nor is it accurate. It’s a deliberate perversion of language to make a political point; dead people do not pay taxes. Their estates and heirs do.

(The people who oppose estate/inheritance taxes have a variety of arguments against the practice. I side with Bill Gates Sr., Warren Buffett, several Rockefellers and lots of other people who believe the arguments against the tax are specious and, more than that, dangerous to the nation’s future should massive, untaxed transfers of wealth to people who haven’t earned a dime of it become the law of the land.)

The Journal’s editorial page has called the estate tax a “death tax” for years, in keeping with its wealth-equals-good stance on just about all issues. Moving this language to the news pages is a sign that the newspaper is taking on a more overt world view — a view that takes its lead from the truth-be-damned ideologues on the editorial page.

I don’t mind that the Journal is doing this, though I suspect more than a few of the journalists who write for the paper must be having major qualms. In fact, it strikes me as healthy that the paper is showing its world view in such a deliberate way.

There are risks for News Corp. in taking this stance, not least a repeat of the self-marginalization that Fox “News” has chosen with its incessant BS, to the point that no one who cares about honest journalism has much respect for the channel. Fox has thrown away any reputation it might have had for being even remotely interested in contrary facts, because even its supposed straight news reporting so often takes a political stance and the lies of the commentators are so astonishingly in-your-face.

The greater risk, in the short run, is whether the Journal’s journalists will let themselves be turned into propagandists. This need not be the case.

The Telegraph in London has a right-of-center view of the world, proudly so, even in its news pages. But its journalism is generally excellent, rarely (from my reading, at any rate) propaganda.

I’m all for the Wall Street Journal turning itself into an American equivalent of the Telegraph: a responsible news organization with a transparent world view. But should the Journal turn itself into a newspaper/Web version of its Fox TV channel, it will be making a fatal mistake in the long run.

In “Wissen” beschäftigt sich die ZEIT in ihrer aktuellen Ausgabe einmal mit sich selbst und entwirft in einer ganzseitigen Infografik ein Verlaufsdiagramm der Entstehung einer Zeitung. “Die Woche im Pressehaus” lautet die Überschrift, die schon nicht ganz stimmt, weil das, was gezeigt wird, eben nicht allein in Pressehaus geschieht. Und bei näherem Hinschauen stockt man bei der Darstellung des Herstellungsverlaufs an verschiedenen Stellen. Es mag daran liegen, dass grafische Illustrationen gelegentlich zur Vereinfachung verleiten. Es mag auch daran liegen, dass sie unfreiwillig etwas offenbaren, was in der gesprochenen Sprache gerne weggeredet wird.

Blick 1: Die ZEIT entsteht in auf verschiedenen Etagen des Pressehauses. In der obersten sitzt die Chefin vom Dienst, die das Blatt plant, und – siehe an – die Anzeigenabteilung. Sie aquiriert und erstellt den Anzeigenplan, der jedenfalls nach der Grafik der erste Schritt im Entstehungsprozess einer Zeitung überhaupt ist. Das ist ganz sicher nicht so (gemeint), aber es sieht so aus. Und perception is reality.

Blick 2: Die Hälfte der ganzseitige Grafik nimmt die physische Herstellung der Zeitung ein. Druck, Auslieferung, Vertrieb, Zustellung, Grossist und Kiosk. Das ist natürlich bei gedruckten Zeitungen so, nur dass wir leider nicht mehr im analogen Zeitalter leben. Was die Zeit im Internet macht, bleibt in dieser Grafik verborgen. Das passte wahrscheinlich einfach nicht auf die Seite. Ein Schelm wer Böses dabei denkt und glaubt, es gäbe bei der ZEIT noch immer Menschen, die meinen, einzig wahre Zeitung müsse gedruckt sein und deshalb können man alles Digitale getrost weglassen.

Blick 3: Offenbar hat die ZEIT die Redaktionskonferenz abgeschafft. Darüber hatte ich noch gar nichts gelesen, aber das liegt an mir. Jetzt schreibt der Reporter allein und auf sich gestellt seinen Text (dieser war dafür tatsächlich auch in der Welt, nämlich in einer Realitätsblase, die oben links über dem stilisierten Riesenrad des Hamburger Dom schwebt, ja, da kann einem schon schwindelig werden bei so vielen Umdrehungen der Wirklichkeit). Er tut das, ohne die Idee irgendwo präsentiert oder diskutiert zu haben. Und dieser Text wird dann vom Redakteur bearbeitet und vom Korrektor auf Rechtschreibung überprüft. Warum ich hierbei an ein Fließband und nicht an eine Redaktion denken muss, kann ich mir selbst nicht erklären.

Blick 4: Es gibt genau zwei Personen, die in dieser stilisierten Grafik als sie selbst zu erkennen sind. Die eine ist Angela Merkel, deren Bild fast den ganzen Platz der Titelseite über der Falz einnimmt. Damit sie dorthin kommt, hat sie in der zuvor beschriebenen Recherchesituation über den Spitzen Hamburgs “bla bla” gesagt. Eine Grafik muss ja vereinfachen. Ich habe sehr geschmunzelt, als ich die kleine Figur recht oben auf dem Balkon der obersten Etage des Pressehauses gesehen habe. Sie steht dort auf einen Stock gestützt und raucht vor sich hin. Ohne Helmut Schmidt geht es in der ZEIT nicht.

Blick 5: Wer ist der Mann auf dem Bild, das im Zimmer des Chefredakteurs hängt. Er selbst? Oder soll das Marion Gräfin Dönhoff sein? Das kann man ja mal bei der Blattkritik klären. Die gibt es in der Grafik auch nicht, aber ich bin sicher: in Wirklichkeit schon.

Joe Trippi has an important post about to understand the upcoming election results: The electorate’s Us vs. Them has changed from Our Party vs. Their Party to The Electorate vs. Anyone in Power:

Voters are increasingly seeing themselves as “us” and both parties in Washington as “them.” They are not going to discriminate between the two parties in 2010. The results next Tuesday will likely demonstrate the voter’s frustration with those in power, regardless of party. Far from signaling a backlash against Democratic rule and hope for the Republican Party, the results on Tuesday will signal that in 2010 incumbents in both parties, of all ideological stripes should be frightened.

On Thursday, right after failing to get a root canal for the Xth time (saga here), I participated in a square-table discussion (I say that because we sat around a table with four corners) titled “How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century — An Executive Session sponsored by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy”, hosted by Harvard’s JFK School of Government. My panel was this:

It was a good one, and it was fun sharing the side (since there was no stage) with such bright and interesting folks. Nicco kindly let me speak last, since I was fighting major tooth pain at the time, and wanted a few minutes for the Tylenol to kick in. Other folks said I made sense. But I didn’t pull my various threads together since I kinda ran ahead of myself. So I thought this morning it would be good to share what I wanted to say, drawing from the outline I wrote on the pad kindly provided by the organizers there, and which I kept. Here goes…

Let’s take the long view here. Later I’ll bring in the paleozoic, but for now I’d like to start just a quarter-millennium ago, with The Enlightenment, the ideas of which were applied by the framers of our republic. The Enlightenment’s value system elevated the principles of liberty, freedom, self-reliance, personal rights, and reason, among other things. It was also a movement that was in some ways suspended when Industry won the Industrial Revolution, which, among other things, created the modern corporation. By “modern” I mean since they got big. (Although the East India Company was big enough deserve the Boston Tea Party in 1773.) Think railroads, oil companies, car companies, phone companies… and media companies, starting with the oldest of the biggies: newspapers.

The industrial system was this pyramid-shaped top-down thing that changed us from individual craftspeople to workers in a system that subordinated our originality to the positions we occupied in an org chart. Check your surname for evidence of some ancestor’s individual craft. Baker, for example. Or Merchant or Miller or Weaver or Tanner or Cooper. Nobody names themselves, or their kids, “Joe Middlemanager” or “Mary Drillpressoperator”. Collective power was all. This was believed by both the capitalist system and the communist and socialist thinkings that opposed it.

In the industrial system, nearly all industry, including orginal thinking — invention and innovation — took place within, and belonged to, some company. Governments, colleges and universities did some origination too, but The System still encompassed everything, and it subordinated the individual to its larger self. This was not a Bad Thing, but rather just how things worked. And it did lots of good. In the area of communications — our concern here today — this gave us magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and a phone system that was smart in the middle and dumb at the ends. Innovation by the phone system, Bell Labs and all, included touch-tone dialing, the Princess Phone, the RJ-11 jack, call waiting and message recording. And that all happened over the span of about forty years.

Near the beginning of that stretch, in 1959, Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker”. By then Drucker had already forecast the end of the modern corporation, and had compared management (his specialty) to conducting a band or an orchestra of self-empowered individuals, each good at what they did, and eager to learn more and improve. He said companies existed at the suffrance of the individuals who comprised them, even as it organized their work and put it to use.

As it turned out the knowledge workers who mattered most were geeks. Engineers. Programmers. These were the people who gave us the Internet, the PC and now hand-held Internet devices that still do old-fashioned telephony — but within the context of a zillion other things.

Consider the differences between the International Telecommunications Union, which started as the International Telegraph Union, and the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF. While the former governs its member companies through a complex and slow bureaucratic procedure, the latter uses a “request for comment” system that results in operative good-enough standards based on “rough consensus and running code”. The differences here are what account for the fact that the phone system never could have created the Net, and geeks did exactly that, and then some.

Anybody know when we first started talking about open source? The answer is February, 1998. That’s when Eric S. Raymond posted a short instructional missive titled “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source“. In it he explained why Free Software, long in use as a term and accounting for much success in the computing realm, was not going to make good enough sense to businessfolk, and why a crew of fellow geeks were going to make the world talk about open source instead.  Look up open source, and you’ll now get 73 million results, give or take.  (In no small way this was the direct result of Eric’s charisma — I’ve watched him hold crowds of fellow geeks in thrall while pacing the stage and holding forth for more than three hours at a time — and his and skills at evangelism and polemics. In the midst of this work he also put out some of the strongest and most durable writing, including The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which now amounts to canon.)

The Net employs a principle called end-to-end. Among other things, it assumes that the bulk of intelligence is at the ends of the network — with people and the devices serving them — rather than in the middle, where the phone companies used to be, back when they thought, as old-fashioned formerly modern industrial companies, that most of the network’s intelligence should reside, and make decisions for us.

This principle provides an environment for creation and contribution that is radical, profound, and beyond huge. It’s as big as the invention of movable type, or maybe bigger. Or maybe an exposive expansion of it. In any case, it’s the new environment. It helps us pick up where The Enlightenment left off, and gives us endless ways to start carrying those old principles forward again. It supports dynamism out the wazoo, both for individuals and for whatever collections they form.

Which brings us to journalism.

Big newspapers, big magazines, big radio and TV… these are industrial age creatures. Some will persist in the new age that is coming upon us. But they will need to adapt to the new networked environment, where everybody can contribute.

That environment is very new. Think of today as a moment in the early paleozoic, say in Cambrian time. In that context Facebook is a trilobite. Twitter is a bryzoan. The Huffington Post is a primitive sponge. For small-j journalism, this is not the End of Time, but the beginning of it. Will big-J journalism survive? Only if it adapts. While some of that adaptation will be corporate, the leadership won’t be in the corporate system. It will be among the journalists themselves. Just as it was, and still is, with technology companies and the geeks they employ.

Bonus link: Dan Gillmor’s The Only Journalism Subsidy We Need is Bandwidth.

In response to my essay Framing the Net, on Publius, Rikke Frank Jørgensen has posted Metaphors We Regulate By. Her summary lines: “I have found four categories to be dominant in both Internet-related literature, and in current regulatory battles at the international level. The metaphors suggested are Internet as infrastructure, Internet as public sphere, Internet as media, and Internet as culture.”

I’m thrilled to have Rikke join me as a fellow voice in the wilderness of the Internet’s lack of clear definition. She outlines a huge greenfield for necessary discussion.

About a month ago I offered myself to my kid as an example of good dental hygeine practices. While I have a mouthful of gold (owing mostly to molars that came with deep gooves that no brush could reach), all my teeth are alive. Wisdom teeth and all. I brush and floss every day, I told him. And I’ve used a Sonicare toothbrush for many years. The kid has one too. (Mostly it enforced a 2-minute discipline, though I usually go longer.) No cavities since I started with it.

So about an hour after I bragged on my teeth, number 17, my left mandibular third molar — the back wisdom tooth on the bottom — started to hurt like hell. I took Tylenol for it, but it only got worse, to the point where I couldn’t do anything but sit or lie there in fire-red pain that trobbed with every pulse.

After it failed to go away, I went to a dentist at Harvard Health Services. She couldn’t see anything in the x-ray and sent me to an endodontist — or a practice with six endodontists.

On the first visit, Dr. #1 saw nothing on his x-ray, and gave me some antibiotics, hoping that this would kill any infection that might be there but not visible. I took that for a week, during which the pain was the same or worse. In the course of that week I also discovered that Tylenol (acetaminophen) was the only over-the-counter pain-killer that mixed with other drugs I already take, and could cause liver damage in some cases. I checked with a pharmacist, who said not to go over 4,000 mg/day. But I found that only doses of 1,000 mg worked, and for only about three hours at a stretch. So I would dose when I needed to work, and otherwise was pretty useless.

When I went back and saw Dr. #2, he took a look with a microscope and saw a crack in the tooth, and also did some tests that confirmed it. His recommendation: get a root canal. So we scheduled one. On the way, however, I screwed up what trains I was taking, arrived a bit late, and then the anesthesia didn’t fully deaden the tooth. The doctor said we’d have to reschedule. So we did. By this time the pain was still strong, but 500 mg doses of Tylenol were working, so that gave me 8 pills a day to take.

Dr. #3 was late this time, and we had to re-schedule again.

This morning Dr. #3 did the job. The nerve is now gone, replaced with grout (or whatever they use). Turns out the crack was not front-to-back, and the tooth is strong, if also dead. My jaw hurts like hell, but that’s mostly from the multiple needle stabs required to fully anesthetize the tooth. (The nerve bundles serving the jaw are in odd places.)

Total time from toothache to toothfix: almost a month.

So the good news is that the tooth won’t hurt again. The bad news is the cost, but that’s the American Way. Also all the work I couldn’t get done because I was moving at reduced speed. Lots coming up, so it’s good to be fixed again.

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As the holidays near, like many of you, we here on the Herdict Team are thinking about those less fortunate than us…so when the perfect opportunity to give came up, we couldn’t resist:

Heifer International allows you to supply a sheep for wool to a family in need

The Herdict Team chose to contribute a sheep, via Heifer International, to a family in need. As the Heifer International web site states, “Entire communities depend on wool and meat from sheep. Struggling families use sheep’s wool to make clothes, or sell it for extra income. Sheep often give birth to twins or triplets and can graze even the hilliest, rockiest pastures unsuitable for other livestock.”

We’re pretty sure our own mascot, Shep, would approve!

I’m sorry, but the title of this post is accurate. A bunch of my work is hitting bookstores, newsstands, and the Interwebs at present, and I feel the need to publicize it all here. I promise to revert to less self-regarding blog posts after this one.

I came back from a trip to find the first copy off the press of my book Enterprise 2.0 waiting for me in my office. I’ll leave it to others to discuss its content (hopefully in uniformly glowing terms); I just want to say that Harvard Business Press did a fantastic job on the book itself. It looks great, and I’m really grateful to my publisher for creating such a lovely container for the ideas. I love my Kindle, but I also still love physical books. And it’s a great feeling to see this one sitting on my desk.

Enterprise 2.0 should start shipping shortly from Amazon and 800ceoread (for bulk orders). It’ll also be available at next week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where I’ll be signing copies. I hope to see you there.

Also available now is my Harvard Business Review online article “Shattering the Five Myths of Enterprise 2.0,” the content of which is not hard to guess. It deals with common misconceptions around the deployment and use of emergent social software platforms. It is not an excerpt from the book, or a rehashing of ideas covered here; it’s novel work based on recent research and observations. I hope it’s useful and thought provoking, and I’d appreciate hearing any reactions. Please leave them here in the form of a comment.

And please also check out and comment on my new blog over at Harvardbusiness.org.   I’ve joined their family of bloggers (which includes many heavy hitters and fresh voices), where I’ll concentrate on IT’s impact on the business world. My ‘Hello, World’ post is called “Bridging the Geek-Suit Divide,” continuing my recent run of boring, self-explanatory titles.

I’ll use my HBR.org blog to talk to suits (in other words, managers) about how geek tools (information technology) are changing their world and their jobs. I don’t think enough attention has been paid to this topic, and I want to use the blog to make clear the depth and breadth of changes brought to the business world by computers. I use the word ‘digitization’ as a broad label for this change process.

I believe that digitization is one of the most important phenomena taking place in the business world now. I believe the data back up the previous statement. And I believe that most executives, and managers don’t fully appreciate how big a deal digitization is, and how critical is their role in harnessing the power of IT instead of getting blindsided by it. So I’ll use my Digitization Blog at HBR.org to try to drive all these points home to the site’s readers.

I’ll continue to blog separately here, of course, and I’ll also repost here all my HBR.org posts after a two-week delay. So if you’re happy just visiting andrewmcafee.org, you can continue to do so. But if you want to join the conversation over at Harvardbusiness.org or point your colleagues there, please do. I look forward to hearing from you no matter which venue you choose.

And if there are tech topics you really think the suits need to hear about, please let me know. I’d value your thoughts on what they need to hear about.

Tim McGuire: Let’s not let Medill Innocence Project be another Hazelwood. The bullies who want to hamstring great student journalism need to be stopped.

Amen.

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols believe that “journalists deserve subsidies, too.” They argue that America is “nearing a point where we will no longer have more than minimal resources (relative to the nation’s size) dedicated to reporting the news.”

There’s every reason to dispute their woe-is-us assumption. There’s even more reason to say they are wildly off-base in calling for special subsidies for journalists.

The authors, longstanding activists in media reform, are exceedingly well-meaning. And they are more accurate than not when they say:

We seek to renew a rich if largely forgotten legacy of the American free-press tradition, one that speaks directly to today’s crisis. The First Amendment necessarily prohibits state censorship, but it does not prevent citizens from using their government to subsidize and spawn independent media.

Indeed, the post-colonial press system was built on massive postal and printing subsidies. The first generations of Americans never imagined that the market would provide sound or sufficient journalism. The notion was unthinkable. They established enlightened subsidies, which broadened the marketplace of ideas and enhanced and protected core freedoms. Their initiatives were essential to America’s progress.

If the authors had only pursued their logic, they’d have ended up at the only sensible conclusion — that taxpayers could well subsidize the equivalent of the postal and printing subsidies they celebrate (among many other infrastructure supports that helped get the news from one place to another, such as roads, never mind the variety of other government help that’s gone to news organizations over the past several centuries.

What would following their logic lead us to in a digital world? That’s easy: We should collectively install dark fiber to every home and business where it’s feasible to do so, and put fiber as close to the ones that are too remote to make sense otherwise. It should be “dark fiber” — that is, data lines not controlled by government but available for others to light up to provide services for users.

This would not be about journalism only, any more than building roads in the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries was about helping newspapers deliver their goods to people’s homes and businesses. It would be about boosting trade of services and information (for-profit and not-for-profit), one part of which would be media.

We are seeing an explosion of creativity and innovation in media and journalism right now. Entrepreneurs and big companies alike are experimenting in new forms of journalism and ways to pay for it.

We have never had so much high-quality coverage in some areas, such as technology, as we have today. We have never had so much truly local conversation that has high value as we have today. And we will have vastly more tomorrow.

We may well be losing, at least temporarily, some of what Alex Jones calls “accountability journalism” — hard-nosed reporting of what powerful institutions, including government, are doing with our money and, in some cases, our lives. But to assume it will disappear and not be replaced, especially given some of the experiments we’re seeing, is grossly premature.

But Nichols and McChesney make that worst-case assumption, and veer off to this conclusion:

Saving newspapers may be impossible. But we can save journalism. Step one is to begin debating ways for enlightened public subsidies to provide a competitive and independent digital news media. Also, we should greatly expand funding for public and community media, and establish policies that help convert dying daily newspapers into post-corporate low-profit news operations that realize the potential of the Internet. If we do so, journalism and democracy will not just survive. They will flourish.

We don’t need government support of this kind. It will lead us down a path that media reformers will rue: licensing of journalists, picking of winners and other pernicious outcomes.

Government surely does have a role, no question. But it should be to create the fundamental communications infrastructure on which tomorrow’s journalism can thrive.

• World Affairs Journal – The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English
  John McWhorter makes the case – which he knows is provocative and controversial – that the death of small lanuages may be more an aesthetic tragedy than a cultural one, and may, in the end, be completely unavoidable: "At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. "
  (tags: globalization culture language english)
• Professionalization in the academy | Harvard Magazine Nov-Dec 2009
  Fascinating and challenging article on the problems with the modern PhD – massive oversupply for few jobs, far too long and apparently designed to produce ABDs, not new doctorates: "there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get."
  (tags: academia phd scholarship economics education harvard humanities)

"Hello, World!"

In programming tutorials, the standard first example is a bit of code that prints out the text "Hello, World!" on a display device. So I thought that this optimistic little greeting would be a good title for my first blog post here at HBR.org, since I'll be writing about the impact of code-carrying devices (in other words, information technology) on the world of business.

I'm excited to carry on a conversation about IT and business here, because most of the visitors to this site, it seems safe to say, are on suit side of the suit-geek spectrum. Much of the discussion about the power of technology, however, has been geeks talking amongst themselves, often using jargon so specialized as to appear like a foreign language. (One outstanding exception to this rule has been Babson's Tom Davenport, who's been blogging here for a while and enlightening us greatly.)

This is an unfortunate situation, and one that I'll work to rectify with this blog. I'll write about what technology is doing to the world of business using the language of business. After spending 15 years at business schools (first Harvard Business School and now MIT Sloan) this is the language that comes most naturally to me.

I've spent that time investigating both how and how much IT affects businesses — their processes, interactions with customers, formal organizations and informal networks, productivity, levels of centralization and standardization, and so on. I've also researched what IT does to business as a whole — how technology is changing the nature of competition among rivals and increasing the "clockspeed" of an industry. I'm particularly interested in how IT affects sectors of the economy that are not obviously high tech. Computers and networks are having a large effect even on "old economy" industries, and it's fascinating to watch this happen and try to understand its implications.

I've become convinced that those implications are large, and one of my main goals for this blog is to use evidence and argument to convince you as well. My writing here will be about the phenomenon of digitization. This word has historically been used to describe the conversion of paper documents to electronic ones, but I want to use it in a much broader sense. Here's a working definition: digitization is the transformation of business activities by the introduction and use of information technology.

The closest parallel I can find to the digitization of the economy taking place today is the electrification of the manufacturing sector, which in the US took place in the first couple decades of the 20th century. A body of great research has revealed that electrification was not a simple process of replacing water and steam power with dynamos and motors. Instead, it was a drawn out, turbulent, and difficult process, one that upset longstanding assumptions about how to run a factory. It also upset established competitive balances and let a new generation of leading enterprises emerge.

As Mark Twain observed, history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. I see digitization and electrification as remarkably similar phenomena, the main difference being that digitization's effects will be much larger. They'll be felt everywhere in a company, not just on the factory floor, and they'll unfold in every sector of the economy, not just manufacturing.

If you're interested in IT impact on business, I hope you'll read become a regular reader and commenter. I'll aim my posts at corporate executives and managers, not at CIOs, tech vendors, academics, startup entrepreneurs, or venture capitalists (although I hope this blog will be useful to those groups as well). And if you think that digitization is no big deal, or one that can be safely delegated to the IT department, I'd love to hear your views. I think both those ideas are incorrect and actually very dangerous in today's world, and I'd love to talk about why.

Arguing that access to the flow of information on the Internet in Iran and Cuba is in line with US interests, the US Treasury has asked Google and Microsoft to give users in those two countries access to their chat services. This is a smart move, but just the beginning of what should be done to increase the flow on online speech in those countries.

Ethan Zuckerman fist noticed a disturbing trend earlier this year when Internet companies such as Bluehost and others began to use sanctions against countries like Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Sudan as an excuse to cut off service entirely to users in those countries, even if the users were human rights groups fighting against the governments that are the real target of the sanctions. Not long after he observed the problem in Zimbabwe, Bluehost shut out users in Iran, including leading bloggers like Kamangir. It seems that most firms, large and small, just shut off access to most of their products that require a software download out of fear of running afoul of US sanctions. In their cost-benefit analysis, it is just easier to shut off access and not look at the impact of those decisions on activists in those countries.

However, it seems that Microsoft has continued to allow citizens in Iran, Cuba and other sanctioned countries to use its Hotmail e-mail and Live Spaces blog service, since they are hosted in the cloud. This is possibly another argument in favor of cloud computing, where services are increasingly migrating lately, although it depends on where those services are hosted.

This is a good first step, but there is still much the US can do to ease restrictions on Internet speech and access to software and services provided by US companies in countries where we have the strictest sanction regimes.