I just read Sherry Turkle's excellent and provocative Alone Together and I plan to put up four wordy posts about it here, more "inspired by" than "review of", which will probably take me a month or so. Does anyone want to join in, either at your own blog or here, to make it a conversation instead of a monologue? If so, either leave a comment or by email (here).
Category: Uncategorized
Ethan Zuckerman’s “Cute Cats and the Arab Spring”
Table of Contents
Cory Doctorow (*) and Jillian York (*) were both full of praise for Ethan Zuckerman's Vancouver Human Rights Lecture on Cute Cats and the Arab Spring (*), so I listened to the podcast from CBC's Ideas (*). You can also watch the lecture on YouTube (*).
Ethan Zuckerman (EZ) has a long and admirable history of involvement in digital activism and a wide knowledge of both technology and social change; the lecture is worth an hour of your time. But (you knew there was a but) in the end I have to disagree with his main thesis.
1 Dry Tunisian Tinder
EZ tells us how, after years of sporadic and failed protests in Tunisia, one particular spark in the city of Sidi Bouzid blossomed into the forest fire of revolution. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest at official interference with his vegetable stall it was a dramatic and desperate act, but not unique: he wasn't the first person to do so even that year. What was different this time?
EZ's argument is that digital social media was different. The early protest was captured on video using a cheap phone and posted to a social networking site where… it did NOT "go viral". Instead the video was picked up by Tunisians outside the country (including EZ's friend Sami ben Gharbia1), who were scanning Tunisian web content for political news and curating it on a site called nawaat.org (*).
Al Jazeera got the video from nawaat.org and broadcast it back into Tunisia; Tunisians found out in turn what was going on from Al Jazeera. What's important here, says EZ, is that the new low-cost participatory media is an essential part of a larger media ecosystem that helped to stir up feelings within Tunisia.
2 Cute Cats and Malaysian Opposition
In the 1990s EZ ran a web site called Tripod for college/university students. Surprisingly, many people used it not for the Worthy Purposes he and his colleagues had planned, but to share simple and casual things, like pictures of cute cats. Also surprisingly, some of the heaviest use came from Malaysia. Wondering what was going on, Zuckerman got the Malay content translated, only to find that his site was hosting the Malaysian opposition Reformasi movement (*). Tripod was a space that was difficult for the Malaysian government to censor while being easy to hold discussions.2
And so we reach the "cute cat theory": the ideal places for those who suddenly have important, politically sensitive material they want to share are sites designed for sharing videos and pictures of "cute cats" (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr). These sites are easy to use, have a wide reach, and are difficult to censor – if the government shuts them down it annoys a lot of people and alerts them that something interesting is going on. "Cute cats" sites are natural tinder boxes for revolutionary sparks.
The events EZ recounts are compelling, but a lot of compelling things happen in this strange world, so my first thoughts whenever I hear a story of the Internet producing some unique chain of events is: can I think of a non-Internet example that matches? So here is the lunch-room theory of political dissent (details from here).
3 Polish lunch rooms
On July 8, 1980, in the lunch room at a transport equipment plant in the eastern Polish town of Swidnik, the price of a pork cutlet jumped from 10.20 zloty to 18.10. For Miroslaw Kaczan, this jump was the final straw, and after lunch he switched off the machines he was working on. Others in Department 320 joined him, and other departments in the factory were quick to join. Soon there was a factory-wide stoppage, and it wasn't just about pork cutlets: the demands of the protesters revealed a wealth of pent-up frustration.
News about the strike in Swidnik spread so quickly that within two weeks 50,000 people in the region were on strike. This wave of strikes was resolved on July 25, but the disruption was far from over: three weeks later the strikes at the Gdansk ship yards in northern Poland started, and within a year Solidarnosc had over 9 million members.
In the early days of the strikes, Poles had a hunger for news of the protests, of course, and despite the heavy censorship of official media they found them, through short-wave radio broadcasts from other countries.
So the lunch-room theory is not that different from the cute-cat theory, except that there's no Internet. People gather wherever they gather for their everyday conversations and interactions, and it is in these everyday places that a spark of frustration can catch fire. And once it does catch fire, a combination of broadcast media and a networked public spreads the news quickly.
Perhaps, the Polish example shows, the Internet is not essential for the spark to turn into a fire. Perhaps a digitally networked public is not the only networked public.
4 Tunisia's Second Act
Even in Tunisia, politically sensitive material for which there is a high demand has found its way through dangerous pathways to reach a public desperate for news.
In a long piece called Streetbook (*) John Pollock interviews two members of an underground Tunisian group called Takriz [update: see Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York's comments below for reservations about Streetbook]. One of these "Taks" describes how the video that "made the second half of the [Tunisian] revolution" was taken when the regime had shut down the Internet, so "Takriz smuggled a CD of the video over the Algerian border" before forwarding it to Al Jazeera. YouTube may make it it easier and safer to make videos available (at least so long as Google lets it be done anonymously), but when an important video was available, the Internet was not essential to the process of distribution.
5 Media Ecology or Network Ecology?
If we are really going to talk about a "media ecology" in the sense EZ means, we need to include all those gathering places–online and offline–which are difficult to shut down precisely because of their everyday, general purpose role. In addition to Facebook and YouTube we need to include factory lunchrooms, mosques and churches, football stadia (*), universities, popular music (*), balconies (*), and more.
All these share a number of properties with Cute Cats sites. They are difficult to shut down without annoying large numbers of previously quiescent people, they are difficult to monitor in detail because of the dispersed and varied nature of the interactions that go on, and they are already familiar places for the gathering and sharing of information. EZ says that "we don't take these 'cute cat tools' seriously enough. These tools that anyone can use, that are used 99% of the time for completely banal purposes" but he doesn't take offline everyday institutions for banal sharing seriously enough.
EZ's mistake is the achilles heel of social media advocates. Talk of a "networked society" is justified by comparing today's digitally connected populations to a population of couch potatoes watching prime time TV, but such a comparison overlooks all those other institutions of public networking. Instead of talking of a "media ecology" we should be talking of a "network ecology": the intricate tapestry of multiple networking institutions and practices that makes up a society.
Do digital social media supplement other networking instutions or displace them? There has been a lot of work on this at the individual level, but it's much more difficult to evaluate on a societal level. It is possible that digital social media increase the richness of social networks in a society, but it's also possible (likely?) that digital social media are the kudzu of networks, thriving while they strangle the other components of a rich and diverse network ecology; the best network left standing in an impoverished environment.
Footnotes
1 Among other things, Sami ben Gharbia is author of a fantastic essay on The Internet Freedom Fallacy and Arab Digital Activism (*)
2 In fact it may not have been so much that the site was difficult to censor, as that Malaysian government had decided to exclude the Internet as a whole from its otherwise-strict censorship rules (*).
Date: 2012-01-05 22:50:21 EST
2012 Predictions: Turning Points for the Web
Table of Contents
Avoiding Cynicism (As If)
Peering into the New Year, my better half Lynne reflected yesterday that it is a duty of each of us, as we grow older, to be vigilant against encroaching cynicism. She's right (of course!), and I do feel that strong and steady current tugging me sluggishly downstream towards the lazy, easy waters of geezerhood, to a place where everything new shows itself only by its flaws and in which every new glass is basically empty.
Luckily, 2012 looks like being a banner year for those of us who take a critical view of the hype and commercialization around digital technology, so I'm actually feeling quite cheery. The number of digital hecklers is growing1, and will continue to do so as the relations between the mainstream Internet and its audience/members sours. A growing wave of disenchantment is gathering enough steam [sic] to become a creative force in its own right, and I think that's going to be fascinating to watch, as well as potentially a period of renewal for alternative culture.
So Happy New Year, and here are a few predictions for 2012. I don't think the full impact of any will be over and done during the calendar year, but I do think we'll look back at 2012 as a turning point in attitudes to digital technologies.
Facebook: Privacy Hits the Mainstream
- Prediction
- High-profile privacy cases in 2012 will dramatically accelerate the level of public distrust in Facebook, which will spill over to other Internet aggregators.
Privacy has always been the other side of the openness coin. Everyone loves openness, of course, but the last year or two has made it clear that behind Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile (*) claim that "I'm trying to make the world a more open place" there is a hard, cold, commercial reality. Are we sharing among each other, or are we feeding Facebook? And where is the boundary between the two?
Here's a dilemma my son faces, which also confronts many other young people. After university one potential employer is the Canadian government. If he clicks his support on Facebook for political protests, will government background checks have access to this information and will it count against him? There's no point asking Facebook even if you did trust it, because today's terms and conditions may change, and the laws governing it may change too. From being an open space where it is easy to express our political views, Facebook is becoming a panopticon where we censor ourselves, not knowing who is watching.
It's not clear that the advertising driven model of web technology is sustainable given its dependence on data that we are increasingly reluctant to give up. As ex-Facebook engineer Jeff Hammerbacher says, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks." We've lived with this downside until now but as the choices become more stark this may change, and when things change on the Internet, they can change very quickly. danah boyd's view that "Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated" (*) will become mainstream. We'll see demands2 for changes to Facebook's practices (see the Europe vs Facebook group (*), and the Irish data protection commissioner's report here) gaining momentum.
Amazon: Abusing Community
- Prediction
- Change in the open source world as Google takes on Amazon.
Amazon is rapidly making a name for itself as the company to give the Internet a bad name. From brutal working conditions (*) to treating physical bookstores as showrooms (*) to union-bashing (*) to McCarthyist policies around Wikileaks (*) to tax opposition (*) to screwing libraries (*), this company has done everything it can to demolish the image of the Internet as a source of cooperation, collaboration, and open friendship. It has perfected the act of free-riding on open source efforts, building its (remarkable, it must be said) profitable EC2 infrastructure on Xen Hypervisor, using Linux extensively, and not contributing back (*), in the same way it happily takes all those volunteer hours put into Wikipedia and uses them to sell its own devices, messing with authors' rights as it does so (*).
The Kindle Fire is the icing on the cake: Amazon has taken the Android operating system and its Linux kernel and used it to power the Amazon tablet. In doing so, it has taken Google's language of openness around Android (always suspect) and thrown it right back in Google's face, removing the Google applications and most evidence that the device is running Android, and making it an Amazon device from end to end.
With the Kindle Fire looking likely to become the top selling Android tablet, you have to wonder how long Google will welcome this state of affairs. There's a lot of talk about the rivalry between Google and Apple, but the tension between Google and Amazon is the conflict that may change the open source world. The licensing terms for open source software have been increasingly friendly to commercial exploitation of community projects, moving steadily away from the more restrictive GPL (*), and Amazon's nose-thumbing may be the step that forces a re-evaluation of this enterprise-friendly stance.
Apple: Stepping in Front of Google
- Prediction
- As the open web fragments, Google will look to its bottom line.
Speaking of Google, Apple's voice control system Siri may be the biggest threat the friendly ad-broker has yet faced, and you could argure that Siri is the major threat to the openness of the web.
It's increasingly obvious that the web has several natural bottlenecks, and that these bottlenecks are simultaneously the places where money can be made and chokepoints where political pressure can be applied. Ever since broadband and mobile access replaced ye olde dialup and Internet access became dominated by telcos and cable companies, ISPs have been one set of bottlenecks. Mobile device makers are another. The DNS system itself is yet another, which SOPA is looking to squeeze. Finally, there is aggregation, Silicon Valley's preferred source of influence.
Aggregation creates a single point of entry into a part of the web, whether it's aggregating consumer items (Amazon), digital products (Apple), people (Facebook), or the web itself (Google), and aggregation is driven by increasing returns to scale. The point of aggregators is to stand between us and what we want to reach, guiding us to those parts of it that seem best.
The thing about Siri is that it stands in front of Google, potentially displacing the search box as iPhone users' point of entry to the web. Just as removal from Google's search engine makes you vanish from the web, so Siri has the potential to make Google vanish. Well, not vanish in the short term, but fade at least. Apple negotiates deals with providers like Yelp and Wolfram Alpha, doing an end run around the PageRank algorithm.
If Siri and other voice-recognition "assistants" move towards the mainstream, we can expect to experience an increasingly curated/censored version of the web (*). The relationship between Apple and the anti-establishment has always been love-hate, and Siri may drive it into hate-hate.
Google's friendly image can last only so long as its growth rate and profit margins stay healthy. It's already lost the aura of being the place to be for programmers, soon we'll soon see enough competition to force Google into a more orthodox stance, and that will shock a lot of observers.
Footnotes:
1 A few years ago Andrew Keen's silly "Cult of the Amateur" was the most prominent digital criticism book. Now we have Zittrain ("The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It"), Carr ("The Shallows"), Turkle ("Alone Together"), Wu ("The Master Switch"), Lanier ("You Are Not a Gadget") and many more.
2 "Demands" is not the best word, as Chris Dillow points out (*)
Comment problems and one other update
I've had a couple of people tell me they were unable to post comments. After taking this up with Typepad, I have shifted from their "Typepad connect" system back to the vanilla commenting system. If you have problems posting a comment, then I would appreciate an email at last name dot firstname (gmail). And you can rest assured it isn't personal unless you are a spambot, in which case it is, or would be if you were a person.
Also, in a recent post I suggested that there was a conflict of interest in a paper I read. The authors have now published an explanation at the end of the paper and I retract the suggestion (I still don't understand why lead author Gilad Lotan lists his affiliation as he does, but that's his personal decision). I've put a note in the post to clarify.
Morozov on Jarvis: Is There a Point?
Jeff Jarvis's 2009 book What Would Google Do? is a breathless paean to the benefits of sharing, linking, and being open, but it has not a single reference or footnote, and no bibliography. Jarvis extols the virtues of listening and speaks of mutuality but in the end, of course, the benefits flow one way. Jeff Jarvis has become wealthy from this new ethic of sharing — he is fond of "starting conversations" which he can then take ownership of — but when it comes to giving credit to those who come before, for example by referencing previous writers on the topics he addresses, well it just seems like it's too much work for him. The book is one long argument by assertion, unsupported by facts and liberally sprinkled with utterances like "small is the new big" or "We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance" or "Google has built its empire on trusting us".
It looks like his new book, Public Parts, is more of the same. The New Republic just published a long review of the book by Evgeny Morozov here or here. It's forthright, opinionated, angry, entertaining and also makes some damning arguments against the book.
Jeff Jarvis responds to the review here in bizarre fashion. He first raises the prospect of personal prejudice ("Morozov reliably dislikes me, just as he dislikes people I quote") and then dismisses the review as "he writes only a personal attack". Morozov spends 800 words critiquing Jarvis's misunderstanding of ideas about the public sphere and his oversimplification of Habermas, which Jarvis distorts and reduces to a complaint "about the names Habermas and Oprah appearing in the same book". Morozov spends 600 words on Public Parts' culturally narrow ideas about Germany, Finland, and the strange attitudes of non-Americans to privacy, which Jarvis encapsulates as "[Morozov] finds Streetview to be a case of Germans 'tyrannized by an American company'". In short, Jarvis exaggerates and distorts the arguments before dismissing them.
* * *
To anyone who reads carefully, the argument is over and Morozov wins, but unfortunately that's not the end of the story. Much of Morozov's frustration comes from Jarvis's refusal to engage with the world of facts. He stays safely in the world of pronouncement ("Publicness is a sign of our empowerment", "the crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd" and so on). Jarvis is skilled at the marketing of ideas: if you Google [publicness], four of the first page listings are about or by Jarvis, and this canny use of branding will keep his profile high, well beyond the reach of factual criticism. Jarvis knows his audience and what they want to hear, and what they want is a self-help message for businesses: the world is changing, everything you thought you knew is irrelevant, and I have the key to the future.
So what, then, is the point of the hours Morozov spent writing a 7,000 word review if he won't reach Jarvis's core constituency? There are two other audiences that such pieces can reach. One is to shore up those who broadly agree with Morozov's perspective (yes, like me) that there is an ulterior motive, a very familiar and old-fashioned one, behind this talk of sharing and publicness. We cannot read every new book, watch every new TED talk, attend every conference and yet we do need to stay current and stay informed. I am not going to read Public Parts because there are so many other things to read, but I cannot afford to be completely ignorant of it. Morozov's review does the job for me.
The second is more important. Many people are attracted by the romantic rhetoric of openness, sharing, and the end of existing institutions, but not all have yet sorted out the political consequences of a commitment to these virtues. There are still people on the fence – and it's important for these people to know that, no matter what progressive-sounding language is used, some of the most idealistic arguments for sharing are made by those who will mine the data you provide in order to build fortunes from advertising. To shape that debate and to keep a political space open for an Internet that does not simply follow the venture-capitalist idea of progress, we need fact based arguments, so kudos to Morozov for doing the necessary work in this case.
Broken Promises: Following Your Dreams, and the 99 percent
This speech by Steve Jobs has been posted in many places over the last 24 hours:
It is a strange speech: quite moving, personal, modest, and thoughtful. But in the end it’s a “follow your dreams” speech, and as such is quite a contrast to another Internet event of the moment, the very moving stories being posted at We are the 99 percent.
“Follow your dreams” invokes a cosmic bargain (fortune favours the brave) and it also invokes a social bargain: that if you work hard, and have a little luck, society will ensure that your efforts are rewarded. Meanwhile, the "we are the 99%" posters “sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy – work hard, play by the rules, get ahead – has been broken, and they want to see it restored” (Felix Salmon, quoted here).
So nothing against the guy, but over the next few days I’ll think more about what the 99%-ers say than what Steve Jobs said at Stanford. One of the stories he tells is of dropping out of college and, instead, monitoring courses independently. It's an inspiring story, but the contrast to this post, made today, is glaring.
My favourite post…
… is this one.
Every now and then I look back at previous posts on this blog. Some I still like, some not so much. Some got a lot of views at one time or another, but my favourite post of all got little attention.
I think that this time right now, with Amazon's and Facebook's recent announcements and Apple's to come next month, mark a turning point in attitudes to the web and the companies that dominate it.
So please, I don't often trumpet my own writing and it's not that easy to read, but this post is exactly what this blog is all about.
